At 69, Bill Clinton is helping Hillary Clinton run her 2016 presidential campaign with the goal of becoming...what, exactly? A kind of über-veep? A chaotic meddler-in-chief? On the trail and across Washington, already there is whispering and wondering: Who is Bill Clinton these days? And who does he intend to be if he—er, if his wife—wins the White House?
To be an ex-president is to live forever in the past. You write books and build museums to preserve your great moments, to commemorate a time when you led the free world. Crowds still gather and men in dark suits still hover protectively nearby. But mostly these are vestiges. You're a historic figure now, and that makes living in the present—or making the case for the future—a bit tricky. Bill Clinton knows this better than anyone.
On a cool spring morning, the 42nd president, almost 16 years removed from the White House, was standing on the blacktop outside a school in a blighted section of Oakland. It was the third and final day of the annual conference he hosts for college students, a powwow for the world's young thought-leaders-in-training held under the auspices of his Clinton Global Initiative. A few hundred of the students had gathered now to prettify some playgrounds, and Clinton—dressed in the politician's community-service-casual uniform of a blue pullover and stiff jeans—walked among them. Mostly, he posed for pictures. As he did, I watched one especially assertive student wade into the scrum and stride up to the former president.
“Hi, my name's Emma,” she said, and then explained that she had a question about the Middle East. Clinton's smile dimmed a bit, as if he were bracing for something. But Emma, it turned out, wasn't there for a debate—just a photo, albeit of a certain kind. “There's a really cool picture of you standing behind Rabin and Arafat,” she said, referring to the famous shot of Clinton pushing the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to shake on the Oslo Accords in 1993, “and I was wondering, Could my boyfriend and I re-create that picture with you?”
For a moment there, Clinton seemed almost let down, as if, having readied himself to consider the intractable dilemmas of the world, he was reduced to a prop—a wax figure in a historical re-enactment. Quickly, however, his grin returned as they struck the pose. Though Emma and her boyfriend didn't ask for one, he proffered a memory, shoehorned into a joke: “It was a lot harder to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands than it was to convince you two.”
Moments later, I approached Clinton with a question of my own—an actual one, about the politics of 2016, about his wife's fight to win his old job. I wanted to know what he made of the kids he was hanging out with that day—and if, considering Hillary's notorious struggles with young voters, he thought they were likely to support her over Bernie Sanders. “I don't know,” he told me, betraying no great affection for the question. “It hasn't occurred to me.”
I offered that most of the students I spoke with were pulling for Sanders. That seemed to goad the former president into an answer, and suddenly a stew of frustrations—about his wife's difficulty reaching young people, about Sanders's attacks on her—seemed to simmer over. “The thing that I believe is that unlike in many places, if we had a debate here, they would listen to both of them,” Clinton told me, his words quick and measured. “Most of these students are here because they believe that the best change comes about when people work together and actually do something. So I think they're much more likely to have their eyes and ears open to everybody and every possibility, which is all I would like for everyone.”
I pressed him about what he meant. Was he angry, I wondered, that people had seemingly long ago made up their minds about Hillary? About him, too? Was that fair? He looked at me, his eyes resolute. “I've already told you enough to read between the lines.”
A few weeks earlier, the good people of Bluffton, South Carolina—their minds open to the Clintons or not—were hustling down to a local gym on a Friday afternoon. A woman in medical scrubs led her little girl by the arm, hurrying her toward the doors before the space grew too crowded. They were there, the mother explained to her daughter, who had been dressed in her Sunday best, to glimpse a piece of “living history.”
Inside, the space was festooned with VOTE FOR HILLARY signs, but candidate Clinton would not be in attendance. It was late February, the day before South Carolina's Democratic primary, and her time was better spent elsewhere in the state, in bigger cities with more voters and greater numbers of TV cameras. Instead, the piece of living history that a few hundred of Bluffton's 15,000 citizens had come to see was her husband, the former president of the United States, who now was ambling to the podium.
People craned their necks and held their phones aloft, and Bill Clinton leaned into the microphone. But when he opened his mouth, words failed to tumble forth. Rather, his vocal cords produced a shivers-inducing rattle. He gathered himself. “I apologize for being hoarse,” he finally croaked. “I have lost my voice in the service of my candidate.”
That seemed the least of his maladies. Up close, his appearance was a shock. The imposing frame had shrunk, so that his blue blazer slipped from his shoulders, as if from a dry cleaner's hanger, and the collar of his shirt was like a loose shoelace around his neck. His hair, which long ago had gone white, was now as thin and downy as a gosling's feathers, and his eyes, no longer cornflower blue but now a dull gray, were anchored by bags so dark it looked like he'd been in a fight. He is not a young man anymore—he'll turn 70 in August—but on this afternoon, he looked ancient.
This is Bill Clinton, on the stump circa 2016. The extravagant, manic, globe-trotting nature of a post-presidency lived large—the $500,000 speeches, the trips aboard his billionaire buddies' private planes to his foundation's medical clinics across Africa—has given way to a more quotidian life spent trying to get his wife into the White House. And this time around, more so than in 2008, Clinton is cast in what even he regards as a supporting role. “He's able to go campaign in the places that, because of the schedule and the pressures on her, she can't get to,” John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman, told me.
And so Clinton travels to places like Bluffton on small, chartered planes—or takes the occasional commercial flight (albeit in first class with an aide always booked next to him to avoid chatty seatmates). More often than not, the ex-president finds himself staying in hotels with nothing resembling a presidential suite; he typically overnights in Holiday Inn Expresses and Quality Inns. His aides say he's the least prissy member of his small traveling party—caring only that his shower has good water pressure and that the TV has premium cable so that he might watch San Andreas or one of the Fast & Furious movies before he drifts off to sleep. When he wakes, he often makes coffee for himself in his room.
Of course, he still turns out crowds—especially in these hamlets unaccustomed to political royalty. But on that day in Bluffton, as Clinton began to talk, there wasn't much of the old oratorical genius on display. He recalled his college roommate, a Marine who had been stationed nearby; but what seemed like a quick geographical touch point soon spun into a rambling tale about the man's sister-in-law, who had a disabled daughter who now lives in Virginia. “I watched her grow up,” Clinton told the puzzled crowd. His attempts at eloquence—“We don't need to build walls; we need to build ladders of opportunity”—weren't his best, and when he delved into politically relevant topics, like terrorism, he sounded less like a man who used to receive daily intelligence briefings than like an elderly relative at the holiday table. “The people who did San Bernardino,” Clinton explained, “were converted over the social media.” All the while, his hands—those (with apologies to Donald Trump) truly giant instruments that he once used to punctuate his points—now shook with a tremor that he could control only by shoving them into his pants pockets or gripping the lectern as if riding a roller coaster. For more than half an hour, Clinton went on like this, losing more of the crowd's attention as each minute passed, until a few people actually got up from their chairs and tiptoed toward the exits.
Then a young man abruptly stood up, not to leave but to make his own speech. He wore a dark suit and sported a high-and-tight haircut, and, interrupting Clinton mid-sentence, he told the president that he was a Marine, “just like your college friend.” With that, the man began a lecture about buddies lost in Iraq and his concerns about the Department of Veterans Affairs. Clinton looked startled and unsure of himself but soon poked his way into the exchange. “What do you think should be done with the VA?” he asked, seemingly trying to coax the man to a better place. But Clinton's question sailed past, ignored. “... And the thing is,” the man continued, his voice rising, “we had four lives in Benghazi that were killed, and your wife tried to cover it up!” That's when a line was tripped and Clinton, meek and muted until now, suddenly sprang to life.
“Can I answer?” Clinton asked icily. The man raised his voice, but Clinton was now almost shouting and had the advantage of a microphone.
“This is America—I get to answer,” Clinton said, his shoulders thrown back and his eyes now alive. “I heard your speech. They heard your speech. You listen to me. I'm not your commander-in-chief anymore, but if I were, I'd tell you to be more polite and sit down!” As two sheriff's deputies began to hustle the disrupter out, Clinton beseeched the cops to wait. “Do you have the courage to listen to my answer?” he said to the man. “Don't throw him out! If he'll shut up and listen to my answer, I'll answer him.”
But it was too late: The guy was gone, and so Clinton gave his reply to the people who remained. It was a tour de force, a careful explanation not only of what had happened that night in Benghazi but also of the multiple investigations that had absolved his wife of any wrongdoing, as well as a history of past congressional investigations into similar attacks. With precision and clarity, Clinton pressed his case and won the crowd as only Clinton could. It felt as if 30 years had fallen away, and the people of Bluffton—who had come to see a star—roared louder and longer than they had all afternoon.
“You know,” Clinton said, a smile spreading across his face and his voice now honeyed with satisfaction, “I'm really sorry that young man didn't stay.”
Of course, there are flashes of greatness—moments that validate the notion that the supreme politician of his generation has still got it. But in many ways, Clinton's routine these days might be regarded as humbling—an epic comedown not just from his presidency but also from the global celebrity he's enjoyed in the decade and a half since it ended. Making matters worse, there's the sense, even among some friends and supporters, that Clinton's own capabilities have diminished, that the secondary role he now finds himself playing in his wife's campaign is perhaps the only role to which he's now suited. But for Clinton, whose life story is one of suffering and then overcoming (often self-inflicted) setbacks, the current presidential campaign offers him the chance—perhaps the final chance—at a form of redemption: to atone for past mistakes, to prove his doubters wrong, to return to the White House, and, above all else, to be of service. More than anything, Clinton, as his biographer David Maraniss has written, “loves to be needed as much as he needs to be loved.”
Image: Dina Litovsky
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