Hillary’s post-debate spinners called his answer irresponsible and jejune. Even some of Obama’s own team thought he should walk it back.
The next morning, Obama made a surprise appearance on a staff conference call and declared: I want to be clear. I said what I meant and I believe it. We should go on offense here, because what Hillary is saying is she wants to do what Bush and Cheney do. It’s the sort of typical Washington groupthink that I hate.
Obama believed that he was right on the substance and on the politics. But the conventional-wisdom mongers in the media bludgeoned him for weeks, swallowing the Clinton line, slamming him for dropping the ball again on a national security question.
The debates fed a narrative that was becoming pervasive in the press: Edwards was running on bold ideas (universal health care, a new war on poverty); Hillary was the mistress of the nitty-gritty; and Obama was a lightweight, all sizzle and no steak. This is what the media did—it put every candidate in a neat little box and slapped a pithy label on it. Obama understood. But for the past three years, as the press fawned over him, the box he was stuffed into bore a succession of tags that were flattering and advantageous. New. Fresh. Inspiring. Post-racial. He’d never had a negative run of press on the national level, and therefore never developed the kind of thick protective hide that repelled the media’s slings and arrows.
What made it worse was that Obama knew he’d helped build this box himself; that he’d left himself open to, and even invited, the charges of insubstantiality that were bedeviling him. He had signed on to the strategy of stressing thematics over specifics, on the grounds that waging a battle with Clinton on the policy margins would pay paltry dividends. But now he was having his doubts.
He wanted to be seen as substantive. He was substantive. And not being viewed that way was hurting his chances, he thought. I’ve spent my whole life caring about policy, he told his staff. I want to have new ideas, I want them to be specific. I want to make sure that no one can say they’re not specific enough. Obama had imagined at the outset of the campaign that he would set aside hours to consult with world-class experts, delving into the issues, devising innovative solutions. He kept asking for more time to do that, but his schedule was too jam-packed with fund-raisers and campaign events. All he was doing was reading memos from his policy shop—and getting pummeled by the press for being a cipher.
The media was in his head on this topic, for sure, but there were other voices in there, too, and other causes for concern. Michelle was worried about the national polls: Why aren’t we moving? she kept asking. She feared that the campaign, with its monomania about Iowa, was failing to build a broad base of support across the map. It struck her that the campaign’s post-racial demeanor, while politically expedient, was neglecting one of the central motivations that had driven Barack to enter the race. More than anything, it bothered her that her husband was losing—and that he seemed disconsolate in the bargain.
Michelle’s disgruntlement was echoed in Obama’s ears by another source—one from outside the bubble that enveloped him. For months, he had been swapping emails with his former law school professor Chris Edley, sharing his myriad dissatisfactions with how things were going. Edley had worked in the Carter and Clinton White Houses and been issues director on the Dukakis presidential campaign. Even from the remove of the deanship of Berkeley’s law school, Edley had strong views about what caused presidential campaigns to fail. And he was stoking Obama’s fear that his bid was headed in that direction.
The candidate decided it was time to stage an intervention of his own.
IN MID-JULY, OBAMA LET Plouffe know he wanted to set aside a few hours for a meeting of the senior staff. Everyone was aware that Obama wasn’t happy, so they braced for an unpleasant evening. At 7:30 on the appointed night, the extended Obama brain trust—Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs, Hildebrand, Mastromonaco, Pritzker, Jarrett, Nesbitt, communications aide Dan Pfeiffer, a few others, and Michelle—convened at Jarrett’s Chicago apartment, where they were joined by Edley. To everyone in the room besides the candidate’s wife, the dean was a stranger.
Obama had invited Edley to the meeting without giving him any instructions as to what his input should be. It was a halfway-to-Iowa review, Obama said, and that was all. Now Edley was sitting there between Michelle and Jarrett, directly opposite Obama, with everyone crowded around the giant oval table in Jarrett’s dining room. After listening to the candidate’s opening remarks—We’ve come a long way, we have a long way to go, there are things we need to do better—the dean unloaded.
You people, Edley said, referring to Mastromonaco, the scheduler, and Julianna Smoot, the chief fund-raiser, are being too relentless, too greedy for Barack’s time. He’s being overprogrammed, overscheduled, treated like a standard-issue candidate—when nothing could be further from the truth.
“This is a guy who likes to think, he likes to write, he likes to talk with experts,” Edley said. “You folks have got to recognize what he’s in this for. He’s in this because he wants to make contributions in terms of public policy ideas, and you’ve got to make time for him to do that.”
Edley wasn’t speaking calmly. He was all riled up. He believed that the campaign was putting at risk the whole point of Obama’s candidacy. And he was certain that Obama felt the same, because Obama had told him so. “With all due respect to all you here,” he said, nodding toward Axelrod and Plouffe, “you should just get over yourselves and do what the candidate wants.”
Around the table, the members of Team Obama either stared straight down or shot daggers at Edley. Quietly, the room seethed. With all due respect? thought Gibbs. Who the hell are you to come in here and tell us “with all due respect”?
But Edley was far from done. The policy work at the campaign was perfunctory, he said. Just laundry lists of mediocre stuff. They needed to develop some conceptually ambitious, “frame-breaking” proposals, rooted in Obama’s personality and values, and then integrate those ideas thoroughly into his message, Edley said.
Axelrod, bristling with resentment, spoke up in defense of the campaign. “We do spend time with him on policy,” he protested, citing a focus group they had recently conducted in Michigan. Edley’s jaw nearly hit the table. “A focus group isn’t policy making,” he said derisively.
Edley raised the question of constituency politics, suggesting that the Obama team’s obsessive focus on Iowa was causing them to pay too little attention to minorities and that the campaign was blowing off women because of Clinton’s strength among female voters—both dangerous games politically that could create problems long term.
Obama wasn’t wavering on the early-state strategy and its focus on Iowa, though. “I think it’s the right strategy,” he said. “I think it’s the only strategy, and I don’t think we should change it.” But he was bothered by Clinton’s lead with black voters. “They don’t want to be taken for granted,” Obama said, noting that he didn’t appreciate the carping of the African American leadership, with its claims that he was trying to downplay his blackness. “And I don’t think we can concede women to Clinton, even though she’s going to win the majority of them,” he added.
The meeting lasted for more than three hours, covering many topics. But it was the impression left by Edley that lingered. In the eyes of the Obama staff—and especially Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs—his words were counterproductive. They fueled Obama’s fixation on policy, which the political professionals considered a distraction from the real tasks at hand. And Edley’s demeanor was worse than that. The Obamans viewed him as an obnoxious ass and prayed they’d never see his face again.
But not everyone in the room shared that assessment (even though, looking back on it later, Edley himself would acknowledge his insufferableness). All throughout his comments, Michelle and Jarrett were conspicuously nodding their heads. Obama’s campaign, from the start, had been controlled with an iron grip by the troika of Axelrod,
Plouffe, and Gibbs—“the suits,” as they were
nicknamed internally by those wary of their degree of power. Over the previous few months, as Obama’s distress grew, Michelle and Valerie had come to see the suits as forming a circle around Barack that was too tight and too resistant to dissenting opinions for his own good. They were thrilled to have an outsider at the table and avidly absorbed what Edley was saying. He’s channeling Barack, thought Jarrett.
Obama’s own feelings about the Edley intercession were opaque, however—in the moment, at least. He neither supported his friend’s fiercest contentions nor defended Axelrod and Plouffe when Edley laid into them. He refused to show his hand even privately to the dean, who never heard a word from Obama about the meeting. But after Edley returned to Berkeley, he did hear from Jarrett.
You were terrific, she told him—fiery and provocative, the perfect foil.
What did Barack think? Edley asked.
You played exactly the role he wanted you to play, she said.
A MONTH LATER, at the end of August, the Obamas made their usual summer sojourn to Martha’s Vineyard. Nothing about Barack’s political fortunes had brightened in the time since the Edley meeting. If anything, they had darkened. A few weeks earlier, he had given a speech advocating military strikes under certain circumstances against terrorist targets in Pakistan—and been whacked again for an alleged gaffe by the Clinton campaign and the foreign-policy panjandrums. The national polls were stuck stubbornly in place: Obama trailed Clinton by some twenty points. And the situation in be-all and end-all Iowa was hardly cheerier. For all the time and money the campaign had poured into the state, Obama had put no distance between himself and Hillary or Edwards.
Among Obama’s donors, sturm und drang was the order of the day. Having sunk more than $50 million into Obama, they were jittery about the possibility that they had thrown good money after a bad candidate. Frantic calls and emails were flooding in to Pritzker, complaining about Obama, his advisers, and their strategy, offering theories on how to fix all three—the loudest of which was that Obama needed to go negative on Clinton.
Much of Washington agreed. Chuck Schumer was up in arms, telling fellow senators that Obama needed to take a two-by-four to Hillary, prophesying that Barack’s reluctance to do so indicated that he wasn’t tough enough to win. Claire McCaskill was serving as a backchannel to Obama for the whispering conspirators, those Democratic senators privately rooting for him but afraid to cross the Clintons. Tell Barack this, they would say to her, and then advise that he take out his truncheon. He has to go after her, they urged. There’s so much there. He has to do to her now what the Republicans will do to her in the fall, or at least remind Democrats what’s in store for us if she wins the nomination.
McCaskill dutifully took the messages to Obama. “It won’t work,” he said. “It’s not what this campaign is.” And besides, Obama added, “We’re gonna win Iowa.”
“You know, Barack,” McCaskill replied, “every candidate running for president says they’re going to win Iowa.”
I know, said Obama. A long pause. “We’re gonna win Iowa.”
Up on the Vineyard, though, as he and his family luxuriated in eight days of bike rides and beachcombing at a house in Oak Bluffs with Jarrett, the Nesbitts, and the family of another close friend from Chicago, Eric Whitaker, Obama brooded and pondered. He still had faith in his strategy, his team, and himself. But he knew the time was fast approaching in which his campaign would have to step up its game—and more to the point, he would have to step up his game. His staff might have thought the Edley meeting was just a passive-aggressive tactic on Obama’s part, a way for him to let off steam by proxy. But for Obama, it was the moment when he began to take control of his campaign.
Obama had long talks on the Vineyard with Jarrett and Rouse (who happened to be vacationing there, too) about how the operation had to change. He trusted Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs, and preferred to deal with as few people as possible—the campaign may have been pushing bottom-up democracy, but he was a top-down guy. Yet Obama had come to agree with Michelle and Jarrett that the innermost circle needed to be broadened beyond the suits. He asked Rouse, who was still living in Washington, to start commuting to Chicago so he could have a more active hand at headquarters. And he asked Jarrett, whose role had been informal until then, to join the campaign full time.
Bringing Valerie on board was no small thing. Her relationship with both Barack and Michelle transcended politics. They had all known one another since 1991, when Jarrett was working as Richie Daley’s deputy chief of staff and Michelle Robinson presented herself for a job. The bond the women struck was nearly instantaneous and soon extended to Michelle’s fiance. Barack now thought of Jarrett almost as a sibling. He had faith in her judgment, her intuitions, and her motives. Her desire to see him win was overwhelming, but she cared just as much about his remaining true to himself.
Obama returned to the mainland to discover an unwelcome development. Just as he’d feared in February, Clinton was trying to encroach on his message. Over Labor Day weekend, Hillary and Bill had traveled together to New Hampshire and Iowa, rolling out a brand-new slogan for her campaign—“The Change We Need.” Up in Concord, on a stage set bearing a placard that read “Change + Experience,” Hillary intoned, “Some people think you should have to choose between change and experience. Well, with me, you don’t have to choose.” Softening her stance as a partisan warrior, she touted her record in the Senate as a bipartisan pragmatist. Out in Des Moines she told audiences that her candidacy, too, was a history-making proposition, a chance to nominate a woman and thus break “the last and biggest glass ceiling.”
The arrival of October brought more bad news: the ABC News/ Washington Post poll that put Obama thirty-three points behind Clinton nationally, followed by a Des Moines Register poll that had him third in Iowa, seven points behind Hillary and one behind Edwards.
The day the Register poll appeared, in early October, Obama’s national finance committee, comprising a couple hundred of the campaign’s richest fund-raisers, was gathered in Des Moines—and now in something close to open panic. Obama arrived that unseasonably cold Sunday afternoon and spoke to the bundlers, calming their nerves. But many were left still wondering if it was too late to stop Hillary, especially if Obama was unwilling to kneecap her.
Obama wondered, too. The Iowa homestretch was drawing near, and he believed that on his present trajectory, he was headed for a respectable second place. And I ain’t running, he thought, to be a respectable second. He needed a plan to change the dynamic. He needed a plan to change the game.
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE finance committee meeting, Obama and his brain trust convened in the conference room of a law firm in downtown Chicago. The candidate opened the proceedings with a blunt and bracing statement: “I think everybody around the table would admit that we’re losing right now.”
I’m not gonna yell, Obama went on. Look, everybody here has worked extremely hard and done a very good job. No question about that. And we’re in a position to win this thing, but the fact is, right now we are losing. We’ve got ninety days to turn this around, and we’re going to figure out in this room what we have to do to make sure we win. We’re all on the same team here. Everybody’s got to check their egos at the door. But we’ve got to be honest about where we’re falling short and what we need to do to succeed.
Obama raised an issue that had been bothering him for months: the change-versus-experience dichotomy. He’d always grasped the rationale behind homing in on transformation. He’d accepted, though not eagerly, the campaign’s decision to make its slogan “Change We Can Believe In.” (It struck him as too pat, but he preferred it to the other option on the table, “United We Stand,” which he rejected as sounding “like an airline slogan.”) But Obama was reluctant simply to cede experience to Hillary. Being a state senator wasn’t nothing, he said. He had a real record, had passed legislation—some of it important, such as ethics and death penalty reform—in Springfield. He had more elected experience than Clinton
, as a matter of fact.
Like Obama, the pollsters in the room had been grappling with the issue all year long. Time and again they would hear in their focus groups expressions of unease about Obama’s greenness and his barren resume. “He’s too new,” people would say. “Why doesn’t he wait four years?” “Why doesn’t he just take the vice presidency?” “He doesn’t know about foreign policy.”
But what was true when Obama’s advisers met back in February was still true in October. Voters wanted change over experience by about a two-to-one margin. “Change is still the way to go,” Benenson said. “Believe in the message. It’s still right on.”
The problem now, Benenson observed, was that the campaign’s polling showed Clinton making inroads with her new change-centric pitch. And though the national numbers may have been meaningless, she seemed to be gaining ground in Iowa. Everyone in the room understood from day one that they had to beat her there. The imperative was clear: The campaign had to prevent Hillary from swiping the mantle of change from Obama.
Obama called on Axelrod to present a memo he’d prepared for the meeting. There are three pillars to the kind of change voters want, Axelrod reminded them. They’re looking for a president who can bring the country together, who can reach beyond partisanship, and who’ll be tough on special interests. Obama could embody that sort of change, but Hillary could not, Axelrod said. In fact, she could be painted as the embodiment of everything Americans despised about the Washington status quo. As Larry Grisolano, another Obama strategist, often put it, If Clinton wanted to tout her experience, they had to make her pay for her experience.
Axelrod was a master of the dark arts of negative campaigning. (The first major profile of him, twenty years earlier in Chicago Magazine, was titled “Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod.”) Having worked on Clinton’s Senate race in 2000, Axelrod had seen the background research that exposed her vulnerabilities: the apprehension among voters who thought of her as calculating, triangulating, slippery with the truth. Obama and Axelrod had agreed all along about Clinton fatigue, that it was bubbling out there, just below the surface of her popularity—and her husband’s. The trick would be to incite it subtly, by implication and inference. To revive the voters’ worst memories of the Clinton years without so much as mentioning her name. To eviscerate her without damaging Obama’s reputation as an exponent of clean politics. To go negative, in other words, without seeming nasty.
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