Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (36 page)

From the beginning, we knew that once the actual nominating process began, it would either come to a quick resolution or become a long, hard slog. And the verdict was in. We had missed our chance for an early knockout in New Hampshire and survived Hillary’s ferocious comeback. Now we were in for an extended battle for delegates, a race to see who could reach the magic number needed to clinch the nomination. It had become a math-laden marathon for which we were better prepared.

So confident were they of a knockout, that Hillary’s folks had focused intensely only on the early states. Thinking like an insurgent, General Plouffe, in contrast, had created separate operations—one for the first four states, under Hildebrand’s command; and another for all the rest, run by a quiet, intense young Peace Corps veteran and master organizer named Jon Carson. While the political world was fixed on the early contests, Carson prepared for the long march, studying all the vagaries of the delegate selection processes, which varied widely state by state. Some were primaries, with delegates elected congressional district by congressional district. Others, as in Iowa and Nevada, selected their delegates through local caucuses, which put a premium on the enthusiasm of your supporters, since participating in caucuses is a much greater time commitment than simply casting a vote at a polling place. Under the party rules, it was hard to walk away from primaries with a huge margin of delegates, even if you won the popular vote by a comfortable margin. Yet caucuses could be a treasure trove for the well-organized.

Capitalizing on the huge influx of the young and young at heart from every corner of the country who had come together online, Carson had a strong corps of volunteers in every state, which would be particularly crucial in caucus states. As soon as one of the early primaries or caucuses ended, he would scoop up our best-performing organizers and give them just enough gas money to get to an upcoming state to help direct this wealth of determined volunteers.

With the first four contests behind us, we were hurtling toward Tsunami Tuesday on February 5, a slate of primaries and caucuses so big that “Super” was no longer extravagant enough to describe it. More than half the delegates to the convention would be chosen that day, in twenty-two states in every region of the country plus American Samoa—and with California and New York among them, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that Clinton, better known and with decades of associations and chits to call in, was well fortified for this far-flung competition.

Plouffe, Carson, and an army of folks out to change the world had a surprise waiting for them.

The expanded battlefield meant a much more complicated advertising challenge. Thanks to an extraordinary influx of money—fifty-five million dollars would come in during February alone—we would run ads in nearly every Tsunami Tuesday contest. Grisolano was our cartographer, mapping media strategy on an office wall lined with whiteboards indicating which ads were destined for which state. Margolis and his GMMB team had melded well with Del Cecato and my AKPD crew, with all becoming a cohesive creative force. We would add other top-flight ad firms, as well. Working with some of the talented Democratic ad makers against whom I had competed for years felt like playing in an all-star game.

I loved the team, one or more of whom I was in touch with from the time I woke up each day—assuming I actually slept—to late at night, going over scripts and polling data, trying to find any edge we could. They were brilliant, funny, irreverent, and deeply committed. In a situation that could have been convulsed by jangling egos, we hung together. Still, it wasn’t points on the air that would allow us to survive the tsunami, but sneakers on the ground.

The weekend before the big vote, we held a rally in Boise, Idaho—not a regular stop for a candidate on the Democratic political circuit. There were fourteen thousand boisterous supporters waiting, a number that represented just about 1 percent of Idaho’s population. “This is unbelievable,” a wide-eyed local activist told me, as he surveyed the jam-packed arena. “Four years ago, five thousand people caucused for the Democrats in this entire state. Look at this place!”

It was an auspicious auguring—and on Tuesday, we rolled.

Hillary wound up taking nine states, including the glamour twins of New York and California, which allowed her to claim a narrow lead among the sixteen million Democrats who voted that day. Yet we won thirteen contests, including six of the seven caucus states, carrying them by an average of more than forty points.

In Idaho, for example, we netted twelve delegates more than Hillary. That one, tiny state wiped out the entire delegate advantage she rolled up in beating us in the much larger state of New Jersey.

By investing in these caucus states, which Hillary had largely ignored, we were able to eke out an overall thirteen-delegate edge among the nearly seventeen hundred at stake that day. And as we looked down the roster of the nine remaining state races in February, which generally fell in places where we had significant demographic and organizational advantages, we saw we had a chance to run the board and pad our lead.

The Saturday after Tsunami Tuesday, the dominos began to fall for us. We handily won the Louisiana primary, overwhelmed Hillary in caucuses in Nebraska and the state of Washington, and, for good measure, won 90 percent of the vote in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The following day, we pulled off a coup by winning the Maine caucuses Hillary had been favored to carry. Two days later we racked up wins in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC, putting Barack in the lead by one hundred delegates. The once-mighty Clinton campaign was broke and sputtering.

Yet as we rolled up victories, the relentless campaign—thirteen months on the road and counting—was taking a toll on us as well. Even Barack, whose steady temperament was one of the campaign’s great strengths, was getting cranky. His irritation spilled out during a campaign stop in Milwaukee after I informed him that we had added an advertising shoot at the end of the day. It was necessary because, with the elongated race, we had to keep up with the demand for fresh scripts and footage, but I still felt like an accountant telling a client who was expecting a refund that he needed to write another check. Barack clearly felt the same way. “Come on, man,” he pleaded. “I’m ninety minutes from Chicago. I thought I was going to get home in time to see my kids. And now you want me to do ads instead? Give me a break!”

Despite his grumbling, Barack did the shoot and performed impeccably, reading scripts and warmly interacting with students and others in a series of B-roll shots the ads required. That warmth didn’t extend to me on the ride home. Anyone who could find another way back to Chicago did, leaving me to deal with the sullen candidate. As Obama read through some papers, I caught up on my e-mail, including one with an irritating story about Elizabeth Edwards attacking our health care plan. Her husband had just dropped out of the race, and it struck me as gratuitous for Elizabeth to continue weighing in. It brought back old memories, bad ones.

“Goddamn it,” I muttered.

“What’s wrong with you?” Obama asked, without looking up from whatever he was reading.

“Oh, it’s Elizabeth Edwards out there attacking us,” I said. “They just got out of the race. What’s the point?”

Barack shrugged. “Forget about it,” he said. “They’ve had a pretty hard time lately. It’s not worth worrying about.”

It impressed me that, even in an irascible mood, Barack was able to rise above an annoying provocation—and I felt slightly embarrassed that I had not.

Barack wasn’t the only Obama who found the run-up to Wisconsin challenging. The day before the primary, Michelle had made some unwelcome news while campaigning in Milwaukee. “For the first time in my adult lifetime I’m proud of my country . . . because I think people are hungry for change,” she told a crowd of supporters, setting off an immediate firestorm.

Before the primary season officially began, Fox News and other conservative outlets had run wild with a claim that Barack, as a child in Indonesia, had been educated in a madrassa, which, to many Americans, meant a radical Islamic school in which anti-Western values were routinely taught. With Gibbs and our research team on point, we were able to beat back that calumny—and we had frustrated other efforts to peel away white voters by portraying Barack as an angry, alien black man. Now Michelle’s comment provided fodder for the right-wing commentators eager to portray the Obamas as outside the American mainstream.

It was a momentary tempest, but the criticism hit Michelle hard. Driven to excel, she had worked her way from modest beginnings on Chicago’s South Side to Princeton and then Harvard Law and an admirable career of her own. She had performed in stellar fashion for us in Iowa and South Carolina. Now she had become a target. She felt exposed and vulnerable and was unhappy with the support she was receiving from the campaign team. While she let us know about it in no uncertain terms, her frustrations would boil over in the months to come.

It is the nature of presidential campaigns that each success brings heightened scrutiny. The process gets harder and more demanding, and thus, inevitably, more exasperating the longer you go. Every misstep or inconsistency is blown up instantly. The trivial can seem cataclysmic, at least for one news cycle. As a crusty alderman I once covered put it when I asked him about a colleague who was pondering a race for higher office, “Just remember, the higher a monkey climbs a pole, the more you can see his ass.”

Now we were indisputably the front-runner, and everyone was looking up.

Much has been written about how hard it is for politicians to deal with defeat. Yet success presents its own challenges, inviting hubris and the safe harbor of conventional thinking. If there was a lesson we should have taken from New Hampshire, it was that when you’re up, you can become too eager and begin to cut corners. Yet with ten straight wins and a solid delegate lead, we were desperate to end the nominating contest. John McCain had wrapped up the Republican nomination, and would have free rein to focus on us, while we were still tussling with the unsinkable Hillary. Bill Clinton had signaled to reporters that she would have to win the March 4 primaries in both Texas and Ohio to remain a viable candidate—and we had decided to move heaven and earth, and a whole lot of money, to slam that door.

With uphill fights in both states, Plouffe authorized prodigious spending for television and mail to try to muscle our way through—the political equivalent of Shock and Awe. Yet trying to gain traction with older white, working-class voters, who would have a decisive say in both primaries, we wound up launching some decidedly un-awe-inspiring attacks.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was a signature achievement of the Clinton administration, passed in 1993 over the vehement objections of organized labor and liberal Democrats. Hillary had argued then, and for years after, that NAFTA benefited the economy by opening new markets for American goods. However, fourteen years later, NAFTA still was anathema to many in rust belt states such as Ohio, where companies had shut down manufacturing plants, lured by cheap labor and lax regulation to Mexico and China. From his Senate race on, Barack had taken a nuanced view, embracing the need to boost trade, but opposing NAFTA because it lacked sufficient labor and environmental protections. In Ohio, where our polling showed that NAFTA could prove a big liability for Hillary, we were, to put it charitably, a little less nuanced. A mail piece featuring the picture of a closed plant quoted Hillary as calling NAFTA a “boon” to our economy, which was actually one newspaper’s paraphrase of remarks ascribed to her back in 2006.

The second issue we pressed was the health care mandate. Hillary had pummeled Barack for omitting it from his heath care proposal, arguing that his plan would fall far short of universal coverage. While her position resonated with activists on the left, our polling showed that it was deeply unpopular with many voters. So we sent out a hard-hitting piece declaring that Hillary would force “everyone to buy health care, even if you can’t afford it.”

The pieces were factually defensible, and Barack stood behind them publicly. The tactics followed the tried-and-true rules of engagement that my colleagues and I had executed over hundreds of campaigns—and Hillary’s team was hardly firing blanks at us. Still, Shock and Awe was a long way from Hope and Change. Hillary was
supposed
to be the experienced practitioner of such “textbook” politics. We were not. The attacks we wielded against her would look even more dubious in the full blush of history, given that Obama, as president, would embrace the health care mandate and become a stalwart promoter of trade treaties.

Sensing a chance to knock us off our white horse, Hillary seized on the mailings with a theatrical outburst during a press conference in Ohio. “Shame on you, Barack Obama,” she shouted, waving the mail pieces. With all the righteous indignation she could muster, Hillary fingered us as practitioners of the black arts favored by Bush’s hard-hitting political guru Karl Rove, and accused us of aping the anti–health reform arguments of the insurance industry.

Her campaign also got widespread attention with a late ad in Texas that went right at the question of experience. The ad asked voters whom they wanted in the White House when the 3:00 a.m. call came alerting the commander in chief to a crisis somewhere in the world. Its message, ironic given the role Hillary would later play in an Obama administration, didn’t make a huge impact on voters when we tested it, but the media loved it and played it so incessantly that many voters in Ohio, where the ad never aired, said they had seen it.

The cumulative result of all this, at least by the gauge of my gut, was the same dyspeptic feeling I had in the days before New Hampshire. We were out of sync, playing Hillary’s game instead of our own, and playing it not as well.

That became apparent on primary night in San Antonio, where we had gone hoping to claim one victory. The first hit came in from Rhode Island, where Hillary, as expected, routed us. Then came Ohio, where she whomped us by a commanding ten points. The exit polls in Texas, which predicted a close race with Hillary holding a slight edge, proved accurate, as she won by three points. Our only solace was that Texas had a hybrid system, with caucuses and a primary on the same day. As usual, we won the caucuses, and by such a large margin that, overall, we netted more delegates than Hillary that night. Still, as energetically as I tried to spin our delegate numbers, there was no hiding the fact that we had gone in for the kill and Hillary had escaped. “She’s like Freddy Krueger in
Nightmare on Elm Street
,” I told Plouffe. “She just won’t die!”