2-12-14 Nicole Sandler Show - Don #39;t Run Hillary!
Nicole talks with Crooks Liars #39; Susie Madrak about Krystal Ball #39;s plea to Hillary Clinton NOT to run in #39;16! Nicole #39;s old friend Andy Geller is capitalizin...
By: Nicole Sandler
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Hillary Clinton had read some 43 biographies of her predecessors to prepare for becoming first lady, according to her close friend Diane Blair. But ultimately, Clinton would chart her own course.
New documents, recollections and letters collected by Blair and obtained by ABC News about Clintons time as first lady show a Clinton simultaneously struggling during the low points of her husbands presidency and moving steadily toward satisfying her personal ambition -- even when it polarized the public and activated her enemies.
Just visited with Hillary. I told her how fascinating I found the latest spate of Hillary-at-two years stories, and she expressed her total exasperation with all this obsession and attention, and how hard shes finding to conceal her contempt for it all, Blair wrote.
Clinton discussed often a desire to correct the record and was frustrated by a seemingly endless spate of stories that she could totally refute, according to Blair.
Yet Clinton feared keeping records of thoughts and conversations in a diary that she might use to eventually write her own history because they might also be subpoenaed by the Clintons political enemies, Blair noted.
Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas and a longtime friend of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, mused that Hillary had instinctively done First Ladylike things to cover for her policy stuff as a way of mitigating the backlash over her more active role in policy making in her husband's administration.
In her most private conversations with her friend Blair, Clinton is often faced by what Blair described as being a pioneer in an anachronistic role.
But Blair also laid some of the blame at Bill Clintons feet.
She suggested that a big problem had been Bill Clinton being less than presidential, which [Hillary] warned against from the beginning.
[Hillary] said hed been trying really hard - he thought it was rude to walk off from questions, but is beginning to see that he must, Blair said, a reference to Clintons famous tendency of answering virtually every question from reporters during media availabilities.
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Polls show Hillary Rodham Clinton drawing support far above any other prospective Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in 2016. The most experienced campaign operatives in the business are jostling to be by her side if she decides to run. Time magazine asks, Can anyone stop Hillary?
At first blush, the worlds most famous woman projects an air of invincibility.
And yet: An avalanche of coverage prompted by the relatively obscure Washington Free Beacon which scored an impressive scoop by exploring a cache of papers with a mix of gossipy and revealing insights into her personality and marriage in the 1990s highlighted a Clinton paradox. Her ability to dominate the national political conversation is nearly as much liability as asset, since the obsessive interest about her character, her past, and her future intentions leaves her acutely vulnerable to publicity storms that can hijack her public image and swamp her plans to carefully manage her reentry into public life.
(PHOTOS: Hillary Clintons 50 influentials)
While this weeks furor over the journal entries of Hillary Clintons close friend Diane Blair, who died in 2000, is likely to be ephemeral, the larger challenge facing her is not. Her professed view that there is plenty of time to worry later about presidential politics is not really true. If she decides to run for president a campaign that will almost certainly be vigorously underway as soon as the midterm elections are over nine months from now the window for making some decisions will start to close this year. This leaves Clinton with a very specific, very urgent to-do list in 2014, according to a variety of operatives who have been close to her previously or are watching from afar.
These are vulnerabilities she needs to start tackling right now:
Dont turn into Mitt Romney
Even many Democrats acknowledge that Romney might have been president if he could have narrowed the gap between himself and people who thought he was awkward, elitist, insular, and just a bit odd.
This clearly isnt as big a challenge for Clinton, who tops surveys of the countrys most admired woman. Unlike Romney, shes among the most well-defined politicians that exist. But she still has a considerable task in front of her to avoid making the mistakes of someone whos been cloistered her recent acknowledgment that she hasnt driven a car since 1996 exploded on the Internet.
(PHOTOS: Mitt Romney through the years)
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An inverse relationship seems to exist between the length of time since a Clinton has orbited the White House and the power held by the mythology of Matt Drudge. However, there's a chance that the Drudge watercooler could start up again if his lucky charm decides to run in 2016.
As Drudge was quoted in New York Magazine in 2007,I need Hillary Clinton. You dont get it. I need to be part of her world. Thats my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism I have Hillary.
Matt Drudge
And when Drudge links to stories about Hillary Clinton, the Internet often returns the favor by writing about Matt Drudge. The Washington Free Beaconreminded usof the beginnings of Clinton and Drudge's long saga this week, by diving into old documents from when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998. Hillary Clinton's friend, Diane Blair, wrote a note to the first lady back then asking,"Do we take Matt Drudge seriously?" During her 2008 run for the White House, she decided to, and reporters and commentators responded in kind. The question now is whether both will take him seriously again in 2016. Below, for posterity, find the long history of writers writing about Drudge writing about Hillary Clinton.
June 19, 1998, The New York Times:"People often wonder how the great social observers of the past would dissect the madness and the inanity in Washington today. How would Mark Twain skewer Kenneth Starr on Larry King? What would be left of Matt Drudge after Evelyn Waugh got through with him? And surely, the ideal chronicler of Hillary Clinton would be Edith Wharton, who sat in her own grand white house writing about women strangled in a cat's cradle of tribal constraints and pieties. She wrote about women forced to narrow their lives or disguise their natures or choke down indignities because of double standards. She wrote about the awful ironies that crushed women's dreams."
Sept. 16, 2000, The Washington Times: "The flap began earlier this week when Internet gossip Matt Drudge announced on his Web site -- http://www.drudgereport.com -- that the New York Times was "sitting" on the story of Mrs. Clinton's overnight guests because the newspaper did not want to give ammunition to Mr. Lazio in Wednesday's debate between the two Senate candidates."
Sept. 17, 2000, Slate: "Is Matt Drudge good for the Democrats? Not intentionally, of course. But look at who benefits, objectively, as the Marxists say. Last week, Drudge discovered that the New York Times hadn't published a story it had been working on, a story about donors to Hillary Clinton's campaign being rewarded with overnight stays at the White House and Camp David. So Drudge posts an item on his well-read site chiding the Times for sitting on an anti-Clinton report. What happens? The White House goes on full alert, as other news organizations begin to chase the story. The account dribbles out through a variety of outlets, including Fox, a conservative TV network far easier for Clinton supporters to dismiss than the Times would be. When the Times finally prints John Broder's piece about the overnights, it runs in the B section, below the fold, with the headline Mrs. Clinton Denies Visits Rewarded Gifts. The news by this point isn't the overnights, it's whether there was a quid pro quo for them; the first three paragraphs detail the official denial that there was. And the paper has its back up--a prominent paragraph denies Drudge's report that the Times had been suppressing the story. What if Drudge didn't exist (or if he had just done nothing when he learned of the Times piece)?"
Nov. 6, 2000, The American Prospect: "Yet with e-spin, it often seems that for every success on the part of a campaign, there's a comparable blunder. In August, Florida Governor Jeb Bush's office was accused of 'bigotry' and of being 'anti-Semitic' after a staffer accidentally e-mailed out a Bible verse to reporters instead of Bush's schedule. (The verse read in part: '[Every] spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist.') And in a more serious slip-up in May, the Hillary Clinton campaign inadvertently sent out the e-mail addresses of hundreds of reporters at the top of an update on the First Lady's travel plans. Matt Drudge got his hands on the list and put a story about it on his Web site; before long, other sites advertised the whole list. Soon, reporters were getting blitzed with hate e-mails from right-wingers lurking in the FreeRepublic.com neighborhood of the Internet. One such message, reported in The Washington Post, read: 'Since Hillary Klinton was nice enough to publish all your e-mail addresses, us in the right wing conspiracy wanted to drop each of you a note to say that you're all slime.'"
Feb. 2, 2001, The Washington Times: "'There's no fingernail polish on the nails. There have been Senate sessions without even any lipstick. It's pushing it to the Janet Reno, Donna Shalala crowd,' opines Internet scribe Matt Drudge, who weighed in on Mrs. Clinton's style crisis in a recent column. 'Even Patty Murray is more glamorous than Hillary," giggles Mr. Drudge, on the phone from his Miami newsroom. "It has Washington completely buzzing out.'"
March 5, 2007, Wonkette: "This is a conveniently context-free video clip of an audio clip of Hillary Clinton speaking supposedly before a southern Black church. You might notice that she's talkin' funny. Which is all well and good when beloved character actors or presidents do it, but when politicians do it, they're pandering. Or something. Anyway, Matt Drudge said this was important. So listen to it over and over again and start quoting it to your friends at happy hour. Now you're in the gang of 500!"
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The media tell us there is a huge groundswell of support for Hillary Clinton to run for the...
It is happening again. The media tell us there is a huge groundswell of support for Hillary Clinton to run for the presidency in 2016. Already an enormous political action committee has been formed. She is again -- as she was in 2008 -- the inevitable candidate and, by the way, the inevitable president. Moreover, the mainstream media are, of course, with her.
These are what I have been calling for over 20 years the media's Episodic Apologists. Their professional lives have followed a well-worn arc since at least 1992 when the Clintons first emerged nationally -- though the arc was there in Arkansas back in the 1980s. At first, the Episodic Apologists are full of hope for the Clintons -- they have such charisma, such political promise. Then, splat, they fall headlong into a scandal of their own making -- Troopergate, Travelgate, Monicagate, Impeachment, or their incomparable exit from the White House. Of a sudden, the Episodic Apologists fall into darkest despair. "How could they? They had it all," and The Episodic Apologists' funk continues.
After the Clintons exited the White House in 2000 it sounded like this. The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt: Bill Clinton is the "albatross" of his party, he should "drop dead"; the New York Times' Bob Herbert: Clinton "has been a disaster for the Democratic Party; and the Times editorializing, the former president "has plunged further and further beneath the already low expectations of his most cynical critics."
I could go on, but then -- for no apparent reason -- the Episodic Apologists' hopes are renewed. Hope never completely dies.
To return to the present, reality is again intruding on the Episodic Apologists' hopes. Now Benghazi is again in the news. It appears that in the months preceding the attack Hillary was engaged in furthering one of her goofball boasts. The secretary of state was padding her frequent flyer account, flying hither and yon and ignoring warnings from her people on the ground in Libya. They wanted more security. They got less, and the ambassador and three others were killed. Furthermore, according to my sources, another American soldier may still be in the National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., recovering from wounds incurred during a valiant effort at relieving the besieged annex.
And drip, drip, drip, another familiar process is auspicated. The Clintons' tawdry past begins once again to haunt them. At first, it was the lonely voice of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul noting the Democrats' hypocrisy in charging the Republicans with a "War on Women," when the Democrats' leading personality is Bill Clinton, the famed "sexual predator," to say noting of ex-Senator John Edwards and ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner, and many more. Then began the deluge. The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a mother lode of documents from Hillary's White House years. Maintained by Hillary's Arkansas friend, Diane Blair, who passed away in 2000, the documents include diary entries, letters and memos of conversations with Hillary from her embattled White House. They are candid.
They include Hillary's insight that the journalists -- the Episodic Apologists? -- have "big egos and no brains." Her overbearing mentality, "I'm used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms." And her attempts to deal with perceived enemies. For instance, she discussed with Blair the need to depict Gennifer Flowers, Bill's on-again off-again mistress of 12 years, as a "fraud, liar and possible criminal to stop this story and related stories." As for Monica Lewinsky, Hillary described her as a clever bully who seduced her helpless husband. Monica was 22, Bill 49 and president of the United States of America. Writes Blair, "It was a lapse, but she [Hillary] says to his credit he [Bill] tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a 'narcissistic loony toon'; but it was beyond control." Incidentally, in attempting to "break it off" Bill had telephone sex with Lewinsky some 15 times, often after 10:00 p.m.
I happen to know of the above nocturnal amours because I wrote of them in a 2007 book, "The Clinton Crack-Up." I got that information from intelligence operatives. They reported to me that they were not the only intelligence professionals who had this information. Most likely the French, Israelis and Russians were listening in on Bill and Monica's calls. Will the contents of these calls remain secret if Blair's documents cannot even be kept quiet?
Hillary, it is a long way to 2016.
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