Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Schmidt also took the draconian step of curtailing his boss’s access to the media. The old days of reporters indulging McCain’s freewheeling disquisitions—on everything from the caprices of his Senate colleagues to the temptations of Brazilian table dancers—and not writing about them were long gone. Now the coverage was constant, glaring, and driven by the quest to trip him up.

  And so, in July, a barrier between McCain and the reporters covering him was installed on his jet. Press availabilities were cut back. Literally, figuratively, and symbolically, a curtain came down on the Straight Talk Express—just as one was rising on the Obamapalooza World Tour.

  IT WAS, BY EVERY MEASURE, an extraordinary spectacle, with a sprawling itinerary that would have posed real challenges to a sitting president and his team. Eight countries in ten days, including two war zones: Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq on the first leg; Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, and England on the second. And yet the Obamans miraculously pulled it off without a hitch. The pictures beamed around the world were priceless: Obama visiting an army base and effortlessly sinking a three-point shot in front of hundreds of cheering soldiers; Obama in a helicopter with General Petraeus, both in sunglasses and grinning like mad; the soaring speech in front of two hundred thousand at the Victory Column in Berlin; the interviews with each of the broadcast network anchors, who had tagged along for the trip.

  The reaction of the McCain campaign was unambiguous. It went on the attack. It released an ad unveiling the campaign’s slogan, “Country First,” with its insinuation that Obama put something else (i.e., his ambition) above the nation. It aired another claiming that Obama, while he was in Germany, “made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops—seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” On the trail, McCain spat venom over an interview from abroad in which Obama said that, although the surge appeared to have been effective, he still opposed it. “It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign,” McCain said.

  Schmidt doubted that any of it was working. We’re almost out of time, he said to Davis. Obama is up by double digits now. He could be up twelve or fifteen points heading into their convention. Bill Clinton’s going to give a great speech. Hillary’s going to give a great speech. Obama’s definitely going to give a great speech, and even if he doesn’t, the press will say he did. So now we’re down twenty heading into our convention. On the first night, we have Cheney and Bush; after that, we could be down twenty-five. If we don’t figure out something immediately to arrest Obama’s lead, we’re done.

  On July 27, the day after Obama returned stateside, Schmidt and a small group of McCain advisers met in a conference room at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton to take up that task. “We’re running against the biggest celebrity in the world,” Schmidt said. Obama was flying at an altitude no politician had ever before attained. He was flying so high that there was no way to shoot him out of the sky or pull him down to earth. Their only hope, Schmidt went on, was to push Obama higher. Push him from twenty thousand to forty thousand feet, above the so-called death line on Mount Everest, where there’s not enough oxygen to breathe.

  You said he’s a celebrity, noted Fred Davis, McCain’s lead adman. “Well, let’s turn that against him. Big celebrity? So’s Britney Spears! So’s Paris Hilton!”

  The room exulted. Linking Obama with such famously insubstantial household names might shove him straight into the asphyxiation zone. Davis rushed off to produce some ads based on the concept. A version featuring Oprah was scuttled by Schmidt. (“Don’t politicize Oprah. She’s more powerful than you can comprehend, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.”) A version including Ellen DeGeneres was nixed as well. But the incarnation with Britney and Paris was good to go.

  The ad, called “Celeb,” hit the air on July 30. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” a female voice intoned over soft-focus images of Spears, Hilton, and Obama in Berlin. “But is he ready to lead?” The ad’s unveiling was accompanied by an email from Davis: “Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula.”

  The message wasn’t difficult to decode. Not only was Obama a celebrity, but he was precious, self-infatuated, effete, hoity-toity—a celebrelitist.

  “Celeb” quickly became ubiquitous on cable. It went viral on the Web. Trivial and trivializing, the talking heads snorted. Pathetic. And some liberals discerned a subtext in the ad that was more insidious. They saw the juxtaposition of Obama with the comely white women as an attempt to stir up fears of miscegenation. They pointed to a shot of the Victory Column and called it phallic. They cited an earlier McCain negative spot that showed Obama draining his three-pointer and found a racial angle there as well: that McCainworld was trying to portray Obama as a blinged-up, camera-hogging NBA point guard, Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree.

  Obama seemed to see something, too. On the day that “Celeb” went up, he was campaigning in Missouri. At his first stop, in Springfield, Obama said, “Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. ‘You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s too risky.’”

  McCain was on a hair trigger over accusations or imputations of racism. He had warned his team to steer clear of anything that might open him up to that charge. He was emphatic that Reverend Wright was off-limits. McCainworld, however, feared that innocence wasn’t a sufficient defense when it came to racial matters. John and Cindy had talked at length about the charges that had been leveled against the Clintons during the Democratic nomination fight. They believed that those accusations had been unfair, saw the Obama campaign’s hand in the besmirching of Hillary’s and Bill’s reputations, and had vowed not to let the same thing happen to them. So when Obama let loose with his “other presidents” comment, McCain and his lieutenants were gripped with a sickening sense of deja vu.

  “We gotta call bullshit on this,” Schmidt said.

  “Do whatever you have to do,” McCain told Davis. “This is not right.”

  The next morning, Davis put out a press release that minced no words. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” Davis’s statement said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful, and wrong.”

  THE OBAMANS HAD NEVER been so directly challenged on playing the race card—except by Bill Clinton in South Carolina, when his head was in the process of exploding. The campaign’s reaction was furious backpedaling. “What Barack Obama was talking about was that he didn’t get here after spending decades in Washington,” Gibbs tepidly told the AP. “He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

  But, of course, it was. Obama himself had made the same point more explicitly six weeks earlier, when he said at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida, “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try and make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’ ” But outside the context of the McCain negative-ad assault, that remark had gone unnoticed.

  On his nightly call after the Davis broadside and the Gibbs retreat, Obama wasn’t happy. The campaign had failed to defend him as well, as vigorously, or as forthrightly as he thought it should have. Obama understood the strategic imperative of maintaining a post-racial metier. And he grasped the tactical wisdom of sometimes playing possum, of not letting race swallow the campaign. But he also believed that his campaign tended to be too gun shy when the issue was forced upon them.

  “You guys are trying to pretend I’m not black,” Obama said urgently. “I’m black!”

  You can’t pretend this isn�
��t an issue, he went on. Of course it’s an issue. You know McCain is playing the race card by accusing me of playing the race card. They’re making sure that race is injected into this campaign. They’re going to keep doing it in a lot of ways, and when they do it we have to fight back.

  Axelrod’s head wasn’t buried in the sand with respect to Obama’s pigmentation or its political implications. He had no doubt that the McCain campaign would employ an assortment of race-freighted messages against Obama. In “Celeb,” Axelrod saw a bid to paint Obama as a figure undeserving of his success—the affirmative-action nominee. From his experience with other African American candidates, he suspected that coming next would be volleys on a pair of issues that pushed racial hot buttons: crime and taxes.

  But the Obamans were preparing for far more nefarious assailments than that, if not directly from McCainworld, then from shadowy independent groups on the right. The degree of Chicago’s readiness was a well-kept secret; there was no sense in admitting publicly how concerned they were about Obama’s vulnerabilities surrounding his race and background. But their worries were considerable, especially about the consistent thread they picked up from voters that wove together the false rumors about Obama being a Muslim with the charge that he was insufficiently patriotic.

  While the cash-poor McCain campaign was coming up with negative ads on the fly, scribbling scripts, in effect, on the backs of napkins, airing the spots without ever testing them, the well-heeled Obamans were running a stealthy high-tech lab to discover which attacks were most dangerous and to develop responses. Dozens of Obama-funded faux negative ads against Obama were produced and tested: about Wright, Ayers, Muslimism, the flag pin—the works. And some were devastatingly effective.

  Obama had begun inoculating himself against the charges that his brain trust presumed were on the horizon. But some efforts he resisted as too ham-handed. At one point, he and his ad team were preparing to shoot a spot designed to deal with Muslimism and patriotism in one throw. “If I have the privilege of taking the oath of office, I would do so with my hand on the Bible and pride in my heart,” the script read. Obama began to recite it, then stopped and grimaced. “Guys, I can’t do this,” he said. “There are limits.”

  Despite all the study and safeguarding, however, Obama and his campaign were caught off guard and knocked off balance by “Celeb” and its aftermath. Through the entire nomination fight, Clinton had never found a consistent negative frame in which to put her opponent. But McCainworld had conjured one almost by happenstance—and the whole of the rightward realm, from the Republican National Committee to the flying monkeys of conservative talk radio, was pounding away at Obama in a concerted fashion, just as it had done to Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. The frame was dead simple: McCain equals country first; Obama equals Obama first.

  After weeks of bombardment over the airwaves, Obama’s negative ratings were inching upward, just as Hillary and Bill had predicted. Now he faced a trio of challenges in rapid succession: selecting his running mate, making peace with the Clintons, and delivering a dynamite convention speech. The last of these might have been a gimme (this was Obama, after all), but the first two would require the savvy of a Metternich and the patience of a saint. And there was no room for error. On August 1, the Gallup tracking poll made Obama versus McCain a dead heat.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Mile-High Club

  THE SENATOR ARRIVED in Minneapolis in disguise, having shed his uniform of suit and tie, wearing a baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead and a pair of aviator shades. The Obama people told him they were worried he’d be recognized, so he was traveling incognito. When he climbed off the private jet from Washington on August 6, a young woman hustled him into a waiting car with tinted windows. As they set off for the Graves 601 Hotel, the site of the secret meeting, the senator couldn’t stop talking. This is the first time in decades, he said to his escort, that I’ve been on a job interview.

  Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., didn’t want to be vice president—at least not at the start. He liked to trot out an old chestnut for his aides: A woman has two sons; one goes off to sea, the other becomes vice president; neither is heard from again. No, what Biden wanted was to be secretary of state. That was a real job. But then Obama began pushing the VP thing, and Biden’s competitive juices started flowing, especially when he thought about the other names supposedly on the short list. Tim Kaine? Evan Bayh? Kathleen Sebelius? Nothing against them, Biden thought, but if that’s the group, I’m the guy.

  It was that kind of cogitating that had gotten Biden into the 2008 race in the first place—that and a hunger for redemption. Twenty years had passed since his first White House bid ended in ignominy, when he was caught lifting lines from a British politician’s speech. He’d survived two brain aneurisms and turned himself from a gabby showboat into the (still-gabby, still-showboaty) chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and one of the party’s leading voices on judicial matters, too. He’d abstained from running in 2004, although the political circumstances would have been better for him. This time, he was ready. His wife, Jill, was ready. At sixty-four, he saw it as his last chance.

  Biden knew he was a long shot, but he was also convinced he was more qualified than his opponents. In 1988, he had believed he could do the job of getting elected. Looking at 2008, he believed he was up to the task of being president.

  His campaign ended, in effect, on the day it started, cut down in its tracks by his mortal enemy: his own mouth. It was that first morning, January 31, 2007, when Biden was quoted in The New York Observer calling Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Biden spent the day of his announcement apologizing, to Obama among others, for having tiptoed into a racial minefield in concrete shoes. The gaffe resurrected every caricature of Biden as a victim of terminal logorrhea and instantly crippled his fund-raising. A year later, he snared 1 percent of the vote in Iowa, finished fifth, and dropped out that same night.

  A week later, Biden’s inner circle assembled around the kitchen table at his home in Greenville, Delaware, just outside Wilmington. They spent five hours having lunch, gazing out the big kitchen windows at the frigid lake beside the house, speculating and scheming about what might come next for Joe.

  Biden had acquitted himself with honor after his disastrous opening salvo. His debate performances were top-notch—funny, smart, and even disciplined. Somehow, despite his drubbing, Biden came out of the campaign standing taller than when he entered. “People agree,” said his adviser John Marttila, “that your stature has been enhanced.”

  The question was whether to cash in that currency by supporting either Clinton or Obama. Joe was close to Hillary, extremely close, treating her with the warmth and protectiveness of an older brother. (He kept a picture in his Senate office of Hillary laughing as Biden whispered in one ear and her husband whispered in the other.) But while he’d started out, like all the veterans in the field, thinking Obama was too big for his britches, not ready to be president, Biden had revised his opinion. “He’s the real deal,” he told the table.

  Biden was inclined not to endorse anyone. His inner circle agreed, arguing that it made no sense to foreclose any possibilities, of which they saw two. Secretary of state was the obvious one; they all assumed he’d be in the running, especially if Hillary won. But Biden might even have a chance at being on the ticket. With the Democrats headed toward choosing the first female or the first black nominee in history, a white male with gravitas could be tempting for either Clinton or Obama.

  Although Biden made a show of scoffing at the running-mate talk, he was willing to proceed with the strategy his staff devised for a kind of soft campaign. There would be no lobbying. No phone calls. No talking up his name. Biden would go back to the Senate, try to build on the best aspects of his performance in 2007. He would hammer the GOP on foreign policy, offer advice to Clinton or Obama if they sought him out—and keep his yap shut about
everything else.

  Biden informed Barack and Hillary that he wouldn’t be endorsing them, but also pledged to each that he wouldn’t endorse the other. “My word as a Biden” was one of his pet phrases. (The family name meant a lot to Joe.) And he was giving them his word now.

  For the next five months, Biden talked incessantly to Clinton and Obama. They just kept calling him. At first it was mostly about policy, but later, as the race dragged on and Hillary’s chances faded, Biden began to play honest broker, trying to engineer a peaceful end to the brawl. He counseled Clinton that she should ignore the pressure to drop out, make up her own mind, but delicately added that it made sense for her to stay in only if she believed she had a realistic shot of winning (say, one in three). To Obama, Biden said, Don’t push her over the cliff; you’ve got to respect her; let her take her time; a graceful exit is in everyone’s interest. After Obama’s race speech in March, Biden had become an avid fan, telling aides it was the best oration he had heard since Dr. King. But his respect for Clinton was undiminished. In fact, he told Obama point blank that he should pick her as his running mate.

  Biden’s advisers were beside themselves when they heard that. What the hell was Joe doing, they asked each other, boosting Hillary for his job? But Biden didn’t care. He thought Hillary had earned it, and doubted he’d be in the veepstakes running anyway.