I’ve always wondered what the conversations must have been about this within the Clinton campaign. The fallout was easy to predict: the gambit was universally ridiculed and prompted a great line that Barack started using at every event: “Now, I know some have been rooting around my kindergarten papers, trying to dig up dirt ...”
It was a consistent crowd-pleaser.
The second Clinton misfire was the unveiling of what they billed as a tough new contrast speech Hillary was going to start giving in Iowa in the closing weeks. In it, she challenged Obama’s experience, his ability to bring about change, and our campaign’s ability to take on the Republican machine. But she prefaced her new lines by saying, “Now the fun part starts,” referring to the speech’s switch into attack mode.
We leapt all over this as a prime example of what was wrong with Washington and the current state of politics. No matter the response of her supporters, the American people en masse do not think attacks should be the fun part of politics, and this statement fed into the belief of many Iowa voters that Clinton would not change the political warfare mentality that had dominated recent affairs—if anything, it seemed, she would enjoy it.
In the weeks and even months to come we often deflected political attacks with a blanket statement along the lines of, “What else would you expect from a campaign that thinks political attacks are fun and that what happened in Barack Obama’s kindergarten class is more important than what’s happening to you and your family right now?” It was brutally effective.
Right before Christmas, about two weeks before the caucuses, I joined Obama on a swing though the eastern and northeastern parts of the state. I wanted to spend an extended time with the road show in Iowa and evaluate how effective our events were in the closing days. You can often get a sense of things beyond the numbers based on the energy, crowd makeup, and dynamic at events this close to an election.
We were primarily in mid- and smaller-sized counties—Jones, Delaware, and Benton in the eastern part of the state—and the crowds were swelling. Even more important than the raw numbers was who, specifically, was showing up. Our Iowa staff would run the names of those in attendance against our voter file and find that the majority of people in the crowds were undecided ; many had no prior caucus history. This was a tremendously important yardstick in our quest to expand the electorate. While it made for good press to have buoyant crowds that conveyed our momentum, what was most important to us was whether our events were preaching beyond the converted.
Iowa caucus-goers could spend a year casually shopping for a candidate, and many did. Now they had to step up to the register—and we had to close the sale. Iowa staff reported that many of the attendees were either signing up to support us at the end of events or shortly thereafter in follow-up conversations. Our conversion rate was very high.
Obama was lighting it up on the road, and he wasn’t alone. Michelle Obama was another road warrior, lighting it up around the state. She had become a secret weapon for us in Iowa. Her nickname was “The Closer,” because the conversion rate at her events was very high—people just responded very positively to her—and she also was terrific in private conversation about gently putting the arm on folks to sign up. She was directly responsible for thousands of people pledging to support us, which is not an insignificant percentage of our turnout. Just as we had planned, both Obamas were clicking on all cylinders as we headed into the stretch. I was not, though. One Saturday morning in December while I was traveling with the road show, I slept through two alarms and had to dash out to the bus, unshowered. As Obama entered his first event, I tried with only marginal success to clean up using the sink and washcloths in the bus. It was a pretty sad sight, and it reminded me that campaigns are best suited for the very young. Gibbs couldn’t resist rubbing it in as he witnessed my morning escapade: “Pretty hard out here on the road these days, huh?” He was right.
I had not been able to travel as much recently; leaving HQ was becoming increasingly difficult as the race got more intense. And the road show was exhausting—five or six events a day, early mornings and late nights. Even as hard as I was working from my desk in Chicago, life at HQ paled in comparison to the grueling pace of the road.
Years ago the Iowa caucuses were held in February; lately they had been in mid- to late January. Due to unfortunate calendar chaos in the 2008 election cycle, the caucuses were to be held on January 3, just nine days after Christmas and three days into the New Year. To say that this complicated things would be a gross understatement. Many Iowans would be traveling out of state during the holidays, making it harder to contact them. We urged our precinct captains to change their own holiday plans or shorten them if they planned to go away—we needed them on the job. As a matter of campaign policy, our poor staff in Iowa was forbidden to leave the state or their posts for the holidays. They would spend the time together as a campaign family. For many of them, it was the first time they would not spend Christmas at home. The rest of the campaign staff was permitted to leave on Christmas Eve but had to be back to work the morning of the 26th. For those celebrating Hanukkah, the same strict regimen was in place. We asked for it because we needed it. There was no time to spare.
Barack knew I was attending church services with my wife and son at 5:00 p.m. on Christmas Eve, so when I saw him calling shortly before 5:00, I knew something was up. I excused myself and went into the vestibule.
“Sorry to bother you,” Obama said, “but I just got word from someone I trust, someone close to him, that Al Sharpton is planning to come to Iowa for the closing days.” He paused a moment to let it sink in. “This person thought maybe he could influence Sharpton’s plans, but wanted our take on it.”
Sharpton had not endorsed anyone in the primary, but it was clear that his presence in Iowa would not be helpful. We had polled him, as we did many political figures that could potentially endorse one of the candidates, and his ratings in Iowa were less than 20 percent positive and over 60 percent negative. Our research showed that voters were always interested in whom Obama would surround himself with in the White House. Based on that finding, we tried to highlight his advisers in both foreign and domestic policy through ads, mailings, policy summits, press events, and surrogate speeches. Given Sharpton’s rating, it was clear that having him come out for us—if that’s what he was planning—might raise more questions than support.
“Was there any more detail about what he planned to do or say?” I asked.
“No,” said Obama. “The person speculated that he might be going to endorse Hillary. Or even that he might try and engineer a last-minute debate on urban issues in the final days before the caucus.”
My assessment was that even with his negative numbers in Iowa, if he endorsed Hillary it would have no downside for her. The only negative effect he could have would be if he endorsed us or hijacked campaign coverage for the closing week. This was an instance where race, which had been largely a nonfactor to date, could enter into the equation. If undecided voters got the impression that Sharpton was an influential adviser for us, it could undermine their willingness to take a chance on Obama.
“I think we should say that if he’s coming to endorse Hillary, of course there’s nothing we can do,” I told Obama. “Have at it. But if somehow he thinks coming there will be helpful to us, the last thing he should do is come to Iowa. This race is razor-thin and we do not need a press sideshow. We just need to keep doing our blocking and tackling.”
Obama sent this message back to the Sharpton source and we never heard back one way or the other. But he did not come to Iowa. And throughout the rest of the campaign, I found Sharpton to be a reasonable and constructive force.
After church, my wife and I took our three-year-old son on a carriage ride through wintry downtown Chicago, stopping for hot chocolate. The next day was wonderful: we unwrapped presents and played with new toys at our leisure, without the interruption of a single conference call. I think that was the first day of the whole campai
gn—nearly a year—without a call. It was surreal. The Iowa caucuses were moments away but the political world largely came to a stop. It was like the movie The Perfect Storm. There were gale force winds and turbulent seas behind us and in front of us. But for a brief window, everything was amazingly, blissfully calm.
In a way, the brief respite was cruel. Back in the trenches the next day, many of us talked about having forgotten what these simple pleasures could mean, especially the joy of being fully present with family and friends. After the election, my son reminded me of that day-after-Christmas epiphany. He pointed something out to me and I responded, perhaps a bit absently, “Oh yeah.”
“Daddy, you weren’t listening,” he said.
“Yes I was, buddy,” I replied.
His response cut me to the core. “No, Daddy,” he told me. “You said, ‘Oh yeah’ like you used to in Chicago whenever I tried to talk to you and you were on your BlackBerry and you weren’t really listening and just said, ’Oh yeah.‘”
He was right. For a lot of us, that strange holiday reminded us of the distracted, isolated lives we had been leading. After going to New Hampshire just before Christmas, we had made the decision to spend the final eight days leading up to the caucuses exclusively in Iowa. We were surprised to see that Clinton was going to spend one day during the closing stretch in New Hampshire but shocked to see Edwards doing the same. We all had a lot riding on Iowa, and their decision to leave the state, even for a day, seemed at odds with that. For us, it was not much of a decision. We had to win Iowa, so that’s where we bunkered in.
Between December 26 and caucus day, our daily internal poll showed Hillary winning most nights, us leading narrowly a couple of times, and Edwards gaining ground and decidedly still in the hunt. Conversely, our field data suggested that we were picking up support each day and, just as important, not losing any ground. (Field data comes from a huge number of conversations between our staff and volunteers and actual voters. It hits a lot more broadly than polling, which takes a small representative sample and extrapolates a bigger picture). At this point, we were talking to all of our confirmed supporters to ensure they knew where to caucus, make sure they could still attend, and simply to reconfirm their support. We were able to undertake such massive voter contact only because of the sheer scale and enthusiasm of our volunteers. They opened up a world of possibility for us because of their commitment. Call every confirmed supporter? Check. Call and knock on the door of every undecided or leaning Obama supporter? Check. It was a rare and remarkable thing to witness. Thanks to the grassroots network we had built, we could communicate through any means and have a conversation with any voter, no matter how unlikely they would be to caucus.
Our better than expected fund-raising and early organization building in Iowa were a huge bonus for us at the end—there was very little, if anything, I wished we could be doing that we weren’t already. I was in our Iowa HQ full time at this point, and throughout the day I would wander into the office of Mitch Stewart and Anne Filipic to talk to them about the data they were getting back from the field, what their staff was saying, and what the other campaigns were up to. Their office was like a temple to me in those closing days, a no-bullshit zone. No spin, no polls, no pundits. Just the numbers. It gave me guarded confidence every time I checked in.
One day Paul Tewes, our creative and obsessive Iowa state director, was out conducting some last-minute political business. He was finagling Dennis Kucinich to put out a statement encouraging his supporters to back Obama in areas where Kucinich would not hit the 15 percent viability threshold. Tewes was also working with the Richardson camp to come up with a tacit agreement that in places where neither of us was viable we would make it clear to our supporters that each candidate preferred the other on the second run-through. The press always makes too much of these “deals.” Voters are going to do what they want to do, regardless of instructions from their first-choice candidate. But every vote counts, and Tewes’s approach summed up how we tried to operate during the whole campaign—no margin for error, assume the outcome will be razor-thin, and try to do everything humanly possible to give us any edge on our opponents.
While Tewes was out, I was using his office for a phone call with Obama. Mitch, who was overseeing the organizational side of the Iowa campaign, walked in looking for Tewes. Seeing him, I said into the phone to Barack, “Listen, it’s out of all of our hands now. It’s in Mitch Stewart’s hands. If his organization delivers what he says it will, we are going to win.” I looked up to acknowledge Mitch’s presence in front of me. “Oh, here he is,” I told Obama. “Why don’t you say hi.”
When I told Mitch the candidate wanted to say hello, his face turned ash white. Mitch was already a jumble of nerves, his hair was falling out, and he was sleeping about two hours a night. This about sent him over the edge. He took the phone from me warily and put it to his ear. “Hello, sir?” He listened a bit, and then said, “I keep looking over the numbers and I think we’ll get to where we need to be. Or we’ll die trying.”
A moment later, Mitch hung up and gave me back the phone. “I think I am going to throw up,” he said.
“You’ll be okay,” I told him. “Sorry to put you on the spot, but he just wanted to say thanks and tell you he appreciates all you’re doing.
Mitch managed a queasy smile. “I still want to throw up.” It was a lot of pressure for a twenty-eight-year-old.
The last Des Moines Register poll was scheduled to come out on New Year’s Day, two days before the caucus. As I’ve mentioned, all the Register polls are important, but this trial can build or destroy a candidate’s momentum. This poll had boosted Kerry and Edwards four years earlier and was devastating to Gephardt and Dean. It was the only Register poll Kerry ever led; no doubt it convinced some late-breaking voters to jump on board with the momentum candidate. The poll would likely be posted at 9:30 or 10:00 p.m. central time, New Year’s Eve. We were far too busy to obsess about it, but it was clearly on everyone’s mind. Even Obama, who was terrific about not paying too much attention to outside numbers, was on pins and needles waiting for it to come out.
All of us in Iowa were manning phone banks. Call time ended at 8:00 p.m. because it was New Year’s Eve and we did not want to harass people too late. I jumped into a car with Pete Giangreco, our lead direct-mail vendor and a key strategist for us in Iowa, and we drove down to Dahl’s grocery store to buy a bunch of champagne for the staff. They wouldn’t be drinking much that night, but they deserved a little free booze to ring in the New Year. We spent the whole ride chewing over what the fallout would be based on different outcomes of the poll. How far behind would be acceptable for us? The Register had endorsed Clinton—was there any way that could impact their polling? What if Edwards was in first? What if we were all tied? “Fuck it,” Pete said eventually. “We’ll know soon enough and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
Back at the office, our press staff kept refreshing the Register website. The Register poll never, ever leaks—which is very rare with polls—nor does the paper’s staff send it out to the campaigns a few minutes before they post it on their site. Everyone gets the results at the same time. I was told later that throughout the evening hundreds of thousands of people across the country were frantically hitting refresh on their browsers to update the Des Moines Register website. People were becoming obsessed with this race. The poll finally popped up: Obama 32. Clinton 25. Edwards 24.
Our campaign office erupted. People were hugging and screaming at the top of their lungs. The results were better than we could have hoped for. This would give us a huge jolt heading into the last forty-eight hours. The reason for the big lead, according to Ann Selzer, the Register’s longtime and respected pollster, was that Democrats were heading to a historic, astronomical turnout, and many younger voters, independents, and Republicans were planning to participate. And they were giving the lion’s share of their support to Obama.
Barack was driving to a late-Saturday-
night event in Ames, home of Iowa State University, when I got him on the phone. Gibbs had just given him the news of the Register poll, and Obama was jubilant. “Things feel great out here on the trail,” he told me. “The events are packed, huge energy, and the precinct captains all report good momentum. This Register poll ought to kick things into even higher gear, don’t you think?”
“It should,” I said. “But even if all it does is motivate our staff and volunteers to work even harder and believe we can win, it’s still a help.”
Obama touted the poll at the event in Ames as a sign that our campaign was gaining momentum, though he cautioned the crowd not to believe in polls, but in their own ability to shape the future.
Within the hour, the Clinton and Edwards campaigns released unusually tough memos taking dead aim at the poll. It was deeply flawed, they said. Too many independents and Republicans. Not enough older voters in the sample. The numbers suggested a total voter turnout approaching two hundred thousand and that’s just not possible. Mark Penn was famous for memos throughout the campaign disparaging the methodology of unfavorable polls and extolling the dubious findings of polls that treated Hillary Clinton kindly. It was an all-out assault on Selzer and to some degree it worked. Most reporters I talked to that night thought the Register poll was an outlier. And perhaps it was. But on the ground in Iowa, I knew it was going to be a big asset.
Once again the Register poll turned out to be rosier than our own polling numbers. But it closely tracked our field data. On the phone with Obama that night, I told him that the poll captured what would happen if a healthy enough number of our confirmed supporters turned out. Our goal was to get confirmation from sixty thousand “1’s”—rock-solid confirmed supporters—and thirty thousand “2’s”—people who were strongly leaning in our direction. Remarkably, we thought we would hit that by the morning of the caucuses. We would also pick up support from people outside this universe; many voters would not discuss their candidate preference, preferring to keep it secret until caucus night, and there were some people with whom we were never able to connect. The Register poll modeled our best outcome. But it was plausible.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 17
