The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  After two days of meetings and briefings in Washington, Bush is returning home for the last time before his inauguration in nine days. Four weeks earlier, thanks to an intensely controversial ruling of the United States Supreme Court, he becomes the first candidate in 124 years to lose the popular vote and still become president.

  Often guarded or defensive in interviews, Bush is more relaxed and candid than we remember from many previous interviews.1 He’s also unusually reflective as he describes the extraordinary events that began with election day and continued for thirty-seven days, holding him, his opponent, Al Gore, and the nation in a state of suspense unmatched in any previous presidential election: shouting protesters, angry charges, spin and counterspin, court challenges and counterchallenges. All expose an American political system imploding before the eyes of the world.

  In the end, by a five-to-four vote the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time intercedes and determines the outcome of a presidential election. The court overturns Florida’s state court ruling, halts the recounts, orders them ended. The election results are to stand as tabulated. Out of nearly six million votes cast in Florida, Bush leads by 537. Gore wins the popular count by 543,816. Because of the Supreme Court’s ruling, however, Bush has 271 electoral votes—one more than needed.

  Bush’s inaugural will take place against a backdrop of the divisive controversies of the Clinton years, which resulted in only the second impeachment of a president in history. Clinton still ignites Bush’s conservative base with anger, but he will be leaving office with an unusually high public approval rating of 65 percent.2 He also bequeaths favorable conditions to his successor: a nation at peace, facing no visible foreign threats, with projected surpluses for years to come. The rosy forecast for Bush’s inauguration day is nearly $6 trillion in surpluses that would accumulate between 2001 and 2011. If a national political consensus can be achieved, America has the ability to do almost anything it wants.

  As Bush’s plane speeds toward Texas, he envisions the opportunities these challenges present for his presidency. When he addressed the nation for the first time as president-elect from the House chamber of the Texas State Capitol the day after the Supreme Court ruling, Bush told Americans, “I believe things happen for a reason.” What did he mean by that? we ask as the plane begins its descent to Waco.

  Bush, who campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” whose intent was to be, as he had told the American people, a “uniter, not a divider,” amplifies that theme. Leaning across his aisle seat, he cites Lincoln’s warning about the dangers of an American house divided. His presidency, George W. Bush says, provides those like him, who have been entrusted with power, a chance “to rise above the expectations of what a divided house means, and at the same time to diminish cynicism. I believe it is an opportunity for people who go to Washington—both Republicans and Democrats—to come together.”

  His last words before touchdown still echo: “It’s a heck of an interesting tale, isn’t it?”

  At the Gate

  Seldom in American history had a president experienced such a roller-coaster ride. After 9/11 Bush received the highest approval rating ever recorded. By January 2007 his popularity was plummeting toward depths not recorded since Nixon at the time of his forced resignation.

  Washington, January 2007

  In modern American history, no presidential election seemed as wide open—or as consequential. The 2008 campaign attracted one of the largest and most impressive fields of candidates ever, and one marked by a historical precedent: For the first time in more than half a century, a presidential race begins without either a president seeking reelection or his vice president attempting to succeed him.

  The Democratic field is especially strong. Even the less likely candidates—John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden—are substantial politicians and credible nominees. Edwards is the glamorous southerner and former senator from North Carolina who ran a strong race for the Democratic nomination in 2004 and then ended up as John F. Kerry’s vice presidential running mate. Kerry later told a friend he regretted picking Edwards as his running mate. Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, blamed the Kerry team for strategic blunders. So as Kerry held open the possibility that he might run again, Edwards plunged into the 2008 campaign less than a month after Bush’s second inaugural, soon to harbor a dark secret about an affair with a campaign aide.

  Biden of Delaware is one of his party’s most respected voices on foreign policy and has been a senator for nearly three decades; Richardson is the most prominent Hispanic politician in the country, now the governor of New Mexico after having served as United Nations ambassador and secretary of energy during the Clinton years; Dodd is one of the Senate’s leading legislators, having earned that reputation after almost three decades of Capitol Hill experience.3

  Among Republicans, the field is less strong, if only because no one seems to fit the mold of past nominees, especially the commanding figure of Ronald Reagan. McCain aside, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is the most intriguing—best known for his leadership of a shaken city after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks leveled the World Trade Center. Mitt Romney looks most like a president, with his square jaw and boyishly handsome face, seen posing beside the perfect political family. He has a dynastic name too. His father, George, was a popular Republican governor of Michigan and a leading GOP presidential candidate in 1968. Romney’s religion poses an obstacle. In a party dominated by conservative southern evangelicals, can a Mormon ever win? Conservative credentials are not the problem for Mike Huckabee, the former governor from Arkansas. Like Bill Clinton, he can boast of having come from a town called Hope. He has a warm and winning personality, and conservative views. But nobody takes him seriously. Lurking in the background, but already the subject of political speculation, is the dark horse candidacy of Fred Thompson, former senator as well as screen and TV actor.

  Besides an impressive field of candidates, yet another factor elevates the 2008 election to historic status. By 2007, the United States faces severe economic challenges. At the same time, America is involved in two wars, still confronts the threat of Islamist terrorist attacks, and stands in danger of seeing its power decline. All of this induces a deep sense of anxiety among voters.

  Two-thirds of them tell pollsters they believe the country is headed seriously in the wrong direction. Month by month that negative feeling intensifies. The housing market is collapsing, setting off a wave of foreclosures with shock waves that ripple through America’s banking and financial sectors. The middle class is imperiled as unemployment rises, triggering layoffs and buyouts. The Gallup Poll finds a majority of voters more pessimistic about their financial future than at any point in decades. The stock market has plummeted from a 2007 high of 14,164 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average to just over 8,500 a year later and continues to fall. All of this grim news is a prelude to much worse. In the weeks before the election, the failure of leading Wall Street firms and banks spawns a crisis of confidence that raises the specter of a financial collapse rivaling the darkest days of the Great Depression three-quarters of a century earlier.

  The gloomy news inspires the oldest theme in American politics—time for change—and sets the stage for what political commentators inadequately call “a change election,” an election that could mark the end of the conservative era dating from Ronald Reagan’s presidency nearly thirty years earlier. Those years marked the rise and fall of the Democratic Party. In 1964, a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide in American history with 61.1 percent of the vote over Barry Goldwater, eclipsing even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s margin over Alf Landon in 1936. Yet two years later Republicans emerged from the 1966 elections in control of half of the statehouses, including seven of the ten most populous states. Democrats fell into such public disfavor that they lost seven of the next ten presidential elections. Only once did they carry barely more than half of the votes cast—w
ith Jimmy Carter’s 50.1 percent in 1976.

  That same brief time span, from 1964 to 1966, marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s rise from seeming political irrelevance to that of America’s leading political power. By the summer of 1965, after the great moment in Selma, the common cause of blacks and whites marching together was shattered. Racial riots swept the Watts section of Los Angeles. Over the next two years they spread to cities across the country. At the same time America was experiencing growing waves of protests, many violent, about the bitterly divisive Vietnam War. LBJ’s Great Society, which had passed the liberal reforms of Medicare, Medicaid, and advances in women’s and minority rights, was over.

  By 2007, as the candidates gather, nothing better illuminates the changes and challenges facing them and their two political parties than the standing of George W. Bush. He has become an increasingly distant, almost irrelevant figure, so much so that it’s hard to recognize the hopeful president-elect who flew back to Texas before assuming the presidency.

  His words on that memorable flight six years earlier are in poignant, near tragic contrast to a presidency gone awry, of hopes dashed both by events and by his own decisions in the White House. His political capital is eroded, his Republican Party in turmoil, his country trapped in an unpopular war and sinking deeper into debt, and his fellow citizens more polarized than when he first took his oath of office—all the opposite of what he hoped for when he talked about wanting to elevate the politics of the era and bring the country together. In between came 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction, “Mission Accomplished,” Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, the Republican loss of Congress.

  Seldom in American history had a president experienced such a roller-coaster ride. After 9/11 Bush received the highest presidential approval rating ever recorded (90 percent) in all the years since the Gallup Poll began its first opinion surveys during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. By January 2007 his public standing hovers at sixty points below its peak and plummets toward depths not recorded since Nixon at the time of his forced resignation. The final chapter on Bush’s presidency has not yet been written; he still has two years left in office. But at the least, his has been a damaging presidency that will leave his successor a legacy of some of the most daunting policy problems at home and abroad ever faced by a new president.

  Of the candidates who begin the battle, only three—Obama, McCain, and Clinton—emerge to dominate the race for the nomination. Their challenge is to convince voters they can produce significant change after years of public disaffection from all things political. Obama and Clinton carry a special burden: to prove they can break through the barriers erected by the virulent record of American racism and sexism.

  Obama, born in 1961, is the biracial figure initially viewed suspiciously by many blacks as not representative of the black experience and by many whites as an elitist black whose values are different from those of the America they know. His entry into politics came long after the destructive political climate of the sixties that divided the generations, pitted region against region, group against group, and launched the divisive “culture wars” that have influenced political battles since. If elected, he will be the first African-American president, and one of the youngest.

  McCain was shaped by the legacy of a family of World War II military leaders. His defining experience was as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and his campaign carried a Shakespearean element: the former prisoner of war who again has become a “POW.” His steadfast support of the war policies of George W. Bush, who crushed his presidential hopes seven years before, now becomes his greatest political liability.

  Clinton is a classic representative of the post-World War II baby boom generation, the Goldwater girl who turned against the Vietnam War and became a progressive Democrat. Her generation came to political power in the wake of immense change—the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement—that created a revolution in American life, affecting everyone and everything, from the nature of the society to the structure of its institutions. Those explosive times left a legacy of both great achievement and despair, as riots, assassinations, scandals, and impeachments deepened public cynicism about politics and politicians. With the possible exception of Eleanor Roosevelt, Clinton has been more influential than any previous First Lady. But she also carries the baggage of the scandals of the Clinton years and the fierce opposition of critics who despise all things Clinton. If elected, she will be the first female president.

  It is with those three candidates, talented but so different, so representative of their times, that we begin.

  BOOK ONE

  THEY’RE OFF

  CHAPTER ONE

  Obama

  “So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?” Tim Russert asked. “I will not,” Obama replied.

  —January 22, 2006

  Ten months after that exchange, when he again faced Tim Russert in the well-chilled studios of NBC News in Washington, along the angular wooden table where news has so often been made on Meet the Press, Obama knew Russert would ask him once more about his plans to run. Obama was prepared for it. This time, he was ready to make some news of his own.

  Tim Russert was a political celebrity in his own right whose stature eclipsed most of those who appeared with him as guests. Time magazine had named him among the one hundred most influential people in the world, and it was on his television program that all politicians and public figures craved to be seen. When Obama had last appeared on Meet the Press, Russert had recalled Obama’s pledge to serve out his full six-year Senate term and not seek higher office after having been elected in November 2004. Russert had pressed Obama for another declaration of his intentions. “My thinking has not changed,” Obama said. Russert, leaning forward, his eyes fixed steadily on Obama, tried again. “So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?” Obama replied, “I will not.” Ten months later, he was on Meet the Press again.

  The night before, while driving back from Philadelphia after completing the first week of a book tour during which clamorous crowds were urging him to run for president, Obama discussed with his top strategist, David Axelrod, and his communications director, Robert Gibbs, the questions Russert would likely ask the next morning. They all knew that Russert, famous for throwing quotations back in the faces of politicians, was certain to air segments from Obama’s last appearance and demand a response. “We have to say we’re thinking about this,” Obama told Axelrod and Gibbs. They agreed.

  Russert waited until the very end of Meet the Press to play the earlier tape. Turning to Obama, he repeated Obama’s final “I will not run” words and waited for a response. Obama hesitated a fraction of a second. “Well, the—that was how I was thinking at that time,” he said. “And, and, you know, I don’t want to be coy about this, given the responses that I’ve been getting over the last several months, I have thought about the possibility. But I have not thought about it—about it with the seriousness and depth that I think is required. My main focus right now is the ’06 election, and making sure that we retake the Congress. After, oh—after November 7, I’ll sit down and, and consider, and if at some point I change my mind, I will make a public announcement, and everybody will be able to go at me.”

  Russert pressed the point. “But it’s fair to say you’re thinking about running for president in 2008?” he asked. “It’s fair, yes,” Obama replied. “And so when you said to me in January, ‘I will not,’ that statement is no longer operative.” Again, Obama paused briefly. “The—I would say that I am still at the point where I have made no decision to, to pursue higher office, but it is true that I have thought about it over the last several months.”

  “So it sounds as if the door has opened a bit,” Russert concluded.

  Obama acknowledged, “A bit.”4

  Those words shattered all assumptions about the 2008 presidential campaign. Whatever had gone before—all the tr
ips to Iowa by lesser-known candidates, all the talk about Hillary Clinton’s invincibility—was suddenly the subject of major reevaluation. A media, already fascinated, treated Obama’s appearance with Russert as major news. Even though the real top political story of the moment was the possible takeover of Congress by Democrats just two weeks away, both the Washington Post and the New York Times carried the Obama story on their front pages the next day: “Crowd-Pleaser from Illinois Considers White House Run,” read the Times headline.

  Long after he secured the nomination, after the most grueling contest in the history of the Democratic Party, during an interview aboard his campaign plane Obama reflected on what pushed him into the race after only two years in the Senate. “Objectively you’ve got to say there’s a certain megalomania there that’s unhealthy. Right?” he said with a chuckle. “Axelrod said this to me and he always reminds me of this. One of the things he said to me is he wasn’t sure I would be a good candidate because I might be too normal. Which is why it’s amusing, during the course of this campaign, the evolving narrative about me being aloof and elitist.

  “Axelrod’s right,” he continued. “I’m not somebody who actually takes myself that seriously. I’m pretty well adjusted. You know, you can psychoanalyze my father leaving and this and that, but a lot of those things I resolved a long time ago. I’m pretty happy with my life. So there’s an element, I think, of being driven that might have operated a little differently with me than maybe some other candidates. The way I thought about it was more of a sense of duty, in this sense. I thought to myself, there aren’t that many people put in the position I’m put in. Some of it’s just dumb luck. Some of it maybe has to do with me embodying some characteristics that are interesting for the time that we’re in. But when I made the decision to do this, it wasn’t with the certainty that I was the right person for the job. It was more the sense of, given what’s been given to me, I should probably just give it a shot and see whether in fact there’s something real there.