Game Change (18 page)

How to get past Hillary was the question. At the urging of Trippi, Edwards had recently adopted a harsher tone with the front-runner, attacking her for being too close to corporate power and tainted by the special-interest corruption in Washington. At a debate in Chicago sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Edwards fired a populist broadside at a recent appearance of Clinton on the cover of a national publication—with her smiling face above the headline “Business Loves Hillary!”

“I want everyone here to hear my voice on this,” Edwards declared. “The one thing you can count on is you will never see a picture of me on the front of
Fortune
magazine saying, ‘I am the candidate that big corporate America is betting on.’ That will never happen. That’s one thing you can take to the bank.”

To Edwards’s eye, his punches seemed to be landing on the mark. When he ran into Clinton backstage at the event, her hostility was evident—which delighted him. “She won’t look at me,” Edwards told his aides triumphantly. “I’m getting under her skin.”

But Edwards knew that even if he beat Clinton in Iowa, she would be a resilient foe. He began to ponder the possibility of a novel, and radical, anti-Hillary strategy: teaming up with Obama to run on a joint ticket against Clinton after the caucuses. He raised the idea with Hickman early that fall.

“Who’s going to be number one and number two?” the pollster asked. Edwards replied, “He would be my running mate.”

The idea was far out, certainly, but no less odd than pretty much everything about Edwards’s situation as he hurtled into the Iowa homestretch. Rielle Hunter was hanging over his head. His wife was apparently on the verge of a breakdown. But Edwards was undaunted. All he needed was a little help. If he could just get Obama to lend him a hand, everything in the end might, just might, turn out golden.

THEY TOOK THE STAGE in the auditorium at Drexel University just before 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 30: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Obama, Richardson, and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. The candidates in various combinations had appeared at more than a dozen previous debates or forums. Their interchanges had been informative (on occasion), entertaining (less often), and almost entirely free of impact on the basic contours of the race. Clinton was the comfortable front-runner, Edwards and Obama her obtrusive challengers, and the rest irrelevant also-rans.

But the debate at Drexel would be different. Looking back on it later, the candidates and their advisers would all agree: what happened that night in Philadelphia changed everything.

Dominating debate after debate had bred a certain complacency in Clinton—and a distinct disdain for Obama. After many of them, Hillary would privately lambaste Obama for comparing his meager record to hers and Dodd’s and Biden’s. (Every now and then onstage, the three of them would share furtive eye-rolls over Obama’s self-regard.) “What an asshole,” Clinton, employing her favorite profanity, grumbled to her aides. “Am I the only one who sees the arrogance? Does that not bother people?”

Hillary knew that Obama intended to play offense at Drexel. The Sunday before the debate,
The New York Times
had run a front-page story based on the table-setting interview that Obama and his team had planned weeks earlier. In it, Obama claimed Clinton was being less than truthful about her positions. That she was acting like a Republican on foreign policy. That she was too divisive to win a general election or unify the country. “We have to make these distinctions clearer,” he said. “And I will not shy away from doing that.”

The Obama plan worked. The initial question of the debate was directed at him by moderator Brian Williams; the topic was the
Times
story. But Obama bobbled the ball, backing away from his charges. “I think some of this stuff gets overhyped,” he said.

In the opening segment of the debate, Edwards’s attacks on Clinton were repeated and razor-sharp, while Obama reverted fully into his passive, prolix, professorial mode. Edwards wondered what the hell was wrong with him. Puncturing Clinton was their mutual objective, with time running out, but only Edwards was wielding the blade. During the first intermission, he pulled Obama aside and stared him in the eyes. “Barack, you need to focus!” Edwards implored. “Focus! Focus! Focus!”

The next segment opened with Hillary answering a question about her electability and appropriating a phrase of Obama’s about the need to “turn the page” (she applied it to Bush and Cheney). Obama thought,
She stole my line!
And was mocking him in the process! That did it. He finally pounced.

“I’m glad that Hillary took the phrase ‘turn the page,’” he said sarcastically. “It’s a good one.” After smacking her for refusing to release records of her time as First Lady held by the National Archives, he went on: “Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is that’s a fight they’re very comfortable having. It is the fight that we’ve been through since the nineties. And part of the job of the next president is to break the gridlock and get Democrats and independents and Republicans to start working together to solve these big problems, like health care or climate change or energy. And what we don’t need is another eight years of bickering.”

What ensued then was one of the more extraordinary group assaults in the history of presidential debates. It was seven on one—five candidates (Kucinich refrained) and two moderators pounding on Clinton mercilessly.

With just eight minutes left on the clock, Clinton had withstood the fusillade—at least she was still standing. Then, the other moderator, Tim Russert, asked her if she supported the idea of giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, as New York’s Democratic governor Eliot Spitzer had proposed.

Clinton ducked Russert’s query, saying she sympathized with Spitzer, then pivoted to stress the need for comprehensive immigration reform. But when Dodd declared his opposition to the plan, Clinton jumped back in: “I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it.”

“Wait a minute!” interjected Dodd. The senator from Connecticut considered Hillary a friend; all year long he had held back from going after her, against the advice of many of his advisers, who were virulently anti-Clinton. But this rigmarole that she was spouting struck him as absurd. “You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it.”

“No, I didn’t, Chris,” Clinton replied, and started squabbling with Dodd. Voices escalated. Eyebrows arched. The back-and-forth got heated. Finally, Russert stepped in and asked Clinton to clarify her position: Did she support Spitzer’s plan or not?

“You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha,” Clinton said, gesticulating with both hands. “What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem. We have failed and George Bush has failed. Do I think this is the right thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? . . . He’s making an honest effort to do it.”

Watching the exchange on TV in the staff room, Clinton’s aides felt as if they were witnessing a car crash in slow motion. Grunwald pleaded with Hillary’s pixelated image on the screen as if she were trying to advise her candidate telepathically. Okay, that’s enough, she cried. No! No! No! Stop!

But it was too late. Williams tried to segue to a new topic, but Edwards wouldn’t let go. “Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes,” he noted, “and I think this is a real issue for the country.” Obama nodded vigorously and Williams asked him why. “I was confused on Senator Clinton’s answer,” Obama said with a smirk. “I can’t tell whether she was for it or against it.”

Clinton exited the stage both bloodied and bowed. Of the sixty-two questions at Drexel that weren’t part of a “lightning round” in which all the candidates were asked the same thing, more than half were either directed to her or elicited answers that ended up being attacks on her. Only five times did any candidate go after someone besides her. Among the questions put to Obama: Did he believe in life on other planets? What would he do to fix air travel? And what would he dress as for Halloween?

On the flight home to Washington, Clinton asked her aides, How bad was that? Grunwald tried to be gentle but candid about the driver’s license cockup: It wasn’t great. We’re gonna catch some crap. We’re gonna need to clean it up.

The next day, however, Clinton’s people didn’t clean it up at all—they made an even bigger mess. A statement was issued that simply reformulated her muddled position from the night before. Then her press shop clarified the clarification, saying Clinton backed “the basic concept” of giving driver’s licenses to illegals absent immigration reform. At the same time, the campaign posted on the Web a thirty-second video titled “The Politics of Pile-On,” with intercut images of the other candidates assailing Hillary at the debate, set to music from Mozart’s
Marriage of Figaro.
The day after that, in a speech at her alma mater, Wellesley College, Clinton noted that the school had “prepared me to compete in the all-boys’ club of presidential politics.”

The combination of Clinton’s debate performance and the suggestion that sexism was at work unleashed a torrent of scorn from the media. And her opponents were no less scathing. The Edwards campaign produced a Web video of its own, highlighting Clinton’s obfuscations at the debate, called “The Politics of Parsing.” The Obama campaign made a video, too, featuring unflattering shots of Clinton against a soundtrack of “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” Obama personally vetoed the video as too mean. But he did go on the
Today
show and characterize Clinton as a whiner: “One of the things that she has suggested why she should be elected is because she’s been playing in this rough-and-tumble stage. So it doesn’t make sense for her after having run that way for eight months, the first time that people start challenging her point of view, that suddenly, she backs off and says: Don’t pick on me.”

The scale and intensity of the backlash stunned Hillary. “We need to stop talking about gender,” she instructed her staff. All year long she had shied away from putting her femaleness front and center, out of fear that it would undercut the tough-as-nails image she required to clear the commander-in-chief threshold. She had approved the piling-on video, but thought it had nothing to do with sexism—and was furious at her campaign for letting it be cast that way. But her deeper anger was directed at the media. Obama had been bad in so many debates and been given a free pass, she thought. And yet here she was, batting a thousand until then, getting pilloried for whiffing once by a press corps lying in wait for the first excuse to nail her. She found the unfairness of it galling.

The dynamics that drove the coverage were both more complex and simpler than that, of course. The press always wants a race. The press always loves conflict. Driver’s licenses for illegals was a hot topic. Clinton stumbling was a man-bites-dog story—and the way she stumbled reinforced an existing stereotype of her, to which the media was certainly receptive. Nor was Clinton’s campaign blameless in fomenting some of the ill will toward her. Its approach to the Fourth Estate, reflecting the candidate’s disposition, had fluctuated throughout the contest between heavy handed and outright hostile.

But whatever the confluence of causes and effects, the damage to the front-runner from the Drexel debate and its aftermath was more severe than anyone in Hillaryland knew. The inevitable candidate was suddenly revealed as vulnerable. The flawless campaign looked fallible. The Clinton juggernaut had a hole in its hull—and the water was rushing in.

HILLARY LOOKED DOWN AT the text of her speech and felt ill. She’d picked up a rotten cold on the road and was struggling to shake it, but that wasn’t the only reason for the dull throbbing in her skull. It was Friday, November 9, ten days after what had turned out to be the most important debate of 2007 and one day before what was expected to be her most important address of the year. In a little more than twenty-four hours, she would be standing on a stage in Des Moines at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, holding forth without notes or the aid of a TelePrompTer, in the round, before nine thousand Democrats. And yet here she was, sitting with her aides at Whitehaven, laying eyes on her speech text for the very first time—and saying, No, let’s change this.

The internal debates over what Clinton should say at the J-J had dragged on for weeks and arrived at no place good. In the past months, Obama had developed a fiery call-and-response that had become a trademark flourish: “Fired up! Ready to go!” For the J-J, Clinton would have an incantation of her own: “Turn up the heat!” (On the Republicans.) Nobody in Hillaryland liked it except Penn, who claimed it tested well in his polling and would reinforce Clinton’s image as a fighter against the GOP—in contrast to the weak and platitudinous Obama.

The Clinton campaign’s organizational efforts were equally haphazard. The J-J was a fund-raiser for the Iowa Democratic Party. The more tickets you bought, the more supporters you could bring. Teresa Vilmain kept badgering the people at the Ballston headquarters: Gang, either we come up with more money now or we lose out, she said. But the Iowa team had trouble getting the budget for the J-J approved. Its request for cash to hire a band to play outside the hall to rouse the troops was rejected. When the funds for crowd-building finally arrived, it was too late—the Obama campaign had already snatched up the prime seats in the place.

On the night of the event, Clinton and her team arrived late to Veterans Memorial Auditorium and Hillary retreated to a trailer to squeeze in a rushed final read-through or two. She would be the penultimate speaker, followed by Obama. The dinner had been plodding along for more than three hours already by the time she took the stage. Because it was so late, and because her supporters tended to be older, her crowd, which was smaller than Obama’s to begin with, had thinned out appreciably. Astonishingly, Clinton’s rendition of her text was letter perfect. Dressed in a black pantsuit with a yellow top, she gamely built toward her signature theme. “I’ll tell you what I want to do,” Hillary said. “I’m not interested in attacking my opponents. I’m interested in attacking the problems of America and I believe that we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans! They deserve all the heat we can give them!”

Out in the darkness of the hall, Obama’s brain trust was incredulous at Clinton’s message. She was talking about fighting, rather than uniting, playing right into their hands.

Obama’s speech—indeed, the entire Obama operation at the J-J—could not have been more different than the Clinton effort. Steve Hildebrand, Paul Tewes, and the Iowa field team treated the event as if it were a dry run for caucus night, scheduling a concert by John Legend for the foot soldiers beforehand. The Obama ranks were young, energetic, and eardrum-splitting. They went wild when their hero took the stage, as the PA system blasted an introduction by the Chicago Bulls announcer Ray Clay: “And now, from our neighboring state of Illinois, a six-foot-two force for change, Senator Barack Obama!”

Unlike Hillary, Obama had prepared meticulously for his speech. He had road-tested it a week before, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He’d spent hours in his hotel room over several days memorizing and rehearsing it. As for his message, there was never even the slightest doubt or dithering. His indictment of Hillary—and her husband—was subtle but unmistakable, his takedown of them a deft blend of coded language and clear implication.

“We have a chance to bring the country together in a new majority,” Obama declaimed. “That is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do in this election. That’s why not answering questions because we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we’re worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us just won’t do.” And also, “I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe it’s somehow owed to me.”