I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement, the one that Gary Gensler had described to me when I first took over as interim chair. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.
Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment? Why should he work hard for Hillary if it seemed as though she would win this without question?
I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials. We needed to use the platform we had negotiated that reflected the issues that had galvanized his voters to excite the electorate to support Hillary.
I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster to ensure that Hillary got elected. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.
When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.
ELEVEN
The Collapse
Summer was over and Hillary looked tired. I saw her sitting in an armchair at the reception before she spoke at the Cipriani Wall Street restaurant in New York on the night of Friday, September 9. We were there for the DNC’s annual LGBT Leadership Council dinner. I immediately noticed her face was puffy and her skin looked pale and papery. Her eyes were glazed, and she was looking off into the distance. She wasn’t chatting with anyone and she didn’t seem much like the vibrant Hillary I’d seen when we were fund-raising in Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard a few weeks earlier. I pulled aside her top aide, Huma Abedin, to suggest they needed to be taking better care of our nominee.
I knew how hard Hillary had worked during the weeks she spent at Martha’s Vineyard. There was no way that kind of schedule wouldn’t run down a younger person, and Hillary was in her late sixties. Yet the people around her didn’t seem to notice the toll this was taking on her.
I was not the only one concerned about Hillary’s health. Just a few days before, I’d gotten an unsolicited email from a doctor who believed that Hillary seemed run-down. The doctor wanted me to pass along a message to Hillary that fame and glory were fleeting but the body is your foundation and requires you to take care of it. She warned that if Hillary didn’t get some rest, she might be looking at worse health problems. I thanked the doctor for her concern, but I had not detected any evidence of Hillary’s exhaustion myself until I saw her backstage at this fund-raiser. The atmosphere was so chaotic, I was having a hard time getting anyone to pay attention when I said to one aide and then another that Hillary did not look well. Then I thought, why was I talking to them? I could just go over and talk to Hillary.
As I walked over to her she grabbed the arms of the chair and brought herself to standing but she was wobbly on her feet, steadying herself by placing her hands on a table. She laughed at herself; however, it was not the usual big, hearty laugh that came from deep down in her diaphragm, but a top-of-the-throat laugh that turned into a rattled cough.
“How is everything going, Donna?” she asked.
“It’s going well,” I said. “I peeked out at the crowd in the ballroom, and they all seem really excited to see you.”
“Good!” she said, and then she started to cough again.
I told her that if she was going to be in town for a day or two, I suggested that she should see an acupuncturist. Alexis Herman, who served as Secretary of Labor in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet, might have a suggestion, one she had referred me to who had a magic healing touch and had broken me free of a muscle ache and cramps. As her friend, I wanted to say, I thought she really should get someone to check into that cough.
Hillary was gracious in response. She thanked me for my concern and said I should give the name of the acupuncturist to Huma Abedin. I also wanted to send her some herbal tea that I found after the GOP convention in Cleveland had made me so sick that I thought I would die from coughing. Maybe, I suggested, I could get it to her the next day. Was she planning to take a little time off? I thought that would do her some good. But Hillary was not willing to upset the schedule she was on. Just like Robby, she wanted to stick to the plan.
A short time later, I was seated in the audience at the Cipriani when she strode up to the stage with her usual strong steps. Then she said something that, had she been in better health, I don’t think she would have said.
“I know there are only sixty days left to make our case—and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, ‘Well, he’s done this time.’ We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up,” she said.
When she said “basket of deplorables,” I knew that no matter what she said in the rest of her remarks, this would be the comment that made it on to the evening news. Did she not understand where she was? This was a public event. It was not one of those cozy little backyard fund-raisers where I’d heard her speak freely knowing that her statements were not likely to leak outside that gathering. Here, with dozens of cameras recording her, this would get back to Donald Trump and his supporters, and it would make a lot of news.
From that night forward, Trump pounded Hillary with that remark. The press were calling it her “47 percent” moment, comparing it to the time in the 2012 campaign when a waiter at a private event recorded GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney saying that 47 percent of people would vote for Obama no matter what because they were dependent on the government. Many thought that Romney’s elitist remark was a significant factor in his loss. Sure enough, after the “deplorables” comment hit the press, the Trump campaign went into overdrive, lambasting Hillary for insulting so many hardworking and patriotic Americans who just didn’t happen to believe she would make a good president. Trump himself was tweeting about it, chiding Hillary for what “a terrible thing she said about so many great Americans.”
It would have been better if Hillary had not attached a percentage to her comment, but since it had gone viral, I wanted her to own it. I thought she should say in clear and strong terms that she no longer found it possible to look for sugarcoated ways to state what was happening. It was time for serious introspection and for truth speaking among the Democrats, and if her words stimulated that conversation, they had served a purpose beyond the confines of this election. Too many people—even good people—were hiding their heads in the sand, and the media were providing the sand buckets, I wrote to some of the top people in the campaign.
The next day, a Saturday, the campaign issued a statement saying that she was wrong to be so “grossly generalistic” in her remarks, but would not back down, calling her opponent’s campaign one that had been built on prejudice, hateful views, and cruel voices. She made good points in this statement, which didn’t even seem to make a ripple on the surface of the campaign. As Minyon wrote to me in an email, this woman could not seem to catch a break.
I was home on Sunday, September 11, and aware that Hillary was scheduled to attend a morning memorial service at Ground Zero. It was a lazy morning with good weather, and I was hoping that Hillary
was getting some rest after the service.
Just a bit before 10 a.m., I got an email from Jake Tapper’s Sunday show producer wanting to know what I had heard about Hillary’s health. Hillary had left the memorial service after only an hour, well before it was scheduled to conclude. The email said, “She fainted and was helped into the van leaving.” Next John King called and said that the network had video of this.
I knew how much this could damage Hillary. In August Trump had returned again and again to the idea that Hillary “lacks the physical and mental stamina to take on ISIS and the many adversaries that we face.” It was not as if Hillary was going to be on the battlefield, but the intent of this attack was clear: to make people see Hillary as a weak woman, soft and incapable of the rigors of being president. He was enjoying this line of criticism and had begun to make it a regular part of his stump speech at his rallies. On Tuesday, September 6, he tweeted that the media had never written about Hillary’s “hacking” or coughing attack. I feared what he would be able to do with this video.
CNN was airing a taped show that ended at 11 a.m. In a few minutes the network would go live, and it was likely to lead with video of Hillary’s collapse. I needed an answer from the campaign immediately, and I feared I would not be able to get one in time. I started emailing everyone I could think of, all the people who were with her in New York, but got no response.
When the video aired it was heartbreaking to watch. The camera angle was from behind so I could not see her face. Her trip director Connolly Keigher was right at her side, her arm linked in Hillary’s. When the door to her van opened, Hillary did not step forward to enter. She wobbled and fell backward a bit. One of her legs gave way. I gasped, thinking that had it not been for Connolly’s arm linked with hers she might have hit the sidewalk. Several people rushed to her side to keep her upright, but they couldn’t. I saw her foot come out of her shoe. She fell forward into the van as people scrambled to keep her upright enough to continue the story that she was just fine, just a little stumble on the curb. Despite the efforts of the staff, it looked as if Hillary had fainted.
When CNN aired the tape, the reporter said that Hillary had left the event early because she was “overheated.” What? Who thought that up? They made her sound menopausal, which was unlikely in a woman at the age of sixty-seven. I emailed Brooklyn to express my opinion about what a stupid explanation that was. For a campaign that had a reputation for being closed off and sometimes less than truthful, this was a huge blunder. When reporters started calling trying to find out what was wrong after she left the memorial, the campaign had not returned their calls for an hour. When they did, they offered up this “overheated” nonsense that sounded like a lie.
I was calling Minyon and Charlie, trying to figure out what I should say. My phone was jumping. The fact that the press could not get a straight explanation out of Hillary or her staff meant they turned to the next person on their list: me. I emailed advice to the campaign: “The media is going to run with the health narrative, so do not sit idly by. Get a statement from a DOC. Let the public see her and let it go. Don’t sit on this. Please.”
I also offered to go on television to refute rumors she was gravely ill. I was frantic to give the correct answer to the media as soon as I knew what that answer was.
The next time we saw Hillary on television was that afternoon when cameras filmed her exiting her daughter Chelsea’s apartment in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. She was smiling and waving to the crowd of press that had gathered out in the street, her eyes hidden by dark glasses. She didn’t look bad, but she was not giving them an answer about what had happened on that curbside at the memorial. She said some nonsense about how she was fine and wasn’t it a beautiful day in New York. Then she stopped to take a selfie with a little girl who had been waiting for her, and got in the SUV to go home to Chappaqua.
Again, who decided this was the best approach? She should have thanked them for their concern and told the truth about what was happening to her body. If she had been honest, we all could have moved forward. Campaigns are exhausting, and most people would understand if a candidate was pushing too hard. By shrouding this small incident with so much mystery they made it much bigger than it had been, and they also fed the impression that Hillary was lying to us. Was this a lingering effect of the concussion she suffered in 2012, where she was out of commission for weeks and had double vision for six months and later a blood clot? Did she have brain damage? Did she have Parkinson’s? The rumors were flying all over the Internet.
I was now as anxious as anyone in the country about the state of her health and the state of her campaign. She was supposed to go to California later in the week on a fund-raising tour. The reporters who were contacting me wanted to know if she was going to cancel that. I kept emailing and calling the campaign, but as the hours ticked by with no response, my mind filled in the blanks with worst-case scenarios.
By evening the campaign had worked to craft a statement from her doctor saying she had allergies that made her cough and now she had pneumonia. Did that make sense? Allergies do not cause pneumonia. When you have two explanations, my gut always senses that one of them is a lie. And who was going to believe that a grandma with pneumonia would go to her daughter’s house to recover with two vulnerable little ones around? The situation had to be pretty dangerous for her to risk exposing the grandbabies. The whole story stank, and the way the campaign handled it just made matters worse.
Amid this breakdown in messaging, the press and some folks inside the Democratic Party had begun to speculate how to replace Hillary as the candidate. In a way this was a bit funny to me. When I got frustrated with Brooklyn, I’d remind them that the Democratic Party charter gave me some power they could not control: the chair of the party has the ability to replace the candidate. I had not seriously considered doing it but, after this stumbling Sunday, many others in the party were.
Donald Fowler Sr., Donnie’s dad and a former chair of the DNC, was quoted in Politico insisting that the DNC should call the officers of the party together to develop a contingency plan immediately. He wanted us to name her replacement just in case. “Now is the time for all good political leaders to come to the aid of their party,” he said.
When they called me for a comment I gave a bland response about how I was glad that Hillary was resting and was looking forward to seeing her out on the campaign trail soon. This was only hours before Brooklyn announced that Hillary was canceling her fund-raising trip to California. When I heard that, I began to think maybe Donald Fowler’s advice was not so far off the mark.
The announcement that her trip to California was canceled set off another frenzy. Elaine told me that she’d been getting calls from reporters who knew she was a long-time veteran of the rules committee, asking what was the procedure to replace a candidate.
Amid this tornado, I thought not just about Hillary’s health but about her anemic campaign. I thought about the muffled atmosphere at the campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, so lacking in the spirit of the fight. We were in a campaign that always seemed forced to react rather than being able to advance a positive agenda. I also recalled, so fresh in my mind, the frustrations of the people I met in Florida and in Colorado. There was so much political energy on the ground—it was just looking for someone to harness it. The whole country was in an uproar and eager to carry new leadership to victory, yet they had not embraced Hillary in the way that we had hoped. The fact of her historic candidacy, this great chance, never got any comment or built enthusiasm. Perhaps changing the candidate was a chance to win this thing, to change the playing field in a way that would send Donald Trump scrambling and unable to catch up.
Trump had done things that for a different candidate would have ended his campaign, and yet he sailed through the outrage with that smug and condescending grin on his face. He was someone who had upended the rules, thumbed his nose at the keepers of decency and standards, and made his supporters feel great while he was doing it. A
t last the elites were on the run, he said. They no longer held the keys to success. To believe this, his supporters had to ignore the fact that Trump was a member of the elite. He was a billionaire from an Ivy League school who slid into New York real estate with a huge loan from his father. The wild mix of him being so vulgar and contemptuous, but also covered in gold, made those who supported him identify with him. As one wit put it, he was a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Acting as he did, he made it very difficult for anyone to take him down, because he seemed impervious to shame.
Hillary still held a solid lead in the polls, but the gap was closing fast. In July she had led by ten points, but by early September Trump had cut that in half. Pundits analyzing the results in different states still did not give Trump much of a chance to win. He was claiming he’d take traditionally blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which had gone for Obama in 2012. This seemed impossible to most people, but sitting alone in my house in the late hours of the evening of September 11, I had to admit his potential victory didn’t seem at all impossible to me.
My thoughts turned personal. Replacing the candidate was a bold move, but it was one that Hillary would never forgive me for. How could I do that to her? She had been my friend for decades, and the women of the Democratic Party, the women of the whole country, had been waiting nearly a hundred years for this chance to elect a woman as president. I thought of what Madeleine Albright said at a campaign rally in February, that there was a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She had said that before, but it felt powerful to me that evening. If I worked to replace Hillary as the candidate, more than Hillary would scorn me. Most of my women friends would, too.
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