HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (34 page)

Some Democrats thought Obama would ice his reelection campaign with a switcheroo that put Vice President Joe Biden at State and Hillary on Obama’s ticket.
The Obama campaign even polled to see how she would fare, determining the numbers weren’t good
enough to pursue a change. Time and again the speculation was dismissed. But there was one post that Hillary’s aides insist she was actually in the mix for, and though it was reported several months later, the rumor never seemed to have legs in the media, perhaps because other officials denied that it ever happened.

A Hillary aide, who cited the
Washington Post
’s reporting on the matter as gospel, told the story this way: In the summer of 2011, Bill Daley, then the White House chief of staff, visited Hillary at State to gauge her interest in
taking over as treasury secretary. Tim Geithner, who held the job at the time, had put Hillary at the top of his list of potential successors, and the White House was taking the recommendation seriously enough to feel Hillary out about it.

She politely declined. It was “a nonstarter,” one of her aides said.

But Daley said the reported incident never happened. “I never did that. That’s bullshit!” he said while attending a Clinton Global Initiative event in Chicago in June 2013. “Not true. I never talked to her about it.”

The whole story was overhyped, according to a source close to Geithner. Hillary’s name appeared on a list that Geithner provided to the White House, but she wasn’t his sole recommendation, the source said.

Surely, adding bona fides in the financial sector through a job at the World Bank or the Treasury Department to her work at State would have rounded out Hillary’s résumé for a second presidential run, but the Treasury post would have carried the risk of a second economic collapse. Either way, Hillary never planned to remain in the administration for more than four years, according to her aides, and there was still a lot left for her to do at State.

At the time, Hillary was well aware of just how well she was polling, and at least one close friend warned her that her approval ratings were a function of voters seeing her as above politics, a perception that would be hard to maintain if she jumped back into the fray right after leaving State. In mid-September 2011, longtime friend Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary for arms control, hitched a ride with Hillary from the Waldorf-Astoria to the UN building in
Manhattan during a General Assembly meeting. Bloomberg News had just published
a poll showing that 64 percent of Americans viewed Hillary favorably, and Tauscher had heard the news on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
. The same poll also showed that 34 percent of Americans believed the country would be better off if Hillary, not Obama, were president, 47 percent believed things would be the same, and 13 percent thought the country would be worse off with Hillary at the helm. Major media outlets were reporting the news as a sign of voters’ “buyer’s remorse” over electing Obama and not Hillary. When Tauscher got in the car, Hillary was sitting in the back smiling, and Tauscher assumed it was because of the big numbers.

The stretch of streets between the Waldorf and the United Nations had been blocked off so that officials could move freely during the General Assembly, giving midtown an eerily empty feel as Tauscher cautioned Hillary to husband her popularity carefully. “What worries me is the reason that you have [high favorables] is that people have marked to market that you are out of politics and they can accept you now,” Tauscher said. “If I have one more Republican tell me that they wish you were president, I’ll just want to backhand them.”

Hillary, who had been listening quietly, laughed at the backhand remark. But Tauscher still needed to make a serious point. She wanted Hillary to make sure her public standing remained strong after she left State. “You have to know what the downside of this is,” Tauscher, the former congresswoman, said. “The moment you move back into politics, you go from sixty-six to forty-six to twenty-six faster than a split second. There is real political capital here. It’s not conventional political capital, but it’s real. How do you manage that in a post–State Department world?”

Of course, it was impossible for Hillary to completely escape politics, especially while her husband was settling three-year-old scores for her on the electoral battlefield. In August,
Bill endorsed Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat from Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, for reelection. Sherman had been a loyal Hillary supporter until the very end, even cheering for her from the
audience during her Building Museum concession speech. That Bill got behind Sherman would have merited little attention, except for the fact that the state’s independent redistricting commission was expected to redraw Los Angeles–area political boundaries in a way that could induce Sherman and Representative Howard Berman, the thirty-year House veteran who led Democrats on the Foreign Affairs Committee, to run against each other in a primary. Berman was one of the most widely respected Democrats in Washington, and he had worked closely with Hillary on any number of thorny foreign policy issues, including Iran sanctions and aid to Pakistan. Sherman, on the other hand, would have had a hard time finding anyone in Washington, outside the people who worked for him, who thought he was a better congressman than Berman. But the district lines favored Sherman, and the calculus for Bill was clear: Sherman had endorsed Hillary early, and Berman had endorsed Obama.

Berman went into damage control mode, pushing every button he could to try to get Bill to stop at the endorsement and not campaign, or raise money, for Sherman. He dialed up Mickey Kantor, who had been Bill Clinton’s trade representative, for help. He asked DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to intervene. He leaned on friends at the State Department to make his case to Hillary. Berman heard back from the intermediaries that Bill understood which lawmaker was the better congressman but wasn’t going to retract the statement he had given in support of Sherman. Moreover, the Clinton camp declined to say whether Bill would or would not do more for Sherman.

On one policy issue, in particular, Berman felt that maybe Bill Clinton owed him something. In the early 1990s, Berman had been a leading congressional advocate for Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, despite the political cost with labor unions that opposed the pact. Berman even hoped at one point that Bill might take the wind out of the Sherman endorsement by releasing a statement praising Berman for his advocacy on trade issues. In October 2011, as Hillary lobbied Democrats to vote for three Obama-backed
free-trade agreements, Berman pressed her personally on Bill’s support for Sherman.

“I pointed out the irony that she was asking me to vote for the free-trade agreements and alienate a significant base in my district while her husband was supporting my opponent,” Berman recalled. “She gave that funny nervous laugh and said she wasn’t involved in politics.”

As Bill spent political capital rewarding Hillary’s 2008 supporters, he also drew down on it in service of Barack Obama. But this was a calculated investment. If Obama won—and if Bill and Hillary, by extension, helped—the victory would enhance the Clintons’ standing both within the Democratic Party and outside it. Back in 2008, as Obama began his steady march to the White House, his top campaign aides were hesitant to bring Bill Clinton into the fold for the final push, fearing that a halfhearted Clinton would show up on the trail and simply run through the motions with little feeling. And even as Clinton agreed to campaign that fall for Obama in key swing states—including must-win Florida—the decision to use him was met with some internal skepticism, aides confessed.

But as Team Obama began to map out the president’s reelection bid in the summer of 2011, it became increasingly clear they needed a little Clinton magic. Bill was once again the patriarch of the Democratic Party, having regained his own broad popularity as Obama’s had diminished over the course of more than two years in the presidency. It was the biggest irony heading into the reelection campaign, Obama’s aides acknowledged. They needed the man who had once attempted to tear their guy down, the man some accused of race-baiting, to help win the second round.

Even though the relationship between the two presidents had grown from barely bearable to cordial, it would be a sensitive mission, asking Clinton to go all out for Obama. There was no love lost between Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and Doug Band, the self-important minder of Clinton’s phone calls, calendar, and political favor file. So Obama’s aides called on Wasserman Schultz, who
represented Florida in the House, to play matchmaker between the two presidents.

During a blistering-hot Washington summer in 2011, Wasserman Schultz dialed up Band to start the dance of involving Bill in the campaign. Band, ever the savvy political operator who returns calls on his own timetable, knew why the congresswoman was calling. He was slow to call her back. Bill Clinton was playing hard to get—or at least Band was. “It’s not like there was this enthusiastic rush to jump on board,” said one Clinton ally.

Months went by, until Wasserman Schultz finally connected with Band in the late fall. Messina, chief Obama strategist David Axelrod, DNC executive director Patrick Gaspard, and pollster Joel Benenson wanted an audience with Clinton. They settled on November 9, just less than a year before Election Day, at Bill’s Harlem office.

The meeting was a classic exercise in bonding, but it was also an opportunity for the Obama aides to roll out the full-court press and solicit advice from the former president. They needed Clinton solidly on their team, and to woo him, they were willing to play to his sense of importance.

Inside a conference room at the Clinton office, Messina presided over a PowerPoint slide show presentation, laying out the details of the Obama campaign strategy, state by state, and explaining in great detail the pathways to victory. As Messina spouted off statistics and numbers, Clinton—joined by Band and Band protégé Justin Cooper—carefully reviewed each slide and listened intently. Cooper, who would later take over Band’s duties, had interned for Band in the Clinton White House, and he dressed like, spoke like, and committed the same grammatical errors as his mentor. When it was over, Bill offered up his thoughts on various states and counties. Few people knew the numbers and specifics of state-by-state politics better than Bill, who could easily tick off which counties in Colorado had the largest populations of college-age students to increase turnout and where Team Obama needed to set its sights in must-win Ohio.

Messina, who had left his deputy chief of staff job at the White House earlier in the year to head up the Obama campaign operation,
had spent time reading books on reelection bids, including Clinton’s 1996 victory. Going into the meeting, he was particularly interested in the strategy Clinton had used to define his opponent, Bob Dole, early on in the campaign, and he wanted Clinton’s thoughts on how to replicate it in 2012.

Obama’s top advisers were floating
two ideas about Romney, the more clichéd theme of Romney being a flip-flopper, and another portraying Romney as an extreme conservative who held views aligned with the Tea Party. Clinton recommended that they focus on the latter. Donors in particular, he told the Obama crowd, would welcome such a strategy. Besides, he added, going with the flip-flopper tack didn’t generally work.

The meeting was scheduled for an hour, aides said, but it lasted two and a half, as Team Obama mapped out the reelection strategy for Clinton. Bill savored the political talk, every second of it. The Obama folks, after all these years, were finally starting to speak Clinton’s language back to him. It was always good to get political insights from the former president, but the gentle woo—soliciting his advice, talking to him in numbers, and getting him energized for the campaign—was more important for its power in creating buy-in from Clinton, who would go on to be Obama’s most effective surrogate.

Obama’s aides left the meeting feeling satisfied and grateful for Clinton’s help. Back in Chicago and Washington, they bragged that the meeting went “really, really well.”

“A lot of the advice President Clinton gave us was helpful and exactly right,” said one of the Obama aides.

The Harlem power conference paved the way for a bit of business that would bind Obama and the Clintons in the way that most counts in politics: financially. Days after the meeting, Band dialed up Gaspard, executive director of the DNC. He was calling to relay an ask from Bill to Obama. The former president wanted Obama to take another crack at retiring Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign debt once and for all. The debt, which had once totaled more than $25 million, had fallen to $274,000, due in large part to e-mail pitches and raffles sent to donors from Bill. While Hillary
crisscrossed the world as top diplomat, Bill sent several e-mails to donor lists, including one that stated that while her campaign was “
so close to paying off the last of her debt—she’s not there yet.”

But nearly every dollar had been squeezed. Hillary’s debt didn’t seem like an astronomical number, but there were a lot of obstacles to getting it paid off. First and foremost, a lot of Democratic donors in both her camp and Obama’s already had given maximum contributions either to fund the original campaign or to pay off the debt after the primary. The Clintons were desperate for new sources of cash. There were still Obama donors who had categorically refused to write checks to her, even after Obama appealed to them to do just that in 2008. Bill needed Obama to prod his elite set of givers a bit harder.

While some Obama donors still had hard feelings from 2008, others were now more willing to pony up. “It was significantly different because, number one, you were much further removed, and, two, you saw the work as secretary of state,” said one Obama donor who subsequently gave to Hillary and called her the “number one team player” in Obama’s cabinet. There was also a good back-scratching reason for Obama’s team to step up its effort to pay off Hillary’s debt: Bill agreed to do three fund-raisers for Obama in the spring.