Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Once again, Clinton had pulled a rabbit from her hat. Once again, she’d raised questions about Obama. Why couldn’t he win the big states that would matter most in the fall? Why did he have trouble connecting with working-class voters? Why couldn’t he close the deal?

  Yet none of the doubts those questions raised was enough to alter the underlying dynamics or overriding mathematics of the race. For Obama to lose the nomination would require a magnum-force game changer. Something that might cause Democrats en masse to slam on the brakes and say whoa. Something that might lead the party to perceive Obama as Clinton saw him—as a “disaster in the making,” as she put it.

  Obama, with his epic self-confidence, couldn’t imagine what that something could be. More than a year into the campaign, he had thwarted the efforts of his rivals to turn him into a parody. He was still Barack Obama. What he never guessed, though, was that the gravest threat he’d face—the threat now looming before him—wouldn’t be posed by his enemies in the present. It would come instead from an old friend.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Obama Agonistes

  THE OBAMAS ATE BREAKFAST in silence at their hotel in San Antonio the morning after Ohio and Texas. Their friends Jarrett and Whitaker tried to cheer them up, but it was no use. Bad vibes suffused the table.

  Michelle was especially out of sorts—which is to say, pissed off. She’d been that way the night before, too, but her mood had worsened with the new dawn. She was tired, very tired, and she missed her girls. She was no campaign strategist, but she knew her husband’s operation had poured $20 million into Texas and Ohio. And what had all that dinero yielded? Two big, fat losses. Michelle felt she was wasting her time on the road, spending countless days away from home, and yet failing to help her husband. She was unhappy with her schedule. Unhappy with her stump speech. Just unhappy. On the flight home to Chicago, she plugged her iPod headphones into her ears and spoke to no one.

  Checking out was no option for Barack, but he was just as displeased as Michelle. He wanted the race against Hillary to be over. He still desperately needed some sleep.

  But by failing to put Clinton out of her misery, Obama had all but guaranteed himself another three months of this hell. A seven-week chasm stretched out before him until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, which, given its older and whiter demographics, he was virtually certain to lose. Many of the contests after that would be no picnic, either; the calendar, which had been his friend in February, was now his enemy. Meanwhile, the press was starting to treat him as what he was: the front-runner. Obama didn’t much like it. At a press availability two days earlier, when reporters nagged him about Tony Rezko, he’d whined, “C’mon, guys, I just answered, like, eight questions”—and then stalked off, cutting them short. For more than a month since South Carolina, Obama had been in the catbird seat. Now he braced for his turn in the barrel.

  No amount of girding, however, could have prepared Obama for what he saw on his TV screen eight days later. On March 13, ABC News aired a story about his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Using excerpts from videotapes of Wright’s sermons that were for sale at his parish, Trinity United Church of Christ, the story painted a picture of a preacher unhinged. In one clip, Wright railed about the treatment of African Americans: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes the three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no! Not God bless America—Goddamn America!” In another, he referred to America as the “U.S. of KKK A.” In still another, from a sermon delivered after 9/11, Wright bellowed, “We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!” Revolving on his heel, gazing heavenward, fluttering one hand in the air, Wright ominously concluded, “America’s chickens . . . are coming home . . . to roost!’

  As the story went metastatic the next day, Obama was traveling from Washington to Chicago, where he had a pair of ed-board interviews scheduled with the Windy City’s two daily papers. He had been pushing for some time to sit down with the press and try to clear the air about his relationship with Rezko. The suits had resisted, but with the crooked developer on trial and the media pressing on the subject, Obama felt it was imperative. But now, on top of prepping for the interviews, he had to deal with the Wright imbroglio.

  “All right, let’s get down to business,” Obama said as he walked into his campaign HQ. “We’ve got about two hours and we have a lot to do.”

  He took a seat in a conference room amid sheer pandemonium among his aides. One of them had drafted a statement on Wright to release to the Huffington Post. But Obama rejected it and, in about twenty minutes, dictated one of his own, which called Wright’s sermons “inflammatory and appalling.” When the suits said the statement would be a sufficient response, Obama overruled them, saying he wanted to go on TV that night. “They’re going to be looping Reverend Wright all weekend; the public needs to see me, too,” Obama said. Then he prepared for the Rezko ed boards, and aced them. His performance that day—calm, methodical, precise, and strategic—impressed his team immensely. Anita Dunn, the strategist who’d run Hopefund, had joined the campaign after Nevada. This is a guy I want in a foxhole with me, she thought.

  Beneath Obama’s cool exterior, though, he was furious with his campaign for failing to unearth the Wright tapes before then. Obama had been a member of Trinity for twenty years. He knew Wright could be provocative, even incendiary. And so did much of the political community in Chicago. “This guy is going to be a big problem for Barack,” Mayor Daley had warned his brother Bill, even before Obama launched his bid. The Rolling Stone story that prompted the downgrading of Wright’s role at the announcement in Springfield tossed up another red flag. But the campaign’s research department had inexplicably failed to follow up.

  Michelle was even angrier than her husband, though the focus of her upset was elsewhere. From the moment she’d read the piece in Rolling Stone, she was through with Reverend Wright, ready to quit the church. “That’s enough of that,” she told Jarrett. Her husband’s panicked advisers approached her to find out basic details about the Obamas’ membership at Trinity; they knew hardly anything. How often did the family go to church? Had they been present for any of the controversial sermons? Michelle made it clear that she’d never much liked Wright. And that since the births of Malia and Sasha, in 1998 and 2001, the Obamas had rarely attended services.

  Still, Obama had said that Wright “brought me to Jesus.” He had declared himself a proud Christian. To admit that his religiosity was, in practice, limited, would have made Obama look craven at best, and like a liar at worst.

  Obama’s relationship to Wright and Trinity was, in fact, complicated. His initial attraction to the parson and his South Side ministry sprang from its commitment to the social gospel: the day care programs, the work with prisoners, the encouragement of HIV/AIDS testing—all the kinds of things that would have appealed to a young community organizer. Obama liked the admixture of working-class and buppie congregants at the church. He was impressed by Wright’s reputation as a biblical scholar and had been inspired by his oratory; he had lifted the title of The Audacity of Hope from one of Wright’s sermons. And although Obama considered the words that were causing the current controversy beyond the pale, he well understood the context—generational, cultural, and social—by which Wright had come to the views that animated them. His ties to his pastor were neither mainly religious nor political. They were quasi-familial. “He’s like your uncle who says things you profoundly disagree with,” Obama told The Chicago Tribune editorial board. “But he’s still your uncle.”

  The evening that Obama released his initial statement about Wright, he conferred with Jarrett, Nesbitt, and Whitaker, then phoned Axelrod. Obama told his strat
egist that he wanted to give a major address on race—and wanted to do it on Tuesday, just four days later. Given how personal the speech would be, Jon Favreau waited to hear from Obama before he started working on a draft. Obama was busy campaigning the next day and didn’t reach him until late that night.

  “This is tough,” Obama said, “but I’m running for president, and this is what you do when you run for president. I want this to be a teaching moment.”

  The idea of doing a big race speech had been on Obama’s mind for months. Back in the fall, he’d brought it up, but the suits were wary, not wanting to mess with his post-racial brand. He’d raised it again the day after Texas and Ohio, when the exit polls showed that Clinton had won the white vote in the Buckeye State by thirty points. Convinced that he would be the nominee, Obama wanted to start dealing with issues he was destined to confront in the general election, of which race was plainly one. The Wright fiasco had simply sped up the timetable on the speech, filling Obama with—to swipe a phrase—the fierce urgency of now.

  Yet even with the Wright snippets playing endlessly on cable, and conservatives baying for Obama’s head—demanding to know if he was a closet black radical, as anti-American as the man The New York Post had dubbed the “minister of hate”—the suits were dubious. They feared the speech might make the problem worse, deepening instead of healing the gash that Wright had opened up in the belly of Obama’s candidacy. “Do you guys understand, this could be it?” Axelrod said. “This could be the whole campaign.”

  But when Obama emailed the speech text to his senior staff on March 18, the morning of the address, Axelrod was blown away. “This is why you should be president,” he emailed Obama back.

  Standing at the lectern at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, flanked by four American flags on either side of him, Obama delivered the remarks he’d titled “A More Perfect Union.” The speech was candid, nuanced, and replete with context. It spoke to the resentments of both blacks and whites, tried to explain how they had arisen, what fueled them, why they were “grounded in legitimate concerns”—but then argued they had landed the country in a “racial stalemate” that had to be broken.

  Obama denounced Wright’s comments as “expressing a profoundly distorted view of our country,” as “not only wrong but divisive—divisive at a time when we need unity.” Yet Obama refused to cut his pastor loose. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother . . . who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

  “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made,” Obama said. “But what we know, what we have seen, is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

  In the short term, politically, the speech was as effective as it was eloquent. It placed Obama on the elevated plane where he always thrived. It strummed the mystic chords of the media. It replaced the TV images of Wright fulminating with those of Obama soothing, synthesizing, and waxing hopeful.

  Its longer-range effects were harder to gauge. Obama’s refusal to disown Wright left him open to attacks from the right. Two days earlier, a video produced by conservative activists titled “Is Obama Wright?” had been posted to YouTube. It weaved together clips of Wright with other ephemera—shots of Obama at a campaign event without his hand over his heart during the national anthem, of him saying he wasn’t inclined to wear an American flag lapel pin—to suggest that the senator was unpatriotic. It also featured footage of Michelle, speaking at a recent rally in Wisconsin, saying, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”

  To many Republicans, Obama had long appeared to be a tougher general election opponent than Clinton. But with Wright’s emergence, that assessment was being revisited. The question was whether many Democrats were thinking the same thing—and what, if anything, the Clintonites could do to spur the party’s synapses to start firing in that fashion.

  HAROLD ICKES PROPOSED HIRING a private investigator to look into the connection between Obama and Wright. Ickes was famously liberal; he’d worked for Jesse Jackson. But he was also famously tough and he was at least half-serious about the PI. He was meeting with the Clintons and the Hillaryland high command one day in late March, trying to figure out how to handle the Wright story. Everyone was pussyfooting around the thing, and Ickes had finally had enough. “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty fucking years,” he said. “If you really want to take him down, let’s take him fucking down.”

  The Clintons wanted to take Obama down, but they weren’t sure that going after Wright was the way to do it. Some Hillarylanders thought holding a candidate responsible for the words of his minister was unfair. Others thought pushing the story risked touching the third rail that race had become in the campaign. Even Penn was an advocate of Hillary personally keeping a safe distance. But like Ickes, with whom he shared nothing but fierce mutual enmity, Penn believed the campaign should be searching for evidence that Obama had been present for one of Wright’s screeds. “The tape will speak for itself” was Penn’s position.

  Hillary reconciled herself to the wisdom of exercising restraint on Wright. But she saw a maddening double standard in play yet again. “Just imagine, just for fun, if my pastor from Arkansas said the kind of things his pastor said,” she held forth one day to her aides. “I’m just saying. Just imagine. This race would be over.”

  Instead—in spite of Texas and Ohio, in spite of Wright—super-delegates were still swarming to Obama. Since Iowa, he had picked up fifty-three endorsements to Hillary’s twelve. The flashiest of these was Bill Richardson, who signed on with Obama three days after his race speech. Richardson had been in bad odor with the Clintons since his deal with Obama in the Hawkeye State caucuses. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton had flown to Santa Fe to spend Super Bowl Sunday with Richardson and court him. Clinton swore up and down to his friends that Richardson had promised him five times he would at least refrain from endorsing Obama, even if he didn’t back Hillary. Thus did Richardson, courtesy of James Carville, earn himself a new sobriquet in Clintonworld: Judas.

  More disquieting to Hillary were the mounting calls for her to leave the race—the latest and loudest of which had emanated from Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. But far from weakening her resolve, the suggestions that she quit only galvanized her commitment to stay in until the bitter end. They were trying to force her out, even though she still had a chance to win, and that struck her as mighty strange in light of Obama’s weaknesses.

  What Clinton failed to apprehend were the vulnerabilities that many Democrats continued to see in her, a number of which were on vivid display in the run-up to Pennsylvania. Cable was having a field day with a story that had become known as Snipergate. More than once on the trail, Hillary had described a trip she made to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. In her telling, she arrived under sniper fire, racing across the tarmac with her head down. In late March, video surfaced of her being greeted at Tuzla airport by cheerful children, with Chelsea smiling beside her. The story reinforced every extant preconception about the Clintons’ dodgy relationship with the truth.

  Then, on April 4, Clinton was engulfed in yet another Hillaryland melodrama. The Wall Street Journal reported that Penn, in his continuing role as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, had just met with the Colombian ambassador in Washington to strategize about how to win passage of a free trade deal with the United States—a pact that Hillary and the labor unions opposed. The resulting furor forced Clinton to demote Penn, elevating Wolfson and the pollster Geoff Garin to jointly fill the role that her chief strategist had occupied.

  To the outs
ide world, the Penn fracas was another sign of a Clinton campaign in chaos, and a damning one for a candidate running on experience and competence. Inside Hillaryland, however, the situation was seen as even more disturbing. In the eyes of many, the chief strategist had shown his true stripes: that his paramount client was always himself, his preponderant aim his own enrichment. What Penn had done was a firing offense, his continued presence in the building a demonstration of Hillary’s insecurity.

  Clinton, it seemed, couldn’t catch a break—and then, out of nowhere, she got one. On April 11, less than two weeks before the primary, the Huffington Post put online audio of Obama speaking at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama told the group. “So it’s not surprising then that [people there] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

  Obama’s “bitter/cling” comments seemed to be a heavenly gift to the Clintons. They billboarded a simple message about Obama that Hillary and Bill already believed was true: that he was, at bottom, a helpless and hopeless elitist. Unlike the Wright story, here was something the Clintons could push—and push it they did, immediately and furiously and with no fear of stumbling over racial trip wires. For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.