Despite the rosy news and our undeniable progress, we knew that we had not seen the full Clinton arsenal. Our impressive start had allowed us to gain sight of a slim possibility for victory. We knew the road would get rockier, and the Clinton campaign would retrench. We often joked that the race was like the Empire versus the Jedi resistance: we were winning some early battles, but wondered at what point they would fire up the Death Star and unleash holy hell on us. That was the Clinton way. We assumed we would see it soon.
Just a few short weeks later, we were essentially given up for dead.
4
The Empire Strikes Back
The first six months had gone well, but we knew we were sailing into stiffer winds as the first actual contests approached. We were about to run our first TV ads and move aggressively into building our hard count-the list of confirmed supporters in each state. And we now had to launch offensives in states outside the first four. Our opponents and the press were ready to fasten on any misstep.
A July debate—our fifth-provided one of those tests, creating real sparks and revealing a meaningful distinction that would impact both the primary and the general-election campaign. Obama was asked at the debate, hosted by CNN and YouTube, whether he would be willing to engage in diplomacy without preconditions with bad apples like Ahmadenijad, Castro, and Chavez.
“I would,” he answered.
It was, simply, what he believed should be our approach on diplomacy. We knew that our opponents, especially Clinton, would pounce on it as an example of how he was not ready for this office and claim that the GOP would have a field day with statements like this in the general election. The news media, always looking for conflict and potential gaffes, would further hype the story line.
We decided to be pugnacious rather than defensive. Obama was with Gibbs while we were on the postgame conference call, and at one point he grabbed the phone from Gibbs’s hand. “We will not back down one bit from this,” he asserted. “If Hillary and the others want to defend the Bush-Cheney foreign policy approach, let ‘em, but this is one of the big differences in the race. So let’s make our case.”
Predictably, our opponents and the political community worked themselves into a lather. They all thought we had committed a major gaffe that finally exposed our naivete, political weakness, and inexperience.
Our sense was that Democratic primary voters would react quite differently. We had clearly telegraphed how we stood apart from the pack with a stance that was timely and forward looking. It was easy for voters to visualize distinctions in certain areas-Obama’s freshness versus Washington’s stagnation, generational change, the clear differences between us and Clinton on Iraq-but when it came to foreign policy writ large the differences were harder to grasp.
The diplomacy issue provided an illustrated guide. Hillary was defending a Washington salon foreign policy-as were the rest of our opponents-while Obama articulated a different view. People were clearly hungry for a foreign policy that invested in diplomacy and rejected the notion that giving our adversaries the silent treatment was somehow a show of strength. Not only did Obama embrace and give voice to that position, he also confidently stuck to his guns when he was attacked for it.
A clear contrast on foreign policy had now been established between the Democratic front-runner and her closest rival. It was a real difference and one that we thought was working for us. Our field staff in Iowa reported that the exchange had opened eyes and ears on the ground. One staffer told Ax and me about an encouraging postdebate discussion with a Democratic voter. “I wasn’t sure there were any differences between them other than Iraq,” the voter had said. “Now I see it runs much deeper than that.”
Interestingly, the Clinton campaign clearly thought they had some ground to gain here and deliberately stoked the flames. Hillary called a newspaper reporter in Iowa, Ed Tibbetts, of the Quad-City Times, and launched a broadside, calling our position “irresponsible” and “naive.”
This set the political world on fire. Conflicts always do. We welcomed the engagement and had Obama call the same reporter and say that what was naive was thinking we could keep doing the same thing as Bush and Cheney on foreign policy and expect a different result. In fact, it was just as naive as following George Bush into the Iraq War without first asking the tough questions.
When we polled this issue in Iowa, we discovered our side of the diplomacy fight was earning much wider support. More important, in focus groups we were discovering that it was a signal to voters that Obama represented change in these areas and Hillary did not.
Focus groups yielded the valuable insights of listening to voters discuss key issues, and we used them frequently. After the election I was told that, remarkably, the Clinton campaign conducted very few focus groups. If true, this is campaign malpractice of the highest order. It was one of several decisions by their chief strategist and pollster, Mark Penn, that gave us a huge advantage. I can only assume he preferred interpreting his own polls to determine voter sentiment over allowing Senator Clinton to hear directly from the voters who would decide her future.
Focus groups conducted by a professional moderator (not a pollster) and feedback from the field were two of our most important assets; we wanted to listen to voters every way we could to see how they processed arguments throughout the campaign. We did not use them to make policy decisions. We used them to gauge how the arguments in the campaign were being received and digested. It was about communication, not content. We were lucky to have Penn on the other side, because a more rigorous research regimen would have showed the danger in pushing this diplomacy fight. More generally, it would also have turned up some of the lingering doubts voters in Iowa and other states had about Hillary Clinton, all her strengths notwithstanding.
The August debate was the first to actually take place in Iowa. We knew it would receive strong viewership numbers among potential caucus-goers, our most crucial audience. It was the real deal-this debate could affect the outcome on the playing field we cared about most.
There were two large hurdles. First, we couldn’t afford to take a lot of time out of the Iowa schedule for prep. August time in Iowa is invaluable; you can do outdoor (and therefore larger) events and still have time to shake hands at baseball games and county fairs, but that warm-weather window was closing fast. And college kids were back home where we ultimately wanted them to caucus, not on their campuses where their support would be diluted.
Our goal was to reach as many people as possible during this time. We scheduled a multiday bus trip heading into the debate and set aside snatches of time for more formalized prep, though most of it had to be done on the bus in hour-long chunks led by Axelrod. This was less than ideal given the importance of the debate. We knew the diplomacy fight would be front and center and we needed to win that exchange. But running for president does not allow you to compartmentalize priorities very often. Multitasking up on the high wire is the natural order.
The second concern was that this would be a morning debate, broadcast nationally on ABC in George Stephanopoulos’s Sunday-morning time slot. The debate would start at 8:00 a.m. central time. The problem? Barack Obama was not a morning person. Quite the opposite, in fact. And the bus was not getting into Des Moines until after 10:00 p.m. the night before the debate. So our candidate would likely get a few hours of sleep at most and have to perform at a high level at his worst time of day.
I flew in from Chicago and trudged across the street from the Des Moines airport to the Hampton Inn, which had become our hotel when Obama overnighted in the center part of the state. He and the road show often wound up crashing at Super 8s or single-floor motels in small towns throughout Iowa when the schedule took him far afield and it was inconvenient to head back to HQ.
Interestingly, we later discovered that when Hillary Clinton was in Iowa she preferred to stay at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, a historic Democratic-owned hotel, and would often insist on returning there as opposed to staying out around the state.
This gave us a small but important advantage-we had less travel time than she did, meaning over the course of the Iowa campaign we were probably able to squeeze in at least a dozen more events because we did not have to fly or drive back to Des Moines. This may seem tiny, but because we believed everything had to break our way to win, it was an unexpected advantage we valued.
As I reached the hotel, the traveling party pulled in. I went with Obama to his room to go over some nondebate issues and then back to the lobby where our advance staff had some beer in coolers. I sat down with Axelrod, Gibbs, and Jim Margolis, our media consultant who was also helping on debate prep. We were all tense. Our candidate was not prepped as well as he should have been, and we were petrified of the morning debate time. “This debate should be in Waterloo,” someone said.
Oddly, Ax, who is never one to look for silver linings, wasn’t entirely convinced we were heading for disaster; he thought we’d done a good job of scoping it out and had even armed Obama with a killer joke. This was disconcerting, because we were now so used to his disaster mongering that we just thought it was background noise. But his confidence notwithstanding, even after a couple of beers, none of us would sleep well that night.
The next morning, Ax and I got ready to ride over to the debate site with Obama. When he stepped into the SUV, I expected to hear how tired he was. Instead he was smiling.
“Are all the debates in Iowa going to be this early in the morning-being one with the farmers or something like that?”
We were relieved. He seemed loose and his head was in a good place.
We knew that he would be on the griddle, and Obama assured us he was more than ready. “This diplomacy debate is one I can and should win.”
Our Iowa staff did an amazing job raising our visibility around the debate site. All the campaigns put up a lot of signs and have a horde of volunteers show up to try to suggest they have outsized momentum and support. In most cases, this is a completely overhyped waste of time. But in Iowa and the other early states, it did have some value in testing the organization. Would your volunteers and precinct captains show up to help? If not, that raised questions about their commitment and follow-through capabilities. Throughout the campaign, we carefully measured how well our organization performed at various junctures. This measurement was a hallmark of our organization: metrics, metrics, metrics.
Our Iowa staff had gathered at the HQ at 4:00 a.m. Joined by hundreds of our volunteers, they moved out and dominated the debate area. Many who came said they had not slept at all that night, either afraid to oversleep or simply too excited. It pumped up Obama to see a mass of his supporters as he rode in.
As predicted, the first ten minutes of the debate was all about our diplomacy position. Stephanopoulos went to all the candidates before calling on Obama, giving each a chance to swipe at us. Joe Biden even went so far as to repeat that he did not think Obama was ready to be president. When it was Obama’s turn to speak, he was ready with a line to deflate the tension that he, Gibbs, and Axelrod had cooked up the night before: “To prepare for this debate, I rode in the bumper cars at the state fair.” He had in fact done that with his girls recently, and the pictures played all over the state so it was a relevant reference point for local voters.
Unruffled, Obama concisely laid out his position and made the point that the Bush-Cheney approach of not talking to our enemies, in contrast to what strong presidents like Kennedy and Reagan had done, was a failure the country would do better to abandon.
We learned over time that Obama was an excellent counterpuncher in debates, much better than when launching his own broadsides unprompted. He found that sort of attack-first style inauthentic and it showed.
The debate was a home run for us. He was strong throughout, and this time both the voters and the pundits thought we had won. Afterward, Obama headed to the airport to fly home to Chicago for a few hours with his family before hitting the trail again. As Axelrod, Gibbs, and I walked with him to the motorcade, he wore a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “I really felt comfortable on the stage for the first time in any of these debates,” he told us, “I think because we had real differences emerge, not forced or phony disagreements. I could have stayed up there for hours, having that diplomacy discussion.”
“Guess we should fight to have all these debates at sunrise,” Gibbs cracked.
Obama grinned. “Not on your life. Let’s go home.”
At Paul Tewes’s request I headed to our Iowa HQ to thank the staff and do a rah-rah. The HQ was always alive, volunteers and staff all over the place, tripping over each other, pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers everywhere. Local Iowa volunteers had painted murals throughout the entrance to the office depicting lots of hope and change and even an Obama endorsement from the farmers of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Prominently displayed was Tewes’s motto, in huge letters no one could miss as they came in: “Respect. Empower. Include.”
I always enjoyed talking to our organizers in Iowa; these kids were laying it on the line and doing a great job.
“Our candidate just kicked ass in the debate,” I said, to hoots and hollers. “He showed definitively today why he should be our nominee and the next president. But you showed how we’re going to win. Once again, you out-thought, outhustled and just plain wanted it more than the competition. And that’s how we are going to win. We are going to keep it close and you are going to pull us over the finish line.”
Ax and I called the Iowa team our field goal unit-we thought the organization they put together would be worth at least three points. They were our secret weapon.
The debate had been held at Drake University, home of the Bulldogs. As I was walking out of HQ, I saw a blue oversized bulldog mascot head. I couldn’t believe it. These guys had thought of everything; our cheers had been lead by someone in a Drake Bulldogs mascot costume, rented for the occasion. I asked to meet our staffer who played the bulldog. The poor guy must have lost five pounds, sweating for hours in the outfit.
“Above and beyond the call of duty,” I said to him.
“I’d wear it every day if I had to,” he replied.
From there I headed out for a two-day trip in northern and eastern Iowa. I was going to smaller communities to meet with key activists and residents who were still undecided to try to persuade them to support us. Looking back, this is exactly the kind of approach that helped us succeed. We did not see the other campaigns’ national manager or senior staff fan out across Iowa to small meetings, as we did with frequency. Rather than have campaign personnel like me camp out in packed urban areas like Des Moines or Iowa City, the Iowa staff sent us to smaller counties where senior staff did not traditionally spend much time, places where just showing up was greatly valued by the locals.
We believed nothing was more important to our success than local Iowans talking to local Iowans, persuading their neighbors, friends, and colleagues to caucus for Barack Obama. That Sunday night I was driving with a staffer to Iowa Falls, a small town a few hours north of Des Moines, in rural Hardin County, when a severe midwestern summer storm enveloped us. A tornado watch was in effect and there was spectacular lightning and pounding rain all around us. Off to the west, we thought we saw a funnel cloud in the distance, so my driver hit the gas just in case. We pulled into Iowa Falls and went to a small coffee shop that had closed hours ago but reopened to let us have the meeting. About six key political and community activists gathered, and we spent an hour talking about the campaign; the conversation ran the gamut, from issues to electoral viability in the general election.
Several of these folks signed up either that night or in the following days. These few people might seem inconsequential. But day in and day out, that’s how you build in Iowa: a few people at a time.
On caucus day, Barack Obama won Hardin County.
Two days later, after another meeting, I spent the night in Decorah, in the northeastern part of the state. It is a small and beautiful town, hilly for Iowa. After grabbing some snacks for
the night and settling into my hotel room, I pulled out my laptop and spent a couple of hours playing with numbers, looking at different scenarios in Iowa.
What would happen if turnout of voters under thirty was 17 percent of the ectorate? What if it was 22 percent? What would happen if one-third of the turnout was new? How about 40 percent? How well did we need to do in the smaller counties out west to complement our strength in the east, where the border with Illinois gave us some familiarity and an initial boost?
I ran through these exercises frequently-sometimes at 4:00 a.m., according to my wife, while flailing in my sleep. Often it gave me comfort. Sometimes agita. But it was the one thing that was real to me about this process at this moment.
It was clear we could pull off a win in Iowa, but only with a big turnout and by holding our own in the smaller, rural counties. We could leave no stone unturned, anywhere in the state.
Our staff, precinct captains, and volunteers had begun voter contact in earnest over the summer. By September we had done enough that a picture of our supporters-at least those signaling their commitment this early-was coming into view.
It was exciting but terrifying. Even if our numbers picked up, we were going to be heavily dependent on people who had never before participated in a Democratic caucus. We adjusted accordingly, adding more media and Internet advertising geared exclusively to younger voters; we prepared to do a lot more instructional and informative work with our supporters so they knew how to caucus, while trying not to spook them; and we redoubled our efforts to attract support from conventional caucus Democrats so our newbies in certain precincts were matched with some grizzled veterans.
It was clear that we would win Iowa only on the backs of independents, Republicans, young voters, and new registrants—a scary proposition, to say the least.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 12