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

by David Plouffe

  “[T]he most articulate and profound speech on race in America,” added the Sacramento Bee, “since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, ‘I have a dream,’ in 1963.”

  More important, voters also responded very well to it. Wright still bothered them—but they respected how Obama dealt with the issue.

  As was the case throughout the campaign, most people did not watch the speech on TV. It was delivered on a Tuesday morning, when just about everyone was at work. Instead, people watched it online, most of them on YouTube, either as it was happening or at their leisure later that day or in the days to come. Eventually, tens of millions of voters saw the speech through various outlets.

  This marked a fundamental change in political coverage and message consumption, and one that will only continue as technology rolls forward: big moments, political or otherwise, will no longer be remembered by people as times when everyone gathered around TVs to watch a speech, press conference, or other event. Increasingly, most of us will recall firing up the computer, searching for a video, and watching it at home or at the office—or even on our cell phones.

  As a result of Obama’s race speech and our subsequent ability to start working other message points, our numbers finally began to bounce back a bit. But we had no chance to win Pennsylvania. Our best hope was to keep it relatively close, minimize the Clinton delegate haul, and try to mitigate the overheated political analysis suggesting we could not close Hillary out.

  Both candidates had strong bases in every state, and even though we had taken the upper hand mathematically in the campaign, Hillary was still a formidable candidate. Very few voters cast their ballots based on the delegate tallies. They made individual determinations. Some states were jump balls, with the outcome unclear. But in most we could predict with a high level of accuracy what would happen based on the makeup of the electorate.

  Pennsylvania was one of the best states in the entire primary for Clinton, with its older electorate, closed primary system, and a sympathetic state party apparatus. Despite that, we campaigned hard to cut down her lead. Obama went on a six-day bus tour, crossing the state from west to east. He shook hands and did retail politics in small communities, visiting sports bars (during NCAA college basketball’s March Madness) and even infamously bowling a few frames, during which he threw more gutter balls than strikes.

  The bowling session was read by most reporters as a gaffe—he only rolled a 37, and they said he was trying too hard to fit in and look less “elitist.” But voters viewed it differently. Many voters saw Obama as a gifted figure, very calm and collected, who made few mistakes. His willingness to try something he was not good at, under a withering media spotlight, was refreshing to them.

  The incident hadn’t been scripted. He and our great supporter in the Keystone State, Senator Bob Casey, were supposed to shake hands with bowlers and leave it at that. But Casey and Obama decided it would be fun to throw a few frames, much to the chagrin of Dan Pfeiffer, our message policeman on that trip.

  “The bowling I don’t mind,” I told Obama that night. “But at least you could have taken off your tie. In the pictures you and Casey look like accountants going office-bowling.”

  He laughed. “Just make sure the press staff makes it known I did not bowl a thirty-seven,” he said. “I bowled a thirty-seven in six or seven frames. Sure, I was bad, but at least let the record show I would have broken fifty”

  Throughout the rest of the campaign Obama occasionally pined to go bowling again; he wanted to expunge his record with a better performance. I found this both amusing and insightful. Despite his calm demeanor, Obama was prideful and competitive, and hated that he had failed so utterly at something.

  Things had stabilized in Pennsylvania until Obama made his biggest unforced error of the entire campaign. I happened to be in western Pennsylvania, doing a round of interviews about the primary and meeting with some of our volunteer team leaders, when all hell broke loose.

  The popular blog Huffington Post ran a story from a woman named Mayhill Fowler. Fowler, who had actually contributed to our campaign and was part of Huffpost’s citizen journalist brigade, had attended a recent San Francisco fund-raiser featuring Obama and surreptitiously made an audio recording of Barack’s speech.

  In it, Obama made some cringe-worthy remarks: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

  “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

  Fowler reportedly agonized for days about whether to post and release the comments. She knew it would cause us major problems. Finally she talked to an editor who told her she had an obligation to make them public. Fowler agreed, and suddenly we were back in major damage-control mode.

  The first problem was that once again we were blindsided. None of us knew he had made the comments. The event staff hadn’t flagged it. We normally recorded everything Obama said, but, inexplicably, we had failed to do so at this event. We never made that mistake again.

  I couldn’t imagine a worse context for him to have made such boneheaded comments: standing in a room full of wealthy donors in San Francisco—to much of the country a culturally extreme and elitist city with far-out views—speaking in anthropological terms about the middle of the country; describing the setting, it really couldn’t sound much worse.

  I called Obama immediately. He began to make a somewhat halfhearted effort to explain what had happened. First, he focused on the fact that he did not know he was being taped.

  “C‘mon,” I said to him, “in the world we live in, you know there’s a terrific chance that anything you say anywhere could be captured.”

  He quickly shifted gears. “It should be clear what I was trying to say,” he argued. “But I really did mangle the words. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that I had misspoken, but looking at the transcript now, I really don’t know how the hell I constructed my point like that.”

  I told him we would just have to fight through this. We’d say that the words were chosen poorly but the point is valid—economically stressed voters feel like their voices aren’t heard, that their struggles take a backseat in D.C., and that all too often efforts are made to distract and divide on social issues.

  He was very quiet. A moment later he was going into an event and we had to wrap up. “I felt like we were really beginning to hit our stride again,” he said. “And this will set us back again. I can’t blame anyone but me for this. I’m sorry.”

  That might be the only time in twenty years in politics I saw a candidate confront a setback so honestly. In my experience, politicians almost always look to blame someone else, circumstances, being tired—anything but accepting responsibility. And it’s not just politicians. It’s human nature.

  With as light a heart as I could muster, I said, “Well, I’m just glad this broke after I left the meeting in rural western Pennsylvania. Most of the discussion was about how to convince people you weren’t going to take their guns away. Had this come out while I was there, I might have been bitter. At you.”

  The incident was in many ways an updated version of George Allen’s Macaca moment from 2006, when he was caught on video making racially insensitive comments. In the world we live in, nothing is private. At any time, someone could have a small video camera, audio recorder, or cell phone camera. No room was safe; anything the candidate said could be captured and launched on the Internet and then taken up by the mainstream media, ginning up a first-class crisis.

  When I was coming up in politics, the saying was, Don’t put anything on paper you don’t want to see on the front page of
the New York Times. The new adage should be, Don’t say anything you don’t want posted on YouTube and whipped around the Internet at warp speed. We were spared to an extent in that there was no video of his comments in California, and the audio recording was not great quality. The words were still replayed incessantly, but because online video is now king, the clip didn’t get the play it might have.

  My flight back to Chicago was delayed several hours. Once all the conference calls wrapped, I wandered over to the airport Chili’s for some comfort food and a beer. It was crowded, the Pittsburgh Penguins game was on, and in between some cheers and boos I picked up a conversation about “Bittergate,” which was just in its infancy. The gist of it went like this:

  “So maybe this is who he is after all,” a guy at the bar said to his buddy sitting next to him. “He hid it for a while, but now we see he looks down on us if we hunt, go to church, lead normal lives. Just like the rest of the Democrats.”

  “Maybe, but maybe he just messed up,” his friend replied. “It doesn’t sound like him. I’m going to put him on probation.”

  That was music to my ears. Eyes lifted to the hockey game, I thought maybe we’d get put in the penalty box but not thrown out of the game. If the bitter comment had happened the previous fall, before he was as well known, we might not have recovered. But people now had enough of a sense of Obama to know that the statement was discordant with his whole approach and demeanor.

  As I was leaving the bar I passed a full-size replica of Franco Harris (who was supporting us) of the Pittsburgh Steelers making the Immaculate Reception back in 1972, the most famous catch in Pittsburgh sports and perhaps in NFL history.

  I thought to myself, “Franco, could we just get one friggin’ break here, and not have to keep catching balls right before they hit the turf? How about a nice slant route where the ball is thrown perfectly and we get a clean run, like back in February?”

  The Pennsylvania primary was never going to be easy for us and there was nothing immaculate about our performance. We fought through the “bitter” comments and actually had some success turning Clinton’s inevitable attacks on the issue against her. She lost no time calling us “elitist” and “divisive,” and began making the assertion that we were now damaged goods with rural and small-town voters in the general election.

  Obama struck back immediately, ridiculing her as the new tribune for hunters and the working class. A line he completely ad-libbed, “She’s running around like Annie Oakley,” was my personal favorite.

  The Clinton campaign returned fire—wrongly, in my view. In politics you have to know what issues to lean into and when to leave your opponent punching into the wind. By trying to capitalize on it politically, they gave us an opening and we took it. Our response ad called out their attacks as more of the divisive politics that have let our country down. These comments will do nothing, we told voters, to create jobs or lower the price of gas. It was reminiscent of a tack Bill Clinton took against George Bush in 1992 when he declared, to great effect, that political attacks have never educated a child. It worked for Clinton in 1992, and it also worked for us.

  Pennsylvania was a roller coaster. We started way down. Climbed to within shouting distance after our bus tour. Plummeted after Wright but then began to bounce back after Obama’s speech on race. We dropped again after Bittergate, but as we pivoted off the Clinton attacks, we began to see some positive movement again. Hillary would still win, but it seemed we might keep her margin to five or six percentage points and minimize her net delegate yield.

  Two events in the closing days stopped any momentum we had and handed Clinton the big win she desperately needed.

  Our lone Pennsylvania debate took place six days before the primary in Philadelphia, on April 16. This was our twenty-second primary debate, and Obama had won or tied the three previous one-on-one meetings with Clinton.

  Not this one. Our prep was a disaster. I wasn’t there, but I received constant e-mail updates from Ax. Obama was arriving late and leaving the sessions early. He was unfocused and generally annoyed by the types of questions he knew were coming: Wright, bitter, his viability with white voters. He fiddled with his BlackBerry constantly, e-mailing Valerie Jarrett concerning various rumors about Wright: whether he was going to start speaking again, what those close to him were saying his next move would be, and other distracting chatter.

  He called me before taking the debate stage. I said I had heard debate prep was spotty and that this match promised to be brutal; he needed to pull himself together and have a strong ninety minutes. We had not made our decision public yet but had determined internally that this would be our final primary debate.

  That’s the card I played to get him to focus. “If nothing else,” I urged Obama, “get excited that this will be your last primary debate. One year, twenty-two debates, and dozens of forums later the nightmare has finally come to an end. You will never have to debate Hillary Clinton again. Never.”

  He chuckled wearily. “I’ll get my game face on but this one’s not going to be fun.”

  His prediction was more accurate than we imagined. Moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson spent the entire first half of the debate pummeling him. Sidestepping substantive issues, they led a cook’s tour of all our campaign controversies: Wright. Bitter. Flag pin. They even introduced Bill Ayers, a former domestic terrorist and acquaintance of Obama’s who would later assume a starring role in the campaign.

  At first Obama handled the interrogation with characteristic poise. But as it ground on and on, he grew increasingly on edge and stopped trying to segue back to our message. The barrage of questions forced him to play defense, and he got pounded.

  The debate halted our momentum and particularly hurt us with women in the suburbs of Philadelphia, still a prime battleground at that late date. I was furious at the moderators and was not alone; they received a torrent of criticism for their handling of the debate. The relentless negativity exemplified why people get disengaged from politics. Yes, Barack needed to address in a public forum his relationship with Wright and the sentiments he expressed on bitter Americans. But with all the other issues facing the next president, these subjects did not merit half of the debate between the two Democratic contenders.

  On shaky footing already, we mishandled the close of the Pennsylvania primary. Rather than turning Clinton’s negativity against her, we got down in the muck again. On the last weekend of the primary we addressed a bogus Clinton TV ad tying us to Dick Cheney on energy with an overheated response of our own claiming Clinton was in the pocket of big oil. We even attacked her for misrepresenting the particulars of her trip to Bosnia as first lady; she said she had come under sniper fire when pictures from the trip showed her in a calm setting receiving flowers from schoolchildren. The Bosnia episode hurt her, because it struck at her credibility and received an enormous amount of coverage, but adding fuel to the fire was unnecessary and discordant with Barack’s message of a new politics. We were thinking small and forgetting who we were.

  We paid for it on primary day. Clinton beat us by nine points in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t a shock but it was painful. The national narrative quickly centered on two questions: Why couldn’t Obama close the deal? Did he have a lasting problem with seniors and working-class whites?

  Looking at the larger, long-term picture, there were some rays of sunshine poking through the storm clouds of the moment. Amazingly, after Bittergate, Wright, bowling, and a terrible debate, we left the Pennsylvania primary with generally high favorability ratings across all spectrums of voters. They didn’t vote for us in large enough numbers, but we had actually improved our standing over the six weeks. Obama campaigned hard, and these voters saw us fight wave after wave of adversity. Despite its outcome, and the scars it left, our primary battle in Pennsylvania significantly strengthened our chances of winning the state in November. We had spent more time there than in any state but Iowa, with the same eventual outcome: even voters who did not participate
in the primary got a heavy dose of Obama. Ultimately it gave us a big leg up against McCain.

  There was another long-term payoff as well. We registered a lot of independents (and some Republicans!) so they could participate in the primary. It didn’t help us much then, but it did help our cause greatly in November.

  Many voters who liked both candidates simply chose Hillary in the primary. That did not mean they would not vote for Obama in November. The suggestion that primary results predicted general-election outcomes was silly, but that was the narrative of the moment. I was absolutely confident that, come November 4, the Democratic nominee would get 90 percent of the Democratic vote. The desire for a change from Bush and his policies was so great that just about everyone would come home to their party nominee. The deciding factor in the general election would be independents; McCain held real appeal to those voters. We also believed we could peel off over 10 percent of the Republican vote in select battleground states and drive historic voter turnout among young voters and African Americans.

  That’s how we saw it. And fortunately most superdelegates agreed. But the margin of our Pennsylvania loss guaranteed another six long weeks of fighting through the fog of Clinton’s opposing view.

  The only silver lining the night of the Pennsylvania primary was that I had promised that if we finished within four points I would jump into the Chicago River. The first exit polls were woefully off and had the race a dead heat. I wasn’t checking water temperatures just yet but there was buzz in the office that I might be getting wet. Unfortunately, I stayed dry.

  10

  Closing the Door

  We had a meeting of the campaign’s senior staff at the Obamas’ house the night after our brutal loss in Pennsylvania. After the girls were in bed, ten of the senior staff gathered around the dining room table with Michelle and Barack. Bowls of nuts laid out for us to munch on served as dinner, though few of us had any appetite. The room was tense.