Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (35 page)

 • • • 

We finally rolled out Kerry’s endorsement the day after the Boston event. As it turned out, it was far more valuable to us in defeat than in victory. To have a senior Democrat, the party’s past nominee, step up and embrace us at that moment helped prod the media off a negative story line.

Still, there is no substitute for winning, and winning in Nevada, just a week away, would be a tricky pass. Hillary had a strong lead in polls there, though that was not the whole story. In Nevada, as in Iowa, delegates to the convention would be chosen not by statewide popular vote, but by district caucuses. This arcane formula meant that with our superior ground game in the far-flung regions of the state, we could win more delegates, even as Hillary turned out more people overall because of her strength in populous Las Vegas.

That’s how it played out. Yet in the game of perceptions, it took a lawyer, not our volunteers in the field, to salvage the day.

The problem for us was that while Hillary’s victory was clearly visible, ours was not—not to a news media lacking expertise in Nevada’s abstruse caucus rules. Whatever spin was accepted that night would wind up defining the vote. So the only drama that mattered came
after
the caucuses, when we thrust Jeff Berman, a reclusive, gray-bearded Washington lawyer and our chief delegate hunter, onto a conference call with hundreds of reporters to explain how we had claimed a win. They hung on the line, rapt, as Berman went through the numbers and Nevada caucus rules with the chief Associated Press delegate counter, to whom news organizations looked for authoritative numbers. “You’re right,” the AP man finally acknowledged, reversing himself and unofficially awarding Obama a one-delegate edge over Hillary. Technical as the discussion was, Berman’s timely intervention helped muddy the coverage of what would have been viewed as a clear win for Hillary, her second in a row. “We’ll keep letting them spin the victories, and we’ll keep taking the delegates,” I told the reporters on the call, most of whom were smart enough to appreciate that I was spinning them even as I mocked Hillary’s spinners.

 • • • 

No such gamesmanship would suffice the next week, in South Carolina, where with its large black population, anything short of victory would be a potentially mortal blow.

As the primary approached, Edwards sent emissaries to talk with Plouffe and me about a possible deal to get him out of the race and onto our side. Edwards was done and knew it, and he was tempted to drop out rather than lose his native South Carolina—and Hillary’s camp was desperate to escort him out the door. “They figure they’re a lot more likely to win with John out of it, instead of splitting the white vote,” the Edwards man told me, repeating the familiar racial calculus that hovered over the South Carolina primary. “But John doesn’t want to hurt Barack so he is willing to hang in there. But he wants to know that there would be a place for him with Barack down the line.” I recognized a squeeze play when I saw one, and immediately scrambled up some vague assurances.

“Sure,” I said. “John is a talented guy, and I’m sure there would be a place for him.”

“Well, between us, Hillary is offering attorney general, but what John really wants is to be on the ticket again.”

Stunning as it was, you had to admire the unmitigated chutzpah of it. Here was a guy who had finished out of the money in the first three contests, yet he was playing his cards as if he held a full house, aces over kings.

“Well, I can take that to Barack, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to fly,” I said.

That was an understatement. When we raised the idea with Obama, it not only didn’t fly. It crashed.

“Seriously?” Barack said, with a quizzical smile. “He wants me to commit the vice presidency to him to stay in the race? Forget about it. Just tell them that I think highly of John, but that he’ll have to make his own decision.”

The proposition of a different, more hopeful politics would be tested in South Carolina, a pillar of the old Confederacy, where the heavy cloud of race hung over the primary. After a particularly nasty debate, in which Barack and Hillary threw away their scripts and went at each other in caustic, personal terms, Hillary left the state to her husband, who tried to rally white voters on her behalf with “she gets you” appeals. Gibbs was convinced that Bill Clinton was trying to tap into the ugly impulses in southern politics that he had done so much to allay during his political career. “This guy had risen above the Old South,” Robert said. “Now their backs are to the wall, and look at what they’re doing. Campaigning right out of the Lee Atwater handbook!” referencing a southern political operative who was legendary in the 1980s for brazen racial appeals that helped solidify Republican control of the South.

Gibbs, who had worked in South Carolina before, quietly teed up one of our supporters, a crusty former state party chair named Dick Harpootlian, to go after Clinton for his tactics. Famous for getting in the faces of his opponents, Harpootlian lived for moments like this. “I realized, as soon as I talked to him, that I had launched a missile without a particularly sensitive guidance system,” Robert told me. Harpootlian eagerly adopted Robert’s edgy analogy as his own, publicly accusing Clinton of “reprehensible tactics reminiscent of Atwater.” Bill Clinton was born when the Jim Crow era was still a reality in Arkansas, so it drove him absolutely nuts to be compared to the race-baiting Atwater. Red-faced and furious, Clinton responded with an unusual, lengthy, and much replayed public screed aimed at us and the news media. Wagging his finger at a group of reporters, he stalked away after telling them, “Shame on you.”

Clinton’s outburst only fueled the tension, which made an NBC poll, released the day before the election, all the more titillating to a press corps for whom race was the shiniest of objects. It showed Obama’s white support in South Carolina had dropped ten points in a week, and was now hovering near single digits. Tim Russert, in an interview on the
Today
show, called the development “rather dramatic.” The press swarmed. At Barack’s event later than morning, I ran into Ron Fournier, a veteran Associated Press political reporter who had followed Clinton from Little Rock to Washington. “You guys are in trouble,” he said. “I know the South. These white folks just aren’t going to vote for your guy.”

Cornell Belcher, who was polling for us in South Carolina, was more optimistic. Harpootlian was utterly confident. Plouffe had dispatched Steve Hildebrand to help marshal the field operation in South Carolina. I ran into Hildy that night at a rollicking final rally in Columbia, and he was even more robust in his forecast. “We’re going to win this thing by eighteen points,” he said. It sounded absurd, but even accounting for some irrational exuberance, we appeared to be in a far better position than public polling and the conventional wisdom suggested.

We had thrown everything we had at South Carolina and had done everything we could. Yet I was still worried because, having spent a lifetime around the politics of race, I knew we were challenging some deeply ingrained attitudes.

Rather than stew, I used Election Day productively and set up a film shoot for the late afternoon with Michelle, who was in South Carolina for the final days of the primary. While we were filming, I got an e-mail from Stephanopoulos with the initial exit polls and a subject line that read something like “Wow.” When I opened them, I understood the note of surprise. “I can’t believe this,” I said. “What?” Michelle asked. “I just can’t believe these exit polls I just got!” I replied. “What? What? What do they say,” she said, showing some exasperation. “They say we’re winning by thirty points.” Michelle slugged my arm, and not in a playful way. “Don’t ever scare me like that again,” she said.

The exit polls weren’t far off. When the vote came in, Obama won by twenty-eight points, collecting nearly 80 percent of a huge African American turnout, but also a quarter of white voters, including a third of young voters.

There was an innocent beauty to caucus night in Iowa, but for me, South Carolina was even more powerful. Just a day earlier, pundits were writing us off, predicting that the primal pull of race would trip us up at the end. Now the people of South Carolina had emphatically defied that cynical calculation. The thousands of supporters who jammed into our victory party were there to celebrate
that
victory, too. Some burst into spontaneous chants of “Race Doesn’t Matter!” which way overstated the reality. Still, here in the heart of the old Confederacy, an African American had taken a big step forward, buoyed by blacks
and
whites, making this win especially sweet.

Upon leaving the state before the polls closed, Bill Clinton capped his tough week with an appalling postmortem. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88, and he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here.”

His point was abundantly clear. No big deal. The black guy had won the black primary. The dismissive remark didn’t require a response or any significant spin. Everyone could see it for what it was. The media blowback for both Clintons was fierce, and the hard feelings between the forty-second president of the United States and the man who would become the forty-fourth would take years to heal fully.

 • • • 

One Democrat of importance was monitoring these events closely.

For some time, Ted Kennedy had been inching toward an endorsement of Obama. He had been a warm mentor to Obama in the Senate. He had said in the fall that he was looking for a candidate who would inspire him, which we took as a welcome sign. With Kennedy as the foremost champion for civil rights in the Senate, it seemed almost irresistible for him to play a leading role in electing the nation’s first black president. If Kennedy had any reluctance, Bill Clinton unwittingly had pushed him our way a few weeks earlier when he called and asked Teddy to support Hillary. As Kennedy related it, Clinton argued that Obama hadn’t paid his dues. “He just got to town, dropped his bags, got someone a cup of coffee, and now he thinks he should be president,” Kennedy recalled Bill Clinton saying, a comment to which Kennedy took offense. “He thought it was coded language,” one of his aides told me. “It really outraged him.”

The endorsement would come on a Monday in Washington. Before it did, Caroline Kennedy, who had lobbied her uncle to back Obama, delivered her own endorsement in a touching piece that appeared in the Sunday edition of the
Times
.

“I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” wrote Caroline, forever frozen in our memories as a five-year-old gripping her mother’s hand as her father’s horse-drawn casket rolled by on its way to Arlington. “But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president—not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.”

As one of the many Americans whose passion for politics was ignited by JFK, I teared up when I read Caroline’s closing lines.

On Monday, Teddy, Caroline, and Patrick Kennedy joined Barack at American University in Washington. For all the tragedies and setbacks he had endured, there was no one who relished the process more than Ted Kennedy. He believed deeply in public service as a calling, and plainly loved the theater of politics. It was a joy to watch him in action.

Taking the podium by storm to officially enter the fray, the seventy-five-year-old Lion of the Senate instantly had an arena full of college students in the palm of his hand when he cocked his head slightly and roared, “I feel change in the air.” Within two years, Teddy would be gone, the victim of a brain tumor. Yet on this day, he was filled with youthful energy and idealism.

Recalling the arguments that were made against his brother, JFK, Kennedy went right at the critics who were saying Obama wasn’t ready.

“What counts in our leadership is not the length of years in Washington, but the reach of our vision, the strength of our beliefs, and that rare quality of mind and spirit that can call forth the best in our country and the best in the world,” Kennedy said.

It was an amazing, gratifying moment. Barack and I had spoken about striving to rekindle the spirit and urgency of the 1960s, when young people marched and organized in the belief that they could change the world. The Kennedys ignited that belief and embodied that spirit. Now, here was the last of the Kennedy brothers—stooped and gray but still a powerful figure—wholeheartedly endorsing Barack and our campaign as heir to that tradition. Though he was just a child during that era, Obama had been an avid student of its history and he was visibly moved by Kennedy’s warm embrace.

“You know I am usually pretty chill about these things, but I have to say, that was humbling,” Barack said afterward. “To have Ted Kennedy essentially hand you the torch like that. With Caroline sitting there. You can’t help but feel a responsibility to be worthy of that.”

Though I had worked for his son in Rhode Island, I didn’t know Kennedy well. Still, I knew that, even in a bitterly divided Senate, he remained a beloved and respected figure on both sides of the aisle. I knew that he had always inspired extraordinary loyalty among his staff. What I quickly learned was that for all his elevated stature, Kennedy was as far from a prima donna as could be. He responded to every request, asked for little, and gently offered constructive advice when he thought it might help and encouragement when he knew it was needed. A few weeks later, he would chase me down by phone on the birthday we shared to wish me well.

One small moment from that day gave me some insight into Caroline. Backstage, she noticed Gibbs wearing a fleece with our campaign logo and asked where she could buy one. He laughed and said we would be happy to furnish her with one. “Oh no,” she said emphatically. “You guys have enough to do! Just tell me where I can order it.” Here was a woman who, almost from birth, was regarded as American royalty. Yet she displayed no trace of entitlement and had a healthy and hilarious disdain for those who did. She would become a great friend.

I viewed Ted Kennedy’s rousing embrace, coming on the heels of the landslide in South Carolina, as a pivotal moment in the campaign. It wasn’t that his backing or Caroline’s would automatically translate into votes—our polling was pretty clear that people were inclined to make their own judgments—but the association with the Kennedy legacy gave fresh luster to our message of hope and possibility. While the endorsement of a forty-five-year Washington veteran might not have screamed of “change,” Ted Kennedy’s weighty imprimatur was a powerful rejoinder to those who questioned whether Barack had the experience to be president.