Hillary Rodham Clinton will officially announce she’s a candidate for the presidency on Sunday, but she’s been running — in place — for the better part of two years.
Clinton was only out of the State Department a few months in the late spring of 2013, a period she’s often described as one of apolitical reflection, relaxation and recharging, when friends began fielding interesting phone calls from her D.C. mansion, known as Whitehaven. One person in Clinton’s orbit at the time recalls picking up the phone and hearing “Hello! It’s Hillary!” followed by a barrage of detailed queries about the organizational health of state parties in two key presidential battleground states — Florida (bad) and Ohio (much, much worse).
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“That’s when I knew she was going to do it,” said the person, who also recalled sitting through one I’m-never-doing-this-again conversation with Clinton after the 2008 election. “To me she was always basically a ‘yes,’ and wanted people to make the case for ‘no.’ But the case for ‘yes’ was always stronger.”
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who served as national party chairman during Bill Clinton’s second term, had a similar experience — this time the topic was African-American politics — a couple of months later at the June 2013 funeral of longtime Philadelphia congressman Bill Gray.
“She asked me a lot of questions about people who attended that would only have been relevant for someone who would make use of those connections in the future as a candidate for office,” he said. “It was a surprise to me that she had made up her mind so early.”
Around the same time, Clinton joined Twitter, and made her intentions tantalizingly unclear, describing herself as “Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…”
Even if most people around Clinton knew she would run, the candidate-to-be left that “TBD” deliberately open for months — leaving herself latitude to ditch the entire enterprise if she got cold feet or faced a serious Democratic challenger. It’s axiomatic to the point of cliché to say that Clinton, the instant Democratic frontrunner, has wanted to be the first woman president since earliest girlhood in Chicago. The idea that she is unquenchably ambitious has embedded itself in the American consciousness, in part because she has been less artful about cloaking it – in part because it’s true. In its 2016 Clinton kickoff skit, Saturday Night Live fabricated a 1940s sonogram of in-utero Hillary Rodham waving a campaign sign.
The truth is considerably more complicated. Clinton is dead-set on avoiding the mistakes of ‘08, and approved a series of secret reports studying the 2008 campaign in minute detail, friends and advisers say. But for all her calculation, she’s been surprisingly noncommittal and reluctant to leave her comfortable double-mansion life for the grinding, grubby, lacerating realities of another campaign, fully exposed to the media horde she fears, loathes and fights.
Her ambivalence made for a rocky pre-campaign — a methodical but often scattershot two-year slog that included a lackluster book tour, a triumphant return to the stage as a surrogate during the 2014 midterms and a painfully slow-footed response to the State Department email server scandal.
For all the talk about how different things will be this time around, Clinton’s slow-walk to 2016 hearkens back to the overly-cautious frontrunner’s approach that helped sink her campaign in 2008. Unlike her husband, Clinton isn’t a political natural — she’s an unconventional candidate who performed best when she was losing, and the lack of an obvious primary opponent means she’ll have fewer opportunities to battle-test her new approach.
Like she did in 2007, Hillary Clinton is expected to kick off her long-awaited campaign with an online announcement. | AP photo
Clinton was undecided about embarking on another run as recently as December — “She was at 95.5 percent” in favor of running “but not all the way,” said a Clinton insider — and she was worried about an Obama-like challenge from the left by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to people who spoke with her at the time. And she seems to have genuinely questioned her desire to seek the office a second time, or at least put her ambitions on hold for four years. In the aftermath of the 2008 campaign, before she accepted Obama’s offer to become secretary of state, Clinton was genuinely burned out and told friends she thought her electoral career was behind her. But as her approval ratings spiked during the controversy-free first years at Foggy Bottom, she started reconsidering.
Bill Clinton, who always viewed 2016 as an opportunity for family redemption after his implosion during the 2008 South Carolina primary, didn’t need convincing. He never stopped urging her to take the plunge.
“My understanding is that she was always reluctant and that Bill has always been pushing,” said one longtime Clinton adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But many of the women closest to his wife were pumping the brakes. The “no” camp was led by Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s top State Department aide and her right-hand-woman and Maggie Williams, Clinton’s most trusted friend and one of her 2008 campaign managers, who told her — with some justification — that she was throwing away a chance to exit the stage at the top of her game and height of her popularity. Harold Ickes, a veteran Clinton hand who played a central role in 2008, was part of a group of advisers who laid out the downsides — conservatives would dig up anything they could on her, and the fractured GOP field would unite around their common goal of destroying her.
“She didn’t agree. She didn’t disagree,” is how one participant in one of those discussions described her attitude.
Chelsea Clinton, who has gradually taken on a greater role in the family foundation — and her mother’s political career — leaned yes from the start, but was more hesitant than the former president, fretting about the psychic toll it would take on her 67-year-old mother and the physical toll it would exact on her 68-year-old father, who has battled heart problems. Huma Abedin, Hillary’s longtime personal aide — considered part of the extended Clinton family — shared Chelsea’s concerns and wavered between yes and no until her boss made it clear she would run.
Clinton took her time. When Charlie Baker, Michael Whouley and Minyon Moore, longtime Clintonworld advisers who ran a D.C. consulting firm called the Dewey Square Group, approached her about preparing secret preliminary 2016 memos, she did nothing to discourage them. Clinton threw in one request: She knew well enough what went wrong seven years earlier — bad strategic planning, poor hires at the top of the campaign, a press-hostile communications shop. Instead, she wanted to know “what went right” in both her campaign and Obama’s own. She devoured several of the memos, and her suggestions prompted them to write more, according to a source familiar with the process. She also sought out the advice of communications consultant Doug Hattaway, an architect of Clinton’s late-in-the-game reset with the press during her last campaign.
Still, Clinton was understandably obsessed with Obama’s 2008 victory and began chatting up 2012 Obama campaign manager Jim Messina and, eventually, David Plouffe, Obama’s highly-regarded 2008 campaign manager — the man whose strategy dismantled her campaign. Plouffe, in a series of conversations in September at Whitehaven with his nemesis, told Clinton flatly that she needed to spend less time on 1990s-vintage hand-to-hand political combat and more time reading the mood of the country. Create a single straightforward message of economic opportunity and fairness, he said, and stick to it like a blueprint.
She heeded much of what Plouffe advised. And she took him up on his suggestion to enlist Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson, who was known for presenting his bosses with unvarnished advice based on his reading of the data, not on his personal vision of how a campaign should theoretically be run. Developing a new, less confrontational relationship with the press was also high on the agenda. But by mid-2014, she was talking less about changing her own, skeptical mindset and outsourcing the bonhomie to a team of veterans selected, in part, because of their solid relationships with reporters.
Both Plouffe and Messina urged her to jump in early (Benenson, their former pollster, had no problems with waiting a few more months), to reestablish her connection with voters and counter an expected wave of anti-Hillary activity on the right. This advice she didn’t heed, telling people she wanted to delay her jumping-off as long as possible. Bill Clinton not only supported that delay, he was telling visitors to his Harlem office that he favored her waiting until the fall of 2015 to officially announce her candidacy — in line with his own October 1991 announcement.
Clinton didn’t take her husband’s advice either — controlling her own timetable is the decision she is least likely to brook dissent on — and by the spring of 2014, she was already talking regularly to John Podesta, then a senior Obama aide, about joining the campaign as chairman. The former Clinton White House chief of staff, a hyperkinetic, hyper-organized whippet known for his sharp mind and quick temper, immediately put together lists of potential hires to fit the campaigns org chart, as he had done for Obama as his presidential transition director. Podesta, several people told POLITICO, was empowered to be the first among equals, overseeing the campaign’s strategic planning and working closely with Robby Mook, one of the young stars of Clinton’s ’08 effort, who will oversee day-to-day operations as campaign manager.
Amazingly, even as she was assembling a shadow campaign and interviewing potential campaign staffers in her house, Clinton was telling people, with a straight face, that she still hadn’t made up her mind. She meant it, her “volunteer” non-campaign campaign staffers told reporters. One of them would comically interject “if she runs” into conversations about strategic and hiring decisions the non-campaign had already made.
It wasn’t exactly a charade, but it had a whiff of royal eccentricity at a time when advisers were stressing humility and approachability.
But the candidate’s head wasn’t quite there yet. Well into the fall of 2014 Clinton herself seemed intent on putting off the formal decision to run as long as logistically possible.
Podesta, people close to Clinton say, pushed for an announcement timed for the first couple of months in 2015. He was especially itchy to dispense with the fiction of the non-candidacy and pointedly told both Clintons he opposed an idea, being floated internally, for an “exploratory phase” — an intermediate step he thought would stall planning and hiring.
Decision time came just before the Clintons jetted off to the Dominican Republic for their annual Christmas vacation. Clinton, a senior Clinton source said, told Mook, Benenson, Abedin and ad consultant Jim Margolis, another Obama veteran, she was running. Lower-level Clinton staffers and consultants didn’t get the word directly from her – but they noticed she was responding more quickly to their queries and she ordered staffers to print out a new raft of strategy memos from her inbox — a sign she was serious about reading them. By the time she returned to New York, Clinton was talking openly about declaring her intention to run and began mapping out the details of the rollout — and she began to sign off on budgets necessary to secure the campaign’s lease in Brooklyn and pay dozens of soon-to-be-staffers who were working for free and living on other people’s couches.
A short time later, she walked into her first maelstrom, in the form of a blockbuster New York Times story detailing her use of a private email server, an apparent violation of State Department rules. Yet even as she stumbled through a shaky press conference that raised more questions than it answered, Clinton’s people could take comfort that she wouldn’t have endured the public thrashing if she weren’t running for president. “It sucked, but we looked up there and thought, ‘We have a candidate.’”
But James Carville, who has served as a formal and informal adviser to both Clintons for a quarter century, thinks she was kidding herself all along.
“I have a rule here that anybody that has ever run for president always wants to be president. I never thought that she was not going to run,” he said. “The way I described it was that running for president is like having sex. Nobody ever did it once and forgot about it… There never was a moment that ever led me to doubt it would happen.”
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