—a longtime Clinton family associate
Chuck Schumer came to Iowa prepared to make news. That was not at all that unusual for the flamboyant senior senator from New York. The media-loving politician is known to have press releases at the ready on almost any issue discussed on that morning’s news shows, and long has been known to introduce legislation to fit any conceivable headline—waging “war” on a potentially hazardous caffeine-laced malt liquor drink, Four Loko, that suddenly became trendy; getting federal subsidies for Greek yogurt when the snack became popular; and seeking a ban on certain bath salts when they were the subject of an alleged act of cannibalism in Florida. Schumer even boasted of inventing a media-friendly family in his head—the Baileys—who advise him on the day-to-day struggles of the working class. “Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them,” he once said. The aggressive senator is the perennial punch line for that favorite D.C. joke: What’s the most dangerous place in Washington? Between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.
Schumer’s Iowa appearance, on November 2, 2013, was timed almost three years to the date before the 2016 presidential election. He was speaking before the ever-important Democrats in the state who will trudge through snow and ice to vote in the nation’s first presidential caucuses, which will help set the course of the next election, and which mortally wounded Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign when she lost Iowa to a hardly known man who’d been in the U.S. Senate for what seemed about fifteen minutes. The victory didn’t seal Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination, but it sure made his candidacy, and the threat he posed to the front-running and so-called inevitable Clinton, suddenly seem more plausible.
Schumer, whose hair recedes to almost the middle of his head, took the stage wearing a dark suit and a light blue tie. His thick-rimmed glasses rested securely at the end of his nose. His left hand rested on his prepared remarks to help him keep his place as his eyes darted toward the 750-person crowd—and the cameras.
“I am urging Hillary Clinton to run for president,” Schumer said in his nasal New York accent, as he pumped his right hand into the chilled air. TV cameras swept the applauding crowd, who by and large remained seated. “2016 is Hillary’s time!” he announced.
He shuffled his upper body back and forth to try to get momentum or perhaps to feign excitement. “Run, Hillary!” Schumer punched the air again with his right hand. “Run! If you run, you’ll win! And we’ll all win!”
The unexpected announcement, odd for a number of reasons but perhaps mostly because it came so many years before the actual race, received the hoped-for response. “Schumer Endorses Clinton for President in Iowa Speech,” read a headline in the New York Times. Politico, the influential Virginia-based trade publication, highlighted the New York senator’s remarks with the following headline: “Chuck Schumer in Iowa: ‘Run, Hillary, Run.’ ”
In addition to satisfying his attention fix for the day, Schumer made the announcement for larger strategic reasons. To show the Clinton team that he was their guy. A man who could make things happen for them. A man whom future president Hillary Clinton ought to support for the Senate majority leader’s post, which just might be opening up, conveniently enough, in 2016, when Harry Reid is expected to retire.
The announcement also came with a complex backdrop, since the Clintons knew what tabloids such as the New York Post had speculated for years: Chuck Schumer hated Hilary Clinton and had worked against her from the outset of her time in elected office. So did most of the Democrats who worked with her in the Senate and went out of their way to humiliate her by endorsing Barack Obama in 2008. But that, as they say, was then.
The emerging story of the 2016 campaign is the careful, quiet, behind-the-scenes coronation that the Clintons are arranging for themselves. It’s a feat reminiscent of what advisors did for Texas governor George W. Bush in the years preceding the 2000 election, when scores of Republican big thinkers and politicians began coalescing around a seemingly reluctant, torn candidate who hadn’t even declared for the White House. As with Bush, the approach is working. Careful efforts are made to avoid the mistakes of 2008, when Hillary put herself forward too soon, failed to raise enough money, and underestimated her potential rivals.
“Hillary Clinton met with a handful of aides for a detailed presentation on preparing for a 2016 presidential campaign.” That was in the summer of 2013, a good year before any campaign would really begin, and nearly three and a half years before Election Day 2016. “Three officials from the Democratic consulting firm Dewey Square Group—veteran field organizer Michael Whouley, firm founder Charlie Baker and strategist Jill Alper, whose expertise includes voter attitudes toward women candidates—delivered a dispassionate, numbers-driven assessment. They broke down filing deadlines in certain states, projected how much money Clinton would need to raise and described how field operations have become more sophisticated in the era of Barack Obama,” reported Maggie Haberman of Politico.1
Key to their restoration are the pledges of fealty from people like Chuck Schumer, among the many prominent Democrats working to absolve themselves of their Great Sin—supporting, directly or otherwise, the man who stole Hillary’s presidency away from her. Any number of those who cast their lot with Obama gambled that the 2008 defeat would rid them of the Clintons forever as a national political force—a wager they obviously lost.
“I endorsed Obama for two reasons,” says one nationally known Democrat in an interview with me, echoing many others. “I thought he was something special and then the second reason was I was concerned that if Hillary was elected all the old Clinton people would come back. And to make a long story short, Obama brought all the old Clinton people back anyway.”
The Democrats overestimated Obama, and they underestimated his most famous “frenemies,” the Clintons. So now it is time for errant Washington, D.C., Democrats to make their amends. In addition to the shameless, and seemingly pointless, Schumer shout-out, all sixteen of his female Democratic colleagues in the Senate have circulated a letter endorsing Hillary for president.2 The list includes a woman often mentioned as posing a possible primary challenge from the left—newly elected Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. The early and enthusiastic embrace contrasts notably with 2008, when Hillary’s Senate Sisters were largely silent or quietly rooting for Obama. The most notorious rebuff came from Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, whom Hillary had lobbied furiously. Endorsing Obama, McCaskill poured salt into the wound by saying she had chosen Obama because he, not Hillary, had inspired her daughter. (Her daughter, McCaskill famously said, would not be allowed to go near Bill Clinton.)
To further demonstrate their fealty, many former foes like McCaskill have glommed on to any vehicle available. For the moment, that vehicle is a once-obscure super PAC called “Ready for Hillary,” founded by a professor whose acquaintance with Hillary appears rather tenuous.
“Although I just met Hillary—we can’t remember if it was ’90 or ’91, but it was before the campaign—I have known about her since ’76 and ’77,” founder Allida Black says. “Do I trust her the same way I trust a close friend? Yes. Can I laugh with her? Yes. Do I want to bother her, the way I bother a close friend?” She laughs. “No.”
Black is not anyone’s idea of the polished political operative. She explains her tardiness for an interview by stating that her dog had thrown up that morning. Her voice is a bit gruff, her hair short and a little uneven, and she’s dressed like a liberal academic, in a Native-American- style, zigzagged, loose-fitting shirt. A scholar of Eleanor Roosevelt and editor of books such as Modern American Queer History, she’s quick to point out that she’s “not some gazillion-dollar donor.”
“I mean, look at me,” she says, proudly holding out each of her fingers. “I don’t have an eighteen-thousand-dollar ring.”
The group’s mission has been endorsed by such notables as Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s former campaign manager; perennial Clinton cheerleader and TV pundit Paul Begala; California lieutenant governor Gavi
n Newsom; and Minnesota governor Mark Dayton. Even billionaire George Soros, a major funder of liberal causes (and a ringleader of the donor class), has pledged $25,000 to the group—the maximum the group is accepting right now. “It’s just beyond our wildest expectations,” Black says. “The enthusiasm, the response we’ve gotten, our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and Instagrams, have just exploded.”
Others have gotten into the act to a notable, if not embarrassing, degree. ABC News labeled 2013 “The Year Everyone Gave Hillary Clinton an Award”—from the Pentagon to the Elton John Foundation’s Founder’s Award to something called the Michael Kors Award for Outstanding Community Service. The city of Little Rock opened up the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and Learning Center. In 2012, the Little Rock airport’s name was changed to Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.
Yet all of this activity pales against the actual Hillary Clinton presidential campaign—behind the scenes, mostly below the radar, and now decades old.
“They’ve kept their network very much alive that they cultivated when he was running for president the first time, even before he was running for president,” says one of Clinton’s former press secretaries. “Look at some of the fund-raising he’s done for state and local candidates and even getting involved in races from time to time, that you wouldn’t necessarily think he’d get involved in. It’s pretty extraordinary.”
Their permanent campaign “has been never ending, never stopping, always on the ballot, always pushing, always driving forward,” says another former Clinton aide. “Which is pretty insane.” It’s a candid reflection that they’ve been going in national politics for the last thirty years, an unheard-of commitment at such a frenetic pace.
Yet another offers his former employers praise that in retrospect sounds rather sad. “Look at the fucking hits that they’ve taken. Anybody else would’ve just fractured and gone away. Right? But they don’t,” he says. “Working and campaigning is all they know. That is their life.”
The Clintons already have blunted one of the most formidable potential challengers, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, smart and telegenic, with access to New York money. As a former Clinton cabinet secretary, his ties to both Bill and Hillary are long-standing. His office in Albany, for example, is decorated with Clinton memorabilia.3 Two decades ago, as both Bill Clinton and then-governor Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father, considered seeking the 1992 Democratic nomination, the families famously feuded. But if any bad blood still exists, it’s not visible.
A few months after Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, a Cuomo administration insider, described as having “direct knowledge of the situation,” informed the New York Post that the governor “has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected.”4
Generally speaking, potential presidential candidates do not like to offer such unequivocal statements, especially three years before the next presidential election. Why Andrew Cuomo would go out of his way to make such a statement—and so early—says more about the fears he has about the Clintons than any they have about him.
A Clinton advisor offers one benign explanation. “Andrew won’t run because he already ran against [African American Carl] McCall [for governor] and he pissed off the entire black community,” he says. “So he’s not gonna go piss off every woman for the rest of their lives” by challenging Hillary.
There was, however, a more urgent explanation for Cuomo’s unusual move. Since her days as New York’s junior U.S. senator, both Clintons have worked to build a financial juggernaut in the Empire State.
Cuomo went further to assure his loyalty. Not long after the Post article appeared, he and Hillary marched together in a Memorial Day parade in Westchester County, where the governor took every opportunity to kiss her ring. “It was a pleasure to be with Hillary Clinton today,” he said. “I served eight years in the Clinton administration, so it was a pleasure to be with her and reminisce.” Onlookers viewed the scene as confirmation of the New York Post story: He was going to stand down in 2016 to Hillary—in return, he received their warm embrace for governor.
If they weren’t both running from the same state, they almost looked like ideal running mates. But Mark Warner might have something to say about that. The fifty-nine-year-old Virginia senator’s vice presidential aspirations are an open secret in Washington. The action-oriented Warner, a former governor and business executive up for reelection in 2014, had actually considered retiring from the gridlock-laden Senate but changed his mind in part to remain a plausible Clinton running mate. On paper he is ideal—youngish, attractive, and ambitious with business savvy. And hailing from Virginia, he may help hold a swing state that would be crucial to the Clintons’ electoral math.
Bill Clinton already has given considerable thought to the vice presidential selection, which is crucial considering Hillary’s age. (She would be sixty-nine years old on Inauguration Day in 2017, the second-oldest president in history—just a little younger than Ronald Reagan was when he became president in 1981.) He is known to favor the unorthodox approach. For his own running mate, he shied away from traditional consideration of age, experience, and regional balance in favor of someone who looked—on paper at least—just like him. Al Gore was another young, good-looking southerner who fancied himself as a moderate. Campaigning together with their wives and children, the duo conveyed a perfect image—of young, dynamic, reform-minded leaders. Similarly, in 2000, Clinton urged Gore to make an equally unorthodox choice—Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, a four-foot-eleven-inch, unmarried liberal dynamo. It was a choice so seemingly unpolitical that it might have made the plodding, overly cautious Gore look something close to bold. Clinton’s influence might have persuaded Gore to make his ultimate decision, which was another “outside the box” choice—Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew and critic of Clintonian ethics. At the time Clinton called the Lieberman selection “brilliant.”
Thus for his wife, Clinton would likely counsel someone equally unexpected or bold. Someone who might underscore Hillary’s strengths while addressing questions about her age and health. Perhaps another woman. There are no shortage of Democratic females quietly auditioning, if not for VP then as a Hillary stand-in—McCaskill, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who succeeded Hillary as U.S. senator after Clinton became secretary of state.
With the prospect of the Clintons returning to the White House, it’s only reasonable for Americans to ask: Under what capacity would they serve? Would they even be together? Would 2017 offer a return of marital infidelity, embarrassing scenes in the Oval Office, and a whole new round of investigations, allegations, and simple tawdriness? And besides, who’s to say that Bill Clinton wants to return to the White House and be put under the same scrutiny he came to despise toward the end of his own presidency?
No one really knows the answer. Not even them. For the first time in basically thirty-five years, neither Clinton holds public office. They are richer, more powerful, and more popular than they have ever been. They are happy wanderers, both free to do whatever they want, whenever they want. To whomever they want. And they are doing it largely together, at least for now.
On June 13, 2013, in Chicago, Bill welcomed a glowing Hillary Clinton to her first job in the private sector in recent memory. The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, where Hillary had formally come on board, had just been renamed to include the entire immediate family: the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Three for the price of one.
“This last six months for our foundation has been a very interesting time,” President Clinton said, a typical understatement considering the series of news articles and financial mismanagement scandals that were about to circle around Clinton and his consigliere, Doug Band.
He praised his new partner and, some would say, accomplice. “For the last couple of years, Chelsea’s
been spending about half her time on the foundation work,” he noted. “She just got back from Asia, visiting our projects in Malaysia and Cambodia, and visiting the efforts of our CGI partner, Procter and Gamble, in Myanmar, Burma, where we, our foundation, is also slated to do a lot of work. And I’m very grateful to her for helping us to spearhead a reorganization to try to put all of our forces into one place.”
Chelsea stood onstage smiling. Her cold dispatch of her rival for her father’s affections was already in her rearview mirror.
“And I was thrilled when the third member of our tiny family, Hillary, said that she wanted to come into the foundation and resume her work,” Bill gushed. With his tangents and awkward sentence structure, it was clear that he was once again winging his remarks. “I would depart from our normal rule that nobody gets to give a speech and let her give a fairly brief outline to you about what she will be doing in the Clinton Foundation, which has been renamed with Hillary and Chelsea as part of it. I can see this coming now, as I move into my dotage: My job will be to fund people who really know what they’re doing.” The audience offered a light chuckle. “Which I am very happy to do. So I’d ask you to join me in welcoming at her first—she’s been at many CGI meetings in the past—but never as a principal in the Clinton Foundation: former senator and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
The gathered attendees applauded, and a few added a smattering of whoops and hollers. Clinton embraced his wife, who was sporting a new hairdo and a teal oversize pantsuit. They kissed on the lips.
A wide smile came across her face as she looked out at the audience. “Good morning! Thank you!” The applause continued. “It is such a pleasure to be here in Chicago, participating as a private citizen.”
This was her coming out at the foundation—and to the world—as philanthropic Hillary, the woman who cares about the Third World. Her brand-new official bio, which popped up on the foundation’s website that day, indicated her latest rebranding, which would come as a surprise to many of her former colleagues at the State Department:
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 31
