The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  By the time Palin arrived at Delgado’s house on Wednesday night, Culvahouse’s team already knew much about her. They had scoured the public record. They had looked closely at an investigation that came to be known as Troopergate, into whether Palin had pressured and then fired the state public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, after he refused to fire her former brother-in-law, who was in a divorce and child custody fight with her younger sister. They examined her tax returns and other financial records. Nothing appeared amiss. They did turn up a small blemish: Palin had once been fined for fishing without a valid license.

  Culvahouse did not send Palin the lengthy questionnaire that all finalists were asked to complete until McCain invited her to Arizona. The questionnaire ran to seventy questions. Some were highly intrusive, the kind once saved for a personal interview: Did you ever fail to pay taxes for household help? Have you ever filed for bankruptcy? Have you undergone treatment for drug or alcohol abuse? Have you ever downloaded porn from the Internet? Have you ever paid for sex? Have you ever been unfaithful? Palin’s questionnaire turned up one new piece of information: Her husband had once been arrested for driving while intoxicated. The questionnaire also asked if there was anything particularly sensitive that a prospective candidate preferred to discuss verbally. Palin indicated there was.

  At the Delgado house, Palin spoke with Culvahouse. It was now well after 10 p.m. Phoenix time, and their interview lasted between ninety minutes and three hours. She was direct and cooperative, according to officials privy to the conversation, and revealed that her unmarried teenage daughter Bristol was pregnant. When Culvahouse finished, he gave Rick Davis a readout of the conversation.

  In the days after her selection, Palin’s vetting became a major question, with top officials insisting that nothing of significance had surfaced after her selection. Although they didn’t learn of her daughter’s pregnancy until she was about to meet McCain, they agreed that it should not be disqualifying. The appearance of haste in choosing her fueled speculation that McCain had acted impulsively. But if there was a breakdown it appears not to have been in the vetting but rather in a decision made without a deeper understanding of whether Palin would be judged ready to sit a heartbeat away from the presidency. As one person close to the campaign put it, Palin may have received a thorough legal vetting, but what she didn’t receive was a thorough political vetting. Those closest to the decision claimed that in the weeks before the choice they discussed with McCain the pros and cons of picking Palin as much as they talked about other finalists. They believed the potential reward outweighed the risk.

  While Palin talked with Culvahouse, Schmidt and Salter waited impatiently. They approached the decision from different perspectives. Schmidt was more committed. Like Davis, he believed she was the best remaining hope to change the dynamic of the campaign. One of his business partners worked in Alaska; through those contacts, he had become aware of Palin. He checked her with people he knew; the reviews were positive. She represented a risk, but one Schmidt believed worth taking. Salter was more skeptical, but he was open to the possibility. And he was utterly loyal to McCain.

  The two advisers spent an hour or more with Palin, impressing on her the degree to which her life would be turned upside down. Nothing she had ever experienced would prepare her for the scrutiny, the intensity, and the outright brutality of a presidential campaign. Schmidt did most of the talking. You’re going to be very far from home, he told her. You will have executive and constitutional duties in Alaska, but short of an emergency in the state, you’re not likely to be going back. This is incredibly demanding and rigorous. Your advisers and people with opinions back in Alaska will not have a seat at the table. Your job in this race, should this project go forward, is to perform at your highest level of ability every day.

  Palin, unruffled and self-confident, said she got it. Salter asked her about her statements in support of creationism. Did she disbelieve the theory of evolution? “No,” she told them. “My father’s a science teacher.” Salter later told author Robert Draper, “The sense you immediately get is how tough-minded and self-assured she is.” On the ride back to their hotel, Schmidt told Salter he still believed they needed a game-changing pick, meaning Palin was worth the risk. Salter still liked Pawlenty.

  Early Thursday morning, the group set off for Sedona. The campaign had taken every precaution to preserve secrecy about Palin. Their next challenge was getting her to Sedona without being recognized. Christian Ferry bought baby shields to cover the windows of the SUV. The advance team asked the Secret Service to withdraw to an outer perimeter around McCain’s compound. The group arrived without incident at around 8:30 a.m. McCain greeted Palin, offered her coffee, and then took her down to a bend in the creek where he often liked to sit and watch a hawk’s nest in the tree above.

  While Palin was being driven to Sedona, McCain spoke to Culvahouse by telephone about the previous night’s interview. Culvahouse gave a positive report. She had knocked some of the broader questions21 out of the park, he told McCain. She would not necessarily be ready on January 20, 2009, to be vice president, but in his estimation few candidates ever are. Culvahouse believed she had a lot of capacity. “What’s your bottom line?” McCain asked. Culvahouse responded, “John, high risk, high reward.” McCain then replied, “You shouldn’t have told me that. I’ve been a risk-taker all of my life.”

  Palin’s biography appealed to McCain. He liked her spunk and the fact that she had tangled with Stevens and Young—as had he. Yet he didn’t really know her, certainly not the way he knew Lieberman or even Pawlenty. The previous February, he had met Palin in Washington when he hosted several governors during the National Governors Association meeting. She had impressed him during a discussion of energy policy. Palin also attended a reception McCain hosted for all Republican governors and they spent a few more minutes talking that night.

  Now they talked for about an hour down by the creek and were joined toward the end by Cindy McCain. That was the extent of McCain’s personal interview with the woman whom he was about to thrust into the national spotlight. When they finished their conversation, McCain took a short walk with Cindy. He then huddled with Schmidt and Salter, who by prior arrangement argued the case for and against her. Schmidt restated his case: McCain needed to shake up the race; Palin’s profile would reestablish his reform image; Pawlenty was credible and acceptable, but once the convention was over he would disappear. Salter argued that Palin was untested nationally and a high risk. He also said that, for all the talk about “country first” in his campaign, McCain could be accused of making a political choice designed only to help him win the election, not enhance his ability to govern. Pawlenty, he argued, was solid, had an attractive biography, and could talk to both the Republican base and swing voters.

  Their conversation over, McCain returned to the deck of his cabin and offered Palin the job. After pictures were taken, McCain and Cindy left. He would see his running mate again the next morning in Dayton, Ohio.

  Advisers later said the decision was McCain’s, that he was in no way forced to take Palin against his better judgment. Because McCain is a gambler, the decision was described in the press as a roll of the dice. There was no disputing that. But one person who knows McCain well offered a different interpretation. Remember, he said, McCain is an ex-Navy pilot. Fighter pilots do things routinely that normal people wouldn’t have the guts to do. They undertake risky maneuvers and feel they are in control at all times. And, he said, if they are losing, they will go to the very limits of what is possible, first to stay alive and then to win. That does not necessarily make them unsteady or unreliable; they simply live with a level of risk and danger that most people cannot tolerate, physically or emotionally.

  What persuaded McCain? In part he believed that, in Palin, he had found a fellow reformer who would help him transform the special-interest-dominated culture of Washington. But there was more to it than that, as Rick Davis later explained to us. “I think he rea
lized that everything that was an indicator of success in the campaign was pointing down for us,” Davis said. That included the economy, the country’s pessimistic mood, the president’s unpopularity, and McCain’s belief that the press was in Obama’s corner. “When you looked at everyone else, they all were good solid selections in their own right, but who was really going to help us try and push back all these signals that said we were going to lose? Sixty days wasn’t enough time to crawl our way back into the election.” Nor did McCain’s advisers worry about seeming to give away the experience argument he had been using all summer against Obama; they did not believe that alone could win it for McCain, any more than it had for Clinton. “We couldn’t win with experience,” Davis said. “McInturff, when he came back on payroll, said experience will get you to forty-seven [percent]. Well, good luck.”

  If that were true, however, they had wasted weeks making the case. It was an example of the campaign’s inability to settle on a message, emblematic of larger disorganization.

  After the McCains departed, Palin and the others waited until they were certain that no reporters remained in the area, then she was driven back to Flagstaff for the flight to Ohio. En route her plane touched down in Amarillo, Texas, to refuel—and to refile the flight plan to make tracking the aircraft more difficult for reporters trying to learn the name of McCain’s running mate.

  McCain’s team was determined not to let the choice leak that night, partly out of deference to Obama, who was to give his acceptance speech in Denver. McCain did not want to be accused of sabotaging that event. But his team also wanted the element of surprise to dramatize their choice. Their goal was to keep Palin under wraps until the moment she stepped onto the stage in Dayton.

  Earlier in the week, the campaign had put in motion a stealthy plan designed to get Palin and her family to Ohio without anyone knowing. Davis White had called Tom Yeilding, a close friend in Alabama who had once done advance work for Vice President Cheney. “I need you to get on a flight to Cincinnati today,” White told him. Yeilding, who worked for a company called CraneWorks, protested, saying he was on a construction site. “You’re the only one who can do this,” White implored him. Yeilding walked off the site and headed for Ohio. His role, as White later put it, was to “catch the package” there on Thursday night. The plan called for Palin and the others to stay at the Manchester Inn in Middletown, thirty miles south of Dayton. Yeilding made reservations for them under the name of the Uptons (Yeilding’s bosses). The cover story for airport workers, who might wonder why jets were arriving from Arizona and Anchorage, was they were part of a family fishing trip in Alaska. Meanwhile, Schmidt had sent his colleague Jonathan Berrier to Alaska to assist in getting Palin’s family to Ohio.

  Palin arrived early in the evening and was taken to her hotel. Next to arrive were Nicolle Wallace, the former White House communications director who served as spokeswoman for McCain, and Matthew Scully, a former Bush White House speechwriter who would be writing Palin’s speech. Schmidt led them to room 508. “I’m about to introduce you to our nominee,” he said. No BlackBerry communications, no calls to family. When they walked in and saw Palin, they were astonished. Wallace remembers Palin that night as “super mellow . . . really calm.”

  Davis White drove to Dayton at midnight to check out the event site. He found one problem: The lectern was set up for a tall person—the assumption among the advance team was that Romney was the choice. “When I told them to lower it for someone who was five-seven, they thought it was Bloomberg,” White said.

  The secret held until morning and then exploded across the country, provoking a sense of disbelief. McCain called Lieberman, who was vacationing on Long Island, to give him the news before it was confirmed publicly. Lieberman was stunned. “I said, ‘No kidding!’” he told us. “I was surprised. I said, ‘Gee, I don’t know much about her.’” He then watched with amusement as the cable networks went through a process of elimination before declaring Palin the choice, at one point speculating that it might be Lieberman because he had issued no public statement saying it was not him, as had some of the other presumed finalists.22

  Axelrod told Obama of the pick as he was about to leave Denver. “Wow, that’s surprising,” Obama said. “Why do you think he did that?” Joe Biden, in the front cabin of Obama’s plane, drew a blank. “Who’s Sarah Palin?” he asked. In Denver, David Plouffe woke up campaign chief of staff Jim Messina. “Get your ass up here. They picked Palin,” he said. Messina was in charge of assembling material on McCain’s possible choices so the campaign would be ready to respond. He was dumbfounded. He knew Palin was a possibility, but on the basis of the Troopergate investigation alone he believed she was a non-starter. On his vice presidential charts, “Palin never left the third tier.”

  Palin joined McCain in Dayton for the rollout at a rally that drew between ten and fifteen thousand people, the biggest crowd of his campaign. McCain appeared pleased with his history-making pick—the first woman chosen for a Republican ticket—and by the surprise he had pulled off. Not even Palin’s staffers in Alaska knew where she was that morning. In his remarks, he emphasized Palin’s credentials as a reformer as he tried to seize the change message from Obama. McCain said, “I found someone with an outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and entrenched bureaucracies; someone who has fought against corruption and the failed policies of the past. . . . She’s exactly who this country needs to help me fight the same old Washington politics of me first and country second.”

  Palin was poised and confident, delivering her speech with no sign of nervousness, as if she had long been ready for this day. She praised the man who had selected her, saying, “There is only one candidate who has truly fought for America, and that man is John McCain.” She paid tribute to Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman nominated for vice president, and to Hillary Clinton for the “grace and determination” she showed in her battle against Obama. “It was rightly noted in Denver this week that Hillary left eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America,” Palin said in the line that drew the most attention. “But it turns out the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.”

  Palin’s selection created a frenzy. Reporters scrambled to confirm the choice, then to explain who she was and why she was picked. Few people knew anything about her background or record, including those in the McCain campaign now charged with helping introduce her to the country. Scully—who thought McCain had made a bold choice—had spent part of the night on the Internet gathering information about Palin to include in her speech.

  At McCain headquarters in Virginia, the communications team was caught unawares. No one had given them the advance word they needed to prepare background material. Inundated by press calls trying to confirm the choice, they were helpless, some of them not sure how to pronounce her name. One staffer was frantically trying to download information about Palin when the overloaded Alaska state government Web site crashed. Unable to get answers to basic questions, the campaign gave out inaccurate information, telling one news organization she had been to Iraq when she had only been near the border on a visit to Kuwait. “It was horrific,” one campaign official said. “It was a disaster. It was a huge disaster.”

  The choice of Palin generated mixed signals from the Obama campaign. Their first statement was a harsh putdown. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of nine thousand with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” spokesman Bill Burton said. When Obama saw those words, he ordered the campaign to back off and issued a more gracious statement in his and Biden’s names.23

  Obama advisers argued with one another about whether Palin was a real threat. Steve Murphy, a member of the media team, had worked on the Knowles gubernatorial campaign in 2006 against Palin. He believed she had natural political talents and could pose problems. Axelrod disagreed, strongly. The campaign should take a deep breath, h
e e-mailed others. She is not ready for the national stage. Murphy pushed back, and so did the normally mild-mannered Axelrod. “There was just an awesome fight between Axelrod and Murphy,” Messina recalled. Axelrod said later, “My initial reaction was that they’d just blown up their message, that they’d spent the whole summer talking about celebrity, inexperience, and that John McCain was always going to put country first. And now they’d picked a candidate who was incredibly inexperienced. They made her an immediate celebrity and McCain didn’t look like a guy who had put the country first because he had picked someone who was plainly suspect in terms of her preparedness.”

  Nevertheless, in the short run, Palin’s selection stopped any momentum Obama had hoped to gain coming out of his convention and breathed life into the Republican base beyond anything McCain’s campaign had anticipated. The element of surprise, the impact of having a woman on the ticket, the fact that she was strongly pro-life and had an infant son with Down syndrome, and her debut performance in Dayton turned Palin into an instant star, from her good looks and designer glasses to her easy ability to connect with people. Within twenty-four hours, McCain’s campaign raised $7 million (although Obama’s campaign raised huge amounts in that time as well). The campaign Web site saw a sevenfold increase in traffic. At McCain offices around the country, volunteers signed up to help at a rate faster than anything the campaign had yet experienced. Davis called the reaction “seismic.” That weekend he told us only half-jokingly, “I wish [McCain] hadn’t committed to the public money [for the general election].”

  Almost as quickly came the backlash, criticizing McCain’s judgment, questioning her background, fueled by Democratic attacks and by rumors. The media pack was in full pursuit. Reporters were digging into the Troopergate scandal, her record as mayor of Wasilla, her views on abortion, her religious beliefs. Then came ugly rumors that little Trig was not Palin’s baby. The Internet was awash with stories and blog chatter questioning the circumstances of Palin’s pregnancy and the birth. By the time she arrived in Minneapolis-St. Paul on Sunday to prepare for her convention speech, the McCain team was in crisis mode. One adviser with long experience in crisis communications was appalled. “It was the ease with which a really disgusting rumor could live in the blogosphere and just jump into the body politic through mainstream sources,” the official said. “When I get an e-mail from a Washington Post e-mail address asking me to comment on the parentage of the governor’s baby, it strikes me that we’ve reached a new low and it did not portend well for our country, much less this campaign.”