Klain didn’t even bother having Obama sit through the usual critique. Where would we even begin? Instead, when Obama retired, we held a long brainstorming session to figure out how, in the day we had left, we were going to pull the president back from the abyss. “We need an intervention,” someone suggested.
The next morning, a small group of us—Klain, Plouffe, chief of staff Jack Lew, and I—sat down with the president to give him our honest assessment. “You’re treating this like it’s all on the level,” I said. “It’s not a trial or even a real debate. This is a performance. Romney understood that. He was delivering lines. You were answering questions. I know it’s a galling process, but it is what it is. It’s part of the deal. You’ve done it before. We need you to do it again.”
The president responded to our candor with a rare and disarming admission. “I know I am not hitting this, guys,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. I was trained to argue facts. When I stop in diners or taverns or factories, I’m talking to people. In speeches, I’m talking values. But my inclination here is to argue fact. And I know that’s not the exercise. I know I am letting folks down.
“I’m just out of sync,” he continued. “It’s like the movie Tin Cup. You know, the guy develops a slice and he can’t straighten out his swing. Finally the caddy—I think it was Cheech from Cheech and Chong—says, ‘Put your hat on backward . . . do this . . . do that. And put your tees in your left pocket. Okay, now swing.’ And the guy hits a long, perfect drive. He didn’t change anything, really, but his head.
“It’s in my head now, and I need to straighten it out.”
After the others cleared out, I lingered to offer a little encouragement. “We’ll get there,” I said, hoping, but without real conviction, that I was right. I thought about our exchange backstage in Boston before Obama made his national convention debut eight years earlier. “Don’t worry, I always make my marks,” he reassured me back then, without betraying a hint of anxiety. Yet he hadn’t made his marks in Denver, and now he was confronting an unfamiliar and unwelcome feeling of vulnerability.
“I’m doubting myself,” Obama conceded. “And I have to get past that.”
When he left, we reconvened the debate team to consider what had become an exercise in triage. Obama did have some terrific moments and great lines during our sessions; our problem was that he couldn’t be counted on to repeat them. Bob Barnett, a prominent Washington attorney we had assigned to prep Kerry as part of our team chimed in with a sensible suggestion, perhaps gleaned from years of experience prepping Hillary. “I don’t know any way to do this but to take the same question over and over until he locks in the same answer.”
When Obama returned for the final day’s exercises, the difference was palpable and positive. Proceeding topic by topic, he worked over and massaged his answers while incorporating our suggestions. He promised this time to deploy his best lines and hit Romney’s “47 percent” slander, and he repeated all the exchanges until everyone was satisfied that he could replicate them on the real stage the next night.
As much as we try to orchestrate these debates, planning well in advance how to address the major themes of the election, news events intrude and can roil the discussion. A month earlier, on September 11, the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans had been killed in a terrorist attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. It quickly became a right-wing meme that the White House had tried to obscure the true nature of the attack and possible Al Qaeda involvement in order to preserve the president’s national security bona fides through Election Day. It was an absurd charge.
From a political perspective, if the Republicans wanted to spend the last two months of the campaign talking about terrorism instead of the economy, I would have welcomed it. After bin Laden’s death and Obama’s aggressive pursuit of Al Qaeda, national security was a huge advantage, and the tragic events in Benghazi weren’t going to change that.
Obama knew and liked the ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and was genuinely offended by the suggestion that the White House would put politics first in the midst of such a tragedy. The allegation was particularly galling because it was Romney’s campaign that had sent a press release trying to capitalize on Benghazi even before we learned the fate of the Americans there.
So as Kerry was channeling Romney bearing in on Benghazi, Obama responded with righteous indignation. “Well, let me first of all talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation. And these aren’t just representatives of the United States, they are my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm’s way. I know these folks and I know their families. So nobody is more concerned about their safety and security than I am. So the suggestion that anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. It’s offensive to me as a president. It’s offensive to me as commander in chief.”
It was powerful, strong, and genuine, and we rehearsed it again and again until the president had it locked in. “If this comes up, it will be a hell of a moment,” I said, confident that it would, given the demand welling up in the right-wing blogosphere. If Romney didn’t take the Benghazi shot, he would be flogged by his base.
By Monday night, our panic had subsided. In twenty-four hours, the improvement had been nothing short of miraculous. This time the president was going in with a game plan. He was armed with answers, clever lines, and useful pivots. It’s possible he even wanted to be there. When I saw him the next morning, Obama removed a piece of paper from his pocket. “When I went back to my room last night,” he said, “I outlined about a dozen questions and exactly how I’m going to deal with them. Figured I would review it on the way up to New York.” What a difference a day made!
A few hours later we were hanging out in our holding rooms at Hofstra University, the debate site, when the president beckoned Plouffe and me. “I just wanted to tell you guys, I feel really good about this,” he said, his handwritten primer sitting on a nearby table along with a golf tee we had presented him that morning as a reminder of Cheech’s advice in Tin Cup. “We prepared well. I know what I have to do. We’re going to have a good night.”
Maybe we could have survived another bad night, but after what we had just heard, I told Plouffe that I was pretty sure we wouldn’t find out.
“You don’t get to be president of the United States by accident,” I said. “You get there because when you’re tested, because in those really hard moments, you come up big. Either he will or he won’t. But he always has.”
Our space at Hofstra was cramped, and the tension was palpable. Our contingent was larger than usual, given the high stakes. Even Kerry, who had skipped Denver, was there. Klain paced the room obsessively. Then, a few minutes into the debate, Klain’s once-grim visage morphed into a flushed smile.
Obama looked confident as he rose from his stool and approached the first questioner, a college student who was concerned about entering an uncertain job market. “Number one, I want to build manufacturing jobs in this country again. Now when Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt, I said we’re going to bet on American workers and the American auto industry and it’s come surging back,” the president began. Economic values, message, and contrast all in one answer—exactly as Obama had practiced. Our crew was no longer groaning or slamming laptops in dismay, but rather hooting and hollering in delight.
When Romney responded by touting his five-point plan, the president pounced.
“And Governor Romney’s says he’s got a five-point plan? Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan,” the president said, in an answer he had first surfaced on the plane ride to Williamsburg. “And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosoph
y as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money. That’s exactly the philosophy that we’ve seen in place for the last decade. That’s what’s been squeezing middle-class families.”
It was pure message without the stultifying minutiae—and it presaged a complete role reversal. It was the president who was fully engaged and on the offensive against a challenger who suddenly looked defensive and ill at ease. I smelled a rout.
By the time the night was over, Binder’s focus group of fifty-two Des Moines–area swing voters would award us the debate by a whopping thirty points.
There would be a third debate, dedicated to foreign policy, a week later in Boca Raton, Florida. Yet it now lacked any of the high drama of the first two encounters. The president had confronted an obstacle he had never before faced: self-doubt. And as this doubt surfaced, it had spread to the rest of us like an epidemic. When he vanquished it in the second debate, it simply never returned. Our preparations at Camp David for the final debate were blessedly uneventful.
“We’ve figured out how to do this,” Obama said aboard Air Force One as we headed to the final showdown with Romney in Boca Raton. “We didn’t prepare right for the first one, and I just wasn’t in the right psychological place.
“I really felt like I let everyone down. I didn’t go out and fight for them. I’d go to these rallies and see these young volunteers who are working their hearts out, trying to keep their chins up. But I knew I had let them down, and I wasn’t going to let them down again. I think this was just a wake-up call to remind me who and what I’m fighting for.”
And hours before his last encounter with Romney, the race well in hand, Obama reflected on the campaign and the country.
“You know, it’s a crazy country and a crazy process,” he said. “But what we end up with are a Mormon and a black guy who, it turns out, are pretty good reflections of our politics. He represents the America of the 1950s, and believes that the country does well when guys like him are in charge. I represent the America that is.”
• • •
Throughout the year and particularly in the final weeks before the election, I was acutely aware that, after three decades in the trenches of American political campaigns, those days for me were coming to an end. Even during the most agonizing, pressure-filled days of the campaign, I was suffused with a sense of good fortune and deeply appreciative of the life I would be leaving behind.
There is nothing quite like that final coast-to-coast barnstorming of a presidential campaign, when the frenzied pace and pandemonium delivers the excitement of a rock-and-roll mega-tour. The “road show” becomes a world unto itself, and the ultimate bonding experience for those who share it. And there was a renewed sense of mission that was palpable in the final weeks. You could feel it in the warm, enthusiastic crowds that greeted us everywhere, reminiscent of 2008, if not quite as large. As we traveled, I was like a retiring baseball player in the fall of my final season, appreciating every last moment of a glorious rite I knew I would never experience again.
I felt the same way every time I walked into our bustling campaign headquarters and found it overflowing with inspiring, joyful, sleep-deprived kids who had come from all over America to be a part of our effort. I would miss the high-energy collaborations and the ceaseless banter with my gifted and creative colleagues. We were a tight team, bound together, day and night, by this urgent, heady mission, all of us working toward a single goal and a single day when America would choose its leader and its course.
Along the way, I spent hours with reporters who were misled by public polls and the Romney campaign into believing that the race was closing. In a moment of exasperation, I wagered my mustache of forty years to Joe Scarborough on his eponymous morning TV show. After the election, I would parlay my winnings into a larger deal to raise money for CURE. It cost me the ’stache, shaved off on national TV, but raised $1.2 million for epilepsy research. Susan was thrilled with the money and, to my surprise, the chance after all those years to glimpse my naked lip.
Only Mother Nature would disrupt our sprint to the finish line. When a colossal hurricane named Sandy slammed into the Eastern Seaboard on October 29, Obama’s official responsibilities trumped his campaign schedule. With more than a hundred dead and fifty billion dollars’ worth of destruction, Sandy pushed the election news off the front page. While the storm and its aftermath didn’t determine the outcome of the election, the pictures of the president and Governor Chris Christie, a GOP stalwart, working together as they toured the ravaged New Jersey coast was a heartening show of bipartisanship for a country that, of late, had seen far too little of it.
When the president resumed campaigning on the final weekend before Election Day, Bill Clinton joined us for a Sunday rally in New Hampshire. Clinton had campaigned so aggressively in the closing days that he barely had any voice left. On the ride to the event, Clinton gazed out the window at the passing countryside and remarked on how much he loved New Hampshire. What went unspoken was that the state had revived not only his political fortunes in ’92, but Hillary’s in ’08. Plouffe, pugnacious to the end, couldn’t resist. “We feel the same way about Iowa!” he said with a big grin.
So it was only fitting that Iowa, which four years earlier had given life to our campaign, would be where this final race would come to an end. Bruce Springsteen joined us for the final day, and before the Obamas made their last appeals to a massive crowd in the late evening chill, the troubadour offered his sage and world-weary perspective on the distance we had traveled.
“I’ve lived long enough to know that the future . . . it’s rarely a tide rushing in,” he told the crowd between songs. “It’s often a slow march, inch by inch, day after painful, long day . . .
“President Obama last time ran as a man of hope and change and you hear a lot talk about how things are different now . . . Things aren’t any different. They’re just realer. It’s crunch time now. The president’s job, our job—yours, mine; whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, independent; rich, poor; black, brown, white; gay, straight; soldier, civilian—is to keep that hope alive and to combat the cynicism and the apathy; and to believe in our power to change our lives and the country and the world that we live in.”
Springsteen had captured the moment. This wasn’t the beautiful, innocent rapture of 2008. Our idealism had been tested and tempered by four hard years of wrenching problems and brutal politics. It was realer now. Progress had come, but not as a “tide rushing in.” The gains we had made were the product of a “slow march, inch by inch, day after painful, long day.” And for all he had done, Obama could never match the outsize expectations he had first stirred in Iowa.
On the plane home to Chicago, Obama stopped in the senior staff cabin for one last bit of campaign analysis from Plouffe, Gibbs, and me. Based on all our data, we believed we would win 332 electoral votes. I was hoping North Carolina might even give us another 15. Either way, tomorrow figured to be a very good day. The president listened and nodded, as if he had heard such confident expressions from us before.
“Okay, but I don’t want the three of you knocking on my door with long faces again tomorrow night to tell me you were wrong,” he said, shifting his gaze between us as he recalled that moment in the hallway of a Nashua hotel, almost five years earlier, when we had to tell him we had come up short in the New Hampshire primary.
“He didn’t sound like he was kidding,” Plouffe said with a nervous smile after Obama left the cabin.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he was.”
One of the enduring mysteries of the 2012 election is how the Romney crew so thoroughly missed the reality of what was happening on the ground. Even on Election Day, the Romney team was still preparing it
s victory party—complete with a barge loaded with fireworks to light up Boston Harbor. It wasn’t that Romney and his team weren’t smart people, but that they seemed so detached from minority communities and younger generations that they wholly underestimated their commitment to the country and its election process. That is why Team Mitt was shocked when the numbers rolled in.
When Messina, Plouffe, and I arrived at the president’s hotel suite that night, there was no trace of the serene Obama who awaited us on Election Night in 2008; this time, he was pumped, and he greeted us with fist bumps and high fives.
He was a president who believed he had made tough decisions at a critical time, only to find himself dismissed as a shooting star whose fire had burned out, a certain one-termer. Now he had won and won decisively—not just with 332 electoral votes but by a margin of almost four points in the popular vote. “In some ways, this one’s sweeter,” he told us. “Because it was harder. And there was so much on the line.” He felt the differences between his vision and Romney’s were so stark; the stakes were even greater than 2008.
There was a mob of delirious supporters waiting for him a few miles down the road, and he was eager to celebrate with them, but we had heard nothing yet from Boston. “How long do we have to hang here?” Obama wondered about the protocol of waiting for Romney’s concession. “If he doesn’t call soon, we should go. I don’t want to leave those folks just standing there.”
While we were waiting, I sat down with Plouffe in a quiet corner of the suite. He was never one for sloppy emotion; that was my province. Yet, after ten years of partnership and collaboration, it was an incomparable moment for both of us, one I knew we would never again share. We spent a few minutes reflecting on what we had accomplished together. “It’s been a pleasure, brother,” I told him, extending my hand. “I’m proud that we’ll always be linked together in history. The Davids!”
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 59