Ruthlessness and Grit Seen in Clinton's Style
New York Times
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign rally on Sunday at Indiana Tech in Fort Wayne.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is waving her fists across Indiana, signing autographs on boxing gloves.
"We need a president who's a fighter again," Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to "get knocked down and get back up: that's the story of America, right?"
In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for "counting me out" and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to "close the deal" and declared that no one was going to make her quit. "She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy," North Carolina's governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her "testicular fortitude."
This kind of language and pugilistic imagery, however, also evokes the baggage that makes Mrs. Clinton such a provocative political figure. For as much as a willingness to "do what it takes" and "die hard" are marketable commodities in politics, they can also yield to less flattering qualities, plenty of which have been ascribed to her over the years. Just as supporters praise her "toughness" and "tenacity," critics also describe her as "divisive," "a dirty fighter" or "willing to do anything to win." [..]
[That] camp gained a new spokesman on Thursday when Joe Andrew, a superdelegate who was a chairman of the Democratic National Committee under President Bill Clinton, switched his support to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Andrew accused Mrs. Clinton and her allies of being "the best practitioners of the old politics," who "will use the exact words that Republicans used to attack me when I was defending President Clinton." [..]
"She has learned how to be ruthless," said Robert B. Reich, an Obama supporter who served as Mr. Clinton's secretary of labor and knew Mrs. Clinton in their college days. "I doubt that it came to her naturally, but she has learned."
There is, of course, a fine line between ruthlessness and the necessary grit Mrs. Clinton's supporters say she possesses. Her feisty talk seems to play well with people in her audiences, many of them women who are quick to hail her fighting bona fides.
"Would you want to take her on?" asked Barbara Anderson of Jeffersonville. "I'll tell you, she has survived her fight. Obama has yet to have his."
While Mrs. Clinton is casting herself as a warrior for ordinary Americans who need jobs, health care and cheaper gasoline, she is also establishing a contrast with her opponent, suggesting he is an untested lightweight. She mocks Mr. Obama's rhetoric as naïve and challenges him to debate her on the back of a flat-bed truck.
When asked if the fighting motif could go too far, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that it could, but then quickly contrasted her aggressive style with Mr. Obama's. His campaign "has been about creating an atmosphere," she said. "I've never understood that. Because it's not easy. I've been in a lot of these fights."
Mrs. Clinton wears her battle scars proudly, and her surrogates promote them. In introducing her at a campaign event in Jeffersonville last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the crowd she had "endured one of the most savage beatings of anyone I've ever seen in my lifetime" from her political adversaries on the right.
Some of the conflicts she has engaged in were of her own choosing, like education reform in Arkansas, while others, like Whitewater and impeachment, were not. Her fighting style was honed in combat against opponents who could be relentless in their own right, both in Arkansas, where she was criticized as the young governor's uppity wife who refused to take his name, and in Washington, where Republicans vowed to kill her efforts to overhaul health care.
From Mr. Clinton's 1980 defeat as governor in Arkansas and the Democrats' presidential losses through the next decade, the Clintons took away an enduring lesson: No attack can go unanswered. It must be dealt with fast, hard and decisively.
To that end, Mrs. Clinton has spearheaded the creation of "war rooms" over the years, beginning with the rapid-response media operation of Mr. Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign "She was the one who named it ?'war room,' " said James Carville, the longtime Clinton loyalist.
Mrs. Clinton continued with a White House war room during the successful campaign to pass Mr. Clinton's economic plan in 1993 and another for her ill-fated effort to overhaul the health care system. In that effort, the first lady went after the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as villains but also turned on a potential ally, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, who had proposed an alternative plan. Her team solicited fellow Democrats to denounce him and his proposal.
"To me it showed her brittleness, her coldness, her spoiling for a fight," said Mr. Cooper, an Obama backer. "She's so good at this war machine stuff, it's sad."
When she arrived in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton, who represents New York, urged Democratic leaders to establish a war room in the Capitol to respond to every Republican attack and to hammer home a daily message. And in her current campaign, where the war room occupies a prominent place in her headquarters in suburban Virginia, she has been a consistent advocate for hitting Mr. Obama hard.
Campaign insiders say she has usually sided with advisers favoring a more aggressive approach to challenging Mr. Obama, of Illinois, instead of those arguing for restraint, worried about reinforcing the negatives about her image.
A lawyer, Mrs. Clinton has never been a litigator. But those who know her describe her as litigator-like in her attacks: methodically gathering evidence and marshaling her arguments, habits she has displayed in Senate hearings and on the campaign trail.
While living in Arkansas, she once appeared at a news conference called by a political rival of her husband's, pulled a sheaf of papers from her purse and began reading them aloud to counter his claims about Mr. Clinton. During the Whitewater investigation, White House aides described Mrs. Clinton pressing them to find negative information about Kenneth W. Starr, the special prosecutor, and to pass it on to reporters. In her husband's 1992 presidential campaign, she helped oversee the team that hired a private investigator to try to discredit Gennifer Flowers, who declared she had an affair with Mr. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton is said to be a more disciplined fighter than her husband. "He never stops trying to convert people," said Max Brantley, an old friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, who writes a column for The Arkansas Times, an alternative newspaper. "She's much more clear-eyed, recognizing the imperfectability of people." [..]
In recent years, Mrs. Clinton has more readily acknowledged her mistakes and become more willing to compromise. She has also disarmed old enemies ?- courting, if not entirely winning over, some of her nemeses in the news media, like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife [..].
"Part of being a political warrior is knowing when to maintain a grudge and when not to," said Mr. Reich, the former labor secretary. "If you need somebody for a vote, if you need the media, then there's no reason to settle scores. You do what you have to do." [..]
As Mr. Obama has learned, the central principle of Mrs. Clinton's combat style is simple endurance. Like her husband, she has always taken fierce pride in sticking around, outlasting enemies.
"We're going to keep on going," Mr. Clinton said to his wife in the final passage of Bob Woodward's book "The Agenda" after the couple had pushed the White House economic plan through Congress. "They're never going to stop us."
That scene has obvious resonance today in Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign, and with voters.
"She's not going to quit, not going to quit fighting," said Jody O'Dell of Decatur, Ill., who met Mrs. Clinton last week in Jeffersonville. She got her signature, too, a prized "Hillary" across a pair of red boxing gloves.
blaming Rove for what Hillary does. It's just saying that Hillary's acting like Rove.
