Vanity Fair has a damning piece on the Clintons

The latest Vanity Fair includes excerpts from a book about to be released this month called For the Love of Politics - Bill and Hillary Clinton by Sally Bedell Smith.  I read it Friday night as something to put me to sleep, oh dear, this book is anything but that.  I know nothing about the author, but am glad the timing is before the  primaries are over and not after them.

Here is the story from November 2007's Vanity Fair: The White House Civil War.  Here is a synopsis:

Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, the author reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.

The story begins with the two couples as great friends celebrating their victory and the inauguration events.  Eight days later, without consulting Vice President Al Gore or any of his cabinet members, he assigns Hillary to create a national health care system.  

The move took nearly all his top officials by surprise, including Al Gore. Bill had invested Gore with considerable responsibility, but his failure to confide in his vice president was a telling sign of the real pecking order.

Then it goes on about Hillary's influence in all the decisions in the White House.  Dee Dee Meyers, a White House press secretary and now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, said Hillary was known as the Supreme Court.  She was the final decider on the issues.  

Gore was the one most affected by Bill's reliance on his wife. It was a given in the White House, as Chief of Staff Mack McLarty said, that everyone would "just have to get used to" the fact that Hillary, along with Bill and Gore, had to "sign off on big decisions." But having what Clinton domestic-policy adviser Bruce Reed called "three forces to be reckoned with" added yet another layer of perplexity and rivalry to the West Wing, where advisers and Cabinet officers knew they could lobby either the First Lady or the vice president to reverse decisions by the president.

Reading the above paragraphs made me realize how wrong I was when I used to state that Hillary was not the candidate with the most experience.  I believed elected and legislative experience were what politics meant by experience, and, if that were the case, Obama has the most experience.  But taking into consideration Hillary's influence during the WH years, this gives her an advantage few others except Al Gore can claim.

The story worsens during the ending years when Al is running for President and Hillary is running for New York Senate.  They are competing campaigns and President Clinton should be helping out to make sure the Democrats keep control of the White House, but this does not happen.  Of course, Bill Clinton, has a bit of baggage which Al Gore wants to keep very far away from, but he still needed his help.  Here are some excerpts:

As a sitting president, Bill was in a unique position to boost his vice president's candidacy by scheduling White House events to highlight his achievements. But in 1999 those resources were diverted from Gore to Hillary "in a big way," said one member of the Gore team. "The Clintons come first. That was their basic framework." From June through December, Bill and Hillary appeared at 20 events under the aegis of the White House, including a celebration of Hillary's 52nd birthday,
<snip..>
During the same period, Gore was featured only at a White House Conference on Mental Health—with Bill, Hillary, and Tipper.

And it wasn't just the help that was taken from Al Gore, the Clinton's began to take away the donors too:

Before Hillary officially established her exploratory committee, she began directly competing with the vice president for money, sometimes even at his own fund-raising events. When Tipper's friend Melinda Blinken and a group of women planned a Gore fund-raiser in Los Angeles, Hillary insisted on being invited—over the objections of the event's organizers. Hillary then shocked the vice president's supporters by soliciting donations for herself in front of Tipper.

The story goes on about the two campaigns and the ruthless behavior of the Clintons.  I won't bore you with it.  In the end, one campaign is victorious and the other one lost and left a nation divided and in ruins.  

Here is the final excerpt, so well said by Bruce Reed:

"Election Night was so bizarre, mostly bitter," Bruce Reed recalled. "It was clear from almost the moment she got in the race that the First Lady would win and that the vice president's camp was star-crossed from the outset. There wasn't anybody at the White House who felt much like celebrating. We were over the moon for Hillary's victory, but the prize lost was so consequential and painful that it dwarfed everything."

I am happy Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize.  I hope he runs for President in 2008 but I can certainly understand why he would not.   I am not a Hillary supporter right now because of issues of the war but I am impressed with how strong and ambitious she is.  

UPDATE: There was an excellent blog by JecklynHyde on October 1 on this topic plus it includes some excellent work by Nuevo Liberal.  Here is the blog on Daily Kos  Clintons and Gores: Not So Peaceful Coexistence.