Obama’s defeat was a lesson from Politics 101: Campaigns matter. In New Hampshire, his effort was as much an extended victory party after Iowa as it was a campaign. He was asking New Hampshire voters to ratify what had happened in Iowa. That was not enough to trump what Clinton rightly understood about New Hampshire’s stubbornly independent-minded electorate.
The Obama team had missed the signs, so focused were they on continuing the powerful narrative of Obama’s post-Iowa momentum. In Iowa, Clinton’s closing argument had been: Pick me because I’m experienced. In New Hampshire, it was: Pick me because I care so deeply about what has happened to this country and to you. Her tearful moment in Portsmouth and her debate performance at Saint Anselm brought women back to her side. She won New Hampshire by seventy-six hundred votes, with 39.4 percent of the vote compared to Obama’s 36.8. Final preelection polls had suggested Obama would carry the women’s vote, as he had in Iowa. Exit polls showed Clinton winning women by twelve points. The New Hampshire firewall held.
In her victory speech, Clinton said, “I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice. I felt like we all spoke from our hearts, and I am so gratified that you responded. . . . for all the ups and downs of this campaign, you helped remind everyone that politics isn’t a game. This campaign is about people, about making a difference in your lives, about making sure that everyone in this country has the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential. That has been the work of my life. . . . So we’re going to take what we’ve learned here in New Hampshire, and we’re going to rally on and make our case. We are in it for the long run.”
She had taken her campaign onto her own shoulders and survived. But as she prepared to break camp after her stunning victory, she presided over a divided house. Her dispirited and squabbling senior staff had contributed almost nothing to her success in New Hampshire. Now they were on the verge of a calamitous breakdown.
CHAPTER TEN
Disintegration
We need to change the leadership.
—Message to Patti Solis Doyle, January 8, 2008
Patti Solis Doyle was in her Concord hotel room the morning of the New Hampshire primary when a new message popped up on her BlackBerry. She stared at the tiny screen in disbelief. Devastated, she put in a telephone call to Harold Ickes, a veteran of Democratic presidential politics and of Clinton’s world. He was eating breakfast in the same hotel. Ickes often ignored his phone. But the vibrations on the table caught his attention and he decided to answer. To his dismay, he heard a distraught Solis Doyle on the other end of the line.
Solis Doyle began by saying, A number of friends who have our best interests at heart have concluded that we need to change the leadership of the campaign. Ickes asked, “Are you reading to me?” Yes, she replied, from her BlackBerry. She continued: Maggie Williams will be coming in with full authority on all hiring and budget matters. I want you to remain as a valued member of the senior management team. You can retain the title but Maggie will have effective control of the campaign. Ickes asked, “Who’s this from?” When she told him, “Hillary,” Ickes replied, “Well, you’re lying to me.” She said, “No, I’m not.” Ickes wolfed down the rest of his Belgian waffle and walked quickly to Solis Doyle’s room, where he found her in tears.
What began that morning—what had really begun in the hours after Iowa—would, at the very least, mar Hillary’s victory in New Hampshire that night. While Clinton’s New Hampshire-based team of advisers was still focused on pulling off a political miracle, almost all of her national team had given up hope. They were huddled—bunkered, really—in the Centennial Hotel in Concord. Most spent the day in the staff room in a running debate over how to revive Clinton’s candidacy—if that was even possible after what they assumed would be two consecutive losses to Obama. Solis Doyle spent much of the day cloistered in her room, visited occasionally by a few staunch allies in Clinton’s dysfunctional inner circle. They had heard about the e-mail and became deeply involved in the drama about a staff shakeup.
For that day, and many to come, the Clinton team was in a state of turmoil that had begun five days earlier in the boiler room in Des Moines as they watched the Iowa caucus returns. How could Hillary and Bill Clinton remake the team that had begun the race a year before with such soaring hopes and with every expectation that many of them would end up in the White House? Now, with a New Hampshire loss seeming a certainty, they suddenly faced the prospect of being held responsible for one of the most stunning collapses in presidential annals.
All day, cable television had been filled with rumors of big changes in the works. That morning’s New York Times identified as possible victims the four top people in the campaign: Solis Doyle, chief strategist Penn, media adviser Grunwald, and communications director Wolfson. Solis Doyle and Penn seemed most vulnerable, but no one really knew how much the Clintons would break up the operation if she lost. Even as Hillary pressed ahead in New Hampshire, largely on the strength of her own character, the paralysis of her senior staff deepened. Solis Doyle’s BlackBerry message signaled that things were about to get worse.
Ahead lay a decisive month, with contests in Nevada and South Carolina leading to Super Tuesday, with more than twenty contests. That was when Hillary would wrap up the nomination, or so the conventional wisdom had held. Instead, those became the weeks when the Clinton team experienced a collective breakdown that lasted until Obama had a lead among pledged delegates big enough to make him virtually unbeatable. Far from being the overpowering political machine of legend, the Clinton campaign turned out to be a world filled with destructive internal conflicts, a place of tensions and enmities. The campaign team fought over strategy and message. Senior staffers either warred with each other or jealously protected their positions; factions fought factions; individuals maneuvered for advantage. During this critical month, there seemed to be no way to stop the infighting or the damage it was causing to the effort to win the nomination.
Stories of the inner wars quickly became legend. Reporters feasted for months on the internal strife that had become endemic through the course of the campaign. Much later, the Atlantic Monthly’s Joshua Green published campaign memos that illuminated the strife through much of 2007 and early 2008. On March 6, the Washington Post’s Anne E. Kornblut and Peter Baker (later with the New York Times) published a remarkably revealing article rich with on-the-record quotes from campaign officials firing at one another and airing dirty laundry in public. The Post article prompted an anguished e-mail from Bob Barnett, noted Washington lawyer and Clinton campaign intimate, to top campaign officials. His subject line said it all: “STOP IT!!!!”
Hillary Clinton bears prime responsibility for the breakdown of her campaign at a time when she could least afford it. She was the architect. She established a team without a clear leader. She allowed the lines of authority to blur by failing to put anyone in charge. In the end, there was no one to take full responsibility for the operation and its decision-making. Her mistake, Politico columnist Roger Simon later concluded, was in valuing loyalty over experience. “The Clinton campaign was not nearly as good as it looked from the outside,” Simon said. “Make no mistake. It was not Penn, it was not Ickes, it was not Patti Solis Doyle, much as they were reviled within the campaign. Hillary Clinton was warned about what was going on, and more than once. In the end she ran the kind of campaign she wanted to run.”
She created an operation in which it was always easier to stop something than do something. The tight inner circle numbered just five people, talented and with strong personalities: Penn, Solis Doyle, Wolfson, Grunwald, and Neera Tanden. Solis Doyle was a sunny personality. She was the campaign manager in title but not the dominant leader and could not crack heads to enforce decisions. Penn was brilliant, even his opponents gave him that. But he could be difficult in his personal relationships. He was a centrist who in 1996 helped design President Clinton’s small-bore reelection initiatives like school uniforms. Penn had written a book called
Microtrends that sliced the electorate into segments. In Iowa, he put labels like “Seasoned Salties” (older women) and “Latte Drinkers” (mostly up-scale men) on different demographic groups. Of Clinton’s advisers, he was the most aggressive, regularly advocating that the campaign begin attacking Obama. In a March 2007 memo, he had urged the campaign to take note of Obama’s “lack of American roots” and said he could not imagine the country electing someone in a time of war “who is not at his center fundamentally American.” He said the campaign could not attack directly on this but argued, “Let’s own ‘American’” in its message. He was overruled. Others resented what they saw as his ability generally to run rough-shod over the rest of the campaign. He chafed at what he felt was lack of real power to implement his ideas—less power than he believed he had in 1996.
Grunwald earned her stripes in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign as a smart and very tough operative. She oversaw the advertising team but often battled with Penn over what those ads said and looked like after New Hampshire. Wolfson led a communications operation designed to fend off the New York tabloids and a national press corps that the Clinton team saw—often correctly—as hostile to their candidate. The communications team was fast on rapid response and geared to win every news cycle, but rarely known for its light touch. Tanden did policy, but not much politics. She had served as Clinton’s policy guru for years and had her ear on such major initiatives as health care.
Others in the headquarters group exercised powers of their own. Ickes oversaw delegates and helped Solis Doyle with the budgets, but did not feel fully empowered to deal with political operations. He was one of the few insiders with long experience in presidential politics, shrewd and sometimes prickly, who had helped create the system of nomination rules that ultimately proved Clinton’s undoing. He was also a sworn enemy of Penn; their contentious relationship dated back a decade. Mike Henry, the deputy campaign manager and political director, had developed a solid reputation in Virginia politics, but ran a political operation that others in the campaign came to regard as weak and overwhelmed. To remedy that, Solis Doyle and Ickes recruited Guy Cecil from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who was asked to oversee New Hampshire and the February 5th Super Tuesday states. He quickly became Henry’s rival and nemesis. Phil Singer was Wolfson’s deputy, skilled in the thrust and parry of campaigns, but volatile. On the fund-raising side, Jonathan Mantz was a clearly talented finance director, but he was appalled when he realized how rapidly and foolishly the money was being spent. Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chairman, was a fund-raising powerhouse, a pal of the former president, and the campaign’s self-designated chief cheerleader.
Hillary Clinton created a campaign in which authority always seemed to rest with someone else. Her team spent endless hours in conference calls hashing out everything, yet struggled in after-action reports to pin down responsibility for mistakes. For much of 2007, this team seemed highly effective, though even the smoothest of campaigns might have foundered against a newcomer who was tapping so effectively into the public mood. When Hillary stumbled badly in Iowa, the knives came out—as they often do in losing or struggling campaigns. As a group, the inner circle was seldom upbeat, often pessimistic, worried, embattled—all the more so when things were difficult. James Carville, the Clinton loyalist who was rarely directly involved, was struck by two things. First, how much everyone loved Hillary. Her advisers were devoted to her. But, Carville said, “it always struck me how joyless that campaign was.”
Hillary’s e-mail caught Solis Doyle by surprise, although she later realized she should have known, not only because of the swirl of rumors but also because of a tense private discussion she had with Clinton the day before. Because of that meeting, the e-mail was devastating. She and Clinton had talked about how gloomy the projections seemed. The senior staff believed, as everybody did, that they were going to lose New Hampshire, possibly by double digits. They thought the Culinary Workers were going to go for Obama in Nevada right after New Hampshire, and they knew South Carolina looked increasingly solid for Obama. Solis Doyle also knew that if they lost four in a row, their money, already tight, would dry up.
Solis Doyle’s meeting with Clinton took place a few hours before Clinton choked up in the Portsmouth diner. All that day, according to an informed source, Solis Doyle wondered whether the bleak electoral outlook that she had described to Clinton contributed to the emotions Hillary displayed for the world to see. They talked alone for most of their meeting—Bill Clinton came in at a later point—but mostly it was a frank discussion between the candidate and her campaign manager about the state of the campaign. Solis Doyle outlined possible options based on her belief that New Hampshire was lost. Among them was a proposal for Clinton to quit the race, withdraw gracefully, return to the Senate, and begin salvaging her career in the job she loved. The informed source said Solis Doyle did not recommend that course to Clinton but pointed out to her that it was certainly an option. Clinton reportedly was furious after their conversation, incensed by what she regarded as her campaign manager’s defeatist attitude.
Solis Doyle also told Clinton that she needed fresh blood in her campaign. She knew that a second straight loss would result in a chorus of demands for heads to roll, including hers; and she was prepared to accept that fate. But she also urged Clinton not to stop there. She recommended that Penn, the most divisive figure inside the campaign, go too. Among new people, she recommended that Clinton bring into the campaign Doug Sosnik, who had served as political director in the Clinton White House, and Steve Richetti, another Clinton White House veteran. She had long pushed for another pollster to supplement Penn, and urged Clinton to hire Geoff Garin, one of the party’s most respected pollsters, a suggestion she had made before. She also recommended that Carter Eskew be recruited to help improve the campaign’s advertising. Why would any of them come into the campaign under such difficult circumstances? Clinton wondered. They have nothing to lose at this point, Solis Doyle replied. She suggested they reach out to Maggie Williams, who was Hillary’s chief of staff in the White House. Clinton was dubious that Williams would come aboard. She’ll do it for you, Solis Doyle said.
Solis Doyle later told others she believed it was a mistake to have such a gloomy discussion the day before the primary and agreed only because Clinton wanted an unvarnished assessment. That made Clinton’s e-mail all the more upsetting. She did not mind being fired. She was a big girl. It was the way Clinton did it. Solis Doyle sent an e-mail back saying she would leave the campaign.
Once that e-mail from Hillary was sent, her departure was certain, though it took another month. “Did I think that the job and the place is bigger than I am? So many times,” she said as she reflected on the experience. But she also believed that she had presided over Hillary’s feuding team effectively. Not everyone agreed.
Solis Doyle was the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her older brother Danny Solis worked as a community organizer with Obama and later became a Chicago alderman. She grew up on Chicago’s heavily Latino southwest side, graduated from Northwestern University, and, with the help of her brother, started her political career working in city hall and later in the reelection campaign of Mayor Richard J. Daley. She was recruited for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign by Daley’s campaign manager, David Wilhelm, who managed the Clinton campaign. Solis Doyle became Hillary Clinton’s first hire. Over the course of sixteen years, she rose steadily to become one of Clinton’s most trusted advisers. They were so close that Hillary had read at Solis Doyle’s wedding.
When the time came to organize for the 2008 election, Clinton named Solis Doyle as her campaign manager. Among those who argued against her was Terry McAuliffe, the close friend of both Bill and Hillary. David Axelrod, a longtime friend, had warned Solis Doyle not to take the job. He knew the Clinton culture, that when things went sour, everyone would take cover. He told her she was better off being the candidate’s best friend than the candidate’s campaign manager.
S
olis Doyle had many detractors both in the campaign and in Hillary-land. They grew in numbers through January and into February, as Clinton’s campaign suffered through its lowest weeks and the weaknesses in strategy, operations, organization, and management became clearer. The most serious charge against her after Iowa and New Hampshire was that she had badly mismanaged the budget.
So depleted were their finances that when the campaign looked beyond New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and the nearly two dozen Super Tuesday contests on February 5th, they discovered that they would be virtually broke. Even worse, according to her critics, she had failed to keep Clinton informed. When Clinton learned in January how little money was left, according to a report, she was dismayed that her only recourse was to loan her campaign $5 million.
In September, Ickes had written a memo warning of a sizable deficit by January—$12 to $15 million—at the rate the campaign was spending money. He advised Solis Doyle to keep Clinton fully informed and in his few budget meetings with Clinton laid out those projections.
The campaign spent enormous sums in Iowa: in the neighborhood of $25 million. Hillary Clinton complained repeatedly about the budgetary sinkhole that Iowa became. Even in the middle of the Iowa campaign, she could not understand why they were spending so much for so few voters. Twenty-five million for a hundred and fifty thousand voters? “She thought it was a huge waste of money,” Solis Doyle said. But Clinton was told there was no other way to play Iowa, and besides, Obama was doing the same. The Clinton campaign spent lavishly elsewhere, based on the assumption that there would be a knockout blow by February 5th. “The culture of our campaign was a high-priced culture,” one senior official said. “Much more was spent on scheduling and advance than we should have spent. They were used to a lifestyle and a culture that I think resulted in money being spent that we could have saved. . . . Those decisions were not made blindly. They were made with a lot of debate.”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 18