The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Carville recalled being with Bill Clinton and McAuliffe in mid-December when Hillary won the endorsement of the Des Moines Register. “We’re out of money after South Carolina,” McAuliffe told them, according to Carville. “Everybody said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Yeah, they spent it all.’” Later, Jonathan Mantz, who directed the fund-raising, was appalled when campaign officials blamed a lack of resources for the failure to fully contest some states. In an e-mail to Wolfson he called the assertion “bullshit.”

  Solis Doyle was adamant that Clinton knew the full state of the campaign’s finances throughout the race. Never was there any attempt to hide the financial situation from the candidate, she said. Nor was it even possible. “Without question the idea that Hillary did not know about the financial situation is just ludicrous,” Solis Doyle said after she left the campaign. “Totally and completely. Anybody who knows Hillary knows that she’s an extraordinarily frugal person, worries about money, and she demands to know.” Whatever the state of the finances, she said, Hillary Clinton knew at every turn how bad they were.

  Late on the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton knocked on Solis Doyle’s hotel door. It was a very difficult discussion between two people who had been extraordinarily close until that moment. Solis Doyle joined the victory party that night. She was happy for Hillary, but personally felt as if she had been cast aside by a campaign looking for scapegoats.

  The next day, as the entire Clinton campaign left New Hampshire early in the morning and returned to Washington for a chaotic day of meetings at their headquarters in suburban Virginia, Solis Doyle caught a later flight and returned by herself. Feeling abused and abandoned, she went home rather than to the headquarters.

  The longtime Clinton friend and ally lasted another month before she was finally replaced. That too proved messy. After New Hampshire, Clinton brought a number of additional advisers into the campaign, Maggie Williams among them. But with Solis Doyle still there, Williams became frustrated and in early February announced she was returning to her consulting firm. To some in the campaign, it was an overt signal to Hillary Clinton that she had created an untenable environment inside her campaign and that it was time to choose between Williams and Solis Doyle.

  Solis Doyle was equally frustrated by the lack of confidence shown her in those weeks. Once past Super Tuesday, she was planning to meet with Clinton on the morning of Sunday, February 10, to air her grievances, describe the low campaign morale, declare her intention to step down entirely, and urge again that something be done about Penn. At the last minute, she had to cancel because her babysitter could not look after her children that morning.

  Clinton, under the stress of the campaign, reacted angrily to the apparent snub. She organized a conference call for that morning and announced that Williams would be taking over. The announcement of Solis Doyle’s departure came later that night, as Clinton was losing the Maine caucuses. Solis Doyle left without talking to her. Four months later, when the primaries were over and Clinton was announcing the end of her losing campaign, Solis Doyle and Clinton still had not talked. Solis Doyle could not bring herself to go to Clinton’s concession speech in person; she watched it on television. “I just didn’t feel right about going,” she said later. “But I saw it and I just could not stop sobbing uncontrollably. This is a woman I love and admire.”12

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  An Uncivil War

  “Don’t let them tell you we’ve got to wait. Our moment is now!”

  —Obama in South Carolina

  Cars began filling the parking lots around the University of South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia early Sunday morning, December 9, 2007. People were standing three and four abreast near the entrances. Oprah Winfrey was in town, and Barack and Michelle Obama too. They would draw the largest crowd any candidate had seen to that point in the campaign. By early afternoon, when Obama took the stage, twenty-nine thousand people were inside the stadium, most of them African-American.

  Echoes of the civil rights movement were powerful that day. “There are those who say that it’s not his time, that he should wait his time,” Winfrey said to cries of “No, no!” from the grandstand. “Think about where you would be in your life if you waited when the people told you to. . . . There are those who say that he should take a gradual approach to this presidential leadership. But . . . we have to respond to pressures and fortunes of history when the moment strikes in South Carolina. That moment is now. . . . Dr. King dreamed the dream. But we don’t have to just dream the dream anymore. We get a chance to vote that dream into reality.”

  Obama linked his presidential campaign even more directly to the struggles of the sixties. “They stood up when it was risky,” he said, his voice rising above the roar of the crowd. “They stood when it was hard. They stood up when it wasn’t popular. They stood up and they went to jail. They sat down and then they stood up. They sat down when they weren’t supposed to. The fire hoses came out. The dogs came out. But they kept on standing up. Because a few stood up, a few thousand stood up, and then a few million stood up. Standing up for courage and conviction, they changed the world.”

  Then, echoing Oprah, he said, “Don’t let them tell you we’ve got to wait. Our moment is now!”

  Political scientists have developed sophisticated models for predicting the winners of general elections, formulas that take into account economic conditions, presidential popularity, the public mood, and other fundamentals. But no one has yet devised a formula that with any reliability can anticipate how a truly competitive nominating contest will end. There are too few major differences on issues, too many players, too many contests, too many outside events, too many unpredictable developments. That was particularly true in the early weeks of the primary/caucus season of 2008.

  South Carolina was the fourth state to vote in the Democratic nomination battle. The primary was marked by racial politics in which Bill Clinton’s role became the centerpiece of smoldering resentments in both camps, igniting alarm throughout the Democratic Party. South Carolina produced the sharpest, nastiest debate of the campaign, provoking anger and grievances inside both campaigns. The state also became another powerful turning point in which the Obama campaign outmaneuvered the Clinton machine once again. When it was over, it was clear that Hillary Clinton had been lured into a trap—pushed into it by her husband might be more accurate—and had paid an enormous price for the mistake. Obama’s victory not only cost her South Carolina, but also redrew the landscape heading into Super Tuesday on February 5. Most critical, South Carolina was where the Clintons lost the allegiance of much of the Democratic establishment, both black and white.

  Bill Clinton provided Hillary with an asset no other candidate could employ. He was the ultimate surrogate, popular in virtually every corner of the Democratic Party, an obviously skilled campaigner who could double the reach of the campaign by assuring that the Clintons could be in twice as many places on any given day as Obama. He also was a strategist with few peers in presidential politics. There were limits on his powers, however. This was, after all, Hillary’s campaign, not his, and her advisers talked at length about how to make maximum use of him without in any way allowing him to overshadow his wife. Behind the scenes, he was an influential voice on strategy but, as the experience of 2007 had shown, did not get his way on how much Obama should be attacked. When the campaign turned to South Carolina, however, he exerted himself.

  Bill Clinton insisted that Hillary compete all out in South Carolina, against the advice of her top advisers. “I believe they felt that they could either win or come very close, and I know this from conversations with Bill Clinton himself and with her,” said Don Fowler, a former Democratic Party chairman and one of Hillary Clinton’s leading supporters in South Carolina. “I think that they believed that their loyalty in the African-American community would withstand the psychology of Obama’s win in Iowa and at least they wouldn’t get wiped away or embarrassed in the black communit
y. I think that Bill Clinton wanted to demonstrate that he still had political force and influence within the African-American community.”

  There were eighteen days between New Hampshire and South Carolina, with an intervening contest in Nevada. Although Obama had the support of the Culinary Workers union in Nevada, the Clinton camp still believed she could win there. South Carolina was different. Through all of 2007, Clinton and Obama were almost even in the competition for the allegiance of African-Americans. The Clintons’ deep connections with the black community and Obama’s uncertain prospects kept those voters divided. Black women were especially conflicted over the choice between the first African-American with a serious chance to be president and the first woman. Clinton, whose multiple hairstyles had become a running joke when she was First Lady, took her campaign straight to the beauty salons of South Carolina. Her message included a pop-up brochure with photos of her many styles over the years and the words “Pay attention to your hair because everyone else will.”

  When Oprah Winfrey appeared with Obama in South Carolina in December 2007, polls showed that black women supported Clinton over Obama while black men were relatively evenly divided. Many African-Americans appeared to be holding back from saying they were for Obama because they doubted that white America would support him. Obama’s team worked hard through the later months of 2007 to build support in the African-American community, working salons and barbershops as assiduously as they did the black churches. Largely white Iowa provided the proof. When Obama showed he could win among an electorate like that, the polls shifted almost overnight, with Obama now the overwhelming choice of African-Americans.

  That reality changed the equation for Clinton in South Carolina. In the days after Iowa and New Hampshire, as the Clinton campaign was scrambling to set its strategy, South Carolina not only looked like a certain loser to Clinton’s advisers but also appeared likely to be a huge drain on the time and resources of a campaign now badly strapped for money and needing its focus for Super Tuesday. Had Bill Clinton not intervened so forcefully, the campaign was set with what it thought was the ideal plan. She would debate Obama and spend a couple of days in the state. Bill Clinton would spend a day there but devote more time to fund-raising elsewhere. She would lose, but not so badly that it would cripple her campaign. “Bill Clinton decided, by God, we were going to do better with African-Americans,” a senior Clinton adviser said. “The decision had been made not to do what we did—and we did it.” Nobody foresaw the disaster ahead.

  Part of Bill Clinton’s response to the Iowa loss was understandable. He wanted his wife to win, truly believed she was the most fit to be president, and was prepared to fight as hard as he could to help her recover. But part of his reaction was destructive. He was convinced the caucuses had been manipulated in Iowa. He believed that Obama had gotten a free ride from the media, and he wanted to force a conversation about that. He believed Hillary’s campaign had not been tough enough, and he took it upon himself to lead the attacks. It seemed for a time that his once certain political touch and instincts eluded him and the rest of the Clinton campaign.

  The controversies had begun in New Hampshire, though they attracted attention only after Hillary Clinton won. First was Bill Clinton’s finger-wagging effort to debunk Obama’s antiwar credentials. “It is wrong,” he said, eyes flashing at a young man who had dared challenge him, “that Senator Obama got to go through fifteen debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time—not once, ‘Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war. And you took that speech you’re now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since.’ Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

  Then came Hillary Clinton’s comments about Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, and how civil rights became the law of the land. Fox News correspondent Major Garrett asked her the night before the primary to react to something Obama had said that day. Obama had chastised her for suggesting during the New Hampshire debate that his campaign was an exercise in false hopes. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized,” she told Garrett, “when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, presidents before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality—the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we’re going to do it and actually got it accomplished.” Historically, she was entirely accurate about the role LBJ played in fulfilling King’s dream after Selma. Politically, her words proved to be incendiary.

  Many African-Americans were offended by Bill and Hillary’s comments. Some took his “fairy tale” remark as a broad attack on Obama’s message of hope and inspiration, though he insisted that was not his intent. Hillary had made similar comments in the past about Lyndon Johnson’s central importance in passing civil rights legislation, but without the racially explosive connection to King that was taken by African-American critics as a denigration of King’s role. Representative Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s most prominent black politician, rebuked Bill Clinton, saying the former president should “watch what and how he says it because there are a lot of people who see Barack Obama as their hopes and dreams. And they’re going to feel like you’re throwing cold water on their dream.” Both Clintons sought to dampen the controversy that was hurting her candidacy in South Carolina. Then another incident brought new problems.

  On the Sunday after New Hampshire, Hillary was campaigning in South Carolina with Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television. Johnson defended her King-LBJ comments, described Obama pejoratively as a kind of Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and then, inexplicably, invoked Obama’s use of drugs as a teenager—which Obama had written candidly about in Dreams from My Father. “As an African-American,” Johnson said, “I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood—and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book.”

  The Clinton campaign then allowed Johnson to issue a questionable denial on campaign letterhead. “My comments today were referring to Barack Obama’s time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else,” he said in what the Obama campaign called a tortured explanation. “Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect.” Whatever Hillary Clinton was thinking as Johnson delivered those remarks, she did nothing to condemn them until she could no longer avoid it. It was not the first time she appeared reluctant to rebuke someone immediately in her campaign over questionable criticism of Obama.

  A month earlier, her New Hampshire co-chairman, Billy Shaheen, had spoken openly about Obama’s vulnerabilities as a general election candidate because of his past drug use. Shaheen told the Washington Post’s Alec MacGillis that Republicans would jump on the issue if Obama were the nominee. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’ There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks.” Clinton’s staff were outraged by Shaheen’s remarks and believed he should be dismissed. Clinton, according to one source with inside information, resisted. Only after her New Hampshire supporters insisted did she agree.

  As the racial issue boiled over, yet another controversy erupted between Obama and Bill Clinton, triggered by what Obama said in Nevada. In an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board, Obama was talking about the mood of the country and how Americans seemed ready for something different. “I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure,” h
e said. “I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, that 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. [Reagan] put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the sixties and seventies and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Obama also said that Republicans have been “the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.”

  Bill Clinton was enraged. In Nevada, he accused Obama of saying that, since 1992, “Republicans have had all the good ideas.” In Buffalo, he claimed Obama had said, “President Reagan was the engine of innovation and did more, had a more lasting impact on America than I did. And then the next day he said, ‘In the nineties, the good ideas came out from the Republicans.’” These were skillful distortions of what Obama had said by a master politician determined to defend his wife, but comments that led Clinton into a thicket of trouble.