Hillary Clinton?s 2016 campaign for the presidency had already begun ? without her ? on November 6, 2012, the day Barack Obama won a second term.
That night Allida Black and Adam Parkhomenko, veterans of Hillary?s 2008 campaign, began e-mailing each other about plans to construct a virtual national campaign called Ready for Hillary. They knew Hillary had been on the sidelines of politics for four years and hadn?t been able to build her list of volunteers, activists, and donors as aggressively as an overtly political figure could, at a time when the rapid advancement of social media had revolutionized the art of developing a national constituency. They wanted to build Hillary a grassroots organisation while she decided whether to run.
Page 369
Hillary?s supporters weren?t the only ones champing at the bit to run the 2016 race. The day after the election, at Politico?s head-quarters in Rosslyn, Virginia, editors slated a story about a possible Hillary Clinton-Jeb Bush 2016 matchup for the top of the website the following morning. The story, which began ?American politics may be headed back to the future,? posted online at 4:34 a.m. on November 8, less than thirty-six hours after Obama was declared the winner of the 2012 race, and it carried the bylines of the paper?s A-team of political reporters, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman.
Not too long after that, the RNC researcher who dealt with foreign policy issues was assigned to full-time Hillary 2016 duty. While the Republican Party kept tabs on other potential Democratic candidates?Vice President Joe Biden, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and Maryland governor Martin O?Malley, among others?Hillary was what RNC communications director Sean Spicer called the ?eight-hundred-pound gorilla? in the Democratic field.
Even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had angered mutual supporters by claiming neutrality while tacitly helping Obama in 2008, jumped on the bandwagon in mid-December presaging a trend in which women politicians who opposed Hillary in 2008 treated the prospect of a 2016 run as a chance to get back into the good graces of Hillary and her loyalists. ?I hope she goes,? Pelosi told NBC?s Andrea Mitchell. ?If she decided to run, and I think she would win, she would go into the White House as well prepared or better prepared than almost anybody who has served in that office in a very long time.?
Pages 370-371
As with the possible presidential campaign, the groundwork for Hillary?s return to the private sector had been laid by others. Over the course of more than two years, first Chelsea and then Huma had spent time cleaning up the freewheeling Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs, including the Clinton Global Initiative. Shortly after the summer 2010 wedding, Chelsea, who has worked in business consulting at the firm McKinsey & Company, jumped into analyzing how her father?s office was run. The younger Clinton, thirty-one years old at the time, felt the foundation was in need of some serious housekeeping, if not housecleaning, source familiar with the situation said, and an internal audit was ordered up.
Pages 374-375
For the second time in eight years, if Hillary chose to run, she would begin a campaign as the front-runner both for Democratic primary nomination and for the general election. Where many voters had once seen her as a creation of her husband?s, a coat-tail rider who had made it into the Senate on the strength of Bill?s popularity and figured she could waltz back into the White House, the way she handled the ultimate reversal in the 2008 primary and stepped up when Obama asked gave her greater credibility as a success in her own right. She would run as a former secretary of state, a former senator, and a philanthropist on the mom-and-apple-pie issues of improving the lives of women, kids, and American workers. She would run as someone who had been told repeatedly what she needed to do in order to avoid a repeat of the cluster-fuck campaign she ran the last time: hire staff based more on competence than on loyalty and personal comfort, and position herself as the transformational candidate that she would be as the first woman to hold the presidency. She would run as a Clinton-style centrist who believes that government, business, and the nonprofit sector must all thrive. She would run as a shrewd manipulator of the levers of government who understands how to maximize dollars with public-private partnerships and how to get agencies that seem always to be at odds on the same page. She would run as an advocate and a practitioner of smart power, the use of all forms of America?s influence, from persuasion to pulverization. Most of all, she could run right up to the moment ? if it ever came ? that she decided not to. She would even run as a candidate who, despite getting knocked down, was answering the bell for one last round.
Page 387
Hillary, who had largely been quiet since CGI in June, returned to the political spotlight in the midst of the Weiner scandal, joining Obama for lunch at the White House on July 29 and Joe Biden for breakfast at the Naval Observatory the following day.
?It?s largely friendship that?s on the agenda,? White House principal deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters who pressed him to detail every aspect of the power lunch, including the fare. Earnest came prepared to tell them: grilled chicken, pasta jambalaya, and salad.
*********
Obama, who had declined to bring the Clintons into the White House for social occasions early in his presidency, now just wanted to spend time with Hillary, according to White House aides. ?The things that the president loves most are when he can have something without an agenda,? said one Obama adviser, who noted that their meeting lasted for about two hours. ?they were ?just visiting,? as my girlfriends would say.?
In a different sense, many in the Clinton world view the Obama?s stint at the White House that way?they?re just visiting.
Page 397
Excerpted with permission from Random House