Hillary Clinton was standing in her holding room in the Longworth House Office Building, exhausted, hoarse and relieved after her Benghazi testimony, when the phone rang. It was Bill Clinton.
He had been glued to the television watching her performance, and he had a message that would boost her spirits. You did a great job, the former president said.
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Hillary had executed a strategy that Bill helped put together for one of the biggest tests of his wife’s campaign to date. In closed-door prep sessions leading up to the high-stakes, 11-hour testimony, he had pushed his wife to do what came so hard to him: focus on your demeanor as much as any individual answer, stay calm, keep smiling, be as focused in hour 11 as hour one and, above all, don’t let them get to you, according to insiders.
Eight months into Hillary Clinton’s second presidential run, Bill Clinton is already occupying a more significant private role as a strategic adviser than he did in 2008, when his deployment was as a public surrogate — a role that effectively ended with his angry, politically damaging diatribes in a catastrophic South Carolina primary loss to Barack Obama.
This year, his biggest influence so far has been behind the scenes, a veteran voice who can carry the day during decisive moments in the race, even if he’s removed — by design — from the nitty-gritty of directing the daily operation.
As always, it’s hard to figure out exactly what Clinton is doing — he doesn’t make a habit of reading out his conversations with his wife to anyone. But people close to the Clintons tell POLITICO it’s not unusual for him to sit in on big meetings or even participate in conference calls with senior staff from time to time. He’s motivated by his belief that Hillary belongs in the Oval Office, but he’s also eager to undo any negative impact he had on the campaign last time around. And unlike 2008 — when the campaign’s top staff were loyalists to his wife — his new role is enhanced by strong personal ties with campaign chairman John Podesta, his former chief of staff at the White House, and campaign manager Robby Mook, with whom he developed a personal bond when Mook ran the campaign of his good friend, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
“His mood is that it’s still hers to lose,” said hedge fund billionaire Marc Lasry, a major Clinton donor who has traveled extensively with the former president. “If she continues to do what she’s doing, which is talking about the issues, she’ll be the next president.”

While Bill Clinton has no clearly defined role on the campaign and is not involved on a daily basis, the reality is that no major campaign decision occurs without his involvement. Over the summer, while vacationing with his wife in the Hamptons, Bill Clinton became “obsessed with the email thing,” one source close to the Clintons said. “He was really in the weeds about how classification works. He was intense.” For weeks, he pushed the position to Podesta that Hillary Clinton should not apologize or give an inch by dumping anything out in public, inside sources said.

He also assumed a role in some of the prep sessions for the two biggest moments of the campaign so far — the first Democratic debate and Clinton’s testimony in front of the House Benghazi Committee. There, he has served both as a sounding board for campaign officials and helped tighten Clinton’s answers to questions, donning his «explainer-in-chief» cap to help to simplify policy proposals. Hillary Clinton often performs best when her husband is around and offering supportive advice, according to her confidants. She was thrilled, for instance, when the former president accompanied her to the debate in Las Vegas.

Sensitive to the complicated emotions involved in ending a life in politics, Bill Clinton was firm in his belief that the campaign should not weigh in as Joe Biden made his decision about whether to run — even as some top outside advisers began pushing for the campaign to do more to block his entry as the waiting game dragged on. “His view was that people should step back and appreciate what this means to Joe Biden, that was his attitude throughout,” said an associate close to Bill Clinton. “He really felt very strongly that this was something that was particular to him and his family. He spoke to the vice president after he made a statement.”

Bill Clinton also remains involved in editing his wife’s major speeches — a role the Clintons have performed for each other for decades. And he has stepped up his fundraising efforts too, just as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders began to close the money gap with Clinton in last quarter’s cash dash. Last month, Bill Clinton headlined more than five fundraisers for his wife’s campaign, and he will continue to bring money into the campaign’s coffers over the coming months, an aide said.

For the first six months of the year, sources said, Bill Clinton was “highly concerned” about the Jeb Bush juggernaut on the other side of the aisle. But that fear has faded recently, as Bush has failed to deliver a breakout debate performance and his poll numbers have tanked. Overall, friends said, Clinton remains confident and upbeat about his wife’s shot at the White House, which may explain the ease he seems to be having with his role.

In the weeks leading up to the campaign’s launch last April, outside advisers said the campaign was overthinking how to manage Bill Clinton’s role. Eager not to repeat the mistakes of 2008 — when top operatives attempted to limit his exposure to the campaign out of fear the former president would overshadow his wife — the campaign quickly established tighter coordination between Clinton’s staff in Harlem and his wife’s campaign in Brooklyn. But campaign officials also rolled Hillary Clinton out alone for weeks on a soft launch “listening tour» and made it clear Bill Clinton wouldn’t be hitting the campaign trail until further down the road. His first official appearance at his wife’s side — at her Roosevelt Island kickoff rally — was understated. He was seen but not heard, standing next to their daughter, Chelsea, smiling and waving to the crowd.

But Bill Clinton’s role has fallen more easily into place with less planning than many expected — even during the testing months where the email controversy threatened to sideline the Democratic front-runner and some feared the ex-president would show off in public his more volatile side, which can emerge when his wife is under attack.

Nonetheless, it remains difficult for Clinton allies to clearly define his role — Bill Clinton looms too large, and it begins to look like he is overwhelming his wife’s campaign; Bill Clinton appears marginalized, and the subtext is the campaign views him as a distraction as it did eight years ago, when he was siloed off and channeled his influence primarily through chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn. In short, the campaign’s challenge is to maintain the Goldilocks effect when it comes to explaining Bill Clinton — showing him off in a role that is not too big, but not too small.

“It’s no secret President Clinton is committed to doing everything he can to see his wife elected president,” said Tina Flournoy, his chief of staff. “We talk to the campaign regularly and work with them to figure out where he can be most helpful while balancing his other work.”

“He could always be of counsel, of course,” added Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who served as a close adviser to Clinton in the White House. “But, this isn’t his full-time job. He offers his opinion and provides his perspective when asked.”

Indeed, many people close to Bill Clinton paint a picture of a man happy to help when called upon to do so, but not knocking on the door at Brooklyn headquarters eager to get more involved; available for moral support and big-picture thinking, but also keenly aware of his role as an outside adviser who is not living and breathing the campaign on a day-to-day basis.

“He doesn’t plan his life around her campaign,” said Joe Lockhart, a longtime friend who served as a senior adviser to Clinton in the White House. “He’ll throw his two cents in. If he’s around, he’ll jump on a call. It’s not part of the schedule, but it’s something he enjoys thinking about and helping when he can.»

For instance, Bill Clinton does not have a regular campaign conference call on his schedule. And he does not speak daily with anyone on the campaign, as he did in 2008, when he would confer constantly with Penn to dissect polls and rehash strategy. This time around, Bill Clinton is invited to be more involved, but at the same time “he doesn’t spend every day on the phone, going through polls,” said someone close to Clinton. There are full days, insiders said, when Clinton makes no calls at all, and spends hours at a time on his own correspondence and reading.

While his first and only official campaign appearance in Iowa earlier this month was considered a success, there are no more public campaign events on his schedule through the end of the year, and his schedule is packed with unrelated travel — last week, for instance, he traveled to Israel to commemorate the anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Later this month, he will travel to Ohio to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, in addition to more travel abroad for the Clinton Foundation.

“When things get tense, Hillary and Bill Clinton rely on each other,” said one longtime confidante. “When they’re not so tense, you don’t have to as much.”

Eight months in, the Clintons have also finally shared a stage together. When Bill Clinton spoke in front of the Hy-Vee Center in Des Moines last month to warm up the crowd ahead of the critical Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, the former president joked he would keep it brief because “I’ve never been the warm-up act for Katy Perry before.” But more remarkable to longtime Clinton world veterans watching the Big Dog’s official debut on the campaign trail was that he was scheduled as the warm-up act for his own wife. Eight years ago, one Democratic insider said, “they would have put him 600 miles away from her,» fearful his natural political skills would cast an unflattering light on hers.

Bill Clinton appeared to revel in the limelight in Iowa, where he stayed on script in introducing his wife as someone who has had the same friends since grade school, a sign of character that is the “definition of a trustworthy, reliable, good person, unless they had a toy theft gang going.” After the dinner, the Clintons were the last two people to leave the arena, shaking hands and posing for pictures on the rope line, Bill Clinton, as usual, more eager to engage with reporters lobbing questions at him than was his wife. But even there he wasn’t hanging back behind her. At one point he told a fan pressing for another selfie, «I need to go find my wife.»

Insiders also credit his more seamless entry into the campaign to greater physical proximity between the candidate and her spouse — in 2008, Hillary Clinton was living in her mansion near Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., while Bill Clinton inhabited the couple’s Chappaqua farmhouse. This time around, sharing the same home base in New York, they simply see each other more — he’ll jump on a call if he’s in the room when she happens to be on one. And those close to the Clintons said Hillary herself is more open this time around to listening to her husband’s advice without worrying he will overstep.

«The campaign has already had some ups and downs, and it’s been tested a little bit,» said a source close to the Clintons. «The campaign has gone to hell for a few weeks, and did he step in, to take over? He did not.”