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

by David Plouffe

  The pressure we put on our supporters in the update also raised eyebrows. Many organizations that depend on volunteers tread gingerly when asking for help, emphasizing their gratitude and almost shyly or defensively asking for more: “We know you’re busy, and it’s a lot to ask, but if you could find any way to help again ...”

  We took the opposite tack. We saw our grassroots supporters as full partners and had designed a campaign with the belief that they could make the difference for us—financially, organizationally, and in helping us move message. So we pretty much laid it on the table for them: If you want change, you have to continue to fight and work for it. If you let up, we may not win. It’s your decision—dig deeper or take a walk. The outcome of the election will turn on what you choose to do.

  It worked. By the end of the campaign, I thought most of our volunteers really believed that if they did not show up on Saturday and knock on doors like they said they would, Barack Obama could lose. They felt that personally involved and responsible for his success. And they were right to.

  Lehman Brothers did, indeed, collapse on Monday, September 15. Steady erosion in the markets and economic confidence was now threatening the foundations of the economy.

  We were in unchartered waters as a country. And it was clear from our research even before Lehman went under that voters not only blamed Bush’s policies for contributing to the worsening economic slide but also believed that the emerging crisis was not being managed intensively or with the right degree of urgency.

  Americans went from feeling deep concern to being flat-out scared. And not just Main Street Americans-titans of finance and premier academics were also taking some deep breaths. No computer model had fully predicted this crisis, or could show an easy path out of it.

  On the day of the Lehman collapse, voters thought our economy was going downhill, and fast. Early that day, Obama addressed the subject directly. He focused specifically on the lack of regulation and enforcement that contributed to the meltdown, but married this critique to our larger economic point: it was time to have a president, and a government, that was focused on improving the lives of the middle class, and not enabling the special interests to cash in while everyone else got stuck with dwindling 401(k)s and mounting job insecurity.

  A bit later that morning, in Tallahassee, Florida, John McCain delivered some commentary on the crisis that flew directly in the face of what most of America was feeling. In many ways, along with Sarah Palin, the statement he made came to define his candidacy. While noting that Lehman was a very serious situation, McCain resurrected a line he had not used in months, and for which we had pounded him at the time. Despite the blow of Lehman’s collapse, he said, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

  Our press and research staffs were watching McCain’s speech on the TVs in the bullpen, and when he dropped this bomb, they exploded. From my office I heard their collective cry—“Nooooo!”—and thought there must have been some tragic breaking news. “Oh no, he didn‘t!” someone yelled loudly.

  I dropped the call I was on and walked down the hall to Dunn and Pfeiffer’s office. Pfeiffer, generally less excitable than even me, was bouncing off the walls.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “That fool McCain,” he said excitedly, “just said the fundamentals of the economy are strong!”

  I looked up at the TVs. “No kidding? I thought they’d banned that phrase from his repertoire.”

  “I almost felt sorry for him,” added Anita. “Almost. Because this is going to be one of the most brutal days of his political life.”

  Some commentators gave us great credit for how quickly we pivoted to McCain’s comments and then punished him unmercifully for days across every platform. I thought we deserved little credit. It would have taken a Herculean effort to screw up the gift he had handed us.

  Our response followed a standard formula. Insert a rebuttal to McCain’s outrageous comment in Obama’s next speech that day to create a back and forth, ensuring maximum coverage. Produce TV and radio ads for release by that afternoon and get them up in the states right away. Make sure all our volunteers and staff out in the states had talking points on this to drive home in their conversations with voters. Make sure all our surrogates campaigning for us, especially those doing TV interviews, relentlessly pushed the point. And make sure reporters understood that we thought this could be the defining moment of the campaign. There was no need to get clever on this one.

  McCain tried to clean it up at his next event in Orlando, suggesting that what he meant was that the American worker was strong, not the whole economy, but this contorted explanation gained little to no traction. Part of McCain’s problem was that the gaffe served as another blow to his already shaky economic foundation with voters. From saying earlier in the campaign that he was not an expert on the economy, to ruminating that he would need a running mate with economic experience to balance out his lack of knowledge, to famously not being able to recall in a newspaper interview how many houses he owned (a moment that, had it been captured on video, might have rivaled this one in import), McCain had increasingly signaled to voters that he would be out of touch and out of his league when it came to dealing with the economic crisis.

  Axelrod has a saying when evaluating how damaging a moment will be to a campaign: “The question is how many more bricks can the wagon carry?” In this case, McCain’s economic wagon was already wobbly and teetering. His fundamentals gaffe was not a brick but a two-ton slab of cement. He would be crushed by it. The question was whether it would be merely crippling or a mortal blow.

  Had this comment been a mere slip of the tongue, its shelf life and ultimate impact would have been fairly limited. But it rang true to people that McCain, out of touch and out of economic ideas, could actually believe that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. When Obama uncorked his infamous “bitter” comments back in March, they provoked concern but ultimately did not square with voters’ perceptions of him. McCain’s comment, however, confirmed what people were thinking about him. It accelerated the pace of a boulder that was already rolling downhill. For just this reason, confirmatory comments often have real legs in politics, as was certainly the case here.

  It didn’t help McCain that his comment came just as the worsening economic crisis threatened to shut out everything else in the news. The campaign was still being covered extensively but for the most part through the prism of the economy. For a moment it seemed the campaign was taking a backseat to the economy when it came to media coverage, and also in voters’ minds. President Bush had used eerily similar language to describe his confidence in the economy, and it helped us to link McCain and Bush on one of the dominant electoral issues.

  Then two huge campaign moments injected politics back onto the front pages and grabbed voters’ attention. They also rivaled the “fundamentals” comment in terms of the damage they did to McCain’s campaign.

  Sarah Palin had conducted her first postselection interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC News from Alaska the week after the GOP convention. The expectations for Palin going into that interview were absurdly low, especially as it related to foreign policy. We sensed that if she did not completely implode, the press would view it as a successful first effort; what voters thought, however, could be a different story.

  Commentators thought she had a few rocky moments but generally believed she had acquitted herself well. When pressed about her foreign policy experience, she famously said in the interview, regarding Russia, “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska—from an island in Alaska.” This made for a lasting sound bite, especially after Tina Fey got hold of it on Saturday Night Live.

  We were beginning to see in our research not merely a cooling off in terms of people’s views of Palin, but downright concern about her qualifications. In focus group after focus group, voters essentially said, “She very well could be president. McCain is a cancer survivor and in his seventies, after
all. She just doesn’t seem to have the depth, understanding, or experience to take over. Hell, I’d love to have a beer with her. But I’d like to have a beer with a lot of people I know. And none of them should be president.”

  What interested me most in these focus groups was that voters didn’t use their assessment of Palin to decide how they might vote. They almost always talked about her through the prism of John McCain. After expressing concerns about Palin, voters would go on to say, “I just don’t understand how McCain could have picked her.” They would talk about how political the pick was, even cynical, rushed, and desperate. They compared it very unfavorably to our pick and process.

  Palin’s next major interview was with Katie Couric of CBS News. This exchange will go down in political infamy. Couric took a much different tack than Gibson, instead allowing Palin to do more talking. Who knows if this created a dynamic where Palin was less on edge and therefore did not execute her prerehearsed answers?

  Low points of the interview included Couric’s asking Palin repeatedly for examples of McCain’s push for greater oversight of Wall Street, only to be told by the smiling governor, on her third attempt, “I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring ‘em to ya.”

  My favorite responses, though, framed her foreign policy experience based on geographic proximity: “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.”

  Though conservative commentators had labored to boost Palin’s selection through most of September, these interviews caused many of them to start to turn on her. Kathleen Parker, a prominent conservative voice, captured in a column what many were privately thinking after the Couric debacle. “As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate,” she wrote, “it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.”

  Parker went on to suggest that Palin withdraw, though this was further than many in the GOP were willing to go. But the buzz around the Couric interview was very strong, and millions of voters who did not see the broadcast watched it on YouTube and CBS’s website. Our research suggested that many people who saw it were deeply troubled.

  While many pundits—and, we sensed, the McCain campaign itself—viewed the race during this period through the prism of Sarah Palin, we never really did. And neither, it turned out, did voters. While gleeful at the troubles the interview caused the McCain campaign, we did not focus much on it externally. They had created an inferno. We could just sit back and watch it burn.

  The first presidential debate would be held on September 26. The vice presidential debate would follow on October 2, leading in to the final two presidential debates on October 9 and October 16.

  We thought these four encounters could very well determine the election, or at least have a significant impact on the outcome. While people watch fewer debates in campaigns for lesser offices than they did thirty years ago, they still tune in for presidential debates in huge numbers.

  And what happens during these debates can play a major role in the campaign. In 2004, Kerry’s strong performances in the first two debates closed the gap with Bush and proved the major reason the race grew so close at the end. Al Gore was judged as inauthentic and too aggressive in his debates with Bush, while Bush exceeded expectations, helping turn the tide in the 2000 election. In 1992, Governor Bill Clinton connected with voters’ economic pain at a town hall debate while President George H. W. Bush impatiently checked his watch, seemingly tired of the interactions with voters; the contrast was devastating.

  We thought our situation was most comparable to Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. Like Obama, Reagan was an outsider criticized for his lack of Washington experience and sometimes accused of offering more sizzle than steak. The electorate was clearly ready for change, but they were not yet convinced Reagan was the necessary antidote. His convincing debate performance eased doubts about his capabilities, and a dead-heat presidential race opened up in his favor. It didn’t hurt that Reagan also provided one of the campaign’s only enduring lines—“There you go again”—while chastising Carter for some liberal cant.

  Axelrod often cited the Reagan-Carter debate as a good guide for us. “Reagan’s performance created a permission structure for voters,” he explained. “After that, they felt it was okay to vote for Reagan. We need to do the same thing. Strong debates will allow people to feel it’s acceptable to do what they’re thinking about doing, but not quite there on—vote for the new guy with the strange name and little Washington experience.”

  Formal debate prep camp for the first presidential debate, to be held in Oxford, Mississippi, on Friday, September 26, opened on Tuesday outside of Palm Beach, Florida, at an old hotel called the Biltmore that was undergoing desperately needed renovations. During this period, Obama showed confidence but also some nerves. “If I can just have four and a half really good hours, we can win this thing,” went his regular refrain. He wanted us all focused on achieving a strong performance. “Make sure we’re being smart about prep and giving it enough time,” he told me. “And I’ll do my part—I’ll take it more seriously than I did before.”

  Anita had witnessed some of our less than stellar debate prep sessions in the primary and knew we needed help from outside the campaign to manage this very cumbersome process. She recommended Tom Donilon and Ron Klain, who between them had prepped Kerry, Gore, and Clinton. Ax and I were initially skeptical—we didn’t want the same old folks who had done this for other nominees; we felt we needed to have some fresh thinking. But once we met with Ron and Tom, we knew Anita was right—they were the folks for the job.

  Prep was a daylong affair, with a break for Obama to campaign briefly in the local market. Ron and Tom drilled him during the day, working on different answers and spending extra time on areas where we needed improvement. At night we would do a full-length mock debate, starting at 9:00 p.m. EST, the same time the real debates would start. We even built an actual replica of the stage for each debate, practically right down to the carpeting. I initially resisted this idea because of the cost, but Ron and Tom convinced me it was worth replicating every detail of each night, so Obama could be familiar with how much room he would have to walk around, where exactly the moderator would be, and so on. It was wise counsel. The move added to Obama’s comfort heading into the debates.

  The financial crisis had altered the operation of our campaign. We now had at least one daily conversation, often more, about the economic crisis with some of our outside economic experts, like former Treasury secretaries Larry Summers and Bob Rubin. Jason Furman, our staff economic aide, and Austan Goolsbee now regularly dialed into our nightly phone roundup with Obama, and on many nights these economic discussions took up half the call. This meant that the calls started running long with some frequency, putting pressure on our schedule.

  Obama was also talking to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and congressional leaders, to stay abreast and offer his help and advice. Doing so let Obama stay plugged into all that was happening, but it was taxing in terms of time. Still, he seemed to thrive on it. He always preferred policy to politics, and I began to further appreciate his ability to stay very calm during a crisis, his efforts to stay one step ahead of the situation, and his hunger for information.

  I mentioned this to Ax. “You know, we better win this thing,” I told him. “I think our country really needs this guy to stay afloat.”

  “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, and displays some of the best leadership qualities I’ve ever witnessed,” Ax responded. “So don’t blow it, Plouffe.”

  I wasn’t so worried about me, but Wa
shington, I thought, could easily blow it. At that moment, it wasn’t clear that the so-called bailout plan to rescue the banks and thus the economy would pass Congress. Unsurprisingly, there was not much appetite among politicians to spend over $700 billion of taxpayer money on something that many voters neither understood thoroughly nor could see how it would benefit them.

  Obama thought we needed to do more publicly to help pass the bailout. He was fearful of what would happen if Congress couldn’t push through a capital infusion for the banks. His advisers were unanimous: the fate of capitalism and our economy hung in the balance.

  “I don’t care whether it helps in the election or not,” he said on our nightly call after the first mock-debate session in Florida. “And I think McCain would feel the same way. He’s clearly not wild about this bailout, and neither am I, but it’s the only responsible thing to do.” Obama wanted to call McCain about the possibility of putting out a joint statement that restated both men’s general support for the concept. “It’ll give cover to members of Congress,” he said, “that the two nominees are holding hands and are willing to jump off the cliff with them.”

  Obama called McCain first thing the next morning. A couple hours later, as I was boarding a flight to Florida, Gibbs reported there was still no response from McCain. “He’s up to something,” Gibbs said. “I can feel it.”

  When I landed in Florida, there was still no word. On my way to the hotel, I got a call from Obama. “McCain finally called me back,” he told me. “He says he may be willing to do a joint statement. But then he suggested maybe we needed to do more—he seemed to be hinting we should both suspend our campaigns, maybe even the debate. He wasn’t very clear. Anyway, we agreed you would talk to Rick Davis and sort out where things stand. Where are you anyway?”

  “A couple minutes from the hotel.” “We’re right behind you.” Obama had just been speaking at a rally in Dune-din. I heard him ask the service how long until they were back. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”