Game Change

by John Heilemann

  His team was clearly out-organizing, out-strategizing, and out-hustling the other side. And now it looked like the Obamans would be able to out-muscle the Clintonites, too.

  In the previous few weeks, an extraordinary thing had happened: money had begun gushing into O-Town through the Web. From the outset, the campaign had labored to build the tech infrastructure to enable that flow, but it wasn’t until after New Hampshire that the phenomenon took off. In January, Obama’s campaign had raised an astonishing $32 million, much of it online, compared to $13 million for Clinton. And since South Carolina, the pace had only accelerated, fueled by the debut of the singer will.i.am’s “Yes, We Can” YouTube video, in which a multiracial array of celebs performed a soulful musical rendition of Obama’s speech from the night of the New Hampshire primary.

  Plouffe didn’t yet know that Hillary had been forced to lend her campaign money; he would find out the next day, with the rest of the world, even as his operation was putting out word that $6 million had poured into its coffers in the span of the previous twenty-four hours.

  The significance of Obama’s new financial edge was magnified by the calendar. In the weeks between Super Tuesday and March 4—when Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont would vote—there would be eleven contests, four of them caucuses and four primaries with a big share of black voters. With Obama able to outspend Hillary by two or three to one, Plouffe was convinced that his candidate would win nine or ten of the remaining February races, and amass a redoubtable lead in pledged delegates.

  Ever since the failure to put Clinton away in New Hampshire, Plouffe had feared that Super Tuesday might be Obama’s Waterloo. Now, at three in the morning, he realized it had been Clinton’s. Looking up from his tabulations, Plouffe was gripped by the sort of certitude that a math teacher has about multiplication tables.

  My God, he thought. We’re going to win the nomination.

  PLOUFFE WOULD BE PROVED wrong about one thing. Obama didn’t win nine or ten of the rest of the contests in February—he won all eleven, in many states trouncing Clinton by margins far wider than Plouffe dared dream of.

  Even when things had been going reasonably well, Clinton had never exactly been a buoyant Hubert Humphrey on the stump. But now her unhappy warriorhood was painfully evident. For two solid weeks during Obama’s winning streak, she hauled herself to state after state in which she knew she was destined to be routed. She didn’t have any choice but to go and scrap for every stray delegate. But the forced-march nature of the stretch only made her agony more acute.

  That she was losing—losing eleven in a row, losing the nomination—would’ve been bad enough by itself, but more wrenching was the way she was losing. Every day seemed to bring some fresh indignity clanging down on her head.

  Three days after Super Tuesday, Clinton woke up in Seattle for a day of campaigning ahead of the caucuses in Washington State. On her morning briefing call, Wolfson recapped the past day’s coverage, noting that MSNBC’s David Shuster was getting blowback for an on-air comment he’d made about Chelsea—something about her role on the campaign trail, about calls she’d been placing to uncommitted super-delegates.

  Clinton had been traveling, had heard nothing about it. What did Shuster say?

  He said that Chelsea was, ahem, being “pimped out,” Wolfson explained.

  After a long silence, Clinton exclaimed, “Are you kidding? He said what?”

  Wolfson read the full Shuster quote to her verbatim: “Doesn’t it seem as if Chelsea is sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?”

  Clinton had long before accepted that it was open season on her and her husband on cable and the Web. But this was something else again. Some cable bloviator had referred to her daughter, in effect, as a prostitute.

  Another extended silence filled the air, until Hillary spoke again. Her throat catching, her voice quaking, she wasn’t angry, she was distraught—and clearly in tears.

  How could he say that? How can they get away with that? It’s one thing for them to go after me; it’s another thing for them to go after my daughter. Where were the women’s groups? “If they let them get away with this,” Clinton said, “they deserve what they get.”

  Still crying, she kept rambling—until, out of nowhere, patched in from the road by one of her aides, an unexpected voice piped up. “Hi, Mom, it’s me,” Chelsea said. “I’m okay.”

  The voice of her daughter brought Hillary instantly back to composure. And, almost as quickly, her feelings shifted from upset to outrage. When the call was over, she told Solis Doyle she wanted to pull out of an upcoming debate in Cleveland being sponsored by NBC and MSNBC. More than that, she wanted her supporters to boycott those networks—she wanted retribution. Solis Doyle talked her off the ledge. The NBC brass was apologizing profusely. Shuster had been suspended indefinitely and was writing her a letter of contrition. When Hillary read it, her reaction was tart. “What a bunch of bullshit,” she said.

  Two days later, Clinton returned to the capital to try once again to clean up the mess that her campaign had become. She still had no strategy, no message, no path to victory. Decisions still weren’t being made. Phone calls still weren’t being returned. Solis Doyle seemed checked out. Williams, frustrated with trying to share power with Patti, was threatening to leave.

  Clinton arranged to meet Solis Doyle that Sunday morning to figure things out, air their respective grievances. Patti tried to reschedule at the last minute, citing a child care issue, but Hillary was ready to move on. She organized a conference call and announced that Solis Doyle would henceforth be doing Hispanic outreach and Williams would be running the campaign solo.

  Maggie, you stay on the call and get everything moving, said Hillary, signing off.

  Um, I’m just finding out about this, Williams told the group. I’ll have to call everyone back.

  Clinton wanted Solis Doyle to stick around, maybe travel with her, help out in Texas. But Patti was done. Two days later, she sent Hillary a lengthy exit memo in which she warmly praised most of her colleagues—but savagely stripped the bark off Penn. “He is mean and untrustworthy,” Solis Doyle wrote. “He is demeaning. People hate him. The staff hates him. The media hates him . . . [He] has sucked the soul and humanity out of this campaign.”

  While Patti’s departure left Hillary without one of her most fervent loyalists, another had become a deeply troubled asset. Two months earlier, Bill Clinton had been the best-loved Democrat in the country and maybe the most popular person on the planet besides the Pope. Now, in something like a heartbeat, he’d been transformed into a figure of derision and scorn.

  The day after South Carolina, one of Hillary’s senior advisers had told her, We have a problem. If you can’t control your husband in the campaign, how are you going to control him as president?

  “Well, someone will have to talk to him,” Hillary said.

  “You need to talk to him,” the adviser replied.

  “I can’t talk to him,” Hillary said.

  But Hillary knew Bill’s role had to change, and so did the rest of Clintonworld. Alongside his anger, there was now a self-pity that was nearly all-consuming. The day of the Kennedy endorsement, Bill sent a wave of discomfort through the crowd at a high-dollar fund-raising lunch for Hillary in Manhattan. After giving some good-humored opening remarks, he was asked in the Q&A about Kennedy and suddenly went all Mr. Hyde. Rattling off a laundry list of favors he’d done as president for Teddy—from making his sister Jean the ambassador to Ireland to keeping the Coast Guard out searching for John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane when it went down in 1999—Clinton seemed to be suggesting that Kennedy’s failure to back Hillary was the equivalent of reneging on a debt.

  Some days later, Bill received a phone call from George W. Bush. The current and former presidents spoke more often than almost anyone knew; from time to time, when 43 was bored, he would call 42 to chew the fat. In this case, Bush, tucked away at Camp David, had a more distinct objective. He wanted to reassu
re his predecessor that he didn’t think Clinton was a racist.

  The irony of the situation tickled Bush, but he also felt sympathy for Bill. Hey, buddy, Bush said, I know you’re coming under attack; you just gotta keep your chin up. Clinton thanked Bush—then treated him to a fifteen-minute tirade about the injustices that had befallen him and the sources of his suffering.

  Bush was the highest-ranking personage serenaded with this rant. But few people who spoke to Clinton that February (or for months thereafter) didn’t hear a version of it. His daily conference calls with the campaign took on a Groundhog Day quality: morning after morning, the same litany of woe, same howls of protest, same wails about his persecution. On more than one call, Clinton became so overwrought that he broke down in tears. How extreme was the infatuation of the press corps with Obama? “I’ll tell you,” Bill said. “They just want to cream in their jeans over this guy.”

  Given Clinton’s state of mind, the consensus in Hillaryland was that it might be wise to keep him away from cameras and microphones as much as possible. With Williams in charge and Mills running the campaign’s daily operations, Bill’s internal influence grew, as they brought him into the decision-making loop on advertising and other matters. But his public visibility was greatly reduced. From then on, he would spend much of his time in rural areas, places that, as the campaign put it, had “never seen a president.”

  Hillary agreed with the plan, though her attitude toward Bill remained the same as it had been through all their years together. Even at his most scandalous, most inconvenient, she still found her husband a marvel. “When he dies, they should study his brain,” she’d say.

  ON FEBRUARY 19, OBAMA won his tenth straight contest, administering a 58–41 drubbing to Clinton in the Wisconsin primary, carrying virtually every demographic group, and opening up a pledged-delegate lead of 159.

  The next day, Plouffe, on a conference call with reporters, basically declared the race over. Given the rules governing the allocation of delegates in the Democratic Party, Plouffe argued, Clinton would have to win Ohio and Texas by thirty points each, and then win the Pennsylvania primary in April by forty, to close the gap. “This is a wide, wide lead right now,” he said. “The Clinton campaign keeps saying the race is essentially tied. That’s just lunacy.”

  Plouffe was aware his comments would be interpreted as an attempt to drive Hillary from the race. He knew he risked rallying her supporters. But Plouffe also knew Obama might wind up just short of the magic 2,025 delegates—leaving the possibility of Clinton prevailing by dint of the superdelegates. Plouffe therefore thought it imperative to start driving the argument, with supers and the press, that the leader in pledged delegates should be, and would be, the party’s eventual nominee.

  Cold-eyed calculation wasn’t the only thing fueling Plouffe’s taunts. Frustration also played a part. The longer Clinton stayed in, the more money the Obamans would have to waste in pursuit of a foregone conclusion—millions of bucks that would be better spent on the general election.

  Obama was frustrated, too. By the end of his winning streak, the thrill of victory had lost a modicum of its luster for him. He complained to his aides about the sameness of the succession of mega-rallies, about a certain staleness creeping in. Axelrod likened Hillary to Freddy Krueger, and that made Obama laugh. “My God, these people never die,” Barack said. Yet he chafed at the party’s acquiescence in her continuing her quest. If I had lost eleven in a row, he told Gibbs, I can assure you there wouldn’t be a lot of debate about me sticking in the race. Everyone would be pushing me out.

  Obama’s irritation was leavened by a grudging respect for Hillary’s tenacity. Damn, she’s tough, he thought. But mostly he was confused. Obama had never considered Clinton irrational, yet her refusal to surrender just seemed crazy.

  During the course of the campaign, Obama had asked the suits—as well as Emanuel, who had become his on-call expert regarding all things Clinton—countless questions about the tactics and tendencies of the couple. Now he had only one: What on earth was Hillary thinking?

  CLINTON TOOK THE STAGE in an open-air plaza in downtown San Antonio wearing a dark pantsuit and a pasted-on smile to disguise the depth of her desperation. Under the pantsuit, she had on an orange top that matched the color of the sign fastened to the lectern in front of her: TEXAS—CLINTON COUNTRY. Hillary thought it was true, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of much anymore.

  It was nearly ten o’clock at night on February 29, less than four days before primary day in Texas and Ohio. Clinton was exhausted. But San Antonio always gave her a boost; it was a special place for her and Bill. Thirty-six years earlier, they’d come down here from Yale to work for George McGovern, getting their first taste of national politics. And although everyone was duly dazzled by Bill back then, there were those who saw greatness in Hillary, too. A local organizer named Betsey Wright, who later became an indispensable figure in Bill’s rise, told her that she might have what it took to become the nation’s first female president.

  But now, as Hillary looked out on a crowd of three thousand a stone’s throw from the Alamo, that dream seemed to be crumbling in her hands. She knew that she had to beat Obama in Texas and Ohio to justify carrying on—even Bill had said so publicly a few days earlier. She was doing fine in Ohio, but in Texas, where Obama was outspending her by a mile, she was slipping. This might be one of the last big rallies of her political life.

  So, despite her fatigue, her bone-weariness, and the aching throat that had turned her voice into a raspy growl, Clinton launched into her spiel with gusto—and then, suddenly, the power failed, killing the lights and the sound system, too. Clinton didn’t pause. Standing there in the dark, she just plowed right on through.

  What was sustaining her? What was she thinking? It was simple. She thought Obama wasn’t qualified to be commander in chief. And she thought the Republicans would destroy him in the fall, preying on his inexperience and insubstantiality, prying him open and disemboweling him.

  That morning her campaign had released a new ad in Texas that went directly to those points. Titled “3AM,” it was a concoction of Penn’s drawn from a script he’d drafted a few days earlier on his laptop in a file called “gamechangers.” The ad was aimed at men in Texas and was basically an update of the famous red-phone spot that Walter Mondale used against Gary Hart in 1984. There were sleeping children, the sound of a phone ringing, and a question: When an international crisis hits, who do you want picking up the receiver in the Oval Office? A shot of Hillary, assured and calm, phone to ear, provided the answer; Obama’s name was never mentioned.

  Even so, “3AM” was the first ad the Clintonites had run that challenged Obama’s fitness for office. But Hillary didn’t have a moment’s hesitation about airing it. For days, the Obama campaign had been hitting her with negative direct mail on health care and NAFTA—even as Obama continued to play the part of holier-than-thou lord of uplift. What a phony, she thought. What a hypocrite. Her dander was up.

  After more than a year of battling Obama, she’d concluded he was a cipher. In prepping for their debate a week earlier in Cleveland, she had argued with her staff over whether she should call him a “blank slate.” She compared him to a preacher, a religious leader, and said, “We have to make people understand that he’s not real.” Obama’s vast crowds, his wild-eyed devotees—it was a kind of mass hysteria.

  She was like Cassandra, convinced she could see the future, filled with angst that no one believed her. She looked on in amazement as more and more superdelegates—so many old allies of hers and Bill’s—flocked to Obama. Two days earlier, John Lewis had switched his endorsement from Hillary to her opponent. It was painful for Clinton, but she gave a free pass to black elected officials. She understood their position, the pressure they were under, the threats (which the Clintons kept hearing about) that they would be hit with primary-election challenges if they didn’t toe the Obama line.

  But people such as Senator Jay Rockefel
ler of West Virginia were another story. Hillary and Rockefeller were friends, she’d thought; they had fought side by side through the health care war of the early nineties. Now Rockefeller was telling Clinton he was backing Obama because his children were jazzed about him. Hillary had heard that explanation before. Was it simply an excuse? Or was it actually true? She couldn’t decide which was more pathetic.

  Even if Clinton won Ohio and Texas, her only route to the nomination was by way of the superdelegates. She had to make them understand, had to make them see. She spent the final days before the primaries lashing out at Obama, trying to render him unacceptable. Her campaign drilled him over Rezko, whose corruption trial began that week. They thumped him over his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, caught telling the Canadian government that Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance was merely posturing. Hillary herself handed the likely Republican nominee a choice sound bite to use against her rival in the fall.

  “I have a lifetime of experience I will bring to the White House,” Clinton declared on March 3. “Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002.”

  The Obamans sloughed off Clinton as a terminal patient raging against the dying of the light. But if Clinton found her voice in New Hampshire, in Texas and Ohio she discovered a new persona: the fighter, the populist, the resilient underdog. She started speaking clearly, forcefully, and empathetically to hard-pressed voters who felt her pain. And she reaped the rewards: a ten-point win in Ohio and a three-point victory in the Lone Star State’s primary. Onstage that night in Columbus, Clinton began her speech with a refrain that would thematically mark the rest of her campaign: “For everyone here in Ohio and across America who’s ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, and for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up, this one is for you.”