Despite the negative images of the Clintons shown in the highly publicized new book 'Game Change,' Bill and Hillary Clinton are virtually all alone in defending themselves. Game over: The Clintons stand alone

A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast and furious counterattack from the Clinton inner circle.

What’s notable about the highly publicized release of “Game Change,” however, is the virtual silence from the Clinton camp. The lack of public outrage seems to mark the sputtering end of what was once known as the Clinton political machine and underlines a fact that onetime Clinton loyalists acknowledge: The book’s primary sources about the former candidate and current secretary of state are her own former staffers and intimates.


As a result, there is no campaign of veteran Clintonites spinning the press corps and trying to pre-emptively discredit the book’s scathing depiction of Hillary Clinton as a rudderless candidate and a cheerleader for vicious tactics against eventual winner Barack Obama. There is no team of Clinton proxies going on cable television to denounce authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann as scurrilous and unworthy of belief.

This time, Bill and Hillary Clinton are virtually alone.

While the low-key response to a brutal portrayal of Clinton in part reflected a decision to keep a prominent face of the Obama administration’s foreign policy above the fray, it was also a recognition of reality: The same senior aides who had leaked damaging gossip could hardly be expected to rebut it.

These people have violated the Clinton world’s final taboo: After savaging one another in the press for more than a year, the former aides finally turned on the principals.

“Game Change” peels back a decade of careful renovations off Hillary Clinton’s carefully constructed public face, casting her in the terms that defined her at her lows in the mid-1990s: scheming, profane, sometimes paranoid, often tone-deaf.

The authors report that Clinton and her aides plotted behind allies' backs to enter the 2004 presidential contest and that Clinton herself favored some of the nastiest tactics, such as suggesting that then-Sen. Barack Obama had been a drug dealer, in the 2008 campaign. And she continued to believe — without evidence, and long after her concession — that he had, in effect, stolen the Iowa caucuses by importing out-of-state voters.

Her husband, the former president, is depicted as canny, but flawed as ever: making key errors, as has been widely reported, in South Carolina, and raising his own aides’ suspicions that he was reprising the extramarital wanderings that exploded during his presidency.

“Everybody talked. Anybody that tells you they didn’t are lying to you,” lamented one former top Clinton aide, who mused that perhaps for the first time in a career of leaks and betrayals, the Clinton’s innermost circle of loyalists been breached.

The result leaves the Clintons exposed and isolated, their darkest suspicions — “us against the world” — validated. The closest parallel is the 1994 publication of “The Agenda,” by Bob Woodward, an account of Clinton administration policymaking that seared both Clintons and left them deeply distrustful for years of their own staff.

The book reported that many of Clinton’s Senate colleagues — including some who nominally supported her, such as New York Sen. Chuck Schumer — were secretly offering aid to Obama all along.

And the judgment from Halperin — the high priest of establishment political journalism, who cut his teeth as a political reporter covering Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign — marks the end of a particular era.

Clinton can, of course, survive the judgment. She has one of the world’s best jobs, and one with an unparalleled capacity to change the subject from uncomfortable political stories, as well as to get out of town: She has conveniently scheduled a trip for this week to Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he hadn’t read the book and declined to comment, and a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton also declined to comment on the book. No other defenders volunteered themselves, and e-mails to many of the senior aides referred to in the book drew no contradictions.

“Haven't read the book,” wrote Howard Wolfson, once Clinton’s communications director and fiercest defender — with a specialty in killing unflattering books at birth — in an e-mail. “Working for Secretary Clinton was a privilege that I will always be grateful for.”

One who did rise to the Clintons’ defense was pollster Mark Penn, subject of some of the tome’s most caustic comments, and one of the few former insiders who remains close to the Clintons.

“There was often an underlying lack of respect for the Clintons inside the campaign during the effort and now after it that often amazed me,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have the highest respect for both of the Clintons and what they have accomplished through adversity, and I hope that is clear.”

If everyone talked, it was one aide in particular whose firing breached the Clinton’s innermost circle: Patti Solis Doyle, a former East Wing scheduler who was fired as Clinton’s campaign manager early in 2008. Clinton’s circle blames Doyle for many of the book’s most embarrassing revelations.

“She’s a likely suspect” for “80 percent” of the book’s content, said the consultant James Carville. (Solis Doyle responded to the charge in an e-mail that she hadn’t read the book and was in the midst of a family matter.)

The staffers and politicians who served as the anonymous sources for “Game Change" reveal a deeply unflattering image through the eyes of the people who should admire Hillary Clinton most. After Clinton reportedly offered Obama the tersest of congratulations on his victory in Iowa, for instance, one of her “senior-most lieutenants” is described watching “her bitter and befuddled reaction, her staggering lack of calm or command.”

The staffer told the authors of his or her private conclusion: “This woman shouldn’t be president.”

That is the book's central theme: that Clinton, John Edwards, and John McCain were all brought down by their personal flaws, and probably deserved to be. Obama alone matches up, more or less, to his public portrait. McCain shoots as wildly from the hip as observers ever imagined. Edwards is more the empty suit, his wife more Lady Macbeth, than their worst enemies alleged.

Bill Clinton, too, appears to confirm the worst campaign-trail gossip: shrewd but uncontrollable, believed by his own aides to be philandering, and the source of catastrophic decisions in January 2008. (His spokesman declined to comment on the book and on the allegations of infidelity.)

Hillary Clinton, though, had been at least partially protected in previous tellings of the campaign, her role vanishing into a haze of dueling and disagreeable advisers. "Game Change" puts her at the center of the action and systematically hacks away the attributes she spent a decade acquiring in the public eye: humanity, humility, competence.

Much of the disillusion comes in Iowa. The authors write:

The Iowans didn’t seem to be listening to her, just gawking at her, like she was an animal in a zoo. Hillary would hear from her staff the things voters were saying about her: “She’s so much prettier in person”; “she’s so much nicer than I thought.” It made her ill. She found the Iowans diffident and presumptuous; she felt they were making her grovel. Hillary detested pleading for anything, from money to endorsements, and in Iowa it was no different. She resisted calling the local politicos whose support she needed. One time, she spent forty-five minutes on the phone wooing an activist, only to be told at the call’s end that the woman was still deciding between her and another candidate. Hillary hung up in a huff.

“I can’t believe this!” she said. “How many times am I going to have to meet these same people?”



The public Clinton was humble and hard-working. The private one is depicted as “extravagantly self-certain,” believing so devoutly in her own destiny that she quietly began planning for her presidential transition during the primary.

And when she rose again in New Hampshire, she took full credit: "I get really tough when people f*** with me,” she reportedly told an aide, one of half a dozen times she's quoted in the book using the f-word." (That's not the record: McCain is quoted using the profanity 11 times in a single outburst.)

Perhaps most damaging for Clinton’s current position, the book places her at the heart of the harshest tactics against Obama.

After a supporter, Bill Shaheen, suggested Obama might have been a drug dealer, Clinton’s campaign debated its course of action.

“Hillary’s reaction to Shaheen’s remarks was ‘Good for him!’” the authors write. “Followed by ‘Let’s push it out!’”

She even bought into the wildest of anti-Obama rumors, and was reportedly “obsessed with” a mythical recording of Michelle Obama using the slur “whitey.”

"'They’ve got a tape, they’ve got a tape,' she told her aides excitedly. It just goes to show, Hillary added, ‘You never know what can happen,’” reports "Game Change."

The revelations carry into Clinton’s present post. The aide who, according to the book and other sources, pushed the darkest anti-Obama rumors most aggressively was Sidney Blumenthal, whom Clinton last year attempted to make her official speechwriter. The book casts her state department chief of staff Cheryl Mills as another hardliner whose most sensitive job was her role on a “campaign within a campaign” devoted to Bill Clinton’s sex life. She reportedly “handled delicate matters where attorney-client privilege might prove useful.”

Finally, the depiction of candidate Clinton in "Game Change" suggests that her competitiveness sometimes expressed itself as consuming suspicion.

"I am convinced they also imported people into those caucuses,” she reportedly told Penn a month after her concession. In that conversation, which the authors appear to have obtained from a tape-recording or transcript, she reporteldly gave Penn a particularly self-serving assignment:

I want you to start thinking about how I avoid being blamed [for Obama’s possible defeat]”, Clinton said. “Because I shouldn’t be blamed. But they are going to blame me. I somehow didn’t do enough.”

But if Clinton could be mistrustful, she often had good cause, and "Game Change" leaves the Clintons isolated not only from their dishing aides but also from many prominent Democrats. Schumer reportedly slipped advice to the Obama camp. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid secretly encouraged Obama to run. Al Gore, in a secret meeting, gave Obama a nudge. The authors contend that former Sen. Tom Daschle, who became a top Obama backer, expressed real animosity toward the Clintons, with whom he had worked closely throughout the 1990s and after Hillary Clinton's arrival in the Senate.

Daschle “considered Hillary an icy prima donna; her husband … a narcissist on an epic scale; the dynamic between the couple, bizarre; their treatment of their friends, unforgivably manipulative and disloyal,” the authors write.

Daschle did not respond to a request for comment. Schumer said he consistently backed Clinton as long as she was in the race.

Neither Clinton comes off entirely negatively. The former president is cannier than his aides, seeing the threat from Obama early on. The candidate appears tough, resilient, and deeply concerned for her daughter.

Only one figure in the narrative appears to dissent from this deeply unflattering view of Hillary Clinton: Barack Obama.

“She’s smart, she’s capable, she’s tough, she’s disciplined,” Obama reportedly told skeptical aides when he offered her the job of secretary of state. “She wouldn’t have to be taught or have her hand held. She wouldn’t have to earn her place on the world stage; she already had global stature. She pays attention to nuance. … and that’s what I want in a secretary of state, because the stakes are so high. I can’t have somebody who would put us in peril with one errant sentence.”