For Clinton, Second Try At New Life
Ex-President Plans Public Role as Controversies Quiet Down
Former president Bill Clinton, still adjusting to life outside the White House, plans to become more involved in domestic politics while addressing several social issues important to him. (Douglas Engle - AP)
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By John F. Harris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 28, 2001; Page A01
Six months after his exit from the White House turned into a personal and political debacle, Bill Clinton this week will begin a second attempt at launching his ex-presidency.
A succession of events and announcements about his post-presidential life will occur as Clinton rebounds from what several friends described as a funk in his first months out of power, his departure shadowed by questions about his last-minute pardons and other controversies. By turns angry and morose, Clinton's mood seemed darker even than during the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, one former aide recalled last week.
Clinton's usual buoyancy, these confidants said, has returned. And his post-White House career, while still a work in progress, will have him prominently back in the news for the first time since the pardon uproar.
He has invited his former Cabinet and top aides to an outdoor festival in Harlem on Monday to mark the formal opening of his New York office. Within the next few weeks, confidants said, Clinton expects to decide on various offers to write his White House memoirs, with an advance that some sources expect to be one of the largest in publishing history.
And while Clinton does not plan to directly challenge the Bush administration, aides said he is increasingly eager for an important public role. This means speaking out, including at two events this week, on subjects he is hoping to make signature issues: combating AIDS in the developing world and encouraging racial reconciliation at home.
It also means plunging far more assertively into domestic politics than most ex-presidents have – by courting big donors and talking strategy with presidential aspirants and other Democrats. He met last week with a group of freshman House Democrats to offer advice about the party's agenda; he will attend his first formal Democratic fundraiser, a golf outing, next month.
At the same time, a politician who spent the past 22 years being catered to in a governor's mansion and the White House is learning, sometimes clumsily, to manage the daily details of life. Accompanying Clinton to an automated teller machine, one aide saw that he was keeping a balance of a million dollars in an ordinary checking account. Terence McAuliffe, a close friend, recalled Clinton dropping off the line three times during a conversation while he fumbled to use his portable phone. When the basement in his Chappaqua home flooded, badly damaging a rare book collection that Clinton treasured, his home insurer told him to get over it; basement floods weren't covered.
Clinton is often alone in the house in Westchester County when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is in Washington. While the couple aims to spend three or four nights a week together in New York or in Washington, aides said their extensive travel schedules frequently make that impossible. Dog Buddy often sleeps next to him, Clinton has told friends.
Clinton declined a request for a formal interview for this article, one of 2,000 such requests an aide said he has rejected since leaving office. He did respond to a question about the transition to a new life: "I've never had a period of my life when I didn't have a good time," he said. "What I miss most is my work, about having influence on things I cared about."
"It was a terrible 60 to 90 days; it was a difficult time for him," McAuliffe said of the period after Clinton left office. Now, however, "He is in terrific spirits."
Making a Difference
At 54, Clinton is one of the youngest ex-presidents, eager to make a fortune and influence issues from a platform that rests in a gray zone between celebrity and statesman. One day he drifts into the news pages by meeting with Nelson Mandela, another for playing billiards at a Santa Monica party with actress Elizabeth Hurley.
Eager to help Clinton maximize his influence in the next phase of his life, a group of former top White House aides – chiefs of staff Erksine Bowles and John Podesta, and senior adviser Douglas Sosnik – volunteered this month to help plot strategy. In effect, they are hoping to reintroduce one of the planet's most famous people.
"The issues that animated his presidency are still the ones he wants to work on and make a contribution to," said Podesta. "He wants to leave footprints."
As the pardon uproar recedes, "I think people are ready to listen again," Podesta said.
Privately, many Clinton confidants relish an irony. Last winter, George W. Bush's young presidency got a boost from the troubles of his predecessor. Now, Clinton's team believes, controversies over some of Bush's more conservative stands, and his weakness at public speaking, are putting Clinton's strengths in a better light. Mark Penn, Clinton's White House pollster, said in a recent survey that 48 percent of voters said they would be more comfortable with Clinton as president, compared with 36 percent for Bush. "That's evidence they're putting everything in perspective," Penn said.
The question of how to manage Clinton's public image continues to absorb handlers just as it did in his White House days. All winter and spring, an internal debate brewed: Should Clinton go on television with a major interview to address questions about pardons and the gifts he and his wife took with them from the White House? Alarmed by falling approval ratings for both Clintons, Penn urged such a step. But Sosnik and others said no, arguing that the controversies would die down on their own and that Clinton's reputation would recover as the public saw him moving on productively with his life. "This is not about getting ready for 2002 or 2004," one aide said. "This is about the next 20 years."
The moving-on strategy prevailed. The question remained: How would Clinton fill his days? According to advisers, he is dividing his time roughly 50-50 between public service and making money.
Still some $4 million in debt due to legal bills, Clinton has told friends his aim is to recover quickly, and build up a nest egg large enough that neither he nor his wife will have to worry about income.
Predictions that last winter's controversies had hurt his earning potential were wrong. Clinton has made at least 40 paid speeches so far, sources said. He charges a minimum of $125,000 for domestic audiences, and $250,000 overseas. His representatives have turned down all manner of business opportunities – from media offers to autograph deals – that total $65 million. With advice from Bowles, Clinton may enter some business deals later, confidants said.
But his biggest deal in the near term will be the book. Clinton considered unconventional book deals, including a multi-book deal in which the inveterate mystery reader would try his hand at writing fiction as well as a memoir. In the end, he chose a more traditional course, sources said. He expects to announce a deal soon for a single memoir for an advance in the neighborhood of the $8 million that Hillary Clinton received. Her advance was the second-largest ever, $500,000 short of Pope John Paul II's world record.
Once he makes enough money, Clinton has told friends he hopes to immerse himself in policy issues exclusively. The themes that occupy him are already evident, familiar to anyone who followed his presidential speeches. He talks often about globalization and how to ensure that the growing interdependence of people and economies contributes to broad-based prosperity for many instead of a few. He talks about the challenge of promoting diversity and reconciliation in the United States and abroad. He has said he wants to promote a "political infrastructure" of public servants who can help enlightened leaders carry out needed reforms in former dictatorships. And he has called repeatedly for a much more robust effort to combat the AIDS epidemic in developing countries.
The challenge, as Clinton advisers acknowledge, is the same any ex-president faces: how to translate ideals into achievements. Upcoming events will highlight his early efforts at an answer.
On Tuesday, he will appear with music producer Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds to announce a charity concert for the nonprofit International AIDS Trust, whose advisory board Clinton chairs. On Friday in Little Rock, he will accept a large grant from a telecommunications firm to his own nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, to fund racial healing projects. In September, staff members are hoping to announce a program with the youth service group, City Year, to bring promising young people from South Africa to service programs in the United States.
Focusing His Message
Clinton has told confidants that the two most successful ex-presidents were John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter. Both thrived for similar reasons: by working on a few major projects instead of imagining that they could exercise the broader influence of presidents.
Podesta said Clinton is coming to terms with reality outside the White House: "When he was president, there'd be people who would run behind and follow up on a speech or policy initiative, by directing money or expertise. Now he's got to do that."
Staffing has proved a challenge. Several prospects to be his next chief of staff have begged off. His chief of staff, Karen Tramontano, is leaving in October; she hit turbulence during last winter's controversies and also ran afoul of Hillary Clinton's advisers.
Not all of Clinton's post-presidential thoughts are on a global plane. While rarely speaking in public on contemporary political issues, privately he keeps up an intense conversation about Bush policies and Democratic strategy.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Clinton invited him and a small group of colleagues to breakfast at his Washington home Friday and held forth on current issues. "He's one of the most brilliant strategists our party's ever had," Schiff said, adding that he was reminded of how Clinton is out of power at an age when most people are just ascending to it. "It presents an almost unprecedented dilemma of what you do as a former president."
Among potential 2004 presidential contenders whom Clinton has shared thoughts with are Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), John Edwards (D-N.C.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). His larger message, sources say, is that presidential aspirants should not criticize Bush at every turn, but construct a larger and upbeat vision of where they would take the country.
One person whom Clinton has had scant contact with since departing the White House is former vice president Al Gore, who told Clinton bluntly his scandals were a major factor in Gore's defeat. Clinton, who strongly disputes Gore's analysis, remains mystified by Gore's reported anger at him. People close to Clinton say he always praises Gore's performance as vice president and that he likes Gore even if Gore no longer likes him.
Clinton is reconciling himself – in part – to his responsibility for the controversies that marred his departure from office. He has told people that he misjudged the uproar that pardoning fugitive financier Marc Rich would cause, and that he wishes he had either passed the request on to Bush or insisted that leading Republicans who had supported Rich, such as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, put their arguments in writing.
Moving On
Clinton remains furious about criticism that he and the first lady helped themselves to gifts that were intended to stay at the White House, confidants say. White House stewards had encouraged them to take items that were headed for public storage anyway, he fumes privately, while noting that Hillary Clinton raised large sums for the White House by donating book royalties to it.
People who have spent time with Clinton recently, though, say what is striking is how much he has let go of his White House years – both the controversies and the perquisites. On trips to Washington, he and a team of Secret Service agents hop the shuttle. Overseas he travels first class on commercial flights, sometimes holding forth in impromptu seminars with other passengers. (For his domestic speeches, hosts usually send a private jet.)
Jennifer Palmieri, a former White House communications aide who has traveled with him on recent trips abroad, said Clinton now recognizes when staff members rib him with gently mocking comments; as president, he was usually too absorbed in other thoughts to notice. Clinton, she said, has become the kind of person who gives shrewd job advice, regales visitors with plans for his house renovations and landscaping, or discourses on the merits of Burger King versus Au Bon Pain at an airport foodcourt.
"I have seen the person that he probably was before he became president – basically a normal person," she said. "Before, he was on a different plane than everyone else because he had so much on his mind. Now, he is much more present and engaged."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
