Hillary: What’s in a Name? | Newsweek Scope

CHAPTER 4
Going Into Battle
Evan Thomas 11/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
McCain was not a natural orator on the stump. He had trouble reading from a teleprompter, and he had an odd way of smiling at inappropriate times, flashing an expression that looked more like a frozen rictus than a friendly grin. During one early debate, he smiled broadly as he discussed crushing the enemy in Iraq. McCain could be moody, and he did not try very hard to disguise his moods. One of his advisers used the word "heady" to describe the candidate. He meant that his speaking style was easily swayed by his emotions. McCain could look hot or riled up (his traveling buddy Lindsey Graham particularly affected his moods, for better and for worse), or he could appear wooden, even sullen. McCain was bored by dreary presentations of his own polling data, but he could get agitated reading about other people's polls in the press. His staff tried to keep away overstimulating distractions, but it was hopeless. During the campaign's low-budget period, when the candidate was traveling on the cut-rate airline JetBlue, he would get wound up watching political talk shows on the small video screen facing his seat.
CHAPTER 3
The Long Siege
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
The former president was restless and petulant; that was obvious. Exactly why was a psychologist's guessing game. He seemed anxious that his wife was blowing the chance to get the Clintons back in the White House. At some deeper level, the armchair shrinks speculated, he was jealous of her. Or, in some strange way, he may have been envious of Obama. Clinton was proud of the fact that some blacks called him "America's first black president," because of his comfort and empathy with African-Americans. Obama was upstaging him by threatening to truly become America's first black president. More vexingly, Obama, in remarks to some reporters in Nevada, had praised Ronald Reagan as a true change agent and seemingly dismissed Bill Clinton as an incidental politician. It was always hard for Clinton to be anything but the most amazing person in the room, the "smartest boy in the class," as author David Maraniss had once described him. Clinton wanted to be a major player in his wife's campaign, and he used an office sometimes inhabited by Mark Penn or Mandy Grunwald at Clinton headquarters in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington. But the staff, including the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, found his presence, complete with Secret Service, to be uncomfortable, sometimes intimidating. They were happier when he was on the road—that is, as long as he stayed on message, which was never for very long.
CHAPTER 1
How He Did It
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."
CAMPAIGN 2008
Hackers and Spending Sprees
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown "foreign entity," prompting a federal investigation, NEWSWEEK reports today.
CAMPAIGN 2008
It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue
Jon Meacham 10/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
It was a grand evening. On Thursday, Dec. 5, 1985, at the Plaza Hotel, William F. Buckley Jr. rose to toast the president of the United States on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of National Review. Charlton Heston was the master of ceremonies; the audience included William J. Casey, Nancy Kissinger, Roy Cohn and Tom Selleck. Thirteen months earlier Ronald Reagan had been re-elected, carrying every state in the Union except Walter Mondale's Minnesota. "As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels," Buckley said to the president. "As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you." Buckley was 19 when America dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, he said, and he had just turned 60. "During the interval I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60 … will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong."
WOMEN & LEADERSHIP
Sister, Sister
Susanna Schrobsdorff 10/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
Even with an economic crisis on the front pages, these are irresistible topics—as evidenced by the conversations at NEWSWEEK's annual Women & Leadership conference, held this week in New York. Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, praised Palin's fortitude and, yes, intelligence: "I think she's both smart and resilient and optimistic and courageous and all those things ... Her confident and completely unfazed response to being criticized is great because she didn't run from the stage crying. She sort of shrugged it off and when on to the next event, in a way that didn't seem callous, and it didn't seem unfeminine, and it didn't seem like she was acting like a guy, it was just her way."