We later found out Richardson was severely under the weather, and we felt bad about our reaction, but we definitely appreciated the laugh we got in the tense predebate hours.
Back at the site, the atmosphere was crackling. Supporters for all the candidates lined the streets, waving signs, chanting corny slogans, and singing songs. Our South Carolina staff had recruited a drum line from a local high school to be part of our visibility contingent. Pulling back onto campus, Obama saw our throng of supporters and the band and asked the driver to stop. The motorcade screeched to a halt and he jumped out and shouted his thanks to everyone. The band roared to life and Obama danced with them for a moment.
In the days leading up to the debate, he had confessed to being nervous about it. Generally, he had enormous self-confidence, but he was also deeply self-aware. He knew that the ways debates were judged-glowing press coverage went to whoever got off the best zinger-did not play to his strengths. It seemed an awfully good sign that he had been loose and having fun throughout the day. But as the debate approached, I could sense he was getting a bit tighter; he seemed more and more detached, which I took as a sign of nerves.
Ax and I were in Obama’s holding room moments before the candidates would take the stage, the three of us forming a tight circle as Ax and I took turns giving him last-minute advice.
“Don’t forget to smile,” Ax told him.
“Iraq is an economic issue, too,” I added.
“And remember the experience riff.”
He tolerated this for a few minutes then held up his hands. “Guys, enough,” he said. “You’re junking up my head. All I will be thinking about is what you just told me I had to do and I’ll be tight.”
Every candidate is different. Some thrive on that last-minute banter. Some want to talk before, but about anything but politics. And some just want solitude. Obama seemed to prefer a relaxed, off-topic conversation, and we never again made the mistake of larding him up with too much information at the last minute. We backed off.
The debate, on the whole, was uneventful. Obama’s performance was solid; not a ten strike by any means, but he more than passed muster.
“Well, that could have been a lot worse,” said Ax as the debate ended. “It was a lot better than I’d thought we’d do.” Ax tended to see calamity lurking around every corner. When Obama had left the hold room an hour earlier to take the debate stage, Ax had turned to Gibbs and me with a look of deadly seriousness and said, “This could be an unmitigated disaster.”
More significant was the postgame reaction. Most of the pundits thought Clinton had won, and she did have a fine night from a traditional debate perspective. They did not view our performance nearly as favorably, but our sense was that Obama’s performance would be welcomed by viewers because he was not parroting prewritten talking points. He certainly had a message he was trying to communicate consistently, but he was also providing thoughtful, honest answers on issues like Iraq, Afghanistan, and health care.
Much of the research we saw on viewer reactions backed up our belief. This became a pattern throughout the primary debates: the voters generally gave us much higher marks than the pundits, and gave Clinton lower marks than the pundits. This proved quite meaningful as the primary wore on and provided further evidence that voters were looking for something new, a candidate who did not seem to be following a worn script. It gave us renewed confidence that we could connect directly with voters and have that guide our strategy, as opposed to obsessing over the media filter.
From a standing start we had made striking headway in the early states. As planned, Obama spent most of his time in Iowa, and we tracked metrics of progress there closely. We made an aggressive gamble and staffed up to huge numbers very quickly. Presidential campaigns usually hire in waves for the caucuses, with most staff brought on toward the end of the campaign when people are beginning to pay closer attention. We took the opposite approach-not an insignificant budget risk at the time—and placed more staff in more communities earlier than any campaign in caucus history.
This upending of Iowa tradition was the brainchild of Paul Tewes and Mitch Stewart. As I’ve mentioned, we had no preexisting organization or relationships in Iowa, so we had to build a network from scratch, and fast. Since Obama was not well known on the ground, Paul and Mitch thought it imperative that our organizers become embedded in the local community as soon as possible, to build up relationships and trust. Many Iowa caucus attendees actually met some of the candidates personally in 2007. But for most, their determinant and consistent contact with our campaign would be with our young organizers.
Tewes established a motto for our field staff philosophy: “Respect. Empower. Include.” We wanted to be the nicest, most attentive, and most creative staff in the field.
Though Obama was new to the state, it was clear from the outset that he had an enthusiastic if small base of Iowans. Our early hires never had time to twiddle their thumbs; they had volunteers to manage and empower immediately.
In the spring and summer of 2007, our organizers were focused on developing relationships and beginning to recruit the volunteer leaders in their areas of responsibility-initially about two dozen precincts per organizer. This was a lot to handle, but the number would decrease as we got closer to the caucus and hired more staff. We called these volunteer leaders precinct captains. They served as the head volunteers in their precincts, essentially the face of the Obama campaign to their neighbors and friends. Their tasks included recruiting volunteers, persuading voters to support Obama, and building crowds for events attended by Barack, Michelle, or other surrogates.
We treated our precinct captains like gold. Obama spent time with them on the phone and in person before and after events, to keep them motivated. For him, it was more than a business transaction; he really loved these volunteers. “The thing I get the biggest boost from in the whole campaign is meeting and spending time with our Iowa precinct captains,” he told me once. “They don’t care about how far behind we are in national polls, or what line I did or didn’t use in a debate. They just focus on what they can control. And I’ll put our captains up against anybody’s.”
They included people like John Powers from Cedar Rapids, a strong Republican, who gave in to his wife’s hounding and reluctantly attended an Obama event. He was intrigued but not sold after his first encounter. He attended another event, stopped by our local office to ask a few more questions of our local organizer, and, satisfied by his research, eventually agreed to become a precinct leader. This was John’s first time getting involved in politics to such a degree, and he no doubt convinced many of the large number of Republicans from that area who caucused for us to join him.
Or Jerre Grefe, a grandmother from small, rural Hampton, Iowa, who also had never been involved with politics but spent just about every weekend going door-to-door. In addition to her precinct duties, she also organized women throughout her county for the Obama campaign.
The unprecedented early investment in people that allowed us to find and recruit John and Jerre and thousands more like them flowed directly from our strategy in Iowa and some of the realities on the ground.
We believed from the outset that we had to expand the electorate or we were cooked. We had to look for caucus attendees under every rock. Most caucus campaigns talk to a narrow group of Democrats, those who have attended prior caucuses. In our case, that was just the opening bid. We needed to find young voters, sporadic voters, people who were not registered independents, Republicans. We had to grab them anywhere and any way we could.
In some counties, folks might see Obama in person once or twice at the most. Their interaction with our campaign-and with all the other campaigns—would be primarily through staff. There was huge value in our organizers showing up at charity events, eating at the local coffee shop, drinking at the Main Street bar. Countless key supporters signed up for the campaign because of their positive interactions with our organizers-these Iowans were drawn to and impressed by
Obama, but the staff pulled them over the line.
We knew we were attracting top-shelf staff talent at the organizer level. This speaks to both Obama’s appeal to younger people (almost all of our organizers were under twenty-five) as well as the appeal of organizing for a campaign and candidate who actually believed in, well, organizing. Our people knew they would not be field scum, as I was called when I started out as an organizer in 1988. In many ways, they would be the embodiment of our campaign.
We married these unprecedented investments in staff with others in good old bricks and mortar. Usually, campaigns establish regional offices in Iowa that the staff can use as bases. Staff members work out of the regional office and regularly drive out to the counties they are responsible for. Then, at the very end of the race, they finally descend full time on their areas.
We envisioned a much more comprehensive network of Obama offices throughout Iowa. Tewes and Marygrace made the case for this real estate empire by stressing two points: First, it was another way to ground Obama in these communities, which had not yet had much exposure to him. Second, from an efficiency standpoint, it was a big plus to have locally based staff spend their time working instead of driving. Nine or ten months from caucus day, I was skeptical that we needed all these offices. But it turned out to be one of our smarter moves and a lesson we carried forward.
At the end of May, I flew from Chicago into Moline, Iowa, to join up with Obama on the road for a few days, which I liked to do from time to time just to assess our events, staff, and the feel on the ground. It was my fortieth birthday, and my parents had flown out to Chicago to see me before I left. Bidding them good-bye as I took off for Iowa, I didn’t realize it would be more than a year until I saw them again.
During my time in Iowa, we hosted an invite-only Memorial Day evening event in the Quad Cities for veterans and their families. Several hundred people turned out, an impressive crowd. As with most of our audiences, a hefty percentage had never caucused. Obama gave an understated, nonpolitical, and off-the-cuff speech about America, its veterans, and how, as president, he would view his relationship with both our active-duty military and veterans. As at many of Obama’s events, there was little applause. The room was quiet and still except for the occasional head nod, as the crowd took in and weighed his words. Afterward, many attendees signed up on the spot. It was this type of organization building that was our only hope to win Iowa.
Also at this event, Bill Gluba, soon to be mayor of Davenport, came up to me and produced over twenty supporter cards-signed pledges by people to attend the Iowa caucuses for Obama—that he had collected as he bounced around the day’s picnics and barbeques. As picayune as it sounds, this was exactly what we were trying to do; it was a small but symbolically important sign to me that things were moving in the right direction. We needed to have thousands of Iowans eventually living and breathing the campaign every day. Our supporters’ involvement couldn’t end at making calls or knocking on doors from preapproved lists; they had to approach everyone they could, no matter their electoral history, and make a personal case for why their targets should support Obama. It was the surest way to expand the electorate in our favor.
The other early states were also progressing nicely. In New Hampshire, we were playing a huge game of catch-up with Clinton, whose organization was just-add-water. In South Carolina, we were much more aggressive than Edwards or Clinton-at this point, we were doing the only organizing in the state. All the other candidates were engaged in top-level politics exclusively-signing up political insiders, elected officials, and ministers, and hoping they would convert supporters and get voters to the polls. That’s historically how it was done in South Carolina—you put local big dogs on the payroll, gave them money around election time, and kept your fingers crossed that they would turn out the vote for you. We resisted this approach; we were happy to have political support and received a lot of it, but our consistent core strategy was to build a locally grown organization.
Most politicos in South Carolina thought we were nuts. But we stuck to our guns and refused to engage in many of the bidding wars for support of political figures. This became a source of tension for some of our more traditional supporters, who wondered why we were so focused on volunteers instead of the warlords who had been getting taken care of for decades and had proved they could turn out the vote with some degree of success.
Our South Carolina staff was pilloried for not playing the game. Stacey Brayboy, our state director, came to us from Virginia governor Tim Kaine’s most recent campaign and had worked in South Carolina previously. She and Anton Gunn, our political director, a former offensive lineman at the University of South Carolina and now a community organizer (which is why we hired him—I liked that his orientation was organizing, not old-school politics), asked me to come down to South Carolina to take some arrows and help convince our political supporters that our approach was sound. They were holding the line, but it was getting harder.
The meeting with our statewide leadership turned into a very spirited discussion.
“We have been running and winning races down here for years,” they told me. “We put ourselves on the line for Obama and now you are telling us you’ll do it a different way—you people who have no idea how to win our elections.”
My response was polite but firm. “Look,” I told them, “we need to drive up turnout, find new and young voters, appeal to independents. We need a huge volunteer organization to accomplish this. In combination with the leadership of the people in this room who know the ropes, it will be a very powerful force.”
A prominent local elected official responded with agitation and a little heat: “If you don’t do it our way, you will lose,” he said. “There are no volunteers in South Carolina politics. You need to pay for your help—and your turnout.”
I stood my ground. I said I appreciated their position but we had an established approach, focused on the grassroots, and we had great faith in its potential success. Most of our leadership was relieved we stood our ground ; they were hungry for a new way of doing things; it was the reason they were committed to Obama in the first place. But a few of our key supporters dropped away at that moment and never reengaged, or did so only very late in the game. They just didn’t believe in what we were doing. The word in South Carolina political circles, spread by our opponents, was that we were trying to run an Iowa campaign in South Carolina and that it wouldn’t work.
But we had our game plan and stuck to it. This was a hallmark of our campaign : because our strategy and approach were settled, decision making was fairly uneventful, which I think is important in any organization. When an issue or question arose, we asked ourselves whether it supported our strategy and whether it was consistent with our tactics. If the answer was no—and most times it was-there was no debate or drama. We simply demurred, as in the South Carolina situation. This allowed us to spend more time on execution and less on hand-wringing over decisions.
In Nevada, all the campaigns were off to a slow start compared with the other early states. No one was sure yet how important the state would be in the end. But by spring we were up and running statewide, and in April more than three hundred people came out to the opening of our office—a tremendous turnout, especially as the only headliner was me. It told me that our ground game could be potent, even in a state with no history of holding caucuses and where Obama could not spend much time.
The night’s more relevant lesson came from a great idea on the part of our Nevada staff. As I wandered around the office, I noticed that all the walls were lined with street maps. I asked a staffer what they were for.
“It’s so people can find the street they live on and their precinct name or number,” he told me.
“Most people don’t know?” I asked. “Well, in most states, people do,” he replied. “But here in Nevada, we’ve had an influx of new residents in the last few years. Plus, it’s our first time as a caucus state. So a lot of people have no idea.”
/> I thought this sort of close-to-the-ground strategy could pay big dividends for us. It was fascinating to watch person after person write down their precinct as if it were a strange phone number. In Iowa, voters knew it as well as their kids’ names.
All political campaigns consume lives-presidential campaigns especially so. The normal things in life-movies, sports, books, uninterrupted time with family and friends-fall away almost entirely. People who sign up for a presidential campaign should know that they are putting their personal lives on hold. If they don’t know, they will learn so painfully, and quickly enough. Our staff and their families regularly made sacrifices large and small to accommodate the campaign; the same was surely true in our opponents’ camps. For the most part, as the campaign wore on, we were too absorbed by what lay before us each day to think about what we were missing of the lives that continued around and without us. What was abnormal became normal. But on that trip to Nevada I was reminded of the personal toll of my prolonged absence from my loved ones.
My wife and I had a dog, a beloved pet that was simply a member of the family. On our first date we discovered we had both always wanted a dog named Marley; by the time our son was born, the Rhodesian ridgeback puppy we had picked out together years earlier was jokingly referred to as our “first-born.” Marley had made the trek to Chicago with my wife and son in March, and we had all settled into a condo not far from the campaign office.
The morning after our Nevada office opening, my phone rang at 4:00 a.m. Vegas time. This was not unusual and I answered my phone. My assumption was that there was some crappy press story to deal with. Instead, it was my wife, her voice tight with concern.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 9
