Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (34 page)

I liked and respected Kerry, my admiration extending back to the 1970s, when, as a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, he became one of its most powerful and eloquent critics. Yet in his concern over the poll, I saw the anxious indecision that probably had cost him the presidency four years earlier. It stood in stark contrast to the inspiring courage he would show years later, as Obama’s secretary of state.

Days later, on New Year’s Eve, the final
Des Moines Register
poll was released. The
Register
, which had an excellent record for accuracy, kept its polls under wraps with the same ferocity that Plouffe hoarded fund-raising numbers. It routinely released them to the world only hours before their physical publication, keeping the entire political world on edge. No leaks. No tips. The
Register
poll earlier in the month had given us a huge psychological boost, but this one would set the tone for the caucuses, just three days away.

I can’t recall where I was when I got the news. I just remember hearing the elation on the other end of the line when the call came from headquarters with the numbers: Obama 32, Clinton 25, Edwards 24. Barack had lengthened his lead from three to seven points. The stories would all be about his momentum, which would only serve to inflate its effect. “I wonder how long it will be before we hear from Kerry,” I asked Gibbs. It wasn’t long. On New Year’s Day, Kerry called Margolis and Marvin Nicholson, his old body man, and offered to fly in to barnstorm for Obama.

Kerry’s offer of support prompted an impromptu caucus of our own. I joined Plouffe, Margolis, Gibbs, Marvin, Tewes, Stewart, and John Norris, a longtime Iowa hand who had been a huge force for Kerry, under the bleachers at a rally in a Des Moines high school. As we huddled in the darkness, Tewes and Stewart were vehemently opposed, arguing that a ritual laying on of hands by an establishment figure such as Kerry was not the way to close the Iowa race. Margolis and Norris weren’t as sure, seeing value in Kerry’s blessing. I was a little miffed at Kerry’s fickleness, which colored my view. Plouffe, as usual, kept his counsel, hearing out all the arguments before voting no.

After the event, we took it to Barack, who asked the Iowa team for their thoughts. “I’ll call Kerry and tell him we appreciate the offer, but the timing isn’t right,” he said. It was the right political call, but there seemed to be an unstated, but obvious additional message there for Kerry: the ship had already sailed.

I had been through hundreds of Election Days, and the pattern was familiar. You wake up before dawn, with great anxiety and little more to do. Before long, you’re calling around, desperate for any tidbit on turnout or weather, or some scuttlebutt that almost certainly winds up meaning nothing. Yet caucuses are different because they take place in the evening, at the same, specified hour, and end quickly; there is no real window for scuttlebutt. Instead, I filled my time reviewing the speeches for that night and the following day in New Hampshire, talking with Larry about upcoming ad strategy and doing interviews with reporters. My son Ethan, whom I had barely seen, was at his post, sitting next to Susan in the windowless cavern that was headquarters, from where thousands of reminder-to-caucus calls would be made to our supporters throughout the day.

When the verdict came in, it came quickly. The first signs were overflowing crowds at caucus sites, far eclipsing anything seen before. In all, more than 239,000 Iowans would caucus for Democrats, a 90 percent increase over the turnout in 2004.

Shortly after 7:00 p.m., the networks released entrance polls, as opposed to the exit polls taken during elections. The survey of Iowans on their way into the caucuses projected Obama in first place, with 38 percent of the overall caucus vote. Stunningly, Edwards apparently had edged Hillary for second, a disastrous outcome that suddenly put her candidacy in jeopardy. With the New Hampshire primary just five days away, we had seized all the momentum, and it would be hard for her to recover in time to reverse it. Suddenly you couldn’t help but feel this heady notion that if we won in the Granite State, the nomination fight might effectively be over after just two contests.

The numbers revealed just how effective our strategy to mobilize the young had been. For the first time, there were as many caucus attendees under the age of thirty as over the age of sixty-five. We had built a broad coalition, carrying Democrats, who made up three-quarters of the caucus-goers, while also running up big margins among the Republican and independent voters who had decided to caucus on our side. We carried every income group, from rich to poor, uniting Iowans behind common dreams rather than dividing them against one another. And in an ominous note for Hillary, we carried women as well as men.

By the time the entrance polls popped, I was already doing TV interviews from the auditorium in downtown Des Moines where Obama would greet his supporters. As the magnitude of the results sank in, I regretted having that duty when I could have been sharing this sublime, surreal moment with the inspiring miracle makers back at the office. I wanted to celebrate it with Plouffe and the gang of apostates who had walked through fire together, enduring the smug contempt of Washington insiders and the ill-timed jabs of doubting friends. And I wanted to share it with Ethan and Susan, who would insist on staying at headquarters until the last calls were made.

I had hooked up with Barack six years earlier, at a time when my idealism was being challenged by the cynical, dispiriting exercise that politics had become. I didn’t exempt myself from those harsh judgments, but my partnership with Barack was founded on a shared belief that we could do it a different and better way. Now I saw this big, hopeful, unifying campaign as the triumph of politics as it should be.

Before Barack spoke that night, I frantically searched for Ethan and Susan. When I saw her across the room, our eyes locked and filled with tears. She ran toward me and we shared a big, tight embrace. I wiped her face and smiled. “I’m so damned proud of you,” she said. Then, together, we drank in the moment, amid the euphoria of the delirious crowd.

“They said this day would never come,” Barack told them, his voice bearing the strain from a year of nonstop campaigning. “They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.

“But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days. You have done what America can do in this New Year, 2008.

“In lines that stretched around schools and churches, in small towns and in big cities, you came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.”

J
UST
HOURS
AFTER
the
I
owa triumph, we were airlifted out of
D
es
M
oines and headed to
N
ew
H
ampshire, with a huge media contingent in tow and all the hubris of a conquering army on its way to dictate the terms of surrender.

We had been tied with Hillary in the last poll Benenson conducted in New Hampshire, just before the New Year. Yet now, five days before the primary, we had all the momentum, and political history suggested that the race would open up in our favor, leaving Hillary with little time to mount a comeback. Edwards was running a distant third in New Hampshire, and nothing had happened in Iowa to alter his standing. Biden and Dodd were out of the race on caucus night. Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich were finished, and their decisions to drop out were only a matter of time. It was now a two-person race, and we were poised to deliver the knockout punch.

We arrived in Portsmouth before dawn and rolled up soon after to an old Pan Am airline hangar filled with several hundred supporters. Barack, tired and hoarse from the frenzied last days of the Iowa campaign, delivered a version of his post-JJ stump speech, with the added hint that New Hampshire could strike the decisive blow of the election season.

“Last night the American people began down the road to change, and four days from now, New Hampshire, you have the chance to change America,” he told them.

We followed up with a second event in the state capital, Concord, where an enthusiastic crowd of more than a thousand stood in a quarter-mile line just to jam into a high school gymnasium to hear Obama speak. It all looked good. So why did I feel so bad?

“There’s something about this that doesn’t feel right,” I told Plouffe. “We’re getting rock-star treatment, but it doesn’t feel right. We’re not connecting the way we did in Iowa.”

I quickly became concerned that, despite all our momentum, we were taking way too much for granted in the Granite State. Maybe it was that Barack had spent relatively few days in New Hampshire compared with the eighty-nine we devoted to Iowa, where people really came to know him. We had scuffled and struggled and earned our win there. Now it felt as if we were doing victory laps. Where, days earlier, we felt and acted like the scrappy challenger, now we were the fat and sassy front-runners.

Wounded, perhaps mortally, Hillary was no longer regarded as the “inevitable” nominee. Now that yoke was ours, and
she
became the scrappy, sympathetic challenger. This sudden role reversal played out in unfortunate fashion during a debate on the Saturday before the primary. When one of the moderators wondered aloud whether Hillary simply wasn’t as likable as Obama, she responded with a mocking pout: “Well, that hurts my feelings.” Barack then inexplicably interposed himself in her glowing moment: “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” he barked, without even glancing at her.

The faint praise came off as a rare ungracious note. Barack seemed, for an instant, dismissive and, well . . . unlikable. Hillary, on the other hand, parried an uncomfortable question about her perceived shortcomings with grace, good humor, and even charm.

When we raised the matter with Barack afterward, he was surprised and frustrated that a debate in which he had generally performed well would be remembered for what he regarded as a throwaway line. “Seriously? That’s the story?” he asked in disbelief. Yet that “throwaway line” was replayed often in the following days, and it emerged as a potential red flag for some voters, particularly women, who were getting their first good look at Obama.

There was another moment in the debate that was less noted but far more revealing. In an answer in which she touted the change she had fought for over the course of her career, Hillary added, “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”

With one ad-libbed comment, Hillary had identified the main fault line of her campaign. Her message was clear: she understood the limitations posed by a bitterly divided and corrupted Washington, where political survival and self-interest were paramount. You can’t change that game, she implied; to get things done, you had to know how to play it.

As soon as she said it, I recognized the opportunity that Hillary had handed us. She was too much a part of the system in Washington ever to change it—and without changing the politics of Washington, real solutions to big problems would never come.

Several public polls had us surging, and our internal numbers the weekend before the primary had us up by eleven points. The evening after the debate, that lead had slipped to eight, with some erosion among women, but we didn’t think much of it. An eight-point lead was still substantial, and certainly the Clintons weren’t behaving as if they felt positive about her chances.

While we were barnstorming the state on the Monday before the primary, we heard that Hillary had “broken down” in answer to a question at a campaign event in Portsmouth. In New Hampshire, the news instantly recalled the 1972 Democratic presidential race, when putative front-runner Edmund Muskie teared up in response to nasty inferences about him and his wife in the Manchester
Union Leader
. The incident was widely believed to have ended Muskie’s presidential bid, and now pundits and pols, some of whom weren’t even alive at that time, were wondering if Hillary’s show of emotion might similarly spell the end for her.

Yet this wasn’t 1972, and we didn’t have to wait for the evening news to see the footage. Within minutes of the incident, it was posted online, enabling us to view it as we rode in the RV. What we saw was a little different from how it had been first portrayed to us. Sitting in a diner, with undecided voters around her, Hillary became emotional when a woman asked her how she endured the sacrifices and pressures involved in running for president while keeping herself so put together.

“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” she said, pausing for a moment, before delving deeper into her feelings. “And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backward.” Hillary’s voice caught, and her eyes moistened. “You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political, it’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it . . .”

Barack and I had the same immediate reaction. Far from looking vulnerable, Hillary had come across to us as disarmingly honest, open, and
human
. Now, as she struggled for her political life, she seemed to connect more genuinely with the struggles of others. We both thought it was a poignant and powerful moment. “I don’t like this,” I told him. “I actually think this could really help her. She looked more appealing here than she has in this entire race.”

Campaigns are always about momentum. Whoever has it last tends to win. We had it coming into New Hampshire, but my gut—which, in my anxiety, was growing more substantial all the time—was telling me that, in the final seventy-two hours, Hillary had recaptured the momentum. Despite our leads in public polling, she was moving up and we were moving down. Yet even though all of us, including Barack, sensed the shifting dynamics, we were still counting on our post-Iowa bounce to sustain us.

My sister did nothing to quell my fears. Joan, who had been shuttling up from Massachusetts for months to volunteer in New Hampshire, was working precincts over the final weekend in some of the white, working-class areas in Manchester. “It’s okay, not great,” she reported. “A lot of folks are taking our literature, politely thanking us, and shutting the door without committing. That’s never a good sign.”

On Election Night, as Barack and Michelle awaited the victory celebration alone in their hotel suite, the first returns came in to the nervous folks in our boiler room, the primary night nerve center, a few floors below. While the first wave of exit polls had suggested a comfortable win, the last run, as the polls closed, showed the numbers tightening. I had been scheduled to do press at the site of our Election Night event. While my sister was driving me there, I picked up the late exit polls. “Better take me back to the hotel,” I told her. I returned and headed straight to the boiler room.

When the first, actual returns came in, Matt Rodriguez, our state director, looked stricken. “This can’t be right,” he said as he reviewed the early data. The numbers from the white, working-class precincts of Manchester were considerably better for Clinton than we had projected. Joan’s instinct had been right. “If this holds up, we’re not going to win,” Rodriguez said glumly. “We’re underperforming pretty badly in Manchester.” We gave it time, hoping a wave of young voters in college towns such as Hanover would offset the deficit. They did not; we would lose by three.

Stung but not surprised, I called Favreau and told him that he had better read through the victory speech and excise all references to victory. Under the circumstances, they might seem a bit off-key. I ribbed Joel, whose polls generally were deadly accurate, on his final New Hampshire forecast that had us up by eight. “What was the margin of error on that, plus or minus ten?” The ashen pollster was not amused. Though his pre–New Hampshire poll would become the source of good-natured teasing for years to come, gallows humor only went so far in the moment. Plouffe waved Gibbs and me into a quiet corner and said grimly, “I guess we’d better go upstairs and tell him.” “Who wants to go first?” I said, pushing the others forward as the elevator door opened on Obama’s floor. We knocked on the door and asked Barack to come into the hallway. It didn’t require clairvoyance to discern the purpose of our visit.

“All right, what’s going on?” he said, searching our stern faces.

“We think we’re going to come up short,” Plouffe said.

“By how much?” Barack asked.

“Two, maybe three. She made a big move at the end,” Plouffe replied.

“What do we think happened?” Barack asked, a reasonable question, given our poll and others that had had us in the lead heading into the final stretch. We spent several minutes analyzing this: the debate; her emotional answer in the diner the previous day; our Olympian style of campaigning; the seemingly more competitive Republican primary, which might have prompted some potential Obama supporters among independents to pick up a GOP ballot instead on behalf of John McCain, who was facing a stiff challenge from former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

After a few minutes of postmortems, the conversation shifted to what the results in New Hampshire would mean going forward. Barack leaned against the wall and smiled wanly. “This is going to go on for a while, isn’t it?”

In just five days, we had run the gamut of emotions from soaring victory to stunning defeat. As we left the hotel for his concession speech, the candidate had a message for us. “Folks are going to be looking at me and all of you for clues. If we look deeply wounded, that’s how they will see it. So let’s be upbeat. I mean, let’s remember: a year ago, we would have been thrilled to be where we are.”

When, a few minutes later, he entered a jam-packed gymnasium, Barack looked and sounded like anything but a defeated candidate. “I am still fired up and ready to go!” he began, eliciting a hearty roar from the crowd. After a gracious and unambiguous nod to Hillary for her victory, he gave the same challenging speech we had planned before the results were known.

“We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation ‘false hope.’ But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

It was an extraordinary performance, graceful yet defiant. Even in defeat, Barack looked like a winner, cheered on by an overflow crowd that interrupted him with applause at every turn.

I did my rounds with a news media eager to probe for the meaning of Hillary’s come-from-behind win, and then stayed up much of the night asking myself the same questions. I stewed about things we could have done to close the relatively small gap. I had seen it coming, but couldn’t have—or hadn’t—done anything to stop it. Now the Clintons had new life, and the Empire would surely strike back. Had we missed our moment?

Early the next morning, we piled into an SUV for the hour ride to Boston for what had been intended as a triumphant postprimary fund-raiser. It was clear on the ride down that Barack also had been up much of the night. While he plainly wasn’t happy, he was far from discouraged. “You can see what people were thinking,” he said, waxing philosophically. “‘Here’s this young, untested guy who was a state legislator just a few years ago. We’re not ready to say, after two contests, that he’s ready. We want to see more.’ I get that, don’t you? It makes sense.”

Barack picked up on this theme in Boston. Without a note in front of him, he launched into a brilliant, passionate case for change, delivering among the most inspiring speeches of his campaign.

“I know this is going to sound like spin, but I really think yesterday’s results were good for us,” he told the intimate gathering of supporters crammed into the dining room of a private club on the top floor of an office tower. “Because we were a little like Icarus, flying too close to the sun. This was never meant to be easy. Change—real change—never is. You have to stay close to the ground, and work for it, and struggle for it and fight for it. And I am here to tell you why it’s worth that struggle; worth that fight.”

A year earlier, I had written that I didn’t know whether Barack could take a punch. Here was the answer. Knocked down, he didn’t wallow in disappointment or point fingers of blame. He not only got himself up, but he lifted everyone around him. I would see that quality many times in the coming months and years, and so would the American people—which might have been the point. At the end of the day, whether by intent or instinct, the voters of New Hampshire had cautioned, “Not so fast, Mr. Obama! Run the course. Show us more. Take some hits, and then we’ll judge whether you are ready.”