“I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.”
The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled.
In the back of the room, back where they were parched, back where no water or coffee was served for the two-hour meeting, sat Greg Craig, the White House counsel who was a ghostly presence, given his death by a thousand leaks.
A year after he helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by Obama’s inner circle.
I remember meeting Craig at a book party during the campaign. He upbraided me for writing critical things about Obama. I didn’t like being chastised, but I admired his loyalty.
It couldn’t have been easy for Craig, a special counsel in the Clinton White House who directed the response on impeachment, to break away from the Clintons and help the insurgent Obama shatter Hillary’s dream of shattering the Oval glass ceiling.
As Todd Purdum wrote of Craig in The Times in 1998, “At Yale, he surrendered his $75-a-month apartment in New Haven to Mr. Clinton and his girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, who were a class behind him, and he remains especially close to Mrs. Clinton, friends say.”
In a memo he sent to the press during the bitter 2008 Democratic primary, Craig made the case that Hillary had exaggerated her foreign policy experience and that she did not pass “the Commander-in-Chief test.”
It was brutally effective, taking apart her claims of involvement, country by country, and noting: “As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue — not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.”
I often wondered if Craig and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the other former Clinton official who helped undermine Hillary’s foreign policy record, would have done so if they had known that after turning on Hillary they would once more end up working beside her; if they had known that Obama can often be more interested in wooing opponents than tending to those who put themselves on the line for him.
There were complaints that Craig was out of the loop, but couldn’t Obama have walked the single staircase up to his counsel’s office and looped him in?
Craig was, after all, simply defending positions that Obama himself took during the campaign, from closing Gitmo to greater transparency.
The way the Craig matter was handled sent a chill through some Obama supporters, reminding them of the cold way the Clintons cut loose Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier. But then, Obama is surrounded by many old Clinton hands (and a Clinton).
Writing in Politico, Elizabeth Drew called it “the shabbiest episode of his presidency,” saying that it had caused people who had helped Obama rise to question whether he would behave in as classy and non-Clintonian a fashion as they had hoped.
It recalled Obama’s failure to lift a finger to help Caroline Kennedy — after she had lifted him at a crucial moment — when the loopy Gov. David Paterson was dragging her through mud and refusing to announce a decision on the appointment for the New York Senate seat.
Although a handful of donors were invited to the premiere state dinner Tuesday night — as well as former allies Craig and Hillary — many donors and devoted supporters are let down by Obama’s detachment, puzzled by his failure to make them feel invested.
It is especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election — and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line.
Bill Clinton may not have cared any more about contributors than Obama does, but he was such a talented politician that he made them feel as though they were in “a warm bath,” as one put it.
Obama is more like a cold shower.
Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times.
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