Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine by Daniel Halper

Jerry Springer Show ” 6 and called Clinton’s impeachment effort “very simply about the rule of law, and the survival of the American system of justice. This is what the Constitution demands, and what Richard Nixon had to resign over.” 7 As Speaker of the House he once vowed, “I will never again, as long as I am Speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” referring to the Lewinsky scandal. 8 Today the former Speaker comes close to offering a defense of the Clintons and their tawdry behavior. “First of all, you have no idea what their lives are like,” he says. “None of us do. They kept their marriage together. They seem to have a good relationship with their daughter.”
    Gingrich goes so far as to leave open the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be a good president. “Who knows?” he responds, when I ask him that question. “Compared to what? She would be a methodical, an intelligent, an extraordinarily experienced, very tough-minded liberal. She would be marginally more conservative than Obama. And dramatically more liberal than any Republican. That’s who she is. That’s who she’s been for her whole life.” He also suggests that she would be an effective president. “I mean partly because she just knows so much, she’s been around so long, she’s done so many favors. She would be instinctively more bipartisan than Obama because she’s been here so long.”
    As a U.S. senator from Texas, Phil Gramm was one of the Clinton administration’s most vigorous opponents. The staunch conservative almost single-handedly halted Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform plan by vowing it would pass the Senate over “my cold, dead political body.” 9 He excoriated Bill Clinton over his various scandals and voted without reservation for his impeachment. In fact, Gramm was ranked by his former colleagues as one of the most enthusiastic and effective antagonists the Clinton administration had ever known.
    But that was then. Now Phil Gramm is all smiles when it comes to the Clintons. Labeling the former president “a great communicator” on par with Ronald Reagan, Gramm says, “I think he is a people person. I think he’s capable of having warm feelings toward people that don’t necessarily agree with him.” In our interview, the former senator gushes, “I always was impressed by how prepared he was, how quick he was.”
    What accounts for the change of attitude? Bill Clinton has spent years working his former political enemies by using what he uses best—ingratiation and flattery. He knows well the benefits that come from small, cost-free gestures. Gramm is a Clinton fan for life, apparently, and for one primary reason: “Any time we are on a program together or if he sees me in the audience,” Gramm, who now works in finance in New York City, tells me, “[Clinton] goes out of his way to say nice things about me.”
    Clinton has also maintained a close and personal relationship with Trent Lott, the former senator and Senate majority leader from Mississippi. “He and I still talk,” Lott admitted a few years ago at a public Hudson Union Society event. “You know, when he had a heart attack, I really got worried about it. I was afraid he was going to kill himself. I called him and told him so.”
    Lott continued, “You know, I had my little disaster—I was talking before I put my mind in gear one time and I wound up having to leave the majority leader’s position. Unceremoniously, you know, a lot of my friends—including the president at the time, George Bush—pulled the rug out from under me. But it was a rug that I should have had pulled out from under me. But I didn’t go away and pout and sulk about it, I stayed. I hung in there and kept doing my job, I kept doing my job, and four years later, back in the leadership. Again as majority whip. And what was one of the first calls I got? Bill Clinton. He said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to give you my moniker as the