Double Down: Game Change 2012 (61 page)

Yet Clinton also saw another opportunity at hand—to help himself as well as Obama. In 2008, Clinton’s outsize role in his wife’s campaign had been controversial, at times destructive. In the eyes of countless liberals and
African Americans, that race had left him a diminished figure. Many of Clinton’s deficiencies then derived directly from the way he had spent his time after leaving the White House: at a remove from politics, out of the new-media loop, surrounded by sycophants, rich people, and rich sycophants. In other words, Nolan Ryan had lost his fastball.

But in the years since then, largely unnoticed, Clinton had been gradually regaining his form. He had campaigned all over the place for Democrats in the midterms. Stepped up his reading on economics and policy. Studied Romney and the Republicans closely. And although, as “sterling” attested, Clinton was still rusty, he could feel his mechanics coming back, his arm strength building. Charlotte would be his chance to show the world that he could still bring the heater.

Though Axelrod was in communication with Clinton, he was aware that Chicago would have no input in the speech—which made him and his colleagues queasy, especially after Eastwood. Two longtime Clinton adjutants now serving Obama, Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling, had been assigned to mediate between the realms. As convention week dawned in Charlotte, Axelrod asked tentatively, Um, when do you think we might see a draft?

Reed laughed and reminded Axelrod of a home truth: Clintonworld had always run on a just-in-time business model. Why would it be any different now?

•   •   •

T
HE QUEEN CITY CONVOCATION
opened on the stifling Tuesday afternoon of September 4. Unlike their Republican counterparts, the Obamans had proactively shortened their bash to three days well in advance. Though the weather forecast was a cause of some anxiety in Charlotte—with Obama scheduled to deliver his Thursday night speech outdoors at Bank of America Stadium—there was none of the panic prevalent in Tampa. And that was just the first of the contrasts between the two events. With few exceptions, what unfolded in Charlotte over the next seventy-two hours was an object lesson in minute planning, well-orchestrated enthusiasm, and strategic coherence.

The opening session at the Time Warner Cable Arena was, in effect, coalition-of-the-ascendant night. Representing Hispanics were San Antonio mayor and keynoter Julian Castro and congressman Xavier Becerra of
California; representing African Americans, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, Charlotte mayor Anthony Foxx, and Cory Booker; representing women, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Illinois congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth, and Lilly Ledbetter. And then there was the main event, Michelle Obama, not only covering those last two constituencies but doing much more besides.

For Michelle, Charlotte was the symbolic terminus of a journey she had started four years earlier in Denver. She had entered that convention a vilified figure and exited it a venerated one. Since then, she had carefully conserved her political capital, resisting the demands of the West Wing during the midterms, wanting to save herself for the moment when she could help Barack the most. In the spring, her husband’s advisers had kicked Hilary Rosen to the curb in order to protect Michelle. All those efforts had paid off. With an approval rating of 66 percent, Michelle was more popular than her husband (or any other Democrat save the Clintons) by a mile.

She had started work on her address early—very early. By mid-August her speechwriter, Sarah Hurwitz, had a solid draft. When Michael Sheehan, the veteran Democratic speech and debate specialist, started doing run-throughs with Michelle more than a week before the convention, she had taken full ownership of her text. Sheehan noted a passage that alluded to voter suppression, a growing cause of concern in the campaign, as a number of states had passed voter identification laws that seemed designed to depress minority participation. “That’s a pretty good section,” he remarked.

“Yes, I want that in there,” Michelle said firmly.

POTUS generally made a point of staying out of FLOTUS’s way when she was preparing oratory. He didn’t try to coach her, didn’t offer tips, didn’t review her remarks in advance. But when Axelrod and Favreau started raving about Michelle’s speech as it was coming together, Obama made an exception and took a look at the text—and was struck by how personal it was, how much it referred to the girls.

“This one’s going to be tough for me to watch,” he told Favreau, “because I’m going to cry.”

When she walked out onstage in a bright-pink silk dress, sleeveless to show off her guns, the ovation that greeted her was earsplitting. For all of Michelle’s popularity and visibility, her stage presence and theatricality still
came as a shock. She was warm and natural, charming and convincing, passionate and pitch-perfect. In the stories she told of her humble roots and of her and Barack’s salad days (“We were so young, so in love, and so in debt”), she presented a counterpoint to the privilege of the Romneys. In her devotion to her kids (“My most important title is still mom in chief”), she rooted herself in centrist, even conservative, values. With the powerful anecdotes she unfurled—about how, when she was a girl, her MS-stricken father would “wake up with a smile, grab his walker, prop himself up against the bathroom sink, and slowly shave and button his uniform”—she went beyond telling to showing. In the testaments to her husband’s character, she both vouched for and humanized him. “Today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways I never could have imagined, I have seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are,” she said. “No, it reveals who you are.”

The verdict of the talking heads was unanimous. Fox News’s Brit Hume: “Extremely impressive woman.” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “The first lady hitting not a home run, but probably a grand slam.” CNN’s Donna Brazile: “Love is in the air.”

The Twittersphere heartily agreed. “I think the president is the second-best speaker in the household,” tweeted one wag. And while that may have been an exaggeration, Michelle had certainly raised the bar—not just for her husband but for the Big Dog, whose speech still wasn’t written.

•   •   •

H
E WAS UP IN
his suite at the Hilton, two blocks away, while Michelle was raising the roof of the hall. He had arrived in Charlotte the night before with his aide, Justin Cooper, and nothing resembling a draft; just a pile of notes, a clump of facts and figures, and a headful of scattered strophes. But by the time Clinton and Cooper hit the hay at around 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday, they had a bunch of words on the page. Later that morning, Clinton summoned an assortment of his oldest and most trusted aides—Reed, Sperling, Paul Begala, former White House chief of staff John Podesta, national security adviser Sandy Berger, and press secretary Joe Lockhart—to help him land the plane.

For everyone in the suite, the scene was at once intoxicatingly and
achingly familiar. All had worked on innumerable high-stakes Clinton speeches in years past, from convention addresses to States of the Union to election-night celebrations, and it had always been just like this: a bunch of guys around a table playing verbal pepper with the boss; Clinton armed with his yellow legal pad and a Sharpie, scratching out stanzas in his nearly illegible lefty scrawl, handing them to an aide to be typed up and printed out, then furiously crossing out what he’d written and scribbling something new. The sense of camaraderie was high.
Man, it’s great to have the band back together,
thought Begala.

That morning at a campaign event in Iowa, Paul Ryan had offered a prediction about Clinton’s speech: “My guess is we will get a great rendition of how good things were in the nineties, but we’re not going to hear much about how things have been the last four years.” Begala, being mischievous but not without purpose, took out his iPad and showed Clinton a news story with Ryan’s quote.

“Well,” Clinton said, chuckling, “I guess he’s gonna be surprised.”

Clinton had a lot of a specific business he wanted to get done in the speech, much of it related to Ryan. At the Republican convention, Romney’s running mate had launched an attack on Obama on Medicare, claiming that the president was raiding the program to the tune of $716 billion in order to fund Obamacare.
Ridiculous,
Clinton thought. The Romney-Ryan plan to turn the other big federal health care program, Medicaid, into a block grant and cut it by a third over the next ten years made Clinton see red. Then there was the matter of welfare reform.

Starting earlier in the summer, Boston had taken an unusual tack by putting footage of Hillary into a negative ad aimed at Obama. (It featured her famous scolding of him from 2008: “Shame on you, Barack Obama!”) In mid-August, the Romneyites played the Clinton card again, this time using Bill. A new ad praised him for signing welfare reform into law in the nineties and claimed that Obama—whose administration had announced it would allow states to apply for waivers from the law’s work requirements—was “gutting” one of Clinton’s most cherished achievements.

Bill was loaded for bear on that topic. But above all he was focused on the elemental question that Axelrod and Plouffe had muffed over the weekend: Is the country better off today than four years ago? According to
Clinton’s former pollster, Stan Greenberg, Chicago was right to be wary about claiming that the economy had improved, since it flew in the face of the experience of voters. In the suite, Begala repeated the point: Stan says that if you tell people things are looking up, they get angry, so you shouldn’t. But Clinton was determined to hurl himself straight into the teeth of that maw.

“I can do this,” he said. “I’m the only one who can.”

To Clinton’s way of thinking, it was demonstrably true that circumstances had improved. And in making the argument, he could go even further, providing context about the scale of the economic calamity Obama had inherited. One line in the speech was written with that objective: “No president could have repaired all of the damage that he found in just four years.”

For more than an hour in the early afternoon, Clinton compulsively wordsmithed that sentence, coming back to it again and again. Finally he settled on a crucial edit, changing the line to invoke his own legacy: “No president—
not me, not any of my predecessors, no one
—could have repaired all of the damage that he found in just four years.” Some of the eminences of Old Clintonia at the table were less than keen on 42 making that key insertion. But Bill was adamant.

That one line is the heart of this deal
, he thought.
The whole ball game.

By then the speech was in decent shape, but thousands of words too long. The Obamans had scheduled Clinton to take the stage at 10:25 p.m. and speak for twenty-five minutes. No one in the campaign or in the suite was addled enough to think he would not run over. Still, in an effort to show the Obamans a draft not quite as long as
Infinite Jest,
42 and his team spent the rest of the afternoon cutting and cutting.

Clinton was hyperconscious that the speech would be flyspecked by the press. Any line that could conceivably be misconstrued as him throwing an elbow at—or demonstrating anything less than total zeal for—Obama was excised. Any line that was too cute or cheap: ditto. A shot at Eastwood was discarded, and so was a joke of Begala’s: “Every time I hear Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say they’re gonna fix Medicare, it reminds me of what the veterinarian said about my old dog Buddy. That was not a fix. It was a cut. And there’s a difference.”

With dusk settling in and Axelrod about to jump out of his skin at having not seen the text, the speech still had a small defect: no ending.

“You know, I could just riff,” Clinton said, and everyone cracked up.

At around 7:00 p.m., the speech was finally dispatched to Axelrod, who looked it over with Plouffe and Favreau. All three were shocked by its brevity, and unsurprised by its quality. They had only a few edits, which Clinton uncomplainingly accepted. Around 9:15, he wandered down the hall of his hotel to a room where a prompter was set up for a run-through. As Clinton rehearsed, Obama called to tell him the speech was great. Clinton said thanks and finished his rehearsal. The speech clocked in at twenty-eight minutes.

Clinton ambled out onto the blue-carpeted platform at 10:40, languidly clapping his hands to the strains of “Don’t Stop,” by Fleetwood Mac—his theme song. The speech he proceeded to unfurl bore a passing resemblance, but no more, to the one he had practiced. The text as prepared for delivery was 3,279 words; as delivered, it was 5,888. Much of what had been cut in the suite, he reinserted on the fly, and simply ad-libbed still more. In full effect was Clinton’s capacity to perform like an aw-shucks country lawyer armed with a public policy Ph.D., boiling down complex arguments to their bare (and highly memorable) minima.

On the divergence in core values between Democrats and Republicans: “We believe that ‘We’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than ‘You’re on your own.’”

On the GOP’s case against Obama: “In Tampa, [it] was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy. It went something like this: ‘We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.’”

On Medicare: “When Congressman Ryan looked into that TV camera and attacked President Obama’s Medicare savings as, quote, ‘the biggest, coldest power play,’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because that $716 billion is exactly, to the dollar, the same amount of Medicare savings that he has in his own budget! You’ve got to give him one thing: it takes some
brass
to attack a guy for doing what you did!”

On welfare: “The claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true. But they keep on running ads
claiming it. You want to know why? Their campaign pollster said, ‘We are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.’” A long pause. “Now, finally I can say: that
is
true.”