In his new book, “Unlikeable,” journalist Edward Klein unveils the lengths Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign will go to avoid the mistakes of the 2008 race — when Obama famously said, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” In an exclusive excerpt to The Post, Klein reveals how Bill Clinton reached out to a famous friend for help.
Hillary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable.
She was doing it for Bill, not for herself. It was all his idea.
One evening while they were having drinks with friends, he turned to Hillary and said, “Let’s ask Steven for help.”
Their old Hollywood buddy Steven Spielberg could supply Hillary with acting coaches to help her when she had to give a speech.
Hillary didn’t think she needed help.
“I get $250,000 to give a speech,” she said, according to one of her friends, “and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell me how to do it!”
But Bill insisted.
“Your policies and talking points are solid,” he told her. “You can use Charlotte [Chelsea’s baby daughter] to emphasize how you’re all about women and children. Now the challenge is to repackage you in 2016 as a strong but loveable older woman — more Golda than Maggie.”
Hillary didn’t see the resemblance to Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher, and she said, “I’m not going to pretend to be somebody I’m not.”
But she carried on with the likeability lessons anyway. Partly to please Bill. But mostly to shut him up.
She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. It was just the two of them, her and the camera guy, who had to sign a confidentiality agreement so he couldn’t blab to the press.
Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she’d recently purchased online at Amazon.com, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the pitch of her voice, and her use of eye contact.
She told Bill she found the process tedious.
He said, “This could mean votes. Voters make decisions, even unconsciously, on how likeable a politician looks.”
But it wasn’t only the tedium that bothered her. She didn’t like the results she saw from the Whitehaven video sessions.
“Hillary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable.”
For comparison, she screened videos that had been recorded live by her people when she was on the road and gave one of her six-figure speeches. From the collection of videos, she selected the ones she liked and sent them off to Steven Spielberg’s office, with a reminder that everyone involved in the project was sworn to secrecy.
Not that she had any reason to mistrust Steven. He’d always been more than generous to her. Spielberg let her use his corporate apartment in the Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when she ran for a Senate seat from New York in 2000. Hillary felt right at home in the lavish surroundings, and she crashed at Spielberg’s pied-à-terre more than 20 times.
Accustomed as she was to being treated like royalty, she asked the management of Trump Tower to give her the exclusive use of one of its elevators. The management refused. She had to share an elevator with the skyscraper’s other millionaire peons.
When the Hollywood coaches sent back their critiques of Hillary’s video sessions, they noted that she looked irritated and bored.
Most times, after she glanced at the printout of their notes — she called them “notes from La-La Land” — she tossed them in the wastepaper basket.
There was one thing about the process that she thought was worthwhile: working on her facial expressions.
If she got the facial expressions right, she believed the rest would fall into place. But as she pointed out to friends, she could just as easily work on her facial expressions in front of the bathroom mirror without having some Hollywood schmuck tell her what she was doing right or wrong.
“Sometimes they’re helpful,” she told the friends, “but just as often they’re full of s- -t.”
A couple of weeks after Hillary began her likeability lessons, she invited several women friends to Whitehaven. When one of her friends noticed a video camera standing on a tripod in a corner of the room, she asked Hillary what it was for.
“Speech practice,” Hillary said, according to the recollection of one of the women. “My coaches tell me I’m supposed to pretend when I speak. Pretend that I actually like the audience. I’m supposed to force myself to keep a smile on my face. I’m supposed to think happy thoughts. To think of Chelsea or Charlotte or my [late] mother. But not about Bill, because even though I love him to death, he makes me tear my hair out.”
That got a laugh from the women.
But as the campaign heated up, one of the first casualties was the Spielberg likeability lessons.
Everyone agreed they weren’t working.
“For more than a decade, Mrs. Clinton has tried to swat away a persistent concern about her ability to connect with voters,” noted The New York Times. “‘Saturday Night Live’ recently captured that problem in a sketch featuring an actress playing Mrs. Clinton, who said of herself at one point, ‘What a relatable laugh!’ Years of security-infused Bubble Wrap around her travels and a wealthy lifestyle have done little to pull Mrs. Clinton closer to voters.”
“Given that [Hillary] has been in public life since 1992, it’s a bit incongruous to consider that her speaking style is often so lacking,” wrote The Washington Post. “She has yet to master ‘the big speech,’ which is part of the toolbox of any major politician.”
When Hillary spoke in public, she still had trouble making eye contact with her audience. Her eyes wandered from the text of her speech or her talking points to some unfocused spot on the ceiling and back again. Her voice was flat and uninflected.
In exasperation, Hillary quit taking the likeability lessons.
“I decided I had enough with the camera and the recordings and the coaches,” Hillary told a friend. “I got so angry I knocked the f- -king camera off its tripod. That was the end of my Stanislavski period.”
Excerpted from “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary” by Edward Klein. Out this week from Regnery Publishing.