Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (22 page)

The Clintons let it be known to reporters that Doug Band was tasked with keeping yet another enemies’ list, this time of those who betrayed the Clintons in the 2008 campaign. The existence of the list made headlines in 2014 in a book called
HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.
It claimed that enemies were scored on a scale of one to seven according to the severity of their treachery. In fact, the existence of that list was not news. It was reported by the
New York Times
in 2008. The paper noted that the list included Bill Richardson, South Carolina representative James Clyburn, Obama advisor David Axelrod, Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, “several Kennedys,” and many no-name congressmen.

Terry McAuliffe implicitly confirmed the existence of this list to the
New York Times
. “The Clintons get hundreds of requests for favors every week,” he said. “Clearly, the people you’re going to do stuff for in the future are the people who have been there for you.”

There were, according to the reports, media “enemies,” too. That list included Matt Drudge, who broke the Lewinsky story, as well as many other torments in the years that followed; Todd Purdum, author of the offending profile in
Vanity Fair
; and Obama “cheerleaders” like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.

The dutiful aide Band would keep the list handy on his BlackBerry, ready to pull it up at a moment’s notice in case a congressman or some other favor-seeker called asking for help. And in the coming years it would come in very handy.

When Hillary finally did surrender to the inevitable, at a press event in Washington, D.C., at the National Building Museum on June 7, 2008, Bill was on board in person but not in spirit. He still wanted Hillary to hang in there until the bitter end. When the Obama campaign proved less than effusive in their efforts to unite with Team Hillary, the former president’s attitude became somewhat contagious. Their daughter, Chelsea, for example, was filled with contempt for Obama, close associates tell me. “She loathes him,” says one.

For weeks the Clintons displayed their penchant for sulking and selfishness. On television, Bill refused to say whether he thought Obama was qualified to be president. In private and public settings, Hillary mused aloud about putting her name in nomination against Obama for a public “catharsis” at the convention.
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A group called PUMA—People United Means Action—arose in support of Hillary remaining in the race against Obama, which threatened to cause endless trouble for Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
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There was an effort to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations, which had been disqualified for violating Democratic National Committee rules and whose votes would all have gone to Hillary.
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Liberals accused the Clintons of trying to steal the convention and using Nixon-style dirty tricks. Indeed, many of these efforts were spearheaded by Howard Wolfson. Even when defeat appeared certain, Wolfson continued his attacks on Obama, perhaps even increasing them. He even hinted that delegates who were pledged to support Obama could and should break their pledges and jump ship at the convention. There was some truth in Chris Matthews’s criticism of Wolfson in the final month of the Clinton campaign that ended in early June: “You’re like one of these Japanese soldiers that’s still fighting in 1953.”
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“Some of us can’t get over the personal demonization of her by the Obama campaign and the sanctimony,” says a high-level Clinton advisor in 2013 (note the present tense). “Every time I see David Axelrod on television, I can’t get over that he did the ads that distorted and personally attacked her.”

Many demanded the vice presidency for Hillary, which was of course a nonstarter, if only in part because of the two people in charge of the selection process: Caroline Kennedy and Eric Holder. For his part, Barack Obama took every opportunity, in public and in private, to assure people that Hillary Clinton was on his short list for the vice presidency. Which in the byzantine lingo of national politics of course meant she wasn’t. The very suggestion met almost uniform opposition within the Obama vetting team, including from the two most powerful voices—Michelle Obama and family friend Valerie Jarrett.

But while an Obama-Clinton ticket was out of the question, Obama did want to do all he could to keep his selection from causing their relationship further angst. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that of all the possible candidates Obama could have chosen, Joe Biden was the one who garnered the most Clintonian enthusiasm.

The other two finalists, Indiana senator Evan Bayh and Virginia governor Tim Kaine, were potentially disastrous—at least for the Clintons. Young and ambitious, they would be able to build a potentially formidable machine by 2016 to challenge Hillary. Biden was almost laughably the opposite. For one, there were questions of his health—he had suffered two cranial aneurysms, resulting in brain surgeons, “literally” taking “the top of my head off,” in Biden’s telling of the story. Another consideration was his age—he would be seventy-four years old on Inauguration Day 2017. And of course there was his, well, Bidenness. His inability to stay on message and his unbreakable habit of saying dumb things. Often. Senate colleagues viewed him as at worst a well-meaning buffoon or at best an occasionally brainy eccentric. Biden was the kind of guy who couldn’t help but undermine himself, such as when he told reporters with a straight face that Hillary would be a better choice for vice president than he was. Even Obama second-guessed the Biden choice almost until the moment he made it.
I can’t believe I’m nominating Biden
, he said to himself.

The Clintons received the selection of Biden, a longtime friend, with great enthusiasm. Bill offered an effusive endorsement, saying, “I love Joe Biden, and America will, too.” He added, “With Joe Biden’s experience and wisdom, supporting Barack Obama’s proven understanding, instincts, and insight, America will have the national security leadership we need.”

After the Biden announcement, in fact, there was a sudden shift in the Clintons’ mood. Though still bitter, depressed, and self-pitying, they now saw a glimmer of hope for a future presidential run. Much of the turmoil of the previous weeks seemed to slip away—there would be no convention floor fight, no real effort to seat Michigan and Florida; Hillary and Bill would both be happy to endorse Obama at the convention and on two separate nights.

Perhaps finally sensing he was going too far in his public performance as a sore loser, and perhaps missing the spotlight, Bill Clinton was now Obama’s champion. “Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world,” Clinton said to raucous cheers and applause in Denver. “Barack Obama is ready to honor the oath, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.” Whether Clinton meant a word of it was irrelevant. “These are two people who hate each other,” says one prominent Democrat who insisted he not be named on the record, even though what he was telling me was the worst-kept secret in Washington. “I mean,
hate
each other.” But in any event, one of the longest roller-coaster rides in American political history had taken another unexpected, death-defying turn. Clinton embarked on a multistate tour, talking himself hoarse, appearing in TV commercials for Obama, and quickly becoming Obama’s best and most persuasive advocate.

In his cooler-headed moments, Bill drew several lessons from Hillary’s loss, each of which he was determined to correct the next time around. One was that she did not have enough money to compete over the long run. Two, she had violated one of his most well-known political rules: Campaigns were about the future. Hillary had become identified with the past. Third, Hillary had muddled key relationships with various constituencies—such as blacks, gays, and Latinos. He of course left out the fourth factor—his own contributions, or sabotage, depending on how you wanted to look at it. To the contrary, Bill saw his lack of control of the 2008 operation as the heart of the problem. Next time he was going to be the campaign manager, whether Hillary liked it or not. But that was a fight still to come.

Biden would be a perfect conduit for the Clintons. At some point, it’s not exactly clear when, the former president approached Biden about brokering a deal for Hillary to join Team Obama.

“If she comes in, I’ll watch out for her in the White House and make sure she’s given the power and the autonomy and everything else,” Biden reportedly told Clinton, according to sources.

Biden promised that she’d be given free rein and that as secretary of state she would “own foreign policy.”

By the time Bill Clinton hit the hustings for his enemy, Barack Obama, it was pretty apparent that Hillary’s next candidacy for president was already under way. The Clintons would not be blamed as party poopers or sore losers. In the worst-case scenario, she was a doable eight years away from the White House. Or in the best case, four years if somehow Obama managed to lose the general election.

That tantalizing thought preoccupied Bill Clinton for the rest of the campaign. So much so that he did something no self-respecting politico would do in a presidential race—he flirted, quite obviously, with the enemy. In this case, that was the Republicans’ nominee, Hillary’s old friend John McCain.

“During the 2008 campaign I talked to President Clinton on several occasions,” McCain tells me with a slight smile, as if realizing what he is about to let slip. “We talked about the campaign. We talked about various aspects of it.”

McCain shied away from calling Clinton’s outreach “advice.” “It wasn’t ‘you should do this, you should do that,’ ” McCain says.

“It was sort of ‘well, here’s where I think things are standing and here’s the issues I think you should emphasize.’ ” The conversations continued well into the fall, even after Clinton endorsed Obama at the convention. McCain recalls that Clinton called him to share thoughts about the 2008 financial bailout, which had led McCain to “suspend” his campaign against Obama and urge a legislative solution.

“He’s a policy wonk and we would talk,” McCain says. “We talked about why the bailout was important and why, who the players were, who you could trust, you know, that kind of thing.”

McCain stops just short of saying Clinton had hoped McCain would defeat Obama. “I can’t say he favored [my candidacy over Obama’s],” McCain says, “but I have to say that he wouldn’t be talking to me if he didn’t feel that he and I . . . that it would be helpful to have the communications.”

McCain’s longtime aide Mark Salter confirms the two spoke on occasion during the last stages of the presidential campaign. Salter describes the conversations as Clinton and McCain talking about the state of the race.

As late as September 2008, two months before what promised to be a close election, Bill Clinton was publicly gushing about the Republican. “The American people, for good and sufficient reasons, admire him,” Clinton told the women of ABC’s
The View
.
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“He’s given something in life the rest of us can’t match.”

McCain’s loss that November left the Clintons with Plan B—a piece of the Obama administration all her own.

The incoming president would give her a department to run, let her fly all over the world, and in the process keep her out of his hair. Hillary was now going into a bubble.

7

The Bubble

“She made, I believe, personal judgment calls that turned out to be the wrong call and it cost people their lives.”

—U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz

On January 21, 2009, Hillary Clinton was confirmed as U.S. secretary of state by an overwhelming majority of senators, 94–2. The only two votes in opposition to her appointment came from two conservative Republican senators: David Vitter of Louisiana and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Perhaps it was odd that none of the members of the Senate who had voted to convict President Clinton on two articles impeachment opposed Hillary’s nomination. But all of Clinton’s would-be opposition had been won over in the intervening years. Both Vitter and DeMint were sworn in as senators in 2005, and seemed to have little if no relationship with Hillary during their short overlapping times.

“This nation has come together in a way that it has not for some time,” McCain said, praising the confirmation of Hillary.
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Until January 22, 2009, Hillary Clinton had managed only two things of any major significance: her universal health-care plan, during the early days of her husband’s administration, and her 2008 presidential effort. Both, even her staunchest supporters would admit, were notorious disasters—practically from start to finish. So with her third time up to the plate, and with a chance to show her managerial bona fides, there was enormous pressure for her to succeed when she arrived for the first time at the State Department offices in Foggy Bottom to cheering employees.

While running the department once led by Thomas Jefferson and George Marshall provides great prestige, it also poses unique challenges to even the most experienced diplomat: It’s a massive federal bureaucracy with a budget of over $45 billion per year, a staff of over fifty-eight thousand, and locations all over the world.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was at first determined to do more than manage a large bureaucracy and improve her own image. For the top diplomat, the State Department is a great platform and Hillary Clinton was determined to make the most of it. According to sources, she made a genuine effort early on to push issues close to her heart, assert herself in meetings with other principals in the administration, and make her mark on the policies and priorities of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Just as one would expect from a secretary of state, she immediately made plans to go abroad. But instead of a visit to Canada or Europe or to another traditional ally, Hillary decided to visit Asia—first Japan, then Indonesia and South Korea, before finishing in China. The entire trip was set up to show a “pivot” toward emerging allies in the East and to show that America under this new president would have different priorities.

She’d join the press on the back of her airplane for an off-the-record conversation, which a participant described as surprisingly frank. Most principals even in technically “off-the-record” sessions know better than to dish and to go off talking points. They assume that eventually the conversation will be leaked. In Hillary’s case, she took some chances with the traveling State Department press corps. On her jaunt back across the Pacific, she was able to relax with a stiff alcoholic beverage. It was a goodwill gesture—one that won over a few in the press who were skeptical of her intentions in joining the Obama administration. But there was still much work to be done.

Work that would focus on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then quickly pivoting to other areas of the world that the new administration wanted to focus on. “In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region,” she’d explain in an article in
Foreign Policy
a couple of years later. “The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics.”

But in fact the reality was slightly different in that present moment: America was still heavily involved in two wars, and worse, the Middle East was once again about to go up in flames. A “pivot” would prove to be in name only.

No matter how much Hillary may have wanted to forge a new path, Team Obama had other ideas. The tone was set early on with cabinet meetings. As with other recent administrations, these were scripted affairs, opportunities for select cabinet officials to report on what their departments were doing, but not open for freewheeling discussions. “It wasn’t a debating society, but more of a reporting session,” one former cabinet secretary who served during Obama’s first term tells me in an interview. Officials were informed who would be issuing reports and for how long. “It was a lot of window-dressing to show . . . the country and to show Washington that the president was consulting those cabinet officials,” the former cabinet secretary says. The meetings usually ran about ninety minutes.

Instead of relying on his cabinet secretaries, Barack Obama relied on a small, insular team of White House insiders who have been calling the shots since the first day of his administration. People like Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s loyal, longtime confidante; Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security advisor; and a host of White House staffers who toil in anonymity but whose memos and talking points have the power to shape American foreign policy as much as, if not more than, any decree issued by the secretaries of state or defense.

If tensions between Obama and Clinton eased after the 2008 campaign, that never became true among staffers at the lower levels. This was due to “the campaign hangover,” according to State Department employee Vali Nasr, who served as a special advisor to the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Obama’s inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton,” he told me shortly after the publication of a memoir of his time in the Obama administration—one that wasn’t received well inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “And even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned with her popularity and approval ratings, and feared that she could overshadow the president.”

Clinton and Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration, shared a resentment of the maneuverings of a National Security Council (NSC) populated by people they found largely young, arrogant, and out of their depth. None of them had much of an affinity for Hillary Clinton. One of Obama’s top campaign surrogates, Samantha Power, had called Hillary “a monster.” She resigned from the campaign, but then subsequently was hired as a senior director on the NSC, undoubtedly making chilly some meetings in the Situation Room when both women were present. With the Power selection, Obama was also making another point—Hillary wasn’t in control of national security policy. He was.

Obama had never run a government bureaucracy bigger than a Senate office (which generally has about thirty or forty staffers, a budget of around $2 million to $3 million, and a couple of state offices in addition to its main office on Capitol Hill). Still, his approach was to try to run the important things himself, such as foreign policy, where he had pledged to do things differently than his predecessor George W. Bush—and to restore the trust and confidence the world once had in America.

When Obama recruited Hillary for his cabinet, he told her that
his
top priority would be jobs and the economy. The economy had tanked. Big banks had collapsed and unemployment had surged to highs not seen in recent years. It was for this reason, among others, that he’d need her to take the reins on foreign policy. Whether he meant it or not—he probably didn’t—the reins in fact never left Obama’s hands.

“Part of the fighting was that—where does policy get initiated?” Vali Nasr recalls as I question him in his office at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he’s now dean after leaving Hillary’s State Department. “The national security apparatus is such that the agencies suggest policies, provide intelligence, provide information. The job of the National Security Council is to organize this for the president and set up a decision-making process for the president based on the input of these groups, so they’re really giving the president policy options.”

But it was different with Obama. “When I was there, that’s not the way NSC worked,” Nasr says. “They wanted to basically shape the policy there and then for these agencies to implement it. Basically, it became a singular policy-making apparatus, which then begs the question what is the quality of the decision making there, and what is the quality of the people making these policies there, and what is their objective? Is the objective to protect the president from foreign policy? Is the objective to manage his image? Or is the objective to further America’s national interest?”

As Hillary, the pragmatist, had demanded before taking the job, she did have regular “one-on-ones” with the president. For Clinton this offered the visual, at least to the Washington press corps, that she was an integral player. To Obama it was a chance for respectful listening and making sure that Hillary personally felt looped-in to the happenings at the White House. But it never seemed to stop him from doing whatever he wanted to do once she left the room.

“As secretary of state I think that her relationship with the president was cordial, but never close,” says Senator McCain, who served as the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and observed her up close. McCain’s a foreign policy hawk—one more aligned with Hillary than Obama, so it is with a tinge of regret the former Republican presidential nominee makes this observation one morning in his Senate office. “I don’t believe that when crucial decisions were made that she was necessarily in the room. . . . [W]hen it came to some crucial decisions I don’t think that Mr. Donilon was swayed by her opinion. I’m not saying she wasn’t consulted, but I think it’s very well known she was not in the inner circle of decision makers on national security.”

“I think she had very little interaction” with the president, says one veteran State Department employee. “A lot of this was, you know, she would go to meetings of the NSC when she was in town and called, but it was a very distant relationship.”

The NSC sidelined Clinton at every turn—as it did other cabinet secretaries from Gates to his successors at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel. “They would send [the defense secretary] to someplace like Botswana while they crafted North Korea policy at the White House,” one former Defense Department official says.

“The structure of the White House was set up particularly by people who are not experienced in foreign policy, often came from a domestic policy background, and had their eyes on 2012 and the poll numbers,” says State’s former special advisor Nasr. “They were micromanaging. They were micromanaging the strategic review on Afghanistan. They were micromanaging the Pakistan policy. They were micromanaging Egypt. They were micromanaging all of these issues.”

Contemplating how Bill Clinton would have adapted to the workings of the Obama cabinet, one person who served both Presidents Clinton and Obama laughs. “My prediction is that . . . he would have been a disaster,” he says, “because he would have had a hard time keeping in his lane.” Hillary didn’t have that problem.

“Obama brought her into the administration, put her in a bubble, and ignored her,” says a former high-ranking diplomat. “It turned out to be a brilliant political maneuver by Obama, making it impossible for her to challenge him, unless she left the administration, and not giving her an excuse that she could resign in protest. So she was stuck.”

One early signal to Hillary about her real place in the administration involved formulation of policy toward Afghanistan, which came during the first year of Obama’s presidency. The decision was whether to escalate the war or not. It would be Obama’s first major foreign policy decision, centered on what he had called the “good war,” a contradistinction to the bad war, which he considered Iraq. This one was Afghanistan, which the United States had invaded soon after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks—the largest and most devastating in America’s history. He felt less good about the war upon coming into office.

Hillary, for her part, suggested President Obama listen to his commander on the ground—General Stanley McChrystal—who had requested a surge of forty thousand troops. Gates basically was in agreement, though he could have lived with a smaller commitment.

“I want an exit strategy,” Obama reportedly told Gates and Clinton, according to Bob Woodward’s account, in a private Situation Room war meeting.

But he ended up deciding that a surge of thirty thousand troops on a limited and preordained timeline was what would be appropriate. The deciding factor? Not so much Hillary, though it wouldn’t have exactly been a position of strength to retreat from war without his cabinet behind him. It goes deeper. Obama’s natural instinct was to retreat, to pull back from the world and let the Afghans deal with the problem of Afghanistan. He had made that promise in Iraq—it was a central campaign promise that set him apart from Hillary, who had voted along with most other Republicans and Democrats to support the war in Iraq. The problem was that full retreat was the least politically tenable option, and it would require his crossing the entire military establishment. Pulling back entirely would have resulted in charges of abandonment.

A first-term president already looked at with caution by the hawkish wings of the Democratic and Republican parties did not feel he had the strength to make such a decision.

Hillary had appointed Richard Holbrooke, a longtime Clinton aide, to be her point person on Afghanistan. This didn’t sit well with the president and his loyalists.

From the start, Obama didn’t trust him. And as a result he didn’t listen to him. The president deferred instead to an insular circle of loyalists, many of whom had far less experience in foreign policy. That list included Tom Donilon, a political type with midlevel stints at the State Department who had been an executive at mortgage giant Fannie Mae; Denis McDonough, a longtime Senate aide with a low profile, who was personally close with Obama; UN ambassador Susan Rice; family friend and confidante Valerie Jarrett; and chief political advisor David Axelrod, who was on hand at the weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the Situation Room, where President Obama developed his “kill list” of terrorist targets. These were the trusted advisors in the White House. Not Hillary—or her hand-selected staff.