The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Obama and McCain tried in some of their speeches to outline their differences, but they were often drowned out by the snarling putdowns and taunting e-mails that flowed from both headquarters. A McCain surrogate responded to something Obama had said about the rights of terrorist detainees—a topic on which reasonable people could differ—as “delusional.” An Obama surrogate described as “stupid” the positions McCain had taken on the Iraq war, though it was clearly arguable at that point that the surge strategy was working. It was a depressing start to a historic choice for the country.

  McCain had the advantage of wrapping up his nomination in March, while Obama was still tied down fighting off a revived Hillary Clinton for three more months. So he was free to start running his general election campaign, but he squandered the spring. McCain went abroad, where he got little attention. He took a “biographical tour” to places in the United States that illustrated how his character had been formed. The press ignored him. He went to “forgotten places”—the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and coal mining country in Appalachia—as a way to assert that he was not a stereotypical Republican. They remained forgotten, swamped by the focus on the Democratic race.

  McCain needed to turn the skeletal operation that had seen him through to the nomination into a strong general election campaign. But the first steps, including an ill-advised structure of regional campaign managers that created management headaches, were poorly thought out and eventually had to be jettisoned. The most visible mistake came on June 3, the final night of the primaries. As Obama was getting ready to claim the nomination at a huge rally in St. Paul, McCain delivered a toughly worded speech in New Orleans that was designed to make the case that he was the true change agent. He said of Obama, “He is an impressive man, who makes a great first impression. But he hasn’t been willing to make the tough calls, to challenge his party, to risk criticism from his supporters to bring real change to Washington. I have.” But that night, the sharp rhetoric was overshadowed by the images. Against a garish green backdrop, McCain looked old and tired, in contrast to his youthful opponent.

  For Republicans, the appearance symbolized a McCain on the wrong side of a “change” election, and it touched off a new round of hand-wringing: His campaign structure wasn’t working. His message was inconsistent. McCain seemed angry rather than inspiring. He projected disdain rather than respect for his rival. Relations with the press deteriorated. McCain and his advisers felt reporters were more interested in gotcha journalism than engaging with McCain in the combination of banter and serious inquiry that had marked the old Straight Talk Express. Ultimately they would sharply limit press access, leading to more complaints that the McCain of 2000 had disappeared. Other Republicans said that was a weak excuse for the slow start. “They’ve run a schizophrenic campaign,” a Republican who knew McCain well told us at the time.

  Staffing was one of the issues. Rick Davis was overloaded, as even he was quick to admit. “I basically told McCain I was dying, that I was shouldering an inordinate burden for the growth of the campaign,” he told us. “Through a series of meetings and discussions, it was determined that Steve [Schmidt] had the flexibility and frankly the background to be the most help to me.” Schmidt was brought in to bring discipline to the message and order to the campaign and to oversee the operations of the road show. In a related move, Mike DuHaime, Giuliani’s former campaign manager, was recruited to oversee the political operation. Schmidt’s elevation sparked another round of stories about a campaign in disarray and, in essence, that a hostile takeover at the top had taken place. Neither Schmidt nor Davis would describe it that way in after-action interviews. “It obviously didn’t roll out that well,” Davis said. “It was like this huge coup that Steve was coming in to take over the campaign. It was something McCain, Schmidt, and I had designed.” Still, the change underscored that McCain’s campaign still wasn’t running smoothly, despite four months of general election preparation.

  Obama’s problem was his sheer exhaustion, the fatigue of his top advisers, and his late start, owing to the long nomination battle. What hopes Plouffe and Axelrod had of shifting their focus to the general election kept getting derailed. When the time came to take on McCain, the campaign was weeks behind where Obama’s advisers had hoped to be. Planning followed two tracks: readjustment in messaging to reflect Obama’s new opponent, and the development of an electoral map strategy designed to break the mold of the previous two elections.

  That Plouffe was still at the helm as the general election began was another untold story of the Obama campaign. In April, Plouffe let Obama know he wanted to step down after the primaries. He was worn out, having managed the campaign from the first day and on through the most rigorous nomination battle ever. Of more concern, his wife was pregnant, due to deliver their second child days before the election. She would be returning to Washington in the summer so their son could enroll in school in the fall, and to oversee the renovation of their house. Plouffe, a private person, felt an obligation to his family. Staying in Chicago would have meant “abandoning my very pregnant wife and son in very tough circumstances,” he said later.

  Plouffe had hoped the nomination battle would be wrapped up by late spring, giving his successor time to make a smooth transition for the general election. Obama implored him to stay. No one had contributed more to the success of the campaign and Obama didn’t want to lose him. Axelrod said, “He was just dissipated by the end of the primary season and he made some attempt to quit and Obama wouldn’t accept his decision.” After the primaries, the Obama campaign was behind both in the vice presidential selection process and in convention planning. Plouffe felt he couldn’t leave. To ease his burden, Jim Messina was hired as chief of staff to take over some of his responsibilities.

  Obama’s team ordered up a crash research project. They quickly conducted polls on the economy, domestic issues, and national security. They polled Spanish-speaking voters. They looked at the potential impact of young voters on the general election. They studied the racial contours of the election. They looked closely at how voters perceived McCain and Obama.

  From the research, they drew several conclusions that shaped Obama’s strategy. The first and most important conclusion was the most obvious: The economy was now the key issue. Obama would attempt to own it. “All Roads Lead to the Economy,” read the first page of the domestic policy survey presented to him at one meeting. The second conclusion was counterintuitive. The campaign’s assumption that voters saw McCain as a man who went his own way as a maverick and a reformer did not hold up. Joel Benenson, Obama’s lead pollster, told us later, “People in America had no knowledge of McCain as a maverick, as a force for change, as any more bipartisan than Barack Obama.” Instead, voters worried that he would merely be an extension of Bush. McCain had failed to use the spring months to distance himself effectively from the president. Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s deputy communications director, said, “Our message was basically to tie him to Bush, particularly on the economy, and we did it every day.”

  The final issue was how to deal with the question voters had about Barack Obama. The problems revealed in Peter Hart’s focus group of Independent voters were well-known inside the campaign. As one senior adviser observed at the time, “We’re asking them [voters] to embrace a guy who is four years out of the Illinois state senate and who’s black, whose name is Barack Hussein Obama, and make him president of the United States. . . . That’s a big, big lift.” The problem was not strictly racially based. Communications director Anita Dunn said, “It was much more that he had an exotic name, a different background. It was a proxy for ‘He’s weird,’ for the ‘otherness.’”

  The campaign attacked the problem with rhetoric and imagery. They employed Obama’s family, hoping that the images of a strong and loving family would convey values with which all Americans could identify. On June 30th, Obama gave a widely covered speech about patriotism in Independence, Missouri. Declaring his love of country, he said, “At certain
times over the last sixteen months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged—at times as a result of my own carelessness, more often as a result of the desire by some to score political points and raise fears about who I am and what I stand for.” He offered his own story, told so vividly in Dreams from My Father, as evidence that, adrift as a youth, he had found himself in the narrative of America. “For a young man of mixed race,” he said, “without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father’s steadying hand, it is this essential American idea—that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will—that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans.”

  There were also questions about where Obama really stood ideologically. He talked like a centrist, a pragmatist, someone who would work actively with Republicans. But his agenda—a big health care package, higher taxes on the rich, an aggressive alternative energy plan—sounded conventionally liberal. At that point his agenda lacked focus or priorities that a president would need to be successful.

  Plouffe was determined not to leave his candidate in the predicament that befell Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2000 and 2004, their path to the White House depended on winning Florida or Ohio, both Republican-leaning states. Plouffe vowed that Obama’s electoral map options would not be so constricted. As deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand told us after the primaries, “We would be perfectly happy to win the presidency based on an electoral strategy that included Ohio and Florida, but we don’t want that to be the only pathway.”

  For two elections in a row, the electoral outcome had been extremely close. In 2000 Bush won with 271 electoral votes, one more than needed. He lost the popular vote to Gore, Bush winning just under 50.5 million for 47.8 percent of the vote to Gore’s nearly 51 million popular votes, or 48.4 percent of the tally. Gore got 266 electoral votes. In his reelection four years later, Bush won 286 electoral votes with just over 60 million votes, or 50.7 percent of the ballots, as opposed to Kerry’s 252 electoral votes and slightly more than 59 million votes, for 48.3 percent of the ballots. Between 2000 and 2004, only three states switched from one party to another: Iowa and New Mexico from Democrat to Republican; New Hampshire from Republican to Democrat. Red and blue America became the shorthand for describing the polarized politics of Bush’s presidency.

  By the summer of 2008, however, it was clear the electoral map was changing. Fewer Americans called themselves Republicans. Many Independents acted more like Democrats. The nation’s ever-shifting demographics were creating greater competition in some regions, particularly the Rocky Mountain West with its increasing Latino population. Obama’s unique candidacy, and the enthusiasm of African-Americans, added to the fluidity of the electoral map, particularly in some southern states. These conditions created irresistible opportunities for the Obama team to try to change the electoral calculus.

  Obama’s advisers made several crucial decisions that departed from orthodoxy. First, there would be no halfway efforts in the targeted states. “If we were in, we put in the resources needed to win,” said Jon Carson, who oversaw the field operations. “There were no feints going on, which was an expensive proposition.” The campaign planned a massive ground game to go along with an expensive advertising budget, and when they came up with a list of possible targets—traditional battlegrounds and new opportunities—they quickly realized that even their cash-rich campaign could not afford to play in all of them. This led to a second decision, controversial at the time, not to expend resources in some nominally blue states that had been real battlegrounds in the past. These included Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Minnesota. Plouffe’s team gambled that by November, all would be safely in Obama’s column, though they were not at the start of the general election.

  Their final list still surprised many political analysts. The targets included long-established battleground states, such as Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico. To these Plouffe added Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia, all emerging purple states that both campaigns knew would be competitive. Then Obama’s team added North Carolina, Indiana, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and Georgia. Some of these states had not voted for a Democratic nominee since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Others had voted consistently Republican with an occasional deviation for either Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Plouffe was a major advocate for Indiana. He referred to it as “my dog”—everyone liked to kick it, but it was always there. “How’s my dog doing?” he would ask his staff.

  Plouffe assumed Obama would hold all of Kerry’s 252 electoral votes and likely add Iowa’s seven, given his success there during the caucuses. That would leave him eleven short of the 270 necessary for election. Carrying either Florida or Ohio would easily get him to the White House. So would any of the following combinations of two or three other states: Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado; Iowa and North Carolina; Colorado and Indiana; or North Carolina and Nevada. As Plouffe intended, there were multiple combinations.

  Yet the campaign was hardly crisp at the start. Obama was caught flat-footed when McCain, recognizing the growing concerns about four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, proposed ending the ban on offshore drilling. Obama’s first instinct was to cling to traditional Democratic orthodoxy, which saw the issue through the prism of environmentalists. He was forced, awkwardly, to yield by making clear he would accept offshore drilling as part of a more comprehensive energy package. Axelrod later regarded the campaign’s handling of the drilling issue a serious mistake.

  On July 20, the day after Obama had landed in Afghanistan, we met up with Axelrod over lunch in downtown Chicago. Later in the day, he would join the rest of the Obama staff and the traveling press corps for the flight from Chicago to Amman, Jordan, there to meet up with Obama for the second leg of the foreign trip.

  The coverage of Obama in Kuwait and Afghanistan was positive, but Axelrod worried that over the previous month the campaign had been ground down in tactical wars and that the incessant back-and-forth with McCain had diminished Obama’s strongest attributes. He had just finished a memo for the campaign. “Here’s my admonition to everybody,” he said. “I don’t think any president in our lifetime will have the confluence of challenges that the next president’s going to face. And if they’re handled wrong, we could dig ourselves into a hole that’ll be very hard to get out of. . . . We got into this because this was an election about big things . . . and when we live up there, when it’s about big things, we’re at our best.”

  Axelrod was pleased about the timing of the foreign trip. “This is a big moment in history and this is not a time to play small ball,” he said. “The trip came at a propitious time in that regard.”

  Every successful politician is also a lucky politician, and Barack Obama was blessed by good fortune as the trip began. In Kuwait, in a gymnasium packed with U.S. troops, he grabbed a basketball, did a few quick stretching motions, and turned to the crowd. “I may not make the first one,” he said. Then he let fly from the edge of the three-point line. The ball curled softly into the hoop to an eruption of cheers.

  Something far more significant happened while he was in Afghanistan. The German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said he looked favorably upon Obama’s sixteen-month timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. The interview caught the White House by surprise. Though U.S. and Iraqi officials had just announced agreement on the need to set a timetable—vague as it might be—Maliki’s statement went far beyond anything he had said publicly. When Obama met with Maliki two days later, the prime minister reiterated his belief that U.S. forces should be gone from Iraq by 2010. The debate over U.S. policy suddenly appeared to be moving toward Obama’s position—an unexpected gift for the Democratic candidate in the opening days of his trip.

  Obama’s Iraq itinerary included a lengthy meeting with General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and U.S. ambassador Ryan
Crocker. Petraeus believed troop withdrawals should be based on conditions on the ground, not a timetable. In the meeting, Petraeus, according to an account by author Steve Coll in the New Yorker, carefully made his case for the success of the surge that Obama had opposed and for a more flexible policy on troop withdrawal. Obama held his ground, saying that if he became commander in chief, he would need to think about Iraq in a broader context that also included a growing need for more troops in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and a resurgent Taliban. Obama and Petraeus did not settle their differences but were careful not to let their disagreement cloud what both knew could be a critically important relationship within a matter of months. They were photographed together in a helicopter, Obama in sunglasses, both smiling broadly.

  Obama left Iraq on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 22, arriving in Amman to begin the next phase of his trip. Joined by Hagel and Reed, he held a press conference at the Citadel, whose most notable feature is the ancient Temple of Hercules, a stunning setting for the first public event of his journey. Asked about his meeting with Petraeus and their disagreement about a withdrawal timetable, Obama said, “The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do or I’m ignoring their advice. No. I’m factoring in their advice but placing it in this broader strategic . . . framework.” That night, in an interview conducted earlier in Iraq with Terry Moran of ABC’s Nightline, Obama said he would have opposed the surge in January 2007, even if he had known then what it was accomplishing.

  His answers raised questions that would follow him through the campaign, but his trip was off to a smashing start. Newspapers put his movements in Afghanistan and Iraq on the front page and the images on television showed a confident politician mingling with troops and dealing with government and military leaders. Newspaper Web sites updated his movements throughout the days. Obama’s advisers, led by spokesman Bill Burton, pulled off a coup by choreographing a series of one-on-one interviews with network anchors and key correspondents as he moved from country to country, guaranteeing such visibility that the press quickly again came under attack for favoritism.