The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (40 page)

HH: Am I right about the Haldeman gatekeeping function?

JA:
Yeah, I think there’s a part of that, although a lot of the gatekeeping actually falls to Huma Abedin. You know, I think it’s both of them, to some extent. But you know, in terms of being completely trusted aide, somebody that gets the unvarnished Hillary Clinton, and is there to try to guide her away from pitfalls, Cheryl Mills is that person.

HH: Yeah, you know, when you talk about Mills and Abedin, I’m thinking Haldeman-Ehrlichman, that there is, I was going to bring up Huma in just a minute, but you know, I worked for Richard Nixon. I knew Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon is no Hillary Clinton when it comes to revenge politics spread over 30 years. I mean, he usually gave up and let it go after a while, because he was always running again. They’ve got a memory in Hillaryland, which is deeper than any when it comes to keeping score, don’t they?

JA:
They do. In fact, you know, one of the fun things, I think, in the book that was the first time it was ever revealed is they kept this, after the 2008 campaign, kept this enemies list. We call it in the book a hit list. You can call it what you want. But there were, every Democratic member of Congress was assigned a score from 1 to 7, and the 1’s were people that they felt were
most loyal to them, followed by 2’s who were little less loyal, 3’s who were a little less loyal, 4’s who were somewhere in the neutral, sort of Dante’s hell of neutrality, 5’s who were disloyal, 6’s who were very disloyal, and 7’s were the most disloyal, the people who should be never given anything, the people who should be gone after if ever the opportunity presented itself, particularly on the political battlefield. So yeah, they have long memories, and not only that, they have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

HH: But you know what’s interesting, and I point this out to people, they are not obsessed with my side. You know, I looked in. I looked for Limbaugh, for Hannity, for Levin, for any of the critics, for George Will, for Krauthammer. They’re not here. They don’t worry about the other team. They beat the other team when the time comes to beat them. They worry about Democrats. That’s where they run their operation.

JA:
Absolutely. I mean, you know, are there people on the right that the Clintons don’t like? Of course, but that’s not where they spend their energy. They expect that their opponents are going to hit them. What they worry about, and what they were so angry about in 2008, is they felt like longtime friends had done it, too.

HH: Yup.

JA:
You know, they could name, you know, a million different things that they had done for each of these people. Not everybody had been, you know, had gotten some gift or whatever from the Clintons over time. But they had employed some people. They had given them jobs within the administration. They had written letters to schools to get them in, you know, to get their kids into school. They’d done all these things for people, and then they watched these folks endorse Barack Obama. And they think to themselves, you know, what is wrong here, and we have a point at which Bill Clinton says if you don’t have a loyalty in politics, what do you have? And that is their motivating force.

HH: And loyalty, by the way, defined Nixon as well. I never want Cheryl Mills to get into a big, black limousine and pick up the phone and say “We have to talk about Hewitt.” I don’t ever want that to happen, America. Jon Allen is my guest.
HRC
is his brand new book, along with Amie Parnes… When you, did you get access to Hillary, Jon? Did she give you time?

JA:
So I have to answer this carefully. We got access to every level of the Clinton operation from the very bottom to the very top.…

HH: Page 68, “Informal power gained through Hillary’s favor is far more important than the formal power of a particular title.” Now this is hardly new. Harry Hopkins defined this, right, for FDR? He’s only, he had no title, and no job. He just lived on the second floor of the White House. And so there’s this informal power network. Jake Sullivan is the name that I had never seen before. And you know, I kind of know who Huma is. And Cheryl Mills, I’ve been following since impeachment. But tell people about Jake Sullivan, because that’s a new player.

JA:
Yeah, Jake Sullivan kind of came out of nowhere. He’s a very young guy. He worked on Hillary’s 2008 campaign. He had previously been on the Hill working for Senator Amy Klobuchar, so he did a lot of the foreign policy stuff on, the national security stuff on the Clinton campaign. He was headed back after the campaign to go back to Minnesota, and he wanted to run for a House seat, and he was asked if he wanted to take over a new job that was being created essentially for him, a deputy chief of staff for policy. Once he got in there, he proved himself. Hillary Clinton loved him. She thought he was extremely sharp. I think he shared some of her nerdiness on policy, really wanted to get into the weeds. And he was a turf eater within the State Department. And by that, I mean he started out as the deputy chief of staff. By the end, he had subsumed the policy planning office at the State Department, which is basically the office that does all the future planning for State. He was heavily involved in speechwriting. He was the person that the White House went to. So he became the liaison between the State Department and the White House. And I think he could channel Hillary Clinton’s thinking on policy as well as anybody else. When he left the State Department, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama called him and asked him to take a job as Vice President Biden’s national security advisor. And he is there to this day. So somebody who is extremely well thought of in Democratic circles, and who is pretty young, he’s still in his 30’s, I think mid-30’s right now.

HH: Yeah, I think if people look back to the early days of Reagan when the troika—Baker-Deever-Meese—was there. If they look at Mills, Abedin and Sullivan, you’re going to have the same sort of situation develop in a Clinton White House 2.0 if that happens. And do you quarrel with that assessment, Jon?

JA:
Well, you know, I wish that I was better at making that comparison. I think you know, having obviously watched that time period a lot more closely than I did as a youngster…

HH: Yeah, I lived it. I was there. It works, I’ll tell you. But now let me ask you about Obamacare. You have a great section, and I’m not sure that they like the title “Obama Girl” of the chapter. And I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about that, because you’re referring to her all-in on Obamacare.

JA:
That’s where it comes in handy to have a female co-author. If you’re going to title a chapter Obama Girl, you’ve got to…

HH: Yeah, and you quote the Secretary of State saying, “I believe strongly that the President needs to forge ahead,” when there were rumblings about dumping Obamacare and pushed it through in 2010. On page 177, the first time she saw Obama after Congress passed the health care law months later, it was in the Situation Room. She told him she was proud of him, and she was uniquely positioned to affirm him. Now you know, that’s a two-edged sword, Jonathan Allen. She owns Obamacare. I always call her, she’s the grandmother of Obamacare. But here in your book is the record that she was all-in. She wanted it.

JA:
Yeah, absolutely, and that’s not something that had been reported before. I mean, if you go back to the time period, she was doing everything she could to demonstrate that she wasn’t going to be involved in domestic politics. And frankly, Barack Obama was doing everything he could to demonstrate that she was not going to be involved in domestic politics. One of the reasons to make her secretary of State is to get her out across the world and not make her toxic to the things you’re trying to do domestically, which I think he thought she would have been. But behind closed doors, she was advising Jim Messina and Rahm Emanuel about how to approach health care. She even lobbied a few members of Congress on behalf of the health care law. The way that she viewed it was when someone came to her, she’d give them her view as opposed to dialing 100 names. I mean, I have no idea what the truth of that is, but you know, she’s acknowledged that she, in the book, that she did lobby some members. And of course, this cabinet meeting right after the Tea Party summer, if you will, in 2009, a lot of the cabinet secretaries were very angry about how much of the Democratic agenda was being subsumed into this maelstrom of health care. They wanted to get
their things done, and they thought we’re never going to get anything done, because everybody’s stuck on this health care thing. The Republicans are against us. And there was a lot of grumbling going on, and she got up at this Cabinet meeting and basically said look, I’ve been through this before, and you know, I know what it takes, or I certainly know what it looks like to lose. I know what it looks like when the President’s people abandon him. This is our time. It can get done. The Democrats have majorities in the House and Senate. Let’s get behind the President, and let’s move forward. And you know, people in the Obama White House thought that was a big moment if you think about it from the perspective of a Democratic Cabinet member, Democratic member of Congress. If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both telling you you’ve got to do this, there’s nowhere else to go in the Democratic Party. So it’s a big, it’s symbolic. It’s not an actual vote on the floor, you know, but I think it mattered to the Obama people that she did that. I think for whoever she lobbied on it, I think it probably mattered to them. And now she owns health care that much more than she did before.

HH: Yeah, I mean, that’s what the reporting of
HRC
comes clear to me, is that if Obamacare is soaring in 2016, as they’re saying right now it’s going to be, she’s going to be in a great position. But if it tanks like I think it is, she owns it as much as Obama does. And when we come back, we’re going to talk more about the fascinating Obama-Clinton relationship, not just Hillary and Barack, but also Bill and Barack when we return.…

HH: Okay, now look, there’s a great story within a story here of how Hillary merged with Obama. And it’s in the person of Capricia Marshall. There’s also a warning for young women everywhere about wearing Manolo [Blahnik] heels to a formal state dinner. But in this person, you get how she operated the bridging of the rift. Tell people about it.

JA:
So Capricia Marshall is as diehard a Hillarylander as it gets. She’s as close to Hillary as any of the women around her. And when Hillary came into the State Department, she wanted the president to appoint Capricia Marshall to this job of chief protocol officer. And if folks don’t know too much about that, it’s the job at the State Department where you do all the protocol, and it’s actually something appointed by the President. It’s an ambassador rank. And the person travels on all the foreign travel that the President does, not necessarily the secretary of state, but actually travels on
Air Force One with the president. And the Obama people were completely against Capricia Marshall coming into their fold. They hated the idea of one of Hillary’s best friends being sort of in the inner circle on these foreign policy trips, of actually being on Air Force One with her. And they had a vote. His vetting team had a vote about it. And they all voted no. And then Jim Messina tells the group, breaks the bad news, and says look, guys, this is a Hillary Clinton pick, and we’re going to have to take it to the president. Hillary Clinton goes to the president, goes to his aides, and says look, you guys, you have her all wrong. Once she’s working with you, you’ll understand she’s great. Obama decides to back down. He promised to let Hillary Clinton appoint her people. Capricia Marshall gets the job. She turns out to be somebody that the Obama people really like. They appreciate her on Air Force One. They watch dirty movies with her on Air Force One, as we tell the story in the book. And there’s even a point, as you note, at a state dinner where she falls down. She’s at this formal thing. She’s in a nice dress. She’s got these Manolo heels on. She’s leading the president and the first lady out, and she catches her heel. And she goes down, and you know, it’s being photographed, and it’s being videotaped. And the president says to the press, don’t take that picture. And then Michelle Obama says don’t print that picture. And they’re trying to save Capricia Marshall the embarrassment of this fall. And then later on, the next time they have a state dinner, they’re lining up to go out again, and Capricia Marshall can hear behind her the president lowering his voice like a golf announcer and says, “Here she is on the approach. Will she fall down?” And Michelle Obama says, “Shut up, Barack. Leave her alone.”

HH: It is a great story, but it’s also, they, Hillary put inside the Obama circle one of her best people who served well, and as a result, built a bridge that helped smooth this relationship out. But what’s going to happen with people like, look, Samantha Power called Hillary a monster. You quote that on page 95. One Clinton aide referred to Dan Pfeiffer as a” zero who had ended up in the White House by happenstance.” You quote that on page 100. You say on page 116, Tom Donilon is scared blankless of her. That’s the Obama national security advisor. There’s a lot of that still left over percolating. And then Biden wants to be president. When do all the knives start to get thrown at each other?

JA: Well, I think the Clinton people are very much hoping that they don’t have to throw knives in a Democratic primary. I mean, their view is, I believe, they’d like to stomp everybody down so much that there isn’t a contest. They
may not have that luxury. You know, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton get along well. Joe Biden and Bill Clinton get along well. That’ll be tested if they run against each other. But I don’t know necessarily that it would be nasty. They’ve run for president against each other before. Their friendship has survived it. You know, some of the other, you know, I really would not expect to see Sam Power in a Clinton administration unless it was in some ridiculously cold outpost like ambassador to Greenland or something.