Clinton wanted to believe Obama’s first-quarter numbers were a fluke, but when he beat her again in the second quarter, by even more than in the first—$31 million to $21 million this time—panic set in.
One day that summer, after a fund-raising breakfast at the ritzy Hamptons weekend home of New York venture capitalist Alan Patricof, Hillary walked into the kitchen and started talking to Patricof and her finance director, Jonathan Mantz. Patricof noted that Obama was raking in money by selling T-shirts, buttons, and posters with his campaign logo on them. “He’s got a retail merchandise business going,” Patricof said. “Why aren’t we doing more of that?”
Hillary turned to Mantz and repeated the question: Why aren’t we doing more of that? But before Mantz could answer, Clinton began to unravel.
We’re losing the small-donor race, she said, her voice starting to rise. Why are we losing? What do we need to do? I just don’t understand!
Hillary was nearly screaming now. Gesturing outside, she exclaimed, “Why don’t we have merchandise being sold out back? We could’ve set up tables in the back!”
There were a lot of things Mantz could have said: Because you’re not leading a movement. Because your donors aren’t college kids. Because we’re in the Hamptons and you don’t hawk souvenirs on the lawn beside the swimming pool. Instead, he thought, Wow, this is the angriest I’ve ever seen her. And then simply said, “I’ll fix it.”
FIXING THE FUND-RAISING WAS one of many challenges facing Clinton in 2007—but in terms of urgency and long-range significance, none was in even the same galaxy as the problem of Iowa. Right after New Year’s, Penn had put their first poll in the field to figure out where Clinton stood in the state ab initio. The results were discouraging: Edwards led with 38 percent, with Clinton and Obama tied at 16. In no other state in the country would Hillary, with her name recognition and national profile and popularity among Democrats, have fared so poorly. But hearing the numbers, she put on a brave face. “It’s better than I thought it would be,” she said. “We have our work cut out for us.”
The members of the Hillaryland high command were less sanguine. Unlike New Hampshire, where the Clinton name was platinum because of her husband, Iowa was a place where neither he nor she had spent much time. (In 1992, local guy Tom Harkin was in the race and had it sewn up, so the other candidates skipped the caucuses; in 1996, incumbent Clinton ran for the nomination unopposed.) Democrats in Iowa were decidedly liberal, with a peacenik streak; Hillary’s war record was more vexatious there than anywhere else. Edwards had been working the state more or less constantly since 2003. Obama lived next door. If Hillary was going to be competitive in Iowa, she would need to go all out. The problem was, she hated it there. Every day felt like she was stuck in a Mobius strip: another barn, another living room, another set of questions about immigration (from people who were anti-) and the war (ditto). She’d get back on the plane, slump into her seat, heave a deep sigh, and grunt, “Ugh.”
The Iowans didn’t seem to be listening to her, just gawking at her, like she was an animal in a zoo. Hillary would hear from her staff the things voters were saying about her: “She’s so much prettier in person,” “She’s so much nicer than I thought.” It made her ill. She found the Iowans diffident and presumptuous; she felt they were making her grovel. Hillary detested pleading for anything, from money to endorsements, and in Iowa it was no different. She resisted calling the local politicos whose support she needed. One time, she spent forty-five minutes on the phone wooing an activist, only to be told at the call’s end that the woman was still deciding between her and another candidate. Hillary hung up in a huff.
“I can’t believe this!” she said. “How many times am I going to have to meet these same people?”
Over and over, she complained about the system that gave Iowa so much power in selecting the nominee. “This is so stupid,” she would say. “So unfair.” She bitched about Iowa’s scruffy hotels and looked for excuses to avoid staying overnight. But among the sources of her frustration and bewilderment, the absence of connection was paramount. “I don’t have a good feeling about this, guys,” she told her staff on the plane. “I just don’t have a good feeling about this place.”
People Hillary respected, experts on Iowa, urged her to spend more time there. She seemed to understand, but her antipathy to the state only grew. Mike Henry grasped the scale of the problem and took a radical stab at remedying it. Dismayed by what he’d seen on a trip to Iowa that spring, Henry concluded that there was a sound case for Hillary bypassing the caucuses. In mid-May, after mulling the idea in private with Solis Doyle, Ickes, and political consultant Michael Whouley, Henry drafted a memo laying out his argument. Iowa, he wrote, was Hillary’s consistently weakest state, and was likely to consume $15 million and seventy days of her schedule. “Worst case scenario: this effort may bankrupt the campaign and provide little if any political advantage,” he wrote.
Henry sent the memo to Solis Doyle and Ickes, and also, inexplicably, to a friend of his named Sheila Nix, who worked in the office of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Within twelve hours, the memo had been leaked to The New York Times and was all over the paper’s front page.
Ickes was baffled by Henry’s foolishness: “Mike, what goes through your fucking mind?” But he also saw the irony in the situation. Hillary could never recede from Iowa under these circumstances. The leaking of the memo had locked her in, exactly the opposite outcome of what Henry had hoped for.
Henry’s screwup, however, was an outward sign of a deeper malady in Hillaryland: the team of rivals the candidate had constructed was longer on rivalry—and backbiting, pettiness, and general-purpose dysfunction—than on teamwork.
Every decision Clinton had made (and not made) in structuring her campaign was coming back to bite her. She had effectively given both Penn and Solis Doyle veto power over hiring—which they regularly exercised to preserve their status, preventing any fresh blood or new ideas from penetrating Hillaryland. She had told Solis Doyle to keep a tight rein on the budget, but astronomical salaries abounded and spending was out of control. (A notorious tightwad, Clinton was forever complaining, “There are too many people on the road. . . . I don’t know what all these people do.”) She had empowered her senior advisers to govern by consensus, but Penn so frequently went directly to the Clintons to override choices with which he disagreed that his colleagues considered discussion futile. The level of animosity among them all was off the charts. Screaming matches erupted regularly on conference calls and in person. Solis Doyle’s preferred name for Penn was “fat fuck.”
The result was chaos. Meetings rarely started on time, had any discernible structure, or accomplished their ostensible purpose. Every decision was litigated and relitigated again and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The campaign had neither a political director nor a field director; Henry was de facto both. There was almost no one with experience in Democratic presidential nomination fights. There were no significant budgets or plans in place for any states beyond the first four. The campaign’s delegate operation was understaffed and unsophisticated. The most basic operational and political matters were frequently left unaddressed.
From the outside, none of this was apparent. Hillaryland looked like a colossus. Far ahead in the national polls and the hunt for endorsements, she still appeared on track as the inevitable nominee. But Bill Clinton’s old hands knew better. Locked out of Hillary’s campaign, dismissed as old-school “white boys” by Solis Doyle, they could still see things others couldn’t: that Hillaryland was a fractious, soulless mess—and that their old boss, the former president, was on the outside looking in, just like them.
BILL CLINTON JUMPED ON the conference call wondering what the point of it was. Carson, his spokesman, told him Hillary’s people wanted to have a quick chat before he headed west. For the next three days, over the July 4 holiday, he would be at his wife’s side all over Iowa: the state fairgrounds in Des Moines, the Independence Day parade in Clea
r Lake, private meetings with undecided caucus leaders and potential precinct captains. Hillary had been in the race for coming up on six months—and this was their first joint campaign swing.
The Hillarylanders were nervous about the trip, afraid that Bill would overshadow her, that he’d talk too much—or, more to the point, talk too much about himself and not enough about her. Over the past couple of weeks, they’d worried the trip nearly to death, discussing and diagramming every aspect in minute detail. (Would he sit or stand onstage next to her? How would they work the rope line? Where would they sleep? Would they do any separate events?) Now the high command wished to go over the script again. Just want to make sure you’re okay with everything, sir, Carson said. You’ve got your talking points; you should be fairly brief; turn it over to her and let her rip.
Yup, Clinton said, I got it—but apparently that wasn’t sufficient. Grunwald had a few words to say, then Penn, then Wolfson, then Solis Doyle. All of them said the same thing as Carson had, just repackaged in different language.
“Yeah, okay, guys. I got it,” Clinton said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “I’ll try not to screw it up for her too bad while I’m out there.”
Clinton was getting used to this kind of treatment from his wife’s campaign—well, not used to it, but by now it was familiar. The press kept saying that he was Hillary’s greatest asset, a political genius, the sharpest strategist in the Democratic Party. But his involvement so far in 2007 had been close to nil, and certainly less by most measures than that of a typical candidate’s spouse. That was how his wife’s people wanted it: they saw him not as a priceless asset, but as a problem to be managed. And Bill hadn’t tried to fight his way in. Though he often questioned the campaign’s strategy, he knew that he had to stay out of Hillary’s way, let her win this thing herself. He just wished that Solis Doyle and all the rest of them would stop treating him like an infant. “You know, I did get myself elected president of the United States . . . twice!” he liked to say.
Bill was rusty. He knew that. Politics had changed a lot since he was in the game for real. After his heart surgeries, he’d lost a step or two, no doubt. And, he allowed, he didn’t know beans about Iowa. He found himself parroting the conventional wisdom: Edwards is strong; Obama has a chance; it’s Hillary’s hardest row to hoe. That was one reason he was thrilled to be getting out there. Finally a chance to sniff around, test his instincts, see what was happening on the ground.
The July 4 trip went off without a hitch. Bill demonstrated discipline, giving the same six-minute speech every time, almost to the word. But the best part, from his point of view, was the time he got to spend in private, recruiting precinct captains and other activists for his wife, getting a handle on how the process worked, drilling down with Teresa Vilmain, the top-drawer organizer whom Hillary had just signed on to run the state for her.
On the flight home, Hillary was uncertain how the trip had gone. She was hoarse and exhausted, worried about the press’s parsing of her and Bill’s body language, the criticisms that they’d been too programmed. Bill tried to buck her up. You did great, he said. You really touched people—the crowds were hanging on your every word.
But, in truth, Iowa was starting to plague Bill’s mind. The campaign’s local advisers had told him in no uncertain terms that the one thing Iowans wouldn’t abide was negative campaigning, which meant it would be hard to take Obama down in the manner that Bill and Penn thought necessary. After the Henry memo, there was no getting out of Iowa for Hillary. And yet, after all the work she’d done there, she was still struggling as in no other state.
Bill Clinton wondered if Iowa was laying a triple whammy on his wife: she couldn’t attack, she couldn’t quit, and she couldn’t win.
AND YET FOR ALL that had happened so far in 2007, for all the turbulence and doubts, for all the internal squabbles and external missteps, Hillary publicly didn’t appear to be a beleaguered figure as the summer turned to fall. She didn’t feel that way, either. While there was cause for disquiet, there were plenty of reasons for confidence. She had entered the year the front-runner and she was still the front-runner—now more than ever. And Obama seemed to be fading, just as she had predicted.
She had whipped him in the interminable series of Democratic debates that had taken place since April. Her mastery of the issues, her knowledge of every jot and tittle about every aspect of public policy, had been on full display—and Obama had been exposed for the naif she knew he was, coming across as vague and weak and windy. With Penn’s help, she had neutralized many of her most glaring vulnerabilities. She had blurred the distinctions between her and Obama on Iraq, adroitly changing the subject from which candidate was most antiwar to who was more qualified to bring the conflict to an end. She had recast her awful history with health care reform, unveiling her long-awaited plan in mid-September and getting rave reviews for her substantive prowess, the detail and clarity of her presentation, and her self-deprecating allusions to her disastrous attempt to overhaul the system as First Lady. She’d watched as Obama’s campaign was hammered for producing a proposal that was an obvious rip-off of hers. She’d begun to defuse her rival’s message, giving speeches where she said “change is just a word without the strength and experience to make it happen.” And, finally, in the third quarter of the year, she had succeeded in raising more money than Obama.
All along, Clinton had held a commanding lead over Obama in the national polls. Now, on October 3, came a new ABC News/Washington Post survey that seemed to shift the appropriate description from “clear front-runner” to “prohibitive favorite.” The poll put Hillary ahead of Obama by a staggering thirty-three-point margin, 53–20. Despite all the efforts of her opponents to tar her as too polarizing to be electable, the poll found that 57 percent of voters rated her the most likely of the Democratic candidates to win in the fall. More heartening still, not only was Clinton leading decisively among voters who were looking for “strength and experience,” but she was beating Obama 45–31 among those seeking “new direction and new ideas.” The poll was the talk of the political world. Even in Iowa, the race seemed to be tilting in her favor. Thanks in large part to Vilmain’s labors, Hillary was now in a virtual three-way tie in the state.
Two weeks later, Hillary received a piece of news that thrilled her beyond measure. She was getting the endorsement of Georgia congressman John Lewis. Lewis was one of the civil rights era’s greatest heroes, an African American student organizer beaten nearly to death by a white mob during the freedom rides of 1961. All year long, despite Hillary’s aversion to buttonholing superdelegates—elected officials and other party honchos who would vote automatically at the national convention the next summer in Denver—their endorsements kept falling into her lap, while Obama collected virtually none. But Lewis was a particularly welcome feather in her cap and a harsh blow to Obama.
What all this said to Hillary was that the natural order was reasserting itself. Despite the angst of the past ten months, the elements of Penn’s plan were falling into place: the money, the Establishment support, the muscle to win. She was showing Obama, as Penn wrote in his December memo, “how it is really done.” And the press corps, for all its disdain for her, was coming around to the opinion that the campaign had sought to instill from the start: Hillary’s victory was inevitable.
And she seemed to believe it, too. How confident was Clinton? So extravagantly self-certain that she began to turn her attention to a question no rational candidate would have dared to contemplate this early: Who should be her running mate in the general election? She had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama. She knew she would come under enormous pressure to do so from all corners of the party and the press, and she had already come up with a solution.
Clinton decided she needed to have a prominent African American or two to run her vice-presidential search process. She was inclined to tap Cheryl Mills and Vernon Jordan, a longtime friend of the Clintons and Wa
shington’s premier black power broker. When her aides asked who would be at the top of her VP short list, she mentioned Bayh, Biden, Vilsack, and Ohio governor Ted Strickland.
But Clinton was getting even further ahead of herself than that. One day that fall, she summoned her friend Roger Altman to meet with her in Washington. Altman was a major Wall Street player who had served as deputy treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. As they sat in her basement hideaway office in the Capitol, Hillary asked Altman to undertake a secret project on her behalf. She wanted him to start planning right away for her eventual transition to the White House, on the assumption that she would win the general election. I don’t want to get to the point, she said, where we’re scrambling to do a transition. I want to be in the opposite position.
Altman already knew what Clinton was going to ask him to do. A few days earlier, he’d had a call from John Podesta, who told him that Hillary wanted them together to undertake the transition effort. For about half an hour, Altman and Clinton discussed how the plan would work, setting up a schedule for the next few months and focusing on the selection of chairs and co-chairs to run the preparation on a variety of issues. Hillary made clear how important it was that word of the endeavor not leak. She had devised a cover story: that the Altman-Podesta-led meetings were merely part of a project on presidential transitions already under way at Podesta’s Center for American Progress.
At the Clinton campaign headquarters in Ballston, Virginia, just a few minutes outside Washington, the few aides who were aware of the transition preparations were alarmed by the whole scheme—by the presumptuousness of it, and even more by the risks involved. If news broke that Hillary had already started working on her presidential transition, the ensuing media maelstrom would be crippling, undermining the campaign’s efforts to tamp down the perception of Clinton’s arrogance and sense of privilege. Altman and Podesta, for their part, believed the undertaking was just another sign of Clinton’s methodical commitment to preparation. She’s such a planner, Altman thought. But they were spooked by the notion that Hillary might be jinxing herself. Let’s hope this isn’t the bell that tolls the finale for the campaign, they joked.
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