Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  The debate would be televised on MSNBC and heavily promoted by NBC, which released a poll the previous evening showing the gap closing nationally between Hillary and Barack. True to my Jewish, glass-half-empty outlook, I could see only the cloud around the silver lining: Barack would now be under even greater scrutiny, pressed by his opponents and probed by the pundits to see if he was worthy of his newly lofty standing in the polls.

  When the lights went on, Barack did little to disarm the skeptics. He gave answers without great conviction, as he struggled to adjust to the sixty-second format. He seemed passive, perhaps even a bit intimidated by the occasion or the company. When the moderator, Brian Williams, painting a hypothetical crisis—simultaneous terrorist attacks on major American cities—inquired about the first steps Barack would take, Obama neglected to include that he would pursue the perpetrators. Only after Hillary and others jumped in to make that point did he come back to amend his answer.

  After the debate, Obama’s terrorism gaffe touched off a fracas between Penn and me in the “spin room,” the location of a surreal ritual whereby operatives for each campaign, mobbed by the news media, attempt to put their preferred slant on an event the reporters have just witnessed for themselves. Still, despite our best efforts, there was no hiding the truth. Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the Times recounted the awkward omission from the terrorism answer, and accurately observed that Obama “seemed subdued throughout.”

  Objectively, a lot also was still going right for Obama. What was especially encouraging was the openness to the idea of an Obama candidacy in two early states, Iowa and New Hampshire, in which there were few minority voters. None of us was naïve enough to assume that race, which had defined so much of American history, would not be a barrier for some. There were millions of white voters, particularly in the South, who had shifted to the Republican Party over the years almost entirely over issues of race, and many older, working-class and rural white Democrats for whom it would be a factor. Yet our research in Iowa and New Hampshire suggested that there were plenty of white voters who were open to Obama, and responded well to his message and his story.

  We also saw among black voters in South Carolina an impulse I had seen among minority voters before. They were drawn to the idea of a candidate from their community, but skeptical that white voters would be. So they were holding back, waiting to see if Obama’s candidacy was real. The research suggested that if we won Iowa, it would unlock his support among black voters nationwide, even with the popular Clintons on the other side.

  Yet Barack wasn’t impervious to all the negative chatter. Although he denied reading political punditry, he somehow was always up-to-date on even the most elite musings. (“You know, I think Andrew Sullivan has a point,” a conversation would begin.) And he would hear it from donors, who, sitting in New York or LA, were moved more by a national poll in the Times than happy talk from Iowa. Throughout the campaign, Barack would remain remarkably loyal to his team, even when the world was calling for our heads. But he wasn’t immune to doubt.

  In July, the senior management of the campaign was summoned to a meeting with Barack and Michelle at Valerie Jarrett’s Hyde Park apartment. No one saw this as good news. Valerie wasn’t deeply involved in the day-to-day workings of the campaign, but protective of her friend, she had an unerring instinct for leaning in when she perceived that things weren’t going as planned. Barack told Plouffe and me that he wanted to review “where we were,” and consider what changes might be necessary.

  Anticipating a challenging conversation, a number of us agreed to meet early at my office to prepare before driving down to Hyde Park together. I worked at home until it was time to leave for the pre-meeting at my office. Then, when I tried to edge my car out of the double parking space I shared with my wife, my car suddenly gunned backward, slamming into the front of her car and into a thick beam. Startled, I quickly shifted the car into drive, and it gunned forward, hitting Susan’s car again, before vaulting over a barrier. I didn’t want to be late for this critical meeting, so I kept on driving, calling Susan on the way to tell her I “might have nicked” her car. When she came down to see for herself, the parking lot manager was there. “Do you have any idea who might have done this to your car?” he asked. “Yes,” Susan said, as she eyed the mangled mess. “I think it was my husband.” The manager shook his head in pity.

  It turned out that I had cracked an axle on my own car when I jumped the barrier and had put myself and several of the Obama campaign brain trust at risk by driving us to Hyde Park and back. Even without realizing our lives were in danger, though, we found the drive to Valerie’s in my wounded Pontiac filled with tension—and the subsequent gathering warranted all of it.

  Along with the Obamas, Valerie, and the campaign hierarchy, there was a surprise guest—Chris Edley, the dean of Berkeley’s law school, a veteran of the Clinton administration, and an old friend of Barack’s. The meeting began with the candidate’s review of where he saw the campaign. Obama spoke from copious notes he had written, as was his custom, on a yellow legal pad, raising thoughtful questions about, among other things, how we were utilizing his time. Having just finished his thirteenth swing in Iowa, he wondered whether a continued focus there was strategically right at a time when he was slipping in national polls. He also repeated his familiar refrain that he wanted more time to devote to substantive policy work. Each of us got a chance to respond and report. The fireworks began when Edley, whom few of us knew, took his turn to speak, or more accurately, to lecture. Edley felt we were putting too much of the onus on Barack and were not responsive to his needs.

  “Get over yourselves!” he screamed. “He wants time to think through policy, don’t fight him, give him that time. He is the candidate. You work for him.”

  He mined this vein for considerable time, systematically antagonizing everyone in the room except, perhaps, the Obamas, who listened quietly, and Valerie, who told me later that she thought Edley had been “brilliant.” There were some modest changes as a result of the discussion, but Edley came and went, and the evening faded into memory as a kind of weird catharsis in the midst of our long march.

  The funny thing was that this session happened just as I had begun to sense that things were coming together. Maybe it was because Michelle and the girls had joined him on the July 4 swing, but Barack seemed happier and more energetic than he had in some time. His speeches were tighter and rife with the powerful message of change—not just from Bush, but from Washington—that distinguished him from the pack. While skepticism remained high, even some of the reporters were at least getting the point. Politico’s notoriously cynical Ben Smith noted the contrast between Obama’s appeal and the caustic, hyperpartisan tone in Washington, where, Smith wrote, “Democratic denunciations of the war and the president are growing in volume.”

  “In some of his speeches, he didn’t even mention President Bush,” Smith reported after one of Obama’s July 4 stops. “He told small-town Iowa Democrats of the huge crowds that had greeted him from Atlanta to Iowa City, and mulled what was drawing the masses to his campaign: Not, he said, his own person, but a desire for change. ‘What they’re also saying when . . . they come out to these rallies is, ‘We don’t want to be against something—we want to be for something,’ he said repeatedly in Iowa. This is a central gamble of Obama’s campaign for president. The loudest voices in the Democratic Party—from Chairman Howard Dean to former Senator John Edwards and Senator Hillary Clinton—have been sounding steady notes of confrontation with the White House. Clinton and Edwards argue that they will win the partisan wars. Obama argues that the country, and even partisans, are tired of partisan warfare.”

  Exactly right. That was our gamble. The conventional wisdom held that Iowa Democrats were the most partisan of partisans and would reward the candidate who could best take it to the Republicans. Our bet was that there were plenty of Iowans—even Iowa Democrats—who were fed up with the
trench warfare in Washington, and wanted a leader who could unite Americans. And the message was beginning to punch through.

  Plouffe and Hildebrand had been steadily building the Iowa campaign since February. To run it, they persuaded Hildy’s business partner, Paul Tewes, an experienced Iowa hand, to saddle up one more time. They hired Mitch Stewart, a master organizer from neighboring South Dakota, to lead a field operation of young recruits who began arriving in the spring. Legend held that it took Iowans to organize Iowa, but the special kids who were drawn to the state for Obama became Iowans. They embedded themselves in their assigned communities and their energy and idealism were infectious. One young man from Colorado became so close to the folks in the town he organized that they would ask him to stay and run for City Council.

  Throughout the dog days of summer, visiting with the uplifting kids who were toiling for us in Iowa was the surest tonic for the cynical, dismissive drumbeat of the Washington political class. We believed they would give us a critical edge in a contest that, in the end, would rely on persuading individual Iowans to come out on a cold winter’s night and, in front of their neighbors, stand up for Obama. In that process, there was no substitute for building relationships—and while the troops could prepare the groundwork, it often took the candidate himself to close the deal—sometimes going to great lengths to do so.

  Once, in between flights on our campaign charter, Gibbs asked Obama to call an Iowa high school student to ask for her endorsement. In Iowa, young people who come of voting age before the general election are allowed to participate in the caucuses, even if they’re just seventeen years old. Our Iowa organizers thought the backing of this influential student leader could unleash a raft of caucus attendees from among her classmates. Gibbs got her on the line.

  “Hey, this is Senator Barack Obama,” Barack said brightly. “I’m calling because I’d really like to have your support.”

  Obama listened for a moment. “Uh, yeah, sure,” he said, before handing the phone back to Gibbs, shaking his head.

  What did she say? Gibbs asked.

  “She said she was going into a class and asked if I could call her back later,” Barack said with a weak smile. “Blown off by a seventeen-year-old kid! You know, this business of running for president can be really humbling sometimes.”

  To give our troops air cover, we launched our Iowa advertising campaign in late June, a full six months before the caucuses. This is the edge all that early money afforded us: the chance to reach beyond the cloudy filter of the news media and share Barack’s appeal with enough volume to make an impact. Harstad and Binder had done extensive research among potential caucus attendees in Iowa, and it confirmed our basic theory of the case. Barack’s story was foundational; it authenticated his message. So we began with a series of biographical ads.

  The first, “Choices,” recalled Barack’s early years, the life choices he had made that would illuminate his values and commitments. As a black-and-white archival montage unfolded, the narrator spoke of Obama’s years as a young community organizer after college “for local churches, working to help families devastated by plant closings.” That one sentence alone was remarkably effective. Iowa was no stranger to plant closings, and Barack’s determination to help displaced workers was compelling. That Obama had done the work through churches would help answer the questions that sometimes arose about his faith.

  A second ad burnished Barack’s bipartisan achievements as an Illinois legislator, and featured one of his Republican colleagues, state senator Kirk Dillard. “Senator Obama worked on some of the deepest issues we had and he was successful in a bipartisan way,” Dillard said, as Obama’s substantial legislative achievements scrolled on the screen. Some thought it ludicrous to run a testimonial from a Republican in a caucus dominated by partisan Democrats, but it was a refreshing note to Iowans weary of political disharmony in Washington. The ad worked for us, if not for Dillard, who would narrowly lose GOP primaries for Illinois governor in 2010 and again in 2014, flayed by the Right for his display of bipartisanship.

  Taken together, the ads were a tapestry, weaving for Iowans a picture of Obama as an authentic and effective agent of change. These ads were right in my wheelhouse. The creative process of interviewing subjects, writing a narrative, choosing words and images that told a genuine story while conveying a larger meaning—and all in thirty or sixty seconds—remained one of my passions. Energizing as this work was for me, though, these ads were among the last I would personally take from conception to air. As McKinnon had predicted, the pace of the campaign meant that I no longer could indulge myself. Increasingly, I would focus on strategy, and simply review scripts and rough cuts of ads. The production would fall to Jim Margolis, his brilliant and prodigious team, and my gifted partner John Del Cecato.

  It was hard to let go and even harder to acknowledge that others might have strengths as ad makers equal to or perhaps greater than my own. Yet with Larry deftly managing the process, it was gratifying to watch as so many talents were melded into a coherent and collegial creative team.

  Still, no matter how compelling the ads were or how credible and authentic they felt, they remained ads, and voters would always filter them through that lens. In statewide races, where news coverage of campaigns is limited, ads tend to carry the heaviest weight. In presidential races, which are intensively covered by local and national media, voters watch the candidates day to day, and form their own impressions. Events would either reinforce the ads or undercut them.

  • • •

  We continued pursuing a “lion’s den” strategy of telling hard truths in difficult venues. At Gibbs’s suggestion, Obama unveiled his plan to require significantly higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks at the Detroit Economic Club, challenging the automakers on their own turf. At an AFL-CIO town hall meeting, he defended his support for charter schools over the vehement objection of the powerful teachers’ unions. In the fall, he would challenge Wall Street in a speech at NASDAQ, where he presciently warned that reckless risk taking and market-rigging schemes threatened the economy. Obama was demonstrating what a different kind of politics meant.

  For Barack’s psyche and self-confidence, there were two turning points that summer, provoked by foreign policy issues that pitted him against Hillary and much of the presidential field along with the Washington establishment.

  In a CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, South Carolina, a questioner asked Obama if he would be willing to meet, within his first year in office, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. Obama, without hesitation, responded affirmatively.

  “I would,” he said. “And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous.”

  Sensing an error, Hillary pounced. “I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year,” she said, arguing that foundational diplomatic work would be necessary before any such meetings. “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes.”

  The Clinton campaign quickly attacked Barack for naïvely having “committed” to a presidential meeting with such tyrannical figures as Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez. Obama hadn’t “committed” anything, I shot back, but said he would be “willing” to talk with our enemies, as Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy had with their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. Clinton, I pointed out, had simply shared Bush’s view that we should stonewall, which had proven to be a losing strategy.

  The next morning, as he was leaving Charleston, Obama jumped onto our regular senior staff conference call—such candidate presence was quite rare—grabbing the phone from Gibbs to deliver a message.

  “I don’t want anybody backing off, interpreting, or in any way changing the meaning of what I said,” Barack ordered. “You guys hear me? I meant what I said. We�
�re right on this, and I’m not going to back up one inch.”

  Barack was relishing the fight. “You know, this whole exchange really brings into focus why I am running,” he said, reflecting on the brouhaha. “These other folks are smart, capable people. But they’re just going to tinker at the margins. They’re not going to challenge establishment thinking on any of these issues.”

  A week later, another clash erupted—one to which I unwittingly contributed. In early July, a story in the New York Times had caught my eye. It disclosed that the Bush administration had vetoed a raid in Pakistan in 2005 that could have netted Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and other high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders. Part of the reasoning behind the administration standing down, the Times reported, were concerns that such an operation “could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas,” where bin Laden and his lieutenants were thought to be hiding.

  I found Ben Rhodes, the young speechwriter who was working on a draft of a foreign policy speech Barack was to give in Washington on August 1. A short, intense man whom I called Rocky (to go with Rhodes), Ben was the elegant writer responsible for much of the transfixing, novelistic 9/11 Commission Report. “You mean to tell me that if we knew where bin Laden was, we wouldn’t go in and get him for fear of offending the Pakistanis?” I asked.

  “That’s been the policy,” Ben replied.

  “That’s fucking outrageous,” I said. “One of the reasons Barack had opposed the war in Iraq was that it deflected attention from the mission of dealing with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He should say something about this.” I jotted down a few lines that I wanted to add to the foreign policy speech; Rhodes tweaked them; and Obama, who consistently had argued for a more aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda, agreed with the language.

  “I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges,” he would say in the speech. “But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an Al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”