Hillary Clinton: "You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had
teas but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband
entered public life."
Hillary Clinton has been a major political figure my whole adult life.
I’ve been covering her, in one way, or another since I became a journalist.
And no politician I’ve covered has left me so confused.
There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in
the press.
She gets described as cold, unlikable,
Bill O'Reilly: "One of the most robotic statements I've ever seen."
calculating, manipulative.
She’s not a great campaigner.
The private email server and the Goldman Sachs paydays frustrate even the people who like
her most.
Polls show most Americans doubt her honesty.
And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her,
people who understand Washington in ways I never will.
Their Clinton is described in superlatives.
She’s brilliant, warm, funny, authentic.
And she gets things done.
Everybody says that, she gets things done.
Bob Greenstein: "A master policy strategist – how do you move the policy to make things
actually happen?"
She inspires this real loyalty which, to be honest, is an order of magnitude greater than
what most politicians get in DC.
Neera Tanden: "Even when I don’t work for Hillary – like, I don’t technically work
for hillary – it still feels like I work for Hillary."
I've come to call this "The Gap."
And I spoke to dozens of her colleagues, going back to her time in college, in the Arkansas
Governor’s Mansion, everybody who's worked with her acknowledged the gap.
And so does Hillary Clinton herself.
"It’s always amusing to me that when I have a job, I have really high approval ratings.
When I’m actually doing the work,[..]
Then I seek a job, and all the discredited negativity comes back out, all these arguments
and attacks start up."
And so after interviewing Clinton, I interviewed all these people who have worked with her,
who know her, people who like her, people who have clashed with her.
And I asked every one of them to begin.
What is true about hillary clinton when she’s governing that is not obvious about her on
the campaign trail?
What accounts for the gap?
To my surprise, all these people I spoke to, at some point in our conversation they all
the said the same thing every time.
Tom Harkin: "She really, truly, is interested in listening to people."
Thomas Nides: "Part of her gift is her ability absorb a lot of information.
But not just clinically reading a briefing book.
She wants to hear information from real people, real voters."
She listens.
The first few times I heard this it sounded like such bulls***.
What a gendered compliment, “she listens.”
Neera Tanden: "Her strengths are to really hear what people are saying and incorporate
it into what she's doing."
After 11, 12, 15 times though, I began to take it more seriously, to ask more questions
about it.
Clinton actually kicked off her 2000 senate campaign with a "listening tour."
The press hated it.
They thought it was was just one more way she was dodging having to say real things
about the hard issues.
But to her, it wasn't bulls***.
Hillary did another of these listening tours to kick off her presidential campaign.
Tanden: "She was doing a bunch of events in new hampshire and heard a ton about the Opioid
addiction problem in New Hampshire.
So she decided to put forward a policy on Opiate addiction – And a bunch of other
political leaders have done that since."
Let’s state something obvious here.
Let's stop and talk about the elephant in the room.
There is a gender dynamic at play here.
Women weren’t guaranteed the vote in this country till about 1920.
And you don’t have to assert some grand patriarchal conspiracy to suggest that campaigning,
a process created by men, dominated by men, and until recently, limited to men, might
subtly favor male traits.
Male traits maybe like talking over listening.
It’s really interesting to look at the Democratic primary through this lens.
He’s a great talker.
That’s where his skills come from.
She’s a great listener, that’s where her advantages come from.
And this time, the listener won.
But it felt illegitimate to a lot of people – Clinton’s endorsements, her firewall
of allies made her look like a tool of the establishment, while Sanders’ speeches left
people marveling at his political skills.
I want to be very clear here.
I’m not saying that anyone who opposed Clinton was sexist.
I'm not saying she should have won.
What I’m saying is that presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically
male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently.
A campaign built on charismatic oration feels legitimate in a way that a campaign built
on deep relationships does not.
But here’s the thing: deep listening, building those relationships it is crucial to being
President.
And it can also get you in trouble.
I’m going to walk through a couple ways Clinton uses her real skill, and it is a skill,
at listening as a leadership style.
But you also get a sense of how her process can go awry.
This guy, Bob Greenstein, he’s devoted his life to understanding and improving policy
that affects the poor.
And when I asked him about whether Clinton’s listening ends up in anything he got really
specific about how this works.
Greenstein: "Bill Clinton had run on a platform that included the slogan"
Clinton: “If you work full time, you shouldn’t have to raise your kids in poverty.
We should reward working families and lift them out.”
Clinton: "By expanding the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, if you work 40 hours a
week and you've got a child in the house, you will no longer be in poverty."
Greenstein: "When his first budget came out in 1993, it indeed had a large expansion of
the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But It fell short."
A policy is flawed in a pretty technical and complicated way.
"So we did a paper showing this.
I had a little quote from Bill Clinton, and the lede said but his plan falls short of
the goal."
"I sent it to her top policy adviser, who gave it to her, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon."
She actually listens.
She engages, she reads the memo.
"At 9 AM the next morning, I receive a phone call from the White House."
And then she goes and gets the change done.
"To my amazement, they withdrew the original proposal and submitted the revised within
a few days, and it became law in '93.
This was the heart of the Earned Income Tax Credit of 93, that is one of the biggest anti-poverty
advances of the last several decades and lifts millions of people out of poverty.
"
I heard stories like that again and again.
Clinton apparently has a habit of talking to people and stuffing little notes from her
conversations in suitcases, and then every few months, she makes her whole staff assemble,
they would dump out these suitcases of basically trash.
And then they would try to organize the notes to extract policy ideas, or figure out problems
they should address, based on what she’s heard.
People in her senate office told me that this really did lead to legislation, to new amendments.
You can't understand her without understanding this part of her process.
Nides: "I think one of Hillary Clinton's real gifts is to listen to you – shut up, not
talk, not just sit around and tell me what i want to hear and just blather on and on
– which many of my friends who have been in the political world do.
She basically hears, thinks, and then talks about where her views are.
And you don’t walk away thinking you just wasted an hour of my time."
I heard another story about her at the State Department, that when she came in there, she
had to win the trust of career staff, people who didn’t know her, who hadn’t come to
work for her.
And one thing she would do is invite these diplomats and researchers to big meetings
and then reference something they had written deep in an obscure memo years ago.
And they were thrilled that a secretary of state was actually digging into their work,
and it helped her win over a lot of support in the building.
They felt respected.
One reason people like working for her, a reason she has a very loyal staff, is she
actually listens to them, takes their advice, reads their memos.
A lot of politicians don’t.
Clinton uses listening, in a very real way, to win over allies.
In 2000, when she got to the Senate, she was already a very polarizing figure.
Trent Lott – majority leader during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial – he first
said “She will be one of 100 and we won’t let her forget it” A few years later, they
teamed up on Hurricane relief.
And it wasn’t just Lott.
In 2006, the times tallied her weird alliances.
It was Tom DeLay on foster children.
New Gingrich on health care.
Bill Frist on medical records.
Bob Bennett on flag burning.
Rick Santorum around children's exposure to graphic images.
John Sununu on SUV taillights.
Mike Dewine on asthma.
And the way she did it, again, was listening.
She surprises people who expected to hate her by being really friendly, and by paying
close enough attention that she's able to figure out where they can collaborate.
But a process based on listening doesn’t always get you to the right answers.
You have to listen to the right people, for one thing.
And Clinton sometimes doesn’t.
Clinton:"I will take the President at his word"
It’s part of how she ended up voting for the Iraq War: she listened to people who were
giving her the wrong intelligence and whose appetite for war was perhaps stronger than
she thought.
Clinton: "that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war,
if at all possible”
Another problem is she can listen to too many people.
The biggest government reform Hillary ever sought, the health care bill in 1993 and 94,
it was a disaster.
She created this massive sprawling process with 500 policy experts.
Clinton: "There are so many lessons to be learned."
Everybody was being heard, everybody's ideas were being reflected in the bill.
Advocacy ad against bill: "A national limit on health care?"
And so we ended up with a bill that was so complex that nobody could understand it.
You can hear this in her speeches too, her speeches often sound like a laundry list to
people.
And that's because so many different voices are in them.
Consensus in that way become an enemy of inspiration.
Health care advocacy ad: "There's gotta be a better way."
Listening can also be a way of delaying tough decisions.
Joshua Green did an exhaustive review of private communications of her 2008 campaign for president
and concluded that aides
“routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution.”
“Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance
of the many she did not make,”
There is one group Clinton never listens to.
And that is the press.
In some ways her distrust here is understandable - there’s been an incredibly long history
of media-fueled scandals that have amounted to very, very little.
"Today [...] the House Select Committee on Benghazi finally released its 800-page report
on the attack."
"After a two year, seven million dollar investigation, the eighth investigation to date, the authors
of the report make no new accusations, and provide no new evidence of wrongdoing against
the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton."
But in our interview, she seems blind to the fact that her own behavior is, correctly,
under a brighter spotlight.
Clinton:“A democracy relies on the glue of trust,”
“There’s got to be that rock-solid belief that this transaction between us as voters
and citizens rests on something deep and sacred."
"And I don’t know how we get back to that.”
If she's that worried about trust, a start would have been turning down Goldman Sach’s
2013 offer to accept $675,000 for three speeches.
Anderson Cooper: "Did you have to be paid $675,000?"
Clinton: "Well I don't know.
That's what they offered."
That was 2013.
People already didn't trust Goldman Sachs.
I think she sees the loss of public trust in her as caused by the same forces that led
to the loss of public trust in everything else: a press corps obsessed with controversy,
uninterested in substance, and incapable of in policing the boundaries of decency and
truthfulness.
And look.
I’m a member of the press, I’ll cop to some of that.
But Clinton’s explanation here has become a rationalization.
She has lost sight of the bar she should be held to and now plays loose with the public’s
trust herself.
Clinton: "I did not email any classified material to anyone."
FBI Director Comey: "110 emails, in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning
agency to contain classified information."
Now it’s not the press who will be Clinton’s toughest opponent if she wins.
She gleefully called Republican’s enemies she was glad to make.
Cooper: "You've all made a few people upset over your political careers.
Which enemy are you most proud of?"
Clinton: "Probably the republicans."
And when I asked her if she regretted that comment, because she worried about all the
negativity in politics, she kinda said not really.
Clinton: ”Not very much.
You can go back and look at how i’ve worked with Republicans."
"But you know they terrible things about me, much worse than anything I’ve said about
them.
That just seems part of the political back and forth now."
Now, it’s interesting and weird what Clinton said there.
She doesn't apologize, she says Republicans say worse about her, but she says she will
nevertheless be able to work with Republicans.
"I think I have a very strong base of relationships with them and uh, evidence of that."
And what's weird is there is some evidence of that actually.
You can hear in her approach to working with Republicans a gentle critique of Obama.
His approach is summed up by this 2013 joke he made about Mitch McConnell.
"Of course, even after I've done all this, some folks still don't think enough time with
congress.
'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell,' they ask.
"Really?"
"Why don't YOU get a drink with Mitch McConnell."
This is where Hillary differs.
Clinton: “A lot of governing is the boring of hard boards.
There’s nothing sexy about it.
I think it is getting up every day, building the relationships, finding whatever sliver
of common ground you can occupy, never, ever giving up in continuing to reach out even
to people who are sworn political partisan adversaries.”
And look, a Hillary Clinton presidency, it's not going to be some peaceful era in politics.
if she’s in the White House, Republicans will spend every waking moment working to
recapture it.
It is easy to imagine reading an article, in the third year of a Clinton presidency,
that sees this process as the root of her failures.
Where the president gets lost in the details, where she’s searching for common ground
with Republicans she can’t find.
But Clinton will try, and there may even be moments when she succeeds, even small pieces
of common ground.
She will build these relationships.
No one will ever accuse her of not having Mitch McConnell over for enough drinks.
Hell, he may even like having a drink with her.
He’ll probably find she’s a pretty good listener.