Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (41 page)

Our last stop was Richmond, Virginia, where we visited Tim Kaine. The round-faced, bright-eyed governor had an impressive story. He had served with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras, graduated from Harvard Law School, and then spent many years as a civil rights lawyer, primarily representing victims of housing discrimination in Richmond. He was elected to the City Council and then as mayor, and went on to win races for lieutenant governor and governor despite his personal opposition to both the death penalty and abortion. He was able to overcome the predictable attacks from the opposition and from within his own party, in part because he radiated a palpable sense of decency and integrity.

“I know it’s pretty unlikely that I’m going to be the pick, but it’s flattering to be considered,” he said as we sat down in the living room of the governor’s mansion. “I think it would mean so much for Barack to win this race. I’m happy to do anything I can to help. Even this.”

Kaine had already proven his commitment. He was the first sitting governor outside Illinois to endorse Obama, just days after he announced his candidacy in 2007. If affinity and shared values were the sole basis on which Barack was going to make the vice-presidential decision, he might well have selected Kaine.

“The problem with Tim is that we’re too much alike,” Obama said when Plouffe and I reported back from our journeys. “I don’t know how many young, liberal, Harvard-educated civil rights lawyers with very little Washington experience the market will bear.” On the other hand, Barack wasn’t going to choose someone with whom he had little affinity, knowing they could be partnered for years to come. That made Bayh unlikely. Barack also repeated his concerns about choosing anyone who had not experienced the unique pressures of a national campaign. “There’s not going to be a lot of time to adjust,” he said. “I’m afraid that if someone is experiencing this whole, crazy circus for the first time, it would be too much to ask.”

I felt confident that Barack was going to end his VP search where he began, with Biden, but his choice would remain shrouded in mystery a while longer. Plouffe and the social media team had a clever idea to boost our database of supporters, promising anyone who signed up that they would be the first to hear the news of Obama’s VP choice. He was absolutely determined to thwart leaks until our text message went out to our supporters the morning of August 23, two days before our convention was to open.

At the appointed hour, I was part of an elaborate scheme, flying a charter from a small commuter airport outside Chicago, holing up in some fleabag hotel outside Philly, and waiting for the Eagle (or, in this case, the text message) to land before fetching Biden and his family from their home in Wilmington for a flight back to Springfield for the announcement.

Afterward, I hit the road for a four-day journey to the convention with Barack.

In a nod to our grassroots campaign, we had decided to move Obama’s acceptance speech on the final evening from the arena to the football stadium where the Denver Broncos played. The open-air speech would be an electric moment, of which more than seventy-five thousand of our supporters would be a part. It would be an extraordinarily memorable night, though the candidate, recalling his announcement in subzero temperatures, was less than enthused when Plouffe and I pitched the idea.

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “But if it rains, you two guys will be standing next to me holding the umbrellas.”

It wasn’t the weather that worried me. It was what Barack would say once he got to the rostrum—because as we hopscotched the country just days before he would accept the nomination in Denver, we still didn’t have a speech. The draft we had was far too long and lacked an organizing phrase that would provide coherence and an emotional connection. We were going to have to pull together another big speech on the fly.

Late on Tuesday night, less than forty-eight hours before the speech, the muse finally arrived—and not a minute too soon. One of our convention night themes was “Renewing America’s Promise,” and I suggested that we organize Barack’s acceptance speech around that same idea. This is what our campaign and so much of Obama’s career had been about: standing up for that core American promise of a fair shake and opportunity for anyone willing to work for it. “Renewing America’s Promise” extended to our global leadership as well, where the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld approach had left our alliances in tatters.

“I think this can work.” Barack said, offering Favreau some language and structural guidance. “Favs, you’re going to have to rework this thing overnight and get me a new draft in the morning.” It was already close to midnight. The next morning, a bleary-eyed Favreau emerged with a solid draft in hand.

Later that day, after our flight to Denver, I was looking it over in my hotel room as the convention was getting under way on the TV. When the roll call nominating Obama began, I put the speech down and watched. For weeks we had been pushing for Hillary to make the motion nominating Obama by acclimation, but some of her supporters were insisting on recording all her delegates.

The roll call began, but an hour or so in, there was a dramatic stir. The crowd, cheering with anticipation, parted as Hillary entered the hall and made her way to the New York delegation. Sheldon Silver, the New York Assembly Speaker and delegation chair, warmly acknowledged every New Yorker but the state mascot before finally relinquishing the mike to the state’s junior senator. When he did, Hillary read slowly and resolutely from a statement she held in her hands.

“With eyes firmly fixed on the future, in the spirit of unity, with the goal of victory, with faith in our party and our country,” she said, “let’s declare together, in one voice, right here, right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president.”

The hall erupted in a raucous demonstration, as Hillary, smiling through this difficult and bittersweet moment, called on the hall to suspend the vote and nominate Obama.

Maybe it was simply the codification of the victory we’d fought so hard to secure, but the ritual was truly moving. The image of Hillary, flanked by delegates on the convention floor, making such a strong and emphatic motion was an inspiring symbol of the party unity we had sought and needed.

 • • • 

It was an incredible accident of scheduling that Obama’s speech the next day, August 28, would fall on the forty-fifth anniversary of Dr. King’s momentous March on Washington. The date had been set years in advance by the Democratic National Committee, long before anyone could imagine the nominee would be a black man. Now it had special meaning.

Without King and the movement he led, Barack would not have been poised to accept the nomination for president. It was a debt that was impossible to ignore. The cold political calculus, however, dictated that we not overdo it. It was obvious that his nomination represented a huge milestone in the social history of the country, but we didn’t want to suggest that this was the central rationale for his candidacy. The tribute ultimately found a home among the soaring closing passages in which Barack paid homage to America’s promise.

. . . It is that promise that, 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream. The men and women who gathered there could’ve heard many things. They could’ve heard words of anger and discord. They could’ve been told to succumb to the fear and frustrations of so many dreams deferred. But what the people heard instead—people of every creed and color, from every walk of life—is that, in America, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our dreams can be one.

“We cannot walk alone,” the preacher cried. “And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.”

Barack had collaborated with Favs on these lines. Now, as he read them aloud in the hotel suite for the first time, just hours before he would deliver them to the world, his voice caught and his eyes filled up. He paused, looked down, and took a deep breath. “Give me a couple of minutes, guys,” he said before disappearing into the bathroom. He returned several minutes later and settled back in behind the rostrum. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I guess the enormity of this just hit me. I hope I hold it together out
there
!”

It was a striking moment. Obama wasn’t given to such displays of emotion, even in a small room of his closest aides. In all our collaborations, I certainly had never seen him falter while rehearsing a speech, but I had no difficulty understanding why his emotions had spilled over now. No one said much or, indeed, had to. In the frenzy of a campaign, you become consumed with minute-to-minute tempests and the thousand tasks at hand. Then there are a few unforgettable moments when you feel privileged and grateful to be a small part of history.

O
N
THE
DAY
AFTER
O
bama’s speech, we left
D
enver on a high.
O
ur risky gamble, moving the final night outdoors, had paid off big.
B
y throwing open the convention doors we had kept faith with the grassroots supporters who had propelled us to that moment.
T
he symbolism was powerful, as was the show of organizational strength in filling the enormous stadium.

The swing voters from Binder’s focus group in the heartland capital of Kansas City declared Obama’s speech a success, allaying their lingering concerns that Obama was too partisan or reflexively liberal. The positive reaction was certainly supported by our postconvention polling, which indicated that Obama had forged ahead in the race, departing Denver with a solid four- to five-point lead.

I called Barack in his car on the way to the airport and shared some of the good news. “It was a home run,” I said, with gushing enthusiasm. He was pleased, but hardly gushing. “Well, they get their shot next week,” he said. “We’ll see how they do.”

We were triumphant and riding a media wave.

It lasted all of a few hours.

Knowing that we had scored big, McCain didn’t wait for the GOP coronation to lay claim to the spotlight. When I got off the phone with Obama, my BlackBerry started blowing up with reports that McCain was about to unveil his running mate. We had war-gamed a variety of possible nominees, including McCain’s vanquished primary rival, the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Our list even included a Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. It seemed improbable that the Republican base would embrace Lieberman, who was pro-choice and a leading voice on environmental issues, but the hawkish Lieberman had been McCain’s wingman on foreign policy issues and was one of his closest friends. If McCain wanted to signify his independence, a fusion ticket with Lieberman would certainly do the trick.

In all, we had ordered opposition research reports on more than half a dozen potential candidates and had discussed exactly how the campaign would react to each of them. By the time I boarded our campaign jet, the identity of the nominee was leaking. Her name wasn’t even on our list. “Where the hell did
this
come from?” I shouted into the phone when one of our press staff called to share the news that McCain would name Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. “She’s been governor for what? Two years?” I barely knew of Palin, and had never heard her speak. I vaguely remembered that she had toppled the Republican establishment in Alaska to win the governorship, but I knew little more. Our collective ignorance about the governor and her politics dictated caution. “Let’s not say too much until we get our bearings here,” I instructed the team, particularly cautioning against hitting her years of experience, given the obvious retort about the length of Obama’s résumé.

I raced up to the front cabin, where Obama and Biden were settling in for the flight to western Pennsylvania, from where they would set off on a joint bus trip together with their wives. I grabbed Barack and shared the news.

“Really? That’s kind of surprising,” he said, in typically muted tones. “Why do you think he did that?” Before I could share my thoughts, Barack answered his own question. “I guess the best way to blunt the ‘change thing’ is to put a woman on the ticket. An outsider. It’ll create some buzz. I get it.” He paused for a second, and then resumed his monologue. “But I’ll tell you something. I think I’m reasonably smart, and it took me a good six months to figure out how to handle this whole national campaign thing. Now maybe she’s the greatest politician since Ronald Reagan, and she can come out of Alaska with a year or two as governor and deal with all the pressure and scrutiny. But I would give it about three weeks before we make a judgment. Let’s see how she handles all of this.”

Obama’s analysis was consistent with the concerns that had driven him to choose Biden, who had been around the track and knew what a presidential campaign required. As if on cue, his newly minted running mate joined our huddle.

“What’s up?” Biden asked.

“McCain picked Sarah Palin for VP,” I told him.

Biden’s face went blank. “Who’s Sarah Palin?”

Much of the rest of the country was asking the same question—and just like that, our triumphant convention was yesterday’s news. Obama’s instant analysis was dead-on. McCain didn’t look remotely like change at a time when Americans were demanding it. Desperate to alter the calculus, he and his campaign had stretched to find an intriguing new character who could compel a revision to the prevailing story line. In the long run, McCain’s choice would prove to be a Faustian bargain. At the age of seventy-two, with a history of melanoma, McCain knew there was more than a trivial chance that whomever he selected could become president. Yet here he was, the candidate who promised to put “Country First,” tapping a person of dubious qualifications as his second in command. Ultimately, it would prove a costly gamble, but for the moment, Palin’s selection ignited his campaign exactly as his team had hoped, and roiled the waters for us.

First, there was the obvious. She was a “she,” the first woman ever on a Republican ticket. “Hillary left eighteen million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America. But it turns out the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all,” Palin said on the day of her announcement. Some of the Republicans in the crowd groaned, but as I watched, I could admire the play. We asked Hillary to issue a statement reminding her supporters that McCain and Palin were running on a distinctly different platform from hers, but she refused, perhaps flattered by Palin’s tribute.

Palin was also a self-styled reformer, about as distant from the mess in Washington as you could get. She had begun her political career as a small-town mayor, but soon took on Alaska’s Republican establishment over spending and ethics, winning a David-and-Goliath battle to oust the state’s Republican governor. It was, as we would say in my newspaper days, a hell of a yarn: a fearless, plainspoken, working-class “hockey mom in Alaska,” rattling the cages of the high and mighty. It had particular appeal at a time of widespread anger and cynicism about Washington. As I watched their joint rally in Ohio, I understood her allure and recognized that she had an intriguing backstory.

Yet what would become clear was that the power Palin wielded was less about gender or reform than class and culture. She was a world apart from Hillary. No Ivy Leaguer, Palin had bounced around five colleges before earning a degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. A former high school athlete, beauty queen, and sportscaster, she had married her high school sweetheart and was the mother of five, including a toddler with Down syndrome. Her teenage son was about to deploy to Iraq. She was a social conservative and a hunter who ate red meat and relished dishing it out in folksy barbs ready-made for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Her pitch was for the disaffected, non-college-educated white voters with whom we had struggled so mightily in the primary. If Obama represented the changing face of America, Palin wound up energizing those who resented that change. The East Coast establishment might disdain her as unlettered and ill-prepared, but that would only make her more appealing to millions of Americans who felt they had been getting the raw end of the deal.

“I’ve learned quickly, these last few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” she said in her acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The line touched off a cascade of boos that lasted for half a minute before Palin could continue with her harangue. “Here’s a little news flash for those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this great country.”

The speech was filled with references to Palin’s rural roots and values, and laced with biting lines that portrayed Obama as an exotic poseur detached from the traditional values and life experiences of everyday Americans.

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” Palin said, in one of the speech’s more memorable lines, which touched off pandemonium in the crowd, but particularly irritated me with its disdain for people who do noble, selfless work. “I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening. No, we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”

The “we” she was speaking for turned out in droves at McCain–Palin rallies in the days after their convention. They weren’t coming to see the old pol at the top of the ticket, the guy who had spent much of his life in Washington forging compromises with folks like Ted Kennedy. They were coming to see his provocative running mate, whose connection to them was undeniably visceral. Palin had delivered a desperately needed energy boost to the McCain campaign.

While McCain suddenly was drawing his biggest crowds, we largely steered away from big rallies, still wary of the “celebrity” attack McCain had leveled against us in the wake of Obama’s overseas trip. Our reticence was a mistake. As I watched the news, I recognized that the contrast between his scenes from the campaign trail and ours fed the narrative that McCain had all the momentum—and the narrative wasn’t entirely wrong. A week after the convention, Benenson’s polling, now concentrated in the battleground states we thought to be in play, showed that our lead, which had topped out at five points the day of Barack’s acceptance speech, had shrunk to just one. When voters were asked what they had seen lately that would make them more inclined to vote for McCain, one-third of them had the same answer: Sarah Palin.

 • • • 

I called a meeting on Sunday morning, September 14, at my company office to consider additional steps to blunt the McCain-Palin momentum. Barack decided to join us, but seemed subdued, even a little distracted. Finally, as we were wrapping up, he explained why. He had spent an hour on the phone the previous night with Bush’s Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson. Paulson had informed him of major events that would unfold that very night, bringing with them severe negative impacts on the markets and the economy. “I can’t share the details with you, but it is going to be a big story and will require the government to intervene in some way,” Obama said. “I told Hank we would be as supportive as possible as they try and contain this. And I’m telling all of you, there are times when—what’s the old expression?—‘good government is good politics.’ Well, this is one of those times. In any case, it’s the right thing to do. So I want all of you to abide by that.”

We sat quietly as Obama shared the news, or at least as much of the news as he felt he
could
share. It was a sobering reminder that we were engaged in something more than a competition. There were dramatic, real-life consequences to the decisions of our leaders that transcended the political considerations of winning or losing. I was not surprised that Obama, even in the heat of battle, fully grasped that perspective. He might not have been president yet, but he was clearly thinking like one.

The next morning, I woke up to the news that Lehman Brothers, one of the world’s leading financial services firms, had filed for bankruptcy. You didn’t need an MBA to grasp the magnitude of the story. Hundreds of billions of dollars were tied up in Lehman, and its failure would drive the market down. Worse, Lehman’s demise clearly foreshadowed larger problems within the system. What we didn’t yet realize was how much this event and its aftermath would shape the remainder of the campaign as well as Obama’s presidency.

As Obama headed to Colorado for a campaign event, I watched McCain at his own rally in Florida address the bleak news of the day and ad-lib a line that would go down in presidential campaign lore as Exhibit A in the category What Not to Do. “You know,” said McCain, “that there’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street and it is—people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think—
still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong
.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had said the same thing before, and we had used it in ads. Now it seemed so off-key that it bordered on satire. It wasn’t just that Lehman had gone belly-up, the stock market was tanking, and forecasts were universally bleak. By all the measures most people used, the economy had been in turmoil long before that. The country had already lost more than six hundred thousand jobs in 2008. The unemployment rate had climbed more than a point. Wages were falling and home foreclosures were skyrocketing as the bills came due on the easy-money subprime mortgages that were at the heart of the financial crisis. McCain’s comment reinforced concerns as to whether he had any clue about the lives that everyday people were leading. Only a guy who couldn’t recall how many homes he owned would measure this economy and conclude that its fundamentals were strong.

By the time Barack landed in Colorado, we had drafted an insert for the speech he would deliver to more than thirteen thousand supporters at a rally at the Pueblo fairgrounds, a welcome return to large-scale campaigning. Energized by the crowd, the magnitude of the news, and the political opening he’d just been given, Obama took aim at McCain’s lame response.

“I don’t think John McCain gets what’s happening between the mountain in Sedona where he lives and the corridors of power in Washington where he works,” Barack said. “Because if he did get it, he would have different policies. Why else would he say that we’ve made great progress economically under George Bush? I mean, that’s not what somebody who gets it would say. Why else would he say that the economy isn’t something he understands as well as he should? Why else would he say, today of all days—he said this just this morning—that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong? Now, Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?”