The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Even after her July 4th trip, Clinton’s problems continued. The Iowa leadership wanted more and more of her time, and later that summer an Iowa staffer wrote a memo saying the race was currently unwinnable given the money, time, and travel available to them. “People scoffed at it,” recalled another staffer. Clinton’s time was precious. She had fund-raising demands and other states in which she had to campaign. Most discouraging to the Iowans that was so much of Clinton’s time was being eaten up by her responsibilities in the Senate. Consequently, she squeezed in her campaign time around her Senate voting schedule. At one point in the summer, Vilsack said to her, “You’re going to have to decide whether you want to be a senator or president.” He recalled her response. “ ‘Well, I understand that. The August recess is coming, and that’s when we’re going to start doing what has to be done.’ So she said . . . ‘we’re going to get serious about this in August.’ And she did.”

  By October, she appeared to have made up considerable political ground. The campaign believed Iraq had eased as a major problem. Her health care plan attracted considerable attention in the local press. Her organization was coming together rapidly. Most important as a sign of her resurgence, an early October Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed her leading Obama and Edwards, leaping from third to first in four months. Yet the same weekend, a conversation we conducted with ten activists from Linn County (Cedar Rapids) exposed a troubling undercurrent. Eight months earlier, on her first trip to Iowa, we had assembled the same group with the help of the Democratic county chairman for a story in the Washington Post. We discovered both the potential for her candidacy and the obstacles she faced. Surprisingly, given the Register poll, eight months later those activists still had major questions about her. She was too polarizing to win an election, one of the activists said. Another said she could never bring the country together. Asked what advice they would give her, one person said, “She just has to become more real.”

  There was one other event in October that, had it played out then as it did later, might have changed the Democratic race. The National Enquirer published an article headlined “Presidential Cheating Scandal! Alleged Affair Could Wreck John Edwards’ Campaign Bid.” The story claimed that Edwards had had an extramarital affair with a woman who had traveled with him on the campaign trail. An Edwards spokesman denounced the report as “false, absolute nonsense.” The mainstream media ignored the story. Elizabeth Edwards briefly disappeared from the campaign trail, but her absence was assumed, incorrectly, to be related to her battle with cancer.10

  On October 15, 2007, the Clinton high command held a summit meeting at the law offices of O’Keefe, Lyons & Hynes in Chicago. The Chicago location assured secrecy—the sight of Clinton’s national headquarters leadership descending on Des Moines would have set off alarm bells across the state—as well as providing neutral territory for them to conduct a pointed discussion of her Iowa prospects. From Washington, the group included Penn, Solis Doyle, Ickes, Grunwald, and Henry. The Iowa contingent included state director Vilmain, Dave Barnhart, a Whouley protégé who had arrived the month before to serve as caucus director, Winterhof, the one-time director and now a senior adviser, and Karen Hicks, a skilled party organizer based in New Hampshire.

  Clinton’s Iowa campaign saw Edwards as a greater threat, but beating Obama was their top priority. One fact most worried her Iowa organizers: Many more of Edwards’s supporters had participated in caucuses before and were more likely to show up again. In the early fall, when Clinton’s people crunched the numbers from hundreds of thousands of telephone calls and personal contacts with Iowans, they discovered that an alarming percentage of her supporters—nearly seven in ten—said they had never caucused. Many were older, particularly older women. The Iowa team believed that the Washington staff saw Clinton in better shape than she was (though headquarters always regarded Iowa as her most difficult state) and the Iowans came to Chicago with an agenda, to dispel any sense of false optimism about the state of play in their state and to ask for a substantial budget increase to fund an unprecedented door-to-door operation to educate their supporters about the caucus process.

  Penn opened the meeting with a polling presentation that, from the viewpoint of the some of the Iowans, was outrageously optimistic. Tensions between Penn and the Iowa team already existed. They did not believe he understood the caucuses. Penn, in turn, believed the Iowa team was too hidebound, too wedded to past caucus history. The Iowa staff listened to Penn’s presentation and feared that national headquarters wanted to spend not a penny more than necessary to win their state. National was not going to pay for any landslides in Iowa. As Iowa’s caucus director, Dave Barnhart was particularly upset. When Penn was finished he offered a contrary view based on a different set of numbers. Barnhart recalled later his goal was to explain to them “basically just say, ‘Look, with the current resources, this is what we think we can deliver. If everyone’s okay with that, great, but we need to quit talking about winning the state.’”

  A few days earlier, the Clinton campaign had completed five focus groups, two in Sioux City with Clinton supporters who had never before attended a caucus. As they watched live on their laptops in Des Moines, senior staff couldn’t believe what they were hearing. “Our people didn’t know caucuses,” Vilmain recalled. “They were totally befuddled.” One elderly woman arrived thinking she was at a caucus. “When she said that, you just wanted to throw up,” Barnhart said. Other focus group participants thought they would have to pay to attend the caucuses, or that the caucuses were open only to elected officials or the party elite. Another Clinton staffer called the results an “Oh, shit!” moment for the campaign. They needed a totally new approach to prepare their supporters for caucus night. At the Chicago meeting, they asked for money to hire another hundred people whose only job would be to go door-to-door, sit down in homes with voters identified as Clinton supporters, show them a DVD about how caucuses operate, and give them a pep talk about how important it was for them to show up for Hillary Clinton on January 3.

  Ickes was not impressed with the proposals. He believed the Iowa team had come forward with an insufficient request. At best, he said, it might assure Clinton of second place, and if so they might as well just forget about Iowa and save the money for Super Tuesday. “Why don’t you come back with a budget we can win on?” he demanded. The Iowa team revised their budget, asking for even more money. Headquarters quickly approved, and from that day forward the Iowa campaign never lacked for resources. Whatever Iowa wanted, Iowa got. One member of the Iowa team said later, “And then we had everything we needed and more. . . . It was enough, it was just too late.”

  As Clinton’s team was meeting to resolve their differences over Iowa, Obama was meeting with his senior leadership to review the progress—or lack of it. For weeks, he had been pummeled by donors, friends, journalists, and pundits questioning his strategy. They told him that it was time to start moving his national poll numbers up to stop Clinton from gaining an insurmountable advantage; that his strategy of focusing on Iowa was a loser; that it was time to realize he was running a national campaign; that it was time to go negative. His fund-raisers were so skittish that one even talked of trying to force out some of his top advisers, though nothing ever came of it.

  Obama pollster Joel Benenson vividly remembered the directness with which Obama opened the meeting. He remained confident that the campaign could be won, but said, “But right now we’re losing, and we’ve got ninety days to turn this around.” Then he pressed Plouffe about the Iowa strategy, asking why his campaign manager was certain that Clinton’s big lead in national polls would not infect Iowa’s electorate. “He questioned us sharply,” Axelrod said. “There’s no doubt that he wanted assurance that we knew what we were doing. . . . We said by the measures we apply, things are on the right track. The metrics in Iowa were good.”

  But Obama came to love Iowa and particularly his team of young organizers. “What gave me confidence was the quality o
f the people on the ground,” he told us later. “We had the best statewide organization, I think, in the annals of American politics. Those kids, they were just great. So you’d land in Iowa, it was like an island unto itself and you would just feel this sense of, something’s going on here.”

  Out of that autumn research came three pillars of an Obama message: First, bring the country together to usher in a new politics (however ill-defined that “new politics” might be). Second, strongly emphasize the need to fight the special interests. Obama’s advisers told him nobody believes Clinton can do that. You can. Third, level with the people, tell them even unpleasant truths to enhance Obama’s reputation for authenticity, which his campaign believed Clinton lacked. An October 12 memo highlighted the conclusions, and took particular note that Clinton was vulnerable to attacks on her character. Obama’s advisers believed it was time to start drawing contrasts with Clinton, to heighten voters’ doubts about her and to cement her image as the insider in a year of change. Larry Grisolano, who oversaw polling, research, and paid media, had this expression: If Clinton wants to run as the candidate with Washington experience, we’ve got to make her pay a price for that Washington experience.

  Next to the caucuses themselves, the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner on November 10, 2007, was the most significant political event of the yearlong campaign in Iowa. Nearly ten thousand activists, and all the candidates, were expected to attend. From past history, the Iowa campaign staffs knew the evening could be a turning point. Four years earlier John Kerry had resurrected his slumping candidacy with a fiery speech at the dinner, which turned out to be the beginning of the end of Howard Dean’s campaign.

  The morning of the dinner, Vilmain gathered her troops in a cavernous room in the Hy-Vee Center to review the instructions for the evening and practice the chants their supporters would use when Clinton spoke: Turn up the heat, they would respond after she delivered their promptlines. Later in the afternoon Obama and Michelle led a huge, boisterous band of supporters into the Veterans Memorial Auditorium to practice the campaign’s rally-ending mantra—Fired up! Ready to go!—with the Isiserettes Drill and Drum Corps providing the beat.

  An hour or so before the dinner began, the campaigns packed the balconies with their supporters. Obama’s looked like a youth brigade, Clinton’s a sea of elderly Iowans. Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald walked into the press room early in the evening and disparaged Obama’s forces. “Ours look like caucusgoers,” Grunwald said. Obama’s, Penn added, did not look old enough to vote. But in the balconies, the potential nightmare of caucus night was playing out before the Clinton staffers’ eyes. “It was like a third-world country,” Barnhart said. Only one concession stand was open, and the lines for it were so long that some people had to wait an hour and a half to be served. They ran out of water. By 8 p.m., some of Clinton’s elderly supporters began to leave, saying they would watch on television at home. Aides began posting people at exits to urge them to stay and return to their seats. “We were calling them the hemorrhage group because we were hemorrhaging people,” Barnhart said. “And so we had lost about a third of our people before Hillary even took the stage.”

  It had taken a monumental effort to get Clinton’s national leadership even to focus on the dinner. Less than a week before, they were still haggling over her speech. “It took them forever,” said a Clinton adviser in Iowa. “They were trying to figure out the JJ [Jefferson Jackson] message five days out. And you couldn’t get anybody’s attention.”

  Obama had been preparing for the dinner since his team’s strategy meeting in mid-October. His Iowa advisers included veterans of Kerry’s campaign who knew its importance.

  On November 3, a week before the dinner and one year before the 2008 election, Obama had delivered what the campaign dubbed the “year-out speech” in South Carolina. It was, in fact, a dry run for Jefferson Jackson. A few hours after delivering the speech, Obama told us during a telephone interview from the road, “Now is the time for us to start fleshing out the argument that I’ve been talking about why I should be the Democratic nominee instead of the other candidates who are running in the primary.” When we suggested that Obama was portraying Clinton as embodying the worst of the political system, he disagreed. “I would reject that she represents the worst of the system . . . but as I said, she’s run a textbook campaign and the textbook that is issued by Washington conventional wisdom says that you should be vague and avoid definitive answers in campaigns in part to make yourself a smaller target to Republican attacks, but the argument I’m making is that unless we can be candid with the American people it’s going to be hard for us to govern.”

  Then why was he having trouble gaining traction with voters and still behind in the polls? we wondered. “It’s important to recognize that we’re running against the dominant brand name of the Democratic Party,” Obama replied. “That’s why we focused on the early states where we can be much more directly engaged with voters and spend time with them. This is always going to be a harder argument to make than just to check off the traditional list of Democratic proposals or speak to the enumerated concerns of the various Democratic interest groups. This has more to do with pushing beyond traditional campaign politics.”

  After speaking in South Carolina, Obama flew to New York to appear on Saturday Night Live. Axelrod called speechwriter Jon Favreau from the greenroom. He said Obama liked the speech but it would need to be cut in half to use at the Jefferson Jackson Dinner. He said Obama needed the draft by morning. Since the dinner rules prohibited the use of notes or a teleprompter, every candidate had to memorize the speech. With the new draft in hand, Obama arrived in Iowa Tuesday night for a rally in Cedar Rapids and then headed for Davenport to begin a two-day trip along the Mississippi River and then back across southeast Iowa to Des Moines. “I can remember walking by his hotel room one day that week and the TV was up really, really loud,” Robert Gibbs recalled. What was going on? he wondered. Only days later, he realized Obama had been practicing his speech then, but with the TV sound loud so he couldn’t be heard outside his room.

  The dinner started about 6 p.m. and dragged on for hours. It was approaching 11 p.m. when Clinton, the next to last speaker, was introduced. She delivered a strong speech, although her call to Turn up the heat left many of her own staffers cold. Then it was Obama’s turn. As in Boston and in Springfield, he hit his marks, drawing a sharp contrast between himself and Clinton, though he never mentioned her by name. “Telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do,” he said. “Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do. If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it. . . . This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction; when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose—a higher purpose. And I run for the presidency of the United States of America because that’s the party America needs us to be right now.”

  The next morning, David Yepsen, the most influential political columnist in the state, wrote, “Should [Obama] come from behind to win the Iowa caucuses, Saturday’s dinner will be remembered as one of the turning points in his campaign here.”

  Obama’s speech created an immediate surge of energy for his campaign, and a growing sense that caucus night in Iowa could become a climactic showdown. At that point, Obama seemingly could do no wrong.

  Four days after the Jefferson Jackson Dinner, the candidates met in Las Vegas for another debate. “Look out,” Edwards warned Obama, she’s coming after you. Clinton was aggressive that night but it was the moderators who tried to trip up Obama, and on the very question that had caused Clinton so much trouble in Philadelphia. Asked his position on whether illegal
immigrants should be allowed to have driver’s licenses, Obama waffled. “I am not proposing that’s what we do,” he said. After much pressing, he said he did support them. Unlike Clinton, Obama paid no price for his equivocation. That drove Clinton’s team mad.

  “We are back to April, when Obama had the endless lift of the national media hyping his candidacy,” Penn wrote in a November 23 memo. “Particularly dangerous now is David Yepsen, who is touting his candidacy and who is realistically the most powerful journalist in America at the moment. . . . A chorus of Hillary-bashing press coached Obama relentlessly that he had to attack and that he cross their line with their help. . . . But Edwards managed to attack so harshly that Obama somehow got the best of both worlds: the benefits of attacking her but not being seen as too negative in his campaigning.” Penn noted that the attacks by Obama and Edwards had raised Clinton’s negatives by ten points and had hurt her on honesty and answering tough questions. “In general it put a fog over our candidacy.” Penn knew that Obama had tapped into two real sentiments: people’s desire to be unified and their hunger for authenticity. He knew Clinton was seen as polarizing, but recent events, he believed, had given Clinton the opportunity to change the debate from a referendum on her to a choice for the voters. They had to break through “his façade into the real Obama.”