Game Change (47 page)

Lieberman had met Palin at the convention in St. Paul and established a bit of a rapport with her—another reason for him to be at the Westin. But the Palin he saw now scarcely resembled the confident, brassy woman he’d watched bring audiences close to rapture on the trail. She was sitting there being fed questions, saying virtually nothing, to the point where her coaches asked Lieberman to take the lectern and start answering instead.

Schmidt and Davis arrived and were appalled by the scene they found. The room was hot and claustrophobic; the shades were drawn. The place was full of half-eaten hotel food and stank of moldering french fries. Palin, looking dazed, was surrounded, as usual, by stacks and stacks of index cards.

Schmidt cleared the room and said to Palin, Governor, the debate’s on Thursday and this isn’t working. We’re going to move the show to Sedona and we’re going to fix it. The Katie Couric interview did not go well, and it didn’t go well because you didn’t prepare; and there can never be another instance of something not going well because of that. You’re not the first politician to have a bad interview. Ronald Reagan said that trees cause pollution and went on to be a great president. No one will remember this stuff if we have a good debate.

Schmidt thought Palin looked thin and drawn. Your road crew tells me that you’re not sleeping, he said. No one running for the office of vice president should be getting less than eight hours of sleep a night. If you need to take sleeping pills, you should.

Schmidt then brusquely brought up Palin’s weight. It’s my understanding that you might be on the Atkins diet, he said. That goofy diet is bad for you. I want you off it today. I’m alarmed by your weight loss and it’s noticeable even in just a couple weeks. In order to perform at your highest level, you have to have a balanced diet.

Palin offered not a word of protest.

When Schmidt finished, he walked out in the hall and buttonholed Lieberman. “She’s down,” Schmidt said. “This whole process is affecting her confidence.”

Lieberman couldn’t have agreed more, although he wasn’t sure that having a former VP nominee show off his debating chops was the best way to build Palin up. The situation was wildly unconventional already: a Democratic senator being imported into a top-secret lockdown to assist a Republican vice-presidential candidate whose mental stability was in question. Now Schmidt asked Lieberman to perform another unorthodox intervention.

“You’re both very religious,” Schmidt said. “Go in there and pray with her.”

As it happened, Palin had already been prayed for that day. A group of Republican congresswomen had offered their blessings via conference call with her. But Lieberman went back and took a less direct tack, providing Palin with Talmudic wisdom. Invoking the influential Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, he spoke about the covenant of faith, which is the relationship between God and man, and the covenant of destiny, which is what men make of themselves.

“Look,” Lieberman said kindly, “you gotta be saying to yourself, ‘What am I doing here? How did this happen?’ This is your moment to make it really count for something.”

Palin seemed touched. “Joe,” she said. “I can’t figure any other reason I’m here except that I was meant to be here.”

Palin’s immediate rendezvous with destiny was in Ohio the next day, where she stopped on the way to Sedona to join McCain for a rally and to tape the final parts of her interview with Couric. Palin wanted to blow off Katie, but the campaign felt that doing so would be a PR nightmare. Palin acquiesced, but not entirely. Rather than prepping for Couric, she allowed herself to become consumed by a different media opportunity: a questionnaire from the
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman
, the local Wasilla newspaper, which she insisted on filling out herself. Hours before she was scheduled to meet Couric, Palin emailed several members of her team, “How ‘bout I do the Katie interview after I get the Frontiersman interview questions and reply to them? It’s been my priority.”

The irony was rich, therefore, when the question of Couric’s that tripped up Palin that day was one about her reading habits: What newspapers and magazines did she read to stay abreast of the world? “Most of them,” Palin said. Specifically? “All of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.” Can you name a few? “I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too,” Palin said. “Alaska isn’t a foreign country.”

Debate camp commenced that night in Sedona with an outdoor buffet hosted by Cindy. Palin was thrilled to see her family and spent much of the time cradling Trig, but beyond that, she was subdued. To prevent leaks about the ongoing crisis, Schmidt had drastically narrowed the circle around Palin, cutting out much of her staff and foregoing the idea of a professional politician to stand in for Biden. (Randy Scheunemann, one of her foreign policy tutors from St. Paul, was assigned the job.) Davis had pleaded with Mark McKinnon, who had decided to sit out the general election because he wanted no part of flaying Obama, to ride to their rescue; he agreed, but just for that one night.

After dinner, they all retreated to a small room tightly packed with two lecterns and a camera, in one of the McCain compound’s guest buildings. A run-through was attempted, in which Palin kept getting lost fifteen seconds into her answers, stopping suddenly and saying, No, no, wait, let me start over, or, Shoot, I don’t know this.

The session ended after an hour. Schmidt, Mark Wallace, and McKinnon stepped outside into the cool desert air, the night pitch black around them.

“What do you think?” Wallace asked McKinnon.

“Oh. My. God.”

The next day, Schmidt decreed the banishment of Palin’s hundreds of index cards. Instead, she was given twenty-five or thirty containing full-blown questions and answers, based on her team’s best guesses at what the debate queries would be, along with scripted pivots out of dangerous territory and onto safer ground. There was no time for Palin to learn enough to be turned into Jeane Kirkpatrick in the next forty-eight hours. But after seeing her handle the prompter malfunction at the convention, Team McCain knew that she had an impressive capacity for learning by rote.

They moved the lecterns outside and set them up by the creek for daytime rehearsals. Between sessions, Palin, dressed in a hockey jersey and soccer shorts, would go off by herself, sit on the porch or on a swing under a tree, and study up on her preset questions, committing the answers to memory.

The change of venue and routine seemed to have an effect. That night, Palin made it all the way through her formal run-through. When she finished, the room broke into applause. Priscilla Shanks, the speech coach who had worked with Palin at the convention, shouted out, “She’s back! She’s back!”

Schmidt and Wallace took a dimmer, more angst-ridden view. Outside Sedona, the stakes around the debate had continued to rise. On October 1, the night before the showdown, CBS ran the last, and arguably the worst, of the Couric clips: the one featuring Palin’s muffed Supreme Court answer. The previous Saturday, Tina Fey had unleashed her second stab at Palin on SAL, in a sketch spoofing the initial Couric sit-down, using nearly identical language to what the nominee had said about the bailout bill; a devastating mash-up juxtaposing the reality with the parody was zooming around the Web. And while Palin’s performance in prep had improved markedly, she was still committing howlers that, if let loose during the debate, would be cataclysmic events.

She also continued to stumble over an unavoidable element: her rival’s name. Over and over, Palin referred to Obama’s running mate as “Senator Obiden”—or was it “O’Biden”?—and the corrections from her team weren’t sticking. Finally, three staffers, practically in unison, suggested, Why don’t you just call him Joe?

Palin stared at them quizzically and said, “But I’ve never met him.”

IN FAR-OFF DELAWARE, things were running more smoothly, at least on the surface. At the Sheraton Suites Hotel in Wilmington, the opposing side had taken over the second floor and transformed it into a down-to-the-millimeter replica of the debate stage in St. Louis. The height of the lecterns. The distance between them. The lighting. The color scheme. All of it was identical to the real thing. And then the Obamans and Bidenettes saw the press pictures of Palin rehearsing in her gym shorts by a tree. They had to laugh.

But only for a second. Then they went back to being tied up in knots with fear that Joe would botch his big moment.

It wasn’t hard to imagine how it could happen. The expectations for Palin were subterranean, while the bar for Biden was set around Jupiter. There wasn’t much to win here, in other words, but there was plenty to lose—and there were at least two obvious ways that Biden could do it. He might be condescending to Palin because he thought she was an ignoramus. Or he might be patronizing to her as a woman, which, given Joe’s old-school Sinatraesque tendencies, was just as likely.

The Obamans were pushing a simple strategy: Ignore Palin. Don’t engage her. Whatever happens, don’t let her lure you down any rabbit holes with her crazy syntax and run-on sentences.

But Joe couldn’t resist—not at first. A week or two before the three days of formal debate camp started on September 29, the campaign put him through his paces in a mock run-through against Anita Dunn. She played the part by reading from a script assembled almost entirely out of verbatim Palin quotes. That’s too incoherent, Biden exclaimed. Is that really what she says? No, that can’t be her answer. But, I mean, she’s not saying anything. How am I supposed to respond to that, folks?

And into the rabbit hole he went.

It only got worse once they brought in the actual stand-in for Palin, the governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. Lithe and alluring like Palin, Granholm came with talking points and a strategy, having glutted herself on YouTube videos of Palin’s Alaska debates. Pushing the readiness regimen past the point of absurdity, the Obamans ran Granholm through her own pre-prep prep against a fake Biden. The result was a perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined, flirty—and mean.

Biden’s first sessions with Granholm were bad enough to put a scare into Axelrod and Plouffe. Biden was in
Meet the Press
mode, ponderous and long-winded. Granholm, aware that family was Biden’s soft spot, made cracks about his son Hunter’s lobbying history, and Joe turned defensive. When Granholm dangled bait by playing dumb, he turned scornful and chauvinistic.

But Biden worked diligently with Michael Sheehan, who trained him using what Sheehan—with due generational aptness—dubbed an “Arthur Murray pattern.” Describe the situation; explain how it will be worse under McCain; describe how it’ll be better under us. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Biden quickly got the hang of it.

He also figured out other means of avoiding rabbit holes. In one session, Granholm was tossing in non sequiturs—explanations that started nowhere and ended up even farther off the map—when she tried to entice Joe into hole-diving with an answer on race that concluded with a wayward reference to
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Biden paused. “I really have nothing to add to that.”

By the night of the debate, the Obamans were expressing confidence, but their doubts weren’t far beneath the surface.

“You feel like he’s ready?” Obama asked Dunn an hour before the debate.

“He’s totally ready,” Dunn assured him (and herself).

“You know,” Obama said, “I think I’m just going to watch this by myself.”

The debate began with its best-known moment: Palin striding onstage in a fitted black suit, extending a hand to Biden, and saying, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” From there, the next ninety minutes unfolded as almost no one expected they would. Neither Palin nor Biden gaffed. Neither said anything egregiously stupid. Neither went for the other’s throat, as both aimed their shots at the top of the opposite ticket.

When it was over, the Obamans exhaled and Biden was triumphal. Coming off the stage, he said to his aides, “You guys owe me. You don’t know how much restraint that took.”

McCainworld was ecstatic. Five days earlier, many of them had feared that Palin’s psychological fragility might lead to a fiasco. Palin had not only survived, but fought Biden to something like a draw. In their suite at the Four Seasons, the Palins stayed up past midnight celebrating, drinking champagne, talking about what came next. More rallies. More rope lines. And more attacks on Obama.

Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, Palin said. Let’s get out there and win this election!

THE DEBATE PROPELLED HER back onto the trail with a fresh head of steam, a renewed sense of confidence, and an appetite for Obama’s jugular. On October 4,
The New York Times
provided Palin an opportunity to capitalize on all three when it published a front-page article about the topic that Hillary Clinton always believed would come back to bite Obama: former Weather Underground subversive William Ayers.

Though the story concluded that Obama and Ayers “do not appear to have been close,” the next day McCainworld instructed Palin by email to lay into the Democratic nominee as “someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.” Palin eagerly agreed, and, with a few syntactical tweaks, delivered the message as written.

For McCainworld, it would be one of the precious few times in the election’s final month that Palin stuck to the script. With the debate-related tumult behind them and any possibility gone that Palin would be a game changer, McCain’s strategists hoped that she would continue to be useful in firing up the base and not create too many disruptions or distractions. But it wasn’t long before the signs appeared that Palin was going rogue.

The most widely publicized example was an interview she gave to the
Times
’s in-house conservative columnist, William Kristol, on October 5, the same day she thrashed Obama for “palling around with terrorists.” When Kristol asked why, if Ayers was on the table, Reverend Wright was not, Palin said that Obama’s pastor should be fair game and implicitly criticized McCain for not leading the charge. McCain was rarely bothered when Palin scampered off message, mainly because he did the same so often himself. But this was an exception. He’d drawn a hard line around Wright and couldn’t understand why his running mate would have crossed it.