by Obama Barack
From the start, Tewes impressed upon Plouffe, and Plouffe in turn impressed upon me, that if we wanted to win Iowa, we needed to run a different kind of campaign. We’d have to work harder and longer, face-to-face, to win over traditional caucus-goers. More important, we’d have to convince a whole lot of likely Obama supporters—young people, people of color, independents—to overcome the various hurdles and hang-ups and participate in the caucus for the very first time. To do it, Tewes insisted on opening offices right away, covering all ninety-nine Iowa counties; and for each office we’d hire a young staffer who, with little pay or day-to-day supervision, would be responsible for engineering their own local political movement.
It was a big investment and an early gamble, but we gave Tewes the green light. He went to work, with an outstanding team of deputies who helped develop his plan: Mitch Stewart, Marygrace Galston, Anne Filipic, and Emily Parcell, all of them smart, disciplined, with experience on multiple campaigns—and under thirty-two years old.
I spent the most time with Emily, who was an Iowa native and had worked for former governor Tom Vilsack. Tewes figured she’d be especially helpful to me as I navigated local politics. She was twenty-six, one of the youngest in the group, with dark hair and sensible clothes, and diminutive enough to pass for a high school senior. I quickly discovered she knew just about every Democrat in the state and had no qualms about giving me very specific instructions at every stop, covering whom I should talk to and which issues the local community most cared about. This information was delivered in a deadpan monotone, along with a look that suggested a low tolerance for foolishness—a quality Emily may have inherited from her mom, who’d worked at the Motorola plant for three decades and still managed to put herself through college.
During the long hours we spent traveling between events in a rented campaign van, I made it my mission to coax a smile out of Emily—jokes, wisecracks, puns, stray observations about the size of Reggie’s head. But my charm and wit invariably crashed on the rocks of her steady, unblinking gaze, and I settled on trying to do exactly what she told me to do.
Mitch, Marygrace, and Anne would later describe the particulars of their work—which included collectively screening all the unorthodox ideas Tewes routinely pitched at meetings.
“He’d have ten a day,” Mitch would explain. “Nine were ridiculous, one would be genius.” Mitch was a gangly South Dakotan who’d worked in Iowa politics before but had never encountered someone as passionately eclectic as Tewes. “If he brought up the same idea to me three times,” he’d recall, “I figured there might be something there.”
Enlisting Norma Lyon, Iowa’s “Butter Cow Lady,” who at the state fair each year sculpted a life-sized cow out of salted butter, to make a prerecorded call announcing her support for us, which we then blasted across the state—genius. (She later created a twenty-three-pound “butter bust” of my head—also likely a Tewes idea.)
Insisting that we put up billboards along the highway, with rhyming phrases unfolding in sequence like the old 1960s Burma-Shave ads (TIME FOR CHANGE…LET’S SHIFT GEARS…VOTE 4 THE GUY…WITH BIG EARS…OBAMA 08)—not so genius.
Promising to shave his eyebrows if the staff reached the unreachable goal of collecting one hundred thousand supporter cards—not genius, until very late in the campaign, when the team actually hit the mark, at which point it became genius. (“Mitch shaved his too,” Marygrace would explain. “We have pictures. It was horrible.”)
Tewes would set the tone for our Iowa operation—grassroots, no hierarchies, irreverent, and slightly manic. No one—including senior staff, donors, or dignitaries—was exempt from doing some door knocking. In the early weeks, he hung signs on every wall in every office with a motto he’d authored: RESPECT, EMPOWER, INCLUDE. If we were serious about a new kind of politics, he explained, then it started right there on the ground, with every organizer committed to listening to people, respecting what they had to say, and treating everybody—including our opponents and their supporters—the way we wanted to be treated. Lastly he stressed the importance of encouraging voters to get involved instead of just selling them a candidate like a box of laundry detergent.
Anyone who breached these values got scolded and sometimes pulled from the field. When, during our team’s weekly conference call, a new organizer made a joke about why he’d joined the campaign, saying something about “hating pantsuits” (a reference to Hillary’s favorite campaign attire), Tewes admonished him in a lengthy rant for all the other organizers to hear. “It’s not what we stand for,” he said, “not even in private.”
The team took this to heart, particularly because Tewes practiced what he preached. Despite the occasional intemperate outburst, he never failed to show people how much they mattered. When Marygrace’s uncle died, Tewes declared National Marygrace Day, and had everyone in the office wear pink. He also had me record a message announcing that for that one day, he would have to do everything Marygrace said. (Of course, Marygrace had to put up with three hundred days of Tewes and Mitch chewing tobacco in the office, so the ledger never fully balanced.)
This kind of camaraderie permeated the Iowa operation. Not just at headquarters but, more important, among the close to two hundred field organizers we’d deployed across the state. All told, I would spend eighty-seven days in Iowa that year. I would sample each town’s culinary specialty, shoot hoops with schoolkids on any court we could find, and experience every possible weather event, from funnel clouds to sideways sleet. Through it all, those young men and women, working endless hours for subsistence wages, were my able guides. Most were barely out of college. Many were on their first campaigns and far away from home. Some had grown up in Iowa or the rural Midwest, familiar with the attitudes and way of life of midsized towns like Sioux City or Altoona. But that wasn’t typical. Assemble our organizers in a room and you’d find Italians from Philly, Jews from Chicago, Blacks from New York, and Asians from California; children of poor immigrants and children of the rich suburbs; engineering majors, former Peace Corps volunteers, military veterans, and high school dropouts. On the surface, at least, there seemed no way to connect their wildly varied experiences to the meat-and-potatoes folks whose votes we desperately needed.
And yet they did connect. Arriving in town with a duffel bag or a small suitcase, living in the spare bedroom or basement of some early local supporter, they would spend months getting to know a place—visiting the local barbershop, setting up card tables in front of the grocery store, speaking at the Rotary Club. They helped coach Little League, assisted local charities, and called their moms for a banana pudding recipe so they wouldn’t show up to the potluck empty-handed. They learned to listen to their local volunteers—most of whom were much older, with their own jobs, families, and concerns—and got good at recruiting new ones too. They worked each day to exhaustion and fought off bouts of loneliness and fear. Month by month, they won people’s trust. They were no longer strangers.
What a tonic these young kids in Iowa were! They filled me with optimism and gratitude and a sense of coming full circle. In them, I saw myself at twenty-five, arriving in Chicago, confused and idealistic. I remembered the precious bonds I’d made with families on the South Side, the mistakes and small victories, the community I found—similar to what our field organizers were now forging for themselves. Their experiences pointed me back to why I’d gone into government in the first place, toward the taproot idea that maybe politics could be less about power and positioning and more about community and connection.
Our volunteers across Iowa might believe in me, I thought to myself. But they were working as hard as they were mainly because of those young organizers. Just as those kids may have signed up to work for the campaign because of something I’d said or done, but now they belonged to the volunteers. What drove them, what sustained them, independent of their candidate or any particular issue, were the friendships and relationships, the mut
ual loyalty and progress born of joint effort. That and their cantankerous boss back in Des Moines, the one who was promising to shave his eyebrows if they succeeded.
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BY JUNE, OUR campaign had turned a corner. Thanks to skyrocketing internet donations, our financial performance continued to far outstrip our projections, allowing us to go up early on Iowa TV. With school out for the summer, Michelle and the girls were able to join me more often on the road. Rumbling across Iowa in an RV, the sound of their chatter in the background as I made calls; seeing Reggie and Marvin taking on Malia and Sasha in marathon games of UNO; feeling the gentle weight of one daughter or another sleeping against me on an afternoon leg; and always the obligatory ice cream stops—all of it filled me with a joy that carried over into my public appearances.
The nature of those appearances changed as well. As the initial novelty of my candidacy wore off, I found myself speaking to more manageable crowds, a few hundred rather than thousands, which gave me the chance once again to meet people one-on-one and listen to their stories. Military spouses described the day-to-day struggles of running a household and fighting off the terror of possibly hearing bad news from the front. Farmers explained the pressures that led them to surrender their independence to big agribusiness concerns. Laid-off workers talked me through the myriad ways that existing job-training programs had failed them. Small-business owners detailed the sacrifices they’d made to pay for their employees’ health insurance, until just one employee fell sick and everyone’s premiums became unaffordable, including their own.
Informed by these stories, my stump speech became less abstract, less a matter of the head and more a matter of the heart. People heard their own lives reflected in these stories, learning that they were not alone in their hardship, and with that knowledge, more and more of them signed up to volunteer on my behalf. Campaigning on this more retail, human scale also offered the opportunity for chance encounters that made the campaign come alive.
That’s what happened when I visited Greenwood, South Carolina, one day in June. Though most of my time was spent in Iowa, I was also paying regular visits to other states like New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, whose primaries and caucuses would follow in quick succession. The trip to Greenwood was the result of a rash promise I’d made to an influential legislator who’d offered to endorse me, but only if I visited her hometown. As it turned out, my visit was poorly timed, coming during an especially rough week, amid bad poll numbers, bad stories in the papers, bad moods, and bad sleep. It didn’t help that Greenwood was more than an hour from the nearest major airport, we were driving through torrential rains, and when I finally arrived at the municipal building where the event was supposed to be held, I found only twenty people or so gathered inside—all of them as damp as I was from the storm.
A wasted day, I thought to myself, mentally ticking off all the other work I could have been doing. I was going through the motions, shaking hands, asking people what they did for a living, quietly trying to calculate how fast I could get out of there, when suddenly I heard a piercing voice shout out.
“Fired up!”
My staff and I were startled, thinking maybe it was a heckler, but without missing a beat, the rest of the room responded in unison.
“Ready to go!”
Again, the same voice shouted, “Fired up!” And once again the group responded, “Ready to go!”
Unsure of what was happening, I turned to look behind me, my eyes landing on the source of the commotion: a middle-aged Black woman, dressed like she had just come from church, with a colorful dress, a big hat, and an ear-to-ear grin that included a shiny gold tooth.
Her name was Edith Childs. In addition to serving on the Greenwood County Council and in the local NAACP chapter while also being a professional private eye, it turned out she was well known for this particular call-and-response. She started it at Greenwood’s football games, Fourth of July parades, community meetings, or whenever the spirit happened to move her.
For the next few minutes, Edith led the room in hollering “Fired up! Ready to go!” back and forth, again and again. I was confused at first, but figured it would be impolite of me not to join in. And pretty soon, I started to feel kinda fired up! I started to feel like I was ready to go! I noticed everybody at the meeting suddenly was smiling too, and after the chanting was done we settled down and talked for the next hour about the community and the country and what we could do to make it better. Even after I left Greenwood, for the rest of the day, every so often, I’d point to someone on my staff and ask, “You fired up?” Eventually it became a campaign rallying cry. And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn’t be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign—and by extension a democracy—proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.
* * *
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ANOTHER LESSON I learned from voters: They weren’t interested in hearing me parrot conventional wisdom. During the first few months of campaigning, I’d worried at least subconsciously about what Washington opinion makers thought. In the interest of being deemed sufficiently “serious” or “presidential,” I’d become stiff and self-conscious, undermining the very rationale that had led me to run in the first place. But by the summer, we went back to first principles and actively looked for opportunities to challenge the Washington playbook and tell hard truths. Before a teachers’ union gathering, I argued not only for higher salaries and more flexibility in the classroom but also for greater accountability—that last bit eliciting a deafening silence and then a smattering of boos in the hall. At the Detroit Economic Club, I told auto executives that as president I would push hard for higher fuel economy standards, a position ardently opposed by the Big Three automakers. When a group called Iowans for Sensible Priorities, sponsored by Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame, gathered ten thousand signatures from people committing to caucus for a candidate who promised to cut the Pentagon’s defense budget, I had to call either Ben or Jerry—I don’t remember which—to say that although I agreed with the objective and very much wanted their support, I couldn’t as president be hamstrung by any pledge I’d made when it came to our national security. (The group eventually opted to endorse John Edwards.)
I was starting to look different from my Democratic rivals in more ways than the obvious one. During a debate in late July, I was shown images of Fidel Castro, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and a couple of other despots and asked if I’d be prepared to meet with any of them during my first year in office. Without hesitation, I said yes—I’d meet with any world leader if I thought it could advance U.S. interests.
Well, you would have thought I had said the world was flat. When the debate was over, Clinton, Edwards, and a bunch of the other candidates pounced, accusing me of being naïve, insisting that a meeting with the American president was a privilege to be earned. The press corps in large part seemed to agree. Perhaps even a few months earlier I might have gotten wobbly, second-guessing my choice of words and issuing a clarifying statement afterward.
But I had my legs beneath me now and was convinced I was right, particularly on the more general principle that America shouldn’t be afraid to engage its adversaries or push for diplomatic solutions to conflict. As far as I was concerned, it was this disregard for diplomacy that had led Hillary and the rest—not to mention the mainstream press—to follow George W. Bush into war.
Another foreign policy argument arose just a few days later, when during a speech I mentioned that if I had Osama bin Laden in my sights within Pakistani territory, and the Pakistani government was unwilling or unable to capture or kill him, I would take the shot. This shouldn’t have been particularly surprising to anyone; back in 2003, I had premised my opposition to the Iraq War partly on my belief that it would distrac
t us from destroying al-Qaeda.
But such blunt talk ran counter to the Bush administration’s public position; the U.S. government maintained the dual fiction that Pakistan was a reliable partner in the war against terrorism and that we never encroached on Pakistani territory in the pursuit of terrorists. My statement threw Washington into a bipartisan tizzy, with Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain both expressing the view that I was not ready to be president.
In my mind, these episodes indicated the degree to which the Washington foreign policy establishment got things backward—taking military action without first testing diplomatic options, observing diplomatic niceties in the interest of maintaining the status quo precisely when action was called for. It also indicated the degree to which decision makers in Washington consistently failed to level with the American people. I would never fully convince the national pundits that I was right on these arguments, but a funny trend began to show up in the polls after each of these dustups—Democratic primary voters agreed with me.
