With that, Hillary launched into a long call-and-response, smacking the Republicans hard in every stanza, and then cuing her supporters to chant the made-for-JJ tag line “Turn Up the Heat.”
“I’m interested in attacking the problems of America, and I believe we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans; they deserve all the heat we can give them,” she said.
“Turn up the heat!” her sign-waving supporters shouted in unison, with all the spontaneity of a Politburo meeting.
Standing against the bleachers as Hillary spoke, I thought she had done a fine job of executing her strategy, but she also had played right into ours. There could not have been a starker example of “textbook politics.” Her speech was a steady diet of red meat for a partisan crowd, without a whole lot of nutritional value. The Republicans were responsible for all America’s problems. Now, to solve them, we had to “turn up the heat” on them. It might have seemed like an ideal refrain in an arena full of activist Democrats, but even in that boisterous room, folks were weary of the overheated, partisan food fight that had broken out in Washington. They knew it wasn’t just the Republicans, but our entire political system, that was askew. Many liked Hillary, but saw her as a polarizing figure. By stressing her Washington experience, toughness, and preparedness to fight, Hillary seemed to be promising more of the same.
Well, she’s done her part, I thought, as I waited for Barack to begin. Now I hope to God we do ours.
From the moment Nancy Pelosi returned to the stage to welcome Barack, our supporters, more numerous and frenetic, were primed to explode. Large banners bearing the word “Hope” were strewn from the railings surrounding the balcony, and the mere mention of Obama’s name created pandemonium. We added to this a little shtick of our own. I had recruited Ray Clay, the old Chicago Stadium announcer, to record an additional introduction to lead Barack to the stage in the same hyperbolic fashion Clay had once used to usher Michael Jordan to the court during the player’s glory years with the Bulls.
“And now,” Clay roared in his signature growl, “from our neighboring state of Illinois, a six-foot-two force for change—Senator Barack Obama!” By the time Barack sprinted up the stairs, hugged Pelosi, and seized the mike, the creaky old arena was rocking. After a brisk stroll around the perimeter of the stage to acknowledge the cheers, Obama quickly quieted the crowd.
If Hillary had appealed to them as partisans, Barack addressed them as Americans, signaling from his opening remarks that these were no ordinary times.
We are in a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for feels as if it’s slowly slipping away. We’re working harder for less. We’ve never paid more for health care or for college. It’s harder to save and it’s harder to retire. And most of all we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it . . .
. . . And that is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do in this election. That’s why not answering questions ’cause we’re afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do. If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, then we can’t live in fear of losing it.
This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle. Not by calculation, but by conviction. When we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose—a higher purpose. And I run for the presidency of the United States of America because that is the party that America needs us to be right now.
It was Barack at his best. Hillary had made a standard political speech. Barack was making a reasoned and resonant argument for deeper and more fundamental change. As he spoke, I noticed supporters of the other candidates nodding their heads in agreement and joining in the applause. We had won the day.
As Barack finished to a rapturous ovation, Gibbs and I exchanged a hug and a high five, before catching up with Barack and Michelle as they exited the arena. “Fucking home run,” I blurted. “Yeah, I thought it was solid,” he said, a term to which I long ago had come to realize meant “really good” in Obama’s understated parlance. As we spoke, a gleeful Harstad, who had been sitting in the balcony with the troops, stumbled over. It was clear, from the moment he threw a congratulatory arm around me, that Paul had begun the celebration a little early. “This was a really big night for us,” he said, hanging unusually long on the word “really.” “He reaaaallly nailed it!”
Whistling past the graveyard, Penn told reporters that Obama had packed the arena with kids who would never attend the caucuses. Their response was meaningless, he said. But that was a loser’s lament. Barack had nailed it, clearly and compellingly defining the race in his terms. While we remained in a three-way tie in Harstad’s polling, Barack’s JJ speech infused our Iowa campaign with a new sense of energy and purpose that would sustain us for the final sprint of the campaign.
When Hillary spoke that evening, she told the crowd, “I’m not interested in attacking my opponents. I’m interested in attacking the problems of America.” It was consistent with her usual posture as the strong, confident presumptive nominee. Yet after that evening in Des Moines, it was clear that we had entered a new reality. The presumptive front-runner was in jeopardy—and she knew it.
On November 18, the Times reported that the Clinton campaign had called a Code Blue in Iowa, doubling the size of its operation there and vastly increasing Hillary’s presence in the state. On December 1, the Des Moines Register’s latest poll revealed why the Clinton campaign had gone into emergency mode. In October, Hillary was leading by seven. Now Obama had passed her and was winning by three.
The next day, when Hillary met with the media, it was clear that she was ditching the above-the-fray strategy. “Now the fun part starts,” she said. “We’re into the last month, and we’re going to start drawing a contrast, because I want every Iowan to have accurate information when they make their decisions.” Three weeks after declaring that she did not want to attack her primary opponents, Hillary was about to do just that—and she sounded downright gleeful about the prospect. Even the campaign-hardened press seemed taken aback by the ardor with which she bared her teeth—Hillary unchained!
In campaigns, the most discouraging thing is to be ignored by your opponents. So from my vantage point, Hillary’s challenge was good news. She wasn’t going after Biden or Dodd, or even Edwards. She was attacking us, and everyone understood why. Moreover, there was an air of desperation to the shift. The eagerness with which she descended from her front-runner’s perch to declare open season on Obama only validated our critique that she was a reflection of scorched-earth Washington politics rather than an answer to it.
True to Hillary’s vow, the Clinton camp commenced its version of “shock and awe,” launching attacks that veered from the legitimate, such as Barack’s practice of voting “present” on some controversial issues in Springfield; to the absurd, such as highlighting a pair of schoolboy essays in which Barack wrote of wanting to be president. “What’s next? I didn’t play well in the sandbox in kindergarten,” Obama joked. The goal was to paint him as more of an ambitious, calculating politician than an agent of change—to characterize Obama in the same way he had so effectively characterized Clinton. Yet soon the tenor of the attacks would take on a more personal edge, courtesy of a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire.
Billy Shaheen, husband of the state’s former governor Jeanne Shaheen, was the cochair of Hillary’s campaign in New Hampshire, where public polls showed Obama was closing the gap. So it was big news when he unloaded on Obama for the teenage drug use that Barack himself
had disclosed in Dreams from My Father. That admission, Shaheen said, would make Obama a fatally flawed nominee.
“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen said during an interview with the Washington Post. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”
The next day, we were in Washington, where Barack had Senate business. I joined him because we planned to use a flight to Des Moines to go over strategy for a debate later that day. As the gate swung open at the entrance of the charter terminal, I saw a young man running up to our car. Trying to catch his breath, the kid blurted out, “Senator Clinton would like to speak to Senator Obama.” Hillary’s charter plane was parked right next to ours.
“What do you think this is about?” Barack asked.
“She’ll tell you how sorry she is for Shaheen’s remark and assure you that she and her campaign had nothing to do with it,” I said. “Then they’ll leak that she personally apologized.”
Gibbs and I climbed into our plane and grabbed window seats so we could watch the show. Hillary climbed down the steps of hers with her longtime traveling aide, Huma Abedin, and greeted Barack on the tarmac. The conversation seemed to begin calmly enough, as Hillary spoke and Barack listened. Then, when Barack responded, Hillary became very agitated, jabbing her finger at him and speaking in an animated fashion. The exchange went on for ten minutes, as Huma and Reggie toed the ground and gazed skyward, looking as if they wanted to be just about anywhere but on the tarmac bearing witness to this unfriendly encounter between their bosses. At one point, Barack put his hand on Hillary’s shoulder in what appeared to be an effort to calm things down, but she brushed it away. “What the hell is going on over there?” I asked Gibbs. “I don’t know, but she doesn’t look too happy,” he said.
Finally, Barack and Reggie returned to the plane. Barack flopped down in a seat, a look of disbelief on his face, as he reflected on what had just gone down. Hillary’s initial points were exactly as I had predicted. She apologized. She said she’d had no idea Billy was going to attack the way he had and certainly hadn’t approved it. Then, when in accepting her apology, Barack said each of them still had to take responsibility for the actions and tone of their campaigns, Hillary got angry. She recounted a catalogue of affronts she felt she had endured from us. It wasn’t Hillary’s words that struck Barack, but her demeanor.
“For the first time in this campaign, I saw fear in her eyes,” he said.
• • •
I spent the last six weeks before the caucuses traveling with Barack on what was a combination rock tour and political revival. Some events were ear-splitting, arena-filling extravaganzas, such as the three-state journey from Iowa to South Carolina to New Hampshire with Oprah Winfrey, which drew a combined sixty thousand people.
Yet much of our time was spent moving around the small towns of Iowa in a campaign RV outfitted with couches, tables, a kitchen, and televisions tuned to ESPN, not cable news, by order of the candidate. There was always food around. When we weren’t taking our meals in a back office or gymnasium locker room, before or after events, we would eat in the RV. Generally, it was lean chicken or fish and vegetables for Barack, who was determined to eat healthily, and worked out hard every day; and pizza, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken for those of us whose survival was less crucial to the future of the country. In between meals, there was an endless supply of snacks, which was deadly for me, and my wardrobe, on which one could too often find visual evidence of the day’s samplings. A habitual nosher, especially when I am tense, I would gain twenty-five pounds by the end of the campaign—and I wasn’t exactly svelte when it started.
All this contributed to my sometimes cartoonish image as a rumpled, paunchy, food-stained savant. Susan hated that portrayal, regarding it as demeaning, but it was a source of endless fun for my colleagues, especially the fastidious and elegant candidate. Barack could spot a stain on my clothes from twenty paces, and loved to rib me about it. It didn’t help my cause when, one day on the road, I tried to multitask by snacking and answering e-mail at the same time, perhaps becoming the first person on the planet to disable his BlackBerry with a Krispy Kreme donut.
Much as I enjoyed the jovial camaraderie and the rolling smorgasbord of snacks, I did have a few essential functions on the road. With a full press corps in tow, a lot of plays had to be audibled on the spot when breaking news demanded a rapid response from the candidate. That might mean crafting a “topper,” or an insert for his next set of remarks. It also meant briefing Barack, on the fly, for one of the many interviews he would do along the campaign trail and doing interviews myself, usually to fill the voracious appetite of cable news.
I was an on- and off-the-record resource for the reporters who were following us. My goal in these conversations was to advance our message and ignore whatever contretemps du jour had seized their attention at present—and, generally, I succeeded. Yet in one such scrum, late in December, I wound up making unintended and decidedly unhelpful news.
Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, had been assassinated the previous day, apparently the victim of Islamic extremists. A reporter said Clinton supporters were pointing to Bhutto’s murder as an example of the volatility of the world, underscoring the need for a tested, experienced president like Hillary. Almost mechanically, I followed our basic strategy of turning such questions back to the issue of judgment and Iraq.
“Barack Obama had the judgment to oppose the war in Iraq,” I said in response. “And he warned at the time that it would divert us from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, and now we see the effect of that. Al Qaeda is resurgent. They’re a powerful force now in Pakistan . . . There’s a suspicion they may have been involved in this. I think his judgment was good. Senator Clinton made a different judgment . . . So that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend.”
There were some two dozen reporters there, and almost all of them got my point. Yet one, Jessica Yellin of CNN, drew a slightly stronger inference than I had intended, giving the Clinton campaign an opportunity to suggest that I had blamed Hillary for Bhutto’s death. It required me, later that day, to clarify to CNN what I meant, which added another dimension to the dispute and gave the network’s anchors new angles to discuss. Wolf Blitzer asked Hillary and Barack about it in separate interviews. Suddenly I was the story.
“I believe our policies in Iraq have had a direct impact on events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I would not suggest there is a straight line relationship between the events of today in Pakistan and anyone’s particular vote,” I said. “What I was pointing out was the difference in judgment at the time. Obama thought that the war would have a negative impact in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that seems relevant right now . . .
“I certainly wasn’t suggesting Senator Clinton was complicit. She made a bad judgment on this war, and the war helped exacerbate problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that’s certainly something I would stand by.”
It was a needless brushfire, which smoldered for some time. When Ted Kennedy called Bill Clinton in January to complain about the tactics Hillary’s campaign had deployed against Barack, the former president argued that we were the ones guilty of unscrupulous attacks. “Axelrod said Hillary killed Benazir Bhutto!” he complained.
The Bhutto imbroglio was another reminder of just how easy it is, in the wildly reactive world of a presidential campaign, to trip a wire and, at least for a moment, send the media coverage spiraling off in unhelpful directions. Barack recognized the absurdity of the whole scene, and strongly defended me when he was asked about it in a television interview. Privately, however, he cautioned me about going too far. “I’m telling you what you always tell me. Don’t give them a chance to write stuff like this.”
For the most part, however, the final weeks of the Iowa campaign were as exhilarating as any I had experienced in politics. Fro
m the JJ on, Barack was on fire, inspiring the belief that real, meaningful change was within reach—in not just our policies, but our squalid, debilitating politics. It didn’t need to be said that our candidate’s improbable rise was a living symbol of that hope and change. Overflow crowds greeted us, in large towns and small, for events that now felt less like political rallies than wholesome, joyous community celebrations. At each stop, Barack, his voice raspy from overwork and overexposure to the winter chill, reminded Iowans about the enormous power they wielded to change history’s course.
As the days ticked down, thousands of supporters poured in from across the country on their own dime, happily trudging through the Iowa snow to augment the young corps that had been working the state without relief for months now. Susan and my youngest son, Ethan, home for the holidays from Colorado College, relocated to Des Moines to pitch in for the final stretch. Four years earlier, as a high school student, Ethan had spent a summer volunteering for Barack’s Senate campaign, working as a press assistant in the relative tranquility of our small campaign office. Now he and Susan would man the phone banks amid the pandemonium of our dilapidated Iowa headquarters.
My old friend Bettylu Saltzman, who had introduced me to Barack with such extravagant predictions about his future, encamped in Des Moines with her husband, Paul, for the final push. Though in their seventies, the couple bundled up and went door to door for Barack, as did many other old friends from Chicago.
Throughout December, Harstad’s polls still had Iowa as a tight three-way race. Yet under Iowa’s idiosyncratic caucus rules, where supporters of candidates who failed to attain a prescribed “threshold” of support among caucus attendees could switch their support to one of the “viable” candidates, Barack held a slight edge. This hurt Hillary, who might have been beloved by her own supporters but, with higher negatives than either Barack or Edwards, wasn’t a popular second choice.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 30