The Battle for America 2008
Page 36
That was where she stood as the primary voting began in early 2008. By then, she liked Hillary more than before. Hillary would make progress with health care reform and had the ability “to right the wrongs that have happened with the Republican administration.” Most important, Citerone wanted to see a woman in the White House. “We’re overdue,” she said. “England’s had Thatcher, and that was quite a while ago. Other countries had female leaders, and it seems the U.S., being a significant power, should step up and have a female president. I just hope she’s the right one.” As for Obama, she still thought him appealing, “but I’m feeling less certain that he has the experience and the assertiveness to handle this job at this point. He’s a young man, relatively young. In the future he might be the right president, but maybe not now.”
When we spoke to her again, after Iowa, New Hampshire, and Super Tuesday, she had experienced a complete change. As the time approached to cast her own primary vote in Maryland in mid-February, she struggled with her choice, studied the candidates’ records, watched even more debates, asked friends what they were thinking, how they were deciding. “Most of those I spoke to are registered Democrats—well, a couple are Republicans—and a lot of those I talked to are leaning toward Obama,” she said. “But my friends are saying he has a lot of charisma. They find that attractive, and I do too. I decided myself that I would vote for him.”
She explained her decision to shift from Clinton to Obama this way: “What turned the tide for me was the negative campaigning that President Clinton did a few weeks back [in South Carolina]. That struck me. I tried to weigh it. Did it really matter? Someone said, ‘Oh, that’s the way politicians are. They get down and dirty. And that happens.’ So at first I thought, well, grin and bear it. But through all that negative campaigning I didn’t learn anything about Obama that I didn’t like. Then a few people like Ted Kennedy came out and said to the Clintons, ‘Why don’t you stop? That doesn’t look good.’ I thought that’s interesting that someone so powerful has to step in. And that turned the tide for me.”
The Hillary equation, and what it said about the internal divisions within the Democratic Party, was even more striking, and complicated, for Karen Kaplowitz and her husband Alan Cohen of affluent Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Both are ardent Democrats, both lawyers who have a marketing consulting business, and both began as Hillary supporters. When we spoke, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary in April, they had just cast their absentee ballots.
Karen Kaplowitz voted for Clinton, but was unsure how her husband voted. “If you don’t tell her, I can tell you,” Alan told us. “I voted for Obama because I want Hillary to be out now and I want it to be over.”
Splitting their vote did not mean they disagreed about Hillary’s abilities, or on how they viewed Obama and the stakes for the country. “If I didn’t have a wife to answer to,” Alan said, “I would’ve been an Obama supporter earlier, but I didn’t have a problem joining her in supporting Hillary. I think she’d make a wonderful president.” As for Karen, she said, “I see Hillary as one of the great women of our generation, enormously competent.” Karen was a lifelong feminist, had campaigned for Bobby Kennedy while a student at Columbia. Then, in law school, she moved from civil rights to women’s rights. Though she admired Obama and would be happy for him to be president, she said, “I adore Hillary Clinton. That’s just how it comes out.”
As for the election, “I’d say the stakes are as great as they’ve ever been. And the idea of there being four more years of a Bush-like administration is chilling to me.”
By the time she voted in the primary, Karen had become increasingly troubled by Bill Clinton’s campaign role and was forced, reluctantly, to rethink her support for Hillary. “During the first phase of the campaign, when [Bill] seemed to be helping Hillary, I certainly wasn’t upset. But of late, it’s more upsetting to see him do things that diminish her. . . . Frankly, I think it’s been uphill for Hillary since Iowa. I don’t think she’s done a bad job. I just think Obama swept in on the strength of her clearing that path.”
So despite her ardent enthusiasm for Hillary, she concluded Hillary could not be nominated. “I’m hugely impressed with her tenacity, relent lessness, fight, capability to get up every time she’s knocked down,” she said. “But at this point it’s enough already. I’d love to see Hillary be president. I think she’d be spectacular. But I’m okay with Obama being president. I just can’t stand four more Bush-like years. We need closure.”
As for Obama, the more she watched the campaign, the more impressed she became; he was, she said, “a person of enormous capability, enormous intelligence. But I do worry about whether he’s electable. I worry about whether there are people who won’t vote for him because he’s black. I worry about the Republican attack machine.” In the end, if Obama were nominated would she support him? “Totally. Enthusiastically. I’d walk precincts for him. Raise money for him. Donate money to him. Do whatever it takes to elect a Democrat this November.”
In this, she and her husband Alan were in agreement. He too had been troubled by Bill Clinton. “For a guy who is extremely smart, the best speaker since Martin Luther King, and now you have to put Obama in there, I don’t understand why he’s been so off. I have concerns about having him back in the White House: his personal self-control. That’s a risk for turning the presidency again into a circus.”
He had no reservations about Obama, and believed he had the ability “to rally the populace to refuse to put up with the business as usual that we’ve seen over the past few years.” It was a point he was making regularly with friends and neighbors, many of them Republicans. “I have a neighbor across the street I walk with regularly, a staunch Republican who says he’s sleeping better at night because the Democrats are beating each other up,” he said. “I keep telling him, ‘Don’t sleep too much. McCain is not that strong a candidate.’”
The neighbor, Bob Macauley, a sixty-nine-year-old investment banker, started out as a Democrat, then turned to the Republicans after what he viewed as the disastrous Jimmy Carter presidency. That “entire calculus changed with Ronald Reagan.” At that time, Macauley was serving on Philadelphia’s economic development committee as a Democrat. “I saw the total dissipation of taxpayer funds into programs that amounted to absolutely nothing,” he recalled. “I said, ‘This is not someone else’s money being thrown down a rat hole. It was my wife’s money and my money.’ So I voted for Reagan and switched to the Republican Party. When Reagan reduced the capital gains rate from forty-five to twenty-eight percent, it turned our life around. I’ve voted straight Republican since that time.”
When the election year began, Macauley was pessimistic about GOP chances. He voted twice for George W. Bush (“a monumental mistake”) and thought Republicans “truly deserved to lose.”
But to him, John McCain was “an outlaw among Republicans. He works with people on both sides of the aisle, and I like that. And half of the Republican leadership can’t stand him. The fact that he doesn’t get along with all of them is fine by me. With a president who can work both sides of the aisle, it will be similar to Eisenhower and the Democratic Congress, which was a work of art.”
As he watched the campaign unfold, with bitterness dividing the Clinton and Obama camps, Macauley was even more optimistic about McCain’s chances. “I torment Alan,” he said, “by saying it will be a brokered convention and at the second or third ballot it will be Albert Arnold Gore.” To that, “Alan of course brings up [McCain’s] age. I point out that his mom is ninety-five and plays tennis.”
Still, Macauley recognized McCain’s age could be a problem. His greatest worry about McCain’s electability was that “he doesn’t make a disastrous-type Republican pick for VP. On the contrary, the Democrats do a pretty good job of picking vice presidents beginning with Truman. Why are Republicans so abysmal?”
All the more reason, he went on, why the vice presidential choice this year was “going to be critical for McCain.”
> The age issue—if elected, he would be the oldest president entering a first term—was only one of John McCain’s problems. Voters we encountered during focus groups and in our individual interviews in primary states not only were negative about George W. Bush’s presidency, but equally negative about the Republican Party itself. “I keep looking at McCain and I fear that, well, it’s four more years,” said a male voter in the Charlottesville group. “I think with any Republican in there, I would feel the same way.” A woman voter agreed: “I think John McCain is set in his ways, and I think it would be . . . just another Republican presidency. I don’t think it really matters at this point what Republican we put there. It’s going to be the same thing.”
These were tremendous obstacles for the McCain candidacy and for Republicans in general, obstacles that kept resurfacing in our talks with voters. While they were doubtful about Obama, their doubts about McCain and his party were greater. A telling example: In the 2000 election, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed Democrats holding a five-point advantage over Republicans. By 2008, the same survey revealed a twelve-point advantage for the Democrats. “That is an enormous difference,” said Peter Hart, who conducted many of those NBC/Journal surveys with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, “equivalent to having to carry a fifty-pound sack of potatoes and a one-hundred-twenty-pound sack of potatoes. One individual can carry the first sack, but for the second sack, one needs some kind of assistance.”
In the end, attitudes about the political parties, or even the candidates, were not the most crucial aspect of the election.
Peter Hart summed up where things stood nationally after his Charlottesville session. “The mood is not only negative, spilling into disgust and rejection of the Bush administration,” he said, “but it reflects a more nervous and uncertain time. It is as though one era is ending, but few seem to know what the next era is going to look like. It is the nervousness people feel when seventy percent say the next generation will be worse off than this one. The public knows the fundamentals are wrong and something must be changed, but exactly how one achieves the right kind of change is what the country is grappling with right now. There is a wish and a desire for an ‘easy button’ to solve our problems, but we all know this is not possible.”
In our travels across the country throughout 2007 and 2008, conversations with voters in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley around Youngstown stand out as most memorable. The valley, once one of the great steel-producing places in the world, was known as America’s Ruhr. Older residents recalled that when the steel mills were booming no one worried about soot that landed everywhere, on sidewalks, on windowsills, on floors. As one person told us, “We knew that was money landing there. And everybody had jobs. You’ll hear the stories, if you haven’t already, about how women didn’t even mind if the soot came down when they put their laundry out to dry.”
The valley enjoyed such a mixture of pride and prosperity that it came to embody the best of the American story. It boasted high homeownership. It had multicultural neighborhoods with Romanians and Ukrainians living amid Serbs and Croatians, Greeks and Italians. Its churches epitomized the strength of the country: Jewish synagogues, Ukrainian Byzantine and Ukrainian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, even Italian Protestant churches. It had the aluminum industry, as well as the steel industry, major rubber and concrete enterprises, one of the nation’s largest commercial furniture businesses.
Progress continued into the early seventies; then danger signals began flashing in the face of competition from Japan, Taiwan, and China. As Harry Meshell, a political and economic leader of Youngstown, and a former Democratic state senator, told us, “In the Far East, they were smart enough to learn how to do things, how to make every damn thing in the world that we ever made.”
In 1979, Meshell led a regional delegation to a steel area in China similar to the Mahoning Valley. A friendship agreement was signed, economic delegations were exchanged. Ten years later, he went back to find tremendous growth. “You know, virtually everything you buy in the store comes from there. That led to the economic downfall in many parts of this country, because we didn’t do very much about it. We were not keeping up.
“Those of us in office tried to do whatever we could to create an environment in which growth could occur. We put money in the university. Every time I had a chance, I just pumped another five million, two million, whatever, into Youngstown State. Thank God for that, because it created jobs. We tried to find a way to use state and federal funds to help build the economies, help build stability, and try to create a future for the state. But you can only catch up so much, because other forces were working against us. With high unemployment comes a lot of poverty. And with poverty comes crime. Then you have the housing stock going to hell. All these factors are working against you.”
Without meaning to, Harry Meshell had framed the issues confronting the nation as the people approached their time of decision in 2008.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Citizen of the World
“Americans . . . don’t want to elect the president of Europe.”
—Republican Vin Weber, on Obama’s global tour
The e-mail went out from Obama headquarters at 3:35 a.m. on July 19, under the name of Robert Gibbs. It read, “At approximately 3:15 AM Eastern/2:15 AM Central, I received a phone call telling me that Senator Obama had landed at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.” Gibbs’s predawn message was the official announcement that Obama had begun the opening phase of one of the most ambitious ventures of the campaign.
Obama departed Chicago around noon on July 17 in a Gulfstream III executive jet, which took him to Washington’s Reagan National Airport. From there he was transported by motorcade to Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland. Waiting at Andrews were his traveling companions, Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; one of his foreign policy advisers, Mark Lippert, who had recently completed a tour of duty in Iraq; and several other congressional aides. At about 3 p.m., he boarded an unmarked Boeing C-40 aircraft and under strict security and a news blackout was flown to Kuwait and later to Afghanistan.
No presidential candidate had ever attempted a foreign trip of such magnitude. Obama’s itinerary would cover eight countries in ten days. The trappings were identical to those of a presidential trip abroad, but because he was a presidential candidate on what was considered a political trip, Obama’s team had to undertake the mission without the support of the State Department or the U.S. embassies in the countries he would visit once he left the war zone. The trip was actually two in one. The first portion, covering Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, was under the auspices of the Defense Department. The rest of the trip would be run by his campaign, using the candidate’s chartered aircraft, his own advance teams, and his Secret Service detail. The second part of the itinerary included Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, and Great Britain, and a huge media contingent—including network anchors—would join him, along with a large retinue of foreign policy and political advisers. Security was so tight on the opening legs of the trip that the Secret Service would not allow the campaign even to say when Obama would be visiting Iraq and Afghanistan. Only when he was safely inside each country would they make any public announcement of his movements.
Obama’s foreign trip was both a gamble and a necessity. His advisers had learned from research at the end of the primaries that fixing the economy was a far more important issue in the minds of most voters—especially those considered up for grabs—than the question of which candidate would make a better commander in chief. What Obama’s advisers concluded was that as long as he cleared a minimum threshold in this area, he could be elected. One way to do that was to demonstrate his comfort on a world stage, standing shoulder to shoulder with foreign leaders. The risks were obvious, however. Any misstep, any hesitation, any garbled statement, any sign of unfamiliarity, any slips on names or places would be magnified into a major gaffe. Any logistical snarls�
�chronic lateness, lost baggage, poor briefings—would receive worldwide coverage and undermine the main message of the trip.
His foreign policy advisers—Denis McDonough, Greg Craig, Phil Gordon, Susan Rice, and others—had long talked about the desirability of a trip abroad. Planning became more serious later in 2007, and on a conference call in the fall, Craig made the case that a foreign trip would “change the way the world looks at the United States . . . that it would be a transformational moment for the United States.” He also said that Obama could draw crowds in places like Berlin or Paris or London that no other candidate could attract. “We can probably get as many as five thousand people,” he said.
Obama himself and his main political advisers, focused then on Iowa and New Hampshire, were wary. Obama recommended delaying the trip. No presidential candidate had ever done anything like this; the sheer logistical demands were overwhelming. “Let’s wait until I get the nomination,” he said. “I’ll do it after the nomination and we’ll have thirty thousand people.”
Obama’s foreign journey came at the end of a discouraging opening to the general election. Nothing in the early weeks suggested that either candidate was prepared to rise to the challenge presented by an election of enormous significance, at a time of deepening problems and growing anxiety. The contrasts between Obama and McCain on the issues—Iraq, the economy, and health care—were sizable. And both had records that suggested they might be able to move the country to a better style of politics. Yet everything about the opening weeks of the general election reinforced old politics and deepening polarization.