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

by David Plouffe

  Obama started by laying out what he could have done better in Pennsylvania. He did not spare himself and was particularly critical of his debate performance and having allowed us to get sucked into a tit-for-tat with Hillary.

  “I want us to get our mojo back,” he said. “We’ve got to remember who we are.”

  Then we went around the table and took turns suggesting ways we could improve our performance. Soon our discussion moved to the critical primaries thirteen days away, May 6, in Indiana and North Carolina. We were up in North Carolina by double digits and trailed slightly in Indiana.

  Obama said flatly that he still agreed we were going to win. But he did not want to stumble to the finish line and end up a wounded nominee. Winning Indiana would be hard, but he thought we should try.

  “We need to go all-in,” he told the table. “We have to try to finish this now. Even if Hillary stays in for another month, if we push hard now we will have won the nomination, not backed into it. And I’ll campaign round the clock. I’ll do anything you ask. Right now, we’re teetering. We need to regain our foothold.”

  He was right. This meant ceding some margin in North Carolina, both in raw votes and delegates. It marked the first time we approached a set of contests with political victory and not delegate acquisition as the core of our strategy. It was what we should have done in Texas.

  No one dissented. We were betting the house on Indiana and would barn-storm the state, campaigning very close to the ground with few rallies. We would not engage with Clinton, at least not on the air.

  At Obama’s request we also started regular, nightly calls with him and the senior staff at the end of each campaign day. These centered almost exclusively on message as opposed to budget, operations, or political matters. We went on to do these every night until November 3; sometimes they lasted five minutes, sometimes an hour, but they were important for a number of reasons. First, it was good to download the day’s events with him as a group. The staff had been in a rolling conference call with each other for eighteen months at that point. Obama talked mainly to Gibbs on the road and to Ax and me on the phone if we weren’t traveling with him, for updates, to bounce around new ideas, and to share what our surrogates and opponents were up to. The three of us were the conduit to the rest of the senior staff about Barack’s thoughts and concerns.

  Now, with all relevant parties on the phone, we could more efficiently adjust remarks planned for the next day and, occasionally, even retool the entire day’s message focus. And for those senior staff who so far had had little direct contact with Obama, it helped to give them a better sense of what he was thinking.

  These discussions were also efficient in that they allowed Barack the opportunity to raise whatever was on his mind without having to call or e-mail a bunch of us individually. Ax and I still often talked to him after the staff call about more strategic matters, but now he could deal with speech edits, a question about a surrogate he saw on cable who was off-message, and the interview roster for the next day, all in one fell swoop.

  It quickly became clear to me we should have been doing these end-of-the-day calls since Iowa. Anita Dunn ran these discussions for the whole campaign and did a fantastic job keeping us on track. They effectively rounded out our other regular staff calls at 7:00 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. as the sound tracks of our lives.

  Before we left Obamas’ house the night after Pennsylvania, I made one sobering point. The Reverend Wright was reemerging during this crucial two-week period. He was scheduled to do an interview with Bill Moyers in two days, a speech in Detroit that Sunday, April 27, and then, most disturbingly, a speech and a Q&A session the next day.

  “Even if we’re lucky,” I warned the group, “and he doesn’t completely blow himself and us up, half the coverage in the next thirteen days will be about Wright. The timing could not be worse. Even if he conducts himself like a Boy Scout, day after day his sermons will be all over TVs and the Internet.” Everyone was exhausted, and my observation was greeted with weariness and I think some fear. “His events will be covered like debates,” I continued. “They’ll be the biggest thing going on. It’ll make it that much harder winning Indiana, where Wright has numbers worse than the Ebola virus.”

  His first two events went off without our getting too wet. In fact, he came across in the Moyers interview as less racial bomb thrower than quiet, studious intellectual. He still led the news and his sermons were once again ubiquitous, but this was as good as we could have hoped for. The campaign had no contact with Wright at this time, so we had no idea what to expect.

  Watching his Detroit speech Sunday night, prepared to fold into a fetal position at the slightest provocation, I almost exhaled at the end when I realized we’d made it through unharmed. Certainly not what I would have scripted, but for Wright, it was fairly docile and not inflammatory. Perhaps, miraculously, we were going to dodge a bullet. Two down, one more Wright event to go.

  And then, Monday morning, eight days out from primaries that could make or break us, the dam burst. Our worst enemies could not have designed an appearance by Wright that was more damaging. Speaking at the National Press Club, he was divisive, hateful, bombastic, conspiracy-crazy, and just generally repugnant. He said he thought the U.S. government might have deliberately spread HIV in the African American community. He compared American military efforts to terrorism. He said that Obama “does what politicians do,” and that Obama’s denunciation of some of the language in his sermons was “based on electability, based on sound bytes, based on polls.”

  I was sitting at my desk in Chicago watching it unfold, on the phone with Obama as he drove to the airport. I tried to describe for him what was happening, but eventually my description broke down into sheer negativity. “This is worse than anything we could have expected,” I moaned. “It’s like a Saturday Night Live sketch, but it’s real.” I was slumped in my chair, chin planted on one hand, staring at Wright on-screen with a mixture of venom and bewilderment.

  Barack was crestfallen. I don’t believe he was even thinking about the political damage this would do. Despite their disagreements and the distance that had grown between them over the years, Wright was still his pastor, and, more important, the pastor of a church community Barack loved and respected. In that moment, most of all I think he was hurt.

  As the speech wrapped up and I went quiet, Barack was as down as I have ever heard him. He quietly told me he had to go, and he wanted to watch the whole performance for himself that night.

  The press smelled blood and it was clear Barack had to say something immediately. We gathered the press traveling with us and he went on record as saying that he disagreed vehemently with Wright’s remarks, that they completely went against the grain of all he believed and all his campaign represented.

  He wanted to do our nightly call after he had watched the speech on YouTube. That call, which took place well after midnight, was short and to the point. Obama said he needed to go out in the morning and make clear how repugnant he found Wright’s comments and that he could no longer stand by him—the reverend had crossed a line and permanent separation was the only acceptable recourse. Obama also raised the possibility of leaving Trinity but could not yet bring himself to do so, mainly because he thought it would be devastating for the community.

  I asked if he wanted Favreau to draft some remarks and he quickly said no. “Only I can do this.”

  The next day, Obama held a press conference and said that Wright’s divisive outburst contradicted “everything I am about and who I am.” He was particularly outraged that Wright suggested his Philadelphia speech was political posturing. He called the reverend’s comments “divisive and destructive,” “wrong,” and “outrageous.” The separation was unequivocal.

  Our initial research suggested that voters once again accepted how he handled Wright. There even seemed to be relief that the Band-Aid had finally been ripped off. But Wright had taken a toll on our standing in crucial primary states. In our polling, and confi
rmed by what we were getting back from the field, Clinton’s lead in Indiana had opened way up, by more than ten points. Obama still led in North Carolina but the margin was shrinking.

  We desperately needed an assist. And then, amazingly, we got one. Our salvation came jointly from Clinton and McCain, though this wasn’t clear at the outset. Once again we found ourselves in a situation where we defied conventional political wisdom, and were rewarded for it.

  Gas prices were soaring; in most states it cost $4 a gallon or close to it. The idea of suspending the federal gas tax for the summer, billed as a way to give consumers relief, was gaining traction in Washington. Both Clinton and McCain jumped on it.

  Obama had two major problems with the proposal. First, the relief to drivers was minimal, perhaps a savings of only 30 cents a day. Washington would proclaim it a major fix, pat itself on the back, and call a papered-over problem solved. Barack thought this was a perfect illustration of what was wrong in Washington: short-term political gimmicks trumped tough choices that might put us on the path to energy independence.

  Second, suspending the gas tax, which channels revenue to federal and state highway projects, would cause many construction projects to cease for lack of funds, costing tens of thousands jobs and delaying much-needed work.

  We did no polling before we made a decision. Obama simply laid out his position on a conference call: “I just can’t be for this. It’s nuts. It’s the opposite of leadership.” We had no idea how the politics would play out. But the political playbook certainly suggested we were making the wrong move.

  We decided to go whole hog with it in the closing days of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. We would convert most of our advertising dollars to support an ad spot on the issue, figuring we could just ride the debate all the way in and use it as a proxy for our larger message: political calculations and Washington politics were failing the country.

  Clinton clearly thought this fight was working for her, too. She ran ads suggesting we were thumbing our nose at hard-working Americans, and implying that in the real world, a few dollars was a big deal. From her ads’ perspective, Obama was an elitist who did not understand the pain higher gas taxes were causing.

  At first we were charging uphill. But a fascinating thing happened as the days went by: support for the gas tax repeal began to slip in both states, especially in North Carolina, where college-educated white voters in particular quickly began to move away from the idea.

  And as support for the tax fell, support for us rose. Some of the voters we had lost with Wright were returning to our camp. They seemed to be saying, “This is the Obama I remember. Someone different, willing to take tough stands and fight the status quo.”

  It felt good for us, as well, to wage a lonely fight both against our opponents and conventional Washington thinking. “For the first time in a long time we feel like us,” I told Obama.

  We had one of our semiregular National Finance Committee meetings in Indiana on May 2, the Friday before the state primary. After the October meeting in Iowa, we made a tradition of holding NFC meetings in the war zone, so our fund-raisers could get a better feel for what was going on in key primary states and also spend some time knocking on doors and making phone calls.

  Going in we knew this would be our roughest finance meeting so far. Four days out from the primary many pundits were predicting a blowout loss for us in Indiana and suggesting there was an outside chance we could also lose North Carolina.

  Already in the state campaigning, Obama swung by the meeting. He chose not to cheerlead. He told the room we were being tested and would come out stronger for it and expressed confidence in the final outcome.

  Still the room crackled with a kind of strange paranoia. For the first time in a long time, the financial bedrock of our campaign seemed to believe that we could let the nomination slip away from us. And it was not just them—their anxiety was shared by many of our grassroots supporters across the country. We kept a close read on the mood of our volunteers and found a mixture of frustration and dejection. They, too, wondered if at the eleventh hour we could lose.

  I decided to lay it on the line. This group had become like family, had been with us through thick and thin. I owed it to them to speak plainly.

  I told them Wright, Round II, was a real threat to our candidacy. It had put us in a deep hole in Indiana and caused real erosion in North Carolina. We thought we were climbing back because of the gas tax fight and also believed our organizations in both states were superior. I thought we would finish better than expected and that our performance would have a very positive impact on superdelegates. We had a good grasp of whom they were going to support and when, and we believed that well over two-thirds of them would come out for us in the next few weeks or right after the final primaries in early June.

  We had enough private commitments to get us over the finish line. The only thing that could stop us would be the utter destruction of our candidacy, from external assault.

  I hated to see some of our oldest and most fervent supporters in the grip of doubts, feeling we were on a glide path to victory only two months ago and now wondering if we were in an irrecoverable tailspin. Yes, I told them, we were fighting through a tough patch. But the structure of the race was solid. And Barack Obama himself didn’t want to limp across the finish line. He was determined to win with strength. I thought we could.

  Someone in the audience of two hundred broke in to voice the group’s central concern: “But could we lose this?” he asked. “Could it be taken from us? How hard are we prepared to fight?”

  “Let me be clear,” I responded. “We will have earned this nomination. We have followed the rules and will have won this fairly by all the metrics that matter. If the Clinton campaign and some party leaders try to steal this nomination, to assert their will and judgment in place of the voters‘, we will burn the house down.” My voice began to rise. “It will make Kennedy-Carter and Hart-Mondale look like fairy tales. We will win this ugly if we have to. They are not taking this from us. Barack Obama will be our nominee and he will be our forty-fourth president.”

  The place exploded. If nothing else it was therapeutic, for me, too. Something very strong welled up inside of me as the question was asked. We had walked the most improbable electoral path perhaps in presidential campaign history. We would not be stopped by what I saw as chicanery.

  Things started to pick up for us in both states. The word in the political community was that Hillary needed to win North Carolina or lose it narrowly to have any chance to change the dynamics of the race and convince superdelegates we were damaged goods. They had poured everything they could into the state and were expressing real confidence to reporters about their prospects. Once again, the expectations gap could work to our advantage: beating long odds impressively would affect the way the day was analyzed and ensure that publicly undeclared superdelegates remained committed to us.

  Monday night after 11:00 I got a scary e-mail from Ax: “Red alert. Call me.” He had left me a voice-mail, too. My stomach instantly went to knots, and I called Ax from my normal bathroom posting. “The bottom fell out in the Indiana track,” he said worriedly. Each night our pollsters sent out the numbers to a small group of us by e-mail, but Ax often pestered them for advance notice. “We were down twelve in tonight’s calling.”

  It was a huge gap, and a serious departure from our previous few nights of polling. “That just doesn’t make any sense,” I said, racking my brain for an explanation. “We’re on a good run here. We know the gas tax argument is working. The only possibility is a bunch of people at the last minute decided they couldn’t swallow us because of Wright. But this seems like a screwy poll to me.”

  Ax concurred. But he was still a wreck. I tried to calm him down, though I felt just as nauseated. I didn’t sleep at all that night. I doubt Ax did either.

  The next day was all pins and needles until it slowly resolved into a portrait of pure elation. The moment the polls closed
in North Carolina, the networks declared us the winner; we won in a blowout, by fourteen points. As the returns came in we could see the traces of our strategy’s design: by registering over one hundred thousand new voters, producing strong turnout among African Americans and young voters, and winning college-educated whites thanks to our stand against the gas tax, we had made ourselves unbeatable in North Carolina.

  Indiana produced its own drama. As usual, the exit polls were way off—they had Clinton winning by eight points. As the votes were actually counted, we began to think the gap would be a lot closer than eight points. We were hitting or coming just shy of our vote goals in many smaller and rural areas where Clinton was winning but not blowing us out. In Indianapolis and its suburbs, we were actually exceeding our vote goals in some areas. Slowly it became clear the margin would be razor-thin, either way.

  Then the networks changed their position on the Indiana race: it was now “too close to call.” This subtle shift in language had an enormous effect. Even if Hillary ended up winning Indiana, the perception would be that she had failed to meet expectations, especially considering the hammering we gave her in North Carolina. Pressing doubts about our staying power were the Clinton lifeline in the face of their mathematically dubious position, and now we had taken a huge step toward emphatically quashing those doubts. Finally, we had taken some of their best punches and come away unscratched.

  That night, and in the following days, the top-line analysis recast the race just as we hoped: Hillary had failed to get the “game changer” she needed in Indiana and North Carolina, we had weathered the storm, and Obama would now almost certainly sew up the nomination. The question was no longer if but when.