Game Change (46 page)

For McCain, the chaotic session at the Morgan Library was not an aberration. He detested debate prep, resisted it with every fiber of his being. “Not today” was his reflexive response to the suggestion that he practice. He thought he didn’t need it, thought he knew the issues, and hated being quizzed. During a rehearsal for the first GOP debate in 2007, O’Donnell pressed him on a question to the point where McCain finally snapped. “John, what is the difference between a gay marriage and a civil union?” O’Donnell asked. McCain replied, “I don’t give a fuck.”

When he arrived that morning in Oxford, indeed, McCain had yet to complete a single formal run-through. One hold-up revolved around who would play Obama in mock debates. The campaign had settled on someone it thought would be the ideal stand-in: Michael Steele, the African American former lieutenant governor of Maryland. Not only would Steele be a feisty sparring partner, he could also help McCain become aware of potential racial rhetorical traps. Steele said yes when O’Donnell approached him, and spent all summer gearing up for the task, studying Obama briefing books and watching Obama videos. But McCain stalled, worried that the press would find out he had picked a black Obama placeholder and accuse him of tokenism. After more than a month of paralysis, the idea was scrapped and Rob Portman was brought in with just two weeks’ notice.

On the afternoon of the debate, McCain was nervous. His advisers took it in stride. Charlie Black believed that if a presidential candidate said he wasn’t skittish before his first general election debate, he was lying, was insane, or didn’t comprehend the stakes.

Perhaps Black should have added a fourth option—freak of nature—to describe Obama, who was as calm as ever. An hour before the debate, Valerie Jarrett went to his hotel room and knocked on the door; she was a nervous wreck. When Obama appeared, he took a look at her face, put his hand on her shoulder, and said, “Valerie, I got this.”

Jarrett headed out to the auditorium, where she met up with Michelle, who was a basket case herself. Jarrett told her about her exchange with Barack a few minutes earlier.

“Well, then, I guess he’s probably got it,” Michelle said, smiling.

An audience of more than fifty-three million watched the debate that night. They saw Obama present himself as composed and reassuring. They saw him project an aura of confidence and competence on foreign policy. And they saw him pierce McCain with one poison-tipped sound bite regarding the Republican’s record on Iraq: “You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong. You said that we were going to be greeted as liberators. You were wrong. You said that there was no history of violence between Shiite and Sunni. And you were wrong.”

McCain’s advisers, worried that his disdain for Obama might show through, had advised their man to look at the audience and not at his opponent. He followed that directive all too well, not making eye contact with Obama all night. He seemed dismissive and cranky and ill at ease. The debate was McCain’s chance to redeem himself; instead, he spent ninety minutes reinforcing his weaknesses and doing Obama no damage. He lost every post-debate insta-poll and was pummeled mercilessly by the cable talking heads. “Do you think he was too troll-like tonight?” Chris Matthews asked one of his guests afterward. “Seriously. Do people really want to put up with four years of that? Of [him] sitting there, angrily, grumpily, like a codger?”

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, the Paulson bailout plan was voted down in the House of Representatives, 228 to 205; not a single Republican pulled the lever in its favor. The stock market immediately plunged nearly 800 points. Five days later, Congress finally passed a slightly modified, but still $700 billion, version of the bill. But by now, all confidence was gone. The following week, the Dow fell by almost 2,000 points, losing more than 18 percent of its value—the biggest weekly percentage drop in the 112-year history of the Exchange.

McCain and his advisers were right: the collapse of the economy hurt the GOP. But it was the performances of both candidates during those ten September days after the fall of Lehman that mattered most. In a time of turmoil, Obama demonstrated a capacity to withstand pressure and keep his balance. The crisis atmosphere created a setting in which his intellect, self-possession, and unflappability were seen as leaderly qualities, and not as aloofness, arrogance, or bloodlessness, as they had sometimes been regarded in the past. In the Obama campaign’s focus groups, doubts about his readiness began to fall away—while at the same time, voters described McCain as unsteady, impulsive, and reckless.

This view was shared by Democrats and Republicans alike, by those watching the crisis unfold from afar and those with a front-row seat. Jim Wilkinson, a longtime Republican operative, served as Paulson’s chief of staff during the crisis, and his impression of the candidates could hardly have been clearer. “I’m a pro-life, pro-gun, Texas Republican,” said Wilkinson. “I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq War. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five-hundred-dollar contribution back, when he pulled that stunt and came back to D.C. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.” To his amazement, Wilkinson determined that he would be voting for Obama.

Even one of Obama’s harshest critics was now writing off McCain. None other than Hillary Clinton was finally convinced that there was no stopping Barack. In the midst of the financial crisis, she said to a friend, “God wants him to win.”

Clinton wasn’t alone in the conviction that the outcome of the race was basically settled. But October turned out to hold its own abundance of surprises—shaking the campaigns and appalling or delighting voters, depending on their inclinations. The shocks to come weren’t discharged by McCain or Obama, though. Instead, the game changers of the final month were on the undercard.

SARAH PALIN WAS ALONE in her room at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in New York staring at her index cards. It was September 23, the night before McCain suspended his campaign, and Palin was scheduled to begin a series of interviews the next morning with Katie Couric. Around nine o’clock, Nicolle Wallace arrived to spend some time doing prep. Couric was sure to ask her about the financial crisis, Wallace said, showing Palin a statement that McCain had just released on the subject. “If you internalize this,” Wallace explained, “you should be able to field basic questions about the bailout.”

Wallace knew Couric well, having worked as a political analyst at CBS between her stints at the White House and the McCain campaign. She shared her insights with Palin on other areas the anchor would almost certainly pursue, such as abortion rights. But Palin, who had spent the day meeting foreign leaders who were in Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly, was exhausted and distracted. She had a hard time processing the statement on the bailout, and when Wallace tried to raise other topics, Palin would not engage. For three hours, the prep session went nowhere, as Palin kept downshifting into small talk. “What’s Katie like?” she asked.

By the eve of the Couric interviews, McCainworld was nursing an array of worries about Palin, from her character to her knowledge level to her focus. With her meteoric rise had come fantastic scrutiny, and although Palin had survived so far, the chinks in her armor were becoming apparent—especially to those observing her at close range.

The first signs of trouble appeared immediately after the convention, when the campaign staff began digging in a systematic way into Palin’s background, and noticed that she had a tendency to shade the truth. Had she really said “thanks, but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere? Well, no. Had she really sold the state jet on eBay? Not exactly. Had she and Todd really been without health insurance until he got his union card? Actually, the story was more complicated. At McCain HQ, a white board was set up with a list of controversies the press was exploring, from Troopergate (which the Palins unvaryingly called “Tasergate,” a reference to one of the more lurid details of the case) to the charge that, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin had sanctioned requiring women to pay for their own rape-exam kits. The campaign quickly discovered that consulting her about any issue on the board invariably yielded a sanitized version of reality.

Another source of concern was Palin’s lack of fealty to the commitments she’d made to Schmidt and Salter the night before her selection. Palin had promised to support McCain’s positions, even those she disagreed with. But one day in September, when the campaign arranged an elaborate and expensive setup for her to shoot a pro-stem-cell-research television ad, she showed up and refused to read her lines. You should have sent me the script before, Palin declared. I’m not saying this.

Palin had also pledged to banish Alaska temporarily from her thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand. But she and Todd were fixated on her reputation in the state, concerned that her image was taking a beating in Alaska because of the wave of attacks on her. They wanted the campaign to run television ads there, though Alaska was solidly Republican and money was tight in McCainworld. Todd griped about how few McCain-Palin yard signs he saw when he drove around back home. Sarah voiced so much anxiety over her gubernatorial approval ratings that Schmidt promised to commission a poll in Alaska to prove that her fears were groundless.

Then there was the matter of Palin’s substantive deficiencies. On September 10, she was preparing to fly back to Alaska to see her son Track ship off to Iraq and to tape her first network interview with ABC News’s Charlie Gibson. Before the flight to Anchorage, Schmidt, Wallace, and other members of her traveling party met Palin at the Ritz-Carlton near Reagan airport, in Pentagon City, Virginia—and found that, although she’d made some progress with her memorization and studies, her grasp of rudimentary facts and concepts was minimal. Palin couldn’t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations. She didn’t know what the Fed did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. Asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank. (Palin’s horrified advisers provided her with scripted replies, which she memorized.) Later, on the plane, Palin said to her team, “I wish I’d paid more attention to this stuff.”

But after cramming furiously, Palin managed to emerge intact from the Gibson interview—stumbling only over whether she agreed with the “Bush doctrine” (“In what respect, Charlie?”) and in discussing why the proximity of Alaska to Russia afforded her insight into its behavior on the world stage (“They’re our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”).

Now, with the convention and a network interview behind her, Palin had just the last of her three major hurdles left to surmount: the vice-presidential debate on October 2 at Washington University in St. Louis. It was obvious that she would need to spend much of her time on Biden prep, but McCainworld believed it couldn’t simply bunker Palin and have her disappear from public view. She was a star, a sensation, and the press was howling that, Gibson or no, she was being sheltered from cross-examination.

Hence the decision to grant Couric a multi-part interview. As CBS promoted and unspooled the segments over the following week, Palin could go dark to study while keeping her visibility high.

What no one realized was how severely Palin’s bandwidth was constricted; her road show was becoming a traveling circus—cum—soap opera. Her children—a pregnant, hormonal young woman; a lively teenage girl; a rambunctious child; a special-needs infant; and a son just decamped for Iraq—consumed a vast amount of her psychic energy. Her focus on Alaska (and especially the Alaskan media, with which she had been friendly but which she was now certain was turning against her) and her attempts to prepare for her meetings with world leaders devoured even more. One of Palin’s private email accounts was hacked, and the gossip website Gawker posted messages that she’d sent, as well as Bristol’s cell phone number. And on the season premiere of
Saturday Night Live
, on September 13, Tina Fey debuted her withering, hilarious, uncanny caricature of Palin, mocking her interview with Gibson: “I can see Russia from my house!”

All of this had taken a toll on Palin by the time Wallace sat down with her at the Broadway Millennium. Wallace’s husband, Mark, a former Bush campaign official who was also part of Palin’s team, had warned his wife about a phenomenon that he and others thought of as “the two Sarahs.” One minute, Palin would be her perky self; the next, she would fall into a strange, blue funk. With prep going nowhere, Nicolle decided it was best to put Palin in a positive state of mind. She cooed over the governor’s wardrobe for the next day and said they’d get down to business again in the morning at six o’clock.

When Wallace returned bright and early, she found Palin in a pink bathrobe, her eyes glassy and dead. The candidate was furious and embarrassed about a report in
The New York Times
detailing how the press had been blocked from the first few minutes of her meeting the day before with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. As hair and makeup stylists worked on Palin, Wallace ran through potential interview questions. The candidate was unresponsive. Wallace read Palin the newspaper. The candidate sat in silence. After two futile hours, as they were about to set off to meet Couric, Palin announced, “I hate this makeup”—smearing it off her face, messing up her hair, complaining that she looked fat. Wallace, in a panic, summoned a makeup artist to ride in the motorcade and repair the damage.

On the drive across town to meet Couric at the U.N., Palin could speak of little else besides the Alaska poll that Schmidt had promised but she suspected had never been conducted. I’m trying to trust you people, Palin said to Wallace, but how
can
I trust you?

Palin and Couric greeted each other cordially and then taped the first two segments of the series: a sit-down interview and a walk-and-talk outside the U.N. Everyone in earshot understood immediately the scale of the disaster.

Palin’s answers about the bailout were halting and incoherent. When Couric asked her to name examples of McCain’s efforts to regulate the economy, Palin said, “I’ll try to find some and bring them to you.” Asked again about the relevance of Russia’s closeness to Alaska, she replied, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.” Asked to name a Supreme Court case, besides
Roe v. Wade
, that she disagreed with, Palin awkwardly hedged—“Of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American”—and then came up empty.

A snippet from the interviews aired on CBS that night, but in the clamor over McCain’s campaign suspension, nobody noticed. The next morning, Couric went on the network’s
Early Show
to promote her exclusive, commenting mildly that Palin wasn’t always responsive in replying to certain questions.

At that moment, Wallace was in the middle of an appearance on
Today
and felt her cell phone vibrate madly. As she left NBC, she checked and saw that Palin had been calling nonstop. Soon enough, the governor called again.

Katie said I struggled to answer questions! Palin shouted.

Wallace held her tongue.

Palin shouted again, Are you
listening?

I’m listening, said Wallace. You did struggle to answer a lot of questions.

I don’t know what you guys are trying to do to me, Palin fumed. Why did you make me do Katie?

For the next twenty minutes, as Wallace walked the thirteen blocks back to her apartment, Palin screamed and Wallace yelled back. The reason the interview sucked was because you didn’t try, Wallace said. You didn’t show up and you didn’t fight. The reason Gibson worked out is because even if you didn’t know every answer, you clawed your way through the whole thing.

Wallace could barely fathom Palin’s hissy fit and her attempt to blame others for her failure to prepare. Wallace had been Palin’s closest confidante in McCainworld, but now Nicolle was through with her—and the feeling was mutual.

Palin thought Wallace and McCainworld had tossed her into the lioness’s mouth, that Couric had been bound and determined to devour her. She wanted nothing more to do with network anchors, especially since they got in the way of her talking to Alaska reporters. “I want to do what I want to do,” Palin said stubbornly to Wallace. “Now I know what Hillary meant when she said she had to find her voice.”

THAT AFTERNOON, PALIN LEFT New York and flew to Philadelphia to spend the next week concentrating on debate prep. She and her team—led by Mark Wallace and including Tucker Eskew and Steve Biegun—checked into the Westin downtown, took over a conference room, and got to work.

The next two days, by all accounts, were a total train wreck. Never before had Palin’s team seen her so profoundly out of sorts for such a sustained period. She wasn’t eating (a few small bites of steak a day, no more). She wasn’t drinking (maybe half a can of Diet Dr Pepper; no water, ever). She wasn’t sleeping (not much more than a couple of hours a night, max). The index cards were piling up by the hundreds, but Palin wasn’t absorbing the material written on them. When her aides tried to quiz her, she would routinely shut down—chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor, speechless and motionless, lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor.

Some on her staff believed that Palin was suffering from postpartum depression or thwarted maternal need. (Again and again, she talked about Trig, who most of the time was back in Alaska with Todd. I miss my baby, Sarah would say, I miss sleeping with my baby.) Others pointed to the Couric interview, the second excruciating slice of which aired the Thursday night they arrived in Philly, subjecting Palin to more ridicule. Still others cited the sheer magnitude of the pressure she was under, given her oft-expressed sense of obligation not to let McCain down, an apparent fear of humiliation, and the searing scrutiny she was receiving.

Wallace, with a sense of desperation setting in, tried to buck Palin up. Sure, they were in a rough patch, he said, but it was worth it, right?

“No,” Palin answered darkly. “If I’d known everything I know now, I would not have done this.”

On Saturday, September 27, Wallace sent an urgent SOS to McCain headquarters. On a call with Schmidt, Davis, and Salter, he described how Palin was performing, how dire the circumstances were, especially with the debate just five days away. They began discussing a new and threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.

Schmidt had heard that Palin was accusing him of lying about the Alaska poll—in fact, it had been conducted; her approval rating was in the seventies—which led him to believe that she was becoming irrational. He and Davis planned to take the train to Philadelphia the next day to assess the situation themselves.

Given the acuteness of Wallace’s concern, McCain’s advisers felt they had to bring the candidate into the loop that Saturday. Bluntly, they described to him their unease about Palin’s mental state. McCain suggested that they move the debate prep to his spread in Sedona. Give her room to breathe. Let her bring her family. A change of scenery might do her good. Cindy would be there to support Palin, and a doctor friend of the McCains would be on hand to observe her.

Schmidt and Davis weren’t the only McCainiacs who trekked to the Westin on Sunday. Wallace had also summoned Joe Lieberman, to help Palin grasp elements of foreign policy, and also to get an outside perspective on whether she was doing as badly as he thought. A month earlier, when McCain informed Lieberman that he’d lost out to Palin in the veepstakes, Lieberman had been disappointed, if unsurprised, but more confused than anything. He was so unfamiliar with Palin that he mixed her up momentarily with Linda Lingle, the Jewish Republican governor of Hawaii; after all, “Sarah”
was
a Hebrew name.