Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (31 page)

“Hey, this is Senator Barack Obama,” Barack said brightly. “I’m calling because I’d really like to have your support.”

Obama listened for a moment. “Uh, yeah, sure,” he said, before handing the phone back to Gibbs, shaking his head.

What did she say? Gibbs asked.

“She said she was going into a class and asked if I could call her back later,” Barack said with a weak smile. “Blown off by a seventeen-year-old kid! You know, this business of running for president can be really humbling sometimes.”

To give our troops air cover, we launched our Iowa advertising campaign in late June, a full six months before the caucuses. This is the edge all that early money afforded us: the chance to reach beyond the cloudy filter of the news media and share Barack’s appeal with enough volume to make an impact. Harstad and Binder had done extensive research among potential caucus attendees in Iowa, and it confirmed our basic theory of the case. Barack’s story was foundational; it authenticated his message. So we began with a series of biographical ads.

The first, “Choices,” recalled Barack’s early years, the life choices he had made that would illuminate his values and commitments. As a black-and-white archival montage unfolded, the narrator spoke of Obama’s years as a young community organizer after college “for local churches, working to help families devastated by plant closings.” That one sentence alone was remarkably effective. Iowa was no stranger to plant closings, and Barack’s determination to help displaced workers was compelling. That Obama had done the work through churches would help answer the questions that sometimes arose about his faith.

A second ad burnished Barack’s bipartisan achievements as an Illinois legislator, and featured one of his Republican colleagues, state senator Kirk Dillard. “Senator Obama worked on some of the deepest issues we had and he was successful in a bipartisan way,” Dillard said, as Obama’s substantial legislative achievements scrolled on the screen. Some thought it ludicrous to run a testimonial from a Republican in a caucus dominated by partisan Democrats, but it was a refreshing note to Iowans weary of political disharmony in Washington. The ad worked for us, if not for Dillard, who would narrowly lose GOP primaries for Illinois governor in 2010 and again in 2014, flayed by the Right for his display of bipartisanship.

Taken together, the ads were a tapestry, weaving for Iowans a picture of Obama as an authentic and effective agent of change. These ads were right in my wheelhouse. The creative process of interviewing subjects, writing a narrative, choosing words and images that told a genuine story while conveying a larger meaning—and all in thirty or sixty seconds—remained one of my passions. Energizing as this work was for me, though, these ads were among the last I would personally take from conception to air. As McKinnon had predicted, the pace of the campaign meant that I no longer could indulge myself. Increasingly, I would focus on strategy, and simply review scripts and rough cuts of ads. The production would fall to Jim Margolis, his brilliant and prodigious team, and my gifted partner John Del Cecato.

It was hard to let go and even harder to acknowledge that others might have strengths as ad makers equal to or perhaps greater than my own. Yet with Larry deftly managing the process, it was gratifying to watch as so many talents were melded into a coherent and collegial creative team.

Still, no matter how compelling the ads were or how credible and authentic they felt, they remained ads, and voters would always filter them through that lens. In statewide races, where news coverage of campaigns is limited, ads tend to carry the heaviest weight. In presidential races, which are intensively covered by local and national media, voters watch the candidates day to day, and form their own impressions. Events would either reinforce the ads or undercut them.

 • • • 

We continued pursuing a “lion’s den” strategy of telling hard truths in difficult venues. At Gibbs’s suggestion, Obama unveiled his plan to require significantly higher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks at the Detroit Economic Club, challenging the automakers on their own turf. At an AFL-CIO town hall meeting, he defended his support for charter schools over the vehement objection of the powerful teachers’ unions. In the fall, he would challenge Wall Street in a speech at NASDAQ, where he presciently warned that reckless risk taking and market-rigging schemes threatened the economy. Obama was demonstrating what a different kind of politics meant.

For Barack’s psyche and self-confidence, there were two turning points that summer, provoked by foreign policy issues that pitted him against Hillary and much of the presidential field along with the Washington establishment.

In a CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, South Carolina, a questioner asked Obama if he would be willing to meet, within his first year in office, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. Obama, without hesitation, responded affirmatively.

“I would,” he said. “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 this administration—is ridiculous.”

Sensing an error, Hillary pounced. “I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year,” she said, arguing that foundational diplomatic work would be necessary before any such meetings. “I don’t want to be used for propaganda purposes.”

The Clinton campaign quickly attacked Barack for naïvely having “committed” to a presidential meeting with such tyrannical figures as Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Chavez. Obama hadn’t “committed” anything, I shot back, but said he would be “willing” to talk with our enemies, as Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy had with their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. Clinton, I pointed out, had simply shared Bush’s view that we should stonewall, which had proven to be a losing strategy.

The next morning, as he was leaving Charleston, Obama jumped onto our regular senior staff conference call—such candidate presence was quite rare—grabbing the phone from Gibbs to deliver a message.

“I don’t want anybody backing off, interpreting, or in any way changing the meaning of what I said,” Barack ordered. “You guys hear me? I meant what I said. We’re right on this, and I’m not going to back up one inch.”

Barack was relishing the fight. “You know, this whole exchange really brings into focus why I am running,” he said, reflecting on the brouhaha. “These other folks are smart, capable people. But they’re just going to tinker at the margins. They’re not going to challenge establishment thinking on any of these issues.”

A week later, another clash erupted—one to which I unwittingly contributed. In early July, a story in the
New York Times
had caught my eye. It disclosed that the Bush administration had vetoed a raid in Pakistan in 2005 that could have netted Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and other high-ranking Al Qaeda leaders. Part of the reasoning behind the administration standing down, the
Times
reported, were concerns that such an operation “could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas,” where bin Laden and his lieutenants were thought to be hiding.

I found Ben Rhodes, the young speechwriter who was working on a draft of a foreign policy speech Barack was to give in Washington on August 1. A short, intense man whom I called Rocky (to go with Rhodes), Ben was the elegant writer responsible for much of the transfixing, novelistic
9/11 Commission Report
. “You mean to tell me that if we knew where bin Laden was, we wouldn’t go in and get him for fear of offending the Pakistanis?” I asked.

“That’s been the policy,” Ben replied.

“That’s fucking outrageous,” I said. “One of the reasons Barack had opposed the war in Iraq was that it deflected attention from the mission of dealing with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He should say something about this.” I jotted down a few lines that I wanted to add to the foreign policy speech; Rhodes tweaked them; and Obama, who consistently had argued for a more aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda, agreed with the language.

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges,” he would say in the speech. “But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an Al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

It was a commonsense position, and a pledge on which Obama would eventually make good. Yet the comment touched off a firestorm in Pakistan, where demonstrators burned the American flag and Obama in effigy. The embers, to nobody’s surprise, landed in the middle of the campaign, and in particular during a critical Sunday morning debate from Des Moines.

ABC, which would host the debate, released an Iowa poll a couple of weeks before it showing Barack with a one-point lead, in a virtual three-way tie with Hillary and Edwards. It was a better result than our own internal polling, which still had us well behind. We knew that the ABC numbers, coupled with the heated national security back-and-forth, would guarantee Barack a lot of attention.

A few days before the debate, Barack had taken his family to the Iowa State Fair, where the Obamas playfully smashed into one another while riding in bumper cars. The pictures of their joyous romp had been widely seen. I told Obama, when I saw him later at debate prep, that everyone would be after him on Sunday. “The bumper cars may have been the best prep you could have for this debate.” As folks laughed, Barack’s eyes widened. “You know, that’s a pretty good line. I think I’ll use that.”

In an effort to rouse the candidates and the viewers from their Sunday morning slumber, George Stephanopoulos opened the debate by quoting Joe Biden, another of the candidates, who had said in a recent magazine interview that Obama was “not yet ready” to be president. Starting with Hillary, George asked each of Barack’s seven opponents, including Biden, to comment on his assessment. Barack patiently stood by for nearly five minutes, while George gave everyone a chance to whack the piñata. In truth, though, it proved the perfect setup.

“Well, you know, to prepare for this debate, I rode in the bumper cars at the state fair,” Barack said with a smile, to laughter and applause. He went on to give a strong, relaxed, confident answer, brushing off the critiques and laying out his differences with Hillary on the foreign policy questions that had bubbled over in the previous weeks.

“I do think that there’s a substantive difference between myself and Senator Clinton when it comes to meeting with our adversaries. I think that strong countries and strong presidents meet and talk with our adversaries. We shouldn’t be afraid to do so. We’ve tried the other way. It didn’t work.

“I think that, if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and we’ve exhausted all other options, we should take him out before he plans to kill another 3,000 Americans. I think that’s common sense.”

 • • • 

Watching Barack confidently navigate the debate, the first he was widely considered to have “won,” I thought about how far we had come since the uncertain performances of the winter and spring. Barack was hitting his stride. Yet the national campaign still lagged behind what was happening on the ground in Iowa. As he repaired to Martha’s Vineyard for a late August vacation with family and friends, national polls continued to show Hillary with a large and widening lead. Inside the campaign, we knew it was Iowa or bust. Barack was very concerned about the national polls and the conventional wisdom that suggested we were stalled. While on vacation, he asked Rouse and Valerie to become more involved in the campaign and to provide some “adult supervision.”

Rouse’s presence was the more easily accepted. He was an organizational whiz and a Washington and campaign veteran who spoke our language of politics and seemed eager to support our efforts. Valerie assumed a more ambiguous role of frequent traveling companion and roving scout for signs that Barack was being ill-served. In fairness to her, it was a role to which Barack and Michelle had assigned her. Still, bright as she was, Valerie had virtually no campaign experience, at any level, making some of her critiques hard to take. Whatever their value, these personnel moves were an understandable response to a dreary chorus of bad news that would only grow worse before it got better.

In early October, Barack, Plouffe, and I flew to Des Moines to deal with a group of restive donors at a National Finance Committee meeting. We scheduled the meeting for Iowa to highlight our prodigious and promising efforts there, but in a bit of unfortunate timing, the
Register
published a poll on the eve of the meeting that showed Barack in third, behind both Hillary and Edwards. While just seven points separated Clinton from Obama, the poll gave the impression that we were backsliding, especially given the unduly robust ABC poll in August that had had Barack a point in the lead. “This should be great fun,” I told Plouffe, when news of the poll reached us. In the meeting, the candidate gamely defended the Iowa-first strategy (and his team), acknowledging some early stumbles and lingering challenges, but arguing with conviction that we were still on a path to victory.

Barack’s loyalty in the face of those calling for our heads was gratifying. Yet while he defended “the Davids” and our strategy to others, he also scheduled a meeting with the senior team days later— just two months before the must-win Iowa caucuses—to rigorously test and reconsider all our plans and underlying assumptions.

“We all know we’re not where we need to be,” he said at the meeting. Sitting on the table in front of Barack was the familiar yellow legal pad, on which he had, once again, meticulously written a series of questions and thoughts. Many were concerned with the campaign’s fundamental message. He told us, “We all have to ask ourselves if we are doing the right things, and
everything
, to get us there in the next two months.”