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

by David Plouffe

  “This is not a fire drill,” I said to him. “It’s the real deal. You need to get your team going on Palin. We need a game plan for moving forward, and quickly.”

  We always knew this day was going to be a pain in the ass. Coming right off the exhaustion and exhilaration of our convention week and VP pick, we would have to jump right in and deal with theirs. But Palin was a bolt of lightning, a true surprise. She was such a long shot, I didn’t even have her research file on my computer, as I did for the likely McCain picks. I started Googling her, refreshing my memory while I waited for our research to be sent.

  Her story was original: small-town mayor takes on the establishment and wins a governor’s race; she was an avid hunter, sportswoman, and athlete, and her husband was a champion snowmobiler; she had just given birth to a child with Down syndrome. A profile out of a novel, I thought.

  But here she was, joining our real-life drama. And given her life story, coupled with the surprise nature of her selection, her entrance to the race would be nothing short of a phenomenon. I felt certain that all the oxygen in the campaign would immediately go to the newly minted McCain-Palin ticket.

  But I also thought it was a downright bizarre, ill-considered, and deeply puzzling choice. The one thing every voter knew about John McCain’s campaign at this point was that it had been shouting from the rooftops that Barack Obama lacked the experience to be president. In fact, the celebrity attack was still going on!

  With the Palin pick, he had completely undermined his core argument against us. Worse yet for McCain, he would look inherently political in doing so. His strength—and the threat he posed to us—was rooted in the fact that many independent voters believed in his maverick reputation and believed he did not make his decisions by prioritizing politics over what was right. I guessed people would view this choice more as a political stunt than a sound, reasoned call.

  Though VP selections have rarely made the difference in presidential campaigns, voters do put a huge premium on candidates’ making wise, responsible choices of running mates who could plausibly serve in high office. After all, historically, about a third of vice presidents have ascended to the top job.

  Our campaign did not like surprises. We had established a game plan for the picks we thought were plausible, developing what our top-line response would be and deciding which areas of controversy we’d highlight for the press. Getting Palin right would be a challenge.

  On our 6:00 a.m. conference call, Anita Dunn, who had worked against Palin in Alaska in the 2006 governor’s race, warned us that she was a formidable political talent—clearly not up to this moment, she assured us, but bound to be a compelling player and a real headliner in the weeks ahead.

  “All of you on this call should watch video of her debates and speeches,” Anita counseled. “The substance is thin but she’s a very able performer. And her story is out of Hollywood. She’ll be a phenomenon for a while.”

  Axelrod added that no matter how talented she was, these were rough waters to drop into, especially with no national exposure or scrutiny. “It’s like throwing a baby into the ocean and asking it to swim,” he said.

  Our strategy with the other potential picks would’ve been to start by saying that choice X subscribed to the same failed George Bush policies as John McCain; all they were doing was doubling down on the same out-of-touch economic policies that had hurt American families.

  We should have gone the same way with Palin. But McCain had been haranguing us for months about experience, and we were incredulous that he had picked someone with zero foreign policy experience who had been a governor for less time than Obama had been a senator. Galled by the hypocrisy, we moved in a more aggressive direction.

  We decided to call McCain on the experience card directly. The value was in making him look political—essentially, calling him full of shit—and we sent out a release making that clear. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” it read. “Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil, and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies—that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.”

  Ax and Gibbs were en route the airport with Obama when this went out. Our approach seemed so clear-cut and obvious that we did not run the statement by him before we released it. Ax and Gibbs would brief him on the plane about our conclusions. We advised him not to engage Palin at all when he saw the press later in the day in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Instead, he should welcome her to the race and make the point that Palin, like all McCain supporters, would be defending a discredited economic philosophy. Biden was with Obama for the ticket’s first day of campaigning together, and we said the same advice held for him.

  Our statement immediately received an enormous amount of attention because it went right at her experience. The press clearly sensed heat and was eager to help drive the fight. Seeing the reaction, I began to think perhaps we had misfired.

  Obama clearly thought so. He called me from the air. “Listen, I just told this to Axelrod and Gibbs,” he began. “I understand the argument you guys were trying to make. And maybe we should make it someday. But not today. We shouldn’t have put out the first part of that statement. I want to put out another statement that simply welcomes her to the race, and I’ll call her and congratulate her when I land.”

  I didn’t disagree, but thought backtracking would only add to the sense in the press that perhaps Palin was a brilliant game-changing pick that had scrambled the race. Even the famously disciplined Obama campaign can’t get their story straight—this would be the blowback.

  “Look,” I told him, “simply say that you’re adding your own personal voice, one principal to another.” He acknowledged that he understood and would watch his words. “We’ll send out a personal statement from you and Biden,” I said, “but it’s important you not suggest we misfired on the original statement. Don’t throw the campaign under the bus.”

  But when he took a few questions from the press later that day, he inevitably got one about the difference in tone between the two statements, and he proceeded to drive the bus right over us. “I think that, uh, you know, campaigns start getting these, uh, hair triggers and, uh, the statement that Joe and I put out reflects our sentiments,” he said. Great, I thought, already imagining the heat we’d take on this. But all in all, I felt solid about our instincts. Despite our clumsiness, I still thought we had nailed, in the predawn hours, what this pick would mean over time.

  Obama and I had a long talk late that afternoon to evaluate Palin. I was sitting at the Denver airport, eager to finally get back to Chicago. He was between events, on our campaign bus.

  “I just don’t understand how this ends up working out for McCain,” he said. “In the long term, I mean. The short term will be good for them. But when voters step back and analyze how he made this decision, I think he’s going to be in big trouble. You just can’t wing something like this—it’s too important.”

  Reports had already begun to surface that McCain picked Palin at the very last minute, only days after his first conversation with her, on the phone. The pick increasingly seemed not just political, but the result of a haphazard, irresponsible process, if you could even call it a process.

  “I know this sounds over the top,” I replied. “But in my gut I feel like this might have sealed McCain’s fate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they have a tough hand to begin with, given Bush’s numbers and how we see the Electoral College situation,” I explained. “You add this in ... my guess is that the more we learn about Palin and the lack of process behind the pick, the bloom will come quickly off the rose. No one wins the presidency with stunts. And that’s what this smells like—a reckless stunt.”

  “I think we just need to sit back and play our game,” said Obama. “It actually won’t be bad to be off Broadway for a few days. We sh
ould just leave her out of the equation. This is a race between John McCain and me. To the extent we talk about Palin, I think it should be about the differences in our selection processes—it illuminates differences in how we’d make decisions in the White House.”

  In moments like this I really appreciated Barack. His predisposition to taking the long view of things and to coolly and rationally examining situations was one of the reasons our campaign made decisions the right way—through the prism of our strategy and message. And for the first time, we used terms like “impulsive” and “erratic” to describe McCain.

  Within days, rumors about Palin were flying around the Internet. These included some disgraceful claims made about her family based on conjecture and malice, which we wanted nothing to do with. But it was clear watching their response to these wild assertions—and to valid ones, like her history of support for pork-barrel projects and details on the ethics charges she was facing—that the McCain campaign was completely unprepared for the fallout from their pick. They had little to no knowledge of Palin’s record, her past statements, details of her time as mayor of Wasilla, or anything else. From where we sat, they seemed to be largely flying blind, scrambling to answer a torrent of questions only nine weeks out from the election. Before we picked Biden, we had sussed out almost every question we’d get about his past and record and how to deal with it. Given a three-month head start on us, our opponents were struggling with the basics. It was no way to run a railroad.

  Interestingly, Jim Messina and Anita had struck Palin off their list of top potentials for VP back in May, when their friends in Alaska started sending them all the clips on Troopergate, which seemed to them pretty disqualifying for a position where “first do no harm” was a basic job requirement.

  Our campaign had zero interest in family stories becoming part of the political coverage. When Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became a news sensation in late August, we actually thought that it might provide a boost to our opponents. The family looked victimized by the extensive coverage and the many talking heads moralizing about the supposed hypocrisy of a family-values candidate having a pregnant teenage daughter. These personal attacks would likely generate sympathy from voters.

  Obama thought the topic had no place in the campaign and wanted to send a strong message to all who supported him that they should leave it alone. “I have said before and I will repeat again: People’s families are off-limits,” Obama said in an interview on the subject. “And people’s children are especially off-limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was eighteen. How a family deals with issues and teenage children shouldn’t be a topic of our politics.”

  Controversy or not, it was clear that Sarah Palin was a meteor the likes of which had not crossed the political sky in some time. She was not simply a political candidate; she was an American phenomenon.

  We assumed she would give a knockout speech at the GOP convention that week. Tapes of her previous speeches revealed she was a skilled communicator, and we believed the expectations for her were quite low—she had come out of nowhere and immediately found herself beset with controversy. The news media, and perhaps the voters, would likely judge even a decent performance a home run.

  As the Republican convention started, we were beginning our prep sessions in advance of the first presidential debate, which would take place at the end of September. These were preliminary strategic discussions, during which we worked through exactly how we wanted to approach various issues likely to come up in the debates. On the night of Palin’s much-anticipated convention speech, we held one of our first sessions in a cramped Pennsylvania hotel room after a day of campaigning. Obama’s night-owl tendencies were an asset in this regard; even after a long day on the trail, he was unfazed by prepping for another two or three hours at night. He was often at his best and most energetic in the evening, and he liked this part of prep—the development of strategy and messaging around issues—much more than the practicing and critiquing of answers.

  Showing discipline that night, we decided not to break for Palin’s speech on Thursday night. We worked right through until eleven or so and watched it on YouTube. Some reporters sent us the text of her speech shortly before she gave it, and reading through, I knew it would light up the convention hall.

  I wasn’t wrong. Palin delivered with gusto and presence. She was utterly undaunted by the national stage, sticking a knife into Obama with a smile. Her demeanor was jaunty and funny; she was clearly a terrific political performer.

  But did voters believe Palin had the stature—or the familiarity—to play the role of attack dog? Generally in politics, before candidates can attack their opponent, they needed to build up some credibility with voters. One reason incumbents win so often is that it’s easier for them to undercut their opponents ; they’ve already established legitimacy with voters for their opinions and positions. A challenger who attacks an incumbent without first finding solid ground often provokes a “who the hell does he think he is?” reaction. I suspected this might be the case with Palin. She had burst onto the scene and attracted wide media coverage, but public knowledge about her was still skin-deep.

  She also made a couple of big mistakes in the convention speech, like belittling “community organizers,” almost suggesting they were subversives. I thought this comment insulted the millions of people who volunteer in their community simply trying to do good. The crowd in the hall loved it, but I thought America might see it differently.

  Palin’s speech also offered very little in the way of substance, serving mainly to attack Obama and praise McCain’s biography and character. Our research showed clearly that McCain was already viewed as attacking Obama much more than offering any positive ideas. And voters saw Obama as doing the opposite. If opinions continued to move in this direction, we thought it could give McCain real difficulty, particularly with women independents who were turned off by sleazy ads and attacks. Our research also showed that these women reacted quite negatively to the Palin pick, as did the “Hillary Democrats” that the McCain camp was supposedly courting with her selection.

  In Palin’s first speech the day she was picked, she had made an overt and fairly clumsy appeal to Hillary voters. By this point, most Clinton Democrats had buried any hesitation and were firmly in our camp. We found that many of them were insulted by the notion that Hillary’s supporters would move in droves to the Republican ticket simply because Palin was a woman, even though she was diametrically opposed to Clinton on just about every major issue.

  After watching the convention speech, Ax and I stood in the hallway of our nondescript hotel in central Pennsylvania and ruminated. “That speech will only get the critics and the cynics more amped up that we should go after her, to try to destabilize McCain,” I observed. “And she’s now become the most interesting political figure in decades, so the coverage of her will only intensify.”

  Ax shook his head. “We just have to hold tight,” he said. “I may be wrong. But she’s now reached the stratosphere. Political gravity inevitably pulls someone shot this high back to earth. And usually it’s not a pretty fall.”

  I concurred but added that it would test all of our discipline to stay the course and not get dragged into a shooting match. “That’s the fight the press and political community wants. We have to avoid it all costs.”

  I was still pondering about how we’d stay the course when I went to my room at around 1:00 a.m. to check our online fund-raising numbers. Pulling them up onscreen, I couldn’t believe what I saw. We had taken in millions of dollars in the three hours since Palin had started speaking. We hadn’t even asked for most of it; we had sent out just a single unplanned fund-raising e-mail highlighting her attacks on community organizers, but it was just starting to hit people’s in-boxes as I checked the numb
ers. So the big response from the last three hours meant people were merely venting via contribution.

  Her speech might have ginned up their base, but apparently it had sent ours into orbit. The image that came into my mind was of people sitting home with a computer on their laps, watching the Palin speech, and getting angrier and angrier, contributing again and then again. “I hope she keeps this up,” I thought. “Sarah Palin has now become our best fund-raiser.”

  The next day our field staff reported an avalanche of new volunteers calling and e-mailing and showing up at their offices, all with the same message: “We’re so angry after the Palin speech—so offended by McCain’s choice—that we can’t sit on the sidelines anymore. Put us to work.” A huge number of former Hillary Clinton volunteers also showed up for the first time, clearly peeved at the implication that they were supposed to abandon their principles because McCain had picked a woman. Despite her stated disdain for community organizers, Sarah Palin had suddenly become one—for us.

  She was pretty good at turning out her own party, too. Before the pick, McCain was typically drawing fewer than a thousand people to his events. Now, with Palin at his side, they were drawing Obama-like crowds of fifteen to twenty thousand people with regularity. As a result, his camp announced to the press that McCain and Palin would stay together on the trail for the foreseeable future, doing their events together in battleground states. I understood the thinking behind this—they believed Palin was generating energy that wouldn’t be there when McCain was by himself, and at this point the cable news stations would generally cover live any Palin speech—and some of McCain‘s, too, if she was there.

  But I thought it was a fundamentally unsound approach. Just a minuscule fraction of true swing voters watched cable news—its audience was almost all partisans on both sides. What really mattered—and our research was clear as a bell on this—was the local news. True swing voters watched their local TV station and read their regional paper.