Hillary, meanwhile, was gone—off to Nevada, South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and beyond. Winning in New Hampshire had given her new life, but had also allowed her to defer the hard choices required to right her operation. Solis Doyle and Penn were still in place, augmented now by a corps of reluctant conscripts. Nobody in Ballston knew who was in charge. Nobody wanted to be in charge.
In politics, though, as much as in the realm of physics, nature abhors a vacuum. And in this case, nature—or, at least, a force of nature—promptly stepped in to fill it.
BILL CLINTON PICKED UP the phone a few days later and called an old friend, a member of Congress to whom he and Hillary had long been close. I knew we could do it and I was right, he crowed about the victory in New Hampshire. The congressman congratulated Clinton, expressed his admiration for the upset that Hillary had pulled off. But he was discomfited by the way that Bill was claiming credit for the win. He urged Clinton to step back, to give his wife some running room. “It’s her campaign, Mr. President,” the congressman said. “You have to let her win this thing herself. You have to let go.”
But Clinton couldn’t let go—especially now that the situation was so perilous that everyone was (finally) reaching out to grasp his hand. In the days since the Ballston meeting, Williams and Sosnik had swiftly moved to incorporate him into the campaign in a way Solis Doyle and the other Hillarylanders had resisted. For the first time, he was provided with a briefing book on the campaign’s policies and plans. A morning conference call was set up to give him talking points and a read on the day’s press coverage. And he was assigned the task of calling countless superdelegates, whom Hillary continued to fail to court.
One day that week, over takeout Chinese food in the dining room at Whitehaven, Clinton received from the campaign’s high command his maiden formal presentation on the road ahead. Hillary’s newish political director, Guy Cecil, explained that they faced a lengthy war of attrition over delegates. For all the talk about Super Tuesday being Hillary’s firewall, the reality was that, having poured so much cash into Iowa, the Clintonites hadn’t conducted a poll in almost any of the February 5 states; in many of them, their operations were skeletal or nonexistent. Cecil put a chart in front of Bill that laid out Hillary’s best-case scenario on Super Tuesday: a net gain of no more than sixty delegates out of nearly seventeen hundred up for grabs that day.
“Goddamn it,” Clinton said, the familiar flush coloring his cheeks. “What are we doing?” Studying the chart, he shook his head. “All this money, all this work, and this is all we’re going to get out of it?”
The deeper Clinton delved into the workings of his wife’s campaign, the more upset he got. But in truth he was even more agitated about what was going on beyond Ballston. Seemingly out of nowhere, the race had suddenly turned racial, with both Bill and Hillary being accused of insensitivity at best and perniciousness at worst.
The dynamic had been unleashed the night of New Hampshire, when the talking heads on TV began to speculate about whether Obama’s collapse in the nearly all-white state was due partly to racial factors—and the Clintons’ comments of the previous day came in for closer inspection. The next morning, January 9, The New York Times published a scalding editorial that accused the Clintons of running an “angry campaign” that “came perilously close to injecting racial tension” into the contest, citing Hillary’s remark about MLK and LBJ and Bill’s “bizarre and rambling attack” on Obama at Dartmouth. Two days later, the Times published a front-page story in which South Carolina representative James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, echoed those charges, focusing on the former president and what Clyburn saw as a broad assault on Obama’s candidacy. “To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us,” Clyburn said.
Clinton’s first reaction was astonishment, followed shortly by rage. Bill had been talking about Obama’s record on the war—nothing more. Hillary had been making a historical observation—nothing more. Their words were being twisted, bent out of shape in a way that suggested that something more malign than mere misinterpretation was behind it.
The Times made Bill especially mental. I can’t believe these assholes are sitting there writing this, he wailed to one of many friends he called that week to complain about the editorial. After everything I did for civil rights in Arkansas! After everything I did in the White House! They know damn well I don’t have a racist bone in my body!
What cranked up the thermostat on Clinton’s umbrage were signs he saw that the Obama campaign was stirring the pot with liberal media outlets and black radio and websites. A few days after New Hampshire, a memo surfaced, produced by Obama’s South Carolina operation, that grouped together MLK/LBJ and “fairy tale” along with other race-freighted incidents—including Billy Shaheen’s and Penn’s invocations of Obama’s youthful cocaine use—to suggest that the Clintons were playing the race card. Then there was Illinois congressman and Obama campaign co-chair Jesse Jackson, Jr., who went on MSNBC and noted that while Clinton had teared up in New Hampshire, she never cried over Hurricane Katrina. “Those tears also have to be analyzed,” Jackson said, “particularly as we head to South Carolina, where forty-five percent of African Americans will participate in the Democratic contest.”
To Bill, the picture was all too clear. By accusing him and Hillary of slapping the race card on the table, the Obama campaign was doing exactly that itself. And though it infuriated him, he couldn’t help but respect the artfulness of the play. The Obamans were tough; they weren’t just sitting back and letting the nomination slip away. I wish our people were more like that, Bill said.
Clinton could see the danger of the racial back-and-forth to Hillary’s campaign, and also to his own reputation. Seeking to contain the fallout, he made the rounds on black talk radio, clarifying his statements, defending himself—even talking up Obama. “There’s nothing fairy tale about his campaign,” Clinton told Al Sharpton on his syndicated show a few days after New Hampshire. “It’s real, strong, and he might win.”
What Clinton might have added, if he were being candid, was: But not if I can do anything to stop it.
OBAMA AND HIS BRAIN TRUST arrived in Nevada determined to apply the lessons of New Hampshire. They would home in laser-like on kitchen table issues, from health care to the subprime mortgage mess.
They would scale down their mega-rallies, and instead hold town halls and roundtables with average voters. But now they found a race bomb had been dropped in their laps—and it blew that plan to pieces.
On Obama’s first full day in the Silver State, the Sunday before the Saturday caucuses coming up on January 19, the campaign learned that across the country in South Carolina, Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, had become the latest Clinton surrogate to bring up (albeit obliquely) Obama’s drug use. Defending the Clintons’ record on race with Hillary at his side, Johnson declared that they had been “deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood—and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.” He then went on to compare Obama to the Sidney Poitier character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
The suits had no doubt that the Clintons were playing the race card, that they were trying to blacken up Obama in a way that would hurt him with both white and Hispanic voters on Super Tuesday and beyond. For the Obamans, the Johnson incident was part of an increasingly troubling pattern. One thing is a coincidence, thought Gibbs. Five are a strategy.
Obama himself had not viewed “fairy tale” as racially loaded, though he was annoyed by what he saw as Clinton belittling him and distorting his record on Iraq—and MLK/LBJ hadn’t bothered him at all. But the Johnson remark he found outrageous. Beyond his pique, however, he was worried that the simmering racial stew was on the verge of boiling over. And he was angry at his own campaign’s role in turning up the burners underneath it. When he was told about the mem
o put out by his South Carolina team, Obama erupted. How could this have happened? he demanded of Gibbs. All through the campaign, the Obamans had sought, for reasons of not just principle but strategy, to downplay race. It was hard to see how a wildly polarized electorate would rebound to Obama’s benefit.
“This thing is getting way too hot,” Obama warned his team the morning after the Johnson comments. “Regardless of who’s done what to get us to this point, I’m going to try and defuse it.” At a hastily arranged press conference in Reno, Obama told reporters, “We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness. I expect that other campaigns feel the same way.”
Obama’s effort to turn down the temperature lasted only a few hours. Having tried to put out one fire, he quickly turned around and ignited another. Sitting down with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal, Obama started riffing on history. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said. Obama added that, although the GOP was now in intellectual ruins, it was “fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten to fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging the conventional wisdom.”
Gibbs tried to downplay the strange spectacle of his boss celebrating the Reagan Revolution in the midst of a Democratic nomination fight, pointing out that Obama had paid tribute to the Gipper before. But Marty Nesbitt saw something more forward looking and calculated at work. The day before, Obama had told his friend that he once again feared he was headed for “a respectable second place if we don’t figure out how to move the needle.” Nesbitt agreed: “You gotta do something, but I don’t know what it is.” Now, catching a glimpse of the Reagan story on TV, Nesbitt thought, Wow, brilliant: Obama had set a trap for the Clintons by striking at their pride.
Whatever Obama’s motives, he certainly succeeded in getting a rise out of the couple. To her team, Hillary railed at Obama for his imprecation against her husband.
“Who does he think he is?” she exclaimed on a conference call. “Drives me nuts. Drives me nuts! He has no sense of history at all!”
Penn and Grunwald theorized that Obama, the darling of the left, was pandering to conservative Democrats in northern Nevada. He’s become a chameleon, one of them said.
“He has! We should call him that!” Hillary said, proposing a TV ad that somehow pictured Obama as a color-shifting lizard. “We need a visual,” she said.
“We can’t,” Grunwald replied.
“Why?” Hillary asked.
The color thing, Grunwald said. We’d get hit for dabbling with race.
“Oh Gawwwd,” Hillary groaned. “Give me a break.”
Bill Clinton was even more livid than his wife about the Reagan swipe. He didn’t see it as a tactic. He thought that Obama might actually believe that Reagan’s tenure had been superior to his own. In private, he recited statistics from the eighties and nineties that showed how much better the economy fared under him than Reagan—while in public, he vented his indignation with an attack that contorted what Obama had said almost as wantonly as Clinton’s critics were doing with “fairy tale.”
“Her principal opponent said that since 1992, the Republicans have had all the good ideas,” Clinton said while stumping in Pahrump, Nevada. “So now it turns out you can choose between somebody who thinks our ideas are better or the Republicans had all the good ideas.”
In the closing days before the Nevada vote, Bill was everywhere—traipsing from the casino floors to half-empty community centers outside Vegas, sometimes with Chelsea in tow. Along with his assaults on Obama, he inveighed against the rules that governed the caucuses and lobbed accusations of voter intimidation and vote suppression hither and yon. “Today, when my daughter and I were wandering through the [Bellagio],” he said in a tiny gym in North Las Vegas the afternoon before the caucuses, “and all these culinary workers were mobbing us telling us they didn’t care what the union told them to do, they were gonna caucus for Hillary. There was a representative of the organization following along behind us, going up to everybody who said that, saying, ‘If you’re not gonna vote for our guy, we’re gonna give you a schedule tomorrow so you can’t be there.’”
The chances that a union representative engaging in such strong-arming would have done it within earshot of a former president were close to nil. But Clinton didn’t care. He’d done his job: muddying up the water with an unverifiable story that implied Obama’s supporters had dirty hands, attempting to discredit the caucuses in the event that Hillary lost—which the Clintonites believed was the likeliest outcome.
When the smoke cleared on caucus day, however, Hillary had beaten Obama 51 to 45 percent in the popular vote. Team Obama gamely (and accurately) pointed out that, due to caucus mathematics, their man would actually emerge with more delegates than his rival. But technicalities could do nothing to diminish the thrill of victory for the Clintons—especially for Bill. Once again, Hillary had won a race that almost everyone, including her, believed was beyond reach. And once again, Bill had been the spark, the wild card, shaking things up and making things happen. On the flight home to New York, he reveled in the triumph they’d achieved.
“I knew we were golden,” Bill proclaimed, “when I saw we’d carried the Mirage!”
OBAMA FLEW BACK TO Chicago from Vegas, spent a night at home, and then set off on Sunday morning for South Carolina by way of Atlanta. Having lost two contests in a row, he understood that winning the next one was essential. His lead in Palmetto State polls was anywhere from just six to thirteen points—and with the Big Dog now unmuzzled and on the loose, that was too close for comfort. On the plane to Atlanta with Axelrod, Gibbs, and Jarrett, Obama focused on a single quandary: how to handle Bill.
“Look, I know he’s a former president,” Obama said. “There’s a certain amount that goes with that.” Clinton would always have a blaring megaphone and be accorded a large degree of deference. But Obama was alarmed at his campaign’s passivity in dealing with the Bill problem. From New Hampshire through Nevada, they had let Clinton run free—and Obama had paid a heavy price.
No more, Obama said. In South Carolina, Clinton could never go unchallenged. If he stepped out of line, they had to play aggressive defense, hitting back fast and hard. But Obama also wanted to go on offense, and knew he had to do it himself. Later that day, he took the first chance that presented itself.
“The former president,” he told ABC News, “has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.”
Up in Washington, meanwhile, Penn and Solis Doyle were in agreement for once: South Carolina was unwinnable, and neither Hillary nor Bill should spend much time there, in order to reduce the attention on the state and lessen the oomph of Obama’s inevitable victory. A schedule was drafted that had each Clinton spending no more than a day or two there—just enough to avoid the perception that they were dissing South Carolina or the black vote writ large. Hillary would decamp to the Super Tuesday states in the West and East, while Bill would concentrate on other southern states and raising money for the campaign’s depleted coffers.
But Bill was apoplectic when he saw the schedule. An email from Doug Band soon arrived in the in-boxes of Solis Doyle and others. In essence, it said: The president thinks you’re a bunch of fools.
Clinton’s counterproposal was radical. He wanted to spend every day of the coming week in South Carolina. He had confidence in his roots in the state, in his relationships with both the Bubbas and the black voters—in his ability, at least, to keep the primary close, to beat the spread, and, hey, who knows, maybe even pull off another shock-the-world upset for Hillary.
“I gotta go to churches, I gotta campaign hard. I think I can do it,” he told one of his new-old allies on the campaign. “You can’t win if you don’t compete.”
Hillaryland resisted, begging Bill
to embrace the proposed schedule. But Clinton was implacable. “I’m going,” he said, and that was that.
AS THE CAMPAIGN ROLLED into South Carolina, another fraught psyche was churning and whirling. Since his distant third-place finish in New Hampshire, John Edwards had seemed inclined to heed the counsel of Trippi to stay in the race as long as possible, even if victory was unobtainable, for the sake of amassing delegates. Like the Obamans and the Hillarylanders, Trippi foresaw a protracted delegate fight ahead. But he went further, forecasting the possibility of a brokered convention, with Obama and Clinton obtaining fewer than the 2,025 delegates required for the nomination—a historically unlikely outcome, to be sure, but one that might give Edwards just enough leverage to force his way onto the ticket.
Both the Obama and Clinton camps were in fervent covert communication with Edwards and his advisers. The Clinton people hoped he would get out promptly, ideally before South Carolina, and provide his endorsement to Hillary, allowing her, in theory, to consolidate the white working-class vote. The Obamans hoped for an endorsement, too, but absent that, they were eager for Edwards to follow Trippi’s advice and stay in at least through Super Tuesday, to siphon off white votes from Clinton. Plouffe, in the dark about Clinton’s destitution, remained terrified of her strength on February 5. More than once he shared internal polling with Team Edwards, showing all the states in which the North Carolinian could play a decisive role—to Obama’s benefit.
Edwards was still doing his best Monty Hall imitation: Let’s make a deal. Although he maintained publicly that he never desired to be a running mate again, Edwards was, in fact, quite open to the idea. But he was also willing to consider more modest rewards. Having been rebuffed on the notion of teaming up with Obama after Iowa, he once again dispatched Leo Hindery to make a revised offer.
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