Game Change (31 page)

“Don’t talk to me about safety,” Hillary snapped. “Don’t talk to me about threats on your life. I’ve been living with threats for fifteen years. I’ve had threats on my daughter’s life. I’ve had guns and knives confiscated from my campaign events this year. Don’t give me a lecture on safety!”

A few minutes later, Clinton dutifully went out and made a statement. She mopped up the mess, or, at least, she tried to—but, really, she didn’t care. All the frustration she’d felt with the press through the campaign was encapsulated in that moment. She flew back to New York late in the night, her anger draining away, replaced with dysphoria. Watching her recede into herself, deflated, dejected, one of Clinton’s aides on the plane had a thought:
The campaign is over.

ON THE NIGHT OF Tuesday, June 3, Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Having split the last two primaries that day with Clinton—him winning in Montana, her in South Dakota—and receiving a final-hours influx of support from superdelegates, he had made it to the magic 2,025. At the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans would hold their convention that summer, Obama strode onstage to the strains of U2’s “Beautiful Day,” clasping hands with Michelle, hugging her, then sharing with her the most famous fist bump in the history of humankind.

After the speech, Barack, Michelle, his team, and his friends retired to a bar inside the arena to watch Clinton’s event in New York on television. The Obamans were expecting a concession speech—or, at least, remarks that were courteous and maybe even classy. So was the press. So were even some of her supporters.

But the address Clinton gave that night in the basement gym of Baruch College was instead seen by many as a churlish attempt to stomp on Obama’s buzz. After being introduced by Terry McAuliffe as “the next president of the United States,” Clinton didn’t concede, didn’t endorse, didn’t so much as acknowledge her rival’s historic triumph. “Now the question is,” Hillary asked the crowd, “where do we go from here?”

Her audience chanted, “Denver! Denver! Denver!”

She seemed to revel in it.

Back in St. Paul, some brainiac in the Obama communications shop had decided it would be a good idea to let the media be in the bar while the Obama team viewed Clinton’s speech. As Hillary spoke, all the air went out of the room. Obama walked over and punched Jarrett in the arm.

“What?”
she said to him.

“The look on your face,” Obama said, noting her sour expression. “The
press
is here.”

The next morning in Washington, a conference call of the senior Hillarylanders was convened to discuss their boss’s next steps. “We have three choices,” Penn said. “She can just get out. She can negotiate. Or she can park.” By parking, Penn meant suspend active campaigning but not concede—waiting around, hoping for a landmine to explode under Obama’s feet.

The group quickly coalesced around option number one, but Penn’s preferred option was that she park. “Let’s kick the can down the road,” he said, maybe all the way to Denver. Or at least let’s negotiate. Hillary had won eighteen million votes; her support was a valuable commodity. She should extract concessions from Obama.

“We need to make him grovel,” Penn said.

As the call was going on, Clinton and Obama were at the Washington Convention Center for the annual meeting of the Jewish lobbying group AIPAC. Obama spoke first, then Clinton. When Hillary finished, she hurried backstage for a photo shoot for an upcoming magazine cover story—and ran smack into Obama and his traveling party.

The unfolding scene was a semiotician’s fantasia. For months, Clinton and Obama had battled (and battered) each other more or less as equals. But now there was no longer even a faint hint of parity. When they first spied each other in the cluttered hallway, Clinton hugged the wall deferentially to let Obama pass. Obama took her aside, put his hand on her shoulder, leaned in for a few words. When their chat was over and Obama marched toward the freight elevator to leave, his Secret Service agents brusquely shooed away Clinton’s aides: “Make way for Senator Obama! Make way for Senator Obama!”

The question was whether Hillary herself would heed that directive. A few minutes later, she would head off to Ballston to figure out her end game. She was somber, prideful, aggrieved, confused—and still high on the notion that she was leading an army, Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-size fake pearls. Clinton knew she was being pummeled for her speech the night before, but she’d convinced herself that she was, in fact, helping Obama. Her voters were angry, they felt insulted, they had to be coaxed along. If she’d simply endorsed her rival, her supporters might have washed their hands of both of them, either staying home in the fall or voting for McCain. The situation was volatile.

Clinton was hearing from countless allies about what she should do now, but much of their advice—as it had been all along through the marathon campaign—she considered useless. A war was raging inside her between rationality and denial. Maybe she should wait a week before doing anything. Or maybe two. Keep her options open. You never knew what could happen.

It didn’t take long for Hillary’s high command, huddled in a conference room in her headquarters, to disabuse her of those thoughts. Grunwald told Clinton that she had to avoid letting the past twelve hours become “the last snapshot” of her campaign. The perception that she’d behaved badly had taken hold in the media, and fairly or not, threatened to eclipse everything she had accomplished. She had to get out and get behind Obama, quickly and graciously, but do it in a way that served her interests and her image. “You should own the moment yourself,” Grunwald said.

Tina Flournoy, a savvy labor politico who’d joined the campaign in its late stages, drew an analogy to the Civil War. A lot of people who weren’t ready for the battle to end took to the hills, Flournoy said. You can go to the hills for a while, but you have to come down eventually. You can’t stay in the hills.

Clinton polled the table as to whether Obama could win in November. “Yes,” Flournoy said. “With your help, he can win.” Everyone but Penn and Mills agreed.

Clinton was persuaded to exit and set in motion plans to concede and endorse Obama that weekend.

The former combatants arranged to meet secretly Thursday evening at the home of Senator Dianne Feinstein in northwest Washington. They had much to discuss—Hillary’s role at the convention, what help Obama might offer in retiring her campaign debt, how they would campaign together in the fall—but only one thing really mattered at this moment: whether Clinton would be Obama’s running mate.

Speculation on the topic had been raging in the media for the past few days. Many of Clinton’s supporters considered the veep slot Hillary’s due. BET’s Bob Johnson had launched a public campaign on her behalf, telling the press that Clinton had informed him that “if asked to do this, she must accept because she believes that it is in the best interest of the party.”

The truth was, Clinton’s ambivalence at the prospect was deep. If Obama offered her the number-two spot, Hillary
did
feel she would have to take it—but mainly to avoid being blamed if she declined and then Obama lost in the fall. Though her husband was all for her being on the ticket, Hillary found it difficult to muster any enthusiasm for it. “I’ve already done that job,” she told Penn.

Obama’s view of the matter was complicated, too. For all the heartache and heartburn of the campaign, he respected and admired Hillary, but he wondered if she would ever be able to see herself as his subordinate. There was also the issue of the baggage she brought, especially that one steamer trunk permanently strapped to her bumper. You can’t have three presidents in the White House, Obama told some friends at a dinner in New York.

The Feinstein meeting played out against this psychological backdrop. Seated in the California senator’s living room, each with a glass of water, Obama and Clinton cut right to the chase. Hillary indicated she was willing to be considered, but unwilling to be vetted unless Obama was all but certain that he planned to pick her. Obama indicated he was willing to vet her, but that he was unlikely to pick her.

Then, as if to make Clinton feel better, but actually putting the sting in the tail, Obama added, “You didn’t run to be vice president.”

Clinton left the Feinstein meeting and focused on her official exit. The event was less than forty-eight hours off, a Saturday morning rally at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington. For many of those hours, Clinton’s speechwriters labored over her speech, cranking out twenty drafts. Late on Friday night, the speech was locked—or so everyone thought. In fact, Hillary and Bill stayed up late revising and reworking, editing and reediting the thing. Early the next morning, their new text landed in the email in-boxes of the high command.

“Wow, they really, seriously, fucked this up,” Garin wrote to his colleagues after reading it. “They have turned a gracious endorsement of Senator Obama into something that will (and should) be seen as stingy and small, and turned nice passages about the causes of the campaign into turgid and self-reverential prose. The problem isn’t just what they took out, it’s also what they put in. How many more uses of the word ‘I’ do they have here?”

A furious scramble ensued. The Clintons had removed the word “endorse”; it was put back in. The Clintons had deleted many of the references to Obama; they were reinserted. Hillary uttered not a peep of protest, insisting that her goal all along had been to give a speech that was generous and unimpeachable.

It wound up being an address the Obamans could have written themselves—though it would be best remembered for a stanza that spoke not to Clinton’s praise for the winner but to what she’d accomplished even in losing. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that hardest, highest glass ceiling this time,” Hillary said before an adoring throng, “thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.”

THE PATH TO PEACE between the Obamans and the Clintonites would not be strewn with primrose. The battle between Barack and Hillary had been historic across every dimension, from the amount of money spent and the numbers of voters who had participated to its sheer closeness—roughly 150,000 votes out of nearly 36 million cast divided the candidates. The fighting had been too long, too messy, and too mean for cuddling to commence right away.

The candidates had agreed to have Plouffe and Mills work out the details of how the two campaigns would come to a practical detente. At the center of those negotiations was the matter of Clinton’s $12 million debt. The Clintonites wanted the Obamans to help pay it off by asking his supporters to cough up contributions to her. The Obamans were reluctant, or, in Plouffe’s case, downright recalcitrant.

Though the press was starting to hyperventilate about polls suggesting that Hillary’s voters were up for grabs or even leaning toward McCain, Obama and the suits didn’t buy it. Sure, there were a handful of PUMA—“party unity, my ass”—women who would vote for G. Gordon Liddy before they voted for Obama. But the suits were convinced that rank-and-file Clinton voters would be with Obama in November as long as the campaign handled Hillary with due respect.

On June 27, the public process of rapprochement began when Obama and Clinton traveled together on a joint campaign trip to the aptly named town of Unity, New Hampshire, where each of them had received 107 votes in the state’s primary.

The plane ride up from Washington was awkward, the press scrutinizing their every gesture as they sat next to each other in seats 2A and 2B. But the two-hour bus ride from Manchester was worse. Obama had a compartment to himself up front, Clinton one to herself in back, with a middle section in between. For most of the ride, they stood in their respective doorways batting pieces of idle chitchat (about learning to sleep on planes, using BlackBerrys, eating strange food in strange lands) back and forth like a pair of nervous tennis players.

Axelrod approached Clinton and asked to have a word. They retreated to the rear cabin and huddled. Obama’s strategist wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings between them. Afterward, Axelrod was elated with how the talk had gone. It was a really good conversation, he said. But Hillary had a slightly different view.

It was like a root canal, she told her friends. I wanted to throw up.

The event itself was a relief. Obama and Clinton, their outfits coordinated so that his tie matched her blue pantsuit, fell over themselves praising each other, as if the past eighteen months had never happened. “For anyone who voted for me and is now considering not voting, or voting for Senator McCain, I strongly urge you to reconsider,” Clinton said. When the crowd squealed for Hillary, Obama concurred, “She rocks, she rocks.”

Three days later, from the road in Missouri, Obama called Bill Clinton. They spoke for twenty minutes and agreed to get together in the future, maybe over a dinner in New York, and for a public event, as early as July. Obama knew Bill was still upset about having been cast as a race-baiter in the campaign, and that what he wanted was a get-out-of-jail-free card from Obama. Obama didn’t think Clinton was a racist, but he had no intention of exonerating him.
Let him get over it and then we’ll see
, Obama thought.

A few weeks later, Michelle called Hillary to break the ice with her after a trip to Florida, where some of Clinton’s supporters had held a fund-raiser for Barack. I feel bad because I hadn’t called you, Michelle said. I was waiting for the right moment.

They talked about Hillary’s experience raising a young daughter in the White House, about how Michelle should avoid getting caught up in the campaign attacks that were now coming her way. Don’t let that get to you, Hillary advised. That’s what they’re going to do. It’s the Republican playbook. Expect it.

THE BRAVE FACE SHE put on for Michelle notwithstanding, Hillary was not a happy woman in the summer of 2008. The past haunted her, the future daunted her, and the present was full of burdens. Still coping with her loss and what it meant, she kept casting her mind back, trying to grasp what had gone wrong with her campaign, inviting members of her former high command to her Senate office to conduct extensive examinations of their failure.