Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
TAKEOFF
Waiting
The Warrior
The Uniter
At the Gate
BOOK ONE - THEY’RE OFF
CHAPTER ONE - Obama
CHAPTER TWO - Johnnie Boy
CHAPTER THREE - Hillary
BOOK TWO - THE PEOPLE
CHAPTER FOUR - “Very Scary Times”
BOOK THREE - THE DEMOCRATS
CHAPTER FIVE - Hillary for President
CHAPTER SIX - The Unraveling
CHAPTER SEVEN - Iowa: Round One
CHAPTER EIGHT - Iowa: Round Two
CHAPTER NINE - Five Days in New Hampshire
CHAPTER TEN - Disintegration
CHAPTER ELEVEN - An Uncivil War
CHAPTER TWELVE - Clash of Dynasties
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - King Caucus
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Fighter
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Politics in Black and White
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Over the Top
BOOK FOUR - THE REPUBLICANS
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Looking for Reagan
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Prisoner of War
CHAPTER NINETEEN - The Implosion
CHAPTER TWENTY - No Surrender
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Can Anybody Play This Game?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - Phoenix Rising
BOOK FIVE - THE ELECTION
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - America: Decision Time
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Citizen of the World
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Mile High in Denver
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Palinmania
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Collapse
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Endgame
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - President-elect
CHAPTER THIRTY - Interlude
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
Notes and Sources
Index
About the Authors
Also by Dan Balz
Storming the Gates (with Ronald Brownstein)
Also by Haynes Johnson
The Age of Anxiety
The Best of Times
The System (with David S. Broder)
Divided We Fall
Sleepwalking Through History
In the Absence of Power
The Working White House
Lyndon (with Richard Harwood)
Army in Anguish (with George C. Wilson)
The Unions (with Nick Kotz)
Fulbright: The Dissenter (with Bernard M. Gwer tzman)
The Bay of Pigs
Dusk at the Mountain
Fiction
The Landing (with Howard Simons)
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, 2009
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Balz, Daniel J.
The battle for America 2008 : the story of an extraordinary election / Dan Balz and
Haynes Johnson.
p. cm.
“A James H. Silberman Book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-13251-7
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http://us.penguingroup.com
For Tim Russert,
friend and colleague,
who defined the race
only to miss the last chapter
and to our wives,
Nancy Balz and Kathryn Oberly
Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make . . . transfer of power work effectively. No people have succeeded at it better . . . than the Americans.
—Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960
To the Reader
We began research for this book in 2006 out of a conviction that the presidential election of 2008 promised to be one of the most significant in American history. More than two years later, it has turned out to be that and more—the election of a lifetime, one that will be studied for years for its shattering of historical barriers and its long-term consequences for the United States.
In the decades we have spent chronicling American politics, nothing has equaled this election for the richness of its characters, for the light it sheds on questions of race, gender, religion, class, and generational changes, and for the stakes it raises for the future. It was an election that took place against a background of two wars, the collapse of the world’s capital markets, a gathering global recession, soaring national debt, and pervasive doubts about the direction of the country from traditionally optimistic Americans. These problems created deep anxiety and presented challenges for the presidential candidates faced with some of the most daunting issues the United States has confronted, not least the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression. How well those issues were addressed during the election will define the nation’s course, for better or worse, in years to come. In the end, public hunger for change produced an outpouring of voters hopeful that a new president and a new approach would lead to a better America.
A word about our methods and sources: We were present at many of the scenes recounted in this narrative, and we conducted recorded interviews, covering hundreds of hours of conversations, with the principal political players, their strategists and advisers, and the voters who rendered final judgment on those who won and lost. Many were on the record, but many others were agreed to on the condition that we grant anonymity to encourage candor as the campaign unfolded.
Our narrative focuses on three candidates who battled to win the White House: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, who represent strikingly different strands of the American story. At the same time, the history of this election cannot be told, or understood, without taking into account the record of the failed presidency that preceded it. Though George W.
Bush no longer was on the ballot, his shadow hovered over all that followed.
TAKEOFF
Waiting
“We didn’t have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit card accounts, we didn’t have any staff, we didn’t have a list of people who were going to do our first serious fund-raisers.”
—David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager
Sunday, March 4, 2007, Selma, Alabama
Barack Obama is sitting aboard his modest six-seater chartered aircraft on the tarmac at Selma—waiting. He’s just finished his part in the commemorative ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where forty-two years earlier civil rights demonstrators had been trampled, tear-gassed, and viciously beaten with whips and billy clubs.
As he waits to begin the flight to Boston for political fund-raisers the next morning, he’s accompanied by just two aides: his press spokesman, Dan Pfeiffer, and his six-foot-five-inch “body man,” Reggie Love, who can barely stuff his frame into his small seat. But that doesn’t matter. Obama’s in a good mood. His speech has been well received, and he believes he more than held his own against the imposing figures of Hillary and Bill Clinton, among other notables present for the ceremonies.
For Obama, Selma marks the first time he and Hillary Clinton have crossed paths since announcing their campaigns for the White House weeks before. Inevitably, given the intense media focus on their rivalry, their appearance has been hyped in the press as a critical Obama versus Clinton moment and attracts a huge press gathering. That alone makes Selma a formidable political challenge, but there are others.
With its symbolism as the scene of the last great battle of the civil rights era, leading directly to passage of the Voting Rights Act of which he and every elected black officeholder is a direct beneficiary, Selma gives Obama a chance to demonstrate that his candidacy stems from the history of the civil rights movement. It also provides an opportunity to put to rest doubts expressed among black Americans that he’s “not black enough” to carry the banner of the movement forward.
It’s an argument Obama knows well, frustrating though it is, especially since he is only the third black person to be elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction. With surpassing irony, no American politician has expressed more revealingly the agonizing conflicts of race—or, in his case, the biracial conflicts—than his account of his African father, “black as pitch,” and Kansas mother, “white as milk.” His remarkable memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, first attracted attention to him as a promising political figure twelve years before. Its pages are filled with brooding, self-revelatory passages about his struggle to come to grips with his mixed racial identity, including his painful description of how as a teenager he stopped acknowledging his mother’s race because he feared he would be seen as ingratiating himself to whites, writing, “Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.”
Out of this soul-searching of a thirty-four-year-old emerges the cool, disciplined politician of steely determination in pursuit of his unlikely dream of becoming president of the United States. Obama knows all too well that Clinton stands as the odds-on, even inevitable, winner of the nomination—and for good reason: She is the best known, has the most formidable political organization, the most money, the greatest expertise. She’s backed by a network that has helped win the White House twice, something no Democrat had accomplished since FDR, and can recruit almost anyone she wants. And everyone knows her name.
Beyond all that, she and Bill Clinton have a special claim on the allegiance of black voters. So popular is Bill among blacks that he’s been called, admiringly, “the first black president.” She also begins her campaign enjoying the endorsements of leading blacks from the civil rights era, including Congressman John Lewis of Georgia. Lewis, who was nearly clubbed to death on that Bloody Sunday in Selma, is among those this day who linked arms with her and Obama while crossing the Pettus Bridge in reenactment of that historic march to freedom.
Against the politically intimidating Clinton advantages, Obama begins his “improbable quest” literally with almost nothing. “We didn’t have bank accounts, we didn’t have credit card accounts, we didn’t have any staff, we didn’t have a list of people who were going to do our first serious fund-raisers,” remembers David Plouffe, who has been tapped as the campaign manager. At first, they don’t even have a Web site.
Now, as Obama waits at the Selma airport, before him on the tarmac sit two large, sleek Gulfstream jets. As he watches, two motorcades of black SUVs roll onto the tarmac and up to the jets. Out of one SUV comes Bill Clinton, followed by his Secret Service detail and his aides. The second, even larger motorcade brings Hillary Clinton and her entourage. Within minutes, the former president’s plane is taxiing down the runway. Obama’s small plane is scheduled to depart next. The pilot tries to start their engine, but he can’t. The battery is dead. Don’t worry, the pilot tells Obama, airport crews are searching for a long extension cord. They’ll plug it into a generator in the lobby and run it from the terminal back to the plane to jump-start the engine. Still, the plane won’t start. While Obama and his aides are cramped inside the plane, sweltering in a cabin without air-conditioning, they watch as Hillary’s Gulfstream takes off. Bemused, Obama tells his young aides, “I guess this really is a grassroots campaign.”
The Warrior
“A lot of people are writing you off.”
—A reporter to John McCain
Four months later, Friday, July 13, 2007,
Concord, New Hampshire
It wasn’t the kind of campaign trip to New Hampshire John McCain originally planned. The Granite State was his state, the state he counted on to rescue him from political disaster. By this Friday in July 2007, the McCain campaign has imploded. Not only has it run out of money with what appears to be reckless mismanagement, but McCain has just had to fire key members of his staff; others voluntarily leave his side. Days later, he is traveling back to New Hampshire on his first trip after his campaign’s apparent collapse.
Now here he is, in Concord, speaking to a luncheon audience, hoping to rescue his presidential dreams by rekindling support from citizens of New Hampshire loyal to the old John McCain.
After his address, he holds a news conference. The scene is chaotic. McCain stands surrounded by the media pack, who pound him with question after question about what happened to his campaign. Amid this torrent he tries to strike a cheerful air, but as he faces his questioners, he can see that even old friends in the press corps now doubt him.
Fast and furious, the questions come:
Q: You criticized [Congress] spending like a drunken sailor.
MCCAIN: Yeah.
Q: Yet it seems like some of your campaign staff got their hands on the liquor. How can you justify the spending that went on?
MCCAIN: Well, I’ve fought wasteful spending for a very long period of time, and I’m fighting this, and when I see mistakes, I correct them.
Q: You talked a little bit earlier about the mistakes in the campaign, and you’re taking blame for any mistakes that were made.
MCCAIN: I’m not taking, quote, blame, I’m taking responsibility. . . . That’s the way I was brought up in the military. You take responsibility when you’re in charge.
Q: Senator McCain, are there any circumstances under which you could imagine yourself not still being a presidential candidate when the New Hampshire primary’s held?
Smiling, he gives a quick reply, intended as a humorous quip to draw an appreciative response from his once admiring and supportive press pack: “Contracting a fatal disease,” John McCain answers.
Dead silence. No laughter. Nothing.
“Anything short of that?” the reporter asks.
McCain replies, “Not that I know of.” Then, three times, he gives the same response: “You nev
er know . . . You never know . . . You never know.”
Still the questions come, until finally, “Senator, when it comes to hope, which is more hopeful—the chance of progress in Iraq or the chance of you getting the Republican nomination?”
Here, John McCain laughs. “You mean, in the words of Chairman Mao, it’s always darkest before it’s totally black.” A pause, then, “I don’t know the answer to that. I’m sorry, old friend, it’s hard for me to answer a question like that.”
All he can do, he says, is take his case back to the good people in his favorite state of New Hampshire. He says, “They know me, and I’m very pleased to have the opportunity of really spending a lot of time with them.”
A brave front, but it doesn’t inspire much hope for his chances. On McCain’s next campaign trip to New Hampshire shortly after his ordeal in Concord he’s flying commercial, carrying his own bag, traveling with a single aide, and ignored by the press. For John McCain, it’s either a final humiliation or a test of the power of the old prisoner of war to endure, even to prevail.
The Uniter
“A heck of an interesting tale.”
—George W. Bush
Flashback, January 11, 2001
The winter sky is darkening as the chartered airplane speeds toward Waco, Texas. Inside the cabin, President-elect George Walker Bush sits in the aisle seat in the first row on the right.
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