HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (53 page)

On April 4 she gave her first speech in two months at the annual gala for Vital Voices, the international women’s leadership organization she had launched from the White House in 1999. Two days later Claire McCaskill, who had said in 2006 that she wouldn’t let Bill Clinton near her daughter and then had slammed Hillary in support of Obama in 2008, appeared at Bill’s invitation at CGI’s college conference at Washington University in St. Louis. McCaskill had changed her tune on Hillary, having said on February 1, the same day Hillary departed the State Department, that she would “
work my heart out” to elect Hillary in 2016, if she ran. McCaskill and the Clintons hadn’t completely mended fences by the time Clinton Global Initiative University rolled around in April, according to a source close to the Missouri senator, but they were starting to get along a lot better. “You had a professional division and a personal division, and both of those faded,” the source said. “The personal
division was never meant to be as such, and the professional division was just that—it wasn’t personal.”

Many of Hillary’s close friends and aides rolled their eyes at McCaskill’s sudden love for the early front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination—McCaskill was so enthusiastic about letting everyone know her choice that she reendorsed Hillary in June after her initial statement, reported by the
St. Louis Beacon
, didn’t get much national attention. Hillary seemed willing to have one more person on the bandwagon—not having to deal with the same obstacles she faced in 2008—but she was also busy tending to the folks who had been on it for years.

By the time McCaskill and Bill appeared together at CGI, Hillary was scheduling one-on-one sessions in Washington and New York with an elite set of her political supporters, including members of Congress and big-time donors. These breakfasts and dinners were not explicitly political, but the men and women who found themselves sitting across the table from Hillary had no illusions about what amounted to the reacquaintance phase of the political courtship ritual.

“She talked about how she was very specifically not being political this year,” said one of the people who met with Hillary early in 2013. “That she was focused on giving speeches, being involved with CGI, writing her book, catching up with her family, relaxing, and that she would turn to politics, you know, speaking at Jefferson-Jackson dinners and doing the things that were more overtly political during 2014.

“I came away with the sense that she was probably, not definitely, going to run for president,” the person said. “The whole conversation just led me to believe that she is going to go through a deliberative process and a deliberate process that will get her increasingly engaged politically, and I got the sense that she would be in a position to be able to pull the trigger if she decided to.”

For the time being, Hillary was, as Ellen Tauscher had advised back at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2011, marshaling her hard-won political capital. If she hadn’t brokered any
major peace accords in her time at State, neither had she committed many unforced political errors. It made strategic sense for her to stay out of politics for as long as she could, with the caveat that she would find a way to help Terry McAuliffe, who was again running for governor in Virginia’s off-year 2013 election.

While she put out the word to her top-level supporters that she wouldn’t be hitting the campaign trail or raising money for other candidates until at least 2014, some of them began to advise her about 2016 anyway. Kirsten Gillibrand, the forty-six-year-old rising star who had taken Hillary’s seat in the Senate, was one of the first guests at a series of one-on-one breakfasts to give counsel that Hillary had been hearing for years. Hire new people to run your campaign, said Gillibrand, who had worked on Hillary’s first campaign for the Senate.

Clinton insiders sought to make clear in the summer of 2013 that Hillary wasn’t explicitly laying out plans for 2014 in these meetings, and that any political activities she engaged in during the midterm election cycle would be expressly for candidates on the ballot that year. But they also noted that her expected reemergence on the political scene would be a sign that the option to run for president was still alive and well in her mind.

“There’s no plan, but she’s going to do more politically next year than this year, defined primarily by work on behalf of other candidates,” one of her longtime advisers said in July 2013. “If she was to do nothing, that would be a pretty interesting sign. Doing something is a sign that she’s continuing to keep her options open.”

On April 23, Hillary summoned the team for her first philanthropic project to the house on Whitehaven Street. The sliding French doors of the dining room were usually open, but for this meeting they were closed, a sign of her desire to shut out the outside world and get down to business.

Already it looked as if Hillary might have bitten off more than she could chew in designing an agenda for her post-State life in the
private sector. In addition to the cattle call of meetings with political supporters, she was writing another book, for which she had reportedly received an $8 million advance; she was about to give the first of her paid speeches, to the National Multi Housing Council, the next day; and she was planning to launch three separate charitable projects—one focused on women and girls, one on economic development issues, and the one being discussed at this meeting, on promoting early childhood development.

That might have been a small set of tasks for the seventy-thousand-person State Department staff to pull off, but Hillary now had a much smaller corps to call on. Mills, who was still working on Haiti issues on a part-time basis at the State Department, remained Hillary’s consigliere and the de facto head of Hillary’s fast-sprawling post-State operation. Maura Pally, a Mills protégée whose distinctive black-framed glasses with silver-frosted edges stood out as particularly retro in Clintonworld, had been hired as Hillary’s chief of staff at the Clinton Foundation. Huma, who had so contorted her professional relationship with the State Department to live in New York seven months earlier, was named director of Hillary’s new Washington operation.

In Washington, Hillary had moved more than half a dozen aides into the HRCO office. Jake Sullivan, at the urging of Hillary and Obama, moved on to become Joe Biden’s national security adviser. But Reines, who was busy planning to open a consulting shop with former Panetta chief of staff Jeremy Bash, used the office a little bit as he handed off many of his day-to-day press duties to Nick Merrill. Dan Schwerin, Rob Russo, Lona Valmoro, and Shilpa Pesaru also jumped from State to HRCO. Hillary’s remaining staff was competent and loyal but not equipped to get half a dozen major projects up and running smoothly in the time frame Hillary envisioned. She added consultants into the mix, but even then it was hard to focus an amorphous start-up.

Anxious to have something to roll out at CGI’s annual national conference in Chicago in June, Hillary prodded the team of aides
and consultants gathered around her dining room table to find a way for her to elevate early childhood development as an issue and persuade parents, businesses, and child care workers to use the best practices identified by scientific research to promote healthy brain development in children under the age of six.

“We’re not doing enough,” she said. “What can we do to leverage my name, my standing, and my time to actually improve the health and well-being of kids?”

Hillary already had created a partnership for the project, which was originally the brainchild of Ann O’Leary, a legislative director in Hillary’s Senate office who had moved on to work at a San Francisco nonprofit called the Center for the Next Generation. Hillary would operate her early childhood development project in conjunction with the Center for the Next Generation, which was cofounded by Jim Steyer, who had been a mentor to Chelsea. His brother, Tom, who had made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and had long been a leading source of campaign cash for Hillary, poured money into trying to elect McAuliffe in 2013, fortifying the ties between the Clintons and the Steyers.

In addition to Mills and O’Leary, Hillary had invited Karen Dunn, a former aide who was also working with the Center for the Next Generation; Alec Ross, her innovation adviser at State; and Tom Freedman, a former Clinton White House aide who had served on Obama’s innovation transition team. Several other familiar faces in Hillaryland peered at her from around the table.

But even deep into April, there still wasn’t much meat on the bone. O’Leary’s original idea, first broached in November 2012, called for Hillary to engage in the public policy debate over early childhood development. But Hillary made clear to her aides that she wanted to stick to the private and nonprofit sectors. The group was sharp enough that Hillary didn’t have to tell them why she wanted to avoid political land mines in Washington. Lobbying Congress or the White House would inevitably turn her year out of politics into nothing but politics, and by making it difficult for Republican
politicians to support the issue, she might cause more harm than good. “You don’t need to be that explicit,” said a source in the meeting. “Nobody in that room is on training wheels.”

Two days before the June 13 opening of the CGI conference, Hillary launched a new Twitter account. She was one of the few non-incumbent potential presidential candidates in history who had no need to raise her profile, but she had developed a new understanding of the power of social media, particularly Twitter, as a political organizing tool. She chose the famous
Time
magazine photo that had launched
Texts from Hillary
as her avatar, even nodding to the Tumblr’s creators with her first Tweet.

“Thanks for the inspiration @asmith83 & @sllambe—I’ll take it from here … #tweetsfromHillary,” she wrote. Her Twitter bio tantalized those who hoped she would run for president: “Mom, wife, lawyer, FLOAR, FLOTUS, women & kids advocate, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit fashionista, U.S. senator, ceiling cracker … TBD …” In sloppy fashion, her aides showed just how much attention she pays to every minute aspect of her own brand
by making six changes to the bio on the first day.
Wife
was put before
mom
,
pantsuit fashionista
was changed to
pantsuit aficionado
—ensuring that she wouldn’t be confused for a South American sartorial socialist—and several other words were moved around or added. While
BuzzFeed
popped a quick story on the changes, Hillary racked up new followers. She had 493,000 of them in the first five days, more than the much older Twitter accounts of Joe Biden, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Florida senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, or Virginia senator Mark Warner, all of whom were, by the summer of 2013, leading suspects to run for president. First Lady Michelle Obama even gave Hillary a “forward Friday”—a call to her own followers to start following Hillary.

But a few days later the ramshackle staff work in assembling her Twitter bio proved to be a harbinger for the rocky rollout of her first philanthropic project. The seat-of-the-pants rush to patch together an early childhood development initiative, organized mostly through
conference calls and e-mails, produced a dud when Hillary gave the first public hint of her plan at CGI in Chicago on June 13. Hillary’s advisers confessed that a few hours before she took the stage in the main ballroom at the Sheraton, they still weren’t 100 percent sure that they were ready to launch. Rather than announce the initiative, Hillary told the audience that she would have something to unveil the following day. In a video released the next morning, Hillary announced the Too Small to Fail program—a clever title that had already existed at the Center for the Next Generation before Hillary became involved—which she said would “promote new research on the science of children’s brain development, early learning, and early health” and “help parents, businesses, and communities identify specific actions” that would contribute to giving children under the age of six the resources and tools necessary to thrive.

Several people involved with the project jumped on a conference call with reporters that morning but spoke much more about the general aims of the program than about any specific work that Hillary planned to undertake. Only a few reporters bothered to ask questions. When Hillary took the stage at CGI later that day to announce commitments of money from partner organizations, she did so in competition with the loud clinking of glasses and silverware. The renaming of the Clinton Foundation to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation earned far more media coverage than the new child development initiative, even though the name change already had been announced in April.

That week she broke away from the CGI festivities to appear as the keynote speaker for CURE’s annual gala, not too far from the Sheraton. In the years that David Axelrod worked for Obama, Hillary didn’t attend the CURE dinners, but she often asked the Axelrods about their daughter and the foundation.

It was clear on that June night, as Hillary took the stage at the Navy Pier Grand Ballroom, beneath an eighty-foot dome ceiling with sweeping views of Lake Michigan, that she was regarded by everyone in the room, except perhaps herself, as a candidate for the presidency.

Nick Merrill, Hillary’s baby-faced spokesman, fidgeted in his seat, firing off e-mails on his BlackBerry as his boss spoke; he repeatedly got up to confer with event organizers and Huma, who was waiting in the wings. Speechwriter Dan Schwerin leaned forward in his seat and watched Hillary approvingly from a press area on the sidelines of the dinner floor. Reporters from the
Washington Post
, Associated Press, and
Bloomberg News
, already assigned to Hillarywatch 2016, typed away on their laptops as she spoke.

Hillary gave them copy, using her speech to dip back into politics by launching an attack on sequestration, the automatic spending cuts agreed to by the president and congressional Republicans in 2011. With the caps in place, she argued, research dollars for epilepsy would be harder to come by. At the time, fellow Democrats, including Obama and Biden, were trying to convince Republicans that the limits should be replaced with a mix of tax increases and spending reductions. But Hillary’s attack on sequestration could also be taken as a soft shot high across Biden’s bow; after all, he had cut the deal with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that created the budget-slashing mechanism.