HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  “So I hope that our friends on the other side of the aisle—and it’s a minority, but it’s a noisy one—understand that this is not right to do and this is bad politics for them to do,” she said.

  Throughout the three-day conference, even when she talked about poaching, Hillary’s potential run was the real elephant in the room. During one dinner in the main Sheraton ballroom, Clinton got the biggest nudge to enter the race from Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban in 2012. Yousafzai, who was being considered at the time for the Nobel Peace Prize, told the packed ballroom of bigwigs and celebrities who hung on her every word, that “even in America, people are waiting for a woman president.” The cameras in the room immediately panned to Hillary, who was smiling broadly, amid roaring applause.

  Clinton aides balked at the notion that the presidential campaign had ostensibly started that week. She was simply taking on a bigger, more public role at the foundation. And she was just focusing her attention on initiatives like elephant poaching, her aides insisted. But there were constant reminders of the big question all week and there was tension created—arguably by the Hillary press corps—when the vice president and second lady Jill Biden stopped by the dinner that evening. They sat beside the Clintons at a round table in the front of the ballroom, trying to ignore the buzz around them.

  On October 2, 2013, Quinnipiac University released a poll showing Hillary with a 61 percent to 11 percent lead over Biden among Democrats in a hypothetical 2016 primary matchup. From the perspective of Biden supporters, it didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t do better with a Democratic electorate. After all, he had carved out a serious role in foreign and domestic policy, from helping Obama wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to spearheading the administration’s effort to enhance background checks for gun purchases. He had been first out of the box in supporting gay marriage, even before Obama had been willing to embrace that position. He could credibly argue that he played a significant role in the Obama administration’s major accomplishments. In sum, there was a lot for a Democratic primary voter to like about Joe Biden, but it was all seemingly eclipsed by Hillary’s star power.

  For much of the past year, Biden had been courting fellow Democrats in early caucus and primary states. He invited New Hampshire governor Maggie Hassan to the swearing-in ceremony for his second term as vice president in January 2013 and attended a preinauguration party thrown by Iowa Democrats that week. In mid-September, Biden visited Charleston in the early primary state of South Carolina on technically official vice presidential business and appeared as the headliner at Iowa senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry, a ritual for Democratic candidates for the presidency. Hillary, having committed herself to staying out of electoral politics in 2013, did not attend.

  Biden hadn’t made a decision about whether to run by the time of the steak fry, sources close to him said. “He’s doing things that would put him in the conversation if he chose to run,” said one. Team Biden insists he’ll make a decision with his family about whether to run, regardless of whether Hillary’s in the race.

  “Obviously, who he’s going to run against is a big issue, but it’s one of a lot of big issues that you’re going to have to sit down and work out in real life before you run for president,” said Ted Kaufman, who served as Biden’s chief of staff and later succeeded him in the Senate. “If she runs,” he said of Hillary, “it’s a different set of questions.”

  While Biden built a record as a progressive on domestic issues and a dove on national security matters during his tenure as vice president, he also angered fellow Democrats by cutting deals with Mitch McConnell that created sequestration and locked in most of the Bush-era tax cuts. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in particular, felt that Biden had undercut the Democratic position by going around him to deal with McConnell directly.

  Many Democrats, including some close to Obama, assume that, at some point, Obama will tell Biden not to run against Hillary. But the two have run against each other before—in 2008—finishing with both their friendship and the state of the Democratic Party intact. In the Obama administration, Biden often ended regularly scheduled phone calls to Hillary with the words “I love you, darling.” And at the late senator Frank Lautenberg’s funeral service in June 2013, Joe and Jill Biden bantered with seatmates Hillary and Huma. As Hillary got up to give the eulogy, Biden teased her about having to speak after Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell had just sung. “Good luck following that,” Biden joked.

  Hillary, who had been largely quiet since CGI in June, returned to the political spotlight in the midst of the Weiner scandal, joining Obama for lunch at the White House on July 29 and Joe Biden for breakfast at the Naval Observatory the following day.

  “It’s largely friendship that’s on the agenda,” White House principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters who pressed him to detail every aspect of the power lunch, including the fare. Earnest came prepared to tell them: grilled chicken, pasta jambalaya, and salad.

  On an eighty-degree day, cool by Washington standards for the summer months, the two former rivals met on a patio outside the Oval Office. Obama had asked Alyssa Mastromonaco to set up the lunch after he ran into Hillary at the George W. Bush Library in Dallas several weeks earlier. As she had back in November 2008, Mastromonaco e-mailed her friend Huma to arrange the date. White House officials offered few details on the substance of the conversation, terming the meeting “chiefly social.”

  Obama, who had declined to bring the Clintons into the White House for social occasions early in his presidency, now just wanted to spend time with Hillary, according to White House aides. “The things that the president loves most are when he can have something without an agenda,” said one Obama adviser, who noted that their meeting lasted for about two hours. “They were ‘just visiting,’ as my girlfriends would say.”

  In a different sense, many in the Clinton world view the Obamas’ stint at the White House that way—they’re just visiting.

  Epilogue

  Two harbingers for a Hillary campaign—one with mixed implications and one with a clear, if limited, upside—appeared within a week of each other in the fall of 2013.

  On the morning of Halloween, the Wall Street Journal and NBC News released a poll that put a little bit of a scare into Hillary’s most ardent supporters. Just like Ellen Tauscher had predicted two years earlier, Hillary’s standing plummeted as voters increasingly viewed her not as an above-the-partisan-fray diplomat but as the Democratic front-runner for the presidency. The poll found that 46 percent of those surveyed had a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” view of Hillary, down from 56 percent in the same survey in April.

  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni read the results as a long-overdue reality check. “Here we go,” he wrote. “The beginning of the end of her inevitability.

  “It’s about time, because the truth, more apparent with each day, is that she has serious problems as a potential 2016 presidential contender.… Voters are souring on familiar political operators, especially those in, or associated with Washington. That’s why Clinton has fallen.” Bruni’s was one of the first in a string of op-eds, magazine articles, and news stories that put a fine point on the steep challenges that Hillary still faced if she ran.

  In late 2013, populism was in and the establishment was out in both parties. To liberals disillusioned with Obama because he had talked tough about bankers, insurers, and George W. Bush’s national security policies only to embrace them all in the White House when it suited his goals, Hillary looked like a souped-up version of Obama’s centrist half. They pined for freshman Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren to take Hillary on, hoping that Warren’s feisty populist rhetoric, proven fund-raising ability, and gender would blend into the perfect antidote to Hillary in a primary. The New Republic, which already had delved deep into Band’s financial dealings in a story about the wedge he had reportedly driven into Clintonworld, published a long piece
about all of the reasons Warren could beat Hillary.

  Bruni noted the distaste with which many observers watched Bill and Hillary setting up Chelsea Clinton for the inheritance of a political dynasty by making clear their belief that she could someday be president. But in Virginia a few days later, another Clinton spinoff, Terry McAuliffe, would capture the governor’s mansion, suggesting that the Clinton mantle was hardly a weight too heavy to bear, even when conferred on a close associate with another last name.

  If there was a silver lining in the Wall Street Journal–NBC poll, it was that of all the politicians and party groups tested, Hillary came in first: Obama was at 41 percent; the Democratic Party was at 37 percent; New Jersey governor Chris Christie was at 33 percent nationally, despite being on the verge of blowout reelection victory; and Ted Cruz was at 19 percent.

  Christie’s 22-point win set him up as the front-runner for the GOP establishment’s support in the 2016 primary and to head the Republican Governors Association in 2014, a post from which he could strengthen ties to conservative candidates across the country by supplying the most powerful political adherent of all: money. Christie’s primary problem, though, was just that: a primary problem. After he had embraced Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy—which helped Obama appear bipartisan in the last days of the 2012 campaign—many Republicans had soured on him.

  By the tail end of 2013, there was no shortage of oft-named contenders for the Republican Party’s 2016 nomination. Paul, the Kentucky senator who had gone after Hillary on Benghazi, captured the hearts and minds of the GOP’s increasingly vocal libertarian wing. Fellow Senate conservative Cruz had bolstered his standing with the base by encouraging Republicans to shut down the government in pursuit of an end to Obamacare. Rick Perry, the longtime Texas governor, and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, represented the western part of the Gulf Coast on the list of potent possibles. And, of course, there was Jeb Bush, who hailed from the only family deft enough to bring the moderates and conservatives together to deliver a Republican to the White House in the previous quarter century.

  As votes were tabulated in New Jersey on November 5, Clintonworld was focused on Virginia, where McAuliffe, who had failed to get out of a Democratic primary four years earlier, edged out conservative favorite Ken Cuccinelli by about two-and-a-half percentage points. It was a closer-than-expected result, and Clintonites, who packed McAuliffe’s election-night party, waited anxiously for a final call on the race.

  Two hours after the polls closed, a veteran Clinton hand e-mailed from the party: “Everyone’s a little nervous.”

  There was good reason to be. Bill and Hillary had ignored the risk of losing to put their full weight behind their old friend’s candidacy. Loyalty, in its many forms, was perhaps the only trait they exhibited in greater abundance than political savvy. Early on in 2013, there had been efforts to minimize the degree to which the national press read McAuliffe’s victory or defeat as a commentary on the Clintons. But by Election Day that was impossible. His campaign manager, Robby Mook, was in the small circle of operatives who were widely perceived to be in the running to head a 2016 Hillary outfit. Tom Steyer, the Hillary bundler and brother of Hillary’s partner in the Too Small to Fail effort, Jim Steyer, spent millions of dollars on ads benefiting McAuliffe. As he had in 2009, Bill barnstormed Virginia, and Hillary made a special exception to her no-politics-in-2013 rule to raise money for McAuliffe and speak as a surrogate for him at a women’s rally in Northern Virginia.

  If Cuccinelli had pulled an upset over McAuliffe, especially after the national Republican Party had abandoned him for dead, the morning headlines would have been full of stories about how the Clintons couldn’t get their pal across the finish line. The downside was far greater than the upside. McAuliffe’s win was important, if less than pivotal: Some read it as a boon for Hillary and others wrote it off as meaningless for 2016—or, citing the smaller-than-expected margin, an indication of shifting Democratic fortunes.

  The Clinton crew at McAuliffe’s party let out a collective sigh of relief when the result was finally announced around ten p.m. and the race was called for McAuliffe. “Phew!” the Clinton hand said. “Nail biter!”

  Hillary planned a more robust return to electoral politics in 2014, when she would start appearing on behalf of other candidates to build the party—and chits if she decided to campaign for herself again. All of the female Democratic senators had secretly signed a letter urging her to run early in 2013, and Warren said she wouldn’t jump in. But speculation that Warren might run against her persisted. Biden was still building toward his own run, and several other candidates, including governors Andrew Cuomo of New York, Martin O’Malley of Maryland, and Jack Markell of Delaware, were considering their options. Cuomo, a scion of his father’s liberalism and the Clinton’s pragmatism, was a highly unlikely bet to run if Hillary did because her donor base fully eclipsed his. But, like in 2008, there was a hunger in parts of the Democratic base for a candidate who could fell her in the early states and sweep to the nomination.

  There were also potentially damaging echoes of her 2008 campaign in the prenatal stages of the 2016 race. While she had offloaded hired guns and brought in longtime aides when she went to the State Department, she still prized loyalty to a degree that sometimes overshadowed competence and sound judgment. Far less appreciated at the time, but nagging nonetheless, was that she might make the same fundamental mistake she had in 2008. Back then, she had run an old-school Democratic campaign, banking on victories in big states to win the nomination at the expense of the brilliant delegate-obsessive strategy Obama had pursued. More than anything, the sin was that she was such an excellent student of old campaigns that she had run one.

  In 2013 she was gearing up to run a race that appealed to the Democratic desire to make history by electing a first—in this case the first Madam President—and functioned on the use of technology as a campaign weapon. It’s what Obama had done in 2008. And, as Obama’s popularity plummeted in late 2013, she ran the risk of running a campaign that positioned her as an encore to his election. Were the Clinton name, deep experience in the trenches of Washington, abiding loyalty, and the prospect of running a history-making campaign strengths or weaknesses? It would depend on how she used them. One mistake she seemed unlikely to repeat was planting her base of operations in the Washington suburbs. By November 2013, she had closed her Washington office and was transitioning her post-State staff to New York so that her entire operation could be closer to the Clinton Foundation nerve center.

  But even without a physical presence in Washington, a three-legged support had been constructed to give her a stronger platform in 2016. In addition to Ready for Hillary, which was focused on building a grassroots network of supporters, across the country, Priorities USA, the pro-Obama SuperPAC that got its big fund-raising boost in 2012 when Bill and his inner circle blessed it, was gearing up to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from major donors for a paid media campaign for the presidential election, and American Bridge, another Democratic SuperPAC, set up an offshoot called Correct the Record to get “earned media”—stories and television segments—to defend Democratic presidential candidates and go after Republicans. By mid-November, Priorities USA was in talks to bring in John Podesta, Bill’s former chief of staff, and Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager who had developed a strong rapport with Bill during the 2012 campaign, to run the operation.

  David Brock, the pro-Hillary founder of Media Matters, headed up the Correct the Record organization and quickly hired 2008 Hillary campaign veterans Burns Strider and Adrienne Elrod to help run it. The flavor of Hillaryland was unmistakable, as Brock had to be reminded that he couldn’t use the operation to slam Warren, since it was technically created to help the whole field of Democratic hopefuls. The trifecta—grassroots organizing, paid ads, and earned media efforts—positioned Hillary to benefit from the kind of full-scale outside operation that had become a crucial supplement to any modern campaig
n for the presidency long before she made an announcement.

  Technically, the outside groups couldn’t coordinate with Hillary, but they were so stocked with former Clinton hands—and so reliant on her high-dollar donors—that it was inconceivable that they would fail to take cues from her brain trust.

  As she weighed whether to run—and she had said already that she was doing just that—one existential question facing Hillary was this: How could someone who believed she was the nation’s best choice in 2008, who stood again on the verge of becoming America’s first woman president, who felt called to public service by a higher power, as expressed in her devotion to the service-oriented Wesleyan faith, who had millions of supporters just waiting for the call, say no to one more full-tilt sprint for the ultimate prize?

  “Because there are so many other ways to serve,” she said. “I mean, that is truly the honest answer. It’s not just putting you off because I’m not ready to answer the question.

  “Look, I do have what I’ve called the responsibility gene. I do believe strongly in public service, and I do have, through my religious upbringing and my faith, a sense of obligation because I’ve been given so much,” she said. “I mean, I am such a fortunate person. And I think I am called on to give back. And so I’ve been doing that all my life, and so it doesn’t have to be one position or another.”

  But each time she had felt the call to serve, Hillary had answered it in the affirmative.

  “I never thought I’d run for office, and then circumstances kind of conspired to suck me into the Senate race in New York. And it was almost like I was on the outside watching, saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, look at this, it’s coming around and happening to me,’ ” she said. “So I did that and ran for reelection, then cared deeply about the direction of the country and ran for president. It was an incredibly intense campaign; didn’t work out. I was ready to go back to the Senate, do my service there, because it had been a pretty tough time for New York—I mean, between 9/11 and the financial collapse, I mean, New York was in lots of trouble, and I care deeply about the people who entrusted me with being their senator. And then along comes the president and asks me to be the secretary of state.”