Hacks

The Phone Call

When the name HILLARY CLINTON popped up on my phone in February 2017, I realized hers was a call I’d stopped waiting to receive. On Election Day, the tradition in politics is that candidates personally thank the people who helped most in the campaign. Win or lose, in the days that follow, the candidate extends that circle of gratitude to members of the party and the donors. Bernie Sanders called me on November 9, 2016, and Joe Biden, too. The vice president even came to our staff holiday party. But I never heard from Hillary.

I figured she might be hurting too bad to make that call. I had a tender spot for Hillary. I sympathized with everything she had gone through in the wretched election of 2016. I had been through plenty of rough campaigns in my forty years in politics, but I had never seen anything like the viciousness and turmoil of that horrible season as I fought alongside her. The only thing that was keeping me going as we faced the blazing fury of Donald Trump, when I was getting hit every day and thinking I just wanted to stop, was knowing my friend Hillary was getting the shit kicked out of her, too. Look at what they are doing to her, how they are destroying her, I’d think. I felt a duty to Hillary that went far beyond just being the chair of the Democratic Party.

We had met when I was still in my twenties. I was working as a consultant at the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1980s, which was where I met Hillary. I was a high-minded, strong-willed young woman who, through my aptitude for politics, crawled out of poverty in Louisiana to a career in Washington, DC. Hillary was one of my idols. While I was rough and bossy, Hillary was cool and smooth, polished by the Ivy League, and comfortable in the halls of power. Also, she was fearless fighting for children’s rights, and I saw in her many qualities I wanted to make stronger in myself.

I never forgot that it was Hillary in 2003 who told some of the party leaders to pay attention to a talented young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. Without that assist from Hillary, Obama would not have been offered the keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and almost certainly would not have gone on to become the first black president. Hillary’s gesture back then always stayed with me. So when several decades later, I suddenly was asked to serve again as interim party chair on the eve of the Democratic Convention in July 2016, just until she won in November, I couldn’t say no.

But I wanted to. I had promised myself, after I managed Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, that I never would let politics break my heart again. Acting as a media surrogate and staunch supporter of the team that got the first black president elected more than healed that wound. Getting Obama reelected was joy. So when I was asked to serve as interim chair—for what would be my second stint in this thankless job—I decided I had one more fight left in me, and a noble one at that. I could help get the first woman president elected. After she won, Hillary’s staff would assume control of the party. I could dance out the door to the sweet music of victory and go back to my perfect life. I never could have guessed how the months that followed would alter my life—and my country—forever.

Instead of being able to dance out the door in November, I had to stay through the end of February to perform the somber duties of the defeated: the painstaking work of filing all the financial reports with the Federal Election Commission, filing similar reports in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, shutting down offices, laying off thousands of people.

After that disastrous Election Day I didn’t want to think about politics or talk about it, and I was guessing Hillary felt that way and worse: that she had blown this chance and had let her sisters down. My heart went out to her. No matter how strong our differences were in the campaign, I know she is a good woman. I heard from time to time that she was asking about me, but I never took it seriously. She had all my numbers. I knew what I wanted to say to her and it was: I have nothing but respect for you for being so brave and classy considering everything that went on. But in the weeks after the loss, every time I checked my phone thinking I might have missed her call, it wasn’t her.

After the loss, the Democrats went into hiding, or started picking through the carnage, while the country was hungry for answers from a party that honestly didn’t know what to say. We had lost to Donald Trump! How was that possible? And what did we have to do to make sure that didn’t happen the next time?

It took me until the end of the year, after a holiday in Hawaii, to start getting my mojo back. We needed to remember that Hillary had won the popular vote. We did not have to hang our heads in shame. No, we had to find a way to stand this party back up if we were ever to have a chance to win again.

What inspired me was my kids, all 150 of them. I’ve never given birth to a child, but politics is a family affair. In a campaign, you see what the others are made of, you see people under pressure, and you see their limits tested in triumph and defeat. You get to know one another, in ways better than you do members of your real family. When I spotted young people with a real spark, that true combination of idealism and cunning essential to surviving in politics, I found work for them. Those were my kids, ages twenty-two to forty-five, scattered all around the country. I wanted to rebuild the party to give them a chance to lead.

Back in December when I thought about what the party could do, what I could do, I remembered how Terry McAuliffe took over as Democratic National Committee chair after our loss in 2000 and how Howard Dean stepped up after the defeat of then U.S. senator John Kerry in 2004. They reached out to the voters to understand what the party had gotten wrong about the mood of the country. They wanted to let the grassroots decide the future direction of the party. I would do the same. First we needed to get this loss out of our system.

I set up four regional meetings in January and February—we called them Future Forums—mostly in states where we hoped to regain our electoral advantage, or where we wanted to expand our electoral map in 2020. We’d lost Michigan, but by less than eleven thousand votes, so I planned to spread a little love in Detroit. I scheduled one in Houston and another in Baltimore. I started the tour in Arizona because, even though we lost there, we were making steady gains in that state. If the party was going to rise from the ashes, we might as well begin in Phoenix.

In each city I held a town hall with millennials, asking them what we did wrong and where we should go from here. I arranged for an inspirational speaker to open the general meeting, hoping that an uplifting message would help us expel the ghosts of 2016. In Phoenix I found that the mood was raw: angry, saddened, disappointed, and scared. I started the event telling the story of what we had been up against, but it did not seem like it was a story that people wanted to hear. People were bitter, and all of them wanted to blame the DNC. The Bernie people were saying how no one trusted Hillary, and Hillary people were complaining that the Bernie people never did come on board, even after the convention. These voters had many harsh words for how we didn’t connect with folks, about why turnout was down, and the harassment that some voters had experienced at the polls. No matter how many times during these forums that I was goaded to do so, I never threw the Clinton campaign under the bus. I knew my job was to stand there and take the body blows, acknowledge it, absorb it, so that all of us could let it go.

The meetings were cathartic. I began to feel that I could end my tenure knowing I had done what I could to set things right. As I drove up to Baltimore from Washington, DC, on a cold February morning, I was looking forward to the last of these forums before heading to Atlanta for the election of new DNC officers and then on to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras with my family. After the forum, the staff and I gathered at a restaurant near the Chesapeake Bay for crab cakes and beer. We were toasting each other at the moment when I felt my phone vibrate, looked down, and saw that it was Hillary.

She asked me how I was doing and I said I was fine. She sounded rested and confident, as if the Hillary I knew had returned. I told her about the Future Forums and that I felt good about the people who were running to be the new leaders of the party. We were in better shape financially than we had been in months. Before leaving the White House, the president had agreed to do one more fund-raising appeal, and our online fund-raising was outpacing previous months. We had almost $11 million in the bank, which would give the new chair a head start. This was chitchat, like I was talking to someone I didn’t know. This was not I can’t wait to see you. Let’s get together. You stepped up and I really wanted to thank you for doing it. I know Hillary. I know she was being as sincere as possible, but I wanted something more from her.

The 2016 campaign, convention, and election had shattered long-standing relationships, leaving old friends wary of one another. This was more than the burnout and dejection that follows a crushing loss. The Russian dirty cybertricks that were still just coming to light had left everyone scarred and scared. We were all unable to reach out to the people we normally counted on.

As the call wrapped up, Hillary said she hoped I would be okay. That was when I almost lost it. Even if the party was starting to regain its footing, I was not okay. I had nothing left to return to. This campaign had tarnished my reputation, forced me to step down from CNN, and strained my relationships with colleagues and friends. The hacking of the DNC by the Russians shook my world, depleted my energy, creating in me a fear so deep that now I had surveillance cameras on every door and window at my house. I was struggling within myself to find a way to say this to Hillary, and if it would do either of us any good if I did, when she offered that if there was anything she could do to help I shouldn’t hesitate to give her a call.

“Don’t forget what happened to the DNC,” I suddenly blurted out.

Words started rushing out. I summoned that strength that comes from down deep. I had held it. I had taken all the hits. Hearing her voice was the first moment I understood how tired I was of taking it. What about the Russians? They had tried to destroy us. Was she going to help? I wanted to file a lawsuit. We needed to sue those sons of bitches for what they did to us. I knew the campaign had over $3 million set aside in a legal fund. Could she help me get this lawsuit started? And don’t forget the murder of Seth Rich, I told her. Did she want to contribute to Seth’s reward fund? We still hadn’t found the person responsible for the tragic murder of this bright young DNC staffer.

You’re right, she said. We’re going to get to that. But she really had to go. She had made the call and checked it off her list, and I accepted after we said our good-byes that I might never hear from her again.

In the weeks that followed, as I put my life back together, I thought about the notion that the Democratic Party is a family. I’m one of nine children, and I know how families squabble and forget because they have to move forward. They start to shrivel if they live only in the past. The other thing families are good at is keeping secrets. This Democratic family needed to stop doing that. So many things happened during this campaign that we were not supposed to talk about, and those secrets became part of our bigger problem and part of our defeat. I knew I needed to speak up. I was likely to be the first person to do so, at least in so public a way.

I wanted to tell the story of all the things that contributed to the loss, some of which we could not control and some of which we brought on ourselves. In the midst of the reality show that became the campaign, no one was focused on what was happening to the democracy, and the distractions have only continued with Trump in the White House. Amid the chaos of the new administration, the truth of what happened in 2016 is starting to slip away. We can’t allow that to happen.

We were hacked by the Russians. I want to talk about what this means for our democracy. Most people are not aware of the full-scale terror it creates—fear that slows everything to a crawl as people start to doubt one another. I want to talk about the arrogance and isolation of the Clinton campaign and the cult of Robby Mook, who felt fresh but turned up stale, in a campaign haunted by ghosts and lacking in enthusiasm, focus, and heart. More than that, Hillary’s campaign and the legacy project of the outgoing Obamas drained the party of its vitality and its cash, a huge contributing factor to our defeats in state and local races. I became so frustrated that in the days following Hillary’s shocking collapse at the 9/11 memorial ceremony I nearly replaced her as the party’s candidate for president. I want to explore the reasons why I decided not to do that and instead gave her time to heal and return to the campaign trail.

Many people don’t want me to write this book. They told me no one cared about what happened at the DNC. To them, the hacking was something we would rather forget. Some seemed to think that this was only Hillary’s story to tell. Others were still not convinced that the Russians were behind it. The purpose of this exhumation is to once and for all get everything out in the open.

As galling and heartbreaking as it was, the ascendency of Donald Trump to the White House has also created a tremendous opportunity for the Democrats. Once we understand exactly what happened in the debacle of 2016, we can stand up from this defeat and come back stronger.

As you can imagine, I have a lot to say about that.