Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (38 page)

As I stood watching at the side of the stage, my apprehension quickly dissolved into a mix of awe, pride, and gratitude. Everything about the modern presidential campaign grinds you down, and leads you to a series of small, unsatisfying tactical maneuvers. This moment, though, had genuine meaning. This moment was worthy of the great men who had met down the street more than two centuries earlier to envision the union.

From my vantage point, I could see friends and supporters, many of them African American, in the front rows, dabbing their eyes. I knew Marty Nesbitt as Barack’s best buddy and fellow jock. Tears were flowing down his cheeks as he heard his friend speak so evocatively about his own journey and the black experience. After the speech, I caught up with many of the reporters who had come expecting to bury Obama. They all recognized that something extraordinary had happened. By taking on the explosive issue of race so directly and personally, Barack had transformed his own political crisis into an occasion for national reflection. The world, and even those of us closest to him, got new insight into how he would deal with the crushing pressures and complex challenges of the presidency. Our opponents had hoped the Wright tapes would tear him down and destroy his candidacy. Instead, he had never looked more presidential.

 • • • 

The crisis had passed and we had survived, but there was no respite, no time for rejoicing. Now we had to return to the grinding realities of a nominating fight that felt as if it would never end. The delegate numbers were moving inexorably in our favor. Hillary’s campaign was deeply in debt and suffering from organizational disarray. Penn, caught up in a lobbying controversy, would soon be forced to resign. Still, the national polls remained tied or showed Obama with slight leads; and coming off wins in Ohio and Texas, the indomitable Hillary was not about to give in.

If the speech in Philly was a high point, much of the rest of the campaign for Pennsylvania was an unmitigated disaster, marked by several unforced errors. One was mine. I had the bright idea to send Barack to campaign in that bastion of working-class America, the bowling alley. I love bowling. When my daughter, Lauren, was young and shunned by kids her own age because of her disabilities, she and I would pass hours together at the local bowling alley. Spending as much time as I had there, I remembered that while one person is bowling, everyone else is sitting around waiting a turn. It’s a perfect setup for a politician looking for hands to shake. The image of Obama in a bowling alley would cut against the elitist caricature his opponents wanted to hang on him. Unless, of course, the candidate stopped shaking hands and actually tried to
bowl—
and racked up a grand total of 37, as Barack would do in Altoona. Lauren, as a seven-year-old on her worst bowling day, would have knocked down more pins!

It’s a funny thing about politics. You can deliver incisive speeches, do thoughtful interviews, or pass meaningful laws, yet little of it penetrates the public consciousness. Yet when you bowl a 37 in front of the cameras, it’s not only big news, but also fodder for late night comedians and (worst of all, for a proud jock like Obama) ESPN. So my little bowling alley gambit was a complete gutter ball. Instead of connecting with working-class voters, Barack became a butt of their jokes.

Obama compounded the problem a few days later when he chose to hold forth on the psyche of working-class, white Pennsylvania voters in answer to a question at what he believed was a closed-door 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,” Barack said. “And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This was a common problem. Barack would get into a room of wealthy supporters and, thinking he was among friends, offer remarkably candid, if impolitic, observations—except this time there was a blogger for the
Huffington Post
in the crowd, recording the entire disquisition on her digital recorder.

“For crying out loud, he sounds like Margaret Fucking Mead interpreting the natives to a freaking anthropology conference,” I screamed when I read the quotes. I understood Barack’s analysis and the perspective from which he was offering it. He was not trying to
demean
the white working class; he was actually trying to
defend
them. He was putting himself in their shoes. However, his description of Americans clinging to guns and religion as a reaction to their economic marginalization came off as patronizing and insulting.

Irksome as it was, the San Francisco gaffe also produced some collateral damage. Campaigning at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Michelle decided she had heard enough and took a hard swing at those who branded Barack an elitist. “There’s a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that. Yeah, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with,” she said. “I am the product of a working-class upbringing. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a working-class community.” Then, with more than a little edge in her voice, Michelle added: “Now when is the last time you’ve seen a president of the United States who just paid off his loan debt? But, again, maybe I’m out of touch.”

It wasn’t so much
what
she said, but
how
she said it. The footage quickly made the rounds on cable and the Internet, and it didn’t take a political genius to see that it was harmful. Michelle is a warm, whip-smart, and often hilarious person, but when she’s angry, she can be stinging and come off as sarcastic. Her remarks seemed to me more diatribe than discussion. This normally highly polished professional woman looked peeved and out of sorts. With her comments in Wisconsin—“for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m proud of my country”—and now this, Michelle was playing into a Fox News game of transference: if Obama himself isn’t scary, maybe you can raise doubts by depicting his pastor and his wife as angry militants.

If people thought Michelle seemed angry on the campaign trail, they should have seen her afterward with us. She was livid—and with plenty of justification. Perhaps she had slipped with her remarks, but we were the ones who had thrown her out on the trail with inadequate staffing, preparation, and support. The result was that a remarkable woman, a woman who would become one of our greatest assets, was now regarded as a liability. It would shake her confidence in the campaign team, and that had repercussions. It spun up Valerie, who was sensitive to her friend’s feelings and saw herself as Michelle’s personal advocate within the campaign. Also, it would distress Barack, who revered his wife and felt more than a little guilt over the sacrifices he had asked her to make for his career. He didn’t like being a target; he hated how she had now become one.

Hillary would win Pennsylvania by more than nine points, but in what was becoming a familiar pattern, she won only a few more delegates than Obama, and not enough to cut into our increasingly insurmountable lead. Her only remaining path to victory was to fight to the end, hoping to expose in Obama a fatal flaw that might persuade the three hundred or so still-unpledged superdelegates—members of Congress and party officials—to tilt the nomination her way. Despite our miscues, national polls were working against that scenario, many of which reported that Hillary’s negatives among general election voters were at an all-time high, far exceeding Barack’s.

“If Senator Clinton thinks she has a legitimate chance to win the nomination, she has every reason to stay,” I told reporters on the back of our campaign plane, as we escaped Pennsylvania on primary night and headed home. “But if her only strategy is to try and tear down Senator Obama, I think that’s going to make a lot of Democrats uncomfortable.” Gibbs and I did the press “gaggle” decked out in T-shirts we’d bought in Philly: “Stop the Drama. Vote Obama.”

The next day’s drama was mostly internal when Barack called another “yellow pad” meeting at his home. I learned later that Valerie and Rouse had met with Barack and Michelle before we arrived. They concluded that Plouffe, Gibbs, and I exercised too much power over the campaign, and that the decision-making group had to be expanded. Moreover, they wanted more “discipline” in our message operation. If I had known about the pre-meeting meeting, I would not have been blindsided when Barack announced that there would be an additional “strategy” call every evening, led by Anita Dunn.

Anita was a smart operative, a partner in Squier’s old firm whom I had recruited to join the campaign as a senior adviser in our communications shop. Still, I was irritated by Barack’s gesture, which came without forewarning and was interpreted by everyone in the room as a shot at me. We knew we couldn’t win Pennsylvania. Our mission had been to keep the race close while holding down Hillary’s margin and delegate bounty, and in that we had mostly succeeded. By my accounting, we had moved from quixotic challenger to the doorstep of the Democratic nomination on the strength of the strategic messaging I had developed from the start. Barack’s periodic complaint, particularly in low moments in the campaign, was that my style was instinctive and undisciplined. Yet I certainly hadn’t suggested the “clinging to guns and religion” line or unleashed Reverend Wright—and I wouldn’t have sent Barack to a bowling alley if I had known he was going to roll a 37!

Our campaign had experienced blessedly little of the palace intrigue that had crippled Hillary’s and so many others’. When there were issues, we aired them openly. In the main, that would be true until the end. So this maneuver, cooked up in furtive sidebar conversations, was an unwelcome aberration. I seethed in silence, and the new arrangement wound up amounting to little change in my role. Still, the drawn-out battle in Pennsylvania and this grueling campaign had drained something out of everyone.

 • • • 

There would be seven more state elections, but the May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina were Clinton’s last real opportunity to tilt the race by casting doubt in the minds of still-uncommitted party leaders about Obama’s electability. Indiana’s demographics played to her advantage, while North Carolina, with its large African American base, was ripe for us. A loss there would be a serious blow.

The run-up to these contests brought additional turbulence, as Reverend Wright resurfaced on a national media tour. It culminated in a preening, provocative performance at the National Press Club, in which he took delight in reprising some of his most controversial statements, and dismissed Obama’s race speech as the prattling of a politician, as opposed to the truth telling of a man of the cloth.

When I reached Barack on the road, he didn’t quite process the tone and scale of Wright’s act, and issued an antiseptic statement disavowing the minister’s remarks. Later, when he got to his hotel that night and watched the footage, and the breathless coverage it generated, he absorbed its full impact.

When I caught up with him the next morning, he wasn’t looking for advice.

“I know what I have to do,” he said grimly

It was the final straw. Barack had tried hard to defend his pastor, even as he condemned some of his words. Now he didn’t hold back. “[I]f Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing . . . then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks . . . well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either.” Days later, the Obamas withdrew their membership from Trinity.

 • • • 

It felt as if we had been running on fumes for months. The car was moving forward, but without much pep. Then a gift dropped in our laps that allowed Barack to refill his tank and ours.

In the midst of the Pennsylvania primary, McCain had tried to force his way back into the campaign narrative by calling for a federal gas tax moratorium in response to record high gas prices. Hillary soon embraced McCain’s proposal, which seemed to many like Politics 101. With gas prices nearing four dollars a gallon, logic dictated that you do something,
anything
, to appear to be responding to the problem.

When Barack was asked about the gas tax idea, however, he gave a different answer. He had voted for such a policy as a state legislator, and it had turned out to be a scam. The savings rarely reached consumers because they were quickly gobbled up by the oil industry. Such bogus palliatives failed to address the true causes of fuel price spikes, like manipulation of the oil markets and the absence of a comprehensive national energy policy, Barack said.

Rather than embracing a formulaic Washington gimmick, Obama was telling hard truths. We inserted language on the gas tax debate into Barack’s stump speech, and he went from there, riffing so compellingly that we turned it into a sixty-second ad.

As this dispute was playing out, the
Washington Post
’s Dan Balz grabbed me at the back of a rally in North Carolina and asked, “Are you sure you guys know what you’re doing on the gas tax? Everyone in Washington thinks you’re nuts.” Yet our numbers showed that it was having exactly the impact we had hoped for. People accepted the gas tax debate as less about relief at the pump than a parable about honesty, character, and leadership.

Emblematic of “Change You Can Believe In,” the gas tax debate put us on the offensive again. I was feeling great until I got a call from Harstad, who had been polling in Indiana on the eve of the primaries.

“I have some numbers, and the news isn’t particularly good,” he said. “We’ve been slipping a little every day in Indiana, and in tonight’s calling, we were twelve points down.”

Twelve
points? We were playing for a win in Indiana, or at least a close race.

Sensing my mood, Harstad offered a hasty disclaimer: “It could just be a bad night of calling, and if you look at the full sample of the last three days, we’re still relatively close. But I thought I should tell you.”