Late last June, when Bill Clinton welcomed Larry Hogan to Little Rock, the ex-president realized he had an opportunity to step carefully back into the political fray. The pair was scheduled for a ticketed chat about bipartisanship on Clinton’s home turf just as Hogan, the former Maryland governor, was rumored to be thinking about a third-party presidential run via the No Labels group, which he was also co-chairing. Before they walked onstage, Clinton delicately made his view clear to the Republican, even though Hogan hadn’t asked: Any independent campaign of the kind No Labels was talking about could only benefit Donald Trump.
He
wasn’t done yet. Two months later, Clinton heard from Joe Manchin, who was
vacationing near the Clintons’ spot in East Hampton and wanted advice about his
political future. Clinton had heard real concern from fellow Democrats that the
West Virginian would head a No Labels ticket himself, and he’d previously
discussed the politically tricky senator with the Biden White House when
administration officials asked for his help winning Manchin over on
legislation. Manchin was being far more open about the attractiveness of an
independent run than Hogan was. So when they met in person, Clinton decided to
get considerably more forceful than their placid surroundings might have
suggested. This time, he ditched the diplomatic niceties and told the senator
sharply that he was risking putting Trump back in the White House.
By late
November, Bill found himself closer to the center of presidential politics than
he’d been since Hillary ran in 2016. He and Joe Biden hadn’t talked in person
in a few months, but he had been making no secret to friends that he thought
Biden wasn’t getting the credit he deserved for his accomplishments. Tucked
into a quiet corner of Air Force One on the way to Georgia for Rosalynn
Carter’s memorial service, the 42nd president repeated the sentiment to the
46th, chewing over the unique challenges of the presidency as almost no one
else could. Flying south from Washington, they discussed Biden’s obstacles in a
political environment warped by Trump — how hard it had gotten to focus public
attention on what Biden was doing and how complicated it had become to turn
around the national feeling about the economy.
Hillary
wasn’t part of that conversation, but she was on the plane, too — along with
Michelle Obama and Jill Biden — and she had plenty of her own thoughts as Biden
entered 2024 running behind her old foe in the polls. In recent months, the
former secretary of state has begun convening groups of friends and political
allies for private dinners to talk through the coming election season and to
drum up badly needed support for Democratic candidates, starting with the
president. The sessions are occasionally at the Clintons’ primary home in
Chappaqua, but more often at their house in Washington, not far from the
residence of Vice-President Kamala Harris, with whom she has quietly been
keeping in touch.
Four
years ago, the Clintons were as far from political influence as they’d been in
ages. In a post–Me Too world, Bill was often treated as persona non grata in
public and Hillary was still thought of primarily as the person who lost to
Trump. But a few weeks ago, they drew a flurry of media attention with the
announcement that Biden would host a major fundraiser in the city with Bill and
Barack Obama in late March. (As the inescapable flood of Trump fundraising
emails put it: “Obama is back! Bill Clinton is back too.”) The event is just
the most public part of what’s been a longer-running behind-the-scenes effort.
Neither Clinton considers politics their primary work these days — they’re
staying busy with travel, writing projects, and foundation work — but according
to a dozen people who’ve spoken with them directly in recent weeks, both have
been quietly and steadily increasing their engagement with Washington as the
election season heats up.
It’s
been eight years since a Clinton was on a ballot, the longest period since
Bill’s first failed congressional campaign in 1974, and the 2020 race was
arguably the first one in decades in which neither of them was particularly
powerful. Now they, and the Democratic Party, are trying to work out what,
exactly, their most useful role could now be. No longer a distinct power center
or the same draw for donors or audiences as the Obamas, they are nonetheless
far from retirees. Instead, they are a unique but amorphous source of advice
and influence given their extensive experience and large networks.
Ask
anyone around them, and it’s clear that this is largely because of their
resilient wish to be involved, no matter how official D.C. feels about them.
Bill, 77, remains insatiable in his appetite for political news, and he texts
and calls friends to chat about politics for hours on end. “He wants
precinct-level data,” said one close associate. “He can’t not do this.” A
longtime friend of Hillary’s who also has a place in Biden world shrugged:
“They’re junkies! They’re looking at polls; they’re all in.” And of course they
are, he continued. “They care! They are who they are. They care about this
stuff.” It is also, obviously, personal for them. Hillary has been closely
watching the efforts to beat and weaken the man who defeated her since 2016,
and Bill has been ruminating unrelentingly on Trump’s rise and his takeover of
the GOP, too. (Bill, in particular, still talks often about then–FBI director
James Comey’s late incursion into the 2016 campaign as a contributor to
Hillary’s loss.)
To some
degree, all this has been obvious all along to the most wired-in of Democrats.
Though both Clintons’ relations with Biden have shifted over time, they’ve been
sympathetic to his political struggles and the challenges of confronting a
Trump-dominated Republican Party. Both have expressed to friends that they
found the lines about Biden’s age in special counsel Robert Hur’s report to be
inappropriate. Neither Clinton can consider themself among the administration’s
top advisers or influencers, but Bill has twice visited Biden in the White
House. First, he stopped by in May 2022, checking in with the politically
embattled president about a looming midterm season that many thought would be
brutal for Biden, as Clinton’s first was in 1994. The following February, he
visited again to mark the 30th anniversary of signing the Family and Medical
Leave Act. When the pair have spoken privately, they’ve often mused about how
they consider themselves unique in the modern Democratic Party — able to relate
to working-class voters more than other prominent pols.
Hillary,
meanwhile, has deepened her connection to Harris. At first, they linked up when
the vice-president was preparing for her early foreign trips in 2021. In the
years since, the talks between the first woman to hold the vice-presidency and
the woman who’s come closest to being president have become less formal, more
friendly, and more regular. They speak over the phone, and their chats have
since expanded to political conversations on the sidelines of official events
and advice for Harris about specific appearances, such as when Hillary gave her
tips for speaking at the New York Times’s Dealbook conference last year. She
has also visited Harris at her home.
If their
latest role is unsurprising given their senior macher statuses within the
party, it also reflects yet another evolution in the decadeslong relationships
between both Clintons and the current president. Biden was not always a major
character during the Clinton administration, but they intersected at a handful
of important moments thanks to Biden’s role atop the Senate Judiciary
Committee, where he confirmed Bill’s Supreme Court nominations and wrote the
crime bill. The relationship warmed in the Bush years as a handful of
ex-Clinton aides joined Biden’s office and Hillary joined him in the Senate;
even when it became clear that Biden and Hillary would run against each other
for president in 2008, Bill went out of his way to offer Biden private advice,
warning him that as a senator he might be tempted to use “Beltway Speak” rather
than connecting with voters about their lives. After Obama won, Vice-President
Biden helped mend fences with the Clintons, recruiting her as secretary of
state and then holding regular lunches with her. Though they clashed over
policy, like on Afghanistan, Biden kept up sporadic but friendly contact with
her husband on economic matters. Things cooled significantly in 2016 when
Hillary ran with Obama’s tacit blessing, leaving Biden feeling unfairly passed
over. Still, as the election progressed, he and Bill occasionally fumed
together about how her campaign was being run and about Trump.
Today, a
handful of very tight Clinton allies have roles high up in the Biden
administration and political operations, including well-known associates like
John Podesta and Neera Tanden. Dennis Cheng, a longtime Clinton-world
fundraiser, is a deputy political director in the White House, while Minyon
Moore, a former top aide to both Bill and Hillary, is the chair of the
Democratic convention. And two of Biden’s absolute closest aides, Bruce Reed
and Steve Ricchetti, were also senior Clinton staffers and allies for years. It
all adds up to a feeling among those close to the Clintons that they are
plugged further into Biden’s political thinking than they often were to
Obama’s. In recent weeks, campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez and deputy
campaign manager Rob Flaherty (who worked for Clinton’s 2016 campaign) briefed
Hillary’s political advisors on the Biden gameplan for the coming months.
Still,
neither Clinton appears eager to grab a starring role in the campaign this
year, presumably in part because they know they are far from universally
popular even among Democrats, and because Republicans remain eager to keep them
in the center of their conspiracy theories about liberal cabals pulling Biden’s
strings and planning to replace him as the Democratic nominee. Yet this hasn’t
stopped Hillary in particular from wading into some geopolitical matters that
are complex for Biden, or those in his White House, to address. When she told
MSNBC last month that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “should go; he
is not a trustworthy leader,” it was widely read in foreign-policy circles as a
strong signal from someone close to the administration, given her former job as
the top diplomat and her famously friendly relationship with Jake Sullivan,
Biden’s national security advisor.
Bill,
however, has been significantly more wary about giving interviews to
journalists, and his political appearances have been much more tightly managed
since 2016 as his party has reevaluated his affair with Monica Lewinsky and
accusations from other women. He was mostly absent during the elections of 2018
and 2020, when his convention speaking time was limited to less than five
minutes — a conspicuous change for the famous rambler. In the 2022 midterms,
however, he appeared with candidates who asked for his help in New York, New
Jersey, Nevada, and Texas.
Now, in
the estimation of some liberals, it’s only natural for Biden to call on Bill’s
advice considering the political landscape. “The environment is a lot more
Clintonesque than Obama era,” said one very senior D.C. Democrat who dismisses
fears that ’90s-style triangulation is a recipe for disaster. Biden has
recently been adopting messaging reminiscent of Clinton’s own reelection case:
Last week, he answered Seth Meyers’s question about his age by saying “It’s
about how old your ideas are,” arguing that Trump’s GOP would turn back the
clock on matters like abortion. In 1996, Clinton said that his objection to Bob
Dole wasn’t that he was “too old to be president; it’s the age of his ideas I
question.”
The even
clearer parallel to 2024 is 1992: Both elections feature a two-term
vice-president turned president with approval numbers dragged down by
unfavorable feelings about the economy and a stronger-than-expected third-party
threat. With Ross Perot in mind, it’s Bill who has been most vocal with friends
about undermining No Labels, the group run by Nancy Jacobson, who used to raise
money for Clinton and who is married to Mark Penn, Hillary’s one-time chief
strategist.
Of
course, none of this activity exactly comes as a surprise to those who’ve known
them longest. When I called James Carville, the operative who rose to fame on
Clinton’s first presidential campaign, to talk about the reengagement, he
paused for a second before answering, as if to wonder why on earth I was even
asking. There was never a question that the Clintons would get involved again.
An election is coming. “It’d be stunning,” he said, “if it weren’t true.”
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