Then Obama laid out the theme on which he and his speech advisers had worked so hard: his determination to recapture the American promise for the people. He said, “Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work. That’s the promise of America.”
In the end, he sounded his message of change and hope. “I realize that I am not the likeliest candidate for this office,” he said. “I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington. . . . But this election has never been about me. It’s been about you. For eighteen long months, you have stood up . . . and said enough to the politics of the past. . . . You have shown what history teaches us—that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it—because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.”
By every measure, Obama’s speech was a success. The public was enthusiastic, the critics positive, the polls registered an immediate turn in his favor. From dead even, he was now six points ahead. Democrats, all talk of disunity gone, were confident that victory awaited them in November. Republicans, about to convene the following Monday in St. Paul, were reported to be despondent. As euphoric Democrats were departing from Denver, the Republican delegates nervously awaited the news about the choice of McCain’s running mate to be announced that same Friday.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Palinmania
“You know . . . the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!”
—Sarah Palin at the Republican convention
Shortly before 1 p.m. on Wednesday, August 27, a black car carrying Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pulled up next to the stairs of a Learjet 35A at the executive terminal at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. Palin had just finished an appearance in town and was driven to the airport by her husband, Todd. She bade him goodbye and, along with aide Kris Perry, boarded quickly, lest anyone notice her leaving. In minutes she was airborne. All arrangements had been handled in strict confidence. Twenty minutes into the flight she was handed a phone-book-sized packet of materials by Davis White, John McCain’s director of advance, who had slipped into Alaska late Monday night to oversee the secret journey. The packet contained her reading for the long flight south: McCain’s speeches, a schedule, and other background on the campaign. White explained two possible outcomes. They would fly to Boeing Field in Seattle to refuel, and then on to Flagstaff, Arizona. She would meet with McCain on Thursday morning. If all went well, she would become his vice presidential running mate and not see Alaska for many days. If not, she faced a quick trip home and a return to relative obscurity.
Palin was not well-known outside of Alaska, but to those conservatives who had met her or followed her rise to power, she was already something of a folk hero: a down-to-earth mother of five, staunchly pro-life, pro-gun, an avid hunter, a runner, a beauty queen, a gutsy politician who champi oned limited government and individual liberty. She had risen from the PTA to the city council to mayor of the small town of Wasilla (population at the time, less than ten thousand) to a state energy board. In 2006, she challenged the deeply unpopular governor, Frank Murkowski, in the Republican primary, winning the three-way contest on her charm, straightforward demeanor, and a message of reform. She then beat a former governor, Democrat Tony Knowles, in the general election.
In a bleak Republican year, Sarah Palin was one of the few bright spots. She came to office on a pledge to build a long-stalled natural gas pipeline and break up the old-boy politics in Juneau. She was not afraid to tangle with two of Alaska’s most powerful Republicans, Senator Ted Stevens—principal advocate of the infamous Bridge to Nowhere—and Representative Don Young.
As governor, Palin had attracted favorable notices in prominent conservative publications. Six months into her term, she hosted an informal lunch for the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol and Fred Barnes, and former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, who were on a magazine-sponsored cruise of Alaska’s Inside Passage. Barnes later wrote a glowing piece that, noting her approval rating of around 90 percent, called her a Republican star with a record of “eye-popping integrity.” That same summer she met another group of conservative thinkers who were on a cruise sponsored by National Review and drew more flattering notices. Still she was so little-known that the Weekly Standard felt the need to tell how to pronounce her name: “pale-in.”
Outside conservative circles, Palin remained a dark horse candidate whose inexperience made her a highly risky choice for the Republican ticket. She had been in office less than twenty months and though popular at home had remained out of the national debates. But as her plane headed south to Arizona, she now had the inside track to win the job as McCain’s running mate.
McCain believed he needed someone dramatic to transform the presidential race. Though he had knocked Obama back in early August with the ads featuring Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, everyone around him knew that was merely a summertime diversion, a tactical exercise that would quickly be overwhelmed by Obama’s convention. The McCain team may have mocked Obama’s Greek temple setting in Denver, but they needed a real strategy, propelled by a bold choice for vice president, to preserve any hope of winning in November.
As McCain approached his convention, his advisers saw the challenges as overwhelming—and contradictory. First, he needed to distance himself decisively from the president. Second, he needed to cut into Obama’s advantage among women voters. Despite the bitterness of the primary race, and some of the mutinous talk among Clinton’s most vocal holdouts, the polls showed Obama consolidating most of the Clinton vote. By midsummer, this had become an acute problem for McCain. Third, he needed to energize the lethargic Republican base. While polling showed McCain now winning roughly the same level of support among Republicans as Obama was receiving among Democrats, McCain enjoyed little enthusiasm among conservatives. They might turn out to vote for him—might—but would they staff local offices, make phone calls, knock on doors, contribute money, and rally friends and neighbors as they had done for Bush four years earlier? Fourth, and perhaps most important, McCain had to regain the one advantage he had always counted on: his identity as a reformer. As Steve Schmidt put it, “We had to get that reform mojo back.”
Obama had gone the safe route in his selection of Joe Biden, a do-no-harm pick that followed the classic vice presidential manual. McCain did not have such a luxury—or so argued some of his closest advisers. Schmidt and campaign manager Rick Davis believed McCain’s only hope of winning was to make an out-of-the-box choice. If we pick a traditional candidate and run a really good race, Schmidt told Mark Salter late one night, we still lose.
Palin’s plane landed after dark in Flagstaff. Christian Ferry, McCain’s deputy campaign manager, met the plane and drove the group to the home of Robert Delgado, the CEO of Hensley & Co., the large beer distributor-ship started by Cindy McCain’s father. Though it was late, Palin still had a long night ahead of her. Waiting there to see her were Schmidt and Salter. Waiting back in Washington to talk to her by telephone was A. B. Culvahouse, a former White House counsel under Ronald Reagan who was in charge of the vetting process and needed to conduct the all-important personal interview. Waiting in Sedona was McCain, who was scheduled to leave around 10 a.m. the next morning after his running mate had been chosen.
McCain’s team now had barely twelve hours to complete the vetting process, take a face-to-face measure of their leading candidate, decide whether McCain and Palin had the chemistry to coexist as a ticket, and make a judgment about whether she was ready for the rigors of a national campaign.
McCain’s search for a vice president had started in the spring with about two dozen names. Palin was not a serious candidate. One person said she wasn’t even on the initial list; others said she
was—barely. It was only later in the summer, when the campaign team became alarmed at the size of Obama’s lead among women, that she was added to the list of genuine contenders. “Toward the end of the process, in July, we started taking a look at, like okay, who are we missing? Let’s take a sharper look at women candidates and try that one more time,” Davis said. “That’s when Palin came on.” Palin, he added, “stood out significantly from the rest of that list.”
Eventually, McCain narrowed his choices to six finalists. In addition to Palin, they were Independent-Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal might have been a finalist had he not taken himself out of contention.
Until days before McCain’s deadline, Lieberman appeared to be the leading contender, although one top official later told us it was never as clear-cut as that. “If you characterize this as yes or no on Lieberman and then someone else [became the top contender], that’s not it at all,” he said. “Was he the romantic pick? Yes.”
Certainly none of the others enjoyed the kind of relationship with McCain that Lieberman did. The Connecticut senator ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000, but broke with his party over the war in Iraq. In August 2006, he lost his primary race to antiwar businessman Ned Lamont, who attracted enthusiastic support from liberal bloggers furious over Lieberman’s support of Bush’s war policies. Defeated in the primary, Lieberman ran as an Independent and was reelected. McCain and Lieberman shared almost identical views on the war. If anything, McCain was a more vocal critic of Bush’s policies, but both strongly opposed withdrawal timetables and believed victory could be achieved. They were steadfast in their views when public opinion on the war was running strongly in the other direction.
Beyond that, they simply enjoyed each other’s company. Lieberman and Lindsey Graham traveled regularly with McCain. It was often said that Graham was Robin to McCain’s Batman, a youthful sidekick who had a quick sense of humor, was loyal to the older man, and shared with him a willingness to criticize his own party. Lieberman was different, more an equal than a sidekick. McCain loved him. He admired his probity, enjoyed his corny Borscht Belt humor, and most of all trusted his judgment. They differed on many aspects of domestic policy, but they saw a dangerous world through the same prism.
Advisers thought picking Lieberman would shake up the race, particularly if coupled with the move McCain was seriously considering: a pledge to serve just one term. Virtually all his top advisers favored the idea. A one-term pledge had long been talked about inside the campaign. At the time of McCain’s announcement in April 2007, the draft of his speech included a statement that he would serve only one term. But Davis strongly opposed the idea, and McCain was dubious, believing that it would unnecessarily limit his power. The pledge was removed less than twenty-four hours before the speech, according to two advisers, but resurfaced seriously as part of plans for a possible McCain-Lieberman ticket.
The appeal of picking Lieberman was that it would send a powerful signal that a McCain administration would represent an attempt to break out of partisan politics in Washington, that as president he would actively seek to build a governing consensus at the center of the electorate. The one-term pledge would add an exclamation point to this message, allowing McCain to argue that his administration would have but one goal: to clean up a toxic political system in Washington and take on the most intractable issues that had resisted solution without having to worry about how it might affect his reelection. By now, even Davis had softened in his opposition. “My opposition to it in the primary was that it really was a cheap way to try to win the primary,” he later told us. “It wasn’t worth making that sacrifice for a primary win. . . . That being said, I understood the need for a device like that if you were going to sell Lieberman because Lieberman was going to be a hard sell.”
Both Davis and Culvahouse raised the one-term pledge directly with Lieberman. “My answer to both of them was, hey guys, I didn’t expect to be considered for vice president at all,” Lieberman told us. “I still think it’s a long shot, so you’re asking if it happens would I agree to do it for only four years, that’s an easy question. Of course I would.” Even McCain had come around, according to his most senior advisers. “There would have to be a one-term pledge,” one said. “McCain knew that.”
McCain’s team knew there would be conservative opposition to Lieberman because of his pro-choice views on abortion and his support for gay rights. They developed a plan to reach out to delegates before the convention, with Charlie Black dispatched to St. Paul early for that purpose. As late as the third week of August, the vetting team was still working hard to finish Lieberman’s background checks, questionnaire, and personal interview with Culvahouse. Lieberman joked to Culvahouse that the questionnaire was so personally intrusive that the only thing he had not been asked was “whether I had had sexual relations with an animal.”20 Ironically, Lindsey Graham, one of Lieberman’s main advocates, hurt Lieberman’s chances by talking openly about his possible selection, allowing conservative opposition to intensify. “Lindsey was out talking to people before he should have and the story got ahead of us,” one McCain adviser said.
McCain’s team had circled the three days between the Democratic and Republican conventions as the time to announce their vice presidential choice and scheduled big rallies on all three days to give McCain flexibility to make his decision. But they preferred Friday, August 29, the day after the Democratic convention, as the best way to stop Obama’s momentum after Denver.
On Sunday morning, August 24, McCain’s senior staff met at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix to review their options. The group included Rick Davis, Schmidt, Charlie Black, pollster Bill McInturff, media adviser Fred Davis, and senior adviser Greg Strimple, although only Rick Davis, Schmidt, and Black had been privy to the inside details of the selection process. During the meeting, McInturff went through the results of his latest polling and analysis. He argued that McCain’s position had improved since early July, particularly in battleground states. But much work remained. McCain needed to reinforce his maverick label; a Republican would have trouble winning in November but a maverick McCain might. Given the political climate, McCain would need an unconventional and unorthodox campaign and message.
But McInturff raised serious questions about picking Lieberman, or anyone who was pro-choice, as a vice presidential running mate. That included Mayor Bloomberg and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. Days earlier, McInturff tested pro-choice attitudes in a poll. Forty percent of McCain’s core supporters said they would be less likely to support him if he selected a pro-choice running mate.
McInturff sketched out a possible doomsday scenario. First, he said, there was no way anyone could predict or control how the selection of a pro-choice running mate would be covered by the press. Would the story line be “McCain the maverick”—as everyone hoped—or would it be “McCain shatters the Republican coalition”? Second, he asked, had anyone read the rules of the convention? Majorities of just four state delegations could force a roll call on the vice presidential nomination. Picking a pro-choice running mate virtually guaranteed a divisive floor fight over abortion. While McCain might be able to impose his choice in St. Paul, the damage would be too costly. The story in September would be about a divided Republican Party, not about McCain’s position on the economy or the war or his criticisms of Obama. Others in the campaign later said McInturff ’s analysis ended any realistic chance of Lieberman becoming vice president, although one senior official said McCain had not totally ruled out Lieberman at that point.
The group briefed McCain that afternoon. McInturff shared his findings and repeated his assessment of what could happen in St. Paul. McCain listened, but “John was very inscrutable,” one person who attended the meeting recalled. “He was in his quiet, subdued, shoulder-hunched listening mode. . . . We said to each oth
er after the meeting, ‘From that conversation, we have no clue.’”
At that point, there seemed to be only two realistic finalists: Pawlenty and Palin, although press speculation focused mostly on Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. Romney’s star had risen over the summer. He was not a Washington insider and could talk about the economy in ways McCain could not. Furthermore, his relationship with McCain had warmed considerably since the primaries. McCain was impressed at how hard Romney was willing to work to get him elected. Romney’s prospects may have ended after a McCain gaffe the previous week. In an interview with Politico , McCain said he couldn’t remember how many homes he and Cindy owned, making him sound badly out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. Romney owned four homes. Amid such economic hardship, Republicans could not present voters with nominees who between them owned nearly a dozen homes.
Pawlenty was young and vigorous, a conservative who had grown up in a blue-collar family—his father was a truck driver—and he was pro-life. He had won reelection in the Democratic year of 2006 and was seen as a future leader of the party, an advocate of modernizing the GOP without abandoning its conservative principles. Though not particularly flashy, he was seen as a more than credible choice, a running mate who might keep the Upper Midwest competitive. He was the safe choice if Palin faltered.
That night, Davis and Schmidt went alone to see McCain at his apartment in Phoenix. They urged him to take a serious look at Palin. Davis had been talking with her regularly all through August as part of a confidential plan designed to keep secret the fact that she was even under serious consideration. That weekend, Davis checked with Culvahouse to ask if he could complete a thorough vetting of Palin in the short time remaining. Culvahouse said he could. With that reassurance, McCain called Palin, who was at the Alaska State Fair, and invited her to come to Arizona to meet with him.
The Battle for America 2008 Page 40
