Barack’s take on the meeting, confirmed by Lippert, was that he and Petraeus established a very good rapport and that they had a healthy debate about timetables for winding down the U.S. presence in Iraq. Obama had stood firm on his position, while simultaneously making clear he would pay heed to the commanders on the ground in terms of execution.
The two men also undertook a helicopter tour of parts of Iraq, which generated terrific front-page photos of Obama in sunglasses and radio gear talking to Petraeus. He looked like a leader. Some in the media captioned the picture “Senator Bad-ass.”
I received one of our periodic gifts, this one visual, from McCain that day. He was doing some fund-raising in the Northeast and paid a visit to George H. W. Bush at his compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. The pictures from this get-together showed Bush and McCain driving around in a golf cart, dressed in country club attire (McCain in a turtleneck). The differences between these images and our helicopter shots could not have been starker. Obama looked young and strong, McCain looked old and silly. Obama looked like the future; McCain, the past.
The impact of McCain’s golf cart photos was nearly equivalent to that of seeing Mike Dukakis in a tank in 1988 or John Kerry windsurfing in 2004—indelible. The side-by-side pictures of the candidates’ respective field days were shown over and over and had to be a real low point for the McCain campaign. I could not get enough of the footage of Bush and McCain tooling around the compound and encouraged us to use it in every ad we could. “Bring back the cart!” I’d say.
The visit to Iraq could not have gone better for us. Israel was next and promised to be trickier. Obama held a high-stakes outdoor press conference in Sderot, near Gaza, where he handled a multitude of tough questions from the press corps without missteps. He spent some time at the Wailing Wall in private prayer. In the previous months there had been a consistent guerrilla e-mail campaign around the country, suggesting that Obama would not be a stalwart friend of Israel. The pictures and news coverage from his time there provided ample evidence to the contrary.
The subsequent meetings with European leaders were judged to have gone well. If there was a problem it was that they went too well—Sarkozy essentially endorsed Obama in glowing language during their joint press availability. This created some blowback in the American press that being the candidate of Europe and France could backfire with voters. We found this thinking dated but, nonetheless, we monitored the story line carefully.
Throughout its duration, the trip dominated coverage in every medium. Demonstrating leadership qualities abroad was a crucial part of our strategy, and for over a week, it was hard to turn on the TV, radio, or computer without catching those qualities on full display in Obama. We also were running foreign policy ads—TV, radio, and Internet—in all the battlegrounds, providing real amplification to the press coverage. Everything was synched up and working in symphonic consonance.
The Berlin speech provided the trip’s only real controversy. We knew this would be the obvious target but were surprised by the path McCain chose to try to undercut us. Initially, the media coverage and pundit world largely declared the Berlin event a raging success. At first blush, thanks to the turnout, it was hard not to.
We really had no idea how many people were going to show up. Alyssa kept e-mailing me with crowd updates as the event start time grew closer. She was blown away by the number of people massing at the event site at Tiergarten, a large park close to the Brandenburg Gate. “This is going to look awesome on TV,” she wrote. Axelrod chimed in: “There are Germans waving American flags as far as the eye can see.”
We were hoping for over fifty thousand but would not have been surprised by half that figure. Instead of a factor, we got a multiple: over two hundred thousand people showed up, most from Germany but many from all across Europe. The scene was breathtaking. Obama strode onto the stage looking out into the historic Berlin streets, and a mass of humanity waving American flags hung on his every word. The hunger for new American leadership was palpable.
Back in my office in Chicago, it was hard for me to focus and not get swept up in the moment. We were a long way from fifty skeptical people at a house in rural Iowa.
In his speech, Obama challenged Europe to play a more engaged and constructive role in Afghanistan, but did so in a spirit of potential cooperation, grounded in our shared past looking with hope toward a shared future.
“Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe,” he told the crowd. “No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.... Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity. . . .”
The one passage for which we caught flak—some commentators went so far as to call it a major gaffe, and McCain’s campaign certainly tried to fan the flames—was the following: “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.”
It was “a little too post-nationalist for the typical American swing-voter,” said one New Republic commentator. “I’m not sure you win the presidency without being seen as an unambiguous nationalist.” Many in the media shared this reaction. I thought this was another example of the press looking in the rearview mirror instead of seeing the race in front of it.
True, four short years earlier the Bush campaign, with some success, portrayed John Kerry as an effete, European sympathizer. They leveled the most devastating criticism available: he “looked French.” But times had changed. Voters wanted a different, more cooperative relationship with the rest of the world. Our research after the speech showed that the vast majority of the American people agreed with that sentiment. They did not want the United States to compromise its values or leadership, but they did not see these two goals as mutually exclusive. Once again, voters proved more sophisticated than the press gave them credit for.
From a morale standpoint, the trip was a real boost to the whole organization. It felt good to stretch and succeed. For the first time, we could also visualize what an Obama victory might mean to the rest of the world. The reaction overseas was very motivational.
Barack praised the team’s performance effusively. We talked at length by phone when he landed in Chicago, and he went on and on. “Everybody really lifted their game,” he told me. “It went better than I could’ve ever imagined. It’s the hardest thing we’ve done and the best thing we’ve done in the whole campaign. I’ve got to think voters will look at this—how we pulled this off—and it’ll be another piece of the puzzle in convincing them we can handle the presidency.”
This benefit of the trip hadn’t dawned on me, but he was right. According to our research, the campaign itself increasingly became a touchstone for people when describing how they were wrestling with the experience issue. In focus groups, we heard more and more voters saying, “Well, he might not have been an executive or been in Washington long, but he seems to run a hell of a campaign and doesn’t play it safe. Beating Hillary Clinton, giving a speech in Berlin, traveling around the world. All that should mean something.”
A few days after Barack returned, the McCain camp settled on their next offensive thrust, using Obama’s speech in Berlin as the hook. They released an ad using footage of the speech intercut with crowd shots (interestingly, not the Berlin crowd) chanting “Obama! Obama! Obama!” Then came paparazzi pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ad’s payoff line: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world. But is he ready to lead?”
Obama found the ad downright silly. “I just can’t see any serious person doing anything besides laughing this off and feeling that the McCain campaign is small and irrelevant,” he said. “You may not like me or vote for me, but by now I think I’ve at least made it out of the Britney and Paris category.”
“I agree,” I told him. “But tell me, how does it feel to be the biggest cele
brity in the world?”
Barack laughed for a moment. “I’ll try to wear the crown with grace and dignity.”
The Paris-Britney ad was a weak shot, but we had gamed out many other possible attacks that might be stronger. Our view was that once the torpedoes came, it’d be better to know with some degree of certainty ahead of time whether we faced a direct hit and how to retaliate rather than scrambling after the fact. Our guiding principle: if something could be known, know it. In the case of attacks, it was best to find out how the jury, the voters, would evaluate the charges against us.
As we exposed voters to McCain’s “celebrity” attack and argument, they ratified our belief that he had overreached. Women voters especially considered this ad out of bounds. “Obama may not have enough experience,” they told us in focus groups. “But to compare him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? It’s insulting.”
Thus began the erosion of John McCain’s reputation as a nontypical politician. People just did not accept the celebrity angle as a credible argument, particularly with the economy getting increasingly worse; they thought it was irrelevant, childish, and off-point.
Still, the attack did work with one audience: the press loved it. It was a very personal attack, and though voters weren’t biting, the media seemed convinced that the McCain campaign was on to something. Emboldened by this reaction, the McCain campaign kept pounding. They released new versions of ads suggesting Obama was a substanceless rock star. “[N]ot long ago, a couple hundred thousand of Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of fifty thousand Harleys any day!” McCain told the crowd at the Sturgis Rally, a huge biker gathering in South Dakota. I thought it strange to see such blatant xenophobia on the airwaves. At times his campaign seemed driven by a consuming need to control the cable-news-cycle war; voter reaction was almost an afterthought.
We felt like we had little to worry about from it all. Events coming down the pike would naturally connote stature: The selection of a VP nominee. The Democratic convention. Three presidential debates. Given the natural course of events in the race, the McCain campaign seemed to be playing checkers, not chess.
Day-to-day operations in their camp were now being run by Steve Schmidt, a legendary war room communications strategist. With that background, he brought to the table the ability to attack creatively and respond in ways that captured the lion’s share of attention. This approach has its place, but in many ways, it increasingly came to define their campaign, often at the expense of logic, to my view. Over time I found it more and more difficult to divine consistent and clear strategic decision making in the McCain camp.
When the polls tightened a bit, the McCain folks credited the celebrity attack, but we thought that was bunk. Any slippage in the numbers had little to do with McCain’s antics and everything to do with the fact that Barack Obama went on vacation for a week.
Every year Barack and his family returned to Hawaii to see his beloved grandmother, his sister, and other friends and family. He was not able to make the trip in 2007. Now, he was flat out exhausted after twenty-one months of nonstop campaigning and pressure, and he really needed the break. We talked about vacation after securing the nomination. He asked whether I thought it was feasible that he and his family could have some downtime.
To me, this wasn’t much of a decision. Even though his being absent from the playing field could cause some temporary erosion in the numbers, it would be just that: temporary. I thought it more important to give Obama some time to recharge. He could work on his convention speech and focus on how to be a better candidate in the fall, when the bright lights were really shining. Plus, his grandmother, who had raised him for periods of his life and to whom he was extraordinarily close, was in poor health. A visit seemed imperative. She was his last link to his childhood and formative years. So, Hawaii it was.
Axelrod and I were convinced that the trip was the cause of any slippage. We were invisible and McCain was everywhere, so they were bound to gain a bit of ground. “It’s like a five-on-zero basketball game this week,” commented Ax. “Of course they’re going to put up some points. But it’s garbage time. None of this movement will be permanent.”
I agreed. Right or wrong, we had decided to go to Hawaii. There was no point wringing our hands over McCain’s dominating the race for a few days. In general, we made a point of refusing to obsess over things we could not control.
We also used the week our candidate was on vacation wisely, internally. We spent most of the week the Obamas were in Hawaii doing final message planning and strategy for the general election and laying out most of the rhythm and priorities for issues and events for the last sixty days of the campaign, from the end of the GOP convention to Election Day. We also did a final scrub of the self-research to make sure we didn’t have any nasty surprises still lurking, trying to predict which land mines the McCain campaign would be trying to put in our path and how and when they might deploy them. Spending as much time thinking about what your opponent should or might do was always a critical exercise for us and a discipline we tried to maintain in both primary and general.
Campaigns can be like riding a bucking bronco: you just try to stay upright day to day and are forced all day, every day, to deal with things that have the potential to take you off plan. That being said, we wanted to have the most crucial stretch of the campaign laid out methodically so that we knew why, when, how, and where we would be putting emphasis on certain issues and ideas and what we saw as McCain deficiencies.
The celebrity battle provides a bit of insight into how the two campaigns viewed the race. The McCain camp seemed to approach it as a contest to dominate what insiders were talking about, and they were much more tactical than strategic. We tried to focus exclusively on what voters were concerned about: the economy, health care, Iraq.
Was it fun to read story after story about how smart the McCain campaign was and how we were reacting too slowly and poorly? Did we enjoy hearing that we were making the same mistakes weak Democratic nominees always do, and the suggestion that the celebrity attack was the next iteration of the swiftboat attacks on John Kerry in 2004? Of course not. But we had a game plan and felt we had good radar about what was truly damaging to us. We would stay focused on our own evaluation—the progress we were making in the states—not whether Wolf Blitzer thought McCain was winning the day.
13
Filling Out the Ticket
One item on Obama’s plate as he headed to Hawaii involved perhaps the biggest decision he would make before the election. He needed to select his nominee for vice president.
The late finish to our primary really put us behind the eight-ball on a number of issues—the selection of a VP was one. We had quietly assembled a vetting team so that once we clinched the nomination, the process could begin in earnest right away. We trod very carefully, because although by May we were certain we would win, we didn’t think it would help cement party unity to get deep into the vice presidential process while Hillary Clinton was still ferociously campaigning.
John Kerry and Al Gore both had several months longer than we did to figure out their picks. Given our limited time, our process had to be tight, well organized, and structured to let us make decisions quickly.
We had our first formal meeting in early June, in the conference room of a hotel around the block from Chicago HQ. Here, for the first time, Obama, Ax, the three members of our vetting team, and I discussed names of potential candidates. We needed an initial list so the vetters could start digging through the candidates’ lives and identifying any problems. Likely suspects had already received cursory attention in May, but now we needed to begin to focusing our efforts.
Our vetting team was made up of Jim Johnson, Caroline Kennedy, and Eric Holder. All three had to commit much of their time over the next couple of months to the task. Jim, who helped run Walter Mondale’s race in 1984, had managed this vetting job for Kerry and Gore. He endorsed us very early, one of the few quintessential D
.C. insiders to do so, and given our short time parameters, he seemed like a good choice to head things up.
The job of the VP-vetting group is largely misunderstood. Jim and his team would not help select the nominee. Their primary role was to manage a network of attorneys, all volunteers, who would work around the clock to complete a thorough examination of potential VP candidates. Jim, Caroline, and Eric would also meet with party leaders to get their confidential ideas on nominees. It was a complex and secretive process and one for which Jim had received high marks in the past for his discretion and competence.
Barack and I did not want just one person tasked with running this show; we wanted multiple sets of eyes looking at information and participating in opinion-gathering exercises. We decided, at Ax’s suggestion, to ask one very unconventional choice, Caroline Kennedy, because we had grown to trust her judgment and discretion as she had been out campaigning for us; we also thought it would be good to have an outsider’s perspective, and yes, Caroline was probably the only Kennedy who could possibly be described as an “outsider.” Eric Holder rounded out the team. A former senior member of the Clinton Justice Department and a prominent attorney, he was a natural fit in terms of helping with rigorous vetting.
History largely suggests that the VP candidate is the most overcovered story in presidential politics. The picks rarely make a big difference in the campaign but are obsessed about ad nauseam for months. This factor defined our central operating philosophy in selecting a nominee. Naturally we did not want to pick someone who could potentially hurt the ticket, and looked for a candidate who ideally would bring some assets. But at that meeting Obama made his priorities very clear. “I am more concerned and interested in how my selection may perform as an actual vice president than whether they will give a boost to the campaign,” he told us. “A boost would be fine, of course. But I’m not sure that person exists and I don’t want it to infect our thinking.”
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 37