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

by David Plouffe

  Another shitstorm to fight through. Axelrod in particular had been obsessing for months about Ayers and the challenge of dealing with this in a media world that would likely oversimplify the story; the specter of swiftboats had been dancing in the political community’s head for months.

  “It’s about time they dragged this out,” I said, trying to joke with him the night the story was posted online. “I was beginning to think your angst about it would be unfulfilled.”

  “Sadly, my angst is almost always on the mark,” he replied. “We’ll see. I think we can navigate through this but a lot will depend on how artfully the McCain campaign handles it.”

  “Making something of this requires a scalpel not a sledgehammer,” I said. “Not really their MO so far. We also need to keep everyone calm internally. We’ve prepared for this, so we just have to muscle through it, hopefully quickly, and try not to get snowed under.”

  The traditional political play here was clear—McCain’s camp would try to trump up the relationship with Ayers and question Obama’s judgment for having anything to do with him, all in the interest of portraying Obama as too far outside the mainstream to be a safe pick. As Sarah Palin was fond of saying, “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do.”

  We had war-gamed the Ayers issue in focus groups and polling over the summer, long before this resurgence of interest, assuming it would eventually darken our doorstep. As we exposed voters to the likely Ayers-based attacks, it became clear we could not blow off the subject as simply more negative politics from McCain. The connection raised real questions in voters’ minds: How close were Obama and Ayers? Was he going to be working in an Obama administration? When did Obama first learn of Ayers’s past?

  We found that as voters learned the facts, though, they were largely satisfied with the response, and the association did not alter their view of Obama. It helped that Ayers’s acts of domestic terrorism were committed when Obama was eight years old, and that he was not an adviser to the campaign. The fact that Ayers had in the intervening years become a college professor and education expert also helped round out some of the sharp edges.

  So we knew we would have to respond and defend ourselves—both in the press and through paid advertising—if and when the Ayers attack hit the airwaves. But we thought if we executed well, we could ultimately defuse it. That McCain waited so long to launch this line of attack helped us immeasurably. Voters tend to treat attacks late in campaigns with a high degree of skepticism. “If this is so important,” they asked, “why is this the first time we are hearing about it seriously? What’s really going on here?”

  The McCain campaign also utterly flubbed their injection of the Ayers argument into the main artery of their communications. Sarah Palin—who had almost zero credibility and little standing with the broader electorate—was the tip of the spear, launching into the Ayers attack at a Colorado rally. Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists,” she told the crowd.

  If anything, Palin did receive outsized press attention, and with something this controversial it was bound to explode into the media. For a week or two in mid-October, Ayers dominated the race, which must have made the McCain folks giddy. We were confident, though, that over time voters would eventually come to reject the notion that Barack Obama was spending his time with terrorists; it was just too much of a stretch. In addition to having the facts on our side, Palin’s descriptive overreach made the behavior and motive of the McCain campaign part of voters’ processing; in the long run, we thought, they had sacrificed more of their credibility to no foreseeable advantage.

  While planning in advance for the Ayers assault, we had discussed different ways of blunting the impact of their argument, seeking an issue we could introduce that would raise questions about McCain’s judgment and character. This was a traditionally political, tactical approach, but we did not want to backpedal without getting off a shot. We thought we should create some turbulence for McCain.

  The obvious point was his involvement in the 1980s with Charles Keating and the savings and loan scandal. McCain had been one of five senators investigated for pressuring regulators on behalf of a major campaign contributor. They became notorious as the Keating Five, and McCain was reprimanded by his colleagues in the Senate. A tawdry episode, to be sure.

  We thought Keating was much more relevant to the campaign than Ayers: some of the roots of the economic crisis lay in lax regulators and the influence that financial institutions carried in Washington. Looking at McCain’s history with regulators seemed in bounds and relevant.

  Obama told us he did not want to use Keating as a preemptive strike. Perhaps we could trot the issue out as a response, but he wanted to think hard about even doing that.

  Most voters had hazy recollections or none at all of the twenty-five-year-old affair; if we decided to add Keating to the mix, we would have to find a way to tell the story in full, to both voters and the media. Our new media department suggested putting together a longer-form documentary that would objectively lay out the facts of Keating, McCain’s involvement, and its relevance to the current economic situation.

  I green-lighted a thirteen-minute video that featured lots of archival footage and a searing interview with one of the key regulators pressured by the Keating Five. When Rospars presented the finished product, the results were fantastic. We thought the piece was factually devastating and would be more readily accepted by voters than a thirty-second hit job.

  I told Obama about the documentary and he liked the concept, both that it was factual and educational, and that we would release it only as a defensive measure. We had his approval to launch it if necessary.

  Right before the second debate, the RNC prepared to launch TV attack ads focused on Ayers in all the battleground states. The press was enthralled with this issue, so we knew the move would get outsized attention. Not wanting to be the only candidate playing defense on a personal issue, I convened a call with a small group to discuss releasing the Keating documentary the next morning. Everyone agreed. Pfeiffer suggested tipping off some of the press that night to increase interest and lengthen the time the Keating pushback would be in the media bloodstream. I thought that was a good idea.

  That night, after our first mock-debate practice at the hotel in Asheville, Obama headed upstairs and the prep team gathered in a meeting room. We were reviewing each answer from the mock debate so that in the morning we could review with Obama what worked, what didn‘t, and what needed some adjustment. He really disliked these review sessions. “You guys seem to enjoy telling me how many times I screwed up,” he had frequently complained. Still, they were very helpful. He never agreed with all our assessments and suggestions, but when he did, grudgingly or not, the improvement would be noticeable and permanent.

  As we were reviewing questions, Obama opened the door to the meeting room. This was very unusual; when he went up to his room he was almost always down for the night, reading or watching ESPN.

  “Sorry, guys. I need the Davids for a minute.” Ax and I looked at each other and went into the hallway. We both assumed there was a major problem of some sort.

  “I was flipping through channels and saw that we are releasing the Keating documentary tomorrow morning,” he said. “Why wasn’t I consulted about it?”

  I was stunned, thinking I had his agreement. I tried to explain, “We discussed it and I thought—”

  Obama cut me off. “This is not a run-of-the-mill ad. This is a big bomb. And I should have made the final decision on whether to use it and when.” He was clearly frustrated. “I must tell you, I think this is a mistake. Now, in the debate, when I suggest that McCain is engaging in the same old attack politics, he’ll have an easy comeback: I’m doing the same thing. I’m really disappointed in you two for not handling this the right way.”

  Ax tried to explain how this would not affect our ability to defuse Ayers in the debate; the Keating issue was much more relevant. “It doesn’t hem us in at all,” Ax argued. �
��Ayers is more of the same phony politics of association—.” But Obama cut him off, too. He felt blindsided and was not really focused on the substance.

  I told him we wouldn’t make this mistake again. And we didn‘t, though the Keating video ended up serving its political purpose. It competed with Ayers in the press coverage and pulled in a huge audience on YouTube. I saw it as a potential brushback pitch that could make the McCain folks think twice about how hard and irresponsibly to push Ayers and Obama’s other associations. It also served as a subtle demonstration of our strength; we released the documentary only to the press and online, but they knew that if we wanted to, we had the financial ability to air it on TV.

  Whatever the potential benefits, he felt that his campaign had gotten out of ahead of him, and the communications process between the two of us had broken down. The release of the Keating video did not quite rival the Clinton (D-Punjab) paper in terms of Obama’s unhappiness with me and the campaign, but it was up there.

  We spent a great deal of prep time hashing out responses for Ayers, but the bulk of the audience questions at the town hall debate addressed the issues affecting the voters and their families. Obama relentlessly linked his ideas to improving the prospects of the middle class. Inconceivably, McCain once again largely took a pass on burnishing his credentials with this group. Obama also engaged well with the questioners, an important factor in voters’ evaluations of a town hall debate. McCain, though usually a master of this intimate format, seemed surprisingly uncomfortable and certainly not warm. We had expected him to joke with the crowd and really engage them, but instead he seemed tense, as if he was trying to remember the lines they had practiced instead of just letting it fly a bit. And surprisingly, he did not try to weave in Ayers.

  Both our own research and the polls taken after the debate showed we won this contest even more decisively than the first. As we flew back to Chicago through the pounding Tennessee rain, munching on our superstition-mandated burgers and beers, I said to Ax, “One more. Get through one more goddamned debate and we could be in the clear.”

  “We’re three for three if you count Biden,” Ax replied as he downed his beer. “I don’t think anyone’s gone four for four, but I think we can. Our guy has really hit his stride.”

  “Yeah, he’s in another gear now,” I said. “It’s almost like right before Iowa when it just clicked and everything seemed to slow down for him.” We both considered this for a moment as we chewed silently. “We just need to make sure we don’t have any letup,” I continued. “The prep has to be rigorous. We’ll be expected to win this next one, both because it’s on domestic issues and we’ve already won the first two. Our expectations are soaring.”

  Ax smiled. “Will you settle down and just enjoy this one, at least until we land?”

  I opened another beer and tried to do as he suggested. But with the big prize almost in our grasp, he had to worry about anything and everything that could knock it loose.

  The third debate would be held in New York, but in keeping with our battleground tradition, we prepped in Ohio, at a state park lodge in Toledo. I flew into Detroit and drove down to meet up with the prep team the Sunday before the debate, having flown home to D.C. for a few hours earlier that day to visit my very pregnant wife and son. Landing in Michigan, it dawned on me as I deplaned that this was now our territory. An Obama flag was firmly planted in Michigan—the McCain folks really had abandoned ship.

  The drive down took me from a state in which we had vanquished our opponent to one that was nothing short of a political war zone. Our lead in Ohio was narrow, and dominating the state’s media for three days as Obama zigged and zagged from debate prep to public events gave us a huge boost. McCain was prepping at his ranch in Arizona and popping over to New Mexico for an event, a state that looked to us increasingly like a lost cause for him.

  The team was gathering when I arrived in Toledo. Obama sat down a few minutes later for our initial discussion of the debate, but before we could dive in, he and Gibbs wanted to talk about an exchange he’d just had with a voter while knocking on doors in a neighborhood in northwest Ohio.

  Not many presidential candidates go into neighborhoods and knock doors, but Obama had done it from time to time since the early days of the primary. It produced a nice image of him working hard for votes, engaging at a personal level. The pictures out of this Ohio visit were terrific—but there was one exchange with a voter that was beginning to percolate.

  A resident of the neighborhood had come up to Obama as he was walking down the street and started to question him about his tax plan. The voter said he believed the Obama tax plan would hurt people like him who might one day want to buy or start a small business. Obama patiently explained that his tax plan would actually cut taxes for those in this position, and that the man would be far better off under an Obama tax plan than Bush’s or what McCain was proposing.

  But the man clearly had his mind made up and would not be assuaged by any of the explanations. In Barack’s words, “He wouldn’t take yes for an answer.”

  Gibbs added, “We couldn’t have sold him a glass of water in the desert.”

  During the exchange on the street, Barack had used a phrase in defense of his tax philosophy that we knew McCain would pounce on: “redistribute the wealth.” I blanched at the choice of words, but we were confident voters would understand that this referred to what Obama had been proposing all campaign: a restoration of balance in the tax code, cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans, and allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans to expire.

  Axelrod didn’t think the attack would resonate with voters because we had spent months pounding away in every battleground market that we were going to cut taxes for the middle class and small businesses. In one of the most significant but least appreciated developments of the campaign, in most states our research showed that voters believed Obama would be better than McCain on taxes for people like them. Republicans running for president almost always won this question by huge margins. We had turned the tables, and taxes were now an offensive issue for us, not something on which we had to contain damage.

  Still, we knew what was likely to come from our opponents. “They don’t have much going for them now,” said Ax, “so they’ll probably lean into this way too hard.” I agreed. If McCain wanted to spend the closing debate and some of the last period of the campaign debating who was going to be more equitable on taxes, we should roll out the red carpet.

  To sum it up, none of us were overly concerned about Obama’s exchange on October 12 with the Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher.

  Ax was planning to stay behind in New York after the debate, ostensibly to travel with Obama for a couple of days. I suspected his decision had more to do with attending our last campaign fund-raising event the next night in New York, a concert with Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen; Ax was a big fan of the Boss.

  I was irrationally furious that he would not be joining me on the flight home for our postdebate burger-and-beer ritual. I had told him before the debate with deadly seriousness that he was screwing with our karma. There was a real chance, I said, that we could have a disastrous debate if he broke up our routine.

  Concerned by my bizarre behavior, he offered to change his plans and fly back to Chicago, and then out to New York at 6:00 the next morning. I grudgingly reflected on the wear and tear my anxiety would cause him and said, “No, but if we lose the presidency, you’ll know why.”

  The debate was at Hofstra University on Long Island, and our plane was flying into LaGuardia Airport. Barack, Ax, and I were standing and talking up in the front section of the plane as it descended into New York. One of the nice things about traveling on a private plane is that you don’t have to sit down on approach—you can plop down in your seat right before you land. We were talking about sports and just then the skyline of New York City appeared out the window. Our conversation stopped and we all stared silently for several minutes. It’s hard to fly b
y that skyline without being snapped back to that horrible September day in 2001.

  The moment was also a piercing reminder that we were in a bubble and had been for a long time; seeing the city brought back memories of life during more normal times. For Ax, growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. For Barack, going to school at Columbia, where he first gained his seriousness of purpose. I had my own memories of special times with my wife and friends. None of us voiced our thoughts. Instead, we exchanged knowing looks and took our seats right before the tires of our plane touched down.

  To our surprise and confusion, all McCain wanted to talk about on stage at Hofstra University was Joe Wurzelbacher. McCain raised “Joe the Plumber” in what seemed like every answer. All total, Joe’s name was mentioned twenty-five times in this debate, almost as many times as health care and more times than creating jobs. Strategically, McCain needed to erode some of our surprising strength with voters on taxes. But with his broken-record reference to Joe, I thought McCain turned in a performance that sounded like a Saturday Night Live parody of himself.

  We won the final debate by all measures, though not quite as convincingly as the first two. McCain was animated and attacked Obama with vigor throughout the debate. Expectations were lower because of our routs in the first two debates, and McCain did a better job of meeting and exceeding them.

  I confess my attention was not focused 100 percent on the debate at every moment. My beloved Philadelphia Phillies had a chance to clinch the National League pennant against the Dodgers that night and had taken a big lead as the debate progressed. Ax and I insisted that one of the four TVs provided to us in the staff viewing room be tuned to the baseball playoffs. His Cubs and White Sox had bowed out early—he was incensed at the Cubs the night of the VP debate in St Louis—but my Phillies were defying their pitiful history and charging through the playoffs.