“I think there’s probably more animosity there than people will care to report.”
—a well-connected Clinton aide on the Obama-Clinton relationship
“This was the biggest political payoff in American history!”
—a former Biden advisor on an Obama-Clinton deal
Joe Biden was mad. Not just mad. Pissed.
Those who followed Biden closely, and worked with him, saw the fury firsthand. He had worked hard at the job of vice president. He had basically been successful—in his eyes at least, very successful. He was always, to use Washington parlance, “in the room,” offering opinions, helping the president see his options, making a difference. His extensive foreign policy expertise and wealth of close relationships with world leaders—honed during his time as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—had been indispensable to Obama. In his thinking, at least, he’d done more for the administration than its celebrity secretary of state ever did.
But Joe Biden wasn’t being rewarded for being the last man in the room before President Obama made the most important decisions America faced. He wasn’t being rewarded for giving it his all and doing everything he had been asked. Instead his boss was there, on his television screen, rewarding Hillary Clinton, a largely absent cabinet member, whose contributions, in Biden’s mind, didn’t come close to measuring up.
The event that really drew his ire—and renewed D.C. gossip about the Obama-Clinton relationship—was the president’s joint appearance with Clinton on CBS’s 60 Minutes in January 2013, as she departed her position as secretary of state. In the Democrats’ world, no media forum is more influential or important than the long-running, usually Democrat-friendly CBS News program. Obama had come to rely on the show a number of times to help define himself and certain issues he felt passionate about.
Perhaps more crucial, 60 Minutes was an important fixture to the Clintons, who grew up in politics when network television mattered much more than it does today. It was how to reach an audience, the largest audience, of mindful Americans interested in politics. It’s where President Clinton in 1992 “acknowledged wrongdoing” in his marriage (he was responding, if obliquely, to questions about his relationship with Gennifer Flowers). And, during his presidency, he sat for at least two interviews for the TV program. Indeed, so important was the TV show that Clinton himself briefly worked for the program in 2003, offering commentary in a short-lived “Clinton/Dole” series, where the pair who went head-to-head in the 1996 election would offer perspectives from the left and right, respectively. It didn’t last long because it wasn’t good TV—Clinton and Dole were too nice to each other, and the producers from 60 Minutes didn’t have the guts to do what they really wanted: to pit Clinton against Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.1
When the January 2013 Clinton-Obama interview aired and raised questions about Obama’s 2016 loyalties, the White House’s official explanation for offering Hillary the honor of a joint interview was deceptively simple. “I just wanted to have a chance to publicly say thank you, because I think Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretary of states we’ve had,” the president said on 60 Minutes, with an endearing glance over to Mrs. Clinton. “It has been a great collaboration over the last four years.” The president even let it be known that the decision to depart was not his, but hers.2
In fact, the hyperconfident president, sitting with his right leg crossed over his left, wearing a finely tailored dark suit, a blue tie, a matching purple shirt, and an American flag pin, seemed unusually deferential. He leaned back as Mrs. Clinton spoke, at times stared down at the ground between him and interviewer Steve Kroft, and at other times interrupted to offer uncharacteristically gracious compliments. But for the most part, he let Clinton carry the interview while he positioned himself as a cheerleader, or even understudy. He sat by her side, offering fulsome praise and reassuring looks throughout the entire thirty-minute interview.
Kroft, the longtime, slightly shlubby CBS correspondent, sat across from the two. Despite the program’s reputation for fearless reporting and nonpartisanship, he was solicitous and supportive, careful not to offend his hosts at the White House. “I spent time with both of you in the 2008 campaign. That was a very tough, bitter race,” Kroft recalled, as the camera focused on a wide shot of Clinton, who vigorously nodded her head, and Obama, who stoically stared him down. “And I’m going to spare you reading some of the things that you said about each other during that campaign.”
“Please do,” Clinton pretended to implore, letting out a laugh. It wasn’t necessary; Kroft was going soft. “But how long did it take you to get over that? And when did it happen?” he asked.
Obama took this one. “You know, the—it didn’t take as long as I think people would perceive it. As I said, once the primary was over, Hillary worked very hard for me. Bill worked very hard for me. So we were interacting on a fairly regular basis. I think it was harder for the staffs, which is understandable,” said the president in an unusually soft tone.
But the really interesting question was the simple one asked of Hillary earlier. “What did he promise you? And has he kept the promises?” It was a question many had asked. And the two seemed to have trouble answering it, stumbling in the interview.
“It was going to be hard. But, you know—” Clinton started, before being gently cut off by the man by her side. “And I kept that promise,” Obama said.
“Welcome to hard times,” Clinton continued, leaning her right elbow on the arm of her wooden chair. “I mean, because the one thing he did mention was he basically said, ‘You know, we’ve got this major economic crisis that may push us into a depression. I’m not going to be able to do a lot to satisfy the built-up expectations for our role around the world. So you’re going to have to get out there and, you know, really represent us while I deal with, you know, the economic catastrophe I inherited.’ But, you know, we’re both gluttons for punishment. And, you know, my assessment was, ‘Look, we are in a terrible fix.’ And, you know, I felt like this president was going to get us out of it, but it wasn’t going to be easy. And it was going to need everybody, you know, pulling together.”
By sidling up to Hillary, Obama had dissed his own man, his own choice as running mate, on national television. “The president and his outgoing secretary of state were so laudatory of each other on the CBS news program that they were practically cuddling,” the Daily Beast would observe.3 And for all the world to see. A Gawker headline screamed, “BFFs Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Say Giddy Goodbye on 60 Minutes.”4
Whether intended or not, and it’s hard to believe the overly cautious Obama did many things without careful consideration, various media outlets thought the president was sending a fairly obvious signal. “Obama and Clinton chuckled as they described their partnership and stoked speculation that Obama may prefer Clinton to succeed him in the White House after the 2016 election,” noted the Associated Press, which also noted that the appearance “teetered on an endorsement of a 2016 presidential bid.”5 “Hillary Clinton 2016: Obama Basically Endorses Clinton for President on ‘60 Minutes’ ” was the headline on one blog.6 “Obama Delivered a Not Too Subtle Hillary 2016 Endorsement in 60 Minutes Interview,” wrote another.7 Few seemed to think much of what this meant for Joe Biden, though Politico was one exception. “Jiltin’ Joe?” it asked in a headline, noting that “it is also the first sit-down television interview that Obama has given with anyone other than first lady Michelle Obama.”8 As Gawker reported, “Clinton refused to speculate on a possible 2016 run—‘You guys in the press are incorrigible,’ Obama said when Kroft asked—but it was hard not to look at the appearance as a kind of pre-pre-pre-endorsement.” The Examiner website also chimed in: “After Obama made a statement of support for Hillary Clinton in her job as Secretary of State, the interview invited speculation that Obama might be favoring Hillary for President in 2016.”9
In other words, media outlets across the political spectrum were in effect asking variations of the same question: Considering their once-notorious rivalry, what gives?
In the more than two dozen years since Bill and Hillary Clinton came onto the national scene, conspiracy hung on their every action. As Mrs. Clinton left office, a new conspiracy made the list: that Barack and Hillary had made a secret deal—the Clintons’ support for his presidency in return for his support for theirs. Like so many activities surrounding the former first lady, it can be difficult to support the speculation from facts, myth from reality. What is clear is that President Obama, contrary to his public and occasionally private assertions, has clearly expressed a preference for Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States.
As for the conspiracies, some are more persuasive than others. Perhaps the least persuasive of the arguments is that a deal was struck in the aftermath of the 2008 campaign—that Hillary would support Obama if Obama would support her eight years down the road. For one thing, Obama was in a powerful position—at the height of his power, beloved by his base. He didn’t need to make such an overt arrangement—one that would be radioactive if the news ever leaked—with a family he did not trust.
Still, some observers wonder what motivated her to have a change of heart in 2009, when she already had drafted a press release dropping out of consideration for the position of secretary of state. “I spoke this morning with President-Elect Obama to convey my deepest appreciation for having been considered for a post in his administration,” the draft stated. “[I]n the end, this was a decision for me about where I can best serve President-Elect Obama, my constituents, and our country, and as I told President-Elect Obama, my place is in the Senate, which is where I believe I can make the biggest difference right now as we confront so many unprecedented challenges at home and around the world.”10 According to this version of events, in a midnight phone call, President-elect Obama had said something to change Mrs. Clinton’s mind. What else, one wonders, would explain Mrs. Clinton’s sudden, eleventh-hour reversal of her decision to serve? Obama had wooed his former rival for weeks, even flying her to Chicago for a full-court press. Nothing seemed to work. Did Obama offer to clear the field for her in 2016 if she decided to join the team?
“I’ve never heard, never seen anything in print that suggested there was any pledge of support if she were to run for president,” Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia professor who has been a well-connected observer of presidential politics for thirty years, says in an interview. Then he adds, “I’ve always wondered. It would be the only thing that you would think of politically that would matter to her. The arguments to me were always stronger for her to stay in the Senate. She had her own independent base from a major state right in the heart of media-dom. She could have run a parallel administration, and gotten in a position to run either in 2012 or, if she’d prefer, 2016 on her own terms. And instead, she basically gave up her independence and signed on to his record, whatever it might turn out to be. And she had said, I think she believed it, in 2008 in the primary campaign, that [Obama] would not be a successful president for the reasons she outlined.”
In fact, there were many reasons for Senator Clinton to take the State Department job, without an explicit “deal” with Barack Obama. By many accounts, Hillary was done with the U.S. Senate by 2008. She sure as hell didn’t want to go back to a Democratic caucus that embarrassed and betrayed her, to be one of the crowd rubber-stamping Obama initiatives lest she look like a bad sport.
The State Department job offered Hillary credentials she lacked for another presidential run—foreign policy gravitas, the chance to be photographed with important foreign leaders, an opportunity to look above partisan politics. The job also offered Hillary the possibility of being a constant thorn in Obama’s side.
For a moment, she dwelled on the chance of primary-ing Obama in 2012. Even to Bill Clinton, that notion seemed insane. “Bill’s the one that told her you got to be crazy, you’re not going to run against him,” an observer says. He urged her to take the job as the best possible option. “Everyone’s going to look to [Obama],” he said. “You’ll be nothing.”
“Look, serving as secretary of state is a much more important job than simply being one of a hundred in the Senate,” Karl Rove said in an interview for this book. “And look, it’s hard to go back to the Senate after you’ve run for president, I mean if you’ve, you know, it’s hard for anybody to go back to doing what they were doing before when they thought they had a chance at moving up in the scheme of things.”
“She enhanced her political position significantly,” John McCain tells me. “I think it catapulted her from probably the favorite for 2016 to an overwhelming favorite for 2016.”
Of additional note, the negotiations that led to Clinton’s acceptance of the job were, according to sources, “adversarial” rather than cordial. They were negotiated on the Obama side by John Podesta, the former Clinton aide. The Obama team demanded what one participant described as “chickenshit small-ball” concessions, such as releasing the list of donors to the Clinton Foundation. Team Obama’s demands were all but laughable to the far more calculating Clintons. In exchange, Mrs. Clinton got exactly what she wanted.
Through an agreement with President Obama himself, Hillary secured weekly meetings with the big man, giving her direct access to the most powerful person in the world. She also, importantly, had the newly elected president agree to allow her to pick her own staff, a truly unprecedented distinction that Hillary and her staff would insist on in those formative first months. The deal would take the form of a “Memorandum of Understanding,” dated December 12, 2008, signed December 16, and released to the public two days later. The agreement, signed by Bruce Lindsey, representing the Clinton Foundation, and Valerie Jarrett, for Team Obama, committed to “ensur[ing] that the Foundation may continue its important philanthropic activities around the world” but sought “to ensure that the activities of the Foundation, however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.” Hence “a set of protocols”—“mutually agreeable protocols related to the activities of the Foundation during the period in which Senator Hillary Clinton serves in the Obama Administration”—were adopted by all parties. Team Clinton agreed to “publish its contributors,” to ensure that “President Clinton personally will not solicit funds” or seek contributions.11 It was all meant to keep Clinton, Inc. at bay while Hillary served President Obama. In other words, the Clinton enterprise would not trump the Obama administration, as long as Clinton was confirmed by the Senate and served as secretary of state. Those were terms that both ClintonWorld and Team Obama were happy to accept.
The notion of a 2008 Obama-Clinton deal is further undercut by the fact that Bill Clinton kept attacking Obama, in the press and in private, all the way up to his 2012 reelection. After all, as late as 2011, for example, Bill Clinton was reportedly telling friends, “Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works.”12 In the middle of 2012, Clinton further raised eyebrows by praising Mitt Romney. “I think he had a good business career,” Clinton said on Piers Morgan’s CNN program, when the Obama campaign was ratcheting up attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital. “There’s no question that in terms of getting up and going to the office and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”13
A far more popular, and persuasive, version of a potential Clinton-Obama “deal” centers on 2012—when Obama, struggling in the polls against Romney, really needed the Clintons’ help.
Author Ed Klein cites a meeting in 2012 in Chappaqua, where he quotes Bill Clinton as saying, “I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” Klein’s sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!” Recognizing they have a problem with a furious Bill Clinton, Klein contends that “chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo. A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.”
Over breakfast at a hotel outside Washington, D.C., one former aide to Joe Biden insists to me, “Bill brokered that deal that led to the 60 Minutes interview.” According to this Democratic strategist, Obama needed to make a deal to cover for his dereliction of duty on the night of 9/11/12, when four Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi. Bill is always looking to make a deal to further the couple’s interests, and to help keep things in order for the 2016 campaign. So the deal was struck: Bill would campaign for Obama, and Obama would help the Clintons out sometime later.
“It was the biggest payoff in political history at the presidential level,” the advisor says. “It was run nakedly in front of the entire country.” Turkey bacon in hand, the former aide adds, “And now the person with the Machiavellian influence in the White House is Bill Clinton.”
Bolstering the case was the unusual, even bizarre turn taken by Clinton’s husband, who all but single-handedly dragged reluctant Democrats and independents back on the Obama bandwagon in 2012.
“ ‘As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,’ Mr. Clinton said, wheezing while introducing President Obama at a late-night set at a Bristow, Virginia, amphitheater on Saturday. He kept coughing, patting his chest and mouthing words that carried only muffled strains in chilly air. Black tea with honey and a steady diet of cough drops between events helped little,” the New York Times would report days before the election.14
“They and Michelle had dinner and his numbers were tumbling. Bill Clinton saved his ass,” the Democratic strategist declares.
At the time, many Republicans too seemed to think something sinister was afoot. “I am told that there are some that think this may have a lot to do with 2016 and the president’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” McCain said about Bill Clinton’s sudden change of heart.15 “I suspect that Bill Clinton is collecting IOUs in case Hillary Clinton wants to run in 2016,” said Newt Gingrich.16
A former Clinton associate who knows the former president well but did not work for him in 2012 can envision such a scenario involving his former boss. “If there was a deal cut, it wouldn’t surprise me,” the source tells me, “but Obama himself doesn’t do that.”
Obama is not a wheeler-dealer like many of his predecessors, the source said, and certainly not like Bill Clinton. At events at the Clinton White House, the president so much enjoyed socializing, kibitzing, and plotting that he had to be dragged upstairs so that his guests could go home. Obama, by contrast, is known to spend as little time as possible until he can head upstairs to the residence. “He indulges people,” says one Democrat, “whereas Clinton likes that kind of stuff.” More likely, he suggests, is that a deal of sorts was brokered on his behalf, probably by a man close to both teams.
In some ways, the actual circumstances of the Obama-Hillary arrangement are incidental. What cannot be disputed is that an alliance of some sort is clearly in place, one that began in 2012 and has been augmented with each passing year. There is no other explanation for the litany of senior Obama aides who have signed on, implicitly or explicitly, with Hillary 2016. In the cultlike atmosphere of Obamaland, none of this would happen over the opposition of the boss.
Hillary Clinton likely knew that he would come to see her as the most logical, if improbable, choice. After all, she spent four years in his administration dutifully working him. She didn’t come on too strong. When she was sidelined, she didn’t fight back; she kept her head down. Did her job. Took every chance to chat him up. Was nice to Michelle and the kids. And finally managed to get Bill in line. She lobbied Obama by not lobbying him. And it paid off.
Traditionally, Joe Biden’s position as vice president might pose problems for Hillary. After all, vice presidents, even lackluster ones, tend to win the nominations of their parties—notably Richard Nixon, who served Eisenhower in 1960; LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, in 1968; George H. W. Bush in 1988; Al Gore in 2000. With Biden, however, there is a problem. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Obama increasingly has come to dislike him. (Perhaps the better word for someone like Obama is that he “disdains” him.)
Though many press accounts describe a warm relationship between Obama and his vice president, the truth is that the two men have extremely different personalities. Biden is publicly at least a backslapping, engaging, blue-collar guy with decades of government experience. Obama, by contrast, is not a creature of Washington. Nor is he anyone’s idea of the old-time pol.
Their relationship always has been a little rocky. Biden had always been respectful of Obama in public. Always. Except for that time Biden was caught trying a little too hard. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden told the New York Observer at the outset of the 2008 campaign, when he too was running for the top spot. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”17 When Biden called former black presidential candidate Al Sharpton to apologize, Sharpton told him, “I take a bath every day.”18
Smelling blood in the water, Obama released a statement critical of Biden, saying, “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”19
Biden made up for that verbal gaffe—an exercise he had lots of experience with over the years—the next day in a conference call by heaping mountains of praise upon the then–junior senator from Illinois, while leaving out any more inelegant exultations about Obama’s cleanliness. “Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or Republican Party has produced at least since I’ve been around,” Biden clumsily told reporters on a conference call. “And he’s fresh. He’s new. He’s smart. He’s insightful. And I really regret that some have taken totally out of context my use of the world ‘clean.’ ”20
Though relations warmed enough that Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 2008, the discomfort between the two has remained a constant. “In private, Biden mocks the president’s people skills and chilliness, and even his ability to curse properly,” Time magazine noted. “And he still sees himself as the Washington wise man showing his young ingenue how politics works. When they served together in the Senate, Obama saw Biden as a gasbag, a classic example of the dangers of Senatoritis. During the 2008 campaign, he was infuriated by Biden’s lack of discipline, a mortal sin in Obamaworld. And he’s still a bit bewildered by Biden’s goofy side; like everyone else in Washington, he sometimes rolls his eyes at Joe-being-Joe stories.”21
The New York Times, in a story on Biden in 2012, similarly made note of “a sometimes uneasy term, one marked by triumphs and occasional tensions with a boss markedly different in style and temperament.”22
According to sources who have watched the interaction between the president and his vice president and who spoke to me for this book, there’s little indication the president relies on his vice president for much of anything—except for doing tasks that Obama sees as beneath him. Contrary to Biden’s own spin, the vice president has become in effect a “nonperson” within the administration, sources say. Those in close proximity to the vice president see what Biden is oblivious to, by nature or by choice. That Obama, perhaps unfairly, thinks he’s a fool and a blunderer. Someone who can’t be trusted not to fuck something up. Biden in fact has spent an increasing amount of time in Delaware, where a source claims he once had hoped to establish his official vice presidential residence—an early request to the Obama people that fixed in them a perception that he was an oddball.
In particular, there was the time Biden embarrassed Obama by coming out for gay marriage before him—winning accolades from the base of the Democratic Party while making the president look, like, well, Joe Biden—flat-footed and behind the times. It wasn’t that Obama, who was for gay marriage before being against it, didn’t truly believe in gay marriage. He had long wanted to publicly reverse his position on it again—but he was worried about the politics—and wanted to set it up so that he would be greeted as making a clear step toward civil rights.
“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press.23
The White House summoned ABC reporter Robin Roberts to the White House. (That Obama knew that Roberts is a lesbian is likely. She would later come out of the closet in 2013.) ABC executives couldn’t immediately find her, because at the very moment the White House was beckoning her to interview the president for his “I-have-evolved” interview, she was being diagnosed with breast cancer.
But being the professional that she is, Roberts made it down to Washington the next morning to talk to the president about how his views on gay marriage had shifted. “I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue,” Obama said in the interview, only days after Biden got out ahead of him. “I’ve just concluded that—for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that—I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”24
But he also had to use that interview to apologize for Joe Biden. “I had already made a decision that we were going to probably take this position before the election and before the convention,” Obama insisted. The vice president, he said, “probably got out a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit.”25
It was a stinging rebuke, a coldhearted comment to make on national TV. Especially considering it was a boss mocking his subordinate.
Even if he liked Biden, Obama would still be a realist. It is hard to imagine how the vice president, who has already suffered from two brain aneurysms that required brain surgery, can be elected to the presidency at the age of seventy-three. And he definitely seems to be trying hard to make it clear to Biden that he should not pursue the option. If he did, he’d only muck things up for Obama’s all-but-obvious candidate of choice.
What’s in it for Obama? Like all second-term presidents, Obama looks to his legacy. With over two years to go in his presidency, he quietly has assigned key staff members to figure out what he should do with his presidential library—where it should go, and how it should be run. This is a man who intends to take his postpresidency seriously.
Obama has no more elections in which he will run. No more opportunities to see his name on the ballot, make his case to voters, and push his favored views and positions. All that is left are the remaining years he has in office and the ability to help choose a successor best able to carry forward his vision. Electing a Republican in 2016 would repudiate his vision, perhaps dismantle it. That wouldn’t do. For Obama not to think about who could replace him as Democratic Party leader would be political malpractice.
Obama’s was hardly a unique circumstance. In 2000, Bill Clinton cast aside his own misgivings about the maladroit and wonky Gore to champion his cause. To this day, he is baffled why Gore refused to run as if he were seeking a third Clinton term. And why he refused to allow Clinton to campaign for him—even in states like Arkansas, where he might have been able to make a difference—perhaps the decisive difference.
The 2004 move by Kerry to rebuff Clinton’s suggestion that he pick his wife is still a source of tension between Kerry and Clinton—and perhaps the main reason the current secretary of state, Hillary’s successor, is still scared of Bill Clinton, according to a former diplomat who knows Kerry well.
In 2008, George W. Bush swallowed his concerns about his onetime enemy, John McCain, gauging him the best possible choice to win that year’s election. He knew McCain would cement in place his Afghanistan and Iraq policies and in effect demonstrate that the voters didn’t dislike Bush as much as the polls seemed to indicate. But just as Bill Clinton was kept away from the Gore campaign in 2000, Bush was considered too toxic to be seen too often on the campaign trail in 2008. The most help he could provide, the McCain people determined, was to be close but not too close.
In 2016, Obama faces the same decision—a search for someone who will keep his pet projects in place, whose election would serve as a vindication of sorts of his record. If a Republican succeeds him as president, that person will almost certainly work to enact his party’s number-one political priority—the repeal or neutralization of Obama’s signature health-care plan. A Republican victory would look like the voters had turned against the increasingly unpopular Obama, that Obama might even have fatally damaged the Democratic brand. Barack Obama, a proud, even vain man, does not want that as his political epitaph. He needs someone who can solidify his legacy. And so he needs someone who will not treat him like he is a scandal-ridden Bill Clinton or a trigger-happy George W. Bush. Someone who can win.
Of course, Obama would not want people to see it this way. He probably does not want to see himself that way. Petty politics—well, he might think that is beneath him. Successors, party unity, legacies—those were the sorts of things that a Washington insider worries about. Not him. His aides were equally emphatic, assuring reporters and biographers how little he cared about party succession. He was neutral in the potential rivalry between Hillary and Biden, or whatever other Democrat might want to run. It didn’t matter to him. That he would involve himself in the contest in any way would be “inconceivable.”26 This is the line being fed to political reporters to this day. It is of course demonstrably untrue.
In a clear affront to the sitting vice president—again something Obama could easily have stopped—Mrs. Clinton has been publicly blessed by those closest to the president.
One of the most notable signals came from an unlikely source, the usually discreet David Plouffe, who is often considered “[t]he architect of Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign,” as the Washington Post put it, with “one of the best political minds in the Democratic Party.” Obama himself praised to the sky his political handler by calling him, after he secured election in 2008, “the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best—the best political campaign, I think, in the history of the United States of America.”
So it was altogether startling that Plouffe would say such nice things not about Obama’s running mate Joe Biden but of his rival—Hillary Clinton.
“I think all of us who went through that primary just have the highest degree of admiration for her. She obviously would be an enormously strong candidate if she decided to run; we’ve got others obviously who will look at it certainly if she doesn’t. But it’s too soon to know,” said Plouffe at a public event.27
“She is in both parties right now by far I think the most interesting candidate, probably the strongest candidate. But she has right now the opportunity to take some well deserved and rare time for her with her family and figure things out.”
Calling her the “strongest” candidate was an enormous vote of confidence—and one that made the sitting vice president, Joe Biden, look particularly weak, since Plouffe ostensibly worked for Biden, too, when he was at the White House.
Plouffe made the comments toward the beginning of 2013 at a public event in New York City at the 92nd Street Y. And while he said that he wouldn’t work for her campaign, that’s not to be taken as a slight—those who’ve engineered winning presidential campaigns (from James Carville’s 1992 win with Bill Clinton to Karl Rove’s 2000 and 2004 wins with George W. Bush), it’s basically unprecedented for winners to come back for a second time with a completely new candidate to achieve something they’ve already achieved.
But that doesn’t mean top political advisors don’t have a keen insight into politics—and doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t help from the sidelines. So that means that when David Axelrod, the strategist who helped bring the young state senator from Illinois to the White House and helped to shape the president into the man he is now, says something, Democrats will listen. “[S]he is an indefatigable candidate and very, very powerful, and she’s only stronger now for having four years of I think splendid leadership,” Axelrod recently said. “I think she’d be in a very, very strong position.”28
Even President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been publicly touting Hillary. “I’m behind Hillary if she runs. And I think she will, but that’s up to her. If she runs, I’m in,” Emanuel said. That by itself might not be considered too surprising: Emanuel served in President Clinton’s White House and has always remained close to Hillary Clinton, as well as to key Clinton insiders like James Carville and Paul Begala.
Except Rahm, who has been referred to as “The Godfather” by websites like the Drudge Report, now has a political machine of his own: It came with his election to mayor of Chicago, which position he secured shortly after leaving the Obama White House. And some close to him think he might be gearing up himself for a run. “I don’t know, because you can’t tell what Hillary does and how she’s viewed. She gets her first right of refusal. That’s not to say other people will look at it, but it’s clear, she gets first right of refusal. People like Rahm. I think they’ll look at it depending on what she does,” says a former cabinet member who served in the Obama administration with both Hillary Clinton and Emanuel.
But this friend of Rahm’s pulls back a little when I push him on whether the Chicago mayor would really run. “Rahm and I talk on a very regular basis. We still talk about once a week and he and I are just very good friends. He is still focused on trying to . . . he’s got fiscal problems in the city and he’s really focused on being mayor and he’ll run for reelection and that’s really what he’s focused on. I mean, if you were asking my opinion, I’ve never had an in-depth . . . the things that Rahm and I talk about are what’s going on in the city.”
“Absolutely not,” Rahm told CNN when asked whether he was interested in pursuing a bid for the White House. “I have no interest.”29
Regardless, plenty of other Obama minions are going all in behind Hillary. Obama field director Jeremy Bird has signed up with the Ready for Hillary super PAC. And the lanky campaign manager for President Obama’s reelection campaign, Jim Messina, has already joined Priorities USA, the leading super PAC behind President Obama in 2012, which is now positioning itself for a possible Clinton White House bid in 2016.
That super PAC was run last election cycle by Paul Begala, a key Clinton aide since the very beginning of President Clinton’s rise to national prominence. Begala would be expected to remain involved in the super PAC as it positions to get behind Hillary. Some say that the Clintons, fearing a more amateurish super PAC, specifically implored Begala to get more involved with Priorities USA. “The PAC would act as the centralized pro-Clinton advertising wing,” news outlets reported.30
Stephanie Cutter, another top Obama advisor, who is now a public relations specialist, trading on her close ties to Obamaland, and a cohost of CNN Crossfire, told reporters, “If Secretary Clinton runs, she’ll be the nominee—the first female nominee of either party.”31
The media has taken notice. “Three of the president’s former political hands have all but declared publicly Clinton the Democratic nominee if she runs,” reported Politico’s Maggie Haberman. “It at times has been a cringe-inducing—even if unintended—diss to the man who was on the Democratic ticket with Obama less than a year ago, Joe Biden.”
Then of course there are the moves that are being made by Obama himself. First was the 60 Minutes segment. But even after Hillary left office, Obama has gone out of his way to keep Hillary and her husband, Bill, close.
There was the summer lunch at the White House in 2013, carefully choreographed for the press. At President Obama’s invitation, Hillary and Obama dined on grilled chicken and pasta jambalaya, along with a salad. They sat outside at a table set for two. A photo of the lunch was released by the White House—something the White House wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t wanted to be asked about it.
“As you know, over the course of the last four years, and as much as has been written about over the last four years how Secretary Clinton and the president have developed not just a strong working relationship but also a genuine friendship,” said a White House spokesman. “And so it’s largely friendship that’s on the agenda for the lunch today. So it’s not a working lunch as much as it is an opportunity for the two who saw each other on a pretty frequent basis over the course of the last four years to get a chance to catch up.” When asked whether they’d be talking about work, the spokesman replied, “The purpose of the lunch was chiefly social, but given that the president and Secretary Clinton worked on [Middle East peace] pretty closely together over the course of the last four years, I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up.”32
“I bet Joe Biden loves this,” one former White House speechwriter joked in an email to me at the time. Indeed, if Obama wanted to dispel the idea that he was showing preference to Hillary, he could have invited Biden along. Or closed the lunch to the press.
Hillary tried to ease the tension by having breakfast with Biden the next morning—but that sort of missed the point: that Obama was going out of his way to publicize a meeting with Hillary, not that she had accepted the president’s request for a lunch date.
On November 20, Obama offered Bill Clinton the nation’s highest honor—the Presidential Medal of Freedom—and again, it was something he did not have to do. In the East Room of the White House, the same place Clinton’s official portrait had been unveiled a decade earlier by George W. Bush, Obama awarded the highest civilian honor to the president who had been impeached for not telling the truth to sexual harassment investigators.
“We honor a leader who we still remember with such extraordinary fondness,” Obama said in his public remarks. He painted the portrait of Bill Clinton that the former president loves best—the devoted mama’s boy who cares about nothing more than helping the poor and downtrodden. As Obama put it, “[Bill] still remembers as a child waving goodbye to his mom—tears in her eyes—as she went off to nursing school so she could provide for her family. And I think lifting up families like his own became the story of Bill Clinton’s life. He remembered what his mom had to do on behalf of him and he wanted to make sure that he made life better and easier for so many people all across the country that were struggling in those same ways and had those same hopes and dreams. So as a governor, he transformed education so more kids could pursue those dreams. As president, he proved that with the right choices you could grow the economy, lift people out of poverty, shrink our deficits, and still invest in families, health, our schools, science, technology. In other words, we can go farther when we look out for each other.”33 Bill Clinton appeared deeply affected.
“This year it’s just a little more special because this marks the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy establishing this award,” Obama said. As a youngster, Clinton came to Washington to meet his hero, John F. Kennedy. The photo of a dashing young Clinton shaking the hand of the liberal hero would often be exploited during Clinton’s own ascendancy to the White House—with the photo linking Clinton to Kennedy and implying that Clinton was destined to be president of the United States.
That day, November 20, would be an entire day with the Clintons by Obama’s side. After the ceremony, the Clintons and the Obamas, the president joined by his wife, Michelle, took the short trip in the official motorcade across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery. There the foursome laid a large wreath at the grave of John F. Kennedy, America’s thirty-fifth president, who had been assassinated five decades earlier in Dallas, almost to the day.
It was a chilly November day. Dressed in long overcoats, the four would place their hands over their hearts as a military bugler played taps. The White House pool reporter would note that taps was played “to the accompaniment of clicking cameras,” a sound the Clintons must have been pleased to hear.
“This afternoon, Michelle and I were joined by President Clinton and Secretary Clinton to pay tribute to that proud legacy. We had a chance to lay a wreath at the gravesite at Arlington, where President Kennedy is surrounded by his wife and younger brothers, and where he will rest in peace for all time, remembered not just for his victories in battle or in politics, but for the words he uttered all those years ago: ‘We . . . will be remembered . . . for our contribution to the human spirit,’ ” Obama would say that evening at a dinner at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to honor recipients of the award, the third public appearance he would make with the Clintons in less than twelve hours.34
That night, they’d be serenaded at the Smithsonian by Arturo Sandoval. Bill Clinton would sit next to baseball great Ernie Banks, but would break to partake in his favorite pastime: schmoozing the press. “They told me I had to wear it,” he told the press about the heavy ornate medal he had hanging around his neck, which Obama himself had draped over him. Hillary, accompanied by Huma Abedin, would give a warm hug to Jesse Jackson Sr.35
Through all this, Joe Biden was hardly a thought. Which was kind of the point—and must have been what upset him. The vice president, along with his wife, Jill Biden, would be introduced at the first event of the day, the medal ceremony. But their very presence was perfunctory at best.
Two weeks later, it would happen again. This occasion would be the death of Nelson Mandela.
After news broke of Mandela’s death, President Obama, who had visited the South African nation the summer before, took to the airwaves to express his heartfelt sympathy. And the next week, he’d travel to the memorial service to pay his respects. He had invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to ride with him aboard Air Force One, as well as President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. Bill was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, convening the Clinton Global Initiative Latin America. But Hillary was stateside and had the honor of riding aboard the presidential aircraft.36
In the Air Force One conference room, Dubya would pull out his iPad to show Hillary and Barack, and Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama, the paintings he had created in his postpresidential life.
The White House would do them all the favor of releasing a couple of photos of the activities on board. It would, most important for them, be beneficial to the White House, too. Obama’s a man who does not play well with others. Especially those who are his equals, or, worse, those around whom he feels self-conscious. By releasing photos of the Obamas ably hanging out with Hillary Clinton and George W. and Laura Bush, the White House was taking a page out of the Clinton playbook: rehabilitating the president’s image by showing him spending time with past rivals.
The events all made one thing very clear—for whatever reason, the Clintons have Obama in their corner.
One longtime Clinton aide expressed amazement at the maneuverings to me, given his knowledge of recent history. “I think there’s probably more animosity there than people will care to report,” he says of Obama and Hillary Clinton. However, their alliance is clearly not one of warmth, but rather of necessity. Which is why Chelsea Clinton, who according to sources actively detested Obama all throughout the 2008 campaign, offered fulsome praise for him in 2014.
In ClintonWorld these days, nothing counts more than the opinion of the former first daughter.