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

by David Plouffe

  “Alright. I’ll call Davis and meet you when the motorcade pulls up,” I said. Talking to Rick Davis, it was immediately clear we would not be deciding anything jointly. “We’re announcing in a few minutes that we’re suspending our campaign to go back to Washington to help on the financial crisis and the bailout,” he told me. “We’re also going to announce that we won’t be attending the first debate unless a deal is reached on the legislation. Senator McCain thinks that politics should take a backseat right now.”

  I almost laughed into the phone. Even in the backseat, this was politics at its most crass. “I see,” I said. “I thought we were going to try and send out a message jointly to help the politics on the Hill.”

  Rick said, “We can do that. But we think much stronger action is required. We hope you guys join us.”

  “We’ll have to talk it over,” I replied.

  “McCain is going out to talk to the press in a couple of minutes,” Davis reported, and our conversation was over.

  I tracked down Obama at the hotel, and as McCain made his announcement, I could tell Obama was peeved that McCain had gone to the press so quickly. “He left me the distinct impression that he was mulling this suspension deal over, not that he was running out to the cameras in a matter of minutes.”

  “That tells you all you need to know about this,” I replied, “it’s a high-stakes stunt. Not a whiff of principle involved. But we need to have an answer to this stinkbomb, and in a matter of minutes, too.”

  I asked Reggie to round up Gibbs, Ax, and Anita, and we all met in Obama’s hotel room. All our BlackBerrys were buzzing with unsolicited, uniform advice: You have to follow McCain. If you don’t he’ll look big, and you’ll look small. He’ll look like a statesman and you’ll look political.

  I viewed our situation in the exact opposite way: this was a transparent stunt, very impetuous, and would be seen as such by the voters. Everyone in the room agreed and Obama quickly confirmed he had some instincts too.

  “I think this is absolutely nuts,” he said to us. “First, maybe McCain isn’t on top of this like I am, but I know with certainty based on the umpteenth conversations I’ve been having with folks in Washington that if we turn this into a political circus, it will do much more harm than good. So if we truly want to help pass the bailout, the last thing we should be doing is taking the presidential campaign to D.C.”

  He also thought there was no more important time to debate than right at that moment. One of the two of them would be president in less than four months. People were scared, he said, and canceling presidential debates certainly wouldn’t instill any confidence. Obama thought voters needed to take the measure of the candidates and argued that there was no better time for that than during a crisis.

  “So,” he concluded, “I want to go tell the press unequivocally that we are not suspending our campaign and that I intend to be in Oxford, Mississippi, on Friday night. You guys tell me what I am missing.” We thought about it and decided he wasn’t missing anything. From where we stood, the debate was on.

  This was going to be like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. We couldn’t both win. One of the campaigns would pay a very heavy price for taking the wrong path. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, but we were feeling loose. As much as we loved methodically combing through our data, making a decision on the fly always seemed to suit us.

  Our press team hastily assembled the reporters traveling with us, and we wove our way through the corridors of the old hotel to where they were gathered. Obama announced our response to McCain’s ploy, adding a terrific impromptu line in explaining why it was important to preserve the debate: “Presidents need to be able to do more than one thing at a time.” That clip played over and over next to McCain suggesting postponement. We looked strong, confident, and steady. McCain looked erratic and a bit desperate.

  We’d know soon enough if voters shared that view.

  Back in Obama’s room, we were celebrating his performance and the rush of taking the riskier path when Katie Johnson e-mailed me that Josh Bolten, the White House chief of staff, was urgently looking for me.

  I ducked into the hallway and called him. “Listen, this wasn’t our idea,” he said, “but Senator McCain called the president and asked that we gather a meeting with the president and congressional leaders tomorrow in Washington, including him and Senator Obama, to try to nail down an agreement on the bailout package.” I felt my grip tighten on the phone. “Whether this is a good idea or not, we’ll see,” he continued. “But we can’t turn it down. I wanted to give you a heads-up and also discuss schedule. I know you guys are busy, and I want to make sure we hold it at a time you can attend.”

  While I appreciated the scheduling courtesy, my blood was boiling. I thought the White House was crossing a line, playing right along with McCain’s political stunt and potentially providing legitimacy to his effort to be the white knight.

  “You guys are playing politics with this,” I told Bolten. “I just don’t see how this meeting will be viewed as anything but a political handout from the White House. I feel like we’re getting blindsided and played here.”

  Bolten seemed to be as even-keeled as Obama. “I understand how you could feel that,” he said calmly. “But we’re going to do everything we can to play it straight and who knows what will come out of the meeting. We just think we can’t say no to holding it—and I’m not sure you’d want us to, but that’s your evaluation to make. Anyway, my boss wants to reach out to yours. To talk about it principal to principal.”

  We arranged a time for Obama and Bush to talk. After hanging up, I thought about what Bolten said and realized perhaps I had not seen the whole picture clearly. If the White House refused to accept McCain’s request for a meeting, McCain would surely make hay of that and his ploy would get even more oxygen. Now, with the meeting going forward, Obama would be in Washington, and if McCain tried to accuse him of choosing to campaign rather than stew in D.C., it would strike a discordant note—the one image voters would have would be McCain and Obama together at the White House, meeting about the bailout.

  Obama reported that his conversation with Bush was interesting. “He doesn’t seem all that thrilled about holding the meeting. Almost apologetic.” Obama reported that the president said, “I know what it’s like to be in the middle of a presidential campaign and have something like this dumped on you. And I know you’re talking regularly to Paulson and Bernanke and they say you’re being helpful. I’m not sure why McCain thinks this is a good idea. But I have to move forward. So I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  We’d know soon enough if McCain was a genius and whether the White House was playing it straight with us. Meanwhile, we had real-world scheduling and logistical complications. We would hold our second mock-debate practice that night, Wednesday, and then Thursday morning Obama would fly to D.C. for the White House meeting. After that, though, we were going to have to completely wing it.

  We decided to proceed as if the debate was going to happen, though all signs pointed against it. We couldn’t risk being unprepared if for some reason McCain changed his mind or a deal on the bailout was struck. But we had no idea when we’d be prepping or where. Should we all fly to D.C. with Obama and prep there after the meeting? Should he fly back to Florida, since we had the stage and all our equipment there? If the debate were canceled, at least we’d be in a battleground state and could so some campaigning Friday. Or should we just get to Mississippi early and prep there? For a campaign that abhorred uncertainty, this was excruciating.

  But there we were, forty-eight hours from a first presidential debate that looked like it wouldn’t happen, facing a shocking shift of strategy from our opponent that would likely alter the race, and on our way to a high-stakes White House meeting that could have real consequences for the financial-rescue package.

  Between the bizarrely impulsive VP selection process that yielded the Palin pick and now McCain’s jumping around—suspending the campaign, unsuspending the
campaign; not going to debate, now going to debate—a word entered the official lexicon of our campaign dictionary, a word we wanted every voter to think of whenever they thought of our opponent: erratic.

  16

  Plumbers and Radicals

  On Thursday, September 25, Barack Obama left for Washington to meet with the president, McCain, and congressional leaders from both parties. On a conference call that day with the two Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Obama suggested that he play point at the meeting. They readily accepted.

  Thus, with a little more than twenty-hours left before the first, and now endangered, presidential debate, the two candidates met face-to-face, not at podiums but in the White House. When the meeting commenced, President Bush spoke first, and Obama followed, laying out the Democrats’ principles regarding a final rescue package as well as what they saw as deficiencies in the existing Bush administration plan.

  McCain, by contrast, was quiet, even sullen, according to what we heard from those in the room. His comportment seemed at odds with what was presumably his campaign’s rationale in calling for the meeting: to showcase him as a leader capable of grabbing the reins in Washington and rescuing the country’s finances. He was clearly peeved that Obama was taking a leadership role in the meeting, and, according to multiple participants, when he did speak, he came across as ill informed and offered only platitudes, with little grounding in the real economic situation.

  John Boehner, the House Minority leader, who negotiated on behalf of the House GOP, had suggested that his people were close to accepting the outlines of the bailout legislation. However, at the White House discussion he reversed course and aggressively implied that the House GOP was far from agreeing to a deal. We assumed Boehner was in cahoots with the McCain campaign, though we could not be sure. It looked coordinated, even if just by happenstance.

  The meeting quickly dissolved into acrimony and posturing. Clearly no deal was going to be struck that afternoon, and any fantasies McCain had of creating bipartisan peace were just that. The Republican congressional leaders (sans McCain) exited the meeting and went straight to the press camped outside, where they expressed strong reservations and offered slim prospects for a bailout deal anytime soon. The Democratic leaders (sans Obama) were less bleak but expressed frustration with the Republican posturing.

  The press also began to report on McCain’s role in the meeting, or lack thereof. “This is going to boomerang right back on them,” I thought. The voters would score it that McCain’s gambit yielded a typical Washington clusterfuck.

  The meltdown at the White House seemed to decrease the likelihood that McCain would show up for the debate. He had said he would come down only if a deal was cemented, and we were now farther from resolution than we’d been when he’d issued his ultimatum.

  After the meeting, Obama called Axelrod and me in Florida. There was a chance he’d have to attend another gathering in D.C. with congressional leadership later that night, which meant flying back down to Florida to resume prep was out. We had a plane on standby to bring some of the debate prep team up to him for a 9:00 p.m. session, but Obama suggested bagging the mock debate entirely, even though it was the last of our scheduled three.

  “I think I should just review my materials tonight. We can do an abbreviated mock tomorrow, if the debate is on,” he offered.

  Ax and I were on speakerphone in Ax’s hotel room; hearing this, we rolled our eyes at each other. Both of us knew that what Obama really wanted was a night to himself in a hotel room—reading his debate materials, no doubt, but with ESPN on the tube and no one poking at his answers and directing his every movement.

  He tried to reassure us. “Guys, I know you’re nervous about losing a night of prep. But I think we’re in good shape, and some quiet reading wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

  Ax and I shrugged our shoulders. “Fine,” Ax said, “but we really have to do some time tomorrow—I understand what you’re saying but we still have to work through some of the exchanges we don’t have nailed yet.”

  Barack laughed. “You two really are on edge,” he commented. “We’ll be fine. Figure out how prep will work tomorrow and let me know. Just make sure we aren’t prepping right up to the debate—I want some time to decompress.”

  That was that. We were heading into a debate that could determine our fate and we were losing a third of our prep. Based on McCain’s schedule and what we were hearing in the press, we assumed that McCain was not prepping very rigorously, but this was small consolation; we couldn’t peg our effort on his. We had established a game plan and now it had been thrown out.

  Ron and Tom were predictably apoplectic. “We’re not where we need to be for this debate,” Ron observed. “He’s good to go on most stuff, but we still have to work through some things.”

  “I know, I know,” I told them. “But we are where we are. Let’s figure out how to salvage some time tomorrow and come up with a new game plan. We also have to decide whether to do it here in Florida or jury-rig something up in Oxford.”

  After a quick vote we decided on Oxford. I called Alyssa and told her we had a change of plans. We needed to get to Mississippi right away. The Oxford airport could not accept a plane as large as ours (many of the press were with us as well), so we had to land in Memphis, Tennessee, and have the advance team stationed in Oxford arrange volunteer drivers to transport our crew the hour and a half to Oxford.

  We landed in Memphis well after midnight and clambered into the vans. We had something of a rolling conversation, if you can call it that, during the drive, as we all fell asleep for snatches of time. I would reply to something Ax said, but he would not answer. Joel Benenson, our leading national pollster, might instead. Then I would doze off. The ride was bumpy as hell. We got into Oxford around 3:00 a.m., stumbled into the hotel, and tried to get a couple of hours’ sleep before the conference calls. The glamour of a presidential campaign ...

  We started telling the press that Obama was coming to debate no matter what; if McCain didn’t show, we’d hold an event instead. We all thought there was a decent chance McCain would cave and show—it just wasn’t in his DNA to duck a challenge, even if he would have to concoct a convoluted explanation for why he was changing course.

  In between calls, I went for a quick run outside, largely to try to wake myself up. As I was running through the gorgeous Ole Miss campus, I came upon a sign reading CONFEDERATE DRIVE. I don’t like to break pace when I’m running, but it stopped me dead in my tracks. I stared at the sign for a while. As I’ve mentioned, we were all so close to the race that it was hard to get any perspective when it came to the implications of Barack’s run. Random things would occasionally provide a cue, and this sign was one of them. Looking up at the street name, it washed over me at that moment that Barack Obama, a major-party presidential nominee, would attend a debate that night—whether it happened or not—on the same campus where less than fifty years earlier, federal troops had had to protect James Meredith as he simply tried to attend classes.

  My pace running back to the hotel was much quicker.

  As Obama boarded his plane in D.C. to come to Mississippi, we still did not know if McCain was going to show. Then, at the last possible moment, they sent out a tortured statement saying he would come; he believed that because of his efforts, progress was being made to craft a better financial rescue package.

  Total bullshit. They had blinked. Even worse for them, they had grossly miscalculated how all this would play out. We were thrilled, both because they looked weak and indecisive after royally screwing up a high-stakes game of chicken, and because we needed this debate—it was an important part of closing the deal with voters. Now, the McCain campaign was in a tough spot, with no good options. And they had boxed themselves into this unappetizing situation in pursuit of an ill-considered stunt.

  We had a couple of good short prep sessions that afternoon in Oxford. During our walkthrough of the debate site, I stood in for McCain,
and Barack and I bantered about the upcoming baseball playoffs as we tested the sound, he boasting of the White Sox’s chances if they made it, I of the Phillies. He seemed ready for the spotlight and was feeling invigorated that we had held our ground while McCain had buckled. Psychologically it was a real boost for him and for all of us. “I felt comfortable up there,” he said as we left the stage to drive back to our hotel. “I’m ready to make my case.”

  Obama won the debate convincingly. Polls afterward showed undecided voters who watched the debate giving him the win by a landslide. The pundit report cards weren’t quite as emphatic but most thought we had won, if for no other reason than it was a foreign policy debate that McCain was expected to dominate. Anything beyond holding our own was seen by the political referees as a big win.

  It helped us that despite the debate’s ostensible foreign policy focus, a good chunk of the time was devoted to the domestic financial situation. Obama’s economic answers focused like a laser on the middle class. This was a chief strategy of ours: to relentlessly make the case that as president, Obama would put the needs of the middle class first. We had prepped heavily on it, and Obama delivered beautifully on that score. McCain, though, had failed to display similar advocacy.

  I mentioned this to Ax as the debate wrapped up. “Can you believe it? McCain didn’t mention the middle class.”

  “I was just thinking that,” he replied. “You’re right, not once in the entire debate.”

  This we could capitalize on. Margolis’s team immediately got cracking on an ad we would release the next morning that hammered home McCain’s oversight. It was yet another miscue that made the young, rookie senator look like the steady leader in the race. We were in great spirits.