It didn’t take long for Hillary’s high command, huddled in a conference room in her headquarters, to disabuse her of those thoughts. Grunwald told Clinton that she had to avoid letting the past twelve hours become “the last snapshot” of her campaign. The perception that she’d behaved badly had taken hold in the media, and fairly or not, threatened to eclipse everything she had accomplished. She had to get out and get behind Obama, quickly and graciously, but do it in a way that served her interests and her image. “You should own the moment yourself,” Grunwald said.
Tina Flournoy, a savvy labor politico who’d joined the campaign in its late stages, drew an analogy to the Civil War. A lot of people who weren’t ready for the battle to end took to the hills, Flournoy said. You can go to the hills for a while, but you have to come down eventually. You can’t stay in the hills.
Clinton polled the table as to whether Obama could win in November. “Yes,” Flournoy said. “With your help, he can win.” Everyone but Penn and Mills agreed.
Clinton was persuaded to exit and set in motion plans to concede and endorse Obama that weekend.
The former combatants arranged to meet secretly Thursday evening at the home of Senator Dianne Feinstein in northwest Washington. They had much to discuss—Hillary’s role at the convention, what help Obama might offer in retiring her campaign debt, how they would campaign together in the fall—but only one thing really mattered at this moment: whether Clinton would be Obama’s running mate.
Speculation on the topic had been raging in the media for the past few days. Many of Clinton’s supporters considered the veep slot Hillary’s due. BET’s Bob Johnson had launched a public campaign on her behalf, telling the press that Clinton had informed him that “if asked to do this, she must accept because she believes that it is in the best interest of the party.”
The truth was, Clinton’s ambivalence at the prospect was deep. If Obama offered her the number-two spot, Hillary did feel she would have to take it—but mainly to avoid being blamed if she declined and then Obama lost in the fall. Though her husband was all for her being on the ticket, Hillary found it difficult to muster any enthusiasm for it. “I’ve already done that job,” she told Penn.
Obama’s view of the matter was complicated, too. For all the heartache and heartburn of the campaign, he respected and admired Hillary, but he wondered if she would ever be able to see herself as his subordinate. There was also the issue of the baggage she brought, especially that one steamer trunk permanently strapped to her bumper. You can’t have three presidents in the White House, Obama told some friends at a dinner in New York.
The Feinstein meeting played out against this psychological backdrop. Seated in the California senator’s living room, each with a glass of water, Obama and Clinton cut right to the chase. Hillary indicated she was willing to be considered, but unwilling to be vetted unless Obama was all but certain that he planned to pick her. Obama indicated he was willing to vet her, but that he was unlikely to pick her.
Then, as if to make Clinton feel better, but actually putting the sting in the tail, Obama added, “You didn’t run to be vice president.”
Clinton left the Feinstein meeting and focused on her official exit. The event was less than forty-eight hours off, a Saturday morning rally at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington. For many of those hours, Clinton’s speechwriters labored over her speech, cranking out twenty drafts. Late on Friday night, the speech was locked—or so everyone thought. In fact, Hillary and Bill stayed up late revising and reworking, editing and reediting the thing. Early the next morning, their new text landed in the email in-boxes of the high command.
“Wow, they really, seriously, fucked this up,” Garin wrote to his colleagues after reading it. “They have turned a gracious endorsement of Senator Obama into something that will (and should) be seen as stingy and small, and turned nice passages about the causes of the campaign into turgid and self-reverential prose. The problem isn’t just what they took out, it’s also what they put in. How many more uses of the word ‘I’ do they have here?”
A furious scramble ensued. The Clintons had removed the word “endorse”; it was put back in. The Clintons had deleted many of the references to Obama; they were reinserted. Hillary uttered not a peep of protest, insisting that her goal all along had been to give a speech that was generous and unimpeachable.
It wound up being an address the Obamans could have written themselves—though it would be best remembered for a stanza that spoke not to Clinton’s praise for the winner but to what she’d accomplished even in losing. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that hardest, highest glass ceiling this time,” Hillary said before an adoring throng, “thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”
THE PATH TO PEACE between the Obamans and the Clintonites would not be strewn with primrose. The battle between Barack and Hillary had been historic across every dimension, from the amount of money spent and the numbers of voters who had participated to its sheer closeness—roughly 150,000 votes out of nearly 36 million cast divided the candidates. The fighting had been too long, too messy, and too mean for cuddling to commence right away.
The candidates had agreed to have Plouffe and Mills work out the details of how the two campaigns would come to a practical detente. At the center of those negotiations was the matter of Clinton’s $12 million debt. The Clintonites wanted the Obamans to help pay it off by asking his supporters to cough up contributions to her. The Obamans were reluctant, or, in Plouffe’s case, downright recalcitrant.
Though the press was starting to hyperventilate about polls suggesting that Hillary’s voters were up for grabs or even leaning toward McCain, Obama and the suits didn’t buy it. Sure, there were a handful of PUMA—“party unity, my ass”—women who would vote for G. Gordon Liddy before they voted for Obama. But the suits were convinced that rank-and-file Clinton voters would be with Obama in November as long as the campaign handled Hillary with due respect.
On June 27, the public process of rapprochement began when Obama and Clinton traveled together on a joint campaign trip to the aptly named town of Unity, New Hampshire, where each of them had received 107 votes in the state’s primary.
The plane ride up from Washington was awkward, the press scrutinizing their every gesture as they sat next to each other in seats 2A and 2B. But the two-hour bus ride from Manchester was worse. Obama had a compartment to himself up front, Clinton one to herself in back, with a middle section in between. For most of the ride, they stood in their respective doorways batting pieces of idle chitchat (about learning to sleep on planes, using BlackBerrys, eating strange food in strange lands) back and forth like a pair of nervous tennis players.
Axelrod approached Clinton and asked to have a word. They retreated to the rear cabin and huddled. Obama’s strategist wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings between them. Afterward, Axelrod was elated with how the talk had gone. It was a really good conversation, he said. But Hillary had a slightly different view.
It was like a root canal, she told her friends. I wanted to throw up.
The event itself was a relief. Obama and Clinton, their outfits coordinated so that his tie matched her blue pantsuit, fell over themselves praising each other, as if the past eighteen months had never happened. “For anyone who voted for me and is now considering not voting, or voting for Senator McCain, I strongly urge you to reconsider,” Clinton said. When the crowd squealed for Hillary, Obama concurred, “She rocks, she rocks.”
Three days later, from the road in Missouri, Obama called Bill Clinton. They spoke for twenty minutes and agreed to get together in the future, maybe over a dinner in New York, and for a public event, as early as July. Obama knew Bill was still upset about having been cast as a race-baiter in the campaign, and that what he wanted was a get-out-of-jail-free card from Obama.
Obama didn’t think Clinton was a racist, but he had no intention of exonerating him. Let him get over it and then we’ll see, Obama thought.
A few weeks later, Michelle called Hillary to break the ice with her after a trip to Florida, where some of Clinton’s supporters had held a fund-raiser for Barack. I feel bad because I hadn’t called you, Michelle said. I was waiting for the right moment.
They talked about Hillary’s experience raising a young daughter in the White House, about how Michelle should avoid getting caught up in the campaign attacks that were now coming her way. Don’t let that get to you, Hillary advised. That’s what they’re going to do. It’s the Republican playbook. Expect it.
THE BRAVE FACE SHE put on for Michelle notwithstanding, Hillary was not a happy woman in the summer of 2008. The past haunted her, the future daunted her, and the present was full of burdens. Still coping with her loss and what it meant, she kept casting her mind back, trying to grasp what had gone wrong with her campaign, inviting members of her former high command to her Senate office to conduct extensive examinations of their failure.
One day in July, Penn arrived at the Russell Building for his discussion with Clinton. For more than an hour, Clinton held forth, while Penn mostly listened.
“Well, I thank you for everything you did for me,” Clinton began. “I’m sorry you took so much incoming fire. It kind of goes with the territory. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Yeah, well,” Penn replied with a shrug.
Clinton then launched into a lengthy overview of the problems that beset her. “It was just dysfunctional, and I take responsibility for that,” she said of her campaign. “I mean it just didn’t work.
“Having said that, it would have been a very hard campaign to run against Obama,” she went on. “We had the entire press corps against us, which usually Bill and I could care less, but this was above and beyond anything that had ever happened. I mean, it was just a relentless, total hit job, day in and day out. I don’t mind that, because people seem to do hit jobs on me, but with a total free ride for [Obama]. It wasn’t even a one-to-ten parity, in terms of anything that we thought would be put out there that might get traction. And you know, it was really hard to run against an African American when the entire Democratic Establishment was scared to death. They could not deal with it.”
Clinton then raised the subject of her campaign’s original sin: Iowa.
“If we had gone after Obama on the paid media, I just am not sure,” she said. “If we could have avoided Iowa, which I think would have been very difficult—I was the front-runner, blah blah blah, I had to prove my bona fides. I don’t see how we could have, frankly. But I never felt good about Iowa, ever felt good about it.”
Clinton shook her head in wonder at the Obama phenomenon in the cornfields. “You know, the Oprah thing,” she said. “There was such a sort of a cultlike, peer group pressure. . . . They had drunk the Kool-Aid. And I am convinced they also imported people into those caucuses, which we will never prove.”
Clinton attributed her campaign’s poor performance in Iowa in part to its inside-the-Beltway myopia. “I would never, ever run a campaign in Washington again,” she said. “Ever, ever, ever. It’s poison, it’s toxic.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Penn said. “I’m told in Chicago he had a group of Obama partisans that, when they were losing, and they were almost out, they were willing to do whatever . . .”
“Whatever it takes,” Clinton said, finishing Penn’s thought. “And I would love to get all their internal documents about playing the race card, because I know it was their strategy.”
If there was one Hillarylander whom Clinton blamed above all for the miscues, it was Solis Doyle. “I think she was a disaster, Mark, and I am so disappointed,” Hillary said. “She turned out not to be able to manage. . . . She just was incapable. I put her in a position; she was unable to do it.”
“I thought the deal was that she was going to make the trains run on time,” Penn said.
“She didn’t even know which trains she was supposed to schedule,” Clinton said sarcastically. “And I feel terrible, because it wasn’t a campaign worthy of me.”
But Clinton had harsh words for Penn, too. “Whenever there was a problem, people begged me to fire you. That was the answer to everything: ‘Fire Mark,’” she said. “Now why is that? Because you rub people the wrong way.”
After telling Penn that she was “personally fond” of him, she said he was dismissive, insulting, irritating, and alienating to his colleagues. (At one point, she suggested he consider therapy.) “The Colombia thing, that really was beyond the pale,” she went on. “I felt fucked. I mean I gotta tell you. I felt like we were on the upswing, and I just felt fucked.”
“And I took responsibility,” Penn said sheepishly.
Clinton, apparently all talked out about the past, turned to the here and now. “So what should I be doing?” she said. “I’m trying to stay low and out of the line of fire and not get in the way between [Obama] and the voters.”
Penn focused on Denver and the importance of Hillary’s speech. “He’s got to really make sure that the night goes well,” he said. “The truth is, him making you vice president is the best way to guarantee it.”
“There’s no way—no way,” she said. “He can’t tolerate that.”
Nothing was weighing on Clinton’s mind more than her campaign debt. “Bill and I never leave a debt unpaid,” she said. “It’s just that, I was shocked at how little [the Obama campaign] will help us. They aren’t going to help us. I really, I thought when I started this I might be able to get about five million out of them. . . . You know how much we’ve got so far?”
“Five hundred thousand?”
“No, one hundred thousand. He’s not going to help.”
“That’s why I wanted to negotiate first, withdraw second. Right?”
“The press—I couldn’t. I am held to such a different standard. We’re trying to get somebody to cover the fact that I’ve done more to promote unity than anybody in a comparable position—Bradley . . . you name it, Tsongas, Jackson, Kennedy. But you know it was like they just beat the hell out of me until I got out.”
Penn ran through the latest poll numbers, expressing his view of Obama’s chances against McCain as dicey.
“I want you to start thinking about how I avoid being blamed,” Clinton said. “Because I shouldn’t be blamed. But they are going to blame me. I somehow didn’t do enough.”
“ ‘She stayed in too long,’” Penn put in.
In a voice of mock horror, Clinton exclaimed, ” ‘Oh, she damaged him,’ you know—screw you! I thought it was a competitive election. I can stay in as long as I want to stay in. Teddy Kennedy stayed in until the convention. Give me a break.”
Penn, always on the lookout for business, said he wanted to try “to reconcile with the Obama campaign.”
“They’re never going to reconcile,” Clinton said dismissively. “Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen. They are vindictive and small. They don’t think they need me. They had that conversation with Bill, they never called and asked him to do anything. They don’t care about a former president.”
Clinton returned to Obama’s prospects in the general election. “I think it’s fifty-fifty whether he wins, right?” she said, noting that Obama’s VP choice was critical, giving odds on whom he would pick: “Biden, one-in-two chance. Bayh, one-in-four chance. Kaine and Sebelius, both which I think are terrible choices, one-in-eight chance.”
For a year and a half, Hillary had spent every waking moment not just trying to defeat Obama, but convincing herself that he was a lightweight, a nose-in-the-air elitist totally unfit to be the leader of the free world. A little more than a month after he ended her dream, she hadn’t become unconvinced. But now she would be forced to sit back and watch him run against McCain—a man whom Clinton considered a friend, but one whose election would be tantamount to reelecting Bush
to a third term.
“The campaign was a terrible disappointment,” she said. “I hate the choice that the country’s faced with. I think it is a terrible choice for our nation.”
PART II
Chapter Fifteen
The Maverick and His Meltdown
THE MORNING AFTER THE midterm elections of 2006, John McCain was in the community room of his condominium complex in Phoenix, Arizona, surveying the damage that had been inflicted on the Republican Party—and listening to his lieutenants talk about how he was primed to benefit. The night before, McCain and his wife, Cindy, had hosted a viewing shindig in the same room, which Cindy had catered extravagantly, laying out an opulent spread. The remains of that feast were gone now, replaced by a modest breakfast buffet: fruit, juice, coffee, and those pastries that her husband liked so much.
McCain had been up until the wee hours. He needed that coffee. Arrayed around him were his chief political advisers: longtime stalwarts John Weaver, Rick Davis, Mark Salter, and Carla Eudy, along with a new presence, Terry Nelson. This was the first time they’d all been together to talk about 2008.
On a large-screen TV, the yakkers were yakking about the horrific results from the previous day. Republicans had lost everything: the House, the Senate, a majority of governorships and state legislative chambers. (Nearly a hundred seats in McCain’s beloved New Hampshire—that hurt!)
McCain had seen it coming. Like Obama, he had been his party’s top draw in the run-up to the midterms. With Bush holed up in the White House, toxically unpopular even in many red states, McCain had tirelessly traversed the country, offering aid to candidates in tough races, pushing to save seats. But it was no use. “This is as bad as it’s ever been” for the GOP, he told anyone who would listen.
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