HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  Soon afterward, as administration officials appeared in classified briefing after classified briefing for various committees on Capitol Hill, partisan lines broke down, and Rice became the focal point for members of Congress. “In subsequent hearings, if you closed your eyes, you couldn’t tell friend from foe. Mostly because there were no friends,” the State source said. “What’s most notable about those briefings is that we volunteered them. Nobody asked for them. We said, ‘Let’s go up there and brief the entire Congress,’ and it was effectively kicking a beehive.”

  In the short run, Rice got stung. Obama had planned to make her secretary of state, but the talking-points flap cost her any chance of winning Senate confirmation. Moreover, the Benghazi attack deprived Hillary of the ability to point to Libya as her crowning achievement. And once the 2012 election ended, Republicans were intent on making sure it cost her much more than that.

  PART

  IV

  SIXTEEN

  “Road Warrior”

  Down the home stretch of the 2012 election cycle, Bill Clinton checked in regularly with two men: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee executive director Guy Cecil. With each man, Bill had bonded over the nuts and bolts of politics. Cecil, a gay former Southern Baptist minister and high school teacher, had kept Clinton engaged during the early phase of the 2008 campaign, when much of Hillaryland had wanted the former president as far from the day-to-day operations as possible. Cecil was close enough to the Bill wing of the Clinton political operation that he had briefly gone into partnership with Mark Penn after the primary, before landing a job as Senator Michael Bennet’s top aide. Messina had given slide show briefings to the data-munching Clinton in Harlem at the end of 2011 and in Chicago in June 2012, and they spoke regularly by phone.

  Now Messina and Cecil were facilitators of a dual-track political mission that fall that promised to build more capital for Bill and Hillary within the Democratic Party, one that would allow the Clintons to help Obama and continue to take care of Clinton family priorities. “They didn’t necessarily schedule him only to have his travel coincide for Obama,” said one Democratic official familiar with Bill’s campaigning in 2012.

  After the final debate between Obama and Mitt Romney in late October, Messina hopped an early morning flight from Boca Raton to Chicago, where he met with Bill on the 34th floor of the Hyatt Regency, high above the Chicago River. There were just two weeks to go before Election Day, and it was time to map out Bill’s last dash for Obama. The two men agreed: no interviews, all hustings. “Time on the stump made more sense and was a better venue for him,” said an Obama campaign source.

  “We want him to go talk to voters, not you guys,” one Clinton camp source said of reporters.

  Messina came up with what he thought was an aggressive travel schedule for Bill, but the former president was insatiable. He called back time and again with the same message, according to an Obama campaign source familiar with the calls. “More, more, more,” Bill said. “I want more than this.” The only thing Bill wouldn’t do for Obama was break a date in Washington to watch his nephew Zach Rodham’s final high school football game for Maret against Chelsea’s alma mater, Sidwell Friends, three days before the election. Even better for Bill, a lot of the Obama stops were twofers, where he could validate the president and also ask voters to help House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates, who might return the favor for Hillary in a few years’ time.

  The New York Times counted thirty-seven campaign rallies that Clinton did for Obama over the last seven weeks of the campaign, many of them backloaded in the final weeks. Bill offered help that no other surrogates could. In addition to being what Messina called the Obama campaign’s “economic validator” because of his record of governing during a time of surpluses, he could rally Democrats of all ideological stripes.

  “He’s a great surrogate in campaigns because you can send him to both base areas and swing areas,” said one senior Obama campaign official. It was Bill who insisted on adding events in Minnesota and Pennsylvania in the final days of the campaign, both states where Obama was doing well but where Democrats had other candidates who could use a little boost. For the party, the benefit of having Bill out there stumping outweighed the risk that it might look like Obama was worried about states he was thought to have already locked up. If it gave false hope to the Romney campaign that they might expand the map and thus push them to spend money, all the better.

  Presidents who leave office on good terms are generally loath to sully themselves with the nitty-gritty of partisan politics for fear of hurting their own standing with independents and members of the other party. For Bill, the imperative was the opposite, and he was unhesitant in attacking Romney. After 2008 it was good politics for him to reinforce his place within the Democratic Party. He had cut a video for the Obama campaign in mid-October in which he looked at the camera and directly accused Romney of lying about his own economic plans. On the stump, he was even harsher. “This guy ran Bain Capital and is a business guy, and he’s hiding his budget?” Bill asked at a stop in Parma, Ohio, in mid-October. “That ought to tell you something. He—well, he’s hiding his taxes, too. He’s hiding everything.”

  His efforts as a surrogate became even more vital to Obama as Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast and Obama was forced to cancel his own campaign appearances so that he could monitor events from Washington and not seem overly political in the face of an unfolding tragedy. In the early morning hours of October 28, Obama met with Bill in a room at the Doubletree in Orlando to ask him to continue with a planned rally in a part of Florida that was pivotal for Democratic turnout even as Obama flew back to Washington to attend briefings in the Situation Room. The White House released a photo of the two men, Obama with his sleeves rolled up and Bill in jeans and a lavender shirt literally leaning into the conversation, in a room illuminated only by a desk lamp breaking the darkness of the early morning sky outside. Obama’s feet are curiously cut out of the shot; he wasn’t wearing shoes, according to one of his aides.

  Wherever Bill went, from New Hampshire to Virginia, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, he reminded voters, as he said at one stop, that Obama has “a heck of a secretary of state, too.” But the Obama people couldn’t have asked for more from Bill on the campaign trail, and they continued to raise money to retire the last of Hillary’s debt.

  “He became an absolute road warrior for us,” said a grateful top Obama campaign aide.

  The election period was fruitful for Hillary’s 2008 treasury, but a mythology built up that Obama gave her the parting gift of paying off her debt at the very end, when, in fact, his biggest contribution was actually over the summer of 2012. After having raised more than $200,000 for Hillary between May and July—eighty-five new donors gave the maximum of $2,300 to her over that period, and other Obama supporters wrote smaller checks—Obama also rented a list from Hillary’s campaign in October at a cost of $62,782. Pollster Celinda Lake and candidates such as Elizabeth Warren, Joe Kennedy, and Christie Vilsack rented donor lists from her at lower prices, and Bill sent out a fund-raising solicitation in late November that reaped $63,284 over eight days, putting the finishing touches on the debt-retirement effort. In fact, Hillary was technically in the black by the end of September; she had more cash on hand then than the $73,000 she owed at that time. The most interesting nugget from her campaign finance records is that while Obama raised cash for her from top donors in the spring and summer of 2012, the highest number of contributions came after the election. There were only 238 individual donors to her campaign before the election, and 1,026 after it, suggesting an energy among grassroots Democrats to make sure her balance sheet was in good shape. She would end up with more than $200,000 on hand at the end of December and close out her campaign account in early 2013.

  In the stretch run, Bill made stops that helped a handful of House candidates, including Kathy Hochul, the New York congresswoman whom Hillary had cal
led from London after a 2011 special election. Bill showed up for a joint rally in Rochester with Hochul and Representative Louise Slaughter, who had been among Hillary’s most vocal advocates in 2008. Hochul was in the fight of her life—one she would lose by a little more than one percentage point—but Clinton insisted on trekking to upstate New York.

  “They weren’t just showing up as the icing on the cake in easy races,” Hochul said. “Afterward, I thought he’d be running out to the plane. He stuck around and gave me advice on my race.… My daughter, who was twenty-three, couldn’t make it, so he wanted to write her a note on a poster. It’s that genuine personal touch that separates the Clintons from the people that run for office that I’ve encountered in my time in public office.”

  Bill’s late-campaign visit to Minnesota had the national press wondering whether Obama was vulnerable there. He wasn’t, but Rick Nolan, who was bidding to return to Congress for the first time in thirty years, was in a tight race. Bill had endorsed Nolan’s primary opponent, Tarryl Clark, who was a Hillary supporter in 2008, but Nolan needed all hands on deck in the general election. The trip to Duluth—unnecessary at the presidential and Senate levels—assuaged any lingering resentment on the part of Nolan, who ended up winning.

  Moreover, Bill, who was losing his voice from the string of stump speeches for Obama, jammed in a series of robocalls for Democratic candidates who had been loyal to Hillary. Representative Steve Israel, the chairman of the House Democrats’ campaign efforts, began to worry about turnout in his own Long Island district in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. He put in a call to Bill’s team to ask for help, and Bill quickly recorded a robo-message for him.

  While Messina plotted Bill’s schedule for the Obama campaign, the former president was mapping out his own set of side trips and political tasks. Many of them were for Senate candidates. His main point of contact for that was Cecil, who had immersed the president in Hillary’s New Hampshire strategy when the rest of her campaign was busy in Iowa in 2008.

  At one point during that campaign, Bill had been told that the governor of North Carolina, Mike Easley, a Hillary supporter, had endorsed Obama. He called Cecil, who was in the shower at the time, and left a message. “God damn it! How the fuck did this happen?” Bill yelled into the receiver. “Someone just told me that the governor of North Carolina just endorsed Obama. I’m going for a walk. Call me back at home.”

  Cecil scrambled to find out if it was true. It wasn’t. He called Bill back. “Just so you know, it wasn’t the governor,” Cecil said, explaining it was Lieutenant Governor Bev Perdue, who was running for governor.

  “All right, good job,” said Bill, cooling off. He called back the following day to mend fences.

  The two men had remained friendly despite Bill’s support for Andrew Romanoff in a Colorado primary against Cecil’s then boss, Michael Bennet. During the latter half of 2012, Bill checked in with Cecil a little more than once a month to strategize about helping Senate candidates who had been Hillary loyalists. The DSCC had a clear sense of Bill’s priorities. “We weren’t asking him to go and campaign for people who were hard-core Obama supporters,” said a Senate Democratic source. “He did events for people that endorsed and supported Hillary.”

  The only place he was asked to go that he declined to visit was Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Warren, an Obama acolyte, was running for Senate. Bill would offer his support in the form of an e-mail fund-raising solicitation, but he would not appear with Warren, who is often mentioned as a potential progressive rival to Hillary in 2016. And while he had forgiven Claire McCaskill, Bill Clinton also stayed out of her skin-tight reelection campaign in Missouri. He did hit the trail for Bill Nelson in Florida, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Amy Klobuchar (who didn’t need the help) in Minnesota, Shelley Berkley in Nevada, and Heidi Heitkamp—twice—in North Dakota.

  “He loves the politics,” the source said. “The Obama folks—he was doing more for them than any other former president had done in an electoral contest, maybe ever. So a lot of it was just working out with the Obama folks when they didn’t need him or when they would be willing to give up dates so we [could] do stuff.”

  As Bill barnstormed the country, Hillary was very much in the spotlight herself because of the ongoing fallout from the Benghazi attack. On October 15, the day before the second presidential debate, she insisted that the buck stopped with her, that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden didn’t run the State Department.

  “I take responsibility,” she told CNN on a trip to Lima, Peru.

  Given the timing, it seemed like she was diving on a political grenade for Obama, but her remarks set up the president to field a question about his level of culpability the following night at a debate in Hempstead, New York. The Obama team saw a vulnerability for Romney in discussing Benghazi, in part because he had put out a statement the night of the attack that had garnered significant political backlash.

  “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points. And that’s not how a commander in chief operates. You don’t turn national security into a political issue, certainly not right when it’s happening,” said the president, who had himself sought to capitalize politically on the killing of Osama bin Laden. “When I say that we are going to find out exactly what happened, everybody will be held accountable, and I am ultimately responsible for what’s taking place there, because these are my folks, and I’m the one who has to greet those coffins when they come home, you know that I mean what I say.… Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job. But she works for me. I’m the president. And I’m always responsible.”

  Around the same time, the research team at the Republican National Committee (RNC) was putting together a forty-two-second video that blended a clip of Hillary’s famous three a.m. phone call ad from the 2008 primary with the Benghazi attack. Hillary had suggested Obama wasn’t ready to deal with a middle-of-the-night crisis, and aides at the RNC thought Benghazi might have proved her right. Over images from Hillary’s original ad and of the burning American consulate, white block letters asserted that “the call came on September 11, 2012.” In the background, a phone rang repeatedly. “Security Requests Denied. Four Americans Dead. And an Administration Whose Story Is Still Changing,” the script read. The ad ended with the sound of a busy signal.

  The RNC didn’t have the money to run the ad on television stations, but aides there thought that journalists would give it a free ride by reporting on it if it were posted to the Internet and the link distributed. In a regularly scheduled messaging meeting shortly after the second debate, the RNC pitched it to the Romney campaign. But it just wasn’t fertile ground for Romney, who had botched Benghazi twice already—first with the ill-advised statement the night of the attack, and then during a debate, when the moderator took Obama’s side in an argument over whether the president had called the attack an act of terrorism. The RNC aides were told that Benghazi “is not what the message is this week” by Romney campaign aides, who were trying to keep the focus of the campaign on the economy, according to a source familiar with the discussion. That source did not dispute the notion that Romney’s own flubs on Benghazi made it virtually impossible for him to effectively hit Obama on it.

  Romney’s failure to make Benghazi into a campaign issue was good for Hillary—at least for the moment—and so was Bill’s work on the trail for Obama and other choice candidates. Democrats’ success in Senate races meant that, despite a handful of losses in primaries and the general election, Bill’s batting average in the big contests looked pretty good.

  On November 6, Obama won reelection, becoming only the second Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to perform that feat. (Bill was the other.) Sixty percent of voters identified the economy—the issue on which Bill acted as a validator—as the most important matter facing the country. So even with unemployment at 7.9 percent, Obama had mana
ged to persuade voters that he was better than Romney on the economy. After his victory was secure, Obama spoke briefly with Romney. Then he called Bill Clinton.

  SEVENTEEN

  Please Don’t Go

  High above the jungles of Southeast Asia on November 19, 2012, in the president’s private cabin aboard Air Force One, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had a one-on-one sit-down. They reminisced like longtime friends about their last five-plus years together, dating back to the 2008 campaign. But as they sat in the cabin, ringed with leather chairs and couches and a big wooden desk for the president, Obama had a serious question about Hillary’s future, too.

  It had been about a year since Hillary told Obama she wasn’t going to stick around for his second term.

  I’m confident that you’ll win reelection and my camp will do everything in its power to help you, she had told Obama. But I’m ready to take a break from public life. She was giving him fair warning—plenty of time to pick a successor.

  Obama had put her off, telling her that they could discuss it after the election.

  Now Obama had won that second term. On Election Day, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta surprised Obama by confiding that he was ready to leave the Cabinet. “That hit him like a ton of bricks,” said one source familiar with their discussion.

  Susan Rice, Obama’s preferred pick to succeed Hillary, was running into such heavy criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill that it had become obvious to all but her most ardent supporters that she couldn’t win a confirmation fight. Obama was facing the prospect of losing the top two members of his war council and struggling to find a replacement for one of them. Hillary had proved herself a vital ally during the first term and the pair of onetime rivals had gotten into a good rhythm. Why end a good thing?