How Hillary Clinton’s Loyal Confidants Could Cost Her the Election
Lawyers! Aides! Advisers! No presidential candidate has ever been as defended as Hillary Clinton. As Sarah Ellison reports, the tight-lipped human wall she has raised is also a major liability.
by Sarah Ellison
I. The Praetorians
They were her darkest days yet as First Lady, though there would be far worse to come. In 1994, after her health-care-reform plan imploded and her party suffered a devastating midterm defeat, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, gathered 10 women whose opinion Clinton held dear. The group included Mandy Grunwald, senior media consultant to the president, whose ties to the Clintons went back to the 1992 campaign; Susan Thomases, who had worked as the Clintons’ personal lawyer during the campaign; and Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s scheduler and later the first head of her 2008 presidential campaign. Called the “Chix meeting” by one participant, the group had been getting together to discuss the First Lady’s agenda, and the conversations usually ranged widely—to media strategy, policy debates, political fights, personal lives. The off-the-record gatherings were an outgrowth of her regular staff meetings, which were scheduled for an hour but often went for two or three and into the evening. A few bottles of wine might be opened, and the women would talk about “who was dating whom, who was cute,” and “whose kids were going to the prom,” according to one of the Chix I spoke with recently. In the weeks after the midterm defeat, the meetings were “healing” ones and designed to be “nutrition for the soul,” this participant said.
During one such meeting, toward the end of 1994, Clinton walked into the room and the distress of the past weeks and months spilled out. She fought back tears, and was “quite emotional.” She told the group that she was sorry—sorry if she had let people down, sorry if she had contributed to the recent political losses, as indeed she had. The health-care overhaul, on which Bill Clinton had campaigned so hard, and which he’d handed over to Hillary upon his election, had failed spectacularly under her leadership—undercut by the insurance industry’s aggressive opposition to it, and by her secrecy and high-handedness. Clinton told the group that she was considering withdrawing from the kind of policy and political work that had defined her. “This was all my fault,” she said, according to the participant. She didn’t want to damage her husband’s administration.
Years later, in her memoir Living History, Clinton herself described this moment in trademark humblebrag style: “One by one,” she wrote, “each woman told me why I couldn’t give up or back down. Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.” As we well know, Clinton didn’t back down. She stayed in the game and has stayed in it ever since. The anecdote as Clinton conveyed it seemed designed to make three points. First, she is not in politics to slake her own ambitions. Second, she’s a fighter. And third, if it hadn’t been for this circle of nurturing intimates, she couldn’t possibly have gone on.
Throughout her many years in public life—through all the disappointments and triumphs, the scandals real or alleged—Clinton has surrounded herself with protectors: a tightly knit Praetorian Guard, mute and loyal. The result has been the opposite of what was intended. When troubles arise—sometimes of Clinton’s own making, sometimes not—she retreats into a defensive crouch, shielding herself inside a cocoon of secrecy, with a small circle of intimates standing watch. With each new round of trouble and scandal, the circle seems to draw tighter. The penchant for secrecy—for all operations to be closely and privately held—increases by yet another increment. But this never proves to be a solution. The secrecy and the closed nature of her dealings generate problems of their own, which in turn prompt efforts to restrict information and draw even more tightly inside a group of intimates. It is a vicious circle. The current controversy over Clinton’s State Department e-mails—the use of a private “clintonemail.com” account for government business—is a classic case in point.
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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/hillary-clinton-inside-circle-huma-abedin
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, the slick ads--they're all turning people off the more they hear of all this and the more they hear of the alternative: and beyond style, she stands for more war (she won't let Trump out-hawk her)
