Sunday Nov 25 2007

Hillary Clinton looks as if she has it made. The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination is creaming her competition in the polls. (Despite a blip last week, when Barack Obama showed a slight gain in popularity and Oprah Winfrey came out to bat for him.)

Her already-impressive $34m war chest is expanding by the week. She speaks now with a confident ease that eluded her during her Senate race -- when she came across as starchy and staged -- and even Hillary's most ardent critics are finding it difficult to stop the momentum that suggests this time next year the Clintons may be planning a triumphant move back to the White House.

Unless, of course, the couple who created the avidly watched White House soap opera start acting out again.

And that, in the opinion of author Sally Bedell Smith, isn't much of a stretch.

In her new book, For Love of Politics, Smith focuses on what she calls "the push and pull", between Bill and Hillary, two hardcore "political warriors", who continue to struggle with a dysfunctional yet eerily co-dependent relationship that thrives on their passion for power -- and little else.

Despite the rosy picture the Clintons have painted of their lives in the years since leaving the White House, Smith predicts that the bizarre dynamics that continue to govern their marriage may be too fragile to withstand the stress of the scrutiny they are so boldly inviting.

As she points out, since leaving the White House seven years ago, Bill and Hillary for the most part have led very separate lives. He's been traveling the world, while she has made herself hectically busy filling her life with political speeches and forums. In their first year in Chappaqua -- when people were still paying attention -- Bill visited Hillary twice a month, usually arriving in the evening and leaving the next morning. Going back to living together under one roof -- even if it weren't the pressure cooker atmosphere that's bound to be waiting for them in the White House -- won't be easy.

Smith writes that just as Bill promised "two for the price of one" during his 1992 campaign, Hillary is making no secret of the fact that he is, and will be, her chief strategist. Smith likens this working relationship to "two orbits of power, akin to John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby, who served as attorney general and operated as a de facto vice-president while serving as the President's eyes and ears and closest adviser".

When Hillary embarked on her campaign for the presidency in 2007, Smith says "she and Bill knew it would prompt a reconsideration of their marriage and political partnership. The American people would have to ponder a most un-presidential question: did they really want Bill Clinton running loose in the White House doing heaven knows what and influencing his wife in ways that could only be imagined?"

With just five weeks to go before the election campaign kicks into gear with the Iowa caucus, the question hasn't even been addressed, making the idea of a Clinton co-presidency rattle the beltway and its residents who people the corridors of power.

A recent column in the Washington Post articulated the unease at the prospect of what it called "a historically unique two-headed presidency constantly buffeted by the dynamics of a highly dysfunctional marriage", noting that "the cloud hovering over a Hillary presidency is not Bill padding around the White House in robe and slippers. It's President Clinton, in suit and tie, simply present in the White House when any decision is made. The degree of his involvement in that decision will inevitably become an issue."

Another story, printed early last summer in the usually buttoned-up New York Times, made mention of Bill's friendship with Canadian politician Belinda Stronach. It also reported how "he has told friends that his No 1 priority is not to cause her [Hillary] any trouble". Most disturbing to Camp Clinton was the story's placement: on the top of page one -- an unmistakable sign that all eyes will focus on the Clintons' personal life as the race proceeds.

"The Clintons' temperamental differences and the tensions in their marriage intruded on policy, politics and personnel in their presidential years," says Smith. "The Monica Lewinsky episode was the most egregious instance, but disquieting undercurrents were evident from the beginning. Had the Clintons divorced," Smith reckons, "they would have been more fathomable. The Clintons are complica- ted because they stayed together."

Just as losing her presidential bid is not something Hillary spends much time pondering, Smith reports that the notion of divorce -- even in the dark days after she found out about the degree of her husband's involvement with Lewinsky -- never once entered Hillary's head, furthering Smith's assessment of Bill and Hillary as "two halves of a unique whole", who cannot survive without each other.

Rather than a marriage of convenience, Smith suggests, this is a symbiotic union of necessity.

"It is impossible to understand one Clinton without factoring in the other," writes Smith, who has an ability to describe the chinks in their individual make-up ("He feels everybody's pain but hers. She's adapted.") with chilling clarity.

Depicting Hillary as the stronger force in the relationship, Smith allows that Bill shows the more traditional female sensibility.

"You get a hug from Bill and a solution from Hillary," Smith writes, quoting friends describing Bill as "mushy" and Hillary as "unsentimental".

In the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, the depth of his anguish about the damage he'd done to his relationship with Chelsea was an open secret. Former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers tells Smith: "I think he went into therapy mainly to preserve that relationship," adding: "Hillary, he figured, he could always get back. She always crawled back to him."

Tracing the dysfunction that has defined the Clintons' marriage, Smith takes readers back to October 11, 1975, when a 27-year-old Hillary married 29-year-old Bill in front of 15 guests in the living room of their first Arkansas home.

When Bill met Hillary in Yale during the spring of 1971, Smith reports, he was "impressed and stunned" by her "sense of strength and self-possession". In his own memoir, Bill admitted: "With Hillary there was no arm's length. She was in my face from the start and before I knew it, my heart."

Hillary, according to Smith, fell quickly for the "big gangly guy", whose "vitality seemed to shoot out of his pores". Yet even before their wedding, what Smith calls Bill's "tomcat tendencies" were a tricky issue.

Max Brantley, then a local reporter, told Smith: "There's a saying in Arkansas: 'You are on the second floor and you think you can stand in front of the window naked because no-one can see you.' Bill Clinton thought he was invisible. He had willing partners who didn't say anything... but the rumours about him were so many and so pervasive..."

Smith reports that the Clinton marriage nearly imploded twice during the early Arkansas years, first when he lost the re-election for governor in 1980 and again, later that decade, when her discovery of an affair led to his first session with a therapist -- an exercise Hillary would later admit was unsuccessful. ("I thought he had conquered it... I thought he understood it, but he didn't go deep enough or work hard enough.")

The issue of Bill's wandering body parts was one the couple was forced to defuse in the days before he officially entered the 1992 campaign race. "Acknowledging the past without confessing to it," they told a group of Washington reporters: "Our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties but we feel good about where we are...We intend to be together 30 or 40 years from now."

By then, reports Smith, Hillary was deft in "handling" whatever eruptions her husband created.

Bill hadn't even declared himself for the 1992 campaign when Hillary found herself in a situation described by Time magazine as "handling poisonous snakes".

The "snake" in question was a woman by the name of Connie Hamzy, who, in November 1991, told a reporter from Penthouse magazine that Bill had propositioned her in a hotel lobby. "When aides queried Bill, he acknowledged knowing her but denied any sexual involvement," writes Smith. "Hillary's reaction was chillingly succinct: "We have to destroy her story."

Later -- when the American Spectator reported that Arkansas state troopers had helped Bill hook up on the sly, when Gennifer Flowers exploded onto the national stage and when Paula Jones became a household name overnight -- Hillary stuck with the same defence strategy. Remarkably, Hillary's habit of enabling her errant husband's behaviour was also picked up by her family, in particular her mother Dorothy.

"Dorothy was concerned about Hillary but also about both of them," Hillary confidant Susan Thomason tells Smith. When the couple were on their "reconciliation" trip to Martha's Vineyard, Thomason says, "Dorothy sent the message to Bill that she still loved him, which boosted his morale."

Dee Dee Myers tells Smith that Hillary never relented in her MO of dealing with bimbo eruptions. She schooled everyone -- including her husband -- to follow the specific steps of going "after specific things about the story -- dates and times," says Myers. "Attack the motives and the details."

Mickey Kantor, the former US trade representative and political fixer for the Clintons, tells Smith that whenever an unseemly accusation popped up against the President, the First Lady's reaction was not, "You're a bad boy," but, "How do we get out of it? What are the alternatives?" At the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal, Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos reveals how he watched, stunned, as Bill "would seize on incorrect details and even managed a laugh when he found specifics he could disprove... but it was a nervous laugh, he was agitated, unsettled".

Hillary's strategy served her well until August 1998. Even though she had been hearing rumblings around the West Wing about Monica since the early days of 1998, a source tells Smith that Hillary automatically sought "refuge in denial... She knew intellectually there was a problem, an addiction, but she still believed he could never be that insane."

By the time her husband eventually came clean with her about the graphic nature of his relationship with Lewinsky, Smith claims, Hillary already had her own game-plan in place.

On Saturday August 15, Bill gave the New York Times an emotional interview, describing his anxiety about telling Hillary the truth two days earlier. However, Sidney Blumenthal, a confidant of Clinton's at the time, tells Smith: "Hillary's not naive. There was no one great explosive shock and surprise moment."

Hillary knows her husband well, and has for 25 years. The best evidence is that Sunday (August 16), as the drama was building, she was organising his testimony... so she knew what it was going to be."

Indeed, Blumenthal recalls telephoning James Carville that Monday evening to check on how the President's grand jury grilling had gone that day, and hearing Bill and Hillary "bantering in the background," which was when he realised "they were still working as a team".

By then, Smith contends, Hillary had settled on her own agenda. "One of her top advisors told me that one of the reasons, if not the reason, that she fought the impeachment so hard and was such a chief strategist during that whole period is that she saw her own presidential ambitions go down the drain," writes Smith. "She had been thinking about the presidency for a long time. I found an interview that Bill Clinton did back in 1992 when he was running for office, when he was musing, 'Well, eight years of Hillary Clinton, that's not a bad idea.'"

Like so many men desperate to get themselves out of hot water, Smith says Bill "in his practical and optimistic way" saw the Senate run as "a prize for Hillary, a lifeline for him and a salve for their marriage".

In her memoir, Hillary concurs. "Teaming up put the marriage on fresh ground," Hillary wrote. "Bill and I were talking again about matters other than the future of our relationship. We both began to relax. He was anxious to be helpful and I welcomed his enterprise."

It was only at this point that Hillary really started talking to her husband again. The day the Starr report was released, Smith describes the Clintons' appearence at a dinner for Irish-Americans: "Hillary put her hand on her husband's leg. A moment later, beaming brightly, she leaned over and whispered in the President's ear." Aides, Smith reports, say that was the day Hillary "reconnected the President's oxygen tube".

But, as Smith reports, their lives would never go back to normal and the dynamics between Bill and Hillary shifted dramatically after the impeachment proceedings.

"For all the humiliations that Hillary had endured in the past, the magnitude of Bill's latest transgressions, which abased her in the eyes of the world, intensified her anger and deepened her sense of accumulated grievance," writes Smith, who adds that their last year in the White House, "brought a dramatic shift in their relationship, with the centre of gravity moving from his realm to hers. He was the lame duck, crippled by scandal, and she was the rising political star.

"While questions endure about whether the Clintons love each other in the way of most happily married couples," Smith writes in conclusion, "there is no doubt about their shared commitment to the pursuit of political power."

There is also no doubt that their relationship -- and how it is perceived by the voting public -- will play a major role in the election.

"There are a lot of people who will work for her if she runs for president and who are worried about the relationship," lawyer (and spin-master) Lanny Davis recently told the New York Times. "The conventional wisdom is that the relationship might hurt her -- all those old memories and scandals will be evoked. But I'm betting, and maybe this is wishful thinking, that that's not correct."

And Davis is not alone. In her review of Bedell Smith's book, reporter Nina Burleigh -- who covered the 1992 campaign for Time magazine -- admitted: "Maybe I'm a clueless romantic at heart, but I always believed Hillary was truly in love with Bill -- for a long time, if not still -- and that he broke her heart. The bargain she made was internal: she pressed raw emotion into drive and focus. That seems perverse in the age of marital therapy and Dr Phil's couch. There is something alien about the strange alchemy she performed when making, in the corny commonplace of her middle-class, Midwestern upbringing (an upbringing, by the way, that could not possibly have prepared her for the charming, faithless son of a woman who sobbed the day Elvis died), lemonade from lemons."

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