Tuesday, February 16, 2016

'Liz and Pat and Bill and Hillary'


Hillary Clinton announces her 'listening tour' at the Moynihan farm, Pindar's Corners, New York, July 7, 1999 [AP Archive]

On a bright summer morning in early July, 1999, some 300 reporters descended on the Moynihan family farm in Pindar’s Corners, upstate New York. They had come to cover the start of a state-wide ‘listening tour’ to be undertaken by First Lady Hillary Clinton. Though Clinton had yet to make a formal announcement, it was widely expected she would seek election to the Senate from New York to replace Pat Moynihan, who would be standing down at the end of his fourth term. Illinois-born, and having spent most of her career in Arkansas and Washington, Clinton was already fielding accusations of carpetbagging. Outraged protestors clustered at every stop on her tour. ‘A New Yorker for New York,’ read one of their signs. ‘Hillary Listen: Go Home!’ read another.[1]

Clinton had come to Pindar’s Corners in search of a benediction from the man she aspired to replace. Moynihan and Clinton had a private meeting in the converted wooden schoolhouse in which the former did most of his writing and then the pair emerged to take questions from the media throng. Clinton acknowledged that voters had ‘legitimate questions’ about her candidacy and that she had ‘real work to do, to get out and listen and learn from the people of New York, and to demonstrate that what I’m for is as important if not more important than where I’m from.’ Standing beside her at the microphone and beaming genially, Moynihan was bullish when asked about Clinton’s prospects: ‘I hope she will go all the way. I mean to go all the way with her.’ After questions, they walked away from the microphone arm-in-arm.

Those who witnessed that tableau – the outgoing New York senator unwavering in his support for his likely successor – could be forgiven for thinking that Moynihan was a long-time Clinton ally. In fact, his relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton was far more complicated and fractious, riven with tensions that emerged from differing policy priorities and personal animosities. As one particularly snarky report on the Pindar’s Corners summit noted, anyone who ‘has spent any of the past seven years reading American newspapers … can remember an instance or two when the Clinton-Moynihan relationship seemed scarcely less hostile than that of Montague-Capulet.’[2]

But that hostility was by no means foreordained. In some respects, Moynihan and Bill Clinton should have been natural ideological partners. Both were self-identified defenders of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party against what they perceived as they excesses of post-1960s liberalism. In the 1970s, Moynihan had been associated with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), an organisation founded in the aftermath of George McGovern’s landslide 1972 defeat to repudiate the ‘New Politics’ liberalism that McGovern’s campaign had embodied, and return the Democratic Party to its ‘Vital Center’ traditions.[3] The CDM had all but vanished by the early 1980s, but did serve as a model for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), another internal party organisation founded by moderate Democrats after another landslide defeat in a presidential election (in that instance, Walter Mondale’s loss of 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984).[4] The DLC was established to push the Democratic Party to embrace pro-market solutions, moderate social positions, and a more hawkish foreign policy. Bill Clinton had been one of the founding members of the DLC, and also served as chair, 1990-91. As the two belonged to essentially the same wing of the party, and had fought many of the same opponents in their political careers, it would have been reasonable to expect them to have a harmonious working partnership.

From the off, however, relations were strained. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Moynihan had endorsed his Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska (‘My tiger,’ Moynihan called him).[5] Even so, Moynihan later took a share of the credit for Clinton’s victory. After Kerrey dropped out in March, Moynihan was featured in Clinton’s TV ads in New York denouncing California governor Jerry Brown, Clinton’s principal rival for the nomination, for supporting a flat tax that he claimed would jeopardise the Social Security trust fund. ‘And [Clinton] won New York, and that’s why he’s president today,’ Moynihan boasted on Meet the Press in early 1993.[6] Clinton’s decision to appoint Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as Treasury Secretary elevated Moynihan to the chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee, on which he had served since 1977. In this position, Moynihan had jurisdiction over the policy areas at the top of the Clinton agenda, health care and welfare reform. The White House managed to offend the new chairman almost immediately, when a ‘top administration official’ told Time magazine, ‘[Moynihan] can’t control Finance like Bentsen did. He’s cantankerous but … we’ll roll right over him if we have to.’[7]

The president was furious with the quote, phoning Moynihan the same day to assure him that if found, the leaker would be fired. Clinton’s efforts to repair the breach went further, as one White House strategist recalled: ‘We had Liz [Moynihan’s wife and campaign manager] and Pat and Hillary and Bill dinners. We had Liz and Pat and Hillary and Bill movies.’[8] The president even made a personal appearance at a Moynihan fundraiser, praising New York’s senior senator in lavish terms: ‘You know, before I met Pat Moynihan, I actually thought I knew something about Government. Now I just feel like I’m getting a grade every time I talk in front of him.’[9]

Within a year of Clinton assuming office, Moynihan had clashed with the president on numerous fronts. He dismissed Clinton’s promises to ‘end welfare as we know it’ as ‘boob bait for the Bubbas,’ disparaged the rationale for Clinton’s health care reform proposals (‘we don’t have a health care crisis in America’), and was the first Democratic senator to call for an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater, a failed Arkansas real-estate venture that seemed at one point poised to engulf the First Family. He also publicly mused about holding the Clinton health care reform proposals ‘hostage’ if the White House failed to deliver on welfare.[10]

The issue of welfare reform ought to have been the highest priority of the new administration as far as Moynihan was concerned. He was therefore infuriated by Clinton’s decision to focus on health care. Reforming the health system was of particular importance to Hillary Clinton, who led on the formulation of the legislative package in a way that was unprecedented for a First Lady. As Finance Committee chair, Moynihan was crucial to the success of the proposals. To the administration’s chagrin, his behaviour throughout the ferocious, protracted battle was sometimes less than helpful. Before the full bill had even been published, for instance, Moynihan was publicly rubbishing the plans as a ‘fantasy.’ For all that Moynihan disliked the lengthy and technical bill that the White House ultimately produced, he did labour to produce a workable compromise – as Bill Clinton himself private acknowledged – but without success.[11] Democratic hopes of a major overhaul of the healthcare system would have to wait another decade and a half.

In the 1994 midterm elections the Republican Party won control of Congress for the first time since the 1950s, in part by exploiting public discontent over the long and unproductive health care fight. Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and Moynihan lost his committee chairmanship. Chastened by this ‘Republican revolution,’ Clinton turned back to welfare reform to reassert his moderate bona fides in advance of his own re-election. Though Moynihan had been pressing the White House to tackle welfare, he was virulently opposed to the Work and Responsibility Act that Clinton eventually sent to Congress. In particular, he opposed the provision to eliminate Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a New Deal-era programme that provided direct cash transfers to single mothers with young children. The plans to replace AFDC with the more stringent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programme, argued Moynihan, would lead to a steep increase in child poverty. To Moynihan, the proposals were the panicked response of a White House still shell-shocked by the unexpected Republican insurgency. ‘I had no idea,’ he declared on the Senate floor, ‘how profoundly what used to be known as liberalism was shaken by the last election.’ Moynihan was one of only eleven Senate Democrats who declined to vote for the measure. In the aftermath, he wrote fuming to Senator Edward Kennedy that ‘[t]he Democratic party did not have to go along with this, but sure as hell did.’[12]

Moynihan remained basically estranged from the White House for the rest of Clinton’s tenure. During the Lewinsky scandal, though it had initially seemed that he would endorse impeachment, he ultimately came out against removing Clinton from office, saying that to do so might ‘very readily destabilize the Presidency.’[13] He declined to defend Clinton personally, however, and couched his opposition entirely in institutional terms. ‘Senators, do not take the imprudent risk that removing William Jefferson Clinton for low crimes will not in the end jeopardize the Constitution itself,’ he urged his colleagues.[14]

A few months before the Senate acquitted Bill Clinton, Moynihan announced his intention not to seek a fifth term. When Hillary began exploring the possibility of running to replace him, Moynihan was receptive. He met with Clinton, as did Liz, on several occasions and arranged ‘tutorials’ with leading figures to bring her up to speed on New York politics and policy. In one private meeting, Clinton joked that she had taken to sleeping with Moynihan’s ‘Fisc.’ (the annual report the senator prepared on New York’s fiscal relationship with the federal government) under her pillow.[15] Hillary Clinton’s assiduous courtship of Moynihan in these months doubtless went some way toward smoothing relations between them. Pat surely also recognised the advantages New York State would enjoy with a former First Lady for a representative.

The accusations of carpetbagging dogged Clinton throughout the campaign, as did the related, and by now wearily familiar, charge of ‘inauthenticity.’ Some cited examples of this were silly, as when Clinton, supposedly a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, was ridiculed for donning at New York Yankees cap at one of the latter’s games. However, such froths spoke to a deeper mistrust of Clinton, to the belief that she was a power-hungry opportunist who had parachuted into a convenient race. Clinton was sensitive to such accusations and tried to assuage them with a combination of hard work and humour. She embarked on a campaign tour of all 62 of New York’s counties (in a Ford conversion van that the press nicknamed the ‘HRC Speedwagon’), stopping at diners and cafes to speak with voters; she made appearances on David Letterman’s show and spoke at the annual press dinner in Albany in character as a ‘carpetbagger.’[16] Moynihan, for his part, span Clinton’s out-of-state origins to her advantage, cheerfully telling one interviewer that she would bring ‘that magnificent, young, bright, able Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm to New York, which probably could use a little.’[17]

Moynihan was effusive in his praise of Clinton on the stump. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt would have loved Hillary Clinton,’ he told audiences. (This was, Clinton wrote in her memoirs, ‘the ultimate compliment’).[18] The fact that Clinton had the enthusiastic support of the popular outgoing senator certainly gave her campaign an invaluable boost. Indeed, one ad for her Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, included a mocked-up image of Lazio alongside Moynihan (the two had never been photographed together) in an effort to dilute the benefit Clinton received from Moynihan’s backing.[19] For all their disagreements, Moynihan respected Clinton’s determination and policy nous. She would be, he said proudly, his ‘legacy’ to his state.

However, Moynihan continued to assert his independence from the Clinton administration. In September 1999, two months after publicly anointing Hillary as his successor, Moynihan endorsed New Jersey senator, and former basketball star, Bill Bradley over sitting vice president Al Gore. ‘Nothing is the matter with Mr. Gore,’ he explained to the press, ‘except that he can’t be elected President.’ Unsurprisingly, he was asked how in his opinion Hillary Clinton differed from Gore. ‘I think she can be elected Senator,’ he replied, to laughter.[20]

As indeed she was. On Election Day 2000, with the Gore-Bush race grinding to a stalemate that would end in the Supreme Court, Clinton won handily, by a margin of over 800,000 votes. Riding in a freight elevator down to the victory celebrations in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt hotel, Bill Clinton told Moynihan, ‘If it had not been for your endorsement, Hillary would never have won.’ Whether or not the president was merely being courteous, Moynihan was pleased enough with the compliment to record it in a memo for his files.[21] If Hillary Clinton does win the Democratic nomination, and the White House, later this year, Moynihan may justly claim a sliver of the credit for having assisted in the rise of the first woman to serve as president of the United States. He certainly would not have hesitated to stake that claim.




[1] The Clintons would purchase a home in Chappaqua, just north of New York City, two months later. Michael Grunwald, “First Lady Dives Into N.Y. Bid, Carpetbag Issue,” Washington Post, July 8, 1999.
[2] Tish Durkin, “Hillary’s Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan,” New York Observer, July 12, 1999.
[3] Drawing on New Left currents, New Politics liberals advanced a systemic critique of American politics and society that ‘Vital Center’ liberals rejected. They were generally more culturally liberal (McGovern was famously, and inaccurately, denounced as the candidate of ‘acid, amnesty, and abortion’) and dovish on foreign policy. Coalition for a Democratic Majority ad, New York Times and Washington Post-Times Herald, December 7, 1972. For more on the New Politics, and the McGovern campaign, see Bruce Miroff, The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party (Lawrence, KS, 2009).
[4] The DLC was formally dissolved in 2011 and its records purchased by the Clinton Foundation. For more on the organisation’s heyday, see Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence, KS, 2000).
[5] “Moynihan Endorses Kerrey’s Candidacy,” NYT, January 25, 1992.
[6] Tim Russert, “Wit and Wisdom: Moynihan and Meet the Press,” in Robert A. Katzmann (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (Washington, D.C., 1998), 162.
[7] According to Carl Bernstein, the official was Bentsen himself, trying to send a coded warning to Moynihan through the press. Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York, 2007), 261.
[8] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (Boston and New York, 2000), 351.
[9] William J. Clinton, “Remarks at a Fundraiser for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York City,” December 13, 1993, The American Presidency Project, <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=46235>
[10] Richard L. Berke, “Prof. Moynihan and Clinton: A Course in ‘Washington 101’,” NYT, January 14, 1994.
[11] In private after-hours conversations with historian Taylor Branch, Clinton was keenly aware of Moynihan’s difficulty in corralling the members of this committee. ‘The health care bill was stuck in the Senate Finance Committee … [and Moynihan] was finding no majority for any version of the bill. Clinton analysed Moynihan’s performance with sympathy, observing that he was saddled with bad luck.’ Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President (London, 2009).
[12] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 375-76; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010), 605.
[13] Richard L. Berke, “Moynihan Favors A Clinton Censure,” NYT, December 25, 1998.
[14] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 399.
[15] Dirkin, “Hillarys’ Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan.”
[16] Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (London, 2003), 510-13.
[17] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 399.
[18] “For Clinton Faithful, Vindication Comes With Groundbreaking Victory,” NYT, November 8, 2000; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (London, 2003), 513.
[19] Rodham Clinton, Living History, 520.
[20] Adam Nagourney, “In an Endorsement of Bradley, Moynihan Dismisses Gore,” NYT, Sept 24, 1999.
[21] Moynihan, Weisman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 661.

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