Standing on the street outside the gathering, I said to Ax, “I see where this is headed. I am the logical choice of the folks around him to manage this. Well, I don’t want to and I’m not even sure I’m a good choice. We better come up with some other options. Fast.”
“You go right ahead,” Ax said, smiling sweetly. “But I am going to tell him you are the only and best choice. We’ll be in this boat together, even if it goes down.”
In retrospect, our embryonic team entered this possible race having witnessed in 2004 and 2006, from different perspectives, some of the new techniques and political currents that would emerge so forcefully in 2008. Axelrod and I had worked on the tremendously long-shot gubernatorial campaign of Deval Patrick of Massachusetts in 2006, where we worked with a campaign that was doing some fascinating and new stuff using the Internet to organize and communicate message—from scratch, like we would have to do.
Obama’s own 2004 race showed us the enormous power of his television presence directly communicating with voters. We realized without even having to discuss it that our most powerful weapon would be the candidate, unfiltered.
The fact that all of the initial inner circle—Gibbs, Ax, and me—had done presidential politics in 2004 (for three different candidates) was incredibly important for how we viewed the conventional wisdom about 2008—and was another huge advantage over the Clinton campaign. Few of her inner circle had been involved in the 2004 Democratic primaries. Ax and I had seen improbable outsiders win congressional primaries and races in 2006 while we were working closely with Rahm Emanuel and the DCCC on the effort to win back the House while in 2005 Gibbs was traveling with Obama, seeing a startling passionate reaction to him in very unlikely places all across the country. Of course, most important, Obama was absorbing these lessons as well. All four of us were in the right spots to see a new potential out there to match the changing mood of the electorate and new technological advances that could help us build a campaign to tap into the winds of change. Many of these lessons ran counter to conventional wisdom about how to run for president, so it was a good first test to see if we could ignore the evidence before our eyes, trust our gut, and start with a clean sheet of paper, not try to rerun the campaigns of the past.
When we gathered in Chicago for our next meeting with the smaller initial group, Michelle Obama opened things in very surprising fashion. She declared they had worked through all the family issues and had decided they would run if they thought they could mount a credible effort. They still wanted time to make a final decision on the family side of the ledger, but our conversation that day would focus more on politics than personal life.
We spent a lot of time at this meeting, and during this period, discussing the political calendar. We viewed the race not as national campaign, but as a sequence of states—beginning in Iowa in January and running through Montana and South Dakota on June 3—with the belief that what happened in any one contest had the distinct ability to affect the next. Essentially, this was a momentum theory, and valid or not, we really had no choice but to embrace it. We were thirty points behind Clinton; a head-on race fighting on multiple fronts across the country would be quick and painful. Prior campaigns lent some credibility to our approach. Momentum had historically been crucial in these early contests: winners generally kept winning, at least for a time. A loss was hard to turn around, though front-runners could sometimes stumble and recover due to their strength in other states and financial and organizational superiority.
The year 2008 marked the first time the Democratic Party would add two states to the early primary calendar: Nevada and South Carolina. These would follow Iowa and New Hampshire, in that order. February 5, the first date in the so-called window (those states not granted an early primary date), was also beginning to take form, but we did not know then it would become the twenty-two-state monster that was Super Tuesday.
Before we even knew the contours of the final calendar, we pounded Obama with the mantra that the first contests held undue influence. If you stumbled as an insurgent candidate, you were done. “If you run,” we told him, “you are going to spend all your time doing two things: raising money and campaigning in one of these four states, most often Iowa.” Though this strategy would be tested vigorously at times, in hindsight having it pinned down and clear at the outset could not have been more important.
Our strong strategic sense was that Hillary Clinton had to be disrupted early in the primary season for us to have any chance of derailing her. Ax and I gravitated to the same place on this pretty quickly, and the rest of the team concurred. There were no long drawn-out discussions. It just made sense.
It would take discipline to stick to the path, but the necessity of doing so was not really rocket science. We were running against such a formidable front-runner that if she won the first few contests, the race would be over. We would never be able to erase her big leads in the latter primary states, and at that point, her organizational and financial advantages would really kick in, as she looked to be the all-but-certain nominee and we campaigned in states where we had spent little time or resources.
As Ax told me over a breakfast in Chicago one day during this period, “I really don’t think we have a choice. It’s Iowa or bust.”
I suspected that if you ran a computer simulation of the primary, ninety- five out of one hundred times, Hillary Clinton would win. Edwards would win a couple of the remaining five. That’s how narrow I believed our path to be. And while there was no guarantee that our strategy would lead to victory, backtracking or zigzagging would unquestionably lead to a precipitous fall off the electoral cliff.
Our first cut on these states—before any in-depth survey research was conducted or the final field of candidates was known—was the following (as always, Clinton was the main focus of our analysis):
We thought Iowa could be potential quicksand for Hillary. Bill Clinton never campaigned there in the primaries—in 1992 Senator Tom Harkin ran a favorite-son candidacy (on which I worked), and in 1996 Clinton was unopposed. Unlike in most other states, the Clinton operation, though likely to generate a formidable surge of early endorsements from elected officials and major Democratic activists, was not impregnable. None of her core senior team had any Iowa experience whatsoever. They did not have residual volunteers in every corner of the state from Bill’s 1992 primary campaign as they did elsewhere. And many Iowans were strongly antiwar—including many Republican voters—so we thought her vote and stubborn position on the Iraq War could give her problems. Iowa was also historically friendly to outsider and long-shot candidates if they spent a lot of time in-state, had a resonant message, and organized well.
Of course, we had no assets in Iowa—Obama had close to zero relationships there. But many of us around the table—me, Hildebrand, Axelrod, Alyssa—had extensive experience in Iowa or had dealt with Iowa through the prism of a national campaign. We understood the quirks of caucuses, the nuances of the electorate, and that its voters historically paid little attention to the national media (they would make their own judgments, and take their time doing so). We knew we could count on a fair hearing in Iowa. I did not fully appreciate at the time the advantage such broad Iowa caucus experience gave the Obama headquarters, but looking back I can imagine that at Clinton headquarters, it must have seemed somewhat like foreign territory.
New Hampshire was the next state, and the first primary, and home of Bill Clinton’s “Comeback Kid” resurrection in 1992. The state had a special relationship with the Clintons. Despite that, we thought New Hampshire could be fertile ground. Independent voters can make up a huge percentage of the primary electorate, and our sense was that Clinton would be very challenged to earn a healthy share of their support. The Granite State also had a history of tripping up front-runners—Walter Mondale and George W. Bush most famously—so if we could come out of Iowa as the main alternative to Hillary, we thought New Hampshire could be competitive. For Hillary Clinton, losing New Hampshire could be a damagi
ng, if not fatal, blow.
Nevada was one of the new kids on the block; the Silver State would be holding a caucus for the first time. Our first cut at Nevada was the haziest, but our sense was that this would be a hard state for us, as the Democratic establishment would likely have outsized influence in a first-time caucus. Even in the spring training portion of the campaign, it was also clear that Hillary Clinton would have real strength among Latino voters, whom we expected to compose 10 to 12 percent of the Nevada electorate. We thought Nevada would be the least important of the first four contests in terms of the trampoline effect. I figured we would need serious momentum coming out of New Hampshire to have any chance of winning it.
Conversely, we were thrilled that South Carolina would be the gateway to the rest of the calendar. African Americans made up about 50 percent of the primary electorate, and though Hillary Clinton had a huge lead in the African American community at the moment, we believed that if we could show competitiveness through 2007, and if voters became familiar with Obama (most African American primary voters had no idea who he was or knew only his name, whereas the Clinton name was the gold standard in many of these households), our support levels would increase. If we could topple Clinton in Iowa or New Hampshire, our support in this community would skyrocket. And if we didn’t do what we needed to in Iowa and New Hampshire, it was moot anyway; we’d probably be out of the race by South Carolina. We also believed that only one, Obama or Edwards, would be alive by the time South Carolina rolled around; if it was Obama, we would have a terrific opportunity to attract the support of progressive white voters in the Charleston area and rural white men whose support Clinton might have a tough time securing.
But it started and ended with Iowa. If we did not win there, our chances were probably zero. When you got under the hood in Iowa, it was a daunting challenge. Our first poll there had us firmly in third place. Edwards was polling 38, Clinton 25, and Obama 18. Edwards remained very popular in Iowa after his strong second-place finish in 2004 and had a strong core of organizational support. A look beneath the top numbers showed that our task was even harder than we initially realized. To win Iowa, we thought we’d probably need 35 percent of caucus attendees. If Edwards really faded, which looked unlikely but possible, the win number could jump up higher as his vote percentage dropped.
From the get-go it was clear we could not win if the caucus universe was the same as it was in 2004. And it had been that way pretty much every year since Jimmy Carter won in 1976, propelling him to the presidency. To win, we would have to attain the holy grail of politics—a fundamentally altered electorate.
Say you are a business trying to expand your percent of market share against an established brand-name product. Your competitor’s customers have been buying their product for decades and are unlikely to sample something new. How do you outsell that competitor without converting their customers? You have to recruit new buyers.
We had to grow the share of the electorate we believed would be most supportive of Obama. The 2008 caucuses would have to be younger, attended by more minorities (though they constituted a small percentage of the population in Iowa, every voter mattered), and have a higher percentage of independents and Republicans participating than had historically done so.
It sounded great in theory. The reality was terrifying. In every recent caucus, twice as many people over sixty-five had turned out as people under thirty. We’d have to narrow that considerably, doing something most political observers thought was impossible—get young people interested and get them to show up. Republicans and independents could attend the caucuses but had to reregister as Democrats to do so—a huge barrier to participation. We’d have to find a way to create a permission structure to make this easier.
At our second meeting and in subsequent conversations, some other key assumptions were developed and decisions made that would help guide us out of the box if Obama gave the go-ahead:
We would be headquartered in Chicago. There was some dissent about this—he was a senator and would frequently be in Washington; some thought that we would have trouble attracting staff to Chicago for an underdog effort. I felt strongly that our base should be in Chicago. D.C. is a swamp of conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck a campaign down, and we needed to think differently, to care more about volunteers than political endorsements, to focus more on Iowa field numbers than the national Gallup poll, to be strategic more than tactical, and to not traffic in gossip and internal campaign politics. As far as attracting talent, I thought people who moved to Chicago would be committing themselves to the campaign, not fitting the campaign around their lives. And most simply, it was hard to sell an outsider candidate who was based in Washington. Obama raised splitting the headquarters—basing some functions in D.C. and some in Chicago—to accommodate those who couldn’t move. I quickly shot this down as a potential disaster in the making. Even in the age of technology, it is invaluable to have everyone under one roof. Nothing is a substitute for human, in-person contact for hatching plans and hashing things out.
We would strive to be a grassroots campaign. That meant volunteers. This was a prime motivation for Obama to run, the belief that the American people needed to reengage in their civic life. He laid out a clear dictate that we needed to build a campaign that had this at its core. As a former community organizer, Obama felt in his gut that if properly motivated, a committed grassroots army could be a powerful force. Over time the volunteers became the pillars that held the whole enterprise aloft, but at the outset, we thought the grassroots could play three pivotal roles for our campaign. One, we hoped our volunteers could help fund our campaign with small contributions to a greater degree than any previous presidential candidate had succeeded in doing; two, we wanted them to organize their local communities for the campaign—the best way to get new people to caucuses and polls was to have a family member, friend, or neighbor ask them to go; and three, we needed them to help deliver our message, person to person, which was critical—trust in and attention paid to traditional media sources seemed to be dwindling rapidly.
Obama’s desire to mount a grassroots effort answered neatly the looming question of how to run against the strongest establishment front-runner in our party’s history; we would build a ragtag militia to compete against her regular army.
Technology, like the grassroots focus, would be at the core of our campaign from the start. In order to build a grassroots movement, it was clear that the only way to get to scale quickly enough was to use the power of the Internet to sign people up and ask them to get involved. I also made the point that many of our early supporters were likely to be fairly technologically savvy, as was more and more of the general population as well.
“So many people are living their lives through technology—how can we expect their interaction with politics to be the one exception?” I asked.
Because of the lead time required, we decided to green-light the building of a website, heavy on video and tools for our supporters to organize and raise money and have discussions and find each other—our own social-networking site. If he didn’t run, this work would largely go down the drain, but we knew that the moment he indicated he was running, we would need a website that could absorb the interest and help propel our campaign.
We would follow the Bush model in one area. Obama was running largely to be a national antidote to George Bush, but he had read enough and studied enough about recent presidential elections to know that the Bush people did one thing very well: they had a tight circle involved in key decisions and none of those people talked out of school. Obama wanted the same along with a clear chain of command.
“I don’t want to be involved in a campaign where everyone is leaking on each other and we have to worry that the contents of conference calls and meetings will show up on the Drudge Report or in the New York Times,” he said. “I want to be inclusive on many matters in the campaign, so people feel listened to, but on big decisions, I want the circle small. So we can t
rust each other.
“And,” he added pointedly, “we’ll have fewer suspects to interrogate if there is a leak.”
Ken Mehlman, who was Bush’s manager and Obama’s law school classmate, told him the Bush people had a rule that their campaign inner circle would never expand. If they wanted to add someone new, someone else had to be kicked out. Our tight circle initially consisted of me, Axelrod, and Gibbs, talking through key strategic matters with him. Some staff told me having three white guys as the most inner core in the beginning was the source of some internal tension, and I understood why. The circle would need to get more diverse and grow a bit down the line. But for now, that was the unit.
Fifty million dollars was our initial fund-raising target. That was the number we thought we could raise in 2007 based on initial estimates of fund-raising events, online contributions, and direct-mail contributions. It was a conservative estimate; if we built momentum and looked viable down the line—a big if at that point—we could expect it to grow, but it served for our initial budget. The budget allowed for strong campaigns in the first four states and that was it. We would need to use strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire to quickly raise the money needed to compete in the February primaries. This underscored how perilous our path to the nomination was—we assumed Clinton would raise at least $100 million in 2007 on top of the $10 million she was transferring from her Senate account (we were transferring next to nothing, because his Senate account had next to nothing), that she would outspend us in the early states and also be better prepared in the later states.
The last point may not seem strategic, but it ended up being important. And we would try to have fun. It became clear in these discussions that Obama did not have a pathological desire to be president. He was a grounded, sane, and relatively happy person who would be just fine if he never became president or even a presidential candidate. If he ran in 2008, it would be because at this moment, he thought he had something to offer in terms of leadership and priorities that matched what the country needed. We did not spend much time talking about 2008 versus 2012 or 2016. Obama was not searching for the best time to run. Because of this, we did not have the stifling pressure that came with expectations or unhealthy ambitions. As Obama said at one of our initial meetings in Chicago, “I’m putting all my chips in the middle of the table and letting it ride. If I win, great. If I don‘t, I won’t be personally crushed.”
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 3
