The Battle for America 2008

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The Battle for America 2008 Page 12

by Haynes Johnson


  Edwards also offered Obama advice during the debates. “You’ve got to focus, you’ve got to stay focused,” he said he told Obama during a commercial break in Philadelphia. Later, he told us that Obama would come prepared to confront her but then back off. “He’d do it and then he’d shift back to the intellectual, detached kind of way of talking about things while I was pounding away on her and [stayed] very focused on her.”

  Through most of the Philadelphia debate, Clinton was calm. Then the topic turned to an issue close to home, a plan by then governor of New York Eliot Spitzer to make illegal immigrants eligible for driver’s licenses. “Well, what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform,” she said. “We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally. They are undocumented workers. They are driving on our roads. The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds. It’s probability. So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum. I believe we need to get back to comprehensive immigration reform because no state, no matter how well intentioned, can fill this gap. There needs to be federal action on immigration reform.”

  NBC’s Tim Russert, one of the moderators, asked the others onstage whether anyone opposed the idea. Chris Dodd quickly spoke up. “Look, I’m as forthright and progressive on immigration policy as anyone here. But we’re dealing with a serious problem here. We need to have people come forward. The idea that we’re going to extend this privilege here of a driver’s license I think is troublesome and I think the American people are reacting to it. . . . Talk about health care, I have a different opinion. That affects the public health of all of us. But a license is a privilege, and that ought not to be extended, in my view.”

  Clinton attempted to reenter the conversation. “Well, I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done,” she said, “but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do . . .”

  As she tried to keep talking, Dodd would not hold back. “Wait a minute,” he said. “No, no, no. You said—you said yes . . . you thought it made sense to do it.”

  “No, I didn’t, Chris,” Hillary replied, her indignation rising.

  In fact, she was right; she had not said exactly that. But it didn’t matter. The debate had taken a sudden, fateful turn. When NBC anchor Brian Williams tried to move the conversation to another topic, Edwards would not let it go, charging Clinton with talking out of both sides of her mouth. “I think this is a real issue for the country,” he said. “America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them. Because what we’ve had for seven years is double-talk from Bush and from Cheney, and I think America deserves us to be straight.”

  Obama jumped in. “Well, I was confused on Senator Clinton’s answer. I can’t tell whether she was for it or against it. And I do think that is important. One of the things that we have to do in this country is to be honest about the challenges that we face.”

  At Clinton headquarters in Virginia, senior staffers were watching the debate with half an eye. But they suddenly snapped alert as they saw their candidate melt down in front of a national television audience in a two-minute exchange. For the next several days, Hillary’s response to the immigration question dominated the commentary. Nearly all was critical. “This is classic Clinton,” an anti-Clinton blogger said. “Say anything, DO anything to get elected. Friends, Reject the Clinton Dynasty . . . why should we continue to be ruled by 2 families. . . . Reject the Clintons and their baggage. America deserves better.”

  Clinton advisers tried to spin their way out of the problem, playing the gender card as hard as they ever had. The debate, they argued, showed a bunch of men attacking “one strong woman.” At Wellesley, her alma mater, she told students, “In so many ways, this all-women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.” But as hard as they tried, there seemed to be no way to undo the damage. Obama’s team recognized the balance had changed. “You said, ‘Okay, now there’s something to work with here,’” recalled Jim Margolis, the Obama campaign’s media adviser. “It was a key moment at a time when we needed a few.”

  For months the Clinton campaign had successfully kept the focus on her experience, her strength, her readiness to be president. At every debate she had reinforced those attributes with mostly unflappable performances. Now, nine months of good work were in danger of coming apart in what was being called one colossal stumble. It was an example of the unpredictability of political campaigns and the consequence of not dealing with weaknesses. In a matter of seconds another side of her political character emerged. Here was a Clinton who appeared evasive, a Clinton who shifted positions, a Clinton you couldn’t trust—in short, the side of Clinton that led many voters to doubt whether they wanted her in the Oval Office. After the campaign was over, spokesman Phil Singer said, “It was a real-time example of one of . . . the negatives on her.” Suddenly Hillary no longer seemed invulnerable, transcendent, the inevitable winner.

  Nearly a year later, in an Atlantic article on the debates, James Fallows concluded, “Hillary Clinton seriously blew only one answer of the countless hundreds she delivered. That was her fumbling response on whether she thought illegal immigrants should get driver’s licenses. . . . In other circumstances, she would have batted away this issue as she routinely did much tougher questions. . . . But . . . the blog and cable-news controversy over her ‘stumble’ and ‘equivocation’ significantly cut her then-large national lead over Obama and gave him an opening.”

  Hillary Clinton’s stumble over immigration proved to be highly damaging to her campaign. Coming just two months before the Iowa caucuses, the timing could not have been worse.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Iowa: Round One

  “They understood something intuitive in Iowa. . . . They understood that this process is ego-driven, even at the lowest level.”

  —Former governor Tom Vilsack, a Hillary supporter, on Obama’s operation

  In the long war for the Democratic nomination, Iowa was the epic battle. There would be other critical turning points, but nothing matched Iowa. No one had ever witnessed a campaign quite like it, a Democratic struggle for the heart and soul of a small, rural, almost all-white state. The battle raged for a full year, collectively cost more than $70 million, consumed almost more of the candidates’ time than all the other states combined, and drew by far the most media attention—all for the support of just 240,000 voters out of an American population of more than 300 million.

  Clinton was the dominant national front-runner through most of 2007, but never in Iowa. Her first Iowa poll, taken as she was getting ready to launch her candidacy, showed Edwards, who had never abandoned the state after 2004, at 38 percent and Clinton tied with Obama at just 16 percent. For Clinton—who liked to remind people that though she represented New York, she was born and raised in neighboring Illinois—Iowa was always a struggle, a frustrating state where the Clintons had no network and no particular history. It was a place where she never felt comfortable, with an electorate that never fully warmed to her and a caucus process that she and her husband came to loathe. All had devastating consequences for her candidacy.

  The contrast between her Iowa campaign and Obama’s was significant, if not always visible. Obama, the novice, surrounded himself with an Iowa savvy team of advisers and made a critical strategic bet: to put almost all his emphasis on the state. Then he gamely stuck with this plan through his low months in the late summer and early fall of 2007 when doubts about his candidacy reached a crescendo. “I pushed Plouffe on this and I give Plouffe a lot of credit,” Obama would tell us later. “I was steady but I did ask him, I said, ‘David, we’re not running a national strategy, we’re getting the you-know-what kicked out of us, and do we know that these national polls are not going to infect what’s happeni
ng in Iowa?’ And he held fast. He said, ‘Look, I have confidence in what we’re doing there.’”

  Clinton, far more experienced, surrounded herself with a cadre of senior advisers who did not know Iowa or its caucus process. They were slow to organize and waited too long to make a full commitment. Even then, they spent months debating how much to put into their operation and how to position her. Her vote for the Iraq war provided Obama an opening in a state with a history of antiwar sentiment. As James Carville later noted, her polls suggesting she had put Iraq behind her could never fully measure how her vote ultimately provided Obama’s campaign with energy, resources, and antiwar support. Her vote, he believed, was crippling.

  In the aftermath of Iowa, a consensus emerged that Obama had simply out-organized Clinton on the ground—that he won it because of his superior get-out-the-vote operation. The reality is far more complicated. Obama put together a phenomenal organization in Iowa, but Clinton’s became extraordinarily capable as well. She lost because she wasted months by picking the wrong staff and because of continuous internal arguments over a winning strategy. Perhaps most critical of all, she was never able to match the energy and enthusiasm that Obama inspired among new young voters. With his change message, Obama struck a unique chord. Winning Iowa did not secure his presidential nomination, as it did John Kerry’s four years earlier, but Obama’s triumph made it far more difficult for Clinton to win the nomination.

  The presence of John Edwards also made Iowa different. In 2004, he finished a strong second to Kerry and never stopped campaigning there. Just before New Year’s Day 2007 in New Orleans, Edwards announced his candidacy. Later that day, he flew to Des Moines. More than a thousand people were waiting for him when he arrived at the Iowa Historical Museum. The sheer size of the crowd was a reminder that Edwards would be a formidable candidate, making Iowa unique in being the battleground for a true three-person fight. The overflow crowd that night also signaled that Iowans were ready for a presidential campaign of historic proportions.

  Hillary Clinton was the first of the big two to arrive. Her chartered plane touched down in Des Moines on the afternoon of Friday, January 26, 2007, the first time in more than three years that she had even visited the state. Bill Clinton had never had to run in the Iowa caucuses; when he sought the presidency, everyone stayed out of the caucuses in deference to favorite son Tom Harkin. The Clintons were unfamiliar with the state’s peculiar political culture. She was running behind Edwards in the polls and bunched in a pack that included Obama and Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor. But for the next two days, she looked as if she owned the state. Her first stop was the Drake Diner, where she ordered a milkshake and fries and sat for an interview with David Yepsen, the political columnist for the Des Moines Register. Confirming her star quality, their interview was repeatedly interrupted by a parade of well-wishers.

  Saturday began her real political activities, starting with the Iowa Democratic Party’s state central committee. There she demonstrated that she would follow Mark Penn’s advice about projecting the strength of Margaret Thatcher. “When you’re attacked, you have to deck your opponents,” Clinton told the party officials. That afternoon, she held her first big campaign rally in a Des Moines high school gymnasium before a thousand people. Banners adorning the wall read, “Let the Conversation Begin,” a theme from the announcement of her candidacy the previous Saturday. “Well, I’m Hillary Clinton and I’m so glad to be in Iowa,” she told the crowd. “I’m running for president and I’m in it to win it. I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way. I intend to come and talk to you and listen to you in your living rooms and your church basements and your union halls—wherever you are gathered.”

  After speaking for about fifteen minutes, she invited questions. The first came from a woman who said she was thrilled to see a woman running for president. “It’s about time—if not past time—that we had a woman as president of the United States,” this Iowan said, but then pointed out that all forty-three presidents had been men, and asked, “How is your campaign prepared to tackle that issue?”

  Clinton answered, “I don’t think I’m the only woman here who feels sometimes you have to work a little harder. Right. . . . All I have said is there will probably be more stories about my clothes and hair than some of the people running against me. . . . The fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m a mom, is part of who I am. But I’m going to ask people to vote for the person they believe would be the best president of the United States.”

  A voice from the audience called out, “You go, girl!”

  “Go with me,” Clinton shouted back.

  The next day in Davenport she was supposed to greet people at a local diner, but because of the tremendous curiosity about her candidacy, her event was shifted to the county fairgrounds. This time she got tougher questions, including one about the health care debacle over which she had presided. It took her ten minutes to answer. When asked about her vote for the Iraq war resolution, she excoriated Bush over his handling of the war. But the most memorable moment came when she gave that teasing answer to a question about how she would deal with a dangerous world of evil men, evoking memories of the Monica Lewinsky affair with her husband. “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?” she said. Later, at her first press conference, reporters pressed her to explain what she really meant by her reply to that question. “I thought I was funny,” she said with a shrug after several tries. “You know, you guys keep telling me to lighten up. I get a little funny, and now I’m being psychoanalyzed.”

  This first Iowa trip proved to be unexpectedly moving for Clinton and her team. They were overwhelmed both by the size of the crowds and the warmth of the reception, and by the sense that they were all beginning a historic journey many of them believed would elect the first woman president. “We all underestimated how emotional it was for her and for all of us,” said Lorraine Voles, one of the few members of Clinton’s team who had Iowa roots. “We were all just like, oh my God.”

  Two weeks later, Obama arrived for his first visit. During the short flight from Springfield to Cedar Rapids, he and Michelle, in good humor, roamed the aisle of his chartered airplane, chatting with reporters in the back cabin and reporting that their daughters seemed less than overwhelmed by the historic nature of his candidacy. Obama’s first event was at a town hall meeting at John F. Kennedy High School, where he told the crowd, “This is just a naked political pitch. I want your support. I want your vote. I want your time. I want your energy.” By the time he got to Waterloo for an evening town hall rally, his state director, Paul Tewes, had told him, gently, that in Iowa, presidential candidates ask people to “caucus” for them, not vote for them, part of the quick learning curve he was on as he began his campaign.

  In Waterloo, where he spoke for less than thirty minutes, his reception was electric. He knew his opposition to the Iraq war would play well with Iowa’s strong antiwar activists, and it did. At his mention of Iraq as “a senseless war,” he was interrupted by cheers and applause that lasted half a minute. As he closed, he told the audience, “The biggest challenge we face is not just the war in Iraq. The biggest challenge isn’t just health care. It’s not just energy. It’s actually cynicism. It’s the belief that we can’t change anything. The thing that I’m hoping most of all during the course of this campaign is that all of you decide that this campaign can be a vehicle for your hopes and dreams. I can’t change Washington all by myself.”

  “Right behind you,” someone yelled out from the crowd.

  At every stop, the crowds exceeded expectations. In Cedar Rapids and Waterloo, the town halls were filled to overflowing. In Iowa Falls, a breakfast planned for thirty people attracted two hundred. In Ames, more than seven thousand filled the Hilton Coliseum. Given the emotional response of Iowans to him, Obama’s advisers knew the key to success was to capture all that energy and convert it into support in the caucuses.

  Obama’s campaign saw the national nomination
battle through the prism of Iowa; Clinton’s team saw Iowa through the prism of a national campaign. The distinction was critical. The initial trips to Iowa showed that both Clinton and Obama had star appeal, though he was still the underdog. What would prove decisive was which campaign best understood how to build a winning campaign in a caucus state.

  Unlike a primary, where polls are open from early morning to early evening and ballots are cast in secret, caucuses usually are held at a specified time and can require a commitment of several hours. They attract mainly a small group of party activists. Some people cannot participate because they work during the caucus hours. Others find the process intimidating. Thus caucus voters represent only a small fraction of the total voters. The Iowa caucus voters are required to stand before friends and neighbors and publicly declare support for their candidate. If a candidate does not reach a prescribed threshold of votes, typically 15 percent of the voters in the room, voters are lobbied by representatives of other candidates and then can switch their votes to a new candidate. It is a confusing and often chaotic process, one that in years past has been criticized, but it has also made Iowa activists among the most attentive and discerning voters in the country. For the candidates, it presents a test of how to fashion a strategy to win.

  Obama had two powerful advantages. All of his top advisers—both in Chicago and in Iowa—were veterans of Iowa campaigns. Most came out of the organizational side of politics—vitally important in understanding the requirements of a caucus state—rather than from a campaign’s media, message, or communications side. Campaign manager Plouffe came from the staff of former House majority leader Richard A. Gephardt, who had twice run in the caucuses. Top strategist Axelrod had worked for Paul Simon’s presidential campaign in 1988, for Edwards in 2004, and for Vilsack’s gubernatorial races. Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager, ran Iowa for Al Gore in 2000. Paul Tewes, Obama’s new Iowa state director, had been Gore’s field director in Iowa and was also a business partner of Hildebrand. Marygrace Galston, Tewes’s deputy, was a field organizer for John Kerry in Iowa in 2004. Emily Parcell, the political director for Iowa, had worked for Gephardt. Mitch Stewart, the Iowa caucus director, had been one of Edwards’s regional field directors. Larry Grisolano, who oversaw the media and polling, was an Iowa native and veteran of many campaigns there. Pete Giangreco, who handled direct mail and was Grisolano’s business partner, also had worked campaigns in Iowa for years.

 

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