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Hillary Clinton's campaign has spent much of the past week trumpeting
her pledge to protect the middle class from tax increases. Clinton has
"proposed a bold, aggressive agenda," campaign press secretary Brian
Fallon said in a statement
this week, "but when it comes to paying for it, she will make sure the
wealthiest Americans finally start paying their fair share, not force
the middle class to pay even more than they already do."
The former senator and secretary of state hasn't been shy
about using that pledge to bludgeon her Democratic opponents, Sen.
Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O'Malley, as too eager to take
money away from the middle class. "If you are truly concerned about
raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do
is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes,"
Fallon said. "Yet Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9 percent tax
hike on middle-class families just to cover his health care plan, and
simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the
rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda." Twitter accounts
affiliated with Clinton's campaign have eschewed subtlety to attack
Sanders and O'Malley on this point.
There's a problem with Clinton's line of attack: She is
promising to exempt a lot of indisputably rich people from paying more
in taxes. Clinton pledged last week that, should she become president,
she wouldn't allow taxes to be raised on households earning less than
$250,000 per year—by any measure a very high ceiling for the middle
class.
The middle class is one of those nebulous terms with no clear-cut
definition. But a glance at the distribution of income across the
country makes it hard to argue that anyone earning close to $250,000 a
year could be considered part of the "middle" of the income range.
.
The median household income for 2014, according to the US Census Bureau, was $53,657, about where it has been for the past three years (though still down quite a bit from the $57,357 mark in 2007,
before the recession hit). To get into the top 20 percent, a family
needs to make more than $112,000 per year. Entry into the top 5 percent
requires more than $206,000 in annual income. A typical definition of
the middle class wouldn't include the top 5 percent of earners, who took
in more than half the money earned nationwide in 2014. And yet
Clinton's bar is even higher.
The overwhelming majority of Americans like to think of themselves as belonging to the middle class, even when they have far more buying power than the average resident. With wealth growing increasingly concentrated
at the very top tier of the superrich, it's easy for someone making
$150,000 to look up the chain and feel less than wealthy, even while
liberated from many of the concerns of those closer to the actual middle
bracket of annual income.
Clinton didn't draw her number out of thin air: $250,000 is the same pledge she made in her 2008 campaign, and the level that President Barack Obama has also used to define the middle class. As the New York Times explained
in 2011, that demarcation probably came from Bill Clinton's decision to
set the highest income tax bracket at $250,000. (Thanks to inflation,
the highest tax bracket is now
income more than $464,000 for married couples.) But by setting such a
high marker, Clinton would make it much harder to find the funding to
pass many of the ambitious progressive goals she has suggested on the
campaign trail.
If Clinton (and Obama) had defined the middle class as making up to
$150,000 in yearly income, that slice of the country would exclude all
but the wealthiest 11.3 percent of households—perhaps a more reasonable
metric.
Of course, Clinton's own finances may influence her sense of income
norms. From the time she left the State Department to her presidential
campaign launch, Clinton went on the speaking circuit, raking in millions, with a typical fee of around $200,000 per speech. Since the Clintons left the White House in 2001, the pair have earned more than $230 million together, and financial disclosures from the current campaign show that the Clintons have a net worth between $11 million and $53 million.
Sanders has proposed a broad reimagining of the social safety
net—most prominently single-payer health care—that would require raising
substantial new revenue through taxes. But even less sweeping
progressive legislation, such as Clinton's proposals, would likely force
the government to bump up taxes on a wider swath of the population than
just those making more than $250,000 a year.
"This is the kind of argument that conservatives make," the Huffington Post's Jonathan Cohn wrote
of Clinton's attacks on Sanders. "It might or might not help Clinton
win in November. It’s hard to see how it can help progressives win in
the long run."
Take the Family Act, a bill
introduced by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) to wide acclaim from
progressive groups, which would institute paid family leave for workers.
To offset the cost of that new benefit, Gillibrand's bill would
institute a small increase in payroll taxes, which would hit many of the
same people for whom Clinton has pledged to not raise taxes. Clinton
has endorsed paid family leave in concept but has yet to explain how
she'd pay for it.
On Tuesday, Lis Smith, O'Malley's deputy campaign manager, lit into
Clinton over the recent attacks and called on her to explain how she'd
pay for family leave. "Secretary Clinton is right: Governor O’Malley
does support paid family leave, and he supports paying for it," Smith
said in a statement. "She is trying to have it both ways on this
issue—making promises she can’t pay for, and playing the age-old
Washington game of promising a chicken in every pot."
STAND BY ME Faces change, but Hillary Clinton has long operated behind a tight circle. From left: Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, Clinton, Huma Abedin, Mandy Grunwald, and John Podesta.
Lawyers! Aides! Advisers! No presidential candidate has ever been as defended as Hillary Clinton. As Sarah Ellison reports, the tight-lipped human wall she has raised is also a major liability.
They were her darkest days yet as First Lady, though there would be far worse to come. In 1994, after her health-care-reform plan imploded and her party suffered a devastating midterm defeat, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, gathered 10 women whose opinion Clinton held dear. The group included Mandy Grunwald, senior media consultant to the president, whose ties to the Clintons went back to the 1992 campaign; Susan Thomases, who had worked as the Clintons’ personal lawyer during the campaign; and Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s scheduler and later the first head of her 2008 presidential campaign. Called the “Chix meeting” by one participant, the group had been getting together to discuss the First Lady’s agenda, and the conversations usually ranged widely—to media strategy, policy debates, political fights, personal lives. The off-the-record gatherings were an outgrowth of her regular staff meetings, which were scheduled for an hour but often went for two or three and into the evening. A few bottles of wine might be opened, and the women would talk about “who was dating whom, who was cute,” and “whose kids were going to the prom,” according to one of the Chix I spoke with recently. In the weeks after the midterm defeat, the meetings were “healing” ones and designed to be “nutrition for the soul,” this participant said.
During one such meeting, toward the end of 1994, Clinton walked into the room and the distress of the past weeks and months spilled out. She fought back tears, and was “quite emotional.” She told the group that she was sorry—sorry if she had let people down, sorry if she had contributed to the recent political losses, as indeed she had. The health-care overhaul, on which Bill Clinton had campaigned so hard, and which he’d handed over to Hillary upon his election, had failed spectacularly under her leadership—undercut by the insurance industry’s aggressive opposition to it, and by her secrecy and high-handedness. Clinton told the group that she was considering withdrawing from the kind of policy and political work that had defined her. “This was all my fault,” she said, according to the participant. She didn’t want to damage her husband’s administration.
Years later, in her memoir Living History, Clinton herself described this moment in trademark humblebrag style: “One by one,” she wrote, “each woman told me why I couldn’t give up or back down. Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.” As we well know, Clinton didn’t back down. She stayed in the game and has stayed in it ever since. The anecdote as Clinton conveyed it seemed designed to make three points. First, she is not in politics to slake her own ambitions. Second, she’s a fighter. And third, if it hadn’t been for this circle of nurturing intimates, she couldn’t possibly have gone on.
Throughout her many years in public life—through all the disappointments and triumphs, the scandals real or alleged—Clinton has surrounded herself with protectors: a tightly knit Praetorian Guard, mute and loyal. The result has been the opposite of what was intended. When troubles arise—sometimes of Clinton’s own making, sometimes not—she retreats into a defensive crouch, shielding herself inside a cocoon of secrecy, with a small circle of intimates standing watch. With each new round of trouble and scandal, the circle seems to draw tighter. The penchant for secrecy—for all operations to be closely and privately held—increases by yet another increment. But this never proves to be a solution. The secrecy and the closed nature of her dealings generate problems of their own, which in turn prompt efforts to restrict information and draw even more tightly inside a group of intimates. It is a vicious circle. The current controversy over Clinton’s State Department e-mails—the use of a private “clintonemail.com” account for government business—is a classic case in point.
Clinton’s way of doing business is by now so entrenched that it is hard to imagine she could ever behave differently. And the people around her have their own interests to consider. There certainly are many who believe in Clinton. But, for some, she is also the world’s most high-maintenance and high-profile meal ticket. To get into her circle, one must behave with extraordinary loyalty. Once you’re in, it’s like Fight Club. The first rule is to never talk about it. The State Department e-mails provide ample evidence of the hermetic circle that exists around Clinton—a world of gatekeepers and advisers, but favor seekers too. “I consider you to be the best friend and the best person I have met in my long life,” wrote Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and longtime Clinton associate, who went on in the e-mail to ask Hillary for some help. A top aide, after a television appearance by Clinton, wrote to her of the public reaction: “Three people even told me they teared up.” Another top aide sent Clinton an e-mail, linking to a video of Hillary dancing, with the subject line “Secretary of Awesome.”
II. CONTROL, CONTROL, CONTROL
Hillary Clinton’s network is vast and stretches beyond those involved in her 2016 political operation. Compiling a list of people in the innermost circle is like giving thanks in an Oscar speech—someone is always going to be left out. Twenty-five years ago the group would mainly have consisted of women, but that’s no longer the case. John Podesta, who was chief of staff during Bill Clinton’s second term, is the chair of the campaign. Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s longest-serving aides, is the vice-chair. Mandy Grunwald is a senior adviser. Robby Mook, the campaign manager, helped Clinton win Nevada in 2008 and more recently steered Terry McAuliffe, himself a Clintonite, to the governorship of Virginia. Cheryl Mills, who defended Bill Clinton during the impeachment proceedings, and Maggie Williams, both of them alpha girls in Hillaryland, have no official role in the campaign but are actual friends of Clinton’s. Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, and Jim Margolis, a senior adviser, are former Obama aides. Jake Sullivan, who was close to Clinton when she was secretary of state, is now a senior policy adviser. Philippe Reines, Clinton’s attack dog and public-affairs adviser at the State Department, and a former aide to Al Gore, is currently “in hibernation”—meaning not speaking publicly to the press, according to a campaign spokesman, as if that makes him exceptional. Jennifer Palmieri, special assistant in the Clinton White House in 1994, is communications director. Minyon Moore, who was the director of White House political affairs for Bill Clinton and worked for Hillary’s 2008 campaign, presented crucial research when Hillary Clinton was considering whether and how to run in 2016. She is involved in the current campaign on an informal basis.
Some of the original Chix no longer officially work for Clinton, driven out by fatigue or controversy. But they remain Clinton surrogates and help form the wall around her that keeps outsiders at a distance. The wall has narrow doorways to control what comes in and what goes out—the routing pathways of the Clinton e-mails make that clear. Operations are closely held. In 2009, when Clinton wished to give Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, a button saying RESET, to signal a fresh start to relations, her staff kept the Russia experts at arm’s length and insisted on making it themselves—and got the Russian word wrong. Her behavior is so controlled that she recently had to protest on national television: “I am a real person.” Even something unscripted comes across as planned—like her stop at a Chipotle in Ohio during a campaign swing last spring, which has been widely spun as an exercise in woman-of-the-people pandering. In truth, Clinton and Huma Abedin entered the restaurant in sunglasses, like Thelma and Louise, wanting simply to get something to eat. Hillary ordered a chicken burrito bowl and picked up the tray. They were recognized by no one. A New York Times reporter, alerted by a passing remark, confirmed the visitation later only by reviewing the restaurant’s security video.
By now, the people who constitute the wall—a changing cast of characters over time, but some of them in place for a quarter-century—have built walls of their own and can be as hard to reach as Clinton herself. It is like the fortified Western Front after years of bloody stalemate. Try to penetrate, making your way across a landscape strewn with lethal briefing books, and you’ll come face-to-face with people who are authorized to speak but deliberately say nothing; people who know everything but deliberately never speak; and people who talk all the time but don’t know what they’re talking about. There has never been such a well-defended and battle-hardened candidate for president of the United States. Bill Clinton, Obama, Carter, even Nixon—they all went through periods in the early stages of their campaigns when they were more or less open books, accessible to almost anyone, eager to talk. If Hillary Clinton wins, she will be the only president in history to have already had 24 years of Secret Service protection before she even takes the oath of office. As anyone who has had the experience knows, even a single day with the Secret Service can be isolating.
In reporting this story, I spoke with current and former members of Hillary Clinton’s staff, going back to Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency; with people who have advised Hillary at every stage of her career; and with people who have covered her and run campaigns against her. Most of those I spoke to insisted that the conversations be off the record. They had to be cajoled even into “background” attribution. The most common refrain I heard was “I just don’t want anyone to know we had this conversation.” Setting up an interview with Nick Merrill, the Clinton campaign’s traveling press secretary, who himself has his own scheduler, required more than 40 e-mails, and it took place only after six canceled calls. This is the man who is Clinton’s public interface with the world. One longtime Clinton adviser agreed to meet with me and made an appointment, and then, when I e-mailed to confirm the meeting, retreated into radio silence.
The first thing many people I spoke to for this story told me was to watch out for the people who weren’t really close to Hillary but pretended to be. It was a reminder of the constant jockeying for position within her world. Nick Merrill told me that he had worked with Clinton for nearly 10 years, but if he were going to give me a list of 10 people who really knew her, he himself wouldn’t be on it. “Everyone says they have a deep and abiding relationship with her,” he said, “but you have to be careful.” Being in her inner circle is as much about keeping people out as anything else. It is a recurring theme, and it has deep roots. “The biggest mistake of the American press,” Maggie Williams told The New York Times in 1999, “is thinking they know her.”
III. ROSEBUD MOMENT?
Maybe there was a time when it was different, but if so, you’d probably have to go back to the 1970s, before Hillary Clinton, a young lawyer newly married to Bill, first experienced the sharp-elbowed indignities of public life. From the moment she had to live as a public figure, the pattern we know today began to assert itself.
After he was elected governor of Arkansas, in 1978, Bill Clinton was asked by an A.P. reporter about his wife’s decision to keep using her maiden name, Rodham, as her own—a practice that raised eyebrows in Hillary’s socially conservative adopted state. “She decided to do that when she was nine, long before women’s lib came along,” Bill answered. “People wouldn’t mind if they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” It was an early nod to the distance that has always existed between Hillary’s public persona and her private one. After the election, 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.”
And they would never get much. The Clinton White House generated a series of scandals and run-ins with the press that prompted Hillary to tighten the circle around herself. Even before the health-care implosion there was a majorNew York Times article, in 1992, about a Clinton investment in a real-estate venture, the Whitewater Development Corporation, that eventually failed. Questions about the arrangement blossomed into a full-blown rolling investigation into every aspect of the Clinton presidency; to deal with it, Hillary would come to rely on a group of legal advisers that included attorney David Kendall, who told her not to read the newspapers or watch television and who became, as Clinton put it, “my main link to the outside world.” Staff members were tasked to tell Clinton what they felt she needed to know. In the spring of 1993, the Travelgate scandal hit: the Clintons were suspected of firing the staff of the White House travel office in order to replace it with a firm that had ties to themselves. The Clintons were absolved of the charges, but Hillary unwittingly made false statements to investigators. That July, her close friend and confidant Vince Foster committed suicide after enduring intense pressure from the press throughout the early scandals of the Clinton presidency. Then, in December 1993, The American Spectator, a conservative monthly, printed an article sourced to four Arkansas troopers who claimed they had helped procure women for Bill Clinton when he was governor. As Whitewater dragged on, Harold Ickes, a lawyer who had become Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, headed up a Whitewater Response Team and became a crucial Hillary defender. The scrutiny unleashed by Whitewater soon turned to Clinton’s “improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. Hillary spoke to hardly anyone about the Lewinsky affair but evidently leaned heavily on Diane Blair, an old friend from Arkansas. Blair’s husband, James, had been the chief counsel to Tyson Foods and had helped Hillary earn nearly $100,000 in profits from trading in commodity futures in the late 1970s.
In 1999, as the Senate was voting on her husband’s impeachment, Clinton was contemplating the next chapter in her career, one that Maggie Williams herself called “kooky”: running for the Senate. Clinton eventually embarked on a highly orchestrated “listening tour” through New York State, during which she relied on many of her old advisers, including Williams and Grunwald, and later added new ones, such as Philippe Reines. (At the State Department, Reines would be the person responsible for the mistranslated RESET button.) As a candidate for senator, she briefly opened up. The local press noticed how she was emerging from what the New York Post called “Hillary in Hiding.” Clinton won the Senate election, and a second one, and in due course began to explore a White House run. Most of her veteran White House and Senate staff would prove themselves to be notoriously closemouthed throughout the 2008 campaign, though internal divisions among a few advisers led to leaks of strategy documents and other private campaign communications. After Hillary finished third in Iowa and Obama swept four later primaries, she pushed out her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since her earliest days in the White House, and brought in Maggie Williams. One of the original Chix had replaced another.
IV. LIKE A DAUGHTER
In the first three months of her current presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton spent around $6 million on more than 300 employees, among the largest expenditure categories of the campaign. One observer noted that her team seemed set up to fight the last battle: “If you watch her decisions, it’s making up for what she didn’t do the last time.” She was criticized in 2008 for being too insular and working only with people who were blindly loyal. The Praetorian Guard has been expanded to include men close to Obama, such as Joel Benenson and Jim Margolis. Both were central to Obama’s 2008 campaign, and in fact Benenson had spent some of it sharpening a message that, in part, portrayed Clinton as poll-driven and inauthentic. The influx of these new advisers may have been deliberate, but it comes with a downside. As one former Clinton aide told me, the management of Hillary Clinton is not always straightforward: “If you don’t know Hillary Clinton and she yells at you and says, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ these people are listening to her. They don’t realize you need to give it time, and then go back”—at which point she may be persuadable. This aide went as far as to suggest that Clinton’s first political instincts were generally misguided and that she has little sense of how deficient she is as a campaigner.
There are still some prominent old faces. Chairing Clinton’s campaign is Democratic Party stalwart John Podesta, a former counselor to Obama, who left the White House in February. Podesta, 66, served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff during his tumultuous second term. As the Monica Lewinsky story played out, Podesta reportedly threatened to fire anyone caught talking about the matter, not just in the press but in the hallways of the White House. Podesta is disciplined and strategic, and is often referred to as the “adult supervision” that will prevent anything like the disarray of 2008. He is not an apostle of openness.
Mandy Grunwald, a senior adviser for communications, has perhaps the longest relationship with the Clintons of anyone in the current campaign. Grunwald faced her first big political challenge with the Gennifer Flowers allegations. Appearing on Nightline, with Ted Koppel, then at the height of his popularity, she berated him for letting a “trashy supermarket tabloid” set the agenda. During a victory press conference the day after Clinton won the ‘92 election, Grunwald was the only female adviser onstage, in the shoulder pads and sneakers of the era. She advised Hillary during the Whitewater investigation and during her 2008 presidential campaign. Her sister, a novelist, once wrote about Grunwald in Glamour magazine: “She was older. Braver. Taller. Meaner. Stronger.” Though never far from the Clintons, Grunwald has amassed an impressive array of other clients, including Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was in fact Grunwald’s appointment to Clinton’s campaign that signaled Warren’s decisive move not to run in this election.
The circle around Clinton includes some decidedly odd characters. When Clinton went to the State Department, in 2009, she wanted to bring along Sidney Blumenthal, a former reporter who had served in the Clinton White House and been a senior adviser during her 2008 campaign. Rahm Emanuel blocked the effort, mainly because Blumenthal had been so vicious about Obama during the election. But Clinton kept Blumenthal in a shadow capacity, and he was employed by the Clinton Foundation. From the evidence of the State Department e-mails, he remained in close contact with Clinton. His tone is at once sycophantic and preachy, and he weighs in on many subjects. He wrote Clinton with an analysis, based on “an extremely sensitive source,” of the political situation in Libya. He described John Boehner, soon to be the House Speaker, as “louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle.” He attempted to pull Clinton into efforts to endorse Tony Blair for president of the European Council and offered advice for a speech she was delivering in Germany. In another e-mail, with the subject line “H: Yes, there is a vast right wing conspiracy,” Blumenthal forwarded Jane Mayer’s 2010 New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers’ funding of right-wing causes. “Ah, a little lite vacation reading!,” Clinton responded.
One of Clinton’s most trusted aides is Huma Abedin, vice-chairwoman of the current campaign, who began her work with the Clintons in 1996 as an intern. Abedin is as secretive as Clinton herself, if not more so, and she is the primary gatekeeper. She often forwards press coverage and other messages, highlighting once again the mediating membrane that exists between Hillary and ordinary reality. Abedin is one of the State Department employees who had a clintonemail.com e-mail account, and in 2012, after she stepped down as deputy chief of staff, she was granted “special government employee” status, which allowed her to continue at the State Department while working as a consultant for the Clinton Foundation and Teneo (a firm co-founded by Douglas Band, a former Clinton aide). That Abedin’s husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, was caught tweeting photos of his crotch and then lying about it adds a strange symmetry to Abedin’s relationship with Hillary Clinton.
Clinton is deeply reliant on Abedin, who, in addition to her other campaign responsibilities, occasionally fills in as tech support. In an exchange with Clinton, revealed in the State Department e-mails, Abedin walks her boss through a “secure” fax connection. The subject line from Abedin to Clinton reads, “Can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax.” Clinton responds, “I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?”
“Yes but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.”
“I did.”
“Just pick up phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up.”
“I’ve done it twice now.”
At a celebration for Huma Abedin’s wedding, Clinton said, “I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it would [be] Huma.”
V. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS”
The precise moment that Hillary Clinton decided to run for president a second time is a matter of debate. A Saturday Night Live skit in March featured a sonogram of Hillary in utero, waving a campaign sign. But people close to Hillary say that she wavered for years about the decision to run in 2016. Some of the recently released e-mails indicate that Clinton had carefully watched the political ambitions of other potential candidates, such as David Petraeus, and used her circle to gauge the political climate. After her excruciating 2008 loss to Barack Obama, she told people she would not run again. Eventually, aided by polling and research carried out by the Dewey Square Group, a political consultancy where Minyon Moore is a principal, which sketched a possible route to victory, she came around to the idea. Moore had been an assistant to Bill Clinton when he was president and grew close to Hillary. She was a senior adviser in the 2008 campaign. With roots in Chicago and an expertise in state and local affairs, Moore is a key liaison with the African-American community. When Clinton left the State Department, Moore told me, there was “an instant hue and cry from many of her supporters” for her to run for president again. “But she had not had a chance to think, eat, sleep.” What she wanted to do was take some time to unwind. “If there is such a thing as normal for Hillary Clinton, she wanted to do that,” Moore said. “She had to get that space.” Chelsea was thinking about starting a family. The Clinton Foundation was always there as a comfortable roost. During that time of contemplative unwinding, Clinton made more than $12 million, according to Bloomberg, mostly from her second memoir and by giving dozens of speeches to corporations and other groups. Chelsea did have a baby. And soon after, Clinton was largely decided.
Even so, some of those closest to Clinton advised her to stay on the sidelines. Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff at State, told Clinton that “you don’t have to do this,” according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. Maggie Williams was equally forceful about her concerns. Her sentiment was “I wish you wouldn’t do it,” this person said. A former Clinton aide laid out for me one rationale that circulated last year, arguing against a run: that Clinton had achieved enough success as Secretary of State—“icon status”—to wash away all the bad memories of 2008. She could now have a global voice on any issue she wanted. If she ran for president again, she risked being dragged into the muck of a political campaign, and attacked, and all of that aura of greatness would be washed away.
Mills, in particular, has become a focal point of the current campaign, even though she is not officially a part of it and may never be. Like her former boss, Mills has come under criticism from some members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in particular for what they characterize as her attempts to align talking points of various officials in the aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound there. Mills, like Abedin, was given special-government-employee status, an affiliation that allowed her, at the end of her tenure at the State Department, to continue working on Haiti reconstruction as special envoy. The status permits people to work for the government while pursuing careers in the private sector; Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the Judiciary Committee, has questioned Clinton’s use of the program. Mills’s e-mails with Clinton reveal a relationship far more egalitarian than is the case with other advisers. In one e-mail, Mills joked to Clinton about a video of her dancing: “You shake your tail feathers girl!” More than Abedin, Mills is an equal. She also has a long history with the Clintons. In 1999, as deputy counsel to the president, she became something of a star during the impeachment trial for defending Bill Clinton against allegations of obstruction of justice. “If you love the rule of law, you must love it in all of its applications,” she argued. “You cannot only love it when it provides the verdict you seek.”
Maggie Williams’s relationship dates back to the 1980s, when she was working at the Children’s Defense Fund and Clinton chaired the board. Williams served not only as Hillary’s chief of staff when she was First Lady but at the same time as an assistant to Bill Clinton. She was the first person to hold both positions at once. In 1995, in the middle of the congressional hearings on Whitewater, Williams had to testify about her actions in the immediate aftermath of Vince Foster’s suicide. A Secret Service officer claimed that he had seen Williams carrying folders out of Foster’s office the night he was found; a tearful Williams said she had not done so. In 1997, after Bill Clinton was re-elected, Williams got married and decided to take off for Paris with her husband, who would work at the U.S. Embassy there while she did communications consulting. But this didn’t mean a break with her former bosses. In the fall of 1997, Bill Clinton flew Williams and some others to Washington as a surprise for Hillary’s 50th birthday. And just a short while later, in 1999, Williams was back in the fold, along with a few other formerly burned-out Clinton aides, helping Clinton as part of the exploratory committee for her Senate campaign. Then, in the early 2000s, she worked for Bill again, managing his Clinton Foundation staff. After a short break, she returned in an attempt to salvage Hillary’s nose-diving 2008 presidential campaign. In June of 2014, Williams was named the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
VI. “FUCK THIS SHIT”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent the summer on its heels. In March 2015, when The New York Timesreported on Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account while secretary of state, it must have looked to many in the campaign a lot like every other middling scandal that Hillaryland had ever dealt with. Her advisers seem to have a model that works for this kind of thing: (1) Make a strong legal case. (2) Come out guns blazing. (3) Don’t yield an inch.
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.
VII. WOUNDED WARRIOR
Whatever the changes in her name, her hair, her role, and her identity, Hillary Clinton has always been a lightning rod. From the moment she entered public life, she has had people selling her softer side, starting with her husband. She has always relied on other people to open her “real” self up to the public, because it is not a job she herself is seemingly able or willing to do. On the rare occasions when it happens, it is an accident—as when, this past summer, she spoke candidly backstage to organizers of a Black Lives Matter event, a conversation that was captured on a participant’s cell phone and soon went public. In it, Clinton told activists that they needed a specific agenda to get more than “lip service.” When pressed, her voice hardened, and she said, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws; you change allocation of resources; you change the way systems operate.” Clinton learned early, from experience, that honesty and candor rarely serve her well. She prizes loyalty to the point that staffers who can tell her what she doesn’t want to hear are notable exceptions to the rule. Because she has been burned, exposed, misunderstood, and mocked, she has grown ever more guarded. She listens to plenty of advisers on policy issues, but on matters close to home she is a student of her own history. And, as one administration official told me, for all the troubles she faces, “there’s not a single candidate out there who wouldn’t trade places with her.”
THIS CAMPAIGN IS LIKE A TURING TEST OF WHETHER HILLARY IS INDEED HERSELF.
According to current and former members of the inner circle, there is something extremely winning about Clinton that only these people see: her wit, her generosity, her intelligence, or some combination of all of those things. Tom Nides, a former deputy secretary at State, cited her loyalty, and “not just to the people who worked for her.” Despite the fierce battle with Obama during the 2008 campaign, her State Department was decidedly quiet in any criticism of the White House: “She wouldn’t tolerate it.” One of the most potent elements of her personality is her woundedness, what she’s been through, and how she soldiers on despite all that. Her image as a “fighter” has become a central tenet of this current campaign, and as much as she must want to shed her history and its embarrassments, she would be nothing without them. “She’s built up such an army of allies and allegiances that it’s very difficult for her to hand over the strategic thinking to one person,” the administration official told me. “It’s not about the parts—it’s the sum of the parts. A lot of what holds her back is this unwieldy apparatus that doesn’t have a lot of direction from her.”
The wall around Clinton has a self-sustaining, self-justifying nature. It may have been built with an understandable purpose, but it now exists partly because it has been around for a long time, and living behind it has for Clinton become a part of whatever “normal” is for her. To a great degree, she is her staff and her staff is she. Most politicians maintain a separation between themselves and the people who work for them. The staff’s relationships with Hillary are co-dependent and intertwined. They’ve been protecting her for so long—sheltering her, telling her what to read and what not to read, praising her, and occasionally talking tough with her—it’s hard to tell who is running things. This campaign is like a Turing Test of whether Hillary is indeed herself.
There is a moment in the State Department e-mails when Cheryl Mills sends a Washington Post story about a bank heist in Virginia where the assailant wore a Hillary Clinton mask. In response, Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, deadpanned about his client: “She does, uh, have an alibi, I presume?” Clinton wrote back, “Should I be flattered? Even a little bit?” Later, she seems to have begun to worry. “Do you think the guy chose that mask or just picked up the nearest one?” One wonders if that’s a question Clinton ever asks of herself.
Carlene Bauer contributed historical research on Hillary Clinton and her advisers.
Anybody who thinks they can buy me doesn’t know me.
–Hillary Clinton, The Hill, January 22, 2016
Hillary Clinton may still win the Democratic Primary race when the final votes limp through. But if she does, negativity and evasion will be her masters. Oh, and the motor of finance.
Clinton shares with her husband an insatiable appetite for speaking fees. Her words, and presence, are up for sale, and there are organisations and companies happy to throw money the way of Clinton Inc. This is a system of collusion that seemingly has no end, but at its core is an assumption of acceptance about the role of the corporatocracy. Provided a candidate’s views are appropriate for corporate America, the invitations will come through, and the speaking circuit kept busy.
As Bernie Sanders told those present in Carroll, Iowa on Tuesday, “Goldman Sachs also provides very, very generous speaking fees to some unnamed candidates. Very generous.” He conceded that some of his opponents “are very good speakers, very fine orators, smart people. But you gotta be really, really, really good to get $225,000 a speech.” In truth, not even Solomon would have commanded such fees. The value of words, and the marketplace of value, are two distinct things.
Clinton’s reaction has been one of denial – not that she has been paid such fees, but that receiving such payment implies no compromise of her views. This is tantamount to seeking another definition for bribery or corruption. The way of attacking Sanders is typical, evading any direct points, and going for his voting record regarding Wall Street regulation.
The year she focuses on is 2000, a dark one regarding corporate regulation history. When a vote went to deregulate credit default swaps and derivatives, Sanders was there to cheer. Not that he was the only one – Wall Street exerts an extraordinary pull on the American political classes. Nonetheless, for Clinton, “He’s never owned up to it, he never explained it.”
What Clinton attempts to do, instead, is suggest that you can be in and out of corporate America’s corridors and boardrooms, still maintaining independence, one’s untarnished soul, if you like, while feeding from the same trough. Much like Neo in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy, traversing the system is a matter of being within and without it. One can still remain powerful yet independent, a non-conformist feature of society.
Clinton’s strategy, then, is to advertise her worth, that of a sage whose honeyed words are as valuable as blue stock chips. She is the grandee of product placement, and her name can be hawked about. “What they [the groups she has spoken to] are interested in were my views on what was going on in the world. And whether you’re in health care, or you sell automobiles, or you’re in banking – there’s a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world.”
Her justification also goes to defending an electoral system that accepts the view that cash and candidates are unfortunate partners in seeking office. Barack Obama, she explained, accepted large contributions from the big end of town, and so should she. Doing so does not mean that one is against corporate regulation.
Clinton’s arguments are far from plausible. Under her husband’s presidency, Wall Street proved to be one of the greatest beneficiaries, feted golden boys and girls who would propel the US into richer post-Cold War waters. As the welfare state was slashed, its recipients mocked and further reduced to a sub-stratum of US society, the corporate sector was unchained, its initiative to speculate empowered. The machinery that ultimately crashed in 2008, leading to government bank bailouts, a socialising of capitalism’s greatest losses, can, to a large extent, be attributed to the Clinton administration.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Clinton sees Wall Street as indispensable, organic to any electoral, and governing structure. In her December debate with Sanders at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, moderator David Muir noted the 2007Fortune magazine cover that proclaimed, “Business Loves Hillary.”
A hovering Sanders saw his chance to make a point. “The CEOs of large multinationals may like Hillary. They ain’t gonna like me and Wall Street is going to like me even less.”
The words she says do not matter – her sponsors already know what they are getting, and by having her on stage, hope for a sympathetic president who, at the very least, will not rock the boat of finance. Without big business as it is so deemed, America is nothing, much like Britain without its common law. And it is business that she is hoping, at all times, to court. She may not be buyable as a political commodity, but she is certainly rentable.
Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, presidents have been using tools like photo ops, speechwriting and polling—and often for their biggest achievements
ENLARGE
Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin.ILLUSTRATION: PETER OUMANSKI
As the 2016 election starts for real next month, one complaint that unites Americans left and right—and helps to explain the rise of outsiders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—is that our political process has become shallow and scripted, manipulated at every turn. We gripe about the suffocating presence of “spin”: the policies tested by pollsters and focus groups, the slogans and laugh lines penned by speechwriters, the staged photo ops and town-hall meetings. To find examples of a nobler, more authentic politics, we can only look to the past: the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt, the austereCalvin Coolidge, the jaunty Franklin Roosevelt, the unrehearsed Harry Truman, the unprepossessing Dwight Eisenhower.
But the spin that we find so pervasive today is nothing new. It actually goes back more than a century. In fact, all those revered past presidents were pioneers in honing the modern methods of image-making and message-craft that we now so often denounce.
Since Theodore Roosevelt’s day, when candidates began campaigning for votes and presidents started regularly courting the public, politicians have been refining the tools and techniques of what we now call spin. Spin turns out to be woven into the fabric of American politics, and though it is hardly an unmixed good, it is inseparable from many of the signature achievements of our greatest leaders.
Consider the presidential press conference, an institution so familiar today that no one thinks twice about it. But it began as a political gambit.
When he became president in 1901, the spotlight-loving Teddy Roosevelt realized that news coverage was changing. Newspapers had once targeted elite audiences loyal to a paper’s editorial line; now big-city dailies claimed millions of readers hungry for news. TR realized that by providing the news, he could shape it.
Typically Roosevelt would ask a half-dozen reporters to join him in the afternoon in a small room off his office. There, a Treasury Department messenger would shave the president as he served up a mix of politics, policy and gossip. The excitable Roosevelt would often spring out of his armchair, lather flying off his face, to lecture the newsmen, who were barely able to squeeze in a word, let alone a question. The muckraking reporter Lincoln Steffens, a regular guest, would let Roosevelt ramble until the barber’s razor skimmed his lower lip, forcing it shut; then the journalist would fire his queries as the wriggling president was stilled by the barber’s admonition, “Steady, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt’s successors institutionalized this practice, albeit without the personal grooming. William Howard Taft, though much more press-shy than TR, held press conferences on occasion, and Woodrow Wilson opened them to anyone with credentials. Soon they were widely regarded as an essential part of American democracy.
For more than a century, presidents we revere as authentic and unscripted have exploited the tools and techniques of image-making and message-craft.
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President Dwight Eisenhower (center right), who made avid use of the emerging medium of television, is directed before a speech by former actor Robert Montgomery (center), 1959. ED CLARK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Photographers on the White House lawn, circa 1920s. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
President Theodore Roosevelt, a spotlight-loving leader who pioneered the news conference, drives a point home during an interview with journalists in the mid-1900s.PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES
President Woodrow Wilson, a former academic who relished speechwriting, is surrounded by reporters. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The mild-mannered Calvin Coolidge, one of the first presidents to use photo ops, put on a headdress as he was named ‘Chief Leading Eagle’ by the Sioux tribe, 1927. BETTMANN/CORBIS
President Harry Truman tries out a miniature movie camera presented to him by the White House press corps, 1948. POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
President Dwight Eisenhower (center right), who made avid use of the emerging medium of television, is directed before a speech by former actor Robert Montgomery (center), 1959. ED CLARK/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Photographers on the White House lawn, circa 1920s. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
By the 1920s, presidents were touring the country to push their agendas, and their routine activities started to be covered regularly by newspapers, magazines and newsreels. All of this meant delivering many more speeches.
Speechwriting had come easily to Roosevelt and Wilson—Wilson kept a typewriter at his desk—but not to Warren Harding, who was renowned for his windiness. ( H.L. Menckenwrote that Harding’s speaking style “reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”) So Harding turned to an Iowa newspaperman named Judson Welliver who became—in reality if not in formal title—the first White House speechwriter.
But Welliver’s key job was speechwriting. Harding drafted major presidential addresses himself, including his bombastic inaugural. But for routine talks, Welliver did the heavy lifting. When Harding toured the country to sell his programs, Welliver rode in the secretarial car.
Welliver left no immortal words (not even the phrase “Founding Fathers,” which Harding is sometimes credited with having coined, but while he was a senator). But even the dyspeptic Mencken conceded that the speechwriter made a difference: Welliver “knows how to write simply and charmingly, but he is also a fellow with a sense of humor.” Harding’s successors followed this model, relying on a stable of hired pens to perfect the presidential message. No politician today who takes to the podium dares go at it alone.
With well-chosen words came well-chosen images. In the 1920s, photography was assuming a larger, splashier place in the papers, and photographers’ tripods and boxes became fixtures on the White House lawn. Surprisingly, it was the seemingly guileless, mild-mannered Calvin Coolidge who helped turn the photo op into a regular tool in the image-makers’ kit.
“It was a joke among the photographers that Mr. Coolidge would don any attire or assume any pose that would produce an interesting picture,” one Washington reporter noted. One summer vacation in the Black Hills, Coolidge donned an Indian headdress to address 10,000 members of the Sioux tribe. Another time, he dressed up in garish cowboy regalia—from chaps and silver spurs to a flaming red shirt and blue bandanna—while being feted by local South Dakotans.
The shutters always clicked during Coolidge’s trips to his homestead in Vermont, which provided camera-ready settings to catch him wielding a scythe or riding a tractor—decades before Ronald Reagan chopped wood at Santa Barbara or George W. Bush cleared brush in Texas. Coolidge was filmed felling trees and pitching hay, sometimes wearing a business suit.
Another time in Vermont, the president hosted Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone—longtime “camping pals,” the papers said. They sang Coolidge’s praises on his veranda as he gave Ford a sap bucket that had belonged to the president’s great-great-grandfather. Coolidge’s more photogenic successors soon made the photo op a staple.
By the 1930s, politicians were realizing that to decide which words and pictures worked best, they needed to gauge public opinion. They turned to another practice that has since become a core part of the White House spin machine: scientific polling.
Franklin Roosevelt led the way this time. Hunting for a public-opinion guru, he ended up with a Finnish-American geologist and self-taught polling expert named Emil Hurja.Through his studies of rocks and minerals, Hurja had figured out techniques of weighting and sampling that allowed him to make better forecasts than the big national polls.
“You apply the same test to public opinion that you do to ore,” he explained. “In mining, you take several samples from the face of the ore, pulverize them and find out what the average pay per ton will be. In politics, you take sections of voters.” Then, he said, “you can accurately predict an election result.”
In 1932, Hurja walked into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and offered his services. With his charts and graphs, he showed how the party had wasted funds in 1928 by advertising in states like Pennsylvania that he could have predicted would go Republican. He promised instead to use “a definite method of statistical control and analysis of political sentiment during the coming campaign.”
Hurja set up a color-coded map of the U.S. in his office, with counties shaded in dark blue (strongly Democratic), light blue (leaning Democratic), dark red (strongly Republican) and light red (leaning Republican). To color each state, Hurja drew on a battery of polls—from newspaper surveys to bookies’ door-to-door canvasses—correcting for bias as best he could. Delighted, DNC Chairman James Farley let Hurja write press releases prophesying victory.
Roosevelt, then the governor of New York and the Democratic presidential nominee, summoned Hurja to Albany and peppered him with state-by-state questions. The candidate was especially fascinated by Hurja’s “trend analysis”—the changing responses to the same questions over time.
On the Friday before Election Day 1932, Hurja forecast “a revolution at the ballot box” that would leave the GOP weaker than at any point since the Civil War. He was right. That accuracy won him a plum job in Washington, dispensing official jobs and favors. Nicknamed the “Wizard of Washington,” Hurja worked for the DNC for several more years, but even after he left, FDR was hooked on his regular fix of public-opinion data.
So were Roosevelt’s successors—even those who claimed otherwise. Harry Truman, for instance, loved to belittle pollsters. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” he asked. But when the underdog president hit the hustings in 1948 on his whistle-stop tour, his staff had dutifully reviewed survey data showing how he might follow a path to victory.
Dwight Eisenhower also professed scorn for image-craft even as he made canny use of it. He became the first president to bring spin into the television era.
In 1953, when Ike took office, television was the hot new medium. But Eisenhower was hardly a TV natural. During the 1952 race, his televised campaign debut in his hometown of Abilene, Kan., had bombed. Amid a downpour, Ike had struggled to read his speech through fogged-up glasses, while people had traipsed back and forth on the emptied-out bleachers behind him “as though nothing important was happening,” said his friendHenry Cabot Lodge.
Robert Montgomery, an Oscar-nominated former actor and Hollywood producer, made what he recalled as a “frantic long-distance phone call” to the campaign, urging repairs. A year into his presidency, Eisenhower hired Montgomery to help him master the new medium. Youthful-looking, dark-haired and dapper, Montgomery had reached the limits of his box-office potential by the 1950s. He’d fallen back on hosting a weekly TV program on NBC, “Robert Montgomery Presents” (which also featured the debut of his bewitching daughter, Elizabeth).
Over the course of Eisenhower’s two terms in the White House, Montgomery gave the president a new look, trading dark gray suits for light ones and striped shirts for blues. Banishing Eisenhower’s black horn-rimmed glasses, Montgomery instructed the former general to read his cue cards without them.
Montgomery also made use of softer lights and liberally applied makeup to eliminate what one critic called Eisenhower’s “washed-out look.” A three-inch base under the president’s lectern kept the bald Eisenhower from bending his neck while reading—which had shown off Ike’s glistening pate. Montgomery pulled the president out from behind his desk while speaking and urged him to flash his bright smile.
With these cosmetic changes in place, Eisenhower and Montgomery turned the televised Oval Office address into a staple of presidential communication. During national crises, Eisenhower took to the airwaves to calm the public. In September 1957, he assured the nation that federal troops would safeguard the orderly integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. That November, he promised a resolute U.S. response to the Soviets’ Sputnik launch. These speeches gave Ike a platform for framing the issues and mobilizing the public—and unlike press conferences, they allowed him to avoid reporters’ pesky questions at delicate times.
From behind-the-scenes operatives to before-the-cameras stagecraft, the pillars of today’s towering edifice of spin have long been integral to presidential leadership. Seeing the past as a spin-free zone turns out to be not just a factual error but an act of deceptive nostalgia. The story of modern American politics isn’t a steady decline from authenticity to artifice. Rather, it is a story of the refinement of tools and techniques that presidents—pretty much all of them—have cannily exploited from the moment they became available.
Nor does the long history of spin mean that our politics have always been an empty spectacle. Of course, in massaging the press and crafting their words and images, politicians have overpromised, misrepresented their opponents and inflated their own accomplishments. But our leaders have also used these same tools to produce moments of lasting inspiration.
Theodore Roosevelt’s crusades for fairer regulation, Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a just international order, FDR’s gallant wartime leadership, Eisenhower’s rallying the nation to the space race, Reagan’s challenge to tear down the wall of Soviet oppression—many of the greatest moments of presidential leadership have been forged not by lone statesmen but by teams of savvy speechwriters, pollsters and image crafters. Spin has often helped modern presidents to mislead, but it has been just as essential, at crucial junctures in our history, in helping them to lead.
Dr. Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. This essay is adapted from “Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency,” to be published Monday by W.W. Norton.
