The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Around midnight, NBC’s Tim Russert declared, almost matter-of-factly, “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be and no one’s going to dispute it.” At Clinton headquarters, as one adviser recalled, after Russert’s statement, “The air came out of the room.”13

  For weeks, Clinton’s team had grasped at anything to keep alive the hope she might still defeat Obama. Now that hope had died. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates was too large to overcome in the remaining contests. Short of a last act of defiance on her part that would risk shattering the Democratic Party and lessen its chances in November, she could not make the case she’d be able to accumulate enough delegates to win the nomination. Against great odds, after setbacks that might have destroyed weaker candidates, Obama had prevailed. “He survived . . . six weeks that would have taken most other candidates down the drain, given the strength of Hillary Clinton,” Harold Ickes later said. There was still another month to go before the last primary. But for Hillary Clinton, after a campaign of near-deaths and premature obits, her dream of becoming the first female president was over.

  A week later, Clinton won West Virginia by forty-one points. The next week she won Kentucky by thirty-six points. Those two lopsided Clinton victories again raised doubts about whether Obama could win white working-class voters.14 But on the day of Kentucky, Obama took Oregon handily. On June 1, Clinton won Puerto Rico. Then, on June 3, the final day of the long primary process, the two rivals split the results: Obama won Montana, Hillary won South Dakota. On that last day, Obama gained the support of enough superdelegates to assure his nomination. They came to his side in a rush. When the returns were finally in on the last night, he had enough delegates to claim the nomination. Barack Obama had neither limped nor sprinted across the finish line. Hillary Clinton had never given up.

  The final chapter of her campaign could be said to have been the best time of her candidacy. In the face of near hopeless political odds, she displayed her greatest talent as a campaigner. She had begun the race as the inevitable nominee, and by the end found herself fighting off repeated calls to quit. “She could accept losing,” one adviser said. “She could not accept quitting.” After earlier months of turmoil and bitter internal strife, her campaign staff had functioned effectively and, mostly in the final two months, collegially. Most important, in that final period Hillary had found her voice, and her most effective campaign style. Axelrod described her in those days as “frighteningly good.”

  Her success came too late. In the crucial months of January and February, Obama had outplayed her. After Ohio and Texas, her strategy of necessity was focused on convincing uncommitted superdelegates that she would be the stronger nominee. Mark Penn believed brute force was needed to attract them. Obama’s delegate team knew from their private conversations that that would never work (as did Clinton’s delegate team). They had secured private pledges from many of the superdelegates, who were, they knew, risk-averse by nature. They preferred to avoid going public as long as possible. But the Obama team was confident they would never swing in Clinton’s direction. We asked Garin why the Clinton campaign could never crack those superdelegates, many of whom had started out on her side. He said, “I think it’s a mystery and an irony, and an irony in the sense that Hillary was seen as inevitable when it didn’t matter and Obama was seen as inevitable when it did.”

  The popular vote ended in a near tie and amid competing estimates of the actual counts. The Web site Real Clear Politics estimated the popular vote from the primaries and caucuses, using official and unofficial sources, and found Obama had won 152,000 more than Clinton. His total was 17,822,145. Hers was 17,717,698.15

  Obama’s achievement was remarkable. He had toppled the mighty machine that everyone thought was invincible. On the night of Tuesday, June 3, he celebrated his victory in St. Paul, the site of the upcoming Republican National Convention. “Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another—a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” he said. “Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America.” Of Clinton he said, “She has made history not just because she’s a woman who has done what no woman has done before, but because she is a leader who inspires millions of Americans with her strength, her courage, and her commitment to the causes that brought us here tonight.”

  On the flight back to Chicago, Jim Margolis, Obama’s media adviser, asked Obama to join him in a beer to celebrate. “I said, ‘Hey, you just became essentially the nominee, how about a beer?’ And he starts to say yeah, and then says, ‘I’ve got [a speech to] AIPAC in the morning at 7:30.’”

  Clinton appeared that night in New York in a grimy basement gymnasium at Baruch College. On the Monday flight from South Dakota back to New York, the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut reported that she had sat quietly with her husband as reporters and even aides kept their distance. The next day, with the polls still open, she came under intense pressure to announce her withdrawal from the race that night. She resisted, choosing instead to highlight the achievements of her campaign. “So many people said this race was over five months ago in Iowa,” she said, “but we had faith in each other. And you brought me back in New Hampshire, and on Super Tuesday, and in Ohio, and in Pennsylvania and Texas and Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and South Dakota. I will carry your stories and your dreams with me every day for the rest of my life.”

  She continued, “Now the question is, where do we go from here? And where do we need to go as a party? It’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight.” From her cheering section came chants of “Denver. Denver.” Her most die-hard supporters wanted her to take the fight all the way to the convention.

  On Wednesday, her advisers talked about the next steps. Virtually everyone wanted her to get out and endorse Obama quickly. Penn believed she shouldn’t quit, though he did not favor active campaigning. He also suggested they try to negotiate with Obama over the price of her withdrawal. “Make him grovel,” he said.

  Later Clinton met with her team: Penn, Howard Wolfson, Maggie Williams, Geoff Garin, Cheryl Mills, Tina Flournoy, Mandy Grunwald, and Huma Abedin. Penn again made his arguments for negotiations, but Clinton quickly decided it was time to end the campaign and endorse Obama. She canvassed her advisers. Can Obama win? she asked them. Flournoy, who played a key role during the final months, said, “Yes—with your support.” Penn said no, Obama could not win. He believed Obama would face a far more serious vetting in the general election and would not survive it. Clinton then left for a conference call with the New York delegation. It was later reported that she was forced out of the race because Representative Charles Rangel and others told her it was time to quit. In fact, according to those in the room that day, her mind was made up before the call with the New Yorkers.

  Her official exit came on June 7 at the Pension Building in Washington. The speechwriters had labored over the text; there were more than twenty drafts, but by Friday night it was in good shape. By Saturday morning, the word “endorse” had been removed from the speech, one last sign of the divisions in her campaign. This time it proved to be only a minor problem; the endorsement was quickly reinserted. In her speech, Clinton urged her supporters to turn their energies to electing Obama president. “When you hear people saying, or think to yourself, ‘if only’ or ‘what if,’ I say—please don’t go there,” Clinton said. She pledged to “work my heart out to make sure that Senator Obama is our next president, and I hope and pray that all of you will join me in that effort.”

  In the most memorable line of the speech, she spoke of what her campaign had achieved: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about eighteen million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will
be a little easier next time.”

  Many of her supporters believed the opposite: that she had been hampered in her campaign because of lingering sexism in society.

  In the aftermath of the Obama-Clinton battle, what Churchill called “the terrible Ifs” of history could be found everywhere. What if the Clinton campaign had followed Mike Henry’s advice and skipped Iowa? What if a state other than Iowa had started the process? What if Obama had won South Carolina by nine points rather than twenty-nine? What if John Edwards’s affair had been exposed, forcing him from the race and possibly changing the outcome of the race? What if Florida and Michigan had not been penalized—especially Florida? Plouffe told a forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School after the election, “If that Florida primary, coming three days after South Carolina, happened, it might have mitigated all the momentum we got from South Carolina. In fact, we might not be the nominee.” There were many ways to second-guess the Clinton campaign for its strategic and tactical decisions: from positioning her as the ultimate insider in a year of change, to failing to compete harder in the caucuses; from never adequately addressing questions about her character, to the role Bill Clinton played.

  Given the mistakes Clinton made, it was easy to understate the significance of what Obama and his team accomplished—perhaps the most dramatic victory in the history of presidential nomination battles. In early 2007, few people gave Obama a chance to defeat Clinton. His was anything but a smooth ride to the nomination. When it was over, Axelrod looked back and counted up the false starts and missteps the Obama campaign had made, from its slow start-up to taking New Hampshire for granted—“We looked like a rock star taking victory laps,” he said—to mistakes in message and resource allocation that resulted in Clinton winning both Texas and Ohio. That alone cost the campaign $40 million and three months of time.

  What they did right, Axelrod believed, was to understand the shadow that George W. Bush cast over the election and to take advantage of the fact that Obama represented the cleanest break with the status quo. In his estimation, the turning points came in January starting with Iowa and ending with South Carolina and the Kennedys. “The three most important days in this campaign other than the Iowa caucuses were the South Carolina primary, Caroline Kennedy writing her piece in the New York Times the next day, and Teddy doing his thing on Monday,” he said. “You can scope out whether Kennedy helped us or hurt us in this state or that state but it gave an emotional lift to this campaign that I think was the gas that fueled us through the month of February. It really propelled us to a new height.”

  Obama had what other winning candidates have always had: a message that matched the mood of the electorate, an instinct for where the country wanted to go, the discipline to learn from mistakes and improve with time, the patience to weather setbacks. Obama understood better than Clinton how to tap into the public’s desire for change, however defined, and to project himself as the kind of president who could deliver it. He also had something that the other candidates never had, an organization as large, as innovative, and as effective as anything ever put together in presidential politics. Finally, and perhaps most important, Obama’s campaign understood that the nomination battle was a fight for delegates, not for popular votes or success in this or that primary. They never lost sight of that. Plouffe’s focus on delegates—in finding ways to accumulate them and in repeatedly forcing the focus and the narrative of the Obama-Clinton battle back to that reality—kept Obama moving forward even during times of trouble.

  By the end, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were superb candidates. But Obama found, at almost every critical turn, the combination of message, strategy, innovation, and discipline to prevail. He was a high-altitude candidate who rose to big moments. Hillary inspired great passion among her supporters, especially women—a reality often overlooked during the campaign. But Obama inspired more, and not just among young voters, who were consistently his strongest supporters. He married new technology and new media to produce dollars and volunteers that her campaign could not match. Obama also ran an operation that was in many respects the opposite of Clinton’s in its collegiality and sense of mutual respect.

  Long after the election, we asked two chief strategists of the Clinton campaign, Geoff Garin and Mark Penn, why Obama had won and why Clinton had lost. They offered strikingly different answers.

  Garin said, “There was nothing about this election that was traditional or that followed form. And in any other circumstance Obama would have been a counterintuitive candidate to say the least. But I think we were at a moment in America when people, including Democrats, were not just truly angry but worried about the future. They thought the government had come to a standstill and were looking for someone with leadership qualities to lift the country up . . . move the country forward. And Obama’s genuine skills were closely related to what voters thought was required to do that. As you got to the end of 2007, I think he figured out how to articulate the case that he had the leadership qualities that America needed at the moment. . . . Obama’s ability to sort of seize the moment to me was the most important factor. It took them a while to get there. But that JJ [Jefferson Jackson Dinner] speech in Iowa, it was like curtain up and lights on. . . . He made all of the right connections. People were much more interested in leadership than experience. . . . I didn’t feel at the beginning that just talking about change took him far enough. He needed to make a more specific case about why he had the right qualities to do that. . . . Position papers saying change [were not] going to get him elected. At the beginning, aspects of his campaign were more like a Senate campaign than a presidential campaign. But in Iowa he hit the nerve.”

  Garin also believed the Clinton campaign’s miscalculations contributed to Obama’s success. Long before he joined her campaign, he had worked for Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who after a year of exploration decided not to run in 2008. Garin was struck then by how many Democrats were willing to look past Clinton for another candidate. They admired her but that admiration was intellectual. “There was no emotional connection at all,” he said. “The reasons for people to hold back were abundantly clear. They worried that she would be polarizing, not just as a candidate . . . but also as a president. People were always dying to know what made Hillary tick. . . . Just as experience was Obama’s unique burden, the question of what makes Hillary tick was her burden. Obama faced up to his; the Clinton campaign never faced up to hers.”

  Still, he said, Clinton ended on a high note. “One of the not fully told stories of the 2008 campaign is the transformation of Hillary Clinton from former First Lady to someone who is a great political candidate and leader in her own right. But it took too long for that to happen.”

  Penn offered a counterview on what happened, though he agreed with Garin that Obama had run a strong race. In a lengthy e-mail, Penn wrote, “The Obama campaign was a formidable and superb effort—its strength was that it did what it had to do when it had to do it—often freed from the Washington insider model. They got young people to show up in Iowa, they secured the African-American voters when they needed them, they attacked Hillary when she was strong and seemed to be on the verge of winning. . . . They perfected the mass event . . . and they successfully used the Internet to raise money like it had never been raised before, at the same time building a unique coalition of richer progressive voters combined with the African-American vote. At the end of the day, Obama was a once-in-a-generation leader atop a national movement.”

  Penn argued that Obama benefited mightily from a favorable press. “It was so obvious that Saturday Night Live struck a national nerve highlighting the press bias. Hillary had to get her message through without the aid of a single consistently favorable columnist or writer. Not one.”

  Clinton, he said, despite her many advantages, faced big challenges. She had to overcome doubts among some voters about a woman’s ability to serve as president. She carried baggage from her husband’s impeachment and her role in the Clinton adm
inistration’s failed health care attempt. And she had no history or connection with voters in Iowa, “a state that did not take to Hillary and sure wasn’t Hillary’s favorite place to campaign in.”

  Penn defended himself against the criticism that he had misunderstood the big changes under way in the country and had orchestrated a campaign message that prized experience over change, turning Clinton into an incumbent in a year when people wanted an outsider. “The message of her campaign was never simple experience—that was the opposition’s refram ing of her message,” he wrote. “It was an argument that it takes experience to make change happen and when people saw the two candidates side by side responding to tough questions, in all but one of the debates, Hillary came off as the one you knew both would turn around the country from George Bush’s policies and yet also was ready to handle anything the presidency could throw at her.”

  He then addressed the internal divisions in the Clinton campaign over how to present her. “Some believed that she should have shown a softer side as the key to showing her sincerity. I believed that the only way for her to win was to show a combination of strength and leadership. . . . The more she came out fighting for people and the more she took him on directly on experience, on economics, on his ‘bitter’ comments, the more she seemed both a stronger candidate and the more she won.”

  The errors, he said, included “not going to Iowa in earlier years, not having the organization to play early enough in the other caucus states, not fighting to keep Florida and Michigan in, not successfully budgeting 2007 resources, not having an extended press operation to deal with the bias, and I take my share of the blame and responsibility for them.”