HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (25 page)

Hillary watched with concern from her seat directly to the president’s right. She had lost her own battle to reform the country’s health insurance system in 1994. As secretary of state, she had stayed away from weighing in on the president’s domestic agenda with anyone other than Obama and a handful of his closest aides. Even many White House health care staffers weren’t aware that she was giving back-channel advice to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, particularly on how to deal with members of Congress. She knew them, and the political complexities of their districts and states, as well as anyone in the West Wing.

“A member or two may have stopped and asked me what I
thought,” Hillary said. “And I thought, ‘You need to work with the president and try to get this done.’ ”

In small-group meetings, and sometimes in her weekly one-on-one sessions with Obama, Hillary played cheerleader. “I’m with you. I’m behind you,” she told the president. But she generally was reticent. Any public whiff of engagement on her part could hurt the cause and throw into question whether she was crossing a traditional boundary that kept secretaries of state out of domestic politics. It was Bill Clinton who weighed in publicly on domestic policies. “The president’s doing the right thing,” he had said in an
Esquire
magazine interview that week. “It is both morally and politically right.”

Now, at a critical juncture for Obama, with opposition to his plan playing out on national news broadcasts every night and some Democrats concerned that the issue would doom his presidency, the last thing he needed was petty infighting from his cabinet. Hillary knew this drill: it wasn’t just Republicans who had killed her proposal—fellow Democrats had also left their fingerprints at the scene of the crime. With her party in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House for the first time since her health care push, she knew just how much was at stake in keeping Democrats, including the president’s cabinet, focused on the task. “She used an anecdote or some sort of flashback to when she was first lady” to set up the thrust of her message, said one Obama aide who was present.

Then taking command of the room, she told her colleagues, as her husband had told
Esquire
, that it was the right thing to do. “This is the time to do it,” she said. “We’re all in it. Everyone in the room knows how important this is.” The bitching and moaning ceased. It was a pivotal, if underappreciated, moment in the health care reform effort.

At the end of the meeting, Obama spoke briefly to reporters. “The time is right, and we are going to move aggressively to get this done,” he said. “And every member of this cabinet is invested.” That hadn’t been true at the start of the meeting, but Hillary’s sales job had been just what Obama needed to assuage the doubters.

“I thought, Look, the president had more support in Congress than my husband did back in ’93, ’94, so he could put together a majority,” Hillary said. “If the Republicans stonewalled, which they were beginning to show they would, despite his best efforts, he could still put a package on the floor and get it passed in both houses, which doesn’t come along every first term of a president.”

“I believed strongly,” she said, “that the president needed to forge ahead.”

Her private efforts on behalf of the health care law—working with Emanuel and Messina behind the scenes, encouraging Obama and advising him on strategy, and now speaking up on his behalf at a key cabinet meeting—helped strengthen her bond with Obama. For all of his aides’ suspicions, she was proving to be a loyal ally during the tumultuous first year of the Obama administration.

But Hillary felt that in some instances, the White House wasn’t reciprocating on her priorities. In a rare break, she chided the president in the summer of 2009 for failing to move forward on a nominee to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which fell under State. “
The clearance and vetting process is a nightmare,” she said at a town hall meeting with USAID staff. “It is frustrating beyond words. I pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way and someone will be nominated shortly, and I was unable—it just was—the message that came back: ‘We’re not ready.’ ” Still, in general terms, the tension over personnel dissipated as jobs were filled, reducing the number of available flashpoints between Hillary’s circle and Obama’s.

Bill complemented her efforts by putting his shoulder into the health care reform push, both in his public comments and behind closed doors. In November, while Hillary was on a thirteen-day trip to Europe and Asia, he showed up at a private lunch meeting of Senate Democrats to urge them to put their differences aside and help Obama win on the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. As he chatted with reporters afterward, his cell phone rang. “
It’s my secretary of state calling,” he said, offering a reminder of who he was acting as
a surrogate for on his trip to Capitol Hill. A few hours later Obama finally announced the nominee to run USAID, giving Hillary what she had been seeking for months.

The first time she saw Obama after Congress passed the health care law months later, it was in the Situation Room. She told him she was proud of him, and she was uniquely positioned to affirm him. As first lady, as senator, as a candidate for president, and then as a shadow domestic policy adviser to the president and his aides, Hillary had poured so much of herself and her reputation into trying to provide access to health insurance for all Americans. It was the domestic issue with which she was most identified, and it was Obama who had muscled it across the finish line. They threw their arms around each other, and a photographer snapped a shot of the embrace. The image held such symbolic appeal in the White House that officials hung the framed picture on a wall near the Oval Office. Though such photos are routinely rotated every few weeks, the picture stayed in its spot for months.

It might have been a bittersweet conclusion for Hillary. After all, she’d put a lot of her mind, heart, and soul into health care reform but hadn’t been part of the domestic policy team that put it into law. Still, Obama’s victory, using a model that looked like her proposal from the 2008 primary campaign, left her satisfied if perhaps a touch wistful. “His political position in the Congress was stronger than the one that Bill had after he was elected,” she said. “We—and Bill—had already put so much on the table with the deficit reduction, which passed with not a single Republican vote in either house, that was a huge lift. And then he also put a lot on them for the crime bill, and many members lost their seats because of the NRA. So, he didn’t have the numbers. And he’d also really pushed them hard already. The stars aligned for President Obama and he took advantage of that. So I was thrilled about it.”

Health care drew Obama and Hillary closer, but the big moment in their relationship, according to sources on both sides, came in December 2009, when they traveled to a UN-sponsored international climate summit in Copenhagen. The basic goal of the summit
was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, with special attention to making sure that “developed” countries agreed to specific limitations on their emissions and that “developing” countries could restrict emissions without hurting economic growth.

On the rare international trips they took together, Hillary made every effort to stand in his shadow, mirroring the deferential posture she struck at home. Despite her international celebrity, she played the role of the ideal staffer—well briefed enough to answer his questions, and well disciplined enough to take his directions. Humility may have been an acquired trait for Hillary, but she wore it well as Obama’s diplomat. “In the first year, she was self-consciously deferential and wanted to debunk all the skepticism and doubt that she could be a team player,” said a senior career official at State.

Hillary had a lot of personal capital riding on the Copenhagen summit because she had urged Obama to attend. But it was quickly turning into a disaster. It was poorly organized, and there didn’t seem to be much hope for achieving a real deal among the key nations. At one point, American officials became aware that China was holding a secret multilateral meeting on the sidelines with Brazil, South Africa, and India—a meeting to which Obama had not been invited. He wanted to crash the party.

“Four against one,” one official warned the president.

“No problem,” he said, telling Clinton, “We’re going in now.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Let’s go.”

With Hillary as his wingman, Obama barged into the meeting, demanding to talk to the leaders of the four countries. Each of the countries had been dodging the United States at all levels—from Obama and Clinton on down—and this was a chance to address them all at once. The uninvited U.S. delegation of two caused quite a stir when they busted in.

“The Chinese diplomatic officer, he’s really losing his shit in Chinese,” said one Hillary aide who was briefed afterward.

“I don’t know what he’s saying, but I don’t think it’s ‘Glad to see you guys,’ ” Obama joked to Hillary.

Ultimately they hammered out a watered-down, nonbinding
agreement that was not adopted by the full conference. The Americans proclaimed victory, but they knew they hadn’t won much. What Obama and Hillary had gained, however, was a common appreciation for the difficulties of the nitty-gritty of diplomacy and the sense that they might actually enjoy each other’s company. “We had fun in Copenhagen because we stormed the secret meeting,” Hillary said.

“It was the two of them all day, improvising together, meeting to meeting,” said a senior White House official. “That was the first time we saw them have to—no staff—just figure out ‘What are we doing? What’s our play? What are you going to say to X leader? What do I say here?’ And they just had to improvise together for a full day in the most kind of chaotic environment possible, and that’s when I started to see them kind of click in terms of just working more naturally together, so it wasn’t this kind of formal relationship.” Or as another White House aide put it, “They were real buddies after that.”

One of Hillary’s closest aides agreed that Copenhagen was a turning point. “They both basically walked out of that experience the same way, like ‘You know what, this is really hard because there’s a lot of voices out there in the world with their own ideas, and American leadership is herding cats. It’s tough. It’s a tough slog,’ ” the aide said. “They both had the same kind of sensibility about what it was going to take for us to succeed on the foreign policy front coming out of that experience. And I think it made a big difference in terms of the nature of their conversation from that point on.”

They had already been working together for months on the hard question of committing more troops in Afghanistan and, in reaching a policy both could live with, had grown closer.

Just before Copenhagen, the Clarus Research Group released a poll of voters who described themselves as “
news watchers.” It found that 51 percent approved of the job Obama was doing, while Hillary’s rating was 75 percent. Not only were her numbers with independents (65 percent) and Republicans (57 percent) better than Obama’s, but so was her standing among Democrats (96 percent approval to Obama’s 93 percent). It wasn’t the first poll to
show Hillary’s numbers above Obama’s but the contrast was stark, particularly at a time when Washington elites had concluded she had been pushed to the sidelines. After the heady days of his transition and inaugural celebration, Obama had been dragged back to earth by a series of controversial public fights over his stimulus, health care, and climate change plans, while any work Hillary did on domestic issues was completely behind the curtain. Gallup, which pegged Obama’s approval at 49 percent among a broader set of Americans in the same time window as Clarus, had assessed it at 68 percent when he took office eleven months earlier. It didn’t take a high-priced political consultant to figure out that by the end of their first year in office, Hillary Clinton’s brand had become considerably stronger than Obama’s.

Toward the end of 2009, she had begun to telegraph that she didn’t expect to serve in Obama’s administration for eight years if he won a second term. “Please,” she had said when Glenn Kessler of the
Washington Post
asked her about it. “I will be so old.” In January 2010 she told Tavis Smiley that “
the whole eight” would “be very challenging” and, beginning to laugh, added, “I will be very happy to pass it on to someone else.” She also told Smiley that she was “absolutely not interested” in running for president again.

But her approval ratings—and the fact that she didn’t see herself as an Obama lifer—contributed to speculation in late 2009 and early 2010 that she might run a primary against the sitting president. Conservatives in particular liked to raise the prospect, since its mere discussion contributed to the idea that Obama was weak. Though it was fodder for political junkies and twenty-four-hour cable news programs, there was never any evidence that Hillary gave a thought to running against Obama.

It was really the second year of the Obama presidency in which Hillary’s loyalty mattered. In the first year, she had just lost an election to him, and his star was bigger than hers. But by the beginning of the second year, they had essentially traded places in terms of public esteem. If anyone was familiar with the mercurial nature of public opinion and with the difficulty a president can have in keeping
his lieutenants lined up behind his agenda when he’s losing popularity, it was Hillary. She had watched Bill grapple with the same vagaries. Over the course of 2010, she and her staff threw themselves into delivering on Obama’s agenda on a series of complex issues, from Haiti to the New START nuclear-arms-reduction treaty with Russia to the imposition of sanctions aimed at bringing Iran to heel.

While Obama and Hillary had grown closer in Copenhagen, their two staffs—along with Bill Clinton—forged stronger bonds in January 2010, when an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale ripped through the heart of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing 316,000 people, injuring 300,000 more, and displacing 1.3 million. Cheryl Mills was the State Department’s point person on Haiti and took charge of the recovery and relief effort, and the innovation team devised a text donation program for the Red Cross that raised $40 million in ten-dollar increments. It was a big moment for the fledgling 21st Century Statecraft crew because it demonstrated for Hillary and Mills the transformational power of technology for the poorer, less attended parts of the world that they cared so much about. “There was this kind of emotional connection to the work,” said one State Department official.