Then one day in the middle of September, a disturbing bulletin reached O-Town. Apparently, Biden had been hanging around with the reporters in the back of his new plane, running his mouth about how he was more qualified to be president than Obama. On paper, of course, it was arguably true. But that didn’t make it go down any easier with the suits; actually, it struck a nerve. Axelrod was a fan of Joe’s, but this made him angry. He and Plouffe had warned Biden about precisely this kind of scenario that August day in Wilmington. Right out of the chute, Joe was breaking the deal they’d made.
A chill set in between Chicago and the Biden plane. Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, rarely campaigned together. Not only was Biden kept off Obama’s nightly campaign conference call, he wasn’t even told it existed. (When the idea of having Biden join was put to Plouffe, his response was “Nah.”) A different daily call was set up for Joe, with the Davids, so they could keep a tight rein on him.
The frostiness soon began to run in both directions. Biden had an endless stream of complaints about Chicago. He was frustrated with the staff, didn’t like the advertising, didn’t love how he was being deployed. After his comments about being more qualified than Obama, his access to the press was severely limited, and he didn’t like that, either. Are you part of the Chicago team or are you on my team? Biden would ask new staffers dispatched to join his road show. Are you with me or are you with them?
Then the cold war turned icy, when Biden started making public gaffes, some politically maladroit and some just plain goofy. In the span of a few days in late September, he equated paying higher taxes with patriotism; made a comment at odds with Obama’s position on clean coal; and offered a historical reference to the 1929 stock market crash in which he said that FDR was then the president (it was Hoover) and went on television (which hadn’t yet been invented) to soothe the nation. In an interview with Couric, Biden was asked about an Obama TV ad that knocked McCain for being computer illiterate. “I thought that was terrible,” Biden said. “I didn’t know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it.”
In Chicago, irritation mounted over Biden’s indiscipline—not least inside Obama, whose unflappability burst into flames when it came to his running mate. One night during a debate prep session, Obama approached one of his advisers and said grumpily, When are you going to fix this problem with Biden?
Joe’s insertion of both feet into his mouth on October 20 took the tensions into a new and nasty place. At a fund-raiser in Seattle, Biden seemed to be showing off for the wealthy donors, trying to impress them with his farseeing vision, his exclusive knowledge. (Also, he wasn’t at his sharpest; he was dog-tired and had a cold.) “Mark my words,” he told the muckety-mucks. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. . . . Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
On Obama’s nightly call, the candidate hit the ceiling. (Axelrod was already up there, needing to be peeled off, having let fly a string of F-bombs when he first found out what Biden had said.) “Golly, man!” Obama said, with more anger in his voice than “gollys” normally carry. He was, in fact, as pissed off as most people on the call had ever heard him, more so than he’d been at even the wickedest jabs from Hillary Clinton. “How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?”
Obama asked if Solis Doyle, Biden’s chief of staff, was on the call. “Yes, I’m here,” she said abashedly.
“Listen,” said Obama. “Tell Joe I love him. I love him. But he can’t be doing this.”
A couple of days later, Obama phoned Biden and laid into him. You’re supposed to have my back, he said, not be out there creating problems.
With two weeks to go before Election Day, Biden’s remark was gift-wrapped booty for the McCain campaign, a ready-made TV spot. And, indeed, soon after the comment, just such an ad hit the air, complete with Biden’s voice and pictures of terrorists and a frightened child. Its message spoke directly to the stubbornest doubts that some voters still had about Obama, and to their fears about the risks entailed in electing him.
More than that, though, what rankled Obama was that Biden hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone and apologize. Worse, Biden didn’t say that he was sorry when Obama called; he showed no remorse for his Seattle comments or understanding that they posed a real political problem.
Biden knew he’d screwed up, of course, but he went into a defensive crouch. He told his aides it wasn’t really a gaffe, that he was just speaking the truth—as the Biden brand demanded. He got a little chippy.
Well, gosh, Biden said. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t say anything about bitter people who cling to their guns and religion.
ON OCTOBER 22, PALIN ticked the box next to the only remaining network to which she had yet to grant a sit-down, NBC. After finishing her talk with anchor Brian Williams, she tapped out an email to the campaign’s senior staff that had an air of resignation and a certain poignancy. “Was not a good interview,” Palin wrote. “So hang on to your hat w[ith] the criticism and mocking that will ensue. Just a head’s up—doubt anything can be done about it—the gotcha questions started right out of the shoot and as usual I was perplexed at the whole line of questioning and I’m sure that showed through.”
Palin was still as rogue as ever, but the thrill was gone. The only pleasure she seemed to take was in her crowds; she worked her rope lines hungrily, for two hours at a time, lingering over every hand she touched. Otherwise, Palin was demoralized, isolated, and confused. On her plane, when confronted with an uncomfortable topic by her advisers, she was still dropping her head and refusing to respond, even as they stood there awkwardly waiting for a reply. She had no idea whom to trust anymore or really where to turn. On the day of the NBC interview, Politico broke a story that the RNC had spent $150,000 for clothing for her and her family. It was the first shoe to drop in what over the next week would become a hailstorm of expensive footwear. CNN reported that someone close to the campaign called her a “diva.” Politico reported that “a top McCain adviser” called her a “whack job.” The maelstrom not only eclipsed Biden’s mega-gaffe but signaled the death of whatever was left of Palinmania.
The invective was the visible outcropping of a deeper fault line. McCainworld had split into internecine factions surrounding Palin and her candidacy, roughly divided between those who still had faith in Palin and those who did not. The tensions were bursting forth in the form of proxy warfare in the media, infuriating McCain. Schmidt and Davis ordered the campaign’s email system searched to determine who was behind the snipes in the press. Palin’s loyalists on her plane pointed at Nicolle and Mark Wallace for the “diva” comment. In fact, the source was veteran Republican fund-raiser and strategist Wayne Berman, a close friend of McCain’s.
Palin had long since lost faith in McCainworld. She felt belittled and lectured to by the senior staff; whenever an aide told her Schmidt was waiting to talk to her on the phone, Palin’s reflexive reaction was, “Do I have to?” She was raising so much money for the campaign and drawing such mammoth crowds, yet she received no respect in return. If I’m doing all this, she would ask, why can’t I have input? Increasingly, she was a picture of isolation, either listening to her iPod or surfing cable channels on her seatback TV on her plane. When politicians or donors traveled with her, she rarely spoke more than a few words of greeting to them; she stared at her speech text and avoided engagement.
The truth was, the McCain people did fail Palin. They had, as promised, made her one of the most famous people in the world overnight. But they allowed her no time to plant her feet to absorb such a seismic shift. They were unprepared when they picked her, which made her look even more unready than she was. They banked on the force of her magnetism to compensate for their disarray. They amassed polling points and dollars off of her fiery charisma, and then left her to burn up in the inferno of public opinion.
The face-to-face expo
sure of the campaign’s senior advisers to Palin was minimal in the last month before Election Day. She was on the road; they were at headquarters or with McCain, their paths rarely intersecting. But after witnessing her near-breakdown during debate prep and monitoring her subsequently by phone and email, some in the upper echelons of McCainworld began to believe that Palin was unfit for high office.
McCain was aware that his senior team considered Palin troubled and troubling, but he was shielded from the fullness of their distress. Several of his lieutenants agreed that should McCain’s electoral prospects miraculously improve and winning in November become likely, they would have to confront the nominee as he started to plan how his administration would function. It would be essential, they believed, that Palin be relegated to the largely ceremonial role that premodern vice presidents inhabited. It was inconceivable that Palin undertake the duties of a Gore or a Cheney—or that, if McCain fell ill or died, the country be left in the hands of a President Palin. Some in McCainworld were ridden with guilt over elevating Palin to within striking distance of the White House.
They were hardly alone in such harsh judgments. Obama, who had cautioned his advisers not to jump to conclusions about Palin’s potential when she was first selected, ultimately came to believe that the process used to pick her, the man who did the picking, and the woman who was picked were all suspect. He took to mimicking Palin’s stylized “You betcha!” in front of his campaign team.
In late October, Obama’s focus group maestro, David Binder, was conducting a session with a group of swing voters in a Cleveland suburb. A middle-aged woman let loose with a string of not-unfamiliar broadsides against Obama. He’s a Muslim. He’s soft on terrorism—because he’s a Muslim. He doesn’t put his hand on his heart during patriotic rituals. We’re not even sure he was born in this country.
Binder was confused. This was supposed to be a group of undecided voters. If you think all these terrible things about Obama, he asked the woman, how can you possibly be undecided?
Because if McCain dies, Palin would be president, she said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Finish Line
THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND SOULS FILLED the sprawling field in Kissimmee, Florida, just outside Orlando. It was nearly midnight on October 29 and the air was shockingly cold, but people didn’t seem to mind. They were there to get a glimpse of history, to feel the magic, to witness the commingling of the Democratic future and the Democratic past. They were there for the one and only joint campaign appearance of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
Obama and Clinton came out onstage, clasped hands in the air, and then 42 began to speak. His thirteen-minute talk was amped up to the point of being hyperactive. He flapped his arms, clenched his fists, pointed toward the sky. “Folks, we can’t fool with this,” Clinton said. “Our country is hanging in the balance. This man should be our president!” Obama returned the compliments, singing a song in the key of Clinton, praising his economic record, calling him “a great president, a great statesman, a great supporter,” a “political genius,” and a “beloved” figure “around the world.”
Yet beyond the histrionics and the headline—Barack and Bill, finally side by side—the chemistry between the two still seemed less than stable, the body language awkward. Clinton’s speech was formulaic, lacking a single warm personal anecdote or insight (both trademarks of his). Obama’s expression conveyed no greater satisfaction than if he were being endorsed by the mayor of Kissimmee.
The subject of Clinton campaigning on Obama’s behalf had come up seven weeks earlier, when the two men finally had their much-anticipated tete-a-tete. Obama, who was in New York on September 11 for various memorial events, ventured to Clinton’s Harlem office for lunch. Though he showed deference to Clinton by walking in alone—no staff, no security, no posse—and respect for his stature by asking questions about governance instead of politics, the meeting had a stilted feel. Clinton’s staff and the Obamans had engaged in a tug-of-war over whether to include a Harlem stroll and photo op as part of the visit (with each side ascribing ulterior race-related motives to the other). Obama, who had a vicious stomach bug, spent much of the lunch trying not to puke on Clinton’s shoes.
Clinton offered to hit the trail for or with Obama. But neither party was thrilled by the prospect. Clinton told CNN’s Larry King that he planned to start “after the Jewish holidays,” which he’d never been known to observe. The Obamans, meanwhile, had determined through their polling that Clinton’s presence would help only in a handful of states, mainly with Latinos. (Not only would the Florida event be held in Hispanic-heavy suburban Orlando, but it would also feature actor Jimmy Smits.) Their primary interest in holding a joint event—one joint event—was to keep the press from badgering them about doing none.
That Clinton could be of service to Obama in so few places was as much a testament to the latter’s strength as to the former’s weakness. By the start of the last full week of the campaign, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey had Obama up by ten points; the ABC News/ Washington Post tracking poll put the number at eleven. He was leading in every state won by Kerry in 2004, and either ahead or within the margin of error in ten states carried by Bush in the previous election: Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.
The significance of Obama’s financial advantage over McCain was impossible to overstate. Armed with the tens of millions that kept pouring into O-Town over the Web, the campaign was moving cash around the country as if it were Monopoly money. Just before the Kissimmee rally, Obama and Biden had taken part in an unprecedented thirty-minute prime-time infomercial that cost $7 million and ran on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, BET, TV One, and Univision—attracting thirty-three million viewers, nearly twice the number of the top-rated network show, Dancing with the Stars.
By the end of October, Obama and his team were beginning to face the fact: victory was within their grasp. With Wall Street in flames and the economy falling further into recession, Obama knew that the challenges that awaited him in the White House would be daunting. On the stump, he seized the mantle of FDR, repeating the famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” His aides began reading books about Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office—and also, yes, Team of Rivals.
With such burdens looming, Obama put aside the petty and personal, reconciling with his running mate. The repair of the breach was initiated by Biden, whose close aide Tony Blinken figured out from his sources in the campaign that Obama was still angry over Joe’s failure to apologize for his Seattle remarks. When Blinken explained why it might have gotten under Obama’s skin, Biden said, “Oh, I get that.”
Biden called Obama and came quickly to the point. You know what, I’ve gotta tell you, I was totally remiss, he said. I want you to know I understand that what I did was not only bad for me—it was bad for you and it endangered our common prospects. I never said I was sorry and I want to apologize.
Obama was grateful. Biden felt magnanimous. A warm and lengthy conversation ensued, with more to come. After weeks of distance, a partnership was taking root. Joe was a proud guy. Acts of contrition didn’t come naturally to him. But this one, he admitted, was worth it. And no funny hat was required.
MCCAIN NEVER NEEDED a rapprochement with his running mate. On the upswing and the down, through the nastiest and gnarliest moments, not an ill word escaped his lips regarding Palin. If McCain was disappointed in her or in his own judgment, he hid it from even his closest intimates. He treated Palin chivalrously, inquiring regularly about her well-being and that of her family. We asked a lot of her, McCain said, and he meant it.
McCain blamed Palin’s problems on the press, and on members of his team for feeding the hounds. The leak-fueled stories about her drove him so nuts that he stopped watching cable news. (His staff convinced him that leaving the TV tuned to ESPN would be a boon to his spirits.) Indeed, both John and Cindy held the media responsible for much of what
had gone wrong in the homestretch of the campaign—and that was a long list. October had been a month of misery for the McCains.
The second and third debates with Obama had gone no better than the first. In Nashville, Tennessee, on October 7, they’d met in a town hall—style format that should by all rights have worked to McCain’s advantage. Instead, he rattled around the stage looking slightly lost (Like a crazy uncle in search of a bathroom, one of his top advisers thought), making hokey jokes that fell flat, flinging edgy barbs, and telling stories that referenced Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, Tip O’Neill, and Herbert Hoover, making him seem every bit his age and then some. Eight days later, at Hofstra University, in New York, McCain started strong and got off his best line of all three confrontations: “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.” But the split-screen format used for the final debate enhanced the focus on McCain’s facial expressions. He smirked, glowered, scowled, rolled his eyes; he looked angry. The insta-polls after each debate told the same story. Viewers judged Obama the winner of both by somewhere between twenty and thirty points.
McCain was frustrated and resentful. The campaign had planned to carpet-bomb Obama with negative ads in October, including some that would have used his own voice from the audio versions of his books. With the economy unraveling, however, McCainworld realized such tactics would seem cheap and hollow—and would be ineffective, to boot.
But now McCain lashed out at his opponent on his own in ways remarkable for their tone and subtext, suggesting that Obama was a dangerous, possibly corrupt, possibly Manchurian unknown. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” McCain said at a New Mexico event two days after the Times published its piece on Ayers. “What does he plan for America?” Forty-eight hours later, he referred directly to the former Weatherman. “He wasn’t a guy in the neighborhood. [Obama] launched his political career in his living room.”
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