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

by David Plouffe

  And that was that. But it became clear to all of us that day how much pressure and criticism Obama was getting from all sides. It speaks volumes about his discipline and sense of the race that he refused to jettison elements of our electoral strategy. Most candidates would not have weathered this storm as well. They would have insisted we make some changes to satisfy the hungry hordes. That he did not, especially as a first-time candidate around the national track, increased my sense that Obama had unique leadership abilities.

  Sometimes the quiet events that happen largely out of sight can have as much or more impact on the outcome of a campaign—or any endeavor—than the headline-grabbing moments. Our belief that a lot would have to go right for us to win and that therefore we had to treat any barrier to our success with intense focus was on display in two critical moments during the late summer and fall.

  The first was the Florida-Michigan primary situation. The DNC rules stated that Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina would be allowed to hold early primaries or caucuses. All other states had to hold their contests on February 5 or later or risk being sanctioned, meaning their delegates would not be seated at the Democratic convention. The GOP had similar rules.

  Despite the threat of sanctions, the states of Michigan and Florida decided to move up their primaries. Michigan chose January 15, and Florida, January 29. Upset by this, the four early states announced that they would also move up their contests, with both Iowa and New Hampshire threatening to go in December, before Christmas, which was uncharted waters for the primary (and really nuts in my view).

  Chaos ensued, and it was deeply frustrating to all the campaigns not to have this schedule nailed down tight.

  The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, an otherwise obscure group of thirty party insiders, would decide the fate of Michigan and Florida, and the final primary calendar. Our campaign had been surgically designed to maximize our success in the original schedule, and we vastly preferred having South Carolina rather than Florida play the role of the final gateway to Super Tuesday.

  For one, we had built an organization in South Carolina, and it was sizable enough that we thought our infrastructure could make a difference. There would also likely be close to 50 percent African American turnout, which we thought would benefit us if we came in having performed well in Iowa. If Edwards did not win Iowa, by South Carolina he would be out of the race or severely weakened, and we thought this would give us a good shot at capturing a healthy number of progressive whites and white males.

  South Carolina was also small enough that Barack, Michelle, and our surrogates could cover the state pretty well, and it was becoming increasingly clear to us that time on the ground mattered a great deal. Where we campaigned, we built support. In South Carolina, we could campaign just about everywhere.

  Conversely, we could spend thirty straight days in large, complicated Florida and barely make a dent. And under a scenario in which Florida held a January 29 primary, we might get to spend only five or six days there, tops. Advertising would cost at least $6 million. And Hillary would start with at least a thirty-point lead, making it next to impossible for us to overtake her.

  Given this, it was clear to us that Florida’s becoming the last state before February 5 would be a severe setback. And since from the start our operating philosophy was that we were always one step away from falling off our narrow path, we set out to see what we could do to influence the outcome of the DNC’s calendar.

  In short order we realized that the answer was not much. The Rules and Bylaws Committee was made up of at least a dozen firm Clinton supporters. Many had been appointed to their posts during Bill’s tenure in the 1990s, and two members currently served as senior advisers to the Clinton campaign. The deck was firmly stacked in her favor, but, remarkably, they ultimately voted unanimously to sanction Florida and Michigan at 100 percent—there would be no delegates awarded, and these contests would not affect the race for the nomination. This was the outcome we desired, but it was bittersweet because these were two important battleground states whose voters were now being punished. I figured the state parties would now back off and run their primaries later—I was terribly wrong about that.

  Rules are rules. And I must give the members of the rules committee who were Clinton supporters enormous credit for putting their service on the committee ahead of their candidate’s interest. But in my view it further underscored how unconcerned they were by our candidacy.

  The Clintons have proven through the years to be politically savvy and relentlessly tough. If they fretted about these calendar issues as much as we did, there is no way they would have allowed their supporters on the rules committee to go along with having the Florida primary eliminated from the equation. Had the rules committee decided to not sanction these states 100 percent, we thought we could come close in Michigan or even win narrowly. But Florida was a bridge too far, and losing it would have sapped whatever momentum we had built up in the early states. We assumed the Clinton campaign would share that view and would do whatever it took to have Florida, not South Carolina, serve as the gateway to the February 5 contests.

  But at this point in the campaign we did not look like a serious threat, at least not on the surface. Underneath the surface, though, they had great reason for concern, but apparently they never felt it. Clinton led narrowly in Iowa and had huge leads in the other three early states. But these races are never static. They should not have allowed us the opportunity to build up a head of steam going into February 5. Letting Florida move up its primary likely would have prevented that. Now that opportunity was lost for them.

  Emboldened by the drift of the rules committee, we took it to the next level. I asked Steve Hildebrand to go on a secret diplomatic mission to speak with the four early-state party chairs, encouraging them to ask all the candidates to sign a pledge stating they would not campaign in any states (Florida and Michigan) that had violated the rules and were threatening the approved early states’ primacy. Yes, this was in our self-interest. But it was also in theirs. If these two big states were penalized as severely as possible, and we all committed not to campaign in them, then the role of the early states was protected with no ambiguity.

  From our perspective, this would be the final nail in the coffin. The pledge would make the first four states sacrosanct, and by signing it the Clinton people would box themselves in; they could not claim at a later date that Michigan and Florida were somehow valid contests.

  The early states took the ball and ran, though we weren’t sure what would come of it. Soon after the rules committee sanctioned Florida, the four early states asked all the candidates to agree that we would endorse the rules committee’s decision by not campaigning in the renegade states.

  This was a Friday, and Bill Richardson, Christopher Dodd, and Joe Biden all quickly signed. I called my counterpart in the Edwards campaign and asked what they were going to do. He said of course they were going to sign, and right away. Now, we were by no means in league with the Edwards campaign. But on this issue, we had common ground. Edwards would have even more trouble competing than we would if additional large and expensive states were suddenly relevant early. I suggested to the Edwards rep that it would box in the Clinton campaign more effectively if we waited a day to announce our intentions. If we all said we would sign the early-state pledge on the same day, she could say no, and though she would undoubtedly get grief in these states, it would be easier for her to wriggle off the hook.

  My plan was this: if we let the other candidates go first, and the three “first tier” candidates left the pledge hanging for a day, it would increase press interest and draw the story out. Then if both Obama and Edwards signaled the next morning that they would sign, it would put enormous pressure on Clinton to do the same. Edwards was fading in Iowa and, despite having won South Carolina four years ago, was now mired in third place there, but he was still a threat. While the press generally viewed Obama as the default alternative to Clinton, Edwards s
till was given small odds of possibly emerging—if we failed—as the candidate in a one-on-one showdown with Clinton after the early states. So our campaigns signing on together would create a huge amount of interest and coverage, and raise the stakes for Clinton.

  They agreed, and on Friday we each told inquiring press that we needed time to mull it over. We held our fire until Saturday morning and then sent out statements that we would sign the pledge. The ball was in Clinton’s court. Within hours she had no choice but to say she would sign as well.

  The deed was done. We had our preferred calendar and also a window into the thinking of the Clinton campaign—they still didn’t seem that concerned about us. It was useful to know.

  As this was going down, I was on Cape Cod for a week with my family before all hell broke loose in the fall. The week turned into a full working vacation but was a much-needed break nevertheless. Obama was also on vacation that week (the timing of my vacation was not coincidental), across the sound on Martha’s Vineyard.

  I tried not to bother him too much, but after Clinton signed the pledge I put my son in the stroller and went for a walk through the quiet New England village streets. While we walked, I called Obama to tell him about the Florida-Michigan news. He was thrilled but also curious. “Why would the Clinton folks allow that to happen?” he asked, as I often did. “Are they up to something we haven’t figured out yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “The outcome here is a clear win for us. They must think we’ll be out of the race by late January. None of it matters if we don’t win Iowa, but I think we will look back and remember this as a pivotal day, if we can somehow pull this off.”

  “We are catching some breaks here,” he agreed. “But speaking of Iowa, I’m not sold on this slogan you guys have cooked up. ‘Change We Can Believe In.’ Do you really think it says enough? Nothing about issues at all.”

  Axelrod and his message team had come up with dozens of slogan options and sent Obama a memo recommending we go with “Change We Can Believe In.” We had not had a slogan up to this point but felt that we should have something for the stretch drive. A slogan rarely outlasts the campaign it was created for, but a good one can effectively reinforce your core message.

  I was not sold on “Change We Can Believe In” at first—it seemed a bit awkward and perhaps ephemeral. But it also had potential because it was a bit unusual and could reinforce our message. Few politicians were actually saying they would fight for you, the voter, and change Washington, or at least do so convincingly, and we hoped it would make people stop and think. Cynicism was one of our chief obstacles in convincing voters that Obama could bring about change. Our research showed that most voters believed Obama was authentic about his desire for change; they even thought someone not bound by the ways of Washington was more likely to bring it about than experienced Beltway hands.

  But sadly, many voters weren’t sure anyone could really change the foul atmosphere in Washington. We hoped this slogan would forcefully suggest that Obama could be trusted to try—and that he might just succeed. The slogan also had the value of serving as an implicit contrast with Clinton. Fair or not, a healthy amount of voters still suggested they had a hard time fully trusting her. So there was a character component to the phrase, at least unconsciously, and I had become quite enamored of it.

  “Well, let’s give it a try,” he said. “I’m still not sure, but we can’t spend another week or two on it.”

  The slogan ended up being one of the signature pieces of the campaign. We unveiled it for the first time in September, at one of our grassroots fund-raising events in Arizona. The finished signs and banners had arrived just before that event, and we thought there might be some value in testing it off-Broadway before we brought it to the big stage—Iowa. Perhaps most important, the slogan signage looked great on TV and online, as we could see on Alyssa’s and Emmett Beliveau’s monitors in the scheduling and advance department.

  We had always anticipated that third-quarter fund-raising would be difficult. July and August are notoriously difficult months to raise money, as people head off for vacation and spend less time attuned to politics. Because of that we held fewer fund-raisers in this period, and the ones we did hold were largely packed into September. For this reason, we had to be more reliant on our grassroots donors during this quarter than the previous two.

  We had hoped to raise $20 million on the high end and just barely hit that target, with $19 million of it primary money. Internally we were pleased, having now raised $24 million more in 2007 to date than our original projections had estimated. The surplus was having a profound impact on our ability to prepare for a campaign that could go on for some time. And we believed our fund-raising through the first three months of the fiscal year (October through December) as the early contests drew closer would be at least $25 million. This would put us on track to raise $100 million for the year, allowing us to run Ferrari-like campaigns in the early states and invest heavily in Super Tuesday.

  October 2 was the five-year anniversary of the now-legendary speech Barack Obama had given in Chicago in 2002 at a rally opposing the Iraq War. This speech had cemented his opposition to the invasion that all of our main primary opponents had supported; it had been a huge engine for our candidacy since Day One, and we often distributed copies of the speech at events. It wasn’t simply that Obama spoke out against the war, but that he had delivered a well-constructed and remarkably prescient overview of what he feared would happen down the line if we invaded Iraq—a lengthy occupation, great human and financial costs, and a burden that America would have to bear for a very long time. He also famously said in this speech, “I am not opposed to all wars; I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

  That forthrightness resonated with voters, as did the fact that Obama had seen clearly what would happen in Iraq while Clinton and others gave Bush the authority to proceed down a perilous path. Many voters pointed to this as an answer to Obama’s lack of Washington experience. “Well, he got Iraq right when just about everybody else got it wrong,” they would say. “Seems like he had the best judgment and that was more important than Washington experience.”

  This was music to our ears. In this electoral climate, change and judgment versus inevitability and experience were matchups that worked very much in our favor.

  So we planned to mark the anniversary of the speech by having him speak in Chicago and then Des Moines on Iraq and the way forward. We figured the speech would get outsized coverage but would also educate voters or serve to remind them how his judgment five years ago had proved more well founded than Clinton’s and Edwards’s. At this point, well over a third of early-state primary voters still did not know Obama had opposed the Iraq war. We thought we’d have a huge footprint that day.

  But the Clinton campaign had something up its sleeve. They’d had a very strong fund-raising quarter and decided to release news of it just hours before our Iraq speech in hopes of crowding out our coverage. It was a very clever tactical move, the sort of thing at which Wolfson and company excelled.

  And it worked. They reported raising a whopping $27 million, and for the first time only a fraction of that ($5 million) was general-election money. This was the first quarter during which they outraised us in primary money, and it was the most primary money they’d raised in a quarter to date. Doing that during the summer doldrums was quite an accomplishment.

  The impression it gave fit perfectly with the overall narrative of the race at that moment: we were stalled and Clinton was pulling away. That’s how it was couched in reporting. What I really cared about was that we were hitting our own internal projections, but no one relished the thought of another piece of bad news we’d have to fight through.

  The coverage that day and in the days following was all about how tactically brilliant they were to wash out the coverage of our Iraq speech; this move showed once again that she was in the driver’s seat. I was traveling with Obama the day of the Iraq speech, and he handled it with h
is usual healthy perspective.

  “Well, we’re getting real good at lowering expectations,” he joked.

  Yet where it mattered most, the story was a bit different. His Iraq speech got terrific coverage in the Des Moines market, which at that moment was for us by far the most important market in the country, and much more key to our prospects than national coverage. Explaining this to the press was like whispering into a gale force wind. The national narrative had taken hold—Clinton was up, Obama was down—and our obsessive focus on Iowa would not be part of that story. That’s pretty much how we entered the last three months before Iowa: defiant, if a bit defensive; convinced that our electoral path was real if not properly understood; and fighting through a toxic political environment that left very few people in the political community giving us much chance at all.

  Clinton was now exactly where she wanted to be—the clear and close-to-inevitable front-runner. If they got through Iowa unscathed, they would be next to impossible to stop.

  5

  Win or Go Home

  Hillary Clinton could do no wrong through much of the fall. Then two events, minor in their moments but instantly magnified, began to change the national narrative. More important, they caused real damage with voters in Iowa.

  It seemed like we were debating every other day. After our attempt at a joint deal fell apart, we were dragged in every direction, just as I had predicted. The cable networks were drawing high ratings when they hosted Democratic primary debates, so they were constantly trying to lure the candidates on stage by partnering with Democratic constituency groups and local media outlets to generate more of them. It was a moneymaker for them and a schedule killer for us.