Hillary and Obama: Can they stand each other?
As 2016 nears, the amazing story of how Clinton and Obama united -- and how her aides explained her '08 collapse
JONATHAN ALLEN AND AMIE PARNES
Reprinted from "HRC"
On June 6, three days after the last presidential primary, Hillary invited about two hundred campaign aides, advisers, and friends to the family’s $4 million–plus redbrick home on Whitehaven Street for a backyard get-together. The event was a final expression of gratitude for the brainpower, tears, and sweat they had poured into her cause for more than a year.
On this day, the sweat kept coming. It was a sweltering Friday in the nation’s capital, with violent summer storms brewing in the suburbs, and Clinton’s air-conditioned house was off-limits to guests, except for one bathroom that was accessible from the outside. Some of her aides kicked off their shoes and dipped their feet in the pool for relief. Hillary ignored the heat and stifling humidity to work one last crowd, taking pictures with midlevel staffers in sweat-soaked shirts.
Like a weekend griller, Bill Clinton held court in his own backyard, complaining about “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert to just about anyone who would listen. Russert had called the time of death on Hillary’s campaign a month earlier on the night of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. “Sometimes in campaigns the candidate is the last to recognize the best timing,” Russert had said. “It’s very much like being on life support. Once they start removing the systems, you really have no choice.”
Much as Bill blamed big-media types for jumping on the Obama bandwagon, Russert was just reporting a truth that was evident even to Hillary. The narrowness of Hillary’s victory in Indiana, where she had run the field operation for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, was just as telling as the pounding she took in North Carolina that night. The day after those primaries, on a conference call with the campaign’s top executives, she issued the edict to cease and desist on attacks that could hurt Obama in the general election. The final month of the campaign was a slow march to her inevitable fate.
At the end of that slog, the backyard party had the feel of a wake, a bittersweet goodbye. Though the Washington air was thick with speculation about whether Obama might pick Hillary to be his running mate, the two former rivals had met the night before at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s D.C. home and, unbeknownst to the partygoers at Hillary’s house, Obama made clear that he did not intend to ask her. For the most part, the extended Clinton family of friends and aides tried to keep the mood in the backyard upbeat. But surface conviviality couldn’t hide the fact that this journey was ending on the north lawn of the Whitehaven house rather than on the South Lawn of the White House.
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Hillary had always favored making a robust endorsement, her aides said. But as she reviewed the latest draft at her dining room table, she still wasn’t sold on the riff about her place in history. She was more inclined to show first and foremost that she was a team player—an attribute she prized in herself and that was important to preserving her political future. She had to be brought around to putting so much emphasis on honoring her achievement as the woman who had come closest to winning a major party’s presidential nomination.
She scrawled a question mark in the margin beside the paragraphs about her.
“It wasn’t about being a woman,” Hillary said.
“Think about talking not about you as a woman but to the women who supported you,” Hattaway countered, framing his argument in terms that might appeal to the midwestern Methodist who reflexively worried about the potential unseemliness of calling attention to herself. “This is a big accomplishment for them.”
Hillary wasn’t convinced. “Her head wasn’t there,” said one source. Then Hurwitz, a Harvard-educated lawyer and speechwriter who had been taking notes quietly, leaned forward and made the case. For one young woman with proximity to power, this was the moment to speak for the millions of women her own age, as well as for the mothers and grandmothers, who had stuck by Hillary. They burned to see the first woman in the Oval Office, choosing that cause over another cherished hope for many of them—to elect the first black president. This, above all else, mattered. It wasn’t that Hurwitz was consumed with hatred for Obama. Within weeks, she would join his campaign, and she ended up landing a coveted job on the White House speechwriting team. But this moment mattered for so many women who had pinned their hopes on Hillary. In the end, Hurwitz’s passion, and her reason, won out.
Okay, Hillary said, it stays.
I could have been in D.C. for that speech, but chose not to attend. I still haven't watched the entire speech. It hurts too much.
