You can compare this to how Trump operated. When the opioid epidemic finally started getting news attention, he jumped on it as a way of making people believe that America was falling apart. But once he became President, he turned his back on everyone who needed help by seeking to cut money for treatment.
The press often seemed bored by the roundtables where these conversations happened. Critics dismissed them as staged or carefully controlled. But I wasn’t bored. I wanted to talk with people, not at them. I also learned a lot. To me, this was a big part of what running for President was supposed to be.
Over the long months that I had weighed running a second time, I thought a lot about what kind of campaign I’d want. I certainly wanted one different from the one I ran during my 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama. I studied what he did right and I did wrong. There was more to learn after 2012, when the President put together another strong campaign that helped him win reelection over Mitt Romney by a healthy margin despite a lackluster economy. His operations were two of the best ever. I paid attention.
My low-profile first trip to Iowa reflected some of the lessons that I kept in mind as I started to put my own organization in place. In 2008, I had been criticized for arriving in Iowa like a queen, holding big rallies and acting like victory was inevitable. I never thought that was a fair description of me or our campaign; we believed I could prevail in a crowded and talented field, but we certainly didn’t take Iowa for granted. In fact, we recognized that it wasn’t an ideal first contest for me and spent a fair amount of 2007 trying to figure out how to make the best of it. Still, the criticism stuck, and I took it seriously. This time I was determined to run like an underdog and avoid any whiff of entitlement.
I also wanted to build on the best parts of my 2008 effort, especially the fighting spirit of our campaigns in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where I succeeded in forming a bond with working-class voters who felt invisible in George W. Bush’s America. I had dedicated my victory in the Ohio primary to everyone “who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up.” I wanted to bring that spirit to the 2016 campaign, along with the best lessons of Obama’s victories.
We sought to set the right tone with my announcement video. It showed a series of Americans talking excitedly about new challenges they were taking on: two brothers starting a small business, a mom getting her daughter ready for the first day of kindergarten, a college student applying for her first job, a couple getting married. Then I appeared briefly to say that I was running for President to help Americans get ahead and stay ahead, and that I was going to work hard to earn every vote. This campaign wasn’t going to be about me and my ambitions. It would be about you and yours.
There were other lessons to put into action. In 2008, the Obama campaign had been way ahead of us in using advanced data analytics to model the electorate, target voters, and test messages. It focused relentlessly on grassroots organizing and winning the delegates who would actually decide the nomination. It also built a “no drama” campaign organization that largely avoided damaging infighting and leaks.
John Podesta and I talked with President Obama and David Plouffe about how to construct a team that could replicate these successes. Plouffe was a big fan of Robby Mook, whom I ultimately chose as campaign manager. Robby had impressed David by helping me win against the odds—and against him—in Nevada, Ohio, and Indiana in 2008. In all three states, he put together aggressive field programs and competed hard for every vote. Then he went on to manage my friend Terry McAuliffe’s successful longshot campaign for Governor of Virginia. Robby was on a roll—young but, like Plouffe, highly disciplined and levelheaded, with a passion for data and a talent for organizing.
Huma Abedin, my trusted and valued advisor for years, would be campaign vice chair. President Obama praised his pollsters Joel Benenson and John Anzalone and focus group expert David Binder, so I hired all three, as well as a veteran of the Obama data analytics team, Elan Kriegel. Navin Nayak came on board to coordinate all these different elements of opinion research. Here’s how to keep it all straight: pollsters call up a random sample of people and ask their opinions about candidates and issues; focus groups gather a handful of people together in a room for an in-depth discussion that can last several hours; and data analytics teams make a lot of survey calls, crunch huge amounts of additional demographic, consumer, and polling data, and feed it all into complex models that try to predict how people will vote. These are all staples of modern campaigns.
To help guide messaging and create ads, I hired Jim Margolis, a respected Obama veteran, and Mandy Grunwald, who had been with me and Bill since our first national campaign in 1992. They worked with Oren Shur, my director of paid media, and several talented and creative ad agencies. I thought Jim’s and Mandy’s partnership would represent the best of both worlds. That’s what I was going for with all my hiring decisions: mix the best available talent from the Obama campaigns with top-notch pros I already knew. The latter category included Dennis Cheng, who had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my 2006 Senate reelection campaign and 2008 presidential campaign, and later helped build up the Clinton Foundation endowment; Minyon Moore, one of the most experienced political operatives in Democratic politics and a veteran of my husband’s White House; and Jose Villarreal, a business leader who had worked with me at State and came on board to serve as my campaign treasurer.
As I built my team, I was focused on two tricky areas: how to strike the right balance with President Obama and his White House, and—drumroll for emphasis—how to improve my relationship with the press.
The challenge of striking a balance with President Obama wasn’t personal at all. After four years in his Cabinet, we liked and trusted each other. There aren’t many people in the world who know what it’s like to run for President or live in the White House, but we had that in common, and it gave us a special bond. When he finally passed health care reform, something I had fought for long and hard, I was overjoyed and gave him a big hug before a meeting in the White House Situation Room. After his rough first presidential debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, I tried to cheer him up with a photoshopped image of Big Bird strapped to Mitt’s family car. (Romney had promised to slash funding for PBS, and also famously took road trips with his dog on the roof of his car.)
“Please take a look at the image below, smile, and then keep that smile near at hand,” I told the President.
“We’ll get this done,” he replied. “Just hold the world together five more weeks for me.”
Now that we had switched places, and I was the candidate and he was the cheerleader, the challenge for me was navigating the tension between continuity and change. On the one hand, I believed deeply in what he had accomplished as President and desperately wanted to make sure a Republican wouldn’t be able to undo it all. We might have areas of disagreement, such as on Syria, trade, and how to deal with an aggressive Russia, but by and large, I would defend his record, try to build on his accomplishments, and listen to his advice. He would call from time to time and share his thoughts on the race. “Don’t try to be hip, you’re a grandma,” he’d tease. “Just be yourself and keep doing what you’re doing.” I was proud to have Barack’s support, and nearly every day told audiences around the country that he didn’t get the credit he deserved for putting our country back together after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.