by Obama Barack
For the better part of two years, Gibbs, Marvin, and Reggie would be my caretakers, my anchors to normalcy, and a steady source of comic relief. We played cards and shot pool. We argued about sports and swapped music. (Reggie helped me update a hip-hop playlist that had stopped at Public Enemy.) Marvin and Reggie told me about their social lives on the road (complicated) and their adventures in various local stops after our work was done (tattoo parlors and hot tubs were sometimes featured). We teased Reggie about his youthful ignorance (once, when I mentioned Paul Newman, Reggie said, “That’s the salad dressing guy, right?”) and Gibbs about his appetites (at the Iowa State Fair, Gibbs would have trouble choosing between the deep-fried Twinkie and the deep-fried Snickers bar, until the woman behind the counter helpfully said, “Honey, why should you have to choose?”).
Anytime we could, we played basketball. Even the smallest town had a high school gym, and if there wasn’t time for a proper game, Reggie and I would still roll up our sleeves and get in a round of H-O-R-S-E while waiting for me to go onstage. Like any true athlete, he remained fiercely competitive. I sometimes woke up the day after a game of one-on-one barely able to walk, though I was too proud to let my discomfort show. Once we played a group of New Hampshire firefighters from whom I was trying to secure an endorsement. They were standard weekend warriors, a bit younger than me but in worse shape. After the first three times Reggie stole the ball down the floor and went in for thunderous dunks, I called a time-out.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“What?”
“You understand that I’m trying to get their support, right?”
Reggie looked at me in disbelief. “You want us to lose to these stiffs?”
I thought for a second.
“Nah,” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far. Just keep it close enough that they’re not too pissed.”
Spending time with Reggie, Marvin, and Gibbs, I found respite from the pressures of the campaign, a small sphere where I wasn’t a candidate or a symbol or a generational voice or even a boss, but rather just one of the guys. Which, as I slogged through those early months, felt more valuable than any pep talk. Gibbs did try to go the pep-talk route with me at one point as we were boarding another airplane at the end of another interminable day, after a particularly flat appearance. He told me that I needed to smile more, to remember that this was a great adventure and that voters loved a happy warrior.
“Are you having any fun?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Anything we can do to make this more fun?”
“No.”
Sitting in the seat in front of us, Reggie overheard the conversation and turned back to look at me with a wide grin. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I’m having the time of my life.”
It was—although I didn’t tell him that at the time.
* * *
—
ALL THE WHILE, I was learning a lot and quickly. I spent hours dutifully poring over the fat briefing books prepared by my staff, inhaling the latest studies on the value of early childhood education, new developments in battery technology that would make clean energy more accessible, and China’s manipulation of its currency to boost its exports.
Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we’re uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we’re good at. I knew policy; I knew how to consume and process information. It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn’t a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.
My more seasoned opponents already understood this. I embarrassed myself early in their presence at a healthcare forum sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, held in Las Vegas on a Saturday evening late in March 2007. Plouffe had resisted my participation. In his view, such “cattle calls,” where the candidates appeared before this or that Democratic interest group, played to the strengths of insiders and took time away from direct voter contact. I disagreed. Healthcare was an issue I felt strongly about—not only because I’d heard many devastating personal stories while campaigning but because I’d never forget my mother in her waning days, fretting not just about her chances of survival but about whether her insurance would keep her solvent during treatment.
As it turned out, I should have listened to Plouffe. My head was crammed with too many facts and too few answers. Before a large audience of health workers, I stumbled, mumbled, hemmed and hawed onstage. Under pointed questioning, I had to confess that I didn’t yet have a definitive plan for delivering affordable healthcare. You could hear crickets in the auditorium. The Associated Press ran a story critiquing my showing at the forum—one that would promptly get picked up by outlets across the country—under the painful headline IS OBAMA ALL STYLE AND LITTLE SUBSTANCE?
My performance stood in sharp contrast to those of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, the two leading contenders. Edwards, the handsome and polished former vice presidential candidate, had left the Senate in 2004 to be John Kerry’s running mate, then made a show of starting a poverty center but really never stopped campaigning full-time for president. Though I didn’t know him well, I’d never been particularly impressed with Edwards: Despite the fact that he had working-class roots, his newly minted populism sounded synthetic and poll-tested to me, the political equivalent of one of those boy bands dreamed up by a studio marketing department. But in Las Vegas I was chastened as I watched him lay out a crisp proposal for universal coverage, displaying all the gifts that had made him a successful trial lawyer back in North Carolina.
Hillary was even better. Like many people, I’d spent the 1990s observing the Clintons from afar. I’d admired Bill’s prodigious talent and intellectual firepower. If I wasn’t always comfortable with the specifics of his so-called triangulations—signing welfare reform legislation with inadequate protections for those who couldn’t find jobs, the tough-on-crime rhetoric that would contribute to an explosion in the federal prison population—I appreciated the skill with which he had steered progressive policy making and the Democratic Party back toward electability.
As for the former First Lady, I found her just as impressive, and more sympathetic. Maybe it was because in Hillary’s story I saw traces of what my mother and grandmother had gone through: all of them smart, ambitious women who had chafed under the constraints of their times, having to navigate male egos and social expectations. If Hillary had become guarded, perhaps overly scripted—who could blame her, given the attacks she’d been subjected to? In the Senate, my favorable opinion of her had been largely confirmed. In all our interactions, she came across as hardworking, personable, and always impeccably prepared. She also had a good, hearty laugh that tended to lighten the mood of everyone around her.
That I’d decided to run despite Hillary’s presence in the race had less to do with any assessment of her personal shortcomings and more to do with my feeling that she just couldn’t escape the rancor, grudges, and hardened assumptions arising out of the Clinton White House years. Fair or not, I didn’t see how she could close America’s political divide, or change how Washington did business, or provide the country with the fresh start it needed. Yet watching her speak passionately and knowledgeably about healthcare onstage that evening at the SEIU forum and hearing the crowd cheer enthusiastically after she was done, I wondered if I’d miscalculated.
That forum would hardly be the last time Hillary—or, for that matter, half the primary field—outperformed me, for it soon seemed as if we were gathered for a debate once every two or three weeks. I had never been particularly good in these formats myself: My long windups and preference for complicated answers worked against me, particularly onstage with seven savvy pros and a single timed
minute to answer a question. During our first debate in April, the moderator called time at least twice before I was done speaking. Asked about how I’d handle multiple terrorist attacks, I discussed the need to coordinate federal help but neglected to mention the obvious imperative to go after the perpetrators. For the next several minutes, Hillary and the others took turns pointing out my oversight. Their tones were somber, but the gleam in their eyes said, Take that, rookie.
Afterward, Axe was gentle in his postgame critique.
“Your problem,” he said, “is you keep trying to answer the question.”
“Isn’t that the point?” I said.
“No, Barack,” Axe said, “that is not the point. The point is to get your message across. What are your values? What are your priorities? That’s what people care about. Look, half the time the moderator is just using the question to try to trip you up. Your job is to avoid the trap they’ve set. Take whatever question they give you, give ’em a quick line to make it seem like you answered it…and then talk about what you want to talk about.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
I was frustrated with Axe and even more frustrated with myself. But I realized his insight was hard to deny after watching a replay of the debate. The most effective debate answers, it seemed, were designed not to illuminate but to evoke an emotion, or identify the enemy, or signal to a constituency that you, more than anyone else on that stage, were and would always be on their side. It was easy to dismiss the exercise as superficial. Then again, a president wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant or a pilot, hired to carry out some narrow, specialized task. Mobilizing public opinion, shaping working coalitions—that was the job. Whether I liked it or not, people were moved by emotion, not facts. To elicit the best rather than the worst of those emotions, to buttress those better angels of our nature with reason and sound policy, to perform while still speaking the truth—that was the bar I needed to clear.
* * *
—
AS I WAS working to curb my screw-ups, Plouffe was running a seamless operation from our Chicago headquarters. I didn’t see him often but was coming to realize that the two of us had much in common. We were both analytical and even-keeled, generally skeptical of convention and pretense. But whereas I could be absentminded, indifferent to small details, incapable of maintaining an orderly filing system, constantly misplacing memos, pens, and cell phones that had just been handed to me, Plouffe turned out to be a managerial genius.
From the start, he focused unapologetically and unswervingly on winning Iowa. Even when cable pundits and some of our supporters were calling us idiots for being so single-minded, he wouldn’t let anyone waver an inch from the strategy, certain it was our only path to victory. Plouffe imposed a martial discipline, giving everyone on our team—from Axe to our most junior organizer—a level of autonomy while also demanding accountability and a strict adherence to process. He capped salaries as a way of eliminating needless staff dissent. He pointedly directed resources away from bloated consulting contracts and media budgets in order to give our field organizers what they needed on the ground. Obsessive about data, he recruited a team of internet savants who designed a digital program that was light-years ahead of those not just of other campaigns but many private corporations as well.
Add it all up, and in six months, from a standing start, Plouffe built a campaign operation strong enough to go toe-to-toe with the Clinton machine. It was a fact he quietly relished. This was another thing I came to realize about Plouffe: Beneath the low-key persona and deep convictions, he just plain liked the combat. Politics was his sport, and in his chosen endeavor he was as competitive as Reggie was in basketball. Later, I’d ask Axe if he’d anticipated just how good a campaign architect his then junior partner would turn out to be. Axe shook his head.
“A fucking revelation,” he said.
In presidential politics, the best strategy means little if you don’t have the resources to execute it, and this was the second thing we had going for us: money. Given that the Clintons had been cultivating a national donor base for nearly three decades, our working assumption had been that Hillary would have a tremendous fundraising advantage over us. But the hunger for change in America was proving to be stronger than even we had anticipated.
Early on, our fundraising followed a traditional pattern: Big donors from big cities wrote and collected big checks. Penny Pritzker, a businesswoman and longtime friend from Chicago, served as our campaign’s national finance chair, bringing both organizational acumen and a vast network of relationships to the effort. Julianna Smoot, our tough-talking and experienced finance director, built an expert team and had a gift for alternately sweet-talking, shaming, and sometimes scaring me into engaging in the endless hustle for dollars. She had a great smile, but the eyes of a killer.
I grew accustomed to the drill, partly out of necessity, but also because as time went on, our donors came to understand and even appreciate my terms. This was about building a better country, I’d tell them, not about egos or prestige. I would listen to their take on an issue, especially if they had some expertise, but I wouldn’t shade my positions to satisfy them. If I had a spare minute, the thank-you notes I wrote and the birthday calls I made would be directed not to them but to our volunteers and young staff out in the field.
And if I won, they could count on me raising their taxes.
This attitude lost us a few donors but helped develop a culture among supporters that wasn’t about perks or status. And anyway, with each successive month, the makeup of our donor base was shifting. Small donations—in ten- or twenty- or hundred-dollar increments—started pouring in, most coming through the internet, from college students who pledged their Starbucks budget for the duration of the campaign, or grandmas who’d taken up a sewing circle collection. All told during primary season, we would raise millions from small donors, allowing us to compete in every state for every vote. More than the money itself, the spirit behind the giving, the sense of ownership that the accompanying letters and email messages conveyed, infused the campaign with grassroots energy. This is not all up to you, these donations told us. We are here, on the ground, millions of us scattered across the country—and we believe. We are all in.
More than a strong operations strategy and effective grassroots fundraising, a third element kept both the campaign and our spirits afloat that first year: the work of our Iowa team and their indefatigable leader, Paul Tewes.
* * *
—
PAUL GREW UP in Mountain Lake, a farm town tucked into the southwest corner of Minnesota, a place where everyone knew and looked out for one another, where kids biked everywhere and nobody locked their doors, and where every student played every sport because in order to field a full team, none of the coaches could afford to cut anybody.
Mountain Lake was also a conservative place, which made the Tewes family stand out a little. Paul’s mom instilled in him early an allegiance to the Democratic Party that was second only to the family’s allegiance to the Lutheran faith. When he was six years old, he patiently explained to a classmate that he shouldn’t support the Republicans “ ’cause your family ain’t rich.” Four years later, he cried bitterly when Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. Paul’s father was proud enough of his son’s passion for politics that he shared the episode with a friend, the town’s high school civics teacher, who in turn—perhaps hoping that a ten-year-old’s interest in public affairs might inspire sullen teenagers—relayed it to his class. For the next several days, older kids teased Paul mercilessly, scrunching up their faces like crybabies whenever they spotted him in the halls.
Paul was undeterred. In high school, he organized a dance to raise money for Democratic candidates. In college, he interned for the local state representative, and—in a feat that gave him particular pride—somehow managed to deliver one of Mountain Lake’s two p
recincts to his favored candidate, Jesse Jackson, in the 1988 presidential primary.
By the time I met him in 2007, Paul had worked on just about every type of campaign imaginable: from mayoral races to congressional races. He’d served as Al Gore’s Iowa state caucus director and as the director of field operations across the country for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He was thirty-eight by then but looked older, stocky and slightly balding, with a pale blond mustache and pale skin to match. There was nothing fancy about Paul Tewes; his demeanor could be gruff, and his clothes never seemed to match, especially in the winter, when, like a true Minnesotan, he’d sport all manner of flannel shirts, down jackets, and ski caps. He was the kind of guy more comfortable talking to farmers in a cornfield or drinking in a corner saloon than mingling with high-paid political consultants. But sitting with him, you quickly realized he knew his stuff. More than that: Beneath the tactical insights, detailed district voting histories, and political anecdotes, you might hear—if you listened carefully enough—the heart of the ten-year-old boy who cared enough, who believed enough, to cry over an election.
Anyone who’s ever run for president will likely tell you that there’s nothing simple about winning Iowa. It’s one of a number of U.S. states that hold a caucus to determine which candidates their delegates will support. As opposed to a traditional primary election in which citizens cast votes privately and largely at their convenience, a caucus is more of a throwback to town hall–style democracy, when voters showed up at an appointed hour, usually at a school gym or a library in their precinct, and debated the merits of each candidate in a neighborly manner for as long as it took to come up with a winner. Such participatory democracy had much to commend it, but it was time-consuming—a caucus could last three hours or more—and required participants to be well informed, willing to vote publicly, and committed enough to make an evening of it. Unsurprisingly caucuses tended to attract a small and static cross section of the Iowa electorate, made up of older voters, party functionaries, longtime partisans—those who hewed, in general, to the tried-and-true. This meant that Democratic caucus-goers were more likely to support a known quantity like Hillary Clinton than someone like me.
