The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  No one in Clinton’s tight inner circle had real Iowa experience, nor was there any top adviser steeped in the intricacies of caucus organizing: Only Lorraine Voles, part of the communications team, and JoDee Winterhof, the Iowa director, had lived and worked in Iowa before. Clinton’s first Iowa trip in January was also the first time a number of her advisers had ever set foot there. That experience gap gave Obama’s team a huge head start—and the confidence to make early decisions that later paid enormous dividends. Obama’s advisers concluded that his candidacy would rise or fall with the early states and that of those, Iowa was first among equals. As Giangreco put it, “Everything was subservient to Iowa.”

  Early in the campaign, David Plouffe showed his mettle. It was two weeks after Obama’s first visit, when the Iowa and Chicago headquarters teams met in Des Moines for a daylong retreat. That weekend, Plouffe signed off on a hugely ambitious blueprint for organizing Iowa. Traditionally, the approach to organizing in the state began with the list of voters who had attended the previous caucuses. In 2004, 124,000 people had participated in the Democratic caucuses. The Iowa Democratic Party’s voter lists, which every campaign bought for up to $100,000, contained the names of 99,000 of them. But Obama’s research showed that his likely support among these Democrats would not be enough to overcome Clinton’s or Edwards’s appeal.

  “They understood something intuitive in Iowa and probably something intuitive about this race nationally,” said Tom Vilsack. “To win in Iowa, they were not going to be able to rely on the same hundred and ten, hundred and twenty thousand Democrats who generally show up at a caucus. They had to blow the roof off of the numbers of people attending caucus. . . . In other words, you go to people who aren’t normally courted and you make them feel like they are the most special people on earth.”

  Obama’s Iowa team was envisioning a bold plan to build a new electorate. Instead of operating out of a headquarters office in Des Moines, and a relatively few field offices elsewhere, Obama should create as many regional offices as his money would allow. Tewes, the state director, projected a need for two dozen or more, which eventually increased to thirty-seven.

  “We wanted to open up all these offices real quick and have our people out [there],” Tewes explained. This was at odds with the traditional approach. “We said no, we wanted, for at least eight or ten months, to have the same people working the same area,” Tewes said. “But that required having a lot more people up front and a lot more offices up front, which required obviously spending more money up front.”

  Plouffe grasped the importance of what Tewes and others were proposing, gave general approval to their concept, and when it became clear that Obama would have far more money than anyone originally thought, the campaign accelerated its timetable. “It made a huge difference,” Tewes said, “because a lot of our organizers were fixtures in the community. They had been there for ten months. The office was on Main Street. It was like a scene from The Andy Griffith Show. It was just a place to go and talk about politics. No amount of TV can buy those kinds of relationships.”

  Nate Hund, one of those grassroots Obama organizers, was a perfect example. When the caucuses were over and he was getting ready to leave the little town of Algona, where he had spent months, local leaders encouraged him to stay and run for mayor. Despite his affection for Algona, he moved on.

  Plouffe made another critical decision: Obama would avoid, as much as possible, local and county Democratic Party fund-raisers and gatherings. The Iowa staff balked, but it was Plouffe’s hunch that among hardcore activists who showed up at those meetings, Obama would be the third choice behind Clinton and Edwards. He wanted Obama to appear before Democrats who weren’t the party activists and, when possible, Independents and even Republicans. Like much about Obama’s focus on organization, the success of this plan only became evident later as the Obama operations gathered momentum in attracting new groups of supporters. “We were a bit skeptical ourselves of this plan to bring in all these new caucusgoers,” said Mitch Stewart, “just based on the lore of Iowa—you know, that there’s a certain set of groups that generally show up and it’s our responsibility to persuade those folks as opposed to bringing in a whole new slew of people. And Plouffe and Paul [Tewes] saw right away the ability to bring in a new group of people.”

  Tewes also envisioned massive outreach to Independents, Republicans, and Iowans who were not registered to vote. He wanted parallel operations aimed at every possible constituency in the state: African-Americans, veterans, farmers, labor, Latinos, teachers, women, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, sportsmen, Native Americans, the disabled, peace groups—and, most important, young voters.

  The decision to invest so heavily in the Iowa plan was made in the rush of the opening weeks of the campaign, but it proved to be one of their smartest strategic gambles. “It took a lot of guts on Plouffe’s part to say this is the deal, this is what we’re going to focus on,” Giangreco said. “I think there was a moment over the summer of ’07 where Hillary Clinton could have locked Iowa down. But the fact was that no one on that campaign had ever done Iowa, no one understood Iowa at all.”

  Tom Vilsack was one of the first to sound the alarm. The former governor had declared his candidacy for president in late 2006, the first major Democrat to do so. He had the kind of credentials that, in past campaigns, might have made him a serious contender: a leader among the nation’s governors during his two terms in office, a midwesterner, a Roman Catholic, a politician with a deep interest in policy. None of that counted for much in a year when Democrats could choose from two rock stars like Clinton and Obama—and in a nomination battle that included a third candidate, Edwards, who had a strong base in Vilsack’s home state. By the end of February 2007, he was out.

  Not long after ending his own candidacy, he and his wife, Christie, signed on with Hillary Clinton. Vilsack was devoted to her candidacy and, by mid-spring, terribly disturbed at what he was seeing. Edwards was already moving swiftly to sign up members of the now-available Vilsack network. Obama was putting down roots across the state. But Clinton was stalled in neutral. During a spring trip to Washington, Vilsack encountered Terry McAuliffe at a restaurant. He told the former head of the Democratic National Committee, who was national chairman of the Clinton campaign, “Terry, you’ve got to really organize a caucus. It’s not like a primary. It’s about time and it’s about resources and it’s about personal relationships and it’s about schmoozing people repeatedly. It’s highly personalized and the organization you’re setting up doesn’t reflect that and we need to change.” McAuliffe replied, “You need to tell that to the candidate.”

  Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s campaign manager, asked one of Vilsack’s top advisers, Teresa Vilmain, to go to Iowa and report back on the state of the campaign. Vilmain was known as one of the most effective organizers in the Democratic Party, an Iowa native who had maintained close family and political ties to the state. When she arrived in May at Clinton headquarters in Des Moines, she found a train wreck in the making. The headquarters office had no receptionist, no interior walls for offices, no copying machine, and no budget approved by Clinton’s national office. Nor had the national office approved a plan for organizing the state. JoDee Winterhof had complaints of her own. She was struggling to get more of Clinton’s time in the state, fighting to have the senator make more phone calls to prospective supporters, and battling headquarters over the budget. Vilmain checked in with Tom and Christie Vilsack. They told her, “This isn’t working.”

  While Solis Doyle was trying to persuade Vilmain to take over the Iowa campaign, the Clinton team suffered another huge embarrassment. A memo by deputy campaign manager Mike Henry, advising Clinton to consider skipping Iowa, was leaked to the New York Times. Henry, who oversaw the Clinton political and field operations, was growing worried about the cost of the nearly two dozen primaries scheduled for Super Tuesday, February 5, 2008. He wrote, “Worst case scenario: this effort [Iowa] may bankrupt the cam
paign and provide little if any political advantage.”

  Parts of the Henry memo would prove prophetic. Given the cost of keeping her large enterprise afloat over the coming months, an all-out campaign in Iowa would leave Clinton with just $5 to $10 million to compete on Super Tuesday. By skipping Iowa, Henry argued, Clinton would “change the focus of the campaign from a traditional process (Iowa first) to a more strategic campaign that favors us and enable us to amass more convention delegates by campaigning aggressively in the larger states holding greater numbers of delegates. If she walks [away] from Iowa she will devalue Iowa (our consistently weakest state).”

  Within minutes after contents of Henry’s memo appeared on the New York Times Web site, Clinton campaign officials dismissed it as the meaningless work of one person in the campaign. Clinton immediately made a round of calls into Iowa to assure Democrats that she would compete energetically for support in the caucuses. A few days later, she delivered that message in person. “It’s not the opinion of the campaign,” she said of that memo in an interview with Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa. “It’s not my opinion.”

  Vilmain heard about the memo as she was getting ready to leave Washington for a scouting trip to Nevada. She headed back to Iowa to contain the damage. And she exchanged tough words with Henry, whose office she had been sharing. Henry never gave her a warning that he was preparing to recommend pulling out of the state, she complained angrily. “How can I have confidence in you?”

  Two weeks later, the campaign announced that Vilmain would take over Iowa. When she arrived for good the weekend of June 16, her assessment was extraordinarily gloomy: The campaign had no momentum. Clinton was not spending enough time in the state. Washington was in “a delusional state of mind” about what it took to organize Iowa. No one in Washington knew what they didn’t know about caucuses.

  Vilmain thought Edwards had the most impressive operation. Obama was flooding the state with organizers, although it wasn’t clear how effective they were. Clinton had limped through the spring with just eleven people on her Iowa staff. More troubling, Iowans still did not know Hillary Clinton. They knew of her, but few knew, for example, that she had been born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. There also seemed to be little empathy for her. Edwards might have a 28,000-square-foot house and have spent four hundred dollars for a haircut, but Iowa Democrats trusted his sincerity when he talked about ending an America of haves and have- nots. The bottom line was that Clinton was three months behind Obama in organizing and both of them were behind the pace Edwards was setting. The situation, Vilmain told people, was painful.

  Tom Vilsack was equally pessimistic. He said, “There was no written document, so to speak, that laid out precisely what needed to be done, who needed to do it, and what the timelines were. Or if it had been approved, nobody had read it or nobody was following it. Meanwhile, Senator Obama was getting his young people out in neighborhoods all over the state, knocking on doors. . . . So all of a sudden, all these unknowns [voters] who weren’t on anybody’s radar screen—they’re getting phone calls, they’re getting visits, every couple weeks they’re getting e-mails. Now they’re feeling part of something special, a movement, a cause. And they don’t brag about it, they don’t talk about it. They don’t even tell anybody they’re doing it. And we’re struggling to get the plan in place.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Iowa: Round Two

  “We’re going to get our ass kicked.”

  —Terry McAuliffe to Hillary and Bill Clinton on the night of the Iowa caucuses

  The Iowa State Fair is one of the most celebrated stops on the road to the White House. It begins in the heat of August, when the sweet corn is at its sweetest. The presidential candidates flock to the fair to mingle with thousands of prospective voters, gaze at the famous butter cow (a life-size animal sculpted from butter), flip pork chops on a hot grill, hold forth at the Des Moines Register’s Soap Box, see a giant pig in the livestock barns, and consume some of the unhealthiest food on the planet, from corn dogs to deep-fried Twinkies. The better-known candidates draw clusters of autograph seekers and requests for photographs. The rest hope their ritual stop will earn them a line or two in the paper or, better yet, a small photo on the inside pages.

  On the night of July 2, 2007, the Clinton campaign had turned a corner of the fairgrounds into their own piece of political Americana. The fair was still weeks away, and the Clintonites had the grounds to themselves for a special outing, the moment Clinton’s Iowa team had argued and lobbied for. Because Bill Clinton was the most popular Democrat in the state, they wanted him to campaign alongside his wife to jump-start the sputtering organization. Endless conference calls were held to get the planning just right.

  “There were no less than twenty calls,” one Clinton staffer recalled, a reminder that with the Clintons, nothing comes easy, without bureaucracy, or without excessive control. In the end, it was turning out fine, the setting a soft summer night just as they had hoped. On the big flatbed of an eighteen-wheeler, the advance team had created a stage and ringed it with bales of hay adorned with little American flags. On the back of the bleachers, larger American flags were hung, with the largest flag of all displayed on the columns of the exhibition building to form the backdrop for photographers while the Clintons were onstage. Placards bearing the campaign’s newest slogan were everywhere: “READY for Change! Ready to LEAD!”

  The Clintons were more than an hour late—Bill in a bright yellow shirt, Hillary in a bold pink jacket and blouse. Bill’s introduction of her was for him brief—just ten minutes. He spotted a man in the crowd holding a sign that read, “Husbands for Hillary,” and played the good spouse. “I’d be here tonight if she asked me, if we weren’t married . . . because . . . in 2008 I will celebrate my fortieth year as a voter and in those forty years—tumultuous, fascinating years for America—she is by a long stretch the best-qualified nonincumbent I have ever had a chance to vote for president in my entire life.”

  For the next two days, the Clintons owned Iowa. They dominated the news, held forty public or private events and were seen by nearly seventy thousand people, including tens of thousands at a Fourth of July parade in Clear Lake. There, more than four hundred volunteers, along with the former president, hurled twenty thousand pieces of candy into the sweltering crowd. Hillary had never done a parade like that, she said after it was over. In New York, politicians hook arms, and crowds along the route scream and yell, but not always nicely. “Everyone waved at me here,” she went on, “and I’m just happy because they waved at me and all five fingers were showing.” At every stop, while her entourage ate pie and ice cream and sweated in the summer heat, the Clintons made up for months of lost time with voters, while signing up county coordinators and other volunteers in a desperate scramble to build an organization to match those of Obama and Edwards.

  For two and a half days the Clintons seemed to get Iowa—a light bulb went off, said one Iowan. Now they could get down to the business of winning. They already had made a decision to play hard in Iowa. Michael Whouley, a hard-nosed Boston pol—he had helped bring John Kerry back to life in Iowa in 2004 and was one of the most feared organizers in the Democratic Party—helped persuade them at a meeting at their home in Chappaqua.

  Even then the national campaign hesitated, haggling with the Iowa staff over budgets, timing of visits, and spending. Hillary also seemed reluctant to do what other candidates took for granted, wondering why she had to go to some of the smaller counties to meet with twenty-five or fifty activists at a time. She preferred to stay at only a few hotels in the state, which forced her schedulers to plan her trips accordingly. In October the Clinton team prepared three maps showing where she, Obama, and Edwards had traveled since January 1. She had done a total of sixty-nine stops in thirty-seven of the state’s ninety-nine counties; Obama had held one hundred events in fifty-two counties; Edwards, one hundred forty-one events in eighty-seven counties. The maps highlighted what everyone knew: Clinton’s opponents
were significantly outworking her.

  She resisted the constant demands to make phone calls to party activists and influential Iowans. “She’s terrible about phone calls—hates them,” one supporter recalled. But “when she’s on the phone, she’s amazing. She’s engaging, she asks about the kids, she asks about—you know, it’s a real conversation. But she can’t get off the phone, and so she just hates doing it.” Bill Clinton was no better. “The president doesn’t make a political call in the state before Labor Day,” another Iowa supporter complained. “Then you couldn’t get him not to make one in December, when it was too late.”

  In addition to accelerating organizational efforts, the July 4th tour had another purpose: to reintroduce her to Iowans. She was still regarded by many as chilly and distant, an impression at odds with her warmth and generosity to those who knew her well. While the Clinton team was attempting to refurbish her image, Obama’s was making him better known by launching television ads and sending a DVD to voters across the state. Clinton’s first ads featured policy issues and treatises on middle-class economics. Inside her campaign, a long-running debate raged over her ads. The campaign team ordered up a biographical ad, shot in black and white, with Clinton telling the poignant story of her mother, who at age ten took the train to California with her even younger sister to move in with an aunt. “It was beautiful,” Solis Doyle said later. “Brings a tear to your eye.” But it was never shown.