Game Change (32 page)

One day in July, Penn arrived at the Russell Building for his discussion with Clinton. For more than an hour, Clinton held forth, while Penn mostly listened.

“Well, I thank you for everything you did for me,” Clinton began. “I’m sorry you took so much incoming fire. It kind of goes with the territory. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Yeah, well,” Penn replied with a shrug.

Clinton then launched into a lengthy overview of the problems that beset her. “It was just dysfunctional, and I take responsibility for that,” she said of her campaign. “I mean it just didn’t work.

“Having said that, it would have been a very hard campaign to run against Obama,” she went on. “We had the entire press corps against us, which usually Bill and I could care less, but this was above and beyond anything that had ever happened. I mean, it was just a relentless, total hit job, day in and day out. I don’t mind that, because people seem to do hit jobs on me, but with a total free ride for [Obama]. It wasn’t even a one-to-ten parity, in terms of anything that we thought would be put out there that might get traction. And you know, it was really hard to run against an African American when the entire Democratic Establishment was scared to death. They could not deal with it.”

Clinton then raised the subject of her campaign’s original sin: Iowa.

“If we had gone after Obama on the paid media, I just am not sure,” she said. “If we could have avoided Iowa, which I think would have been very difficult—I was the front-runner, blah blah blah, I had to prove my bona fides. I don’t see how we could have, frankly. But I never felt good about Iowa,
ever
felt good about it.”

Clinton shook her head in wonder at the Obama phenomenon in the cornfields. “You know, the Oprah thing,” she said. “There was such a sort of a cultlike, peer group pressure. . . . They had drunk the Kool-Aid. And I am convinced they also imported people into those caucuses, which we will never prove.”

Clinton attributed her campaign’s poor performance in Iowa in part to its inside-the-Beltway myopia. “I would never, ever run a campaign in Washington again,” she said. “Ever, ever, ever. It’s poison, it’s toxic.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Penn said. “I’m told in Chicago he had a group of Obama partisans that, when they were losing, and they were almost out, they were willing to do whatever . . .”

“Whatever it takes,” Clinton said, finishing Penn’s thought. “And I would love to get all their internal documents about playing the race card, because I know it was their strategy.”

If there was one Hillarylander whom Clinton blamed above all for the miscues, it was Solis Doyle. “I think she was a disaster, Mark, and I am so disappointed,” Hillary said. “She turned out not to be able to manage. . . . She just was incapable. I put her in a position; she was unable to do it.”

“I thought the deal was that she was going to make the trains run on time,” Penn said.

“She didn’t even know which trains she was supposed to schedule,” Clinton said sarcastically. “And I feel terrible, because it wasn’t a campaign worthy of me.”

But Clinton had harsh words for Penn, too. “Whenever there was a problem, people begged me to fire you. That was the answer to everything: ‘Fire Mark,’” she said. “Now why is that? Because you rub people the wrong way.”

After telling Penn that she was “personally fond” of him, she said he was dismissive, insulting, irritating, and alienating to his colleagues. (At one point, she suggested he consider therapy.) “The Colombia thing, that really was beyond the pale,” she went on. “I felt fucked. I mean I gotta tell you. I felt like we were on the upswing, and I just felt fucked.”

“And I took responsibility,” Penn said sheepishly.

Clinton, apparently all talked out about the past, turned to the here and now. “So what should I be doing?” she said. “I’m trying to stay low and out of the line of fire and not get in the way between [Obama] and the voters.”

Penn focused on Denver and the importance of Hillary’s speech. “He’s got to really make sure that the night goes well,” he said. “The truth is, him making you vice president is the best way to guarantee it.”

“There’s no way—no way,” she said. “He can’t tolerate that.”

Nothing was weighing on Clinton’s mind more than her campaign debt. “Bill and I never leave a debt unpaid,” she said. “It’s just that, I was shocked at how little [the Obama campaign] will help us. They aren’t going to help us. I really, I thought when I started this I might be able to get about five million out of them. . . . You know how much we’ve got so far?”

“Five hundred thousand?”

“No, one hundred thousand. He’s not going to help.”

“That’s why I wanted to negotiate first, withdraw second. Right?”

“The press—I couldn’t. I am held to such a different standard. We’re trying to get somebody to cover the fact that I’ve done more to promote unity than anybody in a comparable position—Bradley . . . you name it, Tsongas, Jackson, Kennedy. But you know it was like they just beat the hell out of me until I got out.”

Penn ran through the latest poll numbers, expressing his view of Obama’s chances against McCain as dicey.

“I want you to start thinking about how I avoid being blamed,” Clinton said. “Because I shouldn’t be blamed. But they are going to blame me. I somehow didn’t do enough.”

“ ‘She stayed in too long,’” Penn put in.

In a voice of mock horror, Clinton exclaimed, ” ‘Oh, she damaged him,’ you know—screw you! I thought it was a competitive election. I can stay in as long as I want to stay in. Teddy Kennedy stayed in until the convention. Give me a break.”

Penn, always on the lookout for business, said he wanted to try “to reconcile with the Obama campaign.”

“They’re never going to reconcile,” Clinton said dismissively. “Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen. They are vindictive and small. They don’t think they need me. They had that conversation with Bill, they never called and asked him to do anything. They don’t care about a former president.”

Clinton returned to Obama’s prospects in the general election. “I think it’s fifty-fifty whether he wins, right?” she said, noting that Obama’s VP choice was critical, giving odds on whom he would pick: “Biden, one-in-two chance. Bayh, one-in-four chance. Kaine and Sebelius, both which I think are terrible choices, one-in-eight chance.”

For a year and a half, Hillary had spent every waking moment not just trying to defeat Obama, but convincing herself that he was a lightweight, a nose-in-the-air elitist totally unfit to be the leader of the free world. A little more than a month after he ended her dream, she hadn’t become unconvinced. But now she would be forced to sit back and watch him run against McCain—a man whom Clinton considered a friend, but one whose election would be tantamount to reelecting Bush to a third term.

“The campaign was a terrible disappointment,” she said. “I hate the choice that the country’s faced with. I think it is a terrible choice for our nation.”

THE MORNING AFTER THE midterm elections of 2006, John McCain was in the community room of his condominium complex in Phoenix, Arizona, surveying the damage that had been inflicted on the Republican Party—and listening to his lieutenants talk about how he was primed to benefit. The night before, McCain and his wife, Cindy, had hosted a viewing shindig in the same room, which Cindy had catered extravagantly, laying out an opulent spread. The remains of that feast were gone now, replaced by a modest breakfast buffet: fruit, juice, coffee, and those pastries that her husband liked so much.

McCain had been up until the wee hours. He needed that coffee. Arrayed around him were his chief political advisers: longtime stalwarts John Weaver, Rick Davis, Mark Salter, and Carla Eudy, along with a new presence, Terry Nelson. This was the first time they’d all been together to talk about 2008.

On a large-screen TV, the yakkers were yakking about the horrific results from the previous day. Republicans had lost everything: the House, the Senate, a majority of governorships and state legislative chambers. (Nearly a hundred seats in McCain’s beloved New Hampshire—that hurt!)

McCain had seen it coming. Like Obama, he had been his party’s top draw in the run-up to the midterms. With Bush holed up in the White House, toxically unpopular even in many red states, McCain had tirelessly traversed the country, offering aid to candidates in tough races, pushing to save seats. But it was no use. “This is as bad as it’s ever been” for the GOP, he told anyone who would listen.

McCain’s advisers viewed the devastation as a bad news/good news story. On one hand, a poisonous environment would greet whomever the party chose as its nominee. On the other, those circumstances made it all the more likely that the nominee would be their boss.

Since 2000, when McCain waged a spirited but doomed challenge to Bush to become the Republican standard-bearer, the Arizona senator had been an icon. With his war heroism, famously independent streak, and reformist stances on matters such as campaign finance, McCain’s maverick image was sterling. He was, as Weaver liked to put it, “the
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval in American politics.” A familiar presence on the late-night talk show circuit, he was wry and funny; his winking irony and accessibility made him a favorite of the press. And though he’d spent years collecting Republican enemies by defying party orthodoxy—even flirting with the notion of becoming John Kerry’s running mate—he had more recently embarked on a determined, and not unsuccessful, effort to redeem himself with the GOP Establishment. He had put aside his feud with Bush, supported the Iraq War, and built ties to conservative activists and donors. In a party governed by primogeniture, he was now the presumptive front-runner.

A front-runner’s operation was very much what his advisers had in mind. McCain’s bid in 2000 had been a ragtag affair, more cause than campaign. In 2008 his team proposed the polar opposite. They would build a battleship that was sturdy, well funded, disciplined, imposing. Outsider romance would be sacrificed for insider clout. The model they were mimicking was the one that beat them. They were aiming to create a McCainiac emulation of the Bush machine.

The architect of that approach was Weaver, the forty-seven-year-old Texan strategist who’d been McCain’s political guru for a decade. Lanky and laconic but intense, Weaver had temporarily left the Republican Party in a huff, disillusioned by the Bush campaign’s dismantling of McCain. But Weaver was convinced that McCain belonged in the White House, and he had come to see the Bush model as the best means of making it happen. To that end, Weaver had imported Nelson, who in 2004 had served as the Bush team’s political director, to be campaign manager. He and Weaver were all about going big: big endorsements, big donors, big spending.

Bigness didn’t sound too bad to Davis, either. A Washington lobbyist by trade, Davis, also forty-seven, had managed McCain’s last run. He was loyal, fleet, droll, and aimed to please. Despite McCain’s expressed disdain for the culture of Beltway banditry, he always wanted Davis on his team. The guy got things done, and Cindy loved him. He would be McCain’s campaign chief executive.

The planning for McCain’s run had been slowly building for months; this meeting, in a way, was both a culmination and a launch. Davis talked about operations, everything from budgets to office space to a proposed logo. Weaver presented a strategic overview, discussing the calendar, organization, and McCain’s competitors. The field hadn’t fully taken shape, but it was looking weak. There was Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, whose universal name recognition put him at the top of the national polls, but whose social liberalism would make him a hard sell in an ever-more-conservative Republican Party. There was Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, who was handsome, rich, and successful—but unknown across the country and a Mormon, a faith regarded by many Evangelicals and Catholics with suspicion and distrust. The rest were a collection of the anonymous, the toothless, and the marginal. Certainly there was no one on the horizon who possessed the attribute that was making McCain look so good to so many Republicans, even those whose instinctive reaction to him was to balk: he was the only GOP candidate who appeared capable of beating Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination.

Through the whole presentation, McCain sat there looking vaguely bored, saying almost nothing. His detachment was striking, but not entirely unusual. If all candidates fall along a range from micromanagers to hands-off delegators, McCain deserved a category all his own: ultra-laissez-faire. In his rational brain, he knew that a serious presidential effort required scores of staffers, high-priced consultants, polling, advertising, policy development, and more. But he really just didn’t give a shit. The details made his head hurt. A fighter pilot through and through, McCain liked to follow his instincts. He envisioned himself getting in his jet and taking off; whatever he left behind on the carrier deck ceased to exist in his consciousness. All that mattered was him, the plane, and the mission. His approach to political combat was the same. Wherever he was, whatever he was saying, whoever was listening—
that
was the campaign. The rest was noise. As far as McCain was concerned, he could win the election with a roster of events, a few
Meet the Press
appearances, and a sheaf of airplane tickets.

Even so, this was a pretty important meeting, his advisers thought. Yet McCain seemed absent, as if he didn’t want to be there. When Weaver finished laying out plans for the months ahead, McCain finally opened his mouth and said, Do we really have to start this early?

Nelson gazed on in disbelief. He’d been on board only a couple of weeks, after McCain, wearing a dress shirt and his boxer shorts (a favorite outfit of his), offered him the job in a hotel room somewhere.

Now, for neither the first time nor the last, Nelson looked at his new boss and wondered,
Do you really want to be president?

THE TRUTH WAS, MCCAIN had a lot of reasons to dread the start of the race. For all his progress in making himself more acceptable to the Establishment, he knew that winning his party’s nomination would be no cakewalk. Conservative activists still distrusted him for his apostasies on taxes, campaign reform, interrogation techniques, and judges. The religious right would never warm to him. And there were plenty of Establishmentarians who saw his legendary temper as a problem of no small consequence. Some worried his hotheadedness made him unsuited for the Oval Office; others, that he might blow his stack in public and blow up his candidacy. Though he’d been better in recent years at keeping his petulance at bay (or under wraps), McCain was still prone to outbursts of profanity—sometimes in front of campaign volunteers—that made his advisers wince.

Iraq, too, had become a problem for McCain, politically and emotionally. He was a military man, from a family of officers. He worried about the safety of the troops, including his own sons, two of whom were in the service. Long before the campaign began, McCain burned over what he saw as the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the conflict, and he was carrying that anger into the race. “Just incompetent,” he’d say. “Just terrible.”

McCain had been outspoken in pressing Bush to commit more U.S. forces to Iraq, even as Americans had turned decisively against the war and favored a timetable for withdrawal. His advisers warned him that his stance was damaging him politically, hurting him with voters as well as donors. He didn’t care. “You’re not gonna get me to change my opinion on Iraq,” McCain would say. “I’d rather lose the campaign than lose a war.”

By late 2006, McCain had another vulnerability, and an unexpected one. Suddenly, out of nowhere, his status as a media darling was fading. He was losing the constituency he had proudly, and only half-jokingly, called “my base.”

Once, McCain could do no wrong in the eyes of the press. Now, when he engaged in a rapprochement with the Reverend Jerry Falwell or favored tax cuts, the media scalded him for what it deemed transparent efforts to curry favor with the right. When he embraced the Iraq War more fervently than Bush, columnists didn’t praise his adherence to principle, they scorched him for being out of step with the country. His treatment in the blogosphere was even worse.

The new media reality depressed McCain, and the time-honored backroom chores of politics didn’t thrill him much, either. Like his friend Hillary Clinton, he found pleading for money and endorsements about as pleasant as a hot poker in the eye. Also like Hillary, McCain took his work in the Senate seriously, especially now on Iraq.

Through the fall of 2006, Weaver and Salter fretted over McCain’s gut. Salter, at fifty-one, was McCain’s speechwriter and the co-author of all his books, as well as his supremely patriotic and fatalistic alter ego. Don’t just drift into a presidential, he warned McCain. You’ve got to decide you really want to do this.

Salter and Weaver were well aware that two other concerns were weighing heavily on McCain. The first was Cindy’s opposition to his running. The Bush campaign’s demolition of her husband had taken place in South Carolina, amid shadowy attacks that had wounded her lastingly and deeply. Most despicable was the smear campaign alleging that the McCains’ younger daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh, was John’s illegitimate child from a liaison with a black prostitute. But there were also rumors spread that Cindy was a drug addict and that John’s long captivity in Vietnam had left him mentally unstable.

South Carolina was never far from Cindy’s mind. The thought of it being repeated made her sick. She wasn’t merely press shy, she was just plain shy, and she was worried about her servicemen sons, Jack and Jimmy—and especially about Jimmy, a Marine headed for a tour of duty in Iraq. Her fear was that he might be targeted for harm if his father were a candidate.

As the end of 2006 approached, McCain continually told his team, Cindy isn’t ready. His advisers tried to reassure her: things would be different this time; she would be protected. But Cindy wanted guarantees, some of them impossible to offer—that the children would be able to maintain their privacy, for instance. Gradually, eventually, her stance softened. The McCains were a military family, and if John wanted to serve, Cindy wasn’t going to stand in his way. Four words defined her ethic: “I support my husband.” Yet even then she made no bones about being unhappy that John was making the race or about her refusal to play a large or public role. Smiling, nodding, shaking the occasional proffered hand? Fine. Daily events, multistate trips, full-on surrogacy? Not gonna happen.

What gave the McCainiacs even greater pause were John’s frequent references to his age and physical condition. McCain was sixty-nine and a cancer survivor. I’m not the man I was when I ran in 2000, he said. Presented with schedules packed with events from early morning until late at night, McCain would say, “Are you guys trying to kill me?”

There was nothing lighthearted about his tone—he was cranky, peevish. When his staff sang hosannas to his stamina, he would wave them off.

One day, McCain asked Weaver if he was simply too old to run.

“Only you can tell us that,” said Weaver.

“Let’s do it . . . I guess,” McCain replied.

THE FRONT-RUNNER’S CAMPAIGN got under way in December 2006. And just as McCain’s advisers wanted it to be, it was Bush-scale big—at least on paper.

The initial budget devised by Davis was a monster. The fund-raising plan called for the campaign to haul in a record $48 million in the first quarter of 2007. That figure was derived largely by looking at the numbers that Bush had racked up in his 2004 campaign—as an incumbent president with the best-oiled cash-accumulating apparatus ever assembled (in the pre-Obama era, that is). Yet nobody seemed to question whether that was an appropriate yardstick.

At the same time, Weaver and Nelson—who were responsible for spending, while Davis and Eudy handled the collecting of cash—began hiring dozens of high-end consultants and staffers, many of them veterans of the Bush team in 2004. They opened offices around the country and rented space for an enormous headquarters not far from Clinton’s, in suburban northern Virginia.

The split structure of McCainworld was no accident. From the moment the November meeting in Phoenix ended, there were two McCain campaigns, one led by Weaver and one by Davis, two men with a long-standing history of personal enmity. No one could really explain where it had begun, but it was so profound they could barely stand to be in the same room together. Weaver had brought in Nelson partly to keep Davis from being campaign manager. By January, John and Terry were lobbying to have Rick canned.

McCain had known all along that Weaver and Davis detested each other. His attitude toward it was studied indifference. Like Hillary, McCain valued loyalty above all else and avoided confrontation at all costs. He instructed Weaver, Davis, Nelson, and Salter (who didn’t much care for Davis, either), “I don’t want any more decisions being made unless all four of you agree.” But that was only a recipe for gridlock and feuding, which quickly became the hallmarks of McCainworld, just as they were in Hillaryland.