Game Change (8 page)

Daley was struck by how much consideration Obama already seemed to have devoted to his hypothetical candidacy. To the suggestion that he hang back, Obama responded that he didn’t have the luxury of time; if he dawdled, Hillary would lock up too many big donors and key operatives. Obama was clear about something else, which also struck Daley—for its chutzpah.

“If I can win Iowa,” Obama said, “I can put this thing away.”

Yet for all his bravado, Obama was still ambivalent about getting into the race, for reasons personal and political. The personal ambivalence was complex and nebulous, but could be resolved down the road. The political ambivalence was more pressing and revolved around one question: Could he and his advisers chart a plausible pathway to victory?

The cartographic endeavor began in earnest a few hours after his lunch with Bill Daley ended. The setting was the same: the fourth-floor conference room in Axlerod’s office. On the table were cookies, bottled water, and soda. Around it were the members of Obama’s personal and professional brain trust: Michelle, Jarrett, and his close friend, Marty Nesbitt; Axelrod, Gibbs, Rouse, Mastromonaco, Hildebrand, and Axelrod’s business partner, David Plouffe. Over the next few hours, Obama received from the group what amounted to a crash course: Presidential Politics 101—the logistics, the mechanics, the calendar, how the whole thing worked. His knowledge about the topic was limited (alarmingly so, thought some at the table), his initial questions rudimentary. How much of his time would be required? How often would he be on the road? Michelle asked if he could come home every weekend—or at least every Sunday—to be with his family.

“Yes, he can have Sundays off,” Hildebrand blurted out.

Bullshit
, thought Mastromonaco.
Crazy
, thought Gibbs. Almost to a person, the Obama brain trust was determined that their boss understand how hard running for the White House would be, that none of the bitter realities of the process be sugarcoated. Axelrod and Rouse had long wondered if Obama had the requisite inferno raging in his belly. They wanted him to enter the race eyes wide open, both for his own sake and so there would be no recriminations later.

Hildebrand didn’t care one whit about raising Obama’s consciousness. He wanted him, needed him, to run. He was so enamored of Obama that he was willing to say just about anything to get him in, no matter how nonsensical. Sundays off? Sure! We’ll do things differently, we’ll use the Web, we’ll make it work, he assured Obama.

No, we won’t, Plouffe cut in. And no, you can’t come home on Sundays.

Rail-thin, pretense-free, incapable of artifice, Plouffe had run winning campaigns at the senatorial, congressional, and gubernatorial levels, as well as worked on two prior presidentials. He knew the score. You have two choices, he told Obama. You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.

That’s your choice, Plouffe explained. There’s no middle ground, no short cuts—especially when you’re running against Hillary Clinton.

The estimability of the putative Clinton endeavor hovered over the discussion, weighing on Obama. But the people around the table were no rookies at this game; if you had to start from scratch, they were among the best in the business to start there with. Their attitude toward the Clinton machine was clinical and uncowed. The machine was real, but it could be broken down into two constituent parts: personnel and money. Axelrod assured Obama that there were plenty of top-flight players in the party who wouldn’t be working for Hillary, especially in the four states that would kick off the nomination contest: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

Iowa loomed large in Axelrod’s mind. Twenty years earlier, when he worked for Paul Simon’s underdog campaign, the Illinois senator lost the caucuses to another candidate from a neighboring state, Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt, by just one percentage point. The lesson for Axelrod was that proximity mattered; that having Chicago as his home base would allow Obama to penetrate Iowa more readily and thoroughly than his would-be rivals, including Clinton. Focusing on Iowa and the other early contests also addressed the second of Hillary’s advantages. Though she would likely raise a ton of dough, nobody doubted that Obama could come up with enough to match her in the first four, modest-sized, states.

Obama himself had been fixated on Iowa since the steak fry. He had a good feeling about the place, but that wasn’t enough. If the Hawkeye State was going to be so crucial to his chances, he wanted details. Much of November would be spent gathering them, with Hildebrand quietly dispatched to Iowa to do reconnaissance.

One night later that month, Hildebrand’s phone rang in Sioux Falls, waking him from a sound sleep. Obama was on the line. For the next forty-five minutes he quizzed Hildebrand about every conceivable Iowa-related topic: how he would fare against Edwards in rural counties; the impact of media coverage spilling over from Illinois into the Iowa communities along the Mississippi River; which local officials they could expect to bring on board as endorsers. Hildebrand told him that he, Michelle, and the girls would all have to spend a lot of time in Iowa—and also that the catalyst for winning there would be bringing new voters into the process. If we run a traditional campaign, Hildebrand said, we’re doomed.

Axelrod had a complementary view, which he laid out for Obama. In every election, Axelrod argued, the incumbent defines the race, even if he isn’t on the ballot. Which meant 2008 was going to be defined by Bush. And given the enmity that the president had inspired in the Democratic Party, Axelrod went on, the overwhelmingly liberal primary and caucus electorate would be hungry for a candidate representing the sharpest possible departure from 43: one who promised to be a unifier and not a polarizer; someone nondogmatic and uncontaminated by the special-interest cesspool that Washington had become; and, critically, someone seen as a staunch and principled opponent of the war raging in Iraq. Now, who had a better chance of being that someone—Hillary or Barack? The question answered itself.

Axelrod’s contention was bolstered by a conversation that Obama had with Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, an Illinois congressman and another of Axelrod’s clients, was one of the shrewdest and most aggressive pols of his generation. He was also a veteran of the Clinton White House, intimately aware of how the former First Couple operated. They’re gonna do what they gotta do to win—and this is not patty-cake, Emanuel told Obama. But could they be had? They could be had. There’s a soft underbelly with them.

The contours of Hillary’s vulnerabilities were revealed in detail by polling and focus group testing in Iowa that the Obama brain trust secretly commissioned a few weeks later, near the end of 2006. Though the polling put Obama in third place behind Edwards and Clinton, he was within striking distance of both. Not bad, considering that Edwards had been practically living in Iowa for two years already and that Clinton was . . . well, Clinton.

More striking were the focus groups, which were conducted in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. Almost uniformly, the people in the groups reacted favorably to Obama—to his 2002 speech opposing the war, his rhetoric of change and unity, his freshness and sense of promise. Rarely did they express grave misgivings about his race or his exotic background. The more they knew about his biography and bearing, the more they liked him. In one of the sessions, after watching a video clip of Obama, a white woman said, “There’s something about that guy; that’s the guy I want. I can’t even put it into words.”

Observing from behind a two-way mirror, Axelrod was floored. “We can’t forget that woman,” he said to his colleagues. “We have something special here. I feel like I’ve been handed a porcelain baby”—something very, very precious, but very fragile.

The results of the focus groups were equally encouraging when it came to Clinton. She was well known, well liked, and well respected, but inspired nagging doubts. She registered with participants as status quo, as the past and not the future; she stirred up memories of the partisan bickering of the nineties, the Clinton-Gingrich contretemps, Monica, and impeachment. Her standing among women was much stronger than it was among men, but there was no sweeping feminist imperative to support her. “I do want a woman to be president of the United States,” one female voter said, “but not this one.”

BY THE END OF November 2006, Obama could see a route to beating Clinton. Not an easy highway to navigate, by any means, but at least one clearly marked and mapped. And he could also see that the biggest roadblock ahead of him was another woman entirely.

From the get-go, Michelle Obama had made it plain that she didn’t want Barack to run for president. She was wary beyond words, for a long time refusing to discuss the concept, even with her closest friends. The citation of spousal hesitation is, of course, a timeworn trope in American presidential politics. Every male candidate loftily affirms that he couldn’t possibly go ahead without his wife’s full support, but as a matter of course, Y-chromosome ambition trumps X-chromosome reluctance. Really, it’s no contest.

But with Barack and Michelle, it was. Obama adored his wife, genuinely believed she was his better half, that he’d be lost without her. He didn’t even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else’s company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters. As the midterms approached, he told his advisers more than once, I’m not doing this if Michelle’s not comfortable, and she’s certainly not there yet.

She had always been a gut-level skeptic about the gaga-ness around her husband. In the wake of the drooling adulation poured on him after his convention speech, she suspected that he would be treated like “the flavor of the month,” a passing fancy soon discarded by a fickle political culture. As she watched people fawning over him at his swearing-in to the Senate, she said dryly to a reporter, “Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention.”

She had no doubt that day would come. Her confidence in Barack was profound and unshakable. But in the meantime, she was perfectly miserable with him being in the Senate. The Robinson family had been close-knit: a homemaker mother, a municipal-employee father, and a basketball-star brother who ate dinner every night together with her in a one-bedroom brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. They were immersed in one another’s daily lives, the highs and lows, the successes and traumas of childhood and adolescence. She wanted that badly for her daughters, too, and she wasn’t getting it. She hadn’t signed up for a commuter marriage. She was laboring to make it work, but when she was being honest, she admitted that she hated it; she was lonely too much of the time. There had been strains in their marriage back in 2000, when Barack had run unsuccessfully for Congress. Now she was being asked to talk about his running for president—and it felt like the rug was about to be pulled out from under her even more violently than it had been already.

One night midway through 2006, over a four-hour dinner with Jarrett, Michelle let her frustrations pour out. “This is hard,” she said. “Really hard.” Jarrett decided not to even mention the presidential chatter. Michelle was in a bad place emotionally. No point in making it worse.

But following the midterms, Michelle had no choice but to grapple with the subject. After that first November meeting in Axelrod’s office, the Obamas, Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt went for dinner at Coco Pazzo, an Italian joint they loved. Michelle was going on and on about her issues. She had a lot of questions—and also a lot of fears. She’d been worried about Barack’s safety since he entered the Senate. Now he would be an even bigger target, and so would she and the girls. Could the campaign keep their family safe?

The atmosphere was tense. Finally, Jarrett interrupted and said, “Let’s try this from a different perspective. Michelle, let’s say Barack answers all your questions to your full satisfaction and he’s got an answer for every one of them. Are you in?”

“I’m in a hundred and ten percent,” Michelle said. But she wasn’t going to let her husband get away with the “We’ll figure it out” bluster that he was prone to employ over contentious matters. Turning to Barack, she said, “You’re going to be really specific with me. You’re going to tell me exactly how we’re going to work it out.”

All the stress seemed to drain right out of Obama’s posture. His shoulders slackened, his face softened. It was the first time he’d ever heard Michelle say that she could get behind his running. Her list, he knew, would be long and involved, but it would be finite—a mountain that he could scale.

Most of the questions on Michelle’s list involved their daughters. How are you going to continue being a father to them? How many days will you be home? How are you going to communicate with the girls when you’re away? How often are you going to talk to them? Are you going to come to parent-teacher conferences? What about recitals? But other questions were directed elsewhere. How are you going to take care of your health? Are you going to quit smoking? (That was a deal-breaker, she claimed.) And then there was this: How are we, as a family, going to withstand the personal attacks that will certainly be coming?

Barack knew Michelle was right to be worried about the hammer that would fall on both of them if he ran. But he believed it was possible to rise above the distortions and
j’accuses
that had turned politics into the sort of unedifying blood sport from which so many Americans recoiled. Obama was also resolute about not attempting to turn the onslaught against his opponents. Oh, he’d throw punches when it was necessary—he would never shy away from a vigorous fight. But if he had to become just another hack, gouging out eyes and wallowing in the mud to do this thing, then it wasn’t worth doing. If he got in, he told Michelle and his brain trust, he would be in with both feet, for sure. “But I’m also going to emerge intact,” he said. “I’m going to be Barack Obama and not some parody.”