Game Change (10 page)

Axelrod and Gibbs realized immediately that they had a problem on their hands—though its severity wouldn’t be apparent for some time. Obama saw the problem, too. He called his pastor and informed him that his role at the announcement was being downgraded: Wright would now lead a private prayer for Obama and his close friends before the event, away from the stage, away from the cameras.

The phone call was painful for Obama. He and Michelle had been married by Wright. Wright had baptized their children. But as soon as Obama read the
Rolling Stone
story, he knew the decision was unavoidable. Staring at Wright’s incendiary words on the page, Obama thought,
This doesn’t sound real good.

THE DECEMBER DINNER WAS supposed to be at Whitehaven, in the dining room with the intense blue walls, where she’d hosted so many fund-raisers over the past six years. But the press got word of the plan; the house had been staked out—a camera crew was right outside—so the supper was moved a few blocks away, to the home of a friend. Clinton would do that sometimes if she wanted to keep a meeting super-secret. Borrow Evelyn Lieberman’s place in Cleveland Park or the residence of some other trusty pal. On this particular Sunday night in 2006, the stakeout might have seemed odd, since her guests weren’t exactly boldface names: Terry Shumaker, Alice Chamberlin, and Ricia McMahon. But because they were players in New Hampshire Democratic politics, the fact that they had flown down to Washington for a meal with Hillary qualified as news.

She was happy to see the New Hampshirites, all of whom she’d known for years. She had especially warm feelings for Shumaker, who had helped Bill pull off his second-place finish in the Granite State in 1992—the showing that allowed him to dub himself “The Comeback Kid.” The group arrived bearing Christmas gifts, and also an eight-page memo by Shumaker on how Hillary should go about setting herself up to win the New Hampshire primary. If she were running, that is.

That was how she kept talking about it throughout the four-hour dinner—“If I run.” It seemed strange to Shumaker, who assumed, like everyone, that Clinton was certainly running but just staying publicly mum for strategic purposes. Shumaker’s memo was a detailed plan for her New Hampshire rollout in the early months of 2007: the first trip, the small events, the local media plan. “What we are hearing is mainly two things about a possible Clinton candidacy,” the memo said. “Either she is ‘too polarizing’ or ‘she can’t win.’” But those perceptions could be eradicated by the right kind of campaign. “The challenge,” wrote Shumaker, “will be to figure out: How does a ‘rock star’ do retail?”

Clinton wanted to know about all of it. She was in Hillary the Analyzer mode. But she also kept asking questions about Obama. That very night, he was up in Manchester wowing the party faithful at a sold-out dinner, basking in the spotlight, ginning up the activists who would be crucial to winning the first primary on the nomination calendar. And here was Hillary, huddled quietly in a safe house, speaking of her candidacy in the conditional tense, wanting to know what her potential rival was up to, how he was faring in New Hampshire.
We don’t know
, Shumaker thought.
We’re here, not there.

It was, in a way, the perfect metaphor for 2006: Obama out there, always moving, showing leg, gathering momentum—and Clinton hunkered down. She and her team had decided she needed to focus on her Senate race. Her reelection was considered secure, but Hillaryland wanted to win big, to run up the score, and especially to do well outside New York City, to demonstrate her appeal in more conservative suburban and rural precincts. And all of that she had done convincingly, hauling in 67 percent of the vote, carrying fifty-eight of the state’s sixty-two counties. The landslide turned out to be costly, though, with her campaign blowing through tens of millions of dollars against nominal opposition. Penn defended the spending by saying that much of it had gone to test-drive sophisticated vote-targeting technologies. But Hillary wasn’t sure it was worth it, and her husband was even more doubtful. “Spend forty-five million on a Senate race?” Bill Clinton said, shaking his head. “Whew.”

All year long, Hillary hadn’t uttered a public word regarding a presidential bid. She wasn’t against talking about it, but her advisers insisted she not. They called it the third rail of the reelect—if she touched it, the tabloids would go crazy, New York voters would be turned off, her margin of victory would be impaired. But when it came to preparing for the presidential, the effect was deleterious: 2006 had been a wasted year for her, especially compared with how Obama had spent it.

Now that Election Day was in the rearview mirror, the time had come to gear up for 2008. Since the summer, her high command had been holding meetings—some at Whitehaven, others in Chappaqua, in the converted barn beside the house—to discuss her prospective campaign. Hillary had been nearly as closed-mouthed about the presidential with her advisers as she was in public. Most of them, like Shumaker, simply presumed she was going to run. But the small clutch of Hillarylanders in whom she actually confided were a good deal less certain: Solis Doyle and Williams detected an ambivalence in her that was deep and genuine.

Unlike Obama, Hillary had no political misgivings about running. She was sure she could raise the requisite money, and that was no small thing. She was confident she could put together a crack team—a dream team, in fact. She was certain she could win and that she had something important to offer the country. Bush and his cohorts had driven the nation into a ditch, she thought. She was angry about it, fervently inveighing against this or that Bush policy or executive order, how awful it all was, how much damage that man had caused.

No, Hillary’s ambivalence was all personal. Whereas Obama hesitated in the face of the unknown, it was the known that gave Hillary pause. She understood too well what a hellish slog running for president would be. She would be like red meat for the right, and the press would be equally vicious. The
Times
front-pager about her marriage was a preview of how unpleasant it would get—and not only for her, but for Chelsea too, she feared. Just as Obama fretted over how the campaign would affect his girls, Hillary agonized over her daughter. With a job she liked and a steady boyfriend, Chelsea finally had a life that was stable, almost normal, and Hillary wanted to do nothing to disrupt it. She reflected on how smooth the reelection campaign had been, how comfortable and rewarding she found the Senate, how she was on track for a bright future there. (People kept talking about her as a possible majority leader.) Did she really want to plunge back into an old life that was so much more chaotic and traumatic than her new one?

All through November and into December, Clinton kept stalling about getting going, talking about how ridiculous it was that she had to decide so early, constantly citing the fact that her husband hadn’t announced until October 1991. At one meeting with her team in the barn in Chappaqua, she asked over and over about how long she could wait to get in. “I don’t see why I should have to before late spring,” she said.

Hillaryland felt as if it were frozen in place and falling behind. Her people used the specter of Obama as leverage to try to compel her to action. The longer she waited, they warned her, the greater the risk that he would scoop up donors and talented staffers that should have been hers. The practical arguments weighed on Hillary, but she remained unwilling to pull the trigger. As the Clintons took off for the holidays on a trip to Anguilla, Solis Doyle and Williams were convinced there was a decent chance that she would decide against making a run.

On New Year’s Day, Hillary and Bill were out on a boat, bobbing along on the blue-green sea, and decided to take a swim. They leapt into the water, swam up to the beach, and then Hillary posed the question directly to the person who knew her best—and who understood as well as anyone alive what running for president entailed.

What should I do, Bill? she asked. Should I do this or not?

You have to ask yourself one question, he replied. Of all the people running, would I be the best president? If you can answer yes, then you need to run. If you’re not sure, then you need to think more about it, and if the answer is no, don’t do it. That’s all I can tell you, Bill said.

Not long after, Solis Doyle’s phone rang back in Washington.

“Bill said that if I really feel like I can do this, and do a good job and be the best one, then I should do it,” Hillary said. “And I
do
believe that.”

Solis Doyle exhaled and smiled.

“Okay! Let’s go, then!” Patti said, and they were finally off and running.

THE TEAM THAT CLINTON put in charge of her campaign represented a stroll down the path of least resistance. She didn’t so much assemble an organization as reconfigure Hillaryland and give its key players new titles. Penn was named the chief strategist, Solis Doyle, the campaign manager. As communications director, Clinton installed her trusted press guru, Howard Wolfson, whose depth of contacts in the national media was unrivaled and whose reputation for aggression was balanced by a subtle grasp of old media and new. The campaign’s ad maker would be Grunwald, whose toughness and capacity to tap into the appealing qualities of her clients had allowed her to succeed in what was basically a boy’s business—and inspired enormous confidence in Clinton. Neera Tanden, a brilliant issues wonk with a degree from Yale Law School, would run the policy shop. And Ickes, though working only part time on the campaign, would focus on delegate strategy and help Solis Doyle ride herd on the budget of what would be a multimillion-dollar operation.

Two salient facts about this team stood out above all. The first was its long and deep service to the Clinton cause. All six of the senior players had been involved in both Hillary’s election and reelection campaigns to the Senate, and some of them had connections to the couple dating back even further. Both Grunwald and Ickes had labored for Bill Clinton in 1992; Penn had joined the jamboree four years later. Indeed, the only significant outsider whom Hillary brought in was the deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry, a reputed whiz kid who had helped win a succession of tough statewide races, including Tim Kaine’s election as governor of Virginia in 2005.

The second fact was that, when it came to Team Clinton, familiarity had failed to breed a spirit of bonhomie. From day one, the operation was a simmering cauldron of long-held animosities—most of them directed at Penn. Solis Doyle, Wolfson, Tanden, and Ickes all were distinctly more liberal than the chief strategist was. (Some considered him a closet Republican.) None of them trusted Penn’s poll numbers or the way he wielded them, always in support of whatever strategy he happened to favor. But more than that, the rest of Hillaryland detested Penn personally. They thought him arrogant and amoral, a detrimental force whose perniciousness was amplified by his inexplicably tight bond with the Clintons.

Penn felt no more warmly toward most of his comrades. He regarded Solis Doyle as unqualified for her job. Ickes he routinely called a fabulist and an idiot barely capable of speaking English. When Penn was counseled to be nicer to the team, he found it hard to comprehend.
I’m not nice or un-nice
, he thought.
I’m trying to do my job.

Solis Doyle, by contrast, was much beloved in Hillaryland. But even among her friends there were concerns that she would be overmatched by the campaign manager’s post. Both Ickes and Williams had tried to dissuade her from taking it, arguing that the first manager in many campaigns winds up getting sacked, that she was better off being the power behind the throne. Solis Doyle had heard as well that Bill Clinton doubted her ability, and that McAuliffe, who would be the campaign’s chairman, was trashing her behind her back. But Solis Doyle was tired of being a hidden hand. In Hillary’s first Senate race, she felt that, in effect, she had run the show—and yet hadn’t gotten any credit.
Do I really want to do the job without the title and be little Patti Solis Doyle again?
she thought. The answer was no: she wanted the responsibility and, with it, the recognition.

Hillary was well aware of the knocks against both Solis Doyle and Penn, but she dismissed them. For years she’d seen Patti make the trains run on time with ruthless efficiency, and she saw no reason to think that her protegee wouldn’t continue to do it now. About Penn, Clinton’s feelings were more mixed. Largely because her husband had such faith in Penn’s strategic analysis, she put faith in it too. But she gave him no authority to hire or fire, barred him from decisions regarding budgeting and spending, and told Solis Doyle she preferred that he not have an office at campaign headquarters. (Her distaste for socializing with Penn was evident; once, he’d shown up at Whitehaven uninvited, and Hillary was aghast.)

That Solis Doyle and Penn despised each other didn’t bother Clinton at all. Nor did the other discontents that bubbled in Hillaryland. She didn’t encourage dissension in her ranks, but she tolerated it and even expected it. Her husband’s campaign in 1992 had been fractious, yet that hadn’t prevented Bill from winning. And this same team of hers had helped win two Senate races.

Like so many Washingtonians, Hillary had read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s totemic book on Lincoln and his Cabinet,
Team of Rivals.
The model made eminent sense to her. And for a while, it even seemed to work.

CLINTON ANNOUNCED ON HER website that she was running. “I’m in,” she wrote. “And I’m in to win.”

It was January 20, 2007, four days after Obama had formed his exploratory committee and three Saturdays before he declared his candidacy in Springfield. Hillary offered no equivalent grandiloquence. Her Web post contained a link to a one-minute-and-forty-three-second video of her, seated on a beige couch in the sunroom at Whitehaven, wearing a claret-colored jacket over a black blouse, her right arm propped on a chintz pillow. “I’m not just starting a campaign,” she said, “I’m beginning a conversation with America. . . . So let’s talk. Let’s chat. Let’s start a dialogue about your ideas and mine.”

The launch of Clinton’s campaign had been laid out a month earlier in an internal memo by Penn, who argued for positioning Clinton not as a transformational figure, but as a solid, stolid juggernaut. “We are the establishment, experienced candidate,” he wrote. “Our goal in this first quarter is to show we have the muscle to win—to live up to the financial expectations. We want to intimidate the possibility of late entrants like Gore. We want to show Obama how it is really done.”

In the days leading up to her announcement, Clinton traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan, flashing her national security expertise. Shortly afterward, she began a fund-raising drive that was designed to be a show of overwhelming force. Her campaign proclaimed that it intended to raise $15 million in the first three months of 2007 and $75 million by the end of the year, both aggressive-sounding goals that were in fact low-ball numbers. Behind the scenes, the campaign was pressing its upper-echelon bundlers to raise at least $250,000, and ideally $1 million, apiece. The tacit message to big-dollar Democrats was that it was time to choose between Hillary and Obama. At a book party in Los Angeles attended by scores of potential donors, McAuliffe said, half-jokingly, “You’re either with us or against us.”