Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Like everyone else in Washington, Obama took as a given the fearsome potency of the Clinton machine. Despite all the exhortations to take on Hillary, there were many reasons to believe that such an enterprise would be pure folly. That she was unstoppable, a juggernaut.

  But Obama had to wonder. Schumer, Dorgan, Durbin, and now Reid—these four men comprised the upper echelon of the official Democratic leadership in the Senate. Maybe the Establishment wasn’t as foursquare behind the Clintons as conventional wisdom held. Maybe there was an opening.

  A few days after his meeting with Reid, Obama was telling Jarrett about what had happened in the leader’s office.

  She listened to Obama’s description of the Reid meeting and was impressed. But Jarrett wanted to know what it meant in concrete terms. “Is he going to endorse you and support you?” she asked.

  No, Obama answered.

  “So what good is it for him to tell you that you should run if he’s not going to help you?”

  “He just thinks that I should do it, but he doesn’t want to cross Senator Clinton,” Obama replied. “He thinks I can win.”

  Besides Michelle, Jarrett knew Barack Obama as well as anyone. She had watched him for months as he began to wrestle with the idea of running for president. For the first time, she could see him thinking, Maybe I can do this.

  Chapter Three

  The Ground Beneath Her Feet

  BILL CLINTON KNEW HIS wife could do it, and do it damn well, too. From the time they fell in love three decades earlier at Yale Law School, he had been in awe of Hillary. She was the smartest, most committed, most idealistic, most impressive person he had ever met; he thought she hung the moon. Some felt that she had the nomination locked up but would face a daunting challenge in the general election. Bill Clinton believed the opposite—a point he made repeatedly to anyone who would listen. “This primary is gonna be harder than the general,” he would say. “I’m just telling all you people this.”

  Clinton’s assessment was based primarily on one thing: the anger of the party’s liberal base at Hillary’s vote to authorize the Iraq War and her continued refusal to recant it. By the late fall of 2005, the former president was convinced that his wife needed to find her way to a more politically palatable position. With elections in Iraq scheduled for that December, the body count rising, and sectarian violence raging in the region, calls were intensifying for a troop reduction or even a full-scale withdrawal. On November 13, Edwards, whom the Clintons considered Hillary’s most serious rival for the nomination, published an op-ed in The Washington Post apologizing for his own Senate vote in favor of authorizing the war. (Its first sentence: “I was wrong.”) The pressure was mounting on Hillary to do the same.

  Mark Penn, Bill knew, argued vehemently that a mea culpa would cause Hillary more harm than good. Penn believed her vote was right on the merits and that defending it was smart politics. He contended that the biggest hurdle Hillary would have to surmount if she ran for president was the doubt that a woman was capable of being commander in chief. At all times she had to project strength, resolution, rough-and-readiness—and do absolutely nothing that signaled squishiness. He told the Clintons that his polling showed that sticking to her guns on Iraq played to her advantage as a character issue. Apologizing now would only invite Republicans to characterize her later as another cut-and-run Democrat in the mold of Kerry, Dukakis, and McGovern.

  Bill had enormous faith in Penn and his numbers. The bond between them was forged in 1996, when Clinton’s ideologically androgynous Svengali, Dick Morris, brought the pollster into that year’s reelection effort and then was caught up in a toe-sucking scandal with a prostitute, leaving Penn with the presidential ear. And it was cemented by Penn’s skillful navigation of the survival politics of impeachment and his central role in Hillary’s Senate victory.

  But even if an apology was off the table, surely there was a middle ground to be claimed, Clinton thought. In 1991, he had faced a comparable situation when he was asked if he would have voted to authorize the elder Bush’s Gulf War. His answer was vintage Clinton: “I guess I would have voted for the majority if it was a close vote, but I agree with the arguments the minority made.”

  The trouble was that Hillary, for all her virtues, lacked the suppleness (or slipperiness) that was one of her husband’s fortes. He knew better than anyone that she was less capable of the artful shuck and jive that he could muster on his clumsiest day, so he resolved to assist her in making a pivot to a safer berth. The first step came on November 16, just three days after Edwards’s op-ed, when Bill, in Dubai on a swing through the Middle East on behalf of his philanthropic Clinton Global Fund, deviated from his prior support for the war by declaring in a speech that the invasion of Iraq was “a big mistake,” adding that “Saddam is gone—it’s a good thing, but I don’t agree with what was done.”

  A few days later, Bill landed in Jerusalem and set to work ghostwriting a letter for his wife to email to her constituents reframing her stance on the war. In his suite at the King David Hotel, Clinton labored long into the night, editing and reediting faxed copies of the text in his illegible longhand scrawl.

  Well after midnight, he summoned Jay Carson, his twenty-eight-year-old communications director, to his room and showed him the letter. The gist of what Hillary would assert: if Congress in 2002 possessed the information that it had at its disposal today, Bush never would have asked it to authorize the use of force in Iraq—and if he had, he would have been refused.

  What do you think? Clinton asked. I think this is good. I think this gets her in the right place. Carson was aware that Hillary and her aides had been furiously debating how to handle her war vote for months—but to see his boss behaving this obsessively reinforced his sense of the gravity of the problem. Man, this is serious, he thought.

  Carson went back to his room to get some sleep. But a couple of hours later, he was called again to Clinton’s suite to repeat the routine. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning now, but Clinton was still twitchy, uncertain. Did the letter go far enough? Did it find the sweet spot? Would it defang the anti-warriors?

  I don’t know, I just don’t know, Clinton said, shaking his head. Hillary can’t listen to me or anyone else, because she can’t go out there and defend it every day if she doesn’t agree with what she’s saying. She’s got to do what she thinks is right and then just try to weather the storm.

  HILLARY CLINTON HAD ENCOUNTERED few storms—and certainly none of this magnitude or potential consequence—in her first five years in the Senate. In many ways, her entire time in office had been orchestrated to avoid them. Punctiliously, painstakingly, she had set about remediating her political liabilities, putting herself in the best possible position to lead her party. She had moderated her ideological profile, burnished her credentials, honed her policy chops. Established herself as a diligent legislator. Demonstrated her dedication to her constituents in New York. Sanded down every jagged edge from her formerly serrated public image. She had endeavored mightily, in other words, to place herself firmly in the Democratic mainstream, to make herself a figure of respect and admiration, of party cohesion and not divisiveness—and, not least, to create for herself a separate and distinct political persona and operation from that of her husband.

  By 2006, Clinton had achieved all that, with a strategy subtler and savvier than most understood. Her public posture in the Senate, it was widely noted, revolved around bipartisanship and deference, despite her built-in superstardom. Her outreach to Republicans was so ostentatious that it bordered on the masochistic: cosponsoring legislation with forty-nine of them, taking pains to mend fences with those who had voted to impeach her husband, joining a Senate prayer group favored by the GOP’s staunchest social conservatives.

  In private, however, Clinton’s approach was nearly the polar opposite, partisan and assertive to its core. She believed passionately in a more activist government, in a progressive agenda, and she was tired of seeing Democrats flounder
in their aims simply because they lacked a coherent message, organizational skills, and a crisp, high-sticking strategy. Convinced that liberals needed an infrastructure to match the network of think tanks and advocacy groups that had bolstered the right for decades, she assisted John Podesta, one of her husband’s former chiefs of staff, in launching the Center for American Progress and advised the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America. Her goal was to better fortify her party against the dense, cold-blooded armament of the Bush White House, to lay a protective groundwork for Democratic interests on the Hill. But she also was thinking ahead—to another Clinton presidential campaign and administration, when those reinforcements could ease her path and abet her power.

  Within the Senate she was something of a scold toward her party’s leadership, forever prodding Reid to develop a sharper and more consistent approach to battling the Republicans. Her opinion of his predecessor, Daschle, was no better; she had quickly pegged him as ineffectual and weak, a bush-leaguer in a big-league job, and his loss at the polls in 2004 had only confirmed her early verdict.

  Clinton’s prescription for both her and the party’s reformation was rooted in the lessons she drew from recent history, from the failures of 2004, 2000, and especially the nineties. Although her husband had dragged Democrats kicking and screaming into the modern age substantively and ideologically, she considered his administration a tactical and operational disaster: soft, undisciplined, woolly minded, and leaky.

  The political machine that Hillary built for herself was its opposite in every regard. The people comprising it—on her Senate staff, at her PAC, and among her outside advisers—were loyal to a fault, smart and ruthless, hardheaded and hard-boiled. With few exceptions, they embraced her conception of politics as total war and shared her reflexive antipathy to the Fourth Estate. They more closely resembled Bush’s operation than Bill Clinton’s (and were happy, even proud, to admit it). They referred to themselves collectively as Hillaryland, and everyone else in politics did too.

  More than any other player, Solis Doyle embodied the culture of Hillaryland. The sixth child of Mexican parents who came to America and settled in Chicago, she started out as Hillary’s scheduler in 1991 and steadily amassed duties and influence from there on. She had a ready laugh and a teasing wit, but could be brutal in her role as the chief enforcer of Hillaryland’s code of omerta and rarely spoke to reporters. More than her political acumen, it was her almost daughterly connection to Hillary that was her source of power. At forty-one, she was the first and last aide Clinton consulted on any big decision, and was often said to possess the capacity to channel her boss’s thinking.

  And yet in terms of Hillaryland mojo, Solis Doyle was matched by Penn, who exerted an iron grip on Clinton’s message strategy. Appointed CEO of the public-relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller in 2005, he had spent the previous three decades polling on behalf of clients ranging from Ed Koch to Tony Blair—along with companies such as Microsoft and Avis—and had made a specialty of carving up the electorate into itty-bitty demographic and psychographic slices and propounding micropolicies to satisfy voters’ cravings and allay their anxieties. He was fifty-two years old, doughy, disheveled, and socially maladroit; in the Clinton White House, his nickname had alternated between Schlumpy and Schlumbo.

  Hillary was attached to Solis Doyle and Penn for different reasons, and they in turn reflected different aspects of her character. What she liked about Solis Doyle was her crawl-across-broken-glass fealty, her discretion, and the mind meld the two of them had achieved; Patti was a comfortable and comforting presence. What she liked about Penn was his data-drivenness, his tendency to frame even the grubbiest issues and nastiest tactics in lofty policy terms, and, most of all, his certitude; when her own political instincts were muddy, as they often were, he told her what to do.

  The job that the Hillarylanders had done for Hillary had been masterly by any measure. They helped her win her Senate seat when people said it was a pipe dream. They helped her lay waste to the prevailing caricature of her (an arrogant, corrupt, power-mad, harsh, hypocritical liberal) and sketched a new picture (a competent, clever, hardworking, determined, pragmatic centrist) that boosted her popularity ratings to the moon. They were on the way to helping her collect nearly $50 million for her Senate reelection campaign that year, in which she faced only token opposition. And whatever money was left over could be put directly into a presidential bid, assuming she decided to take the plunge into that pool.

  But now the controversy over Hillary’s war vote threatened to eclipse everything she had accomplished. The King David letter, despite Bill’s best efforts, did nothing to subdue her critics. If anything, the attacks only grew more vitriolic in the first half of 2006, as Clinton refused to endorse the demand of some liberal Democrats for a firm timetable for troop withdrawal. To Hillaryland, the assault on her from the left was a test—and the results were not encouraging. The internal deliberations over how to handle the situation consumed dozens upon dozens of meetings and conference calls; her people debated the matter endlessly but never reached a conclusion. What should she do? Introduce legislation? Give a speech? Sit for an interview? And if so, what should she say? Stand her ground? Apologize? What?

  Hillary had no intention of saying she was sorry. I don’t have anything to apologize for, she thought. You want me to apologize for the fact that the president is an idiot?

  Hillary liked to say that she was blessed (or cursed) with a “responsibility gene.” It was no small part of why, as a senator from New York in the wake of 9/11, she had voted to authorize the war in the first place—and why she was resistant to pushing for a date certain for withdrawal now. If she did run for president and wound up in the Oval Office, the decisions regarding Iraq would fall into her lap, and having lived in the White House, she understood the presidential premium on flexibility. Then there were the politics of the matter. “I’m not going to let myself be dragged too far left during the primary season,” she explained to one of her most generous donors. If she reversed herself now, she would be buying a one-way ticket to Kerryville: the GOP would tattoo her forehead with the lethal “flip-flopper” label.

  And so would the press—of that she was certain. The standards to which she was held by the media, she believed, and not without reason, were so much more strict (and latently hostile) than those applied to any other politician in the country. “Everything I do carries political risk because nobody gets the scrutiny that I get,” she told a reporter. “It’s not like I have any margin for error whatsoever. I don’t. Everybody else does, and I don’t. And that’s fine. That’s just who I am, and that’s what I live with.”

  The Iraq dilemma was vexing, a pure Hobson’s choice. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t—and so she adopted her husband’s method and split the difference. In the King David letter, Hillary had claimed that she wasn’t voting for war in 2002 but instead for more diplomacy. Now she decided to add her name to legislation that urged the president to begin a “phased redeployment” of the troops by the end of 2006.

  How the Democratic base would react to these maneuvers was an open question. In mid-June, brave in a hot-pink pantsuit before a rancorous crowd of several thousand progressive activists at the Take Back America conference at the Washington Hilton, Clinton excoriated the Bush administration’s domestic agenda and its handling of Iraq—for having “rushed to war,” “refused to let the U.N. inspectors conduct and complete their mission,” “committed strategic blunder after blunder,” and “undermined America’s leadership in the world.”

  But then Clinton raised her hands defensively and added, with a mild quaver in her voice, “I just have to say it: I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain. I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country.”

&
nbsp; The crowd erupted. “Why not?” people yelled amid a cacophony of boos and hisses so raucous that Clinton could barely be heard above the din. Stepping down off the stage, she was serenaded with chants of protest—“Bring the troops home! Bring the troops home!”—as she made her way to the exit.

  The antiwar base was sending a fundamental message: Clinton’s front-runner status was rooted in shaky ground. As wary as she was of being stereotyped as a conventional liberal a la Kerry or Dean, Hillary didn’t fully apprehend that her split-the-difference stance was reviving an equally damaging narrative. With it, and with a handful of other moves that smacked of cynicism—her cosponsorship of a bill to criminalize flag-burning was frequently cited—Clinton was breathing new life into perceptions that she had done so much to slay: that she was a calculating, expedient schemer wedded to no great principle other than her own advancement.

  For many Democrats, trimming, triangulating, and poll-tested centrism were among the least appetizing features of the Clinton years. But, of course, there were others—as Hillary herself was reminded all the time, in the most unpleasant ways.

  WHEN SHE FIRST GOT the word, she was stunned and angry. The New York Times was doing what? There was just no way it could be true—but it was, she was told by her press secretary, Philippe Reines, and his counterpart for her husband, Jay Carson.

  In the spring of 2006, the Paper of Record was in the midst of reporting a story on the state of the Clinton marriage. And from what the flaks could ascertain from their conversations with the reporter, it wasn’t going to be pretty. The thrust of the piece, they believed, was that the marriage was a sham; that Hillary and Bill barely saw each other, rarely slept in the same bed; that their matrimony was a partnership, an understanding, but little more; that Bill’s bachelor lifestyle had the potential to derail her presidential aspirations.