Sen. McCaskill didn’t want to be in same elevator with
Hillary Clinton
January 12, 2014, 09:00 pm
By Niall Stanage
The ill-feeling between Hillary
Clinton and Sen. Claire McCaskill
(D-Mo.) was at one point so intense that the Missouri Democrat told a friend
that she was scared of getting stuck alone with the former first lady.
“I really don’t want to be in an
elevator alone with her,” McCaskill told the friend, according to the
forthcoming book HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by The
Hill’s Amie Parnes and Politico’s Jonathan Allen.
The deep tension between Clinton
and McCaskill first formed after McCaskill made remarks on NBC’s “Meet the
Press” that struck raw nerves for both Hillary and President Clinton.
In 2006, McCaskill was debating
then-Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.) on the Sunday morning political show. The two were
in the midst of a campaign that McCaskill ultimately won, and the Clintons had given her
strong backing.
But when the subject of Bill
Clinton came up, McCaskill said, “He’s been a great leader but I don’t want my
daughter near him.”
According to Parnes and Allen,
McCaskill instantly regretted the remark. A friend of McCaskill’s told the
authors the unfiltered comment brought her “to the point of epic tears.”
McCaskill later phoned President
Clinton to apologize; his gracious response only deepened her distress. Later,
as Hillary Clinton began ramping up her own run for the White House, she sought
to bond with McCaskill at a private lunch in the Senate dining room, where the
two discussed the physical rigors of the campaign trail.
The outreach gave McCaskill an
appreciation for Clinton’s
human side — but it was not enough to stop her from endorsing then-Sen. Barack
Obama (D-Ill.) for the presidency.
She did so in January 2008, and
successfully proposed to the Obama campaign that two other prominent female
Democrats should come forward during the same period. They were Kathleen
Sebelius and Janet Napolitano, who were then serving as the governors of Kansas and Arizona,
respectively.
During the epic battle that
followed, McCaskill was a frequent surrogate for Obama, earning her ever more
intense enmity from Clinton’s
inner circle.
“‘Hate’ is too weak a word to
describe the feelings that Hillary’s core loyalists still have for McCaskill,”
Parnes and Allen write in the book.
McCaskill has been doing her best
to mend bridges since then, most conspicuously with a startlingly early
endorsement of Clinton
for president in 2016.
In June 2013, McCaskill released a
statement through the website of Ready for Hillary, the super-PAC working to
promote a Clinton
candidacy. In the statement, the Missouri Democrat acknowledged that she had
backed Obama early on in 2008. “I worked my heart out to elect him president,”
she wrote.
But she also stated: “Now, as I
look at 2016 and think about who is best to lead this country forward, I’m
proud to announce that I am Ready for Hillary.”
The following month, McCaskill
publicly apologized for the 2006 comments about not wanting her daughter close
to President Clinton.
“It was not necessary,” McCaskill
recounted at the 2013 event, a public interview with a Washington reporter for Buzzfeed. “It was
gratuitous and hurtful and I have apologized to both President Clinton and
Hillary Clinton for saying it.”
At the same event, McCaskill again
defended her support of Obama in 2008, even though she acknowledged it had
caused her trouble with female Democrats in particular.
“I think they understand that it
wasn’t like I endorsed a good ole boy against her,” she said, but added, “A lot
of the women were upset with me.”
McCaskill emphasized that “Having
said that, I couldn’t be more enthusiastic for her to be president now. And I
can’t wait to work as hard or harder for Hillary Clinton as I did for Barack
Obama.”
HRC will be published by Crown on
Feb. 11. It will focus on Clinton’s
political comeback in the wake of her 2008 defeat and explore the nature of her
relationship with Obama.
Claire McCaskill
Claire
McCaskill is a U.S. Senate
senator, and an honorary co-chair for the Third Way.
Note: Third Way (Past Research)
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
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