The long road to Hillary Clinton’s exit

Losing while winning
For Mrs. Clinton and her campaign staff, it was a surreal period. With each win, pundits would tell her to get out. The former president and his wife’s strategists became convinced that the news media, suffering from sexism, Clinton fatigue and Obama mania, were unfairly trying to hasten the end of their campaign. One day around a conference table, a group of advisers burst out in angry defiance. They started calling out the big states she had won — California, New York — and fired each other up.

"It just became, ‘You get out! Look at these states. You get out,’ " recalled one person in the room. "It got everyone pumped up."

Mrs. Clinton recognized the odds. But she was being encouraged by emotional supporters along the rope lines and came to believe she had an obligation to stay in, aides said. At every stop, someone would say, ‘Don’t you quit!’ " and aides said she internalized the message. "The psychology of it all is very complicated," one said. "I’m sure you don’t want to slow down because once you do, you start to think about things."

Advisers shied from suggesting she quit. "You’re a persona non grata if you bring up getting out," another aide said. "It just wasn’t talked about." But the real mission remained unclear. "What’s peace with honor here?" the aide asked.

If Mrs. Clinton ever thought about giving up, she seems to have kept it to herself. "We kept winning — if you’re winning, why should she leave?" asked Mr. McAuliffe, the campaign chairman and a close family friend. She never expressed doubt in front of him. "She never did. Never, never, never."

Mr. McAuliffe served as morale officer, regularly visiting headquarters and taking dejected aides to dinner. His feisty, manic television appearances became so ubiquitous that aides developed "Terry Bingo" with 25 boxes listing his most common lines of spin — "More electable," "Can still win" — and marked the boxes as he uttered them again and again.

Mrs. Clinton’s last real chance to change the shape of the race would come in Indiana and North Carolina. She started eight points down in internal polls in Indiana, which would prove to be the first state she would win after trailing.

North Carolina was the question mark. Mr. Clinton, unwilling to give up on his native South, believed they could whittle down her double-digit deficit and insisted on spending more time there. Mr. Garin took polls and reported back in an April 25 e-mail message that "we are on track to narrow this to single digits." Mr. Penn argued it was not possible and took his own shadow poll to prove his point.

On election night, North Carolina proved far beyond her grasp, and the Indiana results were lagging from a pro-Obama county. When Mrs. Clinton’s aides looked up at the television and heard what Tim Russert was saying on MSNBC, they realized they were losing the perception battle. "She did not get the game-changer she wanted tonight," Mr. Russert said on air.

No more illusions
Deep in debt and no longer harboring even illusions of winning the nomination, Mrs. Clinton stopped attacks on Mr. Obama to avoid alienating him or the party. With only a handful of primaries left, Mr. Clinton began focusing on how to win as much of the popular vote for his wife as possible. "He wanted to at least put her in the position of being the vice president, and that was one way to do that," said an adviser.

Mrs. Clinton’s elation at each new victory was stemmed by some painful new setback. She crushed Mr. Obama in West Virginia. But as she celebrated, Mr. Obama upstaged her by appearing in Grand Rapids, Mich., the next day with a surprise endorser, former Senator John Edwards .

Mrs. Clinton noticed, however, that Elizabeth Edwards did not join her husband. Mrs. Edwards in recent months had grown to like Mrs. Clinton, an Edwards adviser said, and so the campaign reached out to see if she might back the New York senator.

Mrs. Edwards would not go that far. But the disaffection of other women over the pressure on Mrs. Clinton to step aside only stiffened her determination to press on. She received angry messages on her BlackBerry from friends like Ellen R. Malcolm, the president of Emily’s List, an abortion rights group that supports like-minded women seeking election. Ms. Malcolm said she vented in an e-mail message about how the news media were unfairly diminishing Mrs. Clinton’s victories.

Joe Andrew, a former Democratic Party chairman who had switched allegiance to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton, faced the wrath of her supporters firsthand when he drove up to the Washington hotel where party officials were meeting last weekend to resolve how to count Florida and Michigan delegates. Protesters shouting "traitor" descended upon his Chrysler minivan, denting it with punches and kicks, he said.

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The tensions fed a sense of defiance within the campaign. The Friday before Memorial Day , an aide was dispatched to the New York offices of People magazine to dispute a single word attributed to Mr. Clinton that left an impression of female frailty. The magazine quoted him saying Chelsea Clinton "bawled" after her mother’s loss in Iowa; the campaign said that Ms. Clinton had not cried and maintained that he had said "appalled." The quotation stood.

The withdrawal plan
By last week, though, anger had given way to resignation. Even before the final primaries on Tuesday, aides said Mrs. Clinton knew she could not continue. But she told them she would not concede that evening in the college gymnasium where she was to give her speech celebrating victory in South Dakota. She and her supporters, she told aides, had earned the right to their own day, and she planned to take two weeks to think through her options.

The next day, though, Democratic supporters in Congress pressed her on a conference call to give up quickly. She gave in, hung up and asked top advisers to prepare a plan to withdraw. They met with her at campaign headquarters, where every member of her inner circle recommended she pull out and endorse Mr. Obama without preconditions or negotiations — every member except Mr. Penn, who said she should hold out for concessions.

But Mrs. Clinton was, at last, ready to call it quits and switch focus to the general election, two aides recalled. "Let’s get on with it," she said.

Adam Nagourney contributed reporting. This story, The Long Road to a Clinton Exit, originally appeared in The New York Times.

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