Always Their Own Worst Enemies

There are a number of reasons that Hillary Clinton was able to come back against Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas, but a big one is the "red phone" advertisement that began to air the weekend before the primaries. "It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep," intones the announcer. "But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something is happening in the world … Who do you want answering the phone?" Too late, the Obama campaign began to ask: exactly what world crises has Hillary Clinton handled? The Clinton campaign went on somewhat unpersuasively about the First Lady's peacemaking role in the Balkans and Northern Ireland during the Bill Clinton administration. The real answer is that Hillary Clinton was deeply involved in many of the crises faced by her husband as president, some of them of their own making.

She has implied that she shared a kind of co-presidency with her husband during her White House years in the 1990s. That suggests the co-presidency would continue in another Clinton administration. If the phone rings at 3 a.m. in the Hillary Clinton White House, will she awaken her husband to discuss what to do? (No one really thinks that a First Spouse would be deeply involved, say, in picking bombing targets in response to a terror attack, but the campaign rhetoric and red-phone ad do suggest experience in dealing with security crises.) In fact, a terrorist attack did occur late on the Clintons' first watch: in August 1998, Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. Embassies in Africa. At that time, Hillary Clinton may not have been as engaged as she usually was talking through the president's problems. A couple of weeks earlier, independent counsel Ken Starr had turned up the semen-stained blue dress in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and, at the time of the embassy bombings, the Clintons were reportedly not speaking.

When NEWSWEEK asked voters in a new poll, "Who would you most trust to answer the phone at 3 a.m.?", 45 percent said John McCain, 27 percent said Hillary Clinton and 18 percent chose Barack Obama. It is impossible for voters to truly know how a presidential candidate will respond to a crisis in the Oval Office. But there are clues in Hillary Clinton's background. She can certainly be tough-minded, and she has shown remarkable—and reliable—resiliency. The real wild card is her relationship with her sometimes domineering husband, who can offer good advice but be undisciplined.

The biggest crisis facing Hillary Clinton in recent times is her own campaign. Mixed and ever-changing messages and tactics have confused voters. The Obama campaign out-organized the Clinton campaign, especially in the caucus states. Reports of vicious feuds between her top aides have leaked into the press. It seems that Clinton has been saved mostly by her own gutsiness, not by any particular flair for strategy or for running a large organization. "The major reason she won is her own true grit, resilience and ability as a candidate," Patti Solis Doyle, who was ousted as campaign manager in mid-February, tells NEWSWEEK. Some top staffers have laughed over the comparison between Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood movie monster Freddy Krueger: you can run her over, stab her, shoot her—and she still keeps coming. With her devoted aides in "Hillaryland," Clinton can be full of slightly hokey Midwestern cheer and Methodist do-good stoicism. "If you're wringing your hands, you can't hold others," she'll say; in other words, stop whining and help someone. When things go wrong, she can get icy. "You … fix … this … now," she says in a stone-cold voice, recalls a longtime aide, who does not wish to be identified discussing a private conversation.

Hillary's doggedness is admirable. Her campaign, however, does not offer a model of good government. It has seemed to be afflicted with a siege mentality. The senator puts a great premium on loyalty, and she has kept a faithful coterie of advisers throughout the years. But two of her principal advisers, inherited from her husband's White House, cannot abide each other. The campaign's chief strategist, Mark Penn, is a larger-than-life, if widely misunderstood, character. Soft-spoken, with a high-pitched laugh, he often seems nervous. He sweats profusely under bright lights and, except for postdebate spin duty, is rarely seen on TV. Brilliant, he appears to compensate for his social awkwardness by shows of arrogance and contempt. In the movie, he would be the clumsy geek who gets tripped with a full tray in the high-school cafeteria and then spends the rest of his life getting even by becoming rich and successful (he is the world-wide CEO of the giant PR firm Burson-Marsteller). His arch foe is Harold Ickes, an equally brilliant and even more abrasive labor lawyer, a profane hard-core partisan who can't stand Penn's corporate-pollster-speak, with its talk of "target groups" and "persuadables." Last week The Washington Post published this exchange between the two antagonists: " '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted. '[Expletive] you!' Penn replied. '[Expletive] you!' Ickes shouted again." Solis Doyle, once the First Lady's scheduler in the Clinton White House, was ultimately unable to keep peace between the two men. Hillary Clinton, who does not like personal confrontations, chose to float above the feuding. (Penn declined to comment; Ickes did not respond to inquiries from NEWSWEEK.)

Biographies of Hillary Clinton during her White House years depict her as tense and rigid, suspicious of backstabbers and determined to keep the press at bay. Her aides say that she feels burned by exposure, and that her caution about showing her more human, sympathetic side is rooted in painful experience. During one of Hillary's trips to San Francisco last year, Susie Tompkins Buell, one of her close friends and top fund-raisers, tried to persuade Hillary to "show her heart," Tompkins Buell recalls. "I said: 'I think one of your strengths is you're so passionate. You need to show it more'." Clinton replied, "I know, I know, but it gets taken out of context." Tompkins Buell blames the campaign: "I think they tell her not to show her emotion because that looks like 'you're afraid'," she says. "Look how criticized she gets for things you never criticize a man about … her moods, her emotions, how she's looking, what she's wearing, her laugh."