Family comes first
FORMER US President Bill Clinton has served Ireland well as a power broker for peace and his visit here this week was a signal that payback-time is fast approaching, as Hillary gets her ducks in a row for a likely White House bid.
Speculation about her decision is near fever pitch in the United States and Irish-Americans are said to be already on side in large numbers, cheering her on.
The attraction is mutual, it seems. At least that was the word from a key Hillary supporter who travelled with former President Clinton to Dublin, Derry and then Belfast, where he was honoured at Queens University. It named the William J. Clinton Leadership Institute after him at a ceremony on Wednesday.
“The Clintons have a genuine affection for the place. They love the country. They love the people,” said Stella O’Leary, President of the Irish-American Democrats support group.
But for Irish-Americans it’s not just about sentiment. They are keenly aware of what the former president and the former secretary of state have done for Irish peace and because of that, they have been there for the Clintons on many occasions.
I recall one occasion when I worked in Washington at the height of the Lewinsky scandal when the Clintons had few friends and Bill Clinton’s presidency hung in the balance.
It was the evening of September 11, 1998. The House of Representatives had received Kenneth Starr’s report on the scandal, citing 11 possible impeachable offences against the president, and in a dramatic move the Republican-controlled House decided to make the report public that day.
At almost exactly the time that details of it were breaking across the US and around the world, a few hundred Irish-Americans had gathered on the South Lawn of the White House for a presentation to the president for his work in the North (where five months earlier he had helped broker the Good Friday accord).
No-one was quite sure if the event would go ahead as planned or whether the president and his wife would emerge from the White House or, if they did, how the Irish might react to the scandal-plagued US leader.
The answer soon became clear. The Irish-American group began chanting Clinton’s name and sustained cheering erupted until Bill and Hillary emerged from the White House onto the South Lawn. “Whatever about Americans,” one reporter remarked, “the Irish really do love the Clintons.”
The president, appearing unperturbed by the crisis unfolding around him, went on to speak in support of the still fragile peace moves in Ireland. But even more fragile at that moment was the fate of the Clintons’ relationship.
Hillary, it was said at the time, was the real target of the Republicans in pursuing the scandal. One word from her and Bill would have been toast. But she never took the bait, knowing that if she blinked her husband’s political legacy would be destroyed forever.
We will probably never know what motivated her, whether degrees of discipline, loyalty, love or simply raw politics. In any case, she gritted her teeth and they faced down the crisis together. But in the White House later, I learned that the warmth of the Irish welcome that evening had made all the difference to them on one of their darkest days.
Irish support will be extremely important, according to Stella O’Leary. “We’re talking about the middle class. That’s the Irish vote now. There’s a big difference between now and when people were getting killed in Northern Ireland. Now the Irish issues are the Italian issues, the Polish issues, and so on. The big issue for the Irish and everyone else is the loss of power of the middle class.”
But the real strength of Irish support lies in its level of commitment more than in the numbers. Irish-Americans believe in participatory politics. In other words, they come out and vote. And in a country with record low turnouts, that is crucial.
A number of Hillary’s Irish-American supporters are also well heeled and well connected and such fundraising clout is vitally important for any campaign.
The Clinton machine is revved up too. On the speaking circuit alone, Hillary gets about $200,000 for each speech, Chelsea can get about $100,000 and for just one speech to a company in Nigeria the former president once netted $700,000.
On an average month, I was told by one Washington insider, between them the Clintons bring in about a million dollars.
It seems a big kitty, but a presidential run is big business. In the last election President Barack Obama and rival Mitt Romney spent a combined $2 billion, which worked out at over $70 million a month or more than $2.3 million a day.
She may be filling the coffers and topping the polls now but unless she has the right message, the right campaign staff and enough steel, the money alone won’t do it for Hillary if she decides to run.
Neither will it shield her from forensic probing of her personal and financial dealings, though it helps that she’s been in and out of the political grinder with her husband before.
New York lawyer Brian O’Dwyer, a strong supporter, believes Hillary will be able to take it all in her stride. “If she goes ahead,” he told me, “she’s going to do it with her eyes wide open, knowing very well it will be a hell of a battle.”
Indeed, the battle lines have already been drawn. First Benghazi entered the mix, with accusations that as Secretary of State, Hillary mishandled events surrounding the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic mission in the Libyan city that killed a US ambassador and three other Americans.
And in recent weeks the floodgates have opened with a blitz of rehashed sex scandals that involved Bill. The angle against Hillary is to question her sense of judgement if she were to become commander-in-chief. Her detractors suggest that in standing by her husband during the Lewinsky scandal, she was motivated by a ruthless obsession to hold on to power at all costs.
The problem with that, is that Americans have been down a similar road before and may be loath to go there again because ultimately in US elections, as the Clintons well understand, “it’s the economy, stupid!”. Nevertheless, expect such attacks to continue as fresh papers are released on the Clinton years.
In responding to such attacks, Hillary will need to show voters not just her steel but also her personal warmth. That is not always obvious, but having met her a number of times during my years in Washington, I found her to be a woman of enormous compassion.
She also believes in the notion that politics can improve people’s lot. A remark she made when running for the US Senate in 2000 stayed with me: “It’s about trying to make people’s lives better, especially women’s lives.”
Poll numbers are also on her side. While she had similar numbers in 2008, this time there is no Obama-style figure waiting in the wings and, with the Republicans and the Tea Party continuing to tear each other apart, it’s hard to see a strong opponent emerging.
But Mr Obama will still play a role this time round, one that could yet upset her apple cart. Her political future is inextricably linked to his agenda, which is now in trouble and this is making Hillary’s base increasingly restless.
Meantime, she has finished her book. She will be launching it in June and I’m told it will be the catapult for the unofficial start of her campaign. But she will wait to see how the Democrats fare in the November elections before announcing her final throw of the political dice early in 2015.
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