House of the Stacked Deck of Cards

“The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary Clinton has warned us, and she ought to know. Having been “at the top,” or close enough to it, since 1976, when her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas at age 30—not the biggest job ever, but one with a whole lot of power to play with—she has leveraged every ounce that it held to bring to them ever and ever more money and power, until at this moment, 14 years after leaving the White House, she and Bill sit on a mile-high mountain of both. Their wealth is immense and their power unlimited, at least in their party. The very few viable national candidates left after the two midterm wipeouts that decimated Democratic ranks in the reign of Obama are so afraid to risk the Clintons’ wrath that she is cruising unopposed to the nomination for the first time since no one knows when. How did two penniless kids living in roughly 1,000 square feet in Fayetteville, Arkansas, reach such heights? Let us look back and see.

Our story begins as boy wonder Bill Clinton wins his first election and moves with bride Hillary to the state capital and into a new way of life. Biographers Sally Bedell Smith (For Love of Politics) and Carl Bernstein (A Woman in Charge) seem to agree it was then and there that three things converged: For the first time, Bill was in a position to do things for people; the state was in the middle of a get-rich-quick boomlet; and Hillary, thinking now about starting a family, realized that, given Bill’s disposition and fairly low salary, the family fortunes would be in her hands.

“It was Hillary who decided she wanted to be financially secure, and took the steps to accomplish that,” family friend Betsey Wright told Bernstein. “She had come a long way from her rejection of ‘our prevailing acquisitive corporate life’ that she condemned in her Wellesley commencement address.” Rationalizing shady deals apparently came naturally in “an easy atmosphere of conflicts of interest” in which “everyone does it” was the rule.

“It was a culture in which the moral architecture was weak, and in which everyone assumed that ‘fixing’ was a requirement for getting things done,” as Smith tells us.

The Clintons’ connections helped them enrich themselves in the go-go 1980s, a period they were to denounce as the “greed decade.” .  .  . In that atmosphere, Bill and Hillary developed a sense of entitlement, an expectation that others would take care of them. They became accustomed to borrowing from banks operated by political friends and accepting favors from individuals and corporations, such as the free use of private airplanes.

By the same sort of happy coincidence that saw a Chicago hospital create a $300,000-per-year job for Michelle Obama when her husband emerged as a comer, Little Rock’s venerable Rose Law Firm hired Hillary Clinton in 1976 after Bill was elected attorney general and made her its first female partner when he became governor. This was the start of a cascade of good tidings that would quickly come her way. On top of her $110,000 Rose salary, Hillary cleared $64,000 yearly for sitting on corporate boards, including those of Wal-Mart and TCBY Enterprises, whose chairman explained her presence on the board as “making sure he was in good grace with the people in power.” The favor of other people with similar motives enabled the couple to live very well. According to Smith, Hillary “put $2,104 into a cellular-phone franchise operated by a policy adviser to the governor and walked away with a profit of $46,000.” But her most notorious coup was her $1,000 investment in cattle futures that in less than a year returned an astounding hundred-fold profit of $100,000, this windfall coming just as Bill was first taking office as governor in 1979.

Forced to try to explain this in 1994, when her past was coming under increased scrutiny, Hillary at first said she had done the trading herself, after her father had taught her to read the stock pages. But she eventually admitted that most of her trades had been made by Jim Blair, a counsel to Tyson Foods, the Arkansas-based conglomerate, and a hot-shot commodities trader, with the assistance of local broker and former Tyson executive Robert (Red) Bone, who seemed to have shielded her from damaging margin calls and thrown other favors her way.

The exceptional profits didn’t pass anyone’s smell test. The New York Times, which broke the commodities-trading story, concluded that “at every turn of their financial life .  .  . [the Clintons] were receiving financial favors from individuals who had something to gain from having friends in high places” and had trouble seeing the difference between the public interest and their own. But money wasn’t the only thing the Clintons tried to get the stacked deck to yield them. Sometimes it was power, too.

Many times before, people have run for public office from positions of privilege, having been rich and/or connected, having been famous as athletes or actors, as millionaires funding themselves, or as celebrities whose names were already on everyone’s lips. But no one before Hillary had launched their political career from the White House as first lady, able to enlist the prestige, perks, and glitz that surround that position. From the moment she decided to run for the Senate (late 1998, by most estimations) she drew attention and money away from the sitting vice president, whose presidential campaign was relatively neglected by a husband who, probably out of guilt and loyalty justly mingled with gratitude, turned all his attention her way.

“Hillary continued to vie with Gore for attention and money and to benefit enormously from Bill’s advice as well from her First Lady perch, while Gore essentially left the White House,” Smith tells us, noting that Bill showered his wife with praise, attention, and fundraising efforts, showcasing her in 1999 at 20 feel-good events at the executive mansion, featuring children, the elderly, and Medal of Freedom Award winners, compared to just one for Gore. Hitting up rich donors who would normally have given heavily to the vice president, she began competing with Gore for contributions, sometimes even making her personal pitches for money at his fundraising events. Talking to Hillary “all the time, every day,” Bill gave her advice on how to talk about issues, made plugs for her while campaigning for others, extravagantly talked up her virtues and talents, and urged people at fundraisers for other Democrats to also send something to Hillary. (“A lot of you have given to Hillary,” he would say. “If you haven’t, I hope you will.”)

The Democratic convention in 2000 at which Gore was nominated also turned into an extravaganza for Hillary, with a packed schedule of events before Gore arrived, “siphoning off Democratic money and further angering” Gore. Even her husband’s impeachment seemed to work for Hillary and against the vice president, casting her as the brave little woman seeking a new start in life after a great disappointment, while Gore had the more delicate job of trying to run on the Bill Clinton record while disassociating himself from the president’s sins. Hillary was given an 18-minute speech at the convention, and after that her campaign against a hapless Rick Lazio was practically an afterthought. On election night the Clintons watched from their suite in New York as Hillary won by 12 points while Gore, declared the winner at 8 p.m., was then declared the loser at 2 a.m., and at dawn headed into the Florida recount, which he would lose over a month later by a few hundred votes. If the White House epitomizes what it means to be “at the top,” never had the cards been stacked more in favor of anyone than they were for Hillary Clinton when she had a Senate seat in a state that she never had lived in more or less placed in her hands.

With an ex-president licensed to coin money and a former first lady in the Senate planning her own eventual run for president, the Clintons were in a unique position to leverage their power—past (Bill), present, and future (Hillary). Former presidents had in various ways cashed in before, but by that time they were no longer able to do people very meaningful favors. A donation to Bill, on the other hand, could mean favors from Hillary, in the job she was holding (senator, then secretary of state), and even as president sometime down the line. As the New York Timeshas noted, four days after Hillary was mentioned to head Barack Obama’s State Department, TD Bank (Canada’s largest) hired Bill to give speeches for a fee of $1.8 million. It must have been just a coincidence, like all the others she had enjoyed since their Little Rock days, that Secretary of State Clinton would be ideally placed to push for the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, in which the bank held a large block of shares.

As the New York Post’s Kyle Smith noted, in a piece on Peter Schweizer’s new book Clinton Cash, “Eleven of the 13 highest-paid speeches [Bill] ever gave took place while .  .  . Hillary headed the State Department.” Other ex-presidents had nostalgia to sell, which quickly lost value. Bill had “access to a family member who was secretary of state and perhaps a future president. That’s why his fees actually went up over time, and not down.” The Clinton machine is best explained as a wondrous contraption designed to funnel cash to Bill Clinton, with a million or two tossed now and then in the way of the needy, along with a supply of fascinating new friends, ready to fly him to beautiful islands, in the pursuit of women and song.

And what did Hillary hope to get from all this, beyond a share in the family fortunes? Much the same thing that she got when she lived in the White House as first lady during the years that she ran for the Senate, namely a series of glamorous feel-good occasions meant to showcase her as a species of royalty, altruistic, benevolent, and above it all. As Kenneth Vogel explained in Politico, this summer was supposed to be a four-month display of Hillary mania, with “a splashy Clinton Global Initiative conference in Marrakesh .  .  . followed by a lavish reception and conference in Athens in June, and .  .  . a September extravaganza in Manhattan, featuring an appearance by Elton John.” Alas, the release of Schweizer’s Clinton Cash and related reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post caused the Athens event to be canceled, with the family foundation “scrambling to address concerns about its budgeting, fundraising, and donor vetting, while being buffeted by a raging political storm.”

That storm may have been augmented by the revelation last summer that Chelsea Clinton, hired by NBC News along with Jenna Bush Hager as a part-time contributor, had not only not distinguished herself as a TV reporter, but had pulled down a yearly salary of $600,000 while having done practically nothing. It came to something over $26,000 for every minute she had been on the air. “Chelsea Clinton Leaving Her Unbelievably Cushy Fake Job at NBC” ran the New York headline. The magazine added that “she will no longer pretend to be a reporter,” calling her “one of the most boring people of her era” and her salary “insane.” A tipster told the New York Post that the disclosure (by Politico) of Chelsea’s salary had been “catastrophic for NBC, because not one of the other correspondents, not even Jenna Bush Hager, is in on that sort of money.” The NBC insider added that George W. Bush’s daughter—who is “extremely well-liked on Today, and [who] scored a sit-down with President Obama and reported on the Sochi Olympics—is rumored to be among those who expressed their dismay at Chelsea’s huge salary for apparently very little work.” (Laura Bush, of course, isn’t running for president and has no future favors to give to the network.) Nonetheless, seemingly heedless of her own family’s fortunes, Hillary continues to rail against income disparity as a crisis, and the unfair advantages given the already powerful as a national shame and a sin.

Nobody knows about stacked decks better than Hillary Clinton, who found the deck stacked slightly in her favor 40 years ago and has spent her whole political life stacking it further, to the benefit of herself and her husband and their daughter and Hillary’s brothers, all of whom have managed to make out like bandits, the latter two with no talents to speak of besides being related to her. The Democrats may want to run on inequality, but they should look for some other candidate to do it, and not someone who has made inequality, when it heavily tilts in her direction, her singular calling and life’s achievement.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.

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