HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (6 page)

In the meetings, almost everyone told her that she had hired the wrong people for some of the top jobs. Patti Solis Doyle, the campaign’s first manager, and chief strategist Mark Penn bore the brunt of those complaints. But others, including communications chief Howard Wolfson and policy director Neera Tanden, also suffered from what one aide told her was an “arrogance of the people on top.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” she asked the aide.

“We did,” he replied.

The reviews shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, given that advisers had warned Hillary before the campaign not to make Doyle the campaign manager and that midway through the race Doyle had been demoted in favor of longtime Hillary confidante Maggie Williams. Of course, Penn, Doyle, and the rest of Hillary’s high command were convenient scapegoats. Ultimately, Hillary was responsible for her own dysfunctional operation, and she would have a lot to learn about managing the next political campaign.

To the extent Hillary was dejected, she didn’t let it show beyond a very small circle. “She wasn’t doing cartwheels,” said a friend, describing her mood as “more reflective than anything.” But for many of her advisers, the midsummer sessions were more cathartic than forensic. They felt that they had personally failed her for not calling attention to problems earlier in the process.

Burns Strider, who had served as Hillary’s link to faith-based groups during the campaign, had e-mailed her one day after the
primary, while he was working on the House side of the Capitol. “I’m sad,” he wrote.

“Come over,” Hillary replied.

It was a hot day, and Strider—who later slimmed down with a diet and recipes sent by Bill Clinton—was very overweight at the time. He began to sweat as they walked together to the Senate floor and back to Hillary’s office. When they finally sat down at her desk, Strider couldn’t find words to express his emotions. Behind his glasses, he began to cry.

“You need to get your composure,” Hillary admonished.

“Well,” Strider replied in a thick Mississippi drawl, “I’m just sad.”

“We’re all mourning,” Hillary said, acknowledging her own pain. Then she explained her coping mechanism.

“We all mourn in our own ways, and then we move on,” she said. “We keep going forward.”

Hillary felt like she had gone all out. She was exhausted but had found her peace with the result. She was proud that she had gone the full distance.

“I’m not somebody who dwells on the past or ruminates about ‘what if, what if, what if?’ ” she said. “I have enough people around me who do that. So I don’t need to do that. I delegate it.”

She believed “a few breaks here and there might have made a different outcome,” she said. “So, my view was, okay, I made history; I was the first woman to win primaries, I got all those votes, and I was very proud of the effort. But it fell short. So let’s get to work making sure that what I cared about, which I had expressed in my campaign, was going to be continued through Barack Obama’s candidacy. And so I had a very down-to-earth, practical approach to it.”

For Hillary and her aides, forward was the only way through not just the devastating loss but the shock of returning to Congress. Visions of lofty White House jobs had turned back into the pedestrian reality of Senate life. The type-A personalities who drove her Capitol Hill operation were accustomed to being on the winning side; now they were all coming back with a big “L” in their column.

Hillary was hardly the first candidate who had to descend from
the rarefied air of a presidential campaign jet to the slightly less elite Senate. Over the years, countless sitting senators had run for president and returned to its ranks. But the fall for her was longer and harder. She was at once more famous and less senior than those predecessors. There was no chairmanship of a top committee waiting for her on Capitol Hill. Beyond that, the Senate she returned to was a bit of a snake pit. Of the three top Democratic Party leaders, Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the cochairman of the Obama campaign, might have treated her best over the course of the primary just by being up front about his stance. The other two, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), had advised Obama behind the scenes, even though Reid had technically been neutral and Schumer had publicly been in Hillary’s camp.

“I do think she may have been hurt by the actions of some of her colleagues and friends in the Senate during the campaign,” said an adviser who talked to her a few days after she conceded. “Those who endorsed Obama, those who just sat on the sidelines, and particularly those who were in the shadows.”

Veteran Hillarylanders insist that Hillary was excited about diving back into her Senate work, eager to get back to business as soon as possible. The people of New York hadn’t elected her to take a two- or three-month self-pity break. “From the moment she walked in, it was very much like she wanted to go back to business as usual,” said an aide who stayed with her for years after the campaign. “She was going to go back to her committee life.”

But her return was awkward for everyone on Capitol Hill, including one former aide who encountered her at a park near her Russell Building office.

“How are you?” Hillary asked from behind gigantic sunglasses.

“Senator, how are you?” the young woman replied, before adding, “Is it good to be back?”

Hillary’s stone-faced response oozed contempt for a question with such an obvious answer, and she quickly excused herself from the conversation.

Outside the Capitol that June and July, a rising young executive
assistant, Rob Russo, methodically completed a Herculean political task for Hillary. Russo, who had recently graduated from George Washington University and worked as an intern for campaign manager Maggie Williams, was put in charge of delivering 16,054 thank-you notes to an elite class of Hillary supporters, from top donors and volunteers to fellow politicians. The naughty-and-nice list that Balderston and Elrod assembled covered just a small corner of a political world full of people who had helped or harmed Hillary. Russo was responsible for making sure that folks categorized as particularly generous got a final “touch.”

Presidential campaigns, often the last big run for a given politician, usually dissolved without top backers getting a last personal note from the candidate. Hillary determined that that wouldn’t be the case with her operation. It was more than just a polite demonstration of gratitude from an old-fashioned midwestern girl, as her aides suggest. Just like the methodical autopsy she conducted on the campaign that summer, the massive get-out-the-notes operation hinted that Hillary still had electoral politics on her mind. It was a way for her to show extra love and attention to the very people she would call on for help if she sought the presidency again.

Most of the people on Russo’s list received an e-mail message. But for almost two full months, the impeccably dressed young aide with black-framed hipster glasses delivered to Hillary batches of thank-you notes, state by state. During downtime in the Senate, she read the sixteen thousand typed notes, often making hand edits, and signed those that were ready to be sent. Russo went on to handle Hillary’s correspondence at the State Department and in the Hillary Rodham Clinton Office that she set up after she stepped down from the Obama administration, ensuring continuity in her efforts to keep up with friends and supporters. The list of political and personal contacts, transferred from job to job, expanded her network every day.

With the Senate in recess and the thank-you project wrapped up, Hillary took most of August for herself before arriving
in Denver at the end of the month for the Democratic National Convention, where she had once expected to be nominated for president. Instead, she’d be giving an endorsement speech on Tuesday night and for the second time that summer, the behind-the-scenes fight over the substance and style of a speech would help define Hillary’s persona going forward.

For decades, as first lady of Arkansas and first lady of the United States, and even as a senator from New York, Hillary had been defined in large part by her relationship to Bill Clinton, perhaps the most charismatic man in the country. Even when she ran for president in her own right, the nature of Bill’s role was a question that had to be dealt with not only by her rivals and the media but within her own campaign. But now, with Bill having embarrassed himself at times in his zeal to get her elected, Hillary’s future political fortunes would depend less on him than they had at any time before. If she was to have a political future, she would have to take control of her own story—and not wrestle publicly with the role of her former-president husband in her career as she had during the campaign.

The Clinton team set up its war room that week at the Brown Palace, a posh hotel about a mile from the convention’s security perimeter. The speech had been written over the course of a few weeks. Lissa Muscatine, now the co-owner of Washington’s premier political bookstore, Politics and Prose, had taken over the lead from Hillary’s younger speechwriters and set up shop with other staffers in a conference room with a long narrow table.

Late Monday night, less than twenty-four hours before her big moment onstage, Hillary met with several women in her inner circle, including Muscatine, Maggie Williams, Cheryl Mills, and Melanne Verveer, to discuss the text. It was good, Hillary thought, but it wasn’t quite there. She left it to the group of women to spruce up the draft. Muscatine went back to work, sequestering herself in a corner of the hotel conference room to polish the speech while colleagues worked on other assignments at the table. By Tuesday morning, it was about 80 percent right—in good enough shape for Hillary to feel confident about the substance. At that point, the concern was
mostly about style. How, for example, should she build the drama in a passage about Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor? She was close to finished—or so she thought. She rode to the convention center to practice on a mock stage.

But that afternoon, when Hillary returned to the Brown Palace conference room for another run-through with a TelePrompTer, there was a new problem with the speech. As she started to read it aloud, she stopped short. The text had changed.

“What is this?” she asked, looking askance at her speechwriters and communications advisers in the room. She often expresses her displeasure with the scolding tone of a mother, and here it was unmistakable.

While she had been on the mock stage at the convention center, Bill had delivered edits. He had ripped up the structure and added some of his own poetic flourishes. Clinton aides, many of whom have worked for both Bill and Hillary, still referred to him as “The President.” They had simply done what they had been ordered to do.

But Hillary was having none of it. Bill and the set of advisers she had hired from his 1996 campaign had proved disastrous at developing her message and strategy for the campaign. She was the one in the hot seat now. It was her make-or-break moment as a loyal Democrat and time for her to take control of the message.

“It’s
my
speech,” she declared as she left to find “The President.”

When she was safely out of the room, Hattaway advised the other Clinton aides to put it back the way it was. Keep the president’s one-of-a-kind turns of phrase—“the poetry”—he instructed, but reassemble the original structure of the speech. With just hours left to go until she took the stage, Clinton aides rushed to piece it back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

They moved paragraphs around and made last-minute tweaks to the words. Throughout the commotion, with the clock ticking toward the zero hour for the speech, Hillary was dressed casually. She still had to put on her evening wear, a bright orange suit that would stand out against the Democratic-blue backdrop of the convention floor. Hattaway’s phone blew up: Obama team vetters kept calling to
get a copy of the speech. It’ll be there, he tried to reassure them. But everyone was anxious. Despite the photo-op in Unity, the Obamans didn’t fully trust the Clintonites. The relationship had remained testy during the course of the summer as Hillary’s team tried to extract promises that Obama would help retire Hillary’s debt every time his high command asked the Clintons to appear as surrogates. And the drama of Clintonworld grated on the disciplined Obama campaign.

When Hillary and her speech were finally ready to go at about eight p.m. in Denver, a copy was e-mailed to the Obama team. Jon Lovett, a young Clinton speechwriter who would go on to work with Hurwitz in the Obama White House, clambered into a van with his laptop and a thumb drive with a copy of the speech in tow. He called ahead to advise that Hillary would soon be at the Pepsi Center, the site of the convention. Soon there was a mad dash through the warrens of the building to get the thumb drive to the folks running the TelePrompTer. “Never a dull moment with the Clintons,” Jim Margolis, an Obama ad man, quipped when they arrived.

After final touch-ups to her hair and makeup, Hillary and her team walked through Obama’s staff room in the arena, on the way to the stage. She stopped to say hi to a few top Obama aides, including Anita Dunn and Dan Pfeiffer. As she processed the speech in her mind, “she’s feeling all this pressure,” one confidante recalled.

A rump group of her delegates had shown up at the convention hell-bent on forcing the issue of Obama’s nomination; they weren’t listening to her appeals to just get on board. No matter how hard she tried to stop them, she couldn’t. And she knew that she would take the blame if they disrupted the convention. That added to her tension as she prepared to take the stage. But for once, this would be a dramatic Clinton moment with plenty for Obama’s team to love. It was the third time in less than three months that she would stand before a national audience to offer her testament. For its tenor and its timing, just before John McCain picked another woman, Sarah Palin, as his running mate, it would be the most pivotal of her endorsements.

When she finally emerged before a raucous crowd, with about twenty minutes to go before the end of prime time on the East
Coast, it was to chants of “Hill-a-ry, Hill-a-ry” and a thumping ovation. Clinton and Obama supporters alike waved white signs bearing her signature emblazoned in blue and underlined with a red streak. A television camera captured Bill Clinton mouthing “I love you” from his skybox.