Listening to Bayh talk I thought, There’s no way this guy will color outside the lines. Biden may cross them with too much frequency. Biden will probably end up having more range—he can reach higher heights but could cause us real pain. Bayh’s upside and downside are probably the closest spread of the three.
Bayh was thrilled we were contesting Indiana. “I don’t know if you can win,” he told us, “but I bet you can make it close. Something is stirring my state—I get the sense that we may be seeing a once-in-a-generational electoral shift.” He was modest about his ability to help deliver the state, which we appreciated. “I don’t know if I can help push you over the line there. I assume it won’t hurt, but I couldn’t in good conscience say those eleven Hoosier electoral votes will be in your column if it’s Obama-Bayh,” he confessed.
Bayh’s best moments with us related to family. His wife served on a number of corporate boards, and it was clear that her positions would draw fire if we selected him. He passionately defended his wife’s board service, both in terms of her professional qualifications and talent as well as the lengths they both traveled to remove any conflict of interest. We were satisfied he could bat down any questions on that front.
The Bayhs had chosen to raise their young children in Washington instead of Indiana, sending them to private schools, which, fairly or not, would draw some criticism. He was earnest and resolute in explaining their decision. Keeping the kids close allowed their family to spend the most time together; he was clearly committed to real involvement in their lives. He wrapped up this part of the discussion by saying, “I just won’t allow anyone to question the decisions we have made as parents and as a family.” In these moments, he gave off a humanity and warmth that was very appealing, and showed a dimension that belied his reputation.
As the day grew long, we headed to Richmond, our last stop. We met with Kaine in the governor’s mansion. He was like family by then, so the meeting was comfortable from the get-go. Picking Kaine would be the biggest leap, though it was clear in talking with him about issues that he would be a skilled communicator on the trail and in the media. His own outlook dovetailed closely with Obama‘s, so he was exceedingly comfortable serving as his advocate.
We appreciated his opening remarks. “I’d be honored to be picked,” he told us. “But I have to assume I’m at the bottom of the list right now. I’ll try to explain why I think I’d be a good pick, both for the campaign and after we win, but just know that I won’t have an ounce of hard feelings or disappointment if I don’t get picked. I signed on to this team in the beginning—all I want is for Barack to be elected president.”
It certainly endeared him to us further, without making it easier to select him. There was no great way to explain putting someone with no foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. If we chose him, we would need to rely on some of the same language we had used on this issue as it related to Obama—judgment versus Washington experience, a new foreign policy vision versus the status quo—but doubling down would make it twice as tough for us to roll this boulder uphill. A Kaine pick would entail the roughest entry, but if he availed himself well, we could find our way through. There was no doubt he’d be a trusted ally for Obama.
As our flight took to the skies from Richmond’s airport, Ax and I reflected on our day while we ate the boxed dinners Governor Kaine’s wife had graciously made for us. At root, little had changed. Biden was the top choice for us, but with reservations. The day had shown both the promise and peril of his selection. Bayh was someone we could both embrace, as he would likely make our lives easier and generate fewer surprises, but it felt like he might be too safe a choice. And we wished Kaine had a little bit more experience, because he had so many of the qualities we knew Obama valued.
“This is a jump ball,” Ax declared. “There’s no clear choice. Anyway, I’m glad it’s up to him and not us. It’ll be like the decisions he’ll need to make as president—lonely and tough. Should we tell him we oh so slightly favor Biden?”
“I think we owe it to him to put our thumb lightly on the scale for Biden,” I replied. “But we really need to play it straight and balance out our critiques of each. I don’t want a call from him during a crisis in 2010, where he says, ‘Plouffe, now tell me exactly what you were thinking in convincing me to pick Biden?’”
Thinking about that made us both laugh a bit, but gingerly.
“If he does pick Biden though, that will be your account,” I warned Ax. “You’re going to have to deal with him every day to make sure he stays in the corral. If he picks Bayh or Kaine, I’ll take point. Call it manager’s prerogative and the penalty for forgetting your damn bag at Biden’s place and making us late.”
“Me take Biden?” he asked. “Forget it. You’re the Delaware guy. He’s all you.”
“No way. You love talking and he loves talking. It’s a perfect match. And what’s a couple more hours in the day to you?”
Eventually our barbs petered out and we landed in Chicago. Later that night we held a conference call with Obama to brief him on our day. He mostly listened as we reviewed the bidding. “Well it sounds like you both are for Biden, but barely,” he said. “I really haven’t settled this yet in my own mind. It’s a coin toss now between Bayh and Biden, but Kaine is still a distinct possibility. I know the experience attack people will make if we pick him. But if that really concerned me, I wouldn’t have run in the first place.
“My sense is—and you tell me if the research backs this up—that Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for people. I don’t have to convince people with my VP selection that I am serious about change. But I think people will grow to really respect and appreciate Tim Kaine. He’s the wildcard. We kind of know what we are getting with the other two.
“I’m back to where I was in the beginning,” Obama continued. “I’ll really think this through over the next few days, trying to visualize various scenarios in the presidency, and whom I’d most like to have by my side.”
Obama let out a heavy sigh. “I wish I didn’t have this hanging over my vacation.”
“Well,” I said sarcastically, “if we pull this off, you can just consider it a practice run for all of your vacations over the next eight years. Just remember—when you leave office, you’ll be in AARP but not too old. You’ll still have a few enjoyable vacations left.”
Obama laughed. “Right,” he said. “That’s why I’m working so hard—so at fifty-five, I can have unquestionably the best job in the whole world. Ex-president.”
The selection of his vice presidential nominee was his first presidential decision, and shortly after he returned from Hawaii, he finally made it. On the evening of August 17, he called Ax and me with the news, “I’ve decided,” he said. “It’s Biden.”
The decision had been difficult, but Barack was excited about his pick. More than anything, he felt Biden would be a trusted adviser during tough moments after the election, someone who would always give his unvarnished opinion. And even after all his years in Washington, Biden remained a real advocate for people, which was ultimately what this whole enterprise was about.
Now that Barack had picked him, I felt some exhilaration thinking that Biden would be a nice complement to Obama, in age, background, and style. Once we had things going I thought the mix would work nicely. But at the moment, with the announcement in front of us, I still felt a bit like we were about to take a hard, hairpin turn without being strapped in.
We would formally announce Biden the following Saturday, August 23, in Springfield, Illinois, the site of our campaign launch. Joe Rospars came into my office one afternoon with the idea of telling our supporters first, before the media or politicos. “While our e-mail list is growing exponentially, our mobile numbers could use a big kick start,” he explained. “Why don’t we ask people to sign up for a text alert? We can tell them that they’ll be the first to know who Barack picks as VP.”
The idea appealed to me on two levels. First, it was
consistent with other key junctures in the campaign—reporting fund-raising numbers, the decision to limit our primary debates, opting out of the public funding system—where we had communicated first directly to our supporters. This was their campaign as much as ours, and they deserved to get a heads-up from us about important decisions. Those previous announcements had all been made by e-mail or Web postings; this would be our first large-scale text-only notification.
Second, this was a great way to grow our text-messaging list. Rospars was right about the increasing gap in our contact figures: our e-mail list was now over 6 million, but our list of mobile numbers was in the low six figures. Making a big announcement by text would ignite a spark and juice the latter number.
It sure did. By August 22, the night before we announced Biden, over 2 million people had signed up to receive the VP announcement by text. Our first communication announcing the “Be the First to Know” campaign had happened on August 10. In less than two weeks, we had grown our list over fifteen-fold.
That the Republican convention was scheduled to begin just a week after ours was terrible in many ways. The dates of both parties’ conventions were set back in 2005, when Obama was still figuring out where the bathrooms were in the Senate. The party in control of the White House always gets to go last, but usually there’s a buffer period of a few weeks. I remembered thinking when the dates were announced that having the GOP convention right on top of ours was less than ideal, but I figured it would be someone else’s problem.
No such luck. And the situation was worsening. It was bad enough getting only a week’s lift in the coverage to begin with, but now McCain’s camp signaled to the press that his VP selection would be announced the day after our convention. In the very next news cycle our convention would be relegated to the dustbin while all the attention turned to their pick and the lead-in to the GOP convention. Our bounce, if there were one, would be fleeting. We planned to have Obama and Biden campaign together for first time that week, figuring that by having our two nominees out on their maiden trip, we would have something that would, if not rival their VP announcement, at least compete credibly for attention.
But first there was the matter of informing the selection that he’d been selected. Obama called me from the road Thursday after he talked to Biden.
“Even for Joe, he was going a mile a minute,” Barack joked. “He also said he was humbled and ready to do anything we ask, the way we ask it. He has a million questions, so I told him you’d call him to give him the overview of the next few days and how we’re going to get him and his team integrated.”
I called Biden right away. He was driving to Philadelphia with Jill, to take his mother-in-law for some medical tests. She was quite ill at the time. Despite this family situation, I could tell over the phone he was elated. Netting the VP nomination really was a capstone to his storied career, and despite the indifference to being picked he’d shown at our meeting, now that it had actually happened I could hear how much it meant to him.
I told him we were thrilled to have him aboard and took the opportunity to remind him that he’d had some tough competition in the selection process “You know, Senator, we didn’t push, but Axelrod and I were rooting for you,” I told him. “And Barack knows that. So let’s do us all a favor and make sure we reward him with a terrific, focused, and error-free ten weeks.” He got the message and eventually proved to be every bit the team player we needed.
We were taking extra precaution to keep the pick secret until our announcement, including flying Ax and Patti Solis Doyle to a West Chester, Pennsylvania, airfield instead of Wilmington so the flight could not be traced by its tail number, and in case the airport was being staked out. Ax and Patti would be briefing Biden in the morning and flying with him to Springfield. When they got to their hotel late that night, Ax sent me an e-mail that said simply: “You cheap bastard.” They had been booked at some fleabag motel off 1-95. I told him to enjoy the thin sheets and dirty bedspread.
At least he would sleep a couple of hours that night. As it turned out, none of us involved on the press or text-message side of things would sleep a wink. As the hours progressed, it seemed more and more likely that some news outlet might break the story of our selection—hard evidence or not. If so, we’d have to put in motion our text alert right away.
The media was frantic, each outlet in a rush to be the first to break the news of our selection. Shortly after midnight, the Associated Press was the first to name Biden as the pick. Their story was based on one unnamed Democratic source. One. It sounded pretty thin to me. Almost all news organizations—including the AP—usually require one named source or two unnamed sources before going with a story.
I was absolutely convinced they did not have it directly. They might have talked to someone who thought they knew, but not any of the few of us in the campaign who knew for certain, or Biden or his immediate family.
I understood the competition to be first. But I felt this was a real low moment in terms of reporting in the campaign, and I subsequently learned that some of the AP reporters were uncomfortable as well. They knew their story was shaky but their bosses said to go regardless.
We started sending out texts right away. It took a couple of hours to get them all out, but it was late, so most people on the East Coast and in the central part of the country heard from us first when they woke up (or when our arriving message woke them up). Night owls and West Coast supporters might have heard it first from the media, because as soon as the AP went, everyone else jumped in, and within minutes it was breaking news on TV and on the Web. We felt good that it held as long as it did and that most of our supporters heard from us first. The message read, “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3 p.m. ET on www.barackobama.com. Spread the word!”
It’s important to note that we encouraged people to watch the live stream on our website. We were doing this with greater frequency, and many people were watching major events on our site and then afterward logging on to MyBO.com to discuss what they had just seen with their fellow supporters. We were accomplishing what we set out to create—a website that could be a real “home” for our supporters and a one-stop shopping place for anything campaign related. It was like having our own television returns.
The sun filled the sky in Springfield on the day of our announcement, with temperatures promising to hit the nineties. I flew down from Chicago with Barack and Michelle, and we talked about how the last time we were in Springfield, no one could have credibly predicted we’d be returning on the eve of the Democratic convention to announce Barack Obama’s running mate.
“Remember how cold it was?” Michelle asked. “I couldn’t feel my toes by the end. Now we’ll be lucky not to sweat through the whole event.”
We were all in a great mood. Michelle was very happy to have a sidekick for Barack, someone who could shoulder part of the load and defend him against attacks in a way the rest of us couldn’t. “I think Joe is going to be a warrior,” she said. “A happy warrior. It’s good to have some reinforcements.”
I joked that last the time we were in Springfield, Gibbs and I had shared a room, and it was not a pretty sight in the morning. “At least this time we aren’t overnighting, so I won’t have to wake up to the sight of Gibbs in his boxers,” I said.
Gibbs piped in from down the aisle of the plane, “Or you in yours. Scary stuff, Plouffe.”
The event itself gave us a real boost. Obama and Biden looked great together, and it seemed to be a marriage that worked—the young, inspirational insurgent matched with the experienced Washington hand. Most of the early commentary was favorable, and some of the smarter observers got that Biden was not the safest choice we could have made. Yes, he was a political veteran, but his past controversies and penchant for creating new ones required a small leap of faith on our part.
We also had Obama and Biden film their first video together, in one of the historic rooms at the Ol
d State Capitol, which we sent directly to our supporters. The video introduced Biden and asked viewers to recommit to the campaign by contributing financially, volunteering, and recruiting new supporters. We were trying to include a lot more videos in our e-mail communications—the data suggested that supporters spent more time with these e-mails than with the text-only versions.
Obama usually did these tapings in one or two takes. He was the best I had ever seen at nailing a script, or ad-libbing to produce a more effective product. This video, however, required at least ten takes because Biden kept stumbling over his lines. That was the norm for most political figures. We were just used to Obama’s almost effortless performances.
Conventions aren’t what they used to be. These days they run short on suspense, and shorter on TV. The networks no longer cover them all evening long; in 2008 only three total hours of each party’s convention made the cut. Those hours reached by far the broadest audience, and we needed to spend a lot of time making sure we got them right. But the cable and Internet audience would not be insignificant, and the news coverage would be tremendous, so we also had to think beyond the network hours to create a broader idea of what we needed to accomplish each night.
We had hashed out our goals for the convention during a few conference calls in June. These were pretty straightforward: We needed to put the final nail in the coffin of the bloody-primary/fractured-party story line. In both perception and reality, we needed to come roaring out of the convention a unified, powerful Democratic Party. We needed to introduce Barack’s personal story to the millions of Americans who still did not know it—his humble beginnings, strong values, and deep love for this country. We needed to lay out the case against McCain as well. By the time we wrapped up, there could be no doubt in the public mind about the different directions in which these two men would lead the country.
And finally, we wanted to use the convention to bolster our campaign in Colorado, a battleground state where we thought we could break McCain’s back if he let things slip away. At the day’s end, our plan revolved around taking crucial electoral votes away from McCain wherever possible. If we could use the time and platform of the convention to strengthen our organization and enhance Obama’s standing in a pivotal state like Colorado, it was arguably as important as anything that might result at the national level.
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory Page 39
