HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (55 page)

“There are a lot of people jockeying for position, and Doug is a little bit on the sidelines,” a former White House associate of Band’s told the story’s author, Alec MacGillis.

At CGI, in a pattern he repeated, Band circled the lobby of the hotel, chatting up reporters, longtime Clinton friends, and other attendees before letting them know he had somewhere else to be. Then, almost an hour later, he would turn up again, coming through the hotel’s giant revolving door and go through the same song and dance. One attendee noted that if Band was still close in Bill’s orbit, “he would have been backstage at the meeting, not in the hotel lobby.”

Band’s efforts at rehabilitation served as a sideshow when Hillary wasn’t front and center that week. It was her debut as a full partner in the foundation’s main annual event. She emceed events, moderated discussions, and even announced a new initiative to combat elephant poaching in Africa—an issue that isn’t likely to factor prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign. At each event, it was as though Clinton already had a full campaign press corps.

Everywhere she went, and the reporters followed, Hillary got
a version of the same question. During one panel discussion, on women and girls, she almost went the full hour without being pressed to address her potential candidacy. But then CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who had been moderating the panel, took a stab.

“How important is it for there to be a woman president in the United States?” Gupta asked Hillary, as an audience packed into one of the Sheraton’s smaller ballrooms laughed and cheered.

Hillary, prepared to answer that question in whatever form in which it came, had her response ready. “That is a question I will answer taking myself completely out of it,” she said. “We have a lot of challenges,” she continued. “Electing one person, a woman, is not going to end those challenges. But it provides a kind of boost to the efforts that so many of us have been making for so long.” The short answer, she added, “is that I think it would be important.… I think it would be a very strong statement that would be made to half of our population and half of the world’s population and someday, I hope it happens.”

In the same discussion, Hillary also made news. She waded publicly into domestic politics, which she had done ever-so-briefly at the CURE dinner in Chicago in June. Clinton was asked about the looming government shutdown, something her husband had to face when he was in office nearly twenty years earlier. Clinton slapped congressional Republicans, saying that they “ought to go back and read history, because I would just say it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Democrats if they tried to shut down the government. It didn’t work out very well for those who were so obstructionist.

“So I hope that our friends on the other side of the aisle—and it’s a minority, but it’s a noisy one—understand that this is not right to do and this is bad politics for them to do,” she said.

Throughout the three-day conference, even when she talked about poaching, Hillary’s potential run was the real elephant in the room. During one dinner in the main Sheraton ballroom, Clinton got the biggest nudge to enter the race from Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban in 2012. Yousafzai, who was being considered at the time for the Nobel Peace Prize,
told the packed ballroom of bigwigs and celebrities who hung on her every word, that “even in America, people are waiting for a woman president.” The cameras in the room immediately panned to Hillary, who was smiling broadly, amid roaring applause.

Clinton aides balked at the notion that the presidential campaign had ostensibly started that week. She was simply taking on a bigger, more public role at the foundation. And she was just focusing her attention on initiatives like elephant poaching, her aides insisted. But there were constant reminders of the big question all week and there was tension created—arguably by the Hillary press corps—when the vice president and second lady Jill Biden stopped by the dinner that evening. They sat beside the Clintons at a round table in the front of the ballroom, trying to ignore the buzz around them.

On October 2, 2013, Quinnipiac University released a poll showing Hillary with a 61 percent to 11 percent lead over Biden among Democrats in a hypothetical 2016 primary matchup. From the perspective of Biden supporters, it didn’t make sense that he wouldn’t do better with a Democratic electorate. After all, he had carved out a serious role in foreign and domestic policy, from helping Obama wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to spearheading the administration’s effort to enhance background checks for gun purchases. He had been first out of the box in supporting gay marriage, even before Obama had been willing to embrace that position. He could credibly argue that he played a significant role in the Obama administration’s major accomplishments. In sum, there was a lot for a Democratic primary voter to like about Joe Biden, but it was all seemingly eclipsed by Hillary’s star power.

For much of the past year, Biden had been courting fellow Democrats in early caucus and primary states. He invited New Hampshire governor Maggie Hassan to the swearing-in ceremony for his second term as vice president in January 2013 and attended a preinauguration party thrown by Iowa Democrats that week. In mid-September, Biden visited Charleston in the early primary state
of South Carolina on technically official vice presidential business and appeared as the headliner at Iowa senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry, a ritual for Democratic candidates for the presidency. Hillary, having committed herself to staying out of electoral politics in 2013, did not attend.

Biden hadn’t made a decision about whether to run by the time of the steak fry, sources close to him said. “He’s doing things that would put him in the conversation if he chose to run,” said one. Team Biden insists he’ll make a decision with his family about whether to run, regardless of whether Hillary’s in the race.

“Obviously, who he’s going to run against is a big issue, but it’s one of a lot of big issues that you’re going to have to sit down and work out in real life before you run for president,” said Ted Kaufman, who served as Biden’s chief of staff and later succeeded him in the Senate. “If she runs,” he said of Hillary, “it’s a different set of questions.”

While Biden built a record as a progressive on domestic issues and a dove on national security matters during his tenure as vice president, he also angered fellow Democrats by cutting deals with Mitch McConnell that created sequestration and locked in most of the Bush-era tax cuts. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in particular, felt that Biden had undercut the Democratic position by going around him to deal with McConnell directly.

Many Democrats, including some close to Obama, assume that, at some point, Obama will tell Biden not to run against Hillary. But the two have run against each other before—in 2008—finishing with both their friendship and the state of the Democratic Party intact. In the Obama administration, Biden often ended regularly scheduled phone calls to Hillary with the words “
I love you, darling.” And at the late senator Frank Lautenberg’s funeral service in June 2013, Joe and Jill Biden bantered with seatmates Hillary and Huma. As Hillary got up to give the eulogy, Biden teased her about having to speak after Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell had just sung. “Good luck following that,” Biden joked.

Hillary, who had been largely quiet since CGI in June, returned to the political spotlight in the midst of the Weiner scandal, joining Obama for lunch at the White House on July 29 and Joe Biden for breakfast at the Naval Observatory the following day.

“It’s largely friendship that’s on the agenda,” White House principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters who pressed him to detail every aspect of the power lunch, including the fare. Earnest came prepared to tell them: grilled chicken, pasta jambalaya, and salad.

On an eighty-degree day, cool by Washington standards for the summer months, the two former rivals met on a patio outside the Oval Office. Obama had asked Alyssa Mastromonaco to set up the lunch after he ran into Hillary at the George W. Bush Library in Dallas several weeks earlier. As she had back in November 2008, Mastromonaco e-mailed her friend Huma to arrange the date. White House officials offered few details on the substance of the conversation, terming the meeting “chiefly social.”

Obama, who had declined to bring the Clintons into the White House for social occasions early in his presidency, now just wanted to spend time with Hillary, according to White House aides. “The things that the president loves most are when he can have something without an agenda,” said one Obama adviser, who noted that their meeting lasted for about two hours. “They were ‘just visiting,’ as my girlfriends would say.”

In a different sense, many in the Clinton world view the Obamas’ stint at the White House that way—they’re just visiting.

Two harbingers for a Hillary campaign—one with mixed implications and one with a clear, if limited, upside—appeared within a week of each other in the fall of 2013.

On the morning of Halloween, the
Wall Street Journal
and NBC News released a poll that put a little bit of a scare into Hillary’s most ardent supporters. Just like Ellen Tauscher had predicted two years earlier,
Hillary’s standing plummeted as voters increasingly viewed her not as an above-the-partisan-fray diplomat but as the Democratic front-runner for the presidency. The poll found that 46 percent of those surveyed had a “very positive” or “somewhat positive” view of Hillary, down from 56 percent in the same survey in April.

New York Times
columnist Frank Bruni read the results as
a long-overdue reality check. “Here we go,” he wrote. “The beginning of the end of her inevitability.

“It’s about time, because the truth, more apparent with each day, is that she has serious problems as a potential 2016 presidential contender.… Voters are souring on familiar political operators, especially those in, or associated with Washington. That’s why Clinton has fallen.” Bruni’s was one of the first in a string of op-eds, magazine articles, and news stories that put a fine point on the steep challenges that Hillary still faced if she ran.

In late 2013, populism was in and the establishment was out in both parties. To liberals disillusioned with Obama because he had talked tough about bankers, insurers, and George W. Bush’s
national security policies only to embrace them all in the White House when it suited his goals, Hillary looked like a souped-up version of Obama’s centrist half. They pined for freshman Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren to take Hillary on, hoping that Warren’s feisty populist rhetoric, proven fund-raising ability, and gender would blend into the perfect antidote to Hillary in a primary.
The New Republic
, which already had delved deep into Band’s financial dealings in a story about the wedge he had reportedly driven into Clintonworld, published a long piece about all of
the reasons Warren could beat Hillary.

Bruni noted the distaste with which many observers watched Bill and Hillary setting up Chelsea Clinton for the inheritance of a political dynasty by making clear their belief that she could someday be president. But in Virginia a few days later, another Clinton spinoff, Terry McAuliffe, would capture the governor’s mansion, suggesting that the Clinton mantle was hardly a weight too heavy to bear, even when conferred on a close associate with another last name.

If there was a silver lining in the
Wall Street Journal
–NBC poll, it was that of all the politicians and party groups tested, Hillary came in first: Obama was at 41 percent; the Democratic Party was at 37 percent; New Jersey governor Chris Christie was at 33 percent nationally, despite being on the verge of blowout reelection victory; and Ted Cruz was at 19 percent.

Christie’s 22-point win set him up as the front-runner for the GOP establishment’s support in the 2016 primary and
to head the Republican Governors Association in 2014, a post from which he could strengthen ties to conservative candidates across the country by supplying the most powerful political adherent of all: money. Christie’s primary problem, though, was just that: a primary problem. After he had embraced Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy—which helped Obama appear bipartisan in the last days of the 2012 campaign—many Republicans had soured on him.

By the tail end of 2013, there was no shortage of oft-named contenders for the Republican Party’s 2016 nomination. Paul, the
Kentucky senator who had gone after Hillary on Benghazi, captured the hearts and minds of the GOP’s increasingly vocal libertarian wing. Fellow Senate conservative Cruz had bolstered his standing with the base by encouraging Republicans to shut down the government in pursuit of an end to Obamacare. Rick Perry, the longtime Texas governor, and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, represented the western part of the Gulf Coast on the list of potent possibles. And, of course, there was Jeb Bush, who hailed from the only family deft enough to bring the moderates and conservatives together to deliver a Republican to the White House in the previous quarter century.