'A long relay race': Hillary Clinton on passing the torch to Kamala Harris - Interview

Hillary Clinton hears the sound of glass shattering, eight years later.

She could be forgiven for having bittersweet feelings about that. As the first woman nominated by a major party for president, she won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College in the 2016 election that introduced Donald Trump to American politics.

But she says she feels "exhilaration" about the prospect that Kamala Harris, the second woman nominated for the most powerful job in the world, will achieve what she could not: defeat Trump and win the White House.

"She is a singular figure and will be our first woman president," Clinton declared in an interview about her book, "Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty," being published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster. In what she called "a long relay race" of women in American politics, "I am thrilled that Kamala is carrying the torch forward."

When Harris was elected vice president in 2020, she reached out to Clinton for advice. Over the past several years, the two women developed an increasingly close relationship in conversations about hiring staff, governing during the COVID-19 pandemic, making foreign trips, being scrutinized. Harris was "chronically underestimated," Clinton said.

"It just evolved into regular check-ins and visits whenever we could fit it in," she told USA TODAY. Her phone would ring and a Harris aide would ask, "'Are you available for the vice president to call?' Or I could reach out to her and say, 'I've got something that I'd like to pass on.'"

In July, when President Joe Biden announced he was stepping back from seeking reelection, Hillary Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, were among the first senior Democrats to endorse her, releasing a written statement within 90 minutes or so. Harris called each of the Clintons that afternoon to enlist their help.

Biden called them, too.

The vice president has "endless respect" for Clinton, said Brian Fallon, who is Harris' communications director and was Clinton's national press secretary in 2016. He is one of several former Hillary Clinton aides who are now on Harris' team. "The secretary can relate to this situation like no one else can, and the vice president greatly values her friendship and counsel."

Before last week's debate between Harris and Trump, Clinton passed on advice to Harris through Karen Dunn, a lawyer who ran debate prep for both women during their campaigns. Push back hard, Clinton advised, and try to bait him. Clinton has had more first-hand experience than anyone else, having been the Democrat on stage in three of the six presidential debates Trump had participated in before then. (Biden had done two of those debates in 2020 and another one, disastrously, in June.)

"She did an incredibly good job triggering him and letting people see him for who he is," Clinton said with satisfaction in a phone interview two days later. Harris was widely credited with discombobulating Trump during the 105-minute encounter on ABC that may be the only presidential debate of this campaign.

That is, with baiting him.

The changing politics for pioneers

To be sure, Harris isn't always following Clinton's script.

Clinton leaned into the historic nature of her campaign as a woman. Harris has not, though her election would be even more groundbreaking. If elected, she would be the first woman, the first Black woman, and the first Asian American to serve as president.

Their contrasting calculations may reflect in part the difference in their ages and life experiences. Clinton, now 76, was born in the 1940s; Harris, now 59, in the 1960s ?.so in the first year and the last year of the mid-century Baby Boom generation.

Part of it also reflects the changing politics for pioneers, a trajectory that Hillary Clinton, more than any other figure in American politics, has tracked through a career as first lady, New York senator, secretary of state and presidential nominee.

In an interview in 2014 about her memoir "Hard Choices," Clinton said she believed the sexism she faced during her 2008 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination ? the one Barack Obama won ? had eased and would matter less for a female candidate in 2016.

But after the bruising general election in 2016, which ended her political career and devastated Democrats, she said she had misjudged how much things had really changed.

"I think part of the reason was because of who the candidate was on the other side," she said in a USA TODAY interview in 2017 about "What Happened," a post-campaign book dissecting her loss. "But I also think I may have underestimated the staying power of sexism."

Now, she says, Harris faces a different political landscape.

"From my perspective, she has benefited from the opportunity to see not just me, but the other women she ran against when she was in the primary in 2020," Clinton said. "There's now greater range for a woman to be a presidential candidate."

In her races, some voters struggled to imagine a woman as president, as commander-in-chief, "and I certainly experienced that," she said. "But the more women get into running for president, the more they're seen as vice president, the more they're seen saluting the Marines at Marine One or coming down the steps of Air Force Two, the more that opens the aperture so people can say, 'Oh, I get it.'"

Some political scientists agree.

"A lot of it is about Clinton normalizing that women run for national office," said Shana Kushner Gadarian, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She noted that even when Biden stepped back from the campaign in July, the leading alternative to Harris briefly bandied about was Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, another woman. "We got to skip all that conversation of, like, are we ready for a woman candidate?"

'Something will happen'

Brace for trouble, Clinton cautions Harris.

"Be ready for what might happen," she says. She believes, and other analysts agree, that a major factor in her loss was the unexpected announcement by then-FBI director James Comey in the final days of the 2016 campaign that the agency was reopening an investigation into her emails. "I have no doubt something will happen because it always does, and you have to be ready to take it on in a much more aggressive way."

The wounds from her loss aren't quite healed. "Since 2016, people have asked me, 'Will you ever be able to move on?'" she writes in the opening of her 324-page book. "Move on? I wish."

She says she had been "tempted" to run for president again, in 2020, a race she didn't make. "How do you give up on a dream, especially one so big, one that you came so close to reaching?"

But she seems more at ease in this interview than in previous ones, and the tone in the book is a bit more personal. She reveals, for instance, that her mother suspected that her own father, Hillary's maternal grandfather, had been a closeted gay man. Her mother's parents had essentially abandoned her mother as a child.

"It kind of explained a lot," Clinton said. Her mother, she added, had been "far ahead of her time in her acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community."

Even the book's cover photo, taken by Annie Leibovitz, shows Clinton with a more casual, less constructed mien ? a simple dark green blouse, little make-up, the only jewelry visible the peek of a chain necklace. She has a wary half-smile on her face.

The final version of the book was finished and on its way to be printed when Biden stepped back from the nomination and Harris stepped forward ? a development too late to be reflected in its pages.

Clinton did record a new epilogue for the audio version.

"Some people have asked how I feel about the prospect of another woman poised to achieve the breakthrough that I didn't," she said. "If I'm being honest, in the years after 2016 I also wondered how I would feel if another woman ever took the torch that I had carried so far and ran on with it. Would some little voice deep down inside whisper, 'That should have been me?'

"Now I know the answer ..." she said. "When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hillary Clinton on passing the torch to Kamala Harris: Interview