The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  It was the day after the fifth debate, hosted by the AFL-CIO and held outdoors at Soldier Field before a raucous crowd of union members. Obama had come under fire for his foreign policy statements over the last three weeks, beginning with the CNN-YouTube debate in South Carolina. In a speech, he had made an implied threat to mount cross-border raids into Pakistan by U.S. soldiers if actionable intelligence showed there was a chance to capture or kill “high-value terrorist targets”—a point Axelrod pushed to include to make the speech more newsworthy. He stumbled over considering nuclear weapons to fight terrorism there. In Chicago, his opponents were instantly on the attack. Chris Dodd called Obama “highly irresponsible.” Clinton said it was “a very big mistake to telegraph that and destabilize” the Pakistani government.

  Obama fired back, but clearly he and his campaign had been put on the defensive. The exchanges bolstered the continuing story line: He wasn’t seasoned enough to be president. And even though he was raising significant amounts of money and drawing big crowds, he wasn’t making up ground against Clinton in the national polls.

  The winter months had tested Obama’s capacity to meet the demands of a 24/7 presidential campaign—the punishing physical ordeal, the microscopic dissection of his every word, the longing for time with family, the feeling he was always on. Now the summer and early fall were a test of his patience and resilience. Even Obama and his advisers recognized that Clinton had won the early rounds.

  “I think that they’ve run a good campaign,” Axelrod said that day in August. “She herself has performed at a very high level. . . . She’s very, very disciplined and she’s very tenacious. She obviously wants this in a big way. Strength is an important quality in a presidential candidate, and given all the things that she’s endured, people think she’s strong.”

  Despite his own difficulties, Obama was privately sympathetic when Clinton made a rare stumble during a debate at the YearlyKos Convention of liberal bloggers. Inexplicably, during that debate she had offered a broad defense of Washington lobbyists after her opponents questioned her acceptance of contributions from them. Edwards and Obama immediately criticized her sharply. What could she have been thinking? Axelrod asked Obama. He was struck by Obama’s response. “She made a mistake,” Obama said. “You know what? Nobody can appreciate it but a candidate. This is hard. Running for president is not easy. You get tired, you make mistakes. She made a mistake.” He added, “It’s hard for me and I’m fifteen years younger than she is. And she’s working hard, she’s tired, she made a mistake.’”

  That private remark highlighted Obama’s own frustrations. His senior advisers had worried at times that his sour mood was affecting morale throughout the campaign. After a summer fund-raiser, several top advisers joined Obama for a late dinner. Obama could sense where the conversation was heading. “Okay,” he said, “is this where we have an intervention?” He knew he had to be more positive, he said, adding, “You guys told me what it would be like, but it’s hard.”

  At another point, Gibbs flew from Chicago to Washington to join Obama on a campaign trip to Iowa. His purpose was to have a candid talk about the candidate’s morale and to allow Obama to vent his frustrations. “Are you having any fun?” Gibbs asked. Obama launched into a lengthy response. He was deeply frustrated. He was unhappy with his debate performances. He was annoyed with the long-distance critiques from his advisers. He was exasperated by the way the message was being managed. He was irritated with press coverage suggesting he was leaving audiences underwhelmed. He was troubled by talk that his campaign lacked substance. “He felt like he was stuck in this washing machine of this circular narrative that he couldn’t get out of,” Gibbs said. Gibbs tried to sound sympathetic while urging Obama to find something positive to focus on, saying that as difficult as things seemed, going forward was no more difficult than turning back. Still, Obama could find nothing positive to say about the experience.

  Reggie Love, Obama’s young personal assistant, was working his BlackBerry. He piped up, “Boss, if it’s any consolation, I’m having a blast.”

  “Reggie,” Obama replied with a withering look, “it’s not.”

  What sustained Obama most through those difficult months was his campaign’s amazing fund-raising machine. Early in 2007, during a conversation with Edwards, we asked how his first-quarter fund-raising might compare with Clinton’s and Obama’s. Nobody, Edwards said, would come close to Clinton; his goal was to stay within reach of Obama. Edwards was wrong on both counts. When the first-quarter reports came out, Obama’s numbers stunned the Clinton campaign. Because she had transferred $10 million from her Senate campaign, and raised more general election money in that quarter, she had an overall lead for the period. But Obama became the story. He brought in $25 million that quarter and actually raised more money that could be used in the primaries than did Clinton. Three months later, Obama produced another eye-popping quarter of fund-raising. He raised $32.5 million—$31 million of it for the primaries—topping Clinton’s total of $27 million. “Obama’s Money Puts Clinton’s Inevitability in Doubt,” said a headline on CNN’s Web site.

  Obama was pleased with his fund-raising operation but little else. On July 15, he met with his senior staff at Valerie Jarrett’s home. One adviser recalled it as the moment Obama began to take a more direct role in the operations of his campaign. He was blunt in his critique and the exchanges among some of his advisers became testy. Beyond fund-raising and the operation overseeing the Internet and new media, the campaign was not performing well, Obama said. The message still wasn’t where it should be. The political operation wasn’t up to speed. The campaign lacked crispness and good execution. He believed his campaign was becoming too insular and wanted new people added to the inner circle. He told his team they were all doing B work. If they continued on that course, they would come in a respectable second. “Second is not good enough,” he said.

  The July-August fight over foreign policy marked a turning point for Obama’s confidence. Though he was frustrated by the criticism of his statements, he was exhilarated by the debate they touched off. “That was one of the best moments of the campaign,” he later told us. Obama’s political advisers may have been nervous. Obama was not. The night of the South Carolina YouTube debate, Axelrod was in the spin room, pummeled by reporters about whether his candidate had committed a major mistake. He sought to explain away Obama’s comment about meeting leaders without preconditions. The next morning Obama ordered him to stand firm.

  “We were driving back from South Carolina to the airport and this was already starting to swirl on the blogs as a gaffe,” Obama later told us. “I said, ‘Don’t back down. If we go down, we’re going down swinging.’ It was a moment where I felt confident enough to trust my instincts and also confident about the fact that I wasn’t going to be intimidated by the pundits. One of the things I learned was to stop reading clips and stop reading blogs, because you have these voices swirling in your head. This was a moment where I said, ‘You know what, I’m just going to make sure that whatever I do accords with what I believe.’”

  As he told his aides, he was convinced he was right about what he had said about meeting with leaders of rogue nations and going after terrorists inside Pakistan. That, he insisted, was consistent with the message of his campaign: He would change business as usual in Washington, a position he believed the American people supported. At first, his top advisers were not so sure. They were nervous enough to commission polling in New Hampshire to see whether the public backed Obama on his foreign policy statements. They came away convinced Obama was right. (At the same time, Clinton’s advisers reached the opposite conclusion. Their research persuaded them that Obama had reinforced doubts about his readiness to be president.)

  On a steamy Monday afternoon in mid-August we caught up with Obama after a rally at a recreation center in Keene, New Hampshire. He was relaxed and confident and, to a surprising degree, eager to take on Clinton, even though so far he had appeared tentative.
Though he had faced tough questions during the previous month, he said he had found the exchanges invigorating and, he believed, helpful to his candidacy. “If you look at the specifics of each issue, I feel very confident and comfortable with my position,” he said. “But it runs contrary to some of the conventional wisdom in Washington.”

  He expressed no doubt about his position on the terrorists in Pakistan. “Critics could argue that we shouldn’t talk about it,” he said, “and I absolutely reject that notion because I think that the American people have to understand what’s at stake in our foreign policy, and if we’re fighting on the wrong battlefield and we’re losing ground on the battlefield where we have to win—in Afghanistan along the Pakistan-Afghan border—that’s something that has to be discussed in this campaign.”

  He believed his exchange with Clinton had crystallized her political strategy. “They want to project Senator Clinton as the seasoned, experienced hand. I don’t fault them for that,” he said. But “what the Oval Office needs right now is good judgment. Experience can be a proxy for good judgment, but it isn’t always. And it is striking that all the people who were on that stage in Chicago [at the AFL-CIO debate] talking about their experience and criticizing me for the lack of it were the same people who went along and displayed incredibly poor judgment in going along with a war that I think has been a disaster. So I’m happy to have that debate about what is the relevant experience you need to lead this country.”

  Even though polls showed Clinton holding commanding leads over him, he could say, “I don’t spend a lot of time focused on the polls nationally. . . . The fact is I’m not as well-known as Senator Clinton is. If her name recognition is 99.9 percent, mine is probably—in terms of people actually knowing who I am—closer to 60 percent.”

  He was less positive about his performance in the debates. “There’s no doubt that the sixty-second format debates, or even ninety seconds, are tough for me,” he admitted. “I tend to be a storyteller. I like to connect with people by talking about where we’ve been and talking about where we’re going and the aspirational aspects of my message are rooted in people’s stories and stories about this country. It’s very hard to do that in ninety seconds. I think that having a different format would benefit me. There’s no doubt that if we had more of a conversation, or we had a roundtable and it was a little more open-ended and maybe we structured it so that it focused on one topic would play to my strengths. And there’s no doubt that the sort of sound-bite debate style—some candidates have mastered that art more than I have.”

  He was even more revealing when he spoke about what it was like to move so swiftly from freshman senator to top-tier presidential candidate. It was hard being away from home, he said, and he missed his wife and daughters. Being around them fortified him. He said he also was fighting against trimming his sails or becoming overly cautious. “I think one of my strengths is that when people hear me talk, I think that part of what they like is it sounds like I believe what I’m saying and that I’m not calibrating everything to meet what’s considered politically acceptable,” he said. “So I don’t want to lose that, and that I think has been a challenge. Overall, though, look, if you had asked me on February 11th, the day after I announced, would you be happy with being a strong second place in the polls, having raised as much money as the Clintons, being basically tied or close in all the early states, having three times the number of donors and volunteers as any other campaign on either the Republican or Democratic side, I’d probably take it.”

  Despite those upbeat words, Obama’s campaign was at a low point—“not firing on all cylinders,” as one senior staffer put it. However much Obama pointed to evidence of progress and success, neither he nor his advisers and the wider circle of donors and loyalists were happy with how things were going. “There was obviously significant turbulence late summer, early fall,” Gibbs said. There was no escaping the bad news: “There was a time in the late summer and early fall that people thought the fad’s worn off and the guy’s going to die in the early fall.”

  So now Obama was under pressure to take Clinton on. “The greatest push we got was you’ve got to kneecap her, that you’ve got to go really negative,” Gibbs said. “We just never thought that was the way you win the nomination. But some of that donor pull is hard to resist because you realize that if those guys get crabby it could be tough. We understood that all of what had attracted people to Barack would erode if we did something that people got turned off by. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have discussions, but despite unsolicited advice to just, as Barack said, to kneecap her, we realized that wasn’t a smart thing to do.”

  Through this period, Obama was struggling to sharpen his message. During a short vacation in August he talked to Jarrett about his frustrations. He needed to redo his stump speech, he told her; he didn’t feel he was connecting the way he wanted to. Jarrett often traveled with Obama and that fall heard him talk frequently about his frustrations. “He would say, [it’s] like a lock and I have to unlock [it] and he said I am getting there,” she recalled. “I can figure this out.” Jarrett mimicked the candidate holding an imaginary lock in his hand trying to find the combination that would open it. Obama was looking for a way to transcend the one-on-one conversations with voters he was having and find a message that would captivate masses of them.

  In October, Jarrett traveled to Iowa with Obama for a meeting with members of his national finance committee, who were peppering Obama’s advisers with doubts and complaints. Obama was well aware of the concerns, and what he said that day stayed with Jarrett for months afterwards. “He said, ‘I know you guys are nervous, I know it’s much bumpier than you thought it would be, but I’ll hold your hand and we’ll get through this,’” Jarrett said. “He said, ‘I’ll hold your hand if you’re nervous, I’ll be right there with you, but we’re going to get through this, we’re going to do this together.’”

  Obama told us that trip was an important moment of confidence-building. “I just told people, I said, ‘If you guys thought this was going to be easy, you must have not been listening to us. We always knew this was hard and that I’m the underdog, but we can win this thing if you don’t waver.’”

  Did he really say he would hold their hands? “Yes,” he replied, “and that’s right when things started to turn around.”

  By mid-October, Clinton’s campaign exuded supreme confidence. In an appearance on Jay Leno on October 17th, Obama tried to puncture those hopes. “Hillary is not the first person in Washington to declare ‘Mission Accomplished’ a little too soon,” he quipped that night. Two weeks later her unraveling began.

  All the focus was on Obama as he headed into their next debate in Philadelphia on October 30. Not only was he under increasing pressure from his aides to take Clinton on more aggressively, but also they wanted him to display the fighting temperament his critics said was missing. When Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times interviewed him shortly before the debate, they reported that Obama had glared and said “no” when asked whether he lacked the stomach for a real confrontation with Clinton. “It is absolutely true that we have to make these distinctions clearer,” he said. “And I will not shy away from doing that.” The Times headline set the stage for the next encounter: “Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton.”

  By debate day, the boxing metaphors were running wild, with Hardball’s Chris Matthews leading the charge. “It’s fight night!” he exclaimed as he opened his MSNBC show a few hours before the debate. “Expectations are running high for challenger Barack Obama. Will he come out swinging against Hillary? Will John Edwards get into the mix? Could this battle turn into a brawl, with Hillary walking away unscathed and maybe even stronger?” He turned to NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. “Is this his last chance?”

  If the debate had ended after ninety minutes, the story might well have been that Clinton had survived the toughest series of attacks in any debate so far. Obama challenged her to speed up the r
elease of documents in the National Archives that would shed light on the advice she had given her husband during his two terms in the White House. He accused her of failing to offer the country a clear contrast with Bush and the Republicans. But Obama was hardly as aggressive as the pre-debate chatter had predicted. That role fell, as before, to John Edwards, who ripped into Clinton as a creature of a corrupt power structure. “I think what voters have to ask themselves is: Do you believe that the candidate who’s raised the most money from Washington lobbyists, Democrat or Republican, the candidate who’s raised the most money from the health industry, drug companies, health insurance companies, the candidate who’s raised the most money from the defense industry, Republican or Democrat—and the answer to all of those questions is: That’s Senator Clinton. . . . And I think that if people want the status quo, Senator Clinton’s your candidate. That’s what I believe.”

  The role Edwards played for Obama that night—as in other debates—proved extremely helpful. From late summer, he began leading the attack on Clinton, both on the stump and in debates. A Clinton adviser complained, “Edwards decided to turn himself into a kamikaze.” Edwards was particularly aggressive at the YearlyKos Chicago convention, where he and Obama attacked Clinton for taking money from lobbyists.9 Through the fall, he escalated his attacks. “I felt like I needed to do it,” he later told us, “because I didn’t see it being done in any other way. I thought if we floated through the debates, she would win the nomination.” Obama was able to piggyback on those attacks without seeming overly negative himself, and without paying any price in the press for going negative.