Game Change (12 page)

Penn and Bill agreed they needed a “stopper”—something that would allow the campaign to kill Obama in the cradle. The stopper they seized on was Obama’s record on Iraq. Without a majority of the black vote, Hillary would need to perform better among white liberals, and one way to make that happen would be to take Obama down a peg in their eyes. Penn observed that Obama’s antiwar image was based almost entirely on his 2002 speech; his voting record in the Senate on Iraq was nearly identical to Hillary’s. Now the campaign’s research team discovered a pair of potentially damaging quotes from 2004: “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,” Obama said when asked how he would have voted on authorizing the war had he been in the Senate at the time; and, “there’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.”

To Penn and Bill, the quotes seemed like manna from heaven. The Hillaryland press shop went into overdrive trying to peddle them to the media, but reporters evinced scant interest. Bill monitored the situation closely, asking for regular updates about any progress in pushing the story, growing increasingly frustrated when it failed to click. Told that journalists didn’t consider it news, he would wail, “Why not? Why not?” That so few reporters were biting reinforced his and Penn’s conviction that Obama was getting a free ride.

Invited to speak at a forum at Harvard on March 19 along with the top strategists from the other campaigns, Penn decided it was time to take off the gloves and go public. Suspecting that the rest of Hillary’s team would disagree, he chose not to consult them. He did seek permission from Bill Clinton, though. And Bill Clinton was all for it.

That night at Harvard, Penn sat onstage with Axelrod and Jonathan Prince, the deputy manager of the Edwards campaign, and waited for his opening. Helpfully, one of the students in the audience asked about Hillary’s war vote—and Penn launched into his spiel about Obama, citing both of the quotes that the research team had unearthed. Axelrod, annoyed, sought to clarify Obama’s comments, then lectured Penn, “I really think that it is important, if we are going to run the kind of campaign that will unify our party and move this country forward, that we do it in an honest way, and that was not an honest tactic.” Penn didn’t care.
That was a well-played segment
, he thought.

And the segment wasn’t over. The next day, on a conference call with a group of Hillary’s bundlers—to which a reporter was conveniently allowed to listen—Bill Clinton echoed Penn. “I don’t have a problem with anything Barack Obama said on this,” Clinton stated. But “to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous. This dichotomy that’s been set up to allow him to become the raging hero of the antiwar crowd on the Internet is just factually inaccurate.”

Hillaryland was livid at the freelancing. On a morning conference call of the high command, Wolfson and the rest pummeled Penn for going off the reservation, for a maladroit attempt to drive a story for which the press had no appetite. They believed that Iraq was a losing issue for Hillary; they wanted not to talk about it. Penn defended himself, saying that Bill Clinton had signed off on the offensive. “Who’s running this fucking campaign?” Tanden complained to Solis Doyle.

Where Hillary stood on the supercommittee’s frustrations and efforts was unclear to her other advisers. Though she seemed to approve of Penn’s ploy and had no doubt that Obama was having it both ways on the war, she was hesitant to raise the matter herself in a speech or at a press conference. And without her front and center, the issue was going nowhere. What it all added up to—the staff conflict, the one-off nature of the hit, the reluctance of Hillary to take the lead—was an early example of how hard the Clintonites would find it to put an effective negative frame on Obama.

The difficulty became all the greater two weeks later, when, on April 4, Obama’s campaign released its fund-raising totals for the first quarter of the year. A few days earlier, the Clinton team had unveiled its numbers: $36 million, a staggering-sounding sum that turned out to be somewhat less than it appeared. Roughly $10 million of that was left over from Hillary’s Senate reelection campaign and another $ 6 million was for use only in the general election (if she got there), leaving about $20 million in fresh cash for the nomination contest. The Obama numbers? Total: $25 million. For the primaries: $23.5 million, from a far broader base of donors.

The reaction in Hillaryland was confusion and shock. All along, a core predicate of Clinton’s campaign was that she would possess a major financial advantage over everyone in the field. Now that was seriously in question—and Hillary was staring down the barrel of an objective, quantifiable metric of how redoubtable a combatant Obama would be. A series of frantic conference calls ensued, in which Clinton demanded answers. “This is a big deal, guys,” she said grimly. “How did it happen?” “Someone explain this to me.” “We have to do better.”

Clinton wanted to believe Obama’s first-quarter numbers were a fluke, but when he beat her again in the second quarter, by even more than in the first—$31 million to $21 million this time—panic set in.

One day that summer, after a fund-raising breakfast at the ritzy Hamptons weekend home of New York venture capitalist Alan Patricof, Hillary walked into the kitchen and started talking to Patricof and her finance director, Jonathan Mantz. Patricof noted that Obama was raking in money by selling T-shirts, buttons, and posters with his campaign logo on them. “He’s got a retail merchandise business going,” Patricof said. “Why aren’t we doing more of that?”

Hillary turned to Mantz and repeated the question: Why
aren’t
we doing more of that? But before Mantz could answer, Clinton began to unravel.

We’re losing the small-donor race, she said, her voice starting to rise. Why are we losing? What do we need to do? I just don’t understand!

Hillary was nearly screaming now. Gesturing outside, she exclaimed, “Why don’t we have merchandise being sold out back? We could’ve set up tables in the back!”

There were a lot of things Mantz could have said: Because you’re not leading a movement. Because your donors aren’t college kids. Because we’re in the Hamptons and you don’t hawk souvenirs on the lawn beside the swimming pool. Instead, he thought,
Wow, this is the angriest I’ve ever seen her.
And then simply said, “I’ll fix it.”

FIXING THE FUND-RAISING WAS one of many challenges facing Clinton in 2007—but in terms of urgency and long-range significance, none was in even the same galaxy as the problem of Iowa. Right after New Year’s, Penn had put their first poll in the field to figure out where Clinton stood in the state ab initio. The results were discouraging: Edwards led with 38 percent, with Clinton and Obama tied at 16. In no other state in the country would Hillary, with her name recognition and national profile and popularity among Democrats, have fared so poorly. But hearing the numbers, she put on a brave face. “It’s better than I thought it would be,” she said. “We have our work cut out for us.”

The members of the Hillaryland high command were less sanguine. Unlike New Hampshire, where the Clinton name was platinum because of her husband, Iowa was a place where neither he nor she had spent much time. (In 1992, local guy Tom Harkin was in the race and had it sewn up, so the other candidates skipped the caucuses; in 1996, incumbent Clinton ran for the nomination unopposed.) Democrats in Iowa were decidedly liberal, with a peacenik streak; Hillary’s war record was more vexatious there than anywhere else. Edwards had been working the state more or less constantly since 2003. Obama lived next door. If Hillary was going to be competitive in Iowa, she would need to go all out. The problem was, she hated it there. Every day felt like she was stuck in a Mobius strip: another barn, another living room, another set of questions about immigration (from people who were anti-) and the war (ditto). She’d get back on the plane, slump into her seat, heave a deep sigh, and grunt, “Ugh.”

The Iowans didn’t seem to be listening to her, just gawking at her, like she was an animal in a zoo. Hillary would hear from her staff the things voters were saying about her: “She’s so much prettier in person,” “She’s so much nicer than I thought.” It made her ill. She found the Iowans diffident and presumptuous; she felt they were making her grovel. Hillary detested pleading for anything, from money to endorsements, and in Iowa it was no different. She resisted calling the local politicos whose support she needed. One time, she spent forty-five minutes on the phone wooing an activist, only to be told at the call’s end that the woman was still deciding between her and another candidate. Hillary hung up in a huff.

“I can’t believe this!” she said. “How many times am I going to have to meet these same people?”

Over and over, she complained about the system that gave Iowa so much power in selecting the nominee. “This is so stupid,” she would say. “So unfair.” She bitched about Iowa’s scruffy hotels and looked for excuses to avoid staying overnight. But among the sources of her frustration and bewilderment, the absence of connection was paramount. “I don’t have a good feeling about this, guys,” she told her staff on the plane. “I just don’t have a good feeling about this place.”

People Hillary respected, experts on Iowa, urged her to spend more time there. She seemed to understand, but her antipathy to the state only grew. Mike Henry grasped the scale of the problem and took a radical stab at remedying it. Dismayed by what he’d seen on a trip to Iowa that spring, Henry concluded that there was a sound case for Hillary bypassing the caucuses. In mid-May, after mulling the idea in private with Solis Doyle, Ickes, and political consultant Michael Whouley, Henry drafted a memo laying out his argument. Iowa, he wrote, was Hillary’s consistently weakest state, and was likely to consume $15 million and seventy days of her schedule. “Worst case scenario: this effort may bankrupt the campaign and provide little if any political advantage,” he wrote.

Henry sent the memo to Solis Doyle and Ickes, and also, inexplicably, to a friend of his named Sheila Nix, who worked in the office of Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Within twelve hours, the memo had been leaked to
The New York Times
and was all over the paper’s front page.

Ickes was baffled by Henry’s foolishness: “Mike, what goes through your fucking mind?” But he also saw the irony in the situation. Hillary could never recede from Iowa under these circumstances. The leaking of the memo had locked her in, exactly the opposite outcome of what Henry had hoped for.

Henry’s screwup, however, was an outward sign of a deeper malady in Hillaryland: the team of rivals the candidate had constructed was longer on rivalry—and backbiting, pettiness, and general-purpose dysfunction—than on teamwork.

Every decision Clinton had made (and not made) in structuring her campaign was coming back to bite her. She had effectively given both Penn and Solis Doyle veto power over hiring—which they regularly exercised to preserve their status, preventing any fresh blood or new ideas from penetrating Hillaryland. She had told Solis Doyle to keep a tight rein on the budget, but astronomical salaries abounded and spending was out of control. (A notorious tightwad, Clinton was forever complaining, “There are too many people on the road. . . . I don’t know what all these people do.”) She had empowered her senior advisers to govern by consensus, but Penn so frequently went directly to the Clintons to override choices with which he disagreed that his colleagues considered discussion futile. The level of animosity among them all was off the charts. Screaming matches erupted regularly on conference calls and in person. Solis Doyle’s preferred name for Penn was “fat fuck.”

The result was chaos. Meetings rarely started on time, had any discernible structure, or accomplished their ostensible purpose. Every decision was litigated and relitigated again and again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The campaign had neither a political director nor a field director; Henry was de facto both. There was almost no one with experience in Democratic presidential nomination fights. There were no significant budgets or plans in place for any states beyond the first four. The campaign’s delegate operation was understaffed and unsophisticated. The most basic operational and political matters were frequently left unaddressed.

From the outside, none of this was apparent. Hillaryland looked like a colossus. Far ahead in the national polls and the hunt for endorsements, she still appeared on track as the inevitable nominee. But Bill Clinton’s old hands knew better. Locked out of Hillary’s campaign, dismissed as old-school “white boys” by Solis Doyle, they could still see things others couldn’t: that Hillaryland was a fractious, soulless mess—and that their old boss, the former president, was on the outside looking in, just like them.

BILL CLINTON JUMPED ON the conference call wondering what the point of it was. Carson, his spokesman, told him Hillary’s people wanted to have a quick chat before he headed west. For the next three days, over the July 4 holiday, he would be at his wife’s side all over Iowa: the state fairgrounds in Des Moines, the Independence Day parade in Clear Lake, private meetings with undecided caucus leaders and potential precinct captains. Hillary had been in the race for coming up on six months—and this was their first joint campaign swing.

The Hillarylanders were nervous about the trip, afraid that Bill would overshadow her, that he’d talk too much—or, more to the point, talk too much about himself and not enough about her. Over the past couple of weeks, they’d worried the trip nearly to death, discussing and diagramming every aspect in minute detail. (Would he sit or stand onstage next to her? How would they work the rope line? Where would they sleep? Would they do any separate events?) Now the high command wished to go over the script again. Just want to make sure you’re okay with everything, sir, Carson said. You’ve got your talking points; you should be fairly brief; turn it over to her and let her rip.

Yup, Clinton said, I got it—but apparently that wasn’t sufficient. Grunwald had a few words to say, then Penn, then Wolfson, then Solis Doyle. All of them said the same thing as Carson had, just repackaged in different language.