The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  On Saturday, January 19, Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses (although because of the complex rules of the Democratic Party, Obama was awarded one more delegate than she was). Obama now had lost two contests in a row and was angry about what the Clintons—particularly Bill Clinton—were doing. By the time Obama got to South Carolina on Sunday afternoon, he and his advisers had had enough. “They had a surrogate unlike anybody else would ever have a surrogate,” Gibbs said. “We were slow to recognize . . . that we had to respond.” Obama’s advisers realized that if anyone was going to call Bill Clinton to account, it would have to be Obama.

  Axelrod, standing in the back of a room at Obama’s Sunday night rally in Columbia, said of Bill Clinton, “It’s disappointing, because I admire him as a former president, to see that. But he’s out there on the battlefield. We’re not going to stand by and allow Senator Obama’s comments to be distorted by anybody. No one gets a pass when they’re parsing words or truncating quotes or trying to mislead people.”

  On ABC’s Good Morning America, Obama called the former president’s remarks “troubling.” It is time to stop, he added. “I understand him wanting to promote his wife’s candidacy,” Obama said. “She’s got a record that she can run on. But I think it’s important that we try to maintain some, you know, level of honesty and candor during the course of the campaign. If we don’t, then we feed the cynicism that has led so many Americans to be turned off to politics.”

  The Clinton campaign quickly responded. “Everything the president has said is factual,” Howard Wolfson said. “He’s going to continue to campaign on behalf of his wife. Everywhere and anywhere.”

  Five days before the primary, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards met in Myrtle Beach for a debate that quickly became known as the “brawl on the beach.” Obama arrived exhausted. In debate prep, he started to nod off. His advisers urged him to take a nap and come back when he was rested. They anticipated a tough debate and had prepared a series of pivot points— scripted counterpunches in anticipation of a reprise from Hillary of the lines of attack Bill Clinton had been using. He was ready now. Obama had reached his own boiling point.

  The audience was primed as well. They were a raucous, noisy crowd anticipating a fight. Within minutes, they got it. Asked about one of Hillary’s criticisms of his programs, Obama said, “What she said wasn’t true.” Then, unprompted, he tried to knock down the other attacks from the Clintons. On whether his consistent opposition to the war was a fairy tale: “That simply is not true.” On whether he had said Republicans had better economic policies since the 1980s: “That is not the case.” Clinton then hammered back. “When it comes to a lot of the issues that are important in this race, it is sometimes difficult to understand what Senator Obama has said, because as soon as he is confronted on it, he says that’s not what he meant,” she said. “The facts are that he has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last ten to fifteen years, and we can give you the exact quote. Now, I personally think they had ideas, but they were bad ideas. They were bad ideas for America.”

  When Obama retook the microphone, he returned to Reagan and the Republicans. “Now, let’s talk about Ronald Reagan. What you just repeated here today is—” Clinton interrupted. “I did not say anything about Ronald Reagan,” she said. “Hillary, we just had the tape,” Obama responded. “You just said that I complimented the Republican ideas. That is not true. What I said—and I will provide you with a quote—what I said was that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to. Because while I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.”

  The Wal-Mart reference caught the audience by surprise and represented as personal an attack as Obama had ever made against her in a debate. She insisted again that she had never cited Reagan. Referring to Obama’s interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, she said, “You talked about Ronald Reagan being a transformative political leader. I did not mention his name.”

  “Your husband did,” Obama interjected.

  “Well, I’m here. He’s not.”

  “Well, I can’t tell who I’m running against sometimes,” Obama complained.

  The candidates were standing only a few feet apart, leaning toward one another. Their aides, watching from their holding rooms, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The debate was expected to be tough, but not like this. Wolfson’s BlackBerry flashed with incoming messages from reporters. Have you ever seen anything like this? they asked. He was astonished by the tone of the debate, as were Obama’s advisers.

  Clinton still had the floor, determined to make her own point about who was fighting for Democratic Party values during the Reagan years. Obama’s interview, she said, certainly sounded as if he were praising their Republican ideas. “Yes, they did have ideas, and they were bad ideas.” Obama said he agreed, but Clinton kept talking. “Bad for America. And I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago.”

  The audience erupted at the reference to the developer Tony Rezko. He had been a major contributor to Obama, had entered into a questionable land sale with Obama, was under indictment, and became a major embarrassment once the presidential campaign was launched. All Obama could muster was, “No, no, no.”

  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the debate moderator, finally turned to John Edwards, who had stood by awkwardly as Clinton and Obama exchanged insults. “I don’t know if you want to get involved in this, Senator,” Blitzer said.

  Edwards, by now the odd man out in the presidential campaign, down to one last stand in the state where he was born and where he had won four years earlier, said in exasperation, “What I want to say first is, are there three people in this debate, not two?”

  Everyone by then knew the answer.

  Axelrod said much later, “There was this ugliness hanging over South Carolina.” Neither Clinton nor Obama was particularly pleased with what happened in Myrtle Beach; later in the debate they seemed to go out of their way to be civil. But no temporary truce could undo the damage or the bitterness that would shape the final days of campaigning. Hillary Clinton left South Carolina the morning after the debate for three days out west. She was focusing on Super Tuesday states, a decision her South Carolina supporters believed was a major mistake. “I personally thought it was very costly and I raised hell to anybody I could find,” Don Fowler said. With Hillary absent, Bill Clinton now took the lead role in the South Carolina campaign.

  The morning after the debate, Bill Clinton was campaigning at the Lizard’s Thicket, a restaurant in Columbia. He sparred with reporters over his role in the campaign. As he was leaving, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin asked one of Clinton’s companions, someone who had been with him since his Arkansas days, whether the former president was as good a politician now as he had been in 1992. “Better,” the friend responded. Clinton interjected with a shake of his head. “He’s rusty and old and creaky,” he said of himself, though he didn’t really mean it. But he was right; in those weeks, his words and actions showed him to be a politician who had lost his normally unerring instincts as a campaigner.

  Neither did Obama seem at the top of his game. The battle against two Clintons was taking its toll. The day after the debate, the weather turned rainy and cold. Obama was on a rolling tour through the state, with his big stop of the day in Greenwood, a small town with a city councilwoman named Edith Childs, who had inspired Obama’s chant of Fired up? Ready to go! that he used to close his rallies and who joined him there. As he was working the rope line after he and Childs led the crowd in the chant, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, who knew the candidate’s moods and body language, shouted out, “Are you letting Bill Clinton get inside your head?” Ob
ama looked irritated. “I am trying to make sure that his statements by him are answered. Don’t you think that’s important?” he shot back. As he walked away to shake hands with voters, Zeleny tried again. Obama had not answered his question, he observed. Obama turned, flashed a grin that seemed to hide his peevishness. “Don’t try cheap stunts like that, Jeff,” he said. “Come on, you’re better than that.” Zeleny persisted and Obama finally tried to shrug it off, saying, “My suspicion is that the other side must be rattled if they’re continuing saying false things about us.” But everyone could see how frustrated the normally unflappable Obama was.

  All through the campaign, Obama benefited from a combination of preparation, organization—and luck. In South Carolina all came together in the last few days to turn an expected victory into an extraordinary one.

  Obama had a key advantage that was not understood at the time. He had built an organization unlike anything that Democrats in the state had ever done before. Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager who oversaw operations in the early states, had come to South Carolina early in 2007 with the idea of building an organization from scratch. Traditional organizing called for candidates to graft themselves onto existing political networks, particularly in the black community. It was not only common; it was expected. As early as February 2007, Hildebrand learned about the normal terms of doing business when the Obama campaign lost out in the bidding for the support of an African-American legislator. His asking price in consulting fees was simply beyond what the campaign was prepared to pay. Obama’s team decided they would not supply “walking-around money” to local political leaders. Hildebrand, a white midwesterner, recruited another young white organizer, Jeremy Bird, who believed the key to organizing the state lay in empowering volunteers, not just relying on paid staff. In mid-2007, the campaign helped organize two thousand house parties to recruit volunteers. “A huge percentage of those house meetings were held by African-American women,” Hildebrand said. “It was really African-American women in South Carolina who built this from the ground up.” On election day, the Obama campaign had thirteen thousand volunteers on the streets helping turn out the vote—eleven thousand of them from in-state. The Clinton campaign, in contrast, was no match. It was pitting an Obama F-16 jet fighter against a Clinton World War II P-51. “There are not enough superlatives to describe the Obama campaign,” Fowler said later. “As good as the Obama campaign was at getting out the vote, the Clinton campaign was that bad.”

  A late poll helped shape perceptions of the race in ways that played to Obama’s benefit. MSNBC and McClatchy newspapers released a poll two days out that showed a close race and an electorate polarized along racial lines, Obama leading Clinton by just eight points and winning just 10 percent of the white vote. If this poll was correct, Obama was in danger of coming out of South Carolina tagged as the black candidate with limited appeal to white voters. Obama’s internal polling had him doing much better among whites, but his advisers let the media spin the story in what they believed was a false, but helpful, direction.

  The Clinton campaign was now trapped between Bill Clinton’s all-in approach to the primary and the impression that Hillary Clinton, spending time out of the state, was ducking it. Bill Clinton’s controversial comments damaged his wife’s candidacy and her absence discouraged some white voters who might otherwise have come out for her.

  Everyone expected Obama to win, but no one anticipated the blowout that occurred. Clinton advisers believed Obama’s margin might be as much as ten or twelve points, as narrow as single digits. He won 55 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 27, with Edwards third at 18 percent. Obama won three-quarters of the black vote against a candidate whose husband had been called the first black president. He also won a quarter of the white vote, assembling a black-white majority that the polling had suggested two days earlier was beyond his grasp. South Carolina became a huge victory for Obama and, commentators said, a rejection of the tactics the Clintons had used against him.

  Obama’s team had learned from Iowa and New Hampshire that the results of any single contest could be fleeting, that he was in a battle against Clinton that would be long, difficult, and chancy. His victory speech that night was edgy and defiant, intended to declare he would not be intimidated by the battle ahead.

  “We are looking for more than just a change of party in the White House,” he said. “We are looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington. It’s a status quo that extends beyond a particular party. And that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got, with the same old tactics that divide and distract us from solving the problems people face, whether the problems are health care that folks can’t afford or a mortgage they cannot pay. This will not be easy. Make no mistake about what we are up against.”

  Obama had told his speechwriters he did not want to make the speech a personal attack on the Clintons. But his meaning was clear. “Let me say this, South Carolina. With what we have seen in the last weeks, we are up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign. They feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. . . . So let me remind you tonight, change will not be easy. Change will take time. . . . This election is about the past versus the future. It’s about whether we settle for the same division and distractions and drama that passes for politics today or whether we reach for politics of common sense, innovation, politics of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.”

  Hillary Clinton left the state before the votes were tallied. Bill Clinton, on his way out, was asked why it took two Clintons to try to beat Obama in South Carolina. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88,” he said, though the reporter had not mentioned Jackson. “He ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama ran a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere.” It was a parting shot from Clinton, a comment that seemed infused with racial implications and an apparent attempt to dismiss Obama’s victory—and candidacy—as nothing more than an extension of the former civil rights leader’s two losing efforts. But those were not his last words. Clinton also talked to Jim Clyburn in what a friend of the congressman’s later described as a “red-faced rant.” The former president was fuming over what had happened in South Carolina, to his wife and to himself—and for good reason. South Carolina was a huge event.

  Long afterwards, we asked Obama whether he felt that Bill Clinton was playing the race card against him in South Carolina. He said he thought some criticisms of Clinton had been unfair. “I think when he said this is a fairy tale about my position on Iraq, I think he was factually wrong, but I don’t think he was playing the race card. He was trying to make an argument that somehow this mythology of me being opposed to Iraq wasn’t entirely true—which is a perfectly legitimate political attack. It wasn’t backed up by the facts, but I don’t think there was anything racial about it. I think some African-Americans took offense.” The Jackson comments, he said, seemed as if what Clinton “was trying to do was be dismissive about the victory and discount it a little bit.”

  It was understandable, he said, why black voters took offense.

  John Lewis was not offended by Bill Clinton’s campaign in South Carolina, but Lewis’s own role there underscored how devastating a defeat Hillary had sustained. It was much more than the loss of an early primary state. In the end, it was the irretrievable loss of the black leadership upon which the Clintons had counted. Nothing better demonstrated that than the defection of Lewis himself, for he had campaigned loyally for Hillary out of long devotion to and admiration for both Clintons. As he would tell us later, “I love Hillary. I love President Clinton. They are like family.”

  Of all the black civil rights leaders, John Lewis had emerged from the violent battles to end segregation as one of the movement’s most admired and heroic figures. His skull had been fractured on that Bloody Sunday in Selma, and in the years since as a Georgia congressman he continued to win praise for his efforts to heal racial tensions and follow the t
enets of Martin Luther King. He had long been a staunch supporter first of Bill, and, more than a decade later, of Hillary. He remembered having breakfast with the soon-to-be candidate from Arkansas, and how two of Lewis’s staff members later said, “Congressman, Bill Clinton acts more like a brother than a lot of brothers.” Lewis became one of the first major black politicians to endorse Clinton; later, he did the same for Hillary. Over the years, when he’d meet with either of them, he remembered how Bill “always said to me, ‘I love you, John,’ and I said, ‘I love you.’” And Hillary, too. “Hillary would come to Atlanta from time to time and say, ‘When I grow up I want to be just like John Lewis,’” he recalled. He became so admiring of her that he told Bill before she decided to run for president, “ ‘Mr. President, Hillary is really smart, she’s smarter than you. She’d be a great president.’ Later I made the decision to endorse her because that was in my soul.”

  Lewis hadn’t known Obama so well then, though he had linked arms with him and Hillary in Selma in commemoration of the march to freedom as the campaign was just beginning. But even before the South Carolina primary, he began to, as he put it, “sense something” about Obama’s appeal. He particularly remembered being out of the country on a congressional fact-finding trip during the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, and how he and other congressmen had listened from Vietnam to both Hillary’s and Barack’s concession and victory speeches. When Lewis returned home, he felt even more strongly that “something’s happening here.” By South Carolina, where he began by campaigning for Hillary, he felt increasingly besieged by conflicting emotions. “I had what I call an executive session with myself. I said to myself, I want to be on the right side of history, and I can’t let this moment pass me by.” So he switched his endorsement to Obama. “It was hard, it was like turning my back on a member of my family.”