The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

  Howard Wolfson, whom Ax and I both knew well from previous campaigns, was Hillary’s über-communications director, their answer to Robert Gibbs. He was skilled in the black arts of politics—leaking information, setting traps for opponents—and was deeply respected by the press corps, which seemed to think, not without reason, that Howard was always two steps ahead of everyone else.

  Their fund-raising was led by Terry McAuliffe, considered the best fund-raiser in Democratic Party history, and Jonathan Mantz, who had worked for me at the DCCC and knew every donor in America, having served as chief fund-raiser for both the House and Senate Democrats.

  Some pundits called it the dream team of presidential staffs.

  Barack and I had a long conversation the morning of Clinton’s announcement. We were both underwhelmed by her message, which put a little bounce in our step. “In it to win it?” he said. “Seems awfully political. Maybe the base will like it though. They’re hungry to win.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s an awfully cold message. I think you need to warm folks up a bit with your vision and where you want to lead before essentially calling the race over.” I had already talked to Axelrod at least three times that morning, and he concurred. Barack and I quickly moved our discussion to the myriad things we had to get buttoned up before the formal announcement and in the weeks following. Despite the jaw-dropping challenge all this entailed, we were both grasping onto a bit of fleeting normalcy. It was my last weekend in Washington before moving permanently to Chicago and leaving my family behind for six weeks. Barack had a down day in Chicago and was planning to spend time with his kids and work out. Even with our chief rival officially throwing down the gauntlet, we were pretty relaxed. The respite was brief.

  In Chicago, two days before the announcement, the high temperature was five degrees. It was not much warmer in Springfield. Our inclement weather site in Springfield was an old, dank building. Any event held there would be cramped and depressing, hardly a great first impression.

  Michelle Obama questioned whether we should scrap our outside plans altogether. While the Saturday forecast called for highs in the mid- to high teens by the afternoon, we’d probably be hovering around ten degrees at speech time. She was rightly concerned about her own girls being outside in the cold and was especially concerned about all the kids that would come with their parents and might be standing outside for hours.

  We started rolling out emergency relief—hand warmers, hot chocolate stations—but it was a tough call. Barack was torn, like the rest of us.

  “I get the appeal of being outside, speaking before thousands of hearty souls,” Obama said, “but there’s a thin line between hardy and foolish. This could be the biggest case of mass frostbite in history. Not to mention, it may not matter how good a speech we create if I’m chattering the whole time.” He paused. “But I’m still inclined to roll the dice here and hope the forecast is right and it warms up a bit. Pray it gets all the way up to a balmy eighteen.”

  We conferred and decided the upside of being outside was so great—the specter of thousands of Americans braving the cold to witness his announcement would not be lost on people, as well as the echo of Lincoln—that we should stay outside.

  I reported this back to Obama. “Okay, we’ll give it a go,” he replied. “I just better not see any of you guys huddled around the heaters inside that day.”

  Thus began a trend. Throughout the campaign, whenever we embraced risk, we were rewarded, a lesson that eventually became a touchstone when making hard decisions. I think seeing him refuse to play it safe reminded voters he was different, as was our campaign. It was also good internal motivation to attempt really difficult, unconventional things. We would have to come together as a campaign family, link arms, and try to succeed, knowing the downside would far outweigh any upside.

  Michelle and Barack were satisfied we had worked through all the angles, but Obama said he’d have to wear an overcoat and gloves. That’s all? I thought. No problem. All too often in politics operatives are concerned about things like this. They have an image of John Kennedy standing outside during his inaugural address in just a suit jacket, in bitter cold, and insist their candidate do the same. I thought that kind of attitude was crazy. Anything that kept our fledgling contender from chattering through his speech was fine with us.

  Besides, we had bigger problems with the speech itself. As of Thursday, we still did not have one. Barack and our speechwriter, Jon Favreau, were going back and forth on drafts. Favreau had served as a deputy speechwriter for John Kerry in 2004 before being recruited by Gibbs to join Obama’s Senate staff. Favreau was a brilliant writer, and he and Obama had a great collaborative rhythm. Jon understood Barack’s voice and, unlike many speechwriters, was open to feedback and constructive criticism on his speech drafts. He did not treat them like sacred texts, but as living organisms that would change many times from start to finish. Now the draft sat with Obama, who wanted to add a few lines and spend some time refining the entire speech. It was unusual that the best writer in the campaign was the candidate, but that was definitely our situation. It was a huge asset, not only because it produced effective and powerful speeches but also because by participating so thoroughly in the writing of major speeches, he internalized and owned the material, resulting in better delivery.

  We finally received what he considered his final draft—it was a beautiful speech with a crystal clear message. And it arrived in my inbox on Friday at two or three in the morning.

  Later that Friday morning, a bunch of us caravanned from Chicago to Springfield. The Obamas were scheduled to arrive from Chicago relatively late that night. We had just crossed the city line into Springfield when everyone’s BlackBerry began going nuts. Whatever this is, I thought, it can’t be good.

  It wasn’t. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Obamas’ longtime pastor, had said some inflammatory things in a Rolling Stone interview that was released that morning. The article quoted Wright’s profoundly critical statements about the United States: “We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS.... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.... We conducted radiation experiments on our own people.... We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!”

  This would be problematic in a normal campaign situation, however that’s defined. On this day in particular it was horrific. Wright was slotted to perform the invocation at the announcement. We could not afford to have Obama’s message about coming together swallowed up by the controversy over his fiery and divisive pastor’s comments.

  We were looking at our first crisis.

  Ax looked stricken. “This is a fucking disaster,” he said. “If Wright goes up on that stage, that’s the story. Our announcement will be an asterisk. The Clinton campaign will ensure it.”

  Gibbs, Ax, and I got on the phone with Obama, and Ax laid it out for him. This would obviously be a painful call to make, but he immediately agreed it was no longer tenable for Wright to give the invocation. “I’ll call him and tell him it will overshadow everything,” said Obama. “I still want him to come, maybe he can do a private prayer with my family before I go out to speak.”

  We breathed a sigh of relief. The crisis had been averted. For the moment.

  The incident should have prompted an immediate scouring of the Reverend Wright and all he had said over the years. There will be plenty of time for the reverend later, but it’s worth noting that our systemic failure to deal with this issue properly started the day before Obama’s announcement. I still kick myself for how terribly we mishandled our internal Wright work.

  Obama was scheduled for a few run-throughs of the speech Friday night in the basement of the Old State Capitol. He was also interviewing with 60 Minutes from some of the ornate and historical rooms upstairs. The interview ran long and he was tired. The speech rehearsal did not go well. We all felt like he was just goi
ng through the motions, “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll nail it tomorrow. I just need to get some sleep.”

  When he left, Ax immediately shot me a concerned look. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess we’ll see what the hell we get tomorrow.”

  Obama was not much of a practice player. But when the red light went on, and he had strong material (which usually meant he had written or had a hand in it), he would hit the clutch shot. He was secure in almost every way but, like most people, he did not enjoy the harsh lights of scrutiny. “It’s easy for you guys just to sit there and criticize every little thing I do,” he would sometimes say. “But you’re not out there giving the speeches and doing the interviews. So I need to take what you say with a grain of salt.”

  After that practice we walked into the cold Illinois night and gazed at the setting for the morning’s speech. It was beautiful. Our lighting gave the Old State Capitol an ethereal glow, shedding warm light on the mammoth American flags hanging down the facades of buildings around the square. The scene was set. The estimated crowd count was now well over ten thousand. All we needed was a knockout performance from our candidate.

  We put our heads down and walked the few blocks to the hotel through the frigid air, knowing that things would never be the same after tomorrow.

  By 9:00 a.m. there were well over fifteen thousand people packed into the grounds around the Old State Capitol. I went with Emmett Beliveau, our advance director, as he briefed the Obamas and their extended family about the movements for the day and the program. Obama seemed to be in a great place, very relaxed and jovial. This was a good sign.

  But last night’s ho-hum speech practice was still playing in my head on repeat. As Obama took the stage in the chilly Springfield morning, I looked at Ax nervously. “What do you think?” I asked. “Is he going to deliver?”

  Ax shrugged. “I have no idea. But I choose to be an optimist, just this once.”

  Obama launched into his opening lines and instantly our fears dissipated. The tired, uninterested speaker we had seen the previous night had vanished, replaced by a man who filled the stage and seized the moment. It looked great on TV, but most important, the message was a clear and distinctive frame for his candidacy. Obama had been spot-on about the need to go public early.

  The rest of the announcement tour hit Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and a stop in Chicago, all sandwiched into the space of two days. Ten thousand people attended our two Iowa stops, which was fewer than in Springfield, but keep in mind that only 120,000 people attended the Iowa caucuses in 2004. To have almost 10 percent of that entire total show up at the beginning of the campaign was remarkable. Some attendance was spurred by curiosity, certainly. Many longtime caucus attendees go to dozens of events for all the candidates before deciding whom to support. But because people had signed up online for tickets and we did sign-in at the events, we could match these people to the Iowa voter file we had purchased and see who they were. What it told us was music to our ears: lots of young voters. A surprising number of independents and Republicans. Many Democrats who were regular voters but not caucus attendees. And a healthy number of people not registered to vote.

  It was the start of the group portrait we would build our campaign around. There in Iowa, on Day One of the campaign, it was already on full display.

  The week after the announcement, Virginia governor Tim Kaine endorsed us. Obama and Kaine did not know each other well but had bonded during one of their few conversations over their shared belief in pragmatism, their common Kansas origins, and Kaine’s missionary work and Obama’s community organizing. His endorsement was a nice piece of news; Kaine could be a helpful surrogate voicing the change message, and while political endorsements were not key to our strategy—we assumed Hillary would land the bulk of them—it showed that some people would be willing to go out on a limb for us. It said not everyone expected this to be a coronation.

  In hindsight, what’s most striking about Kaine’s endorsement is that when he gave it, most people, our team included, thought the race would likely be over by February 5. This meant that the Virginia primary a week later on February 12 would be meaningless. At that point Virginia was not even in the discussion about general-election battlegrounds. The future would tell a different story on both counts.

  We had our first serious exchange with the Clinton folks around this time and learned a lot about both of our campaigns in the back-and-forth. The media mogul David Geffen, who had been exceedingly close to the Clintons during the 1990s, had decided to support Obama and help us raise money Obama had met him in 2006 but they were not close. Geffen told our California finance staff that he wanted to host an event, which we considered a coup.

  Geffen invited New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to his fund-raiser and granted her an interview, in which he said some particularly unflattering things about our chief rival, most memorably, “Everybody in politics lies, but [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” The Clinton war room gurgled to life for the first time and Howard Wolfson called on Obama, as the purveyor of a politics of hope and congeniality, to condemn his donor’s remarks and apologize.

  Obama was in the air heading back from California when we received word of Wolfson’s challenge. For us, the Clinton missive quickly ratcheted things up to DEFCON 1. The press was in a frenzy, salivating at the inklings of the primary’s first fight. We decided we could not wait until Obama landed to offer our response. Ax, Gibbs, and I huddled to plot our strategy.

  “This is a test,” I said. “We should ignore them most of the time. But if we let them pound us for something we had nothing to do with, it will send a signal that we are too weak for the fight.”

  Gibbs, who was Wolfson’s equal in terms of tenacity, flashed a grin. “I’ve been waiting for this moment,” he said. “Game on. But seriously, we have to say something back or people will just believe the Clintons can walk all over us.”

  I wrote the meat of our broadside, which didn’t follow our usual division of labor, but I was raring to go. I threw it right back at the Clintons and said Geffen was their lifelong friend; he had spent nights in the Lincoln Bedroom during the messy 1990s, and they should take up whatever beef they had with him.

  My thinking was that while this was not the approach or tone we should take normally, we needed to assert that we would not be cowed; they had to know that “Obambi,” as Dowd called him, would fire back. The exchange was also an opportunity to inject into the news some of the less flattering aspects of the Clinton tenure, which we knew bothered voters.

  We hit Send and the political world went nuts. In the next hours, we received a lot of feedback saying that it was the right thing to do.

  But when Obama landed he was furious.

  “Can I not get on an airplane anymore without you guys launching cruise missiles?” he asked the three of us with exasperation over speakerphone. “I understand your instinct. But going the Lincoln Bedroom route just gets us playing in the muck, where they are more comfortable than we are. Run this stuff by me from now on, at least until we get in stride in terms of tone.”

  He was right. The crack was gratuitous and had moved the game to their playing field. I still think there was value in our punching back, done properly. But it was a good object lesson: anytime we joined candidates on the low road, we took a blow, because it flew in the face of the kind of politics Obama felt passionate about trying to present.

  The exchange did show us that the Clinton folks had a hair trigger. Our reaction may have lacked grace, but theirs had been overheated. Despite regularly dismissing our prospects to the press and insisting we would flame out, they had mounted a full attack at the first perceived provocation, even when doing so drew attention to their own weak spot. Whether they were more worried about Obama’s candidacy than they admitted or were dangerously thin-skinned, it was an illuminating moment. We tucked that nugget away for future war gaming.

  Another moment
during this period revealed surprising weakness in the Clinton camp. The campaign had barely begun and all the candidates were bombarded with invitations to debate and make joint appearances. Every interest group and news organization was hatching ideas for the candidates to appear together. We all had dozens of requests. I convened a discussion with Patti Solis Doyle, my counterpart in Clintonland, and Jonathan Prince, an Edwards representative, to hash out whether there was a coordinated approach we could take to minimize the headache of sorting out the avalanche of requests, and we fervently agreed that if we did not gain some control, we would all end up bogged down with planning for and attending joint appearances. We each would lose both flexibility and control of the most important asset in any campaign, our candidate’s time.

  The three of us decided we would decline all upcoming requests and send out a joint message saying that we wanted to work with the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, to set up an orderly debate calendar. The schedule would include a healthy number of sanctioned debates, and these would be the only ones any of us attended.

  The first joint appearance invitation that every candidate received was to a forum in Nevada hosted by AFSCME—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a government-employee union. In February 2007, AFSCME had partnered with George Stephanopoulos, who would moderate the discussion. News organizations and interest groups commonly co-sponsored debates or forums to make it harder for candidates to say no. Here was the first test of our arrangement. Patti, Jonathan, and I agreed we would decline the AFSCME event and do so by explaining our joint effort to bring order to the debate process. Obama was on board, and my counterparts said their candidates were, too.