HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  It was clear on that June night, as Hillary took the stage at the Navy Pier Grand Ballroom, beneath an eighty-foot dome ceiling with sweeping views of Lake Michigan, that she was regarded by everyone in the room, except perhaps herself, as a candidate for the presidency.

  Nick Merrill, Hillary’s baby-faced spokesman, fidgeted in his seat, firing off e-mails on his BlackBerry as his boss spoke; he repeatedly got up to confer with event organizers and Huma, who was waiting in the wings. Speechwriter Dan Schwerin leaned forward in his seat and watched Hillary approvingly from a press area on the sidelines of the dinner floor. Reporters from the Washington Post, Associated Press, and Bloomberg News, already assigned to Hillarywatch 2016, typed away on their laptops as she spoke.

  Hillary gave them copy, using her speech to dip back into politics by launching an attack on sequestration, the automatic spending cuts agreed to by the president and congressional Republicans in 2011. With the caps in place, she argued, research dollars for epilepsy would be harder to come by. At the time, fellow Democrats, including Obama and Biden, were trying to convince Republicans that the limits should be replaced with a mix of tax increases and spending reductions. But Hillary’s attack on sequestration could also be taken as a soft shot high across Biden’s bow; after all, he had cut the deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that created the budget-slashing mechanism.

  The coming months would test Hillary’s belief in her capacity to bring attention to a wonky policy issue without the benefit of a high-profile role in government and the hungry press corps that came with it. But the time would also give her the opportunity to activate and add to her political network while she stayed out of the partisan fray. For example, in November 2013, she was scheduled to headline the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s conference in Naples, Florida. The head of the CME, Republican Terry Duffy, raised six figures for Hillary in the 2008 election and would be expected to bundle money for her again in a 2016 run. Associating herself with such financial titans was a double-edged sword: sure, she could count on them to raise money for her, but the Democratic primary electorate doesn’t hold financiers in high esteem, whether they operate from Wall Street or Chicago’s Wacker Drive. As for her charitable work, the formula was similar to the way Hillary built her capital at State: focus on a topic that doesn’t inflame partisan tensions, reach out to the business and nonprofit communities, and engage people directly through carefully selected media, such as video messages and Twitter.

  For the second time in eight years, if Hillary chose to run, she would begin a campaign as the front-runner both for the Democratic primary nomination and for the general election. Where many voters had once seen her as a creation of her husband’s, a coat-tail rider who had made it into the Senate on the strength of Bill’s popularity and figured she could waltz back into the White House, the way she handled the ultimate reversal in the 2008 primary and stepped up when Obama asked gave her greater credibility as a success in her own right. She would run as a former secretary of state, a former senator, and a philanthropist on the mom-and-apple-pie issues of improving the lives of women, kids, and American workers. She would run as someone who had been told repeatedly what she needed to do to avoid a repeat of the cluster-fuck campaign she ran the last time: hire staff based more on competence than on loyalty and personal comfort, and position herself as the transformational candidate that she would be as the first woman to hold the presidency. She would run as a Clinton-style centrist who believes that government, business, and the nonprofit sector must all thrive. She would run as a shrewd manipulator of the levers of government who understands how to maximize dollars with public-private partnerships and how to get agencies that seem always to be at odds on the same page. She would run as an advocate and practitioner of smart power, the use of all forms of America’s influence, from persuasion to pulverization. Most of all, she could run right up to the moment—if it ever came—that she decided not to. She would even run as a candidate who, despite getting knocked down, was answering the bell for one last round.

  The X factor was Hillary’s health. Her concussion and the ensuing blood clot were no trifles. Friends who visited with her in the spring and summer of 2013 were struck by how relaxed she was but also how much older she looked after four years at State. Spending time in the Dominican Republic could do wonders for the soul, but it couldn’t roll back the clock. But her aides said, perhaps unsurprisingly, that she was fine, another indicator that they were doing everything they could to preserve her political standing. “She got back to it faster than anyone anticipated,” said one of her senior advisers. “She said her motto is ‘Rest, not rust.’ ”

  Short of health concerns, her aides said personal and family considerations could stop Hillary from jumping into presidential politics again. “Not wanting to spend another thirteen million dollars out of your pocket,” the adviser said. “Not wanting to subject yourself to it. Feeling you can do what you want to do in other ways. Being entirely content that you tried and gave it your all and it didn’t work. There are as many reasons to do it as not to do it. If you’re one of the few people who can run and actually be president, it’s a much more serious proposition, and I think it’s at once a more complicated and normal decision than we mere mortals think. Maybe she doesn’t want her daughter subjected to more scrutiny. Maybe she doesn’t want her daughter to walk around with nine agents.”

  If she were to run for president, she would need to marshal every last bit of goodwill, because her poll numbers were already dropping back to earth. On June 10, Gallup released a poll showing her approval rating had dropped from 64 percent in April to 58 percent. “Once Clinton left the State Department, it was inevitable that Americans would start to view her again in a political light,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said, noting the parallel drop in her approval when, as first lady, she began to campaign for a Senate seat. “This has happened to her before.”

  Around the time of CGI, Cheryl Mills invited Guy Cecil to breakfast. Cecil, who had become close to Bill on the 2008 campaign and gone on to a successful run as the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, served as chairman of the board of the charter school that Mills’s kids attended. So they talked about charter schools for a little while.

  Then the conversation turned to the what-ifs of a 2016 presidential campaign. Cecil, who was the subject of much Washington speculation about who might run that still-hypothetical campaign, couldn’t imagine saying no if he were asked to do it. “It was about her, what’s she going to do next, and then it was like if she ran, who should be the manager?” said a source familiar with the conversation. “A lot of the discussion was about ‘Will there be the right changes in place?’ I think everybody’s interested in that piece of it.” Mills became the de facto chief of informational interviews for political operatives who wanted to get in on the ground floor of Hillary for President 2.0. Her involvement almost certainly precludes a campaign manager selection as disastrous as Solis Doyle in 2008, but the challenges facing anyone who lands the job will be formidable.

  A modern presidential campaign has more than just one primary. In addition to courting votes for the nomination, candidates wage a “shadow primary” to win high-dollar donors and top campaign operatives. Hillary’s formidability reversed the power in the market for operatives. Instead of Hillary wooing them to come to her, several of the rising Democratic stars seemed to be auditioning for the role of her campaign manager. In addition to Cecil, pegged by many Democratic politicos as the man with the inside track, his good friend Robby Mook, another veteran of the 2008 campaign, latched on as manager of McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial bid. In early 2013, Stephanie Schriock, the head of EMILY’s List, an organization dedicated to electing women who support abortion rights, started a campaign called Madam President to build support for a female candidate for the Oval Office. Jen O’Malley Dillon and Jill Alper, two veteran Democratic operatives, also earned mentions from Hillary insiders as p
ossible campaign managers. Dillon, who was deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection run, has done work for the Children’s Defense Fund, the nonprofit where Hillary got her start in public policy.

  More than three years before the election, some of Hillary’s closest advisers openly discussed the characteristics she would look for in a campaign manager, without adding the caveat that she might not run. “The one thing about a campaign manager as a political strategist, that is the most personal decision you can make,” said one Hillarylander. “Part of what she has to look at is whether or not she and the campaign manager have chemistry.… They have to be able to bring almost as much to the table [as the candidate] in terms of being able to talk to your donors, being able to talk to your field staff, putting together infrastructure.”

  Hillary would also look for a manager who understands how to highlight her gender as a positive. “You have to put a strategy in place that supports that vision of her being a woman,” the adviser said. “It has to be a person that uniquely understands that [it] will be as much history as Obama was making.… You either lean into that history or you kind of put the history under the carpet, and I would suggest you lean into it.”

  In any case, Mills would likely be the behind-the-curtain power in a second Hillary run. But there are a lot of entry points into Clintonworld, and even staffers on, and donors to, Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign thought they could better position themselves for jobs or status in a 2016 campaign by helping Huma’s husband. But by July 23, when Huma stood by his side at a torturous press conference in which he acknowledged having text-messaged other women after his resignation from Congress, Weiner’s campaign looked like a dead end; as Politico’s Maggie Haberman put it, his scandal was “proving to be another stress test of the Clinton infrastructure in a year that was supposed to be relatively quiet for them.”

  Not only was the Weiner episode an ugly reminder of the scandal-plagued Clinton years, it appeared that the Clinton camp hadn’t learned much from “no-drama Obama” about how to suffocate a bad story. In the aftermath of the revelation, Clinton sources talked to reporters, usually on background, to send the message that they were angry with Weiner—and with Huma for allegedly drawing parallels between her own situation and Hillary’s decision to remain with Bill through the Monica Lewinsky affair. Some began suggesting that Huma had to choose: Hillary or Anthony. Rather than trying to force Huma out of Hillaryland, they were trying to get her to dump her husband, one explained. Reines even gave an on-the-record interview to the New York Times for a story about his role in successfully encouraging Huma to distance herself from her own husband to preserve her status.

  Whatever the aims of their advisers, none of it looked good for Bill or Hillary Clinton. “If that’s the game they’re playing, then Hillary’s campaign has already started behind the eight ball,” said a senior operative from another candidate’s 2008 primary campaign. “What’s going to happen to the campaign is the same fucking thing that happened last time.”

  Whether the Weiner scandal would turn out to be a bad omen for 2016 or simply an ugly blip, the Hillary Clinton for President movement was otherwise firing on all cylinders by the end of July. Over the first half of 2013, the Ready for Hillary super PAC transformed from a shoestring outfit to a credible operation. While it grew in size and visibility, Hillary insiders moved to provide what one source called “chaperones” for the organization. Harold Ickes, James Carville, and Ellen Tauscher all signed on in advisory roles. The PAC hired Craig T. Smith, who had been a White House political director under Bill. Smith, who approached Allida Black about integrating into Ready for Hillary, started running the day-to-day operations. George Soros, the liberal billionaire who had long funded progressive groups and causes, eventually signed on as a major donor. Hillary allies who checked in with top advisers to see whether they should support Ready for Hillary were given tacit approval to do so. “They did give me the yellow light,” said one major Hillary donor. “I got the feeling that if I wanted to do it, they thought it was a good idea.”

  The PAC’s organizers reached out to Clinton supporters with a triple ask: join the group’s contact list, ask your friends to join, and be ready to write a check later. Several of Hillary’s closest friends and top donors, including Susie Tompkins Buell and Jill Iscol, agreed to lend their names and some start-up cash to the effort after checking with Hillary’s advisers to make sure it was kosher. The money was less important to Black and her small staff than the buy-in. In fact, as they built the grassroots organization, they generally asked for relatively small checks. There was a $25,000 maximum, according to sources familiar with the fund-raising structure, but even multimillionaires were often asked to give $5,000 or less. “If people were writing million-dollar checks, that might be a problem,” said one Ready for Hillary donor who is capable of writing a seven-figure check. “If they were taking big checks, that really taints it. We have much more credibility this way.”

  The move by Hillary’s friends to integrate into the fabric of Ready for Hillary was taken as a sign by insiders that Clinton wanted to protect her brand in service of a presidential run. “We’re all looking to see how these groups or efforts are being professionalized and by whom,” one veteran Clintonworld political operative said in May. “People that have been tacked onto these things are typical Hillary people. They’re more senior folks, and they’re respected.… Now they’re starting to reach out to people that clearly have networks.” In July the group reported having raised $1.2 million in the first half of 2013—a modest sum for a super PAC, but enough money to suggest legitimacy, particularly given the fact that, unlike other super PACs, Ready for Hillary capped donations.

  In more than one way, Ready for Hillary was becoming a reflection of the characteristics likely to define a fourth Clinton bid for the presidency. It wasn’t just the sudden infusion of familiar Clintonworld faces. Black, the ground-level organizer, and the top-dollar donors like Buell and Iscol who invested their time and money in the operation were part of what one Clinton insider called the “army of women” waiting for marching orders in Hillary’s next campaign.

  If it seemed like the Hillary 2016 campaign was beginning to warm up in Chicago in June, it had reached a fever pitch by early fall when the Clintons convened the annual international CGI conference in New York.

  The confab, held to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly each year, always has the feel of a Clinton reunion. That was particularly true in the fall of 2013, as Bill and Hillary’s friends, philanthropic partners, and political operatives roamed the hallways of the Sheraton near Times Square. With Hillary weighing whether to run again, her political contingent was out in force. Huma, Capricia Marshall, Melanne Verveer, and Harold Ickes were all there to see and be seen.

  Doug Band was there, too, seemingly eager to prove his continued relevance in Clintonworld in the days after The New Republic published a highly unflattering nine-thousand-word opus on how he “drove a wedge through a political dynasty” in his handling of Bill’s postpresidency and his own pursuit of wealth and power. It suggested that Band wouldn’t be able to get much closer to a Hillary candidacy than writing a check to her campaign. Because his business model at Teneo is built on access to the Clintons, the narrative was dangerous not just to Band’s ego but to his bottom line.

  “There are a lot of people jockeying for position, and Doug is a little bit on the sidelines,” a former White House associate of Band’s told the story’s author, Alec MacGillis.

  At CGI, in a pattern he repeated, Band circled the lobby of the hotel, chatting up reporters, longtime Clinton friends, and other attendees before letting them know he had somewhere else to be. Then, almost an hour later, he would turn up again, coming through the hotel’s giant revolving door and go through the same song and dance. One attendee noted that if Band was still close in Bill’s orbit, “he would have been backstage at the meeting, not in the hotel lobby.”

  Band’s efforts at
rehabilitation served as a sideshow when Hillary wasn’t front and center that week. It was her debut as a full partner in the foundation’s main annual event. She emceed events, moderated discussions, and even announced a new initiative to combat elephant poaching in Africa—an issue that isn’t likely to factor prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign. At each event, it was as though Clinton already had a full campaign press corps.

  Everywhere she went, and the reporters followed, Hillary got a version of the same question. During one panel discussion, on women and girls, she almost went the full hour without being pressed to address her potential candidacy. But then CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who had been moderating the panel, took a stab.

  “How important is it for there to be a woman president in the United States?” Gupta asked Hillary, as an audience packed into one of the Sheraton’s smaller ballrooms laughed and cheered.

  Hillary, prepared to answer that question in whatever form in which it came, had her response ready. “That is a question I will answer taking myself completely out of it,” she said. “We have a lot of challenges,” she continued. “Electing one person, a woman, is not going to end those challenges. But it provides a kind of boost to the efforts that so many of us have been making for so long.” The short answer, she added, “is that I think it would be important.… I think it would be a very strong statement that would be made to half of our population and half of the world’s population and someday, I hope it happens.”

  In the same discussion, Hillary also made news. She waded publicly into domestic politics, which she had done ever-so-briefly at the CURE dinner in Chicago in June. Clinton was asked about the looming government shutdown, something her husband had to face when he was in office nearly twenty years earlier. Clinton slapped congressional Republicans, saying that they “ought to go back and read history, because I would just say it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Democrats if they tried to shut down the government. It didn’t work out very well for those who were so obstructionist.