The debate was at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, and it was our first with a thinned-down field. Only four candidates were left in the race. Richardson had decided to stay in after Iowa, and he joined Obama, Clinton, and Edwards onstage.
The narrower field played to Obama’s strengths. He was a good counterpuncher and didn’t instinctively try to dominate a debate; as one among eight, his performance hadn’t always come across as forceful. With fewer debaters, he was more frequently in the action, and as the hot candidate he was on the griddle, which worked better for him; he could mix it up and be a major presence without forcing it.
We thought Obama gave one of his strongest debate performances thus far and most of the critics agreed. He had one cringe-inducing moment. One of the moderators asked Hillary Clinton if she thought Obama was winning because he was generally considered more likable. Clinton’s response was pitch-perfect. “Well, that hurts my feelings,” she joked. “But I’ll try to go on.”
She had started to elaborate when Barack piped in, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” Those of us who knew him recognized Obama’s dry sense of humor. The Clinton team spun hard that his response offended women, and that it was a significant faux pas; this spin became part of the New Hampshire narrative. It certainly was not the chief takeaway from the debate. At one point, Hillary lost her temper at Edwards, responding sharply to his assertion that she could not bring about change. This moment received more postdebate analysis than Barack’s throwaway line. Several national reporters e-mailed me after her outburst with the same message: “She just cost herself the New Hampshire primary.”
I asked Obama on the ride back to our hotel if the “likable enough” comment had come out the way he hoped. He was annoyed that it was even an issue. I explained what the other side was pushing.
“I was actually trying to be nice there,” he said exasperatedly. “Maybe not too nice. But nice. Maybe I should’ve said that it was a ridiculous question. I serve with Hillary, she gets a bum rap for not being likable. But it wasn’t my question, so I just said something quickly I thought conveyed that.” He shook his head. “What a process. A long debate about Iraq, health care, and the economy and this is what they focus on.”
Obama generally maintained an attitude of bemusement toward the coverage and how often it could be trivial and banal, obsessed with meaningless detail. I shared this mentality, and frequently we swapped observations on its absurdity as a way of building motivation and releasing the pressure valve. Jon Stewart had a segment most nights during the primary called “Clusterf*&k to the White House” that we thought summed up nicely much of the campaign experience. They key to surviving, we found, was just to fight through the nonsense, keep a true and steady course, and have faith in our strategy. For the first time our internal polls that weekend showed us ahead in New Hampshire, outside the margin for error. Almost every public poll did as well. It was hard to see how we could be stopped.
As our car wound through the streets of Nashua from the debate site to our hotel, Obama raised for the first time the possibility we had so rarely acknowledged : victory in November. “Just think, we might actually win this thing, Plouffe,” he said. “Then we’d really have our work cut out for us.”
I flew to Chicago Sunday night so I could spend Monday in the office nailing down our post-New Hampshire schedule and budget plans, with a special emphasis on Super Tuesday and allocating our new surplus financial resources throughout those twenty-two states. I had not been in the office in almost two weeks and was struck by the change in atmosphere. Everyone was still bone-weary and working around the clock, but I noticed the mood was lighter; almost every staffer was moving with a bounce in his or her step. Headquarters had a different, much more confident feel. It was clear our staff had joined the rest of the political community in thinking that Tuesday’s vote was a mere formality. Then Hillary Clinton threw a monkey wrench into the entire primary.
On Monday afternoon, news began to spread that Hillary had broken down on the campaign trail. We all gathered in the press bullpen, where we had six TVs tuned to different channels, to await the video we knew would come any minute. Reporters had described the moment to our press staff as Hillary having “just lost it.” When the video aired, my heart sank. At a roundtable conversation with a dozen or so voters in a local coffee shop, a woman asked Hillary a personal question about how she managed even to get out the door every day with all she had on her plate—work, family, doing her hair. Clinton responded by moving the focus away from herself and onto the American people. Her eyes welled up as she spoke. “Some people think elections are a game, lots of who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ future, and it’s really about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against pretty difficult odds.... We do it ... because we care about our country, but some of us are right, and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready, and some of us are not. Some of us know what we will do on Day One, and some of us haven’t thought that through enough.” Her emotion hadn’t knocked her off her talking points, I noticed, but it guaranteed that this moment would dominate the news Monday night and all day Tuesday. I thought immediately it could play well for her. It was a very human moment (though in the heat of the campaign I assumed it must have been deviously contrived and staged) and would appeal especially to female voters. Women had supported Clinton in huge numbers through most of the New Hampshire primary, and though they backed away a bit after our win in Iowa, they still liked her and might conceivably return to her camp in the final hours.
Aside from how the clip would be perceived, the mere fact that a curveball had been thrown into our plans while we were on a great trajectory was deeply concerning. We’d had things right where we wanted them. Now we couldn’t be too sure. I called Axelrod, who was on the road with Obama in New Hampshire, to get his take. He shared my unease. “The press will be analyzing this incessantly, some commentators saying she’s hurt herself,” he mused. “There could be a real backlash effect with women voters. Maybe it’s a blip but it could also be a disaster for us.”
Monday also brought fresh reports of Clinton robocalls—automated phone messages left on answering machines and voice-mail-and direct-mail pieces attacking Obama. She was accusing us of being hypocritical on our pledge to cleanse D.C. of lobbyist influence, criticizing us for not being able to stand up to the Republican attack machine, and questioning Obama’s pro-choice record. To top it off, Bill Clinton was telling crowds that our attempt to differentiate Obama’s Iraq position from his wife’s was a “fairy tale.”
They were lashing out hard. We should have shined a spotlight on these attacks, as we had done so effectively in Iowa. Putting the character of her campaign on trial before voters would have been the smart thing to do and would have dovetailed nicely with the change-versus-status-quo argument that had exploded coming out of Iowa.
Instead we decided to deal with these attacks tactically—and traditionally—by sending out our own automated calls, e-mails, and fliers, rebutting her claims and trying to set the facts straight, rather than getting into a pissing match. Looking back on it, I’m not sure we even had a lengthy debate about whether to turn the negative energy of the attacks back on her. I still kick myself for this overconfidence.
Dixville Notch, a tiny town in New Hampshire, kicks off every primary by casting the first votes at midnight. All the cable networks carry it live and the morning shows highlight the result. I was at home by this point and watched it unfold on TV. We had actually worked pretty hard to convince voters here, hoping for even the small boost a win in Dixville might provide. It paid off: we won overwhelmingly, receiving a whopping seven votes to Edwards’s two. Hillary was frozen out. Everyone now seemed to expect a double-digit Obama win; the Clinton people were already spinning that anything less than that would be a “Clinton victory.” I went to bed as confident as I have ever been about anything in politics.
Tuesday was a glori
ous day in New Hampshire, with record highs in the sixties—perfect weather for a trip to the polls. We were thrilled, because we believed a large turnout would help us. It felt like fortune was smiling on us.
The one disturbing piece of anecdotal evidence we received was that some of the independent voters who had pledged to support us (independents can choose to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary) were showing up at polling locations saying they were voting for McCain in the GOP primary because “he needs the help more.” McCain and Mitt Romney were very close in most of the New Hampshire polls while Obama was seen as a lock. When I got to the hotel, Obama was out doing last-minute campaign stops. Axelrod had stayed behind to work on that night’s speech, and we decided to grab lunch. On our way we ran into Mark Halperin, a reporter for Time, who asked if he could join us. He was working on a cover story about “how Obama did it,” and was hoping to get some time with the two of us. We were uneasy at the prospect of talking about how we won before it actually happened, but Halperin persisted. “Listen, you guys are going to win big today,” he said. “If a miracle happens and you don‘t, I won’t use any of what you tell me.”
We grudgingly went along and tried to carefully talk about how we had pulled off Iowa and New Hampshire. But the whole thing felt uncomfortable and ill advised. As I was leaving the restaurant at the hotel, I stopped by Michelle Obama’s table, where she was having lunch with some of her family. She asked me if things were as good as they seemed. “They are,” I said. “Hillary’s moment yesterday concerns me, but all the numbers suggest we should be fine. Even if we shed some support, we should still win by a margin that would’ve seemed inconceivable a week ago.” I hesitated for a moment and then went on. “But it feels odd to be so confident. It doesn’t square with who we are.”
Michelle smiled. “No, it doesn‘t,” she said. This rocket ride we were on was something none of us had adjusted to.
As Ax and I walked down the hall to the elevator bank, he seemed increasingly nervous. “I have a sinking feeling in my stomach,” he told me. “My head says everything is all right. But something is gnawing at me inside that says our world may get turned upside down tonight.”
I hoped this was just run-of-the-mill Ax neurosis.
As evening approached we bunkered down in our makeshift boiler room in the hotel’s basement. The first exit polls from the press had us up six. Exits proved woefully inaccurate throughout the primary, and even early on we took them with a grain of salt, but still this margin was troublingly close. Clinton could salvage things by suggesting she was on an upswing. Her husband had used this tactic successfully here in 1992. Losing badly to Paul Tsongas, Bill Clinton proclaimed himself the “Comeback Kid” because he finished a better-than-expected second place while fighting off multiple scandals. I feared we could have another Comeback Kid on our hands. I started e-mailing our press staff, telling them to keep working the reporters: a win was a win. New Hampshire was a must-win for Clinton after losing Iowa. A week ago she had been the inevitable, sure-thing winner. No amount of spin could fudge losing the first two contests; the wheels had come off the inevitability express.
And then suddenly we were falling. The last round of exits had our lead down to two. Actual results started coming in and our New Hampshire staff immediately said the exits were not going to be too far off—it would be close. As town after town reported, we were falling just short of many of our vote goals (we were modeling off getting 42 percent of the vote statewide). I was pacing and pacing and peering over our staff’s shoulders to look at results and growing increasingly frustrated. With about a quarter of the vote in, our New Hampshire state director, Matt Rodriguez, who knew the numbers backward and forward, came up to Ax and me. “We’re going to lose,” he told us.
“What? Are you serious?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Unless turnout is unusually high in some of our base areas yet to come in and low in hers, we’ll lose by a couple thousand votes.”
This was hard to get my brain around. I was still struggling with how to manage a narrower-than-expected victory. But a loss? It would certainly narrow our already perilous path. It could crush any credible hope we had of winning the nomination.
I told Ax we had better break the news to Obama. We grabbed Gibbs and the three of us rode in silence up to our floor and trudged down the hallway to his room. Gibbs knocked. Obama opened the door and stepped out in the hallway. “What do we know?” he asked.
I grimaced. “Our New Hampshire staff thinks we are going to lose narrowly.”
“Lose?” he repeated.
“Lose,” Ax confirmed. “Something funky clearly happened here.”
“How could everyone be so wrong, us included?” Obama asked, resignation already visible in the slight droop of his shoulders.
“That’s going to take a lot of work to figure out,” I replied.
Obama leaned back against the wall and exhaled. Then he looked at us and smiled. “This is going to take a while, isn’t it?”
Taking charge, he immediately moved to the speech; the current draft built on our victory address in Iowa and was a clarion call for change. “Yes We Can” was a refrain throughout, in answer to the many challenges cynics said could not be overcome. Ultimately, we decided to leave much of the speech intact—“No head hanging,” Obama instructed everyone—with the painful exception of adding a line of congratulations to Clinton on her win.
Obama really kept us going that night. He quickly processed the abrupt reversal of fortune and moved on to the practical, immediate questions in front of us. At some point in the future there would be time to analyze, bemoan, and maybe even wallow, but right now we had to plow forward, and he was the one who stepped up and pulled the wagon.
I think had we lost under a different scenario, we would have had a tougher time recovering. If we had lost by a couple points after going into primary day in a dead heat, it would have been devastating. But because we were surprised, because some combination of unknown factors had converged to produce a result in defiance of all the evidence leading up to the primary, it was in some ways easier to deal with. The loss was more of a head-scratcher than a tablepounder, and our reaction more quizzical than heartbroken.
Obama muscled up and delivered a terrific speech. A casual observer would not have known that he had just lost a primary in one of the biggest surprises in modern campaign memory. Moments later, I forced myself to watch Clinton’s speech. It was excruciatingly painful. We had heard that Hillary’s team had considered having her leave New Hampshire before the polls closed so she would not have to deliver a concession speech in-state. Now, there she was, defiantly victorious and back in the driver’s seat as the prohibitive frontrunner. The media commentary that night along with the e-mails and calls I received made it clear that most onlookers thought order had been restored. Many seemed to think it would be impossible for us to recover from this devastating blow. I thought this was a very simplistic view and was not grounded in the reality of how the race was likely to unfold. We were no longer a plucky upstart but a fully formed campaign machine, with a stellar candidate who could go the distance. And we were likely to be better organized and funded than Hillary at least through early February.
Winning Iowa had been the lift that allowed us to get on even ground with her, but even still, a victory in New Hampshire was not optional in our scenario. Now the momentum had swung away from us and decisively to Clinton. The question was whether the race would now stabilize in her favor. Any hopes we’d had of a quick end to the primaries were over. As Obama had said, it was going to take a while. And we would need it to.
After midnight we held a conference call for all of our staff around the country. I was concerned that they would have a tough time rebounding. My message was simple, pounding home that we were better organized and funded going forward, and that we clearly had the better candidate, one who brought to the moment exactly what our party and country needed. “This was never going to be easy,” I
summed up. “Easy is not what you signed up for. But I’ve never been more confident in a group of people than I am in you and I am still very confident we will prevail. So let’s go win this fucking thing.”
I believed most of what I said. But after the call I kept working through how we might still pull this off. I had always thought, privately, that New Hampshire was the key to the nomination. Win it, and the odds would be heavily stacked in our favor. Winning Iowa was our entry into the finals, winning New Hampshire could give us a close to insurmountable advantage after just two contests. But lose it, and the momentum from our win in Iowa could quickly dissipate and we’d be back to staring up at a strong Hillary Clinton, dinged in Iowa, but having righted her battleship.
At about 2:00 a.m., I sat down to check our online money, expecting the worst. When I saw the numbers, I caught my breath. At first I thought I had made a mistake and pulled up the reports for post-Iowa. But I hadn’t. I was looking at the numbers for late January 8 and early January 9, and the numbers weren’t lying: the money was just pouring in. Even more amazing, a lot of people were giving for the first time. Remarkably, for these folks, our win in Iowa did not prompt them to give, but the loss in New Hampshire did. For the first time since Matt Rodriguez had called the loss a few hours ago, I took a deep breath. Our supporters were not going to be swayed by one setback. They were in it for the long haul.
Obama was planning to do the national morning shows on Wednesday so it would not look like we were hiding in defeat. I decided to travel with him for a few days, so I had to be up early to meet him at the tapings. Sometime after 3:00 a.m. I had finally dozed off, and I was suffering through some fitful sleep when the hotel fire alarm started blaring. Dazed, I lurched into the hallway, where I ran into North Dakota senator Kent Conrad, who had endorsed Obama right before Iowa (our first senator outside of Illinois) and had been in New Hampshire campaigning for us. Standing in my boxers in a hotel hallway in the middle of the night with Kent Conrad, I suddenly experienced an overwhelming urge to get the hell out of New Hampshire.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 20