Barack told me to hire as many people as I wanted to help ease the load but insisted I stay in place as manager, driving and making big decisions as others handled more execution. “I just want to know you are managing the process,” he said, “and ultimately making the big strategic decisions. And I want to keep the relationship you and I have had, talking through everything every day.”
This didn’t address my central problem, which was a need to be with my family. Our senior staff was terrific—I certainly did not think it wise to make any broad expansions to our existing tight unit. I was also exhausted and thought a fresh and singularly focused manager might serve the campaign in its home stretch.
In early 2008, when I first discussed with my wife my stepping down, she had been supportive. Now, as word leaked within the campaign that I might go, several members of the staff expressed to her their personal alarm at the disruption it would cause. As the primary stretched into June, they pointed out, when the countdown to the VP selection, convention, debates, and Election Day had already begun, there was no time to spare for a leadership transition.
Still, I was not prepared for what my wife told me late one night at the end of the spring. “I think you have to stay,” she said. “There will inevitably be a hiccup or two transitioning to a new manager. It’s almost summer already; the campaign doesn’t have time for growing pains. You just fought like crazy to make Barack the Democratic nominee; we have an obligation to do everything we can to elect him in November. I have no idea how we will manage. But we will.”
I was moved but still not convinced. This was not just about what I thought would be best for them. It was about being true to myself. And if I stayed as manager, it would mean that I was choosing not to be the father or husband I aspired to be. This was the kind of choice I had always sworn would be easy. Family first.
It’s what wives want their husbands to do, defying history, odds, and tradition. But there would be no surprise announcement of chivalry and commitment. My wife’s rationale that it was simply too late to make a change carried the day. I stayed in Chicago.
Having allowed myself something of a fresh start, I took stock of things in my office and found I had a hole organizationally. I needed someone to handle a lot of the day-to-day budget matters, interpersonal and human resource issues, thorny political problems, and some key projects: basically, a campaign chief of staff. I wanted more time to spend on large-scale resource-allocation issues and to chew over the states and our Electoral College paths. On top of that I wanted to be able to spend more time with our advertising team and to start focusing on the debates.
I needed someone with a strong management and campaign background and who would make a good fit into the No Drama Obama culture. Barack’s Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse, suggested I bring in Jim Messina, who was himself chief of staff for Montana senator Max Baucus and a veteran of many successful campaigns. Messina dived right in. He endeared himself to me from the get-go by taking not two weeks to wrap up his affair but drove across the country in two days and got started. He was a terrific addition, quickly earning people’s trust and confidence despite being new to our core senior group. I made clear from Day One that he spoke for me, and we made sure there was no daylight between us, which helped. As the weeks passed, I wondered how the hell I had survived the primary without someone like Jim.
One night in June, Axelrod and I were sitting in my office at HQ. Piles of paper were everywhere, and the walls were covered with maps that had not worn well since being tacked up over a year earlier. It was late, and we were taking a moment to catch our breath. “You know,” I said to him, “we have four big things in the next five months we have to excel at. If we can nail those, knowing we should be able to win the message war, especially the economy, have more money and a better organization and electoral strategy than McCain, we should win.”
Ax immediately rattled them off: “Trip. VP. Convention. Debates.”
Translated out of campaign shorthand, this meant a foreign trip we’d decided to embark on in July; the selection and announcement of a vice presidential nominee; the Democratic convention; and the four debates, three between the presidential candidates and one VP debate.
“A gauntlet for sure,” I replied. “But if we can beat Hillary, we can handle these.”
Ax shot me a look. “A foreign trip where one thing goes wrong and we could implode,” he ticked off, “a VP process that is months late and draws from a thin field; a convention that we haven’t even gotten our arms around—and don’t forget the Clinton drama that could dominate Denver—and debates, not exactly our strong suit, whatever improvement we’ve made. Thanks, Plouffe, for seeing the bright side.”
For all his characteristic gloom, he was right. It is often said presidential campaigns are not won in August but they can be lost there. We would soon find out.
12
Innocents Abroad
A key factor for many voters in 2008 was their belief that America needed to repair its relationship with the rest of the world. Relations had largely been decimated by the Bush years—Iraq, walking away from climate talks, a knee-jerk aversion to diplomacy—and Americans believed that their next president needed to bridge some of these divides. We were surprised to learn that general-election voters across the board felt just as strongly about the need to repair relations abroad as primary voters had. In an increasingly interconnected world, they believed we become stronger by cooperating with the rest of the globe while still playing a central leadership role.
Within the campaign, we had been talking as early as the summer of 2007 about making an overseas trip. Obama’s unique family background and his time spent living in Indonesia, along with his clear and pronounced differences with Bush and McCain on the need for more rigorous diplomacy, convinced voters from the outset of the general election that Obama would do more to fix our relationships with the rest of the world than McCain, by a healthy margin. This was an important attribute advantage.
A trip overseas could accomplish two different but equally important things: it would show that Obama could operate effectively on the world stage and would also acutely demonstrate how his election would change the nature of our relationship with the rest of the world.
A small group of us—me, Axelrod, Gibbs, Alyssa, Anita Dunn, Dan Pfeiffer, and Denis McDonough, our top foreign policy adviser—hashed out the itinerary in a series of meeting and calls. Denis was carefully reaching out to some of our key outside advisers to get their input as well. Ultimately we recommended an itinerary of Iraq, Israel, Germany, and Britain; a seven-day trip, including travel back and forth.
We chose each destination to serve a distinct purpose. Iraq would allow him to meet with the commanders and the troops; Israel, to demonstrate once and for all his deep commitment to the Jewish state, as well as his intention to play a leading role in the search for Middle East peace; Germany, to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel and to hold our one public event; and Britain, to do a quick meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Late in June, on our last call before locking in the itinerary, Obama insisted that we add France to the agenda. He said that while it might not add much to this trip, if he was elected president, this perceived slight could start him off on the wrong foot. We fought this but he pulled rank, and that was that. It would now be an eight-day trip, with the addition of a meeting and probable press conference with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
This may sound like the type of trip presidents take all the time. But Obama was not president. We had to pull this off as a campaign, a private organization with no government or diplomatic resources. It was hard enough to put on a flawless week of campaigning in the States, but doing so overseas would test us as we had never been tested before—from Obama on down.
Any of a million things could go wrong: A diplomatic gaffe. Mishandling substance and questions. Bumbled logistics. As Dan Balz of the Washington Post, one of the deans of national political reporters, wrot
e before we embarked on the trip:[T]he tour is fraught with risks. The large media contingent that will follow Obama means that any misstep or misstatement will be magnified and potentially read as evidence of his inexperience, adding to doubts about him. If he successfully navigates his itinerary, however, the political payoffs could be significant enough to affect the outcome of his race against Republican Sen. John McCain this fall.
I thought that just about nailed it. As Ax said to me right before the trip, “This trip—and the idea to do it—will go down in history as either brilliant or colossally stupid.”
“Well, for the history books, we’ll make sure they knew it was your idea,” I replied.
We thought the strategic upside was huge, and as a bonus we would get real coverage, not just pundit chatter, that would reach voters right before they began to check out through the dog days of summer.
I also believed that by pushing ourselves, the trip could help pull us closer together internally and force us to execute at the highest possible level—it stretched us organizationally, made us grow, and would strengthen us for the next impossible task. We all knew the risks: a mistake on this stage could cause serious, lasting damage to our candidacy. But each time we did something really hard in the campaign, the result was that we benefited—voters began to put a value on our ability to execute. Our boldness reminded them that we were not cut from the same typical Washington cloth. No one had ever before attempted a trip like this in presidential campaign history.
During the planning phase, our most important decision was where to hold the one public event we thought the trip required. We immediately ruled out Paris and London, believing that American voters would not assign great value to our ability to draw a big crowd and communicate with the populations of those countries. It would be a little too expected. But we thought Berlin would mean a great deal more to people. Germany was perceived as less socialist than France and a less reliable ally than Britain; our relationship, while strong, had weathered recent ups and down. In a rare instance, we did not poll this. We based our decision on gut and instinct.
The Berlin gamble was truly audacious. We planned an outdoor rally, speaking directly to the citizens of Germany as well as to all of Europe. We believed this would visually demonstrate an important premise: the world was still hungry for American leadership, but of a different, more cooperative kind that only Barack Obama could deliver.
The size of the crowd he drew was less important than the text of the speech, but we certainly wanted a strong showing. Both Alyssa, whose team would be responsible for building the site and generating a crowd, and Denis, who had been consulting with outside advisers on what kind of crowd we could expect, offered no guarantees. They said it could range from a few thousand to a hundred thousand people; we wouldn’t know which until showtime. Unlike at our domestic events, where we had a very good sense based on pre-event online sign-ups and a good local feel on the ground, here we were essentially flying blind. When I reminded Alyssa that we needed a large, pulsating crowd, she offered a sober response. “A rally in Berlin, New Hampshire? No problem,” she said. “In Berlin, Germany? We’re so far out of our comfort zone, I have no idea what will happen. Everybody better keep their expectations in check.”
Even still, I could tell she and her team were animated by the challenge. This event was an advance person’s dream—and potential nightmare. The lights would never shine brighter. I thought we would rise to the occasion. A big day in Berlin provided a nice interruption from the eighteen months of events and rallies we had been doing just about daily in the States, and that had become somewhat routine.
President John Kennedy had spoken before the famous Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1963. We were mindful of comparisons and did not want to encourage them. There was a big difference between a president speaking to a divided Germany during the Cold War and a presidential candidate speaking to a unified Germany nearly half a century later. With this in mind, we scouted other locations.
A couple of days before the trip, I was fund-raising in California when Katie Johnson, my assistant, called me with urgent news. “Denis is in the hospital,” she said. “He suddenly became disoriented and couldn’t remember what day it was or what he was doing. He’s undergoing tests.”
Denis had come to me from time to time in the previous weeks expressing great anxiety about the trip. He was clearly shouldering much of the pressure and felt our success hinged largely on his planning and briefings for each leg of the trip. To a large degree, he was right. He and Alyssa were the star performers on this high wire. I had tried to tell him that he was not up there alone, that we had decided as a group to go and we would rise or fall in that way. “Denis,” I had assured him, grasping at every metaphor within reach, “this trip is going to be a home run. And if isn’t it won’t be because of anything you’ll have done but because we made a bad call to do it in the first place.”
Denis was tough as nails, a former college defensive back, not one to let a physical illness stand in his way. I assumed his poor health was due to anxiety. He and Gibbs had been working closely, so I called Robert to get his take. The conversation quickly confirmed my suspicions. “The trip is just eating Denis up,” Gibbs told me. “He hasn’t slept for days. Night after night, he’s been lying awake thinking about everything and making sure he hasn’t missed anything.”
It turned out he was just having an allergic reaction to Ambien and was temporarily disoriented. They kept him under observation long enough to ensure he had not had a stroke or developed a brain tumor. The whole episode was unsettling, not the least for Denis. Mercifully and happily, he made a lightning quick recovery. The next morning, he sent us an e-mail saying he was leaving the hospital and would be back at his desk shortly. We discussed whether he should stand down, but he would have none of it. But the incident only underscored the tremendous pressure we all worked under to get this right.
The first leg of the trip took Obama to Iraq and briefly to Afghanistan. He had been to Iraq once before in his official capacity as senator, in 2006. We felt it critical that he return on this trip, since the war represented the policy area of perhaps greatest disagreement with McCain. We had pledged to bring combat troops out of Iraq within sixteen months of being elected president, while McCain had suggested—out of context, they claimed, but it sounded pretty clear to us—that we could be in Iraq “for maybe a hundred years.”
Very few Americans were interested in another five years in Iraq, much less one hundred, so highlighting that difference was an important component of Obama’s visit. But he also wanted to spend time with the commanders and troops on the ground, making clear that while their mission would change when he was elected president, he deeply valued their judgment and heroic work.
Though for the rest of the trip Obama would be traveling as a private citizen, he went to Iraq and Afghanistan in his official capacity as a senator and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was joined by Senators Jack Reed of Rhode Island and, in a coup for us, Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Hagel had become a fierce critic of the Bush-McCain Iraq strategy, or lack thereof. He never gave Obama an official endorsement but joining him in Iraq sent all the right signals.
Because this was a diplomatic, government-sanctioned trip, no campaign staff or resources could be made available for this leg of the journey. Obama was assisted only by Mark Lippert, a Navy reservist who had been his foreign policy adviser in the Senate and who had been absent for much of the campaign while on an intelligence assignment in Iraq. Tony Blinken, who was the staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also traveled with the delegation. I stayed behind in Chicago while Ax, Gibbs, Denis, and Alyssa flew to Amman, Jordan, where they would eventually meet up with Obama.
After eighteen months of instantaneous contact and zero-delay feedback, we were suddenly inside a black hole. E-mail was spotty in this portion of the trip, and there was no one other than Obama and Lippert to send updates. “It�
�s only our most important day of the campaign so far and we’re completely in the dark,” I joked to Dunn and Pfeiffer. “It feels like we’re back in the dark ages.”
Lippert finally sent word by e-mail that the meeting with the troops had gone very well and that Obama had played a little basketball with some of the soldiers. Before photos from the meeting were aired on TV, Obama called me to check in. It wasn’t long before he brought the conversation around to his preferred talking point.
“Did you hear about my shot?” he asked.
“I heard you shot some hoops,” I replied.
“Well,” he said with characteristic understated confidence, “you guys are going to have to get me back into a bowling alley soon. I was with the troops in the gym, someone threw me a basketball, and I swished the first three-pointer I tried. Money. Let me out on that bowling alley and the first ball I roll will be a strike.”
When I saw the pictures, I understood why he was crowing. It was a pretty awesome scene: Barack in dress shirt and pants, casually knocking down a three on his first attempt while the troops went nuts. A pretty good first day, I thought.
The next day he would meet with General David Petraeus, who had publicly stated his disagreement with our plan for a phased withdrawal of combat troops; he thought it would bind the hands of the commanders on the ground. One clear objective for the meeting, then, was to not back down one iota on Obama’s commitment to having the bulk of combat troops out of Iraq in sixteen months.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 36