Game Change

by John Heilemann

  In defusing the Iseman story, McCain cleared the final remaining obstacle to his nomination. But the victory came at a cost. For two years, McCain’s relationship with the media had been souring, but this turned things from sour to rancid—at least in his mind, where it counted. The campaign’s dealings with the Times in particular would never be the same again, either. There was no turning back, no way to restore even a modicum of trust with the most important print outlet in the country.

  HAVING DODGED BULLET AFTER bullet, McCain clinched his party’s nomination on March 4 by winning the primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and concluding one of the greatest political comebacks in modern American history. The next morning, he flew from Dallas to Washington to have lunch at the White House and claim his first reward: the endorsement of one of the least popular Republicans in the country. The task of simultaneously embracing and maintaining sufficient distance from George W. Bush presented McCain with his initial political challenge as the presumptive nominee. He handled it awkwardly, garbling his words as he told reporters in the Rose Garden, “I intend to have as much possible campaigning events together as is in keeping with the president’s heavy schedule.”

  The weeks between March and June, when the general election would unofficially begin, should have been a period of enormous opportunity for McCain. His approval rating, according to Gallup, was 67 percent, as high as it had ever been. In head-to-head polling matchups, he was running even with both Obama, by then the likely Democratic nominee, and Clinton. The two Democrats were pummeling each other, spending many tens of millions of dollars to do it, and the rancor in their party was growing every day. McCain, on the other hand, had an extended period to regroup after more than a year of chaos. He had won the nomination with no money, no organization, no well-defined message, and no sophisticated strategy. Now he had a chance to acquire all those things. The question was whether he would even try.

  On April 2, McCain arrived in Annapolis, Maryland, for one of the stops along his weeklong “Service to America” biography tour. The idea was for him to travel to places of significance in his life story, reintroducing himself to voters and redefining his image. He would visit his high school in Alexandria, Virginia; military installations in Mississippi and Florida where he’d been based; his political HQ in Arizona; and Annapolis, which he entered as a plebe in 1954. After leading the pledge of allegiance at a local diner, where scrapple-scarfing patrons huddled in booths beneath a sign that read “DELICIOUS PANCAKES, MAPLE SYRUP, MARGARINE,” he arrived at a grander setting: the Navy football stadium. But no throng of midshipmen-cum-McCainiacs surrounded the candidate on the podium. In front of him instead were sixty folding chairs occupied by wizened dignitaries; behind him were thirty-five thousand seats, occupied by no one.

  McCain was cranky about the setting. “What is going on with this?” he asked his aides. But the speech was hardly better than the TV pictures. He sought to explain how a callow, shallow hellion had become a man of honor. At the academy, McCain said, he was “childish” and prone to “petty acts of insubordination.” But then came the horrors he suffered in Vietnam, and the lessons Annapolis had sought to teach him took hold.

  “It changed my life forever,” McCain said. “I had found my cause: citizenship in the greatest nation on earth.” But his next sentence— “What is lost, in a word, is citizenship”—sounded like a non sequitur, and that’s because it was. The prompter was at fault: it had devoured a page of his script.

  Nevertheless, McCain’s consiglieri professed themselves pleased with the tour. “It was open-field running for us,” McKinnon told a reporter. “While the Democrats continued to attack each other and claw their way to the bottom, McCain was able to communicate a positive message and create a compelling narrative about the values he learned growing up that make him best qualified to be president.”

  But for many Republicans, the biography tour began to instill pessimism about the party’s nominee. McCain had failed to drive a message. He had failed to bore in on the weaknesses of Obama. He had failed to make news of any kind. The press coverage of the tour was perfunctory when not derisory. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart dubbed it the “Monsters of Nostalgia Tour,” cracking that it had “all the allure of an Atlantic City senior citizens’ outing without all the awkward sexual tension.”

  Republicans worried, too, that McCain’s organization was ramping up far too sluggishly. Although its leadership—Black, Davis, McKinnon, Salter, and Schmidt—was well regarded, it seemed stretched too thin. The campaign had just four full-time finance staffers and no significant online fund-raising presence. In March, it brought in a mere $4 million over the Web and through direct mail.

  But the greatest Republican concern was about McCain himself: that in selecting a septuagenarian senator more comfortable in Washington than anywhere else, a dark-humored war hero with a distinctly premodern sensibility, a man who thought that being on Meet the Press was more important than going to church—actually, that being on the show was going to church—the party had chosen Bob Dole all over again.

  The comparison seemed all too vivid, and its implications all too dire, on the night of June 3. As Obama celebrated having locked up his party’s nomination, McCain delivered a televised speech that made Republican hearts sink across the land. In front of an unsightly green backdrop, he stammered through an uninspiring and uninspired text. His people knew it was a disaster from the moment he took the podium; they prayed the cable networks would cut away.

  The general election was now upon McCain. In his three unmolested months, he had accomplished next to nothing. His organization was still too small. He was still in the poorhouse. He still had no real message and no clear strategy.

  McCain wasn’t happy about any of this. But panicked he was not. The guerilla approach had won him the nomination. Why couldn’t it work against Obama?

  PART III

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paris and Berlin

  JOHN MCCAIN AND BARACK OBAMA entered the general election jointly holding out the hope of a different kind of fall campaign. For all of their intellectual, generational, and stylistic differences, McCain and Obama had much in common. Both candidates argued that Washington was broken, in need of root-and-branch reform, and ascribed its dysfunction to hyperpartisanship and the pernicious power of special interests. Both cast themselves as anti-politicians and post-ideological avatars. To gain their respective nominations, both relied on the support of centrist independents and even a handful of members of the other party. Neither had any inclination to turn the election into another bitterly polarized knife fight. Both boasted of being ready and able to lead a more civil and constructive conversation.

  There was one minor hitch with this rosy scenario, however. McCain and Obama didn’t like each other. Not even a little bit.

  Their very first entanglement had ended in a fit of unusually public acrimony. It was in February 2006, when McCain asked Obama to collaborate with him on ethics reform. McCain always kept an eye peeled for young turks who shared his propensity for bucking the system, and he didn’t care if they happened to be Democrats. As a freshman congressman in the early eighties, McCain had been taken under the wing of Democrat Mo Udall, the legendary Arizona representative who was the liberal conscience of the House and a ringing voice for reform. The Udall precedent was on McCain’s mind when he reached out to Russ Feingold, the novice Wisconsin Democratic senator who became his partner on campaign-finance reform. And it was what drove McCain to approach Obama, the designated Democratic captain on ethics.

  Obama indicated an interest in working with McCain on a bipartisan initiative. But after attending a meeting of a McCain-led splinter group, Obama backed away, neglecting to call the Arizonan to let him know, instead sending a formal letter on February 2 announcing that he intended to push the Democratic version of ethics legislation—a letter that was released to the press before it reached McCain.

  McCain felt that he had ext
ended his hand and Obama had slapped his face, and he directed Mark Salter to brush the whippersnapper back. Over his boss’s signature, Salter fired off a letter to Obama (that wound up in the hands of reporters posthaste) bristling with scorn and oozing sarcasm. “I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble,” it said. “I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness.”

  Salter’s chin music was the first time anyone in either party had tossed a high hard one at Obama—and it echoed through the Senate, where decorum made that kind of personal affront about as common as cut-off shorts at a confirmation hearing. The same day, Obama wrote back to McCain, expressing cool puzzlement and ostensible solicitude. But when he was asked about the exchange by the press, Obama didn’t hesitate to throw a brushback of his own.

  “The tone of [McCain’s] letter, I think, was a little over the top,” he said. “But John McCain’s been an American hero and has served here in Washington for twenty years, so if he wants to get cranky once in a while, that’s his prerogative.”

  Did you just call McCain “cranky”? a reporter asked.

  “You got my quote the first time,” Obama said tartly.

  Back in his office, Obama was blunter with his aides about his sentiments. “I’m not interested in being bitch-slapped by John McCain,” he said.

  As far as McCain was concerned, the ethics kerfuffle was just the first in a series of incidents that revealed Obama’s true colors. In 2007, when McCain was paying a brutal price politically for his work alongside Kennedy on immigration reform, Obama joined a bipartisan group of senators who’d agreed to band together and oppose amendments from the right and left that would scuttle the legislation. But then Obama promptly turned around and voted for several liberal provisions. A year later, he criticized McCain for coming out against a new GI Bill that would have guaranteed money for college to anyone who served three years in the military. “I can’t believe [that] he believes it is too generous to our veterans,” Obama tut-tutted.

  McCain didn’t believe any such thing; he worried that the bill would create retention problems in the armed forces. Having his commitment to veterans questioned set off McCain’s first flare of genuine ire toward Obama. “I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did,” McCain snapped.

  McCain never thought any of this would be of consequence in the presidential race. All along, he believed that he would be running against Clinton—and relished the prospect. He liked Hillary, respected her, had become friendly with her in the Senate. They had traveled to the far reaches of the globe together and enjoyed each other’s company. (The vodka shots they’d shared once in Estonia had become the stuff of lore.) His disappointment when she lost was palpable.

  By the start of the general election, McCain’s view of Obama was firmly fixed and strikingly similar to the one that Hillary held: Obama was a lightweight, a line-cutter, a go-along-to-get-alonger who pretended to be a man of independence, and who bore none of the scars of political sacrifice that McCain wore as medals of honor. Honor was the core concept here, the soldier’s highest virtue. McCain believed Obama lacked it, along with guts.

  McCain was fortified in his dim opinion by the people closest to him. Graham and Salter were always trashing Obama, and Cindy had been genuinely offended by Michelle’s “proud of my country” remark. In the past, she rarely said a word about John’s opponents, let alone an opponent’s spouse. But as a mother of two sons in the service, she couldn’t restrain herself; after she took her shot at Michelle on the stump, her husband gave her an approving thumbs-up.

  The Obamas were a good deal less emotionally wound up in their opinions of the McCains. For all of Michelle’s angst about the fallout from “proud of my country” and becoming a target of the right, she was taken aback when Cindy joined the fray. Michelle absorbed her counterpart’s slam with private defiance. Oh, so it’s gonna be like this? So this is how you want to play? she thought. Barack, meanwhile, regarded his past run-ins with McCain as faintly ridiculous. McCain had behaved like an arrogant jackass, happy if he could pat Obama on the head and have him follow his lead, but then all self-righteous and indignant if Barack took a different path. Whatever.

  Nothing Obama had seen had altered his conviction that the political environment was fertile for a Democratic victory. “If I lose the nomination to Hillary, I can hold my head up,” he told his team on a conference call that spring. “But if I lose the general election to John McCain, I’ll be run out of town on a rail.”

  ON JUNE 4, NOT LONG after the news broke that Clinton intended to concede, Obama received a congratulatory call from McCain. The two men pledged comity in the coming campaign and joked about how the pundits had written them both off a year earlier. But McCain also took the opportunity to press a proposal that he and Obama conduct ten joint town hall meetings, one each week between June 12 and the Democratic convention. For McCain, the upside was obvious: a chance to go toe-to-toe with Obama in a format he loved (and generate tons of free publicity to boot). For Obama, the payoff was less evident. In May, he’d declared that he would welcome debating McCain “anywhere, anytime.” Now Obama said he was open to the idea but made no commitments.

  The truth was Obama had an array of more pressing concerns to deal with. After waging a nomination fight of unprecedented length and strain, he and his exhausted team had no time to rest their heads. In the span of a few weeks, they had to plan two vast and vastly complicated events: an ambitious trip abroad in July, to help Obama buff up his foreign-affairs bona fides, and the convention in August. At the same time, the Obamans had to devise a state-by-state electoral strategy for the fall, and take the measure of their new adversary.

  Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson, quickly slammed together a presentation on the state of play. The good news, he reported, was that Obama was leading McCain by 49 to 44 percent among likely voters. The unexpected news was that the economy was now by far the most important issue, especially to undecideds. The neutral news was that neither Obama nor McCain was strong on that issue. The most surprising (and most heartening) news was that the perception of McCain as a maverick change agent was confined to the Beltway; in the rest of America, voters viewed him as Bush redux. The implications for Team Obama’s message were plain. Every effort they expended for the next four months should be devoted to shackling McCain to Bush on the economy.

  The Obamans had grand aspirations for remaking the electoral map. Plouffe’s plan was to target seventeen battleground states, including some—Indiana, North Carolina, North Dakota—that hadn’t voted Democratic in decades.

  That Plouffe was thinking so boldly owed much to the breadth of Obama’s appeal. But it had as much to do with the resources at his disposal. On June 19 the campaign announced its decision to opt out of accepting public financing for the general election, making Obama the first candidate to do so since that system was implemented in the aftermath of Watergate. The decision was a reversal for Obama on two levels: he was a longtime champion of the public system, and had signed a commitment (on an interest group questionnaire) in November 2007 to stay in it. The U-turn undercut the reformist image that Benenson’s data showed was a vital advantage for Obama against McCain. But the unholy amount of money being sucked in by the campaign’s Web fund-raising machine represented an even greater edge.

  McCainworld learned about the decision around the same time it was becoming clear that Obama had no intention of doing the joint town halls. McCain wasn’t surprised by either outcome, but they bolstered his sense of Obama as a phony. What bothered him more was the failure of the press to challenge Obama on his hypocrisy. If I’d
done that, they’d kill me, he thought. McCain and his advisers had been astonished by how far in the tank the media had been for Obama during his race against Clinton. Now McCain, his relations with the press already strained, braced for a similar double standard.

  Steve Schmidt agreed with all of that, but thought it was slightly beside the point. The McCain campaign would be limited to the $84 million provided by the public financing system (although the Republican National Committee would supplement that with spending of its own); the Obamans were likely to raise four or five times as much. Making matters worse, the lengthy Democratic nomination fight meant that the Obama forces had operations in nearly every state, firing on all cylinders—whereas McCainworld was sputtering along, forever on the verge of needing roadside assistance.

  In mid-June, after the green backdrop debacle, Schmidt had a candid conversation with McCain about the state of the campaign.

  “How do you think things are going?” he asked his boss.

  “Not well,” said McCain.

  “I think that’s about right,” Schmidt said. The structure of the campaign was still a mess. There was no political operation. Basic things weren’t getting done. We either need to fix this now, Schmidt said, or not only will we lose, but we’re in danger of going down as the worst-run presidential campaign in the history of American politics.

  For the first time in months, McCain seemed galvanized. He called a meeting of his senior advisers at his condo in Washington and elevated Schmidt to run the show alongside Davis.

  Almost instantly, McCainworld was imbued with a new degree of discipline and order. Nicknamed Bullet by Bush uber-strategist Karl Rove and Sergeant Schmidt by McCain, the shaven-headed operative brought to his task two signal strengths: a relentless focus and zero tolerance for bullshit. He hired a top-flight political director. He instituted a regular message call at eight o’clock every morning. He sought to limit McCain’s cell phone use to keep him from terminal drift. He even took up the matter of housekeeping at the campaign’s disheveled HQ. “This place looks like a fucking gypsy camp,” Schmidt told the office manager over the July 4 weekend. “I want it painted and cleaned up by Monday.”