Hillary’s hit list

By Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen,

[In] late June 2008, and Hillary had dropped her bid for the presidency.

As one of the last orders of business for a losing campaign, they recorded in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet the names and deeds of members of Congress. They carefully noted who had endorsed Hillary, who backed Barack Obama, and who stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail.

On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical grade from one to seven, with the most helpful to Hillary earning ones and the most treacherous drawing sevens. The set of sevens included Sens. John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Casey, and Patrick Leahy, as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen, Baron Hill, and Rob Andrews.

Yet even seven didn’t seem strong enough to quantify the betrayal of some onetime allies.

When the Clintons sat in judgment, Claire McCaskill got the seat closest to the fire.

Many of the other names on the traitor side of the ledger were easy to remember, from Ted Kennedy to John Lewis, the civil rights icon whose defection had been so painful that Bill Clinton seemed to be in a state of denial about it.

Clinton aides exulted in schadenfreude when their enemies faltered. Years later they would joke about the fates of folks who they felt had betrayed them.

“Bill Richardson: investigated; John Edwards: disgraced by scandal; Chris Dodd: stepped down,” one said to another. “Ted Kennedy,” the aide continued, lowering his voice to a whisper for the punch line, “dead.”

Bill was particularly incensed at California representative Lois Capps. He had campaigned for Capps’s husband, Walter, who knocked out an incumbent congresswoman in 1996, delivered the eulogy the following year at Walter’s congressional memorial service—calling him “entirely too nice to be in Congress”—and then helped Lois Capps win her husband’s seat in a special election.

It would be political malpractice for the Clintons not to keep track of their friends and enemies. Politicians do that everywhere. The difference is the Clintons, because of their popularity and the positions they’ve held, retain more power to reward and punish than anyone else in modern politics. And while their aides have long and detailed memories, the sheer volume of the political figures they interact with makes a cheat sheet indispensable. “I wouldn’t, of course, call it an enemies list,” said one Clintonworld source. “I don’t want to make her sound like Nixon in a pantsuit.”

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