Palin was now days away from her debate with Joe Biden. Those around her could sense that she was upset, even angry, at what was happening to her—upset at her staff, at her own mistakes with Couric, at who knew what. She was not a brooder, but occasionally would let off steam. One adviser was startled by the contrast between the Palin who had galvanized the Republican convention only a month before and the Palin who was preparing for her debate with Biden. “It was like a different person—somebody who was just worn down [and] losing her confidence,” the adviser said.
When her campaign began, Palin’s staff had prepared cards with facts to help her master the basics of foreign policy. Soon she became dependent on these cards. Now she had scores of them—cards containing facts, names, questions, and answers sharpened and refined through discussion with advisers. Inside the campaign, they became a source of controversy, defended by some as briefing books in a different form, criticized by others as the crutch for a politician who lacked the curiosity to understand issues in depth and wanted everything in easy-to-digest answers.
Palin’s knowledge of the world was certainly limited. Later, there were reports that she thought Africa was a country, not a continent. Two advisers told us that report was accurate; several others said it was not literally true. That argument raged within the campaign even after the election. Another report claimed she did not know the countries that were part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Steve Biegun, who spent considerable time advising her on foreign policy, described both charges as “absurd.” He told National Review’s Rich Lowry that she knew much about Darfur and about the government’s HIV/AIDS initiative in Africa through her church and never was confused about who was in NAFTA. One adviser, who was sympathetic, complained that Palin was stuffed too full of information by a staff that did not trust her. “I finally figured out they were trying to get her to memorize entire passages instead of just letting her very able mind work on its own . . . instead of concentrating on technique—interview technique and debate technique—they were trying to force this on her. . . . I don’t think they had a proper appreciation of her own abilities.” Others in the campaign became harsher in their judgments of Palin the longer they watched her.
Debate prep began badly. McCain’s advisers were worried by reports they had from her traveling team. On Sunday, October 28, Schmidt and Davis went to Philadelphia for a private conversation with Palin. They were moving debate prep to McCain’s cabin in Arizona, she was told. Her children would have more freedom to move about and the setting would be more relaxing. They also wanted to keep the number of people involved to a minimum to limit leaks about how she was handling the pressure.
By the day of the debate, the stakes for Palin had risen sharply. That morning, we watched Peter Hart conduct another focus group, among critical swing voters in St. Louis. The voters debated Palin’s strengths and weaknesses. To one woman, Palin was a “good strong woman” with “tremendous potential.” To another woman, she was frightening: “This isn’t on-the-job training,” she said. The twelve-member group split five-five between Obama and McCain, with two undecided. When Hart asked how they would vote if the choice were between Biden and Palin, they split eight-four for Biden.
“Nice to meet you,” Palin said to Biden as they were introduced onstage at Washington University in St. Louis. “Hey, can I call you Joe?” Her jaunty opening set her tone. As with her convention speech, her actual performance was far better than any of her mock debates. She did not always answer the questions posed by the moderator, PBS’s Gwen Ifill, but she knew how to talk into the camera and had her lines down well. “I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C.,” she said. Republicans were relieved. “It was the best ninety minutes this campaign has had in two weeks,” Republican Tom Rath told us that night. A campaign adviser later said, “She exceeded those terribly low expectations—more than exceeded them. But it was too little too late against the backdrop of the financial crisis and the weight of our difficulties.”
For the rest of the campaign, Palin was on the defensive. Colin Powell cited her as one of his reasons for endorsing Obama in mid-October, a personal blow to McCain that called his judgment into question. She struggled against growing resentment among some McCain advisers, who began questioning whether she was the right choice. Sometimes they found her either unresponsive or unreliable as they tried to get answers to rebut ongoing investigative stories about her. Some of these were well documented. She claimed she had said “no thanks” to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, but did not say she had kept the money for the state. Others were internal struggles that never became public. She initially told McCain advisers she had no recollection of whether the town of Wasilla charged victims of sexual assault for rape kits and examination. McCain’s advisers could not believe that. Campaign officials had trouble getting straight information about whether the Palins were totally without health insurance until Todd Palin got his union card. She said they had no insurance, but campaign aides learned that the family did have catastrophic insurance. One official said he had never had such a difficult time “getting to the bottom of things” in a campaign. The campaign was split into warring camps. While she had strong defenders, doubters became emboldened as McCain’s chances diminished. Blind quotes popped up in stories and on blogs. Someone called her a “diva,” someone else a “whack job”—characterizations that some of her closest advisers described as vicious and totally unfair. “It was just very hard on her,” an aide said. “She took it all, she was such a trouper.”
At one point, Davis and Schmidt ordered the campaign’s e-mails searched to determine who was leaking damaging information. The search turned up messages that foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann sent to William Kristol of the Weekly Standard blaming Nicolle Wallace, unfairly, for many of Palin’s troubles. In classic McCain campaign fashion, top officials later disagreed over whether Scheunemann had been fired.
In late October, Politico’s Jeanne Cummings broke the story of Palin’s wardrobe. The Republican National Committee, she reported, had spent $150,000 on clothes for Palin and her family. The story was a huge embarrassment never adequately addressed by Palin and the campaign. “We had a headquarters that said we’re not going to comment on strategic spending decisions,” one of Palin’s advisers said. “Well, you knew we were going to comment on it and comment all at once or drip, drip, drip, slice by slice. The failure was emblematic of the campaign. No one took responsibility. No one owned the issue, followed through on it. It’s clear there had been people who were nervous about this, but no one said this is going to come out, we’ve got to do something about this. It was just shunted aside.” Palin bore as much of the blame as anyone. She never seriously questioned how the clothes were being purchased or how much was being spent on her family. The clothes story dogged her to the end of her campaign, providing more fodder for the late-night comedians. Not even Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, with Tina Fey, could improve her image.
To the end, Palin remained a hero to the Republican base. Few others shared that opinion. McCain strategists were divided over whether the gamble of choosing her had been worth it. Voters were less ambivalent. In those closing campaign days, slightly more than half of likely voters had a negative opinion of her, a sharp drop from her post-convention honeymoon when three-fifths viewed her positively. Three in five judged her not ready to be president. Independent voters, once evenly divided about her, now were overwhelmingly negative. By mid-October, 52 percent of likely voters said her selection made them less confident about the decisions McCain would make as president, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. On election day, 60 percent of voters said she was not qualified to be president.
The day after the vice presidential debate, David Axelrod was at lunch at Manny’s, his favorite Chicago deli. Well-wishers greeted him warmly. “We’ve polled only in the battleground states and we’re at our highest number that
we’ve been in this whole campaign,” he said after he was seated. “We’ve got a lead in Florida, which I think is the big reason that [McCain’s] pulling out of Michigan. We’re ahead marginally in North Carolina. Wisconsin was close and has now opened up again to a pretty nice lead. We have had good leads in Michigan. We finally marginally pulled ahead in Ohio, first time.” Axelrod anticipated a rough few weeks ahead. “I think they’re in a fourth-and-long mode and so I think they’ll do whatever it takes, whatever they think it’ll take,” he predicted. “I think there’s risk associated with it but I think they know that right now there’s a bad dynamic in place for them. So I expect it’s going to be very, very rough.”
The next morning, the New York Times published a front-page story about Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the sixties antiwar radical who had been a founder of the Weather Underground that bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. Ayers had never apologized for Weather Underground’s violent actions. In a book that happened to be published at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he said he regretted the group had not done more to stop the war in Vietnam. Now he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama had served on the board of an educational foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, with other notable Chicagoans. Ayers once hosted a coffee for Obama during his first political campaign. The Times article described meetings between Ayers and Obama over the years, concluding, “The two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called ‘somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight.’”
McCain’s campaign was planning to go after Obama over his relationship with Ayers and had prepared an ad that was to be launched about a week later. The Times account accelerated the timetable for the attack. At 11:45 a.m. that morning, Nicolle Wallace sent an e-mail to Palin’s traveling party, a copy of which was later given to us. It read, “Goveror [sic] and Team: rick [Davis], steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below with out approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this.” Included was a 164-word script attacking Obama for his relationship with Ayers. The line that attracted the headlines said of Obama, “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do—as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”
When she read the message, Palin was enthusiastic. “Yes yes yes,” she replied in an e-mail response. “Pls let me say this!!!” Palin delivered those “pal around with terrorists” lines almost exactly as scripted at a Colorado fund-raiser. When she finished, she sent another e-mail back to McCain’s high command, “It was awesome,” she said in the message.
The attack on Ayers unleashed the nastiest seven days of the campaign. McCain launched attacks on Obama’s honesty and seemed to question his character. “Who is the real Barack Obama?” he asked. In New Mexico, he said, “My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned. It’s as if somehow the usual rules don’t apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that.” Obama struck back at McCain with a thirteen-minute video, prepared earlier in anticipation of the attacks, reprising McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal involving convicted savings and loan magnate Charles Keating and his relationship with five members of Congress.27 Palin told William Kristol during an interview that she thought Obama’s links to Reverend Wright should be fair game for criticism, though McCain had ordered his advisers never to raise that issue for fear of being accused of racism. At rallies in Florida, where supporters wore “Sarahcuda” T-shirts, she said, “The heels are on, the gloves are off.”
That was the message she was sending McCain to use in his second debate with Obama, Palin said.
The town hall format for that debate at Belmont University in Nashville seemed to favor McCain, but he was not able to take advantage of it. In front of eighty citizen questioners, neither McCain nor Obama dared launch personal attacks. Neither gave an electrifying performance, neither seemed responsive to the potential collapse of the U.S. economy, neither received great praise. To Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, “The debate had the aura of an almost meaningless ritual being conducted in a soundproof room while outside, panic and calamity were spreading like giant cracks in the earth.”
Criticism of McCain was deservedly scathing. He strode about the debate floor gritting his teeth, visibly angry, looking grim. At one point he seemed to go out of his way to demean Obama. While describing legislation that had been backed by Bush, which McCain deemed harmful, he rhetorically asked, “Guess who voted for it?” Then he pointed toward Obama and said, “That one!”
On the campaign trail, McCain and Palin’s attacks on Obama began to trigger even more hostile reactions toward Obama from some supporters. “No communists” read a sign at a Palin rally in Florida. “Treason!” shouted one person after Palin accused Obama of being critical of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. A speaker at one event asked how Obama could aspire to be commander in chief “when he would not last two hours in one of our military academies.” Frank Keating, the former GOP governor of Oklahoma and a McCain campaign co-chairman, raised the issue of Obama’s drug use, which Obama had written about in his memoir. “He ought to admit, ‘You know, I’ve got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street,’” Keating said. “ ‘I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I’m back at the center.’”
The anger escalated. In Pennsylvania, McCain’s supporters were captured on video calling Obama a terrorist. In Wisconsin, one man stood and said, “I’m mad, and I’m really mad. It’s not the economy. It’s the socialists taking over our country.” The audience rose and applauded. McCain started to respond, and the man shot back sternly. “Let me finish please. When you have an Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the hooligans up there gonna run this country, we’ve got to have our head examined. It’s time that you two are representing us and we are mad. So go get ’em.” As the press bus pulled away, some in the audience flipped a one-finger salute.
Finally, McCain was forced to tamp down the anger. In Minnesota, after a man said he was afraid to raise a child in the United States if Obama were elected, McCain defended Obama. “He is a decent person and not a person you have to be scared of as president of the United States,” he said. Minutes later, a woman said she didn’t trust Obama and referred to him as an Arab. McCain took back the microphone, shaking his head. “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man . . . that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about.” Scattered boos erupted from the audience.
McCain and his advisers were angry with how this was being played in the media. They didn’t excuse the extreme comments at their rallies, but believed the press had exaggerated them by playing the words and actions on television of a handful of people at McCain events. In off-the-record calls to reporters, they seethed.
On Saturday, October 11, John Lewis, the Georgia congressman, issued a statement condemning McCain and Palin. “During another period, in the not-too-distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.” McCain and Palin, he said, were “playing with fire,” and if not careful “the fire will consume us all.”
Lewis’s statement deeply offended McCain. He admired L
ewis, had written generously about him in one of his books. At a forum at the Saddleback Church in August, he had cited Lewis as one of three people he would turn to for advice. He was shocked by the congressman’s remarks—whatever had happened during his rallies that week was nothing compared to the racial violence of the 1960s. During the campaign, McCain had tried to reach out to African-Americans. He had gone to Memphis on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and apologized for his opposition to making King’s birthday a national holiday. McCain’s advisers were enraged at Lewis’s statement. Schmidt told us McCain viewed it as “the worst attack on his character in his entire career.” Salter called it “the most injurious thing that’s ever been said about him.” The advisers argued that Obama was running many more negative ads than McCain and was escaping blame for the tone of the campaign. The public didn’t agree. Polls showed people believed McCain was running a far more negative campaign than Obama.
Finally, after a week of William Ayers and talk of treason and terrorists and lack of patriotism, everyone stood down. The campaign dialogue returned to more peaceful ground and to arguments more central to the country’s real problems. On October 13 McCain delivered a new stump speech, less aimed personally toward Obama and more focused on the economy. Still, he faced the same problem that had plagued him since the spring: lack of a coherent and consistent message. The morning after the Nashville debate, we encountered Salter in the lobby of McCain’s hotel. He was still shaking out the cobwebs from a late night of karaoke with Schmidt and some reporters in a nearby bar. Salter, often given to gallows humor, referred to press coverage that was writing off McCain’s chances and said, “We’ve been dead before.” Then, with a laugh, “We can’t die again.”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 44
