The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory

by David Plouffe

  We finally put our foot down and unilaterally declared that from September forward we would participate only in the two remaining DNC-sanctioned debates and a few in Iowa and New Hampshire that we had already agreed to, like the historically important Des Moines Register debate and one in New Hampshire sponsored by WMUR. This decision upset many groups that were planning to hold their own cattle calls, but it wasn’t our problem. We would have preferred to make the decision in conjunction with our opponents, but we had tried that once and seen they could not be trusted to follow through. Forging ahead on our own allowed Clinton to free up her schedule without bearing the political cost of rejecting debates, but it couldn’t be helped. Our strategy required six public events a day in Iowa, not spending whole days prepping and debating. The clock was running out.

  The next DNC-sanctioned debate was in Philadelphia on October 30. The proceedings were largely unremarkable until the last few minutes, the “garbage time” of debates when very little of consequence usually happens and many reporters have already tuned out to write and file their stories.

  Tim Russert and Brian Williams were moderating, and Russert asked Clinton a question about a proposal by New York governor Eliot Spitzer to provide illegal immigrants with driver’s licenses for the purpose of dealing with issues like traffic accidents; under current law an undocumented worker was not held responsible. Many local law-enforcement officials were also asking for some kind of identification program that would allow them to track undocumented immigrants.

  Clinton said that the federal government had failed on immigration reform, forcing states to address the problem on their own. This answer seemed to express support for Spitzer’s plan. But Russert followed up, trying to nail her down as firmly supporting or opposing it; once again her answer left the impression that she was supportive, but she danced around the question a bit more and refused to answer with a straight yes or no.

  Russert then asked for a show of hands of all the candidates who supported allowing undocumented immigrants to have driver’s licenses. Obama raised his hand; he had voted in the Illinois state legislature for a proposal similar to Spitzer’s. The issue was not a priority for him, but he supported allowing states to pursue it if they desired, as Bill Richardson had done in New Mexico.

  Chris Dodd, who had not raised his hand, uncharacteristically piped up to state his opposition to the driver’s license idea and then, to everyone’s complete surprise, chastised Hillary for not answering Russert’s questions directly. This spurred Clinton to once again speak very positively about Spitzer’s proposal but avoid saying clearly whether she did or did not support it. The tension in the air grew thicker.

  And like that, the story of the debate was rewritten. It was Hillary’s first major unforced error in any debate and the press pounced on it. Fed with oxygen from the media, the spark quickly turned into a firestorm for the Clinton camp. There was no need for us to fan the flames; we stood back and watched the carnage.

  The next day her debate gaffe dominated the television coverage. The campaign tried to put out the fire by releasing a statement saying she was opposed to Spitzer’s plan, which had the added effect of putting them in contrast with us on this issue.

  But this response only made things worse, because it seemed highly inauthentic. Voters who had watched her three stabs at answering the question the previous night might not have been totally clear on her position, but they certainly wouldn’t have come away with the impression that she was against the Spitzer proposal. Now her debate performance looked highly parsed.

  This driver’s license contretemps may seem a small thing in the scope of the entire campaign, but often things that start small end up having a profoundly outsized impact. The problem for Hillary was that she had turned a simple question about driver’s licenses into a deeper question about her motives. It became a character issue, and the data and anecdotal information we got back from the early states showed that it dramatically slowed her momentum. This was also reflected in the national narrative: it was now Hillary Clinton’s turn to be sent to the press penalty box. After months of coverage that cast her as inevitable, finally there was a crack.

  The license debacle was soon followed by “Plantgate” in Iowa. A college student reported that at a forum at Grinnell College the Clinton staff had approached her about asking Hillary a question. She had something in mind but was told by the staff that the questions were already written out. She was then handed a piece of paper with a question on global warming. Naturally Clinton called on the student from a crowd of over four hundred people. When the student read her question, she winked theatrically at the end. It made for great TV.

  Her story became a media sensation across the country and was covered extensively in Iowa. The Clinton camp tried to clean it up by calling it an isolated incident, but no one bought this feeble spin. Their ruse ruffled the feathers of Iowans, who prided themselves on asking tough questions and demanding spontaneous answers of the candidates. Trying to make an end run around this was a big no-no.

  In the early stages of the campaign, voters continually pressed Clinton to explain why she would not apologize for her Iraq War vote; in response to this hounding she had eventually all but ceased taking questions, a move that had earned her sharp criticism. Plantgate bolstered the notion that she would take questions only if her campaign could control what was asked. Our early-state staff reported back that it exacerbated some basic, gnawing doubts among voters. They were concerned Hillary was too calculating and her decisions politically expedient.

  We had expected to approach the November 10 Jefferson-Jackson (J-J) Day dinner with the wind in our faces. The J-J dinner is a yearly Democratic Party event in Iowa that historically has played an important role in the presidential primary. There would be close to ten thousand Democrats in attendance, and the ripples from the impressions made there would carry across the state: a prime opportunity for us to reshape the race.

  The two recent kerfuffles hardly cleared a path to victory for us. “As things stand,” Barack said to Ax and me in the lead up to J-J, “I feel like we’ll end up doing better than people expected, put a scare or two into Hillary, but come up short. We have got to shake things up a bit or in a couple of months we’ll be heading back to Chicago with a nice handshake and thanks for playing.”

  The J-J dinner has two main components. The first is the candidates’ speeches. The media and the Iowa Democratic political community scrutinize each speech intently. What was the crowd’s reaction? Was there new material? Would the speech provide new momentum to the campaign? At the 2003 dinner, John Kerry unveiled a tough new speech that established an implicit contrast with the front-runner at the time, Howard Dean; many saw this as the start of his unlikely climb from a stagnant third to eventually clinching the nomination.

  Second, the event is viewed as a test of organization. Who got the most people there? Who had the biggest presence outside the hall? If undertaken properly—not just by building a crowd of bodies but by forcing your statewide organization to produce attendees—it could also be a very useful internal measuring stick for the health of the campaign.

  Jon Favreau started working on the speech with Axelrod a few weeks out. We decided we had to offer the clearest distillation yet of our message and of the leadership contrast we were offering with Hillary Clinton. During a conference call, Ax laid out the strategic needs of the speech. “We have to shake people and remind them that the kind of change we’re offering can’t be replicated by Clinton,” he said. “Barack Obama can unite disparate elements of our country; Clinton will be more polarizing. Obama can really challenge the ways of Washington; Clinton is comfortable in the muck. And Obama will challenge the country to deal with long-term issues, not play small-ball politics.

  “This is not about issue differences, other than Iraq,” he summarized. “It’s about leadership qualities and vision. That’s what we have to punch through at the J-J.”

  We went through several draf
ts, with Obama’s input, and about two weeks before the dinner, Favreau, Ax, Obama, and I met in the Chicago HQ to start nailing things down. We went over the speech line by line as Obama munched on a tuna melt and made more changes. He began to practice reading through it; teleprompters were banned at this speech, so he would need to know his speech cold. Axelrod and I had been stressing the import of the J-J dinner to the point of probable annoyance, but by the end of the session it was clear that he understood the stakes.

  “This is a very good speech,” he said. “I need to give my best speech of the entire campaign at this dinner, so for the first time I’m going to memorize the whole thing, word for word, so it’s crisp and delivered powerfully, and so I don’t leave anything out.” Memorize. Word for word.

  This was music to our ears. His stump performance to date, when he was not reading a speech, had mostly been workmanlike. But this was a long speech. And at this point the J-J was just ten days away and our schedule was packed.

  “We’re all for that,” I enthused. “But when are you going to be able to internalize this? Ax will be traveling with you so you guys can practice, but there’s no down time set aside for memorization. Do we need to scrap some of the schedule?”

  “No,” he replied. “I’ll spend time with this on drives between events and late at night at the hotel. And I’ll practice some by myself and some with Ax and Favs. I get how much we have riding on this speech and dinner. I need to step it up.”

  Our Iowa staff had a monster plan for accomplishing the second imperative of the J-J dinner, demonstrating organizational strength. Their initial budget for the event was $250,000, which I quickly rejected. But we agreed that spending close to $100,000, though still a sizable risk, was a gamble worth taking for the shot in the arm it could give us. The budget included transportation to Des Moines for our supporters across the state, new signs and banners, and a pre-event concert with John Legend to get everyone psyched.

  One organizational complication was that the J-J is a fund-raiser. Many supporters had to buy a ticket to come, and the cheapest one was $100, no small amount for most people. Some of our National Finance Committee members bought larger blocks of tickets to be distributed to our volunteers who could not afford it. All the campaigns did this, but we were extremely diligent about providing tickets only to people who were confirmed Obama supporters and volunteers. This was not just a tactical exercise for us—filling seats with people who would casually wave Obama signs did us little good. So we tasked our precinct captains from around the state with finding committed supporters in their area to attend the dinner.

  It was clear the Clinton people were going all out as well, though perhaps with a bit less success. An e-mail surfaced from their camp asking out-of-state volunteers to come to Des Moines—something that struck us as very significant. They were a big campaign with a lot of support in Iowa, but if they could not fill their seats with local Iowans, it implied a lack of enthusiasm among her supporters.

  J-J Day has the atmosphere of a college football game. All the campaigns host big “pre-events”—like tailgating. We held the John Legend concert, which drew thousands. At the concert’s end, our supporters, lively and pumped up, marched through the city of Des Moines to the auditorium several blocks away. Barack and Michelle led the crowd, dancing part of the way. It was an impressive display. Our new media team cut a short video of the massive crowd that we shared on the Web and via e-mail with our supporters around the country, so they could get a taste of the enthusiasm and organization in Iowa.

  In the hall itself, we clearly had the most supporters, each one of them committed to caucusing for Obama. Clinton’s crowd was a somewhat distant second, and Edwards’s way back in third. Our folks were ready to let loose and holler for their candidate.

  The problem was they would have to wait four hours. There had been a drawing for speaking order and we drew the last slot. This was a concern; we needed an inhumanly strong reaction to his speech and were worried that by the end of the night, we would be lucky if most of the crowd had not nodded off.

  The program dragged on and on and on. Every elected official in Iowa spoke—at length—in addition to the candidates, each of whom had been assigned a strict ten minutes and proceeded to ignore that limit completely. When at last Hillary took the stage, she used her moment to unveil a new shtick, a call and response. The main thrust of her speech was that she was tough enough to take on the Republicans. She asked the crowd, “And when the Republicans engage in fearmongering, and saber rattling, and talk about World War III, what do we do with them?” And her supporters, as instructed by her staff, shouted out, “Turn up the heat!” as they waved yellow signs emblazoned with the same phrase and repeated like a chorus throughout the speech.

  I had stayed in Chicago for the J-J because we had a lot of planning to get done that Saturday at HQ. Back at our apartment, my wife and I watched the late-night events unfold on TV, which was how most Iowa voters would take in the speeches. “That just seems awful,” I said to her as Hillary riled up the crowd. “Even for a Democratic Party dinner it’s awfully political and partisan.”

  I e-mailed Ax my thoughts and asked how it came across in the auditorium. His reply: “Other than her supporters people are stone silent.” It seemed like they let a desired tactic—an audience call and response—drive her speech instead of focusing on a clear, contrasting message. She delivered some solid lines—change isn’t easy, without experience and hard work it’s just words—but the clear takeaway for those in the hall and in the media was the “turn up the heat” nonsense. It was by no means a disaster for her, just a missed opportunity, and an important one.

  Well after 11:00 p.m., Obama was finally welcomed to the stage. His entrance music was something Ax and I had cooked up late one Friday night in the office. We got the beloved Chicago Bulls announcer Ray Clay to tape Obama’s introduction using the famous Bulls music from the Michael Jordan era. Instead of “From North Carolina, a six-foot-six guard, Michael Jordan,” the music was accompanied by Clay intoning, “From our neighboring state of Illinois, a six-foot-two-inch force for change, Senator Barack Obama!” Obama was a rabid Bulls fan, and we knew that music would pump him up. Just as important, it pumped up our supporters, who had been sitting there for hours.

  He delivered the speech of his life. The whole crowd was riveted. Gibbs and Ax sent me a stream of e-mails noting that even the “jackals,” as we called the press, were impressed. I sat quietly with my wife and knew we were witnessing a very meaningful moment. He delivered the speech better than it was written, and it was one hell of a speech. He just nailed it. “We are in a defining moment in our history,” he told the crowd. “Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for feels as if it’s slowly slipping away. We are working harder for less. We’ve never paid more for health care or for college. It’s harder to save and it’s harder to retire. And most of all, we’ve lost faith that our leaders can or will do anything about it.‘ ”

  His speech raised the stakes of the election. Turning to the same old leaders in Washington was like rearranging the deck chairs as the ship headed toward an iceberg. “And that is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do in this election,” he continued. “That’s why not answering questions ‘cause we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do.” Implicit in the text, and lost on no one that night, was that our main opponent would be more likely to play it safe and political.

  In response to the speech, Mandy Grunwald, Hillary’s campaign media strategist, told the press that Mark Penn had said disparagingly of our supporters that they “look[ed] like Facebook,” while Hillary’s looked more like traditional caucus-goers. And Penn himself made a comment to the media that should go down in political infamy: “Only a few of their people look like they
could vote in any state.” Even less than two months out from the Iowa caucuses, they were oblivious to the growing danger of our grassroots organization.

  Our initial takeaway was that we had gotten out of the J-J exactly what we needed, both organizationally and from the impact of the speech. We were thrilled. Ax’s e-mail to me after the speech was succinct: “Fucking home run.”

  I talked to Obama very late that night, after 1:00 a.m. He was really keyed up, which was unusual. “Sorry for calling so late,” he said. “I just can’t sleep. I’m talking quietly because Michelle is asleep. So you liked it, huh?”

  I had sent him an e-mail as the speech ended saying our odds of winning Iowa just jumped because of his performance. “It was okay,” I joked. “Hard to stay awake through it, but I guess it’ll do.”

  We both laughed. This was a big moment in the campaign and not only had we survived it, we had thrived. He and I spent at least half an hour on the phone, reliving the night, critiquing Hillary’s and the others’ speeches, and talking about the road ahead.

  “The only problem for you is now we all know you can memorize,” I told him. “So next time you say we have to stop handing you a couple of late-breaking new lines for your speech, you’ll get no sympathy.”

  He laughed. “True, but it’s the big red-light moments I rise to.”

  Before we hung up I told him I was very proud of what he had done that night. Clearing the event’s high bar and giving a great performance were both impressive, but so was the text of the speech itself, which he had molded into a compelling articulation of why he was running and offered our clearest explanation yet of the choice in the primary election. The whole campaign now had its rallying cry for the stretch drive.