The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Clinton said they had made mistakes in Iowa and she wanted to move immediately to correct them in New Hampshire—the most important being a campaign to go after younger voters. She wanted to reach out to college campuses. “She made it pretty clear that she was not happy that she was not given, or getting, better information about what she was to do in New Hampshire,” said one person listening. Another later said he believed what she wanted that morning was a conversation about what to do next. But her most trusted advisers were either AWOL or too shaken by the loss in Iowa, too tongue-tied, too depressed to respond. The call was filled with awkward pauses and empty spaces. According to another person listening—who later described as gross negligence the lack of support Clinton got at that moment—“She said in a very calm voice, ‘Well, I guess I’ll do it myself . . .’ That was her attitude. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ It wasn’t mean, it wasn’t vicious. I actually felt horribly sorry for the woman. I felt like this woman had been misserved.”

  Finally, Clinton had had enough; she curtly ended the call with another expression of her displeasure. “Thank you all,” she said as she signed off. “I’ve enjoyed talking to myself the last twenty minutes.”

  The conference call marked a temporary transfer of power. Hillary and Bill Clinton would take it back from her inner circle at headquarters. They would now run the campaign. They would plot the strategy. They would give the orders. They would largely ignore the team that had guided the campaign for the previous year. They would turn instead to a combination of old friends, aides, local advisers, and loyalists who were offering advice directly to them. Now Hillary especially would turn to her New Hampshire team, who knew the state’s electorate intimately and knew well of the Clintons’ long-standing connection to voters there.

  For months, the New Hampshire team had been working to build a firewall in the event of a cataclysmic Clinton loss to Obama in Iowa, a third-place defeat few truly expected. Now they only had five days to turn back Obama’s momentum.

  In Nashua at about 8 a.m. she met backstage in a cavernous, chilly airplane hangar with Nick Clemons, the New Hampshire state director, and Guy Cecil, the national political director, who had been working the state for weeks. She told them she was prepared to do whatever they recommended. She wanted more events where she could meet voters informally, events that would show voters how much this primary meant to her. “I’m going to work harder than anyone else in this state to win New Hampshire,” she told them. At one point that morning, someone suggested that she not take questions at her first scheduled event. Clinton responded testily that her campaign had become too imperious, her events too much like White House events. She wanted to get in closer touch with the voters. She especially wanted contact. “I want to take questions at every single event,” she said.

  There was a sense of urgency in her voice when she opened her first post-Iowa rally in the hangar that morning—and a look of concern on her husband’s face. What the Clintons feared was a rush to judgment, an Iowa-driven gale-force wind at Obama’s back. She told the audience, “New Hampshire voters are going to be weighing and assessing everything in the next five days. It’s a short period of time, but it’s enough time. Time for people to say, wait a minute.” When she turned to questions, someone asked, “Why should we believe you can win a national election?” She replied, “I have been through the fires.”

  Obama also arrived in the middle of the night, exhilarated but exhausted. If Clinton was redoubling her efforts, if she was about to shed some of the baggage she had carried in Iowa and begin the kind of campaigning that New Hampshire voters expected, Obama was in danger of riding the wave coming out of Iowa and letting himself get too comfortable. If he won in New Hampshire, Obama could become the Democratic nominee more easily than anyone had thought.

  A big midday rally in Concord would kick off Obama’s final days of campaigning, to be followed by an important speech that night at a New Hampshire Democratic Party dinner.

  The Obama team’s conference call that morning was lighthearted. There was good-natured joshing with his New Hampshire team about the onus being on them to finish what Iowa had started. They talked about the polling. Even before Iowa, Obama had been gaining in New Hampshire. As of that morning the race remained tight. They discussed what bounce Obama might expect from his Iowa victory, and how long it would last. And they wanted to make sure the crowd for their Concord rally would be good, and give Obama time in the afternoon to rest and get ready for his evening speech. That night, Obama won the rhetorical sweepstakes at the party fund-raising dinner while Clinton seemed to be struggling to find her message. Day one in New Hampshire seemed a continuation of Iowa.

  On Saturday morning a monumental traffic jam was building around Nashua North High School. Cars overflowed the school parking lot and were illegally left along snowbanks or on the edges of intersections. A procession of cars inched down the narrow road trying to get anywhere close to the school, where Obama was scheduled to appear at 10 a.m. The line of people snaked from the front door around the parking lot and up the walkway by the road. Nearly three thousand people showed up that morning, too many to fit into the gymnasium; some ended up in an overflow room next door. That alone seemed to be the story—the massive outpouring being generated by Obama’s candidacy. He was used to attracting big crowds, but there was something about this one that turned heads and caused seasoned campaign advisers and skeptical reporters to let down their guard. Coming off the high of the Iowa victory, Obama appeared to be on an unstoppable roll.

  A member of his New Hampshire team later said, “I think that’s when in some respects we lost sight that there was a race going on in New Hampshire. New Hampshire voters are known for being extremely independent minded. They weren’t going to want Iowa to tell them what to do.” And David Axelrod said, “[Clinton] looked like she was fighting for it and that she was very much on ground level. We looked like we were sailing above and taking victory laps and I think we were all vaguely uncomfortable with it. We had just gone through this whole struggle in Iowa where we were contending for every vote and now [we’re] all coming in hoisted on people’s shoulders and all that and it didn’t seem right.”

  Had Obama sent his staff into the crowd at the Nashua high school that morning, his advisers might have understood why it didn’t seem right. Like many others, we were more impressed with the lines than with what people at the rally were saying. Only later, when we reviewed our notes, did the voices add up to something other than an Obama march to victory. Some were like David Batchelder, who said he was impressed with Obama’s hopeful message and had decided to support him over John Edwards. But a number of others were still undecided and still shopping. “He’s got a new message,” said Bob Gosselin, an Independent voter. “Whether he’s got enough experience to pull it off is the question.” Ken Cody, also undecided, had set out early that morning from the New Hampshire seacoast to see Obama, but he was also interested in Clinton. Cody said he was impressed with Clinton’s policy expertise and experience but credited Obama with having leadership skills that she did not show. “That’s the balancing act,” he said. “He creates a lot of excitement but I don’t think people have had a chance to look under the covers. That’s a little scary to me.” In short, there was evidence, for anyone willing to pay attention to it, that even in the middle of an enthusiastic Obama rally, some voters were still undecided—perhaps more than anyone realized.

  Clemons’s team made the decision to scrap the plan to focus simply on Clinton’s identified supporters. Instead, they would put as much or more emphasis and energy into reaching out to undecided voters and persuading them to vote for the underdog Hillary Clinton. “We knew that they would be seeing poll after poll after poll after poll after poll showing Obama with a growing lead,” said Guy Cecil, the lone adviser from the national headquarters intimately involved in New Hampshire. “And we didn’t want to leave them to chance.”

  The next day, Clinton’s schedule called for her
to go door-to-door in Manchester. Normally with just a few days to the election, she would stop only at houses of supporters, urging them to be sure to vote in the primary. She returned to her campaign bus puzzled. “Why are we going to the doors of ‘threes’?” she asked Clemons. (Campaigns rate voters on a scale of one to five—ones being solid supporters, twos leaners, threes undecided, fours and fives leaning toward or solidly for someone else.) “Because we have to,” Clemons replied. “We don’t have enough ‘ones’ to win.” Later, Clemons explained that he had also reassured his candidate, telling her, “We’ve got it covered on the ground, despite what you’re hearing from the members of Congress and senators who were here. We know what we’re doing. We haven’t lost our minds.”

  For most of Friday and into Saturday, even as she made her way around the state, she and Bill listened, absorbed, talked, and ultimately redesigned the look, feel, and sound of her campaign. On Saturday, she told someone that, since Iowa, she had already heard directly from more than thirty people who offered ideas on message and strategy.

  E-mails poured into her BlackBerry. These were her friends, former aides, loyalists, and others who, out of deference to the campaign leadership, had for months sought to send their advice through the proper channels but had felt shut out by the headquarters team. For many in this group, Penn was a marked man. They felt his strategy of stressing inevitability and experience had led to her defeat in Iowa, and that he had failed to recognize the power of the change message. Many wanted Penn fired, even though he had a powerful hold on the Clintons. The critics also were after Solis Doyle, despite her close ties to Hillary. Until then they had deferred to her as campaign manager. After Iowa, she seemed to them in over her head, unable to help chart a clear course or manage the inner circle of difficult personalities, rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds. The old Clinton network teemed with gossip, complaints, conspiracies, and ideas. They overshadowed the senior advisers, who were powerless to object. One Clinton loyalist said of the inner circle, “They were so down on their knees you didn’t have to kick them.”

  What made New Hampshire so intriguing was that its political culture and demographic profile seemed to be far more promising for Obama than Iowa had been. Already, it was obvious that the Democratic race was dividing the electorate into two demographic camps: older, less affluent, less educated voters for Clinton; younger, wealthier, more liberal voters for Obama. In many of the demographic groups where Obama had found his greatest strength in Iowa, New Hampshire’s Democratic primary electorate had at least as many or more of those voters. There were fewer older voters, twice as many Independents, more wealthy voters, more better-educated voters. However, no outside politicians had deeper ties or a stronger bond to the state than the Clintons after Bill Clinton’s miraculous recovery in 1992 that brought him back from near death to a second-place finish and the self-proclaimed title of “Comeback Kid.”

  Hillary’s allies believed a single demographic group held the key to repeating Bill’s comeback: women. In New Hampshire, women made up 57 percent of the Democratic electorate. Iowa had never elected a woman to statewide office or to the House. New Hampshire’s world had many successful women, including former governor Jeanne Shaheen. After the 2006 elections gave the Democrats control of the state legislature, both the speaker of the New Hampshire House and the president of the Senate were women; both supported Clinton.

  Events over the final four days before the vote built up Clinton’s appeal to female voters. On Saturday night, ABC News, New Hampshire’s WMUR-TV, and the Manchester Union Leader staged a debate marathon at Saint Anselm College consisting of back-to-back ninety-minute debates featuring the remaining candidates from both parties. The Iowa returns had forced Joe Biden and Chris Dodd out of the race. Just four major Democratic candidates were left: Clinton, Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson, although Richardson was hardly a factor. During the debate, Clinton, as she had promised, was aggressive, her voice rising in irritation. But what worked most to her advantage was a two-against-one attack in which Obama and Edwards pounded and at times seemed to belittle the woman in the race.

  Edwards later explained, “I thought I had to win Iowa, and when I didn’t win Iowa, I had to get to a two-person race quickly, and I thought Obama was going to win New Hampshire.” So when Clinton attacked and Obama defended, Edwards counterattacked on behalf of Obama. Later, Obama called Edwards’s performance “a weird thing.” For his part, Edwards conceded he had miscalculated. “I think it helped her,” he said. “And I thought it went exactly the way I wanted it to go. Shows you how smart I was.”

  In the early stages of the debate, Clinton attacked both Obama and Edwards for their thin legislative records. “Words are not actions,” she said. “And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action. You know, what we’ve got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality.” Then she hit out at Obama for changing positions on a series of issues. When Edwards finally got a chance to speak, he said, “Every time he speaks out for change, every time I fight for change, the forces of status quo are going to attack. Every single time. . . . I didn’t hear these kinds of attacks from Senator Clinton when she was ahead. Now that she’s not, we hear them.”

  In the second half of the debate, WMUR’s Scott Spradling pointed out to Clinton that although New Hampshire voters saw her as the most experienced and electable, they seemed to like Obama more than her. “Well, that hurts my feelings,” Clinton said with a kind of little-girl expression on her face, provoking laughter. “I’m sorry, Senator,” Spradling responded. Clinton kept going: “But I’ll try to go on. He’s very likable. I agree with that. I don’t think I’m that bad.” Obama then broke in. “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” he said. “Thank you,” she said. Later Obama realized that what he meant to sound supportive came off as plain rude.

  Obama left the debate unaware that his remark might be a problem. His advisers were relieved the debate was over; it was past time to get him back in touch with real voters. Clinton’s advisers were concerned that she had not done all she could have early in the debate; many voters, they feared, missed her best moments.

  Penn had produced a memo the night of the debate, entitled “Where is the bounce?” In the first days after Iowa, he argued, the race had changed little. By Sunday, however, public and private polls were all showing a substantial boost for Obama, putting him ahead by twelve points on Saturday and by ten points on Sunday. Clinton’s New Hampshire team knew she was in deep trouble, but this was not Iowa, where she had always struggled. In New Hampshire, she had been ahead by twenty-three points in September. It was far harder to win over a voter who had never backed her than to regain the support of someone who had once been a Clinton supporter but now had slipped to undecided or even leaning to Obama. That was particularly the case for women, her advisers believed. They were hopeful that she could win back some of them. On Saturday they saw the first glimmers of a comeback. By Sunday they could see even more.

  The anecdotal evidence flew in the face of the polls. Her coordinator of volunteers reported a huge influx of supporters into the state to help reach out to voters. The uncommitted voters were continuing to come her way. Obama was drawing big crowds, but so too was Clinton. On Sunday she campaigned at the same Nashua high school where Obama had been the day before—and nearly matched the size of his crowd. Her change message was now woven into her words on the economy. In an effort to promote her own less elegant style, she chipped away at Obama’s alluring profile. “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” she told the Nashua crowd. The next day, Bill Clinton went after Obama on Iraq, calling the claim that he really had been a consistent opponent of the war a “fairy tale.” His remark drew little attention in New Hampshire, but gathered strength in the days after the primary.

  The day after the Iowa defeat the Clinton team had decided she could not afford to launch a truly negative campaign against Obama. “It was a small minority that
wanted to do the negatives,” said one Clinton adviser. “A vocal minority.” Bill Clinton and Penn were still in favor, but the entire New Hampshire team was opposed. They had spent months campaigning on a positive message. To shift the tone, they argued, would look transparently desperate. But below the radar, they sent out a mailer challenging Obama’s pro-choice credentials. Obama’s team discovered the abortion mailer on Sunday and decided to have a surrogate answer—a decision they later regretted. But on that Sunday, everything looked solid for Obama, still bleak for Clinton.

  Around midnight on Sunday, Nick Clemons’s cell phone started to ring. “Private number” flashed up on the phone. It’s Bill Clinton, he thought. The former president had been calling everyone he knew in New Hampshire all weekend, trying to make sense of what was happening. He knew the state intimately and the rhythms of its campaigns. How can we be so far behind in the polls here so quickly? he wondered. Is there an opportunity for us to make up the ground? Clemons believed that Clinton was really thinking, Can we still do well enough to claim a victory even in losing, and what do we still need to accomplish that? He was still torn about the campaign’s decision not to attack Obama hard. Should we have hit him earlier, should we have shone more of a spotlight on Obama before he became this “movement”? What was the New Hampshire team doing to win the primary? Clemons gave a frank appraisal. Things were better than they had been, but not good enough. He wanted to keep expectations within bounds. At that point, the goal was to prevent an Obama blowout on Tuesday. “We were thinking if we could just keep [Obama’s margin] under six or seven [points], people hopefully would see that as a win,” Guy Cecil recalled. “That’s where our mind-set was.”