Hart then asked a question that drew an emotional outpouring from the African-American women who were Hillary supporters. What if Barack becomes the nominee? he asked them.
“I’d be so shocked,” one said. “It’s his time, but it’s not going to happen in my lifetime. He’s a mold in the making, but he’s not there yet.”
“I would fear for his safety,” the second black woman said. “You know, the way some people think and act toward different races. I just—I don’t know, I think it’s going to be tough.”
Which was the greatest bias, Hart asked, toward race or gender?
“Race, race!” one of the black women shouted. “No matter whether this gentleman is intelligent enough to be president or not, it’s just the bottom line that he’s black. He could be a rocket scientist and they don’t want anybody black in office.”
“It’s not his time,” said another black woman, a Hillary supporter. Then, impulsively, she blurted out, “I don’t know whether I should say this, because I know he’s not going to win, and [that’s why] Hillary really is my next choice.”
Do you think the country’s ready for an African-American? Hart asked.
“No, I don’t.”
Because?
“Because the bottom line is the country is racist, and no matter what this man does, and how intelligent he is, nobody wants to see a black man be president and to be controlled by somebody who is African-American.”
Suddenly the conversation was charged with emotion—and with disagreement. “I think there’s a lot of people who don’t care about race,” one of the white male voters said. “And I don’t think they would purposely not vote for him because he’s black.”
“Oh, yes,” came the response, strongly disagreeing with the white male’s remark.
“Oh, yes, I do too,” another of the black voters said.
Another trend that proved critical to the election was becoming clearer: the transforming power of young voters.
“I think this new generation is going to turn a lot of things on its heels,” commented a white woman when the discussion turned toward changes taking place in America. “I think they think differently. They act differently. Their attitude toward war, toward work, their lifestyles are so very different from my generation. I came of age in the sixties and seventies and it’s time for them. They want the stage, and I think they’re going to make their presence known, and they should.”
Another woman agreed. “I look at it from a slightly different view,” she said. “There’s a certain segment of society—older, more set in their ways—and it’s a horrible thing to say but once they’re gone I think it will be very different.”
It already was different. Everywhere we traveled, from beginning to end of the long campaign, the way Obama appealed to young voters remains an indelible memory.
One example. The place: outside an Obama campaign headquarters in the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, a group of young white women, all students, about to join other all-white young Obama volunteers inside. Why Obama? we ask Eliza Reynolds. She’d been listening to her committed friends, she explained. “When someone’s real, I think our generation gets so much more involved because we’re used to bullshit in our faces. We’re a TV generation, we’re an Internet generation, and pop-up ads and so forth is so fake to us. Hillary looks so fake. You see her smiling and it makes you want to crunch up. ‘Oh, look at that. I don’t want that. That doesn’t speak to me.’ Then you see Obama speaking and he’s not trying to push too big words at you, anything that’s complex. He’s saying stuff that’s simple, that’s real, that really gets to you, you know. He’s a really impressive speaker, you know. Inspiration should not be undervalued, you know.”
Young voters in 2008 signaled a major shift in political behavior. They were becoming more liberal than they had been a generation ago, and identifying more with Democrats than Republicans, trends documented by extensive survey research.
Since 1966, the year that saw the shift from liberalism to conservatism, from Democratic dominance to Republican ascendancy, an annual survey of entering freshmen at two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities has been conducted each fall by UCLA, in association with the American Council on Education. More than nine million students, at some fifteen hundred institutions of higher learning, have participated. Over the decades the annual surveys had tracked a steady turning away from public life, public service, political and social activism in reaction to the idealism of students in the sixties. Year after year, young Americans placed increasing emphasis on making money and on materialism. That trend continued—or accelerated—through the Bush election of 2000. “Looking Inward, Freshmen Care Less About Politics and More About Money,” read the survey headline about that freshman class of ’04. “If this fall’s perplexing presidential race provided a lesson in politics,” the survey reported, “college freshman may have slept through the class.” Their attention had “reached an all-time low.”
But that was before the Iraq disaster, before the downturn in the economy, before Katrina and other problems severely discredited Bush’s presidency. By the fall of 2006, in its forty-first annual survey of more than 270,000 students, a striking change had occurred. That year’s headline reported, “Interest in Politics Increases as Students Move Politically from Center.” And they were discussing politics more than at any point in the past four decades. This heightened interest produced the largest turnout in twenty years by voters under the age of thirty, and played a large role in the midterm elections of 2006 that brought Democrats to control of Congress. At that point, students identifying as “liberal” were at the highest point since 1975, 30.7 percent, while those identifying themselves as “conservative” were 23 percent. The survey concluded, “This indicates that freshmen are moving away from a moderate position in their political viewpoints.”
Data showed growing support for greater governmental involvement in key issues. Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed believed the government should do more to control the sale of handguns and should give greater support for gay rights (61.2 percent agreed that “same sex couples should have the right to marital status”), while only a fourth thought “it is important to have laws prohibiting homosexual relationships.” On abortion, 78.4 percent of liberals agreed it should be legal; only 31.8 percent of conservatives concurred. Again, reflecting overall trends, moderates were closer to liberals in their views. By more than two to one, liberals favored abolishing the death penalty and legalizing marijuana. On whether the government was doing enough to control environmental pollution, 88.5 percent of liberals thought the government should do more. So did 79.3 percent of middle-roaders—and 62.5 percent of conservatives. When students were asked whether a national health plan was needed to cover everybody’s medical costs, 83.9 percent among liberals agreed, as did 74.2 percent of middle-roaders and 57 percent of conservatives.
In a strong reversal from earlier surveys, the 2006 one reported “a significant increase in commitment to service among American freshmen.” A year later, it reported, “It appears this was not a one-time phenomenon. . . . Student desire to ‘influence social values’ also continues an upward trend and is at its highest point since 1993.”
By the 2008 election, the United States was experiencing its latest—and greatest—wave of immigration, a human tide making America increasingly diverse. When the Census Bureau tabulated its mid-decade figures, not only had the United States hit a historic population milestone of 300 million,7 but one in every three U.S. residents represented a minority. Hispanics, with 42.7 million, were the largest and fastest-growing group. They were followed by blacks, with 39.7 million, and Asians, with 14.4 million.
The country was populated by rising numbers of foreign-born and second-generation Americans. More than half were from Latin America, a fourth from Asia, 14 percent from Europe, and the rest from other regions of the world such as Africa or Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, and island nation
s of the Pacific).
Those new demographics were changing voting patterns across America, both for election of the new president and for the future. Sunbelt and western states like Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada were in play for the Democrats as the election year began. In the last half century, Democrats had carried Arizona only once, Colorado twice, Nevada just three times. New Mexico had been the most reliably Democratic of the group, but had gone for Bush in 2004. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Republicans had counted on California, the Rocky Mountain West, the South, and the Great Plains to produce a virtual electoral lock in presidential races. This was the springboard for the election of every Republican president from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. Despite the shift of California to the Democrats, this geographic coalition delivered the presidency to the father-and-son Bush team.
Americans were still moving to the Sunbelt, continuing to make it the fastest-growing region in the nation. The South contained 36 percent of America’s total population, the West 23 percent, the Midwest 22 percent, and the Northeast 18 percent. But the rising Latino population threatened to break the long Republican hold on those southwestern states. Already, Hispanic voter turnout in presidential elections had risen—from under 2.5 million in 1980 to over 7.5 million in the 2004 election—bringing with it increasing numbers of Hispanic officeholders at all levels of local, state, and national government. By 2008, the number of Hispanics in Congress had increased from nine to twenty-two, including three in the U.S. Senate. The potential shift of several southwestern states posed serious problems for the largely all-white Republican Party.
The new America that emerged was different in almost every respect—socially, culturally, demographically, economically, attitudinally, and politically. Into a new millennium came an America in which memories of past triumphs and tragedies were no longer dominant. The traumas of those times—from assassinations to Watergate to Vietnam to riots—had faded. Even the Clinton years of promise and problems seemed part of a distant historical era.
Candidates beginning their campaigns had to find ways to connect with the new versus the old America, the past versus the present. How would they propose resolving the nation’s economic woes? How would they advocate charting a new direction in America’s foreign policy at a time when U.S. prestige had never been lower? How would they restore faith in the operations of government to ensure that needed progress was made? As potential presidents, they all faced the challenge of addressing these subjects—and more. A country that yearned for change was already in the midst of confounding ones. America in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, an economic downturn, and a deeply unpopular president was a country in transition and in trouble at home and abroad. As ever, people hoped for a new beginning, with new leadership, if it could be trusted, to chart a better course. Now it was up to the politicians to deliver such a message, and the people to decide.
BOOK THREE
THE DEMOCRATS
CHAPTER FIVE
Hillary for President
“We face a lot of evil men.”
—Hillary Clinton in Iowa, January 28, 2007
For much of 2007, it looked as if Hillary Clinton would win it all. She had an inner circle that had been tested through two Senate campaigns and a network that had helped win the White House twice. She could recruit almost anyone she wanted. Her political offices on K Street in Washington were close to overflowing as she neared the announcement of her candidacy, and soon she would move to more spacious, and less expensive, quarters across the Potomac River in suburban Virginia.
Obama began with almost nothing. His minuscule campaign apparatus was divided between Chicago and Washington. On January 17, 2007, when he filed his papers forming an exploratory committee, his tiny Washington office was staffed by just four people. They bought a wireless router the day before the launch to provide everyone with Internet access. The next day they bought a printer. Their only TV was in a back room shared with other people from another company. “Every day we had to haggle with people who were watching Wheel of Fortune so we could control the TV and watch the news,” his spokesman, Bill Burton, recalled. The same almost pitiful shortage of staff and resources was true when the Obama team set up their ground operation in Des Moines, Iowa. Upon his arrival there, Steve Hildebrand, the veteran organizer establishing their Iowa beachhead, stopped at a Verizon Wireless store to pick up a cell phone with a local 515 area code. He then called the number in to Obama’s Chicago headquarters, where it was listed on a press release. “Iowa for Obama” had a phone but no office.
In the opening weeks of the campaign, Obama found the campaign trail more physically taxing and mentally challenging than he had imagined. Despite Plouffe’s December warning, he was at times overwhelmed by the pace and demands of a full-scale presidential campaign. Wherever he went, there were enormous crowds—almost seven thousand in Ames on his first trip to Iowa; ten thousand in Oakland; more than twenty thousand in Austin—but sometimes people who came to hear Obama went away feeling let down. His message did not then seem to match the hype surrounding his candidacy. By contrast, Clinton found ways to inject the unexpected into her appearances. During a question-and-answer session in Davenport, Iowa, she was asked how well equipped she was to deal with a dangerous world full of evil men. “Well, the question really is, we face a lot of dangers in the world, and in the gentleman’s words, we face a lot of evil men,” she said. “People like Osama bin Laden come to mind. And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?” She rolled her eyes and smiled. The audience, assuming she was referring to her husband and his affair with Monica Lewinsky, erupted with a roar of laughter and hoots and whistles that built and rolled through the room for a full thirty seconds.
She was game for everything. At a Democratic National Committee meeting that month, Obama delivered his speech and soon left the building. Clinton stayed for hours to meet and talk personally with the members. At the International Association of Fire Fighters, Clinton opened with a girlish “Thanks so much—and thanks for last night too” that drew a loud “Ooohhh” from the predominantly male audience. She talked about 9/11 and the heroic role that firefighters had played. Obama talked about veterans’ care and fell flat.
“I’m actually always sort of a slow starter,” Obama told us later. “The same thing happened during my U.S. Senate race. My stump speeches tend to come to me organically. I try a bunch of things out. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. So in those first couple of months, I wasn’t operating on this tight script.” He recalled the opening months of his U.S. Senate race. “I’d be talking to an audience of thirty people in a living room somewhere or in a diner or a VFW hall. So you’re off Broadway and nobody’s paying attention . . . ,” he said. “But the problem for us was, we were already on Broadway. The media was following us nonstop. In April of 2007, we had twenty-three thousand people show up in Austin, Texas. So suddenly you’ve got these enormous crowds, huge spotlight, and I’m still sort of working out my riff.”
The gap between Clinton and Obama became clear in late March when the Service Employees International Union hosted a candidate forum on health care in Las Vegas. Obama’s appearance was a near disaster. No union in the country, with the possible exception of the California Nurses Association, had put more emphasis on health care than SEIU. But Obama was utterly unprepared while his rivals arrived fully primed.
First to speak was John Edwards. Two days earlier he and his wife, Elizabeth, had announced that tests showed a recurrence of her breast cancer, only now it had spread to her bones. Her condition was described as untreatable. Amid a wellspring of public sympathy for their ordeal, and expressions of admiration for Elizabeth’s courage and the portrait of the loving, supportive couple they drew before the public, they vowed his campaign would continue.
On that morning in Las Vegas, John and Elizabeth were together for their first public appearance since their press conference announcing the return of her inoperabl
e cancer. As he addressed the union audience he was crisp, forceful, and totally engaged. “What we have is a dysfunctional health system in America,” he said. “What we need is big, bold, dramatic change.” Edwards deftly fielded questions about his wife’s health and their commitment for him to stay in the race. He was also straightforward about the cost of his health care plan and how he would pay for it.
Obama came next. He made no mention of Elizabeth Edwards and her courageous battle and had no plan to present, saying, “Everybody on this stage will have a plan.” The moderator, Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty, had pressed his campaign ahead of time for information about his health care agenda but got nothing in return. She handed off the questioning to a member of the audience, Morgan Miller, who would later become known as the “Obaminator” to her friends because of her pointed questioning of the candidate. She expressed dismay at how little information was available on his campaign Web site. “What really are your top issues?” she asked. Obama was hesitant and defensive. “Keep in mind, our campaign right now is a little over eight weeks old,” he said. When asked about how he would pay for expanded access to health care, he fudged. “I have not foreclosed the possibility that we might need additional revenue in order to achieve my goal,” he said. “But we shouldn’t underestimate the amount of money that can be saved in the existing system.” He received only polite applause.
Clinton took the stage next, and Obama could see the contrast between them. After praising Elizabeth and John Edwards, she said, “We’re supposed to limit this to three minutes. As some of you know, I can talk three hours or three days on health care.” Though Clinton did not have a plan at that point either, it was quickly apparent how expert she was. Health care was her passion, and it showed. It is a disgrace, she thundered, to have millions of Americans left out of the health care system. “We need a movement. We need to make this the number one voting issue in the ’08 election,” she said as her words were drowned out by rising applause. “We’re going to get it done this time.” She was even more impressive during the questions. When she finished, someone in the audience yelled out, “You go, girl!”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 8