Barack had an idea. For the past week, his emissaries had been pushing hard to land (finally) the endorsement of Edwards, whose blue-collar cred might have given Obama a bump with the bitter people. They were close, so close, the go-betweens said, but apparently Edwards was still waffling.
“I’m going to call John one more time,” Obama said on the campaign’s conference call the night of West Virginia, “and tell him that if he wants to do this, tomorrow is the last day when it’s gonna matter.”
Obama had been chasing the endorsement since Edwards dropped out at the end of January. They talked by phone the day Edwards quit, and a few weeks later Obama trekked down to Chapel Hill to make his pitch. Obama and Elizabeth got into a squabble about health care, in which she criticized his reform plan as weak beer. Obama liked John well enough, but didn’t exactly consider him a policy heavyweight. Being lectured to by his wife on substance—well, Obama found that pretty rich.
The trouble with Obama, from Edwards’s point of view, was his refusal to get transactional. He wouldn’t engage, wouldn’t promise anything, wouldn’t so much as deign to stroke Edwards’s ego. When Edwards told Obama that he wanted him to make poverty a centerpiece of his agenda, Obama airily replied, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I care about all that stuff. Clinton, by contrast, proposed that she and Edwards do a poverty tour together, even hinted that Edwards would have “a role” in her administration. Edwards still had his eye on becoming attorney general, and thought the odds of getting that plum were better with Clinton than with Obama. But after South Carolina, the chances of Clinton claiming the nomination just kept falling—and Edwards didn’t want to back a loser.
So, instead, Edwards sat there, perched on the fence, squandering his leverage. Making the situation all the more absurd was the birth in late February of Rielle Hunter’s baby, a girl she named Frances Quinn. In a crib somewhere, secreted away, the out-of-wedlock child was peacefully gurgling. And yet here Edwards was, still believing, beyond all reason, that he could be nominated and confirmed down the road to run the U.S. Department of Justice.
Obama reached Edwards the night of West Virginia not long before midnight, and managed, however momentarily, to pierce his bubble of delusion. At 1:15 a.m., Obama sent an email to his staff: Edwards is a go.
The endorsement was unveiled seventeen hours later in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Edwards enjoyed the experience more than he thought he would. (His attitude on the flight up had been, let’s get this over with.) And he didn’t come away empty-handed. At a meeting with his donors in New York, Edwards bragged about securing a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic convention, though for the Obamans, that was a small price to pay. Timed to coincide with the network evening news, the endorsement succeeded not only in stepping on Clinton’s West Virginia headlines but in shifting the narrative about Obama’s demographic dilemma.
There was another set of problems, not unrelated, that Obama was determined to fix, and they involved his wife. The criticism of Michelle over “proud of my country” had grown more vociferous and pointed; that week, the Tennessee Republican Party posted a four-minute Web video skewering her for the remark. Then there were the rumors buzzing in the political world about the “whitey tape”: footage that supposedly existed of Michelle at Trinity United railing against the sins of Caucasian America, using the term “whitey.” The chatter hit the blogosphere three days after West Virginia. A pro-Clinton site claimed the tape—“video dynamite”—was in the hands of the Republicans, who were planning to deploy it during the general election as an “October surprise.”
The Obama campaign found the idea of the “whitey tape” preposterous. But after the Wright fracas, no one was taking any chances. Jarrett was dispatched to raise the topic with Michelle. “Did you ever say anything about ‘whitey’ at Trinity?” Jarrett asked.
What? Michelle said. I never spoke at Trinity and if I had, I would certainly not have used that word. Later, she joked to Jarrett, It’s such a dated word. I’m much cooler than that!
Barack was in no mood for jest. He expected that the fall campaign would be ugly, and told himself he was ready for the freak-show attacks on him. I’m a big boy, Obama thought. I can take it. What he wasn’t prepared for, what he wouldn’t countenance, was seeing his wife in the crosshairs. “They’re coming after Michelle,” he told Jarrett. “I want to shut it down.”
On May 18, while campaigning in Oregon, the Obamas taped a segment for the next day’s broadcast of Good Morning America. When the interviewer brought up the Tennessee Republican Party Web video, Obama pounced. “If they think that they’re gonna try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful,” he said, fairly growling. “For them to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her, I think is just low class.” Obama added, “These folks should lay off my wife.”
In truth, Obama was talking as much about the whitey tape as the GOP video—and the folks he was addressing weren’t just Republicans but Hillary and Bill. In case they were considering a last-ditch, scorched-earth campaign, he wanted to draw a bright line underscoring the limits of what he’d tolerate.
After the interview, Jarrett asked Michelle what she thought.
“Look at my husband,” she said, beaming. “That’s my husband.”
OBAMA HAD REASON TO be concerned about where the Clintons’ heads were at. Without a plausible road still open to carry Hillary to the nomination, they seemed to be left with only two options: giving up or going postal. Rahm Emanuel, one of the few people in the world talking to both sides, was counseling Obama to give Hillary space, even as he urged Bill Clinton not to turn the final days of the race into a shooting spree. But Emanuel was blunt with Obama about one thing. Quitting, he said, simply wasn’t in the Clintons’ bloodstream.
Certainly there had never been any evidence of that particular form of plasma in the former president’s veins. And his recent behavior gave no indication that he’d received a transfusion. Besides his smalltown stumping, Bill Clinton’s main assignment was continuing to make phone calls to superdelegates, in which he pressed the case for Hillary and against Obama aggressively—at times, too aggressively. Clinton’s message, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, was that the country wasn’t ready to elect an African American president. Some recipients of the calls found them discomfiting, others embarrassing; few found them effective. Complaints were registered with the campaign. Bill’s call sheet was duly adjusted.
Hillary’s avoidance of ringing up superdelegates had long driven Ickes and others in Ballston to distraction. From Texas and Ohio onward, with a loaded gun pressed against her temple, she finally got with the program. The calls she made were softer in tone, but not much different in substance, than her husband’s. Citing her strength among white voters in rural Ohio and Indiana, she would refer elliptically to the racial attitudes that she believed would keep them from pulling the lever for Obama in the fall. “You know how people are,” she’d say.
Yet after Indiana and North Carolina, the Clintons realized that highlighting Obama’s existing vulnerabilities would do little to reverse the tide of superdelegates flowing into his column. Desperately, feverishly, they clung to the hope that a bombshell of some kind would fall from the sky and explode on top of him. A corps of conspiracy theorists around them encouraged such notions. Penn believed that a late-breaking story on Rezko might disqualify Obama. Blumenthal was obsessed with the “whitey tape,” and so were the Clintons, who not only believed that it existed but felt that there was a chance it might emerge in time to save Hillary. “They’ve got a tape, they’ve got a tape,” she told her aides excitedly. It just goes to show, Hillary added, “You never know what can happen.”
Clinton had other, less fantastical reasons for remaining in the race. After one of her rallies that May, she sat down with her friend Ted Strickland and asked what he thought she should do. “I’m under so much pressure to get out,” she said.
“I think
you should do what you perceive to be in your best interest,” Strickland told her. “But let me tell you what a part of me wants you to do, and that’s to fight this thing to the bitter end, because you deserve to do that. No one has a right to try to push you out of this race.”
Hillary heard that kind of thing all the time, and not just from party bigwigs but from ordinary voters, the kinds of people who crowded ten deep along her rope lines now, the women and men screaming, crying, brandishing countless items for her to autograph: T-shirts, books (Living History), pink boxing gloves, crumpled cocktail napkins. (She always signed simply “Hillary.”) As she’d located her groove on the campaign trail, she’d begun inspiring great passion and devotion in her fans, and it meant the world to her.
These people, her supporters, millions of them, wanted her to stay in. So did two of her most trusted advisers, Penn and Mills. And so, of course, did her husband.
The matter of Bill’s approval and his example loomed large in Hillary’s mind. “When he had his toughest test, impeachment, he never gave up, never quit,” an old Clinton hand observed. “How could she ever lie down before the race was completely over? Losing is one thing, but throwing in the towel would mark her as a failure in his eyes.”
But those were not the only voices in Clinton’s ears. Quietly, discreetly, Garin and Wolfson were trying to escort her to a graceful exit. Their arguments didn’t revolve solely around the fact that she could no longer prevail. They spoke to what came next. If Clinton stuck around and aimed to destroy Obama, which was what winning would require, the effort would not only miscarry (they were sure of that) but shred her reputation, hobbling her ability to have any kind of meaningful future in the party.
Clinton, however reluctantly, agreed. She resolved to strike a delicate balance, staying in the race until the end, but eschewing criticism of Obama.
That was easier said than done, as Clinton would learn to her regret. Barely twenty-four hours after Indiana and North Carolina, she was quoted in USA Today saying, “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”
When the inevitable ruckus ensued, Clinton wailed to her aides that she was merely trying to make a demographic point—that the press was yet again casting her words in the worst possible light. “I feel like I’m living in a fun house,” she complained.
Two weeks later, it was more like a house of horrors. Campaigning in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ahead of the state’s June 3 primary, Hillary sat down for an ed-board interview with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader. Clinton mentioned that she found the calls for her to leave the race strange. “Historically, that makes no sense,” she said, “so I find it a bit of a mystery.”
“You don’t buy the party unity argument?” she was asked.
“I don’t because, again, I’ve been around long enough,” Clinton replied. “You know my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
Clinton went on to her next event, at a supermarket in Brandon. As she spoke to a couple hundred voters in the produce section, she noticed a sudden commotion among the traveling press—reporters swarming around her aides, her aides waving their arms and yelling.
The cause of the uproar was a fresh story on the website of The New York Post, whose reporter had watched a video feed of the ed board and wrote of Clinton: “She is still in the presidential race, she said today, because historically, it makes no sense to quit, and added that, ‘Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June,’ making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama.”
Clinton, of course, had made no such comparison, but the horse had left the barn. Soon enough, the story was bannered on the Drudge Report and being jibbered about on cable news. Stoking the frenzy, the Obamans quickly put out a statement, saying her comment “was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.”
After Hillary finished in the produce area, her staff hustled her into the market’s stock room and explained what was going on. Standing amid shelves of canned goods, they ran through the chain of events, explaining that her remarks had set off a firestorm—one in which much of the media was now reporting that she had said, in effect, that she was still in the race because Obama might get shot.
“Unfuckingbelievable!” Clinton said, and shook with fury. How could anyone report that? How could anyone think that I meant that? How could they think that about me?
Mo Elleithee, one of her aides, told her Wolfson was adamant that Hillary needed immediately to face the press and clean up the problem. We tried to explain, Elleithee went on, but the reporters are pushing back because Obama’s safety has been such an issue.
“Don’t talk to me about safety,” Hillary snapped. “Don’t talk to me about threats on your life. I’ve been living with threats for fifteen years. I’ve had threats on my daughter’s life. I’ve had guns and knives confiscated from my campaign events this year. Don’t give me a lecture on safety!”
A few minutes later, Clinton dutifully went out and made a statement. She mopped up the mess, or, at least, she tried to—but, really, she didn’t care. All the frustration she’d felt with the press through the campaign was encapsulated in that moment. She flew back to New York late in the night, her anger draining away, replaced with dysphoria. Watching her recede into herself, deflated, dejected, one of Clinton’s aides on the plane had a thought: The campaign is over.
ON THE NIGHT OF Tuesday, June 3, Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Having split the last two primaries that day with Clinton—him winning in Montana, her in South Dakota—and receiving a final-hours influx of support from superdelegates, he had made it to the magic 2,025. At the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans would hold their convention that summer, Obama strode onstage to the strains of U2’s “Beautiful Day,” clasping hands with Michelle, hugging her, then sharing with her the most famous fist bump in the history of humankind.
After the speech, Barack, Michelle, his team, and his friends retired to a bar inside the arena to watch Clinton’s event in New York on television. The Obamans were expecting a concession speech—or, at least, remarks that were courteous and maybe even classy. So was the press. So were even some of her supporters.
But the address Clinton gave that night in the basement gym of Baruch College was instead seen by many as a churlish attempt to stomp on Obama’s buzz. After being introduced by Terry McAuliffe as “the next president of the United States,” Clinton didn’t concede, didn’t endorse, didn’t so much as acknowledge her rival’s historic triumph. “Now the question is,” Hillary asked the crowd, “where do we go from here?”
Her audience chanted, “Denver! Denver! Denver!”
She seemed to revel in it.
Back in St. Paul, some brainiac in the Obama communications shop had decided it would be a good idea to let the media be in the bar while the Obama team viewed Clinton’s speech. As Hillary spoke, all the air went out of the room. Obama walked over and punched Jarrett in the arm.
“What?” she said to him.
“The look on your face,” Obama said, noting her sour expression. “The press is here.”
The next morning in Washington, a conference call of the senior Hillarylanders was convened to discuss their boss’s next steps. “We have three choices,” Penn said. “She can just get out. She can negotiate. Or she can park.” By parking, Penn meant suspend active campaigning but not concede—waiting around, hoping for a landmine to explode under Obama’s feet.
The group quickly coalesced around option number one, but Penn’s preferred option was that she park. “Let’s kick the can down the road,” he said, maybe all the way to Denver. Or at least let’s negotiate. Hillary had won eighteen million votes; her support was a valuable commodity. She should extract concessions from Obama.
“We need to make him grovel,” Penn said.
As the call was going on, Clinton and Obama were at the Washington Convention Center for the annual meeting of the Jewish lobbying group AIPAC. Obama spoke first, then Clinton. When Hillary finished, she hurried backstage for a photo shoot for an upcoming magazine cover story—and ran smack into Obama and his traveling party.
The unfolding scene was a semiotician’s fantasia. For months, Clinton and Obama had battled (and battered) each other more or less as equals. But now there was no longer even a faint hint of parity. When they first spied each other in the cluttered hallway, Clinton hugged the wall deferentially to let Obama pass. Obama took her aside, put his hand on her shoulder, leaned in for a few words. When their chat was over and Obama marched toward the freight elevator to leave, his Secret Service agents brusquely shooed away Clinton’s aides: “Make way for Senator Obama! Make way for Senator Obama!”
The question was whether Hillary herself would heed that directive. A few minutes later, she would head off to Ballston to figure out her end game. She was somber, prideful, aggrieved, confused—and still high on the notion that she was leading an army, Napoleon in a navy pantsuit and gumball-size fake pearls. Clinton knew she was being pummeled for her speech the night before, but she’d convinced herself that she was, in fact, helping Obama. Her voters were angry, they felt insulted, they had to be coaxed along. If she’d simply endorsed her rival, her supporters might have washed their hands of both of them, either staying home in the fall or voting for McCain. The situation was volatile.
Clinton was hearing from countless allies about what she should do now, but much of their advice—as it had been all along through the marathon campaign—she considered useless. A war was raging inside her between rationality and denial. Maybe she should wait a week before doing anything. Or maybe two. Keep her options open. You never knew what could happen.
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