The Battle for America 2008
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He went on, “And we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of reliving the past—this election can’t be about the old Clinton years, but about the future. Bush did not run on the record of his father, though he benfitted [sic] from the name and association. New Times, New Ideas, a New Clinton.”
Penn argued that former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher should be Hillary’s role model: “She represents the most successful elected woman leader in this century—and the adjectives that were used about her (Iron Lady) were not of good humor or warmth, they were of smart, tough leadership. . . . We are more Thatcher than anyone else. . . . She was brought to power by a disastrous ‘socialist’ government while we are coming in after a disastrous conservative government.”
Penn saw Obama as a potential obstacle who “represents something big—an inspirational movement. But the more you analyze what he says, the more you wonder what is behind the hype.” He recommended they “research his flaws, hold our powder, see if he fades or does not run. Attacking him directly would backfire. His weakness is that if voters think about him five minutes they get that he was just a state senator and that he would be trounced by the big Republicans.”
Another obstacle was the Democratic base, which Penn described as “the most liberal, activist, difficult group of voters in America.” He called for neutralizing them. “The brie and cheese set drives fundraising and elite press but does not drive the vote. . . . Kerry beat [Howard] Dean. Gore easily defeated [Senator Bill] Bradley.” To deal with this constituency, Penn called for outreach to the blogs and more criticism of Bush’s policies in Iraq. He ticked off other potential problems, from concern among Democrats that she could not win a general election to the potential threat in Iowa posed by John Edwards.
He also spoke to the charge that Clinton was insincere. “In the polling, this was the most damaging attack—the smart attack for Republicans or primary opponents,” he wrote. To counter this, Penn recommended avoiding “anything that even smells like a position change. We are perilously close on Iraq and we should stick to criticism of current policy as much as possible.”
Penn described Clinton as she was: the “establishment, experienced leader candidate. While humility is always a great trait, leadership of a party that is looking for leadership is what we have to offer—we are the candidate with the money, the ideas, the operation, and the determination to win. Our goal in this first quarter is to show we have the muscle to win—to live up to the financial expectations. We want to show Obama how it is really done. First trips must be big, fundraising must be big.”
He warned her not to take voters in the early states for granted. “We have to focus on the local races, treating each state like it is Upstate New York. . . . I believe that if you win Iowa it is over,” he wrote.
Toward the end, Penn turned to the touchiest issue of all: how to make Clinton seem more appealing. “Bill Gates once asked me, ‘could you make me more human?’ I said ‘being human is overrated.’ Now don’t get me wrong. Connecting with people and understanding their problems with passion is a critical part of leadership. But the idea that if only you were warmer and nicer so many more people would like you and [you] would be in the White House is wrong. True, more people would like you. Fewer would vote for you.”
His memo concluded by addressing the issue that most threatened her hopes of winning the nomination: Her support for the resolution authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq had created a breach with the left in the Democratic Party—and an opening for Obama.
Clinton’s Senate advisers Philippe Reines and Andrew Shapiro had been urging her to make one more trip to Iraq before launching her candidacy. Many of her political advisers told her she could wait no longer to start the campaign. But Penn thought she should make the trip before announcing. “I believe we have to visit Iraq before we can visit other places in the world,” he wrote. “The Iraq war is the major animating issue. Time and again, it is not about how you voted in the past, but what would you do about it. This gives us a chance to make it clear that Iraq and fixing it is central to what you are about—the reason that you would leave the Senate for the White House—what you see happening there, what is happening to the middle class here, what is happening to America’s respect in the world. They are the reasons you are jumping in. . . . The alternative is to skip Iraq, throw your hat in the ring earlier and do it all as a straight political month. It is what the others will be doing which is why I like plan A.”
On Thursday, January 11, 2007, Clinton, Evan Bayh, and John McHugh, a Republican congressman from upstate New York, left Andrews Air Force Base for the Middle East. The itinerary included Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Six days later, back in Washington, she told reporters at a press conference, “The president’s team is pursuing a failed strategy in Iraq as it edges closer to collapse, and Afghanistan needs more of our concerted effort and attention.” She outlined a series of proposals designed to lead to the start of a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces. If the Iraqis then failed to meet certain benchmarks, the administration would be required to seek a new authorization from the Congress for the war effort.
She was now ready to run. Three days later, she launched her candidacy with a video on her campaign Web site. Sitting in a chair in a sunlit room overlooking the garden at her home in Northwest Washington, a radiant Clinton told the world, “Let’s talk. Let’s chat.” In a statement, she declared, “I’m in and I’m in it to win.”
BOOK TWO
THE PEOPLE
CHAPTER FOUR
“Very Scary Times”
“How many think the next generation will be better off than yours?” the pollster asked the all-Republican group of voters. Not a single hand was raised.
—From a Peter Hart focus group
Optimism has been the hallmark of the American people. Through good times and bad, through wars and economic downturns, they have clung to the belief that, however difficult their own time, their children’s lives would be better than theirs. No longer was that true as the 2008 election year began. That sense of an America confronting dire conditions and unique challenges defined the mood of voters. We found that was true both in our interviews across the nation and in our attendance over a long period of time at “focus groups” chosen to reveal attitudes about the candidates and the issues.
To a startling degree, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, liberals, moderates, and conservatives agreed about the troubled state of the nation, no matter their disagreements over policies and political personalities, their regions and individual backgrounds. These voters were eager, almost desperate, to “turn the page,” as Barack Obama’s call for fundamental change put it—and they needed to rally behind a candidate who offered the best hope of delivering on that promise. In the beginning, they were unsure whether Obama, or anyone else, met that test even as the problems facing the nation worsened.
In the spring of 2007, nearly nine months before the first primary and a year and a half before the election, the pollster Peter Hart conducted the first of ten focus groups. These sessions, each lasting up to three hours and sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, were designed to track the attitudes of voters as the campaign unfolded. The voters represented the range of the American electorate, demographically, politically, and ideologically and by race, age, and gender. The three focus groups that met before 2008 began set the stage for all that followed and proved to be remarkably revealing about the political currents that would mark the entire year.
Once that first group of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents was seated around a long conference room table, Hart asked them to quickly give him a word or phrase to describe how they felt things were going in America. Their bleak responses poured forth:
“Alarming.”
“Depressing.”
“Disturbing.”
“Insecure.”
“Turbulent.”
“Lack of leadership
.”
“Political disunity.”
At that point, the Iraq war was the dominant issue, one that darkened nearly everyone’s opinion about America, regardless of political leaning. Republicans who had supported George W. Bush and Democrats who had opposed him agreed that U.S. policy toward Iraq was not working and needed to be changed.
The group’s feelings about the candidates were sketchy, inconclusive, or ill-formed—with one exception. That was Hillary Clinton. She was, by far, the most polarizing of candidates. Nearly every voter had a strong, often passionate opinion about her, ranging from adoration to loathing. Again, the quick responses told the story. She was either a “strong leader” or “deceitful”; “dishonest” or “phenomenal”; “fake” or “determined.” Hart, struck by the intense emotional attitudes about Clinton, commented afterward, “Of all the candidates I have ever observed, or surveyed for or about, only Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980 resembled this kind of profile. Like Clinton, the view of Kennedy was complex and multilayered. It was not a single challenge he had to overcome but a complex mix of elements. What was clear for Kennedy in that campaign, and now seems clear for Clinton in this one, is that her campaign needs a moment when voters ‘open their windows’ and are willing to listen and reevaluate Hillary Clinton and see her in a fresh light.”
The focus group saw Barack Obama as the most intriguing candidate, describing him as “smart,” “charismatic,” “articulate,” and “independent.” Obama emerged from that first session as a potential leader among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. However, most of those voters wanted to learn more about him; they still felt they knew too little to get behind him.
“He seems young,” said Fay Citerone, fifty-three, a liberal Democrat and an IT professional for a manufacturer. Though she had reservations about Clinton, she was leaning toward her and wanted to see a woman in the White House. Yet Obama intrigued her. “We’ve known about him for three or four years in public life,” she explained. “I just haven’t seen enough about him. He’s a question mark.” We followed Citerone’s future political path throughout the year as she wrestled over which Democrat to support, occasionally shifting from one candidate to another in the face of new campaign evidence about them. In the end, she became a perfect mirror of how Americans voted—and why.
Six months later, in early November, Hart conducted his second focus group, an all-Republican, more ideologically conservative panel. All had voted for Bush for president in both 2000 and 2004, but their responses about the state of America were as pessimistic, if not more so, than the earlier session in which half of the voters were either Democrats or Independents:
“Troubled.”
“Very conflicted.”
“So much sharp division.”
“Very uneasy times.”
“Shaky.”
“A lot of turmoil.”
By then, concerns over Iraq had begun to fade, though the war remained a negative for most voters. Fears of a declining economy—rising gas prices, the deteriorating housing market, increasing loss of jobs—were becoming the number one issue.
Then Hart asked them what they thought the lives of the next generation of Americans would be like compared to theirs. Raise your hand, he told them, if you believe their lives will be better. Not a single Republican raised a hand, and they immediately began talking about their worries about the future.
“It’s very scary times,” said a grandmother of five. “I don’t want my grandchildren to inherit what we are setting up for them.”
“We’re saddling our kids down with debt,” said another voter. “If we continue to break down, it’s going to be chaotic and difficult for them to emerge successfully in the future.”
The housing market is going to get worse, said another: “Right now, kids out of college in that first job can’t afford a starter home. What’s it going to be like ten to twenty years from now? I mean, where are they going to live? Are they going to live with Mom and Dad until they’re thirty? I mean, what’s going to happen?”
The grandmother spoke again about her fears for the generation after her. “It’s scary for me to think about what they’ll have to go through,” she said. “Right now they are all very, very spoiled. They all have everything they want. I don’t know how they’ll handle things when they go out on their own. It also worries me that a lot of what’s going to happen to this country is going to be dependent on our debt. We’re becoming so indebted. . . . Who’s buying our loans? Who is going to own us? Who owns us right now, and who’s going to own us later on? That is my greatest fear: that we are going to be bought. We are going to give ourselves to another country because of debt.”
All these conservative Republican voters shared these negative views, and their concerns were not only about America’s current problems, however severe. They were worried about something more troubling, less characteristic of the way Americans usually feel about their future.
In the decades we have covered the nation’s elections, Americans have experienced fears and problems aplenty. We have listened to hundreds upon hundreds of citizens in their homes and offices as they discussed their concerns about the state of the nation—about the Cold War, the Bomb and the threat of nuclear holocaust; about the fear that the society was coming apart amid riots spawned by assassinations and antiwar protests; about recessions and market crashes; about political scandal and fears about a system that was broken. But the attitudes that tumbled out in 2008 were different. They were not about any one problem, but something more pervasive: a sense that America had reached a historic turning point. At worst, they feared the country was in danger of sliding into a deep decline signaling either that its greatest days were past or that Americans faced a less secure and diminished future.
A month later, Hart’s third focus group—this one entirely Democrats and Independents—reinforced all these feelings and set the stage for what was to come during the election year itself. Once more, the quick responses about the state of the nation were uniformly negative:
“Rocky.”
“Shaky.”
“Disgraceful.”
“Chaotic.”
“Wrong direction.”
As with other groups, these voters were fixated on the sinking economy. Iraq was receding into the background, though the policies that had led the United States into that war continued to be widely unpopular. As one voter said, “People are dying for what?” Now there was more talk of bankruptcies; of “never-ending strain” on finances; of frustration over not being able to understand what was happening and why, especially in a Washington out of touch and a preserve of privilege; of an untrustworthy news media. “If you turn on the news, you can’t get four people and have a conversation,” said one man. “You have four talking heads that scream at each other in sound bites and platitudes. Outside of Tim Russert’s program, I don’t know if there’s a program worth listening to.” A pause, then a follow-up: “With the exception of Jon Stewart, the comedian, that is.” That led someone else to talk about the power of the Internet and the way people depended upon it, and the blogs, for their news. “The Internet has grown and provided us more information,” he said, “but it’s so segmented people only read or listen to what appeals to them. So no one’s getting an overall view.”
Yet for all the negative comments, neither in these focus group sessions nor in our conversations elsewhere did voters fall into the cynicism or despair that had marked so many earlier elections. They were not turned off, or tuned out. They were following the election intensely and repeatedly said they believed it to be one of the most, if not the most, critical elections of their lives. “The stakes are very high,” said one of those Democratic voters. “What comes to my mind is that maybe we should say it’s morning in America again, like Reagan said. I don’t want Reagan back, but we’re going to have to have somebody to change the whole way we’ve been acting and doing things.”
This remark triggered instant reactions:
“Also someone who can show the rest of the world that we are still the greatest democracy in the world,” came another voice.
“I want to trust the government,” said another person, “and then feel like I not only believe them, but I agree with them, and feel like they’re working in our best interests.”
“I’d like to see an America again where we could be proud to be an American,” yet another said, “so that when we go overseas, which I have done, I don’t have to be embarrassed anymore.”
The most revealing moments came when the conversation turned to race and gender. Three of the Democratic women in this group were African-Americans; earlier, they all said they were Clinton supporters, even though they found Obama appealing for his “fresh new face . . . his idealism.” Then one of the women said of him, “He has to be better than anybody. Just like women have to be twice as good as anybody else, Barack has to be that much better.”
And what about Hillary? Hart asked. Does she need to prove something in order to win the presidency? “She does,” the woman replied. “You know, she can be in the boys’ club, and the minute things get hard, she has to prove she’s not weak. She’s not going to be a girl and cry about it. A large part of the population has the perception that women are weaker than men. Certainly she has shown strength. She’s not going to cry. Everybody knows that. I think the same thing of Barack. He’s got to be twice as good.”