Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Read Online Free PDF

Arkansas to be with her future husband, Bill Clinton. Now she was back in Washington, D.C.—the nation’s capital, living in the White House. Along the way Hillary had picked up friends and networks across the country and even a pronounced southern accent that she mysteriously lost shortly after she arrived in Washington in 1993. In other words, she had no strong roots anywhere—which, she believed, gave her license to represent people as an elected official from . . . just about anywhere.
    When Hillary and Harold Ickes first strategized about her Senate run, both knew at least in the back of their minds that she couldn’t win the election simply by being the shattered wife. As the New York Times Magazine wrote, “[F]or four hours, as she and Ickes—a scarred veteran of New York politics and a former aide to her husband—moved from the living room to lunch in the family dining room and back to the living room, she plumbed the risks of a race for the Senate seat that Daniel Patrick Moynihan had decided to vacate. Would she really want to be one of a hundred senators? Could she survive a street fight with a nasty opponent? Could she stand the pawing of New York City’s feral reporters?” How did she counter the sentiment, as one reporter covering the campaign summarized it to me years later, that her candidacy was “naked in its political ambition—the fact it came after Lewinsky.” That, in other words, she was in fact using Bill’s humiliation as justification for being in the Senate.
    As Ickes and Hillary conspired, one thought kept coming back to them. The “bottom line” of the First Lady’s run for Senate, as first reported in the book Hillary’s Choice , was “for redemption.” 4 From what? Take the scandals: There was Whitewater, the investment deal in which they lost a fair bit of money—and probably should’ve lost more had it not been for their good friends James and Susan McDougal. The documents surrounding this mysterious deal—and Hillary’s insistence on fighting to keep them sealed—led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr in the first place, whose portfolio would grow and grow—and finally led to embarrassing allegations of her husband’s sexual misconduct toward an Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, which then led to revelations about an alleged cover-up of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
    While the president remained politically popular due to a robust economy, on a personal level the Clinton brand was increasingly viewed by the public as unethical, immoral, and just plain icky. A Senate election would erase all that—it would not only salvage the Clinton brand, but give Hillary a chance to be the kind of leader she was destined to be. No longer would she have to suffer in comparison to Bill, or deal with his crap. This would be her achievement and her chance to show the world what she could do. On her own. And so Hillary did what she always did. She went to work.
    One way she decided to counter the expected criticism of her bid was to play the reluctant candidate for as long as possible—a stance she will likely echo in her 2016 presidential run. One story leaked out that it was a veteran New Yorker, the outspoken African American congressman Charlie Rangel, who in October 1998 first mischievously suggested to Hillary that she run for a Senate seat. Hillary, according to the reports, laughed the idea off. But, as I’ve learned in my reporting, there’s more to the story. Hillary in fact had been looking at the race ever since she’d heard rumors of Moynihan’s retirement. Long before that chance conversation with Rangel, she had spent more time than was necessary that year campaigning throughout New York State in the 1998 midterm elections, getting to meet the major party figures and donors.
    One member of Clinton’s senior administration happened to cross paths with the First Lady during a retreat at Camp David and shared his encounter with