Game Change (50 page)

McCain was no fool. He could—and did—read the polls as closely as anyone. But in every candidate, fatalism, realism, and hope live in delicate equipoise. McCain’s pollster, Bill McInturff, was seeing some tightening in the numbers around the country. Obama wasn’t over 50 percent. The electoral math was difficult, but not impossible. Some of the key battleground states seemed to be in reach; New Hampshire had closed to four, McCain had heard.

Maybe the smart set had it all wrong.

Maybe an upset was still somehow possible.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

As McCain was getting off his campaign bus at the airport, about to bid adieu to the state he loved so much and that loved him so much back, he turned to Dennehy, a flash of optimism in his eyes, and asked, “How many we down by?”

Dennehy knew the truth, but couldn’t bear putting it into words.

“Let’s not talk about that tonight,” he said.

AS MCCAIN WAS DEPARTING New Hampshire, Obama was arriving in Cleveland, Ohio, rolling up to find eighty thousand people on the city’s downtown outdoor mall listening to Bruce Springsteen belt out “Thunder Road.” At the end of Springsteen’s set, Obama took the stage with Michelle and the girls and shared a warm moment with Bruce, his wife, Patti, and their kids. Springsteen, who hit the trail in 2004 for Kerry, had joked earlier about being glad to be invited back, not being seen as some kind of jinx. Now Obama added to the levity. When he got to the part in his speech where he asked the crowd how many of them made more than $250,000 a year—the floor for his proposed tax increases—The One made a point of telling The Boss that he needn’t bother to answer.

Obama brought up McCain’s endorsement by Cheney, noting that the VP had said he was “delighted” to support the GOP nominee. “You’ve never seen Dick Cheney delighted, but he is! It’s kinda hard to picture, but it’s true!” As Obama giggled, the skies grew dark and it began to drizzle. “Did you notice that it started when I started talking about Dick Cheney?” Obama joked. “That’s all right. We’ve been through an eight-year storm, but a new day is dawning. Sunshine is on the way!”

The next morning, November 3, Obama woke up in Jacksonville, Florida, to the heaviest of all weather: on the last day of his presidential campaign, his grandmother Madelyn Dunham had died at eighty-six.

The news came as no surprise to Obama. Dunham had fought a long battle with cancer, and had been at death’s door for months. Ten days earlier, Obama had briefly absented himself from the trail to fly to Hawaii to see her, knowing all too well that it could be for the last time. Dunham had been Obama’s guardian for much of his youth, while his mother lived in Indonesia. He called her Toot; she called him Bear. He wanted desperately for her to make it to Election Day, to live to see him achieve his dream.

Obama betrayed no emotion in Jacksonville. His speech at Veterans Memorial Arena that morning was rousing. He recalled that, on September 15, McCain had appeared in the same venue and declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.”

“Well, Florida, you and I know that’s not only fundamentally wrong, it also sums up his out-of-touch, on-your-own economic philosophy,” Obama said, “a philosophy that will end when I am president of the United States of America.”

Obama’s next stop was in Charlotte, North Carolina, late that afternoon, where twenty-five thousand people gathered to see him in a field opposite Duke Centennial Hall at the University of North Carolina. The weather had been fine all day long, but as soon as Obama’s jet touched down, the skies began to threaten. As the crowd waited for him, the heavens opened up and a vicious downpour began.

On the way to the event, Obama stopped by his Charlotte HQ to shake hands with volunteers and call a few voters. When one of the voters raised the subject of health care, Obama turned away from the pool reporters and said into the phone, “Obviously this is happening in my own family . . . my grandmother stayed at home until recently.” When he turned back, Obama was visibly deflated, looking drawn and tired.

When he finally arrived in the field at UNC, the rain had stopped, the crowd was drenched, and they were ready for him. He stepped to the lectern and began his speech with a remembrance of his grandmother. He said, “She died peacefully in her sleep with my sister at her side, and so there’s great joy as well as tears.” He said, “She has gone home.” Haltingly, he said, “I’m not going to talk about it too long because it’s hard to talk about.”

Even so, Obama wanted everyone to know a little about Toot. He called her a “quiet hero,” like a lot of quiet heroes in the crowd and in the country. “They’re not famous,” Obama continued. “Their names aren’t in the newspaper. But each and every day, they work hard. They watch out for their families. They sacrifice for their families. . . . That’s what America’s about. That’s what we’re fighting for.”

As Obama said all this, his voice was mostly steady, but tears were streaming down his cheeks—the first time he had wept publicly since taking the national stage. Obama reached inside his pocket, pulled out a white handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and carried on, returning several times to the woman who had shaped his character as much as anyone in the world.

A few hours later, Obama and his traveling crew pulled into the Prince William County Fairground in Manassas, Virginia, for his final campaign rally. The scene was surreal, mind-boggling, like something out of a movie. The buses rolled up into a muddy parking lot behind the stage. The floodlights illuminated a swirling mist rising into the dark night sky. Beyond the camera risers surrounding the stage were a pair of trucks with uniformed, heavily armed, Secret Service tactical teams standing on top, scanning the horizon through their binoculars. And beyond the trucks were some ninety thousand Obama fans on a gently sloping hillside, stretching literally as far as the eye could see.

How fully Obama understood the alchemy or the tides of history, the collision of man and moment, that brought him to that place, putting him on the verge of winning the White House, was impossible to know. But he seemed to grasp the need for closure. At the end of his speech, he returned to the story of Edith Childs, the city council-woman in Greenwood, South Carolina, who early in his campaign bequeathed to him the rallying cry that marked his breakthrough in the Iowa caucuses: “Fired up! Ready to go!”

Obama hadn’t uncorked this riff in months, but he turned on the turbochargers in Manassas and delivered it with gusto, coiling his body, bouncing up and down, sweeping his arms, tracing with his fingers in the air. By the time he got to the end—“One voice can change a room, and if it can change a room, it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it can change a state, then it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change a world; come on, Virginia, let’s go change the world!”—the crowd let loose a roar that shook the ground beneath their feet.

Returning to the airport, Obama boarded his jet and prepared to head back to Chicago. He made his way down the aisle and into the rear cabin, where the press corps mingled. He thanked the reporters for having accompanied him on his astonishing ride. He gave a photographer a birthday kiss. He shook every hand on the plane.

“Okay, guys, let’s go home,” Obama said. “It will be fun to see how the story ends.”

ON THE MORNING OF November 5, Barack Obama had breakfast with his family, saw his kids off to school, donned sunglasses, and went to the gym. The previous night, the nation’s first African American president-elect had secured a victory that was as dazzling as it was historic. His 53 percent of the popular vote was the largest majority secured by a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. He swept the blue states, captured the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, and picked up red states across the country: Colorado, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia. He dominated among black voters (95–4), Hispanic voters (66–32), and young voters (66–32). His share of the white vote, 43 percent, was higher than what Gore or Kerry had attained—and among whites age eighteen to twenty-nine, he trounced McCain, 68–31.

Obama made his way to his transition headquarters on the thirty-eighth floor of the Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago’s Loop. Sitting down with Biden; his soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; his three transition co-chairs—Jarrett, Rouse, John Podesta—and a handful of others, he began examining the possibilities for his Cabinet. Most of the names on the lists were predictable, but one was not. Obama was leaning heavily toward Hillary Clinton for secretary of state.

Among those most intimate with Obama, it came as no surprise. Since the summer, he had been telling Jarrett and Nesbitt that he wanted to find a role for Clinton in his administration. Obama’s inclination was abetted by Podesta, whom he’d appointed to run a kind of pre-transition planning effort after securing the nomination (and whom Clinton had tapped, albeit prematurely, to handle the same task). At the first Podesta-led meeting to discuss potential Cabinet picks, in Reno, Nevada, in late September, Hillary’s name was on the lists for State and Defense. The next morning, Jarrett asked Obama, “Are you serious about Senator Clinton?”

Obama replied simply but emphatically, “Yes, I am.”

Obama shared his thinking with few people before Election Day, but when he did, his praise for Clinton was effusive. She’s smart, she’s capable, she’s tough, she’s disciplined, Obama said again and again. She wouldn’t have to be taught or have her hand held. She wouldn’t have to earn her place on the world stage; she already had global stature. She pays attention to nuance, Obama told Jarrett, and that’s what I want in a secretary of state, because the stakes are so high. I can’t have somebody who would put us in peril with one errant sentence.

Three other names were raised in the meeting at the Kluczynski Building: Daschle, Kerry, and Richardson. Daschle and Richardson were on the short list only as courtesies; Obama had other things in mind for both of them. Kerry was eminently qualified and desperately wanted the job. But he would have been a predictable pick—there was no wow factor with Kerry. Choosing Clinton would send a powerful message about Obama’s bigness.

Much of Obama’s campaign brain trust was resistant to the idea. The suits were skeptical that Hillary would be, could be, a loyal team player. The arguments against her varied among them, but all were forcefully and fully aired. She would pursue her own agenda. She would undermine Obama’s. She would be a constant headache. She came attached to her globe-trotting, buckraking, headline-making husband, whose antics were the very antithesis of the no-drama-Obama way of doing business.

Jarrett was wary, too, though her worries revolved around the question of the chemistry (or lack thereof) between Barack and Hillary. “You’d better really make sure that you two can work together,” Jarrett advised the new president-elect, “because you can’t just fire her.”

Obama listened to the objections and more or less dismissed them. Sure, he needed to sit with Clinton and get comfortable. Sure, the Bill problem needed to be dealt with. But Obama shared none of his brain trust’s lingering animus over the campaign. It was time to saddle up and get down to governing—and he saw Clinton as an invaluable asset. He told his quailing advisers to keep their eyes on the prize. More than once he calmly reassured Jarrett, “She’s going to be really good at this job.”

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, on November 13, Hillary met with Obama in his transition office in Chicago. She had some theories about why she was there, but being offered secretary of state was not among them. Two nights earlier, over dinner in New York with her and Bill, Terry McAuliffe had asked about the rumors swirling in Democratic circles that the gig might be tossed her way. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Hillary replied.

Not that she thought a job offer was out of the question. But she expected it to be a token unity gesture, something both sides knew she would almost certainly turn down—maybe Health and Human Services. When the chatter about State picked up, she assumed that the Obamans were floating it and was suspicious about their motives. Why are they putting my name out? she asked her friends. How does it help them? What game are they playing?

But now here she was, sitting alone with her former nemesis, and Obama was talking about the job in earnest. You’re head and shoulders above anyone else I’m considering, he said. Obama made it clear that they would have to come to terms regarding Bill’s foundation and library-funding, as well as his money-making ventures. He explained how he envisioned their relationship if she took the post: one president, one secretary of state, no overlap. He didn’t formally offer her the job, but he left no doubt that she was his choice.

Obama knew that Clinton would be reluctant, that he’d have to do some wooing. But at the same time he was selling, he was also evaluating.
Do we click? Will she respect the fact that I’m the president? Can she work for me?
By the time the meeting was over, all those questions had been answered to his satisfaction. The conversation confirmed his instincts. He was surer than ever that he wanted Clinton, and he would do what it took to get her.

Hillary’s head when she flew out of Chicago was in a different place.
I’m not taking this job
, she thought.
And I’m not going to let anyone talk me into it—anyone.
But she also remembered a formulation that James Carville was fond of: “Once you’re asked, you’re fucked.”

That was precisely how Hillary felt for the next few days. She had less than zero interest in working for Obama—for doing anything other than going back to the Senate, licking her wounds, and putting her energies into paying down her multimillion-dollar debt. She was looking forward to reclaiming some semblance of the life she’d had before the campaign. Going to the theater. Dining out. Spending time with Chelsea. She was sixty-one years old and staring down the likelihood that she would never be president. And she was tired—oh, so tired.

The pressure on her to take the job was enormous, though, and all the more so because the whole drama was playing out in public. Hillary had flown commercial from New York to Chicago and been spotted on the plane. Then the press pool saw her three-SUV motorcade pulling out from the garage of the Kluczynski Building. Everyone Hillary encountered had an opinion—or, rather, they all had the same opinion, which was that she should accept. Being America’s ambassador to the world at a hinge-of-history moment was a job commensurate with Clinton’s skills, they argued. Biden was on the phone with her making that case persistently; so was Podesta.

Emanuel took a more aggressive tack. He told her she’d be making a big mistake if she turned it down. That a refusal would wound Obama before he even took office. That she had to play ball for her own sake as well as the party’s. The conversations occasionally got heated. Voices were raised. Phones were slammed.

There were other reasons for Clinton to say yes. The Senate wasn’t proving as welcoming as she’d hoped, not by a long shot. She had come back thinking that her campaign had enhanced her status, that she could snag for herself some kind of plum position—a subcommittee chairmanship, a specially created health care panel, something. But Kennedy shot her down on health care, and Reid sidestepped her other requests. (Behind the scenes, he and Schumer were beseeching the Obamans to take Hillary off their hands.) The conspiratorial whisperers in the Senate were no longer whispering. They were telling her not to get ahead of herself, to take a seat, take a number.

There was the Bill Factor, that unremitting source of speculation far and wide. The conventional wisdom held that the former president would be the death knell of the Madame Secretary scenario. Would he open the books and reveal the donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative? He’d always fought that tooth and nail. Would he accept restrictions on his travel, his speaking, his business activities? Please.

But the conventional wisdom couldn’t have been more wrong. Faced with tough, unequivocal demands from the Obamans—demands that many of his people considered beyond the pale—Bill said, fine. Publicly and privately, he vowed to do “whatever they want.” There was no way he was going to let himself be cast as a stumbling block. Back-channeling regularly with Podesta, Emanuel, and Biden, he became the loudest and most ardent voice urging his wife to take to the job.

Hillary felt the pull of patriotism and the call of duty. She believed that when the president asked a person to serve, there was an imperative to say yes. And yet, after five days of tumultuous to-ing and fro-ing, she decided to decline Obama’s offer. Her reasons were many and, to her, dispositive. Secretary of state, of all jobs, seemed designed to turn her life upside down in myriad ways—in particular, the constant travel and omnivorous jet lag. She felt protective of her husband, too, especially after the torching of his reputation in the campaign. No matter how willing Bill claimed to be, she didn’t want to see his philanthropic efforts crimped, his important work helping the sick and underprivileged curtailed. And she kept coming back to the question of her debt. For some politicians, lumbering around millions of dollars in the red was no big thing. She considered it immoral; she wanted to be shed of the burden, and quickly. But how was she supposed to accomplish that as secretary of state? Her people asked the Obamans (again) for help, but the transition team refused. And then there was something that she told one of her friends: she had spent a lot of years working for one guy and had no desire to do it again.

On the morning of November 19, the top officials of Hillary’s and Bill’s staffs held a conference call to coordinate the rejection. To fend off charges that Bill’s activities had thwarted the deal, they planned to send the full list of his contributors to Obama’s transition office in Washington. Thousands of pages had to be printed out and rushed there that afternoon.

Hillary informed Emanuel and Podesta of her decision. She wanted to talk to Obama to put the thing to rest.

Emanuel and Podesta had a lot on the line. They’d been among Hillary’s most forceful advocates internally—and now she was about to drop a heaping pile of public embarrassment in Obama’s lap. The advisers decided that they had no choice but to stall. The president-elect is unavailable for a call, they told Clinton. He’s indisposed.

Hillary’s staff tried to plan a time for the conversation. Again and again, it was pushed back. A 2:30 call was scheduled. At 2:17 p.m. Abedin sent around an email to Mills and others: “We hear that President-elect Obama will not do the call at 2:30. Instead, he wants her to talk to Podesta—talk to him in an hour, so 3:30.” Hours later, Clinton had still not reached Obama. At 7:37, Abedin wrote: “The call has been scheduled for 10 P.M. Eastern.” At 9:42: “God knows what’s going to happen.” At 10:27: “Call will not happen tonight.”

Clinton was in New York for a reception at Chelsea Piers commemorating the renaming of the Triborough Bridge in RFK’s honor. She flew back to Washington late on a charter flight, arriving at Whitehaven around midnight—and there, miraculously, she managed finally to reach the elusive Obama.

It’s not going to work, an anguished Hillary told him. I can’t do it. It was a long, hard campaign, and I’m exhausted. I have this debt to pay down, and I can’t do that as secretary of state. I’m tired of being punched around; I feel like a pinata. I want to go home. I’ve had enough of this. You don’t want me, you don’t want all these stories about you and me. You don’t want the whole circus. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for me. I just can’t do this.

Hillary, look, you’re exactly right, Obama said. Those are all real concerns, they’re all real problems, and it’s fair and legitimate for you to raise them. And the truth is, there’s really nothing I can do about them. But the thing is, the economy is a much bigger mess than we’d ever imagined it would be, and I’m gonna be focused on that for the next two years. So I need someone as big as you to do this job. I need someone I don’t need to worry about. I need someone I can trust implicitly, and you’re that person.

Hillary raised a matter far more intimate than her personal reluctance. You know my husband, she said. You’ve seen what happens. We’re going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can’t control him, and at some point he’ll be a problem.

I know, Obama replied. But I’m prepared to take that risk. You’re worth it. Your country needs you. I need you. I need you to do this.

For both Obama and Clinton, it was a strange and rare moment—one of almost incomprehensible candor and vulnerability. For nearly two years, Clinton’s posture regarding her husband had been fierce and unyielding. Never once had she wavered in Bill’s defense. Never once had she been anything but defiant in the face of his screwups. Only rarely had she ever acknowledged, even to her closest friends, the damage that he had inflicted on her candidacy. And yet now, here she was, laying down her guard with her former rival, admitting not only that her husband could be a thorn in her side, but, in effect, that she’d known it all along.

Obama’s tacit admission was equally revealing. As a public figure and a private man, his signal characteristics were supreme self-possession and self-reliance. He needed no one, was better and smarter, cooler and more composed, than anyone around him. But here he was conceding to Clinton that her help was crucial to the success of his presidency. For the first time, after all the bitterness and resentment that had passed between them as combatants, they had suddenly metamorphosed into different creatures with each other—human beings.