HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  But as Team Obama began to map out the president’s reelection bid in the summer of 2011, it became increasingly clear they needed a little Clinton magic. Bill was once again the patriarch of the Democratic Party, having regained his own broad popularity as Obama’s had diminished over the course of more than two years in the presidency. It was the biggest irony heading into the reelection campaign, Obama’s aides acknowledged. They needed the man who had once attempted to tear their guy down, the man some accused of race-baiting, to help win the second round.

  Even though the relationship between the two presidents had grown from barely bearable to cordial, it would be a sensitive mission, asking Clinton to go all out for Obama. There was no love lost between Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and Doug Band, the self-important minder of Clinton’s phone calls, calendar, and political favor file. So Obama’s aides called on Wasserman Schultz, who represented Florida in the House, to play matchmaker between the two presidents.

  During a blistering-hot Washington summer in 2011, Wasserman Schultz dialed up Band to start the dance of involving Bill in the campaign. Band, ever the savvy political operator who returns calls on his own timetable, knew why the congresswoman was calling. He was slow to call her back. Bill Clinton was playing hard to get—or at least Band was. “It’s not like there was this enthusiastic rush to jump on board,” said one Clinton ally.

  Months went by, until Wasserman Schultz finally connected with Band in the late fall. Messina, chief Obama strategist David Axelrod, DNC executive director Patrick Gaspard, and pollster Joel Benenson wanted an audience with Clinton. They settled on November 9, just less than a year before Election Day, at Bill’s Harlem office.

  The meeting was a classic exercise in bonding, but it was also an opportunity for the Obama aides to roll out the full-court press and solicit advice from the former president. They needed Clinton solidly on their team, and to woo him, they were willing to play to his sense of importance.

  Inside a conference room at the Clinton office, Messina presided over a PowerPoint slide show presentation, laying out the details of the Obama campaign strategy, state by state, and explaining in great detail the pathways to victory. As Messina spouted off statistics and numbers, Clinton—joined by Band and Band protégé Justin Cooper—carefully reviewed each slide and listened intently. Cooper, who would later take over Band’s duties, had interned for Band in the Clinton White House, and he dressed like, spoke like, and committed the same grammatical errors as his mentor. When it was over, Bill offered up his thoughts on various states and counties. Few people knew the numbers and specifics of state-by-state politics better than Bill, who could easily tick off which counties in Colorado had the largest populations of college-age students to increase turnout and where Team Obama needed to set its sights in must-win Ohio.

  Messina, who had left his deputy chief of staff job at the White House earlier in the year to head up the Obama campaign operation, had spent time reading books on reelection bids, including Clinton’s 1996 victory. Going into the meeting, he was particularly interested in the strategy Clinton had used to define his opponent, Bob Dole, early on in the campaign, and he wanted Clinton’s thoughts on how to replicate it in 2012.

  Obama’s top advisers were floating two ideas about Romney, the more clichéd theme of Romney being a flip-flopper, and another portraying Romney as an extreme conservative who held views aligned with the Tea Party. Clinton recommended that they focus on the latter. Donors in particular, he told the Obama crowd, would welcome such a strategy. Besides, he added, going with the flip-flopper tack didn’t generally work.

  The meeting was scheduled for an hour, aides said, but it lasted two and a half, as Team Obama mapped out the reelection strategy for Clinton. Bill savored the political talk, every second of it. The Obama folks, after all these years, were finally starting to speak Clinton’s language back to him. It was always good to get political insights from the former president, but the gentle woo—soliciting his advice, talking to him in numbers, and getting him energized for the campaign—was more important for its power in creating buy-in from Clinton, who would go on to be Obama’s most effective surrogate.

  Obama’s aides left the meeting feeling satisfied and grateful for Clinton’s help. Back in Chicago and Washington, they bragged that the meeting went “really, really well.”

  “A lot of the advice President Clinton gave us was helpful and exactly right,” said one of the Obama aides.

  The Harlem power conference paved the way for a bit of business that would bind Obama and the Clintons in the way that most counts in politics: financially. Days after the meeting, Band dialed up Gaspard, executive director of the DNC. He was calling to relay an ask from Bill to Obama. The former president wanted Obama to take another crack at retiring Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign debt once and for all. The debt, which had once totaled more than $25 million, had fallen to $274,000, due in large part to e-mail pitches and raffles sent to donors from Bill. While Hillary crisscrossed the world as top diplomat, Bill sent several e-mails to donor lists, including one that stated that while her campaign was “so close to paying off the last of her debt—she’s not there yet.”

  But nearly every dollar had been squeezed. Hillary’s debt didn’t seem like an astronomical number, but there were a lot of obstacles to getting it paid off. First and foremost, a lot of Democratic donors in both her camp and Obama’s already had given maximum contributions either to fund the original campaign or to pay off the debt after the primary. The Clintons were desperate for new sources of cash. There were still Obama donors who had categorically refused to write checks to her, even after Obama appealed to them to do just that in 2008. Bill needed Obama to prod his elite set of givers a bit harder.

  While some Obama donors still had hard feelings from 2008, others were now more willing to pony up. “It was significantly different because, number one, you were much further removed, and, two, you saw the work as secretary of state,” said one Obama donor who subsequently gave to Hillary and called her the “number one team player” in Obama’s cabinet. There was also a good back-scratching reason for Obama’s team to step up its effort to pay off Hillary’s debt: Bill agreed to do three fund-raisers for Obama in the spring.

  A few weeks after Obama’s aides visited Clinton in New York, the two presidents came together again in downtown Washington.

  As the economy was beginning to awaken after a steep decline, Obama held an event on the twelfth floor of an environment-friendly building to announce a $4 billion initiative in federal and private green building investments aimed at creating jobs. He invited Clinton, who had worked extensively on the green building effort through his Global Initiative, to join him.

  Even then, after Obama’s campaign had courted Clinton and sought his advice on the reelection, the exchange between the two presidents seemed polite but perfunctory. “Work friends,” one White House aide called them, adding that the two wouldn’t necessarily be hanging out on a Saturday night recounting old tales over beer. Deep down, they had little in common—and said as much both publicly and privately.

  But Bill Clinton tried his best to show the world that he was on Obama’s side more than ever. “I never got to open for the Rolling Stones, so I’ll try and do my best for the president,” he said, before introducing Obama at the event in Washington.

  The two presidents had spent some time earlier that fall on the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base, the first time Obama had invited Clinton onto the links. They golfed for four hours on a cloudy day, accompanied by White House chief of staff Daley and the ever-present Band. It was Band who had recommended to Patrick Gaspard that Obama invite the former president to play a round of golf as a means of bringing the two sides together. There, as they took swings, Bill offered his opinions to Obama. It was too much for Obama, who said he could only take Bill “in doses.”

  Two months later, around the time Obama aides traveled to Clinton’s office to woo him, the former pres
ident continued to offer his opinions to Obama in a book he penned, Back to Work. The older president had been frustrated for quite some time, feeling as though Obama had lost his message. He would complain about Obama’s loss of narrative to anyone who would listen: friends, former aides, and even those with ties to the president. The book was his way of explaining the policies, in classic Clinton style: simple and bite-sized.

  Some White House aides privately grumbled about the book in the halls of the West Wing. But Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told the New York Times, “We appreciate his insights and his advocacy.” Aides on both sides had always maintained there was little daylight between the two presidents on policy. And now at the green building announcement, Obama aimed to incorporate Clinton’s presidency into his own narrative.

  “When Bill Clinton was president, we didn’t shortchange investment,” Obama said. “We lived within our means. We invested in our future. We asked everybody to pay their fair share. You know what happened? The private sector thrived, jobs were created, the middle class grew, its income grew, millions rose out of poverty, we ran a surplus. We were actually on track to be able to pay off all of our debt. We were firing on all cylinders. We can be that nation again.”

  Incorporating Clinton into the fold was a mixed bag for Obama. It was smart to draw parallels to his Democratic predecessor, but it also served as a reminder of the good old days in the Clinton administration, while making Obama look more like the inexperienced leader he had been portrayed as during the 2008 campaign. Ultimately, Obama was willing to sacrifice a little pride in service of winning a second term.

  Moments after Obama concluded his remarks, Ed Henry, the senior White House correspondent for Fox News, shouted a question for the president. President Clinton, that is. “President Clinton, do you have any advice for President Obama about the economy?” Henry asked. A smiling Clinton, who had rarely shied away from the cameras during his presidency, lit up, while Obama tried to bat it down.

  “Oh, he gives me advice all the time,” Obama said to laughter, as he shook Clinton’s hand and tried his best to end the conversation there. White House press aides, always guarding against the risk of unscripted moments, began shouting for reporters to make their way out of the building. But as Obama shook the hands of the other attendees, Clinton, wearing a chocolate brown three-piece suit, slid up to the podium with its presidential seal and took a stab at the question.

  “I just want to, I’ll say again, this announcement today, the reason you should be encouraged by this, you can run the numbers and see how many jobs,” the former president began. By then Obama was standing off to the side watching Clinton yet again commandeer the microphone. It was almost a repeat performance of the time a year earlier when an at-ease Clinton had taken the reins of the podium at the White House, fielding questions from reporters for nearly half an hour. Now as Obama looked on, Clinton settled in right at home, his elbow leaning against the podium and his right leg comfortably crossed over his left.

  He never directly answered the question on what advice he would give Obama. Aides close to Clinton say he doesn’t like to discuss the regularity with which he and Obama speak or what ground they cover. But Clinton gave his endorsement of the president’s announcement.

  “The president, by doing this, can trigger pools of investment so that you can have more buildings like this,” he said. The nod may have seemed issue-specific, but what Clinton was really doing was giving his early endorsement to the 2012 reelection campaign and, more than anything, showing that the past was just that—in the past.

  In mid-December, Hillary attended a baby shower for Huma Abedin at the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington. Huma’s pregnancy had first been revealed over the summer as a coda to Weiner’s texting scandal, with the news serving as a final outrage for those angered by his betrayal. A good number of them were present for the baby shower, which brought together what one participant described as a “great sisterhood” of Hillaryland. The guest list also included Alyssa Mastromonaco, the veteran Obama scheduler who had first contacted Huma to set up the meeting at which Hillary was asked to join the administration, and two of Hillary’s most important rising-star allies in Democratic politics, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Wasserman Schultz.

  When Huma’s friends offered toasts to her, Hillary was asked to give a speech. “Today is not my day. Today is Huma’s day,” Hillary demurred. “I love her, and I wish her the best.”

  “Huma is family to them,” the participant said. Hillary “just wants her to be happy and have people leave her alone.” But that would prove impossible when Weiner ran for mayor of New York in 2013, ensuring that Huma’s personal life would be tied to Hillary’s political narrative as the 2016 campaign season drew closer. “In a perfect world, she would not be with Anthony so that stuff would go away or come up to a lesser degree,” one source with longtime ties to Clinton said. “He’s an impediment. But the damage is done now. If she runs, it will be part of the narrative. Republicans are going to push it out in the press to remind people.” Still, the source added, even with Huma’s link to her husband, “she’s more of an asset than a liability.”

  THIRTEEN

  The HRC Brand

  Hillary was just sitting down for an interview with CBS News in Kabul, Afghanistan, on October 20, 2011, when Huma Abedin handed her a BlackBerry to share the news that Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

  “We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary crowed, laughing as she clapped her hands together. There could be no mistaking her glib reaction, the unseemly swagger of a victor who reveled in the demise of her vanquished foe. Hillary later said that she didn’t know at the time the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death—he had been captured by rebels, physically assaulted, and then summarily executed near his hometown of Sirte. But even days later, amid international calls for an investigation into whether the rebels had committed a war crime by murdering him without a trial, Hillary declined to say she regretted her initial boast.

  She had wanted Qaddafi dead, and she took credit for his killing. Two days earlier, during a surprise visit to Libya, she had issued a decidedly undiplomatic call for him to be “captured or killed soon.” Now, after rebels seized him, battered him, and shot him to death, Qaddafi had been both captured and killed. Seven months after Hillary had put together the coalition to stop his advance on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, she was in the process of expanding American support for the nascent government, much of it through technical assistance rather than straight cash payments. Qaddafi’s death marked a major milestone on what appeared to be a fast march to Libyan liberty and in the narrative of Hillary’s tenure as secretary.

  From the constant chatter about her taking another administration post, to Ellen Tauscher’s advice about preserving her capital when she left office, to America’s efforts to foster democratic reform movements in the Middle East and Asia, neither Hillary nor the rest of the political class could help but think about her future toward the tail end of 2011. At that point, Libya presented the best opportunity for a headline achievement—a “deliverable,” in political parlance—that would ice her legacy as the smart-power secretary.

  On the trip to Libya, just before Qaddafi’s death, Time magazine and its photographer Diana Walker had been granted an unusual level of access to Hillary and her aides, for a cover story on her use of smart power. That was indicative of the State Department’s confidence that Libya would be a signature achievement for Hillary, as she is typically very careful about which media get access to her and when. “There was a feeling that they had turned the page,” said one adviser who traveled with the secretary to Libya. “It was an illustration of the smart-power approach.”

  On a military transport flight from Malta to Libya, Walker captured the most enduring image of Hillary in command. She was sitting in one of several business-class seats that had been installed in the middle of the plane when Walker began snapping photos. As usual, Hillary was surrounded by stacks of brief
ing papers held together by massive binder clips. Wearing sunglasses and a stone-faced expression, Hillary was looking at the screen of her BlackBerry. The photo conveyed an unmistakable countenance: She was in charge.

  “You got this sense of power in her, and I think a lot of people gravitated toward that,” said Stacy Lambe, who several months later would turn the image into the Internet sensation Texts from Hillary. “It captured her in a way that I think a lot of people hadn’t seen.”

  Like an umpire in baseball, a diplomat is most effective when his or her work goes unnoticed. But that’s death for politicians. To win elections and to have sway within government, they need visibility, the ability to point to what they’ve done. By the beginning of her fourth year, Hillary’s own capital within the administration was at an all-time high, Obama’s team was in hot pursuit of her husband’s help, and nearly two-thirds of Americans approved of the job she was doing. Only the most hardheaded of Obama’s aides still harbored a grudge against her from the 2008 campaign. As a token of his appreciation, Obama gave Hillary a black iPad case with “HRC” embossed in gold lettering on the cover and “Sec State” on the spine.

  But most of Hillary’s work had been behind the scenes. She had kept her head down for much of the first two years, but by the third year, she had emerged as a player who could tip the balance in internal White House deliberations on matters of war and peace. She had stood with Obama in going after Bin Laden—at no small political risk to herself if the raid went bad—and pieced together the coalition for war in Libya. Libya was truly Hillary’s account, and it was on track to be the success that defined her legacy. The big knock on her was that she didn’t have a major foreign policy breakthrough under her belt. As the Time cover spread showed, she had the confidence, and the political imperative, to start raising her profile. If all went right, Libya would be the jewel in her crown.