#1: Why the Clinton Cadre Is So Fortified

We’re fascinated by Hillary Clinton. In Vanity Fair this month we learn about the Hillary Clinton’s inner circle. This profile provides valuable background for anyone interested in knowing Clinton. She’s accused of being aloof, inaccessible, and hostile this story tells you why. It also chronicles the challenges Clinton faced as a professional woman constantly under fire for being something other than a doting wife. With a charismatic governor for a husband she was doomed if she did anything other than sing his praises. She learned her public appearances and media interviews were not working in her — or his — favor, so she started retreating. She developed close confidants and trusted few others. This article looks at how this choice of isolation, designed to protect her, has also dehumanized her and created a persona that may be her biggest political downfall.

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We have the interview referenced in the Vanity Fair piece. It highlights how tough it was for Clinton to have a job. The reporter asks: With such busy schedules when do the Clintons spend time together, don’t they want children. He then goes on to suggest that if she didn’t work, if she quit her job, that would solve the problem. It’s also apparent just how much push back she got for not changing her name to Clinton. This reporter tells her the decision to remain Rodham cost her husband votes. Tough. For all the critics who call Clinton’s demeanor cold, or aloof, I would ask, how could she have handled this any better? She could have abandoning her ambitions I guess, but instead she decided to keep her own council and not  speak publicly about things the world wasn’t ready to hear yet, like you want to have your own career. Here’s the interview:

From Vanity Fair:

After the election (1979), Hillary herself gave a lengthy interview to a local news program; the video was unearthed by BuzzFeed earlier this year. The soft-spoken First Lady of Arkansas was 31, wearing her then signature thick glasses, and she patiently answered questions about why she insisted on continuing to work at a Little Rock law firm, why she and Bill didn’t have any children yet, and whether she felt Arkansas was unprogressive. On the traditional responsibilities of a First Lady, the interviewer commented, “One gets the impression that you’re really not all that interested.” In Clinton’s voice a soft southern accent came and went—grafted onto a default accent that comes from northern Illinois—and at one point she responded to a question, again, about her name, noting that “a lot of people have images that are in no way related to reality…. And there’s really not much that one can do about that.” But in the end the Clintons did do something. After Bill Clinton lost the 1980 election, he cut his hair a little shorter and hired some older advisers. And Hillary pulled back. Hillary Rodham became Hillary Rodham Clinton and campaigned with Bill full-time to prove she was just as old-fashioned as her husband said she was. For reasons of expedience, she suppressed her own identity. If Clinton’s attitude has a Rosebud moment, this may be it.

On occasion, in the early days, she was willing to enter the fray—until circumstances made it clear that she wasn’t very good at it, or that she hated it, or that it accomplished very little. When Bill Clinton in early 1992 was thrown back on his heels by allegations of an affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers, Hillary dismissed the rumors by reminding people that the Star supermarket tabloid, which had broken the story, was a publication that ran articles “about people with cows’ heads.” At a roast for then Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown, a week after the story appeared, Hillary engaged in a lengthy, playful, and (from today’s perspective) cringe-inducing speech in which she said she had the answer to the question “It’s 10 o’clock and where is Bill Clinton?” She told the audience that her husband was back in Little Rock, Arkansas, “with the other woman in his life”—his daughter, Chelsea.

But she changed course quickly, and permanently. In the famous 60 Minutes appearance after the Flowers story surfaced—an interview in which Bill Clinton denied the Flowers affair but neither Clinton would address whether he had ever been unfaithful—Hillary told Steve Kroft, “We’ve gone further than anybody we know of, and that’s all we’re going to say.” Those words—“that’s all we’re going to say”—could be the motto on her coat of arms.

After this, there were no more jokes about how much more money she made than her husband. She grew more guarded and occasionally she lost her sense of humor. With a group of reporters in March of 1992 she faced questions about whether her corporate law job at a prominent firm in Little Rock posed a conflict of interest, given that her husband was governor. Frustrated, she replied, “I’ve done the best I can to lead my life…. I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” This came across as a denigration of women who baked cookies and had teas—meaning stay-at-home moms—and Clinton was attacked. Once again she pulled back. Gone was the “two presidents for the price of one” idea that the Clintons had floated for a time. In January 1993, when asked about her future role in the White House, Clinton was playing second fiddle: “I’m going to do what my husband asks me to do.”

Press reports at the time referred to how hurt she was during the campaign by the depiction of her as a modern-day Lady Macbeth. A U.S. News & World Report article mentioned her portrayal in the media as an “overbearing yuppie wife from hell.” Even as she tried to soften her image, Clinton was retreating from the media and taking refuge within a close circle of her own making—the Chix. When she set out to draft health-care legislation, she assembled another group, a cadre of policy experts, and held all discussions behind closed doors. The result was anger, suspicion, and a lawsuit. A USA Today article from May 1993 quoted Andrew Rosenthal, who was then the Washington editor of The New York Times, on Hillary’s studied aloofness: “I’m quite astonished. Given the fact that this woman is one of the key policymakers in the United States of America, we’re very interested in talking to her and we have almost no access to her.”

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Press reports at the time referred to how hurt she was during the campaign by the depiction of her as a modern-day Lady Macbeth. A U.S. News & World Report article mentioned her portrayal in the media as an “overbearing yuppie wife from hell.” Even as she tried to soften her image, Clinton was retreating from the media and taking refuge within a close circle of her own making—the Chix. When she set out to draft health-care legislation, she assembled another group, a cadre of policy experts, and held all discussions behind closed doors. The result was anger, suspicion, and a lawsuit. A USA Today article from May 1993 quoted Andrew Rosenthal, who was then the Washington editor of The New York Times, on Hillary’s studied aloofness: “I’m quite astonished. Given the fact that this woman is one of the key policymakers in the United States of America, we’re very interested in talking to her and we have almost no access to her.”

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The e-mail scandal is the perfect distillation of how Hillary’s wall of protection makes matters worse. Her exclusive use of the Clintons’ personal e-mail server while secretary of state appears born out of a defensive instinct for secrecy. The eye-rolling dismissiveness with which Clinton herself initially greeted the revelation, and the stonewalling nature of the response by her surrogates, have only fed the scandal more oxygen. Before Clinton began at the State Department, she and her aides arranged to create a private e-mail account on a server linked to her home in Chappaqua. An Obama-administration official whose tenure coincided with Clinton’s at the State Department empathized with Hillary. “I understand why she did this. We are targeted all the time in the U.S. government, and there is no more vulnerable feeling than putting your thoughts on a government e-mail.” In July, the Office of Personnel Management said that two major breaches last year of U.S.-government databases potentially compromised sensitive information involving at least 22 million federal employees and contractors, together with their families and friends. “If you are Hillary Clinton and coming into government, of course she would use a personal e-mail account,” this administration official said. When she finally handed over the e-mails, she likely “erased stuff to protect her kid or her husband. Maybe she doesn’t want her J. Crew size out there. Everything she did is actually human-scale stuff and totally relatable. It may not be completely on the level, but it’s completely relatable.” But that’s not the problem, this official said. “It’s all the obfuscating and the ‘Fuck this shit’ attitude.” That said, it’s worth noting that other government employees manage to maintain a personal account for personal matters and a government account for official business. Clinton has come to acknowledge that the use of a private e-mail account was something she regretted. She has also said that she is sorry that some people have found her actions “confusing.” She finally got around to plain-old sorry in September, but only after months of saying she did nothing wrong.

The persistence of the e-mail scandal has surfaced frustration among other Democrats about the campaign’s inability to move on. Her advisers have been second-guessed and nitpicked about their responses. David Axelrod, the former chief campaign strategist and senior adviser to President Obama, defended her team: “I’ve worked with a lot of these people, and they are smart and talented. They didn’t become less smart or talented overnight.” But the bright lights on Clinton and her campaign affect all of them.

Going to battle with the press is still one of Clinton’s most reliable fallback measures. In late July, The New York Times published a story erroneously alleging that a criminal inquiry was potentially being sought into Clinton’s use of her private e-mail while secretary of state. The Times tweaked the online story slightly but significantly and didn’t issue a correction until later, clarifying that the inquiry was into “the potential compromise of classified information in connection with” her e-mail account, not specifically into her. Soon after, the Times also conceded that the inquiry was not criminal, either, and even issued an editor’s note, attempting to account for the errors. Just as the story seemed to be dying down, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, sent a nearly 2,000-word letter to the paper’s executive editor, accusing the Times of an “apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices.” When the paper did not publish Palmieri’s letter, the campaign then forwarded it to other media outlets. It didn’t escape notice that Palmieri’s letter was longer than the initial article in the Times.

Palmieri’s history with Hillary Clinton dates back to 1994, when she was special assistant to Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. (It was at a birthday party for Palmieri in 1995 that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, made eye contact as a prelude to their first sexual encounter.) She eventually became a deputy press secretary for Bill Clinton and later served as director of communications for Obama. She is best known in Washington for her ties to the late Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the disgraced candidate John Edwards, and there may be clues in that relationship to her bond with Hillary. Palmieri worked on both of Edwards’s presidential campaigns, in 2004 and 2008. According to testimony she gave during John Edwards’s 2012 trial—he was charged with using campaign funds to hide his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, and was later acquitted on one count, with a mistrial declared on the others—Palmieri told Edwards to his face that she didn’t think he was telling the truth about the paternity of Hunter’s child. She also testified that she had frequently told Elizabeth Edwards, in moments when Elizabeth was in denial, that she thought her husband was lying to her.

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Check out the whole piece at Vanity Fair

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