Cindy McCain was equally vitriolic, a startling turnabout from a woman who for so long shunned the spotlight. Obama has “waged the dirtiest campaign in American history,” she said one day. The next, she averred about the Democratic nominee’s position on a war-funding measure, “The day that Senator Obama cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body.” A week later, she reprised her attack on Michelle Obama before a pom-pom-waving crowd in Florida. “Yes,” Cindy said, “I have always been proud of my country.”
As the election barreled toward its conclusion, something dark and frightening was unleashed, freed in part by the words of the McCains and Palin. At rallies across the country, there were jagged outbursts of rage and accusations of sedition hurled at Obama. In Pennsylvania and New Mexico, McCain audience members were captured on video and audio calling the Democrat a “terrorist.” In Wisconsin, Obama was reviled as a “hooligan” and a “socialist.”
With the brutish dynamic apparently on the verge of hurtling out of control, a chagrined McCain attempted to rein it in. In Minnesota, when a man in the crowd said he would be afraid to raise a child in America if Obama were elected, McCain responded, “He is a decent person and not a person you have to be scared of as president.” A few minutes later, he refuted a woman who called Obama “an Arab.”
McCain’s efforts to tamp down the furies were valorous, though they did nothing to erase his role in triggering the reaction in the first place. The civil rights hero John Lewis, whom McCain admired enormously, compared the Republican nominee and his running mate to George Wallace and said they were “playing with fire.”
Another prominent African American was watching with alarm. Colin Powell had been friends with McCain for twenty-five years. The senator had been actively seeking his endorsement (as had Obama) for nearly two years. Powell warned McCain that his greatest reservation was the intolerant tone that seemed to be overtaking the Republican Party. McCain’s selection of Palin bothered Powell because he saw her as polarizing. He was dismayed by McCain’s deployment of Ayers as an issue, perceived it as pandering to the right. And then there were the hate-soaked rallies, which he considered anti-American. This isn’t what we’re supposed to be, he thought.
Powell had leaned toward staying neutral, but these outbursts were all too much—and McCain had moved only belatedly to stop them. Obama, by contrast, had displayed terrific judgment during the financial crisis, Powell thought. And his campaign had been run with military precision; the show of overwhelming force struck the general as a political realization of the Powell Doctrine. On October 19, he endorsed Obama on Meet the Press.
The general’s repudiation was a stinging blow for McCain. Beyond their longtime friendship, Powell represented the same brand of Republicanism as McCain’s. Tough on defense. Fiscally prudent. Pragmatic and nondoctrinaire. McCain had to wonder what had become of him if his current incarnation was repelling someone like Powell. He was startled by the crazies at his rallies. Who were they? Why were they there? And what did they see in him?
In the final two weeks of the race, McCain began to try to salvage something of his reputation. He put away the harshest of the personal invective against Obama and went back to talking about the economy, rash spending, and Iraq.
He seemed ever more resigned in his public comments to a graceful exit. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” McCain told Fox News. “I have to go back and live in Arizona and be in the United States Senate representing them, and with a wonderful family and daughters and sons that I’m so proud of, and a life that’s been blessed.”
He wanted to go out on a high note, to recapture some of the old McCain spark, but it was hard to do. On November 1, he and Cindy appeared on Saturday Night Live. In a skit that cast him as a TV huckster, he fell flat. On the same day, he received the most unwanted endorsement in the universe: that of Dick Cheney.
There was no love lost between Cheney and McCain, who’d clashed bitterly over the conduct of the war in Iraq, the performance of Donald Rumsfeld, and interrogation techniques. When Cheney’s friends learned about the endorsement, they laughed. That wasn’t Cheney saluting McCain, they thought. It was him flipping the senator the bird.
The next day, McCain traveled to New Hampshire for one last town hall meeting in the state where his presidential aspirations first took wing. The trip made absolutely no sense politically. The polls had Obama ahead there by double digits. But McCain had been agitating for the Granite State curtain call since a visit there in mid-October. To Mike Dennehy, his top New Hampshire strategist, he said, “I want to go to Peterborough.” Dennehy knew that McCainworld HQ would resist. “Just call them and make it happen,” McCain said.
Peterborough, population 6,100, was the place where McCain first tasted the flavor of a New Hampshire town hall, in 1999. Just nineteen people attended. Months later, the Peterborough Town House was packed on the eve of his galvanizing 2000 primary win, and the scene had repeated itself in January 2008, as he pulled off another—albeit very different—New Hampshire surprise.
And so, in the early evening of November 2, McCain made the hour-long bus trip west from Manchester airport—a lunatic expenditure of time in the final hours of a national campaign, but his superstitions were in full flower. On the bus, he swapped memories with some of his old New Hampshire hands. Dennehy recalled that the first time in Peterborough they had to bribe people with free ice cream to get anyone to come. I’m glad we’re going back, McCain said wistfully. We’ve come full circle.
Standing with Cindy onstage in the Peterborough Town House, dressed in a black jacket with its collar upturned and an open-necked shirt, McCain took questions from the packed hall for half an hour and ended with a flourish:
“My friends, it’s time for all of us to stand up and fight for America. America is in difficulty. We’ve got to fight for America, we’ve got to fight for our children, we’ve got to fight for freedom and justice, we’ve got to fight for the men and women who are serving in the military. We’ve got to fight for America, the things we stand for and believe in. Our best days are ahead of us. America never quits. America never gives up. We will succeed. We will win. Let’s win this election and get our economy and our country going again.”
McCain was no fool. He could—and did—read the polls as closely as anyone. But in every candidate, fatalism, realism, and hope live in delicate equipoise. McCain’s pollster, Bill McInturff, was seeing some tightening in the numbers around the country. Obama wasn’t over 50 percent. The electoral math was difficult, but not impossible. Some of the key battleground states seemed to be in reach; New Hampshire had closed to four, McCain had heard.
Maybe the smart set had it all wrong.
Maybe an upset was still somehow possible.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
As McCain was getting off his campaign bus at the airport, about to bid adieu to the state he loved so much and that loved him so much back, he turned to Dennehy, a flash of optimism in his eyes, and asked, “How many we down by?”
Dennehy knew the truth, but couldn’t bear putting it into words.
“Let’s not talk about that tonight,” he said.
AS MCCAIN WAS DEPARTING New Hampshire, Obama was arriving in Cleveland, Ohio, rolling up to find eighty thousand people on the city’s downtown outdoor mall listening to Bruce Springsteen belt out “Thunder Road.” At the end of Springsteen’s set, Obama took the stage with Michelle and the girls and shared a warm moment with Bruce, his wife, Patti, and their kids. Springsteen, who hit the trail in 2004 for Kerry, had joked earlier about being glad to be invited back, not being seen as some kind of jinx. Now Obama added to the levity. When he got to the part in his speech where he asked the crowd how many of them made more than $250,000 a year—the floor for his proposed tax increases—The One made a point of telling The Boss that he needn’t bother to answer.
Obama brought up McCain’s endorsement by Cheney, noting that the VP had said he was “delighted” to su
pport the GOP nominee. “You’ve never seen Dick Cheney delighted, but he is! It’s kinda hard to picture, but it’s true!” As Obama giggled, the skies grew dark and it began to drizzle. “Did you notice that it started when I started talking about Dick Cheney?” Obama joked. “That’s all right. We’ve been through an eight-year storm, but a new day is dawning. Sunshine is on the way!”
The next morning, November 3, Obama woke up in Jacksonville, Florida, to the heaviest of all weather: on the last day of his presidential campaign, his grandmother Madelyn Dunham had died at eighty-six.
The news came as no surprise to Obama. Dunham had fought a long battle with cancer, and had been at death’s door for months. Ten days earlier, Obama had briefly absented himself from the trail to fly to Hawaii to see her, knowing all too well that it could be for the last time. Dunham had been Obama’s guardian for much of his youth, while his mother lived in Indonesia. He called her Toot; she called him Bear. He wanted desperately for her to make it to Election Day, to live to see him achieve his dream.
Obama betrayed no emotion in Jacksonville. His speech at Veterans Memorial Arena that morning was rousing. He recalled that, on September 15, McCain had appeared in the same venue and declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
“Well, Florida, you and I know that’s not only fundamentally wrong, it also sums up his out-of-touch, on-your-own economic philosophy,” Obama said, “a philosophy that will end when I am president of the United States of America.”
Obama’s next stop was in Charlotte, North Carolina, late that afternoon, where twenty-five thousand people gathered to see him in a field opposite Duke Centennial Hall at the University of North Carolina. The weather had been fine all day long, but as soon as Obama’s jet touched down, the skies began to threaten. As the crowd waited for him, the heavens opened up and a vicious downpour began.
On the way to the event, Obama stopped by his Charlotte HQ to shake hands with volunteers and call a few voters. When one of the voters raised the subject of health care, Obama turned away from the pool reporters and said into the phone, “Obviously this is happening in my own family . . . my grandmother stayed at home until recently.” When he turned back, Obama was visibly deflated, looking drawn and tired.
When he finally arrived in the field at UNC, the rain had stopped, the crowd was drenched, and they were ready for him. He stepped to the lectern and began his speech with a remembrance of his grandmother. He said, “She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, and so there’s great joy as well as tears.” He said, “She has gone home.” Haltingly, he said, “I’m not going to talk about it too long because it’s hard to talk about.”
Even so, Obama wanted everyone to know a little about Toot. He called her a “quiet hero,” like a lot of quiet heroes in the crowd and in the country. “They’re not famous,” Obama continued. “Their names aren’t in the newspaper. But each and every day, they work hard. They watch out for their families. They sacrifice for their families. . . . That’s what America’s about. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
As Obama said all this, his voice was mostly steady, but tears were streaming down his cheeks—the first time he had wept publicly since taking the national stage. Obama reached inside his pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and carried on, returning several times to the woman who had shaped his character as much as anyone in the world.
A few hours later, Obama and his traveling crew pulled into the Prince William County Fairground in Manassas, Virginia, for his final campaign rally. The scene was surreal, mind-boggling, like something out of a movie. The buses rolled up into a muddy parking lot behind the stage. The floodlights illuminated a swirling mist rising into the dark night sky. Beyond the camera risers surrounding the stage were a pair of trucks with uniformed, heavily armed, Secret Service tactical teams standing on top, scanning the horizon through their binoculars. And beyond the trucks were some ninety thousand Obama fans on a gently sloping hillside, stretching literally as far as the eye could see.
How fully Obama understood the alchemy or the tides of history, the collision of man and moment, that brought him to that place, putting him on the verge of winning the White House, was impossible to know. But he seemed to grasp the need for closure. At the end of his speech, he returned to the story of Edith Childs, the city council-woman in Greenwood, South Carolina, who early in his campaign bequeathed to him the rallying cry that marked his breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses: “Fired up! Ready to go!”
Obama hadn’t uncorked this riff in months, but he turned on the turbochargers in Manassas and delivered it with gusto, coiling his body, bouncing up and down, sweeping his arms, tracing with his fingers in the air. By the time he got to the end—“One voice can change a room, and if it can change a room, it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state, then it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change a world; come on, Virginia, let’s go change the world!”—the crowd let loose a roar that shook the ground beneath their feet.
Returning to the airport, Obama boarded his jet and prepared to head back to Chicago. He made his way down the aisle and into the rear cabin, where the press corps mingled. He thanked the reporters for having accompanied him on his astonishing ride. He gave a photographer a birthday kiss. He shook every hand on the plane.
“Okay, guys, let’s go home,” Obama said. “It will be fun to see how the story ends.”
Epilogue
Together at Last
ON THE MORNING OF November 5, Barack Obama had breakfast with his family, saw his kids off to school, donned sunglasses, and went to the gym. The previous night, the nation’s first African American president-elect had secured a victory that was as dazzling as it was historic. His 53 percent of the popular vote was the largest majority secured by a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. He swept the blue states, captured the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and picked up red states across the country: Colorado, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia. He dominated among black voters (95–4), Hispanic voters (66–32), and young voters (66–32). His share of the white vote, 43 percent, was higher than what Gore or Kerry had attained—and among whites age eighteen to twenty-nine, he trounced McCain, 68–31.
Obama made his way to his transition headquarters on the thirty-eighth floor of the Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago’s Loop. Sitting down with Biden; his soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; his three transition co-chairs—Jarrett, Rouse, John Podesta—and a handful of others, he began examining the possibilities for his Cabinet. Most of the names on the lists were predictable, but one was not. Obama was leaning heavily toward Hillary Clinton for secretary of state.
Among those most intimate with Obama, it came as no surprise. Since the summer, he had been telling Jarrett and Nesbitt that he wanted to find a role for Clinton in his administration. Obama’s inclination was abetted by Podesta, whom he’d appointed to run a kind of pre-transition planning effort after securing the nomination (and whom Clinton had tapped, albeit prematurely, to handle the same task). At the first Podesta-led meeting to discuss potential Cabinet picks, in Reno, Nevada, in late September, Hillary’s name was on the lists for State and Defense. The next morning, Jarrett asked Obama, “Are you serious about Senator Clinton?”
Obama replied simply but emphatically, “Yes, I am.”
Obama shared his thinking with few people before Election Day, but when he did, his praise for Clinton was effusive. She’s smart, she’s capable, she’s tough, she’s disciplined, Obama said again and again. She wouldn’t have to be taught or have her hand held. She wouldn’t have to earn her place on the world stage; she already had global stature. She pays attention to nuance, Obama told Jarrett, and that’s what I want in a secretary of state, because the stakes are so high. I can’t have somebody who would put us in peril with one errant sentence.
Three other names were raised in the meeting at the
Kluczynski Building: Daschle, Kerry, and Richardson. Daschle and Richardson were on the short list only as courtesies; Obama had other things in mind for both of them. Kerry was eminently qualified and desperately wanted the job. But he would have been a predictable pick—there was no wow factor with Kerry. Choosing Clinton would send a powerful message about Obama’s bigness.
Much of Obama’s campaign brain trust was resistant to the idea. The suits were skeptical that Hillary would be, could be, a loyal team player. The arguments against her varied among them, but all were forcefully and fully aired. She would pursue her own agenda. She would undermine Obama’s. She would be a constant headache. She came attached to her globe-trotting, buckraking, headline-making husband, whose antics were the very antithesis of the no-drama-Obama way of doing business.
Jarrett was wary, too, though her worries revolved around the question of the chemistry (or lack thereof) between Barack and Hillary. “You’d better really make sure that you two can work together,” Jarrett advised the new president-elect, “because you can’t just fire her.”
Obama listened to the objections and more or less dismissed them. Sure, he needed to sit with Clinton and get comfortable. Sure, the Bill problem needed to be dealt with. But Obama shared none of his brain trust’s lingering animus over the campaign. It was time to saddle up and get down to governing—and he saw Clinton as an invaluable asset. He told his quailing advisers to keep their eyes on the prize. More than once he calmly reassured Jarrett, “She’s going to be really good at this job.”
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