Game Change

by John Heilemann

  A few days before Christmas, Hillary awoke to a new CNN poll that had her in first place in Iowa, two points ahead of Obama and four ahead of Edwards. On her staff call that morning, she was loose and frisky. Wolfson informed her that journalists thought her campaign had stabilized since the Register endorsement. Clinton agreed. Obama’s support outside Des Moines is thin, she said. “We need to start thinking about Edwards.” She mentioned that she’d seen him quoted saying he was the most consistent candidate among the Democrats.

  Hillary scoffed. Edwards and Obama were very different cats, but they shared something in common. Both were “gripped in delusion,” she said.

  IF EDWARDS HAD ANY doubts about his sanity, he didn’t have to look far for signs that would assuage them. The collective media assessment was that Iowa was still a down-to-the-wire three-way race, with an Edwards victory no less plausible than a Clinton or Obama win. In one twenty-four-hour stretch in mid-December, Edwards graced the cover of Newsweek—looking serious and determined, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened—flanked by the headline “The Sleeper”; appeared the same morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos and Face the Nation; and received the endorsement of Iowa governor Chet Culver’s wife, Mari, whose preference was seen by some as a proxy for her husband, who had pledged to stay neutral.

  Edwards was bolstered on the trail by the presence of his children and Elizabeth, who had returned to the road after a month-long absence. During the four long weeks of her hiatus, John’s advisers had fielded countless press calls asking about her health: Had it taken a turn for the worse? But now here she was, back on the hustings, as feisty and outspoken as ever, monitoring the debates, turning up on cable television, receiving wild cheers at rallies. Everything seemed to be back to normal.

  Then the Enquirer struck again.

  On December 18, the tabloid published a follow-up to its October expose on Edwards’s affair—and this one was a doozy. Whereas the first Enquirer story had failed to name Rielle Hunter, the new piece did that and much more. It included a photograph of her six months pregnant, and bore a headline that read “UPDATE: JOHN EDWARDS LOVE CHILD SCANDAL.” And it claimed that Hunter had told “a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!”

  Team Edwards had known that the Enquirer story was coming for some time. Fred Baron, John’s friend and finance chair, had scrambled to coordinate statements from lawyers for the candidate and Hunter denying John’s paternity, which the piece included. It also introduced a new character to the drama: Edwards’s longtime personal aide, Andrew Young, who was asserting that he was the father.

  The details in the article around Young’s involvement were as squirrely as could be. The Enquirer reported that Hunter was living in a rented house near the home of Young, his wife, and children in Governors Club, an exclusive gated community in Chapel Hill. When an Enquirer reporter confronted Young face-to-face, he first denied his identity and knowing Hunter—this despite the fact that the car she was driving was registered in his name—before announcing the next day through his attorney that he was the sire of the unborn baby. Drawing out the obvious implication from this curious chain of events, the story noted, “Some insiders wonder whether Young’s paternity claim is simply a cover-up to protect his longtime pal Edwards.”

  The new Enquirer story rocked the Edwardsphere to its core. Crazy as it sounded, the idea that Young was taking the fall for John had the deafening ring of truth. An attorney in his early forties, Young had a history of run-ins with the law and a rumored alcohol problem. Though he’d done some fund-raising over the years, his main role with Edwards was menial: household chores, personal errands, airport runs for the family. His devotion to his boss was comically servile. One Edwards staffer liked to joke, “If John asked Andrew to wipe his ass, he would say, ‘What kind of toilet paper?’”

  Edwards denounced the Enquirer piece vehemently to his staff. On the campaign bus, he railed at the tabloid: “How could they fucking say this? How could they do this to me? How could they do this to Elizabeth?”

  Some Edwards aides believed John’s denials, thought the story was too far-out to be true. The campaign’s press shop, as it had in October, moved rapidly to contain the damage. Between Edwards’s and Hunter’s categorical denials and Young’s paternity claim, reporters would have a hard time advancing the narrative—the story might just be survivable.

  But other Edwards staffers decided to stop spinning the candidate’s disavowals to the media, so certain were they that their boss was lying. Too many of them knew that Young had talked openly about having a vasectomy a few years earlier, after the birth of his third child, sharing details with anyone who would listen. A bit of math and a glance at a calendar made clear that Hunter had gotten pregnant around June, within months of the recurrence of Elizabeth’s cancer, right around the time Hunter popped up again. Despite the terrors Elizabeth inflicted on the staffers, their sympathy for her now was huge.

  Elizabeth’s presence back on the trail, however, created a situation of massive instability. Even before the second Enquirer piece, she had turned against Trippi and Jonathan Prince, her husband’s deputy campaign manager. (Prince, she was sure, had helped facilitate the Hunter affair; Trippi had lost her confidence by becoming friends with Prince.) She was alternately paranoid about and jealous of their closeness to John, attempting to banish both advisers first from Iowa and then from the campaign bus. Before the final pre-Iowa debate in December, she insisted that they be excluded from John’s prep sessions. John begged Trippi and Prince to understand. Elizabeth is a little upset right now, he said; she’s going through a lot of stress. Edwards arranged to meet with the two aides secretly to get ready for the debate.

  After the story broke, things went from bad to worse. John and Elizabeth were fighting all the time, sometimes all night long. More than once, she announced to the staff that she could no longer speak in public on her husband’s behalf or stay in the same hotel with him. Once, in the middle of the night, she woke up a trip director and commanded, Get me out of here! I’m not campaigning for this asshole another day!

  At other times, Elizabeth seemed intent on convincing herself that Young was indeed the father. She ordered the campaign staff to assemble an elaborate chronology of the previous months, establishing the nights when Young and Hunter might have been in the same city. “When were they together?” she demanded. “We need to figure this out, how many times they were together.”

  It’s been a humiliating few weeks, Elizabeth told a friend. I wish I could wring Andrew Young’s neck.

  One night in the last week before the caucuses, she and John had dinner at Azalea with Kim Rubey and David Ginsberg, two of the former aides from 2004 who had left the Edwardsphere in large part because of the looming threat of Hunter. They had come to Des Moines with mixed emotions and motives: to help their old colleagues handle the mammoth workload and to witness the final days of Edwards as a presidential candidate. They had been there at the start. They wanted to be there at the end. And they believed this was the end.

  Edwards had invited Ginsberg and Rubey to supper after seeing them at one of his events. He seemed touched that they were in Iowa, in light of the circumstances, about which he knew they were better versed than most.

  “Can you believe this is Andrew?” Elizabeth said over dinner. “How has Andrew done this to our family?” She solicited everyone’s opinion about Young and Hunter. Had Ginsberg and Rubey ever seen them together?

  The two former aides squirmed in their seats and held their tongues—while John sat staring silently at them from across the table. They left the dinner astonished by Elizabeth’s herculean efforts at willingly suspending disbelief. But as disquieting for them as the scene at Azalea was, even more disturbing was the possibility that they were wrong about how Edwards would fare in Iowa. What if he won? What would they do? What should they do?

  The thought was occurring in the minds of many old Edwards hands that week, in Iowa and farther afiel
d. The mainstream media, yet again, was determinedly ignoring the Enquirer. If that trend continued, there was a chance, however remote, that John could win the nomination—and thus deliver the White House to the GOP on a platter when the story eventually, inevitably, was proved true.

  Tentatively, unhappily, but soberly and seriously, the Edwards old guard began discussing their obligation to the party to come forward with what they knew. When should they leak the truth to The Washington Post or The New York Times? Which of them would make the call?

  TWO DAYS AFTER CHRISTMAS, Obama delivered what his aides billed as his “closing argument” in Iowa, in the basement of the Scottish Rite Temple in Des Moines. With a law professor’s attention to detail and a litigator’s argumentativeness—plus a hint of the defensiveness of a politician under fire—he included rebuttals to almost every criticism that Clinton had hurled at him down the homestretch. For a month he’d been telling Axelrod he still wasn’t happy with his response to the charge of insufficient experience. But his research team helped him solve that puzzle with the discovery of a quote from a source both gilt-edged and delicious to invoke.

  “The truth is, you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience,” Obama said in the Masonic temple’s basement. “Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people and it will bring real results if we have the courage to change. I believe deeply in those words. But they are not mine. They were Bill Clinton’s in 1992, when Washington insiders questioned his readiness to lead.”

  For all Obama’s confidence, however, his advisers were worried about Hillary’s apparently strong last-minute push and Edwards’s entrenched and loyal following. The Obama campaign’s internal tracking poll on December 27 made the race a three-way tie, with Clinton and Edwards at 26 percent and Obama at 25. The trouble was, the trend lines were moving in the wrong direction. By December 30, the final Obama tracking numbers were Clinton, 27; Edwards, 26; Obama, 24. But the Obama campaign was still phone-banking like mad, calling thousands of voters a day. The calls, his team was pleased to discover, suggested more support for Obama than their tracking poll did, and they all had faith in their turnout operation.

  As he headed for his final event in an eventful year, at Iowa State University, in Ames, Obama was exhausted. A quiet dinner with his wife was on the schedule for late that night. For all her reluctance at the outset, Michelle had poured her heart into Iowa in the closing days. Every voter who met her loved her. Her skill at inducing supporters to sign up had become legend. Michelle was competitive. She was constantly teasing Barack about how she was better at the game than he was. “I got fifteen supporter cards today,” she said to him. “What’d you do?”

  What greeted Obama at Iowa State on New Year’s Eve was a healthy crowd and an extraordinary piece of news: the results of the last Register poll before the caucuses on January 3, ricocheting from BlackBerry to cell phone. Everyone had been on tenterhooks for the Register’s results. The paper’s polling team was highly esteemed, with a long-held reputation for producing numbers of startling accuracy. And these were certainly startling: Obama, 32; Clinton, 25; Edwards, 24. The assumptions beneath the numbers were even more eye-popping. The paper forecast “a dramatic influx of first-time caucusgoers, including a sizable bloc of political independents,” with both groups heavily favoring Obama.

  Onstage, a hoarse Obama reveled in the numbers: “Up six points, maybe it’s seven. Six or seven. It’s beyond the margin of error. So we might just pull this thing off. We might just pull this thing off, Iowa. Who woulda thunk it?”

  For the rest of the night, the wails of Clinton and Edwards operatives could be heard above the clink of champagne flutes all over Des Moines. At the 801 Grand steak house, Trippi piled into the booth of every journalist in sight and explained in numbing detail the glaring flaws in the poll’s methodology: too many first-time voters, too many independents, a turnout model that defied the laws of caucus physics. (In 2004, 124,000 showed up; the Register seemed to be predicting at least 220,000 this year.) And Vilsack, who knew the caucuses like the back of his hand, took one look at the numbers and said, “That can’t be right.”

  THE CLINTONS DIDN’T KNOW what to think. After all the confidence that stirred before Christmas, their post-holiday return to Iowa brought back a familiar disquiet. Outside a church in Indianola one frosty morning, Hillary made a surprise visit to her press bus, bringing the reporters hot coffee and bagels, making a joke at the expense of her spokesman, expressing her sympathies with those who were away from their “significant others”—and was greeted with stony silence. “Why do they hate me so much?” she asked one of her aides plaintively afterward.

  Hillary had labored hard to comprehend the rules of the caucus system, and now she finally understood enough—enough to worry, that is. There were successive rounds of voting, with candidates who didn’t get 15 percent of the attendees at a caucus site forced out after each round. Her campaign had hoped to strike deals with Biden and Richardson to send their voters to Clinton if they failed to reach the threshold. But the negotiations had fallen apart. Hillary considered Biden and Richardson friends (though the former more so than the latter). Why weren’t they being more cooperative?

  On caucus eve, January 2, Clinton’s spirits brightened momentarily. Her final rally at the Iowa Historical Society was jam-packed, the music thumping, the reception for her rapturous. Backstage afterward, she and Bill talked with Vilsack and McAuliffe—both of whom were flying high, telling her she was either going to win or come in a close second.

  The next morning, however, an email arrived in Hillary’s in-box from Penn. The pollster was hedging his bets. If turnout was similar to 2004, then Clinton would do just fine, Penn said. But if turnout was “radically different,” it would be because of “another organization,” and “the outcome will be radically different.”

  Hillary went apeshit and called Solis Doyle, demanding an explanation.

  “I’m as stunned as you are,” her campaign manager replied.

  Hillary was still agitated when she got on her final pre-caucus conference call with her team that afternoon. Everyone else was tense and anxious, too. Curtly, she thanked the group and hung up. Then she hunkered down with her husband to await the returns.

  Around seven o’clock, McAuliffe wandered over to the campaign’s second-floor boiler room in the Hotel Fort Des Moines. Thirty-odd kids hunched over computers, monitoring the turnout numbers as they came in from caucus sites around the state. Every so often someone would yell out an overall turnout estimate: 125! 140! 150! As the numbers kept climbing—165! 185! 195! 205!—McAuliffe started to wonder if something was wrong. He glanced over at Vilmain. She looked like she’d been hit with a poleaxe. Wolfson, walking by on his way to grab some pizza, said, “We’re gonna get our asses kicked.”

  McAuliffe asked Vilmain if it was true. She said it was.

  “Someone needs to prepare Hillary,” McAuliffe said. “Are we going to get second?”

  “Probably not.”

  Just then, McAuliffe’s BlackBerry buzzed. Bill Clinton’s counselor, Doug Band, had emailed: the former president wanted to see him upstairs, and pronto.

  The next four hours were a blur for Hillary Clinton. Reeling from the loss, she appeared onstage for a televised speech surrounded by old and pale faces—Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark, her husband—that created an unflattering contrast with the young and multiracial tableau presented by Obama. Back upstairs at the hotel, she had to be coaxed into thanking her Iowa staff and major fund-raisers, who were gathered in a nearby suite. “Yeah, okay,” she said. Standing on a chair, steadied by McAuliffe, she told the crowd that everything would be all right. It was just one loss, the race ahead would be long; she was on to New Hampshire. But the expression on her face belied her words: with her frozen smile, her dazed eyes, she looked as if she were having an out-of-body experience.

  Returning to her suite, Clinton found it even more crowded than before. Chelsea was the
re, along with Hillary’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, who sat on the bed looking inconsolable. Vilsack walked over to Hillary and apologized for having been too optimistic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought we could win.”

  “It’s okay,” she said—but didn’t mean it.

  Hillary began to pack her things. She was eager to put Iowa behind her and move on to the Granite State. But its primary was just five days away. The Clintonites had to decide, and decide right then, how they were going to halt the momentum that Obama now possessed—in particular, if they were finally going to go full-on negative, blasting him with both barrels, including TV ads.

  Most of Clinton’s advisers remained uneasy at the prospect—and now there was the risk, too, of making Hillary seem a sore and desperate loser.

  “Can we win with a positive message?” Wolfson asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Hillary said. “I don’t know what it would be. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “This may be a movement,” Wolfson said. “It’s tough to beat a movement.”

  Penn could barely believe his ears. “We didn’t go negative here, and it cost us!” he snapped at his colleagues. “This is what we have to do! This is how we’re going to survive and win!”

  Bill Clinton took control of the meeting. His instincts had all along aligned with Penn’s, and now he’d been proved right. Hillary’s team had told him that she couldn’t win Iowa if she went negative . . . and she’d finished third. The hell with this, Clinton thought.

  He demanded to see the best negative television ads the campaign already had in the can. Grunwald sat down next to him on the couch and opened her laptop. Over the past few months, she’d made literally hundreds of negative Obama spots—not one of which, she believed, would have done them a bit of good.