HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  If the scars that the Obama and Clinton camps had inflicted on each other had not been forgotten, they had at least been forgiven. As the campaign season heated up in the spring and summer of 2012, however, the reconciliation between Obama and the Clintons created a delicious political irony. No sooner had he buried the hatchet with Obama than Bill Clinton dug it up for use on politicians who had backed Obama over Hillary in 2008, the names counted on the post-primary hit list. For his own political standing and for Hillary’s future, Bill had to pursue rapprochement with Obama; but when it came to the betrayals of friends and associates, there was no forgetting and no forgiving. A full presidential-election cycle later, Bill was still determined to get payback. The once-a-decade redistricting process had seeded a bumper crop of high-profile Democratic primaries in which one candidate had supported Obama in 2008 and the other had backed Hillary.

  Just a few days before the fund-raiser at McAuliffe’s house, the Clinton bell finally tolled for Jason Altmire, the Pennsylvania congressman who had infuriated Hillary in 2008 by withholding his superdelegate endorsement. Earlier in the spring, Bill had gone into overdrive to help Kathleen Kane, a Hillary supporter, in a primary for the Democratic nomination for Pennsylvania attorney general. She was running against Altmire’s fellow Obama-besotted pol Patrick Murphy, who had endorsed Obama early in the 2008 cycle and was now trying to make a comeback after losing his House seat to a Republican in 2010.

  When Bill endorsed Kane in late March 2012, Altmire saw the writing on the wall. He called one of his leading advisers, Rachel Heiser, and told her he was worried that if Bill was willing to involve himself in a state attorney general’s race to exact retribution for 2008, Bill’s next step would be to target Altmire for defeat. At the time, Altmire was the heavy favorite to beat fellow Democratic representative Mark Critz in a redistricting-induced primary, because their new, shared district included more of Altmire’s old turf than Critz’s. But Bill had helped Critz succeed his old boss, the late representative John Murtha, who had backed Hillary in 2008.

  On April 12, about two weeks before the primary, Altmire’s fears were validated. “I am proud to endorse Mark Critz for Congress,” Bill said in a statement. “I know that Mark will continue his work to create jobs, strengthen the middle class, protect Social Security and Medicare, and do what is right for western Pennsylvania and our nation.”

  Critz immediately turned the endorsement into a TV ad, and on primary election day he edged Altmire by 1,489 votes out of more than 63,000 cast. Critz won Cambria County, where Bill had campaigned for him in a 2010 special election, with 91 percent of the votes cast there. It’s impossible to say how many votes Bill Clinton turned or turned out, but everyone involved in the race agreed that his endorsement of Critz had been pivotal. “It certainly had an impact,” Altmire conceded.

  On the same day, Kane beat Murphy, who had picked up an endorsement from Obama adviser David Axelrod, 53 percent to 47 percent. While Kane went on to win in the general election, Bill Clinton’s aid to Critz may have resulted in the loss of a Democratic seat in the House: in November, Critz lost to Republican Keith Rothfus, the man Altmire had beaten in 2010, by less than four percentage points.

  But the ledger had been balanced. Four years after Michelle Obama had wooed Altmire and Murphy, telling them how Barack Obama was going to blindside Hillary, Bill had blindsided them.

  That same spring businessman John Delaney shocked Maryland’s political establishment by defeating state senate majority leader Rob Garagiola in a primary in a solidly Democratic district anchored in Washington’s wealthy Montgomery County suburbs. Garagiola and his friends in the legislature had drawn the district so that it would elect him to the U.S. House. He had picked up endorsements from Governor Martin O’Malley, House minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), and most of the liberal groups in the state.

  But Delaney, who had raised money for Hillary, had Bill on his side. Delaney coasted to victory, helped along in part by a robocall Bill recorded for him. “Bill Clinton was as much involved and as much responsible for Delaney winning as anyone,” said a former State Department aide familiar with Bill’s activities.

  In June, Bill went head-to-head with Obama in a New Jersey Democratic primary featuring Representative Bill Pascrell, a cigar-smoking seventy-five-year-old member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, against Representative Steve Rothman, a fifty-nine-year-old member of the similarly powerful Appropriations Committee. Both men had first been elected to the House on Bill Clinton’s coattails in 1996. Pascrell had jumped into Hillary’s camp in 2008, while Rothman had gone with Obama. As president, Obama had been judicious—some might say stingy—in hitting the campaign trail for other candidates, particularly in Democratic primaries. On occasion, in his place, one of Obama’s advisers would give an endorsement to a favored candidate, as Axelrod had for Murphy.

  But when Bill showed up in Paterson to campaign for Pascrell, Obama countered personally. He invited Rothman to meet him at the White House, where pictures of the two men walking past the Rose Garden were taken. There was no guile in the act. “The president said he had invited me to the Oval Office because he wanted everybody to know that he supported my reelection to the Congress so I could help him with his agenda in his second term, as I have in the first,” Rothman said.

  But Obama didn’t go all out for Rothman the way Bill did for Pascrell. In what had been expected to be a close race, Pascrell coasted, 61 percent to 39 percent.

  Obama had plenty of reasons to stay out of intraparty feuds as much as possible and particularly to avoid appearing on behalf of other candidates at public rallies. By taking sides in other races, he would inevitably alienate some of his own supporters and would be seen as a partisan political operator, at a time when his own reelection hopes depended on his ability to capture the political middle ground. And of course, he didn’t have a lot of extra time on his hands to campaign for other candidates. Bill wasn’t constrained by the latter two considerations, but because Hillary might run again, he had to avoid angering her base with his activities on the campaign trail.

  In an unusual twist, Bill backed off of Howard Berman, who had launched a full-scale campaign to persuade him not to raise money or campaign for Brad Sherman. Because of a new election system in California, Berman and Sherman were actually pitted against each other twice, first in a pivotal primary in the spring and then again in a general election in November. In May 2012, Obama lent his imprimatur to Berman by letting Berman ride with him to an Obama reelection fund-raiser at movie star George Clooney’s house. But Bill, after releasing his August 2011 statement of support for Sherman, never reengaged with the race.

  “I believe that effort kept him from doing anything more,” Berman said. “He was mulling it.… He did not do fund-raising for Brad, he did not come into the district and do events for Brad. I didn’t get the full treatment.”

  But the statement did enough damage. Sherman topped Berman by 10 points in the primary and by 21 points in the November runoff.

  “I don’t blame Bill Clinton for what he did,” Berman said. “That’s a certain loyalty.… I didn’t like it, but it’s not a source of hostility to me. That’s the way politics is.”

  With Berman, Bill and Hillary scored a double victory. To Berman’s friends, Bill had seen the wisdom of reason in the end. But Sherman’s victory was touted in the press as another tally in Bill’s column, feeding the perception among Democrats that it was dangerous to cross the Clintons.

  There’s no question that fellow members of the Democratic Party received Bill’s message. There was a price to pay—sometimes an entire political career—for crossing the Clintons. “It has the desired effect,” Representative Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), an admirer of Hillary’s, said of the Bill Clinton payback tour. “Let us just posit that they’re even thinking about Hillary running in 2016. In case she is challenged in the primary, a lot of people, after this, are going to think long and hard about supporting her opponent. I
t’s not cost-free.”

  Even as Bill and Obama were fighting proxy wars through candidates like Pascrell and Rothman, they continued to plot Clinton’s contribution to Obama’s reelection. A few days after the New Jersey primary, Obama advisers Jim Messina and Axelrod paid a visit to Bill’s suite at the top of the riverfront Chicago Sheraton. Clinton was in town for CGI’s annual national conference and was joined by Doug Band, Justin Cooper, Jon Davidson, and spokesman Matt McKenna. John Podesta, who had served as Bill’s White House chief of staff and as director of Obama’s presidential transition team, was Switzerland.

  It could have been a tense talk. Bill had just made two public statements that undermined Obama attacks on Romney: he had challenged the wisdom of letting tax cuts on earners making $250,000 or more expire, and he had come to the defense of Romney and private-equity firms when the Obama campaign criticized the Republican nominee’s record at Bain Capital.

  But Obama’s aides, who were dealing with a lot of off-message surrogates, saw Bill’s comments as rustiness rather than sabotage. “I don’t think there was anyone on the campaign who thought he was intentionally trying to screw things up,” one senior Obama adviser said. “He wanted to be an asset, and he was a big asset.”

  Messina, who could see the Obama campaign headquarters from the window of Clinton’s suite, simply wanted to make sure that asset was being used in the right way. He began talking to Bill about polling information, voter data, and campaign infrastructure in minute detail. The rest of the room melted away as Bill and Messina spent an hour in the weeds of the campaign.

  “The two biggest field data nerds I’ve ever met in my life, they’re going over precinct-by-precinct data from ’08 versus ’12,” said a source in the room who marked the meeting as the moment that Bill Clinton began to focus on reelecting Obama. “That was the day.”

  Messina found Clinton to be what he expected—a world-class adviser and political strategist—while Clinton liked Messina’s willingness to lay the campaign’s cards on the table. Their discussion ranged beyond raw political data to messaging, policy, and the ways Bill could most be helpful on the campaign trail. Over the summer and fall, Clinton and Messina spoke frequently.

  Bill had a particular expertise that only one other living man could claim: he had defeated a sitting president. In fact, the feat had been pulled off only three times since 1932—and one of the incumbents who lost was the accidental president Gerald Ford. Bill’s 1992 victory over George H. W. Bush, and his reelection win in 1996 over Bob Dole, gave him special insight into what factored into voters’ judgment of a sitting president. The common factor in lost reelection bids was a weak economy, and Obama’s efforts to get America bustling again hadn’t been as successful as he had hoped. If Romney won and the economy rebounded, as many experts predicted, it would be harder for Hillary to take the presidency in 2016. Therefore the best outcome for Hillary was an Obama victory followed by a booming economy. Ultimately, Bill had no reason to half-ass it for Obama and every reason to go full throttle.

  Spurred on by his growing dislike for Romney, Bill hit the afterburners in Charlotte at the Democratic National Convention. The tipping point had come in August, when Romney tried to pin Obama for going back on the welfare reform law that Bill had signed as president. “The Romney people specifically sort of decided to cozy up to [Bill]…. They tried to drive a wedge between Clinton and Obama on welfare,” recalled a source close to Bill Clinton. “That was one of their three biggest tactical mistakes of the campaign.”

  It was too cute by half in Bill’s book, the kind of shenanigans that worked in a race for a town board but not in a presidential campaign. His professional sensibilities were a little offended. If the meeting with Messina in Chicago had gotten Bill invested in the Obama campaign, the welfare flap got him energized to bludgeon Romney. “Over time, more and more, it felt like he was part of the team,” one Obama adviser observed.

  Bill was eager to hit the trail not just for Obama but also for Democratic Senate candidates—powerful players in future Democratic primaries. But he needed to turn his convention speech into the right springboard for that effort. Romney had been pounding Obama on the limp economy, and Bill’s primary objective was to make Romney’s worldview look like that of an insulated rich guy while wrapping the mantle of the Clinton economic success around Obama’s shoulders. In 2008 everyone knew Bill had been a reluctant advocate for Obama’s cause, but this time, when it came to the president’s reelection, he strove to make sure there was no doubt where he stood.

  In preparing for his dramatic turn onstage—a moment of redemption, catharsis, and political resurrection—Bill surrounded himself with a who’s who of his presidency for a mighty thirteen-hour jam session. Paul Begala, Mark Penn, Joe Lockhart, Sandy Berger, Bruce Reed, and Gene Sperling served as the lieutenants in a new war room that looked a lot like the old one, only grayer and more grizzled. Lockhart had been Bill’s White House press secretary, Berger his national security adviser, Reed the head of the Bill-driven centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and Sperling a top economic adviser. Reed and Sperling, both of whom now worked for Obama, were the connective tissue between the two camps. The Obama folks saw them as old Clinton hands helping the former president work his magic. The Clinton team regarded them as old friends who nonetheless were with Obama. The cast of characters rotated throughout the day, as Bill sanded a vintage speech full of clever contrasts, memorable for its delivery more than for its substance, and a bit too long.

  Bill had begun collecting thoughts on the speech a few weeks earlier, but it was generally a souped-up version of the speeches he had already delivered for Obama. Like Sinatra warming up for a rendition of “New York, New York,” Bill didn’t need much of a rehearsal. He practiced the speech just once all the way through. Once he started the full run-through, his pals knew he would deliver onstage. The text was shuttled over to the Obama camp, where David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Jon Favreau, and Obama anxiously waited. They made a few edits. Then Clinton re-added some old material that hadn’t been in the previous draft. News outlets would soon note that Clinton’s remarks didn’t quite match the prepared text they’d been given by the Obama campaign. Bill was satisfied with the speech by 9:45 p.m., and he took the podium half an hour later.

  Romney’s plan lacked an important component, Obama’s team had been saying: math. But Bill said it differently. In the folksy tone that the lower-class son of Arkansas had used to connect with average Americans for more than two decades, he used a longer word to convey a simple concept that every American who had attended grade school could understand—particularly the older set that Obama was having trouble winning over. “Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic.”

  Arithmetic, not math. It was classic Clinton, and the audience rewarded it with a rousing ovation. “If they stay with their five-trillion-dollar tax-cut plan—in a deficit-reduction plan?—the arithmetic tells us, no matter what they say, only one of three things is about to happen.” He ticked through them, one by one: middle-class families would see their taxes go up, basic services would be gutted, or the national debt would pile even higher.

  Then Clinton turned his attention to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who had been attacking Obama for slashing Medicare even though Ryan’s budget used the same savings. “It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did,” Clinton said to laughter and applause. Sperling would later say privately that the “brass” line hadn’t appeared in any of the drafts of Clinton’s speech. One of the best lines of the night was ad-libbed—or at least held back from the Obama camp.

  Obama watched the speech on a monitor from the wings. During the campaign, according to one of his top aides, he had sometimes found himself forgetting that he had his own speech to give while watching Bill spin text into narrative. He found Bill “very entertaining,” the aide said,
and swore to himself and others that he would give more freewheeling speeches when he was no longer in office.

  There were a lot of ways to interpret Bill’s newfound love for Obama, but they all boiled down to a simple defining trait of the Clintons’ careers: loyalty. In the loftiest sense, Bill was showing loyalty to his country by promoting the candidate he felt was best positioned to lead it. From another perspective, he was demonstrating loyalty to the Democratic Party, as he had from his days as a driver for Governor Orval Faubus right up to that very moment.

  But he was also loyally laying the groundwork for Hillary to run in 2016. If she hoped to capture the nomination and win the presidency, she would need a unified Democratic Party, one that was healed from the bitter 2008 primary. Bill mentioned her early in the speech. Obama, he said, had been wise enough to bring his rivals into the fold—he was of such sound judgment, Bill said, that he had hired Hillary to be his diplomat. Since that moment in 2008, in a political chess game played expertly by both sides, Obama and Hillary had bound together their own political fortunes as well as Bill’s interests both in resurrecting his own image and in positioning Hillary for a second run. The Clinton-Obama political marriage had been more fruitful than any of them could have imagined four years earlier.

  It was afternoon in Dili, East Timor, and Hillary had wrapped up meetings with the president, the prime minister, and the American embassy staff there. Before flying to Brunei for a dinner with the sultan, she settled into a chair in the ambassador’s personal quarters to watch a recording of Bill’s speech. Her aides had undertaken a minor operation to allow her to watch. First, after trial and error, they had determined that the ambassador’s personal computer was the only one in the building equipped to download the recording that Philippe Reines had made remotely and accessed from the Slingbox in his Washington, D.C., apartment.