Clinton expert Chafe analyzes Hillary’s campaign

The Chronicle’s Neelesh Moorthy sat down with William Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor Emeritus of History, to discuss his new book, “Hillary and Bill: The Clintons and the Politics of the Personal,” as well as how their relationship impacts former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s current presidential campaign.

The Chronicle: Could you describe the main aspects of your research?

William Chafe: The book primarily looks at the way the personal chemistry of the Clintons’ relationship has been powerful in shaping the careers of both of them. They are each brilliant in their understanding of the political process. He is much more all over the place and she is much more focused. He is better at relating to individual people. She is better at structuring arguments. They worked together as a team, in Arkansas after they were married, in politics.

Essentially, she saved his political career many times. Most of those times she saved his career had to do with his womanizing and her ability to stand behind him and say that she loved him and that he was a good person even though he had had affairs with a number of women.

She basically took advantage of the fact that she was gaining more power because of having saved him to establish her authority within the White House. She became the first First Lady to ever have an executive office within the West Wing right beside that of her husband and Al Gore, the vice president. She had a staff that was comparable to his, and she insisted on taking control of the major domestic reform in the White House, which was health care reform, just as it had been education reform in Arkansas.

She ran that whole operation with a steel fist. She didn’t listen to criticism or suggestions from either Bill’s aides or from other people in the White House. In the end, the fact that she had total control of it and would not let him compromise led to it being defeated because it didn’t come up for a vote, even though the Republicans had said they were willing to compromise and they would get 95 percent of what they wanted.

She saved him one last time [during the Monica Lewinsky scandal], but she was also saving herself, because she knew that if his career was destroyed, so would hers be. The very same day he was not convicted by the Senate in the impeachment process, she was meeting with her New York advisors to plan for a senate race in New York. She then became liberated to become her own independent political personality, and she won a very successful campaign in New York.

[In the Senate,] she became a very different kind of character than she had been in the White House. She emphasized the importance of listening to the people of New York, not telling them what to do. That’s the way she had been in college and at Yale Law School before she met Bill when she was always looking for reconciliation and building bridges to the oppositon and not alienating people. She got into this sort of alienating role in the White House, but then she went back to being more of a consensus reformer. She was successful in establishing a positive reputation among Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, and when she became Secretary of State she did the same thing.

The real question for the electorate this year is which Hillary is running. Is it the Hillary who took control of health care reform in the White House and demonized the opposition, or the Hillary who wants to reach out to people, build consensus, be a reformer and build bridges.

TC: Which Hillary do you see so far?

WC: I think that for the most part, she’s been showing her consensus-oriented reformer identity. She’s been trying to reach out to people. The only place she’s been showing her bad side is in her insistence on her own privacy, so the private email server is a continuation of her refusal to share any of the papers she had in the Whitewater scandal with the press because she was afraid that she would be embarassed and her character would be demeaned by that. Then the whole connection she has with huge donors to the Clinton Foundation and the whole money issue, where she’s continuing some of the patterns from earlier. For the most part she’s been effective in taking the high ground and not being someone who is a bitter critic and not someone who is demonizing the opposition.

TC: During the first debate, she mentioned that she was proud to have made Republicans her “enemies.” Isn’t this less of a consensus mindset?

WC: No, because she’s really trying to show she’s different from the right-wing segment of the Republican Party. I think she’s actually doing a good job saying that she’s the one who cares about broadening the middle class and returning income back to the middle class that’s been lost through income inequality, so I think she’s been okay with that.

She’s gotten into some more trouble in the past few days when some of her allies like Gloria Steinem attack any women who didn’t vote for Hillary, and that was a little bit bad, because it was distinguishing older women from younger women and saying younger women were being disloyal and weren’t feminist enough. That was a problem.

I think also Bill Clinton’s vicious attack against Bernie Sanders is not going to help her. Bill needs to stay above it also. He needs to not get down into the gutter, because he hurt himself and her very badly in 2008 when he compared Obama to Jesse Jackson, and I don’t think he can afford to do that again.

TC: Republicans have brought up Bill Clinton’s attitudes toward women in this campaign. How do you think this affects her?

WC: I think that the country basically has decided through its public opinion polls and then basically let Bill Clinton get away with it. Even though he was condemned for having engaged in sexual affairs with so many women, when he left the White House he had a 60 percent approval rating. Most Americans thought that her forgiving him and taking the high ground was an act of great loyalty which they respected. I don’t think she gets in trouble for defending him. I think she benefits from being devoted to the family instead of castigating him.

TC: How big an issue in the campaign is Hillary’s privacy?

WC: I think it all depends on whether the investigation of the personal emails leads to any charges. I don’t believe there’s any evidence so far that she consciously or with awareness included any information that was already defined as confidential in those emails. On the other hand, it does continue on a monthly basis, because they’re releasing them on a monthly basis, to underscore the problems with the personal email server. That’s going to be an ongoing issue, and its all going to depend on whether any type of indictment is handed down by the FBI.

TC: Say she wins the presidency, what do you think Bill Clinton’s role in the White House would be?

WC: My guess is he would continue to live at least half-time in his New York house and continue to work with the Clinton Foundation and wouldn’t live full-time in the White House. I think he would probably occupy a fairly diplomatic role of not speaking politically about domestic issues, but maybe getting involved in some aspects of world affairs. His role as former president is to be a statesman, not partisan advocate.