The Return of the Clintons

Late last June, when Bill Clinton welcomed Larry Hogan to Little Rock, the ex-president realized he had an opportunity to step carefully back into the political fray. The pair was scheduled for a ticketed chat about bipartisanship on Clinton’s home turf just as Hogan, the former Maryland governor, was rumored to be thinking about a third-party presidential run via the No Labels group, which he was also co-chairing. Before they walked onstage, Clinton delicately made his view clear to the Republican, even though Hogan hadn’t asked: Any independent campaign of the kind No Labels was talking about could only benefit Donald Trump.

He wasn’t done yet. Two months later, Clinton heard from Joe Manchin, who was vacationing near the Clintons’ spot in East Hampton and wanted advice about his political future. Clinton had heard real concern from fellow Democrats that the West Virginian would head a No Labels ticket himself, and he’d previously discussed the politically tricky senator with the Biden White House when administration officials asked for his help winning Manchin over on legislation. Manchin was being far more open about the attractiveness of an independent run than Hogan was. So when they met in person, Clinton decided to get considerably more forceful than their placid surroundings might have suggested. This time, he ditched the diplomatic niceties and told the senator sharply that he was risking putting Trump back in the White House.

By late November, Bill found himself closer to the center of presidential politics than he’d been since Hillary ran in 2016. He and Joe Biden hadn’t talked in person in a few months, but he had been making no secret to friends that he thought Biden wasn’t getting the credit he deserved for his accomplishments. Tucked into a quiet corner of Air Force One on the way to Georgia for Rosalynn Carter’s memorial service, the 42nd president repeated the sentiment to the 46th, chewing over the unique challenges of the presidency as almost no one else could. Flying south from Washington, they discussed Biden’s obstacles in a political environment warped by Trump — how hard it had gotten to focus public attention on what Biden was doing and how complicated it had become to turn around the national feeling about the economy.

Hillary wasn’t part of that conversation, but she was on the plane, too — along with Michelle Obama and Jill Biden — and she had plenty of her own thoughts as Biden entered 2024 running behind her old foe in the polls. In recent months, the former secretary of state has begun convening groups of friends and political allies for private dinners to talk through the coming election season and to drum up badly needed support for Democratic candidates, starting with the president. The sessions are occasionally at the Clintons’ primary home in Chappaqua, but more often at their house in Washington, not far from the residence of Vice-President Kamala Harris, with whom she has quietly been keeping in touch.

Four years ago, the Clintons were as far from political influence as they’d been in ages. In a post–Me Too world, Bill was often treated as persona non grata in public and Hillary was still thought of primarily as the person who lost to Trump. But a few weeks ago, they drew a flurry of media attention with the announcement that Biden would host a major fundraiser in the city with Bill and Barack Obama in late March. (As the inescapable flood of Trump fundraising emails put it: “Obama is back! Bill Clinton is back too.”) The event is just the most public part of what’s been a longer-running behind-the-scenes effort. Neither Clinton considers politics their primary work these days — they’re staying busy with travel, writing projects, and foundation work — but according to a dozen people who’ve spoken with them directly in recent weeks, both have been quietly and steadily increasing their engagement with Washington as the election season heats up.

It’s been eight years since a Clinton was on a ballot, the longest period since Bill’s first failed congressional campaign in 1974, and the 2020 race was arguably the first one in decades in which neither of them was particularly powerful. Now they, and the Democratic Party, are trying to work out what, exactly, their most useful role could now be. No longer a distinct power center or the same draw for donors or audiences as the Obamas, they are nonetheless far from retirees. Instead, they are a unique but amorphous source of advice and influence given their extensive experience and large networks.

Ask anyone around them, and it’s clear that this is largely because of their resilient wish to be involved, no matter how official D.C. feels about them. Bill, 77, remains insatiable in his appetite for political news, and he texts and calls friends to chat about politics for hours on end. “He wants precinct-level data,” said one close associate. “He can’t not do this.” A longtime friend of Hillary’s who also has a place in Biden world shrugged: “They’re junkies! They’re looking at polls; they’re all in.” And of course they are, he continued. “They care! They are who they are. They care about this stuff.” It is also, obviously, personal for them. Hillary has been closely watching the efforts to beat and weaken the man who defeated her since 2016, and Bill has been ruminating unrelentingly on Trump’s rise and his takeover of the GOP, too. (Bill, in particular, still talks often about then–FBI director James Comey’s late incursion into the 2016 campaign as a contributor to Hillary’s loss.)

To some degree, all this has been obvious all along to the most wired-in of Democrats. Though both Clintons’ relations with Biden have shifted over time, they’ve been sympathetic to his political struggles and the challenges of confronting a Trump-dominated Republican Party. Both have expressed to friends that they found the lines about Biden’s age in special counsel Robert Hur’s report to be inappropriate. Neither Clinton can consider themself among the administration’s top advisers or influencers, but Bill has twice visited Biden in the White House. First, he stopped by in May 2022, checking in with the politically embattled president about a looming midterm season that many thought would be brutal for Biden, as Clinton’s first was in 1994. The following February, he visited again to mark the 30th anniversary of signing the Family and Medical Leave Act. When the pair have spoken privately, they’ve often mused about how they consider themselves unique in the modern Democratic Party — able to relate to working-class voters more than other prominent pols.

Hillary, meanwhile, has deepened her connection to Harris. At first, they linked up when the vice-president was preparing for her early foreign trips in 2021. In the years since, the talks between the first woman to hold the vice-presidency and the woman who’s come closest to being president have become less formal, more friendly, and more regular. They speak over the phone, and their chats have since expanded to political conversations on the sidelines of official events and advice for Harris about specific appearances, such as when Hillary gave her tips for speaking at the New York Times’s Dealbook conference last year. She has also visited Harris at her home.

If their latest role is unsurprising given their senior macher statuses within the party, it also reflects yet another evolution in the decadeslong relationships between both Clintons and the current president. Biden was not always a major character during the Clinton administration, but they intersected at a handful of important moments thanks to Biden’s role atop the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he confirmed Bill’s Supreme Court nominations and wrote the crime bill. The relationship warmed in the Bush years as a handful of ex-Clinton aides joined Biden’s office and Hillary joined him in the Senate; even when it became clear that Biden and Hillary would run against each other for president in 2008, Bill went out of his way to offer Biden private advice, warning him that as a senator he might be tempted to use “Beltway Speak” rather than connecting with voters about their lives. After Obama won, Vice-President Biden helped mend fences with the Clintons, recruiting her as secretary of state and then holding regular lunches with her. Though they clashed over policy, like on Afghanistan, Biden kept up sporadic but friendly contact with her husband on economic matters. Things cooled significantly in 2016 when Hillary ran with Obama’s tacit blessing, leaving Biden feeling unfairly passed over. Still, as the election progressed, he and Bill occasionally fumed together about how her campaign was being run and about Trump.

Today, a handful of very tight Clinton allies have roles high up in the Biden administration and political operations, including well-known associates like John Podesta and Neera Tanden. Dennis Cheng, a longtime Clinton-world fundraiser, is a deputy political director in the White House, while Minyon Moore, a former top aide to both Bill and Hillary, is the chair of the Democratic convention. And two of Biden’s absolute closest aides, Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti, were also senior Clinton staffers and allies for years. It all adds up to a feeling among those close to the Clintons that they are plugged further into Biden’s political thinking than they often were to Obama’s. In recent weeks, campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez and deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty (who worked for Clinton’s 2016 campaign) briefed Hillary’s political advisors on the Biden gameplan for the coming months.

Still, neither Clinton appears eager to grab a starring role in the campaign this year, presumably in part because they know they are far from universally popular even among Democrats, and because Republicans remain eager to keep them in the center of their conspiracy theories about liberal cabals pulling Biden’s strings and planning to replace him as the Democratic nominee. Yet this hasn’t stopped Hillary in particular from wading into some geopolitical matters that are complex for Biden, or those in his White House, to address. When she told MSNBC last month that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “should go; he is not a trustworthy leader,” it was widely read in foreign-policy circles as a strong signal from someone close to the administration, given her former job as the top diplomat and her famously friendly relationship with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor.

Bill, however, has been significantly more wary about giving interviews to journalists, and his political appearances have been much more tightly managed since 2016 as his party has reevaluated his affair with Monica Lewinsky and accusations from other women. He was mostly absent during the elections of 2018 and 2020, when his convention speaking time was limited to less than five minutes — a conspicuous change for the famous rambler. In the 2022 midterms, however, he appeared with candidates who asked for his help in New York, New Jersey, Nevada, and Texas.

Now, in the estimation of some liberals, it’s only natural for Biden to call on Bill’s advice considering the political landscape. “The environment is a lot more Clintonesque than Obama era,” said one very senior D.C. Democrat who dismisses fears that ’90s-style triangulation is a recipe for disaster. Biden has recently been adopting messaging reminiscent of Clinton’s own reelection case: Last week, he answered Seth Meyers’s question about his age by saying “It’s about how old your ideas are,” arguing that Trump’s GOP would turn back the clock on matters like abortion. In 1996, Clinton said that his objection to Bob Dole wasn’t that he was “too old to be president; it’s the age of his ideas I question.”

The even clearer parallel to 2024 is 1992: Both elections feature a two-term vice-president turned president with approval numbers dragged down by unfavorable feelings about the economy and a stronger-than-expected third-party threat. With Ross Perot in mind, it’s Bill who has been most vocal with friends about undermining No Labels, the group run by Nancy Jacobson, who used to raise money for Clinton and who is married to Mark Penn, Hillary’s one-time chief strategist.

Of course, none of this activity exactly comes as a surprise to those who’ve known them longest. When I called James Carville, the operative who rose to fame on Clinton’s first presidential campaign, to talk about the reengagement, he paused for a second before answering, as if to wonder why on earth I was even asking. There was never a question that the Clintons would get involved again. An election is coming. “It’d be stunning,” he said, “if it weren’t true.”