Game Change (29 page)

What Clinton failed to apprehend were the vulnerabilities that many Democrats continued to see in her, a number of which were on vivid display in the run-up to Pennsylvania. Cable was having a field day with a story that had become known as Snipergate. More than once on the trail, Hillary had described a trip she made to Bosnia as First Lady in 1996. In her telling, she arrived under sniper fire, racing across the tarmac with her head down. In late March, video surfaced of her being greeted at Tuzla airport by cheerful children, with Chelsea smiling beside her. The story reinforced every extant preconception about the Clintons’ dodgy relationship with the truth.

Then, on April 4, Clinton was engulfed in yet another Hillaryland melodrama.
The Wall Street Journal
reported that Penn, in his continuing role as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, had just met with the Colombian ambassador in Washington to strategize about how to win passage of a free trade deal with the United States—a pact that Hillary and the labor unions opposed. The resulting furor forced Clinton to demote Penn, elevating Wolfson and the pollster Geoff Garin to jointly fill the role that her chief strategist had occupied.

To the outside world, the Penn fracas was another sign of a Clinton campaign in chaos, and a damning one for a candidate running on experience and competence. Inside Hillaryland, however, the situation was seen as even more disturbing. In the eyes of many, the chief strategist had shown his true stripes: that his paramount client was always himself, his preponderant aim his own enrichment. What Penn had done was a firing offense, his continued presence in the building a demonstration of Hillary’s insecurity.

Clinton, it seemed, couldn’t catch a break—and then, out of nowhere, she got one. On April 11, less than two weeks before the primary, the Huffington Post put online audio of Obama speaking at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama told the group. “So it’s not surprising then that [people there] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama’s “bitter/cling” comments seemed to be a heavenly gift to the Clintons. They billboarded a simple message about Obama that Hillary and Bill already believed was true: that he was, at bottom, a helpless and hopeless elitist. Unlike the Wright story, here was something the Clintons could push—and push it they did, immediately and furiously and with no fear of stumbling over racial trip wires. For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.

“Americans need a president that will stand up for them, not a president that looks down on them,” she said.

THE FINAL DEMOCRATIC DEBATE of 2008 took place in Philadelphia on April 16. The event was being held in the same venue where Obama had given his race speech a month earlier, the National Constitution Center. So there was a certain grim coincidence when, the day of the debate, Obama’s BlackBerry buzzed with the news that Reverend Wright was planning to resurface. Obama was already in rotten spirits over everything that had happened in the past weeks. Now his worst nightmare was planning a comeback tour, complete with media interviews and public speeches. Terrific.

The debate, sponsored by ABC News, did nothing to elevate his mood. The first and second questions to Obama, from Charlie Gibson, were about “bitter/cling” and Wright. The third and fourth, from George Stephanopoulos, were also about the reverend. Next, by video, a voter from Latrobe, referencing the lapel pin controversy, challenged Obama: “I want to know if you believe in the American flag.” Then Stephanopoulos asked about his association with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground (a group that had bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol in the early seventies), who lived in Obama’s neighborhood in Chicago and with whom he was said to be friendly.

Obama looked weary and defeated, as if he’d been beaten with a stick. He soldiered through his answers, calling the flag pin matter a “manufactured issue” and saying that inferring anything from his acquaintance with Ayers, “who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old . . . doesn’t make much sense.”

Hillary seemed to know a lot about Obama’s ties to the erstwhile Weatherman; she noted in her rebuttal that the two men had served on a board together, citing dates and other details. Clinton’s staff was surprised; Ayers hadn’t been part of her prep. But Hillary had a number of friends—among them Sid Blumenthal, whose nickname was “Grassy Knoll”—regularly feeding her on the sly negative tidbits of dubious veracity about Obama. (In getting ready for that night, Hillary casually mentioned to her aides that she’d heard that Obama’s mother was a communist.) Her advisers tried to prevent her from spouting such stuff in the debates. But every so often, she slipped something in.

After the face-off, Clinton was tickled pink over seeing Obama slammed so hard and on such earthy matters. Kibitzing in a hallway offstage, she told her aides, “I need you all to think about the best closing argument, what ads to go with, especially now with all this new material.”

No brilliant closing argument would be required. Between “bitter/ cling” and Hillary’s resurgence on the trail, where her fighter’s stance grew even more pronounced and effective, Clinton had Pennsylvania in her pocket. Six days later, she trotted to victory.

Obama took no comfort from the fact that the suits had told him all along he was foreordained to lose Pennsylvania. Hillary had killed him again among white voters, 63 to 37—and beaten him among every ideological cohort except the self-described “very liberal.” More loudly than before, pundits were saying that Obama couldn’t close the deal. Some were even starting to compare him to McGovern and Dukakis.

Obama flew out of Pennsylvania and scheduled a meeting with his team at his house for the next night.
Enough is enough
, he thought. The time for change had come.

AROUND FOUR O’CLOCK ON April 23, a few hours before the rest of his brain trust would arrive, Barack and Michelle met with Jarrett and Rouse to get their read on the situation.

“I gotta tell you,” Rouse said, “I’m a little uncomfortable having this conversation without Axe and Gibbs and Plouffe here.”

“I don’t know why,” cracked Obama. “I talk to them all the time without you there.”

It had been nine months since the Edley meeting spurred Obama to draw Rouse and Jarrett deeper into the campaign fold. Since then, he’d often expressed a desire to broaden the circle further, get more voices in the room, especially more female voices. But the suits would slow-walk him, and Obama wouldn’t push it. As long as things were going fine, he was happy deferring to them, didn’t mind the narrow pipeline. When things went badly, though, Obama would start making noise again—and things were certainly not tip-top now.

Rouse was all for more voices, but he saw a greater imperative. “You need to take more ownership of this campaign,” he told Obama. You’ve got a great team here, you’ve got confidence in them, they’ve got your best interests at heart. But what it feels like to me is that they say, Here’s our schedule for the week, here’s our theme—and off you go. I think you’re the best political mind we’ve got. You ought to be more engaged.

At seven, the rest of the brain trust arrived in Hyde Park. Attending by phone was Anita Dunn. Everyone could see from Obama’s body language that he was tense. Instead of sitting back, relaxed, with his legs crossed as usual, he was hunched over his dining room table, his hands curled into fists, the trademark twinkle absent from his eyes.

Look, Obama said, I have not been my best the last two months. The “bitter” thing was a huge gaffe. I didn’t perform well at the debate. My pastor was a big problem. But let’s be honest, you guys haven’t been your best, either. We’re not going to lose the nomination. We’ve come too far. But we have a bunch of challenging states in front of us, and I don’t want to limp across the finish line. I want to finish strong.

For the next five hours, Obama and his team chewed over what was wrong and how to fix it. Obama listened to everyone’s ideas—and then told them how it was going to be. From then on, he said, the campaign would have a nightly conference call to run down what had happened that day and strategize about the next. The entire senior staff would be on the call. And Dunn, not Axelrod, would run it. Obama knew that many of his aides felt locked out of the loop by the suits, and were reluctant to disagree with them. He wanted that to end. He also wanted a nightly assessment of how they had fared in each twenty-four-hour news cycle. “We need to win every day,” he said.

Before then, Obama had been fairly detached from the granular details of the daily back-and-forth—now he insisted on being up to his eyeballs in them. He wanted to know which surrogates were going to be on television. To see talking points and message plans. To be consulted on paid media decisions. To prescreen every ad before it aired.

Then there was the matter of Michelle. Since Ohio and Texas, her circumstances had only grown more trying. “Proud of my country” had turned her into something of a target; even John McCain’s wife, Cindy, had taken a shot at her. (“I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier,” she said. “I am
very
proud of my country.”) Michelle worried that she was hurting Barack’s prospects, thought the campaign wasn’t protecting her sufficiently, that it hadn’t devised a real strategy for her.

That, too, was going to end, Obama said. He wanted to see a plan for Michelle. And not just some ideas vomited verbally; he wanted to see paper.

How long all these changes would remain in place was unclear. “I may not need this forever,” Obama said. But it was how they would be doing business at least through the next two contests—the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6.

Obama believed that winning them both would force Clinton from the race. North Carolina, with its large black vote and high concentrations of college students and knowledge workers, promised to be relatively easy. But Indiana would be a bear. Obama decreed that they would go balls out to win the Hoosier State. Michelle would do whatever the campaign planned for her. Their daughters would even hit the trail with them for the final weekend.

We’re all damn tired, Obama said. But we all need to get off our asses and end this thing, all right?

A fine plan, for sure—but there was a small wrinkle. The Jeremiah Wright comeback tour was about to begin.

OBAMA HAD TRIED TO call Wright before his race speech, but failed to reach him; the reverend had just retired from the church and set off on a ten-day cruise. Obama was aware that Wright was angry about what had happened around the announcement in Springfield and disgruntled over the candidate’s words in Philadelphia. Somehow Obama needed to break through all the acrimony and misunderstanding.

The two men arranged a secret meeting at the reverend’s Chicago home. Obama explained that he hadn’t intended to criticize Wright in his race speech—far from it. Disowning him would have been the expedient play, but Obama had resisted. He had tried to place Wright in historical context, tried to help others understand where he was coming from. Obama treated Wright as an old friend, a former mentor. He tried to raise his consciousness about the magnitude of what Wright was jeopardizing: Obama’s run for the presidency represented something far greater than either of them individually. But Wright didn’t seem either persuaded or placated.

He listened to me, heard me out, Obama told Jarrett afterward. I had a chance to express my concerns. We’ll see.

That Friday night, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright spoke softly as he defended himself and argued that the clips of his sermons had been deployed to paint a caricature of him. “I felt it was unfair,” he said. “I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons.” Moyers asked Wright about his reaction to Obama’s race speech. “I do what I do; he does what politicians do,” Wright said. “So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician.”

Most of Obama’s advisers heaved a sigh of relief at the PBS interview—but Jarrett did not. She knew immediately that Wright’s impugning of Obama’s motives would wound her friend. And she was right.

“How could he say that about me?” Obama asked Jarrett. “He knows that’s not true. He knows I wasn’t being a politician.”

Personally painful as the Moyers interview may have been for Obama, it was Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club on the morning of April 28, three days later, that was politically imperiling. Posing and preening, pontificating, apostrophizing, and mugging for the cameras, Wright declined to retract his “chickens coming home to roost” comments about America’s complicity in 9/11. Asked about AIDS, he brought up the Tuskegee experiment and said, “Based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.” Asked about Louis Farrakhan, he said, “He is one of the most important voices in the twentieth and twenty-first century.” Asked about Obama, he repeated and sharpened his attacks on his parishioner as a typical politician, and then added that he’d told Obama, “If you get elected, November the fifth, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”

Campaigning in North Carolina, Obama hadn’t watched the performance live, but Jarrett, by phone, told him it was bad. Very bad. On the tarmac in Wilmington, Obama, under pressure from reporters to offer a reaction, could summon only a wan rebuke for an offense he had not seen. “He does not speak for me,” Obama said. “He does not speak for the campaign.”

Later, on the campaign’s new nightly conference call, his advisers paraphrased for him what Wright had said. But Jarrett urged him, “You’ve got to watch this for yourself. You have to look at him.”