Obama- An Oral History
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BEN LABOLT
Deputy Press Secretary, Obama for America (2007–2008)
Assistant Press Secretary, White House (2009–2010)
National Press Secretary, Obama for America (2011–2012)
I dealt with a lot of the biographical stories, because then Senator Obama would sit down for these long pieces in the Senate office with reporters from the Chicago Tribune and magazines, but I wasn’t really in a rapid-response capacity until I was spokesman on the campaign in August. That’s where I worked closely with the self-research team to bat down false rumors and fight smears. These false email chains had been going around—the original “fake news.”
DAN SHAPIRO
Every day there was some new crazy false rumor, and every day we were out there playing Whack-a-Mole. At some point you said, “We’ll convince those who want to be convinced,” and at some point people didn’t need to be convinced because they started to see through the silliness, and you’d never convince the people who didn’t want to be convinced.
BEN LABOLT
Some of this started in crazy corners of the internet. It wasn’t necessarily well organized. A whole right-wing publishing world leaned into it. So we mounted a full-scale effort to fight back. Everybody on the campaign had learned the lessons of 2004—not responding to the Swift Boat attacks because the view at the time was that [responding] would elevate [the story] to a level that it didn’t deserve. We knew this could be damaging and we had a team to fight back every day.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
It was nothing but blatant racism in America.
BEN LABOLT
In some ways the biggest threat to Obama’s candidacy was because he was undefined, the candidacy was a whiteboard. So voters could fill in their aspirations on the whiteboard, but it also meant that if somebody’s worst fears took hold, there was just as much of a chance for that to stick because he hadn’t been on the national stage for a particularly long time . . . It wasn’t only the madrassa allegation.1 The front page of the New York Times claimed that he exaggerated his drug use in Dreams from My Father for political gain, which I thought was one of the craziest stories of the entire campaign.
BRANDON HURLBUT
A brick was thrown through one of our campaign-office windows with the N-word on it, and in central Pennsylvania, our field staff was hearing some ugly things. There was always this fear in the back of our minds that people could tell the pollsters one thing, but what would they do when no one’s watching in that voting booth?
BEN LABOLT
It’s all about convincing people that Obama represented the Other, that he wasn’t truly American, that he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism. You know, there was really a subterranean campaign to try and discredit him and raise doubts about his biography, and so we needed to mount a significant effort to make sure that people understood what his values were, who he was, where he came from, and, therefore, why he could lead the country. Campaigns are just as much about values as they are about policy.
DAVID AXELROD
Most people would agree that the real sort of watershed moment was the [Iowa] Jefferson-Jackson dinner in the fall of 2007. He really laid out his rationale, and it was an assault on the status quo. It was an assault on the politics of Washington, and he really differentiated himself from Hillary, and he did it on the most dramatic stage. The J-J dinner is, you know, part party fundraiser, part Roman Colosseum. It’s held in a big arena, and the donors are at tables on the floor, and then supporters are in the stands of this arena. It is a happening, and it is a widely watched and covered event, and each candidate got, I think, eleven minutes to speak. No notes. No teleprompter.
JACKIE NORRIS
The Jefferson-Jackson political dinner . . . you knew that meant something. It meant they’re going to show up on caucus night. When you started seeing such enthusiasm, acceptance, and excitement, you just knew that the state seemed ready for him.
DAVID AXELROD
He would spend each night in his room internalizing the speech, because he knew he wouldn’t have any notes. And he was the last speaker of the night. All the other candidates had spoken. Hillary spoke right before him, and when he spoke, you could just feel the electricity in the room. And you could see how deflated her forces were after the speech. It was clear that he really laid down a rationale and distinguished himself.
SCOTT GOODSTEIN
External Online Director, Obama for America (2007–2008)
Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster, famously said Obama’s campaign supporters “look like Facebook,” that they’re all young kids and Facebook was not going to show up and vote, and Facebook kids came out of the woodwork. They organized in Iowa and were getting new kids to volunteer, putting real efforts and energy in.
BRANDON HURLBUT
There always was this sort of romance and magic to Iowa, a connection that we didn’t have in New Hampshire. I went to a labor event in Portsmouth with the candidate, maybe a couple months out from the [Iowa] caucus, and I remember him saying to me, “I’m going to win Iowa.” He was so confident, and at the time, he wasn’t leading in the polls. Edwards was going strong. Hillary was going strong. So this was not backed up by data. “I just know I’m going to win Iowa. I can feel it happening on the ground, and you guys need to get it done in New Hampshire, because I’m coming to New Hampshire with a victory.”
JOE LIEBERMAN
I was really friendly with Obama and had been friendly with the Clintons forever, going back to their days at Yale Law School. Neither of them asked for my support, and so McCain called me somewhere before Thanksgiving in 2007. His basic pitch was, “I’m going to ask you a question, and if you can’t do it, don’t worry about it. It’s never going to affect our friendship. We’re going to be friends forever.” He said, for him, his fate would be decided in New Hampshire. If he could surprise in New Hampshire, he had a chance to win the [Republican] nomination. And he said, “You know, in New Hampshire, independents can vote, and you’re Mr. Independent. You could really help if you would endorse me publicly.” And I thought, What the hell? McCain is my buddy. I got reelected as an independent. To that extent, I’m a little free of party-loyalty concerns. The two Democrats are not asking for my support. I know that McCain can be a good president, and I’m going to do it.
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1 Erroneous stories about Obama’s identity date as far back as 2004, when a crackpot gained traction with the claim that the senator was “a Muslim who has concealed his religion.” More falsehoods sprung from the presidential primary when the conservative Insight magazine suggested the candidate was indoctrinated in Islamic fundamentalism as a child at an Indonesian school.
2008
On January 3, 2008, Iowa caucus voters cast their ballots for the Democratic and Republican nominees. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, advance staffer Herbie Ziskend had been prepping inside the gymnasium of Nashua High School North, the venue for Barack Obama’s Saturday rally, while watching the returns on a small TV. “It was this Oh my goodness, he may actually become president moment,” Ziskend said. “Suddenly the meaning of my work in that gym in Nashua changed.”
In Iowa, Obama had clinched a resounding victory. His 37.6 percent delegate margin bested his contenders’—with John Edwards at 29.8 percent and Hillary Clinton at 29.5 percent—likely on account of his campaign’s months-long commitment to winning over independents and young voters in one of the whitest flyover states, which resulted in something north of 239,000 voters turning out for an election that in 2004 had produced somewhere around 124,000. “I just always knew,” Jackie Norris recalled. “I just knew that young people, if they opened their minds and heard him, something would ignite.” For comparison, among the approximately 108,000 Republican voters who walked into Iowa precincts that Thursday, 34 percent voted for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, while former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney trailed with 25 percent of the vote. Senator John McCain came in fourth behind Fred D. T
hompson—a former Tennessee senator probably best known for his acting work in Die Hard 2 and Law & Order—with 13 percent of the vote. Which is to say, as far as turnout went, Obama was already blowing the other side out of the water.
Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, a Clinton supporter, recalled “seeing people [he] had never seen before” at his own precinct, Ward One in Mount Pleasant, a town with a population of around 8,700. “Under normal circumstances the number of people who showed up for [Clinton] would have been sufficient,” he said. “But it was a year in which [Obama] basically encouraged people who had never been involved in politics before to get involved. They came in droves.”
At his victory speech, Senator Obama congratulated his supporters at Des Moines’s Hy-Vee Hall for achieving “what the cynics said we couldn’t,” bolstering this comparative outsider, who had been criticized for a lack of government experience and refusing to pay credence to Washington’s power structure. Senator Edward Kennedy recognized that these characteristics should not be perceived as liabilities. He had spent months being courted by both the Obama and Clinton camps. As First Lady, Clinton had assisted Kennedy in passing the 1997 State Children’s Health Insurance Program; he was a longtime ally of hers. But the Lion of the Senate, who had assumed his Massachusetts seat after his brother moved into the White House four decades prior, eventually joined his brother’s daughter, Caroline, in endorsing Obama.
“There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier,” Senator Kennedy reminded the students of American University. “He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed ‘someone with greater experience’ . . . and John Kennedy replied, ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do . . . It is time for a new generation of leadership.’”
TOM VILSACK
Governor of Iowa (D) (1999–2007)
US Secretary of Agriculture (2009–2017)
I often said that Hillary didn’t lose that caucus—Obama won it. There’s a difference. He understood that he had to reach beyond the traditional Democratic base to be successful. He invested his time and developed an almost-personal relationship with these folks, where they felt an obligation to show up for him. So he and his team did a tremendous job, and they deserved to win.
SCOTT GOODSTEIN
Thousands of kids showed up, [and] Mark Penn had to eat some of his words. Obama killed it.
BRANDON HURLBUT
It was a sprint, like five days until the New Hampshire primary, and he was campaigning across the state. You had these rallies where there was so much energy, this injection of enthusiasm, and it quickly unraveled. The voters were [of] a different breed. They felt like their jobs were to kick the tires on these candidates and meet them up close—really vet them for the country. I think many of them went into the voting booth and thought, You know what? We’re not going to hand it to this guy. We need to see him get tested a little bit more and make sure he earns it. So there was a backlash. It was a shocking defeat.
HERBIE ZISKEND
Obama had won Iowa. Hillary had won New Hampshire. They split in Nevada,2 and we went across these core towns and cities in South Carolina in the week leading up to the primary, and it was like the Messiah had come. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, and here we are with this African American candidate, and there was such buzz and such excitement. People were holding up their babies on the street as the motorcade went by.
JEREMY BIRD
People saw the difference. Governor Hodges and Joe Erwin, a businessman from Greenville, as they recognized that we were getting grassroots volunteers and picking up steam, they started to come on board. It was Joe Erwin and Governor Hodges who said, This is a campaign that is uniting the Democratic Party in ways that hadn’t been the case in the past.
HERBIE ZISKEND
And Obama ended up winning South Carolina by twenty-eight points.
BRANDON HURLBUT
Two days before Super Tuesday,3 he came to Wilmington [Delaware] and did a rally in Rodney Square. It was cold, February on the East Coast. And we jammed that place. It was like twenty-five thousand people, and he delivered an amazing speech. And we won Delaware by eleven points. It was a twenty-two-point swing in one month.
JOEL BENENSON
I don’t remember any discussions about Delaware being important.
DAVID PLOUFFE
Super Tuesday was the day we always feared. The more the numbers came in, and the states got called, Clinton was viewed to have been the victor by many in the media because she won the marquee states—the Californias and the New Yorks—but it was clear deep into the morning that we were actually going to come out on top in terms of the delegate distribution.
JOEL BENENSON
The currency of winning the nomination was delegates. It didn’t matter how many states you won. It mattered if you won a majority of the delegates. Our whole campaign was designed around that. If you go back and look at Super Tuesday, by the way, we actually split the states pretty evenly.
DAVID PLOUFFE
And we knew we had a good ten or eleven states to come in the rest of February—the Virginias and the Wisconsins and the Marylands. So that was really the first time, I think, I certainly felt comfortable. And I told Senator Obama that morning—meaning like two in the morning—that, all things being equal, the nomination was ours. We were no longer the plucky underdog. Now, obviously, we endured a lot of pain during that period.
VALERIE JARRETT
We all thought that Reverend Wright was an existential threat to the campaign, and a lot of tried-and-true supporters didn’t understand how someone as committed to an inclusive big tent as Barack Obama could have this man as his pastor. They were really hurt and worried. Some were angry and were looking for a better understanding.
DAVID PLOUFFE
[ABC News] started airing [Wright’s sermons] and then they were basically everywhere. I mean, Jeremiah Wright’s name ID within forty-eight hours of that incident was probably close to 80 or 90 percent. You couldn’t turn on a computer, TV, [or] open a newspaper without seeing Reverend Wright. It was one of those moments that went from zero to a hundred in a second. It was an existential crisis. Because if we didn’t come out the other side whole, superdelegates, in particular, would have had questions about us.
DAVID AXELROD
By then we were en route to the nomination and the question was: Would we be knocked off that path?
MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS
I watched the Jeremiah Wright thing with horror in my Senate office. [Obama] needed to explain it to people. He was new on the national scene. They saw what they thought was really authentic about the [senator], and then they saw these videos from his pastor.4 It didn’t really add up.
DAVID PLOUFFE
[The Clinton campaign] always denied it. We always assumed it was them. I don’t think we ever verified that, but you can’t really navel-gaze about why something happened to you. You just have to figure out how to deal with it.
JON FAVREAU
Director of Speechwriting, White House (2009–2013)
I learned on a Saturday-morning call with senior advisors that Obama wanted to give a speech that Tuesday . . . That was also the day that we moved into our big group house in Chicago in Lincoln Park, and I was the first one to move in. So I was in this large house by myself Saturday night. I didn’t even know that we had all the electricity on, but I was sitting there by myself and Barack Obama called at ten o’clock. He’d been on the campaign trail all day, and I remember just first asking how he was doing. Because he had been going through this hell for the last couple days with Reverend Wright, and he said, “You know, this is what you have to do when you run for president. People deserve an explanation, and I want to make this a moment where I can talk about something bigger.”
VALERIE JARRETT
When Pr
esident Obama spoke from his heart, people trusted him. And I thought that he was going to be very able to explain, in human, authentic terms, the broader context of the black church, the black experience, and he took that issue and he turned it, I think, into a very optimistic and inclusive conversation about race and himself and the lives of his family members.
JON FAVREAU
He said, “I’m going to give you stream-of-consciousness thoughts and then hopefully you can turn them into a draft.” And he gave me the most detailed outline of a speech that I could have imagined. “One, this. One-A, this. Two, this. Two-B, this.” He just kind of went through the whole thing, [and before] I got off the phone, he said, “Why don’t you go work on a draft and get me something tomorrow night before I put the girls to bed, and I’ll work on it from there.” I was pretty freaked out by the timeline. It was Saint Paddy’s Day, so the first thing I did was meet everyone and have a beer to calm myself down. Then I went home early and went to bed. I woke up at six a.m., went to the Starbucks in Chicago, and wrote all day long.
VALERIE JARRETT
You have to meet people where they are, and you have to take ’em by the hand and lead them to where you are. In order to do that, they have to believe that you are authentic, and for leaders who are expecting to galvanize a state or a country, that trust, that covenant, means that they believe you have their best interests at heart. That’s not always the case with politicians.
JON FAVREAU
I sent it to him that night, and at like four a.m. Monday morning, he emailed me back a draft that was all Track Changes. You couldn’t see too much of mine. The stuff I wrote were the lines that almost any politician could have delivered about race. The historical stuff at the beginning and the flowery stuff, I had all that. But the stuff that he wrote were lines like “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” Like, that’s not a line that any speechwriter would give their boss.