Hillary's Scheme; Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House

Introduction

“The order of succession to the presidency in this poor benighted country may well be Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton.”
—Dick Morris to NewsMax.com, May 2002

The year 2003 began with startling prospects for New York’s junior senator, opportunities that were almost unimaginable just weeks before. Former vice president Al Gore had dominated Democratic Party presidential preference polls for most of 2002. But in all the surveys in which her name had been included—regional polls taken by New York’s Marist College or Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University or national polls like Gallup or Zogby International—former first lady Hillary Clinton routinely ran a strong second to Gore. Gore usually managed to draw between 30 and 40 percent in these surveys, with Mrs. Clinton running about 10 to 15 points behind. Meanwhile, other prospective candidates—rising political stars like John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and John Edwards, who were regularly touted by the experts as the party’s best hope to beat George Bush in 2004—almost never attracted more than single-digit support.

Gore Withdraws

Then it happened. On December 15, 2002, Gore stunned the political world by announcing that he would not seek a much anticipated rematch against President Bush in 2004. Overnight, Hillary Clinton rocketed to the top of the two major polls of Democratic Party presidential prospects, attracting 30 percent support in a Time/CNN survey and 40 percent backing in a Gallup poll. In both surveys, more Democrats backed Clinton than her two nearest competitors, Kerry and Lieberman, combined. The first presidential spouse to hold elective office in U.S. history was suddenly her party’s front-runner for the 2004 presidential nomination. A week later, Hillary Clinton was named “the most admired woman in America” in a separate CNN survey, edging out even current first lady Laura Bush.

Throughout the early months of 2003, Mrs. Clinton continued to top presidential surveys of Democrats, drawing 42 percent support in one February Quinnipiac survey. In her home state of New York, 50 percent of Democrats wanted her to run—a greater percentage than all the other Democrats combined when undecided voters were figured in.

The Big Question

Will Hillary run in 2004 when the plan has always been for her to make her move in 2008? And if she does, can she win? My answer to those two questions, as someone who has covered both Bill and Hillary Clinton for years as a reporter for the online news Web site NewsMax.com, will likely surprise Democrats—and perhaps shock Republicans into a new awareness of the dangers that lie ahead. Because the short answer to both questions is yes and yes. Her denials to the contrary, Hillary Clinton is considering a presidential run against George W. Bush in 2004 because she knows that year’s election may be her last, best hope to reclaim the White House.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, most observers acknowledged that Bush’s superb performance dispelled any doubts about his strength of character, his resolve, and his leadership. His stirring words—delivered from Ground Zero just a few days after the twin symbols of America’s economic dominance collapsed in a cloud of debris that made Lower Manhattan look as if it had been the target of a nuclear strike—rallied a shaken nation and will remain among the most memorable ever uttered by a U.S. president. Burned into the American psyche forever is the now famous quote: “I can hear you. The world can hear you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” It was Bush’s shout-out to a firefighter who complained that the president couldn’t be heard. The off-the-cuff response from a president not known for his spontaneous eloquence became the most memorable phrase uttered by any leader since FDR pronounced the attack on Pearl Harbor “a day that will live in infamy.”

That day Senator Clinton, not yet a year in office, was among the dignitaries who crowded the small paths carved through the Ground Zero rubble where the president would walk. A witness told NewsMax that Bush was mobbed by firefighters and rescue workers anxious to show support for the nation’s leader in a moment of national crisis. “They couldn’t wait to shake his hand. And they did the same with Giuliani and Pataki—even Schumer, too,” he said, referring to the Republican governor and mayor as well as the state’s senior senator, a Democrat. “But when her turn came the guys just folded their arms and wouldn’t shake her hand. I’m no fan of Hillary,” the source added. “But even I felt bad for her.” The episode didn’t make the newspapers, but it spoke volumes about the nation’s disdain for her husband’s legacy in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

The White House knew that the nation’s near unanimous support for Bush in those weeks of September and October 2001 wouldn’t last forever, but they bet—correctly as it turned out—that the tragedy that took 3,000 lives would color American politics for the foreseeable future. The battle of the 2002 midterm election, the White House decided, would be waged on national security issues. Now, with both houses of Congress as well as the presidency in GOP hands, all that goes right—along with anything that does not—will be credited to George Bush.

The Gulf War Lesson

Unlike his son, George Herbert Walker Bush did not have the same sweeping control over the government when he was president. And yet with his Gulf War victory over Iraq in March 1991—just twenty months before the 1992 election—Bush Sr.’s approval ratings hit a stratospheric 91 percent. He was considered so politically invincible that most Democrats thought it was a waste of time to challenge him. Even New York governor Mario Cuomo, whose stirring speech to the 1984 Democratic Convention had turned him into a presidential contender and whose Depression-era rhetoric would have been perfect for the burgeoning recession that was then just a flicker on the national radar screen, decided not to get in the race.

Enter Bill Clinton, whose sordid private life and sorry military record—he dodged three separate draft notices and finally reneged on a pledge to serve in the reserves—made him his party’s perfect sacrificial lamb. “[Clinton] would get opened up like a soft peanut,” predicted then Senator Bob Kerrey, after abandoning his own bid for the White House in 1992.1 No way could this Arkansas unknown—whose only previous moment in the national spotlight came during a speech to the 1988 Democratic convention that went on so long they had to get out the hook—beat the man who led America to victory in the Persian Gulf and whose own military record as a World War II pilot shot down over the Pacific qualified him as a war hero.

Yet it happened. When the Democratic Party looked destitute in 1991 and 1992 and Bush Sr.’s popularity was at least as high as his son’s was in the wake of September 11, the team of Clinton and Clinton decided to get into the race. From there they managed not only to get themselves elected, but also to hold on to the White House longer than any other Democratic administration since FDR’s.

Déjà Vu 1992?

For the Bush family, 2004 could be shaping up as déjà vu all over again. By the fall of 2002, Democrats like New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine had begun referring to “the worst economic environment we’ve had in 50 years”—an unmistakable echo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign mantra that under Bush Sr. Americans were suffering “the worst economy in 50 years.”2 Then after the midterm election, the dismissal of top Bush administration economic officials Paul O’Neill and Lawrence Lindsey had Democrats crowing over what looked like an admission that the president’s economic policies had been an abject failure.

In 1991 and 1992, Bush Sr. at least had the afterglow of the Iraq war victory to cushion the blow of a souring economy. Today, the international horizons are a good deal more clouded. Another Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil—especially one that could be tied to Bush’s decision to leave U.S. immigration policy and border controls virtually unchanged since September 11—would be met by a chorus of congressional critics arguing that the president had deliberately left America vulnerable. If the next attack comes with a Saudi pedigree, previous assurances that the Saudis have been “reliable allies in the war on terror” delivered by senior administration officials like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention Bush himself, will look particularly ridiculous. In that case the president would be vulnerable to charges that he put his own family’s long-standing relationship with Riyadh royalty ahead of U.S. national security interests. And any U.S. attack on Iraq that ends up with terrorists retaliating on American soil will have the media blaming Bush for putting American civilian populations in harm’s way instead of protecting them.

Instinctively, most Democrats seem to understand that Bush indeed will be vulnerable in 2004. Unlike 1991, a year out from the New Hampshire primary there is no shortage of ambitious Democrats seeking to challenge Bush in 2003; among them are John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean, and Bob Graham. That’s a lot of high-powered political talent competing for the chance to be the Democratic Party’s sacrificial lamb in 2004.

The Risks of Waiting

Another factor Hillary has to consider: Waiting until 2008 entails substantial career risks. What if, for instance, another Democrat beats Bush in 2004? Mrs. Clinto...