“At home, Julián Castro’s been spending more time reading and watching television in Spanish, trying to get his speaking skills up to speed,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere. “On the job as Housing and Urban Development secretary, he’s been carefully working the levers in Washington, with coaching from Bill Clinton and a twin brother who’s a popular and up-and-coming congressman himself.”
And on Saturday, Dovere reports, Castro will be joining Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. He’s not the only current member of Barack Obama’s cabinet to endorse the former secretary of state, a list that includes the Thomas Perez at Labor, Anthony Foxx at Transportation, and Tom Vilsack at Agriculture. Vilsack even campaigned for Clinton earlier this month in Iowa, where he once served as governor.
But Castro’s involvement in the Clinton campaign appears to be particularly, uniquely calculated, the culmination of a years-long personal project. Just take it from Dovere:
Bill Clinton first met Castro at a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2008, in the San Antonio home of Henry Muñoz, now the DNC finance chairman. Four years later, Clinton dialed him up with advice about the convention keynote. Clinton invited him to a small lunch with Cisneros when he was back in San Antonio in February 2014, and then was on the phone again a few weeks after President Barack Obama nominated Castro for the HUD job, providing an intense 45-minute rundown on HUD policy, management and politics. Then, a few weeks after Castro got to Washington, Clinton invited him to a dinner with friends at his D.C. home, without Hillary. Back then, Castro had only met her once, for a couple minutes backstage at a conference at the University of South California in late 2013. Castro turned down the first two jobs he considered for the Obama administration. He said no to Homeland Security before anyone ever offered it, after a Democratic operative with White House ties reached out to gauge his interest in taking over for Janet Napolitano. No way, Castro and his tight circle of advisers decided. The concern wasn’t that he had no national security or law enforcement experience, but, according to people familiar with the conversations at the time, because: what if there was an attack on his watch? That would have ended the political career he’d started with a fundraiser with his twin brother among his Harvard Law classmates before they graduated. When Obama did call with an offer a few months later, Castro had already figured out what it was—Transportation secretary—and that he didn’t want it, though he and his advisers had been intrigued by the kind of travel he could do with the private jet that came with the job. You can tell Obama’s a good lawyer, Castro told people after he got off the phone, from how he felt Castro out without ever actually saying what the call was about. Castro couldn’t see what he was going to get from spending a couple of years cutting ribbons on infrastructure projects and talking up the Highway Bill. Before they hung up, though, Castro pitched Obama on Education secretary, if and when that opened. That’s the kind of thing he felt like he could do something with. Castro remembers very well what Walter Mondale told Cisneros during his 1984 running mate interview: it’s hard to go from being mayor right onto a national ticket. “He believes,” said one person who knows him, “in being on the right platform.”
An Obama Cabinet member with designs on using that position to leapfrog himself onto a presidential ticket? Castro and Clinton should be very happy together.
