Hillary is in for a new walloping with the 'Clinton, Inc.' movie that digs deep into her psychology – and Bill's
By David Martosko
Daily Mail
September 19, 2016
With the right lighting a twenty-something Virginia Clinton – Bill's mom – was a dead ringer for Monica Lewinsky.
That realization alone, and all its Freudian implications, is enough to recommend the movie ‘Clinton, Inc,’ a film adaptation of the 2014 book that will hit theaters on September 30.
It turns out the future president's sexually undiscriminating but lovable and charming mother – and the rock-steady but ambitious and intimidating grandmother who helped raised him – formed maternal bookends that he would later reanimate with Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham.
Hillary was the staid, grandmotherly figure from the beginning, the film suggests, the one who he could count on for comfort and security.
Bill's endless string of one-night stands, including one woman he allegedly raped, were a reprise of the trysting situations in which he so often saw his mother, largely with future stepdad Roger, as he worked his way through boyhood.
And as he progressed into manhood, we learn, Bill needed both the stability of his wife and the wildness of other women.
But far from condemning him, 'Clinton, Inc.' casts the boy from Hope, Arkansas in the same light as Alexander Hamilton, this year's unlikeliest political celebrity.
They were both bastards from social and geographical backwaters – Hamilton was born in Charlestown on the nowhere Caribbean island of Nevis – and they both transcended their origins in world-shaping ways.
The hits keep coming in this feature-length film from producer Mark Sain, who gave DailyMail.com the first sneak-peek over the weekend.
Sain's '2016: Obama's America' became the second-highest grossing political documentary of all time. 'Clinton, Inc.' will see a limited release on 20 metro Chicago cinema screens before hitting 1,000 screens nationwide in mid-October, just in time to give voters a new version of plentiful old history to chew on.
With help from Johns Hopkins University professor John Gartner, the film answers the question that logically follows on the unsuitably named Virginia's bed-hopping, much of which happened with doctors in a hospital where she worked.
Gartner believes Bill may have called the wrong guy 'Dad' for his whole life.
'Because of Bill Clinton's own mother's promiscuity, it was likely that someone else was his biological father – the biological father Bill never revealed,' Sain told DailyMail.com in an interview.
And that, he said, presents a bizarre 'parallel between how he and Obama grew up.'
'Neither of them knew his biological father,' Sain explained. 'And they both were raised by these role models that they thought would teach them who they should be.'
Gartner was not the first to name Bill's real dad as physician George Wright, but he does it on camera in a straight-ahead fashion that makes a compelling case – including an anecdote about how the doctor changed where he took his annual vacations so he could be near Bill as he grew.
The man usually acknowledged as Clinton's dad, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., was still on active duty in the U.S. Army until 8 months before his birth.
At its heart, 'Clinton, Inc.' is a psychological study of the Clintons and what makes them tick, a welcome palate-cleanser from the politically driven and often reckless storytelling that was bound to crop up in the weeks before November's presidential election.
Loosely based on the book by Daniel Halper, who now leads the New York Post's Washington, D.C. bureau and ably narrates much of the movie, the new adaptation leans heavily on Hillary, the Democratic nominee for president.
Her White House run, filmgoers learn, is on the one hand an attempt to rehabilitate her family dynasty's image, and on the other a sort of payback for putting up with her lascivious husband for decade after decade.
What's most interesting about it isn't what's most current. The film does a cursory roundup of the latest scandals in Clintonworld, including the Benghazi terror attacks, pay-to-play accusations leveled against the Clinton Foundation and her classified email scandal.
'It's truth whack-a-mole with Hillary Clinton,' Townhall.com political editor Guy Benson quips in the movie.
The filmmakers also rely on the voice of Dick Morris, a one-time Clinton insider whom the first couple tossed overboard after it was revealed that he allowed a toe-sucking prostitute to listen in on his conversations with the President of the United States.
Morris calls the payoffs during Hillary's State Department tenure – speaking fees for Bill and millions in buy-ins for the foundation – 'thinly disguised bribes.'
Morris was a close-up observer from the beginning, helping Clinton win his way into the Arkansas governor's mansion.
As the Lewinsky scandal broke two decades later, he recalls, 'I urged Clinton not to lie to people. I said they'll forgive the adultery but not the perjury.'
'It was Hillary that said, "You gotta deny it, you gotta stand firm, you gotta be intransigent." And her advice always is to stonewall, to stand firm, not to yield an inch.'
Her storied appearance on NBC's 'Today' show, in which she blamed the brewing tempest on a 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' the film explains, came the following day
'Lying,' Morris concludes, 'is her substitute for charisma.'
Hillary's most powerful role in the movie is that of Bill's immoral savior, rescuing him from himself over and over and enabling him to lie and cheat again and again.
Her own mother Dorothy stoically endured an abusive husband's rantings and kept her own family together anyway, and Hillary followed her lead by looking the other way.
Hillary's pre-ordained carpet-bagged coronation as a New York senator after they left the White House, singularly orchestrated by Bill, was her first cashed-in chit.
She was planning her Senate run, in fact, while the U.S. Senate was deliberating on an impeachment vote that teetered on the edge of toppling Bill's presidency.
A return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue may be her final claim check for playing her role to a tee.
'To understand Bill and Hillary, don't think of a marriage,' Morris advises. 'Think of a racketeering organization.'
The Clinton duo began as a hippie love story, to be sure, but morphed into a more savage lust for power in the film's telling.
By the time she became America's first lady, Hillary had parlayed her feminist chic into control over the future of the nation's healthcare system, which she botched by arrogantly trying to steamroll Senate Republicans.
But Bill was so in debt to her that he installed her in the West Wing of the White House and dared not infringe on her territory.
Because Bill sensed that he needed to pull the Democratic Party back from the brink of full-scale liberalism, he put his weight behind the North American Free Trade Agreement, a political fossil that's in this year's vernacular as a bone that Republican nominee Donald Trump won't let go of.
In 'Clinton, Inc.'s' telling, NAFTA was an easy sell to then-House speaker Newt Gingrich because its purpose was to win cheap labor for big business.
But Bill Clinton had an ulterior motive in capturing a new source of campaign fundraising from blue-chip companies that suddenly owed him.
Many of the same companies, and their Washington lobbyists, backed Hillary when she ran for Senate.
The filmmakers agree with Trump that NAFTA led to wholesale job losses, and suggest the president didn't care because America's working class would never cross the aisle and support an aging, feckless Senator Bob Dole in 1996.
He was right, of course. And besides, now he had the backing of top Republicans from the NAFTA battle. The nation's working class emerged as the losers while the Clinton dynasty 'triangulated' itself and reaped the benefits.
'The Clintons are about power and about money. They're ruthless,' National Review editor Rich Lowry concludes.
Clinton, Inc., the family business, has three iterations, Sain said.
'The first version was during their Arkansas years, the ideal. Then she becomes the U.S. senator and gets more power-hungry. That's version two.'
'Version three is her attempt now to become president.'
Chelsea Clinton, the pair's adult daughter, is the heir to the throne even before Hillary wears a crown.
Power and prominence, we're reminded, are generational. As she campaigns for her mother, Chelsea is hyper-aware that she stands to inherit a family business whose goal is to create wealth and political power.
All the while, Bill and Hillary strut the trappings of a marriage based on a weird mashup of aw-shucks charm and conniving dishonesty.
Voters, of course, will be the film's consumers. They'll come away exposed to the idea that aging baby boomers are looking to install a female president as the incarnation of social upheaval they stoked generations ago.
But feminists in particular have a problem: Hillary Clinton reached the base-camp beneath her ultimate summit because of who she married. Bill made her first lady and furnished her with a Senate seat.
Why? Because he always needed her, he always cared about her, and she has always lacked the raw political talent to earn it on her own.
'They're co-dependent,' Sain told DailyMail.com, while cautioning that 'it's more complex than that.'
'They do very much love each other, but their own personal ambitions drive things as well.'
Investors sank $1.5 million into making 'Clinton, Inc.,' which the MPAA has given a PG-13 rating. Lewinsky's blue dress makes a cameo, and there's ample talk about Bill's affairs – although no appearance from alleged rape victim Juanita Broaddrick.
Sain insisted that he didn't set out to put a divisive hit-piece on the big screen.
'When I made the movie it wasn't with the intent of trying to impact the election,' he said.
'We really tried to make it so that it would appeal to a wide audience.'
'Great movies are great character stories,' he explained. 'And this is a great character story.'
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