HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (39 page)

“I believe that effort kept him from doing anything more,” Berman said. “He was mulling it.… He did not do fund-raising for Brad, he did not come into the district and do events for Brad. I didn’t get the full treatment.”

But the statement did enough damage. Sherman topped Berman by 10 points in the primary and by 21 points in the November runoff.

“I don’t blame Bill Clinton for what he did,” Berman said. “That’s a certain loyalty.… I didn’t like it, but it’s not a source of hostility to me. That’s the way politics is.”

With Berman, Bill and Hillary scored a double victory. To Berman’s friends, Bill had seen the wisdom of reason in the end. But Sherman’s victory was touted in the press as another tally in Bill’s column, feeding the perception among Democrats that it was dangerous to cross the Clintons.

There’s no question that fellow members of the Democratic Party received Bill’s message. There was a price to pay—sometimes an entire political career—for crossing the Clintons. “It has the desired effect,” Representative Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), an admirer of Hillary’s, said of the Bill Clinton payback tour. “Let us just posit that
they’re even thinking about Hillary running in 2016. In case she is challenged in the primary, a lot of people, after this, are going to think long and hard about supporting her opponent. It’s not cost-free.”

Even as Bill and Obama were fighting proxy wars through candidates like Pascrell and Rothman, they continued to plot Clinton’s contribution to Obama’s reelection. A few days after the New Jersey primary, Obama advisers Jim Messina and Axelrod paid a visit to Bill’s suite at the top of the riverfront Chicago Sheraton. Clinton was in town for CGI’s annual national conference and was joined by Doug Band, Justin Cooper, Jon Davidson, and spokesman Matt McKenna. John Podesta, who had served as Bill’s White House chief of staff and as director of Obama’s presidential transition team, was Switzerland.

It could have been a tense talk. Bill had just made two public statements that undermined Obama attacks on Romney: he had challenged the
wisdom of letting tax cuts on earners making $250,000 or more expire, and he
had come to the defense of Romney and private-equity firms when the Obama campaign criticized the Republican nominee’s record at Bain Capital.

But Obama’s aides, who were dealing with a lot of off-message surrogates, saw Bill’s comments as rustiness rather than sabotage. “I don’t think there was anyone on the campaign who thought he was intentionally trying to screw things up,” one senior Obama adviser said. “He wanted to be an asset, and he was a big asset.”

Messina, who could see the Obama campaign headquarters from the window of Clinton’s suite, simply wanted to make sure that asset was being used in the right way. He began talking to Bill about polling information, voter data, and campaign infrastructure in minute detail. The rest of the room melted away as Bill and Messina spent an hour in the weeds of the campaign.

“The two biggest field data nerds I’ve ever met in my life, they’re going over precinct-by-precinct data from ’08 versus ’12,” said a source in the room who marked the meeting as the moment that Bill Clinton began to focus on reelecting Obama. “That was the day.”

Messina found Clinton to be what he expected—a world-class
adviser and political strategist—while Clinton liked Messina’s willingness to lay the campaign’s cards on the table. Their discussion ranged beyond raw political data to messaging, policy, and the ways Bill could most be helpful on the campaign trail. Over the summer and fall, Clinton and Messina spoke frequently.

Bill had a particular expertise that only one other living man could claim: he had defeated a sitting president. In fact, the feat had been pulled off only three times since 1932—and one of the incumbents who lost was the accidental president Gerald Ford. Bill’s 1992 victory over George H. W. Bush, and his reelection win in 1996 over Bob Dole, gave him special insight into what factored into voters’ judgment of a sitting president. The common factor in lost reelection bids was a weak economy, and Obama’s efforts to get America bustling again hadn’t been as successful as he had hoped. If Romney won and
the economy rebounded, as many experts predicted, it would be harder for Hillary to take the presidency in 2016. Therefore the best outcome for Hillary was an Obama victory followed by a booming economy. Ultimately, Bill had no reason to half-ass it for Obama and every reason to go full throttle.

Spurred on by his growing dislike for Romney, Bill hit the afterburners in Charlotte at the Democratic National Convention. The tipping point had come in August, when Romney tried to pin Obama for going back on the welfare reform law that Bill had signed as president. “The Romney people specifically sort of decided to cozy up to [Bill]…. They tried to drive a wedge between Clinton and Obama on welfare,” recalled a source close to Bill Clinton. “That was one of their three biggest tactical mistakes of the campaign.”

It was too cute by half in Bill’s book, the kind of shenanigans that worked in a race for a town board but not in a presidential campaign. His professional sensibilities were a little offended. If the meeting with Messina in Chicago had gotten Bill invested in the Obama campaign, the welfare flap got him energized to bludgeon Romney. “Over time, more and more, it felt like he was part of the team,” one Obama adviser observed.

Bill was eager to hit the trail not just for Obama but also for
Democratic Senate candidates—powerful players in future Democratic primaries. But he needed to turn his convention speech into the right springboard for that effort. Romney had been pounding Obama on the limp economy, and Bill’s primary objective was to make Romney’s worldview look like that of an insulated rich guy while wrapping the mantle of the Clinton economic success around Obama’s shoulders. In 2008 everyone knew Bill had been a reluctant advocate for Obama’s cause, but this time, when it came to the president’s reelection, he strove to make sure there was no doubt where he stood.

In preparing for his dramatic turn onstage—a moment of redemption, catharsis, and political resurrection—Bill surrounded himself with a who’s who of his presidency for a mighty thirteen-hour jam session. Paul Begala, Mark Penn, Joe Lockhart, Sandy Berger, Bruce Reed, and Gene Sperling served as the lieutenants in a new war room that looked a lot like the old one, only grayer and more grizzled. Lockhart had been Bill’s White House press secretary, Berger his national security adviser, Reed the head of the Bill-driven centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and Sperling a top economic adviser. Reed and Sperling, both of whom now worked for Obama, were the connective tissue between the two camps. The Obama folks saw them as old Clinton hands helping the former president work his magic. The Clinton team regarded them as old friends who nonetheless were with Obama. The cast of characters rotated throughout the day, as Bill sanded a vintage speech full of clever contrasts, memorable for its delivery more than for its substance, and a bit too long.

Bill had begun collecting thoughts on the speech a few weeks earlier, but it was generally a souped-up version of the speeches he had already delivered for Obama. Like Sinatra warming up for a rendition of “New York, New York,” Bill didn’t need much of a rehearsal. He practiced the speech just once all the way through. Once he started the full run-through, his pals knew he would deliver onstage. The text was shuttled over to the Obama camp, where David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Jon Favreau, and Obama anxiously waited. They made a few
edits. Then Clinton re-added some old material that hadn’t been in the previous draft. News outlets would soon note that Clinton’s remarks didn’t quite match the prepared text they’d been given by the Obama campaign. Bill was satisfied with the speech by 9:45 p.m., and he took the podium half an hour later.

Romney’s plan lacked an important component, Obama’s team had been saying: math. But Bill said it differently. In the folksy tone that the lower-class son of Arkansas had used to connect with average Americans for more than two decades, he used a longer word to convey a simple concept that every American who had attended grade school could understand—particularly the older set that Obama was having trouble winning over. “Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give
a one-word answer: Arithmetic.”

Arithmetic, not math. It was classic Clinton, and the audience rewarded it with a rousing ovation. “If they stay with their five-trillion-dollar tax-cut plan—in a deficit-reduction plan?—the arithmetic tells us, no matter what they say, only one of three things is about to happen.” He ticked through them, one by one: middle-class families would see their taxes go up, basic services would be gutted, or the national debt would pile even higher.

Then Clinton turned his attention to Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who had been attacking Obama for slashing Medicare even though Ryan’s budget used the same savings. “
It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did,” Clinton said to laughter and applause. Sperling would later say privately that the “brass” line hadn’t appeared in any of the drafts of Clinton’s speech. One of the best lines of the night was ad-libbed—or at least held back from the Obama camp.

Obama watched the speech on a monitor from the wings. During the campaign, according to one of his top aides, he had sometimes found himself forgetting that he had his own speech to give while watching Bill spin text into narrative. He found Bill “very entertaining,” the aide said, and swore to himself and others that he would give more freewheeling speeches when he was no longer in office.

There were a lot of ways to interpret Bill’s newfound love for Obama, but they all boiled down to a simple defining trait of the Clintons’ careers: loyalty. In the loftiest sense, Bill was showing loyalty to his country by promoting the candidate he felt was best positioned to lead it. From another perspective, he was demonstrating loyalty to the Democratic Party, as he had from his days as a driver for Governor Orval Faubus right up to that very moment.

But he was also loyally laying the groundwork for Hillary to run in 2016. If she hoped to capture the nomination and win the presidency, she would need a unified Democratic Party, one that was healed from the bitter 2008 primary. Bill mentioned her early in the speech. Obama, he said, had been wise enough to bring his rivals into the fold—he was of such sound judgment, Bill said, that he had hired Hillary to be his diplomat. Since that moment in 2008, in a political chess game played expertly by both sides, Obama and Hillary had bound together their own political fortunes as well as Bill’s interests both in resurrecting his own image and in positioning Hillary for a second run. The Clinton-Obama political marriage had been more fruitful than any of them could have imagined four years earlier.

It was afternoon in Dili, East Timor, and Hillary had wrapped up meetings with the president, the prime minister, and the American embassy staff there. Before flying to Brunei for a dinner with the sultan,
she settled into a chair in the ambassador’s personal quarters to watch a recording of Bill’s speech. Her aides had undertaken a minor operation to allow her to watch. First, after trial and error, they had determined that the ambassador’s personal computer was the only one in the building equipped to download the recording that Philippe Reines had made remotely and accessed from the Slingbox in his Washington, D.C., apartment.

Then without warning, they kicked reporters off of the Internet to ensure that the connection to the ambassador’s house would have enough capacity. With Hillary at the desk, her aides piled onto the ambassador’s bed behind her to watch.

Nick Merrill, a press secretary who dabbles in photography as a hobby, tried to snap photos stealthily as Hillary sat glued to the monitor. His mission was complicated by the loud sound his Canon 7D camera normally made when it clicked away at eight frames per second. Merrill switched over to taking single frames, ducking behind an armoire between shots so as not to make Hillary aware that she was being photographed. Finally, he crept up close enough to capture a memorable image of her, smiling with her hand resting at the top of her sternum in a gesture of pride, as she watched. In the photo, a half-eaten sandwich sits on the desk. Hillary wore a look of satisfaction when Obama came out to the stage to greet her husband. Her aides later expressed mild surprise that Hillary was so enthralled, given the innumerable speeches she had seen her husband give over the course of more than thirty years.

When it was released by the State Department, Merrill’s photograph was powerful enough to merit play on most major American news sites the following morning. Without uttering a word—without risking a controversial appearance or partisan jab—Hillary conveyed that she had her eyes on the presidential race and on her husband’s role in it.

Even though she followed the tradition of most secretaries of state by declining to campaign for the president’s reelection, Hillary closely monitored electoral developments, particularly in the battle for control of the Senate. During the 2012 election cycle, according to a Democratic source on Capitol Hill, she spoke to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada senator, as many as five times about electoral politics. “It was like ‘I just want to know,’ ” the source said. “She wasn’t asking to do anything. We weren’t asking her to do anything, obviously. But she wanted to have a little bit of the fix.”

Hillary, who could watch Bill take care of her politics at arm’s length, was largely focused on doing well in the job that she had. In a few months, she would leave the administration, and it looked as if she would do so with a spotless record.

When Hillary Clinton had met with Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril for the first time in the penthouse suite at the Westin Paris on March 14, 2011, as part of her campaign to build a coalition to fight Qaddafi, Chris Stevens was one of the handful of American officials in the room. Stevens was so taken with Jibril’s presentation that day—the vision of an inclusive post-Qaddafi Libya—that he urged Hillary to repeat it to President Obama.