Tim Russert, whose voice on these matters carried enormous weight, made the pronouncement on air that night, even before Indiana was called. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” he said. The Clinton campaign was furious.
In the end, we just missed winning Indiana. Jon Carson and our Indiana staff down in the boiler room thought that unless there were some really funky late results, we would lose by about fifteen thousand votes out of over 1.2 million. Such a close loss would normally be hard to bear, but in the current situation we would take those results in a New York minute.
We ended up losing by fourteen thousand; once again our data team was spot on. If Rush Limbaugh had not encouraged Republicans to vote in the Indiana primary for Hillary as a way of extending our race, we would have won outright. Since Mississippi, in states where Republicans could participate in our primaries, Limbaugh had encouraged them to vote for Hillary. We had once welcomed Republican participation; those who participated in our primaries had voted our way overwhelmingly. Not anymore. Now Hillary was winning the Republican vote, and it wasn’t because they had suddenly fallen in love. Over 12 percent of the Indiana primary vote was Republican and Hillary carried it, despite her through-the-roof unfavorable numbers with these voters. Limbaugh’s project worked in Indiana—it cost us that victory—but it didn’t matter. The die was cast.
Beer and laughter flowed freely at HQ that night. We were back in the saddle.
I talked to Obama by phone throughout the night. He was in North Carolina and our last conversation was very late, around 2:00 a.m. I was still at Chicago HQ and the relief in both of our voices was palpable. We were having a senior staff meeting at HQ the next day to take stock and talk about the next phase. I told him I felt strongly that we had nearly closed the book on the primary. We needed to execute well on our remaining tasks—locking in and announcing superdelegates, winning the few remaining states where the numbers favored us, and making sure that the Florida and Michigan situation was resolved properly. The Clinton campaign was ferociously pushing for new contests in both of those states, as well as trying to count the results of the beauty contests—meaningless straw polls—that neither one of us competed in. We needed to put this issue to bed so it didn’t linger like a mirage to which they could cling in hopes of keeping the race going.
“We should do some modest campaigning in the rest of the states,” I said, “but we have to get going on the general election. We have an obligation to the party—and the country—not to get too far behind.” I felt like I was tearing away a heavily marked-up sheet to reveal a fresh map on which to sketch the race anew. “We’ve been doing a lot of planning and that’ll continue,” I went on, “but I think you need to start campaigning in some nonprimary, battleground states—especially Florida and Michigan where we’re behind organizationally—and start quietly sending some staff into these states so we’re not scrambling a month from now. And I think we should largely ignore Hillary’s attacks—it’s time we turned the page.”
Obama agreed. He was anxious for the next phase and felt an enormous obligation to win in November. He had told me in the middle of the Wright episode during the Pennsylvania primary that he would end his candidacy if he honestly thought Hillary had a better chance of winning and that he really was damaged electoral goods.
There were some lessons from Indiana and North Carolina that would inform us going forward. We registered many thousands of new voters in both states, and these voters participated at high rates, defying the conventional view that new registrants turn out in very low numbers. A strong showing from African Americans and younger voters might put both these states in play in the general election. We had done very well with independents in North Carolina, and with independents and non-Limbaugh Republicans in Indiana. That also boded well for the fall.
And the gas tax debate reminded us that whenever we played it safe and conventional, we were punished. As the likely Democratic nominee, we would have to remember who we were. The coat of conventionality was a poor fit.
There were only six primaries left after May 6: West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana. We knew we would get slaughtered in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico (and we did), but we thought we’d win Oregon and Montana comfortably, and that South Dakota would be competitive. Looking forward to the general election, we decided to do a minimal amount of campaigning in all these states and instead start spending a lot of time in battlegrounds like Ohio and Iowa, and building some start-up machinery in Michigan and Florida.
We were endorsed by Edwards and Al Gore in May, and held both of those announcements at large rallies in Michigan. We also did large events in Florida. It was important that we quickly build up our organization in these two states, and attracting people to events and then asking them to help was the best and quickest route. Thirteen thousand people showed up in relatively small Grand Rapids, which was a very good sign that we could put together a formidable organization in a historically tough part of the state for Democrats.
The Clinton campaign continued to attack us on electability but they were largely shouting into the wind. The superdelegates were not buying it, so we increasingly ignored these attacks. We were locking down superdelegate support at a ratio of 5 or 6 to 1.
The Clinton campaign also was spending a lot of time trying to gin up attention and press coverage of the Florida and Michigan situation.
The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee would meet on May 31, just four days before the last primary, to decide what to do about allocating delegates from the two states. Neither state held do-over elections, so the decision was now solely in the hands of these thirty committee members. Our position was clear: the delegates should be split 50-50 since no contest was waged and, according to the DNC rules, no delegates were at stake. The Clinton position was that they should net the full amount of delegates based on the voting that had taken place. This suggestion was a complete nonstarter for us, and it rubbed me raw that we had played by the rules only to see them try to move the goal line when we were about to cross it.
I flew into Washington for the committee meeting. Checking into the hotel, I was surrounded by Clinton supporters. Her campaign had organized a protest of the meeting the next day, to demand that Florida’s and Michigan’s votes be “counted.” We had asked our grassroots supporters in the D.C. area not to show up, to avoid creating an ugly scene.
I wanted our approach to “Florigan” as it was popularly called, to be focused on our preferred outcome, not on playing the PR war. Our goal was simply to make sure that when the DNC meeting was over, no new door to the nomination had been opened by so much as a crack. I planned to keep my head down, work strategically, and shut Clinton down quietly but effectively.
Even though I was not a publicly recognizable figure like Ax or Gibbs, who were on TV a lot, this group of die-hard Clinton supporters knew my face. I ducked angry glares the whole way through the check-in line and as I walked through the hotel. I didn’t understand how people could truly believe that Clinton was being wronged. Rules are rules. And really, who should have been more adept at playing by the DNC rules—the outsider candidate or the one who put most of the people on the DNC in the first place?
The day of the meeting was pure chaos, though the protesting Clinton hordes never materialized. Testimony and debate dragged on for hours. During a break from the deliberations, one of our leaders on the committee huddled with Berman, Matt Nugen, our political director who handled superdelegates, and me. He said we had the votes—by one or two—to win the 50-50 distribution. But there was another proposal to yield five additional delegates to Clinton as some acknowledgment of her performance in the beauty contest. He said that this plan would even get some votes from the Clinton side, so it would be seen as a much more legitimate outcome.
This was a hard one to swallow. But we wanted peace with her supporters, so I assented. Nugen was despondent because that meant he’d have to round up an additiona
l five supers to fill the hole. “After this door is closed, it won’t be a problem,” I reassured him. “They won’t have any credible argument for how they can win.” Still, I felt for him. We were getting to the bottom of the barrel.
When the Rules and Bylaws Committee announced their decisions, the Clinton supporters in the crowd erupted. “Denver, Denver, Denver!” they shouted. They wanted to take it all the way to the convention floor, I guess. From what I heard, they also said very disparaging things about Obama. Some even started chanting “McCain.” It dawned on me then that by building up the importance of this meeting and not being honest about how it would turn out (nothing that happened here was going to change the outcome of the election), the Clinton campaign had raised false expectations for their most rabid supporters.
I smiled as the chanting continued. The second to last chapter of this epic book was now closed. All that remained was for us to nail down a few more superdelegates before next Tuesday. We had removed the last possible barrier to our primary victory.
I headed back to Chicago the next morning, happy to leave the circus behind and excited just thinking that in three days the unending primary race would finally be over.
After counting the delegates we knew we would earn from Montana and South Dakota, we started June 3, the last day of primary voting, a few dozen superdelegates shy of clinching the nomination. We had more than that in commitments and fully expected that by evening, we’d cross the new magic threshold of 2,118 delegates (the Florigan decision pushed it up from 2,025).
As the day rolled on, more and more previously undeclared superdelegates agreed to come out for us. Some superdelegates never wanted to declare their support publically—they were generally afraid of offending the Clintons, and some just didn’t like the new spotlight on their role in the nomination process. Out of principle, a block of them wanted to wait until the polls closed in the last primary state, Montana, before declaring their support. This was a relatively sizable group, and at the start of the day we thought that their announcement would likely put us over the top.
But now many supers were coming out of the woodwork without waiting. They wanted to play a part in our clinching the nomination—and probably to get some “credit” for their support. It now looked likely that we would cross the delegate threshold before polls closed, with a conservative allocation of pledged delegates from our anticipated victories in Montana and South Dakota.
The networks and news organizations were all doing their own counting and calling around to superdelegates. Each wanted to break the news that we had clinched the nomination.
ABC was the first to do so. Charles Gibson led off the news on June 3rd with these words: “Historic may be a word thrown around too loosely in our times. Less than 150 years ago, black men and women were held in involuntary servitude. Slavery was the law of the land. And now, the Democratic Party will nominate a black man to be president of the United States. And that is historic by any definition. Historic in any age.”
It might seem strange, but we didn’t think very often about the historic nature of what we were doing. I watched the ABC newscast from my office and was momentarily overwhelmed by what we had accomplished. This was an important moment in American history, though it was hard to appreciate that when you were still stewing in the middle of a cauldron.
All through May we had been discussing where to acknowledge surpassing the delegate threshold. Chicago? Iowa? Florida or Michigan? Steve Hildebrand, our deputy manager, suggested doing it in the city where the GOP would be having their convention; in the same building, in fact, where in three months the GOP would be delivering their own vision for America’s future. Bingo, I thought. Right away, we could use the opportunity to frame the stark choice voters would face in November: Obama was going to claim the Democratic nomination in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
For the last several days, different staffers had asked if I was going to the event and suggested strongly that I should; they said it was important for me to be there at the end of this first leg of our journey. I preferred to be in Chicago HQ to make sure we had everything buttoned up on the superdelegate front, and just generally to make sure we brought the plane in for a smooth landing. I also wanted to be in Chicago that night with the staff who couldn’t go up to Minnesota—this was going to be a special moment and I thought I should share it with them.
But people kept asking why I wasn’t going to Minneapolis. It got ridiculous. Even Obama started in on it. Clearly something was up. Finally Alyssa told me that Barack wanted to bring me up on stage with him and was disappointed I didn’t agree to go. The subterfuge wasn’t his style, but he knew that if I found out what he was planning, there was no way I would set foot in Minnesota. And of course he was right.
Not that I wasn’t moved. It was a remarkably kind and unusual gesture; candidates rarely think to praise their staff, never publicly, and certainly not on the biggest night of their political life to date. But aside from being mortified by the attention, I also thought this was a strategically important night, the first time the nation would be tuning in to see the Democratic standard-bearer. We couldn’t afford to waste any precious words or time on staff like me.
We rented out a bar in Chicago where staff and their families could celebrate after the speech. Several hundred people showed up, all of our HQ staff and some folks who had been out in the states and wanted to share this moment with their colleagues.
It seemed appropriate for me to say a few words. I wanted to convey to the campaign staff that night that it was time to put the primary behind us. To win, we would need Hillary and all of her staff and supporters. We had to let go of whatever venom we had built up—only with a unified party could we win the election.
Then I watched her speech in New York. All of the networks by that point had declared us the winner. The race was over. Yet Terry McAuliffe, her campaign chairman, introduced her as “The Next President of the United States.” I blinked; for a moment I thought I was in the Twilight Zone. I watched with disbelief as Hillary gave a defiant speech and suggested that despite the fact that we had just won—won!—her fight would go on.
It sucked the generosity right out of me. I started my speech to our fired-up staff by returning full circle to the beginning of the campaign eighteen months ago, mocking our opponent’s opening message. “Well,” I said, “it looks like one of us was in it to win it!”
The staff went crazy. Reconciliation would have to wait for another day.
Obama and I talked by phone when he landed in Chicago. I went out into the street and paced up and down the block for about half an hour as we chatted. He was already moving on to the general election. After his speech, he had met with Clinton’s most prominent supporters in Minnesota and was surprised that to a person they all said they would do whatever we asked. They even seemed excited about it. This happened over and over again in the coming days.
We started talking about what we thought the McCain strategy would be in the coming days and weeks. We naturally assumed they would have one. I feared that the first days after we won the nomination would be reminiscent of storming the beach at Normandy. They’d had three months to get ready for this moment, and I figured they’d have all sorts of surprises waiting for us. It could be ugly.
McCain had given a terrible speech that night, trying to counter our grand achievement. Standing between an ugly backdrop and a desultory crowd, and sporting a new bizarre slogan that played off ours—“A Leader We Can Believe In”—he had delivered an awkward screed. “We have to assume these guys will pick up their game,” I told Obama. “But watching McCain tonight reminded me that the team we just beat was a hell of a lot more formidable.”
As we leave the primary—that long, historic, heated primary—it is important to step back and understand some of the core reasons why we won.
In politics, your two main pillars are your message and electoral strategy. What are you offering voters in terms of vision, issues, and biography? W
hat is your most accessible path to a winning vote margin? (This is much more complicated in a presidential nominating race—in the primaries we had fifty-four different primaries and caucuses, not to mention the superdelegates.) We were willing to adjust tactics but not deviate very often from our core message and strategy, even as both came under fierce criticism from the political community (not to mention our opponents).
We had one slogan. Clinton had too many to count. We made decisions about allocation of resources and time strictly through the prism of electoral strategy. It made decision making less eventful—we had a clear road map about what was important and served our strategic interests and what didn’t.
And we attracted more resources than our opponent had—or than we ever thought was remotely possible. Money still matters in politics.
Obama said at one point in the fall of 2007, when conventional wisdom dismissed us, “People will either accept me and my message or they won’t. But we are not going to cast about for a political identity. We just need to ride this out.”
I felt the same about our electoral strategy. Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush’s chief campaign ad guy, said something in a documentary after the 2004 election I found very compelling: “I’d rather have one flawed strategy than seven different strategies.” In any organization, you have to determine your pathway to success and commit to it. There will inevitably be highs and lows. But you have to give your theory and strategy time to work. Maybe it won’t. Many endeavors fail. But without a clear sense of where you are headed, you will almost certainly fail.
Technology was core to our campaign from Day One and it only grew in importance as the primary went on. We started with fewer than ten thousand e-mail addresses, and by June 3, 2008, our list had grown to over 5 million. A huge portion of that group—almost 40 percent—had either volunteered or contributed.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 31
