Double Down: Game Change 2012 (13 page)

What Biden wanted was to draft a pamphlet (yes, a pamphlet) laying out the case, print up millions (yes, millions) of copies, and have them sent to targeted voters across the country. In this cause, he enlisted a potent ally:
Bill Clinton. Soon enough, the two of them were talking daily by phone, faxing drafts back and forth, refining the argument, marshaling the data. Here’s the latest version from Clinton, Biden would tell Klain. You think it’s good? I think it’s good. Well, maybe one more tweak.

When Biden was finally satisfied, he raised the concept with Obama, who told him, “Work with Axe.” But Axelrod’s affection for Biden did not extend to this cockamamie plan. (
A brochure is gonna change the election?
he thought.
Right.
) But Biden wouldn’t desist, pressing the matter until Axelrod snapped, “We’re not printing a couple million of
anything
and dropping it at people’s houses—
okay
?”

The fall of 2010 also brought the first flotation of the rumor that Hillary might take Biden’s job, with him assuming hers at Foggy Bottom in the bargain. Giving the gossip a dash of credibility and a hefty dose of buzz was that it was first conveyed by Bob Woodward, who declared flatly on CNN that the idea was “on the table.”

The White House immediately denied that any such notion was on any table (or any bench, bureau, or buffet). And Biden didn’t credit the speculation for a minute. But as the JRB-HRC swap rumor popped up again and again all through 2011, it preyed on him nonetheless. Biden and his people all believed that the hearsay was emanating from Hillary’s orbit—not from her personally, but from her staff, outside advisers, or the denizens of Greater Clintonia. It was clearly designed to undermine the president (Obama is failing), undercut Biden (he isn’t helping), and elevate Hillary (only she can save the day). But Biden also found the White House’s reaction annoying. Sure, they denied the story, but they never took the extra step and explained that no swap was needed because the vice president was, well, so awesome. And by not doing so, Biden believed, they were feeding the Uncle Joe Syndrome.

By then, Axelrod, Emanuel, and Klain had all left the White House. And while Axe was still a big player in Chicago, Biden increasingly was left to the less tender mercies of Plouffe and Messina, who cast a gimlet eye and imposed a heavy hand on his maneuvers.

Midway through the year, Biden decided he wanted to hire a new counselor to be his de facto campaign chief of staff. His choice for the job was Kevin Sheekey, a raffish New York operative who had helped turn Mike
Bloomberg into a political force—and had been the maestro orchestrating the mayor’s 2008 dabblings with an independent presidential bid. Though Biden had run for president twice, in 1988 and 2008, the first effort had ended with a plagiarism scandal before any ballots were cast and the second after he claimed just 1 percent of the vote in Iowa. Biden’s only experience with a national campaign were those two months as Obama’s running mate, when he basically did what he was told and nothing more. The challenge in 2012 would be greater, and with Sheekey on board, Biden believed, he would be prepared to meet it.

The Obamans objected strongly to Sheekey, however. They considered him a leaker, a self-promoter, not a team player. Which is to say they were threatened by his mojo and the prospect that he would vivify Biden’s shop. When the vice president told Obama what he was planning to do, the president shut him down. I’ve heard some things that make me think that Kevin is not the right fit, he said—and that ended the matter.

Thus did Biden find himself in limbo that November morning when his outside strategy group assembled at NAVOBS around his dining table. The primary goal, of course, was to help Obama win reelection. But Biden also wanted to think about how, in that context, he could enhance his own political standing.

The question of 2016 hovered over the discussion. When Biden became Obama’s number two, the premise had been that he was a pick in the mold of Dick Cheney: he would serve Obama free of ulterior motives or longer-range ambitions. Biden was then already sixty-six years old, seven years older than Cheney had been when he signed on with Bush. But almost as soon as he assumed office, his people put out the word that “we’re not ruling anything in or out” about 2016, as Jay Carney, then Biden’s flack, told
The New York Times.
And from that moment forward, Bidenland had kept on subtly stoking the embers.

In part, the 2016 whispers were merely an attempt to maintain Biden’s currency and leverage—a home cure for the Uncle Joe Syndrome. But Biden also genuinely wanted to keep the option open, he told the strategy group. I haven’t made any decision, he said. Who knows how I’ll feel four years from now? But right now I feel great. In better shape than ever. People want me to say I’m not gonna run. I’m not gonna say that—and maybe I
will
run.

Behind Biden’s bravado, there was massive insecurity. He had been a national figure for four decades: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. But, at bottom, he remained a parochial politician: Regular Joe, Amtrak Joe, Delaware Joe. He had no political organization. He had no fund-raising operation. Hailing from a puny state and having presided over two Senate committees with no taxing or spending authority (and thus lacking lobbyists or corporations swarming around them and currying his favor), he had no donor base. Standing in the shadow of the most prodigious political and fund-raising apparatus the Democratic Party had ever seen, he felt like a stranger to it, as if he’d walked into an opulent wedding where he knew no one.

Biden wanted to expand his network. Needed to, really. While he was campaigning for Obama, he thought he should meet some new people, stroke some donors, strike up some fresh relationships. Biden had a trip scheduled in January out to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he would be talking about policy with some executives and raising money for Obama. Maybe they ought to tack on a meal or two with Silicon Valley and Hollywood bigwigs so Biden could broaden his horizons. He’d be out there anyway. It was, in a phrase Biden often used, a “collision of conscience and convenience.”

But Plouffe and Messina had ears everywhere, and when they heard about the strategy-group meeting and the California plan, they hit the ceiling. To them, there was only one relevant question about any political activity: Did it benefit Barack Obama? And the answers regarding Biden scheming around 2016 and holding separate meetings with donors were both emphatically no.

Plouffe went to Biden and applied a polite but forceful dressing-down. “If you want to have meetings about your stump speech and how to help the president, great,” Plouffe told him. But you can’t be out there talking about some future election. And you can’t be running bootleg meetings with donors. “We can’t have side deals,” he said.

Biden, chastened, apologized to Plouffe, then got all defensive with Daley.

What are they upset about? Biden wailed. This is crazy! I’m doing
everything they ask. I’m with the program. I’ve been loyal—I’ve been
the most
loyal. Jesus Christ!

Daley tried to calm Joe down. He hated to see him all worked up, which was why he didn’t tell Biden about the other things. In the aftermath of the leaking of the list and the refusal of the leaker (or leakers) to come forward, Obama had decided to go along with Plouffe’s recommendation that they shrink the reelection strategy meetings down to a handful of people—and Biden wasn’t one of them.

But that was the least of what Daley was keeping from Biden. The more explosive details—nuclear, actually—were that the top echelon of Obamaworld had in fact been discussing the wisdom of replacing Biden with Hillary; that, more than discussing it, they had been exploring it, furtively and obliquely, in the campaign’s polling and focus groups; and that Daley himself had been the most vocal exponent of looking into the merits of the idea.

Daley had no innate desire to see his friend dumped from the ticket, nor did the Davids and Messina—the tiny coterie of Obamans involved in the discussions. And all of them suspected that even the notion of a swap might be a nonstarter with Obama. But the president’s political difficulties were severe, and plenty of sensible Democrats were arguing that switching in Hillary could be a game changer. To not perform due diligence on the option, the Obamans believed, would be a dereliction of duty. They polled and focus-grouped every topic under the sun. Testing this one might have seemed hard-hearted, but refusing to do so out of affection for Joe would have been soft-headed—which in Obamaworld was the far more grievous crime.

When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds. Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming—and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.

What Biden could see, though, was that the campaign was turning his way in one respect, at least. From the start of the administration, the VP had advocated that the White House adopt a more populist stance on the economy. And he believed it even more strongly now, with Occupy Wall Street raging in Lower Manhattan and hundreds of other places around
the country. Populism had never been a language in which Obama was fluent—but all of a sudden, the president was speaking in tongues.

•   •   •

O
SAWATOMIE, KANSAS,
was a dust-speck town sixty-one miles southwest of Kansas City. It had a population of 4,477 and a rich but slight political history as a Jayhawker stronghold in the Civil War. In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt went there for the dedication of a park to abolitionist John Brown, delivering a storied speech in favor of a progressive platform that he called the “New Nationalism.” A hundred and one years later, Obama arrived to give an oration, less stirringly titled “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas.”

Like Biden, Obama had taken note of the Occupy movement when it sprang up in September and pushed the topic of income inequality front and center. Obama decided he wanted to give a speech about that. The subject was important, he told his team, and he had things to say. Some of his advisers were less than overjoyed. They worried he would have no solutions to offer for the problem he was raising. They feared he’d get too close to the Occupy fire and come back with his eyebrows singed. But Obama was insistent: I’m giving this speech.

Axelrod argued that the address could be made bigger and broader, incorporating themes they had talked about in the first strategy meeting in the State Dining Room: the contest of economic values, the fight for the middle class. Obama agreed. Over his career he had given two economic speeches that he considered touchstones, the first at Knox College in 2005, on the disruptions caused by globalization, the second at the Nasdaq, in New York, in 2007, on the perils of Wall Street run amok. He told Favreau he was aiming for something like that again.

I want to frame what the election is going to be about, Obama said. A choice between a belief that there are things we can do as a country to combat the forces that have left a lot of workers dislocated and struggling—and a belief on the other side that we should let everybody fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

It was Favreau’s assistant who came up with Osawatomie. Between the
Roosevelt connection and the fact that Obama’s mother was from Kansas, she thought it might be a choice venue. When Favreau brought the suggestion to the president, he lit up. “Great, I love the Nationalism speech,” he said. “It’s pretty far out there—the most radical speech Teddy Roosevelt ever gave.”

Obama’s address wasn’t as piping as TR’s, but it had plenty of Tabasco in it. Onstage in the Osawatomie High School gym, the president homed in on the issue of inequality that had so animated him initially. Noting that the average income of the top 1 percent—the marker made totemic by Occupy—had risen 250 percent over the years, to $1.2 million, while everyone else treaded water, he argued that “for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded.” Obama pounded on the “breathtaking greed” of Wall Street, on “insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, [and] mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford.” Contrasting Republican “you’re-on-your-own economics” with his philosophy, which was aimed at creating an “economy that’s built to last,” Obama said, “This is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class.” And: “This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare.”

The Osawatomie address received only modest attention from the press, but Obama believed he had scored. Though his people had worried about turning out a crowd in a tiny town in a scarlet-red state, the atmosphere in the gym was electric. And while Obama, in an hour-long speech of more than six thousand words, never once uttered Mitt Romney’s name, the themes he laid out were tailor-made for a campaign against him—a man whose calling card was having banked hundreds of millions of dollars at a private equity firm that could be painted as epitomizing much of what Obama decried in Kansas.

To the extent that Obama’s trip garnered coverage, it was portrayed as part of his ongoing crusade to win the payroll tax cut extension—which he did indeed mention in the speech. (“If we don’t do that, 160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxes go up by
an average of $1,000 starting in January, and it would badly weaken our recovery.”) The president had now been bludgeoning Republicans on the issue for three solid months. Boehner and McConnell were tied in knots, squabbling with their own caucuses, trying to figure out what kinds of budgetary offsets they should demand in return.

This was a trap that Sperling had set a year earlier, during the lame duck. Rather than push for a two-year extension then, he had argued for rolling the dollars from both years into one. That way, the economy would receive a bigger immediate boost—and a year later, especially if growth was still slow, Republicans would find it politically difficult not to vote in favor of another extension. Some on Obama’s political team were hoping that they would do just that, giving the president the upper hand on a tax issue for the campaign. But Sperling was adamant that it was worth trading almost anything to get a deal. With the congressional supercommittee having failed to strike a deficit compromise by its Thanksgiving deadline, business confidence was as shaky as ever. And the payroll tax cut extension would be the last chance to significantly goose the economy again before Election Day.