Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (63 page)

We had nearly two weeks until the next debate, and I knew it would be an endurance test. I remembered the frenzy that erupted after Reagan flubbed his first debate with Walter Mondale, briefly breathing life into Mondale’s moribund campaign—at least in the minds of a news media eager for a contest. I believed the same thing was happening now.

Still, we almost certainly couldn’t afford a second straight rout. We needed a return to form, just like the one Reagan executed on his way to a forty-nine-state landslide.

By the next day the president had read and heard enough to understand that the first debate had been a lost night. One commentary in particular had caught his eye. “What Matt Bai wrote in the
Times
really kind of made sense,” the president said of a blog post headlined “Obama’s Enthusiasm Gap.” In it, the columnist wrote about Obama’s reticence to perform, linking it to a “lack of neediness” that drives most politicians. “It turns out, though, that craving validation is a useful political trait. It makes you want to explain yourself and prevail in the argument,” Bai wrote.

It was interesting that the president embraced this commentary, among the many he’d read, to explain his failure. And it reminded me of the conversation in 2007 when I told Obama that he might not be “pathological enough” to run for president. Now, as he contemplated his rare stumble on a large stage, I heard his competitive instincts kicking in. “I’m not going to let him beat me again,” the president said. “Ever! I’m disappointed that I didn’t make a stronger case to the country.”

The day after the debate, I got an unexpected call from Bill Clinton. Generally, when things go badly wrong, you receive a lot of unsolicited strategic advice. Yet President Clinton’s was different and welcome.

“Listen, everybody is beating up on the president,” he said. “But only a few of us know what it’s like to be up on that stage. It’s not easy. I hope everyone cuts him a little slack. He’ll be all right.”

Klain took the debate particularly hard and offered to resign, a gesture Obama quickly and properly refused, and when the debate group reconvened with Obama the following week, the president was shouldering all the blame. “I know everyone in this room feels a responsibility,” he said. “But this one was on me.” He promised to be ready for the next encounter, a town hall–style debate, now just one week away.

As we flew to Williamsburg, Virginia, for our second debate camp, I sensed that the president had genuinely reengaged. Biden had done well in his debate with Paul Ryan. But Obama understood that only he could put to rest any lingering doubts brought on by Denver. Our early prep sessions were encouraging, with Obama performing well in the first night’s run-through.

It sure felt as if we were in a better place and that, with continued practice and improvement, he’d be ready in three days’ time. However, the next night, when Kerry returned to the attack, the wheels came off. Once again Obama allowed himself to be baited into long explanations rather than delivering prescribed lines and messages that would resonate with the audience. He dealt peevishly with Kerry’s interruptions, whining that the moderator needed to intervene. Benenson, Plouffe, and I watched the mock debate on a closed-circuit feed in a nearby room so that we could share our thoughts openly. “Holy shit,” Benenson said, succinctly capturing our collective sentiment over this recurring nightmare.

Klain didn’t even bother having Obama sit through the usual critique. Where would we even begin? Instead, when Obama retired, we held a long brainstorming session to figure out how, in the day we had left, we were going to pull the president back from the abyss. “We need an intervention,” someone suggested.

The next morning, a small group of us—Klain, Plouffe, chief of staff Jack Lew, and I—sat down with the president to give him our honest assessment. “You’re treating this like it’s all on the level,” I said. “It’s not a trial or even a real debate. This is a performance. Romney understood that. He was delivering lines. You were answering questions. I know it’s a galling process, but it is what it is. It’s part of the deal. You’ve done it before. We need you to do it again.”

The president responded to our candor with a rare and disarming admission. “I know I am not hitting this, guys,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. I was trained to argue facts. When I stop in diners or taverns or factories, I’m talking to people. In speeches, I’m talking values. But my inclination here is to argue fact. And I know that’s not the exercise. I know I am letting folks down.

“I’m just out of sync,” he continued. “It’s like the movie
Tin Cup
. You know, the guy develops a slice and he can’t straighten out his swing. Finally the caddy—I think it was Cheech from Cheech and Chong—says, ‘Put your hat on backward . . . do this . . . do that. And put your tees in your left pocket. Okay,
now
swing.’ And the guy hits a long, perfect drive. He didn’t change anything, really, but his head.

“It’s in my head now, and I need to straighten it out.”

After the others cleared out, I lingered to offer a little encouragement. “We’ll get there,” I said, hoping, but without real conviction, that I was right. I thought about our exchange backstage in Boston before Obama made his national convention debut eight years earlier. “Don’t worry, I
always
make my marks,” he reassured me back then, without betraying a hint of anxiety. Yet he hadn’t made his marks in Denver, and now he was confronting an unfamiliar and unwelcome feeling of vulnerability.

“I’m doubting myself,” Obama conceded. “And I have to get past that.”

When he left, we reconvened the debate team to consider what had become an exercise in triage. Obama did have some terrific moments and great lines during our sessions; our problem was that he couldn’t be counted on to repeat them. Bob Barnett, a prominent Washington attorney we had assigned to prep Kerry as part of our team chimed in with a sensible suggestion, perhaps gleaned from years of experience prepping Hillary. “I don’t know any way to do this but to take the same question over and over until he locks in the same answer.”

When Obama returned for the final day’s exercises, the difference was palpable and positive. Proceeding topic by topic, he worked over and massaged his answers while incorporating our suggestions. He promised this time to deploy his best lines and hit Romney’s “47 percent” slander, and he repeated all the exchanges until everyone was satisfied that he could replicate them on the real stage the next night.

As much as we try to orchestrate these debates, planning well in advance how to address the major themes of the election, news events intrude and can roil the discussion. A month earlier, on September 11, the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans had been killed in a terrorist attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. It quickly became a right-wing meme that the White House had tried to obscure the true nature of the attack and possible Al Qaeda involvement in order to preserve the president’s national security bona fides through Election Day. It was an absurd charge.

From a political perspective, if the Republicans wanted to spend the last two months of the campaign talking about terrorism instead of the economy, I would have welcomed it. After bin Laden’s death and Obama’s aggressive pursuit of Al Qaeda, national security was a huge advantage, and the tragic events in Benghazi weren’t going to change that.

Obama knew and liked the ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and was genuinely offended by the suggestion that the White House would put politics first in the midst of such a tragedy. The allegation was particularly galling because it was Romney’s campaign that had sent a press release trying to capitalize on Benghazi even before we learned the fate of the Americans there.

So as Kerry was channeling Romney bearing in on Benghazi, Obama responded with righteous indignation. “Well, let me first of all talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation. And these aren’t just representatives of the United States, they are my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm’s way. I know these folks and I know their families. So nobody is more concerned about their safety and security than I am. So the suggestion that anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. It’s offensive to me as a president. It’s offensive to me as commander in chief.”

It was powerful, strong, and genuine, and we rehearsed it again and again until the president had it locked in. “If this comes up, it will be a hell of a moment,” I said, confident that it would, given the demand welling up in the right-wing blogosphere. If Romney didn’t take the Benghazi shot, he would be flogged by his base.

By Monday night, our panic had subsided. In twenty-four hours, the improvement had been nothing short of miraculous. This time the president was going in with a game plan. He was armed with answers, clever lines, and useful pivots. It’s possible he even wanted to be there. When I saw him the next morning, Obama removed a piece of paper from his pocket. “When I went back to my room last night,” he said, “I outlined about a dozen questions and exactly how I’m going to deal with them. Figured I would review it on the way up to New York.” What a difference a day made!

A few hours later we were hanging out in our holding rooms at Hofstra University, the debate site, when the president beckoned Plouffe and me. “I just wanted to tell you guys, I feel really good about this,” he said, his handwritten primer sitting on a nearby table along with a golf tee we had presented him that morning as a reminder of Cheech’s advice in
Tin Cup
. “We prepared well. I know what I have to do. We’re going to have a good night.”

Maybe we could have survived another bad night, but after what we had just heard, I told Plouffe that I was pretty sure we wouldn’t find out.

“You don’t get to be president of the United States by accident,” I said. “You get there because when you’re tested, because in those really hard moments, you come up big. Either he will or he won’t. But he always has.”

Our space at Hofstra was cramped, and the tension was palpable. Our contingent was larger than usual, given the high stakes. Even Kerry, who had skipped Denver, was there. Klain paced the room obsessively. Then, a few minutes into the debate, Klain’s once-grim visage morphed into a flushed smile.

Obama looked confident as he rose from his stool and approached the first questioner, a college student who was concerned about entering an uncertain job market. “Number one, I want to build manufacturing jobs in this country again. Now when Governor Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt, I said we’re going to bet on American workers and the American auto industry and it’s come surging back,” the president began. Economic values, message, and contrast all in one answer—exactly as Obama had practiced. Our crew was no longer groaning or slamming laptops in dismay, but rather hooting and hollering in delight.

When Romney responded by touting his five-point plan, the president pounced.

“And Governor Romney’s says he’s got a five-point plan? Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan,” the president said, in an answer he had first surfaced on the plane ride to Williamsburg. “And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money. That’s exactly the philosophy that we’ve seen in place for the last decade. That’s what’s been squeezing middle-class families.”

It was pure message without the stultifying minutiae—and it presaged a complete role reversal. It was the president who was fully engaged and on the offensive against a challenger who suddenly looked defensive and ill at ease. I smelled a rout.

By the time the night was over, Binder’s focus group of fifty-two Des Moines–area swing voters would award us the debate by a whopping thirty points.

There would be a third debate, dedicated to foreign policy, a week later in Boca Raton, Florida. Yet it now lacked any of the high drama of the first two encounters. The president had confronted an obstacle he had never before faced: self-doubt. And as this doubt surfaced, it had spread to the rest of us like an epidemic. When he vanquished it in the second debate, it simply never returned. Our preparations at Camp David for the final debate were blessedly uneventful.

“We’ve figured out how to do this,” Obama said aboard Air Force One as we headed to the final showdown with Romney in Boca Raton. “We didn’t prepare right for the first one, and I just wasn’t in the right psychological place.

“I really felt like I let everyone down. I didn’t go out and fight for them. I’d go to these rallies and see these young volunteers who are working their hearts out, trying to keep their chins up. But I knew I had let them down, and I wasn’t going to let them down again. I think this was just a wake-up call to remind me who and what I’m fighting for.”

And hours before his last encounter with Romney, the race well in hand, Obama reflected on the campaign and the country.

“You know, it’s a crazy country and a crazy process,” he said. “But what we end up with are a Mormon and a black guy who, it turns out, are pretty good reflections of our politics. He represents the America of the 1950s, and believes that the country does well when guys like him are in charge. I represent the America that is.”

 • • • 

Throughout the year and particularly in the final weeks before the election, I was acutely aware that, after three decades in the trenches of American political campaigns, those days for me were coming to an end. Even during the most agonizing, pressure-filled days of the campaign, I was suffused with a sense of good fortune and deeply appreciative of the life I would be leaving behind.