Anyone who knew the history between Obama and Biden would have shared that skepticism. In their first two years together in the Senate, Biden’s behavior toward Obama was similar to McCain’s, condescending and patronizing to the point where it rankled. “Can you believe this guy?” Obama said to his Senate staff. “Can you believe what Biden did today?”
In the course of 2007 and 2008, however, Obama had changed his mind about Biden just as Biden had flipped on Obama. He liked the way Joe had handled himself on the trail. Appreciated his working-class appeal. (The unions loved Joe, and so did the cops, after his championing of the crime bill in the nineties.) That clean-mainstream-articulate thing? In public, Obama took a little potshot at Biden when it happened, to appease the African American groups. But in private, the comment rolled right off his back. When Biden called him to atone, Obama told him, Joe, you don’t have to explain anything to me.
Not long after he clinched the nomination, Obama started hinting to his brain trust that he was leaning in Biden’s direction. He mentioned it to Axelrod and Jarrett, and gave the same impression to Rahm Emanuel, whom Obama had asked to throw some ideas in the hopper about potential veeps.
One night on the phone, Barack complained to Emanuel, You haven’t given me a single name. Emanuel flatly said that he wasn’t going to. Why? asked Obama.
It’s just like 1992, Emanuel replied, when he’d been involved with Bill Clinton’s VP-selection process. They examined some forty names that year, but all along, Clinton kept bringing up Gore, singing the praises of his book Earth in the Balance.
This is over, Emanuel told Obama. You’ve decided on Biden. We’re just going through the process to make sure your gut’s right.
PROCESS MATTERED TO OBAMA. Head overruled gut, as always. The screening system he implemented was rigorous and methodical. On June 4, not even twenty-four hours after the nomination fight ended, Obama announced that his selection committee would be run by Caroline Kennedy and former deputy attorney general Eric Holder. Two weeks later, the Obama campaign said that Patti Solis Doyle was joining Team Obama as the eventual VP nominee’s chief of staff. (The move enraged Hillary’s supporters, since it seemed to signal that Clinton was off the table for the number-two spot.) By July, Obama’s pollsters were focus-group-testing potential running mates with voters in Cleveland and Milwaukee.
The first list the committee handed Obama had a dozen names. Many of those that appealed to him were problematic. He liked Tom Daschle, but Daschle had become a Washington influence peddler. Sebelius, the Kansas governor, had no national experience or foreign policy chops, and as Solis Doyle argued, her selection might offend Clinton’s supporters on the grounds that if Obama was going to choose a woman, it should be Hillary. Virginia senator Jim Webb refused to be vetted. Obama’s pollsters reported that voters strongly preferred that the nominee choose a gray-headed Washington insider, and that Chris Dodd tested well. But Dodd’s connection, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, to the subprime mortgage debacle made him a nonstarter.
Obama was less than thrilled with the slimness of the pickings, and, despite his reverence for process, kept raising a name that wasn’t on any ledger: Clinton.
Let’s just run through the Hillary option again, he would say to his brain trust. She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s prepared to be president, she has a constituency—she got eighteen million votes. You can’t just dismiss all that.
The brain trust shook its collective head, reminding Obama of all the hassles that Clinton would bring, not least of them Bill. They told Barack their research showed that swing voters had a hard time accepting him and Hillary suddenly holding hands and crooning “Kumbaya.” Jarrett and Plouffe were dead set against putting Clinton on the ticket. And so was Michelle, who had yet to forgive or forget Hillary’s comment about RFK.
By the end of July, the Clinton option was finally buried and the list was whittled down to three: Virginia governor Tim Kaine, Indiana senator Evan Bayh, and Biden. Of the group, Kaine was the person with whom Obama felt the closest personal bond. Both were Harvard Law grads; both had spent time overseas as children; and, bizarrely, both their mothers and maternal grandparents hailed from the same tiny town of Eldorado, Kansas. Obama knew Bayh less well, but his political appeal was manifest. He was the young, handsome, former two-term governor of the Hoosier State, one of the red states that the Obamans hoped to capture, and the centrist scion of the state’s most famous political family.
Kaine and Bayh submitted eagerly to the investigative cavity search that being short-listed entailed. After the first round of interviews, Kaine’s wife said to him over dinner, “Tim, if there’s anything you haven’t told me, I think you should, because it’s probably going to come out.” They both cracked up. (Their teenage son was less mirthful when the vetters grilled him about his Facebook profile.) Bayh, self-conscious about a recent weight loss, explained in detail to the vetters about his apparent digestive trouble with dairy and gluten, then arranged for a $5,000 consultation with a specialist recommended to him by Hillary.
The phones rang for all three finalists in the first week of August, summoning them for interviews with Obama. Bayh was smuggled into St. Louis; Kaine, into small-town Indiana.
The Biden interview in Minneapolis came last. For ninety minutes they sat in the suite at Graves 601, feeling each other out. Obama ribbed Biden about the financial details his vetters had turned up. “All these years, and you still have no money,” Obama teased.
The salient question for Obama was, did Biden really want the gig? He’d seemed hesitant throughout the vetting process. Did Biden think the job was too small? Did Biden think Biden was too big? Would he rather be secretary of state?
Biden replied that it all depended on how Obama envisioned the job of VP. The role he could embrace was that of counselor in chief; weighing in on every important decision, foreign and domestic; contributing his expertise on congressional relations, legislative strategy, judicial appointments, all of it. The key, Biden said, was building a relationship based on candor—at which point, Obama laughed.
“I know you’ll be candid,” Obama said. “Are you prepared for me to be?”
“Absolutely,” Biden answered.
The next day, Russia invaded Georgia, markedly enhancing Biden’s prospects as the short-lister with the most bombs-and-bullets cred. He talked the idea over with Jill and his family, who said they were all for it. After months of living with the concept, Biden had come around; he wanted the job, and bad.
A week or so later, Biden received a call: the Davids wanted to see him. Axelrod and Plouffe arranged to meet him in Wilmington, at the home of his sister, Valerie. Once again, the senator showed up in disguise. You could never be too careful, apparently, even in your hometown.
The Davids had their worries about Biden, and one above the rest. Could he manage to keep his gyrating gums under control for the duration of the fall campaign?
Sitting outside by the pool, Biden reassured them that he could keep his mouth in check, cited examples of how he’d done it before, promised he could do it again. In talking about how he could control his talking, Biden kept talking and talking—offering a soliloquy that, had it been a one-man play, might have been titled QED.
The Davids silently noted the irony, then pressed Biden for a commitment: not a vow of silence, but a pledge to stick to the script he was handed, to keep a firm grip on his tongue. Biden told them that, if he got the nod, he would be a good, and tight-lipped, soldier. He gave them his word. As a Biden.
On August 22, three days before the start of the Democratic convention, Obama phoned Kaine and Bayh, delivering his verdict with the identical phrase: “I’ve decided to go in a different direction.” He knew Biden was the right call. The working-class thing. The gray-hair thing. The foreign-policy thing. Oh, and the attack-dog thing. Obama was convinced that he could count on Biden to maul McCain.
Still, right up until the moment he rendered his decision as final, Obama kept chuckling,
shaking his head, and thinking, I can’t believe I’m picking Biden.
And neither, really, could McCain, who heaved a sigh of relief when he learned the news with the rest of the world the next morning. McCain and his team had feared that Obama would tap Hillary, creating a megawatt media explosion that would block out the sun, consigning McCainworld to icy darkness.
“Well, good for Joe,” McCain told one of his advisers. “But, boy, Obama will never get a word in edgewise now.”
AS THE NEW DEMOCRATIC vice-presidential pick was elevated and celebrated, the previous one sat in North Carolina wondering how it had all gone so wrong.
The past month had been sheer hell for Edwards; his life was falling apart. On July 22, the National Enquirer, which had become his own personal tormentor and truth squad, ran a story about him paying a secret visit to Rielle Hunter and her baby. Two weeks later, it published a grainy “spy photo” of Edwards holding the little girl.
Edwards, panicked, assembled a handful of his former staffers—Ginsberg, Prince, Jennifer Palmieri—to strategize about how to handle the latest installment of his rolling crisis. The group was at a loss, but Edwards settled on the idea of performing a mea culpa on ABC News’s Nightline. Don’t do this interview unless you plan to tell the whole truth, Palmieri told Edwards, because if you lie, you’re going to make things infinitely worse. Edwards replied that he was going to confess to the affair, but deny paternity of the child. He didn’t want to jeopardize his chances of being Obama’s attorney general.
Palmieri couldn’t believe her ears. “That, John?” she said. “That was gone a long time ago.” Palmieri had been on the phone with the Obama campaign, which was sending the clear, if gentle, signal that there was no longer even a slot available for Edwards to speak at the convention, that it was time for him to stand down with dignity. “You have to call Obama right now” and back out, Palmieri said.
“I don’t want to give up on that yet,” Edwards insisted.
Elizabeth hadn’t given up yet, either. Confronted with the picture in the Enquirer of her husband cuddling the baby, she told Palmieri she still believed that John was not the father. “I have to believe it,” Elizabeth said. “Because if I don’t, it means I’m married to a monster.”
As Palmieri predicted, the Nightline interview, on August 8, only brought more misery for Edwards, as the world gained a vivid picture of his pathology. When reality began to sink in, he started calling his old staffers and apologizing. Edwards finally accepted that he wasn’t going to be attorney general. Not only wasn’t he speaking at the convention, he wasn’t even welcome in Denver. Edwards felt like an outcast. His weight plummeted. His countenance turned sickly. Some of his former aides began to fear that he might kill himself. And though the extent of his ruin didn’t reach that depth, the months ahead held something horrible enough for Edwards: a final and all-too-public reckoning with the truth.
SOME DAYS BEFORE THE convention got under way in Denver, Obama found himself on a campaign swing through Boston, the city where his meteoric and historic ascent began. Riding with Gibbs, Obama noted wryly, “We were here about four years ago, weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” Gibbs replied, “and our lives have been fucking complicated ever since.”
Obama stared out the window and said, “Very complicated.”
With his running mate chosen, the next challenge for Obama was to make his convention a success. And the central wrinkle was the former First Couple. The Clintons of Chappaqua rarely made an inconspicuous appearance at any social occasion. They were almost always, naturally and unavoidably, the center of attention. The question was whether, or how well, the Clintons would behave—and judging by two recent incidents, Obama had reason to be nervous.
In early August, on a trip to Africa, Bill Clinton had given an interview to Kate Snow of ABC News. After observing mulishly that “everybody’s got a right to run for president who qualifies under the Constitution,” Clinton pointedly refused to affirm Obama’s readiness to occupy the Oval Office. (He also renounced his friendship with Congressman Jim Clyburn and declared, with a Nixonian echo, “I am not a racist.”) Two days later, a video surfaced of Hillary at a reception in California, speaking to a crowd of female supporters about the need for “catharsis” in Denver, seeming to suggest that her name be placed in nomination and a roll call vote conducted. The press seized on Clinton’s comments and speculated about trouble brewing.
Two months after the Obama-Clinton trip to New Hampshire, Unity was still just a place on the map. Neither Hillary nor Bill had a shred of personal affection for, or connection with, Obama—whereas they continued to share a rapport with McCain. The Arizonan regularly phoned Bill and chatted with him about foreign policy. Boy, McCain gets it, the Clintons would tell people. John McCain is tough. The country might have been facing a “horrible choice,” as Hillary had said to Penn, but some of the Clintons’ friends got the impression that the couple was more than copacetic with the Republican prevailing.
Still smarting over the hits to his reputation on matters racial, and still blaming the Obamans, Bill was also now grumpy over what he perceived as being given the high hat. After the perfunctory Barack-Bill phone call in June, there had been no follow-up. No meal. No event. No requests for Clinton’s counsel. And certainly no absolution. The first communication the former president’s office received about the convention was a form letter that went to all of the delegates—letting Bill know he was eligible for a discounted hotel room in Denver.
As was typically the case with the Clintons, Hillary was looking forward while her husband was looking back. Despite her ongoing frustration over the Obamans’ failure to assist in paring down her debt—they refused even to send out email solicitations to their Web donors, for crying out loud—she had started campaigning for Obama, saying all the right things on the stump, trying to inoculate herself from being blamed if he lost. For the first time, Hillary was willing to admit that Obama had what it took to win. After what I went through with this guy, she said to a friend, I can tell you, he’s plenty tough.
But Hillary also believed that Obama was capable of screwing it up. And that his minions were severely underestimating the difficulty of inducing her supporters to shift their loyalties to him. An NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll that month found that only half of her voters were behind Obama—and 21 percent were for McCain. Hillary’s talk of catharsis wasn’t either idle chatter or malevolent cauldron-stirring. She was simply pointing out that her people needed to have their voices heard before they would rally around the Democratic nominee.
Although he had little direct contact with the Clintons, Obama had a lucid sense of where they stood. “She’s okay,” he told one of his advisers. “He’s taking a lot longer to get over this.”
Obama’s attitude toward the couple was sharply differentiated. From the moment he clinched the nomination, any rancor he felt toward Hillary evaporated. He needed her support, wanted her on his team, and was willing to work for it. But Bill was another story. Obama saw no benefit in kissing the ring, let alone the ass, of 42. I’d be happy to call if it would make a difference, Obama thought. But why waste my time if the guy’s just going to keep crapping all over me?
When it came to the convention, the Obamans assumed both Clintons would play nice, if only because it was in the couple’s self-interest not to be perceived as the skunks at the garden soiree. The endless Clinton negotiations were annoying, to be sure. (“How did you deal with these people?” Plouffe asked Solis Doyle.) The unpredictability of the couple was a chafing distraction. But it was clear the Clintonites had no intention of setting off a bomb in Denver. They didn’t want a floor fight. Their demands weren’t crazy. They weren’t even certain they wanted the roll call vote. Team Obama had hoped to confine both Clinton speeches to one evening. But word came back from Hillaryland that she expected a night to herself, and the Obamans were fine with that. A certain amount of Clinton drama, whipped up by an adrenalized media, was inev
itable, they knew. Their aim was simply to keep it from consuming the convention.
THE CONVOCATION OPENED on the hot, dry Monday afternoon of August 25—and even before it was gaveled into session, Team Obama was receiving the first of many kicks in the teeth. On the streets of Denver, there were pro-Clinton, anti-Obama marchers. The papers were full of stories quoting Clinton delegates promising defiance. Cable news was riveted by the ravings of the PUMA faction. That night on CNN, James Carville, whom the Obamans (not unreasonably) saw as a conduit for the Clintons, trashed the first day’s proceedings. “If this party has a message, it has done a hell of a job of hiding it tonight,” Carville moaned. “I look at this and I am about to jump out of my chair.”
The collective reaction of the Obamans was: What the fuck? Hillary’s speech was the following night, Bill’s would be on Wednesday. If the Clintons were lackluster or subversive, the Obamans would have only one night to salvage the convention.
The Clintons themselves were lying low, sulking and stewing in their suite at the Brown Palace Hotel. They thought the convention was a mess, that their supporters were being treated like second-class citizens, forced to bow and scrape for passes and other goodies. Beyond that, however, both Clintons were obsessed with their speeches. They realized the stakes involved.
Hillary felt the pressure more than her husband. The eyes of the world would be on her Tuesday night as never before in the campaign. But by that morning, her speech was in good shape, she thought. She went over to the Pepsi Center, the sports arena where the first three days of the convention were taking place, to practice it on a prompter with the convention’s dedicated speech coach, Michael Sheehan. When she was done, she returned to her room to rest. In the afternoon, she wandered down the hall to the small meeting room where her speechwriting team had been laboring over her text, to rehearse it one last time. She picked up the speech, began to look it over—and was stunned to discover that the thing had been rewritten. It was unrecognizable.
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