Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (33 page)

The next day, when Hillary met with the media, it was clear that she was ditching the above-the-fray strategy. “Now the fun part starts,” she said. “We’re into the last month, and we’re going to start drawing a contrast, because I want every Iowan to have accurate information when they make their decisions.” Three weeks after declaring that she did not want to attack her primary opponents, Hillary was about to do just that—and she sounded downright gleeful about the prospect. Even the campaign-hardened press seemed taken aback by the ardor with which she bared her teeth—Hillary unchained!

In campaigns, the most discouraging thing is to be ignored by your opponents. So from my vantage point, Hillary’s challenge was good news. She wasn’t going after Biden or Dodd, or even Edwards. She was attacking
us
, and everyone understood why. Moreover, there was an air of desperation to the shift. The eagerness with which she descended from her front-runner’s perch to declare open season on Obama only validated our critique that she was a reflection of scorched-earth Washington politics rather than an answer to it.

True to Hillary’s vow, the Clinton camp commenced its version of “shock and awe,” launching attacks that veered from the legitimate, such as Barack’s practice of voting “present” on some controversial issues in Springfield; to the absurd, such as highlighting a pair of schoolboy essays in which Barack wrote of wanting to be president. “What’s next? I didn’t play well in the sandbox in kindergarten,” Obama joked. The goal was to paint him as more of an ambitious, calculating politician than an agent of change—to characterize Obama in the same way he had so effectively characterized Clinton. Yet soon the tenor of the attacks would take on a more personal edge, courtesy of a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire.

Billy Shaheen, husband of the state’s former governor Jeanne Shaheen, was the cochair of Hillary’s campaign in New Hampshire, where public polls showed Obama was closing the gap. So it was big news when he unloaded on Obama for the teenage drug use that Barack himself had disclosed in
Dreams from My Father
. That admission, Shaheen said, would make Obama a fatally flawed nominee.

“It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen said during an interview with the
Washington Post
. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

The next day, we were in Washington, where Barack had Senate business. I joined him because we planned to use a flight to Des Moines to go over strategy for a debate later that day. As the gate swung open at the entrance of the charter terminal, I saw a young man running up to our car. Trying to catch his breath, the kid blurted out, “Senator Clinton would like to speak to Senator Obama.” Hillary’s charter plane was parked right next to ours.

“What do you think this is about?” Barack asked.

“She’ll tell you how sorry she is for Shaheen’s remark and assure you that she and her campaign had nothing to do with it,” I said. “Then they’ll leak that she personally apologized.”

Gibbs and I climbed into our plane and grabbed window seats so we could watch the show. Hillary climbed down the steps of hers with her longtime traveling aide, Huma Abedin, and greeted Barack on the tarmac. The conversation seemed to begin calmly enough, as Hillary spoke and Barack listened. Then, when Barack responded, Hillary became very agitated, jabbing her finger at him and speaking in an animated fashion. The exchange went on for ten minutes, as Huma and Reggie toed the ground and gazed skyward, looking as if they wanted to be just about anywhere but on the tarmac bearing witness to this unfriendly encounter between their bosses. At one point, Barack put his hand on Hillary’s shoulder in what appeared to be an effort to calm things down, but she brushed it away. “What the hell is going on over there?” I asked Gibbs. “I don’t know, but she doesn’t look too happy,” he said.

Finally, Barack and Reggie returned to the plane. Barack flopped down in a seat, a look of disbelief on his face, as he reflected on what had just gone down. Hillary’s initial points were exactly as I had predicted. She apologized. She said she’d had no idea Billy was going to attack the way he had and certainly hadn’t approved it. Then, when in accepting her apology, Barack said each of them still had to take responsibility for the actions and tone of their campaigns, Hillary got angry. She recounted a catalogue of affronts she felt she had endured from us. It wasn’t Hillary’s words that struck Barack, but her demeanor.

“For the first time in this campaign, I saw fear in her eyes,” he said.

 • • • 

I spent the last six weeks before the caucuses traveling with Barack on what was a combination rock tour and political revival. Some events were ear-splitting, arena-filling extravaganzas, such as the three-state journey from Iowa to South Carolina to New Hampshire with Oprah Winfrey, which drew a combined sixty thousand people.

Yet much of our time was spent moving around the small towns of Iowa in a campaign RV outfitted with couches, tables, a kitchen, and televisions tuned to ESPN, not cable news, by order of the candidate. There was always food around. When we weren’t taking our meals in a back office or gymnasium locker room, before or after events, we would eat in the RV. Generally, it was lean chicken or fish and vegetables for Barack, who was determined to eat healthily, and worked out hard every day; and pizza, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken for those of us whose survival was less crucial to the future of the country. In between meals, there was an endless supply of snacks, which was deadly for me, and my wardrobe, on which one could too often find visual evidence of the day’s samplings. A habitual nosher, especially when I am tense, I would gain twenty-five pounds by the end of the campaign—and I wasn’t exactly svelte when it started.

All this contributed to my sometimes cartoonish image as a rumpled, paunchy, food-stained savant. Susan hated that portrayal, regarding it as demeaning, but it was a source of endless fun for my colleagues, especially the fastidious and elegant candidate. Barack could spot a stain on my clothes from twenty paces, and loved to rib me about it. It didn’t help my cause when, one day on the road, I tried to multitask by snacking and answering e-mail at the same time, perhaps becoming the first person on the planet to disable his BlackBerry with a Krispy Kreme donut.

Much as I enjoyed the jovial camaraderie and the rolling smorgasbord of snacks, I did have a few essential functions on the road. With a full press corps in tow, a lot of plays had to be audibled on the spot when breaking news demanded a rapid response from the candidate. That might mean crafting a “topper,” or an insert for his next set of remarks. It also meant briefing Barack, on the fly, for one of the many interviews he would do along the campaign trail and doing interviews myself, usually to fill the voracious appetite of cable news.

I was an on- and off-the-record resource for the reporters who were following us. My goal in these conversations was to advance our message and ignore whatever contretemps du jour had seized their attention at present—and, generally, I succeeded. Yet in one such scrum, late in December, I wound up making unintended and decidedly unhelpful news.

Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, had been assassinated the previous day, apparently the victim of Islamic extremists. A reporter said Clinton supporters were pointing to Bhutto’s murder as an example of the volatility of the world, underscoring the need for a tested, experienced president like Hillary. Almost mechanically, I followed our basic strategy of turning such questions back to the issue of judgment and Iraq.

“Barack Obama had the judgment to oppose the war in Iraq,” I said in response. “And he warned at the time that it would divert us from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, and now we see the effect of that. Al Qaeda is resurgent. They’re a powerful force now in Pakistan . . . There’s a suspicion they may have been involved in this. I think his judgment was good. Senator Clinton made a different judgment . . . So that’s a judgment she’ll have to defend.”

There were some two dozen reporters there, and almost all of them got my point. Yet one, Jessica Yellin of CNN, drew a slightly stronger inference than I had intended, giving the Clinton campaign an opportunity to suggest that I had blamed Hillary for Bhutto’s death. It required me, later that day, to clarify to CNN what I meant, which added another dimension to the dispute and gave the network’s anchors new angles to discuss. Wolf Blitzer asked Hillary and Barack about it in separate interviews. Suddenly I was the story.

“I believe our policies in Iraq have had a direct impact on events in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I would not suggest there is a straight line relationship between the events of today in Pakistan and anyone’s particular vote,” I said. “What I was pointing out was the difference in judgment at the time. Obama thought that the war would have a negative impact in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that seems relevant right now . . .

“I certainly wasn’t suggesting Senator Clinton was complicit. She made a bad judgment on this war, and the war helped exacerbate problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And that’s certainly something I would stand by.”

It was a needless brushfire, which smoldered for some time. When Ted Kennedy called Bill Clinton in January to complain about the tactics Hillary’s campaign had deployed against Barack, the former president argued that we were the ones guilty of unscrupulous attacks. “Axelrod said Hillary killed Benazir Bhutto!” he complained.

The Bhutto imbroglio was another reminder of just how easy it is, in the wildly reactive world of a presidential campaign, to trip a wire and, at least for a moment, send the media coverage spiraling off in unhelpful directions. Barack recognized the absurdity of the whole scene, and strongly defended me when he was asked about it in a television interview. Privately, however, he cautioned me about going too far. “I’m telling you what you always tell me. Don’t give them a chance to write stuff like this.”

For the most part, however, the final weeks of the Iowa campaign were as exhilarating as any I had experienced in politics. From the JJ on, Barack was on fire, inspiring the belief that real, meaningful change was within reach—in not just our policies, but our squalid, debilitating politics. It didn’t need to be said that our candidate’s improbable rise was a living symbol of that hope and change. Overflow crowds greeted us, in large towns and small, for events that now felt less like political rallies than wholesome, joyous community celebrations. At each stop, Barack, his voice raspy from overwork and overexposure to the winter chill, reminded Iowans about the enormous power they wielded to change history’s course.

As the days ticked down, thousands of supporters poured in from across the country on their own dime, happily trudging through the Iowa snow to augment the young corps that had been working the state without relief for months now. Susan and my youngest son, Ethan, home for the holidays from Colorado College, relocated to Des Moines to pitch in for the final stretch. Four years earlier, as a high school student, Ethan had spent a summer volunteering for Barack’s Senate campaign, working as a press assistant in the relative tranquility of our small campaign office. Now he and Susan would man the phone banks amid the pandemonium of our dilapidated Iowa headquarters.

My old friend Bettylu Saltzman, who had introduced me to Barack with such extravagant predictions about his future, encamped in Des Moines with her husband, Paul, for the final push. Though in their seventies, the couple bundled up and went door to door for Barack, as did many other old friends from Chicago.

Throughout December, Harstad’s polls still had Iowa as a tight three-way race. Yet under Iowa’s idiosyncratic caucus rules, where supporters of candidates who failed to attain a prescribed “threshold” of support among caucus attendees could switch their support to one of the “viable” candidates, Barack held a slight edge. This hurt Hillary, who might have been beloved by her own supporters but, with higher negatives than either Barack or Edwards, wasn’t a popular second choice.

Our goal from the start was to expand the size of the caucus by attracting new participants, with an emphasis on young attendees. Now, in the final days, it seemed clear that all those efforts would pay off. We were getting encouraging reports from our Iowa directors, Paul Tewes and Mitch Stewart, with the army of organizers they had been banking for months. If at this point you had dropped the scraggly faced, slovenly dressed, sleep-deprived pair on a street corner in Chicago, they probably would have been arrested for vagrancy. Nobody on our team was letting up.

In late December, I got a call from John Kerry, who said he wanted to endorse Obama. “I really think Barack is the right guy,” Kerry said. “I saw something special in him four years ago when I asked him to give the keynote.” While Kerry had chosen Edwards as his running mate four years earlier, it was clear that there had been an alienation of affections. I learned later that before Kerry gave Edwards the nod, he had exacted a promise that if the ticket lost, Edwards would give Kerry first dibs on the 2008 race. Almost immediately after the polls closed in 2004, however, Edwards started maneuvering for the 2008 nomination. It was the kind of betrayal politicians don’t soon forget, and Kerry clearly hadn’t.

The day after Kerry’s phone call, a sketchy poll showed the Iowa race as a virtual tie between Clinton and Edwards, with Obama a distant third. It was a preposterous result, but given the insatiable appetite of the news media, word of Obama’s sinking prospects didn’t take long to spread. This prompted another call from Kerry, this time more agitated.

“Jesus, man, what’s going on out there?” he demanded. “I just saw this poll with Barack in third!”

“Well, Senator,” I said, “I can only tell you that nothing we see, from our polling or the hard counts from our organizers, suggests that we’re going to finish third. We’re going to win this thing.”

Kerry wasn’t convinced.

“But, Jesus Christ, I mean, it’s hard for me to jump in there if he’s in third place. I really need to think this over. I’ll call you back.”