WASHINGTON — In a cozy corner of loftlike offices near Union Station, 16 young researchers sit almost shoulder to shoulder, monitoring rows of computer screens.

Their mission: Track attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton, defend her record and dig up any potentially damaging information on her would-be 2016 rivals. Their leader: the one-time Clinton antagonist David Brock.

While Mrs. Clinton says it is far too early for her to consider a run for the presidency, a sprawling and well-funded operation built by Mr. Brock has already established a rapid-response nerve center for her.

Mr. Brock is determined to defend and define Mrs. Clinton’s image during her candidacy-in-waiting — the kind of task her aides have struggled with since her earliest days in Washington.

Back then, Mr. Brock was a self-described conservative hit man intent on taking down the Clintons. He famously went to Arkansas in 1993 and wrote an article for a conservative magazine asserting that state troopers had facilitated sexual liaisons for Bill Clinton, then the governor, which led to Paula Jones’s 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit against Mr. Clinton and Mr. Brock’s elevation in Republican power circles.

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On Tuesday, Mr. Brock will return to Arkansas for the first time since that article, this time in the warm embrace of the Clinton world: He is a featured speaker at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, delivering an address titled “Countering the Culture of Clinton Hating.”

The Clintons have no official role in Mr. Brock’s empire, but, along the way, as he has abandoned his right-wing roots and sought to expose what he views as the conservative machinery he was once a part of, they have encouraged his efforts.

The “super PAC” he founded, American Bridge, has tapped into the rich network of Clinton supporters, like George Soros; Steve Bing; Stephen M. Silberstein, a Bay Area entrepreneur; and Susie Tompkins Buell, a friend of Mrs. Clinton’s based in San Francisco, according to federal disclosures.

Mr. Brock now has about 165 employees working for American Bridge and the separate nonprofit organization he founded, Media Matters, which monitors conservative bias in news reports and often takes aim at Fox News. And while American Bridge provides rapid response and tracking to help get Democrats elected, Mr. Brock has started a new initiative within it, called Correct the Record, to focus exclusively on 2016 and defending Mrs. Clinton.

Combined, Mr. Brock’s organizations brought in $25 million in donations last year, he said.

Mr. Brock has apologized publicly for his early attacks on the Clintons, suggesting he was a naïve young conservative pressured by the movement’s leadership to participate in what he calls the politics of personal destruction. But people close to Mr. Brock have said his ultimate act of penance would be to help get Mrs. Clinton elected president. He serves as an adviser to Ready for Hillary, a political action committee focused on grass-roots outreach, and is on the board of Priorities USA, the big-money fund-raising vehicle devoted to a Clinton candidacy.

The speech on Tuesday signals a full-circle evolution for the man whose answering machine during the mid-1990s said, “I’m out trying to bring down the president.” He said the address would grapple with the question of whether there has been a resurgence of “the kind of anti-Clinton animus that was motivating a lot of the conversation in the 1990s.” He asked, “Is there a vast right-wing conspiracy redux?”

Not everyone, of course, views Mr. Brock as trustworthy; some conservatives called him a “switch-hitter” who employs the same tactics he once used against the Clintons against their enemies. But he argues his early experiences have only deepened his commitment.

“In the early and mid-’90s, I was on a mission to try and bring the Clintons down, essentially, and now I’m coming back 15 years later with a very different perspective — not only as somebody who’s supportive but somebody who is actually doing some work in relation to her potential presidential candidacy,” Mr. Brock said.

In 1996, Mr. Brock wrote a flattering biography of the first lady and, later, publicly changed his political affiliation. His 2002 book, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” provided a firsthand account of his evolution and resonated with the former president. Mr. Clinton was known to hand out copies of Mr. Brock’s book as proof that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (a term Mrs. Clinton used in a 1998 television interview) existed.

Mr. Brock declined to discuss his relationship with the Clintons, but, according to several accounts, he is a friend and adviser who is in contact with Mrs. Clinton and former White House advisers like Maggie Williams, who helped Mr. Brock start Media Matters, and Sidney Blumenthal, the New Yorker writer turned Clinton aide.

Last year, Mr. Clinton delivered the keynote address at a fund-raiser in New York for Mr. Brock’s biggest donors. Mr. Brock thanked the former president and Mrs. Clinton for “giving me the gift of forgiveness,” said one person who attended the fund-raiser but could not discuss the event, which was closed to the news media, for attribution.

These days, at age 51, Mr. Brock has a gray pompadour, and often dresses entirely in black, making him a conspicuous presence in the Brooks Brothers world of political operatives here. He splits his time between Washington and the West Village in Manhattan, and he works in an open office with Toby, his schnoodle (a poodle-schnauzer mix), at his side.

Many of the researchers who work for him were in diapers during Mr. Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. But the open floor plan that houses American Bridge’s rapid-response operation is called the “war room,” and it is inspired by the hub of Mr. Clinton’s campaign, which James Carville helped run out of an old newsroom of The Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock. About 40 staff members are employed as trackers, monitoring candidates in Senate and congressional races across the country. They have tracked a combined 4,443 events and filed more than 900 federal requests for documents so far this election cycle.

Mr. Brock said he first had the idea for an opposition research shop to help Mrs. Clinton last year, when she testified to a congressional hearing on the 2012 attack on a United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.

“Secretary Clinton held no political office and had no political staff, and that was hampering a response to a lot of the false allegations that were coming out of the Benghazi hearings,” Mr. Brock said. “It didn’t seem to be anybody’s job to respond to that in real time.”

In October, he published an e-book called “The Benghazi Hoax,” which defends Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the attack. And through his media appearances and behind-the-scenes interactions with reporters, he helped discredit an Oct. 27 report on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that led to the network’s apology and the journalist Lara Logan’s leave of absence.

The takedown of the CBS report is exactly the type of response Mr. Brock hopes Correct the Record can do in real time as attacks on Mrs. Clinton intensify.

This past fall, Mr. Brock reached out to another Clinton friend, Burns Strider, who worked on Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign as a liaison to religious communities, to head Correct the Record.

“I thought: ’Good Lord, that’s the stress and time commitment of a full-time campaign,” said Mr. Strider, a Mississippi native with a thick drawl. “ ‘Am I ready? Is my family ready?’ ”

Mr. Brock pointed out that America Rising, a conservative political action committee and its Stop Hillary 2016 effort, were already active. “He said we didn’t get the luxury to wait,” Mr. Strider said.

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With the new documentary “Anita,” the Oscar-winning director Freida Mock (“Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision”) brings a fresh perspective to a somber and awkward chapter of modern American politics: the Senate hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court amid accusations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill.

In the first half of this marvelously structured film, Ms. Mock deftly segues from the hearings to present-day interviews with people who were in that room in 1991, including Ms. Hill, her lawyer and her friends. This gives a sense of an annotated version of familiar words and images. (Among those interviewed are Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times, who covered the trial for The Wall Street Journal and wrote, with Jane Mayer, the 1994 book “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.”)

Ms. Mock shows the ways the Senate proceedings quickly collapsed amid racial unease after Mr. Thomas declared that his confirmation was imperiled as a result of a “high-tech lynching.” He was referring to himself and not to Ms. Hill.

“People think, when they think of those hearings, ‘He had a race, and she had a gender,’ ” Ms. Hill tells a group at Spelman College in the film. She then laughs uneasily at the absurdity before continuing: “But it was really the combination. And it changed the dynamics.”

“Anita” is an important historical document about an event that prompted a larger cultural conversation about sexual harassment. But, perhaps more important, it conveys Ms. Hill’s journey from an accuser alone to an activist who shares with, and listens to, others. (She is now 57 and a professor at Brandeis University.)

“Sexual harassment is just part of a larger problem of gender inequality,” she says. “And I didn’t realize that until I started hearing from people.”

In the second half of the film, Ms. Mock takes Ms. Hill away from that famous image of her testifying before a panel of white men and places her in a context of power as she speaks in front of rooms full of women (like the Brooklyn-based group Girls for Gender Equity). By showing this evolution, Ms. Mock demonstrates that harassment holds its power mainly in isolation.

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WALTHAM, Mass. — On the day in 1991 that the Senate confirmedClarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Anita Hill — the little-known law professor who riveted the nation by accusing him of sexual harassment — faced news cameras outside her simple brick home in Norman, Okla., with her mother by her side, and politely declined to comment on the vote.

In the nearly 23 years since, Ms. Hill, now a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University here, has worked hard, she likes to say, to help women “find their voices.” She has also found hers — and she is not afraid to use it.

“I believe in my heart that he shouldn’t have been confirmed,” she said in a recent interview, acknowledging that it irritates her to see Justice Thomas on the court. “I believe that the information I provided was clear, it was verifiable, it was confirmed by contemporaneous witnesses that I had talked with. And I think what people don’t understand is that it does go to his ability to be a fair and impartial judge.”

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It was a surprisingly candid comment from a deeply private woman who has long been careful in the spotlight. But the quiet life Ms. Hill has carved out for herself is about to be upended — by her own choice — with the release of a documentary, “Anita,” opening on March 21 in theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

For those too young to remember, Ms. Hill was the reluctant witness in the explosive Thomas hearings, the young African-American lawyer in the aqua suit, grilled in excruciatingly graphic detail by an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearings transformed the country, sparking a searing conversation about sexual harassment, as well as Ms. Hill, who was vilified as a liar by conservatives but ultimately embraced, as the film shows, by a new generation of young women.

Directed by the Academy Award winner Freida Mock, the documentary — which does not reveal Ms. Hill’s current views on Justice Thomas — chronicles her plunge, and the nation’s, into a volatile stew of sex, race and politics. For the professor, the film is a chance to show the public (and on a deeply personal level, her large extended family) that she has survived, thrived and, as she says, “moved on.”

Yet like Anita the person, “Anita” the movie is bound to unleash raw feelings in Washington. Some conservative Republicans still revile Ms. Hill. Some Democrats — including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who “did a terrible job” running the hearings, in Ms. Hill’s view — would probably like to forget her.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden said the vice president “continues to wish nothing but the best for Anita Hill.” Justice Thomas, who supervised Ms. Hill at two federal agencies and has categorically denied her accusations, declined to comment. (In his 2007 autobiography, he referred to Ms. Hill as “my most traitorous adversary.”) But his backers, who include some devoted female former clerks, are not shy about speaking out.

“I honestly think she’s just making it up,” said Carrie Severino, a former Thomas clerk and chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, an advocacy group. “I think she’s built her career on that story. She is using that and using him as a way of boosting her own career, and that’s really shameful.”

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One subject Ms. Hill will not address is Justice Thomas’s voting record. If a backlash is coming, she said, she is ready. During an hourlong conversation in an airy gallery in Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, she listened to Ms. Severino’s critique, thought for a moment, then smiled wryly.

“I’ve heard worse,” she finally said.

At 57, Ms. Hill, the youngest of 13 children from a rural Oklahoma farm family, is in many ways the same poised, dignified woman America met 23 years ago. She has the same lyrical voice, the same way of answering questions with perfect precision and gentle pushback. (Asked if she voted for Vice President Biden, whom she faults for failing to call other women and harassment experts as witnesses, she laughed and said, “I voted for President Obama.”)

Yet she is also profoundly changed.

“I think this event changed the course of her life and gave her a public mission that she took on,” said Fred Lawrence, the Brandeis president and a Yale Law School classmate of Ms. Hill’s. “It’s not a duty that she volunteered for, but I think she understood that the circumstances had put her in a unique role, and gave her a voice.”

The hearings were a surreal spectacle, as senators prodded an obviously uncomfortable Ms. Hill through awkward testimony about penis size, pubic hair and a pornographic film star known as Long Dong Silver — shocking public discourse at the time. When the hearings ended, Ms. Hill returned to teaching commercial law at the University of Oklahoma, trying, as she says in the film, to find “a new normal.” It proved difficult.

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There were thousands of letters of support, but also death threats, threats to her job. Conservative state lawmakers wanted her fired; fortunately, she had tenure. Even years later, she felt “a discomfort,” she said. One dean confided that he had tired of hearing colleagues at other schools remark, “Isn’t that where Anita Hill is?”

In Washington, her testimony reverberated. Sexual harassment claims shot up. “Our phones were ringing off the hook with people willing to come forward who had been suffering in silence,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, where Ms. Hill serves on its board.

Congress passed a law allowing victims of sex discrimination to sue for damages, just as victims of racial discrimination could. Waves of women began seeking public office. In 1991, there were two female senators. Today there are 20.

But if Washington moved on, Ms. Hill could not. Once, in an Oklahoma airport, she bumped into Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania senator who had accused her of perjury and who died in 2012. He said maybe they could work together on some things, that she should call him. Ms. Hill was astonished; she never did. Just one senator, Paul Simon of Illinois, made amends; before he died, he sent Ms. Hill his autobiography with a nice inscription.

“For them, it’s all about politics,” she said. “For me, it was about my life.”

She published a memoir in 1997; the following year, she joined Brandeis, teaching courses and pursuing research on gender and racial inequality. Years passed; her notoriety receded. Today, many of her students have no idea who Anita Hill is.

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“I had to Google it,” said one, Megan Madison, who considers Ms. Hill a mentor. “I knew it was a name I should know, but I didn’t know the story.”

Ms. Hill wants young people to know. She had previously resisted entreaties from filmmakers, she said. But in 2010, with the 20th anniversary of the hearings approaching, she decided it was time “to revisit this, and for people to understand who I am.”

A friend introduced her to Ms. Mock, whose 1994 film about the architect Maya Lin won an Oscar for best feature documentary. With Ms. Hill, the director said, she wanted to tell “the story of an ordinary person who does an extraordinary act.”

The movie, which premiered at Sundance last year to good reviews, opens with the voice of Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, in a 2010 message on Ms. Hill’s office answering machine, asking her to “consider an apology and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” (Ms. Hill initially thought it was a prank.) It intersperses old footage of the hearings with interviews with Ms. Hill; her lawyer, the Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr.; some supporters and two journalists, Jill Abramson, now executive editor of The New York Times, and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, co-authors of a 1994 book, “Strange Justice,” that raised questions about Justice Thomas’s candor.

The film follows Ms. Hill through a 20th-anniversary commemoration, where awe-struck young women, some in tears, thank her and praise her courage. Emily May, a co-founder of Hollaback!, a nonprofit group that fights street harassment, was among them.

“We all felt like we were seeing this legend,” Ms. May said.

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The movie also offers a glimpse, albeit a thin one, into Ms. Hill’s private life. Viewers learn that she has kept the aqua linen suit (the Smithsonian has asked for it, but she is “still very protective,” she said); watch her attend a joyful family wedding; and discover that she has a longtime companion, the businessman Chuck Malone, about whom she will say little.

She wears a diamond band, a gift from him, on her left ring finger. “I know,” she said, laughing. “Everybody sees this ring. I guess I’m not such a traditionalist as to think that I need to, at this moment, marry.”

Today, Ms. Hill is working mostly on a strategic plan for Brandeis; she plans to use a sabbatical next year to organize her letters. If she has a legacy, experts say, it is in creating a vocabulary for Americans to talk about sexual harassment, where none existed before. In 1991, after a confidential memo containing Ms. Hill’s accusations leaked out, seven female Democratic House members marched over to the Senate to demand that she be called as a witness.

“I can’t even imagine a hearing today where a woman would come forth with an accusation of sexual harassment, and it would be ignored,” said Representative Nita Lowey, the New York Democrat who was among them. “Today, we probably would have thousands of women from all over the country march to the Capitol.”

As women in the military and on college campuses grapple with sexual assault, Ms. Lowey said there was still more work to be done. Ms. Hill agrees.

But she wants America to know that “I have a good life,” a life of meaning and purpose, that “something positive” has come out of those dark 1991 days. Looking back, she said, she sometimes marvels at how hard her critics worked to destroy her.

“And yet,” she said, sounding satisfied, “here I am.”

2/28/2014 | The New York Times

(Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2013 leaving the State Department, where news media coverage was generally favorable.)

WASHINGTON — Soon after Hillary Rodham Clinton left the State Department, her longtime spokesman talked wistfully about their paradise lost.

“We knew the golden age was coming to an end,” Philippe Reines said.

Mr. Reines was referring to the coverage Mrs. Clinton received from the State Department press corps — in his view, a substantive, high-minded and worldly lot who diligently covered her diplomatic travels and policy initiatives. They were, Mr. Reines explained, in sharp contrast to “the parallel press corps” of political reporters who have scrutinized Mrs. Clinton’s every utterance, scratched at any scent of scandal and speculated about her ambitions since she first refused to bake cookies.

As Mrs. Clinton has now moved back into that parallel universe ahead of a potential second presidential run in 2016, Mr. Reines and the other press operatives entrusted to guard her image remain armored and armed against a media they believe has it in for the former first lady. But some veterans of past Clinton campaigns think her bunker mentality toward the press is outdated, and that it is the couple’s own psychological baggage that could hurt her chances.

After all, Mrs. Clinton has simply outlasted many of her old combatants — real and imagined — from the media wars of the 1990s. In their place is a virtual clean slate of Clinton reporters whose formative experiences with her come from the last campaign or her time as a senator. Some of the babies ready to board the 2016 campaign bus were actually babies in the 1990s.

“I wasn’t politically engaged in that time,” said Ruby Cramer, a reporter who was in single digits at the time of the Whitewater scandal and who covers Mrs. Clinton for BuzzFeed, the attention-grabbing Web publication whose news operation was not yet conceived in 2008. She has written pieces surveying Mrs. Clinton’s support in Iowa and profiling her chief donors in California, but other than receiving warnings about the Clinton press operation, she said. “I don’t think I came with any baggage.”

Mrs. Clinton’s press strategy will have a critical bearing on her political fortunes, especially as she faces earlier and more extensive coverage than any potential candidate in history. Reporters at a raft of publications, including this one, are treating Mrs. Clinton as a beat, an exceptional development for an undeclared candidate two years out from an election.

How and if Mrs. Clinton engages that press offers the first hint of the tone her possible campaign could strike in 2016, and whether it would be different from the approach of 2008, 2006, 2000, 1996 and 1992.

Mrs. Clinton’s media skepticism is a longstanding condition. In 1995, Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary in Bill Clinton’s first presidential term, wrote about the first lady’s aversion to the national Washington media. That memo was among nearly 4,000 Clinton White House documents made public by the National Archives on Friday, the latest entry in a flurry of AOL-era flashbacks.

As a national figure for three decades, half of which has been spent representing or residing in the media capital of the world, Mrs. Clinton is encountering at least her third wave of political reporters. Through Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, the vast right-wing conspiracy, the Senate candidate carpetbagger era, the Suha Arafat kiss, the presidential flirtations and finally the 2008 campaign, she has developed and maintained an attitude skeptical of the press. (“HC says press has big egos and no brains,” Mrs. Clinton’s late friend Diane Blair wrote in her personal papers during the 1993 White House Travel Office scandal.)

Most reporters acknowledge that Mrs. Clinton’s perception of them as enemy combatants is not entirely irrational. But it is a view that has not always served her well.

In the 2008 presidential primaries, as Mrs. Clinton challenged an upstart media sweetheart, Barack Obama, many reporters in her press corps knew her primarily as the senator from New York and not the former first lady. Nonetheless, Mrs. Clinton kept those reporters at bay and failed to employ the charm offensive of which she is highly capable. Only on the eve of the disastrous Iowa caucuses, when relations between the campaign and reporters had already broken down, did she venture onto the press bus with coffee and bagels. “I didn’t want you to feel deprived,” she said during a visit that lasted one minute and 28 seconds. Hardly anyone ate a bagel.

Some Clinton veterans point out that while young reporters might not come into the campaign with chips on their shoulders, they often answer to editors who have their own Clinton histories.

“On one hand, you’ve got reporters in their early 20s whose direct experience watching her is as a largely praised secretary of state and a glass-ceiling shattering presidential candidate,” said Blake Zeff, a former spokesman for Mrs. Clinton who is now the political editor at Salon. “On the other, you have older editors who come at this with a much longer view, steeped in old fights dating back to the 1990s and the Senate.”

To the extent that Mrs. Clinton is following the old playbook of stiff-arming the media, so far it seems to be working out just fine. Polls show her as a prohibitive favorite — for now —and there is no candidate on the horizon who seems capable of generating the media heat Mr. Obama did. Mrs. Clinton’s presumed supremacy has generated a virtual cottage industry of Democratic press operatives working on speculation to boost Mrs. Clinton and police her coverage.

While some of those pro bono boosters have sought to woo new reporters on the Clinton beat, there is still built-in skepticism about the media’s intentions. “What’s the point?” said a former Clinton press operative about shifting to a strategy of greater engagement when interest in Mrs. Clinton is already so intense, and when any tiny error could be amplified.

Sometimes, Mrs. Clinton’s press handlers can seem more obsessed with the past and perceived institutional biases than the reporters covering her. The two veterans who essentially run the Clinton press operation — Matt McKenna, a Montana-based strategist employed by Mr. Clinton and his foundation, and Mr. Reines, who works for Mrs. Clinton — are both known to keep blacklists.

But it is Mr. Reines, varyingly caustic and charming, who is the ultimate Clinton survivalist and the operative who perhaps most embodies his boss’s tortured relationship with the press. He has resided in Hillaryland for almost his entire career and developed a less than favorable view of the political press, comparing it to the hungry T-rex in Jurassic Park. “If you stand still, it doesn’t notice you. But once you move even a little bit it’s on the scent and you can’t get rid of it,” he said.

Mr. Reines, who was sidelined for much of the 2008 campaign, benefited from his exile as he found himself well positioned to follow Mrs. Clinton to the State Department, where he traveled with her extensively and entered her inner orbit. He is now considered a Clinton lifer.

On Thursday on the enclosed rooftop of the W hotel, Mr. Reines arrived late to the book party for “HRC,” a new book that describes Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department in a mostly positive light. His mere presence was a reminder to the myriad reporters and pundits in the room of the Clinton press shop’s Golden Rule: “We treat others in the way they treat us.”

As reporters gravitated toward him, Mr. Reines laughed with one of the book’s authors and then sipped the evening’s signature champagne cocktail. It was called the State Secret.

3/1/2014 | The New York Times

WASHINGTON — OY. By the time the Bushes and Clintons are finished, they are going to make the Tudors and the Plantagenets look like pikers.

Before these two families release their death grip on the American electoral system, we’re going to have to watch Chelsea’s granddaughter try to knock off George P.’s grandson, Prescott Walker Bush II. Barack Obama, who once dreamed of being a transformational president, will turn out to be a mere hiccup in history, the interim guy who provided a tepid respite while Hillary and Jeb geared up to go at it.

Elections for president are supposed to make us feel young and excited, as if we’re getting a fresh start. That’s the way it was with J.F.K. and Obama and, even though he was turning 70 when he got inaugurated, Ronald Reagan.

But, as the Clinton library tardily disgorged 3,546 pages of official papers Friday — dredging up memories of a presidency that was eight years of turbulence held steady by a roaring economy and an incompetent opposition, a reign roiled by Hillarycare, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Webb Hubbell, Travelgate, Monica, impeachment, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Marc Rich — the looming prospect of another Clinton-Bush race makes us feel fatigued.

Our meritocratic society seems increasingly nepotistic and dynastic. There was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years straight. We’re Bill Murray stuck at 6 a.m. in Harold Ramis’s comic masterpiece, “Groundhog Day.” As Time’s Michael Crowley tweeted on Friday, “Who else is looking forward to potentially TEN more years of obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s past, present and future?”

The Clintons don’t get defeated. They get postponed.

Just as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.” Jeb acknowledged in Long Island on Monday, referring to his mom’s tart comment that “if we can’t find more than two or three families to run for higher office, that’s silly,” that “it’s an issue for sure.” He added, “It’s something that, if I run, I would have to overcome that. And so will Hillary, by the way. Let’s keep the same standards for everybody.”

We’ve arrived at the brave new world of 21st-century technology where robots are on track to be smarter than humans. Yet, politically, we keep traveling into the past. It won’t be long before we’ll turn on the TV and see Lanny Davis defending President Clinton (the next one) on some mishegoss or other.

When the Clintons lost to Obama, they simply turned Obama’s presidency into their runway. Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, and a passel of other former Obama aides, are now helping Hillary. And Bill is out being the campaigner-in-chief, keeping the Clinton allure on display in 2014.

The new cache of Clinton papers is benign — the press seems more enamored of speechwriters’ doodles than substance — but just reading through them is draining. There are reams of advice on how to steer health care, which must have filled the briefing binders Hillary famously carried. But did she absorb the lessons, given that health care failed because she refused to be flexible and make the sensible compromises suggested by her husband and allies? She’s always on listening tours, but is she hearing? As one White House health care aide advised in the new document dump, “We need to be seen as listening.”

Just as in the reminiscences compiled by Hillary’s late friend, Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas — some of which were printed in the Washington Free Beacon three weeks ago — the new papers reflect how entangled the Clintons’ public and private lives were in the White House.

In a 1995 memo, Lisa Caputo, the first lady’s press secretary, sees an opportunity for the upcoming re-election campaign by “throwing a big party” for the Clintons’ 20th wedding anniversary.

“We could give a wonderful photo spread to People magazine of photos from the party coupled with old photos of their honeymoon and of special moments for them over the past 20 years,” Caputo wrote, adding that they could turn it into “a nice mail piece later on.”

Both sets of papers are revealing on the never-ending herculean struggle about how to present Hillary to the world, how to turn her shifting hairstyles and personas into one authentic image.

“Be careful to ‘be real,’ ” media adviser Mandy Grunwald wrote to her before the launch of her listening tour at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. “You did this well in the Rather interview where you acknowledged that of course last year was rough. Once you agree with the audience’s/reporters’ reality like that, it gives you a lot of latitude to then say whatever you want.”

Grunwald advises the first lady to “look for opportunities for humor” and “Don’t be defensive.”

It’s hard to understand why so many calculations are needed to seem “real,” just as it’s hard to understand how Hillary veers from feminist positions to un-feminist ones.

In the Blair papers, Hillary’s private view of the Monica Lewinsky affair hewed closely to the lame rationales offered by Bill and his male friends.

“HRC insists, no matter what people say,” Blair said, after talking to Hillary on the phone, “it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex within any real meaning (standup, liedown, oral, etc.) of the term.” The president dallying with a 22-year-old intern was not “a power relationship” and certain kinds of sex don’t count?

Like her allies Sidney Blumenthal and Charlie Rangel, Hillary paints her husband’s mistress as an erotomaniac, just the way Clarence Thomas’s allies painted Anita Hill. A little nutty and a little slutty.

“It was a lapse,” Blair wrote, “but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control.”

The cascade of papers evoke Hillary’s stressful brawls — with her husband, the press, Congress and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. And they evoke the issue about her that is so troubling and hard to fathom. She is an immensely complex woman with two sides. She is the tireless and talented public servant. And she is the tired warrior who can be insecure and defensive, someone who has cleaved to a bunker mentality when she would have been better served getting out of her defensive crouch.

Talking to her pal Blair, Hillary had a lot of severe words for her “adversaries” in the press and the G.O.P. Blair also said Hillary was “furious” at Bill for “ruining himself and the presidency” by 1994.

Hillary may have had a point when she said in 1993, after criticism of the maladroit firing of the veteran White House travel office staff, that the press “has big egos and no brains.” But it speaks to her titanic battles and battle scars.

Hillary has spent so much time searching for the right identity, listening to others tell her who to be, resisting and following advice on being “real,” that it leaves us with the same question we had when she first came on the stage in 1992.

Who is she?

4/23/2010 | The New York Times

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” continues to take on a cable channel.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.

Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.

It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.

“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.

On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.

It has been noticed by, among other people, the Fox host Bill O’Reilly, who called Mr. Stewart a “devoted critic” of Fox News and said “his influence is growing.”

Separately, this week Mr. Stewart’s contract was renewed by Comedy Central into 2013. Combining the earnestness of a journalism professor and the sarcasm of a satirist, Mr. Stewart routinely charges that Fox’s news anchors and commentators distort Mr. Obama’s policies and advance a conservative agenda. He reminds some viewers of the left-wing group Media Matters but much funnier.

“Stewart does a great job of using comedy to expose the tragedy that is Fox News, and he also underscores the seriousness of it,” said Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters.

The segments about Fox are often replayed hundreds of thousands of times on blogs and other Web sites, amplifying their significance. “Media criticism has become part of his brand,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who noted that Mr. Stewart had also dissected CNN and CNBC in lengthy segments in the past.

It is true that the often-left-leaning “Daily Show” deals with a wide array of topics, but Fox is one that Mr. Stewart is overtly passionate about; he said on the show this week that he criticizes the network a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

According to “The Daily Show” Web site, thedailyshow.com, Fox News has been a subject of 24 segments so far this year, including eight in the month of April. The lower-rated news channel CNN, by contrast, has been a subject of five segments this year.

In many of the segments, Mr. Stewart questions Fox’s journalistic practices. He noted that Fox had hired former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be a political analyst in a January segment he called “News of the Weird.” But he wasn’t laughing when he asserted that Fox is “functioning as her de-facto rapid response media arm, and they’re paying her for the privilege of doing it.”

In February he noted that Fox News had stopped showing President Obama’s widely praised meeting with Republican leaders while CNN and MSNBC had carried it start to finish. Mimicking a Fox anchor, Mr. Stewart said, “We’re gonna cut away because” — humorous pause — “this is against the narrative that we present.”

In March he ridiculed the news anchor Megyn Kelly for lining up guests who were opposed to the Democratic health care overhaul and citing polls that claimed the American people were opposed to it. Then he played a clip from October 2008, when Mr. Obama was leading in most polls, of Ms. Kelly’s saying “don’t trust the polls.”

In the past week and a half he found himself in a fight with Bernie Goldberg, the Fox News contributor, after suggesting that Mr. Goldberg and others were hypocritical for having bemoaned generalizations about the Tea Party while having demonized liberals.

As Fox’s ratings have surged, so too has the amount of criticism, particularly surrounding its combination of news programs and conservative opinion programs. Asked on Friday about Mr. Stewart’s criticism, a Fox spokeswoman, Loren Hynes, said the channel would pass on an opportunity to comment.

Mr. O’Reilly responded to Mr. Stewart on his Fox program on Wednesday, calling “The Daily Show” a “key component of left-wing television” and concluding: “Here, we have all kinds of views, all kinds of debates, and we’re not boring. That’s why Jon Stewart loves us, and, yes, needs us, especially Bernie Goldberg.”

Mr. Stewart and his executive producers usually let their segments speak for themselves, and they declined interview requests about Fox this week. Friends and colleagues of Mr. Stewart say privately that he cares deeply about media issues and happens to be in a position to talk about them.

His staff members regularly dismiss claims that “The Daily Show” is a form of journalism. “I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box,” Mr. Stewart said on the show on Tuesday, adding, “The news box is moving toward me.”

But there he was, checking in with the White House when Fox didn’t. The inspiration for the “Fox & Friends” segment about the “Islamic image” came from The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation. Mr. Stewart cut up the clips of the co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson reckoning that the flags of Muslim nations look a lot like the summit logo — followed by Ms. Carlson’s saying “you be the judge” — before letting rip.

“Yeah, you be the judge,” Mr. Stewart said, hurling an expletive and continuing, “We’re just curious citizens, wondering if we put that logo up with four Muslim flags, whether you’ll have a visceral reaction that our president is perhaps Muslim.”

He concluded: “Anyway, what do you think? We’re just doing the math and then giving you the answer, and then asking you to check our work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/television/24stewart.html?_r=0

A version of this article appeared in print on April 24, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

“House of Cards” actress Sakina Jaffrey joins to discuss her role as White House Chief of Staff on the show, and why politics makes for great entertainment.

Clinton, flanked by communications adviser Matt McKenna (left) and top aide Doug Band. | John ShinkleClose

What may surprise people about the Clinton of 2010 is how little it resembles the Clinton of 2001. After leaving the presidency in January, former first lady Hillary Clinton was all set, newly elected to the U.S. Senate. But the former president himself was at loose ends, viewed by many in his inner circle as deeply demoralized, possibly even depressed.

The final hours of his presidency were scarred by the Marc Rich pardon scandal — an earlier occasion, like the 2008 campaign, when some commentators believed Clinton had permanently marred his legacy. With his wife in Washington and most of his White House aides scattered to new jobs, Clinton was brooding at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., often alone except for his personal valet, Oscar Flores. Having spent his life cosseted by aides, Clinton had trouble navigating some routine aspects of modern life. One aide went with him to the automated teller machine at the bank and saw that he had a million dollars in a standard checking account. Perhaps, sir, you should consider moving some of that, the aide suggested.

What’s more, Clinton seemed to have little conception of how to spend his post-presidency beyond reflecting on the achievements of his tenure and nursing his grievances over the defeats. One close aide said at the time he worried that Clinton would squander his legacy “like Willie Mays,” who finished his career greeting customers at a casino.

It was during this period that Band was enlisted to help Clinton. The University of Florida graduate was a familiar figure in the Clinton fold but not then an exalted one. He was the last of four personal aides — known by the coarse title “butt boys” in White House parlance — to work with Clinton at the White House. The job was to be by the president’s side almost constantly from morning to night, at home and on the road, keeping track of his speeches, making sure he didn’t lose his glasses, coughing and shooting peevish glares when Oval Office visitors overstayed their welcome. It might have been a menial job at times, but it also offered uncommon access to the behind-the-scenes life of the president.

The Clintons prevailed on Band to give up a job offer from Goldman Sachs to stay with the former president.

Recalling that period now, Band said in a POLITICO interview that he is shocked to think of how threadbare Clinton’s operation was: “He has this whole new life, but the apparatus of the presidency is completely gone.”

Band said it took time for Clinton and the people around him to conceive a strategy for leveraging an ex-president’s assets — mainly fame and the ability to command an audience with virtually anyone on the planet — into a formal operation.

“He’s one of the most recognizable and important people alive,” Band said, adding that while this creates opportunity, “the burden and the challenge of it is significant. … You have to create the organization, you have to raise the money, and you have to build that enterprise from scratch.”

At the beginning, Band’s role was much the same as the body-man assignments he took on at the White House. Over the years, however, it became clear that he was no longer a mere “butt boy.” A series of rivals to be Clinton’s top staff aide gradually fell by the wayside. In practice, if not title, Band became something like the chief operating officer of Clinton’s life.

These days, Band is sometimes treated as a principal rather than a staff man. He sits on Coca-Cola’s international advisory board and is involved in efforts to recruit the World Cup and America’s Cup to the United States. He was invited to Vernon Jordan’s birthday party this summer as a guest, not as Clinton’s coat holder.

With new power, controversy inevitably followed. Particularly in New York, Band is a regular name in the papers, even though he rarely speaks on the record. His reputation among outside observers of the Clinton operation, and even some on the inside, sometimes seems like a composite. It is one part H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s single-minded enforcer. And it is one part George Stephanopoulos, another person who as a young man won entree to a world of celebrity by virtue of his relationship with Clinton.

Before his marriage in 2007, Band showed up in the tabloids for dating model Naomi Campbell. (His wedding to Lily Rafii in Paris was attended by Clinton and a host of tycoons and was topped off with fireworks. The couple now has a 9-month-old child.) He also won unwelcome publicity in 2007, when a Wall Street Journal article detailed a business deal gone sour with a jet-setting Italian scam artist who later went to prison.

Band said he realizes that the reason many people seek him out or that doors open to him is because of his role with Clinton, and that someone in his role must tread modestly. His reputation as the enforcer in the Clinton circle comes because someone must fend off a ceaseless barrage of invitations, entreaties and requests for favors that descend on a former president — a task Clinton, with his accommodating temperament, would never take on for himself.

But Band seems to warm to the task. While Clinton now gets along well with Obama, there is occasional chest-bumping between Band and West Wing aides like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over whether enough deference is being shown to the former president and his allies. In 2008, John Edwards called, seeking a statement of support from Clinton when his affair with Rielle Hunter exploded publicly. A loyalist with a long memory, Band sent back word, asking whether Edwards recalled his own denunciation of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky controversy.

Band’s loyalists within the Clinton team said his reputation as an operator has obscured his achievements as a strategist. Clinton’s efforts bear Band’s imprint more than that of any other person, except the former president himself.

It is now a far-flung enterprise. At Clinton’s Harlem office, there are 120 employees. From his home in Little Rock, former White House aide Bruce Lindsey weighs in on issues relating to Clinton’s foundation and his record at his presidential library. Policy aide Ira Magaziner, who works on AIDS issues, lives in Rhode Island, and communications adviser Matt McKenna works most of the time from home in Montana. On some policy and political matters, former White House advisers John Podesta or Tom Freedman weigh in from Washington.

The Clinton Global Initiative, according to Clinton, first grew from a suggestion by Band: The former president should try to replicate the annual gatherings of the elite in Davos, Switzerland. Clinton said he wanted the focus to be on global philanthropy, moving beyond panels and speeches and requiring that all participants make specific pledges of money and effort aimed at innovative solutions to world problems. This week marked the sixth CGI summit. In an interview, Clinton said one of the biggest successes of recent years has been enlisting more CEOs to help promote market-based solutions for health care and other humanitarian challenges.

Band said one project has been neglected over the past decade: an organized effort by veterans of Clinton’s White House and other allies to promote and defend his eight years in office.

In the interview, Clinton made clear that he thinks Republicans do a better job than Democrats of developing a sheen of mythology around their presidents.

“President [Ronald] Reagan has got a much higher standing than he did when he left the White House because the Republicans are smart, and they work relentlessly on legacy,” Clinton said. “They understand how important it is to have their narrative out there. When he left the White House, people were worried about Iran-Contra and didn’t feel too hot about things.”

The Reagan comparison also touches on one of the sore points of another relationship: the one between Clinton and Obama. During the 2008 campaign, Obama made waves when he implicitly pooh-poohed Clinton’s accomplishments during an interview with a Reno newspaper.

“Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said at the time. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

Clinton, in his interview, chalked that quote up to politics and offered repeated praise for Obama’s intelligence and policy judgments, though he did critique the president’s political strategy. Aides said Clinton nursed deep resentments over the 2008 campaign for at least a year afterward, but he has gradually let them go.

“You’ve got to draw distinctions, and that’s the deal,” Clinton said. “Politics is a contact sport. And to complain about contact is like a pro-football quarterback complaining if he gets sacked on the weekend.”

He made clear that he regards his own achievements as “transformational,” even if Obama professed not to. He said the fact that Obama passed health care while Clinton did not was simply a matter of “arithmetic” — Obama had more Democrats in the Senate.

He also noted that Obama remains undefined. In diagnosing what’s ailing the presidency, Clinton volunteered that a negative public caricature was able to take hold partly because Obama didn’t have a long background in public life.

“Partly, he was vulnerable to that because he came up so fast,” Clinton said of a president 15 years his junior. “He even wrote in his autobiography that at the time it was a positive thing: People could see a blank slate and write their hopes and dreams in it. And that’s what his branders, as they call themselves, thought about that.”

The comment was intended as a sympathetic analysis of Obama’s political challenges, yet it carried an echo of Clinton’s warning three years ago that Obama’s re´sume´ was too thin to be president.

Clinton did not say directly what many moderate Democrats believe — that the Obama team, in its disdain for what it considered Clinton’s small-bore brand of politics, did not appreciate his instinct for how to advance a progressive agenda in a country that remains skeptical of government. Now that Democrats are facing peril in the midterms, Obama may think anew about Clinton.

Here at the CGI, there was no absence of people who think the 42nd president’s example remains relevant. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm said “people are nostalgic for the Clinton style of governance.”

“His experience after 1994 was ‘communicate, communicate, communicate.’ I think that’s something President Obama and the Democrats will try to do too,” she said. “He brings the perspective of somebody who has been able to govern through crisis and opposition in the legislature.”

“He has leveraged his celebrity and his knowledge in a way no one has,” said civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. “What Barack maybe needs to look at are the people close to him. He needs better communicators.”

David Mark and James Hohmann contributed to this report.