Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Barack said. “And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

  This was a common problem. Barack would get into a room of wealthy supporters and, thinking he was among friends, offer remarkably candid, if impolitic, observations—except this time there was a blogger for the Huffington Post in the crowd, recording the entire disquisition on her digital recorder.

  “For crying out loud, he sounds like Margaret Fucking Mead interpreting the natives to a freaking anthropology conference,” I screamed when I read the quotes. I understood Barack’s analysis and the perspective from which he was offering it. He was not trying to demean the white working class; he was actually trying to defend them. He was putting himself in their shoes. However, his description of Americans clinging to guns and religion as a reaction to their economic marginalization came off as patronizing and insulting.

  Irksome as it was, the San Francisco gaffe also produced some collateral damage. Campaigning at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Michelle decided she had heard enough and took a hard swing at those who branded Barack an elitist. “There’s a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that. Yeah, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with,” she said. “I am the product of a working-class upbringing. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class community.” Then, with more than a little edge in her voice, Michelle added: “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt? But, again, maybe I’m out of touch.”

  It wasn’t so much what she said, but how she said it. The footage quickly made the rounds on cable and the Internet, and it didn’t take a political genius to see that it was harmful. Michelle is a warm, whip-smart, and often hilarious person, but when she’s angry, she can be stinging and come off as sarcastic. Her remarks seemed to me more diatribe than discussion. This normally highly polished professional woman looked peeved and out of sorts. With her comments in Wisconsin—“for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m proud of my country”—and now this, Michelle was playing into a Fox News game of transference: if Obama himself isn’t scary, maybe you can raise doubts by depicting his pastor and his wife as angry militants.

  If people thought Michelle seemed angry on the campaign trail, they should have seen her afterward with us. She was livid—and with plenty of justification. Perhaps she had slipped with her remarks, but we were the ones who had thrown her out on the trail with inadequate staffing, preparation, and support. The result was that a remarkable woman, a woman who would become one of our greatest assets, was now regarded as a liability. It would shake her confidence in the campaign team, and that had repercussions. It spun up Valerie, who was sensitive to her friend’s feelings and saw herself as Michelle’s personal advocate within the campaign. Also, it would distress Barack, who revered his wife and felt more than a little guilt over the sacrifices he had asked her to make for his career. He didn’t like being a target; he hated how she had now become one.

  Hillary would win Pennsylvania by more than nine points, but in what was becoming a familiar pattern, she won only a few more delegates than Obama, and not enough to cut into our increasingly insurmountable lead. Her only remaining path to victory was to fight to the end, hoping to expose in Obama a fatal flaw that might persuade the three hundred or so still-unpledged superdelegates—members of Congress and party officials—to tilt the nomination her way. Despite our miscues, national polls were working against that scenario, many of which reported that Hillary’s negatives among general election voters were at an all-time high, far exceeding Barack’s.

  “If Senator Clinton thinks she has a legitimate chance to win the nomination, she has every reason to stay,” I told reporters on the back of our campaign plane, as we escaped Pennsylvania on primary night and headed home. “But if her only strategy is to try and tear down Senator Obama, I think that’s going to make a lot of Democrats uncomfortable.” Gibbs and I did the press “gaggle” decked out in T-shirts we’d bought in Philly: “Stop the Drama. Vote Obama.”

  The next day’s drama was mostly internal when Barack called another “yellow pad” meeting at his home. I learned later that Valerie and Rouse had met with Barack and Michelle before we arrived. They concluded that Plouffe, Gibbs, and I exercised too much power over the campaign, and that the decision-making group had to be expanded. Moreover, they wanted more “discipline” in our message operation. If I had known about the pre-meeting meeting, I would not have been blindsided when Barack announced that there would be an additional “strategy” call every evening, led by Anita Dunn.

  Anita was a smart operative, a partner in Squier’s old firm whom I had recruited to join the campaign as a senior adviser in our communications shop. Still, I was irritated by Barack’s gesture, which came without forewarning and was interpreted by everyone in the room as a shot at me. We knew we couldn’t win Pennsylvania. Our mission had been to keep the race close while holding down Hillary’s margin and delegate bounty, and in that we had mostly succeeded. By my accounting, we had moved from quixotic challenger to the doorstep of the Democratic nomination on the strength of the strategic messaging I had developed from the start. Barack’s periodic complaint, particularly in low moments in the campaign, was that my style was instinctive and undisciplined. Yet I certainly hadn’t suggested the “clinging to guns and religion” line or unleashed Reverend Wright—and I wouldn’t have sent Barack to a bowling alley if I had known he was going to roll a 37!

  Our campaign had experienced blessedly little of the palace intrigue that had crippled Hillary’s and so many others’. When there were issues, we aired them openly. In the main, that would be true until the end. So this maneuver, cooked up in furtive sidebar conversations, was an unwelcome aberration. I seethed in silence, and the new arrangement wound up amounting to little change in my role. Still, the drawn-out battle in Pennsylvania and this grueling campaign had drained something out of everyone.

  • • •

  There would be seven more state elections, but the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina were Clinton’s last real opportunity to tilt the race by casting doubt in the minds of still-uncommitted party leaders about Obama’s electability. Indiana’s demographics played to her advantage, while North Carolina, with its large African American base, was ripe for us. A loss there would be a serious blow.

  The run-up to these contests brought additional turbulence, as Reverend Wright resurfaced on a national media tour. It culminated in a preening, provocative performance at the National Press Club, in which he took delight in reprising some of his most controversial statements, and dismissed Obama’s race speech as the prattling of a politician, as opposed to the truth telling of a man of the cloth.

  When I reached Barack on the road, he didn’t quite process the tone and scale of Wright’s act, and issued an antiseptic statement disavowing the minister’s remarks. Later, when he got to his hotel that night and watched the footage, and the breathless coverage it generated, he absorbed its full impact.

  When I caught up with him the next morning, he wasn’t looking for advice.

  “I know what I have to do,” he said grimly

  It was the final straw. Barack had tried hard to defend his pastor, even as he condemned some of his words. Now he didn’t hold back. “[I]f Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing . . . then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on
his remarks . . . well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either.” Days later, the Obamas withdrew their membership from Trinity.

  • • •

  It felt as if we had been running on fumes for months. The car was moving forward, but without much pep. Then a gift dropped in our laps that allowed Barack to refill his tank and ours.

  In the midst of the Pennsylvania primary, McCain had tried to force his way back into the campaign narrative by calling for a federal gas tax moratorium in response to record high gas prices. Hillary soon embraced McCain’s proposal, which seemed to many like Politics 101. With gas prices nearing four dollars a gallon, logic dictated that you do something, anything, to appear to be responding to the problem.

  When Barack was asked about the gas tax idea, however, he gave a different answer. He had voted for such a policy as a state legislator, and it had turned out to be a scam. The savings rarely reached consumers because they were quickly gobbled up by the oil industry. Such bogus palliatives failed to address the true causes of fuel price spikes, like manipulation of the oil markets and the absence of a comprehensive national energy policy, Barack said.

  Rather than embracing a formulaic Washington gimmick, Obama was telling hard truths. We inserted language on the gas tax debate into Barack’s stump speech, and he went from there, riffing so compellingly that we turned it into a sixty-second ad.

  As this dispute was playing out, the Washington Post’s Dan Balz grabbed me at the back of a rally in North Carolina and asked, “Are you sure you guys know what you’re doing on the gas tax? Everyone in Washington thinks you’re nuts.” Yet our numbers showed that it was having exactly the impact we had hoped for. People accepted the gas tax debate as less about relief at the pump than a parable about honesty, character, and leadership.

  Emblematic of “Change You Can Believe In,” the gas tax debate put us on the offensive again. I was feeling great until I got a call from Harstad, who had been polling in Indiana on the eve of the primaries.

  “I have some numbers, and the news isn’t particularly good,” he said. “We’ve been slipping a little every day in Indiana, and in tonight’s calling, we were twelve points down.”

  Twelve points? We were playing for a win in Indiana, or at least a close race.

  Sensing my mood, Harstad offered a hasty disclaimer: “It could just be a bad night of calling, and if you look at the full sample of the last three days, we’re still relatively close. But I thought I should tell you.”

  I wished he hadn’t. Despite Harstad’s very sensible admonition about the reliability of one night’s calling, and the visible signs of enthusiastic support right in front of me in the jam-packed Indianapolis mall where Obama had just spoken, I was completely overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom—and I apparently didn’t hide it well. When I walked into Obama’s holding area after the speech, he was in the midst of a big laugh with his friends Valerie, Marty Nesbitt, and Eric Whitaker, who were riding along to help keep their friend’s spirits up. As soon as he saw my face, Obama stopped laughing.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  I foolishly reported on Harstad’s call. In part, I didn’t want a repeat of New Hampshire, and a downbeat knock on his door if things went bad. I also didn’t want to suffer in silence. Yet after the gauntlet of the past two months, Barack had been enjoying himself and he wasn’t in the mood for bad news.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he said, waving me off, only half in jest. “You’re a big downer.”

  As I walked into the hotel, I ran into Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post and Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, two of the more seasoned members of our traveling press corps. Shailagh was a delight, as smart and perceptive as any journalist on our plane, without any of the ego such qualities would imply. Richard, a Brit, approached me suspiciously when he first came to interview me about the campaign, but over time, we had come to trust each other. Both Shailagh and Richard had great senses of humor. Shailagh’s came with a big, lusty laugh. They had become my frequent companions on the road. So when I walked in, they quickly sensed my distress.

  “What’s wrong?” they asked in unison.

  We took a quiet table in the bar, where I swore them to secrecy and shared the details of Harstad’s call. “We’re fucked,” I said glumly. “You’re nuts!” Shailagh replied. “You’re not losing this state by twelve points. You might even win. You guys are in good shape.”

  When we hit Raleigh for Election Day, the world seemed brighter. The mood on the ground was buoyant, with Obama signs and supporters everywhere. That night, we would win an overwhelming fourteen-point victory in North Carolina, and despite the funky Monday night calling, we battled Hillary to a near draw in Indiana. It was almost over. We’d have to endure another month of the primary campaign, but once the last states voted on June 3, Barack Obama would be the Democratic nominee.

  Favs and I had worked on a speech that shifted the focus to the general election and John McCain, in the hope of sending a strong signal that the primary was effectively over.

  “This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country, because we all agree that at this defining moment in our history, a moment when we are facing two wars, an economy in turmoil, a planet in peril, a dream that feels like it’s slipping away for too many Americans, we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term. We need change in America. And that’s why we will be united in November.”

  On the way home to Chicago, Barack was clearly relieved by the results, so much so that he broached the selection of a running mate. He had quietly tapped a small group of outside advisers to begin a vetting process that would eventually evaluate some thirty prospects. Yet Barack already had a notion.

  “You know, I’m thinking Joe Biden might be a good choice,” he said. Barack ticked off his reasons. A native of Pennsylvania who still had close ties there, Biden could help us in a must-win state that had given us problems. He had a strong connection to the struggling middle class, which was central to our economic message and our chances. A Washington veteran of thirty-six years with expertise in foreign affairs, the silver-haired Biden would be a reassuring figure in our capital and others. Finally, Barack said, Biden had been a candidate for president himself.

  “I was impressed with how Joe handled himself in the debates,” said Barack. “He was strong, smart, and much more disciplined than I expected. This national media nonsense is harder than it looks. It would be good to have someone who has gone through that experience.”

  But before that process could move forward in earnest, there were still primaries to endure. Hillary absolutely crushed us in Kentucky and West Virginia, and beat us soundly in South Dakota, states filled with white, rural voters—some undoubtedly less than enthused about a black man in the White House. Pugnacious to the end, she tried to sway the still-dwindling number of unpledged superdelegates, arguing that Obama’s weakness with white working-class voters was a fatal flaw. She waged a procedural battle to reinstate delegates she had won in Michigan and Florida, two states that had been sanctioned for breaking party rules about when they could hold their primaries.

  Sometimes her zeal got the better of her, as when, in an effort to illustrate that competitive June primaries were not unusual occurrences, she made a ham-handed point that raised the hackles of everyone in Barack’s inner circle: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

  It was a bizarre, off-key comment, for which she quickly expressed regret. Still, it enraged me. Those of us who cared about Barack shared a fear for his safety. As the first African American candidate for president, Barack had been assigned Secret Service protection earlier than any candidate in history. The threat stream against him was h
igh, which is why the agents insisted he wear protective gear under his clothes in large crowds. Whatever Hillary’s intentions—and I don’t believe they were malicious—her thoughtless comment was inexcusable.

  These were just the last gasps of a campaign that had finally run its course.

  As the final primary votes were cast on June 3, we flew to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Obama would claim victory, in the same arena where the Republicans would hold their national convention in three months. The moment demanded a largeness of spirit; his mission now was to unify Democrats.

  Beyond the satisfaction of doing the right thing, we needed to bring the Clintons, wounded and seething, back into the fold. The draft we sent Barack reflected that imperative, lavishing praise on Hillary as a worthy opponent and a critical future ally in pursuit of progress for the country.

  Seventeen thousand delirious supporters filled the arena, including Susan, who joined me while in the Twin Cities to visit friends; fifteen thousand more stood outside watching the speech on a giant video screen. Though I had worked with Favs on the words, it still was exhilarating, almost surreal, to hear Barack speak them.

  Sixteen months have passed since we first stood together on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Thousands of miles have been traveled. Millions of voices have been heard. And because of what you said—because you decided that change must come to Washington; because you believed that this year must be different than all the rest; because you chose to listen not to your doubts or your fears but to your greatest hopes and highest aspirations, tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another—a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Because of you, tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States of America.

  We had made history, navigating the most challenging route a candidate had ever taken to the nomination. We had harnessed the power of the Internet in ways that had never before been done to build a grassroots campaign of millions, many of them new to politics. Finally, together we had beaten back the Washington cynics who’d said “No You Can’t” to the prospect of change and the chances of a young black man who had insisted that “Yes We Can.”