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‘Astounding. One of the many triumphs of this compulsive, gossipy, rollercoaster investigation is the way it makes the election result seem much less of a foregone conclusion. With its cliffhangers and colourful prose, it reads less like politics and more like a novel. A very lurid, racy novel’
James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday
‘Easily the best book about the 2008 US election, this is the inside story of the campaign, and particularly covers McCain and John Edwards. The writers have pushed aside the curtains and got incredible access, in almost Rawnsley-esque fashion’
Justin Webb, BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
‘Shocking. The delicious thing about this book – it’s guilty pleasure – is that it transports you to a parallel universe in which everything in the National Enquirer is true. The reader travels with two highly diligent and workaholic reporters who are both clearly addicted to the human drama of US presidential elections’
Edward Luce, Financial Times
‘The talk of Washington. Delightfully sly and bitchy. Read the book and enjoy it’ Sarah Baxter,
Sunday Times
‘The book to read about the election’
Very Short List
‘Has had the American public gasping and much of Washington cringing’
The Week
‘Exhaustive and titillating’
New Statesman
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin are two of the most acclaimed political reporters in the United States, with unrivalled access to the presidential candidates and their teams throughout the campaign.
John Heilemann is the national political correspondent and columnist at New York magazine. He is a National Magazine Award finalist, and a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the Economist and Wired.
Mark Halperin is editor-at-large and senior political analyst for Time, founding editor of ‘The Page’ on time.com, and former political director of ABC News.
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First published in the USA as Game Change by HarperCollins 2010
First published in Great Britain as Race of a Lifetime by Viking 2010
Published in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, 2010
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-196134-7
FOR DIANA AND KAREN
Authors’ Note
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 “The 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
THE IDEA FOR THIS book arose in the spring of 2008 out of a pair of firm convictions. The first was that the election we had both been following intensely for more than a year was as riveting and historic a spectacle as modern politics had ever produced. The second was that, despite wall-to-wall media coverage, much of the story behind the headlines had not been told. What was missing and might be of enduring value, we agreed, was an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House: Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, John and Elizabeth Edwards, and John and Cindy McCain.
The vast majority of the material in these pages was taken from more than three hundred interviews with more than two hundred people conducted between July 2008 and September 2009. Almost all of the interviews took place in person, in sessions that often stretched over several hours. We set out to speak with every individual named in the book; only a handful declined to participate. Many also provided us with emails, memos, contemporaneous notes, recordings, schedules, and other forms of documentation.
All of our interviews—from those with junior staffers to those with the candidates themselves—were conducted on a “deep background” basis, which means we agreed not to identify the subjects as sources in any way. We believed this was essential to eliciting the level of candor on which a book of this sort depends. To a very large extent, we were interviewing people with whom one or both of us had long-standing professional relationships, and thus a solid basis to judge both the quality of the information being provided and the veracity of the providers.
While we made great efforts to compare and verify differing accounts of the same events, we were struck by how few fundamental disputes we encountered among our sources. In part, this owes to timing. We conducted many of our interviews about the nomination fights in the summer of 2008, when the combatants were out of the heat of battle and ready to talk, but their memories were still fresh. And the same dynamic held true in the months after the general election, when we turned intensely to that topic. In most every scene in the book, we have included only material about which disagreements among the players were either nonexistent or trivial. With regard to the few exceptions, we brought to bear deliberate professional consideration and judgment.
With the help of the participants, we have reconstructed dialogue extensively—and with extreme care. Where dialogue is within quotation marks, it comes from the speaker, someone who was present and heard the remark, contemporaneous notes, or transcripts. Where dialogue is not in quotes, it is paraphrased, reflecting only a lack of certainty on the part of our sources about precise wording, not about the nature of the statements. Where specific thoughts, feelings, or states of mind are rendered in italics, they come from either the person identified or someone to whom she or he expressed those thoughts or feelings directly.
No doubt some of our principal dramatis personae will find images of themselves in these pages that they would rather not see in print. But in every case, we have tried to tell their stories in two ways: as fairly as possible from the outside and as empathetically as we could from behind their eyes. In doing so, we have tried to address the multitude of vital questions that daily journalism (and hourly blogofying) obsessed over briefly and then passed by, or never grappled with in the first place. How did Obama, a freshman senator with few tangible political accomplishments, convince himself that he should be, and could be, America’s first African American president? What role did Bill Clinton actually play in his wife’s campaign? Why did McCain pick the unknown and untested governor of Alaska as his running mate? And who is Sarah Palin, really?
Although no work of this kind, lacking the distance and perspective of time, can hope to be definitive, we are convinced that some answers are more readily discovered in the ground that lies between history and journalism—precisely the spot that we were aiming for and believe this book occupies.
Our first and most obvious debt is to our sources, who spent countless hours with us in person and on the phone. We would also like to thank their assistants, who facilitated many of the interviews.
We are grateful to our bosses, Adam Moss and Rick Stengel, the editors of New York magazine and Time, respectively, who granted us the space we needed to take on this project; our agents, Andrew Wylie and Scott Moyers at the Wylie Agency and Jeff Jacobs at CAA, without whom we would have been lost; Richard Plepler of HBO, for his encouragement and perspicacity; our editor Tim Duggan, our publisher Jonathan Burnham, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins—Kathy Schneider, Tina Andreadis, Kate Pruss Pinnick, Leslie Cohen, and Allison Lorentzen—for placing a big bet on this book and laboring to make it a success.
A number of friends and colleagues in the journalism racket provided us support, including work from which we drew wisdom or memories that we tapped: Mike Allen, Matt Bai, Dan Balz, David Chalian, John Dickerson, Robert Draper, Joshua Greene, John Harris, Al Hunt, Joe Klein, Ryan Lizza, Jonathan Martin, John McCormick, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, Liza Mundy, Adam Nagourney, Bill Nichols, John Richardson, Michael Shear, Roger Simon, Ben Smith, Jeffrey Toobin, and Jeff Zeleny. In the closing phase, Aaron Kiersh contributed careful and timely research. And we were assisted throughout by an armada of transcribers, of whom two in particular deserve mention: Frankie Thomas and Steven Yaccino.
A special expression of gratitude is due, Elise O’Shaughnessy of Vanity Fair, a gifted editor who performed miracles to keep the manuscript from turning into War and Peace; we salute her poise under pressure and artful way with the scalpel. Another profound word of thanks is due Karen Avrich, whose tireless and brilliant work as a writer, editor, and researcher is evident on every page that follows.
A panoply of pals provided me with less tangible, but no less invaluable, forms of aid and comfort: Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer; Chris Anderson; John Battelle; Lisa Clements; David Dreyer; Mike Elliott and Emma Oxford; Mary Ellen Glynn and Dwight Holton; Katrina Heron; Michael Hirschorn; John Homans; Jeff Kwatinetz; Kerry Luft; Kenny Miller, Rachel Leventhal, and my goddaughter, Zoe Miller-Leventhal; Neil Parker and Kay Moffett; Jeff Pollack; Robert Reich; Jordan Tamagni and Michael Schlein; Will Wade-Gery and Emily Bo-tein; Harry Werksman; Fred and Joanne Wilson.
As ever, I am grateful for the example and support of my father, Richard Heilemann, which keep me on the straight and narrow (more or less), and for the memory of my mother, which sustains me in all my endeavors.
Finally, Diana Rhoten, my wife and salvation, deserves a bouquet the size of Botswana. Without her as a perpetual source of patience, reassurance, and inspiration—not to mention the occasional dose of tough love and ample portions of homestretch home cooking—I would never have made it through intact.
I send deep gratitude to Josh Tyrangiel and my colleagues at Time and Time.com, as well as to Ina Avrich, Bob Barnett, Gary Foster, Kyle Froman, Gil Fuchsberg, Nancy Gabriner, Charlie Gibson, Debbie Halperin, Bianca Harris, Dan Harris, Andrew Kirtzman, Ben Kushner, and David Westin. I am grateful for the guidance and eternal inspiration of Peter Jennings.
Getting the book done required the support and smiles of Megan Halperin, Hannah Halperin, Madelyn Halperin, Laura Hartmann, and Peter Hartmann. Thanks to their parents: RoseAnne McCabe, Gary Halperin, Carolyn Hartmann, and David Halperin. And also many thanks to Morton Halperin, Diane Orentlicher, Ina Young, and Joe Young.
Karen Avrich’s awesome professional contributions are noted above. More important than those: almost all of what I have achieved in my work, and in my life, I owe to Karen. By her sense of adventure, her generosity, her strength, her grace, and her example, she makes me a better person.
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 on 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 wanted 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.
There was something fitting about the outcomes in Iowa for both parties: the element of surprise, the fundamental way they shifted and shaped the contours of the race ahead. Every presidential contest has its twists and turns, each consequential to some degree. But the 2008 election was a campaign defined by big events, startling revelations, and unexpected episodes that again and again threatened to turn everything on its head. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Bill Clinton’s outbursts in South Carolina. Allegations about troubles in the McCain marriage. The epic crisis of the global financial system. The mesmerizing, confounding, deeply polarizing emergence of Sarah Palin. Palin’s public travails and private nightmares, and the unprecedented steps the McCain team took to cope with their superstar. All developments so extravagant and dramatic that they seemed like elements borrowed from a Hollywood screenplay.
And that was fitting, too. More than any election in memory, 2008 was a battle in which the candidates were celebrities, larger-than-life characters who crashed together to create a story uncommonly emotional for politics; a drama rich and captivating and drenched in modern complexities surrounding race, gender, class, religion, and age; a multimedia spectacle that unspooled 24/7 on the Web, cable television, the late-night talk shows, and Saturday Night Live. The drama played out against a backdrop that was itself vividly cinematic: a country at war, an economy on the brink, and an electorate swept up, regardless of party, in a passionate yearning for transformation.
Out in Iowa that January, however, precious little of this was clear. What the candidates knew was that for months, and even years, they’d been working toward that night, positioning, strategizing, calculating. They’d been traversing the country, raising money and cajoling local pooh-bahs, shaking hands and smooching babies. They had no idea what would happen next, where the narrative would take them. Indeed, for Obama and Clinton, the confusion was deeper still: they had no clue that their tale was a love story—or that it had been all along.
THERE WERE THUNDERSTORMS IN Chicago, bringing air traffic to a grinding halt in and out of O’Hare. So Hillary Clinton sat on the tarmac at Martin State Airport, outside Baltimore, eating pizza and gabbing with two aides and her Secret Service detail on the private plane, waiting, waiting for the weather to clear so she could get where she was headed: a pair of fund-raisers in the Windy City for Barack Obama.
It was May 7, 2004, and two months earlier, the young Illinois state senator had won a resounding, unexpected victory in the state’s Democratic United States Senate primary, scoring 53 percent of the vote in a seven-person field. Clinton, as always, was in great demand to help drum up cash for her party’s candidates around the country. She didn’t relish the task, but she did her duty. At least it wasn’t as painful as asking for money for herself—an act of supplication that she found so unpleasant she often simply refused to do it.
As the wait stretched past one hour, and then two, Clinton’s pilot informed the traveling party that he had no idea when or if the plane would be allowed to take off. To the surprise of her aides, Clinton displayed no inclination to scrap the trip; she insisted that they keep their place in line on the runway. The political cognoscenti were buzzing about Obama—his charisma and his poise, his Kenyan-Kansan ancestry and his only-in-America biography—and she was keen to do her part to help him.
“I want to go,” she said firmly.
By the time Clinton finally arrived in Chicago, she had missed the first fund-raiser. But she made it to the second, a dinner at the Arts Club of Chicago, where Barack and Michelle greeted her warmly, grateful for the effort that she’d expended to get there. For the next hour, Clinton worked the room, charming everyone she met, regaling them with funny yarns about the Senate. Then she and Obama raced off to the W Hotel and spoke at a Democratic National Committee soiree for young professionals. The house was packed, Obama rocked it, and Hillary was impressed.
These people know what they’re doing, she said to her aides— then flew back east and gushed about Obama for days. He was young, brainy, African American, a terrific speaker. Just the kind of candidate the party needed more of, the kind that she and Bill had long taken pride in cultivating and promoting. Clinton told Patti Solis Doyle, her closest political aide and the director of her political action committee, HillPAC, to provide Obama with the maximum allowable donation. And that was just the start: in the weeks ahead, Clinton would host a fund-raiser for him at her Washington home, then return to Chicago to raise more money for his campaign.
Clinton’s aides had never seen her more enthusiastic about a political novice. When one of them asked her why, she said simply, “There’s a superstar in Chicago.”
POLITICAL SUPERSTARDOM WAS A phenomenon with which Hillary Rodham Clinton was intimately familiar, of course. She knew the upsides and downsides of it, the pleasure and the pain, as well as anyone in American life. For more than a decade she had been in the spotlight and under the microscope ceaselessly and often miserably, and in the process came to dwell on a rarified plane in the national consciousness: beloved and detested, applauded and denounced, famous and infamous, but never ignored.
Now, at fifty-six and in her fourth year in the U.S. Senate, Clinton was still the bête noire of the Republican right. But she was also one of the most popular Democratic politicians in the country—more so than her party’s presidential nominee, John Kerry, and more so than her husband, whose public image was still in rehab after the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio and the Marc Rich pardon scandal.
The trajectory that delivered Hillary to this place was remarkable in every way. In the White House she had been, from the start, a profoundly polarizing presence. (Much to her bafflement, too; what she’d done to provoke such a lunatic corps of haters was a mystery to her.) Her time as First Lady was marred by a horrid cascade of defeats, humiliations, and conspiracy theories: health care and cattle futures, Vince Foster and Whitewater, Lewinsky and impeachment. Yet somehow Hillary emerged from all of it a larger, more resonant figure. The Lewinsky affair, for all its awfulness, marked a turning point, rendering her sympathetic and vulnerable-seeming, a woman who had behaved with dignity and fortitude in the most appalling circumstances imaginable. Her decision to run for the Senate in New York in 2000 went against the advice of many of her friends; some political prognosticators predicted confidently that she would lose. Instead, she won the race in a canter, by a thumping twelve-point margin. Weeks after Election Day, Simon and Schuster agreed to pay $8 million for her memoirs, at the time the second-biggest advance ever for a nonfiction tome (just slightly less than the sum handed to Pope John Paul II). But when the book, Living History, was published in June 2003, it earned back every penny, selling out its first printing of 1.5 million copies and then some. And the tour to promote it was a sensation, with her fans camping out overnight to get her autograph and the media comparing her to Madonna and Britney Spears.
The Simon and Schuster paycheck allowed Hillary and Bill to buy her dream house in Washington, a $2.85 million, six-bedroom, neo-Georgian manse that was nicknamed after the leafy, secluded street on which it sat: Whitehaven. But Living History did more than that. It sparked the beginning of a flirtation with the idea of running for president in 2004—a flirtation at once serious and so shrouded in secrecy that even the best-informed Democratic insiders knew nothing about it.
It was the book tour that got the ball rolling inside Clinton’s head. Everywhere she went, people kept telling her she should run, that she was the only Democrat with a hope of defeating George W. Bush. And not just people, but important people—elected officials, big-dollar donors, Fortune 500 chieftains. They were in a panic about the party’s extant crop of candidates: Kerry was in single digits in the polls and so broke he would have to lend his campaign money; Dick Gephardt was past his sell-by date, John Edwards was an empty suit, Joe Lieberman a retread. The only one catching on was former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whom the party bigwigs saw as too hot, too left, and too weak to stand a chance in a general election.
Hillary agreed with all of that, especially the part about Dean’s unelectability. The Bush machine would chew him up and spit him out, then trample on his remains. She also knew that every public poll with her name in the mix had her within striking distance of the incumbent—and trouncing everyone in the Democratic field by thirty points. Oh, sure, her name recognition accounted for much of that lead. Even so! Thirty points! Without lifting a finger!
Hillary was aware, too, that the notion of her running was gaining traction within Clintonworld. For weeks that summer, Steve Ricchetti, who had served as Bill’s deputy White House chief of staff and remained one of his closest political hands, could be heard arguing to anyone in earshot that Hillary faced a Bobby Kennedy moment—in which a terrible war, a torn electorate, and a president who had squandered his chance to unify the nation presented a historic opportunity. Maggie Williams, Hillary’s former White House chief of staff and a paragon of caution, was open to the idea; she saw the nomination and the White House there for the taking. Solis Doyle was more than open: She’d been posting to the HillPAC website a stream of emails from supporters begging Hillary to get in. And now Patti was telling her boss that Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald said that if Clinton was considering entering the race, some systematic steps were in order, and they were ready to help her take them.
Hillary was surprised. Though both Penn and Grunwald were longtime members in good standing of the Clinton high command, they were currently working on Lieberman’s campaign, Penn as its pollster and Grunwald as its media consultant.
“You know how terribly unethical this is?” Solis Doyle said to Clinton.
Of course she did—but Hillary was interested in their pitch, and she couldn’t help but love the loyalty and devotion it showed to her cause.
Between the public polls and the shenanigans on the website, speculation in the media was mounting about a Clinton bid. Hillary’s public posture was unwavering: not gonna happen. At the New York State Fair in Albany that August she told an Associated Press reporter, “I am absolutely ruling it out.”
But in private, Clinton appeared to be inching closer to ruling it in. Over the next three months, she and her inner circle engaged in a series of closed-door meetings and conference calls to explore the possibility in detail. Even as Penn remained on Lieberman’s payroll, Clinton dispatched him to do a hush-hush poll of voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and nationwide. (The results did nothing to discourage her.) She enlisted John Hart, a veteran of Bill’s 1992 campaign, to analyze the logistics of a late entry: the filing deadlines, the feasibility of securing sufficient delegates to claim the nomination. (Tough, but doable.) She tasked her message team with devising an answer to explain away the abandonment of the pledge she’d taken during her Senate campaign to serve out her full six-year term. (The circumstances in the country were so extraordinarily dire that she was compelled to run.)
In the end, nearly all her advisers were in agreement: She should do it. Because there was an opening. Because she could win. Because, as Solis Doyle told her, “This could be your time.”
But Clinton was not a woman swayed by dreamy exhortations to seize the moment. She was a rationalist, an empiricist, with a bone-deep instinct to calibrate risk and reward, and a highly developed—maybe overdeveloped—sixth sense about the trapdoors that might lie ahead.
Clinton took her full-term pledge seriously; it was essential to how she had earned the trust of New York voters. Yes, her husband as governor had made a similar vow to the people of Arkansas, then cast it aside before his 1992 presidential race on the grounds that the country’s need for him outweighed the sanctity of his promise. But Hillary worried about betraying the constituents who had given her a home. She also worried about the political price she would pay for doing so. Wouldn’t she get hammered for being dishonest, being cynical, being a rank opportunist? For being … well, everything her enemies had said she was lo these many years?
And then there was the possibility that she would lose. The Senate seat gave her a political identity that was distinct and separate from her husband’s. If she ran for president now and lost, she’d be done and dusted in the Senate, she thought. The platform that made her more than just a former First Lady would be undermined.
On the other hand, the potential rewards were obvious, both for her and for the country. The prospect was nearly irresistible: another chance for a Clinton to expel a failed Bush from the White House.
Hillary valued what her team had to say about all this, but she didn’t completely trust it. They had no idea what it was like to be her. Ambition and caution were the twin totems of her psyche, and she was torn between them. She needed more data, more input, more advice—though she was loath to widen the circle much, for fear of the story leaking.
One day late that fall, Clinton summoned James Carville, the architect of Bill’s victory in 1992, to her Senate office. Hillary adored James, had no doubt about his allegiance or discretion—although she hadn’t looped him in until now. Having advised against her Senate run, Carville was feeling a little gun-shy, so the counsel he offered was hedged. But Hillary seemed to have the bit between her teeth. I think I can do this, she said. None of these guys who are in the race can beat Bush, and I think he can be had.
Carville sat there thunderstruck. When the meeting was over, he walked out the door and thought, Shit, she may run!
Clinton also put in a call to her old friend Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa. On November 15, she was scheduled to visit Vilsack’s state for the annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Des Moines. The J-J was a big deal every year, but on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in a presidential year, it was the biggest deal in Democratic politics. All the major candidates showed up, kicking off the Iowa homestretch, giving speeches they hoped would provide a rush of adrenaline to carry them across the finish line. Hillary had been invited to deliver the keynote and serve as emcee, an honorary role reserved for a Democratic heavyweight who was not in the hunt for the party’s nomination.
Clinton had heard through the grapevine, however, that Vilsack thought she should be running. On the phone, Vilsack said it was true—and then practically begged her to get into the race. The party had to thwart Dean, Vilsack told her, and she was the only one who could do it. “This is going to be a holy war, and we need our A team on the field,” Vilsack said, “and you’re our A team.”
Flattered but conflicted, intrigued but not convinced, Clinton arrived at the J-J Dinner in a haze of ambivalence. And then uncorked a scathing denunciation of Bush—“He has no vision for a future that will make America safer and stronger and smarter and richer and better and fairer”—that whipped the crowd into a lather.
In retrospect, Kerry’s performance that night, strong and spirited, would be seen as the start of his comeback. Edwards did fine, too. But Hillary’s speech outshone all the rest, and she knew it. As she watched her fellow Democrats work the room—pretenders one and all, free of gravitas or panache, let alone any hope of beating Bush—she thought, These are our candidates for president?
With the filing deadlines for key primaries looming in December, decision time was upon her. Hillary called together the innermost members of her inner circle for one final meeting at the Clinton home in Chappaqua, in the Westchester County suburbs of New York. Around the table were her husband; their daughter, Chelsea, and Chelsea’s boyfriend; Williams and Solis Doyle; and two Clinton White House stalwarts to whom Hillary was close: Evelyn Lieberman, the sharp-eyed former deputy chief of staff famous for having banished Lewinsky from the West Wing to the Pentagon, and Cheryl Mills, the diamond-hard lawyer who had defended Bill in his impeachment trial.
One by one, Hillary polled the group, listening carefully to what each of them had to say. These were the people whose opinions meant the most to her. Solis Doyle and Williams were in favor, as they had been all along. Lieberman and Mills were down with the program, too. And so was Bill. He had no doubt that Hillary would make a better president than anyone who was running. Just as important, he was sure that she could win.
But Hillary discovered that there was one dissenter in the room. Chelsea believed that her mother had to finish her term, that she’d made a promise and had to keep it, that voters would be unforgiving if she didn’t.
Try as she might to convince herself otherwise, Hillary thought her daughter was right. After months of weighing the pros and cons, gaming out the decision from every angle, she simply couldn’t get past the pledge. All the artful answers in the world wouldn’t satisfy her own conscience or drown out the bleating of the anti-Clinton chorus and their amen corner in the press that would greet her if she launched a last-minute campaign. Hillary could hear it now: ambitious bitch, there she goes again, dissembling, scheming, shimmying up the greasy pole with no regard for principle.
“I’d be crucified,” she told Solis Doyle.
Clinton’s decision to forego the 2004 race would prove fateful. It is impossible to know whether Hillary would have won either the Democratic nomination or the White House—although the strategists behind Bush’s reelection considered her formidable in a way they never did Dean or Kerry. But her entry would have scrambled the Democratic race severely. By closing a door, she opened another, inadvertently setting off a chain reaction that would have enormous consequences for her deferred ambitions. The absence of Clinton in the race left the road clear for Kerry to stage his surprising resurgence. The stunning victory over Dean in Iowa. The landslide in New Hampshire. The knockout blow on Super Tuesday that sealed the nomination and put Kerry in a position to make a decision as unlikely as it was momentous: the tapping of an unknown Illinois state legislator to give the keynote address that summer at the Democratic National Convention.
THE SELECTION OF OBAMA had yet to be announced when Bill Clinton rolled into Chicago on July 2, 2004. The former president was passing through on the book tour for his memoir, My Life