Hillary Clinton's consigliere speaks.

Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, is laboring to explain why she doesn't like the word "family" used to describe Hillaryland, the circle of longtime loyalists who dominate the candidate's political empire. Because it sounds too precious? Too insular? Too Mafiaesque? This last suggestion sends Solis Doyle into a full-bodied fit of laughter. Her head flies back, her dark hair sweeps her shoulders, her lean frame twists in the chair pulled up to the small, oval conference table in her blue-carpeted corner office of the campaign's suburban Virginia headquarters. "Yeah! It does!" she shrieks delightedly in a girlish voice that makes her seem closer to age 16 than 42. I make a joke about "The Sopranos," and Solis Doyle heads off on a tangent about that week's episode of the now defunct HBO hit."Did you see it?" she demands of campaign policy chief Neera Tanden, seated beside her. "No," says Tanden. "Can I tell you? He killed Christopher!" "He did?" "Yes! Oh my God, it was such a good episode!" "He killed Christopher?" Back and forth they go, like gossipy sorority sisters, until Solis Doyle crows, "And it's so great because everybody thought, going into the last season, that Christopher was going to be the one to sell him out!" There's something priceless about talking mob hits and snitches (even fictional ones) with Solis Doyle, who has served as Hillary's right-hand woman for the past 16 years. If the infamously close-knit, tight-lipped Clinton campaign is the Washington political equivalent of La Cosa Nostra, Patti, as she's known throughout Hillaryland, is the family's consigliere, its chief enforcer, and its most devoted member. She is also one of its least known. Like her boss, Patti places a high priority on privacy, discretion, and loyalty. Press-averse to the point of hostility, she scorns the Fourth Estate as an irritating distraction and shares her boss's distaste for aides and advisers who chat up reporters in the service of their own reputations. "I hate doing media," she asserts. "I just want to get my work done." This is making life somewhat complicated for Team Hillary these days. Eager to warm up the candidate's image, the campaign would love for the spotlight to fall a little more on its charming, attractive chief, who happens to be the first Latina ever to run a national campaign. Senior Hillary adviser Harold Ickes has been after Solis Doyle for months to play nice with reporters. And, if communications guru Howard Wolfson had his way, she would be on the cover of every magazine from GQ to Cat Fancy. But, even as the campaign pushes her toward center stage, Solis Doyle is pushing back. She will sit for the occasional interview. She'll enthuse about the fabulousness of her candidate and team. She'll even talk a bit about her family life. (Two young kids, not enough hours in the day ...) But, as for insights into what she does, how the campaign functions, or how her boss leads, forget it. Her core ethos remains one of reticence and protectiveness, and she shares the penchant for secrecy that has made Hillary so frustrating for the press. A confessed control freak, she loathes process stories and has made clear there will be no chatter, period, about the inner workings of this campaign or her role in it. Hillary's closest aide may have resigned herself to having her life picked apart for the good of the cause. But that doesn't mean she has to like it. Like Hillary, Solis Doyle hails from the Chicago area. The sixth and youngest child of Mexican immigrants, she was raised to be goal-oriented, organized, and hard-working. Her father came to the United States illegally in the 1940s, only to return home and apply for legal reentry in the early '50s. Her parents both worked--he in a furniture factory, she in a laundry--to send the kids to parochial school. Patti earned a scholarship to Northwestern University and, upon graduating, went to work in Chicago mayor Richard Daley's office. Her first political job was with Daley's subsequent mayoral campaign. Afterward, she followed campaign manager David Wilhelm to Little Rock, where he was heading up Bill Clinton's presidential team. When Wilhelm heard his new boss's wife needed an assistant, he volunteered Solis Doyle. "When I first landed in Arkansas and was told I had been assigned to work for his wife, I could not have been more disappointed," she laughs. "I was like, 'I have to work for the wife?'" Over the next 16 years, Solis Doyle went from being Hillary's reluctant campaign aide, to being her White House scheduler, to top-managing her Senate campaign in New York, to directing her PACs, to overseeing her White House run. Along the way, the two women developed a mutually dependent relationship based as much on personal affection as shared political aims. ("I would do just anything for her," Solis Doyle stresses.) Since 1992, her only foray outside Hillaryland was a six-month stint in 2005 at the Glover Park Group, a political consulting firm. But early on, says firm co-founder Michael Feldman, Hillary made it clear that her longtime aide would not be staying. Soon after Solis Doyle arrived, recalls Feldman, GPG threw a party to celebrate the opening of its Manhattan offices. Clinton showed up, and, as she made the rounds, Feldman stopped her to say, "Listen, I really can't thank you enough for giving us Patti." At which point, he chuckles, "she grabbed my arm--and I remember it being a very firm grip--she looked at me, and she said, 'You mean borrowing.'" A few months later, Patti was back in the Hillary fold, directing fund-raising and laying the groundwork for the presidential run over which she now presides. Just to clarify, Solis Doyle is not the strategic mastermind of Hillary's campaign. (That would be Mark Penn.) She is not its most seasoned adviser. (That would be Harold Ickes.) She is not its p.r. genius (Howard Wolfson), its image genius (Mandy Grunwald), its policy genius (Neera Tanden), its nuts-and- bolts organizing genius (deputy campaign manager Mike Henry), or its overall political genius (Bill Clinton, of course). In the most prosaic terms, Patti's role is to make sure the campaign's myriad geniuses are working together. "I manage the team," she states simply. Far more elementally, her job is to channel the voice--and the will--of Hillary. She is the person with a direct link to the candidate's brain, the one who can predict with uncanny accuracy how Hillary will respond to any given situation. "Patti knows how to read Hillary's moods. She knows how to assess them--when to push certain issues, when to hold back. Some of the rest of us," Ickes notes wryly, "don't necessarily understand such nuances." Among Solis Doyle's trickier duties is refereeing the squabbles that staffers say erupt over everything from when to roll out a policy to how strong the language in a speech should be. ("Brothers and sisters fight and fight hard, " she shrugs, bowing to the family analogy.) Within the core group on the seven- thirty strategy call each morning--Solis Doyle, Tanden, Ickes, Grunwald, Wolfson, Penn, and Henry--the talents are large, the egos larger, and the debates voluble. (While everyone on this campaign is brilliant, say insiders, not everyone is easy to love.) Penn and Grunwald in particular are known for their rough edges, their deep-seated belief in their own rightness, and their tendency to steamroll or simply ignore anyone they consider intellectually beneath them. "Let's put it this way," says a Democratic operative who has worked with them in the past. "Other people's feelings often are not a consideration." And when the two tie up, it's like Clash of the Titans. "Often there are moments where you can forget there's anyone else in the room," says the operative. Lesser mortals are advised to stand clear lest they become collateral damage. Into this mix toss Ickes--whose preferred mode of communication is profane invective--and even run-of-the-mill meetings can be dizzying. "Everyone is kind of talking at once," says Kim Molstre, the current campaign scheduler for both Hillary and Bill. "Mark and Mandy have this shtick that they do, going back and forth." It's not that anybody's really fighting, Molstre assures me. "It's just their way of expressing themselves." And it is Solis Doyle's job, say staff, to keep all this self-expression from getting out of hand. For instance? Don't ask. While Team Hillary will discuss campaign business in generalities, requests for detail prompt wandering gazes, backpedaling, professions of bad memory, or flat refusals. Quizzed about Solis Doyle's oft-cited leadership savvy, senior adviser Capricia Marshall, a Hillary loyalist and Patti pal since the 1992 race, laughs. "I can think of a lot of good examples," she admits. "But I don't want to repeat any of them." Solis Doyle is clearly proud of her first-among-equals status in this crowd, a position cemented during Hillary's first Senate race, when, late in the game, she was dispatched to New York to impose order on the family. By then, many of the ideological and strategic tensions had been worked through, including early antipathy between veterans of Bill Clinton's 1992 political team (like Ickes and Grunwald) and those (like Penn) who replaced them after the 1994 Republican Revolution. Even so, a surfeit of power centers with competing priorities continued to cause problems. At one point early in Hillary's "listening tour," campaign aide Neel Lattimore, a former press secretary for the then-first lady, recalls phoning Solis Doyle in despair over his struggle to serve multiple "masters." "I was sitting on Connecticut Avenue crying. I hadn't slept in two days," recalls Lattimore. "And I told her, 'I can't get it done!'" Solis Doyle's response: "Are you finished? All right, Neel, pull yourself together and get back to work." By the time Patti quietly left Washington to join the war room in midAugust, the campaign was having trouble figuring out what events it was doing from one day to the next. It fell to the obsessively process- oriented Patti to make the dysfunctional operation function. Along the way, she had to educate some of the big dogs about who was in charge: "I remember somebody asked me once, because I said something on a call, 'OK, is that you speaking or is that Hillary speaking?'" she recalls, a gleam in her eye. "And I'm like, 'Does it make a difference?'" No one familiar with the battles of 2000 would ask such a question today, say survivors. Those who have tangled with Solis Doyle can testify to her skills as Hillary's chosen enforcer, especially regarding the family omerta. ("Man, she will come at you!" Lattimore quips, recounting a verbal thrashing he suffered years ago when she thought he had leaked news of Hillary's fiftieth birthday party.) So, even as her colleagues wax rhapsodic about their beloved chief, they do so only in the vaguest terms lest they accidentally reveal too much. It is a tricky line for the campaign to toe: Look at our history-making campaign chief! (Just don't look too closely.) See what a great gal Hillary has put in charge! (Just don't ask what she does all day.) And, to some degree, it is a self-defeating strategy. Team Hillary is openly miffed about whisperings that Solis Doyle isn't up to the job or that she is simply the pretty figurehead of an operation being run by some more controversial entity like Mark Penn (whose pro-corporate centrism enrages the base) or Bill Clinton. But Solis Doyle's refusal to allow any glimpse of her in action ensures that the whispering will continue. Of course, as far as Patti is concerned, this is a small price to pay for retaining a measure of control amid the chaos of a presidential campaign. Like any good consigliere, she understands the value of operating sub rosa. "I've always worked behind the scenes," she tells me. "I'm very effective behind the scenes." Somewhere, Tony Soprano is smiling.