Planet Hillary
The
gravitational pull of a possible 2016 campaign is bringing all the old
Clinton characters into her orbit. Can she make the stars align, or will
chaos prevail?
Hillary
Clinton was nodding solemnly to the mother of a 9/11 victim when Huma
Abedin, standing across the room, called out, “Let’s load!” to the staff
members and bodyguards. The former secretary of state had yet to pick
up her award from the Voices of September 11th, but her entourage was
already preparing to shuttle her off to the next event, a benefit for
God’s Love We Deliver, which was co-hosted by the designer Michael Kors
and where she would sit next to the Vogue editor and former Obama
bundler Anna Wintour. It was just another hectic fall evening in
Manhattan for Clinton, and she was keeping herself busy as usual in the
“is she or isn’t she” interim. There were paid speeches to give (at
$200,000 a pop) to the American Society of Travel Agents and the
National Association of Realtors, filled with the wisdom gleaned from
being the nation’s top diplomat (“leadership is a team sport” was one
favorite; “you can’t win if you don’t show up” was another). There were
awards to receive, like the one from Chatham House, a think tank in
London, to which Clinton traveled on a commercial 757 like the one she
used to command while working at the State Department. (“That was fun!”
she said of the flight.) And there were Beverly Hills galas to attend,
which soon turned into schmooze sessions, like the ones with Harvey
Weinstein and Richard Plepler and Jeffrey Katzenberg, yet another major
Obama bundler.
Unlike
Barack Obama, who will leave the White House with more or less the same
handful of friends he came in with, the Clintons occupy their own
unique and formidable and often exhausting place in American politics.
Over the decades, they’ve operated like an Arkansas tumbleweed,
collecting friends and devotees from Bill Clinton’s kindergarten class
to Yale Law School to Little Rock to the White House to the Senate and
beyond. James Carville has compared the Clinton world, perhaps not so
originally, to an onion (it’s safest, he has said, to exist in the third
or fourth layer), while other Clinton staff members, past and present,
have an endless litany of other metaphors to make sense of it. One
former aide told me that working for the Clintons is like staying at the
Hotel California (“You can check out, but you can never leave”);
another person compared it to prison (“Not everyone can adjust to life
on the outside”). Others compared it to a marriage, one as complicated
and built on blind loyalty as Bill and Hillary’s own. One former aide
noted, succinctly, “People want to feel important, and the Clintons
don’t snub people very well.”
This
may represent Hillary Clinton’s biggest challenge for a hypothetical
2016 campaign. How can Clinton, who is 66, make American voters think
about something other than her fraught personal and political past? How
can she present herself as someone hungry to serve rather than as
someone entitled to office? It starts, perhaps, by figuring out how to
deal with many of those characters assembled along the way. “I love
Barbra Streisand,” says Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist who
worked on both of Bill Clinton’s campaigns, “but Beyoncé is what’s
happening now. I love Peter, Paul and Mary, but she needs to be Justin
Timberlake. She can’t afford to kick people out, but she can afford to
let new people come in. I realize that’s uncomfortable.” Put another
way, the members of America’s most dysfunctional extended political
family are about to meet a lot of young new operatives who don’t work in
the same way. The Clintons may have come to power when an offensive
election strategy meant digging up files of opposition research, but
presidential politics are increasingly the province of number-crunching
quants and code-breaking hackers. “The challenge is to create ways for
people to help but also to figure out who the next generation is,” says
Steve Elmendorf, deputy campaign manager on John Kerry’s 2004
presidential run. “Even David Plouffe is a generation removed. Who is
the 32-year-old version of David?”
It’s
an organizational conundrum that even members of Hillary Clinton’s
innermost circle already concede. “The Next Generation launched a coup
to dispose [of] the old fogies,” Philippe I. Reines, Clinton’s principal
gatekeeper, jokingly told me this summer, when I asked if he had joined
her post-State personal staff. (Reines, who worked for Chelsea Clinton
in 2008, self-effacingly included himself in the Old Generation.) The
fault line, it seemed, was drawn at the 2008 campaign. A few months
later, over lunch near the White House, Reines laughed as a couple of
meddlesome emails popped up on his BlackBerry from two older Clinton
loyalists who had re-emerged since she left State. In between bites of a
shrimp cocktail, he called these noodges “space cowboys,” referring to
the 2000 film in which Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald
Sutherland play aging pilots who reunite to disarm a Soviet-era
satellite on one last mission. (Reines was quick to add that these
old-timers ultimately saved the world.)
Several
people close to Clinton have already discussed installing someone to
play the role of “chief listener,” whose job would be to make these
well-meaning old-timers feel “heard” while simultaneously buffering
their noise — a position that didn’t exist in 2008. If she decides to
run, says Melanne Verveer, Clinton’s White House chief of staff, “the
next question is how is she going to organize this group of people” who
all want to contribute. The complication, of course, will be doing so
without creating the vitriol and noise that scuttled her last campaign.
“I think she understands she has to be, and will be, welcoming to new
people, especially people with technical expertise and know-how,” one
former Obama aide says. “But the knives will be out from people
protecting their place in the world.”
If there is
one thing that Clinton allies want to make sure you know — and will
keep reminding you, over and over, in interviews — it’s that Hillary
Clinton’s State Department was run nothing like her chaotic 2008
presidential campaign. When Clinton accepted the job as secretary of
state, she did so with the understanding that she could bring some of
her most loyal people — called the Royal Council by one aide — along
with her. (“Obama didn’t realize that extended to the cafeteria
workers,” quipped one person familiar with the confirmation process.)
Clinton’s hires included a mix of longtime advisers, like Cheryl D.
Mills, but she also brought in new people and embraced the existing
State Department staff. During meetings, the secretary would sit on a
silk-upholstered couch in her Foggy Bottom office, deferring to senior
and junior aides to hear their opinions first.
The
cloistered State Department offered Clinton a chance to define herself
away from her husband and to shed the stench of managerial dysfunction
that still lingered from the campaign. Legally she could not participate
in fund-raising or political activity, and so the period, noted one
staff member, seemed like a quiet four-year pause. “I had a lot of
anxiety before I took the job,” Thomas R. Nides, who served as deputy
secretary of state for management and resources under Clinton, told me.
“I had never worked for them before, and I didn’t know what I was
getting myself into. Was every day going to be the outside claqueurs
coming in and asking, ‘What’s going on?’ and wanting to be a part of
everything?” Nides, who is now vice chairman of Morgan Stanley, said he
was impressed by Clinton’s ability to shut out the opinions of old
political aides. “To the Clintons’ credit, they communicate with a lot
of people, but I think she has a filter now — to filter some of that out
of her head and basically take the advice she is getting from her
team.”
The
job of keeping out the claqueurs now falls partly on Reines, who is
known in the Clinton world as slightly paranoid, often hilarious and
somewhat quirky. He is 44 and lives in a Dupont Circle apartment with
his cats Uday and Qusay, named after the thuggish sons of Saddam
Hussein. He once accidentally stuck his fingers in my water glass over
breakfast to clear a stain from his dress shirt. At lunch, he orders an
Arnold Palmer and a Diet Coke, seemingly just because. He also instills a
healthy dose of terror in the extended Clinton family that his boss is
said to appreciate. Almost everyone I talked to dutifully emailed Reines
to ask for permission before they spoke to me. “If Philippe told me not
to talk to you, I wouldn’t have talked to you,” Lanny Davis, a lawyer
who served as a special White House counsel under Clinton, told me.
(Reines, for the record, said he named his cats Uday and Qusay merely
because they’re brothers and “were little terrorists when they were
kittens.”)
At
breakfast, at lunch, on emails, on conference calls, over dumplings at
Pei Wei Asian Diner and in meetings with Clinton’s inner sanctum, Reines
is often joined by his protégé and Clinton’s press secretary, Nick
Merrill. Merrill, who is fresh-faced and plays the perfect good cop to
Reines’s bad cop, is also a junior Clinton lifer. Together, the combined
forces of Nickilippe project a tightly knit, loyal-till-death image
that’s already reflected in Clinton’s personal staff. Until recently,
her seven personal aides worked out of a tiny Washington office
(“smaller than my first N.Y.C. apartment,” one aide said in an email) on
Connecticut Avenue. Soon, though, she will move Merrill and the others,
whom she pays out of her own pocket, into a Manhattan office, which,
contrary to previous reports, will not be in the Bill, Hillary &
Chelsea Clinton Foundation offices in the Time & Life Building. Ted
Widmer, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is on hand to
assist with writing Hillary’s memoir about her time at the State
Department, set to be published by Simon & Schuster this summer.
Reines will presumably work on the book rollout and tour, which could
serve as a campaign prologue.
Huma
Abedin, who began her career as a White House aide while studying at
George Washington University, serves as Clinton’s chief of staff. Abedin
is, of course, married to Anthony Weiner. (Bill Clinton officiated the
ceremony.) After Weiner’s latest round of sexting was revealed,
Clinton’s inner circle rallied to support Abedin while protecting their
boss’s image; some of them encouraged Abedin to consider divorce;
others, including past advisers outside the inner circle, have suggested
that she be moved off the campaign (um, if there is a campaign) to a
role at the foundation headquarters. Instead, in a move that aides say
revealed Clinton’s unflinching allegiance — and perhaps a level of
sympathy only she could feel — Clinton kept Abedin attached at the hip.
She “inspires loyalty, and she’s loyal back,” another person close to
the inner circle says.
Clinton,
who has done her fair share of damage control, seems less concerned
with things like the potential embarrassment of Abedin’s spouse than
with building up a system that keeps out the “night stalkers,” as termed
by one former aide. In addition to the chief listener, one strategy
that has sprung up appears to be to spread enough work around to make
many in the old guard — from Little Rock friends to survivors of the
2008 campaign — feel useful and busy. One project is Ready for Hillary,
which has become a kind of clearinghouse for people angling to get in
early with the hypothetical campaign. Former White House aides, like Ann
Lewis, Craig T. Smith (whose relationship with the Clintons goes back
to Arkansas) and Harold M. Ickes (who took care of so many dust-ups
during the White House years that he was known as the director of the
sanitation department) have advised, raised money or visited
battleground states on behalf of the PAC.
But
some of the Democratic Party’s deepest-pocketed donors have described
Ready for Hillary as a make-work program for former Clinton hands. From
its inception, the group didn’t exactly fit everyone’s definition of a
sophisticated, modern-day apparatus. It was started by Adam Parkhomenko,
who worked as an assistant to Patti Solis Doyle in 2008 until Solis
Doyle (who coined the term “Hillaryland” back in the White House days)
was ousted as campaign manager. Just out of high school, the earnest
Parkhomenko started working for a Hillary-related PAC and has been
trying to get Clinton elected president for much of his adult life. (He
also works a couple of nights a month as a reserve officer with the
Metropolitan Police Department in Washington.) The group raised $4
million last year, in part, by hawking iPhone cases with the
black-and-white “Texts From Hillary” image of Clinton looking at her
BlackBerry onboard a C-17 to Tripoli. Last month, Ready for Hillary held
a low-dollar fund-raiser (tickets cost $20.16) at a K Street restaurant
that featured photos with a cutout image of Clinton and a cash bar
serving a gin and tonic called the Ceiling Breaker. The group scheduled a
“kickoff” event this month in Des Moines.
One
Clinton supporter told me that the very specter of Smith in a swing
state is a sign that the old buddy system is still alive and well. To
his credit, Smith (whose firm is paid $10,000 a month by Ready for
Hillary) said he recognizes that “if there is a campaign, it’s got to be
[made up of] people who know how to run a campaign of 2016.” In an
effort to step up its grass-roots organizing, Ready for Hillary has
already signed up numerous 20-something newcomers. It has also brought
on the consulting company 270 Strategies, run by political operatives,
including Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, who were largely credited with
Obama’s ground strategy in 2008 and 2012.
Where
things get thorny, though, is that Priorities USA, the big-money group
that helped get Obama elected, is situating itself as the dominant
money-raiser in 2016. (Sean Sweeney, a founder of Priorities USA, says
he supports Ready for Hillary’s “important” mission.) In fact, two Obama
operatives, Messina and Buffy Wicks, have already signed on to
Priorities to turn it into a big-money behemoth devoted to a Clinton
candidacy, and some Ready for Hillary supporters have accused Priorities
of already trying to take credit for getting their candidate elected.
(Never mind that the election is more than two years away and that
there’s technically no candidate yet.) Certainly Wicks and Messina offer
something that the Clinton old guard doesn’t — a link to the network of
donors who supported Obama. But also crucial is the fact that neither
has ever worked for the Clintons, which allows them to navigate the
waters more easily. They don’t carry the baggage, for instance, of other
old friends who helped get Obama elected. David Axelrod, in particular,
was approached by Solis Doyle as early as 2006 to join the Hillary
campaign, and his decision to sign on with Obama was the first real
signal that the Illinois senator might create a problem. Among Obama
aides, there’s a sense that Bill Clinton never quite forgave him. “The
Clintons make you feel like you’re part of their family; that’s just who
they are,” says Brazile, whose neutrality during the 2008 Democratic
primaries was seen by numerous Clinton hands as an act of betrayal. “Try
divorcing them. I did, and oh, my God, that’s not easy. I felt like I
had broken up with my best lover.”
It’s
not just the rogue friends and former staff members who present
potential problems. In the past, the Royal Council hasn’t always gotten
along so well with President Clinton’s advisers, referred to
sardonically by Hillary’s staff members in White House as “the White
Boys.” The tensions have ebbed and flowed over the years but reached a
low in 2007, when there was an early tug-of-war about how the campaign
should utilize, and dote on, the former president. Recently, more
existential differences have surfaced. People close to Bill Clinton have
told me repeatedly that it irks them that Democrats don’t talk about
the dignified, slimmed-down, silver-haired former president with the
same reverence Republicans give Ronald Reagan. According to those
people, Bill Clinton, who is conscious of the demands of a presidential
race and what another loss would do to his own legacy and philanthropic
work, is deferential about whether his wife should run. When people
shout at him that they’re ready for Hillary, he simply responds with a
“Thank you,” rather than asking for their support as he did leading up
to the 2008 campaign. (That doesn’t mean he’s not curious. When Ready
for Hillary held a seminar for donors at Le Parker Meridien hotel last
fall to discuss what it would take to win in 2016, Bill Clinton
personally checked in with an attendee to ask what was being discussed
and who was there.)
Efforts
to cement Bill’s legacy appear somewhat unaligned with Hillary’s
forward-looking team. (At a recent book party in New York, Bill started
his speech by saying, “I’m not much for living in the past, but I do
think it’s worth going back to what we’ve faced,” and then proceeded to
talk for 20 minutes about electoral politics and his career, dating to
1968.) Denizens of Hillaryland often express exasperation that even
after successfully serving in the Senate and as secretary of state,
their boss is still so closely identified with her husband. “It’s my pet
peeve when they’re described as an entity,” Geoffrey Garin, who stepped
in as a chief strategist after Mark Penn’s disastrous run in ’08, told
me. “Obviously they are married and do things together, but they are two
separate people with two separate identities in political life.”
The
center of the orbit has become even more crowded now that Chelsea is in
the game. The role of Chelsea, to the annoyance of some longtime
Clinton aides — who referred to her as the Child — has become
significantly more pronounced. While some loyalists still think of her
as a teenager hanging around the Oval Office, she has become a
formidable presence at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton
Foundation. There she has assembled her own team, led by her chief of
staff, Bari Lurie, a former White House aide who traveled with Chelsea
during the 2008 campaign. She has her own press secretary, Kamyl Bazbaz,
who worked for Hillary in 2008.
Chelsea
has now ostensibly taken over the foundation, and she wasted little
time in putting her stamp on it. She played a key role in the long
search for a new chief executive, which ultimately installed her friend
and former McKinsey & Company colleague Eric Braverman as the
replacement for Bruce Lindsey, who stepped down after working for Bill
Clinton for decades. (Lindsey remains the foundation’s chairman.)
Braverman, however, soon got a lesson in political bungling when he
hired a staffer to help with, among other things, his own publicity. The
person he hired turned out to have worked on the eventual botched
rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and Braverman was reminded in no
uncertain terms that his job was not to seek his own publicity but to
complement the Clintons’ mission. (A foundation spokesman denies this.)
Chelsea’s
ascent has had perhaps the biggest impact on Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s
longtime aide who was for years considered a surrogate son. Band clashed
with Chelsea over the running of the foundation, and although he had
stepped away from day-to-day operations by the time she arrived, he kept
a hand in the Clinton Global Initiative, the philanthropic gathering he
helped start. When Chelsea helped initiate an outside audit to review
the state of the foundation, including the C.G.I., some staff members
viewed the move, in part, as a means to denounce the old guard, most
notably her surrogate brother. If that’s what it was, it worked.
(Lindsey said any assertion that the audit was personal is false.) Band,
who has spent two decades in the Clinton world, is a case study in how
treacherous it can be to navigate. He has been accused by several aides
of being a source of published rumors insinuating that Chelsea and her
husband, Marc Mezvinsky, had marital problems. A person with knowledge
of the situation told me Band was not, in fact, the source — and several
others said, emphatically, that the couple have a happy, committed
relationship. (Band declined to comment for this article.)
In
some way, Chelsea’s rise could provide a natural bridge between the Old
Generation with its lingering obsessions and grievances — the words
“impeachment” and “Whitewater” came up dozens of times in the reporting
of this article — and the younger, number-crunching analysts. But
Chelsea’s assertiveness at the foundation, while seen as a blessing by
her parents, has rubbed others the wrong way. Two longtime employees
quit, citing, in part, their frustration with the changed atmosphere
since she took over. (Five senior foundation employees who work closely
with Chelsea told me she has brought only positive change. An aide also
added that the handful of people who have historically called her the
Child did so in an endearing way.) But one person with intimate
knowledge of Clinton dynamics had a simpler explanation. According to
this person, staff members — most notably Band — who were insecure about
Chelsea’s power had simply forgotten that they lived “downstairs.”
That sentiment may
be true enough about current Clinton dynamics, but one theory about why
they have amassed such a wide network over the years is that, unlike
political dynasties such as the Bushes or the Kennedys, they did not
come from money. They learned how to keep aides loyal the old-fashioned
way, by doing the kinds of thoughtful things that anyone who has worked
with the Clintons for any amount of time will tell you about: countless
handwritten thank-you notes, remembering staff-member birthdays and
letting them bask in their reflected glory. Over the years, it has
proved remarkably effective. To mark the 20th anniversary of the start
of the first Clinton-Gore campaign, Paul Begala, Carville, John Podesta
and Vernon Jordan, among many others, joined Bill and Hillary in Little
Rock for a raucous, self-congratulatory reunion weekend. Al Gore called
in remotely.
Still,
even back in the Arkansas days, the Clintons knew how to ice out some
of their more complicated friends. One recent Thursday morning, I
stopped by the Little Rock apartment of Betsey Wright, just across the
Interstate from the Clinton library on a leafy street lined with
well-kept clapboard houses with wide porches and upholstered furniture
out front. Around the corner is a Holiday Inn with a restaurant called
Camp David (“a hidden treasure with a culinary style surely fit for both
presidents and first ladies”; kids eat free). Wright, considered a
mastermind behind Clinton’s rise in Arkansas, was among the first in a
long line of surrogate family members. She headed rapid response (or
what she called “bimbo eruptions”) in the 1992 election and was
immortalized by Kathy Bates in the film adaptation of “Primary Colors.”
After not joining Clinton’s White House staff, Wright became a lobbyist
and eventually returned home and began advocating for prisoners’ rights.
In 2009, though, she was arrested on 51 charges of smuggling
contraband, including a box cutter and a knife and tattoo needles that
were hidden in a bag of Doritos, on a visit to death row. She pleaded
not guilty (and, later, no contest to lesser charges) and was released
on probation. She did not respond to my many attempts to contact her,
including in-person pleas to friends and a note left on her front porch.
People
who have known the Clintons the longest have all sorts of theories
about how one of the country’s most brilliant political minds could have
ended up arrested with a bag of Doritos. She may be an extreme case,
but Wright is also, some suggested, a kind of cautionary tale in how the
sharp-elbowed business of being a Clinton soldier can scar some people.
Wright, one Arkansas friend said, had personal issues; she became a
liability — just as Solis Doyle and Penn and Band would later — and the
Clintons cut her loose before they moved into the White House. Max
Brantley, who is editor of The Arkansas Times and has known the Clintons
for decades, told me over gumbo at the Capital Hotel bar in Little Rock
that their relationship with Wright, and other aides, was more
complicated than their simply rejecting her. “Is it malicious? Or a
business decision justified by circumstances?” Brantley said. “Some
people get eaten up by the charisma and forget that, in the end, it is a
business.”
The
problem, in part, is the Clintons’ unique management style. Sitting at a
New York coffee shop one afternoon, a person close to the Clintons,
whom Nickilippe had not authorized to talk, pulled out a felt-tip pen
and drew a triangle and a circle on a white cocktail napkin. The
triangle, this person said, represented Obama’s team, with the president
on the top and everyone else clearly in their hierarchical place. The
circle represented the Clintons, with everyone in a vortex angling for
the innermost rings. Over the years, this amorphous setup has led to a
fair amount of resentment and infighting. After Solis Doyle was pushed
out in 2008, she went to work for the Obama campaign. Begala and
Carville heralded Penn’s struggles; Penn has said he sidelined them in
the 1996 re-election, though neither was formally involved in the
campaign. (Penn notably re-emerged to play a small part in advising
President Clinton on his blockbuster keynote speech at the 2012
Democratic National Convention.)
Steve
Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House who now
works for Vice President Biden, was considered so loyal to the first
lady that President Clinton’s staff called him Steve Rodham Ricchetti.
Years later, one person close to the president accused Ricchetti of
being a source in a controversial 2008 Vanity Fair article about the
president’s private life. (Ricchetti declined to comment.) Todd S.
Purdum, a former New York Times reporter and the husband of Dee Dee
Myers, a White House press secretary under Clinton, wrote that article.
Clinton
ran a relatively leak-free operation at State, but as the circle
widens, the possibilities for people speaking out of school grows
considerably. A recent leak to Politico about a private Clinton strategy
session was a “violation” that should serve as a red flag, one Obama
aide said. When I asked Ickes why, as an obsessive diarist, he hadn’t
written a memoir after he was fired as deputy chief of staff in 1997, he
cited loyalty. “As hard as it may be to imagine,” Ickes told me, “there
are people who feel loyal to the person they’re serving.” Then he
offered a more revealing answer. “The Clintons are still major players
in the national political scene, and even if people were inclined to
write a book — and I’ve never been inclined that way — they [have to]
think the Clintons have a big reach and continue to influence the
Democratic Party. Why do I need to get on the wrong side of them?”
Last month,
several people close to the Clintons expressed mixed opinions about
whether they should cut their vacation short to return to New York and
attend the mayoral inauguration of Bill de Blasio, who ran Hillary’s
first Senate campaign. But the couple themselves decided to attend the
ceremony, which focused on tackling the growing gap between rich and
poor. The Clintons’ endorsement of the populist mayor’s vow to take on
income inequality struck some people as a shift to the left, perhaps
because many voters have forgotten that in an era before he went vegan
and wore double Windsor knots, Bill Clinton ran on income inequality and
for “the forgotten middle class.” He jogged to a Little Rock McDonald’s
and made $35,000 a year, while George H. W. Bush seemed perplexed by a
grocery-store scanner. Though it was hard to blame them for forgetting.
In order to make the inauguration, the Clintons flew to New York on a
private plane from the Dominican Republic, where they were vacationing
at Oscar de la Renta’s lavish resort. Hillary had barely taken her seat
when the bipartisan chatter began about her new haircut. (“What do you
think about Hillary’s bangs? etc.,” Tim Miller, of America Rising, a
conservative political-action committee, later emailed.)
The
de Blasio inauguration served as a reminder of another nuanced
management challenge — her image — that Clinton will face in 2016. In
their four decades in public life, as they’ve amassed their chaotic and
devoted network, the Clintons have undergone their own extraordinary
transformation. This past fall, I watched Hillary try to navigate that
tricky course between showing off her public-service chops and delaying
the inevitable. Between rubbing elbows with celebrity bundlers, she
conducted closed-door presentations to Wall Street bankers, in which she
sprinkled phrases like “of all the presidents I’ve known.” She referred
to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and unofficial steward of the
European economy, as “a close, personal friend” whom “I’ve known for 20
years.” At a Goldman Sachs event at the Conrad hotel in Lower Manhattan,
Clinton answered a question about the Affordable Care Act, a topic she
has carefully avoided in public, by denouncing conservatives’
obstruction of the law and playing down the rocky rollout. “They’ll
either work it out or they won’t,” she said of the website’s early
glitches, which one person interpreted to mean that if Obama couldn’t
figure it out, her administration would.
For
all the pieces now falling into place, the staff members new and old
looking for a seat at the table, the super PACs looking to take credit
and the speeches to Wall Street executives (at one session with a hedge
fund in 2013, Clinton conceded that any hypothetical candidate would
have to decide “toward the middle of next year”) — for all of the
inevitable inevitability, perhaps the most important thing Hillary
Clinton has to do is not appear like a big-footing Goliath who is
finally getting her due. Six years ago, Iowans rejected Clinton, in
part, because she seemed too entitled. I remember talking to
caucus-goers who were turned off by the “I’m in to win” video that
kicked off her candidacy and others who cringed at the loud landing of
the Hill-a-Copter, which cost several thousand dollars a day in a state
where voters prefer their candidates in Greyhounds.
When
I asked David Axelrod what he thought Clinton had to do to win in 2016,
he referred to the change she underwent during the last campaign. “She
stumbled in 2007, when she was encased in a presumption of
inevitability,” Axelrod said. “And she was a very good candidate in 2008
after she got knocked back. Instead of a battleship, she became a
speedboat, and she got down on the ground and really, I thought, really
connected to the middle-class voters and people who were struggling.
People who were struggling connected with her when she looked like she
was struggling.”
In
her final months as secretary of state in the summer of 2012, when her
approval ratings and press coverage were at all-time highs, I asked Bill
Clinton what he thought of his wife’s transformed image. Over coffee at
the Hilton in Nicosia, Cyprus, he told me the story of having just
finished working on the McGovern campaign, his official, and
intoxicating, introduction into presidential politics. He said he told
Hillary he’d met some of the most prominent people of their generation,
and she was by far the most gifted. “You should be in public life,” he
told her back then. “She said: ‘Look at how hard-hitting I am. Nobody
will ever vote for me for anything.’ ” The former president also gave
some thought to her current image. “I think the country sees her the way
those of us who know her see her.”
Clinton
seemed to be implying that Hillary was gifted and driven and committed
to public service and also was someone who genuinely liked to knock back
beers in Cartagena and hit the dance floor in Pretoria. And it was
sweet to hear the former president talk about his wife this way. But it
also seemed like an exercise in magical thinking, as if the intervening
decades of public life — with all the attendant drama and political
missteps and immense power accrued and wielded — hadn’t complicated that
vision of her. Hillary Clinton’s truest challenge, it would seem, is
not to make the country glimpse who she was 40 years ago; it’s to
recognize that for all the layers that have been added to the onion,
there’s still something at the center that’s aching for the rest to be
peeled away.
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