Game Change

by John Heilemann

  One night in October, as Clinton flew back east from a campaign stop in Arizona, she cracked open a bottle of white wine and kicked around the latest media offer on the table—a cover shoot and an accompanying inside photo spread in Vogue. Anna Wintour, the magazine’s glamorous editrix, and her people were wheedling the campaign. It will be good for Hillary, they said. Great photos. The first woman president-in-waiting. She should do it.

  Clinton’s aides thought it was a fabulous idea, another opportunity to humanize their boss, but Clinton was skeptical.

  I don’t think a Vogue photo shoot is going to be helpful, Hillary said. I’m still trying to convince white men that I can be the commander in chief, and me looking pretty in a dress isn’t gonna do that.

  Hillary took a sip of wine and let her mind drift toward the future.

  “You realize,” she said to her aides, “we’re only Iowa away from winning this.”

  Chapter Six

  Barack in a Box

  OBAMA WALKED INTO THE eighth-floor conference room in the downtown Washington offices of Perkins Coie, the law firm where his attorney, Bob Bauer, was a partner. It was February 2007 and the room was filled with expectant faces, some familiar and some new to Barack: the team of pollsters, image makers, and consultants assembled at lightning speed by Axelrod and Plouffe to help Obama reach the White House. They were seated around a big rectangular table—a dozen of them.

  “Whoa,” joshed Obama, looking around the room. “Am I paying all you people?”

  The group was replete with top-flight national political talent, although few of them resided in the capital. They came from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sioux Falls. Almost all were men. Almost all were white. They would play a large role in shaping Obama’s destiny over the next twenty months, but it was the first time they’d all been together in the same space. It would also be the last.

  Obama sat down and listened as David Binder, the focus group impresario from San Francisco, ran through the results of the sessions he’d recently conducted in the first four states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. To the voters he sampled, Obama was an unknown quantity, Binder said, but their first impressions were positive. When Binder showed them video of Obama, they were struck by his sincerity, his genuineness, his not-the-same-old-same-old-politician-ness. They loved his convention keynote, of course, and were also impressed by the prescience of his 2002 speech in opposition to the Iraq War.

  Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, presented the findings of surveys he had done in New Hampshire. And these, too, were encouraging. Obama was only four points behind Hillary in a state in which the Clintons had a reservoir of goodwill, and among voters following the race closely, he actually had a ten-point lead. The numbers showed that, although Hillary was popular with Democrats, there seemed to be a ceiling on her support. The party’s antiwar wing was suspicious of her; others questioned whether her duties as First Lady should count as a qualification for the presidency. Most important, voters were looking for change over experience by a two-to-one margin, and even rock-ribbed partisans craved a candidate who could move the country past the bitter polarization of the previous fifteen years—with which Hillary (and Bill) was strongly identified.

  Obama took it all in with a mixture of interest and amusement, asking questions occasionally but not obsessively. The thing that jumped out at him, however, involved Benenson’s analysis of the change-versus-experience dynamic. “I gotta believe Hillary has people just as smart as our team all around her,” Obama said. “Aren’t they going to realize this and try to take our message?”

  “You know, Barack,” David Axelrod cut in, “Joel used to work for Mark Penn, so he knows him pretty well.”

  “I do know him pretty well,” Benenson said. “I know his blind spots. He believes that you play to your strengths and not your weaknesses.”

  Benenson and Axelrod detested Penn; they thought he represented the dark side of the business. To them, he was a money-crazed mercenary, an arrogant prick, a thug whose chief claim to fame was Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection in which there was no nomination contest. Benenson told Obama that Penn would resist shifting strategy with every fiber of his being. He’ll just keep plowing down the same path, the pollster said, because he wants so desperately to be right from the beginning.

  Obama nodded, but he was wary of any explanation so rooted in psychobabble. He wondered if they could really count on the obstinacy of Hillary’s chief strategist to keep pushing her down the road to ruin. He found the depth of Axelrod’s antipathy for Penn slightly inexplicable—but kind of funny. A few weeks later, when Obama’s message maestro called to recount in copious and animated detail the Harvard event at which Penn had tried to undermine Obama’s antiwar cred, Barack laughed and said, “You really don’t like that guy, do you?”

  But Obama had enormous faith in Axelrod’s judgment and intuitions—a faith that had served him well since they’d become politically entwined nearly fifteen years earlier. He also had faith in the early-state strategy that Axelrod and Plouffe had laid out before he decided to enter the race. At another meeting that February in Washington, this time with a handful of his African American advisers, Obama was confronted with their concerns: some in the press had questioned whether he was “black enough” to appeal to voters of color. In terms of personal identity, he said, “this is very painful for me.” But the questions would fade as a campaign issue as black voters became better acquainted with him—and besides, the issue was more or less irrelevant to the larger construct of the race.

  “Hillary is running on inevitability, and if we win Iowa, that’s gone and this is ours,” Obama said firmly. “We’ll be able to wrap it up in a month.”

  FOR A NOVICE PRESIDENTIAL candidate who launched his bid with virtually no concrete preparation, Obama’s brio and self-assurance at the start were otherworldly. Everything that happened in the campaign’s first few weeks fed his sense of confidence. From the announcement speech in Springfield, he flew to Iowa on a chartered Boeing 757 with his wife, daughters, and fifty-seven reporters in tow. Two thousand people showed up for his first town hall meeting, in Cedar Rapids. The next day, seven thousand at the Iowa State University basketball arena in Ames. Two weeks later, twenty thousand at an outdoor rally in Austin, Texas, standing and cheering in the rain.

  The crowds confirmed Obama’s basic instinct: The country really is hungry for something fresh and new, he thought. And he was it.

  But it wasn’t just the crowds that amped him up. There was also the money. The campaign had set an ambitious goal: $12 million for the first quarter. Penny Pritzker, his national finance chair, had him running flat-out, his schedule crammed with back-to-back fund-raising events, sometimes six or seven in a day, and his call sheet was even denser. Obama didn’t relish pleading for cash any more than Clinton did, but he wasn’t going to do it half-assed. He did what he had to—and he was good at it. He knew how to work an elite room, how to come off as, well, the un-Clinton, in front of big donors who were seeking an alternative to the front-runner.

  Take Orin Kramer, one of the New York financial titans Obama had met with in December. Kramer was a Clinton stalwart who’d raised millions of dollars for Gore and Kerry as well. Hillaryland was working him hard, dispatching Penn to call him and make the sale. But when Kramer told Penn that he thought 2008 was going to be a change election, which would pose problems for Hillary, Penn was airily dismissive.

  Obama, by contrast, didn’t outsource his pitch. He neither dissed the hedge fund kingpin nor sucked up to him. Rather, he talked to him in person, over a meal, and calmly and cogently laid out his theory of the case. And he waxed lyrical about how his operation planned to use the Web in transformational ways for both fund-raising and organizing. The riff on connectivity baffled Kramer, but it enhanced his perception of Obama as an avatar of the future—and by the end of the dinner, he was on board.

  Still, Obama was as shocked as anyone when his fu
nd-raising team more than doubled its goal and beat Clinton in the first quarter. The Web had almost nothing to do with it; that electronic goldmine would be tapped only much later. Instead it had everything to do with big-time bundlers such as Kramer and other Wall Street players such as Soros and Robert Wolf, Hollywood types such as Geffen and Edgar Bronfman, African American music barons such as Andre Harrell and L.A. Reid, as well as a new generation of “baby bundlers,” who were looking for a seat at the table but believed that in the House of Clinton all the chairs were already taken.

  Obama watched as his fund-raising success fueled a virtuous circle: money plus big crowds equaled glowing press, which in turn equaled bigger crowds and even more money. Out in Iowa, Hildebrand and his partner, Paul Tewes, were opening field offices, recruiting precinct captains, training volunteers. In the Chicago headquarters, the campaign hired a pair of Internet whiz kids—one a veteran of Howard Dean’s pathbreaking online operation in 2004, the other a technologist who had worked at the travel site Orbitz—to build a state-of-the-art Web presence with links to Facebook and YouTube. Every day, Obama talked to Plouffe, getting updates on the progress they were making on all fronts, and every day, what he heard said one thing to him: This is real.

  Inside Obama’s campaign, the reigning metaphor for what they were doing was taking off in a jet airplane while they were still bolting on the wings. And in a few short weeks, Air Obama was soaring in the sky. But attaining such altitude so fast brought with it great expectations and close scrutiny, which was about to reveal that Obama’s weaknesses as a candidate were every bit as great as his strengths.

  THE FIRST SIGNS OF trouble came in quick succession in the last week of March. Out in Las Vegas, Obama took part in the campaign’s first issue-specific forum—the topic was health care—and watched from the wings as Clinton knocked the cover off the ball. She was sharp, passionate, and detailed; the crowd ate it up. Obama, for his part, was only casually prepared, assuming he could wing it. It’ll be like when I’m on Charlie Rose, he thought. It wasn’t. Vague and platitudinous, mouthing generalities and making excuses for not having his health care plan in order, Obama came across as amateurish. The union audience was both surprised and mildly offended.

  Back on the plane afterward, Obama was glum, and seemed slightly intimidated by Clinton. “She was terrific,” he said to Gibbs. “I was not.”

  Four days later, in Washington, Obama spoke at the annual legislative conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department, appearing last after all the other Democratic presidential candidates. He was flat, listless, uninspiring; he thought he bombed. Back in his Senate office, he spotted Gibbs and asked him to take a walk. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Obama said as they made their way to the Capitol, where he had to cast a vote. Nothing was clicking, he said. He wasn’t finding his rhythm. He couldn’t understand why. He felt like he was alone in the middle of the ocean without a raft. Gibbs listened intently, attempted to offer consolation, but nothing he said helped. He thought it was the saddest he’d ever seen Obama.

  Thus began a spring and summer of misery for the candidate. He’d been warned how hard this was going to be, but he had silently scoffed. And for the first few weeks, it hadn’t been hard at all—it had been a rush. But now the initial adrenaline surge was wearing off and Obama was facing the wretchedness of the reality he’d signed up for. It wasn’t long before Axelrod and Plouffe wondered if he was nurturing second thoughts about his decision to run.

  The schedule was killing him. The fatigue was all-consuming. The events piled up on top of one another, making his temples ache. He tried not to bitch and moan too much, except when it got out of hand—meaning almost every day. Once, at five in the afternoon on the bus in Iowa, he turned to his body guy, Reggie Love, and asked, “How many more things do I have today?” Reggie: “Three.” Barack: “Are you kidding me?”What made it all the worse was the books—always with the books, these people desperate for his signature. So many nights on the trail, after his final event of the day, with Obama wanting nothing more than to get back to his hotel and hit the sheets, he’d find them stacked up in the holding room: fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty copies of Audacity or Dreams, awaiting his John Hancock. He’d look at the pile, shake his head, then wearily pick up his pen. Obamamania had its costs. This was one of them.

  The loss of privacy, of control over his life, was another. On that Austin trip back in February, he was mobbed at the airport when he tried to catch a Southwest flight to Chicago; he could no longer fly commercial. He often joked ruefully that his life was now controlled by the twenty-two-year-olds who planned his days. Then there was the Secret Service, which began watching over him in May. Man, how he chafed at that. Not long after his protection started, he returned to Chicago from New Orleans looking forward to a haircut. The Service guys said, Sure, but we’ve got to case the place first. “Why can’t I just go to my barber?” Obama groaned. “I’ve been going to him for years!” (The staff, on the other hand, adored the Service. They helped keep the perennially late Obama on schedule; he didn’t like to make the agents wait around for him.)

  Most of all, he missed his girls, all three of them. Every time they came out on the trail with him, he was a different man. He laughed, for one thing. Smiled, for another. Didn’t gripe so much. But they were hardly ever there; Michelle saw to that. She told the staff she would be on the road only one day a week, and that was that. She assented to abbreviated day trips to Iowa sometimes—but she always insisted on being back by nightfall, and she was rarely with Barack. The debates made her queasy, so she stayed away from all but one of them. (And at that one, she turned to Jarrett and said, “Do you think anyone would notice if we leave in the middle?”)

  In the late spring, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Rouse took Obama out to dinner in D.C. He had been complaining in front of the staff more than usual, so they decided to give him a chance to vent. A few minutes into the meal, Obama caught the drift and said, “Okay, is this an intervention?”

  None of it would’ve been so bad if he had been performing up to snuff. But he wasn’t, and he knew it, and it pained him. Of all the things he’d questioned when he was mulling the race, the one he never doubted was that he would be terrific on the hustings. His whole life he had been a star, able to switch on the juice at a moment’s notice, impressive, charming, and memorable. Feelings of inadequacy had therefore never been a big part of the Obama psychic profile. But when it came to playing the role of a presidential candidate, he was experiencing them all the time.

  At town hall meetings, he tried to treat voters with respect by giving them adult, sound-bite-free answers, but he was coming across as professorial and pedantic, taking ten minutes to respond to the simplest queries. The memory of his convention keynote had his audiences anticipating a kind of orgiastic uplift—“People are expecting to come crying out of every speech I give,” he told Gibbs—that was impossible for him to provide day after day. After he’d riffed for months on his announcement address, his stump speech was flabby and overlong. He could feel that he wasn’t connecting.

  The debates were even worse—in no small part because he was suffering mightily by comparison to Clinton, who was just so much better than he or anyone around him had ever imagined she would be: always on message, always in control, her mastery of bullet points and talking points solid, her style an admixture of unexpected breeziness and earnest sapience. And he had a bad habit of handing Hillary a stick with which to thump him. At the first Democratic debate that April, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, NBC’s Brian Williams asked Obama how he would change the nation’s military stance if America were hit again with two simultaneous attacks by Al Qaeda. “Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response,” Obama replied, slowly winding his way to “potentially” taking “some action to dismantle that network.” Clinton’s answer mentioned retaliation within ten seconds; in the debate spin room later, her team pou
nded on Obama for his limp-wristedness.

  Obama had a lot to say and wasn’t good at spitting it out quickly or concisely, tending to back into his responses. Rather than sell one idea well, he tried to squeeze in as many points as possible. “I have sixty seconds,” he said in prep. “How much do you guys think I can get into sixty seconds?”

  When Axelrod showed him video of the debates, he grimaced. It’s worse than I thought ran through his mind. He pledged to do better. “I need to figure out how to get this right,” he said. But as the debates went along and he continued to founder, Obama’s frustration mounted. He started showing up late for prep sessions or cutting them short. Or spending the whole time on his BlackBerry. Or finding excuses to avoid them altogether. “You guys don’t have this together,” he said at one mildly disorganized run-through. “I’m going to take a nap.”

  The superficial way the debates were scored by the press corps annoyed him no end. At the CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, South Carolina, that summer, a questioner asked if Obama would “be willing to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” Obama didn’t flinch: “I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration—is ridiculous.”