Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} HRC State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen ISBN 13: 9780804136754. HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. Allen, Jonathan ; Parnes, Amie. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. The mesmerizing story of Hillary Clinton's political rebirth, based on eyewitness accounts from deep inside her inner circle Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history. The story of Hillary’s phoenixlike rise is at the heart of HRC, a riveting political biography that journeys into the heart of “Hillaryland” to discover a brilliant strategist at work. Masterfully unfolded by Politico’ s Jonathan Allen and The Hill ’s Amie Parnes from more than two hundred top-access interviews with Hillary’s intimates, colleagues, supporters, and enemies, HRC portrays a seasoned operator who negotiates political and diplomatic worlds with equal savvy. Loathed by the Obama team in the wake of the primary, Hillary worked to become the president’s greatest ally, their fates intertwined in the work of reestablishing America on the world stage. HRC puts readers in the room with Hillary during the most intense and pivotal moments of this era, as she mulls the president-elect’s offer to join the administration, pulls the strings to build a coalition for his war against Libya, and scrambles to deal with the fallout from the terrible events in Benghazi—all while keeping one eye focused on 2016. HRC offers a rare look inside the merciless Clinton political machine, as Bill Clinton handled the messy business of avenging Hillary’s primary loss while she tried to remain above the partisan fray. Exploring her friendships and alliances with Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, and the president himself, Allen and Parnes show how Hillary fundamentally transformed the State Department through the force of her celebrity and her unparalleled knowledge of how power works in Washington. Filled with deep reporting and immersive storytelling, this remarkable portrait of the most important female politician in American history is an essential inside look at the woman who may be our next president. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. JONATHAN ALLEN covers the White House and the 2016 presidential campaign for Bloomberg News. An award-winning reporter, he has also written extensively about Congress and national politics, and he appears frequently as a political analyst on national television news programs. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife, Stephanie, and their children, Asher and Emma. AMIE PARNES is the White House correspondent for The Hill newspaper in Washington, where she covers the Obama Administration. A ten- year veteran of political journalism, she traveled with the Clinton, Obama and McCain campaigns while covering the 2008 presidential race for POLITICO . She appears frequently on MSNBC and has also been featured on CNN, Fox News and other networks. New York Times Bestseller. USA Today Bestseller. "Books on contemporary political figures rarely have pinpoint timing, but this one does. [Allen and Parnes's] most persuasive accomplishment is to show, backed by impressive detail, the ways in which Clinton never really abandoned domestic politics." –Jodi Kantor, New York Times Book Review. "[ HRC ] provides useful context and intelligent analysis, and a highly readable account of her tenure at Foggy Bottom. pumped full of colorful you- are-there details." –Michiko Kakutani, New York Times. "Deeply reported. a revealing window into the le Carré-like layers of intrigue that develop when a celebrity politician who is married to another celebrity politician loses to yet another celebrity politician, and goes on to serve the politician who defeated her." – Washington Post. " HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton manages the rare feat of being both important and entertaining. It opens with a juicy chapter detailing the punishment and reward of Bill and Hillary’s political enemies and friends. But the meat of HRC is its narration of her role in tackling crises in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Libya — an amazingly tumultuous period that provides the best preview of what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like, at least for foreign policy." – New York magazine. "A character-driven psychodrama, chockablock with sweaty descriptions of its players. It's no easy feat to wring page-turning narrative juice from four years of state craft, but Allen and Parnes have relied on 200 sources. to get them the gossipy goods."— Los Angeles Times. "A thoroughly reported and well-written chronicle of Clinton’s comeback and her tenure at the State Department." – Christian Science Monitor "Full of the inside baseball that political junkies love and on which opposition researchers thrive. Great stuff to light the hot stove of the off-season." – Hugh Hewitt, The Washington Examiner. Hillary’s Hit List. The Clintons keep a favor file of saints and sinners, according to this excerpt from HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. By JONATHAN ALLEN and AMIE PARNES. January 12, 2014. Facebook Twitter Comment Print. Jonathan Allen is Politico’s White House bureau chief. Amie Parnes is the Hill ’s White House correspondent. They are authors of the forthcoming HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (Crown Publishing, Feb. 11), from which this excerpt is adapted . Inside a cramped third-floor office of Hillary Clinton’s once-bustling presidential campaign headquarters in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Va., Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod put the finishing touches on a political hit list. It was late June 2008, and Hillary had dropped her bid for the presidency earlier that month. The war room, where her brain trust had devolved into profanity-laced shouting matches, was empty. The data crunchers were gone. The political director had drifted out. A handful of Hillary’s aides had already hooked up with Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign in Chicago. Balderston’s salt-and-pepper beard gave him the look of a college English professor who didn’t need to shave for his job. Then in his early fifties, he had been with Bill and Hillary Clinton since their White House days, serving as a deputy assistant to the president and later as Hillary’s legislative director and deputy chief of staff in her New York Senate office. The official government titles obscured Balderston’s true value: He was an elite political operator and one of Hillary’s favorite suppliers of gossip. After more than a dozen years spent working for the Clintons, he knew how to keep score in a political race. Elrod, a toned 31-year-old blonde with a raspy Ozark drawl, had an even longer history with the Clintons that went back to her childhood in Siloam Springs, a town of 15,000 people in northwestern Arkansas. She had known Bill Clinton since at least the age of five. Her father, John Elrod, a prominent lawyer in Fayetteville, first befriended the future president at Arkansas Boys State, an annual civics camp for high school juniors, when they were teenagers. Like Bill Clinton, Adrienne Elrod had a twinkle in her blue eyes and a broad smile that conveyed warmth instantaneously. She had first found work in the Clinton White House after a 1996 internship there, then became a Democratic Party political operative and later held senior posts on Capitol Hill. She joined the Hillary Clinton for President outfit as a communications aide and then shifted into Balderston’s delegate-courting congressional-relations office in March. Trusted because of her deep ties to the Clinton network, Elrod helped Balderston finalize the list. For months they had meticulously updated a wall-size dry-erase board with color-coded symbols, letters and arrows to track which lawmakers were leaning toward endorsing Hillary and which were headed in Obama’s direction. For example, the letters “LO” indicated that a lawmaker was “leaning Obama,” while “BD” in blue denoted that he or she was a member of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition on Capitol Hill. 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 had backed Obama, and who had stayed on the sidelines—standard operating procedure for any high-end political organization. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. “We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,” a member of Hillary’s campaign team said, “and of those who endorsed us, who went the extra mile and who was just kind of there. And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are [Congressional Black Caucus] members or Illinois members. And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.” For Hillary, whose loss was of course not the end of her political career, the spreadsheet was a necessity of modern political warfare, an improvement on what old-school politicians called a “favor file.” It meant that when asks rolled in, she and Bill would have at their fingertips all the information needed to make a quick decision—including extenuating, mitigating and amplifying factors—so that friends could be rewarded and enemies punished. The Sevens. Hillary Clinton’s staffers made a list of Democratic members of Congress, rating them from 1 (most helpful) to 7 (most treacherous). Here are some of the 7s—those whose support of Barack Obama was particularly galling to the Clinton team. Their spreadsheet formalized the deep knowledge of those involved in building it. Like so many of the Clinton help, Balderston and Elrod were walking favor files. They remembered nearly every bit of assistance the Clintons had given and every slight made against them. Almost six years later, most Clinton aides can still rattle off the names of traitors and the favors that had been done for them, then provide details of just how each of the guilty had gone on to betray the Clintons—as if it all had happened just a few hours before. The data project ensured that the acts of the sinners and saints would never be forgotten. There was a special circle of Clinton hell reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post or written a recommendation to ice their kid’s application to an elite school. On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical grade from 1 to 7, with the most helpful to Hillary earning 1s and the most treacherous drawing 7s. The set of 7s included Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Baron Hill (D-Ind.) and Rob Andrews (D-N.J.). Yet even a 7 didn’t seem strong enough to quantify the betrayal of some onetime allies. When the Clintons sat in judgment, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) got the seat closest to the fire. Bill and Hillary had gone all out for her when she ran for Senate in 2006, as had Obama. But McCaskill seemed to forget that favor when NBC’s Tim Russert asked her whether Bill had been a great president, during a Meet the Press debate against then-Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) in October 2006. “He’s been a great leader,” McCaskill said of Bill, “but I don’t want my daughter near him.” McCaskill regretted her remark instantly; the anguish brought her “to the point of epic tears,” according to a friend. She knew the comment had sounded much more deliberate than a forgivable slip of the tongue. So did Hillary, who immediately canceled a planned fundraiser for McCaskill. A few days later, McCaskill called Bill Clinton to offer a tearful apology. He was gracious, which just made McCaskill feel worse. After winning the seat, she was terrified of running into Hillary Clinton in the Capitol. “I really don’t want to be in an elevator alone with her,” McCaskill confided to the friend. But Hillary, who was just then embarking on her presidential campaign, still wanted something from McCaskill—the Missourian’s endorsement. Women’s groups, including the pro-choice women’s fundraising network EMILY’s List, pressured McCaskill to jump aboard the Clinton bandwagon, and Hillary courted her new colleague personally, setting up a one-on-one lunch in the Senate Dining Room in early 2007. Rather than ask for McCaskill’s support directly, Hillary took a softer approach, seeking common ground on the struggles of campaigning, including the physical toll. “There’s a much more human side to Hillary,” McCaskill thought. Obama, meanwhile, was pursuing McCaskill, too, in a string of conversations on the Senate floor. Clearly, Hillary thought she had a shot at McCaskill. But for McCaskill, the choice was always whether to endorse Obama or stay on the sidelines. In January 2008 she not only became the first female senator to endorse Obama, but she also made the case to his team that her support would be amplified if Govs. Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano came out for him at roughly the same time. McCaskill offered up a small courtesy, calling Hillary’s personal aide, Huma Abedin, ahead of the endorsement to make sure it didn’t blindside Hillary. But the trifecta of women leaders giving Obama their public nod was a devastating blow. Hate is too weak a word to describe the feelings that Hillary’s core loyalists still have for McCaskill, who seemed to deliver a fresh endorsement of Obama—and a caustic jab at Hillary—every day during the long primary season. Many of the other names on the traitor side of the ledger were easy to remember, from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to Rep. John Lewis (D- Ga.), the civil rights icon whose defection had been so painful that Bill Clinton seemed to be in a state of denial about it. In private conversations, Bill tried to explain away Lewis’s motivations for switching teams mid-campaign, after Obama began ratcheting up pressure on black lawmakers to get on “the right side of history.” Lewis, because of his own place in American history and the unique loyalty test he faced with the first viable black candidate running for president, is a perfect example of why Clinton aides had to keep track of more detailed information than the simple binary of “for” and “against.” Perhaps someday Lewis’s betrayal could be forgiven. But Kennedy (another 7 on the hit list) was a different story. He had slashed Hillary most cruelly of all, delivering a pivotal endorsement speech for Obama just before the Super Tuesday primaries that cast her as yesterday’s news and Obama as the rightful heir to Camelot. And Kennedy did it in conjunction with a New York Times op-ed by his niece, Caroline Kennedy, that said much the same thing in less thundering tones. Bill Clinton had pleaded with the Massachusetts senator to hold off, but to no avail. Still, Clinton aides exulted in schadenfreude when their enemies faltered. Years later, they would joke among themselves in harsh terms about the fates of folks 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.” For several months, Balderston and Elrod had kept close tabs on an even smaller subset of targeted members of Congress, who were still undecided after Super Tuesday. Because Hillary and her team made such an intense effort to swing these particular lawmakers in the final months of the campaign, they are the first names that spring to mind when Hillary’s aides today talk about who stuck a knife in her back and twisted it. For Balderston, the betrayal of Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) was perhaps the most personal. The two men were social friends in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, about six miles from campaign headquarters. They were even in the same book club. For months Balderston had casually pressed Moran about his endorsement. Moran played coy. He praised Hillary but came up short of promising an endorsement. Then, in January 2008, Moran left a voice message for Balderston: I’m all in for Hillary, he said. Naturally, Balderston was excited. The courtship of delegates hadn’t been going well, and adding a new name to Hillary’s column was welcome news. But Balderston’s joy was short-lived. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed a couple of weeks later as he read the news that Moran was set to endorse Obama. He called the congressman. “Do not ever call me again!” Balderston said. He stopped going to the book club. (“It’s an accurate account. But we’re friends again, and I plan on making it up to him in the 2016 campaign since I’ve always been in love with Hillary,” Moran said. “I simply thought that given the opportunity, it was too important that this country elect an inspiring black president.”)Bill Clinton was particularly incensed at Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.). He had campaigned for Capps’s husband, Walter, who had 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. The Cappses’ daughter, Laura, had even worked in the Clinton White House. “How could this happen?” Bill asked, after Lois Capps came out for Obama at the end of April. “Do you know her daughter is married to Bill Burton?” one of Hillary’s aides replied. Burton was working for Obama as a high-profile campaign spokesman and would go on to join Obama’s White House staff, but this did little to assuage the former president’s frustration. Bill and Hillary were shocked at how many Democrats had abandoned them to hook up with the fresh brand of Barack Obama. The injuries and insults were endless, and each blow hurt more than the last, the cumulative effect of months and months of defections. During the spring and summer, the Clinton campaign had gone days on end without a single endorsement. It reached the point that Hillary—in a stale, sterile conference room at the Democratic National Committee headquarters—asked uncommitted “superdelegates” to give her their word, privately, that they would back her if it came to a vote at the convention, even if they weren’t willing to take the political risk of coming out for her publicly ahead of time. Unlike the regular delegates who were elected in state party primaries and caucuses, the superdelegates, a group of lawmakers, governors, and other Democratic officials, could support whichever candidate they wanted at the convention. As a last resort, Hillary pleaded with them to simply refrain from adding their names to Obama’s column. Bill would make that pitch, too, in phone calls and when he crossed paths with lawmakers. Please, just don’t endorse Obama, he cajoled. Balderston and Elrod recorded them all, good and bad, one by one, for history—and for Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s tall, balding, post-presidency aide de camp. A former University of Florida frat boy, Band had a fierce loyalty to the former president, along with a knack for accumulating wealth and status. Most important for politicians, donors and journalists alike, he became the gatekeeper to Bill Clinton until leaving in 2013 to focus full-time on the firm he had created in 2007. Few question Band’s strategic vision in setting up Bill’s post-presidency philanthropic empire, and he counts Huma Abedin, Hillary’s top personal aide, among his close friends. But some in Hillaryland took a dim view of Band’s influence on the former president. He could be so abrasive that Maggie Williams, Hillary’s former White House chief of staff and the person closest to her over the course of her Washington career, told friends at one point that she quit working at the Clinton Foundation in 2004 in large part because of Band. Band was in charge of the Clinton database, however, a role that made him the arbiter of when other politicians received help from the Clintons and when they didn’t. “It wasn’t so much punishing as rewarding, and I really think that’s an important point,” said one source familiar with Bill’s thinking. “It wasn’t so much, ‘We’re going to get you.’ It was, ‘We’re going to help our friends.’ I honestly think that’s an important subtlety in Bill Clinton, in his head. She’s not as calculated, but he is.” 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 when asked about the spreadsheet put together by Balderston and Elrod. “I don’t want to make her sound like Nixon in a pantsuit.” Another one of Hillary’s longtime advisers sought to diminish the long-term relevance of the naughty-and-nice records kept by Band. “I’m sure Doug does have some sort of fucking memo on his Blackberry like the rest of us,” the adviser said. “But the notion that it is updated, circulated, disseminated and relied upon is absurd.” In the summer of 2008, Hillary couldn’t have known whether or when she would run for president again. But she knew who was on her side and, name for name, who wasn’t. HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes – review. T he dark side of Hillary Clinton's struggle for power is inadvertently revealed on many levels by the dreary new biography, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton , by political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, which purports to tell the story of Mrs Clinton's post- First Lady years (translation: gravitas). She is a woman who should be a natural to become the first female president of the United States. Due to the consolidation of a corporate oligarchy in the US in the past few years with whose policies she is comfortably aligned, she is now being aggressively positioned for just that role. But the continual tragedy of Mrs Clinton's rise and rise is that one feels always one should be excited about her – but never really is. In HRC 's choices and execution, the book reveals, in spite of itself, why Mrs Clinton continually generates bad press in the media, alienates her natural constituencies, and depresses, rather than inspires, with her leadership. I must disclose that I know Mrs Clinton in passing, since when I was a mother of a young child in Washington, DC, my then husband, David Shipley, served as a speechwriter, first for President Clinton and then for the First Lady. I am also acquainted with a number of the figures in HRC 's "Hillaryland". I watched closely the process of speechwriting and talking-points development for the Clintons at that time, as well as observing their teams' interactions with the press. I note this not only for disclosure purposes but also to foreground what I will address below about the book's texture. This is not actually a book. A typical passage reads, regarding Hillary's "rebranding" campaign: "All at once she had enhanced the state department, America's relationship with some foreign countries, and her own brand at home. The mission required a survivor's strength, a gatherer's cultivation of political capital, a hawk's vigilance ['hawk'; checkmark, Pentagon], and the ambition of a woman who believes she should be president… Usually the people she dealt with… walked away with newfound respect for her… she proved herself the ultimate politician, a strategic power player whose hard work, command of politics and policy, and deft calculation produced more admiration than animosity." Masses of unnamed sources at the Pentagon and the state department rave thoughout the book, even comparing her entrance to an office building to that of a rock star – "Members of the state department's travelling press corps raved about her speech"; "Hillary's command of the levers of power… proved invaluable"; "She was the rare cabinet secretary with her own substantial national political following." And on and on and on. But not one unmediated peep from a detractor. In 428 pages. Do journalists write like this? Can they? Does any real editor of what is not being sold as an official biography edit prose like this, without slashing red lines through it and scrawling gigantic, ironic question marks in margins, the unsubtle subtext being: "Author: have you lost your mind?" This is the turgid, enumerative, cheerleading voice of political talking points and White House press aides. The authors had remarkable access to Mrs Clinton's inner circle. This access is very rare for any senior official in the US, in a post-Bush era of restricted press conferences and thundering reprisals of denial of access to any reporter who does not toe the press office's line for that official. The dust jacket touts, indeed, the authors' access to 200 insiders around HRC in what are correctly described as concentric circles of trust. But this access does not lead to a smidgeon of insight. Indeed, you cannot really call HRC a book. It is a 400-plus-page advertorial for Mrs Clinton's presidential campaign, masquerading as an unauthorised biography, and being published and marketed by Random House as unauthorised. But on page after numbing page, the text is weighed down by ceaseless, deadening résumé-building, drawing, disturbingly to my ear, on years of at least very strong echoes from actual HRC speeches, actual HRC communications department talking points, the actual HRC press office-issued "line" about Mrs Clinton, addressing, as talking points do, key constituencies or funders (Israel, Aipac, etc), New York state voters, or Terry McAuliffe, convenor of key Democratic donors. Or hitting focus group-tested "message" points that will be needed in the campaign: Mrs Clinton's ungirly hawkishness; her closeness to the Pentagon and popularity with generals and spies ("David Petraeus… is among those who think she's more than up for the task [of being president]); her international experience – better than a governor's! And, in one of the scariest passages for a mere voting citizen to read, her huge willingness to swing the doors of governance open to the unaccountable, unelected private sector, following the model of the Clinton Global Initiative. There are also no struggles, no griefs, no real mistakes – not Benghazi! – that are not blamed on excessive zeal or patriotism (or on underlings). Here is my concern: writing a political speech for a president or presidential candidate (or controversial First Lady) is an extremely specific and unusual stylistic and editorial task. It involves many, many drafts, structured around a set DNA of signed-off talking points (signed off by the state department, or the chief of staff, or the right senior official up the chain of command). As many as a dozen smart people pore over every sentence and clause, to make sure that nothing – nothing – can be taken out of context and used as an attack aid. In a campaign, too, opposition researchers are deployed over the biography of a candidate. Their job is to find and highlight anything that could possibly be seen as negative in the life of the subject, so it can be recontextualised – or what DC hands call "spun". The trouble with HRC is frank statistical improbability: it is causally impossible for a real journalist or real nonfiction writer independently writing an unauthorised biography to turn in a 400-page manuscript without a single sentence or clause being able to be taken out of context and used to cast a negative light on the subject. Not a single harsh quote from the many prominent Hillary detractors? Not a single unspun mistake, not a single raw regret, not a single frank criticism? Instead the reader gets torrents of unnamed sources recasting, as speechwriters and opposition researchers are highly trained to do, her every potential false move, that could be a liability on the campaign trail, from Monicagate to the Benghazi attack in Libya, in bulletproof language. I don't know how the text got to be in this condition; I do think it raises real questions. Hillary Clinton is, indeed, remarkable. Like many people, I was sceptical about her early media persona, but charmed upon meeting her when, at a party she hosted for her staffers, she held our then two-year-old daughter even after the child had begun to smear chocolatey fingers on Mrs Clinton's chic red suit. Mrs Clinton is indeed hardworking; does indeed master minutiae of policy, as HRC showcases again and again; is indeed witty and warm, and does indeed surround herself with talented women – many of them, I would add, such as lawyer Cheryl Mills and aide Huma Abedin, women of colour who, promoted very young, would be unlikely to be assessed on their vast merits in most other offices. I watched her as First Lady craft smart, visionary policies again and again, and drag crucial issues, such as women and girls' empowerment in global development, from the margins to the centre. She deserves credit for these qualities. But the deadening, propaganda-like quality of HRC showcases why she never gets credit. Again and again, I also watched Mrs Clinton get her connection to her audience and the press wrong – because there is something in her character, reflected in the tone of this Prozac of biographies, that cannot admit to a shortcoming of any kind. This skews her judgment and creates a kind of megalomania. This trait often uses gender as its medium of projection. The first time I saw her, in the first campaign for Clinton's presidency, before we had any connection to them, she addressed a roomful of the highest-powered women in Manhattan, as she solicited their funds and support. I recall the inaudible gasp of offendedness as she declared that, by electing her husband, we would all get "two for one". The women in the room all outranked Hillary: they were CEOs, think-tank presidents, university presidents. A lawyer from Arkansas with provincial hair and clothing, they felt, whom no one had heard of, was promising to help be co-president as if that would fulfil our feminist dreams for ourselves ? Every woman in that room felt that her own résumé made her better prepared than this random southern attorney to be or to advise the president, and at that time she would have been correct. It was an odd assumption, and one carried through in HRC – that Hillary believes she is somehow an archetype "for" us, that we would see her success manifesting our own. "Hey, you are not running for office," was my reaction to the idea that someone unelected and unaccountable was promising to help govern our nation, and HRC abounds with other examples. Resistance to her running healthcare – as someone not elected to office, or was it sexism? Her loss in 2012? Sexism. This weird substitution of gender equity for meritocracy has been continually offensive to voters, and often leads her to be trapped in an early- 1990s feminism that is smug and unrelatable. HRC 's first photo is a big posed portrait composed proudly only of "The women of Hillaryland in 2008"; who wants a one-gender world of any kind? Likewise, her declaration, self-aggrandising and self-pitying, after her presidential campaign folded, that her run had put "eighteen million cracks" into "that highest, hardest glass ceiling". Again: that upper-echelon, Smith-girl metaphor that would do nothing but annoy a female factory worker, a female service worker. A loss of the White House is just more sexism? Maybe – just maybe – not enough voters thought she should be president. In contrast, Obama in his campaign and in his books, used and uses race always as a vector to open up dialogue about "us" – and to pivot to what unites us as a whole, and the challenges that we face. That is an entirely different use of race/ gender in leadership and prose style, and why, I would argue, he won and she lost. Mrs Clinton is likely to be the US's next president, for exactly those banking-centric, military-centric, surveillance-centric, neocolonialist positions showcased in HRC . Because of Citizens United, these interest groups now have more clout in the upcoming election than do mere voters, and whole sections of this book seemed aimed, over the heads of mere voters or mere readers, at them. The book should be read as a cautionary tale about US democracy, as her popularity with those interest groups, and their hold over US elections, should raise questions too. HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen. The mesmerizing story of Hillary Clinton's political rebirth, based on eyewitness accounts from deep inside her inner circle Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history. The story of Hillary’s phoenixlike rise is at the heart of HRC, a riveting political biography that journeys into the heart of “Hillaryland” to discover a brilliant strategist at work. Masterfully unfolded by Politico’ s Jonathan Allen and The Hill ’s Amie Parnes from more than two hundred top-access interviews with Hillary’s intimates, colleagues, supporters, and enemies, HRC portrays a seasoned operator who negotiates political and diplomatic worlds with equal savvy. Loathed by the Obama team in the wake of the primary, Hillary worked to become the president’s greatest ally, their fates intertwined in the work of reestablishing America on the world stage. HRC puts readers in the room with Hillary during the most intense and pivotal moments of this era, as she mulls the president-elect’s offer to join the administration, pulls the strings to build a coalition for his war against Libya, and scrambles to deal with the fallout from the terrible events in Benghazi—all while keeping one eye focused on 2016. HRC offers a rare look inside the merciless Clinton political machine, as Bill Clinton handled the messy business of avenging Hillary’s primary loss while she tried to remain above the partisan fray. Exploring her friendships and alliances with Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, and the president himself, Allen and Parnes show how Hillary fundamentally transformed the State Department through the force of her celebrity and her unparalleled knowledge of how power works in Washington. Filled with deep reporting and immersive storytelling, this remarkable portrait of the most important female politician in American history is an essential inside look at the woman who may be our next president. HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen. State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. Description. Praise For HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton … New York Times Bestseller. USA Today Bestseller. "Books on contemporary political figures rarely have pinpoint timing, but this one does. [Allen and Parnes's] most persausive accomplishment is to show, backed by impressive detail, the ways in which Clinton never really abandoned domestic politics." –Jodi Kantor, New York Times Book Review. "[ HRC ] provides useful context and intelligent analysis, and a highly readable account of her tenure at Foggy Bottom. pumped full of colorful you- are-there details." –Michiko Kakutani, New York Times. "Deeply reported. a revealing window into the le Carré-like layers of intrigue that develop when a celebrity politician who is married to another celebrity politician loses to yet another celebrity politician, and goes on to serve the politician who defeated her." – Washington Post. " HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton manages the rare feat of being both important and entertaining. It opens with a juicy chapter detailing the punishment and reward of Bill and Hillary’s political enemies and friends. But the meat of HRC is its narration of her role in tackling crises in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Libya — an amazingly tumultuous period that provides the best preview of what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like, at least for foreign policy." – New York magazine. "A character-driven psychodrama, chockablock with sweaty descriptions of its players… It's no easy feat to wring page-turning narrative juice from four years of state craft, but Allen and Parnes have relied on 200 sources…to get them the gossipy goods."— Los Angeles Times. "A thoroughly reported and well-written chronicle of Clinton’s comeback and her tenure at the State Department." – Christian Science Monitor. Crown Publishing Group (NY), 9780804136754, 440pp. Publication Date: February 11, 2014. About the Author. JONATHAN ALLENcovers the White House and the 2016 presidential campaign forBloomberg News. An award-winning reporter, he has alsowritten extensively about Congress and national politics, and he appears frequently as a political analyst on national television news programs. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife, Stephanie, and their children, Asher and Emma. AMIE PARNES is the White House correspondent for"The Hill"newspaper in Washington, where she covers the Obama Administration. A ten- year veteran of political journalism, she traveled with the Clinton, Obama and McCain campaigns while covering the 2008 presidential race for"POLITICO." She appears frequently on MSNBC and has also been featured on CNN, Fox News and other networks."