Bill studied the available options, then polled the room: Should they go negative or not? Penn, McAuliffe, and Vilsack said yes. Everyone else said no.
It was nearly midnight now. An overnight flight to New Hampshire awaited them. As the suite emptied out, they all assumed that the negative air war would begin the next day—if only because the former president was adamantly in favor.
Yet no one really knew where Hillary Clinton stood. She went back and forth. Throughout the campaign, her uncertainty at crucial junctures had been profound, but never more so than it was at that moment. All the past year, during which she’d been the undisputed leader in the race, Grunwald had reminded her that front-runners never waltzed to the nomination. Somewhere along the line, they inevitably received a shock, an event that threatened to topple them from their pedestal, but which they almost always survived.
Clinton was versed enough in history to know that it was true. But this felt more like a coronary event than a typical front-runner’s scare. Sitting on her small private jet before it took off for New Hampshire, she leaned back and called Penn, who was flying in a separate plane with McAuliffe and the press corps.
The confusion that gripped her went beyond questions of strategy and tactics, beyond going negative or not. It went to the existential core of her candidacy. In a voice infinitely weary, Clinton asked her Svengali, “What are we going to do now?”
As Penn started to answer, his plane took off. Hillary heard only static.
Chapter Ten
Two for the Price of One
SHE TOUCHED DOWN IN Manchester before dawn that Friday morning, January 4, traveled north to the Centennial Hotel in Concord, cleaned up, changed clothes, then headed back south to Nashua to begin her five-day sprint for salvation. Parlous as her circumstances were, bedraggled as she was from lack of sleep, Hillary took comfort in the steadier footing she had on this fresh soil. If Iowa was terra incognita for her, New Hampshire was terra firma: familiar, friendly, safe. There were no byzantine rules to deal with here, just one that made perfect sense: whoever gets the most votes wins. And hustling and rustling votes in New Hampshire was a Clinton specialty.
Hillary knew she had to make changes, big changes, and had to make them fast. The near-universal assumption was that Obama’s momentum from Iowa would propel him to a win in New Hampshire, where he’d already been gaining ground. A fight the previous year between states jockeying for electoral influence had pushed New Hampshire to hold its primary much sooner than normal after Iowa. No one could be sure how that would shape the dynamics of the race, but Clinton’s supporters feared—and her rival’s fans hoped—that it would favor Obama. And that a second quick victory would all but ensure him the nomination.
As Hillary’s big red-white-and-blue bus rumbled down Interstate 293, she thought about the advice that Bill had given her that morning: she should do more town hall meetings, take questions from her crowds, engage more directly with voters. That was how he turned things around in New Hampshire back in 1992, when he was on the ropes because of Gennifer Flowers, the draft, and all of that. Hillary could see the logic, though she didn’t embrace the whole connecting thing with the relish that her husband did. “It would be a mistake not to appear more open”—not be more open, but appear that way—was how she put it to her senior staff on her early morning briefing call.
But when her bus rolled into the airplane hangar at Boire Field, where her first rally was being held, she discovered that her New Hampshire team apparently hadn’t gotten the memo. Her state director, Nick Clemons, ran through the program: give your speech, pump up the crowd, don’t take questions from the audience, hightail it out of there. Hillary shook her head and said, “I’m taking questions.” Clemons tried to dissuade her, said they didn’t want to drain the energy from the room. Thank you for the advice, Hillary said firmly, but I’m gonna take every question.
Backstage, Bill paced back and forth, talking to their old friend Terry Shumaker about the uphill climb they were facing. We could turn this around if we had the traditional eight days between Iowa and New Hampshire, he said. “I’m just not sure we have enough time.”
The first-person plural was no slip of the tongue. For a year, Hillary had been content to keep her husband at arm’s length, but now she pulled him close. Nobody knew New Hampshire the way Bill Clinton did. He had been to every town and hamlet, remembered the locals and the layout, the demographics, where every cache of votes was stored. For the next hundred hours, until the polls closed on Tuesday, Hillary and Bill would run her campaign together. She needed his expertise, his feel for the state, its quirks and biorhythms. She needed him for his doggedness, his buoyancy, and his trademark Houdini juju. She needed him because, even on his worst day, he was a font of ideas about how to win—as opposed to everyone else on her campaign, whom she increasingly saw as completely and maddeningly useless.
Take the conference call that morning, for instance. For the first time anybody could remember, Bill was on the line—and what he heard confirmed all his doubts about his wife’s operation. Here she was, hanging by her fingertips, trying to hatch a comeback plan. And there was her team, beaten down, barely capable of speech. Penn’s voice was so thick and sluggish that it sounded like he was drugged. Solis Doyle was inexplicably absent. When Hillary rattled off her analysis of what had gone wrong in Iowa—they’d “ceded people under thirty,” appealed to older women at the expense of younger ones, made “a big mistake in not recognizing that Edwards was an equal threat”—her advisers added nothing. When she offered remedies, they offered silence. “We need to do things differently,” Hillary said. “We need to mix it up.”
More silence.
“This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she said. “Goodbye.”
Exasperated though she was, only Hillary could resolve the open question from the night before: Were they going to run negative TV ads against Obama? She turned to Grunwald, a veteran of New Hampshire campaigns, including Bill’s in 1992. Grunwald contended that there wasn’t enough time to accomplish much by blitzing Obama from the air. Better for Hillary to throw herself into the New Hampshire mosh pit and body-slam him there.
Bill and Penn were all for the slamming, naturally. Penn’s analysis was that, unlike Iowa, New Hampshire had been for Hillary all year long—and though Obama’s big mo would cause some voters to shift to him, she could get them back (especially the women) if she laid out sharp and specific contrasts. A debate was set for the following night, January 5, at Saint Anselm College, just outside Manchester, among the four candidates still standing after Iowa: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Richardson. It was there, Clinton’s advisers all agreed, that she would begin her anti-Obama counteroffensive.
Bill showed up at her debate prep session—another first—full of piss and vinegar. Still steaming over how Obama must have cheated in Iowa, he argued for Hillary to pop him hard with that accusation in the debate. Around the room at the Centennial, her advisers squirmed; it was tough to tell a former president that his advice was loopy. Hillary had a different idea: she wanted to whack Obama for his inconsistency on health care. And when debate time came, that was what she did.
Obama defended himself—but not as stridently as Edwards defended him. “Senator Obama and I have differences,” Edwards said, “but both of us are powerful voices for change. . . . What will occur every time he speaks out for change, every time I fight for change, the forces of [the] status quo are going to attack. Every single time!”
Double-teamed, Hillary hit back. “Making change is not about what you believe, it’s not about a speech you make,” she said. “I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” A few minutes later one of the moderators asked what Hillary would say to voters who regarded Obama as more likable than her. “Well, that hurts my feelings, but I’ll try to go on,” she said, with a wistful smile. “
He’s very likable. I agree with that. I don’t think I’m that bad.”
Obama glanced up from his notes and said icily, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”
After the debate, Hillary marveled, yet again, at the insufferability of Obama’s arrogance. And also at another instance of the double standard applied to the two of them. Can you imagine if I’d made a crack like that? she complained to her aides. The press would’ve guillotined her on the spot and played soccer with her severed head.
That night Penn publicly released a memo that questioned why, even after Iowa, Obama and Hillary were still tied in New Hampshire polls; its headline was “Where Is the Bounce?” By the next day, he had his answer. A new round of surveys showed Obama pulling ahead to a double-digit lead. Hillary’s donors were in a panic. Advice was gushing in from every quarter—over the heads and around the backs of her top advisers. Chelsea and Carson cornered Hillary on her bus, arguing that she had to be more accessible to the reporters, chatting them up, schmoozing them off the record, traveling with them, having a press availability every day.
Out on the trail, Hillary was doing all of that and more, almost pleading with people not to be stampeded into voting for Obama. “Everybody needs to be tested and vetted,” she said. “The last thing Democrats need is to just move quickly through this process.”
Meanwhile, Bill was on the phone with Clemons, probing him about how they might make up ground, strategizing with Hillary at the hotel—taking advantage of a rare five nights under the same roof. The Clintons thought they were feeling tremors, seeing encouraging signs. Her staffers thought they were tripping. One likened the couple to a pair of dying patients delirious from too much morphine.
Early Monday morning, with just a day to go, Hillary summoned Solis Doyle to her suite in the Centennial.
What’s going on? Clinton asked her campaign manager. Where do things stand?
Solis Doyle had anticipated this talk and had been dreading it. The polling, the money, the press—all were deeper in the shithouse than Hillary knew, and the implications even grimmer. Someone has to be straight with her, Solis Doyle thought. Who else is gonna tell her?
But Patti didn’t want to tell her then, not just as Hillary was about to head out for her last full day of campaigning before the primary. You’re gonna be late for your first event, Solis Doyle said. You don’t want to have this conversation now.
I want to do it now, said Hillary.
Solis Doyle sat down across the table from her boss and sketched out the dismal picture. Penn’s data matched the public polls: Hillary was going to lose New Hampshire, probably by a lot, and it was even possible that she would finish third, behind Edwards. The most influential union in Nevada, the culinary workers, had decided to endorse Obama, which would likely tip the caucuses there two weeks later to him. After Obama’s win in Iowa, African Americans were swinging hard his way, and given the size of the black vote in South Carolina, Hillary would definitely lose there, too. She had $18 million in the kitty to get her through Super Tuesday, when twenty-two states would hold contests awarding more than half the total pledged delegates at stake. But once she lost New Hampshire, her fund-raising was bound to dry up, while Obama’s would go through the ceiling.
Hillary was taken aback. What do you think I should do? she asked.
Look, I love you, Solis Doyle said. My primary concern is you and your future. We need to think about how four straight losses are going to look. You’re an icon now, but if you stay in the race and embarrass yourself, that could be destroyed. Maybe the right thing to do is just drop out after New Hampshire.
Hillary reeled. From the start, people had warned her not to put Solis Doyle in the campaign manager’s chair. And Hillary knew well that Patti had her weaknesses. But she had decided to ignore all that, to disregard the risks, because of Solis Doyle’s signal virtue: a loyalty so fierce that she would run through a wall for Hillary. But after one setback, one lousy loss, Patti was ready to surrender. The person she thought would be the last to abandon her had turned out to be the first. She struggled for air. She struggled for words. She muttered a few things.
I don’t want women out there to see me as a quitter, Hillary said limply.
Solis Doyle, on the brink of tears, forced herself to continue. If you’re gonna stay in, she said, you’re gonna have to make a show of shaking up the campaign. You’re gonna have to fire people, and bring in some new ones.
As they talked, Bill walked in and asked what was going on. Hillary told him that Solis Doyle was raising the idea that she drop out. It rang familiar. Sixteen years earlier, in his darkest hour in New Hampshire, some of Bill’s aides had recommended that he withdraw. But his credo then was the same as it was now: Fighting hard and losing was honorable. Throwing in the towel was not. Strange stuff happens in campaigns. He had well earned his reputation as a survivor, and in her own way, Hillary had, too. So much bound them together, but one ingredient at that moment was predominant: Clintons aren’t quitters.
“As long as you have enough money for an airline ticket,” Bill told Hillary, “you should go out there and make your case about why you would make the best president.”
The Clintons were both running late for their first events of the day. Solis Dolis told her boss, We’re definitely going to talk about this later; this isn’t a closed conversation.
Hillary went downstairs, got on her bus, and set off for her morning stop: a roundtable with undecided voters at a coffeehouse in Portsmouth. Huma Abedin noticed that Hillary seemed out of sorts, emotional, and raw. Inside the cafe, in her sapphire-blue pantsuit with the black piping, she sat down and took questions. Someone asked innocuously how she kept herself looking so good despite the rigors of campaigning. “It’s not easy,” she started to answer, “and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backward.”
The next thing she knew, her eyes were welling up, her voice was quaking, and words were escaping from her lips that sounded like they’d come from someone else . . . someone vulnerable. “You know,” she said, “this is very personal for me—it’s not just political, it’s not just public. I see what’s happening.”
On TV, the talking heads said (wrongly) that tears were streaming down her cheeks. Solis Doyle was in a meeting when she heard that Hillary had broken down. A wave of guilt rushed over her.
Fuck. I did this, she thought.
OBAMA WAS ON HIS campaign bus that Monday morning, rolling between events in Lebanon and Rochester, when one of his aides pulled up video on his laptop of Clinton’s display. The members of his brain trust issued a collective snort of derision. Some called it a “Muskie moment”—a reference to Ed Muskie in 1972 weeping in the back of a flatbed truck in Manchester, thereby dooming himself in New Hampshire. Others thought Hillary was faking it. But Obama expressed some sympathy for his shaken rival. “You know what, guys?” he said to his team. “This isn’t easy.”
Then again, Obama could afford to be gracious. He was staring at a certain loser.
The past three days had been an exultant blur for Obama, a march to assured victory. He had sailed into New Hampshire with the winds of history and destiny apparently gusting at his back. Everywhere he went, the crowds were massive, overflowing, with lines of people stretching for blocks, waiting for hours in the frigid air to catch a glimpse of him, soak up his soaring cadences. Even the most hard-bitten members of the press were agog at what was unfolding before their eyes. Obama’s donors were flying in from around the country to witness the coronation.
Obama took it all in stride. This was how it was supposed to happen—the dominoes were falling in just the way that Axelrod and Plouffe had predicted. His brain trust told him about the offer that Daschle had conveyed from Edwards the night before: that the North Carolinian was prepared to drop out of the race and become Barack’s running mate, driving a stake through Clinton’
s heart. Obama rejected the entreaty out of hand. By winning the Granite State, he could plunge that dagger in all by himself. What did he need Edwards for?
Obama’s confidence in New Hampshire was overwhelming—and overweening. On his first day in the state, he declared to Newsweek, “At some point people have to stop asserting that because I haven’t been in the league long enough, I can’t play. It’s sort of like Magic Johnson or LeBron James who keep on scoring and their team wins. But people say they can’t lead their team because they’re too young.”
Obama had won just one caucus, but that didn’t faze him. He was cruising now. In Iowa, his campaign had been relentless in responding to attacks. But in New Hampshire, when Hillaryland sent out direct mail assailing him for voting “present” on abortion legislation in the Illinois state senate, the Obamans more or less let it slide. The candidate was too busy talking about hope to stoop to refutation. He didn’t add a jot of substance to his economic message (this in a state where kitchen table issues were always paramount). He went from mega-rally to mega-rally, eschewing town hall meetings. All of a sudden, the narrative line of 2007 was flipped on its head. The insurgent candidate was running on inevitability. He was going to win because he was going to win.
But if Obama was unperturbed by Clinton’s near-tears moment, his brain trust was slightly rattled. The last thing Obama needed was people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. The suits cringed at Edwards’s ungallant reaction: “I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.”
Back at Obama’s New Hampshire headquarters, Plouffe monitored the wall-to-wall media coverage of Clinton in the cafe. Now dominating the final news cycle before the voting began, it threatened to scramble the dynamic in unpredictable ways.
Game Change Page 20