After the Clintons and Obamas I Will Never Vote Democrat Again

Joe Biden wouldn't take the hint, and Barack Obama wouldn't take "yes" for an answer.

It was the fall of 2015, Donald Trump was rocketing up in the polls, Hillary Clinton was already wilting, and there was Obama's vice president, occupying national center stage in an awkward public display of grief and political vacillation. Biden'southward son Beau had died at age 46 that May, and the vice president was coping, it seemed, by throwing himself into a very open exploration of running against Clinton.

To Obama, this was a big, unwelcome problem. He had picked Biden for the ticket back in '08 considering he didn't want him to run for president over again, and besides, he honestly believed Biden would be crushed by a defeat he viewed as inevitable.

Nevertheless, this wasn't personal for the president; it was concern. Protecting his vulnerable accomplishments from the GOP wrecking ball and safeguarding his legacy have ever been height priorities for Obama, and he had told friends as early every bit late 2014 that Clinton, for all her flaws, was "the only one" fit to succeed him. If Biden had come to him half dozen months earlier—who knows? Simply it was much too late, and time to push Biden toward a graceful get out.

The choice was long understood past the president's confidants. "My assumption ever was that when the smoke cleared, he would exist for Hillary," David Axelrod, Obama'due south campaign message guru and sometime White House adviser, told me. "Information technology was merely in the air, assumed." Another former top Obama adjutant added, "After the 2014 midterms, when he could sense the terminate … information technology was similar, 'Who gives me the best chance to win?'"

I of the most important if subconscious story lines of 2016 has been Obama'south endeavour to shape a race he's not running in an anti-establishment environs he tin can no longer control. Over the by ii years, he has worked quietly just inexorably on Clinton's behalf, never mind the not-so-disarming line that he was waiting for the Democratic electorate to work its will. He has offered his former rival strategic advice, shared his top talent with her, bucked her up with cheery phone chats afterwards her losses, even dispatched his elevation political adviser to calm the Clintons during their not-infrequent freakouts over the functioning of their staff, according to one of the ii dozen Democrats I interviewed for this story.

The one matter he wouldn't do was endorse her before she cleared the field. And once, when things were darkest afterwards Clinton's devastating defeat to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton's staff urged him to pause his pledge and rescue her—merely his team refused, a senior Democrat told me.

Clinton'south view of Obama is more than conflicted, people close to both politicians told me. She has repeatedly said, "I'm not running for Obama'due south third term," while taking pains to emphasize their differences on issues such as free trade and Syria. And she started the campaign committed to earning the nomination without his overt help.

Simply Clinton has been pulled closer to the president out of mutual self-involvement and circumstance as the long master flavor has worn on: Both Sanders' unexpected success and Obama's fourscore percent-plus approval ratings with registered Democrats have forced the former secretary of state into a tighter embrace than she anticipated. Indeed, her campaign'south internal polling showed that one of the virtually constructive assault lines confronting the socialist from Vermont was his 2011 remark that Obama'due south moderate governing record was "weak" and a "disappointment" to progressives.

When he could sense the end, it was similar, 'Who gives me the best chance to win?'"

Clinton and Obama take something else in common: They both failed to anticipate seriously the rise of Trump. Early on, they were looking out for challenges from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on the left, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the most dangerous Republican in the field. But Trump's ascension has simply increased the urgency of the president's concluding White Firm mission. "Mr. Trump will not be president," Obama alleged flatly back in February.

Obama'southward ultimate goal in his final year has been strikingly ambitious, according to those I spoke with: not just blocking from office the birther who questioned his legitimacy equally president, but preserving the Democratic Party's agree over the presidency during an era of anti-establishment turbulence. Obama, always ane to embrace a thousand goal, talks in terms of creating "a 16-year era of progressive rule" to rival the achievements of Roosevelt-Truman and to reorient the country's politics as a "Reagan of the left," as one of his longtime White House advisers put information technology to me.

Which is why Obama first needed to stop Biden, and without seeming like he was trying to. Equally much as Obama loved him, Biden didn't fit into the plan—particularly when polls showed he would enter the race confronting Clinton with twenty percent of the Autonomous vote.

So for nigh of concluding summertime, Obama emphasized Biden's weaknesses, gently jousting with him at their weekly lunches. He dispatched his de facto political manager, Dave Simas, to Biden'southward office to deliver a steady diet of polls showing a steep uphill climb, while a former Obama communications adviser presented Biden a programme that showed how tough it would be to attack Clinton, a woman Biden had previously praised in over-the-top terms. The most influential naysayer from the presidential orbit was David Plouffe, the disciplined brand managing director and architect of Obama's two White House entrada victories who remains Obama's political emissary despite his day job on the board at Uber.

Somewhen, Obama toughened his tone, telling Biden in a coming together that it was but too late to run, a former White House aide told me.

But by the finish of September, Biden however hadn't gotten the message (though my sources insist he already was leaning toward no, at the advice of his however-grieving family unit), and Obama was getting itchy. Plouffe stepped up the pressure level on his beau Delawarean subsequently months of gingerly trying only not succeeding to get Biden to step aside gently.

"Mr. Vice President, you take had a remarkable career, and information technology would be wrong to see it terminate in some hotel room in Iowa with you finishing tertiary behind Bernie Sanders," he said, according to a senior Democratic official briefed on the endeavor to ease Biden out of the race.

When Biden finally did tell Obama he wasn't running, on the morning time of October 21, the president comforted his veep—then sprinted into action similar a man liberated. Within minutes, Obama ordered up a Rose Garden announcement—that same solar day. Although Obama saw it every bit a generous way to give his friend a chance to bow out on his own terms, several old White House staffers told me it also reflected Obama's jitters; he wanted to lock in the decision before Biden had a take a chance to change his listen.

And with that, Obama and Clinton, rivals-turned-colleagues who had spent viii years perfecting the fine art of insider deals, assumed they had cleared their biggest hurdle in the Democratic primaries. But this was the 2016 election. Nothing would be piece of cake.

In hindsight, of course, Biden's departure didn't stop the threat to Clinton's candidacy; information technology opened the manner for a more disciplined and unsafe outsider to challenge her, a challenge made all the harder to recognize given that it came in the guise of a comically disheveled Vermont independent.

Biden himself signaled the trouble at that awkward Rose Garden anniversary, sounding the very populist refrain that would before long bolster Sanders and rattle the best-laid plans of Obama and Clinton. Reflecting a party whose base has been racing left much faster than either the president or his designated successor had realized, Biden used his improvised speech that twenty-four hour period—squinting into a low autumn sun as the boss stood nearby, arms folded—for a blunt discussion of all the progressive goals his boss had not achieved, calling for a reorientation of the party toward a simpler message of economic fairness. "We can't sustain the electric current levels of economic inequality," he said. "The political aristocracy … the next president is going to have to take it on."

A few blocks away, ii unassuming barbarians at the gates were sitting in a bar across from the onetime Washington Post, after being stood up past a pair of reporters who had been diverted to the Biden announcement. Sanders campaign director Jeff Weaver and strategist Tad Devine gnawed their sandwiches and watched Biden on a flat-screen TV above the liquor bottles, astonished as he hit nigh every element of their own insurgent platform: free public college tuition, a nonpartisan pitch to independents and blue-collar Republicans, a telephone call for purging big money from politics.

"Holy shit," Devine said. "That'south our message. That's what nosotros're running on."

Everyone seemed to get it. Except Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

***

Every bit intuitive as their alliance at present seems, there is simply no modern precedent for the 2016 Obama-Clinton political partnership. In the words of one staffer in Clinton'due south Brooklyn headquarters, the pairing represents "the historic merger of two celebrated candidates."

Americans really don't like dynastic politics, or the perception that the presidency tin can be handed off between cronies similar a borrowed lawn mower. Just inquire Jeb Bush, who learned the hard fashion that there wasn't much of a White House market for a third fellow member of his family unit. The popular perception that the vice presidency (or a top Chiffonier position, for that matter) is a steppingstone to the big job is likewise myth demolished by fact.

Over the past l years, two-term presidents have routinely endorsed their vice presidents, and it's been a mess. Dwight Eisenhower was deeply skeptical of Richard Nixon's executive judgment and he demurred from issuing a formal endorsement even later Nixon had cleared the field in early on 1960. Ike felt no keen obligation to blitz his decision, and Nixon, a magnet for slights and political side-eye, was biting, as was his wont, until interred. "If you give me a week, I might think of something," was the president'south answer when asked to tick off his vice president'south accomplishments. Eisenhower scrap his lip and in March 1960 finally offered a stiff endorsement of his political party'due south nominee.

George H.West. Bush succeeded in winning the White House where other veeps had flopped, and like Clinton, he did so in function past incorporating key elements of his predecessor's political team. But his relationship with Ronald Reagan was never specially close—Bush had savaged the boss' tax-cut plan every bit "voodoo economics" in 1980—and by 1988, the Gipper was diminished politically after the humiliating Islamic republic of iran-Contra scandal and physically fading. Reagan's endorsement in May, later Bush dispatched televangelist Pat Robertson in a sluggish primary, came almost as an afterthought during a fundraiser for Hill Republicans.

"I'one thousand going to piece of work as hard equally I can to brand Vice President George Bush-league the adjacent president of the The states," Reagan intoned. The Times noted that Reagan had somehow managed to mispronounce his understudy's proper noun, "every bit if information technology rhymed with 'rush.'"

Bill Clinton, who vanquished Bush afterwards just i term in 1992, was the only recent president emotionally and politically invested in electing his vice president, just Al Gore, fearing a backlash against Clinton'due south sex scandals and keen on asserting his independence, famously snubbed the happy warrior'due south offering to barnstorm in battleground states on his behalf. Many of the Democratic staffers who worked that entrada (including Tad Devine) believe Gore might take prevailed in the Electoral Higher had he embraced the dominate—whose popularity ratings were a stratospheric lxx percent, postal service-impeachment.

Clinton, deeply hurt, has never entirely forgiven Gore, and afterward told his biographer Taylor Co-operative that Gore was living in "Neverland" to think he'd be a liability. When the two families appeared onstage together during an awkward endorsement event in August 2000, President Clinton had to pull Hillary into the frame with the Gores, the first lady looking less than thrilled amongst the blizzard of confetti. She never forgot that moment, and has told people around her, time and over again, that she didn't intend to repeat Gore's sin of pride. (The ambivalence is apparently mutual. As of mid-July, Gore was perhaps the only major Autonomous effigy yet to endorse Clinton.)

By comparison, her relationship with Obama has strengthened over the years, sealed by their shared White House experiences, similar the tense deliberations over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and Obama's 2012 reelection, when Bill Clinton cast aside his resentments to evangelize the capstone nomination voice communication in Charlotte, North Carolina.

They even so make an unlikely pair, so friendly today that information technology's difficult sometimes to remember their 2008 primary campaign was i of the longest and most competitive in Democratic history, and that both sides accused the other of muddy tricks. The tone was set early when a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire questioned whether Obama had really stopped using drugs at the young age he claimed in his memoir. When Clinton approached the and then-Illinois senator on the tarmac of a D.C. airport to say she had nothing to practise with the attack, Obama angrily accused her of planting stories nearly him in the press—including the claim that he was secretly a Muslim—and what previously had been a frosty détente devolved into a shouting friction match.

Clinton's millions of primary votes, celebrated in her career-defining "Glass Ceiling" speech when she dropped out of the race in 2008, and her canny team-player approach as secretary of country secured her future leverage with Obama. Still, the early going was rough as Clinton pushed to cleave out her own empire within the administration. The Due west Wing fifty-fifty tried to blackball ii of her closest aides—communications adviser Philippe Reines and Capricia Marshall, a Clinton confidante tapped as director of protocol—until the secretary's tiptop aide, Cheryl Mills, personally wrangled a deal with Obama logroller and future White Business firm principal of staff Denis McDonough.

Those battles seem similar ancient history now. But Obama'southward people still tend to have a Barack-get-go sense of loyalty. (One high-ranking electric current Clinton aide keeps a life-sized paper-thin cutout of the 44th president in his office as a talisman.) And the erstwhile Hillaryland crewmembers (Mills, Marshall, Huma Abedin) remain ferociously pro-Hillary.

1 high-ranking Clinton aide keeps a life-sized cardboard cutout of Obama in his office as a talisman.

Over the years, the two staffs have inevitably melded into something the Republicans envy, though: a core squad of 100 or and then professionals who form the functioning heart of the national Democratic Party, working mostly in harness—a product of eight years in power and three campaigns' worth of collaboration. These days, the big worry isn't about division simply excessive togetherness, a blurring of the lines between the presidency and the campaign (duly noted by the White House counsel's part, which churns out advisories defining legal protocols for communication and coordination in keeping with the Hatch Act).

Simply it'south hard to law all the checkpoints, especially when friends on both sides are kibitzing in a bar or at a altogether party. And almost all the key players in Clinton's Brooklyn loftier command take served time in both camps. John Podesta, the campaign chairman, was Nib Clinton's terminal White House main of staff, informally advised Hillary Clinton in 2008 and headed back to the White House in 2013 as Obama's senior in-business firm strategist—with the caveat that he would hop back over to the Clintons the minute they set up the campaign. Entrada communications manager Jen Palmieri, a former Podesta deputy, held the same chore in the Obama White Firm. Clinton's top strategist Joel Benenson was Obama's pollster—and Clinton advertizement-maker Jim Margolis was part of Obama's Chicago mafia.

Sometimes, information technology seems like family unit tree software would be useful: Take Brian Fallon, Clinton'southward press secretarial assistant, who worked as Chaser General Eric Holder'due south flack before joining the campaign, is married to Obama'southward former legislative affairs manager and interacts frequently with his West Wing counterpart Eric Schultz, a Clinton alum who preceded Fallon on Chuck Schumer's Senate communications staff.

***

Planning for the campaign began in mid-2014, when Cheryl Mills began reaching out to potential Clinton staffers in the West Wing, while Clinton's State Section aide-de-camp Jake Sullivan began putting together a compendium of policy options for the wonky would-exist candidate.

A parallel try to gear upwardly for 2016 was emerging in the White House. 3 years subsequently eliminating his scandal-decumbent political office, Obama substantially reconstituted information technology nether a new name and tapped a chipper veteran campaign organizer, Simas, to act as his point of contact with the campaigns.

The well-nigh important early meeting, in terms of both symbolism and synergy, was in late 2014, when Plouffe, acting with Obama'southward approval (and a mandate to study back), sat down with Clinton in her Washington mansion to map out his vision of her entrada.

Plouffe, a low-key, data-obsessed strategist who made his name as the architect of Obama's ii campaigns, had been one of the concluding anti-Clinton holdouts in 2008, and he was also the party'due south virtually-respected electoral engineer. He was dispatched with Obama's explicit intention to assist "stand up" Clinton'south effort, according to a person involved in the planning. But he took to the Clinton cause with the zeal of the converted and would emerge over the post-obit 18 months as a surprisingly easily-on campaign operative, coaching Clinton's young staff during free time.

"Plouffe is everywhere. Y'all tin can't see him, just he's everywhere," a Clinton aide told me during the Iowa caucuses this wintertime.

At that starting time meeting with Clinton, Plouffe laid out a set up of imperatives to deal with the shortcomings of her '08 effort: She needed to gather a first-rate analytics, targeting and data squad; limit the freakouts and impulsive personnel changes; and rent (also as empower) a steady, technically proficient campaign managing director. He threw his support behind the leading candidate, a thirtysomething party stalwart named Robby Mook, who had run Terry McAuliffe's successful campaign for Virginia governor. Clinton was already sold on a lower-drama campaign (even if she didn't always practice what she preached).

But if her campaign system started out on a more solid footing than in 2008, at that place remained a political trouble on Clinton's left that neither she nor her White House friends fully grasped. They didn't anticipate the populist insurgence that hit both parties, and missed the Sanders revolution until it was nearly as well late, in part because they were and so focused on eliminating what they saw as a far more than dangerous threat on the left, Elizabeth Warren.

The 67-year-old former Harvard professor had long maintained that she wasn't running, merely no one in Brooklyn or the White House quite believed her. That concern spiked to panic in October, when Clinton lavishly praised Warren at a entrada consequence—"I love watching Elizabeth give it to those who deserve to go it"—only to get a cold shoulder from the senator, who barely acknowledged her presence.

So every bit Obama's team was jockeying behind the scenes to maneuver Biden to the sidelines, Clinton's aides were badly doing all they could to keep Warren happy and forestall her from joining forces with Sanders.

Luckily for Clinton, Warren resisted Sanders' entreaties, for months telling the senator and his staff she hadn't made up her heed about which candidate she would support. For all her brownie on the left, Warren is more than interested in influencing the granular Washington decisions of policymaking and presidential personnel—and in ability politics. Warren's favored modus operandi: leveraging her outsider popularity to proceeds influence on the issues she cares virtually, namely income inequality and fiscal services reform.

"Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it," a top Warren ally told me. "The primary thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was."

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came shut to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate. She made a betoken of meeting with Sanders to hear his pitch and continued checking in. But she prioritized opening a aqueduct to Clinton on policy. Warren'south personal relationship with Clinton was originally frosty (she was irked by Clinton's support for a bankruptcy nib more than than a decade earlier). And while the pair take never adult an easy rapport, they did develop a working human relationship, thanks in role to their mutual friendship with a shared consultant, longtime Clinton mitt Mandy Grunwald. In early 2015, Warren sent a major point that she would ultimately endorse Clinton, telling a senior campaign aide, "I'm getting a lot of pressure level to endorse Bernie, merely I'm not going to do information technology."

Clinton made it clear through those back channels that she planned to move in Warren's direction on several central issues. Her first step: consulting Warren on a bill she had sponsored jointly with liberal Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin that would forestall private-sector executives from receiving big bonuses before heading into authorities service. Clinton endorsed the measure out months later on than Sanders did, only Warren told a friend that she was satisfied with Clinton's "progress" on the upshot and hoped to keep pulling her in the correct management.

Hither was a textbook example of Warren'south chess-game approach: The bill, which never had a take chances of passing the GOP-controlled Senate, was partly intended to handcuff Clinton if she was elected, weeding out many top finance executives who demanded big payouts before inbound the public sector.

Warren made her agenda manifestly to Clinton when she earned her own tea-and-tactics invitation to Clinton'south Washington dwelling house in Dec 2014—a stilted coming together that left Clinton annoyed and put upon, according to one top Democrat. Warren was in a feisty frame of mind, and had just announced her opposition to the date of Lazard broker Antonio Weiss to a top Treasury mail service. Westward Wing staffers were infuriated past her decision, just Clinton, differentiating herself from Obama's squad, was more than receptive. And when Warren pointedly pressed Clinton not to appoint Wall Street-friendly officials, Clinton didn't appreciate the total-court press, just she signaled her general agreement, according to a person in Clinton's inner circle. Information technology was hardly a coincidence that, that spring, she named a key Warren ally, Gary Gensler, a former federal regulator loved by the left for his clashes with Obama's Treasury Section, as her campaign'due south chief financial officer.

None of this was quite enough to push Warren into an early endorsement. Support for that position came from an unexpected quarter: In an early on 2015 conversation, Biden counseled the Massachusetts senator to concur off on endorsing Clinton until after the primary, according to a Democrat briefed on the interaction.

Ultimately, it was Donald Trump who brought the ii women politicians closer together. Warren ("Pocahontas" in Trump-speak) detests the GOP candidate on a securely personal level as a racist and sexist. And even though she harbored doubts virtually Clinton's credo, Warren viewed the old secretary of country as a fighter, and opined to friends that Clinton would make a tougher-minded negotiator on all kinds of deals than the comparatively easygoing Obama.

Past late spring, Warren and Clinton were talking on the phone from time to fourth dimension, lamenting the timidity of Democrats yet reluctant to bash Trump and agreeing on the gut-punch arroyo Warren would presently use in a serial of Facebook posts that garnered millions of views. (Clinton and her team were peculiarly amused by Warren'south clarification of the GOP nominee as "a small, insecure moneygrubber who doesn't care about anyone or anything that doesn't have the Trump name splashed all over it," I was told.)

Warren's effectiveness every bit a punch-thrower played a critical role in the Clinton campaign's belatedly-May pivot away from fighting Sanders to taking on Trump directly. Warren wasn't initially a serious candidate for a vice-presidential slot, people shut to Clinton told me. But her late-in-the-game functioning has inverse that, and she warmed to the idea after initially viewing it as just another leveraging tool, according to senior Democrats.

Mutual self-interest as much every bit anything dictated it. Clinton admired Obama'southward team, but she was still convinced that in 2008 he had benefited from unfair advantages like a cheerleading press and undemocratic small-land caucus system that slighted her forcefulness amongst big-country Democrats. "It was important for her to do this on her own," one summit 2008 Clinton adviser told me.

But the president's squad had fiddling doubt on substance—even if timing was an issue. Plouffe, in particular, was adamant to preserve the tarnished '08 promise-and-change brand, and he and Obama shared the opinion that Sanders simply didn't take the bandwidth or willingness to compromise his job required. (When I asked Obama in Jan whether the 74-yr-sometime senator reminded him of himself in 2008, the president quickly shot me down: "I don't think that's true").

Nevertheless, Sanders' directly call for a revolution had chastened Obama, and he was intent on keeping to the no-endorsement deal. Clinton's team had no trouble with that—until her lackluster Iowa and New Hampshire performances, which induced a commonage anxiety set on among some of her squad in Brooklyn.

In mid-February, three officials with direct noesis told me, Podesta approached Plouffe and McDonough to float an idea: If Clinton somehow managed to lose the upcoming Nevada caucuses, which had been unthinkable weeks earlier, would Obama offer his endorsement to stop Sanders' momentum? It was clearly an act of desperation—"a intermission-drinking glass and push button-the-panic-push moment," in the words of a Democrat close to the situation—and Obama's squad quickly vetoed information technology. Plouffe said the endorsement wouldn't help—in fact, he said, it would be "counterproductive"—prompting a backfire that would swamp both the president and his chosen successor. Podesta, a 4-decade veteran of campaigns and White Houses, wasn't pleased, but he conceded the point; it'south not clear if Clinton or Obama even knew nearly the idea at the fourth dimension, several aides told me.

The question turned out to be moot; Clinton won a 5-signal victory in Nevada and established a pattern of solid performances in diverse big states (with Sanders winning in mostly white states, caucuses and open primaries where independents could vote).

The White House did have a counter-offer: Obama would consider making an early announcement if Clinton wrapped things upward during the March fifteen primaries. Merely that deal died when Sanders won Michigan unexpectedly on March 8, upending the race.

***

Every bit clear-eyed as Obama has been about Clinton, some entrada-flavor friction has been inevitable. The organisation is inherently schizophrenic: Clinton's squad wants Obama's back up when they need it almost, while enervating the latitude to intermission with him whenever they need to get out of a political corner. On some issues, it hasn't mattered much. Sources told me Obama waved off Clinton's more hawkish stance on intervention in Syria (she has suggested supporting a no-wing zone, something he has rejected), and that he didn't much listen when she vowed in Iowa last October to "go beyond President Obama" in pursuing immigration reform.

Simply he's been deeply frustrated by her machinations on gratis trade, an issue he views equally the final big-ticket legislative priority of his presidency. And he expressed anger over Clinton's tortured determination to reverse her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. At the time, he told 1 company to the Oval Office that he viewed it not only every bit bad policy simply "bad politics," because it would reinforce the impression, pushed by Sanders, that Clinton was an opportunistic flip-flopper.

The flashpoint came in June 2015, when Clinton told Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston that she would take voted confronting "fast-track" authority for the merchandise bargain—the very procedural tool Obama was hoping to use to hammer through the bargain against a growing populist backlash. Obama's complaint was that Clinton, who was speaking off the cuff, hadn't given him a heads-up before trumpeting such a major intermission with him on policy. The president was furious and—as polite principals do when they don't want to berate other principals direct—he transmitted his displeasure to McDonough for circulate to Hillaryland. The human being tasked with blunting that anger was none other than Podesta, McDonough's longtime jogging partner, the man who had hired him at the liberal Center for American Progress and McDonough's tutor in the utilise of executive power in the West Wing.

Still, Obama and his team kept their optics on the bigger prize—Clinton'south ballot—and sweated right alongside her team when she swooned in Jan and Feb. Obama, who boasted about not watching the debates to stick with TV hoops, never lost confidence in Clinton. But no one amend knew her weaknesses, and he watched Sanders' ascension with warning and a tinge of admiration for the septuagenarian's out-of-nowhere claiming to the organization. The shocker came in late January, one senior Democrat told me, when Simas offered him a readout of internal Democratic polling showing Clinton in serious problem. "She could really lose this thing," Simas said.

Obama dialed through to Clinton on several occasions to offer encouragement and a little heartfelt advice.

In that location wasn't a lot the White House could practise at that indicate. But Plouffe, interim in his dual role as an Obama operative and shadow strategist, developed a close mentoring relationship with Mook, whom he viewed as a clear-headed squad builder. During the Iowa caucuses, Plouffe, who had helped implement Obama'southward innovative voter targeting there, was talking to Mook several times a 24-hour interval, offering tactical communication and encouragement, according to people shut to the campaign. And he counseled his protégé to make what would turn out to be one of the entrada's best hires: Obama veteran Jeff Berman to quarterback Clinton's delegate operation.

Plouffe wasn't the just one working the phones. Obama, according to aides, besides dialed through to Clinton on several occasions to offering encouragement and a little heartfelt if obvious advice. "Loosen up and be yourself," he told her during one long post-New Hampshire telephone call, counseling Clinton to ditch the laundry-list speeches and mix in "some poetry with the prose," in the words of one aide.

***

If Obama's early on delivery to Clinton had any downside, it was the sense of inevitability, of complacency, that it fostered, the notion that anybody could control a process that was speedily being taken over by outsiders and insurgents. "We caught them apartment-footed," Sanders entrada director Jeff Weaver told me.

And it was true: Both Clintons had initially dismissed Sanders' candidacy equally a long shot. "He's a socialist!" she had said incredulously when someone in late 2015 suggested that Sanders' message was taking root. And while Clinton herself would point the finger at her pollsters and consultants for failing to anticipate his rise until last December, the error ultimately lay with a candidate who later told me she preferred to evangelize long, policy-packed speeches to pithier calls to battle.

Sanders, who vaulted from less than iii percent in national polls in early on 2015 to a dead-heat past Apr 2016, turned out to be Clinton's equal in debates, exposing all the flaws that had indomitable Clinton equally a candidate eight years earlier—the wooden delivery, the deliberative poll-tested position papers, the focus on incremental progress—when her opponent was electrifying crowds with promises of seismic (if hard-to-implement) change.

Merely the key thing both Obama and Clinton missed was that responsible liberal governance connected to economic elites—the essence of their partnership—had but faded from style. In their early on, scrupulously civil debates, both Sanders and Clinton repeatedly emphasized how similar their stances on major bug were. Simply as he caught burn—and Clinton shifted on issues like Social Security, trade and Wall Street regulation to meet his claiming—Sanders shifted to a broader, more incendiary anti-establishment argument that focused on what Clinton represented as opposed to the positions she adopted.

And what really sustained him was his positive message of generational alter, liberally borrowed from Obama's 2008 campaign, and broadcast to his faithful through a serial of iPhone-friendly videos. Sanders continued to emphasize policy disagreements, specially on strange diplomacy, but what drew the 15,000-student crowds were his shout-himself-hoarse denunciations of Clinton's connections to financial elites; his repeated assail on her 6-figure Goldman Sachs speaking fees was the most effective attack line of the campaign, his advisers say.

"They are a celebrated pair, and they have a lot of power when they work together," argues a peak Sanders ally. "But if they want to motivate the party, if they want to vanquish Donald Trump, if they desire to excite voters, they need to become into Bernie's space—and fast."

Still, information technology's possible to over-acquire the lessons of Sanders' success. As senior Clinton advisers rightly indicate out—except for the February scare and an unexpected loss a month afterward in Michigan—Clinton won the overall principal flavour convincingly, with 55 percent of the vote, a bigger lead in pledged delegates than Obama ever enjoyed in '08 and 3.5 1000000 more votes than Sanders.

Besides, predictions that Sanders voters wouldn't unite around Clinton haven't, so far, proven any more than accurate than predictions that Clinton voters wouldn't vote for Obama. Alee of the Philadelphia convention, merely about 8 percent of Sanders supporters said they'd back Trump in the general ballot, according to a June Washington Post-ABC News poll—compared with 20 percent of Clinton supporters who planned to vote for Republican John McCain in 2008. By contrast, recent surveys have shown 70 percent of Ted Cruz voters take negative views of Trump.

Go out polls for the early on 2016 primaries tell an fifty-fifty starker story about the relative health of the parties heading into the fall. A bulk of Republicans said they felt "betrayed" by their party—the rage that fueled Trump's candidacy—compared with less than a quarter of Democrats who shared that sentiment. "The biggest misnomer of the campaign is that everybody's pissed off," Clinton strategist Benenson told me in March. "The truth is that Republicans are mode, way more angry than Democrats. And Democrats love Obama."

***

The political party does seem to be uniting, every bit Sanders' awkward but emphatic enough endorsement of Clinton in early on July proved. Just the protracted, weeks-long 3-way negotiations amid Clinton's, Obama's and Sanders' political teams over the Democratic Party'due south platform showed something: that the Clinton-Obama table for ii may need a new place setting.

Sanders, who took a long time to take the reality of his primary defeat personally, squandered some of his leverage. But in the end, the Clinton military camp was eager to requite him nigh everything he asked for in the Democratic platform by agreeing to embrace a new proposal to subsidize public college tuition, a public option for Obamacare and a break-upwardly-the-banks plank.

The final hurdle to kumbaya was a bargain that embittered, or at to the lowest degree bellyaching, all iii parties.

Obama, knowing Clinton and Sanders had bucked him on free trade, lobbied hard to shoot downwardly an anti-Trans-Pacific Partnership provision in the platform during a serial of political party meetings in Orlando in early July. The uncompromising Vermont revolutionary would have to compromise—and he did—past accepting the pro-TPP plank debated during the Orlando meetings. When the deal was washed, Sanders chosen his team from his house in Vermont and declared, in his affair-of-fact, ordering-at-a-diner phonation, "Well, we just created the most progressive platform in the history of the Autonomous Party." Then he said farewell and hung up.

Yet until the very terminal moment, Clinton'due south jittery team couldn't quite believe Sanders was really on lath, seizing on a rumor that he was boarding a plane to Florida to blow up the final agreement.

Never mind that everyone on the Sanders campaign laughed information technology off. The calls from Brooklyn kept coming—"Nosotros're hearing he's on the plane right now!" —until 1 close aide to the senator bellowed into his phone, "Godammit, Bernie'due south in Burlington, and he'due south staying in Burlington!"

The senator was practiced to his word. The next time Clinton's squad saw Sanders, he was sharing a stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his party's presumptive nominee—and declaring himself a loyal Democrat in Clinton'south anti-Trump cause.

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Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-barack-obama-hillary-clinton-democratic-establishment-campaign-primary-joe-biden-elizabeth-warren-214023

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