Game Change_ Obama And The Clintons, McCain And Palin, And The Race Of A Lifetime Part 5

Chapter Six.

Barack in a Box.

OBAMA WALKED INTO THE eighth-floor conference room in the downtown Was.h.i.+ngton offices of Perkins Coie, the law firm where his attorney, Bob Bauer, was a partner. It was February 2007 and the room was filled with expectant faces, some familiar and some new to Barack: the team of pollsters, image makers, and consultants a.s.sembled at lightning speed by Axelrod and Plouffe to help Obama reach the White House. They were seated around a big rectangular table-a dozen of them.

"Whoa," joshed Obama, looking around the room. "Am I paying all you people?"

The group was replete with top-flight national political talent, although few of them resided in the capital. They came from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sioux Falls. Almost all were men. Almost all were white. They would play a large role in shaping Obama's destiny over the next twenty months, but it was the first time they'd all been together in the same s.p.a.ce. It would also be the last.

Obama sat down and listened as David Binder, the focus group impresario from San Francisco, ran through the results of the sessions he'd recently conducted in the first four states: Iowa, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Nevada, South Carolina. To the voters he sampled, Obama was an unknown quant.i.ty, Binder said, but their first impressions were positive. When Binder showed them video of Obama, they were struck by his sincerity, his genuineness, his not-the-same-old-same-old-politician-ness. They loved his convention keynote, of course, and were also impressed by the prescience of his 2002 speech in opposition to the Iraq War.

Obama's lead pollster, Joel Benenson, presented the findings of surveys he had done in New Hamps.h.i.+re. And these, too, were encouraging. Obama was only four points behind Hillary in a state in which the Clintons had a reservoir of goodwill, and among voters following the race closely, he actually had a ten-point lead. The numbers showed that, although Hillary was popular with Democrats, there seemed to be a ceiling on her support. The party's antiwar wing was suspicious of her; others questioned whether her duties as First Lady should count as a qualification for the presidency. Most important, voters were looking for change over experience by a two-to-one margin, and even rock-ribbed partisans craved a candidate who could move the country past the bitter polarization of the previous fifteen years-with which Hillary (and Bill) was strongly identified.

Obama took it all in with a mixture of interest and amus.e.m.e.nt, asking questions occasionally but not obsessively. The thing that jumped out at him, however, involved Benenson's a.n.a.lysis of the change-versus-experience dynamic. "I gotta believe Hillary has people just as smart as our team all around her," Obama said. "Aren't they going to realize this and try to take our message?"

"You know, Barack," David Axelrod cut in, "Joel used to work for Mark Penn, so he knows him pretty well."

"I do know him pretty well," Benenson said. "I know his blind spots. He believes that you play to your strengths and not your weaknesses."

Benenson and Axelrod detested Penn; they thought he represented the dark side of the business. To them, he was a money-crazed mercenary, an arrogant p.r.i.c.k, a thug whose chief claim to fame was Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection in which there was no nomination contest. Benenson told Obama that Penn would resist s.h.i.+fting strategy with every fiber of his being. He'll just keep plowing down the same path, the pollster said, because he wants so desperately to be right from the beginning.

Obama nodded, but he was wary of any explanation so rooted in psychobabble. He wondered if they could really count on the obstinacy of Hillary's chief strategist to keep pus.h.i.+ng her down the road to ruin. He found the depth of Axelrod's antipathy for Penn slightly inexplicable-but kind of funny. A few weeks later, when Obama's message maestro called to recount in copious and animated detail the Harvard event at which Penn had tried to undermine Obama's antiwar cred, Barack laughed and said, "You really don't like that guy, do you?"

But Obama had enormous faith in Axelrod's judgment and intuitions-a faith that had served him well since they'd become politically entwined nearly fifteen years earlier. He also had faith in the early-state strategy that Axelrod and Plouffe had laid out before he decided to enter the race. At another meeting that February in Was.h.i.+ngton, this time with a handful of his African American advisers, Obama was confronted with their concerns: some in the press had questioned whether he was "black enough" to appeal to voters of color. In terms of personal ident.i.ty, he said, "this is very painful for me." But the questions would fade as a campaign issue as black voters became better acquainted with him-and besides, the issue was more or less irrelevant to the larger construct of the race.

"Hillary is running on inevitability, and if we win Iowa, that's gone and this is ours," Obama said firmly. "We'll be able to wrap it up in a month."

FOR A NOVICE PRESIDENTIAL candidate who launched his bid with virtually no concrete preparation, Obama's brio and self-a.s.surance at the start were otherworldly. Everything that happened in the campaign's first few weeks fed his sense of confidence. From the announcement speech in Springfield, he flew to Iowa on a chartered Boeing 757 with his wife, daughters, and fifty-seven reporters in tow. Two thousand people showed up for his first town hall meeting, in Cedar Rapids. The next day, seven thousand at the Iowa State University basketball arena in Ames. Two weeks later, twenty thousand at an outdoor rally in Austin, Texas, standing and cheering in the rain.

The crowds confirmed Obama's basic instinct: The country really is hungry for something fresh and new The country really is hungry for something fresh and new, he thought. And he was it.

But it wasn't just the crowds that amped him up. There was also the money. The campaign had set an ambitious goal: $12 million for the first quarter. Penny Pritzker, his national finance chair, had him running flat-out, his schedule crammed with back-to-back fund-raising events, sometimes six or seven in a day, and his call sheet was even denser. Obama didn't relish pleading for cash any more than Clinton did, but he wasn't going to do it half-a.s.sed. He did what he had to-and he was good at it. He knew how to work an elite room, how to come off as, well, the un-Clinton, in front of big donors who were seeking an alternative to the front-runner.

Take Orin Kramer, one of the New York financial t.i.tans Obama had met with in December. Kramer was a Clinton stalwart who'd raised millions of dollars for Gore and Kerry as well. Hillaryland was working him hard, dispatching Penn to call him and make the sale. But when Kramer told Penn that he thought 2008 was going to be a change election, which would pose problems for Hillary, Penn was airily dismissive.

Obama, by contrast, didn't outsource his pitch. He neither dissed the hedge fund kingpin nor sucked up to him. Rather, he talked to him in person, over a meal, and calmly and cogently laid out his theory of the case. And he waxed lyrical about how his operation planned to use the Web in transformational ways for both fund-raising and organizing. The riff on connectivity baffled Kramer, but it enhanced his perception of Obama as an avatar of the future-and by the end of the dinner, he was on board.

Still, Obama was as shocked as anyone when his fund-raising team more than doubled its goal and beat Clinton in the first quarter. The Web had almost nothing to do with it; that electronic goldmine would be tapped only much later. Instead it had everything to do with big-time bundlers such as Kramer and other Wall Street players such as Soros and Robert Wolf, Hollywood types such as Geffen and Edgar Bronfman, African American music barons such as Andre Harrell and L.A. Reid, as well as a new generation of "baby bundlers," who were looking for a seat at the table but believed that in the House of Clinton all the chairs were already taken.

Obama watched as his fund-raising success fueled a virtuous circle: money plus big crowds equaled glowing press, which in turn equaled bigger crowds and even more money. Out in Iowa, Hildebrand and his partner, Paul Tewes, were opening field offices, recruiting precinct captains, training volunteers. In the Chicago headquarters, the campaign hired a pair of Internet whiz kids-one a veteran of Howard Dean's pathbreaking online operation in 2004, the other a technologist who had worked at the travel site Orbitz-to build a state-of-the-art Web presence with links to Facebook and YouTube. Every day, Obama talked to Plouffe, getting updates on the progress they were making on all fronts, and every day, what he heard said one thing to him: This is real. This is real.

Inside Obama's campaign, the reigning metaphor for what they were doing was taking off in a jet airplane while they were still bolting on the wings. And in a few short weeks, Air Obama was soaring in the sky. But attaining such alt.i.tude so fast brought with it great expectations and close scrutiny, which was about to reveal that Obama's weaknesses as a candidate were every bit as great as his strengths.

THE FIRST SIGNS OF trouble came in quick succession in the last week of March. Out in Las Vegas, Obama took part in the campaign's first issue-specific forum-the topic was health care-and watched from the wings as Clinton knocked the cover off the ball. She was sharp, pa.s.sionate, and detailed; the crowd ate it up. Obama, for his part, was only casually prepared, a.s.suming he could wing it. It'll be like when I'm on Charlie Rose It'll be like when I'm on Charlie Rose, he thought. It wasn't. Vague and plat.i.tudinous, mouthing generalities and making excuses for not having his health care plan in order, Obama came across as amateurish. The union audience was both surprised and mildly offended.

Back on the plane afterward, Obama was glum, and seemed slightly intimidated by Clinton. "She was terrific," he said to Gibbs. "I was not."

Four days later, in Was.h.i.+ngton, Obama spoke at the annual legislative conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department, appearing last after all the other Democratic presidential candidates. He was flat, listless, uninspiring; he thought he bombed. Back in his Senate office, he spotted Gibbs and asked him to take a walk. "I don't know what's going on," Obama said as they made their way to the Capitol, where he had to cast a vote. Nothing was clicking, he said. He wasn't finding his rhythm. He couldn't understand why. He felt like he was alone in the middle of the ocean without a raft. Gibbs listened intently, attempted to offer consolation, but nothing he said helped. He thought it was the saddest he'd ever seen Obama.

Thus began a spring and summer of misery for the candidate. He'd been warned how hard this was going to be, but he had silently scoffed. And for the first few weeks, it hadn't been hard at all-it had been a rush. But now the initial adrenaline surge was wearing off and Obama was facing the wretchedness of the reality he'd signed up for. It wasn't long before Axelrod and Plouffe wondered if he was nurturing second thoughts about his decision to run.

The schedule was killing him. The fatigue was all-consuming. The events piled up on top of one another, making his temples ache. He tried not to b.i.t.c.h and moan too much, except when it got out of hand-meaning almost every day. Once, at five in the afternoon on the bus in Iowa, he turned to his body guy, Reggie Love, and asked, "How many more things do I have today?" Reggie: "Three." Barack: "Are you kidding me?" "Are you kidding me?"What made it all the worse was the books-always with the books, these people desperate for his signature. So many nights on the trail, after his final event of the day, with Obama wanting nothing more than to get back to his hotel and hit the sheets, he'd find them stacked up in the holding room: fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty copies of Audacity Audacity or or Dreams Dreams, awaiting his John Hanc.o.c.k. He'd look at the pile, shake his head, then wearily pick up his pen. Obamamania had its costs. This was one of them.

The loss of privacy, of control over his life, was another. On that Austin trip back in February, he was mobbed at the airport when he tried to catch a Southwest flight to Chicago; he could no longer fly commercial. He often joked ruefully that his life was now controlled by the twenty-two-year-olds who planned his days. Then there was the Secret Service, which began watching over him in May. Man, how he chafed at that. Not long after his protection started, he returned to Chicago from New Orleans looking forward to a haircut. The Service guys said, Sure, but we've got to case the place first. "Why can't I just go to my barber?" Obama groaned. "I've been going to him for years!" (The staff, on the other hand, adored the Service. They helped keep the perennially late Obama on schedule; he didn't like to make the agents wait around for him.) Most of all, he missed his girls, all three of them. Every time they came out on the trail with him, he was a different man. He laughed, for one thing. Smiled, for another. Didn't gripe so much. But they were hardly ever there; Mich.e.l.le saw to that. She told the staff she would be on the road only one day a week, and that was that. She a.s.sented to abbreviated day trips to Iowa sometimes-but she always insisted on being back by nightfall, and she was rarely with Barack. The debates made her queasy, so she stayed away from all but one of them. (And at that one, she turned to Jarrett and said, "Do you think anyone would notice if we leave in the middle?") In the late spring, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Rouse took Obama out to dinner in D.C. He had been complaining in front of the staff more than usual, so they decided to give him a chance to vent. A few minutes into the meal, Obama caught the drift and said, "Okay, is this an intervention?"

None of it would've been so bad if he had been performing up to snuff. But he wasn't, and he knew it, and it pained him. Of all the things he'd questioned when he was mulling the race, the one he never doubted was that he would be terrific on the hustings. His whole life he had been a star, able to switch on the juice at a moment's notice, impressive, charming, and memorable. Feelings of inadequacy had therefore never been a big part of the Obama psychic profile. But when it came to playing the role of a presidential candidate, he was experiencing them all the time.

At town hall meetings, he tried to treat voters with respect by giving them adult, sound-bite-free answers, but he was coming across as professorial and pedantic, taking ten minutes to respond to the simplest queries. The memory of his convention keynote had his audiences antic.i.p.ating a kind of orgiastic uplift-"People are expecting to come crying out of every speech I give," he told Gibbs-that was impossible for him to provide day after day. After he'd riffed for months on his announcement address, his stump speech was flabby and overlong. He could feel that he wasn't connecting.

The debates were even worse-in no small part because he was suffering mightily by comparison to Clinton, who was just so much better than he or anyone around him had ever imagined she would be: always on message, always in control, her mastery of bullet points and talking points solid, her style an admixture of unexpected breeziness and earnest sapience. And he had a bad habit of handing Hillary a stick with which to thump him. At the first Democratic debate that April, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, NBC's Brian Williams asked Obama how he would change the nation's military stance if America were hit again with two simultaneous attacks by Al Qaeda. "Well, the first thing we'd have to do is make sure that we've got an effective emergency response," Obama replied, slowly winding his way to "potentially" taking "some action to dismantle that network." Clinton's answer mentioned retaliation within ten seconds; in the debate spin room later, her team pounded on Obama for his limp-wristedness.

Obama had a lot to say and wasn't good at spitting it out quickly or concisely, tending to back into his responses. Rather than sell one idea well, he tried to squeeze in as many points as possible. "I have sixty seconds," he said in prep. "How much do you guys think I can get into sixty seconds?"

When Axelrod showed him video of the debates, he grimaced. It's worse than I thought It's worse than I thought ran through his mind. He pledged to do better. "I need to figure out how to get this right," he said. But as the debates went along and he continued to founder, Obama's frustration mounted. He started showing up late for prep sessions or cutting them short. Or spending the whole time on his BlackBerry. Or finding excuses to avoid them altogether. "You guys don't have this together," he said at one mildly disorganized run-through. "I'm going to take a nap." ran through his mind. He pledged to do better. "I need to figure out how to get this right," he said. But as the debates went along and he continued to founder, Obama's frustration mounted. He started showing up late for prep sessions or cutting them short. Or spending the whole time on his BlackBerry. Or finding excuses to avoid them altogether. "You guys don't have this together," he said at one mildly disorganized run-through. "I'm going to take a nap."

The superficial way the debates were scored by the press corps annoyed him no end. At the CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, South Carolina, that summer, a questioner asked if Obama would "be willing to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?" Obama didn't flinch: "I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them-which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration-is ridiculous."

Hillary's post-debate spinners called his answer irresponsible and jejune. Even some of Obama's own team thought he should walk it back.

The next morning, Obama made a surprise appearance on a staff conference call and declared: I want to be clear. I said what I meant and I believe it. We should go on offense here, because what Hillary is saying is she wants to do what Bush and Cheney do. It's the sort of typical Was.h.i.+ngton groupthink that I hate.

Obama believed that he was right on the substance and on the politics. But the conventional-wisdom mongers in the media bludgeoned him for weeks, swallowing the Clinton line, slamming him for dropping the ball again on a national security question.

The debates fed a narrative that was becoming pervasive in the press: Edwards was running on bold ideas (universal health care, a new war on poverty); Hillary was the mistress of the nitty-gritty; and Obama was a lightweight, all sizzle and no steak. This is what the media did-it put every candidate in a neat little box and slapped a pithy label on it. Obama understood. But for the past three years, as the press fawned over him, the box he was stuffed into bore a succession of tags that were flattering and advantageous. New. Fresh. Inspiring. Post-racial. He'd never had a negative run of press on the national level, and therefore never developed the kind of thick protective hide that repelled the media's slings and arrows.

What made it worse was that Obama knew he'd helped build this box himself; that he'd left himself open to, and even invited, the charges of insubstantiality that were bedeviling him. He had signed on to the strategy of stressing thematics over specifics, on the grounds that waging a battle with Clinton on the policy margins would pay paltry dividends. But now he was having his doubts.

He wanted to be seen as substantive. He was was substantive. And not being viewed that way was hurting his chances, he thought. I've spent my whole life caring about policy, he told his staff. I want to have new ideas, I want them to be specific. I want to make sure that no one can say they're not specific enough. Obama had imagined at the outset of the campaign that he would set aside hours to consult with world-cla.s.s experts, delving into the issues, devising innovative solutions. He kept asking for more time to do that, but his schedule was too jam-packed with fund-raisers and campaign events. All he was doing was reading memos from his policy shop-and getting pummeled by the press for being a cipher. substantive. And not being viewed that way was hurting his chances, he thought. I've spent my whole life caring about policy, he told his staff. I want to have new ideas, I want them to be specific. I want to make sure that no one can say they're not specific enough. Obama had imagined at the outset of the campaign that he would set aside hours to consult with world-cla.s.s experts, delving into the issues, devising innovative solutions. He kept asking for more time to do that, but his schedule was too jam-packed with fund-raisers and campaign events. All he was doing was reading memos from his policy shop-and getting pummeled by the press for being a cipher.

The media was in his head on this topic, for sure, but there were other voices in there, too, and other causes for concern. Mich.e.l.le was worried about the national polls: Why aren't we moving? she kept asking. She feared that the campaign, with its monomania about Iowa, was failing to build a broad base of support across the map. It struck her that the campaign's post-racial demeanor, while politically expedient, was neglecting one of the central motivations that had driven Barack to enter the race. More than anything, it bothered her that her husband was losing-and that he seemed disconsolate in the bargain.

Mich.e.l.le's disgruntlement was echoed in Obama's ears by another source-one from outside the bubble that enveloped him. For months, he had been swapping emails with his former law school professor Chris Edley, sharing his myriad dissatisfactions with how things were going. Edley had worked in the Carter and Clinton White Houses and been issues director on the Dukakis presidential campaign. Even from the remove of the deans.h.i.+p of Berkeley's law school, Edley had strong views about what caused presidential campaigns to fail. And he was stoking Obama's fear that his bid was headed in that direction.

The candidate decided it was time to stage an intervention of his own.

IN MID-JULY, OBAMA LET Plouffe know he wanted to set aside a few hours for a meeting of the senior staff. Everyone was aware that Obama wasn't happy, so they braced for an unpleasant evening. At 7:30 on the appointed night, the extended Obama brain trust-Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs, Hildebrand, Mastromonaco, Pritzker, Jarrett, Nesbitt, communications aide Dan Pfeiffer, a few others, and Mich.e.l.le-convened at Jarrett's Chicago apartment, where they were joined by Edley. To everyone in the room besides the candidate's wife, the dean was a stranger.

Obama had invited Edley to the meeting without giving him any instructions as to what his input should be. It was a halfway-to-Iowa review, Obama said, and that was all. Now Edley was sitting there between Mich.e.l.le and Jarrett, directly opposite Obama, with everyone crowded around the giant oval table in Jarrett's dining room. After listening to the candidate's opening remarks-We've come a long way, we have a long way to go, there are things we need to do better-the dean unloaded.

You people, Edley said, referring to Mastromonaco, the scheduler, and Julianna Smoot, the chief fund-raiser, are being too relentless, too greedy for Barack's time. He's being overprogrammed, overscheduled, treated like a standard-issue candidate-when nothing could be further from the truth.

"This is a guy who likes to think, he likes to write, he likes to talk with experts," Edley said. "You folks have got to recognize what he's in this for. He's in this because he wants to make contributions in terms of public policy ideas, and you've got to make time for him to do that."

Edley wasn't speaking calmly. He was all riled up. He believed that the campaign was putting at risk the whole point of Obama's candidacy. And he was certain that Obama felt the same, because Obama had told him so. "With all due respect to all you here," he said, nodding toward Axelrod and Plouffe, "you should just get over yourselves and do what the candidate wants."

Around the table, the members of Team Obama either stared straight down or shot daggers at Edley. Quietly, the room seethed. With all due respect? With all due respect? thought Gibbs. thought Gibbs. Who the h.e.l.l are you to come in here and tell us "with all due respect"? Who the h.e.l.l are you to come in here and tell us "with all due respect"?

But Edley was far from done. The policy work at the campaign was perfunctory, he said. Just laundry lists of mediocre stuff. They needed to develop some conceptually ambitious, "frame-breaking" proposals, rooted in Obama's personality and values, and then integrate those ideas thoroughly into his message, Edley said.

Axelrod, bristling with resentment, spoke up in defense of the campaign. "We do spend time with him on policy," he protested, citing a focus group they had recently conducted in Michigan. Edley's jaw nearly hit the table. "A focus group isn't policy making," he said derisively.

Edley raised the question of const.i.tuency politics, suggesting that the Obama team's obsessive focus on Iowa was causing them to pay too little attention to minorities and that the campaign was blowing off women because of Clinton's strength among female voters-both dangerous games politically that could create problems long term.

Obama wasn't wavering on the early-state strategy and its focus on Iowa, though. "I think it's the right strategy," he said. "I think it's the only only strategy, and I don't think we should change it." But he was bothered by Clinton's lead with black voters. "They don't want to be taken for granted," Obama said, noting that he didn't appreciate the carping of the African American leaders.h.i.+p, with its claims that he was trying to downplay his blackness. "And I don't think we can concede women to Clinton, even though she's going to win the majority of them," he added. strategy, and I don't think we should change it." But he was bothered by Clinton's lead with black voters. "They don't want to be taken for granted," Obama said, noting that he didn't appreciate the carping of the African American leaders.h.i.+p, with its claims that he was trying to downplay his blackness. "And I don't think we can concede women to Clinton, even though she's going to win the majority of them," he added.

The meeting lasted for more than three hours, covering many topics. But it was the impression left by Edley that lingered. In the eyes of the Obama staff-and especially Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs-his words were counterproductive. They fueled Obama's fixation on policy, which the political professionals considered a distraction from the real tasks at hand. And Edley's demeanor was worse than that. The Obamans viewed him as an obnoxious a.s.s and prayed they'd never see his face again.

But not everyone in the room shared that a.s.sessment (even though, looking back on it later, Edley himself would acknowledge his insufferableness). All throughout his comments, Mich.e.l.le and Jarrett were conspicuously nodding their heads. Obama's campaign, from the start, had been controlled with an iron grip by the troika of Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs-"the suits," as they were nicknamed internally by those wary of their degree of power. Over the previous few months, as Obama's distress grew, Mich.e.l.le and Valerie had come to see the suits as forming a circle around Barack that was too tight and too resistant to dissenting opinions for his own good. They were thrilled to have an outsider at the table and avidly absorbed what Edley was saying. He's channeling Barack He's channeling Barack, thought Jarrett.

Obama's own feelings about the Edley intercession were opaque, however-in the moment, at least. He neither supported his friend's fiercest contentions nor defended Axelrod and Plouffe when Edley laid into them. He refused to show his hand even privately to the dean, who never heard a word from Obama about the meeting. But after Edley returned to Berkeley, he did hear from Jarrett.

You were terrific, she told him-fiery and provocative, the perfect foil.

What did Barack think? Edley asked.

You played exactly the role he wanted you to play, she said.

A MONTH LATER, at the end of August, the Obamas made their usual summer sojourn to Martha's Vineyard. Nothing about Barack's political fortunes had brightened in the time since the Edley meeting. If anything, they had darkened. A few weeks earlier, he had given a speech advocating military strikes under certain circ.u.mstances against terrorist targets in Pakistan-and been whacked again for an alleged gaffe by the Clinton campaign and the foreign-policy panjandrums. The national polls were stuck stubbornly in place: Obama trailed Clinton by some twenty points. And the situation in be-all and end-all Iowa was hardly cheerier. For all the time and money the campaign had poured into the state, Obama had put no distance between himself and Hillary or Edwards.

Among Obama's donors, sturm und drang was the order of the day. Having sunk more than $50 million into Obama, they were jittery about the possibility that they had thrown good money after a bad candidate. Frantic calls and emails were flooding in to Pritzker, complaining about Obama, his advisers, and their strategy, offering theories on how to fix all three-the loudest of which was that Obama needed to go negative on Clinton.

Much of Was.h.i.+ngton agreed. Chuck Schumer was up in arms, telling fellow senators that Obama needed to take a two-by-four to Hillary, prophesying that Barack's reluctance to do so indicated that he wasn't tough enough to win. Claire McCaskill was serving as a backchannel to Obama for the whispering conspirators, those Democratic senators privately rooting for him but afraid to cross the Clintons. Tell Barack this, they would say to her, and then advise that he take out his truncheon. He has to go after her, they urged. There's so much there. He has to do to her now what the Republicans will do to her in the fall, or at least remind Democrats what's in store for us if she wins the nomination.

McCaskill dutifully took the messages to Obama. "It won't work," he said. "It's not what this campaign is." And besides, Obama added, "We're gonna win Iowa."

"You know, Barack," McCaskill replied, "every candidate running for president says they're going to win Iowa."

I know, said Obama. A long pause. "We're gonna win Iowa."

Up on the Vineyard, though, as he and his family luxuriated in eight days of bike rides and beachcombing at a house in Oak Bluffs with Jarrett, the Nesbitts, and the family of another close friend from Chicago, Eric Whitaker, Obama brooded and pondered. He still had faith in his strategy, his team, and himself. But he knew the time was fast approaching in which his campaign would have to step up its game-and more to the point, he he would have to step up his game. His staff might have thought the Edley meeting was just a pa.s.sive-aggressive tactic on Obama's part, a way for him to let off steam by proxy. But for Obama, it was the moment when he began to take control of his campaign. would have to step up his game. His staff might have thought the Edley meeting was just a pa.s.sive-aggressive tactic on Obama's part, a way for him to let off steam by proxy. But for Obama, it was the moment when he began to take control of his campaign.

Obama had long talks on the Vineyard with Jarrett and Rouse (who happened to be vacationing there, too) about how the operation had to change. He trusted Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs, and preferred to deal with as few people as possible-the campaign may have been pus.h.i.+ng bottom-up democracy, but he was a top-down guy. Yet Obama had come to agree with Mich.e.l.le and Jarrett that the innermost circle needed to be broadened beyond the suits. He asked Rouse, who was still living in Was.h.i.+ngton, to start commuting to Chicago so he could have a more active hand at headquarters. And he asked Jarrett, whose role had been informal until then, to join the campaign full time.

Bringing Valerie on board was no small thing. Her relations.h.i.+p with both Barack and Mich.e.l.le transcended politics. They had all known one another since 1991, when Jarrett was working as Richie Daley's deputy chief of staff and Mich.e.l.le Robinson presented herself for a job. The bond the women struck was nearly instantaneous and soon extended to Mich.e.l.le's fiance. Barack now thought of Jarrett almost as a sibling. He had faith in her judgment, her intuitions, and her motives. Her desire to see him win was overwhelming, but she cared just as much about his remaining true to himself.

Obama returned to the mainland to discover an unwelcome development. Just as he'd feared in February, Clinton was trying to encroach on his message. Over Labor Day weekend, Hillary and Bill had traveled together to New Hamps.h.i.+re and Iowa, rolling out a brand-new slogan for her campaign-"The Change We Need." Up in Concord, on a stage set bearing a placard that read "Change + Experience," Hillary intoned, "Some people think you should have to choose between change and experience. Well, with me, you don't have to choose." Softening her stance as a partisan warrior, she touted her record in the Senate as a bipartisan pragmatist. Out in Des Moines she told audiences that her candidacy, too, was a history-making proposition, a chance to nominate a woman and thus break "the last and biggest gla.s.s ceiling."

The arrival of October brought more bad news: the ABC News/ Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post poll that put Obama thirty-three points behind Clinton nationally, followed by a poll that put Obama thirty-three points behind Clinton nationally, followed by a Des Moines Register Des Moines Register poll that had him third in Iowa, seven points behind Hillary and one behind Edwards. poll that had him third in Iowa, seven points behind Hillary and one behind Edwards.

The day the Register Register poll appeared, in early October, Obama's national finance committee, comprising a couple hundred of the campaign's richest fund-raisers, was gathered in Des Moines-and now in something close to open panic. Obama arrived that unseasonably cold Sunday afternoon and spoke to the bundlers, calming their nerves. But many were left still wondering if it was too late to stop Hillary, especially if Obama was unwilling to kneecap her. poll appeared, in early October, Obama's national finance committee, comprising a couple hundred of the campaign's richest fund-raisers, was gathered in Des Moines-and now in something close to open panic. Obama arrived that unseasonably cold Sunday afternoon and spoke to the bundlers, calming their nerves. But many were left still wondering if it was too late to stop Hillary, especially if Obama was unwilling to kneecap her.

Obama wondered, too. The Iowa homestretch was drawing near, and he believed that on his present trajectory, he was headed for a respectable second place. And I ain't running And I ain't running, he thought, to be a respectable second. to be a respectable second. He needed a plan to change the dynamic. He needed a plan to change the game. He needed a plan to change the dynamic. He needed a plan to change the game.

FOUR DAYS AFTER THE finance committee meeting, Obama and his brain trust convened in the conference room of a law firm in downtown Chicago. The candidate opened the proceedings with a blunt and bracing statement: "I think everybody around the table would admit that we're losing right now."

I'm not gonna yell, Obama went on. Look, everybody here has worked extremely hard and done a very good job. No question about that. And we're in a position to win this thing, but the fact is, right now we are losing. We've got ninety days to turn this around, and we're going to figure out in this room what we have to do to make sure we win. We're all on the same team here. Everybody's got to check their egos at the door. But we've got to be honest about where we're falling short and what we need to do to succeed.

Obama raised an issue that had been bothering him for months: the change-versus-experience dichotomy. He'd always grasped the rationale behind homing in on transformation. He'd accepted, though not eagerly, the campaign's decision to make its slogan "Change We Can Believe In." (It struck him as too pat, but he preferred it to the other option on the table, "United We Stand," which he rejected as sounding "like an airline slogan.") But Obama was reluctant simply to cede experience to Hillary. Being a state senator wasn't nothing, he said. He had a real record, had pa.s.sed legislation-some of it important, such as ethics and death penalty reform-in Springfield. He had more elected experience than Clinton, as a matter of fact.

Like Obama, the pollsters in the room had been grappling with the issue all year long. Time and again they would hear in their focus groups expressions of unease about Obama's greenness and his barren resume. "He's too new," people would say. "Why doesn't he wait four years?" "Why doesn't he just take the vice presidency?" "He doesn't know about foreign policy."

But what was true when Obama's advisers met back in February was still true in October. Voters wanted change over experience by about a two-to-one margin. "Change is still the way to go," Benenson said. "Believe in the message. It's still right on."

The problem now, Benenson observed, was that the campaign's polling showed Clinton making inroads with her new change-centric pitch. And though the national numbers may have been meaningless, she seemed to be gaining ground in Iowa. Everyone in the room understood from day one that they had to beat her there. The imperative was clear: The campaign had to prevent Hillary from swiping the mantle of change from Obama.

Obama called on Axelrod to present a memo he'd prepared for the meeting. There are three pillars to the kind of change voters want, Axelrod reminded them. They're looking for a president who can bring the country together, who can reach beyond partisans.h.i.+p, and who'll be tough on special interests. Obama could embody that sort of change, but Hillary could not, Axelrod said. In fact, she could be painted as the embodiment of everything Americans despised about the Was.h.i.+ngton status quo. As Larry Grisolano, another Obama strategist, often put it, If Clinton wanted to tout her experience, they had to make her pay pay for her experience. for her experience.

Axelrod was a master of the dark arts of negative campaigning. (The first major profile of him, twenty years earlier in Chicago Magazine Chicago Magazine, was t.i.tled "Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod.") Having worked on Clinton's Senate race in 2000, Axelrod had seen the background research that exposed her vulnerabilities: the apprehension among voters who thought of her as calculating, triangulating, slippery with the truth. Obama and Axelrod had agreed all along about Clinton fatigue, that it was bubbling out there, just below the surface of her popularity-and her husband's. The trick would be to incite it subtly, by implication and inference. To revive the voters' worst memories of the Clinton years without so much as mentioning her name. To eviscerate her without damaging Obama's reputation as an exponent of clean politics. To go negative, in other words, without seeming nasty.

We will do this, Obama said, but he was adamant that certain ethical boundaries not be breached. A few months earlier, his campaign's opposition research department had prepared a memo linking Clinton's campaign contributions from Indian Americans to her husband's India-related investments and speaking fees. The headline on the doc.u.ment referred to her as "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)." When the memo came out, Obama was angrier at his team than he'd been at any time during the campaign.

Now he reemphasized that such behavior was verboten. I told everybody at the start of this, he said, that I would not change who I am in this campaign. That I will come out the other side the same person I was on the way in. Don't any of you do anything that's going to embarra.s.s me or make people think that I've changed who I am in order to win. If I ever catch anyone digging into the Clintons' personal lives, you will be fired. But I'm perfectly happy having a debate with her; I need to have a debate with her about who can actually change Was.h.i.+ngton, and that's the debate we should have.

The plan was now set. The following month, Obama would be appearing with all the other candidates at the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines. That would be the perfect place to unfurl the new strategy in earnest. There was precedent for the event providing a stage for a campaign relaunch. Gore and Kerry had come into the J-J on the ropes in Iowa and turned in revivifying performances. The campaign would pull out all the stops to turn the event into a display of its organizing muscle. And Obama would devote the time required to crafting a knockout address-an idea that instantly appealed to him. He thought of himself as a big-game player, the kind of guy who rose to the occasion. He liked the pressure, he loved the spotlight, he reveled in the intensity of the moment. If the solution to a political problem was a speech, hoo boy, he was good to go.

But the J-J was in November, more than a month away, too long to let the new approach to the Clintons sit dormant. Obama had been agitating to spend some more time with national reporters-and this seemed the moment to strike. He would accept a long-standing interview request from The New York Times The New York Times as a way of setting up the next debate in Philadelphia at the end of October. Obama's communications wizards had determined that the media narrative that emerged from each debate was dictated by the first two questions and answers. And the easiest way to influence those questions in Philly was to have Obama take a few pokes at Hillary in the as a way of setting up the next debate in Philadelphia at the end of October. Obama's communications wizards had determined that the media narrative that emerged from each debate was dictated by the first two questions and answers. And the easiest way to influence those questions in Philly was to have Obama take a few pokes at Hillary in the Times Times a day or two beforehand; such catnip would be impossible for the moderators to resist. a day or two beforehand; such catnip would be impossible for the moderators to resist.

As Obama rose to leave the meeting, he brimmed with confidence again. "We're going to win this," he said brightly. All year long, he had been dancing around Clinton. Now he was ready to engage. He would bring many hidden advantages to this fight, not least the receptivity of the press to an anti-Clinton message. But he would also have one thing on his side that was plain for everyone to see: an ally of convenience whose determination to sink Hillary was every bit as great as, and even more rabid than, his own.

Chapter Seven.

"They Looooove Me!"

JOHN EDWARDS NEVER EXPECTED to be the third wheel in the 2008 campaign. The race was going to be Hillary versus him. That was how he saw it from the start. She would be the front-runner, of course; he knew that. He wasn't naive. But as sure as night follows day, there would be an alternative, an anti-Hillary, and he would be it. And once he had her one-on-one, he was certain that he could take her. He thought she (and her husband) represented the arrogance wrought by power. He believed she lacked the common touch, had no feel for regular people, working people-which, needless to say, he possessed in abundance. He mocked Hillary in meetings with his advisers: "There's Main Street's candidate!" Obama he didn't give all that much thought to. At least, not at the start.

Edwards came off the blocks much earlier than the other two, and his decision to run was free of the ambivalence they felt-the weighing of pros and cons, the doubts, the dark nights of the soul. Before the dust had settled on 2004, he was planning for 2008. On the day that Edwards and John Kerry conceded defeat to Bush and d.i.c.k Cheney, he discovered that his wife, Elizabeth, had breast cancer; a few days after that, he was on the phone with his pollster and close friend Harrison Hickman, gaming out the race four years hence, talking about tailoring his message to take on Clinton from the left. In early December, Edwards called his political team over to his place in Georgetown-the six-bedroom row house on P Street that he and Elizabeth had bought two years earlier for $3.8 million-to discuss how to spend the next couple of years in the optimal fas.h.i.+on.

Having given up his Senate seat to run for president, Edwards was unemployed. He needed to beef up his foreign-policy credentials, so he would make some trips abroad. He would court labor, schmooze donors, and nurture his connection to Iowa, where he had finished a surprising second in the 2004 caucuses. He also said he wanted to set up some kind of antipoverty nonprofit. The plight of the poor wasn't a slam-dunk political winner, but Edwards declared that it was something he cared about, and his advisers knew it was no bad thing for a candidate to embrace what moved him. They also knew it would rhyme with the neo-populist stance he would strike in his challenge to Clinton.

The pathway was clear to Edwards: beat Clinton in Iowa, survive New Hamps.h.i.+re, then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he carried in 2004. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, "I am going going to be the next president of the United States." Some of them dismissed his outsize confidence as pro forma, but others took it as a sign of something deeper-a burgeoning megalomania. to be the next president of the United States." Some of them dismissed his outsize confidence as pro forma, but others took it as a sign of something deeper-a burgeoning megalomania.

He was not the same guy who'd come out of nowhere and beaten the inc.u.mbent Republican, Lauch Faircloth, to become the junior senator from North Carolina in 1998. Back then, everyone who encountered him was struck by how down-to-earth he seemed. He had fewer airs about him than most other wealthy trial lawyers, let alone most senators. He was the son of a textile mill worker, the first in his family to attend college, optimistic, cheerful, eager, and idealistic. The first time he met Hickman, the pollster asked Edwards, as he did every candidate whom he was considering working for, what one word his intimates would use to describe him. Most politicians said impatient, aggressive, or ambitious. Stretching the word with his southern drawl, Edwards said, "Niiiiice." And it was true-disarmingly so.

Some of his friends started noticing a change after he was nearly chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate in 2000: the sudden interest in superficial stuff to which he'd been oblivious before, from the labels on his clothes to the size of his entourage. But the real transformation occurred during the 2004 race. When Edwards caught fire in late 2003, he started getting a rush from the larger crowds, and lost interest in smaller rooms or individual meetings. "Why am I doing this trip? There's no big event," he griped to his schedulers. After emerging as Kerry's main challenger, he waged the most open, relentless campaign to get on the ticket of any potential VP in the modern era. That success swelled his head, and his experience during the general election seemed to inflate it to the point of bursting. He reveled in being inside the bubble: the Secret Service, the chartered jet, the press pack following him around, the swarm of factotums catering to his every whim. And the crowds! The ovations! The adoration! He ate it up. In the old days, when his aides asked how a rally had gone, he would roll his eyes and self-mockingly say, "Oh, they love love me." Now he would bound down from the stage beaming and exclaim, without the slightest shred of irony, "They looooove me!" me." Now he would bound down from the stage beaming and exclaim, without the slightest shred of irony, "They looooove me!"

The loss on Election Day and Elizabeth's diagnosis set him back on his heels. For a few months, he was closer to his old self again, but soon enough, what one of his aides called "the ego monster" returned. Once, Edwards had been warm and considerate with his staffers; now he was disdainful, ignoring them, dismissing their ideas, demanding that they perform the most menial of tasks on his behalf. He made his schedulers find out what movies were available on different flights so he could decide which ones to take. He would fly only first cla.s.s or on private planes he cadged from donors. At the same time, he started blowing off his most generous contributors, failing to return their phone calls and refusing to see them.

As Edwards's mistreatment of his staff and supporters got worse through 2005, some of the people closest to him interceded, trying to set him straight. "You can't talk to people that way," Hickman scolded him after one off-putting display. You didn't get any smarter just because you were on the national ticket, he went on. People are attracted to the nice John Edwards, and for a lot of them, you're not that John Edwards anymore.

Edwards bridled at the criticism, disputing the idea that solicitousness was required to win. "Kerry didn't do any of that and he got nominated," Edwards observed. Other times, he reacted with anger. "I don't know where that's coming from," he said to Hickman at one point. "You have to consider the source," Edwards rationalized. "A lot of these people are hangers-on."