The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  After his press conference in Amman, Obama sat down with CBS anchor Katie Couric and then had dinner with King Abdullah and others. When dinner ended, the king insisted on personally driving Obama to the airport in his Mercedes in a motorcade at high speed from the palace to the foot of the stairs of Obama’s plane. Obama was exhausted by the time he reached the King David Hotel in Jerusalem late that night. He had been traveling hard for five days and had not adjusted well to the time zone changes. When he began his first meeting the next morning, Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu asked him how he was holding up. Obama said, “I could fall asleep standing up.”

  The day in Israel presented the most diplomatically challenging itinerary of the remainder of the trip. Obama was seen as suspect by some American Jews, who worried that because of some of his past statements and friendships, he would tilt American policy toward the Palestinians. He was anxious to allay those fears, reassuring Israeli leaders on Iran while telling both sides he would make peace talks a high priority as president. His schedule was packed with meetings with all the important Israeli and Pal estinian officials and symbolic stops for the cameras.

  Late in the afternoon, he took a helicopter ride across the narrow country to the town of Sderot, which sat just miles from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Against a backdrop of spent rockets and missiles that had been launched on the town, Obama vowed his commitment to Israel’s security. “The first job of any nation-state is to protect its citizens,” he said. “And so I can assure you that if—I don’t even care if I was a politician. If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

  After he left, several people said the response was “very Israeli,” one of his advisers recalled. “And they meant it as a compliment.”

  With the war zone and the Middle East portions of the trip over, Obama now turned his sights on Europe and the one big public event of the week, an outdoor speech on the night of July 25 in the heart of Berlin. In each country, preparations were carried out smoothly, save for Berlin. When word leaked that Obama’s team was eyeing the Brandenburg Gate as the site of his public speech, German Chancellor Angela Merkel protested.

  For three decades, the famous pillars stood behind the Berlin Wall, symbolizing Europe’s divisions during the Cold War. John F. Kennedy had come to view the wall from a site near the Brandenburg Gate in 1963, when he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” It was in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate that Ronald Reagan had declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Obama told his senior advisers he opposed the site, though by the time he weighed in, his team in Berlin had already crossed it off. They chose instead Tiergarten Park. Obama would speak from a stage erected at the base of the Victory Column, which commemorated German military victories of the nineteenth century. The Brandenburg Gate would be captured in the pictures, a mile or so off in the distance.

  On the flight from Israel to Berlin that morning, Obama’s aides briefed him on the plans for the speech. “I did not know that they had set up the space that accommodated five hundred thousand people, and I did not hear that until we were leaving Israel,” Obama told us a day later. “I said, ‘What!’ We were sort of walking the tightrope without a net there.” Were his aides certain they could fill enough of the space to make it look good? His arrival into Berlin resolved that question. Foreign press lined the sidewalk outside his hotel, the Adlon, and the streets were filled with spectators eager to get their first look at this young American, who was treated more like a rock star than a politician.

  Obama conducted a series of meetings and then taped an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams. When he returned to his hotel, he said to advisers, “My work day is done.” He planned a trip to the gym and some rest. “Got to give a speech tonight,” he added. “I’m in great shape.”

  It was a soft summer evening, with a near-cloudless sky and warm temperatures. In Tiergarten a festive atmosphere reigned, part rock concert, part political rally, with two hundred thousand people stretching from the base of the Victory Column along the Strasse des 17 Juni almost to the Brandenburg Gate. Television crews and still photographers were packed to capacity on an enormous riser. The campaign set up a crane so photographers could take in the whole sweep of the scene. Obama was scheduled to speak at 7:30. When he was introduced he came from the back of the column to confront the sea of humanity that now seemed to surge to greet him. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian said Obama “almost floated into view, walking to the podium on a raised, blue-carpeted runway as if he were somehow, magically, walking on water.”

  Obama called his speech “A World That Stands as One.” “Tonight I speak to you not as a candidate for president but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” The address was sober and substantive; a call for a renewal of transatlantic cooperation and a tribute to the struggles Berliners had overcome during the depths of the Cold War. “People of the world,” he said, “look at Berlin!” His words were strong, but far more memorable were the visuals of flag-waving Europeans cheering an American politician.

  His only blemish in Germany came over canceling a visit to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to visit with wounded troops. That came after the Pentagon told his team he could not take any campaign staff with him. Obama said he decided not to go in order to keep wounded soldiers from being drawn into a political controversy. But the decision created controversy back home. McCain’s campaign accused him of stiffing the troops. McCain said that, if it had been him, he would have gone to see them alone to show his respect

  By now Obama’s team was eager to get home, though he still had stops in France and Great Britain, where he would receive more adulation, particularly from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose enthusiasm seemed unbridled. The trip had been enormously successful at home and abroad. Nevertheless, Obama and his advisers worried that ten days away from the campaign trail could cost him among voters. “I don’t think that we’ll see a bump in the polls,” he told us the day before he returned to the United States. “I think we might even lose some points. People back home are worried about gas prices, they’re worried about jobs.” He knew voters cared less about what the Europeans thought of him than their own well-being. As Republican Vin Weber put it, “Americans would like the president to be more popular in the world, but they don’t want to elect the president of Europe.”

  The scorekeepers back home tallied the week as a rout for Obama. “McCain lost the week badly, let’s be honest,” said John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, as Obama was nearing the end of the trip. “John is still in striking distance, thanks to his own character, biography, and memories of the McCain of previous election cycles. But he cannot afford another week like this one.”

  McCain’s campaign was staggering in the face of the coverage of Obama’s foreign trip and stumbled in responding. The day before Obama’s departure, Jill Hazelbaker, the communications director, had dismissed Obama’s trip as a “first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas.” Her remarks were part of a plan approved by McCain to counter Obama’s favorable publicity. But when reporters confronted McCain, who had long urged Obama to go to Iraq, McCain disassociated himself from her remarks. “I will talk to her,” McCain said. “The fact is that I’m glad he is going to Iraq. I am glad he is going to Afghanistan. It’s long, long overdue if you want to lead this nation.”

  Hazelbaker, who began the campaign as McCain’s communications director in New Hampshire and ascended to the bigger job when the campaign imploded in July 2007, was angry. She had been one of his most loyal staffers, and now, in public view, he was rebuking her. She called McCain: What are you doing? He apologized and later in the day tried to soften his remarks, saying the scheduled rally in Berlin certainly could be seen as a campaign event. Hazelbaker, frustrated by what happened, did not come into the office the next day. McC
ain advisers had been working for nearly a week on the new communications plan and McCain had signed off on it. Now he seemed to have forgotten. They wondered, does he really want to win?

  McCain’s advisers had anticipated blanket coverage of the trip, but even they were taken aback by what they saw as the frenzy of the media. The networks, responding to criticism, offered interviews to McCain, but there was little he could do to stem the story of a triumphal tour. He hammered Obama over Iraq, saying his opponent had been “completely wrong” about the policy, pointing to the success of the surge that Obama opposed.

  While Obama was in Berlin, McCain went to a German restaurant in Ohio. He would love to give a speech in Germany, he said, but would prefer to do it as president. At an event with Tour de France cycling champion Lance Armstrong, McCain jabbed at the media’s favorable coverage of his rival. “My opponent, of course, is traveling in Europe, and tomorrow his tour takes him to France,” he said. “In a scene Lance would recognize, a throng of adoring fans awaits Senator Obama in Paris—and that’s just the American press.”

  Schmidt worried that Obama was attempting to put the election away before the conventions. Obama would come back from Europe in the lead and would hold the first convention, destined to give him another bounce in the polls. The Republican convention would follow with a first-night schedule likely to include appearances by the unpopular President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Schmidt feared that, by the second night of the Republican convention, McCain could be down by twenty points. He told others they needed to break Obama’s stride. “He’s on his way to running away with this in August,” he said.

  On July 27, McCain’s top advisers met in Phoenix to decide what to do. Schmidt laid out a hypothesis. Measured by the amount of favorable coverage he was receiving, Obama was now operating at a higher altitude than any previous politician. If Bill Clinton in 1992 or John McCain in 2000 had topped out at fifteen thousand feet, Obama was at thirty thousand. Pulling him back to earth would not work, Schmidt argued. It was like trying to hit somebody on the roof of a tall building with a bunch of rocks. “You can’t throw a rock that high, no matter how hard you try,” he said. “So you can’t engage with him.” The only way to bring him down was to force him even higher and hope for an “Icarus effect,” so high that he couldn’t sustain himself. McCain’s team decided to try to turn what they regarded as Obama’s greatest asset, his celebrity, into a liability.

  The result was the most famous ad of McCain’s campaign, unveiled days after Obama’s return to the United States. The thirty-second spot opened with scenes of Obama in Berlin, and then, as images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton flashed quickly across the screen, a narrator said, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?”

  The ad was mocked as petty, a diversion, and the latest example of how far McCain had strayed from the kind of campaign he ran eight years earlier. Obama’s campaign tested the spot and concluded it had little resonance with voters. “People thought it was trivial. They didn’t like it,” Joel Benenson said. The election was too important to let it get sidetracked by ads featuring Paris Hilton. And yet the commercial worked: It put McCain on offense and, despite the public’s apparent dismissal of the ad, threw the Obama team off its stride.

  Obama’s advisers were sensitive to the charge that Obama was too lofty, too elitist—something they had worried about since the primaries—and knew he still had not overcome doubts about him. Whether it was fatigue after the foreign trip or the distraction of preparing for the Democratic convention now only weeks away, the celebrity ad spooked Obama’s team. They did exactly the opposite of what Axelrod had recommended before the foreign trip, scaling back on the size of his events and taking much of the energy out of his campaign. “We went very small,” Axelrod said. Gibbs said, “We got inside our own heads too much.”

  Obama went to Hawaii for vacation in the middle of August, unhappy with the state of things. “He knew that we were out of synch and I think more than anything what he felt was like we were in the doldrums,” Axelrod said. At a meeting on August 12, Obama pollster Joel Benenson presented the findings from new data. “We began this race by running against Washington and the broken politics that have blocked progress and we can, and must, reclaim that territory and block McCain from encroaching on it,” the opening slide of his PowerPoint presentation said. McCain’s team, surprisingly, had bought time to regroup and devise a real plan for winning the election. For both campaigns, the coming conventions would be critical opportunities to reenergize and reframe the election.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mile High in Denver

  “Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our president.”

  —Hillary Clinton, addressing the Democratic convention

  In 1908, when Democrats had last selected the “Mile High City” for their national convention, the Denver Post, in a burst of boosterism, hailed the news as “the greatest thing to ever happen to the city. It will bring in millions and millions of dollars.” The sardonic Damon Runyon, one of the horde of journalists covering that convention, watched as a troop of dancing Apaches hired by the city whooped and mingled with the delegates and wrote that it was hard to distinguish between Indians and delegates except that the delegates were wearing badges and shouting all the time. That year for the third time the Democrats picked William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, as their nominee, and for the third time Bryan lost, even more disastrously than in 1896 and 1900.

  A century later, in August 2008, the Democrats were back in Denver, badges, funny hats, shouts, and all, and once again visions of convention money danced before city leaders. But this time, the Democrats were poised to make history and nominate an African-American as their presidential candidate. Finally, they believed, they were on the way to winning back the White House.

  As the Democrats gathered, however, another narrative competed for attention in the media, focused on Obama and the Clintons and asking whether there could ever be true peace between them. Certainly there were lingering resentments between supporters of Obama and Clinton. Her advisers did not believe he had done enough to help retire her campaign debt. His supporters believed the Clintons were still not convinced that Obama could defeat McCain. Could they come together in Denver?

  The vice presidential selection created more hard feelings among her loyalists. Early in June, immediately after she ended her campaign and endorsed Obama, her supporters—not Clinton herself, who repeatedly praised Obama in her public appearances—began lobbying for him to choose her as his vice president. It was never to be. As one Obama adviser put it later, “You can’t have two alpha dogs on the ticket.” Still, when Obama picked Biden as his vice president on the eve of the convention, it was reported that Clinton had not even been vetted. Her supporters took that as the ultimate snub.

  Two days after the primaries ended, Obama and Clinton met alone in the Washington home of California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Their meeting had all the trappings of a cloak-and-dagger operation. Obama had just finished an event that Saturday in nearby Virginia and was supposed to fly back to Chicago. When reporters traveling with him boarded the plane at Dulles, Obama wasn’t there. No one on his staff told them why, or where he was. At Feinstein’s home he and Clinton talked for an hour in an upstairs room, then left. After the press found out, Obama’s staff said it was a “productive meeting” to discuss Democratic Party unity as they approached the fall campaign. Obama, according to one of his most senior advisers, indicated to Clinton that while she was more than qualified, there were mitigating circumstances that might make it difficult for him to select her. Clinton said that while she was willing to be considered, she did not want to go through the exhaustive vetting process unless there was a high likelihood she would be chosen.

  Their relationship had been strained by the nomination battle and Obama could see that she still had not worked her way through what had happened. But that was not the last time he though
t about her as a running mate. Gradually the relationship improved, and he would occasionally raise her name when talking about possible running mates. “Through the process he’d always come back and say what about Hillary?” one adviser said. “She’s smart, she’s tough, she certainly is qualified.” But Biden was always the front-runner, and just before the convention, Obama tapped him. End of story—but not for elements in the media that remained focused on how bitterness between the rival camps could explode in Denver and tear apart the party.

  Talk of tensions between the Clintons and Obama persisted into the opening of the convention, in part because there were real grievances. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd perfectly captured the underlying emotions of a convention that “has a vibe so at odds with the thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution” that she asked a noted political strategist, “What is that feeling in the air?” He replied: “Submerged hate.”

  But both the Clinton and Obama teams were determined not to let rancor and distrust disrupt the convention. Whatever her feelings, Clinton would be “blowing up those balloons herself, hanging them in the net,” if that’s what it took to produce a harmonious convention, an aide joked. The overwhelming majority of Democrats wanted exactly that; they had had enough of losing elections. They did not want internecine warfare to doom their prospects again. As Democratic strategist William Galston told us before the convention, “The Democratic Party is like a mule. If you hit it over the head with a two-by-four often enough it finally gets the message.”