Negotiations with the remnants of the Clinton campaign couldn’t have gone down easier. Scores of media reports leading up to the convention suggested otherwise, implying that the “Clinton drama” would overshadow our message. First, we were confident that both Clintons, Hillary on Tuesday and Bill on Wednesday, would deliver strong and compelling speeches. Even if we occasionally still questioned her team’s motives—and we did less and less of that because Hillary was campaigning her heart out for us—we knew it would be political suicide for either of them to give anything but a full-throated, stirring endorsement of Obama. If we lost in a close race, lackluster support from our former primary opponent would quickly surface as a main culprit of the defeat.
We raised the idea with the Clinton camp that on Wednesday during the traditional roll call of states, Hillary would enter the floor, stride to the New York delegation, and ask that the convention end the roll call and nominate Barack Obama by acclamation. We suggested doing this around 6:30 p.m., right as the network news programs were beginning, for maximum effect.
Clinton readily agreed, and her request unexpectedly turned into a powerful and gripping moment that sent an electric charge through the convention. With poise and confidence, she commanded the microphone in the New York delegation and said, “Let us declare in one voice, right here, right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate, and he will be our president!”
The convention roared its agreement and pandemonium broke out. The song “Peace Train” burst from the speakers, and confetti and balloons rained down. Tears and emotion were flowing throughout the arena, and I imagine in living rooms and offices around the country as well. I watched the scene with the staff at our convention HQ office at a hotel a few blocks from the hall. At that moment, the history, the long battle, and the improbability of it all washed over me; emotion came rushing to the fore. The spectacle grabbed the media, too, whose commentary was very focused on the historic nature of Barack Obama’s nomination, as well as the brilliance of Hillary’s making it official—and her humility in agreeing to do so.
It’s nice to be surprised in this business. And we were, all of us, that when this moment finally arrived, it carried such authentic emotion. Barack watched it from his hotel room; he had just arrived in Denver. He told me it affected him, too. “That was terrific that Hillary agreed to do that,” he said. “Seems like it sent a jolt through the whole convention.”
The Clinton speeches were all we could have asked for, unambiguous in their enthusiasm for Obama’s potential presidency and forceful in their denunciation of McCain’s flawed vision for America. Our convention hall staff HQ was right off the floor, and Hillary had to walk through it on the way to her holding room after she spoke. As she entered the room, we all burst out into loud and sustained impromptu applause. We understood better than most the fortitude her public embrace of his candidacy required. After everything we had thrown at each other, she had given us her all.
Michelle Obama’s speech on the first night of the convention was critical for two reasons. First, it was our best opportunity—better even than Obama’s own speech—to show what kind of person Barack was. There were shadowy suggestions floating both virally on the Internet and in the mainstream press that he was un-American, a Muslim, an elitist, a privileged phony.
Michelle’s speech would tell the truth about Obama as a son, a husband, a father, and a citizen. Even though voters found Barack quite likeable, too many of them still found him somewhat remote and did not have a grasp of what his life had been like. Helping them understand this would make his promise to try to improve their lives more tangible and real.
The second objective was to showcase Michelle herself in a slightly different and more accurate light. A whisper campaign had been circulating for months, saying that she was hurting our campaign, that she was too angry. A misconstrued statement she made during the primary—“For the first time in my life, I am proud of my country”—left some voters wondering what really made her tick. I wanted America to see and truly understand the real Michelle Obama, someone who profoundly appreciated the generosity and bold spirit of her country.
She delivered an absolute gem. We introduced her with a video narrated by her mother, a beautiful presentation that described Michelle’s parents, the sacrifices they made, and her own improbable success. Her speech built on this and also revealed a side of Barack that many voters had not been exposed to, most memorably with a tender line about Barack driving back from the hospital after their first daughter was born.
“And in the end, after all that’s happened these past nineteen months,” she told the crowd, “the Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with nineteen years ago. He’s the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital ten years ago this summer, inching along at a snail’s pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he’d struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father’s love.”
Michelle’s favorable numbers jumped eighteen points that night in our tracking, and they never dropped the rest of the campaign.
Preparing for the convention speeches illuminated one interesting contrast between Michelle and Barack. Michelle wanted a draft of her speech more than a month out so she could massage it further, get comfortable with it, and practice the delivery. Barack was always crafting his at the eleventh hour. In this regard, Michelle was a concert pianist—disciplined, regimented, methodical—and Barack was a jazz musician, riffing, improvisational, and playing by ear. Both Obamas, it turned out, were clutch performers when the curtain rose.
We were determined to break Barack’s habit of last-minute prep and have his convention speech together well in advance, but we knew he would not dig in until right before showtime. At one of our planning meetings, I raised the idea of taking Barack’s acceptance speech outside, so grassroots supporters throughout the country, not just the Democratic delegates inside the arena, could attend the event. We were a grassroots campaign, and it felt wrong that our biggest night so far could not be shared with those who had selflessly given so much time and effort. Plus, many of the additional people—numbering in the tens of thousands at least, depending on the outside venue—would be Colorado voters. Everyone was gung-ho in theory, but execution would be a far more difficult task.
Alyssa and her team looked at every option, including holding the speech outside in the streets of downtown Denver, where there would be no limit on the number of attendees. We thought we could easily draw 250,000 if we did not have space limitations. But for security and other logistical reasons, we needed a confined venue, which left us only one option—Mile High Stadium.
Four of our central operating philosophies came together in one moment. First, the willingness to chuck the old playbook and chart our own course. John Kennedy was the only candidate to have previously given an outdoor acceptance speech, in Los Angeles in 1960. I hadn’t remembered that when making the suggestion, but once I found out, I appreciated the historical connection.
Second, testing the organization by consistently reaching to accomplish difficult things. When this idea was first broached with the convention staff in Denver—who technically worked for us now but had been plugging away on the convention for months awaiting a nominee—they told us flat-out there was no way financially, organizationally, or politically it could be done. It would add millions to the cost; we’d have to move all the delegates to another location, which was logistically impossible, they said; there were no hotel rooms anywhere in the Denver area for all the new people an outdoor speech would draw; and the delegates would be upset that the event would be opened up to the public. After all, this was their special night; they were the ones nominating Barack Obama. “We’ll find a way to make it happen,” we told them. Winning the primary had infused our whole campaign with the sense that anything was possible, which is a g
reat mind-set for any organization to have.
Third, we knew who we were—a grassroots campaign to the core. We started with our supporters on the ground and they led us to victory. It just did not feel right that this important night would exclude the people most responsible for Obama’s being the nominee. The fourth principle the decision reflected was our belief that the election came down to winning battleground states. Colorado perhaps trailed only Virginia in my mind in terms of importance. McCain had to have Colorado’s nine electoral votes to have any hope of winning, and opening up our convention to the people there could go a long way toward tipping the state into our column.
One Saturday shortly before we had to make a final decision, Obama and I were on the phone talking through the pros and cons.
“Tell me again what happens if it rains or if there’s lightning?” he asked.
I said we had checked in with our friends at the meteorologists union, who did a study of the last hundred August 28s at 8:00 p.m. mountain time. It had rained on only one occasion, and that was showers, not a drenching rain. Colorado was usually bone dry that time of year.
It sounded reassuring, but he asked the natural follow-up question. “Well, what if this is that one time? Can we look at the most detailed forecast that morning and decide to go back inside?”
“Unfortunately not,” I replied. “For Secret Service reasons as well as just logistics of having tens of thousands of people en route, it’s lock and load. And that’s leaving aside all the money we’d be out. It is costing us a pretty penny to retrofit the stadium. If we decide now to go outside, we have to live with the decision.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Okay, let’s go for it, as long as we can have some sort of covering on standby so I don’t have to give the speech in the pouring rain.” He wryly added, “It’s only the most important speech I may ever give.”
“Uh, that’s a no-go,” I told him. We had looked into it and found we couldn’t have a temporary rain shelter moved into place at the last minute. It just wouldn’t work visually. If we did it, the shelter would have to be built into the stage construction, and if it didn’t rain, we’d regret having a big overhang.
Barack was a bit incredulous. “So, what, we’re just going to go with a wing and a prayer and hope beyond all hope we get lucky on the weather?” he asked.
“First, the odds are with us it won’t rain,” I said. “Look, I know this isn’t the soundest way to make decisions, but this whole enterprise has been a roll of the dice. Every time we’ve gone up on the high wire, it’s worked out. We shouldn’t stop now.”
I wasn’t sure I could get him to buy into it. He had understandable concerns. But I knew the idea of bucking conventional wisdom appealed to him.
Finally, he made his decision. “Okay, we go outside,” he said. “But at some point our luck will run out. So if it’s raining, I want you and Axelrod out there holding goddamn umbrellas over my head while I give the speech.”
I laughed. “Deal.”
Strategically, we had decided some time ago that we had three major imperatives for his speech. First, build on what Michelle and some other speakers had done that week by talking about his family and values, and to a lesser extent his experience. This would make his motivation and commitment to help the middle class more authentic and believable—he and Michelle had walked in those shoes for almost their entire lives.
Second, lay out in great detail exactly what he would do as president. We had long faced a chorus of criticism that we were too light on specifics. Too much hope, just give us the dope, said some. In response, we had always planned for a heavy dose of issue specifics in Denver. And, again, because this moment presented the chance to leave a large footprint, we also thought it was important for Obama to lay out a tough critique of John McCain’s agenda—how it represented little change from the Bush agenda, domestically and internationally, and that we simply could not afford more of the same for another four years.
The last item surprised a lot of people. Generally, the nominee stays positive while the rest of the convention speakers beat up on the opposition. And our other speakers had certainly laid out compelling arguments against McCain. But we thought it was important that Obama himself not shy away from any of these critiques. A healthy percentage of our ultimate jury would be watching or would hear about the speech; we needed to make our best case to that audience.
Gibbs and I started that Thursday together at the stadium at 4:00 a.m. for rounds of TV interviews. It was eerie being there in the pitch black, with the cool mountain air rushing in and the signage for all the states reaching toward the open sky. The advance team had finally locked everything down just hours before.
We could have fallen asleep standing, but it was hard not to be taken in by the scene. “We’ve come a long way from Springfield,” Gibbs said, looking around the stadium. “But some things are the same—we’re exhausted and we still don’t have a final speech.”
I laughed. “Fixing that would be change I could believe in.”
Fifteen hours later, Gibbs and I were standing backstage with Barack. He was loose and clearly very comfortable with his speech, which had once again magically come together sometime during the day. I had spoken at the convention earlier that afternoon, giving an organizational pitch and campaign update, and now Obama was razzing me about it.
“Plouffe, how many people were there when you spoke?” he asked.
I flashed a smile. “About two thousand. And none of them were listening.”
“Well,” he said, “I hope you have pictures of it to prove to your kids that you actually spoke.”
Gibbs and I left the holding room along with Axelrod, who was going to watch the speech with some of the media and production folks a short distance away. We had learned Obama liked to spend some time alone before a big moment, to get ready and perhaps just to get in the zone.
That night was remarkable. The weather was perfect, warm and still, and almost eighty thousand people waving American flags filled the stadium. A roar erupted when Obama walked out, and the electricity as he spoke raised the hair on my neck.
Gibbs and I both were speechless. A lot came washing over us at that moment—what it took to get there; the beauty of the decision to go outside; the historic nature of what was happening; and pride in the guy we worked for, who was rising to the occasion, once again, and giving the speech of a lifetime. Gibbs and I looked at each other often during the speech, saying little, but communicating a lot. And for perhaps the first time in the entire campaign, we both went a full hour without looking at our BlackBerrys.
“For eighteen long months,” Obama told the masses, “you have stood up, one by one, and said, ‘Enough’ to the politics of the past. You understand that, in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You have shown what history teaches us, that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens—change happens—because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.”
As the speech ended, Gibbs and I made our way to Ax and his media team, and there were hugs all around. Obama had just nailed it, and we had nailed the week. This was the third of the four hard things Ax and I had discussed back in my office in June, and so far we thought we were three for three.
Backstage, Obama was more demonstrative than usual, and actually seemed downright giddy. He was still calm, but I could tell he knew he had done well, and how much that mattered. “We all performed well this week,” he told us. “Now we only need eight more weeks like this.” Put that way, it seemed digestible and doable.
My dad and wife were in Denver, so I told Obama I needed to duck out for dinner with them. I gave him a last fist-bump and was off. It was nice to have an hour free and clear of the tumult. We had a late dinner at our hotel, talking so
me about the big night but also about family and sports. My dad and I are rabid Philadelphia Phillies fans, so we were likely bemoaning their latest loss or bad move.
We cleared out of the restaurant somewhere around 1:00 a.m. I planned to get up at 5:00 a.m. Colorado time to see my wife off and to start the workday—McCain would be announcing his VP nominee that morning, and I wanted to get a head start.
But my phone and e-mail started going off well before then. Rumors were swirling that McCain was going to make a surprise pick.
14
Hurricane Sarah
“It looks like they picked Sarah goddamn Palin. We have to get moving.”
It was early morning, Denver time, and the echoes of Barack Obama’s stirring convention speech were still ringing in my ears when my cell phone erupted with calls and the first rumors started flying online. I was in the fog of a couple of hours’ sleep. Palin—it took me a moment to place the name. Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Joe Lieberman—these guys had been filling my brain for weeks now. But in an instant they became also-rans.
My mind strained to remember the pertinent details on Palin. She was on our initial list of about twenty potential McCain picks when we started the process back in May, somewhere near the rear of pack. It had been months since we discussed her at our campaign HQ.
The first thing I did was call Jim Messina, who was managing the day-to-day VP opposition research project. I woke him up, and he sounded like he’d been celebrating until very recently. “Stop screwing with me,” he pleaded into the phone.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 40