Surviving The Free Fall

Privately, she has told confidants that she is "disappointed" in Solis Doyle and regrets her decision to put her closest aide in the top campaign job. "I put her in a job she was incapable of performing," one Clinton intimate quotes her as saying recently. "I'm out there killing myself . . . thinking a process exists, and no one said, 'The emperor has no clothes.' "

* * *

The Obama campaign was stunned by the swift and loud outcry from the Clinton camp when Solis Doyle's appointment was announced last month. Loyalists read the hiring as a pointed message from Obama that he had no intention of considering Clinton as his running mate.

"There was no message -- absolutely not," Obama senior strategist David Axelrod says. He said he never asked Solis Doyle, whom he's known for 20 years, where she stood with Clinton, and he says he was not aware of issues associated with her management style.

"Honestly, we were not privy to the history of the campaign's relationships," he says.

The Obama operation hired Solis Doyle, he explains, because it needed someone who had been through the process. "She is my friend -- I make no bones about it," he says. "But we're not a [charitable organization]. We're trying to win a election here. She brought a useful skill set."

Asked whether he had given consideration to Solis Doyle's reputation as a controversial manager, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says: "There's a culture to an organization that influences people's behavior, and our culture has been collegial and respectful. . . . I heard theirs was not as collegial. . . . In the past few weeks, she has been a complete team player."

Solis Doyle also offered the prospect of a seamless transition because of her longtime relationships with many of those in Obama's inner circle. Fresh from Northwestern University in 1988, Solis Doyle went to work at Chicago's City Hall for Treasurer Miriam Santos and then joined Richard M. Daley's mayoral campaign. Her brother Danny is a well-connected alderman from the city's largely Hispanic lower West Side. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel -- another Chicagoan -- is a friend.

She has leased an apartment virtually next door to the headquarters, filled it with rented furniture and stocked it from Target. Her husband, Jim Doyle, a lawyer, is working from there, and their two young children are settled into day camps. Her mother and siblings are close by. "It's good to be back with old friends, it's good to be home. It's very good to be with my family," Solis Doyle says.

Her job with Obama is a significant one. Reporting directly to campaign manager Plouffe, she is hiring more than 30 people to support the vice presidential nominee and his or her family. "Unless someone has run for president before, this is an experience that is completely indescribable," she says. "The idea of going from zero to 100 overnight -- it is incumbent upon me to staff that person with people who have done this before. And I have done it before." And that staff's foremost loyalty is to the nominee, not his running mate. The fierce loyalty that Solis Doyle once enforced for Hillary Clinton she will now insist upon for Barack Obama.

"The day she conceded I cried," Solis Doyle says, "but I heard her. She said we are moving on, and we cannot waste time with the what-ifs." She says restoring her reputation was not paramount in her decision, but notes, "Certainly, no one would want their final act in anything to be what happened to me."

* * *