Clinton exited the stage both bloodied and bowed. Of the sixty-two questions at Drexel that weren’t part of a “lightning round” in which all the candidates were asked the same thing, more than half were either directed to her or elicited answers that ended up being attacks on her. Only five times did any candidate go after someone besides her. Among the questions put to Obama: Did he believe in life on other planets? What would he do to fix air travel? And what would he dress as for Halloween?
On the flight home to Washington, Clinton asked her aides, How bad was that? Grunwald tried to be gentle but candid about the driver’s license cockup: It wasn’t great. We’re gonna catch some crap. We’re gonna need to clean it up.
The next day, however, Clinton’s people didn’t clean it up at all—they made an even bigger mess. A statement was issued that simply reformulated her muddled position from the night before. Then her press shop clarified the clarification, saying Clinton backed “the basic concept” of giving driver’s licenses to illegals absent immigration reform. At the same time, the campaign posted on the Web a thirty-second video titled “The Politics of Pile-On,” with intercut images of the other candidates assailing Hillary at the debate, set to music from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. The day after that, in a speech at her alma mater, Wellesley College, Clinton noted that the school had “prepared me to compete in the all-boys’ club of presidential politics.”
The combination of Clinton’s debate performance and the suggestion that sexism was at work unleashed a torrent of scorn from the media. And her opponents were no less scathing. The Edwards campaign produced a Web video of its own, highlighting Clinton’s obfuscations at the debate, called “The Politics of Parsing.” The Obama campaign made a video, too, featuring unflattering shots of Clinton against a soundtrack of “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” Obama personally vetoed the video as too mean. But he did go on the Today show and characterize Clinton as a whiner: “One of the things that she has suggested why she should be elected is because she’s been playing in this rough-and-tumble stage. So it doesn’t make sense for her after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly, she backs off and says: Don’t pick on me.”
The scale and intensity of the backlash stunned Hillary. “We need to stop talking about gender,” she instructed her staff. All year long she had shied away from putting her femaleness front and center, out of fear that it would undercut the tough-as-nails image she required to clear the commander-in-chief threshold. She had approved the piling-on video, but thought it had nothing to do with sexism—and was furious at her campaign for letting it be cast that way. But her deeper anger was directed at the media. Obama had been bad in so many debates and been given a free pass, she thought. And yet here she was, batting a thousand until then, getting pilloried for whiffing once by a press corps lying in wait for the first excuse to nail her. She found the unfairness of it galling.
The dynamics that drove the coverage were both more complex and simpler than that, of course. The press always wants a race. The press always loves conflict. Driver’s licenses for illegals was a hot topic. Clinton stumbling was a man-bites-dog story—and the way she stumbled reinforced an existing stereotype of her, to which the media was certainly receptive. Nor was Clinton’s campaign blameless in fomenting some of the ill will toward her. Its approach to the Fourth Estate, reflecting the candidate’s disposition, had fluctuated throughout the contest between heavy handed and outright hostile.
But whatever the confluence of causes and effects, the damage to the front-runner from the Drexel debate and its aftermath was more severe than anyone in Hillaryland knew. The inevitable candidate was suddenly revealed as vulnerable. The flawless campaign looked fallible. The Clinton juggernaut had a hole in its hull—and the water was rushing in.
HILLARY LOOKED DOWN AT the text of her speech and felt ill. She’d picked up a rotten cold on the road and was struggling to shake it, but that wasn’t the only reason for the dull throbbing in her skull. It was Friday, November 9, ten days after what had turned out to be the most important debate of 2007 and one day before what was expected to be her most important address of the year. In a little more than twenty-four hours, she would be standing on a stage in Des Moines at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, holding forth without notes or the aid of a TelePrompTer, in the round, before nine thousand Democrats. And yet here she was, sitting with her aides at Whitehaven, laying eyes on her speech text for the very first time—and saying, No, let’s change this.
The internal debates over what Clinton should say at the J-J had dragged on for weeks and arrived at no place good. In the past months, Obama had developed a fiery call-and-response that had become a trademark flourish: “Fired up! Ready to go!” For the J-J, Clinton would have an incantation of her own: “Turn up the heat!” (On the Republicans.) Nobody in Hillaryland liked it except Penn, who claimed it tested well in his polling and would reinforce Clinton’s image as a fighter against the GOP—in contrast to the weak and platitudinous Obama.
The Clinton campaign’s organizational efforts were equally haphazard. The J-J was a fund-raiser for the Iowa Democratic Party. The more tickets you bought, the more supporters you could bring. Teresa Vilmain kept badgering the people at the Ballston headquarters: Gang, either we come up with more money now or we lose out, she said. But the Iowa team had trouble getting the budget for the J-J approved. Its request for cash to hire a band to play outside the hall to rouse the troops was rejected. When the funds for crowd-building finally arrived, it was too late—the Obama campaign had already snatched up the prime seats in the place.
On the night of the event, Clinton and her team arrived late to Veterans Memorial Auditorium and Hillary retreated to a trailer to squeeze in a rushed final read-through or two. She would be the penultimate speaker, followed by Obama. The dinner had been plodding along for more than three hours already by the time she took the stage. Because it was so late, and because her supporters tended to be older, her crowd, which was smaller than Obama’s to begin with, had thinned out appreciably. Astonishingly, Clinton’s rendition of her text was letter perfect. Dressed in a black pantsuit with a yellow top, she gamely built toward her signature theme. “I’ll tell you what I want to do,” Hillary said. “I’m not interested in attacking my opponents. I’m interested in attacking the problems of America and I believe that we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans! They deserve all the heat we can give them!”
Out in the darkness of the hall, Obama’s brain trust was incredulous at Clinton’s message. She was talking about fighting, rather than uniting, playing right into their hands.
Obama’s speech—indeed, the entire Obama operation at the J-J—could not have been more different than the Clinton effort. Steve Hildebrand, Paul Tewes, and the Iowa field team treated the event as if it were a dry run for caucus night, scheduling a concert by John Legend for the foot soldiers beforehand. The Obama ranks were young, energetic, and eardrum-splitting. They went wild when their hero took the stage, as the PA system blasted an introduction by the Chicago Bulls announcer Ray Clay: “And now, from our neighboring state of Illinois, a six-foot-two force for change, Senator Barack Obama!”
Unlike Hillary, Obama had prepared meticulously for his speech. He had road-tested it a week before, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He’d spent hours in his hotel room over several days memorizing and rehearsing it. As for his message, there was never even the slightest doubt or dithering. His indictment of Hillary—and her husband—was subtle but unmistakable, his takedown of them a deft blend of coded language and clear implication.
“We have a chance to bring the country together in a new majority,” Obama declaimed. “That is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do in this election. That’s why not answering questions because we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead o
f telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do.” And also, “I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it’s somehow owed to me.”
The decimation was interwoven with flashes of inspiration: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.” The crowd adored it all. When Obama walked offstage to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” the ovation was thunderous. His supporters raised the rafters with their cries of “Fired up! Ready to Go!” Backstage, Obama spotted Axelrod, smiled, and said, “That was solid, right?”
That Obama won the night dramatically was apparent even to Clinton’s staunch allies. Ohio governor Ted Strickland, who’d accompanied Hillary to the dinner, thought the shift of momentum to Obama was palpable, almost visible. Penn and Grunwald attempted to spin reporters on the notion that the youth of Obama’s supporters was a negative. “Our people look like caucus-goers and his people look like they are eighteen,” Grunwald remarked, adding dismissively, “Penn said they look like Facebook.” Clinton’s chief strategist chimed in, “Only a few of their people look like they could vote in any state.”
Hillary’s loyalists took pains to praise her at a party afterward, not insincerely. But McAuliffe expressed dismay at Obama’s greater show of force in the auditorium, and Vilmain acknowledged that the opposition had more people in the hall.
“Why?” asked Hillary.
They got their money in sooner and they had more of it, Vilmain explained.
“Oh,” Clinton said and walked away.
But Hillary wasn’t satisfied with Vilmain’s answer. She had a lot of questions and a lot of worries—a cascade of concerns that had been growing for a while, but that the J-J unleashed full force. She was worried that Obama seemed to be building some kind of movement in the cornfields. “Movement” was the word she kept hearing from Maggie Williams, who told her it was easy to run against a man, but devilishly hard to run against a cause. “I think there’s something going on under the surface here,” Clinton said to Penn.
She was worried that Obama’s team seemed to be reaching out to a new universe of potential caucus-goers. Vilsack relayed to her that her rival’s canvassers were knocking on doors of Republicans and independents—an unheard-of practice in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses. Clinton wondered if her side should do the same or if she should be making a play for students, especially young women. But Hillary feared that her war vote would get her hooted off any campus where she spoke. And Vilsack and Vilmain assured her that come caucus night, if history was any guide, the non-Democrats would remain at home and the college kids, lazy or unserious, would stay in their rooms and on their Wiis.
Hillary was worried, too, that the caucus system was unfair. The process required that voters show up in person and hang around for several hours on a frigid January evening; absentee ballots weren’t allowed. For people who worked the night shift, single mothers, the elderly, and active-duty military—all key elements of her constituency—the rules made it difficult or even impossible to participate.
She was worried about some indications that Iowa simply didn’t cotton to female candidates. Recently, she’d been informed by the Des Moines Registers David Yepsen, the dean of the Iowa press corps, that no woman had ever been elected to Congress or the governorship there. The factoid stunned Hillary—and she started repeating it constantly.
Yet in spite of all her worries, Clinton decided to double down on Iowa. Millions of additional dollars started pouring into the state. Her local advertising budget soared, her staff there was increased twofold, her calendar was packed with Iowa travel. Hillary hated spending the money but was convinced she had no choice. And the J-J had only reinforced that conviction. Within days, Penn’s polling found that Obama was starting to open up a lead.
The political gamble here was evident, but the upside was huge: If Clinton carried the caucuses, the nomination would be in the bag. If she didn’t, her strength in New Hampshire and the big states on Super Tuesday might dissipate. There was another gamble, however, involved in doubling down on Iowa—a financial wager that Solis Doyle and Harold Ickes laid out for her one day in her Senate office.
Hillaryland was burning cash at a prodigious rate, her advisers said. If she won Iowa, her fiscal health would be jake—money would come gushing in to her campaign’s coffers. But if Clinton fell short in the Hawkeye State, a yawning deficit loomed.
Hillary was taken aback by the forecast. Where in God’s name did all the money go? she thought. She looked at Solis Doyle and Ickes, set her jaw, and said, Well, then, I guess we’d better win Iowa.
BILL CLINTON’S INVOLVEMENT IN his wife’s campaign was still minimal at that point. He took part in few conference calls, had no briefing books, and was only rarely sent on the road to campaign for or with her. (The fear of him overshadowing Hillary persisted. Let’s make sure that he’s not going to get a bigger crowd than she’s going to get, Solis Doyle told the Iowa staff whenever Bill visited for separate events.) But now his status was about to change.
Much of Clinton’s political acumen lay in his ability to synthesize three streams of data: the polling, what was happening on the ground, and what was happening with the candidate. With Hillary’s campaign, his intake had been limited mainly to the numbers being fed to him by Penn, and for much of the year, those numbers had been good—deceptively good. But now Bill was hearing ominous chatter from the members of his old political circle, most of whom had either absented themselves from Hillaryland or been locked out. His friend Carville opined that Hillary’s team was stocked with joyless misanthropes who loved neither politics nor people. Well, you have to call Hillary and tell her, Clinton said beseechingly.
Bill was keenly aware of Hillary’s political (and human) liabilities, but he found it difficult to discuss them with her without raising her hackles. One day that fall, they were on a plane together and he tried to give his wife a pep talk, while at the same time gently broaching the topic of her perceived haughtiness. “I know you’re working hard,” he said, “but you need to let people know how hard you’re working for them, and you have to really dig in there. There’s a belief that you’re above them, and you need to really let them know who you are.”
“Bill, I’m working eighteen hours a day,” Hillary snapped, ending the discussion.
The former president thought he could rely on Penn as his instrument inside of Hillary’s campaign. But Penn was stymied in his efforts to go negative against Obama. His colleagues at headquarters and in Iowa were firmly opposed to running attack ads; the press showed little interest in the dirt the Clinton press shop was peddling under the table; and Hillary refused to rule in favor of strafing Obama.
The whole thing baffled Bill. Over the past months, his assessment of Obama had hardened. Yes, he was exciting. Yes, he was talented. Yes, he was the future. But he was also, Bill thought, an “off-the-rack Chicago politician” who had figured out how to have it both ways—appearing to be above bare-knuckle tactics while his team practiced them with a vengeance. In early November, for example, The Atlantic had published a story in which an unnamed Obama official plopped down next to the author and inquired as to “when reporters would begin to look into Bill Clinton’s postpresidential sex life.” The incident enraged Bill for reasons that went beyond the obvious. Obama was constantly bragging on the cleanness of his campaign. Yet no one in the media saw fit to call him out when his hired guns egged on the press to start rummaging around in Bill’s boudoir. What more evidence did anyone need that the media was in the tank for Obama? It was as if the referees were on the field wearing the opposing team’s jerseys, Clinton said.
Clinton grasped the rhythm of a presidential campaign as well as anyone alive. He knew there always came a moment, late in the game, when a candidate either found his voice or didn’t, when the souffle either rose or fell. For him
, the moment had come in the autumn of 1991, with a series of third-way policy speeches that propelled him into the lead. Clinton could see that the J-J had done the same for Obama—and that his wife was headed in the opposite direction. Ever since Philly, the press had been all over Hillary, and not just about the debate. There were stories about her staff planting questions at town hall meetings in Iowa. About her failing to leave a tip at a Maid-Rite diner. She was being buffeted by external flaps, distracted by overblown hassles, coping with internal disagreements, and all the while not only failing to find her homestretch groove, but looking ever more lost out there.
Hillary sensed it, too. Her Iowa stump speech was a themeless pudding, laundry-listy and flat, but she was too busy lurching from crisis to crisis to find time to fix it. The story about her not leaving a tip was bullshit, plain and simple, and the one about the planted questions . . . well, that was true, and, man, did she give her staff an earful about it. She asked them, What are we doing? We’re supposed to have this organization that’s the best in the world. Why do we keep making these mistakes? The press is gonna turn molehills into mountains, but can we please stop giving them so many molehills to work with?
One night around Thanksgiving, the Clintons held a private meeting with Penn to discuss what they should do to stanch the bleeding and turn Iowa around. Once again, Bill and Penn pressed the argument for going negative against Obama on TV. Hillary had been hitting Obama harder of late. (“Voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of ten prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face,” she’d said in Iowa. “I think we need a president with more experience than that.”) But her team was ineffective in backing her up when she took on Obama. She told Penn that she felt like a general running up a hill with a sword in her hand but no troops behind her. For months, she’d tried to stay on the high road—but now she’d had enough. She was ready, she announced to Penn and her husband, to commence the carpet-bombing.
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