Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Bill had definite ideas about how to nuke Obama. He was still obsessed, and so was Penn, with Obama’s Iraq record. He was also fixated on Obama’s habit of voting “present” in the Illinois state senate, his less-than-pristine history of taking campaign cash from lobbyists, and his ties to the shady Chicago developer Tony Rezko.

  At Penn’s instruction, Grunwald produced an array of ads revolving around those issues. She made harsh ads, mild ads, mean ads, funny ads—but when they were tested with Iowa voters, every one of them fell flat. Grunwald showed the spots to the Clintons at a meeting at Whitehaven. She explained her difficulty in finding anything that stuck. Bill told her to keep trying, offering ideas in granular detail about the scripts and visuals.

  But nothing worked. It began to dawn on Grunwald that the problem was that Iowans simply didn’t want to hear trash talk about Obama from Hillary. They liked him and they didn’t like her, and there would be no changing that—her negatives were just too deeply cooked into the casserole.

  The Clintons flew out to Iowa just after Thanksgiving in a state of irritation and anxiety. On the first night of December, they had drinks at Azalea, a swish restaurant in Des Moines, with the editorial board of the Register and some of its political reporters. Hillary was working hard for the paper’s endorsement; Bill was gathering intelligence, chatting up the beat reporter who was covering Hillary’s campaign. The reporter told him that the Obamans were regularly feeding her negative information about Hillary—but that no one from the Clinton team was doing the same regarding Obama.

  When the drinks were over, Bill related the story to Hillary. The next morning, she woke up simmering—and then received yet more bad news. One of her most trusted aides confided that he’d spoken the night before with Karen Hicks, a veteran field organizer who had been dispatched to Des Moines to fortify the Iowa operation. Karen’s unhappy, the aide told Hillary. The Iowa team isn’t getting what it needs from headquarters. Phone calls aren’t being returned. Decisions aren’t getting made. Hillary’s aide didn’t cast blame explicitly on Solis Doyle or Henry, but Hillary had no difficulty in drawing the inference.

  Clinton picked up the phone and got on the morning briefing call with her senior advisers—and promptly blew a gasket. Our communications shop isn’t getting the job done, she growled, mentioning what she and Bill had learned during drinks the previous night. No one is engaging with reporters, she said. Nothing we throw at Obama is sticking. Everything he throws at us is. All the decision makers are back in Washington, doing God knows what. Clinton seethed uninterrupted for five minutes; when she finished, there was silence.

  Finally, Solis Doyle offered meekly, “I’ll have a plan for you this afternoon.”

  “I’ve been asking you this for weeks, Patti!” Hillary angrily replied.

  After the call, Clinton phoned Solis Doyle directly and ordered her and all the rest of the Ballston high command to head to Iowa. You need to get out here, Hillary said. This is too important. Pretend that nothing else exists in the country.

  Clinton could hardly believe where she’d found herself five weeks out from caucus day. Frustrated, panicky, still steaming over what she’d learned that morning, she went before reporters at an afternoon news conference in Cedar Rapids. After criticizing Obama for insisting that his health care plan was universal when it wasn’t, Clinton was asked if her opponent’s lack of candor on the topic meant he had a character problem.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like that,” Hillary said. “I have said for months that I would much rather be attacking Republicans and attacking [the] problems of our country, because ultimately that’s what I want to do as president. But I have been for months on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks—well, now the fun part starts.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Fun Part

  FOR OBAMA, THE FUN PART had already been under way for weeks. The J-J had been a slingshot for him; he was flying now. His media team put the speech front and center in TV advertising and direct mail. And its message became the core of what Obama was saying four or five or six times each day on the stump. At the end of November, the latest Register poll confirmed the Obama uptick: he was three points ahead of Clinton and four ahead of Edwards (a swing of ten and five points, respectively, since October). In early December, his friend Oprah Winfrey traveled to Des Moines and anointed him in front of eighteen thousand fans. “There are those who say it’s not his time, that he should wait his turn,” Oprah proclaimed. “I’m sick of politics as usual. We need Barack Obama.”

  Since the start of Obama’s bid for the nomination, Plouffe had been chanting a mantra in his ear: “You need to own Iowa.” Owning Iowa meant establishing a deep and intimate connection to the state. It meant visiting any county and remembering what had happened the last time he was there—whom he’d met, why they mattered. It meant doing more than appreciating the grassroots machine that Hildebrand and Tewes were building. It meant being invested in it, living it and breathing it, becoming one with it.

  It took Obama a long time to get there, but now something had clicked. All of a sudden, he was asking, How many people am I getting? How many supporter cards? How many precinct captains? Instead of begging off making calls, he was reaching for the phone. At rallies, he started bringing organizers up onstage and giving props to them by name, a nice idea that impressed Plouffe all the more because it was Obama’s. After town hall meetings, he would take a group picture with his volunteers—and then another with the high school students in attendance, because those who’d be eighteen by the general election were eligible to participate in the caucuses. To Penn, they might have looked like Facebook. To Obama, they looked like victory.

  Obama was enjoying himself, too, at Hillary’s expense. He and his advisers took no small pleasure in the planted-question story. (The Obama press shop pushed it sub rosa with reporters and found plenty of takers.) The episode was a perfect illustration of what Obama meant when he dissed “textbook” campaigns, and it reinforced the negative frame that Axelrod wanted to place around Hillary’s portrait: that she’d do anything to win. At town halls, Obama would slyly mock Clinton by saying to the crowd, “You know what? Ask me any question. I haven’t asked anybody here to ask me a certain question.” The line always got a laugh.

  As Clinton began to take more shots at Obama, his advisers—especially Axelrod and Gibbs, both summa cum laude graduates of the school of rapid-response politics—were dying to return fire. But many of her shots were so maladroit that Obama found them easy to slough off. On the day she announced that the fun part was starting, her campaign put out a press release that cited an “essay” written by a four- or five-year-old Obama with the title “I want to be president.” (The point was that Obama was more ambitious than he pretended to be.)

  “It’s the silly season,” Obama said with a shrug at an event that night in Des Moines. “I understand she’s been quoting my kindergarten teacher in Indonesia.”

  Obama’s team wanted to make even more hay with the kindergarten kerfuffle. One of his ad makers hacked together a goofy Web video featuring still photos of Obama as a child dressed up to look like a buccaneer. “Barack Obama wanted to be president when he was in kindergarten but there were other things he wanted—he wanted to be a pirate,” the voice-over intoned melodramatically. “Do we really want a pirate president?” (Michelle put the kibosh on that idea; she thought it diminished her husband.)

  Ambition wasn’t the only youthful excess of Obama’s that the Clinton campaign injected into the conversation, however. On December 12, Billy Shaheen, one of Hillary’s national co-chairs and a veteran of New Hampshire politics, gave an interview to The Washington Post in which he cast doubt on Obama’s electability.

  “Republicans are not going to give up without a fight,” Shaheen said, “and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use”—a reference to Obama’s acknowledgment in Dreams that he’d dabbled with cocaine and marijuana as a young man.
“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’”

  Obama tried to brush off Shaheen’s insinuations as garden-variety cheap politics. But it hadn’t gone unnoticed by him that two Clinton volunteers had recently been caught forwarding emails suggesting that Obama was a Muslim with vague connections to jihadists trying to destroy America. Things seemed to be taking a turn for the ugly, and he and Michelle were certain it was no accident. Obama’s brain trust agreed: Shaheen was acting as a puppet for one or both Clintons.

  Their suspicions weren’t unreasonable. The Clintons talked about Obama’s drug use with some regularity in private, citing it as another example of the willful failure of the press to vet Obama. Why are they giving him a free ride on this? the couple would complain. Why isn’t it out there?

  Hillary’s reaction to Shaheen’s remarks was “Good for him!” Followed by “Let’s push it out!” Her aides violently disagreed, seeing what Shaheen had said as a PR disaster. Grudgingly, Clinton acquiesced to disowning Shaheen’s comments. But she wasn’t going to cut him loose. Why should Billy have to fall on his sword, she asked, for invoking something that had been fair game in every recent election?

  Hillary was in Washington for votes in the Senate. So was Obama. The next day, as both of them prepared to fly to Des Moines for another debate, they found themselves boarding their campaign planes at the same time at Reagan National Airport. One of the strangest things about presidential campaigns is how rarely the candidates are ever in close proximity to one another. They might greet voters one county apart or brush past each other in a debate hall, but private conversations almost never happen.

  Yet now came an exception.

  “Senator Clinton would like to speak with you,” one of her advance people told Obama. Obama ambled over to Clinton as she stood there on the tarmac.

  I’m sorry about what Billy said, Hillary began. I didn’t know he was going to do that. I’m not running that kind of campaign.

  That’s fine, Hillary, Obama replied, but this wasn’t an isolated incident. There were those emails in Iowa . . .

  Now, hold on a second! Clinton said, cutting Obama off, uncorking the long list of grievances she’d been stewing on for months. What about Geffen? What about attacking her about her White House papers? The list went on and on.

  For the next several minutes, the two went at it in animated fashion. Bug-eyed, red-faced, waving her arms, Hillary pointed at Obama’s chest. Obama tried to calm her down by putting his hand on her shoulder—but that only made her angrier. Finally, they broke from the clinch, stalking back to their respective planes.

  “Wow, that was surreal,” Obama told Axelrod. He was struck by her fury, and more than that, he thought that she seemed shaken. “You could see something in her eyes,” he said, something he hadn’t seen before. Maybe it was fear. Maybe desperation. “You know what?” Obama said. “We’re doing something right.”

  On her plane, Clinton related her interpretation of what had happened. I tried to apologize, she told her people, but then he started yelling. The way Obama came back at her told her that he was rattled. She couldn’t believe he’d put his hand on her, violated her personal space. “He’s got a lot of nerve,” she said.

  Later that day, Clinton, under pressure from her New Hampshire staff, agreed to excommunicate Shaheen. But she still had plenty of surrogates ready to sink their canines into Obama’s keister. That night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Penn appeared in a segment from the debate hall spin room with Trippi and with Axelrod via remote. Chris Matthews asked about the Clinton team’s turn toward negativity, and Penn replied, “The issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.”

  “He just did it again! He just did it again! Unbelievable!” Trippi interrupted indignantly, pointing at Penn. “He just said ‘cocaine’ again!”

  “I think you’re saying ‘cocaine,’” Penn chuckled. “I think you’re saying it.”

  Axelrod shook his head mournfully at the sleaziness on display. Trippi fulminated further. And Penn returned to Clinton’s Des Moines headquarters giddy as a schoolgirl, giggling to his colleagues, “Did you notice how many times I said ‘cocaine’?”

  And then there was Hillary’s husband. As part of a book tour to promote his latest tome, Giving, Bill Clinton appeared on Charlie Rose the night after the verbal fisticuffs on the tarmac. He spent most of the show talking earnestly about philanthropy, but when Rose nudged him into the realm of politics, he couldn’t restrain himself. A year’s worth of agitation flooded out. Voters had to decide, Clinton said, if they wanted a nominee with the experience to be a change agent or were willing to “roll the dice” on “somebody who started running for president a year after he became a senator because he’s fresh, he’s new, he’s never made a mistake, and he has massive political skills.” Bill dinged Obama for repeating a “total canard” about his wife pursuing a decades-long scheme to run for president. He reamed out the press for being “stenographers” for Obama and attributed Barack’s strength in Iowa to the fact that he lived in a neighboring state. He predicted that people would “watch this interview and parse everything I said” in order to “get a political story and a fight going.”

  He was right about that. His denigration of Obama on the eve of the caucuses had everyone talking. But Clinton didn’t care. His attitude toward politics was in some ways simple: always be on offense, never on defense; if someone is standing in your way, the only sensible course is to crush him. Fuck it, he thought. Somebody has to say this stuff about Obama, and Hillary’s campaign isn’t going to. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I’m glad I did.

  Hillary didn’t blame her husband for the controversy his comments engendered, in no small part because she believed that every word he said was true. But she could see that her side’s negative barrage was backfiring, that it looked like indiscriminate flailing, that all the energy in Iowa remained with Obama.

  Clinton began to despair. “If he’s who they want, they can have him,” she said dejectedly.

  Then came a bolt from the blue. In years past in Iowa, the next most influential occurrence after the J-J had been the Register endorsement. Both sides had courted the paper assiduously, slavishly, and the Clintons especially so. (Vilsack plotted out their strategy; surrogates such as Madeleine Albright were enlisted to call ed-board members; and Bill laid the charm on thick with the editorial chief.) Because of the paper’s leftish leanings, though, most believed Obama had it cinched.

  Clinton happily learned otherwise on a frigid mid-December day while she was flying on a tiny chartered jet from New York to Washington. A loud, mysterious buzzing sound kept going off on the plane. Her Secret Service detail began to panic, thinking that it must be an emergency alarm. But then someone noticed an ancient air phone tucked under Hillary’s seat. Headquarters was on the line with the good news about the Register. Clinton did a little dance for joy—it was the best news she’d heard in weeks.

  Penn and others inside Hillaryland thought the Register endorsement could be a game changer. A rapid shift of strategy was called for. Out with the negative. In with the positive. Showcase Hillary’s softer side. The internal advocates of humanizing her were thrilled, although they worried that it was too late. The price tag on the Iowa campaign was already stratospheric—more than $25 million had now been spent—but no expense would be spared in the last two weeks before the caucuses. To put Clinton in front of as many voters as possible, a private helicopter was secured. (The sleek, navy blue Bell 222 chopper was promptly christened the Hil-o-copter.) And, maybe most remarkable of all, Chelsea Clinton would hit the trail in Iowa.

  She had done so only once before, a couple of weeks earlier, on the same day that Oprah arrived to campaign for Obama. Hillary detested the idea, fought it tooth and nail. Her protectiveness of Chelsea had been unwavering and fierce since the Clintons went national. Her daughter was an adult now, sure, old enough to make h
er own decisions. But Hillary was nervous anyway about throwing her into the middle of the mayhem—and if Chelsea made a mistake or was harassed, Hillary would feel the sting of responsibility.

  The prohibition against deploying Chelsea—intelligent, poised, and charming as she was—struck many of Clinton’s advisers as nuts. (“Is the daughter dead?” Vilmain asked incredulously on learning that Chelsea wouldn’t be accompanying her parents on their July 4 Iowa swing.) And Chelsea desperately wanted to help, lobbying her mother insistently, enlisting aides to make her case. She knows you don’t want her to do it, Clinton’s traveling chief of staff, Huma Abedin, told Hillary. But she wants to do it—she keeps calling and telling me she wants to do it. Finally, Hillary relented.

  For five days leading up to Christmas, Hillary embarked on what The New York Times described as a “likability tour” of Iowa. She brought her husband along to vouch for her warm and fuzzy side. She brought her best friend from sixth grade. She brought farmers from New York to tell Iowans how she’d helped them. She even brought Magic Johnson to a few events. Gone from her speeches were any strident tones. Speaking as if she were on Quaaludes, her voice was bedtime-story soft, her cadences syrupy slow. In a Des Moines grocery store, she told reporters, “I know that people have been saying, ‘Well, you know, we’ve got to know more about her, we want to know more about her personally.’ And I totally get that. It’s a little hard for me. It’s not easy for me to talk about myself.”

  The hokiness of Hillary’s likability tour was overpowering—and the inconsistency of it with her message all year long even more so. But there were signs that whatever Clinton was doing, it was working.