On October 15, Obama and McCain held their last debate at Hofstra University on Long Island. McCain was at his best, on the offensive throughout the debate. Obama, however, calmly deflected the attacks, unruffled to the end. One headline writer summed it up as “Aggressive Underdog vs. Cool Counterpuncher.” McCain tried one last time to distance himself from President Bush. “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush,” he said. “If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I’m going to give a new direction to this economy in this country.” But Obama fired back, “If I occasionally have mistaken your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people—on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities—you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush.” Commentators instantly called the debate a draw. Polls instantly gave it to Obama.
The surprise star of the evening was a character named Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who forever would be known as Joe the Plumber. Obama had run into him on a rope line in Ohio several days before the debate. Wurzelbacher complained about Obama’s plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans, saying it would prevent him from buying a small business. Obama said his tax plan was based on fairness. “I think when you spread the wealth around, everybody benefits,” he said. The conservative blogosphere picked up the line and claimed that Obama was a socialist. McCain cited Joe repeatedly—he was mentioned two dozen times in the debate—and seized on his criticism of Obama as reinforcement for his own opposition to Obama’s economic plan, his health care plan, and their differences about the size of government. Joe, who it turned out did not have a plumbing license and owed taxes himself, became another overnight celebrity, the latest and unlikeliest of the campaign. Republicans turned him into a member of the campaign, having him appear at rallies. He sat for endless interviews. Jay Leno joked, “This plumber has done more interviews in one day than Sarah Palin has done since being chosen by John McCain.” Joe the Plumber was one last, weird sideshow in a campaign now rolling steadily toward Obama.
Everything pointed to an Obama victory. National polls gave him a popular-vote lead that bordered on double digits. By late October battleground state polls were moving dramatically in his direction. Across the country, people were already lining up to cast early votes and the Obama ground machine pushed hard to take advantage. Their goal was to bank as many votes as possible before election day—especially voters who were newly registered or had participated only sporadically in the past. Anyone following state-by-state statistics could see the strategy was working. In Colorado, more than half the total votes in 2004 were cast before election day. With a new, more Democratic electorate, that was good for Obama. In Florida, more than a third of the total 2004 ballots were cast early. Governor Charlie Crist was forced to extend voting time by hours each day to reduce long lines at limited numbers of polling places for early voters. In Nevada, more than half the 2004 total was cast early, with big Democratic margins in the two biggest counties. In North Carolina, Democrats had a big margin among early voters as the Republican turnout dropped dramatically.
Obama’s organization was now running at full speed. The campaign had taken the best of their work in the primaries and combined it into a new model: massive infrastructure in the states with hundreds of paid staffers in places like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, and Virginia coupled with tens upon tens of thousands of empowered and accountable volunteers to knock on the doors and make the phone calls to turn out Obama’s vote. All this effort was integrated with the campaign’s use of new media to raise money—half a billion online by the end of the campaign—and energize supporters. Their e-mail list numbered thirteen million. Their Internet operation encouraged supporters in any state to download lists of names to call elsewhere in the country to urge them to turn out on election day.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, who had worked for Edwards before joining Obama as battleground states director, told us after the election, “I think [we] had the perfect balance of new technology, old-school organization, faith in the people that they hired, and trust they were going to get the job done. [There was] very little infighting and total empowerment of the team. It was just a very different environment than you see in a lot of presidential races.”
The Obama team prized the culture they had created. Jim Messina, hired as chief of staff after the primaries, recalled his discussion with Obama before joining the team. He said Obama told him, “I don’t want to hire anyone who’s going to come in and kick the shit out of my people. And I demand your absolute loyalty. And we don’t leak . . . we have a culture.”
As frustrations deepened, McCain’s campaign began splintering. Veterans of previous GOP campaigns saw alarming disorganization and lack of crisp decision-making. Palin was accused by critics—some from inside the McCain campaign—of going “rogue,” of looking out for herself and a possible 2012 presidential campaign at the expense of McCain. Her defenders insisted she was determined to do whatever she could to help the man who had put her on the ticket, but increasingly she seemed to speak for herself rather than the campaign. When McCain pulled out of Michigan, she sounded incredulous, saying she’d like to campaign there. During a campaign trip in October to New Hampshire, she balked at sharing the stage with former congressman Jeb Bradley because they differed on abortion and drilling in the Arctic wilderness. That same day, she was reluctant to join Bradley and Senator John Sununu for conversation aboard her campaign bus and had to be coaxed out of the back of the bus to talk to them, according to a McCain adviser. She created a distraction at the time of the Hofstra debate by demanding the campaign issue a statement denying that her husband Todd had ever been a member of the Alaska Independence Party or that that party had ever advocated secession, according to a top official. Schmidt refused.
As election day neared, there was an eruption of accusations and recriminations from inside the campaign, blind quote after blind quote trashing Palin. Some officials denied the worst of the accusations against her; others privately said they were accurate. Opinions about her were so divided that determining the truth was impossible. But the viciousness of the charges and countercharges left a stain on McCain’s entire campaign.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
President-elect
“It’s the ride of a lifetime.”
—David Axelrod, two nights before the election
Obama began his last full day of the campaign on November 3 in Jacksonville, Florida. He had made three stops in Ohio the day before, playing to huge crowds: an estimated sixty thousand in Columbus, eighty thousand in light rain in Cleveland, where Bruce Springsteen warmed up the crowd with a slow-tempo rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” and closed with “The Rising,” one of Obama’s campaign anthems. Late that night, Obama drew twenty-five thousand at the University of Cincinnati’s football stadium. He arrived in Jacksonville around 1:30 a.m. That morning he learned that his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him, had died after a long illness—a melancholy start to the final forty-eight hours. Obama worked out at the gym and then around 10 a.m. left the hotel for the first of three rallies that day. All were in states won twice by George W. Bush: Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. All were within his reach.
Plouffe’s goal of expanding the electoral map had worked brilliantly. Voter registration efforts over the summer had changed the electorate in some states. Now volunteers were out in force. That final weekend Obama supporters knocked on more than four million doors in Pennsylvania, almost half a million the Saturday before the election in Ohio, while in California volunteers placed a million calls into other states and poured into neighboring Nevada to knock on more doors. Illinois volunteers flooded into Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri.
McCain held a midnight rally in Miami. His traveling press corps was up at 5:30 for baggage call before a flight to Tampa for the first of seven events that would carry him across the country. He was playing defense, try
ing to checkmate Obama, but, as Plouffe had hoped, there were too many weak areas to catch them all. A great tidal wave was building behind Obama. Some states that Republicans won in 2004 already appeared lost: Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, even Nevada. Others were teetering: Ohio and Florida among them. McCain advisers told reporters they detected movement in some places. Pennsylvania was one. So his schedule called for him to stop there during the day. It was the only state on his itinerary that had voted Democratic four years earlier. At Obama headquarters, Jon Carson and the field team scoffed at McCain’s talk of winning Pennsylvania. The surge in Democratic registration meant it would take a miracle for McCain to prevail there.
Florida had slipped away from McCain over the summer when his resources were limited and his organization small. Obama had invested heavily there in money, television ads, paid staff, volunteers, and campaign visits. Now he held the upper hand. McCain’s team could see the falloff from 2004 in a Tampa rally. Adam Smith of the St. Petersburg Times posted a Web site item that last morning recalling that he had been in Tampa two days before the 2004 election. McCain’s crowd, he said, was a fraction of what Bush had drawn. From Tampa, McCain plunged on, trying to save Virginia, Indiana, Nevada, and New Mexico before arriving home in the middle of the night for an Arizona rally.
Obama, meanwhile, continued on a final triumphant tour. “We are one day, one moment, from the rebirth of our very nation,” DeJuana Thompson told the crowd in Jacksonville as they waited for Obama. “Have you called every person you can think of?” Obama came next. “I have just one word for you, Jacksonville,” he said. “Tomorrow!” After Jacksonville, Obama flew to Charlotte, North Carolina. The weather turned foul, as two drenching rains soaked the outdoor rally site before Obama arrived. But the crowd continued to grow and a huge cheer went up as the headlights of his motorcade appeared over the hill in the darkness. An hour earlier, the campaign had released a statement about Obama’s grandmother. As he began his speech, the normally reserved and controlled candidate was overcome with emotion. “She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, so there’s great joy instead of tears,” he said. But photographers caught a tear rolling down his right cheek.
The storms had backed up traffic at the Charlotte airport and there was a brief reminder that Obama was still a mere candidate for president. His pilot announced that the Obama charter was eighteenth in line for takeoff. Twenty minutes later, after his plane had jumped ahead of a few others, he was airborne for Virginia and the last event of the day. He landed at Washington’s Dulles International Airport well behind schedule, but even before he left Charlotte there were reports of a huge crowd building in Manassas.
The symbolism of man and moment spoke powerfully of the changes in America that had taken place in his lifetime: Manassas, the site of the most noted early battle of the Civil War at Bull Run, which sent the Union army fleeing back to Washington; Virginia, which housed the capital of the Old Confederacy in Richmond; Obama, the candidate on the cusp of shattering a racial barrier that many people thought they would never live to see. That was not why Obama’s Virginia team had selected Manassas or why his national team had set Virginia as its last stop. Their focus was on practical politics. They were determined to win Virginia, and Manassas was situated near the intersection of two of the most important counties in the state, Loudon and Prince William, both exurban counties critical to the campaign’s hopes of converting a state that had not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964.
Lights flashing, Obama’s motorcade sped down the freeway from the airport and then snaked through residential neighborhoods before pulling into the parking lot at the Prince William County fairgrounds. It was then that Obama and his aides could begin to see the mammoth crowd spread out in the park, filling every corner—between eighty and ninety thousand people, which Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post called “an artificial lake of humanity.” Obama was nearly ninety minutes late but the crowd was eagerly awaiting him however long it took. He delivered his standard stump speech and closed in a powerful voice, “Virginia, your votes can change the world.” He worked the rope line and then came back up on the stage again, as if to savor the campaign moment one last time.
The flight home to Chicago went quickly. Before takeoff, Obama thanked reporters for their time on his campaign. Some had been with him for most of the twenty months he had been running, a punishing daily routine that kept them from home for weeks or months at a time. It was now just after midnight. Obama was subdued, grieving over his grandmother’s death while knowing that within twenty-four hours he likely would be president-elect, though he gave no public hint of those feelings. “Whatever happens tomorrow, it’s extraordinary,” he said. As he passed through the cabin, some reporters offered condolences for his grandmother. He shook hands with everyone, then said, “Okay, guys, let’s go home.” A day earlier, Axelrod had summed up the extraordinary campaign as “the ride of a lifetime.” Even those who had traveled Campaign 2008 from start to finish and were physically and mentally exhausted regretted seeing the end come; they sensed there would not soon be another election as dramatic and significant as this one. Before Obama disappeared toward the front of the plane, he offered a final, parting comment: “It will be fun to see how the story ends.”
On election day, as polling places began closing in the East, only the size of his victory remained in doubt.
Yet even in the absence of suspense, there was a sense of great anticipation as the states began reporting. A different America began to take shape on the electronic tally boards in the television studios. The eastern sea-board, save for Georgia and South Carolina, was a blue wall. To the Democratic bastion of the Northeast, Obama added Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. Across the battered industrial heartland, there was a solid bulwark for the Democrats: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, thanks to strong support in the suburbs; Ohio by four points; Illinois, of course, a landslide; and, remarkably, Indiana—Plouffe’s dog. The turnaround there was astounding. Four years earlier, Bush won the state by twenty-one points. Obama carried it by a single percentage point, a margin of twenty-eight thousand votes. Only Missouri slipped from his grasp, and by the narrowest of margins. Whatever concerns were voiced during the primaries about Obama’s ability to win the big industrial states—supposedly stemming from racial resistance to a black candidate and his difficulty connecting with white voters—were swept aside by the growing alarm over the economy. The Upper Midwest, the scene of fierce battles in 2000 and 2004, was solidly for Obama. Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all fell to the Democrats by double digits. The West Coast remained firmly Democratic, as it had since 1992. Obama made striking inroads in the Rocky Mountains, where so much time and energy had been invested over the previous months. New Mexico, Republican by less than a percentage point in 2004, went for Obama by fifteen points. Colorado, Bush country by five points in 2004, went for Obama by nine. Fast-growing and rapidly changing Nevada, thought to be competitive until the final weeks, was another rout, with Obama’s margin at twelve points.
Four years after Bush’s victory sparked talk of a lasting Republican majority, the Republicans looked like a shrinking minority with a southern base and little more. Analyst Rhodes Cook calculated that McCain won the South by seven points. The rest of the nation went for Obama by fourteen. McCain bettered Bush’s percentage in just four states, all in the South: Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
Obama’s candidacy rejuvenated the Democratic coalition. Ronald Brownstein described Obama’s supporters as the “coalition of the ascendant,” combining the Democratic base with rising population groups. Obama won the minorities generally loyal to the Democrats—African-Americans and Latinos—but by bigger percentages than Kerry or Gore. Among younger voters, he won overwhelmingly: by two to one among those under thirty and by six points among those thirty to forty-four. His margin among young voters was significantly higher than that of either Gore or Kerry, hinting at a p
ossible generational shift in political affiliation. He enlarged the Democrats’ support among upper-middle-class voters, winning those with college degrees as well as those with incomes of more than $200,000 (despite his pledge to raise taxes on many of them). He lost whites without college degrees, but by no more than Kerry or Gore before him. The geographic and demographic shifts left Republicans no immediate answers about how to compete for political power in a country that had moved so quickly away from them.
Obama’s 53 percent of the popular vote was the highest for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, and he was the first since Jimmy Carter to win by more than 50 percent. His electoral vote totals—375 to McCain’s 163—were comparable with those of Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, but all the more impressive because he was both an African-American and a northerner. For almost sixty years, the only Democrats who could win the White House were white southerners. In the end, Obama won by nearly 10 million votes, 69,456,897 to McCain’s 59,934,814.
Obama’s victory was assured when the networks called Ohio shortly before 9:30 p.m., but it wasn’t until 11 p.m., when the polls closed on the West Coast, that the networks named him the winner, setting off celebrations across the country and pandemonium in Chicago’s Grant Park, where more than 125,000 people waited on a warm November night. In Atlanta, John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, was speaking in Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Church before a crowd that filled the church and spilled outside. When news came that Obama had carried Pennsylvania and Ohio, Lewis knew Obama had won. “I had an out-of-body experience,” he told us later. “I just felt so good. And then later, around eleven o’clock when they declared him the winner, I cried. I just cried.”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 45
