The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Three people, including Ickes, said the story was true. Penn said, “The whole story is false.” Whether or not Penn understood the rules, he and others in the Clinton campaign seemed oblivious to the Obama campaign’s emerging delegate strategy. On September 27, Obama held a huge rally in New York, drawing twenty thousand or more people in Union Square. In a strategy memo dated September 29, Penn seemed bewildered by Obama’s decision to spend time organizing such an event. “Why hold a 20,000 person rally and burn money in New York when you are losing Iowa and NH?” he wrote.

  In fact, the Obama campaign, preparing for a prolonged struggle against Clinton, was far more advanced in its strategic planning, and well along in plotting a state-by-state, district-by-district battle. The huge New York rally was based on the delegate math strategy Berman and others were developing. Yes, they would concede, New York was Clinton territory, but there was also incredible enthusiasm for Obama in many places in the state. A big New York rally would help turn that enthusiasm into activism and prepare for a more organized effort to win as many delegates as possible there on February 5. Obama was not going to walk away from states that looked favorable to Clinton. “This is going to be more of a delegate fight than we’ve seen in a long time,” Steve Hildebrand told us at the time. The Clinton campaign didn’t get it.

  Penn’s September 29th internal memo is intriguing for one sentence. Written at the peak of Hillary Clinton’s strength in the national polls, it was extraordinarily upbeat in tone. Penn saw few problems ahead for her—and plenty for Obama and the only other challenger of note at the time, John Edwards. But weighing Obama’s chances, Penn wrote, “The biggest threat from Obama is not what we see, but what we don’t see—if he is building a significant new type of organization.”

  His concern was that Obama might be assembling a movement of college students that would be invisible until caucus night in Iowa. But the Clinton campaign did not fully appreciate—and should have—how Obama was building organizations of activists and new voters not just in Iowa but across the country, aided by skillful exploitation of the tools and technology of the Internet, the cell phone, and social networking.

  Just as critical was the shrewdness with which the Obama team captured the grassroots energy that was building around his candidacy. Jon Carson, who managed the Super Tuesday ground operation, liked to tell reporters that, to understand the Obama campaign, they had to go to my.barackobama.com. Without doing that, he said, covering the campaign was like trying to understand finance without looking at Wall Street. The potential power of the volunteers was evident from the beginning of the campaign. “We had a thousand grassroots volunteer groups created in the first twenty-four hours after he announced on February 10, 2007,” said Joe Rospars, who oversaw the new media operations. His team tapped into Facebook and MySpace, but through my.barackobama.com they could see what kind of activity was taking place around the country. What they found when they looked past the four early states was a preexisting base upon which to build their organization.

  In the early fall of 2007, Obama’s Chicago team began to dispatch organizers to the February 5 states for Super Tuesday, with particular attention to the caucus states. Their September budget memo was revealing. Fifteen new staff hires were recommended for California, but the far smaller caucus states were strongly staffed too: nine new hires recommended for Minnesota, eight for Colorado, five for Kansas, and two for tiny Idaho.

  Idaho became the textbook study of the Obama strategy. Only a few thousand people had participated in the caucuses in 2004. Obama’s advisers realized that with a relatively modest investment, they could probably win. What made Idaho even more attractive was the volunteer cadre already at work. “By the time our first staffer landed in Idaho at the beginning of October, the Idahoans for Obama had organized themselves,” Carson told us. “They had an office ready to rent, had the phone lines already on order . . . and had already figured out the caucus rules and typed them up and put them together in sort of an easy-to-use here’s how to caucus in Idaho.”

  The first young staffer who arrived there was Joey Bristol, who after graduating from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs volunteered for Obama. Later, after becoming a paid staffer, he was dispatched to Idaho. When he was leaving Chicago in October, he asked Carson for some last-minute advice. “Kick some ass out in Idaho,” Carson told him. “We need it.” It had been years—even decades—since a Democratic presidential candidate had put staff into Idaho. The local activists were thrilled.

  Within two weeks, the grassroots organizers held a gala opening ceremony that attracted local and regional media attention and sparked new interest in Obama’s campaign. “Most days at least one to two new faces would show up, poke their face in the door, and say, ‘I just wanted to see if you guys really existed. I’ll come back to volunteer now that I know it’s real,’” Bristol said. A few supporters passing out Clinton buttons and bumper stickers was the only sign of her campaign.

  The same enthusiasm was generated in other states, particularly those holding caucuses. In Colorado, Obama had such an energetic base of volunteers that Clinton allies warned Bill Clinton about the problem during one of his visits to the state. Clinton began sending staff to Colorado, but mostly the warnings went unheeded. By late fall, Obama had paid staff in sixteen of the twenty-two February 5th states. Clinton’s team was invisible.

  At that point the Clinton camp had no Super Tuesday strategy at all. They were entirely focused on Iowa. “Harold and I were both pushing very hard for more resources into the fifth and earlier decisions,” said Guy Cecil, who had been put in charge of overseeing Super Tuesday. “And it just didn’t happen. You can only set your hair on fire so many times.”

  Hillary and Bill Clinton bore a significant share of the responsibility. Because of their experiences in Iowa and Nevada, Bill Clinton had come to detest caucuses. He was persuaded that the Obama campaign had engaged in fraud in Nevada and still had questions about the legitimacy of the Iowa effort. Whenever either Bill or Hillary spoke about primaries and caucuses, they were dismissive of caucuses as favoring the kind of people likely to support Obama: liberal party activists, better-educated and wealthier Democrats who had flexible hours and were more likely to attend the caucuses. The caucuses also would draw the antiwar Democrats who were attracted to Obama and could not forgive Hillary Clinton for her 2002 vote.

  No one in authority in the Clinton campaign ever offered a clear explanation of how the apparent decision to avoid the caucus states on Super Tuesday and the remainder of February happened—or accepted responsibility. One adviser said of her team, “It was malpractice what they did to her.” Penn absolved himself of any responsibility, saying he was not invited to the meetings where the targeting decisions were made. Solis Doyle said it was preposterous to think that Penn as chief strategist did not have a major voice in where they would compete. Ickes agreed with Solis Doyle; Penn said Ickes cut money from the budget to poll the caucus states. Henry said there was no specific decision to ignore the caucus states, just a series of decisions that led them to concentrate their resources elsewhere. Money was tight at that point and forced them to make difficult decisions.

  Late on the night of February 1, Obama’s campaign touched down in Boise. It had been six days since his victory in South Carolina, four since the Kennedy endorsement rally. The Kennedy endorsement alone, Clinton’s advisers later calculated, provided Obama with millions of dollars’ worth of free advertising.

  Edwards had quit the race days after his third-place finish in South Carolina, and Clinton and Obama had met the day before for their first one-on-one debate. Held in Los Angeles, it was a civil affair in contrast to the Myrtle Beach brawl, highlighting the historic reality that the Democrats’ nominee would now shatter either the racial or the gender barrier. Instead of spending more time in California with its 370 delegates, Obama accepted his advisers’ recommendation to travel to Idaho, which would award just eighte
en delegates on Super Tuesday.

  In Boise, Obama awoke to light snow that made the roads slick. His rally was scheduled for 9 a.m. at the Taco Bell Arena on the Boise State campus. Despite the weather, crowds started arriving hours before, with traffic snarled to a standstill and lines stretching half a mile from the arena. When Obama entered, an explosion of cheers greeted him from a crowd numbering more than fourteen thousand, nearly three times the number who had attended the Democratic caucuses in the entire state of Idaho four years earlier. Obama looked out at the crowd with a sense of awe. “So they told me there weren’t any Democrats in Idaho,” he teased them. They hooted and applauded even louder.

  Plouffe’s February 5th go-everywhere, play-everywhere strategy was now on full display. From Boise, Obama flew to Minnesota, where eighteen thousand people turned out to see him in a basketball arena. From there, it was on to St. Louis for a nighttime rally with twenty thousand people on the floor of the Rams’ football stadium. In Delaware the next day he drew twenty thousand, and in Connecticut the day after, seventeen thousand more.

  Clinton, who had long assumed February 5th would be the day she secured her nomination, could now sense the gathering momentum of Obama’s candidacy. She was forced to scramble, and her voice was raspy from too little sleep and endless rallies. She was in St. Louis two days before Super Tuesday. It was Super Bowl Sunday—the New England Patriots against the New York Giants. “Somebody asked me today who I’m rooting for,” she told a labor audience. “Please! You know, we’ve got two big contests coming up. We’ve got the Super Bowl tonight and Super Tuesday. I want the New York team to win both.” She got half her wish.

  After her loss in South Carolina, her advisers saw their projected Super Tuesday delegate estimates slip. Now the price of her pledge to support sanctions against Florida became painfully clear. Cecil said later, “There’s no doubt that Florida would have been very helpful in stemming that tide and giving us something else to talk about: winning an election in a big state with delegates allocated to it.” Her team earlier had anticipated that she would emerge from Super Tuesday with a lead in both pledged delegates and superdelegates. Their new calculations showed Obama gaining strength. Her strategy now looked extraordinarily shaky.

  The media narrative had returned to one of Obama’s momentum. The only question was, did he have enough time to overcome Clinton’s lead in most of the states? Polls showed California closing. With that came talk about a possible Super Tuesday knockout blow to Clinton. But at Obama headquarters, Plouffe was still nervous. Surviving February 5 was still critical. Before South Carolina, Plouffe had feared Clinton might win a hundred more delegates on Super Tuesday. By the day of the voting, he was mildly pessimistic. “I did not think we were going to be ahead in delegates that day and I thought we’d be lucky to win more states,” he said.

  The Super Tuesday returns came cascading in. In the early evening, Clinton was the beneficiary of time zones and geography. She racked up a big and expected victory in New York and won New Jersey handily. She took Massachusetts, even though Obama had the support of the Kennedys, Governor Deval Patrick, and Senator John F. Kerry. The cable networks made much of that. At Obama headquarters, the staff pounded on the networks to show Obama’s victory in the Kansas caucuses. But Clinton was winning Arizona, where Obama had the endorsement of Governor Janet Napolitano, and was ahead in New Mexico, seemingly further evidence of Obama’s weakness among Latinos. And as midnight neared, she had a solid lead in California. Most viewers shut off their televisions. The story at that point appeared to be Clinton’s success in blunting Obama’s momentum. Plouffe knew otherwise. Late into the night the tide began to shift. By early morning it was clear at Obama campaign headquarters that he had managed to eke out a narrow victory in delegates and would capture a greater number of contests, even if they were the smaller caucus states. More important, the survival strategy he had been pursuing since the fall had worked even better than he had hoped—thanks to his momentum from South Carolina.

  Two pairs of states tell that story. The first are New Jersey and Idaho. New Jersey was one of the four Clinton base states; Idaho, the prototypical caucus opportunity for Obama. New Jersey had 107 delegates at stake on Super Tuesday, Idaho just eighteen. Clinton won New Jersey by ten points (54 percent to 44 percent) and won eleven more delegates than Obama. But Obama’s investment in tiny Idaho neutralized the impact of New Jersey, as he won there by an astounding sixty-two points, more than 79 percent to Clinton’s 17. With that margin, he gained twelve more delegates than Clinton. Plouffe had assumed that Obama would win the caucus states, but hardly by the margins achieved. The candidates’ home states provide the other example of how Obama outmaneuvered Clinton. New York had 232 delegates at stake to 153 in Illinois. That should have meant she would come out of those states with more delegates. But Obama kept the race closer in New York than Clinton managed to do in Illinois, thanks to the decision to campaign on Clinton’s home turf. Clinton, though she was born and raised in Illinois, had ignored her home state. The result was that Obama netted more delegates from Illinois than she did from delegate-rich New York.

  Plouffe had calculated that if Obama could survive Super Tuesday by keeping the delegate count close and then do well for the rest of the month of February, the two campaigns might then be in a struggle that would last into the spring. But as he studied the results he came to a far more surprising conclusion—one not apparent to the expert commentators on television or in the press: “I really thought that night we were going to win the nomination,” he said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Fighter

  “This is like a great movie that’s gone on about half an hour too long.”

  —Obama, after defeating Hillary in eleven straight contests

  After Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton lost eleven consecutive contests in fourteen days. She was trounced not only in caucus states like Washington, Nebraska, and Maine, but also in primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and Wisconsin, staggering losses that broke the morale at Clinton headquarters. The impact of her failure to compete fully in the caucuses was now devastatingly clear. With the conclusion of the February 19 Wisconsin primary, more than 2,200 delegates had been awarded—four-fifths in primaries, the remainder in caucuses. In the states with primaries, Obama had won just 27 more delegates than Clinton, but in the states with caucuses he had accumulated 138 more than she had. That meant that 80 percent of his lead came from caucuses, though they accounted for barely a fifth of the total delegates. Clinton’s campaign had blown a critically important opportunity. Given the Democratic Party rules for allocating delegates, Obama now had what amounted to an insurmountable lead.

  Obama drew enormous crowds and favorable press. He could see the finish line and was eager to cross it. Shortly after the Wisconsin primary he told Axelrod, “This is like a great movie that’s gone on about half an hour too long.” He was weary of the battle, as was his chief strategist. “I’m tired of fighting with my friends,” Axelrod told us as he waited for Obama to speak before more than twenty thousand people in the shadow of the Texas Capitol on a chilly February evening.

  Clinton’s campaign was now in total disarray. “It was like acid inside,” said a senior Clinton adviser. Reporters preparing expected postmortems found advisers eager to settle scores with one another publicly. With Solis Doyle gone soon after Super Tuesday, Penn became the prime target. He was criticized for his strategy of inevitability and incumbency in an election year dominated by change and attacked for his brusque and imperious manner.

  As the campaign imploded in January and February, the long-running argument over how to present Clinton continued. Her advisers had long fought over whether they should attack Obama or try to show Hillary in a more appealing way. Now they argued over the message going forward. The disagreement resurfaced the day after New Hampshire at a meeting at the Clinton headquarters. Accounts describe a surreal gathering that began late in the day and went on until late in the
night. Bill Clinton was there, as was Hillary. Advisers floated in and out, debating their opinions, disagreeing on what to do next. Penn came with a proposal to focus on the theme of community, an American community. It sounded like something Bill Clinton might have done in a series of speeches late in his presidency. No one liked the idea.

  Mandy Grunwald argued that the template ought to focus on struggling families. She pointed to Hillary’s moment in New Hampshire, when she welled up with tears as she was talking about fighting for people who themselves were struggling. All great campaigns that have fended off challenges, she said, have been about fighting for people—that was how Bill Clinton had defeated Paul Tsongas, how Walter Mondale had beaten Gary Hart, how Al Gore had stopped Bill Bradley. “Putting people first,” the theme of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, was still a model worth following, she said. Penn worried about anything that smacked of class warfare. Others were not sure it would work.

  Days later, Roy Spence, who had been Mondale’s ad maker in 1984 and was close to both Clintons, had a counterproposal: the “solutions business.” Hillary should stress that she was about solving problems. For a time, the campaign tried that message—to little effect. It seemed contrived; it did not capture the mood of change; it was too detached from more passionate focus on working families. Hillary shifted to a message with more fire, and greater focus on hard-hit families.

  Penn and Grunwald, often allies in the past, began to part ways over the message. They argued over ads. One exchange became so intense that Guy Cecil walked out in disgust. “You guys need to grow up,” he snapped. “You’re acting like kids.” Penn continued his feud with Ickes. He disagreed with Wolfson over basic strategy. Critics said he was too powerful. Penn complained that he never had enough authority to do what he really wanted, to attack Obama relentlessly. Nerves were raw as the once mighty Clinton team absorbed the reality of Obama’s now strong position. After an argument with Wolfson, Singer snapped, dropping a series of F-bombs before storming out of the headquarters. He stayed away the rest of the week, cooling down. “At that point, everybody had reached a breaking point with the press,” said a senior Clinton adviser. “The press had reached their breaking point with us. And we all had reached our breaking point with each other.”