Photo illustration by Jesse Lenz; Hillary Clinton: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images. Black Hole: M. Weiss/NASA. Nebula: M. Livio/ESA/NASA. Dark Matter, Vortex and Supernova: NASA. Cluster: Karel Teuwen. Quasar: ESA/NASA. Comet: ESA
Hillary Clinton was nodding solemnly to the mother of a 9/11 victim when Huma Abedin, standing across the room, called out, “Let’s load!” to the staff members and bodyguards. The former secretary of state had yet to pick up her award from the Voices of September 11th, but her entourage was already preparing to shuttle her off to the next event, a benefit for God’s Love We Deliver, which was co-hosted by the designer Michael Kors and where she would sit next to the Vogue editor and former Obama bundler Anna Wintour. It was just another hectic fall evening in Manhattan for Clinton, and she was keeping herself busy as usual in the “is she or isn’t she” interim. There were paid speeches to give (at $200,000 a pop) to the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors, filled with the wisdom gleaned from being the nation’s top diplomat (“leadership is a team sport” was one favorite; “you can’t win if you don’t show up” was another). There were awards to receive, like the one from Chatham House, a think tank in London, to which Clinton traveled on a commercial 757 like the one she used to command while working at the State Department. (“That was fun!” she said of the flight.) And there were Beverly Hills galas to attend, which soon turned into schmooze sessions, like the ones with Harvey Weinstein and Richard Plepler and Jeffrey Katzenberg, yet another major Obama bundler.
Through it all, the former first lady/secretary of state/likely Democratic candidate for president seemed gracious and untroubled, and yet it was hard not to feel an enjoy-it-while-it-lasts sort of sympathy for Clinton. She had, after all, spent four years at the State Department displaying great political and diplomatic and managerial skill, and in that process shed much of the baggage generally associated with the Clintons. Yet that very organizational meshugas already threatened, once again, to entangle her. Before Clinton had even left the State Department, last February, Ready for Hillary, a political-action committee supported by some of her old pals, had emerged. Emily’s List, another PAC, introduced its Madam President initiative. While working on Barack Obama’s re-election, Jim Messina, the savvy operative, had already courted Bill Clinton. There would even be Correct the Record, an initiative designed to defend Clinton against media attacks. Conservative groups had begun calling her still-presumptive campaign the Queen’s Machine. They had a point.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/magazine/hillary-clinton.html?hp&_r=0
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