HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  The final tweaks to the speech were made at the last minute. Hillary arrived nearly an hour late, well past even Clinton Standard Time, the term Washingtonians have long used to describe Bill’s indifference to other people’s schedules.

  She had to bury her own campaign before she could praise Obama, and she delivered a long eulogy. It took more than six minutes, and almost seven hundred words, for Hillary to get to the two that mattered most: “The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States,” she said.

  In its final iteration, Hillary’s Building Museum speech wove together the threads of her base, Obama’s base, and the common Democratic values they shared. As is often the case with politicians and their concessions, it rated as the best speech of her campaign. But it will be most remembered for the stanzas that had made Hillary uncertain the night before.

  “Now, on a personal note, when I was asked what it means to be a woman running for president, I always gave the same answer, that I was proud to be running as a woman, but I was running because I thought I’d be the best president,” she said, building to an echo of the famous line—“Ain’t I a woman”—that Sojourner Truth uttered at a Women’s Convention in 1851. “But I am a woman, and like millions of women, I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that respects and embraces the potential of every last one of us.”

  Hillary, having integrated the struggles of women and African Americans by subtly paying homage to Truth, retreated briefly from the building momentum, allowing the crowd to recover—for just a moment—before etching an indelible line in the nation’s political memory.

  “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it,” she said, as her supporters, some of them in tears, burst into applause. “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.”

  With everyone in the building now rapt, Hillary bound her cause to Obama’s through a more explicit marriage of the women’s rights movement and the black civil rights movement. “Think of the suffragists who gathered at Seneca Falls in 1848 and those who kept fighting until women could cast their votes,” she said. “Think of the abolitionists who struggled and died to see the end of slavery. Think of the civil rights heroes and foot soldiers who marched, protested, and risked their lives to bring about the end to segregation and Jim Crow.”

  It was a powerful pivot, from the emotional pull of the women’s movement and the hope of electing the first woman president to the parallel arc of the civil rights movement and the possibility that her own followers could still make history by electing Obama. Women and African Americans, and no small number of activists who were both, shared the same struggle for equality and opportunity. Moreover, it was a personal struggle.

  “Because of them, I grew up taking for granted that women could vote, and because of them, my daughter grew up taking for granted that children of all colors could go to school together,” Hillary said. “Because of them, Barack Obama and I could wage a hard-fought campaign for the Democratic nomination. Because of them and because of you, children today will grow up taking for granted that an African American or a woman can, yes, become the president of the United States.”

  No doubt the same logic could be applied to rally African Americans, Hispanics, gays, and other minorities to her cause if she ran for president again.

  The argument sounded so genuine because she, too, had to give up her dream, or at least defer it. It had once seemed so inevitable, her course to the White House and certainly to the Democratic nomination, and now she was being asked to support the guy nearly fifteen years her junior who had skipped the line to get in front of her. To ask her millions of followers to do the same thing, she needed to give a compelling explanation for her own conversion.

  The two factions in Hillary’s campaign had battled over the balance of eulogizing her own candidacy and endorsing Obama’s for so long that talking points for the media were drafted in an anteroom after the speech was delivered. The speech was really hard to write, she thought, and just as hard to deliver. But it was credible because she didn’t ask her supporters to do anything she wasn’t willing to do. Like her candidacy, it was both aspirational and inspirational, and her decision to link herself so directly with the cause of women’s rights was an early sign that Hillary was ready to take charge of a new political narrative that cast her more as a pioneer and an Obama loyalist than either her husband or his old political advisers would have liked.

  Hillary disappeared from public view for two weeks after the concession speech, spent some time at the Clintons’ primary residence in Chappaqua, New York, and in the Dominican Republic, then returned to the Senate with the pomp of a president on June 24, a humid Tuesday. When her mini-motorcade pulled up to the Capitol that morning, Clinton’s staff met her on the East Front plaza outside.

  They knew it would be a hard homecoming for their boss; staying in the Senate had never been the plan. So they set out to make her landing a little softer. In lieu of encountering “Welcome back!” banners and tear-jerking speeches, she entered her office to find a Ping-Pong tournament in midswing. Staffers clad in gym clothes—headbands, shorts, striped knee-high socks—paddled a ball back and forth. Dan Schwerin, a press aide who returned to the Senate after working with Balderston and Elrod on the campaign, had driven all over town to find the table in time for Hillary’s arrival.

  Clinton delighted in the boisterous, unlikely scene inside the Senate office that she hadn’t seen much of in recent months. She let out a hearty laugh. To network anchors, the sound of her full-body laugh was a “cackle,” a word that made her aides cringe; but to her adoring and anxious staff, it was a sign of normalization. “I love this!” she exclaimed.

  She watched the match closely, as the ball was smacked in one direction and batted back in the other—a dynamic with which she was very familiar. She couldn’t resist offering a self-aware admonition to the legislative assistant who ultimately lost.

  “Be gracious in defeat,” she advised.

  In those weeks, Hillary was heeding her own advice, but she was having difficulty getting her die-hard supporters to follow suit. The campaigns booked a ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington two nights later, June 26, so that Hillary could gather her top donors and political supporters in a show of unity for Obama. It was a struggle to fill out the guest list, as many of Hillary’s most loyal backers were still in no mood to shift allegiance. But the room was full by the time Obama and Hillary appeared together with Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton family fund-raiser who introduced them to the crowd. Hillary spoke glowingly of Obama, and he returned the favor, recounting how his daughter Malia had told him it was “about time” for a woman to be president.

  “I’m going to need Hillary by my side campaigning during this election, and I’m going to need all of you,” said Obama, who announced that he had written a check for $2,300 to help retire Hillary’s campaign debt and had asked his leading donors to do the same. But his olive branch was quickly snapped in half. During a question-and-answer session, Hillary’s supporters peppered Obama with questions that were thinly veiled jabs.

  “Q and A really turned more into commentary, and some of her most significant supporters were very pointed and forceful,” one participant recalled. “Obama was getting annoyed. It was not good.… Neither one of them were happy. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. It was supposed to be a unity event.”

  Finally Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and Hillary loyalist, put a stop to the kvetching with a call for civility. While Davis was an ardent Hillary advocate, his own son was an Obama guy—a sign of a generational divide that had to be closed for the good
of the party. “It’s time for the family to come back together and act as one and take this because we need to win,” Davis said.

  Unity, it turned out, was more than just a sentiment for Hillary to express. It was also the name of a remote town she had to visit to prove her loyalty. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was obsessed with the symbolism that Unity, New Hampshire, held for the forced union of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Not only did the small town’s name provide the ideal message for the absorption of the Hillary camp into Obama’s fold, but Unity had given each candidate 107 votes in the February primary. Unity was a metaphor for Plouffe himself: the perfect marriage of data and messaging. Perhaps that’s why he was so taken—much more so than anyone else—with the idea of staging the first public joint postprimary event in a tiny burg an hour west of Concord.

  It would have been far easier logistically for Obama and Clinton to rally the Democratic faithful in northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., in a major swing state. After all, they had been at the Mayflower in Washington the night before. To get to Unity, about five hundred miles away, the rivals, and their embittered aides, had to gather in close quarters on an airplane and fly about ninety minutes from Washington to New Hampshire. As if that weren’t enough punishment, they then boarded a bus for an hour-long ride to Unity Elementary School.

  Every presidential campaign event is carefully staged, but Unity was as precisely choreographed as a ballet. Staffers even e-mailed to make sure Obama’s periwinkle tie would go with Clinton’s pantsuit. The Obama campaign staff had never been assigned seats for a flight until they boarded the jet. An Obama aide dutifully made name tags for the handful of people on the plane, who were as recognizable to one another as a nose tackle is to a center. Obama settled into a window seat in the second row. Clinton sat beside him. She traveled light: Huma Abedin and traveling press director Jamie Smith were the only aides with her.

  On the flight, Obama and Hillary discussed what she and her husband could do to help him in the general election. Hillary told him that they would go all out, but warned him that the rest of her base might be more difficult to sway. She felt obligated to push them, but it wasn’t easy for her. She wanted Obama to understand that it wouldn’t happen overnight; just like his backers wouldn’t have jumped into her camp immediately if she had won the primary.

  “Look,” she told him as they flew north, “the harder part is going to be convincing my supporters at the grassroots, at the donor level, everything in between, to be enthusiastic about your campaign.”

  Enthusiasm on the plane could have used a boost as well. “A lot of people in Hillaryland were holding their noses while they were doing this,” said one former top aide with knowledge of the trip. And the feeling was mutual. On Obama’s side, Plouffe harbored an intense hatred for Hillary. The campaign had also worn on Hillary’s relationship with David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser. A decade earlier Hillary had spoken at the first annual fund-raising dinner for CURE, the epilepsy charity established by Axelrod and his wife, Susan, in honor of their daughter, who suffers from the condition, and Clinton thanked Axelrod in the acknowledgments of her memoir Living History. David Axelrod later said that Hillary was the “patron saint” of CURE and that she didn’t “hold the sins of the father against the mother and daughter,” but Susan Axelrod acknowledged that there was “a little discomfort” in the relationship during the campaign. Hillary compared a conversation with Axelrod on the bus from the airport to Unity to a “root canal.”

  “Hello, Unity!” she exclaimed, with a clenched smile, when she took the makeshift stage in an open field before a roaring crowd of about four thousand people. “Unity is not only a beautiful place, as we can see, it’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it?” As she spoke, Obama appeared locked into her every word and was the first to applaud in the right places. When she wrapped up, he kissed her and thanked her. Hillary patted his back. “You’re welcome,” she said.

  The crowd cheered with approval, but exhalation rather than elation characterized the Obama and Clinton camps when the event ended. “I remember it was a big relief when it was over because it had gone smoothly,” one Obama aide recalled. “Her people made an effort to be magnanimous.”

  There may have been residual tension after Unity, but Obama and Clinton didn’t have either the time or the mental energy to dwell in it. Nearly two weeks later they appeared side by side yet again for a couple of fund-raisers in New York, where they basked in each other’s celebrity. For Obama, it was another introduction to Hillary’s vast donor base. For Clinton, it was an opportunity to help pay off some of the backbreaking campaign debt—more than $22 million still remained—that she had racked up in her desperate attempt to catch Obama. (At one fund-raiser, Obama had to double back to the microphone after leaving the stage. He had forgotten to ask his donors to write checks for Clinton and had to remind them to fill out the forms at their tables.) For her part, Hillary still struggled with many of her top donors, cajoling them to bankroll a Democratic victory without her on the ticket.

  Over that summer, as Obama marched toward the presidency, Hillary quietly held a series of postmortem meetings with aides and advisers in her Senate office and at the house on Whitehaven Street. Each had a slightly different tenor, tone, and purpose, but all were generally aimed at figuring out what went wrong, at learning from the mistakes, and at plotting the rest of her career.

  It didn’t take her long to figure out the basics of why the campaign had imploded. “I was struck by how good of a sense she had before I walked in there of the problems that were going on in [the headquarters],” said one adviser. “She had a mosaic pieced together that if you read a transcript of it, you would have thought it was someone who sat at headquarters every day, and it was remarkably accurate.… She just had it pegged.”

  In the meetings, almost everyone told her that she had hired the wrong people for some of the top jobs. Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign’s first manager, and chief strategist Mark Penn bore the brunt of those complaints. But others, including communications chief Howard Wolfson and policy director Neera Tanden, also suffered from what one aide told her was an “arrogance of the people on top.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” she asked the aide.

  “We did,” he replied.

  The reviews shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, given that advisers had warned Hillary before the campaign not to make Doyle the campaign manager and that midway through the race Doyle had been demoted in favor of longtime Hillary confidante Maggie Williams. Of course, Penn, Doyle, and the rest of Hillary’s high command were convenient scapegoats. Ultimately, Hillary was responsible for her own dysfunctional operation, and she would have a lot to learn about managing the next political campaign.

  To the extent Hillary was dejected, she didn’t let it show beyond a very small circle. “She wasn’t doing cartwheels,” said a friend, describing her mood as “more reflective than anything.” But for many of her advisers, the midsummer sessions were more cathartic than forensic. They felt that they had personally failed her for not calling attention to problems earlier in the process.

  Burns Strider, who had served as Hillary’s link to faith-based groups during the campaign, had e-mailed her one day after the primary, while he was working on the House side of the Capitol. “I’m sad,” he wrote.

  “Come over,” Hillary replied.

  It was a hot day, and Strider—who later slimmed down with a diet and recipes sent by Bill Clinton—was very overweight at the time. He began to sweat as they walked together to the Senate floor and back to Hillary’s office. When they finally sat down at her desk, Strider couldn’t find words to express his emotions. Behind his glasses, he began to cry.

  “You need to get your composure,” Hillary admonished.

  “Well,” Strider replied in a thick Mississippi drawl, “I’m just sad.”

  “We’re all mourning,” Hillary said, acknowledging her own pain. Then she explained her co
ping mechanism.

  “We all mourn in our own ways, and then we move on,” she said. “We keep going forward.”

  Hillary felt like she had gone all out. She was exhausted but had found her peace with the result. She was proud that she had gone the full distance.

  “I’m not somebody who dwells on the past or ruminates about ‘what if, what if, what if?’ ” she said. “I have enough people around me who do that. So I don’t need to do that. I delegate it.”

  She believed “a few breaks here and there might have made a different outcome,” she said. “So, my view was, okay, I made history; I was the first woman to win primaries, I got all those votes, and I was very proud of the effort. But it fell short. So let’s get to work making sure that what I cared about, which I had expressed in my campaign, was going to be continued through Barack Obama’s candidacy. And so I had a very down-to-earth, practical approach to it.”

  For Hillary and her aides, forward was the only way through not just the devastating loss but the shock of returning to Congress. Visions of lofty White House jobs had turned back into the pedestrian reality of Senate life. The type-A personalities who drove her Capitol Hill operation were accustomed to being on the winning side; now they were all coming back with a big “L” in their column.

  Hillary was hardly the first candidate who had to descend from the rarefied air of a presidential campaign jet to the slightly less elite Senate. Over the years, countless sitting senators had run for president and returned to its ranks. But the fall for her was longer and harder. She was at once more famous and less senior than those predecessors. There was no chairmanship of a top committee waiting for her on Capitol Hill. Beyond that, the Senate she returned to was a bit of a snake pit. Of the three top Democratic Party leaders, Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the cochairman of the Obama campaign, might have treated her best over the course of the primary just by being up front about his stance. The other two, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), had advised Obama behind the scenes, even though Reid had technically been neutral and Schumer had publicly been in Hillary’s camp.