Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (39 page)

I wished he hadn’t. Despite Harstad’s very sensible admonition about the reliability of one night’s calling, and the visible signs of enthusiastic support right in front of me in the jam-packed Indianapolis mall where Obama had just spoken, I was completely overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom—and I apparently didn’t hide it well. When I walked into Obama’s holding area after the speech, he was in the midst of a big laugh with his friends Valerie, Marty Nesbitt, and Eric Whitaker, who were riding along to help keep their friend’s spirits up. As soon as he saw my face, Obama stopped laughing.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said.

I foolishly reported on Harstad’s call. In part, I didn’t want a repeat of New Hampshire, and a downbeat knock on his door if things went bad. I also didn’t want to suffer in silence. Yet after the gauntlet of the past two months, Barack had been enjoying himself and he wasn’t in the mood for bad news.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, waving me off, only half in jest. “You’re a big downer.”

As I walked into the hotel, I ran into Shailagh Murray of the
Washington Post
and Richard Wolffe of
Newsweek
, two of the more seasoned members of our traveling press corps. Shailagh was a delight, as smart and perceptive as any journalist on our plane, without any of the ego such qualities would imply. Richard, a Brit, approached me suspiciously when he first came to interview me about the campaign, but over time, we had come to trust each other. Both Shailagh and Richard had great senses of humor. Shailagh’s came with a big, lusty laugh. They had become my frequent companions on the road. So when I walked in, they quickly sensed my distress.

“What’s wrong?” they asked in unison.

We took a quiet table in the bar, where I swore them to secrecy and shared the details of Harstad’s call. “We’re fucked,” I said glumly. “You’re nuts!” Shailagh replied. “You’re not losing this state by twelve points. You might even win. You guys are in good shape.”

When we hit Raleigh for Election Day, the world seemed brighter. The mood on the ground was buoyant, with Obama signs and supporters everywhere. That night, we would win an overwhelming fourteen-point victory in North Carolina, and despite the funky Monday night calling, we battled Hillary to a near draw in Indiana. It was almost over. We’d have to endure another month of the primary campaign, but once the last states voted on June 3, Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee.

Favs and I had worked on a speech that shifted the focus to the general election and John McCain, in the hope of sending a strong signal that the primary was effectively over.

“This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country, because we all agree that at this defining moment in our history, a moment when we are facing two wars, an economy in turmoil, a planet in peril, a dream that feels like it’s slipping away for too many Americans, we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term. We need change in America. And that’s why we will be united in November.”

On the way home to Chicago, Barack was clearly relieved by the results, so much so that he broached the selection of a running mate. He had quietly tapped a small group of outside advisers to begin a vetting process that would eventually evaluate some thirty prospects. Yet Barack already had a notion.

“You know, I’m thinking Joe Biden might be a good choice,” he said. Barack ticked off his reasons. A native of Pennsylvania who still had close ties there, Biden could help us in a must-win state that had given us problems. He had a strong connection to the struggling middle class, which was central to our economic message and our chances. A Washington veteran of thirty-six years with expertise in foreign affairs, the silver-haired Biden would be a reassuring figure in our capital and others. Finally, Barack said, Biden had been a candidate for president himself.

“I was impressed with how Joe handled himself in the debates,” said Barack. “He was strong, smart, and much more disciplined than I expected. This national media nonsense is harder than it looks. It would be good to have someone who has gone through that experience.”

But before that process could move forward in earnest, there were still primaries to endure. Hillary absolutely crushed us in Kentucky and West Virginia, and beat us soundly in South Dakota, states filled with white, rural voters—some undoubtedly less than enthused about a black man in the White House. Pugnacious to the end, she tried to sway the still-dwindling number of unpledged superdelegates, arguing that Obama’s weakness with white working-class voters was a fatal flaw. She waged a procedural battle to reinstate delegates she had won in Michigan and Florida, two states that had been sanctioned for breaking party rules about when they could hold their primaries.

Sometimes her zeal got the better of her, as when, in an effort to illustrate that competitive June primaries were not unusual occurrences, she made a ham-handed point that raised the hackles of everyone in Barack’s inner circle: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

It was a bizarre, off-key comment, for which she quickly expressed regret. Still, it enraged me. Those of us who cared about Barack shared a fear for his safety. As the first African American candidate for president, Barack had been assigned Secret Service protection earlier than any candidate in history. The threat stream against him was high, which is why the agents insisted he wear protective gear under his clothes in large crowds. Whatever Hillary’s intentions—and I don’t believe they were malicious—her thoughtless comment was inexcusable.

These were just the last gasps of a campaign that had finally run its course.

As the final primary votes were cast on June 3, we flew to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Obama would claim victory, in the same arena where the Republicans would hold their national convention in three months. The moment demanded a largeness of spirit; his mission now was to unify Democrats.

Beyond the satisfaction of doing the right thing, we needed to bring the Clintons, wounded and seething, back into the fold. The draft we sent Barack reflected that imperative, lavishing praise on Hillary as a worthy opponent and a critical future ally in pursuit of progress for the country.

Seventeen thousand delirious supporters filled the arena, including Susan, who joined me while in the Twin Cities to visit friends; fifteen thousand more stood outside watching the speech on a giant video screen. Though I had worked with Favs on the words, it still was exhilarating, almost surreal, to hear Barack speak them.

Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said—because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another—a journey that will bring a new and better day to America.
Because of you, tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States of America
.

We had made history, navigating the most challenging route a candidate had ever taken to the nomination. We had harnessed the power of the Internet in ways that had never before been done to build a grassroots campaign of millions, many of them new to politics. Finally, together we had beaten back the Washington cynics who’d said “No You Can’t” to the prospect of change and the chances of a young black man who had insisted that “Yes We Can.”

Much as I admired him, I hadn’t known at the start just how Obama would hold up under the constant and weighty pressures of a presidential campaign. Yet he had weathered them all, displaying the uncommon wisdom, grace, and toughness the presidency required.

For inspiration, Barack had hung in his Senate office that same iconic portrait of Ali, an improbable victor, standing triumphantly over Liston, a feared, formidable, and defeated champion.

Now Obama had taken on the Democratic Party’s undisputed champions, the relentless tag team of Clinton and Clinton.

And he had emerged with the crown.

I
T
TURNS
OUT
that
U
nity can be hard to reach.

On June 5, two days after their marathon ended, Barack and Hillary held a clandestine meeting at the Washington home of Senator Dianne Feinstein to begin burying the hatchet—and preferably not in each other! The first order of business was dealing with a troubling problem before it got out of hand. Many of Hillary’s supporters, if not Hillary herself, believed that a near tie for the top spot entitled her to the vice-presidential nomination. They argued that she would only add to the historic nature of the ticket and boost Obama with a proven, tenacious fighter to dog the Republicans throughout the fall.

Barack was eager to begin the healing, but he also wanted to halt any momentum toward an Obama-Clinton ticket. Barack sent a gentle but clear message to Hillary at the Feinstein summit by telling her that he was considering a range of people and that he wanted to spare her the full, intensive vetting process unless he reached the point of actually choosing her.

Obama respected Hillary and knew firsthand that she was a tough, indefatigable campaigner, battle-tested on the national stage. But the wounds of the long primary were still fresh and a lot of our supporters were adamantly opposed to her selection. Her nomination would have the feel of a co-candidacy, a factor that would be compounded by the larger-than-life spouse who would, inevitably, figure into the deal. And while half of the voters had favorable feelings about Hillary, almost as many did not. We all felt it was baggage that we didn’t need.

After the Feinstein Summit, there was an array of contacts and discussions between Hillaryland and our campaign. Plouffe quickly established lines of communication, eager to figure out how we could begin to tap into Hillary’s vast fund-raising network. The Clintons, in turn, wanted help in retiring their campaign debt. The day after Hillary dropped out, I called Neera Tanden, her longtime policy maven and my old friend. It was the beginning of a courting process. I wanted to reestablish our relationship and, after a respectful period of time, recruit Neera to our team. I also reached out to Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary’s ousted campaign manager, whom we asked to prepare and run the campaign operation for the eventual vice-presidential nominee. I felt a bond with Patti, who was from Chicago, and admired her. It was also appealing to have a prominent Hispanic woman in the leadership of our campaign. One ancillary benefit was that, given her recent, painful history with Hillary, Patti’s selection would send a signal to the tea leaf readers that Clinton was unlikely to be the choice for VP.

At the end of June, and after much negotiation, Barack and Hillary met with her key donors in Washington, where she urged them to fall in line. The next day, they held their first public event together, in Unity, New Hampshire. Jim Demers, a longtime New Hampshire political operative and our state campaign cochair, had pitched Unity not just because of its irresistible name, but also due to the fact that Obama and Clinton had each received 107 votes there. It was the perfect embodiment of neutral ground. Plus, New Hampshire would be a swing state in the fall.

The only problem was that Unity the town was almost as hard to reach as unity between campaigns that had battled long and hard. The tiny hamlet is nestled in a far corner of the state, bordering Vermont. There is no major airport nearby. Reaching it would require a seventy-minute plane ride from Washington to Manchester, followed by an hour-long ride in the campaign RV. That’s a lot of togetherness for folks who had so recently come together and whose bonds were tenuous. Yet on the flight from DC, Hillary and Barack sat next to each other and seemed to be engaged in intense, friendly conversation. Then, when we hit the road to Unity, Hillary regaled us with stories of her travels with John McCain, laughing heartily about some vodka-drinking episode on an official trip in Estonia.

In the spirit of the moment, I thought I would try to make amends of my own. When I got a few minutes alone with Hillary, I told her that it was never my plan to be working against her, that I admired her and appreciated the kindness she had shown my family. Beyond that, I told her that I could not have imagined a more able or determined opponent. “McCain’s going to seem like a day at the beach after you,” I said. I thought it went well, but later I realized that I probably sounded like the phony, cloying Eddie Haskell from the old
Leave It to Beaver
show, buttering up Mrs. Cleaver. Also, my words must have rung a little hollow after I had dedicated the previous eighteen months to thwarting her ambitions. Hillary sat impassively as I spoke, and later compared our conversation to a “root canal.”

Yet I wasn’t simply blowing smoke. Hillary was as game, smart, and experienced an opponent as Barack could draw, and she had pushed him in ways that made him a much better candidate. After sparring with her for fifty rounds, McCain seemed less daunting than he had at the beginning, when Barack speculated that beating the Arizonan would be our most difficult challenge. Had McCain been the McCain of 2000, that might still have been true, but the crusty senator was no longer the bold iconoclast of 2000 who nearly upended George W. Bush by challenging orthodoxies of both parties. As I had forecast in my initial strategy memo, in order to lead his party, McCain had had to fall in line and make peace with President Bush and appease the right-wing elements of the GOP that were so critical in the nominating process, striking Faustian bargains that would benefit us in a general election.

The hawkish McCain was predictably an outspoken supporter of Bush’s war policies, which gave us one clear contrast. As the 2008 campaign approached, however, McCain also had muted his past objections and embraced the Bush tax cuts. He would argue during the campaign that our economy had “made great progress” during the Bush presidency, an opinion few Americans shared.

For voters in Benenson’s polling and Binder’s focus groups, McCain’s reversals and circumlocutions dimmed his luster as a maverick who would change Washington. Even McCain, so engaging and open during his 2000 campaign, seemed uncomfortable with his cramped, new 2008 model. “I hate my new friends,” he confided to a mutual acquaintance. His ambivalence showed on the stump, where he often seemed a little irascible, like the grumpy, old neighbor shooing the locals away. “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!” Gibbs would croak every time he saw McCain fulminating on TV.

Barack had come roaring out of his long contest with Hillary better known and liked than McCain. Growing economic problems and disenchantment with Bush had created atmospherics that were very much in our favor. It would be a “change” election, and Obama looked and sounded much more like change than the veteran Washington pol who had been forced to embrace the eight years of the Bush presidency in all its dubious glory. Also, even before the massive registration and mobilization efforts we planned, the electorate promised to be more diverse than ever. Benenson’s model suggested that if we properly defined the choice, we were looking at a 53–47 win, which would be a landslide by contemporary standards. It was an amazing prospect, given where we began.

Still, tempting as it was to become intoxicated by our own brilliance and good fortune, no one was doing victory laps. Barack Hussein Obama was still a black man with an alien-sounding name. He still was just four years out of the Illinois Senate. He still lacked experience, particularly in the areas of foreign policy and defense, which could be exploited by McCain. Finally, given the stakes, the other side, led by a man whose tenacity had been proven under the most brutal conditions, was not going to surrender and start chanting, “Yes, we can!”

 • • • 

In campaigns, there are two things that keep you up at night: the things you don’t know and the things you do. Campaigns can turn on totally unanticipated events. This is a given of presidential elections. Then there also are crucial,
anticipated
events that demand assiduous planning and execution: the selection of the vice-presidential candidate, the convention, and the candidate debates. In 2008, we added one more.

For more than a year, we had been talking about sending Obama on a major trip abroad to burnish his image as a potential world leader and commander in chief. We shelved it during the primary campaign because we felt we couldn’t afford the time out of the country and feared that Bill Clinton, with all his global clout, would find ways to undermine it. Even now, the foreign trip was a high-risk, high-reward venture. Done right, it could help close the stature gap with McCain, the war hero and POW whose one big advantage was his national security experience. Yet if we stumbled, it would only underscore Obama’s newbie status and raise questions about his abilities in this critical arena. Pulling off an international trip worthy of a world leader without all the assets of one was an audacious challenge. Enter the Little General.

On first blush, you wouldn’t mistake Alyssa Mastromonaco for a logistical wizard and mover of men. Short and freckle-faced, Alyssa looked younger than her thirty-two years, but she’d come to Obama with critical experience, having directed Kerry’s presidential campaign scheduling team. From the announcement in Springfield on, Alyssa had aced every task we had thrown at her. So her assessment was critical in persuading the candidate and the team that this gamble was worth taking. Now, after assiduous discussion and planning, she and our foreign policy advisers mapped out an ambitious, eight-country tour that would take Obama from the thorny Middle East to the major capitals of Europe. “We can do this,” Alyssa said. “It won’t be easy. There are lots of moving parts. But we can do it.”

Obama’s journey began with two stops, the details of which we couldn’t announce in advance: Afghanistan and Iraq. It was an official trip, on which only Senate staff could join. From a campaign standpoint, though, it could not have turned out any better. The pictures, including one showing Obama touring Iraq by helicopter with General David Petraeus, were pure gold. Even better was a development we hadn’t anticipated. The day before Obama arrived in Iraq, prime minister Nouri al-Maliki embraced Obama’s proposed timetable for the withdrawal of American troops. It was big news, and elevated Obama’s image on the world stage beyond anything we could have planned.

As we watched Obama land in Jordan from Iraq in a military helicopter, Gibbs was ready to declare victory before the campaign-sponsored tour began. “Okay, can we just cash in our chips now and go home?” he asked, as the whirring Osprey set down. “It can’t get better than that!”

But it did. Barack was accorded first-rank treatment at every stop, greeted by heads of state and government as if he were already in office.

In Israel, Obama deftly navigated the full gauntlet of government and opposition leaders. He made a moving visit to the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and visited Sderot, a village in the Negev that had been the constant target of shelling from Hamas in the Palestinian-held Gaza. We also squeezed in a visit to Ramallah, in the West Bank, where Barack met with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s venerable president, Shimon Peres, received Barack with particular flourish, all but endorsing him in a warm public statement before their meeting. The visit would help quell the concerns of some American Jews, who feared that a black man with an Islamic-sounding name and a Farrakhan-hugging minister would not feel a sufficient bond with Israel. I was a top adviser, and many of Obama’s early mentors and supporters in politics were Jews. Yet the questions persisted. “I know what he
says
about Israel,” I was asked more than once by anxious Jews back home, “but does he feel it in his
kishkes
?” Though the questions would persist into his presidency, on this trip, Barack more than passed the
kishkes
test.

At the same time, Barack also passed a presidential-level endurance test. In retrospect, what we asked of him was beyond crazy. To get the maximum return out of his week abroad, we jammed as much as possible into his daily schedule. Following an exhausting tour of Afghanistan and Iraq, he hopscotched across Israel and the West Bank, from one tricky pass to another, a journey culminating in a late-night dinner with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. “I could fall asleep standing up,” he confided to opposition leader Bibi Netanyahu earlier in the day. When he finally got to sleep, he had completed the day without a single misstep. With every new adventure, I was learning more about my friend and his prodigious capabilities.

One of the signature commitments Obama had made during the campaign was to rebuild our alliances throughout the world after eight years of Bush’s unilateralism. Barack believed that the solutions to the greatest problems of our time (terrorism, human rights, poverty, and climate change) required global cooperation, and the economic integration newly wrought by technology absolutely demanded it. We wanted one public speech on the trip in which he could address the people of Europe and the world about our common interests and interwoven destiny. Berlin, which was so central to the convulsive changes of the twentieth century, seemed the perfect setting for it.

Alyssa, half German herself, had shown her Teutonic steel by arm-wrestling with the authorities there for a permit to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, where former presidents Kennedy and Reagan had made historic speeches during the Cold War. When Barack heard about this plan, he was incredulous. “You think we’re setting expectations a little high? Let’s find another spot.” We did, though the new site was hardly modest: the Victory Column, in the center of the historic Tiergarten, about a mile or so from the gate.

A few hours before the speech, Gibbs and I took a walk through the Tiergarten, a beautiful, leafy park rife with history. It was there that the people of Berlin rallied to resist a postwar Soviet blockade of food aimed at starving them into submission. (In his speech, Obama would recall the American- and British-led airlift that sustained Berliners through that siege, just three years after the end of World War II.) The Victory Column stands in the center of the park, an ornate, nineteenth-century granite-and-sandstone tower topped by a bronze sculpture of Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. Obama would walk down a long, dramatic runway to a speaker’s platform that extended into the plaza surrounding the column. It was an awesome setting, but I wondered how in the world we were going to fill it. We had proven our ability to draw huge crowds in America, but now we were across the ocean, counting on people who would never vote in an American election.