I loved doing events for Hillary, though once she won her Senate seat in 2000, she didn’t need much help. Her work spoke for her—securing aid to help New York recover from 9/11; supporting the families of those who were killed and the survivors, some with agonizing injuries; serving on the Armed Services Committee (the first New Yorker ever to do so), where she helped to ensure better care for wounded servicemembers, especially those with traumatic brain injuries, secure safer vehicles and more protective gear for our forces in combat zones, and save defense operations based in New York. She was also the only senator the Pentagon asked to serve on a special commission to recommend how best to reorganize our military for the twenty-first century.
One day I was walking out of the Hart Senate Office Building after giving testimony to the Foreign Relations Committee as a young Army officer was coming in. He shook hands with me and said, “Mr. President, you don’t know me, but I represent the Pentagon on Capitol Hill. I think you should know that the general consensus at the Pentagon is that no member of the Senate or House from either party knows more about our issues than Senator Clinton. And she really cares about the men and women in uniform. We don’t always agree with her, but we always listen because she’s always straight with us. And she never takes a cheap shot in the press.”
I was proud but not surprised. Almost everyone who really knew her felt the same way.
Her work on domestic issues struck the same chord. She worked with upstate New York businesses, from big ones like Corning to a small manufacturer of fishing rods, to expand their markets. The rod company got online and tripled their sales, all to buyers in Norway, and quadrupled its workforce from three to twelve. She helped the wineries and farmers upstate and on Long Island to increase their sales in New York City markets and restaurants. She saved three hundred jobs at a Defense Department data processing center in Rome, which had been scheduled to close, and even persuaded the department to increase its workload there, adding four hundred more jobs. That’s a lot in a small town in a rural county. Finally, she became an active member of the Senate Alzheimer’s task force and a new one focused on autism, where she worked to raise awareness on Capitol Hill of the large number of families with children all along the autism spectrum who needed help to give their kids the best possible future. And she kept working to support 9/11 survivors struggling to get their lives back.
In 2006, she coasted to reelection, with ads featuring New Yorkers talking about what she had done to help them and how she made them feel. All I had to do was show up at the State Fair, visit the farmers and the artisans in the pavilions, and eat Dinosaur Bar-B-Que at their mobile unit, a fixture at the fair. I also did a number of fundraisers so she could spend more time in the Senate and on the campaign trail.
In December of 2006, Hillary and I took a short vacation to the small Caribbean island nation of Anguilla, to the home of our friend Bob Johnson, the founder of BET, the Black Entertainment Television network. We took long walks and talked about her running for president in 2008. When she asked me what I thought, I said the Democratic nominee would almost certainly be elected, because of the increasing opposition to the war in Iraq and the already clear weakening of our economy, thanks to the return of trickle-down economics and the lack of oversight from the SEC and federal bank regulators over increasingly risky derivatives trading, especially in real estate. Besides, it’s always hard for any party to win three presidential elections in a row.
Primary elections and caucuses are about culture and conditions; candidates and their campaigns; the calendar, because early victories tend to give winners a bigger boost than later ones; and the coverage, because how the political media decides to cover campaigns determines what voters not directly involved know or don’t know. Social media was beginning to play a role in 2008 as a means to communicate with and mobilize small donors and other supporters, but its role was nowhere near as dominant as it became in 2016 and 2020.
Although the likely field of Democratic primary candidates was large and strong, I told Hillary I thought only she or Senator Barack Obama could win. She had a national following built from eight years as first lady, six as senator, and twenty years of work before that from law school to Boston to Washington to Arkansas fighting on behalf of children and families, especially to improve education and healthcare for people without regard to their race or income. And she had a strong record on security issues, which generated a lot of support from the military, veterans, and national security communities.
Obama was a successful community organizer and an effective state senator, and had served two years in the Senate, making friends at work, learning more about national issues and the legislative ropes, cosponsoring legislation with Republicans, and planning his campaign. Most important for 2008, as a state senate candidate in 2002, he had delivered a clear statement of why the United States shouldn’t invade Iraq, followed by a powerful keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. And he knew that in a new era increasingly dominated by sound bites and storylines, having a lot of experience was somewhere between a wash and a net negative in a presidential campaign, because no matter how much good you’ve done, there are votes or statements that can be used against you. Better to strike while you’re still new and the iron’s hot.
I thought Obama was the only candidate who could beat Hillary for several reasons. First, he was more than talented enough to pass the first presidential test: you could imagine him being president. Second, his running would mean two historic candidacies—one Black, one female—both with a chance to be elected president, and I thought most Democrats would probably see breaking the race barrier as more important than the gender barrier, although the latter, too, had proven to be deeply embedded. Third, he was the only candidate who could prevent Hillary from winning the lion’s share of the Black vote. Fourth, he was from Illinois, where Hillary was born and grew up and still had great support, but no chance to win against their own popular senator. Fifth, Illinois was next door to Iowa, the first state to vote, in a caucus, and Obama had sent people there to lay the groundwork not long after taking office in the Senate. And finally, he had the advantage of being new, always a plus in the Democratic primaries and one which had helped me win the nomination in 1992.
Hillary’s story would be that after decades of service she was ready to be president on day one, with a commitment to the well-being of ordinary Americans, a clear grasp of the national security issues, and decades of standing up for civil rights, women’s rights, and human rights, and getting results in education, healthcare, and economic development. Obama’s story was that he represented real change, a chance to empower ordinary people at home and abroad by moving beyond the red state/blue state divide to unite America with hope and change. Exhibit A was his opposition to the Iraq War and Hillary’s vote to authorize it.
It was critically important for Obama that the political press adopt a “storyline,” a frame of reference for organizing the information that comes fast and furious at campaign reporters every day, that was as close to his storyline as possible. If he could do that, it would create a lot of groupthink that would affect the print, social, and television media and Hillary would have to counter it, as much as possible, by disciplined messaging, good performance in the debates, strong campaigns in the states, and paid advertising.
His strategy was to run a fifty-state campaign designed to flood all the states with organizers and to ring up big victories in the caucus states by generating strong support among those most likely to caucus, college students and white liberals. Her strategy was to do as well as possible in the early primaries in January and in the big vote- and delegate-rich states from February on, as the calendar grew more favorable to her.
The first big issue of the campaign was their respective records on the Iraq War. It was a big issue because there was a disconnect between lawmakers and their constituents: while most Democrats strongly opposed the war, many Democratic members of Congress had voted to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq if Saddam didn’t cooperate with the weapons inspections looking for large, unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons that were left over from the first Gulf War.
Hillary was a sitting senator in 2002 when the Iraq War vote came before the Senate. Barely a year after 9/11, with troops in Afghanistan still hunting for bin Laden, President Bush had asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam Hussein to remove the threat of any weapons of mass destruction he might have. In a few days, Hillary would have to cast a vote on his request, as well as an alternative offered by Democratic senator Carl Levin of Michigan which essentially said, if Saddam doesn’t cooperate with the inspections and the U.N. authorizes an attack, come back to us and we’ll support it. The decision was presented to the American people in stark terms: If you think Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and is supporting al-Qaeda in the war on terror, vote for the resolution. If you don’t think he has any WMD, see no evidence that his secular dictatorship has anything to do with radical Islamic jihadism, and think it’s a mistake to shoehorn another war into the battle against the 9/11 killers in Afghanistan we haven’t won yet, vote against it and for the Levin alternative.
The real dilemma was more complicated. After the first Gulf War in 1991, Iraq’s records of Saddam’s WMD caches and missiles were uncovered, then matched against what was known to have been destroyed, with the rest assumed to be still in Iraq. The U.N. authorized an inspection program to find the remaining stocks and destroy them. The inspections continued in fits and starts until 1998, my sixth year in office. Most of the items on the list were discovered, a lot of them thanks to the cooperation of one of Saddam’s two sons-in-law, both of whom defected to Jordan for a while in the mid-1990s. The one who had overseen the stockpiles gave us a lot of good information that led inspectors in the right direction. Unfortunately, Saddam lured them back with offers to kiss and make up and soon they were both killed.
In 1998, Saddam kicked the U.N. inspectors out, allegedly because he was angry that the sanctions hadn’t been lifted after years of cooperation. Then I authorized, in concert with Prime Minister Tony Blair and the U.K., a bombing campaign for four days on targets our intelligence agencies had identified as the likely storage sites of any remaining WMD stocks. We hit the targets, but since the inspectors weren’t allowed back in, no one knew for sure what the impact of the bombing was.
After 9/11, there was broad agreement that the inspections had to resume, because again, according to verified U.N. records, there were substantial unaccounted-for stocks of biological agents aflatoxin and botulinum and chemical agents VX and ricin, as well as some Scud missiles. No one thought Saddam would use them and guarantee his own destruction, but there remained a risk that they might be stolen, sold, or given to terrorist groups. So the U.N. authorized the inspectors to resume and Saddam accepted them. The head of the inspection team, Hans Blix, a tough-minded Swede, took on the challenge methodically and vigorously. When he thought the work was being stalled, he said so and got the access he needed.
So why, if Blix was on the job, did we need to give President Bush the authority to go to war? And why would Blix, who would become one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War, support the Bush resolution? Because Blix knew that Saddam only did the right thing on the inspections when he felt forced to. And he knew Saddam was caught in a bind rarely discussed in the United States: he wanted the West to believe he no longer had any WMD and wanted Iran to believe he did. Saddam had fought a bloody eight-year war with Iran which ended in a stalemate in 1988, and ever since, he had feared his much larger neighbor remained a threat to his survival. He thought the possibility that he had WMD was a deterrent to another conflict he might not survive. After 9/11, Blix agreed that the world needed to know whether he had WMD stockpiles or not, and if he did, they had to be destroyed. He thought if President Bush was serious about letting the inspectors do their jobs, the threat of imminent attack from the United States for noncooperation would push Saddam to cooperate.
That’s what the vote came down to: Was Bush committed to letting Blix finish the job? On the negative side, the administration was full of neocons, clustered around Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who thought they could use America’s position as the world’s only military, political, and economic superpower to remake the world in our image. And they wanted to start in Iraq, which they thought presented a bigger problem and greater opportunity than dealing with al-Qaeda, even after 9/11. They believed it would be easy to depose Saddam, then establish a functioning government supported by most Iraqis, and leverage the example to spark a movement toward more open democratic societies in the Middle East. If President George W. Bush listened to the neocons, he would start a war before the inspectors finished, rather than run the risk that there was nothing to find.
On Monday, October 7, just a few days before the vote, President Bush gave a speech in Cincinnati, laying out the case against Iraq and its WMD that the neocons were pushing. But he left the door open to allowing the inspections to run their course and avoiding war. I listened very carefully. Twice he said that Iraq could avoid conflict by declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction and complying with other U.N. resolutions. One quote: “I hope this will not require military action, but it may.”
So Hillary was in a quandary. For a Democrat in a Democratic state, the safe vote was no, but New York had been attacked, so feelings were more scrambled. Regardless of how she voted, the force resolution clearly had enough votes to pass both the House and the Senate, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Hillary’s fellow New Yorker, was voting yes. On the other hand, if WMD were found and not turned over, or if Blix finished and found nothing but said he’d been kept out of places where remaining stores might be located, there could be another vote. Just a few years earlier, several Democrats had voted against the first Gulf War authorization, which was popular from beginning to end, and none of them were badly damaged by it.
She was torn, because she was a New Yorker up to her ears in 9/11 work, ably serving her country and state on the Armed Services Committee, and deeply immersed in both the needs of the men and women in the armed services and what needed to be done to enhance our defense against new threats. She had forged a constructive relationship with the president and was inclined to give him some flexibility as commander in chief, especially since he had honored his commitment to her to support $20 billion in aid to New York after 9/11 when some congressional Republicans were opposed. Finally, she thought her vote for the resolution might increase both Saddam’s cooperation and Bush’s willingness to let the inspectors finish, in spite of the unrelenting pressure of the neocons and his own hatred for Saddam, who had made a clumsy, poorly concealed effort to kill his father in Kuwait after the elder Bush left office. Also, the Levin alternative wasn’t real, because it required the support of the U.N. Security Council before any attack could take place. Germany and France were leading the opposition to war in the U.N., with support from China and Russia, to veto any force authorization in the Security Council regardless of what the weapons inspectors found.
When Hillary asked me what she should do, I said the resolution was going to pass regardless, and if we went to war, she would have a lot to do to support the troops, whatever happened. Given how it played out, I should have screamed, “Just say no!” Instead, I think my response helped to trigger her responsibility gene to enter a field in which the ideologues had already captured too much ground.
On October 10, the House approved the resolution 296–133, and the next day, the Senate followed suit, 77–23. Hillary voted with the majority. Then we all watched for five months as the United States prepared for war, Blix raced against time, and Bush held the stopwatch.
On March 8, 2003, I went to England to give the annual Churchill lecture at Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family’s magnificent ancestral home in Oxfordshire, then drove to Chequers, the official country residence of the prime minister, to see Tony Blair. He had one last idea to avoid war. By then, a majority of Americans had accepted the neocon claims that Saddam most likely still had WMD and may even have offered support to al-Qaeda before 9/11. Virtually no one outside the U.S. believed the latter or thought it made sense to start a war with Blix so close to the finish line. Blair’s idea was to get the U.N. to adopt its own stopwatch: a U.N. resolution setting a deadline for finishing the inspections on a timetable Blix said he could meet.
Blair knew that opposition to war had hardened in Europe and elsewhere in response to Bush’s buildup. Like Hillary, he was in a quandary, torn between the opposing arguments and his competing objectives for the U.K.: to remain America’s strongest ally and to support the European Union, in which the U.K. could play a leading role, in part because of its special relationship with the U.S. He hoped his idea could prevent him from burning either bridge. Blair knew trust was in short supply and it would be difficult to persuade a majority of the Security Council to cast a vote that could be characterized as even conditional support for the invasion. But he was a good vote counter and it was a good argument: How can you start a war with uncertain consequences when you’ll know the answer to the WMD question in a few days?
Tony said the only way to pass a resolution Germany and France were working against was to get the support of Chile and Mexico, who were serving two of the rotating terms on the Security Council. He asked me to make the case to their presidents, Ricardo Lagos and Vicente Fox, because I had good relationships with them. Ordinarily I would have cleared the request with the White House, but time was short and the request was consistent with President Bush’s most recent speech in Cincinnati saying Iraq could avoid war by complying with the U.N. resolutions. Bush still hadn’t said he was going to war regardless of the inspections, and Blair was by far the most important ally Bush had left. I was sure Bush was aware of Blair’s effort and would know he asked for my help.
So I flew home to make the calls, knowing it was a hard sell. I got through to Fox first. He was friendly but forthright: 85 percent of his people opposed invading Iraq under any circumstances. He also believed that, even if Saddam had WMD, he wouldn’t use them. And any deadline resolution could be portrayed as conditional support from Mexico for an invasion. Lagos, whom I knew much better, said the same thing. He was leaving office with a 76 percent approval rating, which he was using to support his chosen successor, Defense Minister Michelle Bachelet, who if elected would become Chile’s first female leader. He said he couldn’t risk turning Chile upside down in a cause he felt was already lost. Still, a few days later, he and a couple of other leaders did float the possibility of a thirty-day extension, which the White House, locked and loaded, quickly shot down.
On March 20, just twelve days after I met with Blair, the Iraq War began. Saddam was quickly deposed, captured in December, and tried, convicted, and executed three years later. The war continued for more than eight years, until late 2011, then returned on a smaller scale in 2014 when the U.S. and other forces helped the Iraqis reclaim land lost to ISIS, another vicious terrorist group trying to control part of the still fractured country. More than 4,500 U.S. troops lost their lives there, about 3,400 in combat, and about 33,000 were wounded. Most of the casualties were in the first three years. Of course, many more Iraqi combatants and hundreds of thousands of civilians were also killed.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. When the Iraqi who oversaw the WMD stocks was captured and interrogated, he said his government had destroyed those we didn’t hit in the 1998 bombing, but Saddam had ordered his people, on pain of death, never to acknowledge it, fearing Iran would move against him.
When the statue of Saddam in Baghdad came down, the cracks in Iraq’s foundation came out. As the 9/11 Commission later stated, terrorism came to post-Saddam Iraq with a vengeance, and took a deadly toll on the lives of soldiers and civilians there.
Saddam played his Iran card too long by not telling the truth from the very start, and not doing everything possible to speed up the inspections to prove it. And the U.S. sacrificed the almost unanimous sympathy and support of the world after 9/11 on the altar of the neocon dream by not letting Blix finish his job.
In early 2005, a bipartisan commission cochaired by Republican Court of Appeals judge Laurence Silberman and former Democratic senator Chuck Robb, a highly respected Marine officer and Vietnam combat veteran who did not support the Iraq War, issued a report on the intelligence failures at the root of most of the arguments for war. The report found that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, especially the evidence of a dangerous new bioweapon, saying, “This was a major intelligence failure.” Still, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community “distorted the evidence” about Iraq’s WMD program. They said “what they believed. They were simply wrong.”
The Intelligence Community also found no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with or any advance knowledge of 9/11. They were right about that. The commission’s official report was issued in a classified version with seventy-four recommendations, and an unclassified one containing sixty-eight of them. In Chuck Robb’s memoir In the Arena, he says President Bush honored his commitment not to interfere with the commission’s independence and accepted 95 percent of its recommendations.
I tell this story not to change your mind about the Iraq War, but to explain why Hillary and some others voted as they did, and why the caricature of Blair as a warmongering accomplice to U.S. policy, for which he was pilloried for years in the U.K., is oversimplified. Of course, when the war started, and he chose to stay with the U.S., he was all in, as you have to be when you send troops into harm’s way. But until the war bell rang, he was trying to find another way.
It’s also worth noting that after the invasion, in fits and starts, many Iraqis did try to lift their country out of Saddam’s dark shadow, the wreckage of the war, and the destruction of governing capacity by the early U.S. decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to keep experienced Ba’ath Party members from participating in any new government. Millions voted in competitive elections for the first time; the Shia Iraqis didn’t all become puppets of Iran; the Kurds kept performing well; and serious people tried to put a functioning representative government back together. But the cost was great in lost and damaged lives, including many U.S. soldiers with lost limbs and brain injuries who would not have survived in earlier wars; in the loss of confidence in American politicians and intelligence agencies at home and abroad; and in speeding up the polarization already well underway in the U.S.
For Hillary, and for me, it was a lesson hard won. Sometimes you can’t stop a freight train or move it to a better track. You just have to step away and wait for another chance to make a difference.
Back to the 2008 primary. The state-by-state chronicle of the contest between Obama and Hillary has been well documented elsewhere. First, Obama won in Iowa. Hillary and John Edwards had good organizations, but Obama’s, aided by a large influx of people from Illinois, was better. His Iowa victory earned the usual 18-point bump in the polls in New Hampshire, with Obama going from 5 points down to 13 ahead just five days before the New Hampshire vote and only two days before the only debate on Saturday night. This was a huge break for him because usually the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primary were eight to twelve days apart, giving more time for the impact of Iowa to ebb. It wasn’t unusual for Iowa and New Hampshire to have different winners. This time New Hampshire had moved its date up a week to stay ahead of Michigan and Florida, who were opposed to the permanent Iowa/New Hampshire monopoly on the first and second contests, and had moved their primaries up in violation of the Democratic Party calendar. So Hillary was 13 points behind just five days before the New Hampshire vote.
She did well in the televised debate, and Senator Obama made a rare error. When asked by the moderator why some people didn’t seem to like her, Hillary, with good humor, brushed it off, then Obama interjected, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” However it was meant, it came off as a putdown. The next day she had an encounter with a voter which brought her to tears. The episode aired on the evening news. It was a raw, real rebuttal of the cartoon characterization of her as robotic and ruthlessly ambitious.
Hillary also ran only positive ads and benefited from the support of a large number of old friends and a remarkable array of New Hampshire women, including several highly influential legislators. That’s especially important in New Hampshire because there are so many of them, 400, each representing only about 3,300 people, so they know virtually all of their constituents and can make a real difference if they’re organized and committed. She won New Hampshire by 3 points, moving up 16 points in just two and a half days with an entirely positive campaign. I had never seen that happen before and haven’t since. The race could have been over had Obama won. Now it was back on.
A week later came the Michigan primary. Hillary had a 10-point lead over Obama in the most recent poll, with Edwards several points behind him, and she had good, well-organized support there. The party’s rules said all the candidates could run in Michigan and Florida but could only visit to raise funds. No campaign events or advertising. In Michigan, Obama and Edwards took their names off the ballot, a smart move designed to minimize the impact of Hillary’s likely win. Instead, longtime Michigan congressman John Conyers and his wife, who were leading Obama’s campaign, ran radio ads urging people to vote uncommitted, which they said did not violate the DNC rules against advertising since Obama was not on the ballot. Hillary got 55 percent of the vote to 40 percent for Uncommitted, mostly Obama and Edwards supporters.
On the nineteenth Hillary won the Nevada caucus 51–45, overcoming a stiff challenge from Obama, who had the strong support of the union representing the hotel workers. Thank goodness the mostly female, mostly Latina workforce supported her and showed up anyway. Hillary’s Nevada campaign was led by Clark County commissioner Rory Reid, who put together a great organization and got good help from, among others, Dolores Huerta, legendary for her leading role in starting the farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez, actresses Eva Longoria and America Ferrara, social activist Elsa Collins, and others who all worked the hotel staff in the cafeterias and break rooms like seasoned pros. And she got favorable coverage and a wonderful endorsement from the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, Brian Greenspun. Brian, once a moderate Republican who had recoiled at his party’s move to the right in the 1980s, had been critical to my carrying Nevada twice. He, his wife, Myra, and daughter Amy are close friends of ours. Brian thought she’d be a great president.
Next up was South Carolina. After losing Iowa, Hillary had won New Hampshire, Michigan, and Nevada, and was well ahead in soon-to-vote Florida, so some in Hillary’s campaign thought she shouldn’t contest a race in South Carolina she had no chance to win. Given the way it played out, they might have been right.
Congressman Jim Clyburn, the state’s most powerful Democrat, didn’t publicly endorse Obama, but after Iowa was clearly heading in his direction. Obama was waging a vigorous campaign, as was John Edwards from next-door North Carolina. Hillary had a lot of supporters there, too, including popular former governor Richard Riley, who compiled an impressive record as governor and secretary of education in my administration for all eight years.
The most critical thing I thought South Carolina would tell us is how well Hillary could do with Black voters in a place where both she and Obama put on a full-court press. If she could only get 10 percent in states with a heavy Black vote, she couldn’t win the nomination. If she got 30 percent, she could.
The political press turned sharply negative in South Carolina, saying that I was Hillary’s attack dog, playing the “race card” on Obama. They accused me of saying his campaign was a “fairy tale” in New Hampshire. After the life I’d lived, it hurt to be accused of playing the race card. I should have seen it coming. With Hillary’s big wins, the press narrative was in danger. The difference between coverage in today’s hard-right-wing media and in the mainstream political media is that the latter prefer not to say anything that’s demonstrably false. They just omit information that contradicts or blunts the impact of their storyline.
I was speaking at Dartmouth College just before the New Hampshire vote and was asked about Hillary’s Iraq War vote and Obama’s opposition to the war. I said that when Senator Obama was asked at the Democratic Convention in 2004 about how he would have voted on the resolution, said the case hadn’t been made to the public but he hadn’t seen all the intelligence, so he didn’t know for sure. I also told the audience something else they likely didn’t know, that both he and Hillary had cast more than eighty votes on Iraq in the Senate, differing only once, when he voted for confirmation of a new military commander and she voted against him because she disagreed with the prevailing strategy. So the “fairy tale” was not a reference to Obama and his impressive campaign, but to the storyline that there was a big difference between them on Iraq. Stating facts in defense of my candidate was not an attack on him but a disagreement with the storyline.
In fact, my respect for Obama was growing. One night when all the candidates were out of state for a debate, all the press still stuck in South Carolina had to cover was a rally where I spoke for Hillary. There were several hundred people there. After I made the positive case for her, I opened the floor for questions. A young Black man stood up. He said he was a minister who had recently moved to the state to start a church. He then said that he liked Senator Obama, but the Democrats had to win in November and he had decided to support Hillary because she had a long record of supporting civil rights, had been a fine senator and first lady, and he didn’t think the country was ready to elect a Black president. I thanked him for his support, but said I disagreed with him about whether Obama could win, saying that since he had won Iowa and was running a good campaign, he could win the nomination, and if he did, I would do everything I could to help elect him. (This account is confirmed in the book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics by Minyon Moore, the director of the Public Liaison office during my administration and one of the authors, who was in the audience and saw the event unfold.)
When it was over, I was afraid of the headline, “Even Clinton Admits Obama Can Win!” I needn’t have worried. There wasn’t a single mention of it, perhaps because it contradicted the “Clinton Plays the Race Card” storyline.
It’s true that I compared Obama’s coming victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s in 1988, but not in a derogatory way. Early on election morning I went to work at a polling place with two congressmen who were supporting Hillary. A young man with a local radio station came up and asked what we were talking about and I said the history of South Carolina primaries. He asked if I thought Obama would do well and I said I did. I said we had just discussed how well Jesse had done in 1988, putting together an impressive coalition of Black and working-class white voters in his home state. Immediately the press and Obama supporters were howling that I had shown disrespect to Obama and his supporters, insulting his Black supporters by suggesting that they would vote for him because of his race, and his well-educated liberal white supporters by comparing them to the poor working-class whites who had supported Jesse. I thought Jesse had run a great campaign in 1988 and I called him to explain what happened. He laughed it off, saying he understood what they were up to. Somehow the press reports forgot to mention that the two Hillary-supporting congressmen with whom I was talking about Jesse were both Black, Greg Meeks of New York and Kendrick Meek of Florida.
Barack Obama won South Carolina with 55 percent to 27 percent for Hillary and 18 percent for John Edwards. He received about 80 percent of the Black vote and a good number of white voters, just as Reverend Jackson did in winning 55 percent in 1988. Hillary, with strong Black leadership and a record on issues important to grassroots leaders, like not loading up Black neighborhoods with toxic waste dumps, managed to get about 20 percent of African Americans to support her, right in the middle of the gap between the road to defeat and a path to victory. I’ll always be grateful to Hillary’s South Carolina cochairs, three respected African American legislators, Senator Darrell Jackson, Senator Robert Ford, and Representative Harold Mitchell. Because they supported her, they all drew primary opponents in the coming election, but all three won handily, by 65 to 72 percent, showing that most African Americans who voted in the primary liked both Hillary and Obama. That was the real story, and what made the primary so fascinating.
Shortly after New Hampshire, Hillary had to make some changes in her campaign. She brought in Maggie Williams, who had been her chief of staff in the first lady’s office; Minyon Moore, who had run the White House constituent outreach and political affairs operations when I was in office; Cheryl Mills, who had served in the White House Counsel’s office and defended me brilliantly before the Senate; and Tina Flournoy, a gifted political maven then with the American Federation of Teachers. All four were strong, accomplished Black women, and the headquarters operation got a lot better. Their unprecedented prominence didn’t get a lot of coverage.
Three days after South Carolina, Hillary won Florida 50 percent to 33 percent for Obama, and 14 percent for Edwards. They were all on the ballot this time. So it looked better heading into February—losses in Iowa and South Carolina, victories in New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida.
She was also ahead in the popular vote, though it was rarely reported. She was hurt badly by Michigan and Florida going against DNC rules and holding their primaries before February 5, a choice she had nothing to do with, and was hurt even worse by what the DNC did to punish the two states, and how the political press covered it.
In both states the Republicans handled the arrangement as provided for in their party rules, counting the votes but allocating only half the delegate votes they otherwise would have received. The Democratic Party rules would have produced the same result. But after Michigan and Florida voted, the DNC’s Rules Committee decided, by a secret one-vote majority, to change their rules to strip all the delegates from both states, while saying they might decide to allocate them with half votes at a later date. It was obvious they were going to do that. Otherwise they would have had to pretend the primary never existed.
Still, the political press declined to include in their reports of the vote totals those that Hillary won in Michigan and, even more indefensibly, in Florida, where Obama and Edwards were on the ballot, saying they could be included later when the DNC decided what to do with the delegates.
If that one member of the Democratic Party Rules Committee had done the “democratic” thing and voted to seat the delegates but cut their votes in half, which of course they later did, the political press would have had to report the totals showing Hillary ahead in the vote count. The political press’s decision, using the secret Rules Committee vote as an excuse, not to report her vote totals in the two states that jumped the line were daggers that undermined her big-state strategy and the case she was making to the superdelegates, mostly elected and party officials who were made voting delegates by the party rules.
Heading into February, it was clear that Obama had done and would do better than Hillary with African Americans, younger voters, in the caucuses, in the Democratic Rules Committee, and in the political press coverage. By contrast, Hillary had done and would do well with working-class and older voters, Latinos and voters with military and national security ties, and would shine in the debates, in the big state primaries, and in other states that rejected caucuses in favor of more democratic primaries. The pattern held in the contests to come.
The national coverage was so biased, it was laughable. At least the press, unlike in 2016, didn’t pretend otherwise. For example, The New York Times sent a reporter into all the stores in Chappaqua to ask if the people working there had anything negative to say about Hillary or me. I learned about it in Lange’s Delicatessen, which was probably his last stop. The employees and owner were chuckling about it. When the reporter learned our neighbors liked us, there was no article. It didn’t help with the storyline.
Obama’s best decision was to start his campaign early with a full fifty-state strategy, something Hillary’s campaign had to develop after she strengthened her leadership team in February, but she never really caught up. He also had an early, aggressive, and effective effort with the superdelegates, helped by much more positive press coverage for him than for Hillary, including the omission of her vote totals in Michigan and Florida.
By February, it was clear that Hillary’s best chance was to maximize her strength on the stump and in the debates, her command of the issues, and her determination to make the economy, healthcare, and education accessible to people who were working hard and needed more opportunities. Meanwhile my best use was to reinforce her message and stay under the national media radar by focusing on meeting voters in medium- and smaller-sized communities, at university events, and in overlooked urban neighborhoods. All told, I did about three hundred events, including thirty-nine in Pennsylvania, thirty-one in Indiana, and twenty-something each in Ohio, Texas, and California. The state and local media coverage was straightforward and fair. She won them all.
From February through to the end, Hillary did well, finding her voice and, when she had a good local organization, often doing better even in states where the established state politicians had endorsed Obama. My favorite was Massachusetts, where Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator John Kerry, and Governor Deval Patrick all endorsed Obama and Hillary won by 15 points, thanks to a vigorous campaign, her longstanding ties to many people in the state, and the extraordinary efforts of Representatives Richie Neal, Jim McGovern, Steve Lynch, and Barney Frank.
She also won in New York’s neighbor New Jersey. And she won Pennsylvania by 9 points, thanks to strong support in Pittsburgh and the rural counties of Western Pennsylvania, in Northeast Pennsylvania where her father grew up, and in Philadelphia, thanks to former governor Ed Rendell and the city’s Black mayor, Michael Nutter. In a national television interview, Nutter was pressed on why he wasn’t supporting a man who could become the nation’s first Black president. He said he was Black and was also the husband and father of two strong women who liked Hillary, but his job was to support the person he thought would be best for Philadelphia. That’s why he was supporting Hillary. The Black mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, Doug Palmer, said the same thing.
In late May, West Virginia and Kentucky went for her by 40 and 35 points. Ironically, she was actually helped by the political press saying the remaining primaries were meaningless and she should just drop out. People in states that hadn’t voted yet appreciated that Hillary wanted their voices heard and felt she owed it to them to finish what she had started. By then, a lot of remaining mostly working-class voters thought the press’s overt preference for Obama made him the establishment’s choice and that Hillary cared more about them.
South Dakota and Montana were the last two states to vote. I had gone to South Dakota several days earlier to do stops, one of which was at the local American Indian college where the president, Tom Shortbull, had put together a small meeting of tribal leaders. He introduced me by saying why he thought it was important to support Hillary. He said when he was a state senator, she had come to Pine Ridge Reservation as first lady, then persuaded me to come. Then I came with a delegation committed to improving opportunities for one of America’s poorest communities. He then mentioned the good things that happened after our trips and ended with a question: “If we listen to the party leaders and walk away from the only candidate who’s actually done something for us, why would anyone ever support us again?”
I didn’t need to say a word. After the event I went to a pay phone in the parking lot and called headquarters, telling them that if they’d let me do a two-day swing through small towns, and if Hillary would come once or twice, she’d win. I made the stops, eighteen of them, often forty or fifty miles apart, and loved every one. I still often drink my morning coffee out of a Webster, South Dakota, mug. She came, got the endorsement of the state’s largest newspaper, and even carried the University of South Dakota community. Outspent by more than four to one, with every prominent Democrat in the state endorsing Obama, Hillary won by 10 points.
But it was too late. On the last day, Obama carried Montana by 15 points, in part because he had organized early. I went there and first worked the eastern part of the state, where Hillary was doing well, but when I got to Missoula, home of the university, I knew we were toast. One guy in a bar told me he liked Hillary but, as with other states, Obama’s campaign had been working there since early 2007.
On June 7 in Washington, Hillary made her concession speech to a large crowd of supporters. She said she had fought hardest for people who needed a president who would help them, and mentioned several examples. Then she congratulated Obama on the “extraordinary race he has run” and said, “I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.” More than half of the speech was about Obama and the importance of electing him. The rest was a clarion call to women and girls not to give up on their dreams. It was a brilliant speech and it went a long way to unite the party. She always showed up when it was pouring rain, demonstrating again why she would have been a great president and making those of us who love her very proud.
Obama soon named Joe Biden as his running mate, a smart move that added experience to the ticket, especially in foreign policy and fighting crime, something I had seen firsthand when I worked closely with Senator Biden on the Crime Bill and on Bosnia, Kosovo, and several other foreign policy issues. Then Obama had a successful convention in Denver, where Hillary spoke for him and persuaded her most die-hard supporters, who called themselves “The 300” (in reference to Leonidas and the 300 Spartans who fought the massive Persian army to the last man at Thermopylae), to join in making his nomination unanimous. John McCain won the GOP nomination, and in an attempt to unite a Republican Party whose right wing didn’t think him right-wing enough, named Alaska governor Sarah Palin, later a Tea Party favorite, as his running mate.
In late September, the housing bubble, blown up by financial machinations which left banks massively overleveraged, burst, placing the entire financial system at risk and in effect ending the election. I always thought Obama would win, but now it wouldn’t be close. As a senator, Hillary had gone to Wall Street and warned them that their overleveraged trading in housing derivatives and other poorly collateralized debt obligations would lead to disaster if they didn’t stop. Wall Street ignored the warning and kept raking in the cash.
President Bush had to spend the last months of his presidency dealing with the financial crisis and the Great Recession it triggered. He knew he had to provide federal assistance to avert a depression, but he hated giving massive sums to the very institutions that had caused the crash. Congress felt the same way.
The first vote on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bill, aka the bank bailout, was held in late September 2008. The legislation failed in the House 205–228, with Democrats in favor 140–95 and Republicans 133–65 against. When the stock market reacted to the vote by dropping 777 points, a slightly revised version of the bill passed the House and Senate a few days later, and was signed into law by President Bush, still with more overall Democratic votes than Republican. Without the Democrats in Congress backing the Republican president, there weren’t enough votes to pass the bill. The GOP members loved feeding at the trough but didn’t want to plug the holes when it leaked.
The most extraordinary aspect of the bank bailout was that everything happened in the teeth of the 2008 presidential election, with both candidates voting for the bill, although McCain would later say that he regretted his vote, claiming the money was misspent, a position many of the GOP supporters of the law would take in later elections to placate the right-wing media and the antigovernment voters they’d need to keep their seats.
I felt for McCain. He was an old-fashioned conservative who believed in honorable compromise and respectful treatment of his opponents. He enjoyed working with Hillary in the Senate and called me during the 2008 campaign, asking how he could speak out against Russia’s attempts to undermine the former Soviet republic of Georgia’s increasingly open, effective democratic government without looking like a warmonger in a country increasingly opposed to the Iraq War. Later I spoke at a dinner in New York for his foundation, hosted by our friend Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who was a supporter of both Hillary and McCain. Two thousand eight was just not his year. He might have done better in 2000, but lost the primary to George W. Bush after a brutal takedown in South Carolina from which he never recovered.
Almost all economists believe the aggressive fiscal measures taken by Bush and later by Obama were necessary and largely effective in halting the disintegration of the financial sector and the larger economy, but the facts wouldn’t make it more palatable, especially when several Republican members of Congress blamed homeowners for the crash and, over the opposition of most Democrats, had given them less help than they gave the banks that had reeled them into risky mortgages and shaky trading offerings.
In the last weeks of the election, the Obama campaign asked me to make campaign stops in several states where Hillary had done well in the primary, and where polling had indicated Senator John McCain was close or leading down the final stretch. I did a couple of events in Florida, including one in Orlando with Senator Obama, then went to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Kerry had won four years earlier in Pennsylvania 51 to 48 percent, but he had lost the other three. Obama needed to do better, and I was glad to help.
Though Hillary made far more appearances than I did and had a much larger impact on the outcome, I tried to make sure that people knew that Obama and the Democrats understood Americans were hurting, with declining incomes, job losses, foreclosures, maxed-out credit cards, unaffordable healthcare, rising food, utility, and gas costs, and increasing poverty and inequality, and that he had good, realistic plans for how to improve their lives and their children’s futures. Most voters were eager for a new leader and a new direction. They had given Congress to the Democrats two years earlier and decided to give Obama a chance to do better.
I was happy about his victory but concerned that the same forces that had guaranteed Obama’s election could prove his undoing. The serious financial crisis he had inherited would last longer than typical economic downturns, and when things didn’t improve quickly, voters might blame the new president before he had a chance to make things better, or at least before they could feel the upturn.
And lurking not far from the surface was an even more profound problem. Another, more radical “us vs. them” America had been making its case at least since 1994 with the rise of the Gingrich Republicans, and it hadn’t gone away. During a McCain town hall in Minnesota, an audience member accused Obama of being a terrorist, and later on a woman, when asking McCain a question, said Obama was an Arab and insinuated that he wasn’t one of “us.” The people at the town hall didn’t invent those fantasies that night; right-wing media had been raising spurious questions about Obama’s birthplace for months. To his credit, McCain took the microphone from the woman, pushed back forcefully, and continued to run a hard-fought but fair campaign. But in his choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, he had also reached out to the growing segment of his party that focused on cultural grievance and divisive populism, with relentless attacks that often were clearly false.
The Republican right apparently believed that protecting democracy in an increasingly diverse country didn’t work for them. After all, they voted to extend the Voting Rights Act in 2006, then promptly lost both houses of Congress. In a more normal time, the GOP would have tried to broaden its appeal. Instead they chose to double down, to Just Say No to the president, purge their party of as many moderates as possible, and try to win enough white working-class voters outside the South to carry the Electoral College, which is heavily tilted in favor of less populated, more culturally conservative states.
This was a preview of what was to come in the years after Obama took office. Senator Mitch McConnell, who was Republican Whip during the election, became Majority Leader when the GOP won the Senate back in the 2014 midterms. In his memoir, McConnell said he’d voted for President Johnson and supported the Civil Rights Act, but as he rose to prominence in the Senate, he became a master at partisan politics, both at home and in Washington. After President Obama won in 2008, he said his number one priority was to make him a one-term president.
I saw the Republican strategy working in Arkansas in 2008, when four former Democratic governors joined Governor Mike Beebe on a campaign swing for Obama: Jim Guy Tucker, Senators Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, and me. All of us had approval ratings between 55 and 70 percent, with Beebe leading the pack. We made stops all over the state and had a great time. Dale was so excited that he said at the last rally that he thought Obama might win Arkansas even though many Arkansans were disappointed he didn’t come to the state, just to show respect to Hillary. I told Dale I had loved being with him, but we were about to get the hell beat out of us. The only people at the rallies were young people, both Black and white, who liked Obama, and our tried-and-true friends, who were older then and not as active as they used to be.
Sure enough, Arkansas was one of John McCain’s best states. He won by 20 points. An exit poll showed Hillary would have won by 15, but I doubted that enthusiasm for her would last either, as time, distance, and the loss of locally owned rural newspapers and radio stations—with the rise of Fox News and more politically strident evangelical churches filling the spaces they had once occupied—took their toll.
Those factors didn’t translate into political victory for Republicans nationally in 2008, but they would come back with a vengeance. Still, Obama won the election handily, with a big Democratic turnout and a strong showing with independents, who were tired of the Iraq War, furious about the financial crash, and eager to make a new beginning. The hard-right base of the GOP, because they were also turning against the Iraq War and opposed the bank bailout, was less enthusiastic in its turnout, despite McCain’s selecting Palin as his running mate.
Two Americas were emerging with very different stories. Those represented mostly by Democrats believed that our growing diversity was a source of strength, not decline, and the right path for such a diverse nation was to fight inequality through shared opportunities and shared responsibilities, and equal treatment in our local, state, and national institutions. As I noted in the introduction, the other America, represented primarily by the Republican Party, saw that same diversity and the economic stagnation in more rural areas as a sign they had lost control over our economy, our social order, and our culture, and grew even more determined not to lose control over our politics, through which they could regain control over the other three. Millions of them were not the howlers we saw acting out at the rallies, or storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They just thought they didn’t matter anymore, that America had said to them, as the title of Fiona Hill’s brilliant book about her small hometown in rural pro-Brexit Northern England puts it, “There Is Nothing for You Here.”