The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  On December 2, with a new poll showing Obama now leading in Iowa, Clinton struck back. “I have said for months that I would much rather be attacking Republicans, and attacking the problems of our country, because ultimately that’s what I want to do as president,” she said. “But I have been, for months, on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks. Well, now the fun part starts. We’re into the last month, and we’re going to start drawing the contrasts.”

  Earlier that day, Clinton had lashed her own campaign team during a morning conference call. “She was just fed up,” said one staffer who was on the call. “She just got on the conference call and just lit into everyone.” Her anger was prompted, in part, by being told by aides that things still weren’t clicking in Iowa, particularly on the message front. The previous night, during a cocktail reception for the Des Moines Register, she was told by the local reporters that they rarely heard from her campaign about Obama. That news, too, set her off. “We’re getting outhustled here,” she said, according to a staffer who listened in. “And it’s not a field problem, it’s not a political problem, it’s a messaging and communications problem. Their message is beating us here, their press team is beating us here, their overall communications is just better than us here, and we have to do something.”

  Solis Doyle was at home that morning, listening in as well. Clinton’s ire included the entire senior staff at headquarters. A member of that staff remembered Clinton’s frustration and anger. “This is crazy,” Clinton said. “This is all about Iowa, we need to win there, decision makers need to go do Iowa. . . . Everybody’s got to go.” By the next day Solis Doyle was in Des Moines, followed by others. They stayed until the caucuses were over.

  There was cause for alarm. Clinton’s internal polling showed serious slippage. Five days before the Jefferson Jackson Dinner, a three-way track had her at 32 percent, Edwards at 31 percent, and Obama at 25 percent. Five days later, Obama had surged into the lead. Later in November, Clinton’s polling showed her ahead once more, with 35 percent as against 27 percent each for Obama and Edwards. But the December 4 track brought worrisome news. Now the race was essentially a dead heat—Clinton and Obama at 29 percent each, Edwards at 31.

  In the meantime, inside Clinton’s campaign, the battle over whether she could afford to attack Obama continued to rage. Penn remained hawkish, as did Bill Clinton. One of the campaign’s top advisers said later of Bill Clinton, “He really started poring over Mark’s research and said we have to go negative, we have to attack this guy. If the press isn’t going to take a fair shot at him and a fair look at him, then we’re going to be the ones that have to do it.”

  At a meeting at the Clintons’ Washington home on December 1—the day before Hillary’s angry conference call—Bill Clinton vented his frustrations about the campaign. “He basically said,” one person recalled, “We’ve got to make the negative ads, got to get ’em ready, we’ve got to put them up and we’ve got to go negative on this guy. Nobody else is doing it. We’ve got to do it’. . . . It was pretty much an order.” That night, Penn told Hillary, “I see no way we can win if we do not take him on.”

  Clearly the Obama attacks on Clinton were hurting her, in part because her campaign had never taken steps to inoculate her. “The campaign against us, which the Obama campaign has never gotten enough notice for having run—is that she’s dishonest, can’t be trusted, disingenuous,” a senior Clinton adviser said later, “and we never did a goddamn thing to anesthetize ourselves against it.”

  But Clinton faced a dilemma the campaign was never able to solve in Iowa. Her advisers were right to anticipate the attacks, but they misjudged how the attacks would be delivered. They prepared negative ads and responses to what they thought would be the likeliest attack ads from Obama and Edwards. But neither of them used television ads to deliver their attacks. Instead, they went after her in debates and speeches and campaign appearances. Her ads had to remain on the shelf.

  Much of the Iowa team objected strenuously to Clinton’s negative turn in early December, arguing that voters there would react badly if Clinton went on the attack. “The emphasis on being nice was overwhelming,” Phil Singer said. If anybody but she attacked Obama verbally, the press ignored them. And if she did it, she might alienate undecided voters she was trying to convert. The Iowa team wanted a totally different approach. “We brought her mom out, we brought Chelsea out. We brought people from her past to introduce her,” Solis Doyle said. “We cut these great ads with Dorothy [Rodham], Chelsea. They went over so well we put them on in New Hampshire, where we were losing ground because we were losing ground in Iowa. And it was working. I just think it was too little too late.”

  Caucus day arrived with a sense of anticipation and expectation in Obama’s campaign, nervousness and concern inside Clinton’s. That morning, Tom Vilsack was prowling the corridors of the Polk County Convention Center, where the television networks were conducting round-the-clock interviews. Like all of Clinton’s supporters, he was trying not to show his nervousness. If turnout was not extraordinarily high, he remained optimistic that Clinton could win.

  What is remarkable is how close the two campaigns were in their projections of likely supporters. Obama’s campaign estimated turnout would be about 167,000, possibly 180,000. Only Gordon Fischer, the former Iowa Democratic chairman and now a loyal Obama supporter, predicted that as many as 200,000 might turn out. No one on Obama’s team believed him. Based on the 167,000 projection, the Obama campaign was certain they could produce 54,000 people, which would give Obama about 33 percent of the total allocation of delegates.

  Clinton’s team estimated turnout at around 150,000, though some thought it could rise to 160,000. The campaign estimated that 50,000 to 53,000 Clinton supporters would show up. So meticulous was the Clinton team that they had taken the unusual step of striking identified supporters off their lists if it was clear those voters were either too infirm or not enthusiastic enough to show up to caucus. Almost 16,000 people were eliminated this way.

  On the afternoon of the caucuses, Clinton had lunch at the Latin King restaurant in Des Moines and met with several of her Iowa team in a back room. We feel good up to 165,000, they told her. Anything above that made them nervous. On caucus morning, the Iowa team reviewed Penn’s final tracking. The Des Moines Register’s final poll had shocked everyone, giving Obama a clear lead and projecting a big turnout. Penn’s three-way numbers showed Clinton at 32 percent, Obama at 31, and Edwards at 28. But Penn also had done another random-digit dialing survey. That showed Obama at 41 percent, Clinton at 30, Edwards at 24. What if turnout hits 180,000? someone asked. Then it’s too late to do anything about it, someone remembered Penn responding. Besides, Penn said, if you believe in your assumptions, there’s no reason to abandon them because of the Register poll.

  Obama had two organizational advantages at that point. First was the campaign’s emphasis on younger voters. During the Christmas holidays they had devised elaborate means of tracking college-age supporters, handing them off from an organizer at their campus town to an organizer in their hometown. They also had developed a spreadsheet of every high school in the state, with organizers identified for each. Obama’s second advantage was his campaign’s outreach to Independents and Republicans. But the true focus of the Obama team was any voter under age forty. Students might not be reliable, but the others likely were.

  Earlier, Clinton had gone after Independent women, but Obama’s team launched a last-minute push to go back to virtually every Independent voter in the state as well as selected Republicans. Their message was simple: If you want information about the caucuses, call this 800 number. “We had twelve lines dedicated to incoming 800-number calls,” Tewes said. “Four days before [the caucuses], we had to add another eight. And we still couldn’t keep up. People wanted to know where their caucus location was, wanted to know the hours, what a caucus is.” Eventually, twenty lines were dedicated to the Independents. “You just felt like something was going on,�
� he said.

  Hillary Clinton is superstitious. She generally does not like to watch election returns. Early on the evening of January 3, as thousands of Iowans were heading to the caucuses, she was in her suite at the Fort Des Moines hotel.

  Barack Obama was confident. “You could just feel we were firing on all cylinders,” he later told us. “The field stuff was working. . . . The intensity was there. My message was working. The crowds were excited. The last night before caucus night, we flew into Dubuque. It was zero degrees. There was like half a foot of snow on the ground. We got in at eleven at night into Dubuque and there were like two thousand people packed into this auditorium going crazy. You could just feel that we were going to be in pretty good shape.”

  Obama had never been to a caucus, and after all the miles he had traveled through Iowa, he wanted to see what one looked like. With Plouffe and press aide Tommy Vietor in tow, he set out for a caucus site in Ankeny, just north of Des Moines. They arrived at Ankeny High School about 6:15 to a parking lot overflowing with cars and long lines through the door. “This is democracy in action, and I’ve lost my voice,” a raspy Obama told one supporter.

  It was a scene that left the normally undemonstrative Plouffe still giddy six weeks later. “It was a manifestation of all that work for a year of what we’d hoped to put together,” he said. There was an elderly man with a long white beard and a red T-shirt who looked like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. There were young African-Americans and single moms and families, a portrait, Plouffe said, of what they had hoped to build with their campaign. “It was a wonderful, wonderful night for democracy.”

  One hundred forty miles away, Tom and Christie Vilsack were arriving at the Ward One precinct caucus in Van Allen Elementary School in Mt. Pleasant. “Who are these people?” Vilsack thought. “I’ve never seen these people before.” The population of Mt. Pleasant is about nine thousand. Vilsack’s wife is a native and Vilsack has lived there most of his adult life. For him to walk into a caucus and not recognize scores of people was unnerving. Even then his first reaction was not one of panic. He thought the turnout was good for Clinton, very good for Obama. He still believed she could hold her own. It wasn’t until the caucus process moved to its second phase, when the supporters of the candidates who did not reach 15 percent began to move to other candidates, that he started to worry. Clinton was getting very few of the second-choice supporters.

  By the time he and Christie were flying back to Des Moines to meet with the Clintons and their advisers, he realized she was going to lose. Vilsack was in anguish. He gripped his wife’s hand, but through the entire flight the two never talked, sitting silently in the small plane as it made its way over frozen fields and small towns. “I felt that I had failed somebody that I cared deeply about,” he said. “I couldn’t even articulate what it was that I should have done differently or how I should have approached this differently, but I felt there was a great deal of trust placed in me and I didn’t deliver.”

  At Obama headquarters, as early reports of long lines gave way to more precise estimates of how many people were coming out, it was clear that turnout would far exceed projections, and with it came the confidence that Obama was about to spring a stunning upset on Clinton. In Clinton’s boiler room, the realization of what was happening brought looks of panic and feelings of nausea. By the end of the evening, turnout reached 239,872. Obama’s percentage of the delegates was 37.58, Edwards’s was 29.75, and Clinton’s was 29.47.

  Clinton’s team was totally unprepared. “We thought we would either win Iowa or Edwards would win Iowa,” Wolfson said. “Either of those outcomes was fine.” One Clinton supporter remembers it as one of the worst experiences of her life. “I was in the boiler room the night of the caucuses,” she said, “and I was watching people’s faces turn green. Patti. Teresa. Karen. Howard. Silence. Green. Sickening looks on their faces.” Teresa Vilmain recalled approaching Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman, fund-raiser, cheerleader and confidant of the Clintons. “Prepare them,” she said. Though the final numbers were not in, she doubted that Clinton would even finish second.

  McAuliffe already had gotten a call from Bill Clinton to come up to their suite. McAuliffe told him they were going to lose—badly. You’ve got to be kidding me, the former president said. He got Hillary and McAuliffe repeated the news. “We’re going to get our ass kicked,” he said. A call went out for others in the senior staff to come to the suite. Hillary went downstairs at one point to deliver her concession speech. Later she gathered the entire Iowa staff to thank them. But mostly that night, she, Bill, and her stricken top advisers fumed and argued over what they should do in the wake of her third-place finish.

  One adviser in the room said of Hillary’s emotions, “disappointed is not strong enough and outrage is too strong.” Another said, “She wasn’t screaming and yelling and lashing out. She was disappointed to have lost. Upset. Surprised. Not to have lost, but to have finished where we finished.” Jerry Crawford, one of the savviest veterans of Iowa politics and a longtime Clinton ally, described her that night as the “ultimate prizefighter who has taken the ultimate punch and pulls herself together and doesn’t get knocked off stride and goes downstairs and performs.” But she was more than disappointed; she was intensely frustrated. Vilsack recalls her words. She said, “I’m doing what you all asked me to. Every time you ask me to do something, I’ve done it. Would you just give me a clear understanding of precisely what my mission is here?”

  Bill Clinton was in a fighting mood. He thought there had been she nanigans at the caucuses and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Even more, he was annoyed that they had not taken on Obama earlier. He had wanted attacks on Obama’s ties to the corrupt Chicago developer Tony Rezko. He had wanted a vigorous effort to undermine Obama on Iraq. “He wanted to go negative,” recalled one person in the room. His attitude was, “We should have done it in Iowa, we should have kept doing it. We need to do it in New Hampshire.” “He’s the Comeback Kid,” said another person in the room. “He was anxious to start the comeback.” Penn was in full agreement about attacking Obama, as he had been for months. Vilsack, who had strongly opposed going negative in Iowa, now said he agreed. Grunwald said some of the negative ads had already been prepared, and the Clinton team huddled around her laptop to watch them. Solis Doyle was described by others as shell-shocked and mostly silent, though she was opposed to going negative. Wolfson strongly resisted going negative. It’s hard to run against a movement, he warned. Grunwald, who knew the New Hampshire electorate better than anyone there, cautioned against a quick shift toward negative campaigning in New Hampshire.

  The meeting in Clinton’s suite ended inconclusively. She had a flight to catch for New Hampshire. Vilsack remembers Clinton packing her bags, getting ready to leave. “See you in October,” he said, his way of telling her she would still be the Democratic presidential nominee in the general election to come. Clinton flashed a smile. On his way out, Vilsack caught a glimpse of Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham. “I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” he said. “Mrs. Rodham was in the bedroom, this adjoining bedroom by herself. And she was hurting for her daughter. You could tell. Her head was down. She just didn’t know what to do.” The Clintons flew off in their own plane; most of the staff piled into the press plane for the ride to New Hampshire. Solis Doyle and Mike Henry planned to return to Washington temporarily. As the others were leaving, they saw the embattled pair, Solis Doyle and Henry, campaign manager and deputy campaign manager to an enterprise now in turmoil and disarray, sitting in the darkened coffee shop in the Fort Des Moines. Whatever pain they felt that night would only increase in the days and weeks ahead.

  Obama delivered a memorable speech. A great victory had now been turned into a movement.

  “You know, they said this day would never come,” Obama told his delirious supporters. “They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a co
mmon purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. . . . Years from now, when we’ve made the changes we believe in, when more families can afford to see a doctor, when our children—when Malia and Sasha and your children—inherit a planet that’s a little cleaner and safer, when the world sees America differently, and America sees itself as a nation less divided and more united—you’ll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began. . . . This was the moment when we finally beat back the policies of fear and doubts and cynicism, the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up. This was the moment.”

  Then he was off to New Hampshire.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Five Days in New Hampshire

  “Why should we believe you can win a national election?” a New Hampshire voter asked Clinton. She replied, “I have been through the fires.”

  Hillary Clinton’s chartered airplane landed in Manchester sometime around 4 a.m. on Friday, January 3. It was brutally cold, the temperature hovering just above zero and piles of snow everywhere. Her morning started badly with a senior staff conference call.

  She tried to sound strong and determined and, if not upbeat, at least positive. Iowa was behind them, she said. Let’s go forward. But the call quickly revealed a campaign team in a deep funk and ill-equipped to help her. She was met with virtual silence when she said hello. Solis Doyle was not on the call. Penn and Wolfson, who normally dominated the morning calls, had nothing to offer, and when asked later neither of them could remember much about it. Grunwald, Clinton’s media adviser, echoed her boss and tried, gently, to encourage Penn or Wolfson to weigh in. Again there was silence, according to several accounts.