Plouffe, his stomach churning, phoned Axelrod and said, “I don’t like this.”
HILLARY DIDN’T LIKE IT, either. She thought it was a Muskie moment, too. Having labored so long to highlight her strength, to prove to the world she was tough enough to be commander in chief, she worried that she had blown it with one ill-timed display of the turmoil bubbling just below the surface. One of her aides tried to ease her mind by pointing out that crying had become fashionable in politics: “Bush can tear up! Mitt Romney can tear up! All the guys are tearing up!” Hillary couldn’t see how the analogies applied. “I didn’t cry,” she kept insisting. It made you seem real, seem human, some of her advisers argued. But the realm of emotional resonance was, for her, a foreign country. “I’m an information person,” she said.
The rest of Hillary’s day was no less eventful. At her next stop on the trail, a gym in Dover, she gave an interview to Fox News in which she responded to Obama’s claim that she was denigrating the value of leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., whose stock in trade was the raising of hopes. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton said. “It took a president to get it done.”
Hillary’s point was that words alone weren’t enough to effect change. But the interview caused a flap on cable TV and the blogs, where it was cast by some as a slight against King. The Clinton campaign realized immediately that what Hillary had said was problematic, and she moved quickly to walk it back, inserting remarks into an early evening speech in Salem effusively praising King.
While Hillary was trying to dance delicately through a minefield of racial sensitivities, Bill was working the remote western and northern parts of the state. At a town hall meeting at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, he uncorked the argument that he and Penn had been longing to make for a year. Hoarse-voiced and finger-wagging, he ripped into Obama’s claims of antiwar purity and the media’s complicity in letting those claims go unchallenged:
“It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through fifteen debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time—not once!—’Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you’re now running on off your website in 2004 and there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since.’
“Give . . . me . . . a . . . break” the former president moaned. “This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen!”
And Clinton was just getting warmed up. “What did you think about the Obama thing, calling Hillary the ‘Senator from Punjab?’ Did you like that?” he continued. “Or what about the Obama handout that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook, scouring me, scathing criticism over my financial reports. . . . The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that’s in the media doesn’t mean the facts aren’t out there.”
Bill was infinitely pleased with his performance. “I thought that was good, didn’t you?” he said to an aide as he pulled out of Hanover. Back at the Centennial afterward, he told Penn and others, “I finally was able to get the whole case out there.”
THE MORNING OF THE PRIMARY, the Clintons woke up girding themselves for defeat. But Hillary kept working with manic intensity all day, scrounging for every last vote. She visited four polling places and a Dunkin’ Donuts (shades of 1992 again) before noon, then interrupted an afternoon nap to cram in one last campaign event in Manchester.
The rest of her day was a swirl of intrigue and whispered conversations. If Hillary was to be defeated in New Hampshire, the Clintons had decided they would hang a silver lining around the loss. For days before Solis Doyle suggested a shake-up, the couple had been discussing a retooling of Hillary’s plainly dysfunctional campaign. After Iowa, their friends, associates, and informal advisers had started filling their ears with long-suppressed complaints about Solis Doyle and Penn. The chief strategist’s bond with the Clintons was too durable for Penn to get the axe. (“You’re indispensable,” Hillary emailed him.) But Solis Doyle, her relationship with Hillary irreparably ruptured by their conversation the previous day, would be demoted. And a clutch of old Clinton hands would be imported to right the ship: Texan adman Roy Spence; Bill’s former White House political director, Doug Sosnik; and Hillary’s former chief of staff, Maggie Williams, whom she wanted to run the show.
Solis Doyle was getting ready for breakfast with a reporter when an email arrived from Hillary. Its subject line: “Moving forward.” A number of our friends who have our best interests at heart have suggested that we need a new team, Hillary wrote with odd formality. Solis Doyle would retain her title but would relinquish much of her responsibility to Williams.
Patti read the message and cried. She’d suggested that Hillary needed to make changes, but never really thought she’d be the one to take the hit. Hillary loved her like a daughter. (Supposedly, Patti thought.) Being dumped via email—the indignity was almost as bad as the betrayal. (Pick up the phone, at least!) Solis Doyle believed that she’d done a good job, that many of the campaign’s flaws could be laid at Hillary’s feet. She was prepared to take her share of the blame. But keep her job in name only and let Williams run everything? No way.
I understand, she emailed Clinton, but I really don’t want to stay on. I’ll do everything I can to help with the transition, but I don’t want my title. I’ll just go home to my kids.
Hillary emailed her back: I don’t accept your resignation.
For the next several hours, Solis Doyle’s closest friends in Hillaryland streamed in and out of her room. Wolfson, Tanden, Ickes, Henry—all sat shiva with Solis Doyle, who alternated between disbelief and hysteria. Everyone agreed that if Hillary lost, they would quit en masse. Everyone agreed that it should have been Penn who was given the boot.
By late afternoon, as word seeped out into the campaign, Hillary started hearing from those who thought getting rid of Solis Doyle would be a mistake. Too many people in Ballston are loyal to Patti, Ickes told Clinton. The move would cause too much chaos at a time when order—and the perception of order—was vital.
Hillary hated personal conflict, avoided it like the plague—hence the demotion via email. But around five o’clock, she went up to Patti’s room and knocked on the door.
“Let’s talk turkey,” Hillary said with forced cheer as she walked in, trying to lighten the mood. And then, even more awkwardly, “Let’s talk ham. Let’s talk tortillas.”
The attempt at levity did nothing to lessen Solis Doyle’s discomfort. Sitting down on the bed, Hillary asked her to stay: People are gonna leave if you leave, they need you around, you’re the glue, I can’t do this without you, she said. Solis Doyle told Hillary she’d think about it. What she told herself was, I’m outta here.
After Hillary left, Wolfson trundled in, bearing data from the first wave of exit polls.
“Can you believe this?” he said. “We may only lose by single digits.”
Solis Doyle tried to be happy. But it felt to her like someone had died.
BARACK AND MICHELLE HAD a bad feeling the whole day. Michelle was especially edgy. At lunch at their hotel in Nashua, though the polls had been open only a few hours, she dispatched Jarrett to Axelrod and Plouffe’s table to ask if they’d heard anything about how things were going.
The first wave of exit polls from the networks late that afternoon began to provide an answer, and not the one the Obamans were expecting. The early returns from blue-collar Manchester were terrible, the first indication that Obama might have trouble with white working-class voters. The suits kept Obama apprised as the numbers went from worrying to scary
to depressing. Standing in the hallway in front of his boss’s suite, Axelrod said dejectedly, “It looks like she may inch us out.”
Jarrett came up from her room and found the Obamas swallowing hard to choke down the bitter pill. What on earth am I going to say to make this okay? she thought.
But before Jarrett had a chance to open her mouth, Barack put one hand on her shoulder and said, “This is going to be a good thing. You’ll see.”
Michelle was steelier, less reassuring. “This is going to be a test,” she said. “It’s going to be a test to see if they’re really with us or not.”
In the Clinton suite up in Concord, however, there was less certainty that the primary was truly over. Hillary, who made a practice of never watching election returns on TV, was nowhere to be seen. Her husband, in a pair of jeans and a sweater, his reading glasses perched on his nose, presided over the room with his game face on, serious and concerned.
Bill was closely monitoring the late returns from the Hanover area, eager to see if his broadside at Dartmouth had worked. But now, as he sifted through pages of precinct-level results, Clinton reached a dispiriting conclusion. If Obama wins Hanover by three to one, we’re gonna lose this thing, he said. One minute, the networks were about to call the race for his wife; the next, they were saying, hold on, we’re not so sure.
Clinton’s knowledge of New Hampshire allowed him to be his own decision desk, more finely tuned than the networks’ data models and teams of analysts. Clinton phoned Clemons, from whom he’d been hoovering fresh numbers every fifteen minutes all evening. A new batch from Hanover had just come in. “We’re gonna win it!” Bill exclaimed.
It was after ten o’clock when excitement finally washed over the room. The networks had certified Hillary’s win. The candidate came in and hugged everyone. “I felt it all day,” she said. Bill boasted about how his “fairy tale” attack had been pivotal to the outcome—it had held down Obama’s margins in Hanover.
Racing out of the hotel, they sped to Manchester for Hillary’s victory speech. “I come tonight with a very, very full heart,” she began. “Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process, I found my own voice.”
When it was over, Hillary marched down a hallway backstage, with her husband and Chelsea at her side. She looked like a quarterback who’d just completed a last-second Hail Mary pass in overtime—pointing at her aides, high-fiving them, smiling from ear to ear. “This is amazing,” one of them said. “I’m so proud of you! You did this! You did this!”
Hillary nodded and puffed out her chest.
“I get really tough when people fuck with me,” she said.
IT WOULD TAKE a while for Obama and his brain trust to figure out what happened in New Hampshire. The sight of Hillary being bludgeoned in the debate, her tearing up, and her gritty performance at the end—all of it while Obama was coasting—had done exactly what Penn said Clinton needed to do: bring home the women voters who had been with her before but who had drifted briefly, in the wake of Iowa, into the undecided column or into a flirtation with Obama.
Obama’s initial analysis was more rudimentary. Back at his hotel late that night with friends, he compared himself to a comet—and the next morning, at a fund-raising breakfast in Boston, to Icarus. But his calm philosophizing masked a deeper disquiet about his situation after New Hampshire. The candidate wondered again if he might benefit from a broader circle of advisers, something he’d been pushing for, albeit sporadically, since the summer of 2007. His brain trust was gobsmacked. The campaign’s internal polls had been just as far off base as the public ones—Clinton ended up winning by three points—and its strategy was in tatters. The momentum out of Iowa that was supposed to carry Obama to the nomination had been stopped in its tracks just five days later. With one win of her own, Hillary had changed the game again.
Obama looked at the calendar and took no comfort in what he saw. Super Tuesday, February 5, was Hillary’s firewall; she’d been saying for months that the race would be decided that day, when a gaggle of the big states where her support was robust would render their verdict. Obama realized that, for him to prevail, the contest would have to continue well into the spring—and he was already exhausted. In Boston, one of his donors asked him what the New Hampshire loss might mean.
“It means I’m not gonna get any sleep,” he said. “And I’m dying to get some sleep.”
Chapter Eleven
Fear and Loathing in the Lizard’s Thicket
THE BALLSTON HEADQUARTERS OF Hillaryland occupied three floors in a building that once belonged to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service—and looked the part. The place was charmless, soulless, drab, and gray, suburban-office-park neo-brutalist in every detail. The single homey touch was Solis Doyle’s conference table, which in an earlier era had been the Clintons’ kitchen table in the Arkansas governor’s mansion.
The day after New Hampshire, Hillary convened a rolling meeting around that nostalgic piece of furniture, beneath seven framed covers of Time magazine that bore her image. The meeting ran from the late afternoon until nearly midnight and included a sprawling cast of characters: Bill, Chelsea, the original high command, and many of the old-guard Clintonites now being hauled into service. The only person missing from Solis Doyle’s office was . . . Solis Doyle. (The staff had tried to find her all day long; her whereabouts were unknown.)
Hillary rarely ran a campaign meeting, but this was an exception. She wanted to get her arms around the situation facing her in the weeks ahead. Having just staged a once-in-a-lifetime comeback, she should have been flying high. Instead, she was acting like she’d just been annihilated—she was angrier even than she was after Iowa, angry in a way that the old hands in the room hadn’t seen since Bill’s impeachment. She began with a seething soliloquy that lasted fifteen minutes but seemed a whole lot longer.
“I’m not putting up with this anymore,” she fumed.
Everyone stared down at their shoes.
The sources of Hillary’s ire were manifold, each more maddening than the last. A year into her campaign, her advisers were still squabbling over what her message should be. Don Baer, who had served as Bill’s communications director during his second term and was now an associate of Penn’s at Burson-Marsteller, suggested she adopt a new motif: “the politics of common purpose.” Grunwald advocated an update of her husband’s old theme of “putting people first.” Doug Sosnik said that she should focus on “the future”; Roy Spence argued for “solutions.” At this late date, it was as if they were starting from scratch.
Wasn’t there any lesson to be drawn from what had worked in New Hampshire? The Clintons thought so: Hillary had won because they’d attacked Obama, she at the debate and Bill at Dartmouth. The faction of Hillaryland that for months had been pressing for her to show a softer side had a different view. Wolfson offered an analogy to the movie The Queen. You know how, at the end, Queen Elizabeth becomes sympathetic when she displays her humanity? he said. That’s what happened in New Hampshire.
Hillary looked uncomprehendingly at Wolfson, as if he were speaking Portuguese.
Having no message was one thing. Having no money was another. Historically, nothing agitated the Clintons more than the prospect of being outspent in a campaign; the fear of it drove them to such extremes as the renting out of the Lincoln Bedroom. Hillary had raised more than $100 million in 2007. She’d known that if she lost Iowa, her wherewithal would be strained—but she never imagined it would be this bad, that she would basically be broke.
“The cupboard is bare,” Ickes said. And replenishing it would not be easy: Clinton’s donors were tapped out. “We have to win in order to raise,” said her finance director, Jonathan Mantz. “If we don’t win, we’re not gonna raise.”
But Hillary didn’t even want to compete in the next two contests. So certain was she of losing both, she thought it was pointless. Next on the calendar was Nevada, another caucus state. It would be like Iowa, only worse, she said, with caucu
s sites in the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip rife with fraud and abuse, and the culinary union rigging the outcome for Obama. As for South Carolina, turnout was likely to be at least 50 percent African American. Meaning, she was screwed.
“You can’t skip Nevada and South Carolina,” Sosnik said emphatically, and the rest of the room agreed. With the campaign running on empty, losing two in a row before Super Tuesday would be debilitating—and, who knows, maybe even fatal.
Worn down, Hillary relented and agreed to play in Nevada, where both her team and her support among Hispanics were solid. (A decision about South Carolina was deferred.) But she could scarcely comprehend the situation in which she now found herself—gasping for air after just two contests, her campaign on the edge of bankruptcy, with no clear plan for how to win.
The person Clinton blamed most for her predicament was the one who wasn’t there: Solis Doyle. Yet in the last twenty-four hours, Hillary had reaffirmed that she couldn’t afford to dispense with Patti after all. She didn’t need any more instability, and dumping Solis Doyle would invite mayhem. She didn’t want to deal with awkward questions from the press. And she couldn’t risk a backlash among Hispanics over the firing of the highest-ranking Latino political operative in the country; in an awful lot of the states ahead, Hillary was relying on the votes of that community to pull her through.
Solis Doyle had gone off the grid to think things over. She had little desire to stay, but Hillary implored her, and Patti caved. The next day, she resurfaced and began talks with Williams about finding a workable modus vivendi for their jointly running the campaign. Williams was busy with a consulting business and had clients demanding her time. Her appetite for being in Ballston was as minimal as Patti’s—but her loyalty to Clinton was deep. The conversations between Williams and Solis Doyle were uneasy and tense. Once, they had been close friends, the two most powerful women in Hillaryland; now they were the usurper and the usurped. It was a recipe for, if not disaster, then paralytic discord.
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