Today, Terry McAuliffe is the consummate political power broker: millionaire, fundraiser, influence peddler and now governor. But for one night in January 2008, McAuliffe had the single worst job in modern politics — informing the Clintons that they were about to lose. At the time, McAuliffe was the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and then, as now, Senator Clinton had spent the previous year skiing down the comfortable slopes of certainty towards the presidential prize awaiting her below. Yet despite the trappings of sure victory — millions spent in Iowa, support from Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, her husband’s deployment across the state — Clinton had utterly failed to apprehend the seismic rumblings of Senator Barack Obama’s grassroots support. An incredulous McAuliffe had to emerge from the boiler room with a staggering ream of turnout data that would launch Clinton into a frantic nightmare to outrace an Obama-triggered avalanche.
It’s hard to imagine how a single moment could embody the essence of a chaotic and bloody six-month-long campaign. Yet the moment that Clinton lost Iowa is just that. The story is detailed neatly in John Heileman and Mark Halperin’s account of the 2008 election, “Game Change.” When McAuliffe entered the room, we’re told, Bill engaged him: “Hey Mac, how you doing?” The account continues:
“‘How we doing?’ McAuliffe asked, taken aback…‘We’re gonna get our ass kicked.’
‘What?’ Clinton exclaimed, jumping to his feet, calling out, ‘Hillary!’
Hillary emerged from the bedroom. McAuliffe filled her in…she was going to finish third, slightly shy of Edwards and a long way behind Obama.
McAuliffe’s words landed like a roundhouse right on the Clintons’ collective jaw. On the eve of the caucuses, the people the Clintons trusted most had assured them [Iowa] would pay off…
Watching her bitter and befuddled reaction, her staggering lack of calm or command, one of her senior-most lieutenants thought for the first time: This woman shouldn’t be president.”
Losing is the ultimate test of fortitude, and Clinton had never lost a political contest before Iowa. Suddenly faced with the prospect of a loss for the first time, Clinton was forced to react quickly under pressure — like a president must. Rather than presidential patience, however, history has documented a campaign that began a steady, methodical unraveling.
Negative campaigning. Financial mismanagement. Managerial chaos and staff factionalism. The inability to control Bill on the trail. These images, only six years old, of a deeply dysfunctional Clinton campaign seem to have been scrubbed from the collective liberal mind. Now, “Ready for Hillary” labels dot the country — the emblem of the Super PAC designed to ward off potential challengers and lay the groundwork for another “inevitable” Clinton victory. Even for a name as storied and a political organization as deep as Clinton’s, it’s hard to believe that her presumptive candidacy has attracted little skepticism from the left, if for nothing other than the enthused political amnesia it requires.
Clinton is not a great campaigner. She’s not particularly liberal. And she’s not that experienced. If she were, there would be no political necessity to ward off potential challengers, as Ready for Hillary seeks to accomplish. Clinton is not a great campaigner. She’s not particularly liberal. And she’s not that experienced. If she were, there would be no political necessity to ward off potential challengers, as Ready for Hillary seeks to accomplish. Why, then, has the party that prides itself on skepticism of power — at the clear expense of a strong primary, vigorous debate and an honest appraisal of the Democrats’ 2016 candidates — suddenly decided that it’s so ready to prematurely elevate a single candidate?
Would Hillary Clinton make a good president? Maybe. She created the Global Hunger and Food Security program. She played a leading role in the bipartisan passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her coalition-building prowess propelled her to the head of the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee. But what’s unnerving about the case of Clinton isn’t her theoretical tenure in the Oval Office so much as the condition that would underlie it: the growing precedent of a liberal establishment more interested in succession to the throne than rule by the people. It could likely be the liberal zeal for Clinton that is the very thing that costs her the presidency all over again. The 2008 scene in Des Moines could happen again next January if Clinton is again unprepared for the possibility of losses or unwilling to accept more losses with patience. In asking questions about Clinton, the purpose is less to raise doubts than to follow through on a process that might make her a better candidate and make us better voters.
We should start with what we do know about Clinton: She needs to work on her campaigning skills. After Iowa, the picture of the Clinton campaign only gets bleaker. Frequently, as Heileman and Halperin’s “Game Change” details, no one knew who was in charge. Clinton cast this confusion herself when she apparently fired campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, but nominally retained her on staff. Clinton routinely hung up without warning on conference calls that she deemed unnecessary. By Nevada, morale had sunk so low that senior staff began quitting publicly. “Fuck you and the whole fucking cabal!” one such staffer screamed, standing on a chair so that his voice could project across the busy office floor at campaign headquarters. Clinton grew increasingly irritable — understandably, since nothing is more grueling than a national campaign. Yet, according to her campaign staff, her antipathy seemed especially piqued with the advent of each new loss. Assessing a candidate’s ability to cope with the relentless pressure and incessant schedule of a campaign is a basic prerequisite for any candidate, as it was in 2008 and should again be in 2016 for Clinton.
But we also know something else about Clinton, a well-worn point, but one to which enthusiastic progressives who are ready for Hillary would have to turn a blind eye: Clinton’s record as a liberal is decidedly mixed. First among equals is her vote to authorize the Iraq War — perhaps the least progressive foreign policy of recent decades — for which she may never apologize. Her milieu is decisively conservative on issues of corporate finance and regulation: “Her best friends, her intellectual brain trust [on economics], all come out of that world,” an aide to Clinton told The New Republic.
You don’t become a senator or secretary of state by being an envelope-pusher and a reformist. Throughout her tenure in the public eye, Clinton has been neither, with one notable exception. Those who know her claim that the catastrophe of healthcare reform in 1993 played a fundamental role in strengthening her neorealist approach to politics. It’s difficult to reconcile America’s onetime healthcare warrior with the senator who voted to make flag burning a crime 13 years later. In a different setting, the nearly legendary maneuvering might be admirable — but it doesn’t square with her boosters’ preferred image of Hillary as a get-it-done force of nature, an image that liberals have bought wholesale. These criticisms may be old news, but Clinton has plenty of new questions to answer. She is reported to share the views of her husband, who suggested President Obama would be “a total fool” not to intervene in Syria — hardly a view in sync with the reality of war-weary Americans. The epochal debate now gripping the country over the legitimacy of the security state could also easily ensnare a Clinton candidacy. After all, Senator Clinton not once, but twice, authorized the PATRIOT Act — the legal source of the NSA’s domestic spying.
Clinton’s murky bona fides gravitate around her greatest myth: the fallacy that she is so supremely qualified that she warrants a path to the Democratic nomination without challengers. Commentators enthuse that Clinton would be the most qualified candidate to reach the presidency since Nixon. The observation says far less about Clinton than the power fetish of Washington, where experience, talent and mystique are merely the sum of titles on one’s resume. President Obama launched a successful counterargument against this notion in the face of Mitt Romney’s managerial “success” story in 2012 and Clinton’s “3 am phone call” advertising campaign in 2008. For liberals, the philosophy later paid off. In 2010, President Obama was faced with a situation similar to the one Secretary Clinton had grappled with nearly two decades earlier — a hard and treacherous road to passing healthcare reform. Unlike Clinton, however, who as head of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform did not succeed in enacting change, a comparably inexperienced Obama was able to maneuver his plan through staunch opposition. The young president’s success was validation that experience is made meaningful more by the ability to react to difficult or volatile situations than by the length of one’s list of titles and stories.
It’s easy to forget how Obama, a senator for only three years, defended against Clinton’s experience argument by repeatedly pointing out the true paucity of her senatorial record. Her coalition-building reputation notwithstanding, Clinton’s voting record was a full-time maintenance operation and her stances timid at best. In eight years, a time frame in which the Senate passed over 5,000 bills, Clinton sponsored only three that became law: one to rename a highway, one to rename a post office and one to commission a historic landmark. One thing seems clear. With flag burning, Iraq and the PATRIOT Act on her resume, Hillary Clinton’s primary achievement in the Senate was probably her own transformation — from the right wing’s bête noire of 1999 to the sanitized and centrist politician we see today. Again, there are far worse things, but the gap between the imaginary liberal senator and the real, not-so-liberal one is wide.
Since then, maybe the most impressive chapter in Clinton’s public life has been her time at the State Department. But even Secretary Clinton’s portfolio of achievements there looks increasingly vulnerable to critique. Her two major initiatives now ring hollow: the evaporating “Pivot to Asia,” largely unwound by her successor and the “Reset with Russia,” now reversed by Crimea. Secretary Kerry has arguably accomplished more in one year than Clinton did in four as he gaffed his way to reducing Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, reached a landmark agreement with Iran and jumpstarted (however ill-fated) peace talks between Israel and Palestine. That may say more about Clinton than Kerry. At critical moments in Obama’s first term, such as the unexpected decision to intervene in Libya, firsthand accounts depict Obama, not Clinton, as the creative instigator, while Kerry has been portrayed with more autonomy. Kerry transplanted his senatorial activism to the State Department, while Clinton did the same with her minimalism.
There’s a reason that, in 2015, Clinton will hold the longest record for being in the national public eye: Her reserved nature has allowed her to occupy positions of high visibility while avoiding the implications of scandal. Even the Secret Service drugs-and-prostitution affair and Benghazi are now only light stains.
Another anecdote from “Game Change,” in another primary contest and in another hotel room, reveals one of the strongest arguments for a competitive primary. It takes place in Nashua, NH, as the Obamas learn that they have been handed an unexpected loss. It was longtime friend and aide Valerie Jarrett who had to walk the plank and inform the Obamas of their grim loss. Their entire strategy had hinged on the momentum from Iowa catapulting Obama to the nomination, and the entire election was now in doubt. Rumors had spread about Clinton’s hotel meltdown in Des Moines, and Jarrett clearly feared the McAuliffe treatment:
“Jarrett found the Obamas swallowing hard to choke down the bitter pill. ‘What on earth am I going to say to make this okay?’ she thought. But before Jarrett had a chance to open her mouth, Barack put one hand on her shoulder and said, ‘This is going to be a good thing. You’ll see.’
Michelle was steelier, less reassuring. ‘This is going to be a test,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be a test to see if they’re really with us or not.’”
Heileman and Halperin’s account does more than just capture Obama’s resilience. It typifies why the Democratic Party needs a primary. To understand the counterpart election night stories in Iowa and New Hampshire is to understand the reason for Ready for Hillary: For better or for worse, the Super PAC is designed to ensure that political history does not repeat itself. A Hillary campaign may not be able to survive another bout of staff resignations and steely-eyed brooding from Clinton. Then again, it won’t have to if there’s no competition.
That brings to light a fundamental, philosophical divide that requires two starkly different interpretations of the 2008 primary. Are primaries good for their candidates? The answer could easily be no: See Mitt Romney’s cyclical pummeling in 2012, offering up binders full of blunders along the way. The cost of primary campaigns has grown, increasing the risk of financial disadvantage in the general election. It wasn’t for nothing that, in 2008, Rush Limbaugh encouraged Republicans to vote in Democratic elections to prolong the primary, announcing, “We need Barack Obama bloodied up.”
But there’s one circle this theory just can’t square. It assumes that the candidate whom a primary would “harm” really is the best candidate after all. Romney and Clinton’s implosions were no one’s fault but their own. The notion that a primary is something to be circumvented requires presumptuousness on the part of the candidate, or at least the candidate’s backers, that runs completely counter to the democratic principles behind primaries, which were originally put in place to prevent candidates from being picked in the proverbial smoke-filled room. After Ann Romney scoffed, “It’s our turn now,” when speaking of her husband’s imminent nomination, liberals rightly skewered her entitlement-of-the-elite mentality. It’s hard to see what’s materially different about the assumptive spirit behind Ready for Hillary.
Has Clinton learned from the catastrophic experience of 2008? Only a moderately challenging primary can tell. Running a campaign can be more difficult than running the State Department — at least for Clinton, who failed at one and debatably succeeded at the other. In a primary, seething press pools and angry donors replace eager dignitaries. Whether she can run a smooth campaign will be a stern and necessary test that will better her candidacy and, possibly, her presidency.
Even if Ready for Hillary succeeds in suppressing potential primary opponents, the political vulnerabilities it will obscure won’t disappear for long. Iraq, Syria, the PATRIOT Act, Russia and the question of her ability for grace under campaign pressure still remain. They are simply waiting to be reignited by an agile and unforgiving Republican opponent who will view the election not as a procession, but as a street brawl.
In the most enduring irony, it’s impossible to miss the source from which her supporters derive Clinton’s most flattering images: a fighter who squares up to political adversaries; a pragmatic consensus builder in Congress; a fundraising behemoth not too righteous for the indignities of politics. Six years into the constant diminishing of expectations that represents the Obama era, it’s no wonder that liberals have eagerly transposed their dashed hopes for Obama onto the promise of Clinton’s candidacy. But the presumptiveness adds a spark of real danger to the selective memory of liberals. In all their nostalgia for the dynastic ‘90s and their pervasive optimism for a first female president, supporters and sticker-sporters could be setting an uncontested Clinton up for another loss — maybe this time at the expense of the White House for the party altogether. And unlike the political resurrections of Clinton’s past, this time it would be a loss that liberals will find difficult to undo.