The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  The next morning, McCain appeared at a town hall meeting at Keene State College. Harking back to 2000, he said, “It seems like only yesterday,” except the reception was not as friendly. A student asked a pointed question about Falwell. Not satisfied with McCain’s first explanation, the student said, “This is a radical religious movement that Jerry Falwell is part of and don’t you think that a respected person such as yourself, and rightfully so, don’t you think that legitimizes that movement?” McCain then defended the Christian right. Religious conservatives had become the backbone of the party structure, he said. “Should we eject people from our party because we may have disagreements?” he asked. “I think the great strength of the Republican Party is for us to all get involved, debate, and come to a consensus.”

  Minutes later, a man stood up to challenge McCain on immigration. He called illegal immigrants “parasites” and declared, “A criminal is a criminal.” Ten minutes later, another man raised the immigration issue. Why is the bill under consideration in Congress likely to be any more effective than the one passed twenty years earlier? “It’s very different from the 1986 law,” McCain explained, but it was clear his questioner did not agree.

  Then a woman stood up. Her list of grievances was long and she concluded by saying, “This country no longer belongs to me. I’m not getting anything I really need and my grandchildren are being saddled with a nine-trillion-dollar debt. Why should I vote Republican?” McCain, prickly now, told her Democrats were even more profligate than Republicans. “So maybe you should vote for vegetarians,” he scolded.

  “The Republicans are in charge of three houses,” she responded. “You have no excuse.”

  As the audience applauded, McCain answered, more politely. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. And then, “I knew we should have cut this thing off.” The quip brought laughter from the crowd, but it was now clear the climate he would face as a candidate in 2008 was far different from eight years earlier, and the closer he tied himself to Bush, the more precarious his path.

  McCain’s makeover extended beyond courtship of establishment Republicans and leading social conservatives. It included a dramatic shift in his position on Bush’s tax cuts. In 2001, McCain was one of just two Republican senators to oppose the new president’s massive $1.35 trillion tax cut plan. Two years later, he was one of three Republican senators to oppose another round of tax cuts, arguing they were irresponsible. In 2004 he said he would not support extending the cuts. That soon changed. With Republicans pushing to make the tax cuts permanent in 2006, and McCain now courting the tax-cutting wing of the party, he suddenly shifted positions and voted with his party to extend tax cuts for dividends and capital gains, saying, “American businesses and investors need a stable and predictable tax policy.”

  What was emerging was a far different McCain from the one who ran in 2000. He was no longer maverick enough to satisfy the Independents who once embraced him, but neither was he yet reliably conservative enough to generate passion within the base.

  The final step in his political makeover was to sign off on a campaign apparatus patterned after Bush’s 2004 reelection committee, a huge operation that was in sharp contrast to the lean campaign he ran in 2000. McCain approved an initial blueprint that called for spending $154 million to win the Republican nomination. The plan was laid out in great detail in a spreadsheet, later provided to us. There were itemized projections for travel (chartered airplanes would cost the campaign a quarter million a month); for Cindy McCain’s staff and traveling expenses; for super-offices in New York and California; for political offices in two dozen states; for communications and policy and research; for an e-campaign; and for advertising (production of the first ads was slated for July 2007, with the spots budgeted to begin airing in November).

  All it required was money. McCain’s team envisioned raising $48 million in the first quarter of 2007, a figure that no campaign had ever achieved. They anticipated $36 million from major donors, more than $5 million from direct mail, almost $2 million on the Internet. The numbers were unbelievable. But McCain’s advisers were committed. “We have to look as much like Bush on fund-raising as we can,” Rick Davis, CEO of the burgeoning enterprise, told us. That McCain was now adopting the Bush model was a supreme irony.

  When the Republicans lost the House and Senate in November 2006, McCain didn’t worry about formally announcing his campaign for president. He had already been running for two years. Days after the midterm election, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission declaring himself a candidate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hillary

  We are more Thatcher than anyone else. . . . Being human is overrated.

  —Mark Penn’s advice to Hillary

  In January 2007, no one loomed larger in presidential politics than the newly reelected junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her path to the starting gate was unique. No former First Lady had ever sought the presidency; no female politician had ever begun a presidential campaign as the favorite; no First Lady had ever suffered the public humiliation Hillary did over her husband’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

  Clinton’s decision to run for the Senate from New York in 2000 seemed folly to many, including some of her own advisers. When she began, she was a cautious and sometimes wooden candidate who came to appreciate even more her husband’s natural gifts as a candidate, she ruefully told her advisers. New Yorkers had anticipated a titanic battle between a sitting First Lady and the hero of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani. But after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Giuliani quit the race. In his place, Republicans offered a callow Long Island congressman named Rick Lazio. She won easily.

  On the night of her election, Trent Lott, the Republican leader of the Senate, gave her fair warning of the reception she could expect. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “When this Hillary gets to the Senate—if she does, maybe lightning will strike and she won’t—she will be one of one hundred, and we won’t let her forget it.”

  Instead, what they got was a consummate politician. Clinton was diligent, prepared, and respectful of the upper chamber’s traditions and of her elders. She sought out the senior Democratic senator and guardian of its traditions, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who tutored her in the arcane ways of the Senate. “I think of her as a pupil of mine,” Byrd later said. She made friendships across the aisle. She joined a prayer group that included a number of evangelical Republicans. She co-sponsored legislation with conservatives like Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, though it pained him to explain their relationship. She teamed up with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who had led Republicans in pressing for Bill Clinton’s impeachment and remained an outspoken opponent of her husband. She worked with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to improve conditions for reservists and members of the National Guard. She joined McCain and Graham on a congressional trip to the Baltic region. What happened there soon became legend on Capitol Hill—a vodka-drinking contest in which the New York senator matched the men drink for drink. When we asked Graham about the incident in March 2005, his eyes brightened and he began to chuckle. “What goes on a trip stays on a trip,” he said. “Let’s just say that Hillary Clinton’s one of the guys.”

  Clinton waited patiently until a seat on the Armed Services Committee opened up, then seized it. On the committee, she rarely missed a hearing and, as the panel’s junior member, waited for her turn to question the generals and admirals and civilian leaders of the Pentagon. “She had an extraordinary grasp of our military culture, our soldiers, our families and what it was like for them,” General John Keane said in the summer of 2006.

  Nor did she neglect her home state of New York. Traveling with her in early September 2005, we watched as she moved through a procession of meetings to highlight her success in bringing money to complete a section of interstate highway near Elmira, to fund a high-tech facility in Canan daigua, to create markets for fruit and vegetable growers, upstate wineri
es, and New York City restaurant owners. In Penn Yan, she drew a laugh when she said the reason she spent so much time working on agricultural issues was “I like to eat and drink.”

  She was happy in the Senate, pledging to serve the full six years of her term when elected in 2000 and holding firm to that pledge when, in 2003 and early 2004, supporters urged her to enter the Democratic nomination battle. In November 2003, she traveled to Iowa to emcee the annual Jefferson Jackson Dinner featuring all the presidential candidates, sparking more talk about how she towered over others in the party.

  After the 2004 election, there was no escaping the speculation about a Clinton race, nor did she make any serious effort to discourage it. Before turning full attention to 2008, she had one overriding goal: winning reelection as impressively as possible in 2006. She hoped a good performance among upstate Republicans would persuade skeptical Democrats that she could win in other Republican areas around the country. Unlike her potential rivals, she did not even visit Iowa or New Hampshire that year, so intent was she on rolling up a huge victory at home.

  Her Senate reelection campaign offered the powerful opportunity to build a fund-raising base that would follow her into a presidential campaign. If she raised money successfully, and spent wisely, she would be able to begin her presidential race with more money in the bank—perhaps $20 or $25 million—than many of her rivals could expect to raise in the first two or three quarters of 2007. But the Senate campaign became a financial disaster. Though she eventually raised $51.5 million, she burned through $41 million of it against an opponent who spent just $6 million. She ended 2006 with only $11 million in the bank for her presidential campaign. A year later, she would pay dearly for this mismanagement. She wanted a huge reelection victory and got it, carrying 67 percent of the vote. But it came at a price. Some of her advisers believed there had been too much focus on the reelection effort and not enough on getting ready for 2008. “My own gut is they put way too much premium on that,” one of the Clintons’ closest friends said later. “We should have used ’06 to get ready to run for president.”

  For all of Clinton’s effectiveness as a senator, questions lingered as she prepared to run: What did she really believe? Was she, as her husband had been, a New Democrat, a centrist who would challenge the party’s liberal constituencies? Was she a radical feminist, as the right-wing talk show hosts liked to depict her? Was she the Clinton of Hillarycare, the ambitious and ultimately disastrous effort to reform the nation’s health care system? Was she the Clinton who had been the target of the most relentless assaults on her character and whose own strong counterattacks dismissing her enemies as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” only triggered greater controversies?

  Her attempts to answer these questions did little to clarify her political identity. She answered a call from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council to head a project for a fresh agenda for the 2006 midterms. But the speech she delivered at the DLC’s 2005 summer meeting in Columbus, Ohio, was gauzy Democratic boilerplate, not a new vision of the party. In the spring of 2006, she began a series of policy speeches with the intention of giving people a fuller sense of what she believed. But even her aides had difficulty describing what was distinctive about her philosophy or ideology.

  At the same time, she seemed unwilling to reduce herself to political sloganeering. “I don’t think like that,” she told us in May 2006. “I approach each issue and problem from a perspective of combining my beliefs and ideals with a search for practical solutions. It doesn’t perhaps fit in a preexisting box, but many of the problems we face as a nation don’t either.”

  Everyone had a different label for her. One of her outside advisers called her “a modern centrist,” another “a progressive without illusions,” a politician who has been “consistent but complicated.” Mark Penn, her chief strategist, saw her as a “responsible progressive.” The late Molly Ivins, the tart-penned Texas liberal, saw her as a combination of “triangulation, calculation and equivocation,” and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, before he died, told us she was a liberal “ideologue.”

  The public at large had pervasive doubts: Did Americans really want to return to the bitter controversies and tawdry scandals of the Clinton years? Even more troubling was an undercurrent we heard. “Dynasty,” said one such voter, female and Democrat and admiring of Clinton personally. She meant, she explained, the dominance of two families over the nation’s destiny that had characterized presidential control for the last twenty years. Starting in 1988, George H. W. Bush’s presidency was followed by two Bill Clinton terms. They were followed by George W. Bush’s two terms from 2000 to 2008. Now Hillary’s candidacy raised the prospect of possibly another two-term Clinton reign.

  Clinton resisted any public talk of a candidacy, but in late summer 2006 her advisers began putting together the machinery for a White House bid, starting with the team that had carried her into the Senate. The presumed manager-to-be was Patti Solis Doyle, a Chicagoan who had worked for Hillary Clinton since 1992. The chief strategist would be Mark Penn, who was as close to Hillary and Bill Clinton as anyone in their political world. Mandy Grunwald, who had joined Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and remained part of the political family, would be in charge of media. Howard Wolfson, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, would be the communications director. Neera Tanden, Clinton’s chief issues adviser, would be policy director. One other person who would play a critical role was Harold Ickes, who had served as deputy White House chief of staff under President Clinton and as a longtime confidant to Hillary. These people were experienced, winners, tough-minded and feared—but as a team they were dysfunctional. They often were at war with each other. They did not adequately supervise control of their financing. They debated endlessly over the campaign message and strategy. They failed, in short, to run a taut, disciplined political operation. They also misjudged their opposition. Ickes recalled a long strategy meeting that summer where Obama’s name came up. He was not regarded as a serious threat. Ickes bet Obama would not even run. Solis Doyle predicted he would.

  While her immediate advisers were united in wanting her to run, Clinton loyalists beyond the inner circle had misgivings. Mike McCurry, a self-described “Hillary partisan” who had been Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary, was one of them. “I thought running was a bad idea for her, because of the viciousness and the polarization she would start with as baggage,” he told us in the fall of 2007, months after the decision to run had been made. “To be successful, she’d have to shed a lot of that. You know, front-runners don’t fare very well.”

  McCurry said he made these points to people he had worked with in the White House who were very close to her, but he was speaking as someone not directly plugged into her select inner team. “I’d say, ‘Look, when you’re talking her through this [decision whether to run], someone has to make the case that this is going to be awfully hard. It will get very personal. Whatever’s out there about President Clinton lurks in the shadows all the time; you never know what bombshell may drop the next day. . . . And why go through that when you are, right now, one of the most popular United States senators? People really admire how hard you work, and they like you; you’re appreciated on both sides of the aisle; within the confines of the Senate you’re not an incendiary, polarizing figure. You’re a real leader, and you’ve got credibility leader qualities written on you.’ . . . That was my message literally.”

  Clinton herself had no doubt the campaign would be tough and at times painful, but worth the prize. “She loved the United States Senate,” recalled campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe. “She knew how brutal the campaign would be. I think what in her mind she had to get over was [whether] it was worth what she was going to have to go through, considering she was in a place she loved.” At one point she told McAuliffe, “I have no illusions about how tough this is going to be. I am ready for what they throw at me.”

  Shortly before Christmas, Penn sent
Hillary an eleven-page, single-spaced memo entitled “Launch Strategy Thoughts.” Part of his memo, first unearthed by Josh Green of the Atlantic, was pure flattery. At one point he wrote, “We have incredible image strengths—we have the highest levels of early enthusiasm for any Democratic candidate in modern history—people don’t just like Hillary Clinton, they love her; they are enthusiastic about her, and that enthusiasm is growing, not shrinking.”

  The memo was critical of the party’s two previous nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry, whom he regarded as weak. People knew where President Bush stood, both in 2000 and 2004, Penn wrote, adding, “What on earth were Gore and Kerry going to do if they got elected? Few could figure that out. They were too busy trying to explain the past rather than give the voters a clear vision of the future. Gore became obsessed with Monica Lewinsky and Kerry with Vietnam. Kerry became a relentless voice of criticism, not or [sic] leadership or creativity.”

  In boldfaced type he wrote, “Hillary occupies a completely different ground than past nominees. People see in Hillary Clinton someone who works hard to get results, someone who is tough enough to make decisions, someone who is smart enough and experienced enough to understand the complexities of the modern world and yet passionate enough to fight for causes she believes in. She also heads a movement of women looking to achieve the true promise of America—that a qualified woman could be president of this country.”