Bill Clinton: The Sequel

NEW YORK (By John F. Harris, Politico) September 24, 2010 ― No newspapers, no television, no Web: If someone boycotted them all, it might have been possible to avoid Bill Clinton this past week.

Everyone else knew that he was back at center stage — full of ideas, full of meetings, full of formal pronouncements and provocative asides.

CEOs like Google’s Eric Schmidt, movie stars like Jim Carrey, boldfaced international names like Tony Blair — and Barack Obama himself — mingled with the former president at the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conclave that each year swells to new proportions.

Some 40 heads of state here for a United Nations summit booked time for personal meetings with Clinton. A parade of interviewers — many of them feigning interest in the CGI in order to quiz him on politics — have asked Clinton to divine the mysteries of the 2010 elections as though he were a bearded oracle atop a peak in the Himalayas.

Consumers of this week’s glut of Clinton coverage might be forgiven for wondering: What happened to the idea that the 42nd president was an embittered has-been, his presidency no longer relevant with a younger and bolder Democrat in the Oval Office, his reputation permanently bruised by a graceless and losing season on the campaign trail for his wife in 2008?

This week’s New York extravaganza was a reminder that the widely written Clinton obituaries of two years ago were not merely premature but divorced from history: Clinton’s life for decades has been marked by familiar cycles of victory, disaster and recovery.

“There will be good times and not-so-good times,” Clinton said Wednesday in a wide-ranging POLITICO interview. “I have loved the life I’ve had since I left the White House.”

This week put the latest comeback in sharp relief. The CGI summit came after a recent Gallup poll put Clinton’s approval rating at 61 percent, 9 points higher than Obama’s and 16 points higher than George W. Bush’s. Obama, who once dismissed Clinton as an incrementalist president in contrast to his own “transformational” ambitions, is now being urged by many midterm-dreading Democrats to study the 1990s — history lessons Clinton remains happy to deliver.

The CGI also offered a milestone to measure the broader arc of Clinton’s post-presidency, a period now nearly a decade long. Over 10 years, Clinton and Douglas J. Band, 37, the man who has become by far his most powerful aide and among his closest confidants, have succeeded in turning the 42nd president into a global brand — one that at times seems to operate as a kind of free-floating mini-state.

The brand resides partly in the realm of good deeds, as in Clinton’s earthquake relief work in Haiti or his foundation’s efforts against AIDS in Africa. It resides in the realm of money, specifically his success in making himself worth at least tens of millions of dollars through speeches and investments after leaving the presidency deep in debt from legal bills. The brand resides partly in the realm of celebrity, as when Clinton and Band watch the World Cup in South Africa with Mick Jagger and Katie Couric in their suite. And, it goes without saying, it resides in the realm of politics, as Clinton jets off to far corners of the country to raise money and stump for Democrats.

What may surprise people about the Clinton of 2010 is how little it resembles the Clinton of 2001. After leaving the presidency in January, former first lady Hillary Clinton was all set, newly elected to the U.S. Senate. But the former president himself was at loose ends, viewed by many in his inner circle as deeply demoralized, possibly even depressed.

The final hours of his presidency were scarred by the Marc Rich pardon scandal — an earlier occasion, like the 2008 campaign, when some commentators believed Clinton had permanently marred his legacy. With his wife in Washington and most of his White House aides scattered to new jobs, Clinton was brooding at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., often alone except for his personal valet, Oscar Flores. Having spent his life cosseted by aides, Clinton had trouble navigating some routine aspects of modern life. One aide went with him to the automated teller machine at the bank and saw that he had a million dollars in a standard checking account. Perhaps, sir, you should consider moving some of that, the aide suggested.

What’s more, Clinton seemed to have little conception of how to spend his post-presidency beyond reflecting on the achievements of his tenure and nursing his grievances over the defeats. One close aide said at the time he worried that Clinton would squander his legacy “like Willie Mays,” who finished his career greeting customers at a casino.

It was during this period that Band was enlisted to help Clinton. The University of Florida graduate was a familiar figure in the Clinton fold but not then an exalted one. He was the last of four personal aides — known by the coarse title “butt boys” in White House parlance — to work with Clinton at the White House. The job was to be by the president’s side almost constantly from morning to night, at home and on the road, keeping track of his speeches, making sure he didn’t lose his glasses, coughing and shooting peevish glares when Oval Office visitors overstayed their welcome. It might have been a menial job at times, but it also offered uncommon access to the behind-the-scenes life of the president.

The Clintons prevailed on Band to give up a job offer at Goldman Sachs to stay with the former president.

Recalling that period now, Band said in a POLITICO interview that he is shocked to think of how threadbare Clinton’s operation was: “He has this whole new life, but the apparatus of the presidency is completely gone.”

Band said it took time for Clinton and the people around him to conceive a strategy for leveraging an ex-president’s assets — mainly fame and the ability to command an audience with virtually anyone on the planet — into a formal operation.

“He’s one of the most recognizable and important people alive,” Band said, adding that while this creates opportunity, “the burden and the challenge of it is significant. … You have to create the organization, you have to raise the money, and you have to build that enterprise from scratch.”

At the beginning, Band’s role was much the same as the body-man assignments he took on at the White House. Over the years, however, it became clear that he was no longer a mere “butt boy.” A series of rivals to be Clinton’s top staff aide gradually fell by the wayside. In practice, if not title, Band became something like the chief operating officer of Clinton’s life.

These days, Band is sometimes treated as a principal rather than a staff man. He sits on Coca-Cola’s international advisory board and is involved in efforts to recruit the World Cup and America’s Cup to the United States. He was invited to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party this summer as a guest, not as Clinton’s coat-holder.

With new power, controversy inevitably followed. Particularly in New York, Band is a regular name in the papers, even though he rarely speaks on the record. His reputation among outside observers of the Clinton operation, and even some on the inside, sometimes seems like a composite. It is one part H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s single-minded enforcer. And it is one part George Stephanopoulos, another person who as a young man won entree to a world of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with Clinton.

Before his marriage in 2007, Band showed up in the tabloids for dating model Naomi Campbell. (His wedding to Lily Rafii in Paris was attended by Clinton and a host of tycoons and was topped off by fireworks. The couple now has a 9-month-old child.) He also won unwelcome publicity in 2007, when a Wall Street Journal article detailed a business deal gone sour with a jet-setting Italian scam artist who later went to prison.

Band said he realizes that the reason many people seek him out or that doors open to him is because of his role with Clinton, and that someone in his role must tread modestly. His reputation as the enforcer in the Clinton circle comes because someone must fend off a ceaseless barrage of invitations, entreaties and requests for favors that descend on a former president — a task Clinton, with his accommodating temperament, would never take on for himself.

But Band seems to warm to the task. While Clinton now gets along well with Obama, there is occasional chest-bumping between Band and West Wing aides like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over whether enough deference is being shown to the former president and his allies. In 2008, John Edwards called seeking a statement of support from Clinton when his affair with Rielle Hunter exploded in public. A loyalist with a long memory, Band sent back word asking whether Edwards recalled his own denunciation of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky controversy.

Band’s loyalists within the Clinton team said his reputation as an operator has obscured his achievements as a strategist. Clinton’s efforts bear Band’s imprint more than that of any other person, except the former president himself.

It is now a far-flung enterprise. At Clinton’s Harlem office, there are 120 employees. From his home in Little Rock, former White House aide Bruce Lindsey weighs in on issues relating to Clinton’s foundation and his record at his presidential library. Policy aide Ira Magaziner, who works on AIDS issues, lives in Rhode Island, and communications adviser Matt McKenna works most of the time from home in Montana. On some policy and political matters, former White House advisers John Podesta or Tom Freedman weigh in from Washington.

The Clinton Global Initiative, according to Clinton, first grew from a suggestion by Band: The former president should try to replicate the annual gatherings of the elite in Davos, Switzerland. Clinton said he wanted the focus to be on global philanthropy, moving beyond panels and speeches and requiring that all participants make specific pledges of money and effort aimed at innovative solutions to world problems. This week marked the sixth CGI summit. In an interview, Clinton said one of the biggest successes of recent years has been enlisting more CEOs to help promote market-based solutions for health care and other humanitarian challenges.

Band said one project has been neglected over the past decade: an organized effort by veterans of Clinton’s White House and other allies to promote and defend his eight years in office.

In the interview, Clinton made clear that he thinks Republicans do a better job than Democrats of developing a sheen of mythology around their presidents.

“President [Ronald] Reagan has got a much higher standing than he did when he left the White House because the Republicans are smart, and they work relentlessly on legacy,” Clinton said. “They understand how important it is to have their narrative out there. When he left the White House, people were worried about Iran-Contra and didn’t feel too hot about things.”

The Reagan comparison also touches on one of the sore points of another relationship: the one between Clinton and Obama. During the 2008 campaign, Obama made waves when he implicitly pooh-poohed Clinton’s accomplishments during an interview with a Reno newspaper.

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said then. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

Clinton, in his interview, chalked that quote up to politics and offered repeated praise for Obama’s intelligence and policy judgments, though he did critique the president’s political strategy. Aides said Clinton nursed deep resentments over the 2008 campaign for at least a year afterward, but he has gradually let them go.

“You’ve got to draw distinctions, and that’s the deal,” Clinton said. “Politics is a contact sport. And to complain about contact is like a pro-football quarterback complaining if he gets sacked on the weekend.”

He made clear that he regards his own achievements as “transformational,” even if Obama professed not to. He said the fact that Obama passed health care while Clinton did not was simply a matter of “arithmetic” — Obama had more Democrats in the Senate.

He also noted that Obama remains undefined. In diagnosing what’s ailing the presidency, Clinton volunteered that a negative public caricature was able to take hold partly because Obama didn’t have a long background in public life.

“Partly he was vulnerable to that because he came up so fast,” Clinton said of a president 15 years his junior. “He even wrote in his autobiography that at the time it was a positive thing: People could see a blank slate and write their hopes and dreams in it. And that’s what his branders, as they call themselves, thought about that.”

The comment was intended as a sympathetic analysis of Obama's political challenges, yet it carried an echo of Clinton's warning three years ago that Obama's resume was to thin to be president.

Clinton did not say directly what many moderate Democrats believe — that the Obama team, in its disdain for what it considered Clinton’s small-bore brand of politics, did not appreciate his instinct for how to advance a progressive agenda in a country that remains skeptical of government. Now that Democrats are facing peril in the midterms, Obama may think anew about Clinton.

Here at the CGI, there was no absence of people who think the 42nd president’s example remains relevant. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) said that “people are nostalgic for the Clinton style of governance.”

“His experience after 1994 was ‘communicate, communicate, communicate.’ I think that’s something President Obama and the Democrats will try to do too,” she said. “He brings the perspective of somebody who has been able to govern through crisis and opposition in the legislature.”

“He has leveraged his celebrity and his knowledge in a way no one has,” said civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. “What Barack maybe needs to look at are the people close to him. He needs better communicators.”