Since stepping down as Secretary of State, fifteen months ago, Hillary Clinton has kept a calculated distance from the press and the public. She has been working on a memoir about her years at the State Department, “Hard Choices,” to be published in early June; making occasional speeches, often for a fee said to exceed two hundred thousand dollars; and talking with close advisers about a possible second Presidential run. Despite the absence of a story, the media can’t stop discussing her. The mainstream press recycles talking points concerning her hypothetical campaign while casting about desperately for something new: Will Chelsea’s pregnancy and the prospect of becoming a grandmother mean that Clinton will be less likely to run? Would she support Marjorie Margolies, the Democrat vying to represent Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth Congressional District, who also happens to be Chelsea’s mother-in-law? (She did, but Margolies lost.) When the Washington Post asked eleven Democratic activists in Iowa which of four prominent Democrats they would invite to a dinner party, why did only one choose her?
Meanwhile, Clinton’s old nemesis the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has begun declaring her not only politically but also clinically moribund. “Whispers are persisting, whispers,” Rush Limbaugh said, in anything but a whisper, several months ago on his radio program. “There’s a whisper campaign, folks, that Mrs. Clinton is sick, that she will not run for the Presidency because she is sick.” The Drudge Report contributed a picture of a wan-looking Clinton above the caption “Is she sick?” The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, added, “Whispers persist that Hillary won’t run: Health may be worse than disclosed.” A hard-right blogger, Robert Morrow, wrote that he was “ninety-five per cent sure” that “Hillary Clinton probably has brain cancer” and would not run in 2016. In mid-May, Karl Rove, who learned his trade under Donald Segretti, a dirty-tricks master in the Nixon camp, mentioned a fall Clinton took in December, 2012, which eventually led to a blood clot. He asked why she had emerged from the hospital after thirty days—it was actually just three—“wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury.”
Then Monica Lewinsky reappeared. After ten years of silence, she described in Vanity Fair the indignities she has suffered since her sexual encounters with Bill Clinton, and her belief that Hillary Clinton unfairly maligned her at the time, calling her a “narcissistic loony-toon.” Lynne Cheney, the wife of the former Vice-President, promptly appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s program to speculate whether “this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way.” She wondered if Hillary had somehow persuaded Lewinsky to tell her side of the escapade for the first time. Fox News commentators relished the thought. Eric Bolling said, “Now, the theory that I’m hearing is to provide sympathy for Hillary, just remind everyone that Bill Clinton was a jerk.”
Like so many mad theories that have swirled around Clinton over the years, it was enough to fuel more speculation and to highlight her famously defensive relationship with the press. From her first days in Washington, she adopted a bunker mentality. (Friends and colleagues of Clinton’s often told me that they needed clearance from her spokesman before they could talk to me.) But if she wants to be President she may have to find a new strategy for getting herself across the battlefield.
In the years since Clinton’s Presidential campaign, in 2008, the media has become more polarized, less thoughtful, and faster paced. Conservatives seem to be of two minds about how best to take her on this time. Newt Gingrich said that he was offended by Rove’s remarks. Lindsey Graham, who has consistently criticized Clinton for what he sees as her negligence over security at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for the deadly attack there in 2012, announced that he had “no reason” to think that she “has a health problem that would disqualify her.” In an interview on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace, who worked with Rove on George W. Bush’s 2004 reëlection campaign and then served as the White House communications director, said that Rove was “off the wall” and “had some of the facts wrong,” although she noted that “this was a deliberate strategy on his part to raise her health as an issue . . . ahead of the next campaign.”
I met with Matthew Continetti, the co-founder and editor of the online Washington Free Beacon, which presents itself as an enlightened addition to the right-wing press. Continetti, who is thirty-two, dresses like an older man, in sombre dark suits, plain shirts, modest ties, and frameless glasses. His first job after college was as an intern for William Kristol’s neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard. He was subsequently hired, and he stayed for eight and a half years in all. In 2012, Continetti married Kristol’s daughter, Anne; on their first date night as new parents they attended the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. Kristol sits on the four-member board of the Center for American Freedom, a conservative group that funds the Free Beacon. (The center does not disclose the names of its donors.) Its chairman is Michael Goldfarb, who was an aide to Sarah Palin and has worked as a communications strategist for the Koch brothers.
Continetti’s politics aren’t always predictable. In an article in The Weekly Standard, he criticized as “nonsense” some of Glenn Beck’s musings, such as his “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” on which Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson rank higher than Hitler and Pol Pot. “Not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly,” Continetti wrote. And he has defended the safety net provided by Social Security and Medicare. “It is wishful thinking that they could ever be junked,” he told me in an e-mail. “The best response, then, is to stop fighting the New Deal and try to finance it in a way that does not bankrupt the country.” In his first book, “The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine,” published in 2006, he criticized the undue influence of money on congressional Republicans. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, he wrote, “relied on paid lobbyists to get bills passed, not the other way around.” Three years later, he published “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star,” which he describes in the introduction as “a book about how the feral beast hunted down its prey.”
Continetti launched the Free Beacon, in February, 2012, as a nonprofit enterprise. Conservatives may be divided on some issues, but they remain united by indignation at having been marginalized by the mainstream media. For the Free Beacon’s launch, Continetti wrote a manifesto, “Combat Journalism,” in which he asserted that there weren’t enough conservative journalists to “nullify or even sublimate the loud, constant, coherent progressive roar of: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC; the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and others; the left blogosphere, Hollywood, and practically every magazine editor in the country.” The only option was to respond in kind: “Scrutinize the left’s claims with the same adversarial techniques that the left uses to cover the right. Don’t back down from confrontation. Stick to the facts and avoid the cul-de-sac of conspiracy theory.”
The Free Beacon’s headquarters are situated in an office building at the corner of Sixteenth and K Streets. On the day I visited, the staff was preparing pieces with headlines such as “WHITE HOUSE CONTINUES SECRET MEDIA WAR AGAINST ISRAEL,” “EPA GAVE HUGE BONUS TO PORN ADDICTED EMPLOYEE,” and “BOEHNER: WHEN WILL OBAMA ADMIN TELL THE TRUTH ON BENGHAZI, IRS, FAST & FURIOUS?” The Free Beacon has also broken news. In February, it published the diary notes and correspondence of Diane Blair, a close friend of Hillary Clinton who died in 2000, in which she recounted their personal conversations from the mid-nineteen-seventies until her death. Alana Goodman, a Free Beacon reporter, unearthed the material in the archives at the University of Arkansas. The Free Beacon published a story about some of Clinton’s blunt private opinions, and posted a link to the diary entries. For example, she told Blair, in 1993, that the “press has big egos and no brains” and, in 1994, that she was “furious” at her husband for “ruining himself and the Presidency.” Blair added, “She keeps trying to shape things up, knows what’s wrong, but he can’t fire people, exert discipline, punish leakers.” Traffic to the Free Beacon briefly jumped.
Continetti emphasized that the Free Beacon’s targets are not all Democrats. Last July, he published a story revealing that Jack Hunter, the social-media director for the Republican senator Rand Paul, was for many years a pro-secessionist talk-radio host known as the Southern Avenger. The report compelled Hunter to resign, and it embarrassed Paul. Beacon stories are fact-checked, so that “we don’t make ourselves easy to dismiss,” Continetti said. “Conservatives are held to a higher standard. What I worry about is getting the story right.” He noted happily that his site had recently been slammed in the Washington Post by Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to President Obama, and he dismissed a remark made by Andrea Mitchell, on NBC, that the Free Beacon is an “anti-Clinton Web site.” To Continetti, the criticism was further evidence of what he sees as a vast left-wing conspiracy, a term popularized in 2005 by Byron York, then the White House correspondent for National Review, in a book by that title.
“I see the news agenda being set by the major networks and by people who often take their cues from the New York Times,” Continetti said. “The treatment of Sarah Palin is when I first became aware of this. I think the treatment of Charles and David Koch in the media resembles that. You can see some of this going on with the G.W. Bridge and Chris Christie. The attention paid to what he knew, and when, over the closing of a lane on the bridge seems to me far disproportionate to the attention that was paid, up until a week ago, to who knew what, and when, with respect to the Benghazi talking points.”
Continetti refers to his staff of media researchers as the “war room.” I asked with whom he was at war. “We have a side,” he said. “We have a conservative viewpoint. So we want to report on people who disagree with us, because they’re reporting on us. You may as well even the playing field as much as you can.”
In Continetti’s “Combat Journalism” essay, he provides a brief history of the rise of conservative journalism. He invokes Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew and their speechwriters, William Safire and Pat Buchanan; moves on to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and other “counter-establishment” outlets; and laments the appearance, after 2000, of “counter counter-establishment” groups, such as the Center for American Progress, and wealthy liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis, who have funnelled millions into campaigns on behalf of Democrats. Like any origin story, it glosses over less convenient realities, such as the degree to which, for decades, wealthy conservatives have actively sought to shape press coverage, particularly of the Clintons.
When Hillary Clinton arrived at the White House, in 1993, her guard was already up. As the governor’s wife in Arkansas, she had retained her maiden name and pursued her own career, as a partner in a prominent law firm in Little Rock. When, in 1980, Bill Clinton was defeated in his gubernatorial-reëlection bid, the press cited Hillary’s independence as a contributing factor. She was aware, too, of her husband’s infidelities, as Carl Bernstein revealed in his 2007 biography, “A Woman in Charge.” Diane Blair told him that in the nineteen-eighties Hillary knew that her husband had a wandering eye, and that after Chelsea was born she worried about raising her as a single parent. “Hillary never went into details—absolutely never,” Blair said. “And I doubt she did with anyone.”
Clinton’s apprehensions that her private life would be exposed in the media were confirmed in January of 1992, during the Presidential campaign, when headlines announced that Bill Clinton had allegedly engaged in a twelve-year affair with Gennifer Flowers. In subsequent interviews, the Clintons presented a united front, having apparently agreed that the best strategy was to stick together and keep the media at bay. “I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together,” Hillary told “60 Minutes.” “And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.” Around the same time, Bill Clinton, while campaigning in New Hampshire, asserted that Hillary would be a full partner in his Administration. Their slogan, he said, jokingly, should be “Buy one, get one free,” but several critics wondered if she aspired to be “co-President.” After Clinton was elected, he gave Hillary an office in the West Wing and a mandate to shape health-care reform. “She was the first professional woman to have an operational role” as First Lady, Kati Marton, the author of “Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History,” told me. “She treated the role as if it were a job. This was jarring to many.”
Hillary Clinton became a lightning rod for criticism. In “Living History,” her 2003 memoir, she wrote, “Innocent comments or jests erupt into controversies within seconds of being reported on the news wires. Rumors become the story du jour.” But she also misplayed her hand. Her plan for universal health care failed to gain support in either the House or the Senate, despite Democratic majorities, and Democrats lost control of both chambers, in part because Republicans made “Hillarycare” a campaign issue during the midterm elections.
A minor industry of right-wing commentary sprang up, funded in part by Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon oil, banking, and aluminum fortune. Scaife’s foundations were major funders of the American Spectator, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell. The sole aim of the magazine’s Arkansas Project was to dig up dirt on the Clintons. “These people were talking about impeaching Bill Clinton long before Monica Lewinsky,” David Brock, who was then a reporter at the magazine, told me. “After the 1992 elections, parts of the right did not accept Clinton’s election. Most of the early Clinton ‘scandals’ came from that.”
In 1993, several members of the White House Travel Office were fired, largely because Hillary overreacted to suspicions of financial irregularities; this became Travelgate, and the American Spectator relentlessly pushed the story. A money-losing Clinton land deal in Arkansas grew from an embarrassing but not criminal conflict of interest into the Whitewater scandal. That July, Vincent Foster, the White House deputy counsel and a close friend and former law partner of Hillary’s, committed suicide, and Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review poured resources into investigating whether he was murdered and the Clintons covered up the crime.
In January of 1994, in an article for the American Spectator, Brock quoted four Arkansas state troopers who described how they ferried Governor Clinton to and from assignations, lied to Hillary about his whereabouts, and solicited the phone numbers of women he found attractive. When the Clintons vigorously denied the story, it became known as Troopergate. Later that year, an independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, was assigned to investigate Whitewater. The investigation metastasized, and, in 1998, Starr discovered Monica Lewinsky, which led to the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton and remove him from office.
By then, Brock had renounced his story. “I later came to learn that a lot of the details were wrong,” he said. In late 1997, when the troopers began giving depositions under oath, they did not confirm what they had told him. It was later revealed that they had received support from a fund set up by a conservative donor after the article was published. His book “The Real Anita Hill” (1993) purported to demolish the credibility of Hill, who testified before Congress that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Brock introduced the phrase “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” He now says, “I got sold a bill of goods. I was never the same after I realized that my book had facts that were not true.”
Nevertheless, he next set out to write a critical book about Hillary Clinton, but “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,” published in 1996, was sufficiently nuanced that conservative journalists banned him from their circles. A scathing review appeared in the Washington Times, where Brock had once worked, under the headline “SAINTHOOD FROM A HILLARY CRITIC.” Brock is gay and thought that his conservative colleagues had accepted him, but he now became the subject of media smears. In 1997, he wrote an article for Esquire in which he condemned the right-wing “thought police” and apologized for the role he had played in their company. In 2002, after he published “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” Bill Clinton called him; Brock met Hillary the same year. Since then, he said, he has stayed in contact with them, but he declined to discuss the extent of their interactions.
Brock is a slightly dishevelled fifty-one; his tie is often askew and his graying hair uncombed. He completed his ideological transformation in 2004, with the founding of a nonprofit, Media Matters for America. Through its Web site, he told me, it “monitors and corrects conservative misinformation in the media.” In 2010, he founded American Bridge, a PAC whose aim is to elect liberal Democrats and do opposition research on Republican candidates. It has also assumed an unofficial role as a pro-Hillary media watchdog. In March, in an address to the Clinton School of Public Service, at the University of Arkansas, where longtime Clinton loyalists served as his hosts, he extolled Clinton’s “deep desire to affirm the good and virtuous in politics,” and lamented that the “right-wing noise machine is far more sophisticated and far-reaching than in Matt Drudge’s heyday.” One cog in that machine, he said, is Continetti’s Free Beacon, whose “sole goal” is “slandering its political opponents.” When I asked Continetti what he thought of Brock, he replied, in an e-mail, “David Brock is a very successful fund-raiser, and I am impressed by the longevity of his career.” In a subsequent note, he added, “Brock has an ideological flexibility that is rare even for Washington. It’s served him remarkably well.”
For many years during the Clinton era, Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, spent late nights at the White House interviewing Bill Clinton for a biography that eventually became “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.” The three had met in 1972, during the McGovern campaign, and become friends. By Clinton’s second term, Branch was struck by the Clintons’ obsession with the press. For a time during the first term, the Clintons read only staff-assembled newspaper clips and stopped watching the evening news.
One night, Branch became so alarmed by the President’s “dark mood” on the subject that he wrote a two-page letter addressed “Dear Bill.” It began, “Please allow me to step beyond my role as your historical sounding board,” and offered some advice: “Your biggest weakness is a tendency to lump ‘the press’ together with your political opponents.” He pleaded with Clinton to instead deploy his charm on reporters; he could attack his opponents, but not the press. A few days later, he received a note in the mail, signed by Hillary: “Thanks for your words of encouragement during the past week.”
But Hillary has never quite overcome her guardedness toward the political press. Cheryl Mills, who was the deputy White House counsel in Clinton’s second term, became Hillary’s chief of staff at the State Department and today is a central figure in the wide circle of friends and advisers known as Hillaryland. Mills said that many newcomers to the White House press environment were, like Hillary, sometimes baffled by the line of questioning. At a substantive press conference about childhood obesity, for example, reporters might ask: “Who’s the expert you guys are quoting? Was he ever obese? Did he know that you were going to be talking about this? What’s your relationship with him? Is he making any money off his book because you’re talking about childhood obesity?”
In 2000, when Clinton ran for the Senate from New York, she tried a different tactic. She had only recently moved to the state, and critics portrayed her as a carpetbagger. She went on a “listening tour,” to hear the concerns of voters. Although she rarely granted interviews to the national press, she got to know the group of local reporters assigned to follow her. “She was one hundred per cent focussed on New York,” Philippe Reines, her longtime spokesman, says. “If you were a reporter for the Watertown Daily Times, you got her on the phone in a minute.”
Reines has been her spokesman since 2002. He shielded Chelsea Clinton from the press during the 2008 Presidential campaign and worked for Hillary at the State Department. He oversees her communications strategy and works with nine personal staffers who are fiercely loyal to Hillary. He is also a partner at Beacon Global Strategies, one of Washington’s revolving-door consulting firms. His preferred style is an open-necked shirt over a T-shirt; some days he shaves, some days he doesn’t.
As a senator, Clinton earned the respect of her constituents, including conservative upstate and suburban voters, and also of her Senate colleagues. She passed bills providing for 9/11-related health care and veterans’ health care; co-sponsored a measure with Lindsey Graham to expand benefits for members of the military; and served on the Armed Services Committee. Easily winning reëlection in 2006, she was anointed the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination.
But her staff was deeply divided over how she should present herself to the media and the public. At the start, her chief strategist, Mark Penn, insisted on promoting her political attributes—experience, practicality, endorsements, name recognition, and the inevitability of her candidacy. In the spring of 2008, Penn was replaced by Geoff Garin, the campaign’s pollster. But Clinton was burdened by her vote, in 2002, granting President Bush permission to invade Iraq if diplomacy failed. And she seemed to say more about herself than about what she would do for people. Many Democrats came to believe she felt entitled to the nomination.
Clinton’s advisers complained that the press was swooning over Obama. A study published in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism seemed to bear them out: in the first months of campaigning, thirty-eight per cent of media stories about her were negative, and only twenty-seven per cent were positive. Only sixteen per cent of stories about Obama were negative, and nearly half were positive. Dana Perino, who was George W. Bush’s press secretary at the time, remembers talking with Bush about Clinton: “President Bush thought in some ways that she was getting a raw deal from the press.”
Residents of Hillaryland attribute some of the negative coverage to reflexive sexism. “Men won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she reminds them of their nagging wives,” the Fox anchor Neil Cavuto told a television audience at one point, quoting a guest on his show. Gloria Steinem, a staunch supporter of Clinton, says journalists affix adjectives to female candidates—shrill, pushy, aggressive, ambitious, divisive, bossy—that they don’t apply to males. Today in public forums, Clinton often criticizes the press’s “gender-based characterization” of women.
But reporters on the 2008 campaign complained that Clinton was remote and came across as scripted and inauthentic. Reines bridles at the suggestion that Clinton or her handlers contributed to the problem. “Why, because she only spent ninety seconds with them when she brought them bagels to the back of the bus? And if she spent nine minutes the coverage would have been fair? That’s apparently the takeaway: because she didn’t spend enough time with them and their bagels, they couldn’t be fair.” He insisted that “she spent a tremendous amount of time with the press, formally, informally, off the record,” and added that it’s not easy “to pal around with hundreds of people.”
On September 11, 2012, the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked, and Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed. Conservatives demanded to know why security was lax, and, when it began to appear that the attack might have been planned by terrorists, accused the Obama Administration of covering up that knowledge. “We’re going to find a system failure before, during, and after the attacks,” Lindsey Graham said on his Facebook page in May of 2013. “We’re going to find people asleep at the switch when it comes to the State Department, including Hillary Clinton.” Her memoir will offer her version of the story, but, regardless of what she says, if she runs in 2016 Benghazi will be the bloody shirt around which many of her critics rally.
Clinton’s tenure at State was otherwise mostly free from controversy, and she maintained a cordial relationship with the press corps. Fifteen or so correspondents are assigned to the Secretary of State. “They travel with the Secretary, so there’s a lot of schmooze time, a lot of off-the-record time,” Steven Weisman, who was the chief diplomatic correspondent for the Times until 2006, told me. Often, he said, the State Department is referred to as “the Department of Nice,” because “it’s always trying to make peace.” Mike McCurry, who was the State Department spokesman from 1993 to 1995, before moving over to the West Wing as press secretary, says, “The White House is a political beat, the State Department is a policy beat. The White House press starts from the premise: Is the President up or down today? Is this good politically or not good politically? There’s far less interest in the substance of policy.”
Reines derides the right-wing media for promoting the idea that Clinton was directly responsible for the deaths in Benghazi. “You can tell when something is just being pushed by everybody, using the same language. You can see it in the course of Benghazi.” That’s what he expects from Fox News and others. He has more contempt for the mainstream press corps, which is on what he views as a frantic quest for “ ‘gotcha’ moments.” He has told at least one reporter to “fuck off.” He said to me in our first meeting, “There’s no such thing as straight reporting anymore.”
He blamed economics for the tendency of the press to latch on to stories and sensationalize them. “I don’t think the imperative is ideological as much as it is commercial,” he said. “It’s about views—eyeballs, clicks.” Part of his task is to maintain a kind of firewall, to keep the right-wing chatter, like the kind ignited by Karl Rove’s remarks, from spreading. This is hard to do when Hillary is involved. “The Clintons are good for business,” he said. “With Hillary more than anyone, there’s a premium placed on the sensational, the colorful, the inane, and that often comes at the expense of accuracy.”
If Clinton decides to run for President, she will need to take a more open approach to the press. “You have to engage with the media,” David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief strategist, says. “There is a tendency among politicians to believe it is an adversarial press. And it is a maddening process. Obama used to roll his eyes: ‘This is news?’ Hillary has to let people in.” Stephanie Cutter, who was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 and John Kerry’s communications director in 2004, says, “Coverage always improves if there’s access to an individual. You’ve got to feed the beast.” But, as Stuart Stevens, a Mitt Romney strategist in 2012, pointed out to me, befriending the press is not easy: “In a world where everyone has an iPhone, a candidate can’t go to the back of the bus and have an off-the-record conversation.” Like Clinton in 2008, Romney was distant and stiff. To reporters, Stevens said, his efforts to be casual came across as “ ‘trying to play us.’ It was not, ‘Look, this is a chance for us to get to know each other.’ ”
Taylor Branch remembers that when Hillary Clinton first contemplated running for the Senate she asked him for advice. “I told her that she has to think of the press as representatives of the people, even if she carried bad memories,” he said. “And part of her strategy had to be to win them over.” If Reines has a strategy for doing so this time around, it is not apparent. He has been described as “slightly paranoid” about the press. When I asked if that was a fair description, he said, “I’d rather be called paranoid than naïve. Or stupid.”
Some of Clinton’s allies are concerned. “I hope she will be more accessible, more relaxed,” Lanny Davis, a Yale Law School friend who is a longtime Clinton adviser, said. “She will get burned by some, but this is worth the risk, because when she is being herself I know she is sincere and likable.” Another longtime adviser to the Clintons said, “They’re putting up the gates around her, being very protective. That’s what she wants. But that’s only successful when she’s really on top. Can she and her people be more humble in dealing with the press? It’s a really good question. I don’t see how she can fundamentally change.”
Regardless of Clinton’s strategy, the media will continue to find outlandish things to say about her. Headlines on Robert Morrow’s blog have proposed that “CHELSEA CLINTON IS THE BIOLOGICAL DAUGHTER OF WEBB HUBBELL AND NOT BILL CLINTON,” that “HILLARY WAS HAVING SEX WITH BOTH WEBB HUBBELL & VINCE FOSTER, HER PARTNERS AT ROSE LAW FIRM,” and that Foster did not actually shoot himself in a park but, instead, died mysteriously in the White House. Glenn Beck predicted recently that “Hillary Clinton will be having sex with a woman on the White House desk if it becomes popular.” (He did not indicate how this might become popular.) In response, Brock told me, he has organized Correct the Record, a team of twenty staff members from American Bridge, to “answer conservative and Republican attacks on Democratic candidates in 2016. Most of that activity focusses on Hillary Clinton.”
Some conservatives wonder if the rhetoric is self-defeating. In a 2001 article in The Atlantic, Byron York—now the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, a Fox News contributor, and a keen critic of the Clintons—wrote that in the nineteen-nineties some commentators “became possessed by a self-destructive brand of opposition to Bill Clinton, and, in their desire to knock the President out of office, they ended up hurting themselves more than him.” York was referring to the decline of the American Spectator, after Clinton’s Justice Department opened an investigation into allegations of witness tampering. The broader cause suffered, too. After the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, his popularity soared, Republicans lost seats in Congress, Newt Gingrich’s sharp-edged “Republican revolution” faded, and George W. Bush won the 2000 Presidential race in part by promoting “compassionate conservatism.” York worries that the conservative press could make the same mistake with Hillary Clinton. “If you go overboard, you tend to look into stories that don’t have merit and pay too much attention to unimportant things,” he told me. To dredge up the distant past “will only work in her favor.”
Steve Schmidt, who served on George W. Bush’s communications team when Bush ran for reëlection, in 2004, and was John McCain’s chief strategist in 2008, shares the concern. “The average Limbaugh listener is rural and sixty-nine,” he said. “The country is changing in a lot of ways, and what those people are fed is a steady diet of grievance and anger.” Like other Republicans, he contends that the stream of Tea Party invective only alienates the G.O.P. from the growing population of Hispanic and Asian voters. “It’s profoundly worrying,” he said. “There’s no question that the Clinton campaign, should there be one, will be more than adequately prepared to take advantage of the excesses and overreach of people on my side of the aisle.”
William Kristol agrees: “The personal stuff became bigger in the nineteen-nineties because the policy stuff was relatively small. It was a more centrist country; the Democrats were more centrist, and the Republicans were probably more centrist. So everything became the personality drama. The 2016 race is going to be a very big policy election. There will be big choices to be made on foreign policy, Obamacare, the Supreme Court. These aren’t personality-driven issues.” Continetti said, “The Clintons have been quite resistant to scandal. The point of attack should be her record”—health care, spending, “how aggressive she was in protecting our embassies”—not personal matters. “The case to be made against Hillary Clinton is a policy case.”
Hillary, like her husband, is respected among people who know her, even those who don’t share her politics, for her intelligence and charm. Brock isn’t the only former foe to have embraced her. Beginning in 1994, in a series of articles in Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, Chris Ruddy accused the White House, the doctors, and the coroner of covering up the details surrounding Vincent Foster’s death. In 1997, he published a book along the same lines, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster.” Recently, Ruddy told me that he now keeps a picture of Bill Clinton on a wall of his office, in West Palm Beach. He said, “Do I think I got caught up in anti-Clinton hysteria? Sure. Was the stuff I did over-hyped? Sure.”
In 1998, Ruddy founded News Max, a conservative Web site designed, he said, to “provide the other side of the story” to those “on the right or center right.” (Recent headlines have included “SCIENTISTS REBUT WHITE HOUSE GLOBAL WARMING CLAIMS” and “ALL EYES ON HOUSE SPEAKER BOEHNER FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM.”) He began to warm to Bill Clinton after the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, which he opposed, and because he found Clinton’s post-Presidency philanthropic efforts commendable. In 2007, a Times reporter called him to ask what he thought of Clinton now.
“I said to the New York Times that my position had changed, and I had a higher opinion of his Presidency,” Ruddy said. A few months later, an aide to Bill Clinton called Ruddy and invited him to have lunch with Clinton in his Harlem office. Scaife went along, and the lunch lasted three hours. “I started getting invitations to Clinton events in Florida,” Ruddy said. He was invited to lunch several more times, and now considers Clinton a friend.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton, during her campaign for President, agreed to meet with Scaife and the staff of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The paper endorsed her candidacy, noting that her willingness to talk to the staff “was courageous given our longstanding criticism of her. That is no small matter: Political courage is essential in a President. Clinton has demonstrated it; Obama has not. She has a real record. He doesn’t.”
Ruddy told me that his first choice for President in 2016 would be Jeb Bush. “Jeb was a fantastic governor,” he said of Bush’s two terms in Florida. “He’s not the party of no.” Still, Ruddy isn’t averse to the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. “I don’t perceive her as an ideological person,” he said. “I do think she would make a good President.” ♦
