To put New Hampshire to bed we needed to understand what happened. We lost by a few thousand votes. Any number of factors could have been altered to produce our expected win. After much reflection, I reached some conclusions as to what brought about the shift at the end. Let’s call it “Plouffe’s Primer on How to Lose a Sure Thing.”
First, there was Hillary’s moment of emotion. Remember, she started out with support well in the range of 40 to 45 percent and maintained that level until the last couple of months. And even those who went to Obama or were undecided at the end still viewed her favorably. There was a very fertile group of New Hampshire voters who had always liked her, and this raw moment brought them home.
Next, we lost too many of those pesky independents. The data showed definitively that a healthy number of the independents we identified as both supporting Obama and intending to vote in the Democratic primary had switched to McCain at the end. In fact, there were numerous reports of these voters telling our staff and volunteers, “Your guy is going to win. I think McCain is the best Republican, it will give us a good choice. But don’t worry, I’m voting Obama in November.” Third, we suffered the attacks in silence. Had we called out the Clinton attack strategy, we would have profited by it. We were too confident in our position and treated her attacks as discrete issues to be addressed in the context of a limited number of voters and not as the broad opportunity they presented.
Finally, we were guilty—or seemed to be guilty, which is just as bad—of hoisting the icon. This was a term Axelrod used often to describe a dynamic we needed to avoid. The press coverage suggested Obama was taking a victory tour while Hillary fought for her life. New Hampshire loves underdogs and punishes overconfident front-runners. The voters had not been ready to call the race over. Perhaps they felt it shouldn’t be so easy for a political phenomenon who had barely seen combat to carry the Democratic torch.
“I actually think this is for the best,” Obama said. We were driving down to Boston the day after the primary. “Sure, if we had won New Hampshire, we’d be in the driver’s seat. But I’d be like a comet streaking across the sky. White hot. And comets eventually burn up. Now people can see how I deal with adversity, whether we can bounce back.” He paused for a second, thinking. “And they want me to earn this. They don’t want it to be so easy for someone like me and it probably shouldn’t be.”
Rather than engaging in a lot of second-guessing-though he did want an analysis of how our polling was off and what we thought happened—he was in a remarkably sanguine place.
I looked at him with raised eyebrows. My first thought was, You are in serious denial, dude. We are royally screwed. But I got the sense that he wasn’t rationalizing. It was what he believed, convenient or not. I still wasn’t sure if or how we could win the nomination having lost New Hampshire, but I knew our candidate’s reaction and state of mind gave us a fighting chance.
Super Tuesday was staring us in the face. Twenty- two states would be voting in less than four weeks—in states with early vote, like California and Arizona, voting was under way. We were trailing in many of these February 5 states by over twenty points. And our internal numbers told us we were likely to lose the next contest in Nevada. We would need to fend off a furious Clinton onslaught aimed at ending the race. The next few weeks were likely to be about survival.
Weeks earlier, we had scheduled fund-raisers in Boston and New York for the day after New Hampshire, which was January 8. After our big win in Iowa, these events sold out immediately. Many donors had thought they would be coming to see the Democratic nominee. Now we were no longer a sure thing, and I wondered if the energy at the fund-raisers would be muted as a result. I needn’t have worried. Both events were packed to the rafters with excited donors and great energy. Our longtime financial supporters were particularly energized, and none were hanging crepe. Very few pursued the “How did you guys screw that up?” conversation. They could tell some funky things had happened at the end in New Hampshire—some in our control, many not.
If any guests felt shaky, Obama worked to steady them. “This is not going to be easy,” he reminded the crowd. “Change never is. We will have more setbacks like last night in New Hampshire along the way. But if you really believe in the campaign—not in me, but what we are trying to collectively change in Washington and in our world—then it is after the setbacks that we need you most. I still believe with all my heart that we can win this race. But I need you not to get discouraged, to get more energized and go the distance with us.”
For many donors, seeing his confidence brought into relief by his realism and self-awareness was a powerful reassurance that their dedication to the cause would be honored and matched. Meanwhile, our Internet money continued to fly in, setting a record for our biggest twenty-four-hour period to date. Some of this was in response to fund-raising e-mails sent to our online list, but much of the growth was organic, as new donors sought us out. Our field offices around the country reported that new volunteers were pouring in. It became clear that this setback had emboldened our supporters rather than discouraged them.
We also had a series of high-profile political endorsements lined up right after New Hampshire. While endorsements were not core to our strategy, we had thought that after winning New Hampshire, it would be important to demonstrate the party uniting behind Barack, in hopes of bringing the primary race to an early close. After the loss, we feared some people who had committed would get cold feet. Obama spent much of Wednesday in between events calling these folks, and to a person they all stuck with us. John Kerry was scheduled to go out Thursday, January 10, in South Carolina, and he was still raring to go. Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Senator Claire Mc-Caskill of Missouri also reaffirmed their commitment, as did countless other members of Congress and local elected officials.
These endorsements, in addition to their political and organizational value, sent a strong message that we would not fade away after one setback. Our robust rebound must have been somewhat demoralizing to the Clinton campaign. With some justification, they likely thought they had regained control of the race. But now they could see that we were still growing in strength organizationally and politically. The endorsements also signaled that more and more politicos were not merely comfortable with Obama on the top of the ticket, but thought he would be the stronger standard-bearer.
Our Wednesday-night fund-raiser in New York City ended just after nine, and Gibbs and I wearily made our way to our hotel, the W in Midtown. Shuffling through the lobby, we could see the bar was hopping. Gibbs and I looked at each other gloomily. After losing New Hampshire, and never even properly celebrating Iowa, a belt or two and a good meal in a lively spot were just what the doctor ordered. But we had hours of conference calls ahead of us. ABC News was planning to give us the front-runner treatment, doing a proctologic piece on Good Morning America, Nightline, and World News. They were delving into Obama’s relationship with Tony Rezko, a political supporter with whom Obama had engaged in a real estate deal, which Barack had subsequently acknowledged as an instance of poor judgment. We had to war-game out how we were going to minimize the damage.
In the throes of a campaign, it’s better never to glimpse an oasis like the W bar, or even pay too much attention to normal people going through their daily lives. A campaign is a constant pressure cooker and the only exit is if the top blows. Keep your head down, work around the clock, and don’t reflect for a minute on what you’re missing—that’s the survival mantra.
Gibbs and I grabbed apples from the front desk for dinner that night and grumbled our way to our rooms. Maybe ABC needed some reminding as to which candidate had just lost New Hampshire and which was now more deserving of the “front-runner” scrutiny, I thought.
Nevada, on Saturday, January 19, was the next contest, and we never had a poll showing us in real striking distance. The only way we could win was through staggeringly superior organization. Clinton had the bulk of the establishment support, and as far as
we could tell, her team was much better organized than they had been in Iowa. We had put together a deeper campaign, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to put us over the top.
We never thought Nevada would mean much in terms of its impact on subsequent primaries; we anticipated it as a blip on the screen. But after Clinton’s upset comeback in New Hampshire, the state took on new importance: if she won Nevada she would shout from the hills that the race had turned. So we threw all we could into winning it. Obama campaigned hard, as did some of our new high-profile endorsers, like Kerry and Napolitano. It was a valiant effort, but not enough to overcome Hillary’s big lead in the raw vote. She ended up with 51 percent to our 45 percent. Edwards completely flamed out, getting only 4 percent.
About an hour after the race was officially called for Clinton by the news organizations—well before all the results were officially in—our canny delegate director, Jeff Berman, burst into my office looking happier than I expected. “I think we might have won more delegates than Clinton,” he said.
“Why, because we were more balanced statewide?” I asked.
“Yep,” Berman answered. “I think we’ll win more delegates than her in the rural districts. If everything holds as the last numbers come in, we’ll take thirteen pledged delegates overall and she’ll get twelve.”
This was huge news. We could certainly use it to steal some of their thunder. Since Iowa, the Clinton campaign had stuck to the same mantra day after day: “This is a race about delegates.” In my view, they took this tack because they thought they would dominate us on February 5, and at this point they still had a huge lead among superdelegates: the party leaders and officials who have a vote at the Democratic convention. But given how much they had hammered at this argument, it would be hard for them to deny the importance of our Nevada coup. Our press staff suggested that Berman and I do a conference call with the press to put our usual spin on the results with the added twist that we would announce that we had won more delegates, to throw our own little monkey wrench into the Clinton celebration.
Berman and the Associated Press delegate tracker, who is considered the authority on all matters regarding delegates, actually got into a colloquy on the phone. At first the tracker disputed Berman’s assertion. But then they went through the results, district by district and delegate by delegate, and finally the AP tracker pronounced to the entire national political press corps that, in fact, we did seem to have a split verdict—Clinton had won the raw vote but Obama edged her in delegates.
Many of the stories that ran that night and the next day called it a split verdict. The AP headline that ran across the country read, “Clinton, Obama Split Nevada Spoils.” It must have infuriated the Clinton folks to no end. This gave us great satisfaction, though it did not change the fact that Hillary was on a roll.
Nevada also had the effect of beginning to shift the national narrative from raw votes to the question of delegates. As more of the press corps became convinced the race was going to go on for a while—meaning it could turn into a battle for delegates—they started to bone up on the selection process. They already knew that close contests produced essentially split-delegate results-we netted one more than Clinton in Iowa when defeating her by nine points, and tied in New Hampshire despite her raw-vote win. But Nevada illustrated for them that delegate results did not necessarily track the statewide popular vote. This was a critical lesson for us to press upon the media before February 5.
Next came South Carolina, on January 26, and here we had to do more than win. We had to have a victory that somehow produced enough momentum for us to survive Super Tuesday. A close or modest win would likely be insufficient. We needed divine intervention.
It arrived in the form of Bill Clinton.
We had recently worried that, as in a forward-thinking chess strategy, the Clinton campaign might decide to cede South Carolina. Sacrificing this piece would essentially render any win there meaningless and would free up Hillary, Bill, and all their surrogates to get a head start campaigning in the February 5 states, where she already held comfortable leads.
Much has been written about the internal debates in the Clinton camp over whether and how to contest South Carolina. According to numerous reports, we had Bill to thank for their decision to go in whole hog. He apparently argued strenuously that they had a chance to win there and should compete hard. The week leading into the South Carolina primary was the most intense week of the campaign to date, as both Bill and Hillary spent a great deal of time in-state; Bill campaigned there almost full time. It really felt like two on one.
The Clinton attack machine had kicked into full gear, going so far as to assert based on a contorted reading of an interview that Obama believed Ronald Reagan had better ideas than the Democrats. Bill Clinton was especially aggressive during this period. Every time he launched a broadside, it got outsized attention.
We had learned something from New Hampshire, when we did not respond to the attacks effectively. We returned to our approach in Iowa, utilizing what Axelrod would call jujitsu, trying to shine a spotlight on their attacks, not ignore them, and use their negative energy against them.
We set up an in-state “truth squad” of some of our most prominent South Carolina supporters, who would shadow everything Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and their campaign surrogates said that could be construed as an attack and would hold press conferences, make calls, and post on the Web our criticism of the fusillade and their tactics and put out the truth, as we saw it.
We put the Clinton attacks front and center as rationale to vote for change. I believe they thought their attacks in New Hampshire and Nevada had worked and that they saw no reason not to keep going back to the well.
At the one debate in South Carolina, five days before the primary in Myrtle Beach, things turned ugly fast. Obama and Clinton got into a seven-minute slugfest, leaving John Edwards and the rest of the viewers to watch in amazement as the gloves finally came off. Obama was not going to turn the other cheek in this debate. Accusations flew, with each candidate accusing the other of selling out American workers, and every subsequent claim ratcheted up the intensity level onstage. The details were less important than Obama’s display of mettle and willingness to get into a slugfest with Hillary, a champion pugilist. Showing that spine and willingness to fight toe-to-toe was energizing for our supporters and served to shine a spotlight on the Clinton camp’s negative and distorted attacks. It was a tactical detour from our standard debate approach and one that we felt paid real dividends.
We had led in South Carolina for some time, but many of the public polls now showed a tightening of the race. So in addition to serving as the venue for a battle royale, South Carolina was starting to look like a possible upset. And if Clinton won here she would almost certainly be the nominee.
John Edwards was still in the race. Publicly, his team insisted they could resuscitate his campaign in South Carolina. But privately, it soon became clear they knew otherwise, and some time after the debate, I got a call from a senior Edwards adviser. This was the pitch:
“Listen. It’s clear unless the race is shaken up, Hillary is going to win. You guys might not even win South Carolina. What would shake the race up is John ending his campaign, but not to simply endorse another candidate. All things being equal, John prefers Barack. They should announce they are joining forces and will run as a ticket. Edwards can vouch for Obama with blue-collar and Southern whites and is running on a change message. ”It’s a perfect fit. And it has to be something that big to slow down Hillary. You need a big shakeup in the race and this could be it.“
I listened intently and replied that obviously this was something I would need to discuss with my boss. “Am I authorized to raise this offer with him?” I asked.
“Yes” came the reply. But then right at the end of the conversation, the Edwards rep added a new wrinkle: “Just to be clear, we’re going to talk to the Clinton people, too. That’s not where John’s heart is, but he is at a poin
t of maximum leverage now. We want to see what each of you is thinking.”
My initial reaction was that this was a nonstarter. Of course, we wanted Edwards’s support and his message was certainly closer in spirit to ours than it was to Hillary’s. But political deals like this rarely work; people see right through them. Plus, I couldn’t imagine Obama agreeing this far out to lock in his running mate without going through any process or even being certain that we would be the ones making a selection.
Obama’s answer was quick and firm: he would cut no deals. If he won, he did not want to be locked in to any personnel matters, and he had little interest in deciding on a vice presidential pick in the heat of the primary campaign.
We decided he would talk to Edwards personally and make clear there could be no promises. During that conversation, Obama reiterated that we wanted John’s support and thought it would make a difference, and clearly there could be a potential role for him down the line. But if he endorsed us now, there could be no hint of something concrete in the future.
Shortly after this I checked in with my Edwards contact. Clearly Edwards had already downloaded his conversation with Obama. The contact said that while John’s inclination was to be with Obama, it seemed the Clinton folks were more intent on gaining his support. He did not allude to specifics, but the message was that Hillary might offer specific commitments. “Well,” I said, “we have made clear that we would value your support and think it would be very meaningful. I hope this is where you decide to hang your hat.”
I strongly doubted that Clinton was offering Edwards anything concrete, and certainly not the VP slot. She knew better than most how important decisions like this were, and I had a hard time believing that even a crucial endorsement on this level, days before South Carolina, would warrant much more than a thank-you and a promise to talk further down the line.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 21