In another up-and-down, anything-can-happen primary season, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be a formidable candidate—and a much happier one. Will she finally, at long last, make history?
It was another Sunday morning in New Hampshire, a few days into the new year, at another town-hall meeting in a middle school in front of another boisterous crowd. After the Red Star Twirlers nailed their baton routine to the Donna Summer song “She Works Hard for the Money”—with no apparent sense of irony—Hillary Clinton, in brown slacks, a gray sweater, and kitten heels, appeared to a standing ovation. She spent the next hour moving through the applause lines of her stump speech, and then listening intently to voters’ questions and answering them with candor. She was connecting. You could feel it. At one point, she launched into a story about how difficult it was for people in developing nations to comprehend how she could lose to President Obama and then wind up becoming his Secretary of State. “They were confused,” she said. “In their countries, even in burgeoning democracies, if you oppose somebody, you run against somebody, you end up being exiled or imprisoned, not Secretary of State!” The audience laughed. “When they first asked me, I was on my very first trip, in February 2009. This was in Indonesia and I was in front of a big audience on their very popular morning TV show, which translated into ‘The Awesome Show!’ ” More laughter. “And I was so worried they were going to ask me to dance or sing. I think that would be a disaster for my country.” She dropped her voice into its lower register and got serious. “We ran a hard campaign against each other. He said things that hurt my feelings, I said things that hurt his feelings. It was tough! But he won and I lost. And I said, ‘I want to do everything I can to get you elected,’ and I did. I did everything I could think of to do.” More applause. “And then he asked me to be Secretary of State, and I said yes for the same reason. And you know what that reason is? We both love our country. And we in this country not only have to make our democracy work, we’ve got to make it work for the rest of the world, who will look at us and say, ‘This is what a democracy is.’ ”
Afterward she said hello to—and took a selfie with—every person who stayed behind to meet her. When she finally headed backstage, she passed me in a hallway and said in a cartoon-happy voice, “Well, hello, JONATHAN. Isn’t thisFUN?” I think she was being sarcastic about the drudgery of the modern American presidential season . . . but maybe not! Maybe she was actually having fun. Moments later, I was ushered along with a few Clinton staffers into a room where Clinton was shaking hands and taking photos with local muckety-mucks. Once I got my bearings, I realized we were standing in the boys’ locker room, with open showers. Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest adviser, was next to me. “The bathroom,” she deadpanned. “We do this a lot. Glamorous, huh? People have noidea.” And then we talked about how her boss had done—how she’d come across moments before. “Well, you know, people see her as this figurehead, but she is, in fact, a real person. It’s hard to break through sometimes. But I feel like she’s gotten into a really good rhythm. She’s not speechifying. She’s just being herself.”
In fact, Clinton had been in full flight for weeks. Nick Merrill, her traveling press secretary, noticed something shifting in mid-December, at a town hall in Iowa City—not exactly a stronghold for Clinton. (The home of the University of Iowa is Bernie country.) I noticed it too: People in the audience were prefacing their questions with statements of support. One woman, perhaps a decade younger than Hillary, with a thick Midwestern accent, stood up to speak her piece: “I want to say that when I listen to you, I feel that the political discourse is taken back to sanity.” Knowing laughter rippled through the crowd. “I really feel like with the Republicans . . . that there’s almost a collusion to all say things that aren’t . . .sane. So I want to really say thank you to you because you’re pleasant, you’re joyous, you’re happy. And your running for president is, I think, fundamentally an act of generosity.” The crowd leaped to their feet, yelling and whistling for nearly a minute, as Clinton stood in the middle of the circle of adoration holding back tears. When she finally spoke, she was as invigorated as I’d ever seen her. “I know there aren’t too many Republicans in Iowa City,” she told the crowd, “but if you do run into one . . . I want you to tell them: I don’t have horns.”
In keeping with the Mark Twain idiom “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes,” early presidential primaries are notoriously fickle. Trying to figure out how to campaign in New Hampshire and Iowa is like trying to bead a necklace on a roller coaster. I said goodbye to Clinton and her staff late on the night of January 3 in a high school in Keene, New Hampshire. (“Walk me to the bathroom,” Clinton said to me. “I’ve got to wash my hands. It’s my first line of defense against getting sick.”) Less than a week later, the weather had changed. Bernie Sanders, who was expected to do well in New Hampshire, suddenly closed the gap in the polls in Iowa to a squeaky few points. And just like that, the Sanders and Clinton campaigns turned negative. When Sanders released an ad on January 14 that included a not-so-subtle swipe at Clinton for taking “millions from big banks,” her campaign called it a personal attack. Clinton and her campaign, in turn, went after Sanders’s record on gun control, and even had Chelsea Clinton out on the stump attacking his health-care plan, charging that Sanders “wants to dismantle Obamacare . . . dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance.” The question became, Would Hillary Clinton keep her cool? Would she make the same mistakes she made against Obama eight years ago, when he started to pick up steam? Could she stop her campaign from losing the loft and equilibrium it had had for months? When I asked Stephanie Cutter, a former senior adviser in the Obama administration, about the challenge that Sanders presents, she said, “Elections are always about change, and to some people, Hillary doesn’t denote enough change. But the question is, Are there enough of those voters to block her ascendancy to the nomination?”
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