The long road to Hillary Clinton’s exit

A new landscape
This was no longer an environment the Clintons were accustomed to. Black voters had always been the most loyal part of Mr. Clinton’s base, and the accusations of racism wounded him deeply. The Clintons had little experience with caucuses in the 1990s and failed even to compete in most states holding them this year, allowing Mr. Obama to rack up a mass of uncontested delegates. Rather than sealing the nomination for Mrs. Clinton, the Feb. 5 coast-to-coast voting led into an 11-contest, monthlong losing streak.

Mrs. Clinton dumped her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since 1992, and the two have not spoken since. Maggie Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff in the 1990s, was brought in to take over. Mrs. Clinton finally agreed to attack Mr. Obama in a more sustained way and scratched out victories in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 to keep her bid alive.

The day of those votes, Mr. Clinton called Representative Jason Altmire, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania, the next state to hold a primary. "You could hear it in his voice how happy he was," Mr. Altmire recalled. "He said, ‘Now we’re coming to Pennsylvania and I know you might be leaning one way or another. I think you should keep your powder dry and hopefully we can win your support.’ "

The campaign shifted to a contest for the superdelegates, or party elders and elected officials like Mr. Altmire who can vote at the convention. Mrs. Clinton was too far behind to catch up to Mr. Obama among delegates selected by primaries and caucuses, so she hoped to persuade the superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in the fall. Only then did she agree to start calling superdelegates personally, something Mr. Obama had been doing for months.

Behind the scenes, Howard Dean , chairman of the Democratic National Committee , was pushing other superdelegates to announce their choices as quickly as possible in hopes of settling the nomination without added delay. Some Clinton aides viewed Mr. Dean as sympathetic to Mr. Obama and suspected his motives.

Tensions boiled over at a meeting in April between Mr. Dean and fund-raisers for the two campaigns at the Upper East Side apartment of the prominent Clinton supporters Steven Rattner and Maureen White. What was supposed to be a moment of unity quickly deteriorated when one of Mrs. Clinton’s national finance chairmen, Hassan Nemazee, confronted Mr. Dean about the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries.

"I said to him, ‘It seems to me that you as the chair need to exert some leadership and produce some resolution to this problem,’ " Mr. Nemazee recalled. The two argued over Mr. Dean’s reply that Mr. Nemazee was trying to force him to choose sides, Mr. Nemazee and party officials said.

The campaign swung in unpredictable directions during the seven-week campaign in Pennsylvania. Radical sermons by Mr. Obama’s minister generated days of cable television coverage, but Mrs. Clinton’s false account of an under-fire trip to Bosnia stepped on her momentum. Mr. Penn pushed to go after Mr. Obama more directly for his association with the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. , but Howard Wolfson , the communications director, Mandy Grunwald, the media chief, and others resisted.

The rancor within the campaign escalated a few days later when Mrs. Clinton learned that Mr. Penn had met with Colombian officials as part of a contract to promote a free trade pact that the candidate opposed. Her aides fumed. One adviser, Tina Flournoy, walked out of campaign headquarters in anger. Mr. Penn’s many enemies seized on the chance to get him demoted. Colleagues rejoiced. "People felt like the sun came out a little more," said one. Geoff Garin, another pollster, and Mr. Wolfson took over the direction of the campaign, although Mr. Penn remained part of the operation.

While Mr. Penn had pushed to go on offense against Mr. Obama, seeing that as the only way to change the dynamics of the race, Mr. Garin steered in the other direction. "There were lots of people who spent a lot of time thinking about what to say about Barack Obama and not enough people waking up every morning thinking about how to make the case for Hillary Clinton," he said in an interview.

As the race wore on, Mr. Clinton played a growing role in shaping strategy. Flying to events or at the local campaign headquarters, he would pore over maps of Pennsylvania with Governor Rendell, pushing for more time and resources in the Philadelphia suburbs. He crisscrossed the state, hitting small towns and pressing superdelegates.

At one point, the former president visited Mr. Altmire’s district, giving what the congressman called "the hard sell."

While riding with Mr. Clinton in his car to an event, Mr. Altmire said, he asked how Mr. Obama’s learning curve at the White House would stack up with that of the former president, who was 46 when he took office. "I made a lot of mistakes when I started out," Mr. Clinton replied, according to Mr. Altmire. "And I did some things in office that were politically naïve, and I would have a fear that Senator Obama would have the same experience."

On election night, Mr. Clinton grew playfully competitive with his wife over who had done more events or had had more impact, Mr. Rendell said. Mrs. Clinton was superstitious and rarely watched election night coverage, but in the hotel suite, Mr. Rendell showed her husband county-by-county returns.

"The president wanted to know exactly what the returns were in the places he had been and Hillary hadn’t been," Mr. Rendell said. "He kept showing Hillary, and she would laugh."

Election night brought home the varied complex personal and political dynamics at play. Mr. Penn, once the most influential voice in the Clinton universe, showed up at campaign headquarters outside Washington to watch the returns but virtually no one would talk with him and he left early.

Mrs. Clinton handily beat Mr. Obama in Pennsylvania on April 22, but she could not translate that into gains with the critical superdelegates. The next day, she met with Mr. Altmire. She had won his district by some 31 percentage points and assumed that he would now commit his convention vote as a superdelegate to her. But he still refused.

"I think that was the frustration they were experiencing in that campaign," Mr. Altmire said. "They kept winning state after state and they expected others to start turning their way and it just didn’t happen."

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