THE FOLLOWING WEEK, on November 13, Hillary met with Obama in his transition office in Chicago. She had some theories about why she was there, but being offered secretary of state was not among them. Two nights earlier, over dinner in New York with her and Bill, Terry McAuliffe had asked about the rumors swirling in Democratic circles that the gig might be tossed her way. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Hillary replied.
Not that she thought a job offer was out of the question. But she expected it to be a token unity gesture, something both sides knew she would almost certainly turn down—maybe Health and Human Services. When the chatter about State picked up, she assumed that the Obamans were floating it and was suspicious about their motives. Why are they putting my name out? she asked her friends. How does it help them? What game are they playing?
But now here she was, sitting alone with her former nemesis, and Obama was talking about the job in earnest. You’re head and shoulders above anyone else I’m considering, he said. Obama made it clear that they would have to come to terms regarding Bill’s foundation and library-funding, as well as his money-making ventures. He explained how he envisioned their relationship if she took the post: one president, one secretary of state, no overlap. He didn’t formally offer her the job, but he left no doubt that she was his choice.
Obama knew that Clinton would be reluctant, that he’d have to do some wooing. But at the same time he was selling, he was also evaluating. Do we click? Will she respect the fact that I’m the president? Can she work for me? By the time the meeting was over, all those questions had been answered to his satisfaction. The conversation confirmed his instincts. He was surer than ever that he wanted Clinton, and he would do what it took to get her.
Hillary’s head when she flew out of Chicago was in a different place. I’m not taking this job, she thought. And I’m not going to let anyone talk me into it—anyone. But she also remembered a formulation that James Carville was fond of: “Once you’re asked, you’re fucked.”
That was precisely how Hillary felt for the next few days. She had less than zero interest in working for Obama—for doing anything other than going back to the Senate, licking her wounds, and putting her energies into paying down her multimillion-dollar debt. She was looking forward to reclaiming some semblance of the life she’d had before the campaign. Going to the theater. Dining out. Spending time with Chelsea. She was sixty-one years old and staring down the likelihood that she would never be president. And she was tired—oh, so tired.
The pressure on her to take the job was enormous, though, and all the more so because the whole drama was playing out in public. Hillary had flown commercial from New York to Chicago and been spotted on the plane. Then the press pool saw her three-SUV motorcade pulling out from the garage of the Kluczynski Building. Everyone Hillary encountered had an opinion—or, rather, they all had the same opinion, which was that she should accept. Being America’s ambassador to the world at a hinge-of-history moment was a job commensurate with Clinton’s skills, they argued. Biden was on the phone with her making that case persistently; so was Podesta.
Emanuel took a more aggressive tack. He told her she’d be making a big mistake if she turned it down. That a refusal would wound Obama before he even took office. That she had to play ball for her own sake as well as the party’s. The conversations occasionally got heated. Voices were raised. Phones were slammed.
There were other reasons for Clinton to say yes. The Senate wasn’t proving as welcoming as she’d hoped, not by a long shot. She had come back thinking that her campaign had enhanced her status, that she could snag for herself some kind of plum position—a subcommittee chairmanship, a specially created health care panel, something. But Kennedy shot her down on health care, and Reid sidestepped her other requests. (Behind the scenes, he and Schumer were beseeching the Obamans to take Hillary off their hands.) The conspiratorial whisperers in the Senate were no longer whispering. They were telling her not to get ahead of herself, to take a seat, take a number.
There was the Bill Factor, that unremitting source of speculation far and wide. The conventional wisdom held that the former president would be the death knell of the Madame Secretary scenario. Would he open the books and reveal the donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative? He’d always fought that tooth and nail. Would he accept restrictions on his travel, his speaking, his business activities? Please.
But the conventional wisdom couldn’t have been more wrong. Faced with tough, unequivocal demands from the Obamans—demands that many of his people considered beyond the pale—Bill said, fine. Publicly and privately, he vowed to do “whatever they want.” There was no way he was going to let himself be cast as a stumbling block. Back-channeling regularly with Podesta, Emanuel, and Biden, he became the loudest and most ardent voice urging his wife to take to the job.
Hillary felt the pull of patriotism and the call of duty. She believed that when the president asked a person to serve, there was an imperative to say yes. And yet, after five days of tumultuous to-ing and fro-ing, she decided to decline Obama’s offer. Her reasons were many and, to her, dispositive. Secretary of state, of all jobs, seemed designed to turn her life upside down in myriad ways—in particular, the constant travel and omnivorous jet lag. She felt protective of her husband, too, especially after the torching of his reputation in the campaign. No matter how willing Bill claimed to be, she didn’t want to see his philanthropic efforts crimped, his important work helping the sick and underprivileged curtailed. And she kept coming back to the question of her debt. For some politicians, lumbering around millions of dollars in the red was no big thing. She considered it immoral; she wanted to be shed of the burden, and quickly. But how was she supposed to accomplish that as secretary of state? Her people asked the Obamans (again) for help, but the transition team refused. And then there was something that she told one of her friends: she had spent a lot of years working for one guy and had no desire to do it again.
On the morning of November 19, the top officials of Hillary’s and Bill’s staffs held a conference call to coordinate the rejection. To fend off charges that Bill’s activities had thwarted the deal, they planned to send the full list of his contributors to Obama’s transition office in Washington. Thousands of pages had to be printed out and rushed there that afternoon.
Hillary informed Emanuel and Podesta of her decision. She wanted to talk to Obama to put the thing to rest.
Emanuel and Podesta had a lot on the line. They’d been among Hillary’s most forceful advocates internally—and now she was about to drop a heaping pile of public embarrassment in Obama’s lap. The advisers decided that they had no choice but to stall. The president-elect is unavailable for a call, they told Clinton. He’s indisposed.
Hillary’s staff tried to plan a time for the conversation. Again and again, it was pushed back. A 2:30 call was scheduled. At 2:17 p.m. Abedin sent around an email to Mills and others: “We hear that President-elect Obama will not do the call at 2:30. Instead, he wants her to talk to Podesta—talk to him in an hour, so 3:30.” Hours later, Clinton had still not reached Obama. At 7:37, Abedin wrote: “The call has been scheduled for 10 P.M. Eastern.” At 9:42: “God knows what’s going to happen.” At 10:27: “Call will not happen tonight.”
Clinton was in New York for a reception at Chelsea Piers commemorating the renaming of the Triborough Bridge in RFK’s honor. She flew back to Washington late on a charter flight, arriving at Whitehaven around midnight—and there, miraculously, she managed finally to reach the elusive Obama.
It’s not going to work, an anguished Hillary told him. I can’t do it. It was a long, hard campaign, and I’m exhausted. I have this debt to pay down, and I can’t do that as secretary of state. I’m tired of being punched around; I feel like a pinata. I want to go home. I’ve had enough of this. You don’t want me, you don’t want all these stories about you and me. You don’t want the whole circus. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for m
e. I just can’t do this.
Hillary, look, you’re exactly right, Obama said. Those are all real concerns, they’re all real problems, and it’s fair and legitimate for you to raise them. And the truth is, there’s really nothing I can do about them. But the thing is, the economy is a much bigger mess than we’d ever imagined it would be, and I’m gonna be focused on that for the next two years. So I need someone as big as you to do this job. I need someone I don’t need to worry about. I need someone I can trust implicitly, and you’re that person.
Hillary raised a matter far more intimate than her personal reluctance. You know my husband, she said. You’ve seen what happens. We’re going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can’t control him, and at some point he’ll be a problem.
I know, Obama replied. But I’m prepared to take that risk. You’re worth it. Your country needs you. I need you. I need you to do this.
For both Obama and Clinton, it was a strange and rare moment—one of almost incomprehensible candor and vulnerability. For nearly two years, Clinton’s posture regarding her husband had been fierce and unyielding. Never once had she wavered in Bill’s defense. Never once had she been anything but defiant in the face of his screwups. Only rarely had she ever acknowledged, even to her closest friends, the damage that he had inflicted on her candidacy. And yet now, here she was, laying down her guard with her former rival, admitting not only that her husband could be a thorn in her side, but, in effect, that she’d known it all along.
Obama’s tacit admission was equally revealing. As a public figure and a private man, his signal characteristics were supreme self-possession and self-reliance. He needed no one, was better and smarter, cooler and more composed, than anyone around him. But here he was conceding to Clinton that her help was crucial to the success of his presidency. For the first time, after all the bitterness and resentment that had passed between them as combatants, they had suddenly metamorphosed into different creatures with each other—human beings.
It was nearly one o’clock in the morning on the East Coast. I don’t want this to be your final answer, Obama said quietly and in conclusion. I want you not to say no to me. I want you to keep thinking. I want you to sleep on it.
THE NEXT MORNING, HILLARYLAND prepared to announce Clinton’s decision to the world. The previous day, she had signed off on a statement she would deliver before the cameras at a press stakeout site on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. It said:
“I spoke this morning with President-Elect Obama to convey my deepest appreciation for having been considered for a post in his administration. It is not something I sought or expected. In fact, it took me by surprise when he first mentioned the possibility a week ago. . . . [I]n the end, this was a decision for me about where I can best serve President-Elect Obama, my constituents, and our country, and as I told President-Elect Obama, my place is in the Senate, which is where I believe I can make the biggest difference right now as we confront so many unprecedented challenges at home and around the world.”
In Chicago, at the Kluczynski Building, Obama walked into Jarrett’s office and told her where he was with Clinton. She said no last night, Obama reported—but she’d called him back that morning. “She’s going to do it,” he said.
Jarrett studied Obama. In the course of the campaign, their conversations had numbered in the thousands. She couldn’t remember a time when he seemed prouder, more satisfied.
It was November 20. The election was sixteen days in the past. But today, Obama had pulled off the grandest game changer of them all. On the brink of great power and awesome responsibility, he and Clinton were on the same team.
Index
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ABC News, 71, 90, 99, 202, 234, 241, 342, 343–44, 368, 373, 397, 418
Abedin, Huma, 25, 165, 183, 434
abortion, 355, 356, 359, 361
Afghanistan, 83, 329
Afghanistan War, 371
AFL-CIo, 143
Africa Bill Clinton interview about Obama from, 343
Edwards’s trip to, 131
idea of Bush spending republican convention in, 366
Obama’s trip to, 31, 55–56, 68,
African American churches, 71, 234–36, 247, 253
African Americans, 195, 338 Hillary Clinton’s support among, 6, 90, 99, 100, 114, 214
Obama’s support among, 90, 106, 197–98, 205, 215, 231, 244, 429
see also African American churches; civil rights movement; racism
AIPAC, 259
Alaska, 358–68, 372, 396, 399, 409
Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), 367, 410
Alaska National Guard, 368
Albright, Madeleine, 164, 173
Alcalde and Fay, 305, 306
Alito, Samuel, 296, 365
Al Qaeda, 110
Altman, roger, 100–101, 140–41
American International Group (AIG), 378, 380, 381
Arizona, 101, 317, 323 McCain’s home in, 280, 358, 422
Arkansas, 9, 193, 198, 295
Associated Press (AP), 17, 309, 312, 332
Atwater, Lee, 209–11, 311
Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 55, 58–59, 108, 236
Axelrod, David, 26–27, 29, 30, 32, 59, 67, 91, 128, 170, 185, 229, 350–51, 385, 406 former political clients of, 26
Hillary Clinton and, 26, 119, 263
as Obama’s chief strategist, 2, 61–65, 72–75, 103–5, 108–10, 113–16, 152, 160, 162–62, 189, 202, 204, 205, 213, 236–37, 242–43, 248, 338, 341, 376–77, 390, 412–13
Ayers, William, 241–42, 333, 408, 421, 422
Baer, Don, 194
Baldick, Nick, 128, 130–31, 133, 134–35, 139
Band, Doug, 50, 173, 203
Baron, Fred, 167
Baruch College, 258
Bauer, Bob, 103
Bayh, Evan, 35, 100, 267, 335, 340, 341
Bear Stearns, 378
Beatty, Warren, 87, 89
Benenson, Joel, 104, 119, 327
Bennett, Bob, 308–9
Berman, Wayne, 415
Bernanke, Ben, 380–81
Biden, Hunter, 406
Biden, Jill, 336, 341
Biden, Joe, 35, 100, 172 campaigning of, 260–61, 411–14
Hillary Clinton and, 336, 337–38, 432, 433
long-winded monologues and gaffes of, 28, 336, 338, 341, 342, 406, 411–14
Obama and, 337, 340–42, 411–14, 419, 429
preparation and debate of Palin and, 370, 401–407
presidential bids of, 145, 335–36
Senate career of, 28, 336, 337, 338
vetting and selection of, 267, 335–38, 340–42
Biegun, Steve, 370–71, 400
Binder, David, 103–4, 416
Black, Charlie, 286, 297, 302, 308, 316, 318, 356, 359, 366, 384, 391
Black Entertainment Television (BET), 199, 261, 419
Blagojevich, rod, 95
Blair, Tony, 43
Bloomberg, Mike, 354, 358
Bluhm, Neil, 21
Blumenthal, Sidney, 214, 242, 255
Boehner, John, 382, 386, 388
Bonior, David, 137
Boxer, Barbara, 37
Bradley, Bill, 90, 266
Bridge to Nowhere, 366, 372, 396
Bronfman, Edgar, 106
Brownback, Sam, 69, 295
Brumberger, Josh, 129–35
Building and Construction Trades Department, U.S., 108
Burkle, ron, 48, 87
Burson-Marsteller, 43, 194, 240
Bush, George H. W., 40
Bush, George W., 146, 185, 221–22, 227–28, 267, 294, 328, 330, 366, 368, 371, 372 administration of, 22, 28, 34, 42, 43, 45–46, 64, 79, 91, 111, 147, 271–72, 277, 278, 283, 310, 316, 331, 355, 381, 387–89, 393, 397
Bill Clinton and, 227–28
Iraq
War and, 35, 45–46, 79, 84, 91, 186, 274–75, 278, 295, 297
McCain and, 272, 274–75, 316, 375, 384, 385, 387–89
unpopularity of, 272
see also specific elections
Bush, Laura, 372
California primaries of 2008, 222, 257, 290, 314
Carbonetti, Tony, 292
Carson, Jay, 41, 46–49, 96–97, 180
Carter, Jimmy, 112, 218
Carville, James, 18, 154, 239, 346, 432
CBS News, 386, 395, 397, 405, 419
Cecil, Guy, 196–97
Cedar rapids, Iowa, 3, 65, 105, 158
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 290
Chappaqua, N.Y., 49, 343 Clinton home in, 19, 22, 48, 79, 80
Charlie Rose, 107, 163, 359
Cheney, Dick, 111, 123, 146, 296, 330, 366, 368, 382, 416, 422–23, 424–25
Chicago, Ill., 2, 13–14, 20–21, 23–24, 58–59, 61–66, 108–9, 118, 134, 223, 234–35, 241, 245, 427
Obama’s home and headquarters in, 28, 29, 107, 202, 233
South Side of, 65–66, 236
Chicago Tribune, 26, 208, 236
Childs, Edith, 427
civil rights movement, 99, 185, 198, 421
Clemons, Nick, 178, 181, 189
climate change, 35, 137
Clinton, Bill administration of, 5, 15, 16, 24, 34, 43, 44, 51, 65, 100, 112, 187, 198, 200, 417
books of, 20–21, 163
George W. Bush and, 227–28
dynastic hopes of, 6, 209, 218
impeachment of, 15, 19, 40, 42, 65, 193, 212, 220, 256
media coverage of, 86, 87–88, 178, 197–98, 202, 207–8, 210, 212, 281
Obama and, 21, 24, 155, 162–63, 186, 197–98, 200–215, 218, 264, 267, 332, 343–45, 380, 417–18
philanthropic work of, 40, 163, 382, 385, 431, 433
political acumen and talent of, 40, 154–55, 164, 178, 182, 202, 207–8, 209
Game Change Page 47