Game Change Read online

  GAME CHANGE

  * * *

  OBAMA AND THE CLINTONS,

  MCCAIN AND PALIN, AND

  THE RACE OF A LIFETIME

  * * *

  JOHN HEILEMANN

  AND MARK HALPERIN

  FOR DIANA AND KAREN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One – Her Time

  Chapter Two – The Alternative

  Chapter Three – The Ground Beneath Her Feet

  Chapter Four – Getting to Yes

  Chapter Five – The Inevitables

  Chapter Six – Barack in a Box

  Chapter Seven – “They Looooove Me!”

  Chapter Eight – The Turning Point

  Chapter Nine – The Fun Part

  Chapter Ten – Two For the Price of One

  Chapter Eleven – Fear and Loathing in the Lizard’s Thicket

  Chapter Twelve – Pulling Away and Falling Apart

  Chapter Thirteen – Obama Agonistes

  Chapter Fourteen – The Bitter End Game

  Part II

  Chapter Fifteen – The Maverick and His Meltdown

  Chapter Sixteen – Running Unopposed

  Chapter Seventeen – Slipping Nooses, Slaying Demons

  Part III

  Chapter Eighteen – Paris and Berlin

  Chapter Nineteen – The Mile-High Club

  Chapter Twenty – Sarahcuda

  Chapter Twenty-One – September Surprise

  Chapter Twenty-Two – Seconds in Command

  Chapter Twenty-Three – The Finish Line

  Epilogue – Together at Last

  Index

  Author’s Notes

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  BARACK OBAMA JERKED BOLT upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning. Darkness enveloped his low-rent room at the Des Moines Hampton Inn; the airport across the street was quiet in the hours before dawn. It was very late December 2007, a few days ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Obama had been sprinting flat out for president for nearly a year. Through all the nights he’d endured in cookie-cutter hotels during the months of uncertainty and angst—months of lagging by a mile in the national polls, his improbable bid for the White House written off by the Washington smart set, his self-confidence shaken by his uneven performance and the formidability of his archrival, Hillary Clinton—Obama always slept soundly, like the dead. But now he found himself wide awake, heart pounding, consumed by a thought at once electric and daunting: I might win this thing.

  The past months in Iowa had been a blur of high school gyms, union halls, and snow-dusted cornfields. Obama was surging, he could sense it—the crowds swelling, the enthusiasm mounting, his organization clicking, his stump speech catching sparks. His strategy from day one had been crystalline: win Iowa and watch the dominoes fall. If he carried the caucuses, New Hampshire and South Carolina would be his, and so on, and so on. But as Obama sat there in the predawn stillness, the implications of the events he saw unfolding hit him as never before. He didn’t feel ecstatic. He didn’t feel relieved. He felt like the dog that caught the bus. What was he supposed to do now?

  By the morning of the caucuses, Obama was laboring to project his customary aura of calm. “Never too high, never too low” was how he and everyone else described his temperament. His opponents were still out there running around, squeezing in a few last appearances before the voting started. But Obama had decided to chill. He woke up late, played some basketball, went for a haircut with Marty Nesbitt, a pal of his from Chicago. Lazing around the hotel afterward, he and Nesbitt shot the breeze about sports, their kids, and then more sports. Anything, that is, to avoid talking about the election, the one topic that Obama seemed intent on banishing from his head.

  The phone rang. Obama picked it up. Chris Edley was on the line.

  The two men had known each other for almost twenty years, since Obama was a student at Harvard Law School and Edley one of his professors. Now the dean of Boalt Hall at Berkeley, Edley was one of the few outsiders in whom Obama had confided all year long, with whom he shared his frustrations and anxieties about his campaign, which were greater than almost anyone knew. But today it was the teacher who was stressing while the pupil played Mr. Cool.

  “I haven’t been able to eat in thirty-six hours, I’m so nervous,” Edley said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m serene,” Obama said. “I just got back from playing basketball.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Nope,” Obama said. “We had a strategy. We stuck to it. We executed it reasonably well. Now it’s in the hands of the voters.”

  Obama’s advisers took comfort in his serenity, but share it they did not. The Obama brain trust—David Axelrod, the hangdog chief strategist and self-styled “keeper of the message”; David Plouffe, the tightly wound campaign manager; Robert Gibbs, the sturdy, sharp-elbowed Alabaman communications director; Steve Hildebrand, the renowned field operative behind the campaign’s grassroots effort in Iowa—was a worrywartish crew by nature. But their nerves were especially jangly now, and with good reason.

  The Obamans had bet everything on Iowa. If their man lost, he was probably toast—and certainly so if he placed behind Clinton. By his campaign’s own rigorous projections, an Obama victory would require a turnout at least 50 percent higher than the all-time Iowa record. It would require a stampede of the college kids and other first-time caucus-goers they had been recruiting like mad. Would the kids show up? Obama’s advisers had high hopes, but no real sense of confidence. Many of them were convinced that John Edwards would wind up in first place. Others fretted that Clinton would win. The campaign’s final internal pre-caucus poll had Obama finishing third.

  Anxiety among Obama’s brain trust rarely seemed to affect the candidate, but as caucus day morphed into night, his façade of nonchalance began to crack. On a visit to a suburban caucus site with Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett—a tough Chicago businesswoman and politico who was a dear friend to Obama and his wife, Michelle—he saw a swarm of voters in Obama T-shirts and got teary-eyed in the car. Outside the restaurant where he planned to have dinner with a couple dozen friends, Obama was fiending for information in a way his aides had seldom seen before. Overhearing Plouffe and another staffer kibitzing about turnout, he doubled back and peppered them with queries: “What are you guys talking about?” “What did you say?” “What are you hearing?” Obama sat down with Michelle in the wood-paneled dining room of Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse in West Des Moines. Plouffe had warned him to ignore the early returns, which were likely to be skewed against him. But not long into the meal, BlackBerrys around the table buzzed with emails that told a different story. Turnout was massive. Unprecedented. Beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Obama was leading in Polk County. He was leading in Cedar Rapids. Then a phone call came from Plouffe. Obama listened, hung up, and apologized to his friends. “I think I gotta go get ready to give my victory speech,” he said.

  As Barack and Michelle walked out of Fleming’s and headed back to their hotel, the candidate was neither elated nor surprised. He had been too confident the past few days for those emotions now. What Obama felt was something close to certainty: he would be the Democratic nominee. The African American with the middle name Hussein had conquered the nearly all-Caucasian Iowa caucuses. Who could possibly stop him now? Especially given what he’d just learned about the fate that had befallen Hillary.

  TERRY MCAULIFFE ENTERED THE suite on the tenth floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, let in by the Secret Service agent stationed outside the door. Bill Clinton sat alone on the couch, watching the Orange Bowl o
n TV. McAuliffe had been the chairman of the Democratic National Committee when Clinton was president; now he chaired Hillary’s campaign and had just learned the brutal news.

  “Hey, Mac, how you doing?” Clinton said casually. “You want a beer?”

  “How we doing?” McAuliffe asked, taken aback. “Have you not heard anything?”

  “No.”

  “We’re gonna get our ass kicked.”

  “What?” Clinton exclaimed, jumping to his feet, calling out, “Hillary!”

  Hillary emerged from the bedroom. McAuliffe filled her in. The data jockeys downstairs in the campaign’s boiler room had rendered a grim verdict: she was going to finish third, slightly shy of Edwards and a long way behind Obama.

  McAuliffe’s words landed like a roundhouse right on the Clintons’ collective jaw. They’d known all along that Iowa was Hillary’s weakest state. But she and her team kept pouring time and money into the place, pushing more and more chips into the center of the table. On the eve of the caucuses, the people the Clintons trusted most had assured them the gamble would pay off. First place, Hillary and Bill were told. A close second, at worst. Yet here she was, a far-off third—and the Clintons were reeling like a pair of Vegas drunks the morning after, struggling to come to grips with the scale of what they’d lost.

  The members of Hillary’s high command soon began piling into the suite: Mark Penn, her perpetually rumpled chief strategist and pollster; Mandy Grunwald, her ad maker; Howard Wolfson, her combative communications czar; Neera Tanden, her policy director; and Patti Solis Doyle, the quintessential Hillary loyalist, who served as her campaign manager. Though the suite was the best in the hotel, the living room was small, the lighting dim, the furniture shabby. The atmosphere was clammy and claustrophobic—and became even more so as the Clintons’ shock quickly gave way to anger.

  How did this happen? the Clintons asked again and again, grilling Penn about his polling and Grunwald about her ads, railing about the unholy amount of cash the campaign had blown on Iowa. (The final tally would be $29 million—for 70,000 votes.) The turnout figures made no sense to them: some 239,000 caucus-goers had shown up, nearly double the figure from four years earlier. Where did all these people come from? Bill asked. Were they really all Iowans? The Obama campaign must have cheated, he said, must have bussed in supporters from Illinois.

  Hillary had been worried about that possibility for weeks; now she egged her husband on. Bill’s right, she said. We need to investigate the cheating.

  “It’s a rigged deal,” Bill groused.

  Hillary was trying to rein in her emotions. The former president was not. Red-faced and simmering, he sat in the living room venting his frustrations. He was furious with New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, the fourth-place finisher, for cutting a backroom deal that had funneled some of his supporters to Obama, after assuring Hillary’s campaign that he would make no such pacts. Bill Clinton had appointed Richardson to two high offices during his administration, and now he’d knifed Hillary in the back. I guess energy secretary and U.N. ambassador weren’t enough for him, Clinton huffed.

  But mostly Bill was enraged with the media, which he believed had brutalized his wife while treating Obama with kid gloves. This is bullshit, he said. The guy’s a phony. He has no experience, he has no record; he’s not nearly ready to be commander in chief.

  “He’s a United States senator,” Hillary snapped. “That’s nothing to laugh at.”

  He’s only been in the Senate three years and he’s been running the whole time for president, Bill replied. “What has he really done?”

  “We have to be real here— people think of that as experience,” Hillary said.

  Losing always tests a politician’s composure and grace. Hillary had never lost before, and she found little of either trait at her disposal. Presented with the carefully wrought, sound-bite-approved text of the concession speech she was soon supposed to deliver before the cameras, she sullenly leafed through the pages, cast them aside, and decided to ad lib. Her phone call to congratulate Obama was abrupt and impersonal. “Great victory, we’re three tickets out of Iowa, see you in New Hampshire,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  The advisers in the room were all longtime intimates of the Clintons and had experienced their squalls of fury many times. But to a person, they found the display they were witnessing now utterly stunning— and especially unnerving coming from Hillary. Watching her bitter and befuddled reaction, her staggering lack of calm or command, one of her senior-most lieutenants thought for the first time, This woman shouldn’t be president.

  The truth was, the dimensions of Obama’s win boggled Hillary’s mind. He had beaten her among Democrats and independents, among rich and poor. He’d even carried the women’s vote. His victory would destroy her support among African Americans, Hillary was certain of that. Twenty-four hours earlier and all the previous year, she’d been the front-runner, the unstoppable, inevitable nominee. Now Obama stood as the most likely next president of the United States.

  Bill Clinton was resolved to do whatever it took to thwart that probability. For months he had held his tongue as his fears escalated—about Iowa, about what he saw as her team’s lack of competence, about their unwillingness to take down Obama. It’s Hillary’s campaign, he’d told himself; he had to let her run it. But now her candidacy was hanging by a thread, and with it the prospect that he held dear of creating a Clinton dynasty. The time had come, he decided, for the Big Dog to be unleashed.

  Yet Hillary wondered if it was too late for that. Turning to her husband, she shook her head and sighed. Maybe the problem wasn’t Iowa. Maybe the problem wasn’t her campaign. “Maybe,” she said, “they just don’t like me.”

  JOHN EDWARDS STOOD ONSTAGE in the ballroom of the Renaissance Savery Hotel in Des Moines, gamely attempting to put the best face possible on his distant second-place finish. “The one thing that’s clear from the results tonight is that the status quo lost and change won,” he declared. “And now we move on.”

  Edwards knew better than that, however. When he first learned the outcome from his number crunchers, what he thought was, Well, we’re fucked.

  For Edwards even more than Obama, winning Iowa was the sine qua non of survival. The former North Carolina senator had always kept one foot in the Hawkeye State after the 2004 campaign, in which his surprise second-place finish in the caucuses vaulted him into the vice-presidential slot under John Kerry. Edwards’s campaign this time around had been a spirited neo-populist crusade. But compared to Clinton and Obama, he was running a shoestring operation—really, he was running on fumes. To have any chance at all in the states ahead, Edwards needed a clear victory in Iowa to give him the momentum of a contender and to unleash a flood of contributions into his coffers.

  But Edwards had no intention of going quietly into any good night. He had a contingency plan. Two months earlier he had asked Leo Hindery, a New York media investor who was one of his closest confidants, to convey a proposal to Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and a mentor to Obama. The scheme was audacious but straightforward: If Edwards won the caucuses, Obama would immediately drop out of the race and become his running mate; if Obama won, Edwards would do the converse. (If Clinton won, it was game over for them both.) Wounding though a loss in Iowa would be to Hillary, she might well prove strong enough to bounce back. The only way to guarantee her elimination would be to take the extraordinary step of uniting against her.

  Hindery had presented the proposal to Daschle, with whom he’d long been friends. Daschle brought it to the Obama campaign. The talks were tentative; nothing had been decided.

  Now, with the results of Iowa in, Edwards determined it was time to strike the deal. A little while before taking the stage at the Savery, he summoned Hindery to his hotel suite and gave him his marching orders: “Get ahold of Tom.”

  Hindery considered the timing miserable. Obama just frickin’ won Iowa, he thought. Give him a chance to savor it. But Edwards wa
nted to set the wheels in motion—tonight.

  Hindery left the Edwards suite and tried frantically to locate Daschle, but discovered that he wasn’t in Iowa. Calls were placed. Messages were left. No one knew where he was.

  As Edwards delivered his speech, Hindery stood a few feet to his right, until an aide suddenly alerted him that Daschle, vacationing with his family in Mexico, was on the phone.

  Hindery stepped offstage and took the call, straining to hear Daschle over the noise of the crowd. “Tom? I’ve got John Right here,” Hindery said. “You aren’t going to believe this, but he’s willing to cut a deal right now. He’ll agree to be Barack’s VP.”

  Hindery was correct. Daschle was dumbfounded.

  “Are you sure you want to do this now?” he asked.

  “I’m not, but he is,” Hindery replied.

  All right, Daschle said. I’ll take it to Barack.

  THE TRIUMPH OF BARACK Obama, the humbling of Hillary Clinton, and the evisceration of John Edwards made January 3, 2008, a night for the history books. It was one of those rare moments in political life in which the world shifts on its axis—and everyone is watching. Obama, Clinton, and Edwards had all come into the caucuses with similar hopes and expectations. And they all left in radically different places: Obama, confident to the point of cockiness; Clinton, desperate but determined to save herself; Edwards, doomed but playing the angles. Looking back on it, they all agreed: Iowa had been a game changer.

  Though the world was paying less attention, the Republicans held caucuses in Iowa that night as well, and they were a game changer, too. The GOP nomination race had been in disarray all year, with no clear front-runner. For months, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and brusque 9/11 icon, had run first in national polls, but he was fading fast. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, was a charming performer, but his almost exclusively Evangelical base of support was too narrow to make him a plausible nominee. Yet Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, trouncing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney by ten points. The defeat was a vast humiliation for Romney, who’d spent millions on the state and had planned to use a victory there as a springboard to New Hampshire and beyond. By throwing the race into even greater chaos, the caucuses accomplished one thing: they opened the door wide to a candidate who wasn’t even in Iowa that evening, John McCain, who instead was in New Hampshire at a town hall meeting, casually telling an antiwar activist that it was “fine with me” if American troops stayed in Iraq for a hundred years.