Everyone understood the math. In addition to the 3,253 pledged delegates, there were approximately 800 superdelegates—Democratic elected officials and other party leaders—who were automatically given seats at the national convention. Under party rules, they were free to vote for any candidate of their choosing, regardless of which candidate had more pledged delegates. Harold Ickes and his deputy Lisa DiBartolomeo had prepared a memo on the eve of Super Tuesday that anticipated Obama would win more pledged delegates that day—and that Clinton could lose almost every subsequent contest for the remainder of the month. Her candidacy then depended on winning the support of superdelegates. Obama’s advisers were making the case that the superdelegates should not override the popular will of Democratic voters, but Clinton was stressing that she would be the stronger nominee in November. The South Carolina primary, however, had damaged the relationship the Clintons had with much of the party establishment, which made her chances of winning over those superdelegates that much harder. “We are in for a real fight. . . . Given some breaks it is a fight that she can win,” Ickes and DiBartolomeo wrote in the memo, which was later obtained by Josh Green of the Atlantic . “But it will be a fight.” That was the rosy scenario.
Ahead on March 4 lay Ohio and Texas. Bill Clinton himself set expectations dangerously high for Hillary. An Obama victory in either state would knock Hillary out of the race, Bill suggested publicly while campaigning in Texas two days after Wisconsin. Even Hillary seemed resigned to losing, or so some thought on the night of February 21 when she and Obama met on the campus of the University of Texas for one of two debates before the March 4 primaries. As the session was ending, CNN’s Campbell Brown asked both candidates to recall a moment in life that had tested them as a president is when confronted by crises. Obama gave a perfunctory and safe answer. Clinton created a stir with hers. “I think everybody here knows I’ve lived through some crises and some challenging moments in my life,” she said in obvious reference to her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. She talked about the lives of people she had met and their struggles. “You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country,” she said.
At this point she reached out to shake Obama’s hand. In the press room, there was a collective “Where is this going?” moment. “I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama,” she said. “I am absolutely honored. Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that’s what this election should be about.”
Her words sounded like a valedictory, but as the coming days would show, they were not an exit from the stage.
Obama’s team was determined to bring the nomination contest to a close on March 4. One day in February, Plouffe called Jon Carson and Larry Grisolano into a conference room at the Chicago headquarters. They were the field generals running two major departments in the campaign, Grisolano overseeing the media, polling, and research, and Carson directing the ground operations. By then Obama’s victories were producing an avalanche of money (the campaign would take in a staggering $55 million in February alone) and Plouffe was ready to spend it to knock Clinton out of the race. He had a pool of between $15 and $20 million that he was budgeting for March 4 (which included Rhode Island and Vermont as well as Ohio and Texas). His instructions were straightforward. Spend the money, he told them. Let’s end it.
But for all of Obama’s advantages, neither Ohio nor Texas presented an easy victory. Clinton’s Texas roots were deep. As a college student, she had gone there in 1972 to work for the Democratic National Committee while Bill Clinton was helping run George McGovern’s Texas campaign. In 1992, the Clintons desperately wanted to win Texas, despite its growing red-state leanings. But Bush easily won the state. Even so, neither Clinton ever lost their affinity for Texas.
Their experiences then, and later during Bill’s presidency, had left Hillary with ties to every possible community and constituency, from Ann Richards liberals to labor leaders in Houston to the moneyed crowd in Dallas, plus her connections to African-Americans and strong support from the state’s large Hispanic community. Obama was a newcomer who hoped to appeal to a new generation of Texans, both Hispanics and Anglos. But he had little time to make his case. As Hidalgo County Judge J. D. Salinas told an Obama adviser who called seeking an endorsement, “It’s too late.”
Ohio was even more daunting. The state’s economic woes made its electorate particularly receptive to Clinton’s focus on bread-and-butter issues. Though Obama had begun his career as a community organizer, he had been slow to develop his voice on economic issues. Clinton might not be warm and fuzzy, but on economic issues voters trusted the Clinton name and record. Beyond that, blue-collar Ohio, southern Ohio, Appala chian Ohio appeared resistant to Obama. He constantly had to knock down mysterious e-mails and insidious Internet traffic falsely suggesting that he was Muslim. There were questions about his patriotism, stemming from a photo that seemed to suggest he refused to put his hand over his heart when he said the Pledge of Allegiance; the photo had actually been taken during the singing of the national anthem during the Tom Harkin steak fry in Iowa in September 2007 when, like millions of fans at sports contests, he stood with arms at his sides.
Just who was this man? voters wondered aloud as they shared their doubts with neighbors and reporters. Clinton benefited from the support of Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who had led the Democratic resurgence there in 2006 and intuitively understood the conservative parts of southeastern Ohio. He devised a plan for the primary that would put both Clintons into the rural areas of the state during the final week of the primary campaign.
They were her last lifeline. She was counting on a strategy that would produce victories in the big states and thus persuade the superdelegates that Obama was not electable in the fall.
Clinton’s generous words to Obama in Austin proved a fleeting moment of harmony in a contest that quickly turned bitter. If anyone thought she was preparing for a graceful exit, they did not understand her grit and determination. She was motivated by a belief that she would be the superior president and the more electable nominee against John McCain in November. She was also driven by a constitution and a work ethic that would not let her give up. Against the odds, she fought harder. Her message became more populist.
Two days after the Texas debate, she was handed a pair of Obama fliers that attacked her positions on health care and the North American Free Trade Agreement. She responded with a withering denunciation of Obama during a press conference in Cincinnati. Obama’s charges were “false and discredited,” she said. She accused him of hypocrisy, of running a campaign of hope from his pedestal at big rallies while employing tactics “right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.” She called his campaign destructive and ended with a memorable challenge to her rival: “So shame on you, Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign that is consistent with your messages in public. That’s what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio. Let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign.”
When that debate took place at Cleveland State University, Clinton was put on the defensive by moderators Brian Williams and Tim Russert of NBC News. She tried to fight back against Obama on health care, accusing him of putting forth a plan that fell short of the Democratic goal of universal coverage. But it was clear she was feeling the stress of her precarious situation. At one point she flared testily when she thought the moderators were not being evenhanded. “Could I just point out that, in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time?” she complained. “And I don’t mind. You know, I’ll be happy to field them, but I do find it curious. And if anybody saw Saturday Night Live, you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he’s comfortable and needs another pillow.”
Days earlier, SNL had mocked the press over its fawning treatment of Obama;
the Clinton campaign now was determined to embarrass the press into giving tougher coverage of Obama, who disparaged that attempt. “I am a little surprised that all the complaining about the refs has actually worked as well as it has for them,” Obama told reporters. “This whole spin of how the press has just been so tough on them and not tough on us—I didn’t expect that you guys would bite on that.”
Five days before the primaries, she launched her toughest ad. Penn had finally gotten his way. The ad—his ad!—was titled “3 a.m.” and showed sleeping children, a worried mother, and the sound of a phone ringing. When there is a crisis in the middle of the night, who do you want answering the phone in the White House? the ad asked. All you had to do was pose the question, and everybody knew the answer, Penn believed. The ad aired only in Texas, where Clinton’s campaign was most worried and where economic issues alone were not enough to assure her victory, and it dominated coverage the final weekend, but Plouffe was dubious about its effect. Nevertheless he moved instantly to counter with an ad of his own. “Voters believe Barack Obama would be a strong commander in chief who would have the judgment and approach to handle a crisis,” Plouffe said.
Despite the huge crowds, the momentum, and a sense of inevitability, Obama was once again losing his edge. His change message was becoming blurred and more conventional. Was he change or just another typical politician? He seized on NAFTA as a wedge issue to use against Clinton in Ohio, citing her support for the trade agreement while her husband was president. But then, in the closing days before the two primaries, reports surfaced about a meeting that one of his economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, had convened at the Canadian consulate in Chicago. The reports said Goolsbee had assured the Canadians that Obama’s tough anti-NAFTA stand was merely campaign rhetoric and not to be taken seriously. Obama denied the description of the meeting, but it dogged him nonetheless.
More distractions erupted on the eve of the primary. Tony Rezko, the Chicago developer who had been a significant Obama contributor and had sold Obama a small piece of property next to the Obama home in Hyde Park, went on trial for corruption charges. “I don’t excuse myself for having made an error,” Obama told reporters, “and I’ve said that repeatedly.” Was there anything new, he asked in exasperation, other than the fact of the trial and the Clinton campaign’s decision to make an issue of it? Nothing, the Clinton camp suggested, other than a possible vulnerability for Obama if he were to become the nominee.
For the first time since New Hampshire, the sure-footed instincts of Obama’s operation broke down. He was campaigning at high altitude while Clinton was in the trenches. As in New Hampshire, she appeared to want victory more. Both were on the edge of exhaustion, but her days were longer and her perseverance greater. Then the Obama campaign made a key tactical error—the single biggest mistake of the nomination contest. Plouffe decided to have Obama split his time between Ohio and Texas in the final days. Later he concluded that had Obama focused exclusively on Texas he might have won the primary and ended the race. That was questionable hindsight, for in those final seventy-two hours, Hillary Clinton was the better candidate.
She also shuttled back and forth between the two states. From Texas she slipped away from her press corps and flew to New York for a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live. The cast reenacted the Ohio debate, portraying Clinton as shrill and obnoxious and the moderators as fawning protectively over Obama. “Do I really laugh like that?” she asked after Amy Poehler mimicked what had become known as the candidate’s cackle. Her campaign was cheered by the appearance—finally some humor from Hillary. From there it was on to Ohio for a day that took her from the outskirts of Columbus into some of the hardest-hit areas of the state, around Youngstown and Akron, before ending with an evening rally in Cleveland.
Her stump speech by then was a recitation of tales of woe: poignant stories of real people she had met or been told about along the campaign trail who were grappling with adversity—job losses, no health care coverage—and for whom there has been no happy ending. She wore their stories on her sleeve, and her audiences instantly responded in a way that said they knew the kinds of people she described. Campaigning through central Ohio days earlier, Bill Clinton asked those in his audiences to raise their hands if they knew someone without health insurance. All over the gymnasiums, hands shot up. Hillary’s answer to all this hardship was not just to empathize with it but to show a fighting spirit. Ads featuring Strickland repeatedly used the word “fighter” to describe her. The fight phraseology drowned out almost everything else coming from the campaign. An audience in a high school gymnasium in Westerville responded with foot-stomping approval when Clinton shouted, “One thing you know about me. I am not afraid to get into a fight on your behalf.”
In New Hampshire, she had found her voice with a teary-eyed moment when her emotions got the best of her. In Ohio she found a different voice, one that took the vulnerabilities and problems of others and put them on her shoulders. This was the authentic Clinton, more so than the emotional Hillary in the New Hampshire diner. Her message to Ohio in the final hours was not uplifting, but it was direct and determined. She had become the embodiment of the voters who had the power to save her candidacy. She talked of the resilience of people in Ohio. What she hoped was that they would see the same strength in her and reward it with their votes.
Obama awaited the returns on the night of March 4 in San Antonio, where the chilly weather and small crowd seemed an ominous sign. Clinton celebrated in Ohio, where the strains of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” expressed the metaphor that her campaign had been looking for since New Hampshire. The delegate numbers would eventually make the evening’s results almost a wash. Clinton would win more in Ohio, but in Texas, with a split system of primary and caucus on the same day, Obama would eventually come out ahead. But the popular vote was featured in the coverage and the analysis. In Texas, Clinton emerged with a narrow popular-vote victory. In Ohio, she won decisively.
Her campaign was in debt and still mired in internecine warfare. The delegate math still seemed impossible to overcome. But Clinton’s victory provided the rationale to keep the race going. She vowed to keep fighting. “You know what they say: ‘As Ohio goes, so goes the nation,’” she said. “Well, this nation’s coming back and so is this campaign. We’re going on, we’re going strong, and we’re going all the way.” Obama insisted that her successes would not stop his march toward victory. “We know this,” he said. “No matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead as we had this morning and we are on our way to winning this nomination.”
On primary day, Obama was subdued. He had spent part of the day in his hotel suite. Michelle, Eric Whitaker, and Valerie Jarrett were there. Obama could not sit still. He paced the room as they watched a movie. He conferred with his advisers and looked at the numbers. He worked on his speech. They all ate a quiet dinner. By then the results were clear. His hopes of ending the nomination battle had evaporated. He knew the consequences. This was not a loss like New Hampshire, a defeat that truly threatened his candidacy. But in many ways it was more disheartening, because it meant there would be no early end to the battle. “New Hampshire was a gut check,” he told us. “In New Hampshire, all our momentum from Iowa had been broken and we’re looking at a bunch of contests. We could have lost [the nomination] after New Hampshire. After Ohio and Texas, my attitude was, we will win this thing but it will be painful.”
The next morning, Obama had breakfast in the hotel before flying to Chicago. He was pensive as he thought about what the results meant. Efforts to cheer him fell flat. Michelle was eager to get back to Chicago and be with their daughters, and with the difficult assignment of telling them that their father would not be spending much time at home in the coming weeks. Obama said he wanted to meet with his staff, to hold an unscheduled gathering of the high command. The ride back was quiet. Barack and Michelle sat together and talked through part of the flight.
> The staff was exhausted and dispirited. Axelrod, after seeming weary of the sniping, sounded newly pugnacious, telling reporters Obama would not sit idly by while under attack (though that had never been the case). “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he told reporters. Gibbs said later, “We knew we were not going to have the luxury of winning this thing in March. We’re not going to have the luxury of spending two months getting ready for the general election. We’re not going to have all those things you wish you had. We’re not going to get a week and a half off. At that point, all your batteries are dead because the truth is we’ve been running this marathon at a sprint pace for a really, really long time.”
Obama was scheduled to take the rest of the day off. When he got back to Chicago, he went home, showered, and returned to the headquarters. He wasn’t happy, but he took time to walk around the office, shaking hands with the young staffers, many of whom he barely knew. At the staff meeting, he had a notebook or piece of paper and Gibbs could see that the page was covered with jottings. Obama had written a series of lists: things he could have done better, things the staff could have done better. “He started off by saying, ‘Look I’m not here to point fingers, because I can think of a dozen things I could have done better or more in the last couple of weeks. But plainly we didn’t do well and we ought to figure out why and make sure we do better next time,’” Axelrod recalled.
The Battle for America 2008 Page 24
