The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  After Wright and “bitter,” as his San Francisco comments were abbreviated by the media, Hillary Clinton was on the attack and would not let up. “I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America,” she said in Indianapolis on April 12. “Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans, certainly not the Americans that I know. . . . Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of a constitutional right, Americans who believe in God believe it’s a matter of personal faith.” Obama tried to backpedal. “Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” he told a North Carolina newspaper.

  Clinton repeated her criticisms at every stop. Irritated, Obama said that she was beginning to sound like Annie Oakley with all her appeals to gun owners. “Hillary Clinton’s out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.” But he continued to apologize. At a forum on faith and compassion, he described his words as “clumsy.”

  The controversy came amid new problems for Clinton. The first involved Hillary’s embellishments about a trip to Bosnia she had made as First Lady. On the campaign trail, she described a harrowing arrival in Tuzla under sniper fire. Only when videos showed her being greeted on the tarmac by children did she recant and apologize. Later, Bill Clinton offered a spirited but inaccurate defense, which prompted Hillary to tell him to keep quiet.

  Then she was forced to demote Mark Penn as chief strategist after the Wall Street Journal reported that, as CEO of Burson Marsteller, the giant public relations and lobbying firm, he had recently met with the Colombian ambassador. The Colombians were seeking to win passage of a free trade agreement that Clinton publicly opposed. Geoff Garin, who had been advising part-time, was named as co-chief strategist with communications director Howard Wolfson. The Penn demotion had both practical and symbolic significance. Symbolically, it removed the most visible antagonist from atop the campaign’s management structure. Practically, the decision meant that Penn would never again play as central a role as he had before. He remained on the campaign team and continued to conduct polls (as did Garin) and offer advice. But other advisers found it far easier to ignore his ideas on strategy and message. The campaign became more collegial and, under the management of Maggie Williams and Cheryl Mills, operated with greater efficiency.

  Despite Clinton’s mishaps, Obama remained the focus of criticism and could not escape the charge that he wasn’t connecting with white working-class voters. In Pennsylvania he adjusted his campaign style, scaling back on his big rallies in favor of roundtable discussions and informal stops at cafés or ice-cream shops. Clinton had the support of Governor Ed Rendell, the most prominent Pennsylvania Democrat, but Obama got the endorsement of Senator Bob Casey, whose pro-life father had been a popular governor. Casey was popular with the working-class voters Obama was trying to win, and the two campaigned by bus across the state. One day they stopped at a bowling alley for a photo opportunity. Obama, trying his hand on the lanes, embarrassed himself by rolling a thirty-seven. It was one more small indignity on top of more than a month of trouble.

  A third bad moment for Obama came on April 16, when Obama and Hillary debated for the last time at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where Obama had delivered his race speech. Obama now put forth one of the worst debate performances of his campaign.

  He was in a foul mood before the debate. “I never felt surer that we were heading into a disaster as I did heading into that Philadelphia debate,” Axelrod said later. “He had gotten word on his BlackBerry heading into the debate that Wright was going on a tour. He was preoccupied with that. He was completely distracted. He was on his BlackBerry through the debate prep. He just didn’t want to do the debate. He was frankly just sick of debating Hillary Clinton.” Obama took a long break during debate prep. Sometimes that helped. This time it did not. He was still unenthusiastic as the debate was ready to begin. “It was just a dreary day that yielded to a dreary night,” Axelrod said.

  ABC News hosted the debate, with anchor Charles Gibson and Sunday morning host George Stephanopoulos as moderators. Clinton was asked about her Bosnia exaggeration, but Obama drew tougher questions about his “bitter” comment and about Reverend Wright.

  Obama called his “bitter” comment “mangled,” saying it was neither the first nor last time he would make a mistake. Clinton went right at Obama. She spoke about her father and grandfather, who had grown up in Scranton. “I don’t believe that my grandfather or my father or the many people whom I have had the privilege of knowing and meeting across Pennsylvania over many years cling to religion when Washington is not listening to them,” she said. Asked whether Obama could beat John McCain, she danced around the question until Stephanopoulos pressed her. “Yes. Yes. Yes,” she said. It was the most positive she had been about his November prospects, but she added, “I think I can do a better job.”

  Obama had gotten through earlier debates without too many embarrassing questions. Not this time. The moderators showed a video question from Nash McCabe of Latrobe. “I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen, and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don’t.” Obama, frustrated, responded, “I have never said that I don’t wear flag pins or refuse to wear flag pins. This is the kind of manufactured issue that our politics has become obsessed with and, once again, distracts us from what should be my job when I’m commander in chief, which is going to be figuring out how we get our troops out of Iraq and how we actually make our economy better for the American people.”

  Stephanopoulos followed with a question about Obama’s association with William Ayers, an issue that had been bubbling but had never been given a full airing in a debate. During the sixties and seventies Ayers was a member of the radical Weather Underground that had planted bombs at the Capitol and elsewhere. Decades later, he had worked with Obama on an education foundation board in Chicago. “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from,” Obama said. “He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George.”

  The moderators drew considerable criticism for their questions, especially from Obama’s network of supporters around the country. But Obama suffered most from his performance.

  Given the state’s demographics and the solid working-class voters Clinton continued to attract, Obama was almost destined to lose Pennsylvania. But after the Wright controversy and the damage from his “bitter” comments, the debate slowed his movement and turned the primary wholly in Clinton’s favor.

  Obama’s goal had been to keep her victory margin well below the ten points by which she had won Ohio. He failed. She won Pennsylvania by just over nine points, taking the white vote by twenty-six points (compared to thirty in Ohio). Obama attracted less support in the Philadelphia suburbs—a critically important area for Democratic candidates—than he had hoped. After revamping his campaign style, devoting most of seven weeks to Pennsylvania, and spending a record $11 million on television ads, Obama had made no real progress with white voters.

  Obama and his advisers did not accept the analysis that he had a problem with white working-class voters. The press might have been obsessed with this, he told us, but “we were always just much more sanguine about it. Our view was never that we had a white working-class problem. Our view was that we had an age problem. Sixty-five and over was always our worst group; eighteen to twenty-nine was always our best group and it followed almost perfectly on graphs.”

  Despite these figures, Obama faced a critical question being raised both by the
Clinton team and his critics: Why could he not win the major states, and how seriously would that affect his chances in a general election? No Democrat had ever won the nomination after losing primaries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Jersey and California.

  The Pennsylvania loss put new pressure on Obama as he headed toward the May 6 Indiana and North Carolina primaries. He was now certain he would be the Democratic nominee and believed that Clinton also knew that was so. But she was in the race to the end, determined to continue making the case that she would be the stronger general election candidate. Another five weeks of combat would prevent him from preparing for the fall campaign, threatening to damage him by exposing his weaknesses. “She was helping do the work of the Republicans by just beating up on him in pretty significant ways,” an Obama adviser said.

  The day after Pennsylvania, an unhappy Obama made a round of calls seeking advice and then convened his senior staff for a lengthy discussion. He felt his campaign had underperformed in Pennsylvania, and wanted to refocus his operation. “There was a clear message from the candidate that he did not want to win the nomination limping across the finish line,” Anita Dunn, his communications director, said.

  Then Reverend Wright reappeared. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS on April 25, feted at an NAACP dinner in Detroit two days later, and on Monday, April 28, spoke to a breakfast gathering at the National Press Club, where he declined to take back his most controversial comments about how the United States brought the 9/11 attacks on itself, praised the Nation of Islam leader the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, saying, “He didn’t put me in chains,” and, in a final thrust, dismissed Obama as a typical politician. Even though Wright’s performance reinforced his image as a self-obsessed minister determined to salve his own damaged ego, his latest appearance could not have been worse for Obama. Yet Obama was slow to react. He was campaigning when he learned of Wright’s latest barrage. How bad is it? he asked Jarrett by telephone. Not good, she said, but struggled to describe just how bad. You have to watch it. Under pressure to say something, Obama issued a tepid statement rebuking Wright, but it fell far short of what many of his friends and outside advisers believed was necessary. The best Obama could muster was “He does not speak for me.”

  The new eruption caused Obama real anguish. “The second one was in some ways more painful because I felt that was a personal breach on the part of Reverend Wright,” he told us.

  Obama and the senior staff conferred by phone. The question, as one adviser bluntly put it, was “How are we going to elect someone president of the United States who has this person as pastor?” Obama and his team agreed he would need a much stronger statement to mark his full break with Wright. It came the next day: “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church,” Obama said. “They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs.” He described Wright’s comments as “outrageous” and “ridiculous.”

  After Wright’s reappearance, Obama’s numbers plummeted in Indiana. A CBS News/New York Times poll showed doubt about Obama’s ability to win the nomination. And doubts about his values and his patriotism had grown, adding to concerns about whether he could win the general election. But the polls also showed that Clinton had been weakened by her combat with Obama. Geoff Garin told reporters that he saw two important shifts that favored Clinton over Obama in the fall. The economy was now the most important issue in the election, eclipsing Iraq, and Clinton did consistently better than Obama among voters who felt the economy was the most important issue.

  With the Wright issue threatening his candidacy anew, Obama decided to make a major issue out of Clinton’s support for a summer holiday from gasoline taxes. The dispute captured fundamental differences in their campaigns. He claimed she was practicing the old politics of pander; she argued that she was more willing to take whatever steps she could to help working families. Obama pushed the gas tax debate hard not just because of the clear philosophical difference with Clinton. By focusing voters on a substantive dispute, he hoped to divert attention from Reverend Wright.

  Clinton, gambling that she would win Indiana easily, shifted more of her focus to North Carolina. If she could hold down Obama’s margin there and decisively defeat him in Indiana, she would strengthen her argument to superdelegates that she would be stronger against McCain in November. As she began the final weekend of that campaign, she knew the script by heart: Once again her back was against the wall. Her slim hopes depended on her victories and on mistakes by Obama. If she couldn’t emerge from the primaries with more delegates, she needed to overtake him in the popular vote. Only then might superdelegates start swinging back toward her.

  She had found a groove, pushing forward relentlessly, demonstrating with each stop that she would not yield until she was defeated once and for all. The time was short and so her days were long. Most began very early in the morning and almost always stretched late into the night. Rallies. Town hall meetings. Small gatherings. Rope lines. Local interviews. Network heavies. Hotel arrivals after midnight. It was an endless rotation, repeated over and over again.

  She throttled back on some of the hot rhetoric that had marked her closing days before the Ohio primary. She was less the pure fighter than in Ohio. But she was as resilient. North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, a supporter, told an audience in rural Kinston that she was “as tough as a lighter knot,” a regionalism that refers to the hardest spots on a piece of pinewood. That brought a smile from the candidate. Her core message was “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Her secondary message: “When I tell you I’ll do something I’ll do it, or move heaven and earth” trying.

  She was looser, liberated from the constraints of being the inevitable front-runner. She attacked the rope lines with more gusto than even her husband. She signed endless autographs on everything imaginable—placards, scraps of paper, photos, books, boxing gloves. “Ha Ha! Hillary,” she scrawled in large letters on the T-shirt of a young man in Terre Haute. She roared when someone asked her to sign a placard that read, “I’ve got a crush on Hillary.” She laughed even harder over a T-shirt worn by another man with Bill Clinton’s likeness superimposed over a painting of Jesus. Before Kentucky Derby weekend, she told supporters in Louis ville, “I want everybody to place a little money on the filly.”

  As the votes in Indiana and North Carolina neared, Obama’s pace nearly equaled Clinton’s. For several nights in a row he had only a few hours of sleep as the staff piled on extra events and flights. “We just had to dig deep,” Obama told us later. “[We] probably worked as hard during that week as we did at any time in the election.”

  The night before Indiana, the campaign staged a big rally with Stevie Wonder in Indianapolis. When it was over, Obama had some time to relax before a late-night visit to a factory. As was often the case in moments of stress or relaxation, he was joined by friends Eric Whitaker, Valerie Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt. Jarrett remembers Obama despondent. He told us, “We had lost Pennsylvania and now we’re going into a couple of pretty tough states. We [were] just getting our groove back and suddenly this [Wright] thing pops up again. And you felt like, well maybe we’re just not going to survive this. Maybe people are just going to feel too skittish or just feel that I was mortally wounded and that I wouldn’t be able to survive a general election and that could start changing how delegates think.”

  Jarrett said she had never seen Obama as down as he was that night. “That was the worst night,” she said. “There’ve been other tough nights, certainly, but for me there was no worse night. He was saying you know there’s so many people who’ve worked so hard on this campaign, just how devastating it would be to lose because of Reverend Wright, somebody who’s supposed to be on his side,” Jarrett said. “It was a conversation where he was just so troubled by the whole episode. It was so bad we were just trying to, like, make jokes about it because, you
know how some situations are just beyond the pale, and this one was way beyond the pale and we spent an hour trying to get him to laugh and he just wouldn’t laugh. Finally Marty said something completely ridiculous and started to get a little bit of a response out of him.”

  At that point, Axelrod came into the room. He did not know how grim the mood had been earlier. He only saw Obama and his close friends laughing and smiling. I have some bad news, he told Obama. The final night of tracking in Indiana showed Clinton ahead by twelve points. Public polls showed the race far closer and Axelrod had been warned by pollster Paul Harstad that the numbers might simply reflect a bad one-night sample. But the poll appeared to confirm Obama’s fears. He told the group: Whatever happens is going to happen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Over the Top

  “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be.”

  —Tim Russert, May 6, 2008

  On the night of May 6, Clinton’s staff settled into the war room at the campaign’s Virginia headquarters. Mexican food, as always, had been ordered. Clinton was in Indianapolis awaiting the returns. Everyone anticipated another good night. Hillary and Bill were optimistic, believing she would win Indiana and come close in North Carolina. They had dipped once again into their personal fortune, lending her campaign more than a million dollars in the week before those votes. But that night, nothing went according to plan. The networks called North Carolina for Obama early—a double-digit victory. Then, as the Indiana returns dribbled in, for hours the TV analysts offered increasingly pessimistic commentary about her candidacy. Even after she finally narrowly won Indiana, their negative drumbeat continued.