Where Has Hillary Clinton Been?
At a private fund-raiser Tuesday night at a waterfront Hamptons estate, Hillary Clinton danced alongside Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney, and joined in a singalong finale to “Hey Jude.”
“I stand between you and the apocalypse,” a confident Mrs. Clinton declared to laughs, exhibiting a flash of self-awareness and humor to a crowd that included Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein and for whom the prospect of a Donald J. Trump presidency is dire.
Mr. Trump has pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s noticeably scant schedule of campaign events this summer to suggest she has been hiding from the public. But Mrs. Clinton has been more than accessible to those who reside in some of the country’s most moneyed enclaves and are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to see her. In the last two weeks of August, Mrs. Clinton raked in roughly $50 million at 22 fund-raising events, averaging around $150,000 an hour, according to a New York Times tally.
And while Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for her failure to hold a news conference for months, she has fielded hundreds of questions from the ultrarich in places like the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.
“It’s the old adage, you go to where the money is,” said Jay S. Jacobs, a prominent New York Democrat.
Mrs. Clinton raised about $143 million in August, the campaign’s best month yet. At a single event on Tuesday in Sagaponack, N.Y., 10 people paid at least $250,000 to meet her, raising $2.5 million.
If Mr. Trump appears to be waging his campaign in rallies and network interviews, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential bid seems to amount to a series of high-dollar fund-raisers with public appearances added to the schedule when they can be fit in. Last week, for example, she diverged just once from her packed fund-raising schedule to deliver a speech.
Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, said 2.3 million people had contributed to the campaign, which has significantly increased the number of donors who give online in small increments.
The public has gotten used to seeing Mrs. Clinton’s carefully choreographed appearances and her somewhat halting speeches and TV interviews over the course of the long — and sometimes seemingly joyless — campaign, but donors this summer have glimpsed an entirely different person.
It is clear from interviews with more than a dozen attendees of Mrs. Clinton’s finance events this summer and a handful of pictures and videos of her at the closed-press gatherings that Mrs. Clinton, often described as warm and personable in small settings, whoever the audience, can be especially relaxed, candid and even joyous in this company.
Look WHO DID come over for lunch… Wow. #ImWithHer pic.twitter.com/1pX4V4mUxq— Justin Timberlake (@jtimberlake) August 23, 2016
Mrs. Clinton’s aides have gone to great lengths to project an image of her as down-to-earth and attuned to the challenges of what she likes to call “the struggling and the striving.” She began her campaign last year riding in a van to Iowa from New York and spent much of last summer hosting round-table discussions with a handful of what her campaign called “everyday Americans” in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Yet some of the closest relationships Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have are with their longstanding contributors. If she feels most at ease around millionaires, within the gilded bubble, it is in part because they are some of her most intimate friends.
“It’s like going to a wedding or a bar mitzvah — you catch up,” explained Mitchell Berger, a Democratic donor in Florida, about the familial nature of the events. Mr. Berger would know: He has been raising money for the Clintons since he held a fund-raiser in his Fort Lauderdale office for Mr. Clinton the day after he announced his candidacy in 1991.
Mr. Berger, who joined Mrs. Clinton last month at a donor event in Miami Beach, said many of the individual conversations before and after she speaks at the gatherings are centered more on grandchildren than weighty policy matters. But when she has had a give-and-take this summer about issues, Mrs. Clinton, who has promised to “reshuffle the deck” in favor of the middle class and portrayed Mr. Trump as an out-of-touch billionaire, has almost exclusively been fielding the concerns of the wealthiest Americans.
To businessmen who complain to Mrs. Clinton that President Obama has been unfriendly to their interests, she says she would approach business leaders more like Mr. Clinton did during his administration, which was widely considered amicable to the private sector.
When financiers complain about the regulations implemented by the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, Mrs. Clinton reaffirms her support for strong Wall Street regulation, but adds that she is open to listening to anyone’s ideas and at times notes that she represented the banking industry as a senator.
The wealthy contributors who host Mrs. Clinton often complain about her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and express concerns that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed her to the left on trade and other issues. Mrs. Clinton reminds them she has both opposed and supported trade deals in the past.
Graphic: Donors for Bush, Kasich and Christie Are Turning to Clinton More Than to Trump
And, as she noted at an event last month on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Mrs. Clinton points out that she worked cooperatively with Republicans when she served in the Senate and would do so as president.
“I’d say the major themes are small business, regulation and getting people back to work,” said Alan Patricof, a financier and longtime donor to Mrs. Clinton.
The campaign’s finance team is led by Dennis Cheng, previously the chief fund-raiser for the Clinton Foundation, and it employs a couple dozen staff members. Mr. Cheng, who attends the events with Mrs. Clinton, offers donors a number of contribution options that provide them and their families varying levels of access to Mrs. Clinton. John Morgan, a Florida lawyer and donor, described Mr. Cheng as “the master concierge.”
For a donation of $2,700, the children (under 16) of donors at an event last month at the Sag Harbor, N.Y., estate of the hedge fund magnate Adam Sender could ask Mrs. Clinton a question. A family photo with Mrs. Clinton cost $10,000, according to attendees.
And when Mrs. Clinton attended a dinner at the Beverly Hills home of the entertainment executive Haim Saban last month, the invitation was very clear. If attendees wanted to dine and receive a photo with Mrs. Clinton they had to pay their own way: “Write not raise” $100,000.
Another advantage to choosing private fund-raisers over town halls or other public events is that Mrs. Clinton can bask in an affectionate embrace as hosts try to limit confrontational engagements.
Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a backer of Democrats and a friend of the Clintons’, made sure attendees did not grill Mrs. Clinton at the $100,000-per-couple lamb dinner Mrs. Forester de Rothschild hosted under a tent on the lawn of her oceanfront Martha’s Vineyard mansion.
“I said, ‘Let’s make it a nice night for her and show her our love,’” Mrs. Forester de Rothschild said.