Game Change

by John Heilemann

  “John will settle for attorney general,” Hindery emailed Tom Daschle.

  Daschle shook his head. How desperate is this guy?

  “Leo, this isn’t good for John,” Daschle replied. “This is ridiculous. It’s going to be ambassador to Zimbabwe next.”

  Daschle warned Hindery that this new offer, like the last one, was sure to be rejected. And it was. When Obama heard about the suggested quid pro quo, he was incredulous.

  That’s crazy, he told Axelrod. If I were willing to make a deal like that, I shouldn’t be president!

  Edwards wondered if Clinton might be more open to cutting a deal. For all his previous distaste for her, he was beginning to find her more agreeable than Obama—less aloof, more brass-tacks. But Edwards knew his options were rapidly running out. He had no money, the press was ignoring him, and his vote totals were spiraling toward zero; he’d won just 3.8 percent in Nevada.

  Then again, Rielle Hunter was only eight months pregnant.

  So Edwards still had another month to strike a bargain.

  THE SOUTH CAROLINA CONTEST began in earnest on January 21, Martin Luther King Day, with a debate in Myrtle Beach. Even before the three candidates took the stage, the rowdy vibe of the crowd announced one thing: Toto, we’re not in Kansas—or Iowa or New Hampshire or even Nevada—anymore. The political culture of South Carolina was wide open and down and dirty. Anything went, and everything always somehow boiled down to race. Given the events of the past two weeks, circumstances were ripe for a blowup.

  The Clintonites were eager to avoid that eventuality. In debate prep, Hillary’s team advised her that African Americans didn’t want to see her trashing Obama. Their advice was unambiguous: Be big, be gracious, be positive, keep any criticisms muted. Obama’s aides were less kissy-kissy. If she slugs you, you have to counterpunch, they said. Still, there was one caveat, delivered to the candidate by Axelrod: Don’t make this about you and Bill Clinton; you’re running against her, not him.

  But Obama didn’t wait for so much as a jab to start throwing haymakers—aimed squarely at Bill. “President Clinton says that I wasn’t opposed to the war from the start or says it’s a fairy tale that I opposed the war. That is simply not true,” he said. “President Clinton asserts that I said that the Republicans had had better economic policies since 1980. That is not the case.”

  Hillary interjected that Obama had indeed said “he really likes the ideas of the Republicans over the last ten to fifteen years.”

  “That is not true,” Obama said. “What I said is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to. Because while I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.”

  The Myrtle Beach crowd had been hoping for fireworks. They were getting the Fourth of July. Ooohs and aaahs filled the auditorium at the most personal attack that Obama had launched in the entire campaign.

  Clinton fired back that she wasn’t talking about Reagan.

  “I didn’t mention his name,” she said.

  “Your husband did,” Obama retorted.

  “Well, I’m here. He’s not.”

  “Okay, well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes.”

  The crowd cheered again, but Clinton wouldn’t let go of her point about Obama’s apparent embrace of Republican brainstorms.

  “Yes, they did have ideas, and they were bad ideas,” she said. “Bad for America, and I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.”

  Obama’s association with Rezko was one of the missteps from his past that the press had barely touched—much to the chagrin of Bill Clinton and Penn. Although Penn had told Hillary before the debate that this wasn’t the time or place to raise Rezko, the chief strategist couldn’t contain his visceral excitement in the moment. Watching the debate on TV with his colleagues, Penn yelled out, “Yes!”

  No one was belting out affirmations in the Obama staff room; everyone was too busy grimacing at Barack’s performance. The candidate had presented an image—caustic, sarcastic, and thin-skinned—at striking variance with public perceptions of him. It was a side of Obama, however, that his aides sometimes saw in private, and one they feared might cause voters to view him as an angry black man if it were displayed in public. After catching the clips on TV afterward, Obama didn’t disagree. “I probably went a little too far,” he told Jarrett over dinner, “but she did, too.”

  Hillary shared that assessment, but believed she had justification. “I’m sorry,” she told her aides as she exited the stage, “but he was such an asshole.”

  The “brawl on the beach,” as it was instantly known, made all the previous fifteen Democratic debates look like sewing circles. In every respect, it perfectly foreshadowed what lay ahead. The hot tempers. The lack of control. The jolts of pure adrenaline. And, of course, the focus on the man who wasn’t center stage—but soon would be, for good or ill, and for the duration.

  BILL SHOWED UP THE next morning for breakfast at the Lizard’s Thicket restaurant in Columbia, wearing gray pants, a taupe blazer, and an electric-orange tie. The menu board listed black-eyed peas and chicken livers, but Clinton went easy on his fragile arteries and had a veggie omelet. A bank of cameras captured his every move; a throng of reporters craned their necks to catch the pearls that fell from his lips.

  Clinton looked like the cat who’d swallowed an entire flock of canaries: calm, carefree, and sated. When one of the journalists asked about a comment made the day before by Jim Clyburn—that the former president “needs to chill a bit”—Clinton answered mildly, “I’m pretty chilled out, don’t you think?”

  In truth, Clyburn was only saying publicly what Clinton was being told privately by members of his party. All through Nevada, he’d been fielding calls from prominent Democrats, Ted Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel among them, urging him to tone down his attacks on Obama, saying they were unwarranted and unseemly, and that they threatened to rend the Democratic family. When a voter at the Lizard’s Thicket offered the same point—“I think there’s a party perception that coming back on the attack doesn’t help”—Bill made it clear that he had no intention of laying off, that he had skin in the game now.

  “Well, for three to four months in Iowa, [Obama] attacked [Hillary] every day and she never said a word,” he answered, “so you think we should go back to that?”

  As Clinton got up to leave the restaurant, a reporter asked a member of his cadre if the boss was as good a politician as he was in 1992. Clinton turned and answered the question himself: “He’s rusty and old and creaky.”

  Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t, but the press corps regarded him as a more than worthy adversary for Obama. With Hillary in Washington, D.C., about to head to California, The New York Times captured succinctly the media’s framing of the contest: “Mrs. Clinton’s campaign this week in South Carolina is essentially running Mr. Clinton against Mr. Obama.”

  Worried as the Hillarylanders were about Bill’s long-term stay in the state, they comforted themselves with the thought that he seemed to be rattling their foe. In Greenville that afternoon, Obama got into a testy confrontation with a reporter he knew well, Jeff Zeleny, late of The Chicago Tribune and now at The New York Times.

  “Are you letting Bill Clinton inside your head?” Zeleny shouted out as Obama worked a rope line.

  “I am trying to make sure misstatements by him are answered,” Obama said with a peevish tone through a forced grin. “Don’t you think that’s important?”

  Zeleny tried to shout another question from the other side of the barricade.

  “Come on, Jeff, don’t try cheap stunts like that. You’re better than that,” Obama said, walking away. Then he turned around and walked back.
“My suspicion is, I think, that the other side must be rattled if they’re continuing to say false things about us.”

  The unflappable Obama was plainly flapped—but he had another arrow in his quiver. Since the plane flight on Sunday night, his campaign had devised another means of piercing Bill Clinton: a “truth squad” comprised of Daschle and a number of Obama’s leading South Carolina supporters. Daschle took the lead on the press conference call announcing the effort and made it clear they were going after Bill, not Hillary. “It’s not in keeping with the image of a former president,” Daschle said of Clinton’s behavior.

  The most famous (and infamous) local member of the truth squad was former Democratic state party chairman Dick Harpootlian. Once a supporter of both Hillary and Bill, Harpootlian was a media magnet, glib and hard-edged, a perfect combination of down-home grit and steely sophistication. He possessed an unerring gift for feigning indignation with reporters in a way that was provocative and witty—and therefore sure to drive a story to an interesting destination.

  Team Obama knew that Harpootlian was itching to take on Bill. They also knew there were risks involved. Harpootlian was volatile, unpredictable, messy—a human IED. He could detonate at will but not necessarily on command, and it was impossible to know where the shrapnel would land after one of his explosions.

  That Tuesday afternoon, January 22, Harpootlian showed up in person at a midday event of Bill Clinton’s in Aiken. He told reporters that the Clinton campaign was “reprehensible,” that it was using the playbook of the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater, the progenitor of a shameful litany of racially exploitive Republican campaign tactics. (Willie Horton, anyone?) The Clintons, he added, were practicing the politics of “personal destruction.”

  “Bill Clinton loves his wife more than he loves his country,” Harpootlian said, “and this is all about continuing some kind of Clinton dynasty as opposed to doing what I believe is best for the country.” He went on, “It’s distressing to me that we have to follow the former president of the United States to make him tell the truth.”

  “ALL GREAT CONTESTS,” Bill Clinton once said, “are head games.”

  Clinton had always regarded political contests as the greatest contests of all. He loved them, lived for them, mastered them—in no small part because he understood the psychological rules so well. Successful combatants, Clinton said, had to put “distance between them and these withering attacks” they would face. “You just have to know they’re coming in different ways and you just can’t let yourself be defined by them.” You couldn’t let them undermine your judgment. Couldn’t let yourself be paralyzed. “Only a small percentage of what voters are looking for is whether any of this stuff is true,” he said. “What they’re really looking for is to see, how is this person going to react?”

  For two weeks now, Clinton had been playing a head game with Obama and had arguably been winning. But suddenly, the terms of the contest had shifted, and Dick Harpootlian was playing a head game with him.

  The next day, Clinton was leaving a town hall in Charleston when a reporter asked him about Harpootlian’s comparison of his tactics in Nevada to those of Atwater.

  Removing his reading glasses, Clinton leaned in and responded.

  “Dick Harpootlian wasn’t in Nevada,” he said, adding that Hillary’s campaign had received hundreds of complaints of voter suppression during the caucuses. “Now, it’s okay. We’re not hung up about it; we just pointed it out, and we won anyway—we fought hard and we won. But to say that’s Lee Atwater, stating a fact, is a little stretch.”

  On the surface, Clinton seemed calm as he started speaking, his tone even, his volume low. But inside he was steaming, the bile rising in his throat. The drumbeat of criticism against him since “fairy tale” hadn’t let up. He was still being pilloried for playing the race card, crucified by people he’d been friends with forever, people who knew better. His frustration, his hurt, his anger—all were off the charts. But even greater was his epic sense of incredulity. Here he was—Bill Clinton!—smack in the middle of a Democratic primary, trying to win black votes for his spouse while fending off the most absurd charges imaginable. Charges that cut to the core of his self-conception and sense of his own virtue. Charges being taken at face value and amplified by a media that was desperate, as he liked to put it, not to be “on the wrong side of history.” And now here was some reporter who barely knew who Atwater was—oh, Clinton was sure of that—asking him (Bill Clinton!) if he and Atwater, that diabolic demon, bore any traits in common.

  Lee Atwater? Me? Clinton thought.

  He should have ended the exchange. Should have shut his mouth. But Clinton forgot his own rules of political combat, let his judgment take leave of him, along with his equilibrium. He couldn’t stay mum. He couldn’t walk away. Because this was . . . just too much.

  So Clinton kept talking. For five minutes he kept talking. His finger wagging, his face turning magenta, his tone growing sterner and preachier.

  As the cameras rolled, he attacked Obama for negative campaigning and praised his own restraint: “When he put out a hit job on me at the same time he called her the senator from Punjab, I never said a word. And I don’t care about it today. I’m not upset about it.”

  He accused the Obama campaign of playing the race card and lashed out at the charges against him: “This is almost like once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something, the facts become irrelevant. There are facts here.”

  He castigated the media for falling for the Obamans’ baleful spin: “They are feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for . . . And the Obama people know that.”

  He lashed out at his nemesis: “Harpootlian calls me Lee Atwater . . . He doesn’t care what happened. He just knows he can call you a name and you guys will cover it.”

  Finally, Clinton seemed to finish and headed toward the door, when another reporter called out to him, “But do you think the Obama people . . .”

  Clinton turned around and glanced back at the press pack with a look of scorn.

  “Shame on you!” he said—and then, at last, Elvis left the building.

  CLINTON’S OUTBURST REVERBERATED through the remaining days before the primary, playing in an infinite loop on cable and on YouTube. The performance was, in many ways, unprecedented. Never before had anyone seen a former president behave this way. Never had anyone seen a candidate’s spouse behave this way. On garish display was Clinton violating the cardinal rule that was supposed to govern his conduct from the start of Hillary’s campaign: don’t overshadow your wife. Airing his private (and deep, and bitter) grievances in public. Assailing the media on a rope line. For elites, the picture was damning. What it said to them was that Clinton had lost more than a head game with Harpootlian. He’d lost the mental battle with Obama.

  For all those reasons and many others, the reaction in Hillaryland was horror. Solis Doyle had been hearing the same analysis from advisers inside and outside the campaign since New Hampshire: they had to stop Bill’s spasms. Beyond everything else, they were fueling a damaging argument that the Obama campaign was now making openly. As Greg Craig—a Washington attorney who had known the Clintons since Yale Law School, coordinated Bill’s impeachment defense, and now was advising Obama—observed in an interview in that week’s Newsweek, “Recent events raise the question, if Hillary’s campaign can’t control Bill, whether Hillary’s White House could.”

  There was a frantic scramble in Ballston to lasso Bill. “What’s he doing in South Carolina?” Tanden, in a panic, said to Solis Doyle. “Get him out!”

  “We’ve been trying to get him out for days, and he won’t leave,” Patti said.

  Solis Doyle raised the subject with Hillary. He’s causing huge agita for us, she said. It’s not good.

  Hillary tried to change the subject and then defended Bill. He’s getting a raw deal, she insisted. But Hillary knew that the problem was real; she simply couldn’t bear to con
front her husband directly about it. Instead, she delegated others—Penn, Williams—to implore him either to leave the state or to pipe down. To no avail, at least at first.

  “Goddamn it, I’m doing this,” Bill said when Williams reached him by phone.

  But by the following morning, Thursday, Clinton seemed to have grasped the need to rein himself in. Deflated, crumpled, and clearly exhausted, he attended a town hall meeting in Lexington and began by saying, “I feel like a little scrambled egg.”

  A sympathetic voter in the audience suggested that Clinton “stop taking the bait from Obama.”

  “When I was running, I didn’t give a rip what anybody said about me,” Clinton explained piteously. “It’s weird, you know, but if you love somebody and you think that they’d be good, it’s harder.” Clinton spent the rest of Thursday and Friday doing wonky events and steering clear of criticizing Obama.

  With primary day finally upon them, Hillary’s advisers surveyed the wreckage of the week. For all the fears many of them had always nursed about the risks entailed by Bill, no one could have imagined an implosion quite this bad or this baffling. All during the campaign, media and cocktail party psychobabble had abounded as to whether the former president actually wanted his wife to win. Now, for the first time, Hillary’s closest aides began to contemplate the question seriously—asking themselves whether, on some unconscious level, he’d been trying to sabotage her.

  Months later one of them shook his head and said in wonder, “It would take ten Freudians to explain what Bill Clinton did to Hillary in South Carolina.”

  OBAMA WATCHED THE MELTDOWN of the Clinton campaign with a mixture of shock and amusement. When he was told about Clinton’s on-camera implosion, he could only laugh. But his advisers continued to worry that Bill Clinton was pursuing some masterfully nefarious racial strategy: sacrificing South Carolina’s black vote in order to transform Obama from a candidate who was black into the black candidate, thereby helping Hillary with white voters in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania down the road. Michelle Obama was on board with that theory. In the closing days of South Carolina, a scathing fund-raising email went out under her name that accused Bill of “misleading accusations,” “disingenuous attacks,” and “smear tactics.”