#The hit list 2016 how to#

And of those who didn’t endorse us, those who understandably didn’t endorse us because they are members or Illinois members. “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. But the data went into much more nuanced detail. 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. 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.Īs 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. Trusted because of her deep ties to the Clinton network, Elrod helped Balderston finalize the list.įor 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. 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.

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. Like Bill Clinton, Adrienne Elrod had a twinkle in her blue eyes and a broad smile that conveyed warmth instantaneously. 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. She had known Bill Clinton since at least the age of five.

#The hit list 2016 how to#

After more than a dozen years spent working for the Clintons, he knew how to keep score in a political race.Įlrod, 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. The official government titles obscured Balderston’s true value: He was an elite political operator and one of Hillary’s favorite suppliers of gossip. 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. Barack Obama’s campaign in Chicago.īalderston’s salt-and-pepper beard gave him the look of a college English professor who didn’t need to shave for his job. A handful of Hillary’s aides had already hooked up with Sen.

The war room, where her brain trust had devolved into profanity-laced shouting matches, was empty. It was late June 2008, and Hillary had dropped her bid for the presidency earlier that month. 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.

Needless to say, Team Clinton will not be happy campers once they read this – if they haven’t already: It reads like a modern day “enemies list”, but will also remind people of the Bill Clinton administration FBI files scandals, where the President and his aides abused the power of the Presidency by amassing some 700 FBI files on their political enemies. John Kerry – Very high on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 enemies list.īoth The Hill and Politico have published a lengthy excerpt today from a forthcoming book two of their writers (Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen respectively) have written about Hillary Clinton titled HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton.