Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (30 page)

It all came to a head in late March, when Barack had his first major face-off with the other candidates at a health care forum in Las Vegas. With the cost of health care rising along with the number of uninsured Americans, health care reform loomed as a major issue for Democratic candidates. Disappointingly, we would fail the first test on this complex and contentious subject.

Our policy team had produced for Obama a dense, thirty-five-page brief filled with the arcana of health policy. What it lacked was a lot of thought about the message we wanted to spread, the quotable lines we wanted to deliver, and the real-life dynamics that were likely to play out on that stage in Vegas. Moreover, while it contained general principles of health reform, it offered no plan.

Hillary was confident and very coherent, drawing on the expertise she had gained leading her husband’s ultimately unsuccessful health care campaign. Edwards, running from the left, played to the audience, with a passionate case for reform in human terms. Barack was the odd man out.

Pressed by a questioner from the audience on why there was no detailed plan for universal health coverage on his Web site, Obama awkwardly copped a plea. “Keep in mind that we, uh, our campaign now is, I think, a little over eight weeks old,” he said, completely underwhelming the audience.

This was new and depressing terrain for Obama, who was accustomed to excelling. It had taken extraordinary self-confidence to enter the race for president just four years after leaving the Illinois State Senate. Now he was shaken. His unwavering confidence had taken a direct hit.

“Hillary looked like a president up there, and I didn’t,” he said glumly, when we spoke after the forum. “I am just not a very good candidate right now. But give me some time. I am going to figure this out. I will become a good candidate.”

In all the years I had known Barack, I had never seen him like this. Innately resilient, he was unquestionably knocked for a loop now, stirring doubts in himself about his preparedness and justifiable concerns about the campaign’s future. While he plowed on, doing everything that was necessary on the road, the anxieties and doubts created by this first face-off with his opponents lingered for months, and the day-to-day demands of the campaign became a grind.

Barack grew weary of reciting the same lines, and occasionally would riff off script—at times brilliantly and at others a little disjointedly. In town hall settings, he preferred to give each question its full due, responding with lengthy, ponderous answers, often saving the most relevant and useful points for last—a bad habit that would resurface time and again. He was frustrated by the endless game of “Gotcha” played by reporters, who also become bored with repetitive speeches and are always looking to stir the pot. He was tired of the travel, missed his family, and constantly lamented the lack of time he had to read and think.

At one point, he grew understandably weary of my constant critiques, and let me know in no uncertain terms. “You know, maybe you should run for president and get up there and answer these questions, David,” he said. “This shit is not as easy as it looks!”

In late April we flew to Orangeburg, South Carolina, for the campaign’s first debate.

Obama would debate twenty-seven times during the course of the 2008 campaign. While he never fully embraced the prefabricated nature of these affairs, over time he did gain confidence and boosted his proficiency. Still, there wasn’t much time for improvement between Las Vegas and now. We had a lengthy prep session in Washington, but there were too many people involved, often offering conflicting advice. For his part, Obama was far more interested in exploring arcane points of fact than memorizing the snappy one-liners that win these events. I didn’t come to Orangeburg with high expectations, and I wouldn’t be disappointed.

Though we weren’t going to stay the night, the debate’s organizers provided holding rooms for us at a local motel. Michelle’s was on one floor while Barack’s was on another. When he emerged from his room, Barack’s clothes reeked of an unmistakable odor. He was failing Michelle’s no-smoking mandate. “She’s either in denial or knows and is mercifully cutting him some slack,” I told Gibbs.

The debate would be televised on MSNBC and heavily promoted by NBC, which released a poll the previous evening showing the gap closing nationally between Hillary and Barack. True to my Jewish, glass-half-empty outlook, I could see only the cloud around the silver lining: Barack would now be under even greater scrutiny, pressed by his opponents and probed by the pundits to see if he was worthy of his newly lofty standing in the polls.

When the lights went on, Barack did little to disarm the skeptics. He gave answers without great conviction, as he struggled to adjust to the sixty-second format. He seemed passive, perhaps even a bit intimidated by the occasion or the company. When the moderator, Brian Williams, painting a hypothetical crisis—simultaneous terrorist attacks on major American cities—inquired about the first steps Barack would take, Obama neglected to include that he would pursue the perpetrators. Only after Hillary and others jumped in to make that point did he come back to amend his answer.

After the debate, Obama’s terrorism gaffe touched off a fracas between Penn and me in the “spin room,” the location of a surreal ritual whereby operatives for each campaign, mobbed by the news media, attempt to put their preferred slant on an event the reporters have just witnessed for themselves. Still, despite our best efforts, there was no hiding the truth. Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the
Times
recounted the awkward omission from the terrorism answer, and accurately observed that Obama “seemed subdued throughout.”

Objectively, a lot also was still going right for Obama. What was especially encouraging was the openness to the idea of an Obama candidacy in two early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, in which there were few minority voters. None of us was naïve enough to assume that race, which had defined so much of American history, would not be a barrier for some. There were millions of white voters, particularly in the South, who had shifted to the Republican Party over the years almost entirely over issues of race, and many older, working-class and rural white Democrats for whom it would be a factor. Yet our research in Iowa and New Hampshire suggested that there were plenty of white voters who were open to Obama, and responded well to his message and his story.

We also saw among black voters in South Carolina an impulse I had seen among minority voters before. They were drawn to the idea of a candidate from their community, but skeptical that white voters would be. So they were holding back, waiting to see if Obama’s candidacy was real. The research suggested that if we won Iowa, it would unlock his support among black voters nationwide, even with the popular Clintons on the other side.

Yet Barack wasn’t impervious to all the negative chatter. Although he denied reading political punditry, he somehow was always up-to-date on even the most elite musings. (“You know, I think Andrew Sullivan has a point,” a conversation would begin.) And he would hear it from donors, who, sitting in New York or LA, were moved more by a national poll in the
Times
than happy talk from Iowa. Throughout the campaign, Barack would remain remarkably loyal to his team, even when the world was calling for our heads. But he wasn’t immune to doubt.

In July, the senior management of the campaign was summoned to a meeting with Barack and Michelle at Valerie Jarrett’s Hyde Park apartment. No one saw this as good news. Valerie wasn’t deeply involved in the day-to-day workings of the campaign, but protective of her friend, she had an unerring instinct for leaning in when she perceived that things weren’t going as planned. Barack told Plouffe and me that he wanted to review “where we were,” and consider what changes might be necessary.

Anticipating a challenging conversation, a number of us agreed to meet early at my office to prepare before driving down to Hyde Park together. I worked at home until it was time to leave for the pre-meeting at my office. Then, when I tried to edge my car out of the double parking space I shared with my wife, my car suddenly gunned backward, slamming into the front of her car and into a thick beam. Startled, I quickly shifted the car into drive, and it gunned forward, hitting Susan’s car again, before vaulting over a barrier. I didn’t want to be late for this critical meeting, so I kept on driving, calling Susan on the way to tell her I “might have nicked” her car. When she came down to see for herself, the parking lot manager was there. “Do you have any idea who might have done this to your car?” he asked. “Yes,” Susan said, as she eyed the mangled mess. “I think it was my husband.” The manager shook his head in pity.

It turned out that I had cracked an axle on my own car when I jumped the barrier and had put myself and several of the Obama campaign brain trust at risk by driving us to Hyde Park and back. Even without realizing our lives were in danger, though, we found the drive to Valerie’s in my wounded Pontiac filled with tension—and the subsequent gathering warranted all of it.

Along with the Obamas, Valerie, and the campaign hierarchy, there was a surprise guest—Chris Edley, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, a veteran of the Clinton administration, and an old friend of Barack’s. The meeting began with the candidate’s review of where he saw the campaign. Obama spoke from copious notes he had written, as was his custom, on a yellow legal pad, raising thoughtful questions about, among other things, how we were utilizing his time. Having just finished his thirteenth swing in Iowa, he wondered whether a continued focus there was strategically right at a time when he was slipping in national polls. He also repeated his familiar refrain that he wanted more time to devote to substantive policy work. Each of us got a chance to respond and report. The fireworks began when Edley, whom few of us knew, took his turn to speak, or more accurately, to lecture. Edley felt we were putting too much of the onus on Barack and were not responsive to his needs.

“Get over yourselves!” he screamed. “He wants time to think through policy, don’t fight him, give him that time. He is the candidate. You work for him.”

He mined this vein for considerable time, systematically antagonizing everyone in the room except, perhaps, the Obamas, who listened quietly, and Valerie, who told me later that she thought Edley had been “brilliant.” There were some modest changes as a result of the discussion, but Edley came and went, and the evening faded into memory as a kind of weird catharsis in the midst of our long march.

The funny thing was that this session happened just as I had begun to sense that things were coming together. Maybe it was because Michelle and the girls had joined him on the July 4 swing, but Barack seemed happier and more energetic than he had in some time. His speeches were tighter and rife with the powerful message of change—not just from Bush, but from Washington—that distinguished him from the pack. While skepticism remained high, even some of the reporters were at least getting the point.
Politico
’s notoriously cynical Ben Smith noted the contrast between Obama’s appeal and the caustic, hyperpartisan tone in Washington, where, Smith wrote, “Democratic denunciations of the war and the president are growing in volume.”

“In some of his speeches, he didn’t even mention President Bush,” Smith reported after one of Obama’s July 4 stops. “He told small-town Iowa Democrats of the huge crowds that had greeted him from Atlanta to Iowa City, and mulled what was drawing the masses to his campaign: Not, he said, his own person, but a desire for change. ‘What they’re also saying when . . . they come out to these rallies is, ‘We don’t want to be against something—we want to be for something,’ he said repeatedly in Iowa. This is a central gamble of Obama’s campaign for president. The loudest voices in the Democratic Party—from Chairman Howard Dean to former Senator John Edwards and Senator Hillary Clinton—have been sounding steady notes of confrontation with the White House. Clinton and Edwards argue that they will win the partisan wars. Obama argues that the country, and even partisans, are tired of partisan warfare.”

Exactly right. That was our gamble. The conventional wisdom held that Iowa Democrats were the most partisan of partisans and would reward the candidate who could best take it to the Republicans. Our bet was that there were plenty of Iowans—even Iowa Democrats—who were fed up with the trench warfare in Washington, and wanted a leader who could unite Americans. And the message was beginning to punch through.

Plouffe and Hildebrand had been steadily building the Iowa campaign since February. To run it, they persuaded Hildy’s business partner, Paul Tewes, an experienced Iowa hand, to saddle up one more time. They hired Mitch Stewart, a master organizer from neighboring South Dakota, to lead a field operation of young recruits who began arriving in the spring. Legend held that it took Iowans to organize Iowa, but the special kids who were drawn to the state for Obama
became
Iowans. They embedded themselves in their assigned communities and their energy and idealism were infectious. One young man from Colorado became so close to the folks in the town he organized that they would ask him to stay and run for City Council.

Throughout the dog days of summer, visiting with the uplifting kids who were toiling for us in Iowa was the surest tonic for the cynical, dismissive drumbeat of the Washington political class. We believed they would give us a critical edge in a contest that, in the end, would rely on persuading individual Iowans to come out on a cold winter’s night and, in front of their neighbors, stand up for Obama. In that process, there was no substitute for building relationships—and while the troops could prepare the groundwork, it often took the candidate himself to close the deal—sometimes going to great lengths to do so.

Once, in between flights on our campaign charter, Gibbs asked Obama to call an Iowa high school student to ask for her endorsement. In Iowa, young people who come of voting age before the general election are allowed to participate in the caucuses, even if they’re just seventeen years old. Our Iowa organizers thought the backing of this influential student leader could unleash a raft of caucus attendees from among her classmates. Gibbs got her on the line.