Game Change

by John Heilemann

  How is this a legitimate story? Hillary wanted to know. And not just a story, but a story in the most esteemed newspaper in the country. “It’s just fucking unbelievable,” she said. “This is my life? I have to deal with this bullshit?”

  Carson and Reines suspected that the Times’s true intention was more pernicious still: the paper wanted to write about the rumors swirling around Bill Clinton’s alleged infidelities and was using a discussion of the Clinton marriage as camouflage. Within Hillary’s and Bill’s operations, a series of heated discussions ensued about whether to engage with the reporter, Patrick Healy, or simply say, “No comment.” The dominant view inside Hillaryland, with its aversion to the press, was that to participate would do nothing but legitimize the story. Carson and Reines strongly disagreed. Guys, the story is likely to be on page A1 of The New York Times, Carson said. It’s already legitimized! Carson and Reines considered Healy an ethical reporter, persuadable by the facts. Weighing in, they felt, could influence the piece, soften it, and at least prevent errors or egregious insinuations from appearing in print.

  Carson and Reines prevailed in that debate and spent a frantic weekend pushing back on the story. They pulled schedules to demonstrate that the Clintons spent plenty of nights together—more, in fact, than Chuck Schumer spent with his wife, Iris. The Clintons loved each other, the press guys insisted; this was not a marriage in name only.

  When the story appeared, on May 23, the Clinton camps were braced for the worst. But although it was indeed on A1, the effects of Carson’s and Reines’s efforts were evident. The piece was elliptical, full of loaded language and ominous hints, but contained no damaging facts. Even better from the Clinton perspective, the reaction from readers was harsh—a flood of letters denouncing the paper for going tabloid, for slumming in the gutter. (Stung by the criticisms, the Times’s public editor felt compelled to devote a column to justifying the article.) Months later, Carson would tell Bill Clinton that the story, for all the agita around it, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For as long as anyone could remember, Carson thought, reporters had been dying to peek inside the couple’s bedroom. The Clinton people warned them not to do it—there’s a big mean dog in there, they suggested, ready to chew your face off. Now the Times had ventured in and come out bleeding. From that point on, for two solid years, not a single reporter approached Clintonworld in pursuit of a similar story.

  Yet the Clinton victory, in the moment, was a pyrrhic one. In Washington, the fact that the Times—the prudish, starchy, self-important Gray Lady—had been willing to go there, however awkwardly, merely turned up the flame on the burning speculation about Bill’s putative priapism. What had been a slow simmer in 2005 became a roiling boil in the summer and fall of 2006, as the chattering classes theorized about whether and why the Times had pulled its punches. Worse, Clintonworld was hearing that a gusher of gossip was flowing from members of the couple’s own inner circle—and in particular from Steve Ricchetti, the longtime consigliere to Bill who had been so keen on Hillary running for president in 2004.

  Since his departure from the White House, Bill Clinton had not exactly erred on the side of caution when it came to his personal comportment. Within days of settling into the Clintons’ new house in Chappaqua in 2001, he could be found at Lange’s deli, chatting up the stay-at-home mothers who trundled in after yoga, startling his aides that he already knew all the women by name. He gallivanted around the world with his business partner Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate and notorious playboy, whose custom-converted Boeing 757 was referred to by Burkle’s young aides as “Air Fuck One.” Clinton’s regular trips to that carnal triptych of Los Angeles, Miami, and Las Vegas struck many of his friends as a recipe, if not for trouble, then at least for undue temptation and embarrassment. But Bill seemed not to care. He was going to do what he wanted to do, appearances be damned.

  And yet Bill was ripshit when Carson and Terry McAuliffe informed him of the extent to which tongues were wagging in Washington. Those goddamn people in D.C., Clinton fumed. They don’t have anything better to do than talk about my sex life? Goddamn that city! This is why I hated it from the beginning down there. Everybody’s got boring lives so they just sit around and talk about someone else’s.

  All the murmurings about Bill were starting to get back to Hillaryland as well. When Solis Doyle made the rounds of senior party players—members of Congress, major donors, former Cabinet secretaries—to chat about Hillary’s prospective presidential run, she was encountering a troubling pattern. Almost uniformly, the Democratic grandees professed their affection and respect for Senator Clinton. She’s terrific, they said; she’d be a good candidate and make a great president. But then would come the inevitable addendum: What are you going to do about Bill?

  What Solis Doyle invariably would say was “We’ve got that under control.” It was a clever answer she had come up with herself, and it seemed to pacify her listeners.

  But Patti was rattled by the specificity of the chatter she was hearing. One rumor was that Bill Clinton was having an affair with a dishy Canadian member of parliament, Belinda Stronach; another involved a wealthy divorcee, Julie Tauber McMahon, who lived in Chappaqua; another revolved around the Hollywood actress Gina Gershon; and the list went on.

  Solis Doyle was equally unnerved by the caliber of the people indulging in the speculation. One day she paid a visit to Ricchetti, who mentioned without blinking that he’d recently been on a conference call with a handful of big-name Clinton stalwarts, including former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, which devolved into a prolonged discussion of Bill’s supposed indiscretions and the danger they posed to Hillary.

  This is a problem, Solis Doyle thought, and not a small one. These were heavy-hitting Clinton supporters who had Hillary’s best interests at heart, whose intent was anything but malicious, who were actually trying to help. Solis Doyle decided that she needed to tell Hillary, and quick.

  She had brought word to Hillary more than once about the rumors hovering around Bill. “It’s not true,” Hillary would say, and in any case, she knew how to handle it. She had some experience in this area, after all, and she had always emerged intact. “We’ll be ready for it,” she said, and then, again, “It’s not true.”

  But Solis Doyle needed Hillary to listen this time, to appreciate the implications of what was happening. You don’t understand, she said insistently. They’re having conference calls about this—what he’s doing, who he’s doing it with, how it’s going to damage you.

  The mention of conference calls snapped Hillary to attention. She demanded to know who was on the calls. Solis Doyle told her. Hillary reeled, first stunned into silence by the betrayal, then loudly livid about their friends trafficking this crap behind her back. How dare they? They don’t know anything! Who do they think they are?

  Hillary had always been adamant that her and her husband’s personal lives were nobody’s business but theirs. She immediately froze Ricchetti out of Hillaryland. (The reaction in Bill Clinton’s world was even harsher; when other staffers asked Doug Band, the former president’s chief counselor, why Ricchetti was no longer included on regular conference calls of old White House hands, Band icily replied, “He’s dead to us.”)

  Hillary wasn’t in complete denial about the perils of the situation, however. She had seen the damage that Bill’s bimbo eruptions could inflict and knew that his imputed peccadilloes were among the gravest potential impediments to her reaching the White House. Clinton turned to two aides she trusted with the most intimate matters, Solis Doyle and Cheryl Mills, and Solis Doyle included Howard Wolfson in the circle. Together, the trio formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido. Mills, the lawyer, handled delicate matters where attorney-client privilege might prove useful; Solis Doyle was in charge of the political dimension; and Wolfson worked the media side of the equation.

  The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much o
f the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that Bill was indeed having an affair—and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship.

  This was exactly the scenario that had incited so many members of the conspiracy of whispers to urge Obama into the race—and what everyone who signed up with Hillary feared each waking day. But whatever storm of emotions Clinton herself might have been experiencing she put aside in the interest of survival. She instructed her team to prepare to deal with the potential blowup of Bill’s personal life. For months thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any time.

  Yet even without any detonations, the Bill-related rumblings and their reverberations would continue—and be absorbed by Hillary in painful, maddening, and portentous ways. In October, she was scheduled to headline a New York fund-raiser for Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Missouri. McCaskill, a plainspoken centrist who held the job of state auditor, had narrowly lost a run for governor in 2004. She’d been expected to take another shot at that office four years later, but had decided against it out of fear that Clinton would be her party’s presidential nominee in 2008. According to a story in The New Yorker in May 2006, McCaskill had “told people in Missouri and in Washington that a ticket led by Clinton would be fatal for many Democrats on the ballot, and that a Clinton candidacy would rule out her chance to win the governorship.”

  Hillaryland was not amused by the New Yorker piece. But McCaskill smoothed things over with the Clintons, apologizing, claiming she’d been quoted out of context. In September, Bill flew to St. Louis and did a fund-raiser for McCaskill, and now Hillary was set to help fill her coffers, though (not coincidentally) nine hundred miles away from the Missouri media.

  The day before the New York fund-raiser, however, McCaskill appeared on Meet the Press and was asked by Russert if she thought that Bill Clinton had been a great president. “I do,” McCaskill said. “I have a lot of problems with some of his, his, his personal issues.” Russert began to speak, but McCaskill cut him off. “I said at the time, I think he’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

  Reines was in Chicago to attend a wedding and happened to be watching the show. Mortified, he knew that someone had to inform Hillary before the fund-raiser took place. He emailed the quote around Hillaryland. Everyone was aghast—and no one wanted to tell the senator, so Reines was saddled with the unpleasant duty.

  “So what’s going on?” Hillary asked, when Reines reached her by phone.

  Oh, not much, Reines replied, running through the day’s news, the guests on the Sunday shows, and then, at the end, sidling up gingerly to McCaskill’s comment.

  “She said what?” Hillary asked incredulously.

  Reines read her the quote verbatim: “I think he’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

  The phone went quiet. Hillary was speechless. A few more seconds passed, and then finally came her voice, hot with fury.

  “Fuck her,” Hillary said—and then called Solis Doyle and summarily canceled the fund-raiser.

  MCCASKILL WOULD AGAIN APOLOGIZE to Hillary and Bill, writing them letters, begging their forgiveness and forbearance. What she said had been stupid, hurtful, insensitive. But the truth was that McCaskill meant it, just as she’d meant her earlier prediction of the damage to Democrats across the country if Hillary won the nomination. McCaskill was in the market for a different horse—and now, like many other Democrats, she thought she saw one in Obama.

  Inside Hillaryland, the notion that Obama might enter the race seemed remote to almost everyone. Harold Ickes, a fabled Democratic operative and longtime adviser to the Clintons, was so dismissive of the idea that he offered to bet Solis Doyle $50,000 that it would never happen. Penn, too, was sure Obama would stay out; that was the skinny he was hearing from inside the Illinois senator’s orbit.

  Hillary, for her part, had no idea what Obama would do, though she knew that he wouldn’t be swayed by the argument that his experience was insufficient. “No one ever thinks they don’t have the experience to do this,” she told one of her aides. “No one thinks that way. He wouldn’t have gotten to this point and then said, ‘Oh, I don’t have the experience.’ You don’t think about your weaknesses. You think about your strengths.”

  But Obama’s strengths didn’t strike her as especially intimidating, and whether he took his weaknesses seriously or not, they were many and glaring. Sure, he had a great deal of potential, but it was just that—potential. He had no fund-raising network, no tangible accomplishments in the Senate. The speeches he gave—oh, they were pretty, but so what? You don’t change people’s lives with words, Hillary thought. You change them with committed effort, by pushing through the opposition. You change them with a fight. That was how you won elections, too. With a fight. In his entire career, Obama had yet to be hit with a single negative ad. How would he ever withstand the sheer, unrelenting hell of a presidential race: the constant pummeling by his opponents, the withering scrutiny and X-ray intrusions of the media?

  But even as most of Clintonworld dismissed Obama, one dissenter stewed. All that talent. The antiwar credentials. The desire for something different in the country. The combination could be deadly, Bill Clinton kept saying. This guy could be trouble.

  Chapter Four

  Getting to Yes

  OBAMA FLEW OUT OF Washington on August 18, 2006, and arrived the next morning in Cape Town, South Africa, to start his two-week tour of the continent—and the two-and-a-half-month rocket ride that would carry him to the day of the midterm elections. “Rocket ride” was Gibbs’s term, and he wasn’t exaggerating. The period would include the publication of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, the national book tour to publicize it, and a marathon stretch of campaigning for Democratic candidates from coast to coast. Everyone around Obama understood that the interval would be pivotal to his decision about running for president, which he had consciously put off until November. But most of them assumed that in the end, however tempting he found the idea, practicality would prevail.

  The Africa trip turned out to be a revelation for both Barack and Michelle. The last time he had been there was fourteen years earlier, with a pack on his back and not much more than a packet of cigarettes in his pocket. Now, from Chad to Ethiopia to Djibouti, and especially in his father’s Kenyan homeland, he was treated like a head of state—or Muhammad Ali in Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle. In Nairobi, thousands lined the streets and stood on rooftops chanting, “Obama biro, yawne yo!”—“Obama’s coming, clear the way!” The crowds were bigger than any he had experienced since the Democratic convention, but unlike that audience, the African throngs were there for him and him alone. Michelle found the spectacle discomfiting. “Part of you just wants to say, ‘Can we tame this down a little bit?’” she said at the time. “Does it have to be all this? This is out of hand.”

  But what Michelle saw as overwhelming, her husband viewed as possibility. He began to entertain the notion that he’d tapped into something remarkable; that by virtue of what he represented, he might be able to effect change on a global scale. It was heady and humbling at the same time, nothing short of an epiphany.

  When Obama got home, he had one event on his calendar before the madness of the book tour began: the 29th Annual Harkin Steak Fry. And in its way, it was an even bigger deal than the Africa trip. Taking place every September in Indianola, Iowa, the steak fry was a political fair sponsored by Senator Tom Harkin and attended by hundreds of the state’s hardcore Democratic activists—and was thus a coveted speaking venue for any aspiring presidential candidate. Eager to avoid an awkward choice between Clinton, Edwards, Warner, or Vilsack, Harkin offered Obama the keynote slot on the assumption that he wasn’t running. Obama’s advisers were fully aware that if he accepted, the
political world would erupt with speculation about his intentions.

  “You have to understand what this is going to indicate to a lot of people,” Gibbs told Obama, in a meeting with the senior staff. “They’re going to think you’re running.”

  “I understand,” Obama said.

  The truth was, he was ready to stir the pot. Going to the steak fry didn’t commit him to anything. The media might whip itself up, but attending the event would let him take the temperature of Iowa activists—another important data point for decision time after the midterms. Obama was intent on not being sloppy about it, not showing too much or too little leg. “If we’re gonna do this, we have to do it right,” he said, then glanced around the room. In case he wasn’t being sufficiently clear, he added, “Don’t fuck this up.”

  Obama, though, was the one to blunder. After the press reported that he’d agreed to keynote the steak fry, Michelle’s phone started ringing off the hook, with people calling about her husband’s first foray into Iowa. But Michelle was totally in the dark—and now steamed at him. Obama walked into his Senate office looking sheepish.

  “Next time I decide to make a big announcement,” he said to Gibbs, “would you remind me to tell Michelle?”

  Not screwing up the steak fry itself would require staffing Obama well. And Pete Rouse had an idea—one that made sense on the merits and was sure to draw attention. They would add Steve Hildebrand to Obama’s traveling party.

  Among Democratic insiders and political reporters, Hildebrand was renowned. A grassroots-organizing savant with close ties to three foundational Democratic factions—women’s groups, gay activists, and labor—Hildebrand was yet another former Daschle staffer, which was how he and Rouse were friends. But his claim to fame was having helped deliver the Iowa caucuses for Al Gore in 2000. Goateed, tattooed, and openly gay, Hildebrand was the rare top-shelf national operative who lived outside the Beltway (and way outside, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota). Even rarer, he was passionate about issues and had a romantic streak about politics as wide and verdant as a Paris boulevard.