Teacher and Apprentice
By
Marc Ambinder
A
few weeks after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama
told his staff he wanted to meet with Hillary Clinton. In her
years as a senator, Clinton had deftly navigated many of the
challenges that now confronted Obama. She had come to the Senate
as a national figure whose celebrity eclipsed (and therefore
imperiled) her status as a freshman senator. She had a broad
but shallow base of support among the voters she represented.
And she, like Obama, held national political ambitions that depended
heavily on how well she performed in the Senate.
On
February 1, 2005, the two talked for an hour in Clinton’s
cheerful, canary-yellow Senate office. Obama developed a good sense
of the Clinton algorithm for success: Don’t be a showboat.
Keep your head down. Choose the right committees, the ones that
will allow you to deliver tangible benefits to your state. Go to
hearings, stay the whole time, wait to speak, follow the lead of
the chair or the ranking member, and remain quiet and humble at
press conferences.
“I hadn’t known her well prior to joining the Senate,” Obama
told me in New Hampshire this fall. “We had a similarity
in that we both came in with a celebrity that outstripped our actual
power, although I think it was much more pronounced for her than
it was for me.”
The
senators’ staffs soon paired off. Obama’s aides
drew on Clinton’s example to face the barrage of questions
aimed at the new senator. These ranged from those that confront
all senators—how should they tend to the interests of downstate
constituents?—to those that confront only a few. “We
had people who wanted, for different causes, to auction off signed
copies of the senator’s books,” an Obama aide recalls. “How
do you deal with that? Who do you say yes to? Who do you say no
to? We asked ourselves, ‘Who else would know how to deal
with it?’ The Clinton folks.”
Clinton’s staff was collegial. Obama’s overture was
viewed by some as genuflection to the party’s natural leader,
its likely presidential nominee; Obama himself was thought of as
a possible apprentice and, perhaps one day, an heir. Clinton’s
own decision to run for president had a whiff of destiny about
it—she’d been preparing for years, had served four
years as a senator, and had developed a nuanced political strategy.
Some of her top advisers exuded a sense of entitlement: Clinton
deserved to be president; it was her turn. They did not perceive
any threat until it was almost too late.
During
Obama’s first year in the Senate, nothing suggested
that the Clinton assessment was wrong. Even inside Obama’s
world, “the Plan,” as his top advisers dubbed their
long-term strategy, largely conformed to the road map Clinton had
laid out.
The
Plan didn’t call for sacrificing Obama’s political
fame so much as allowing it to attenuate and bringing his ego into
line with his role as a senator in the minority party. The hope
was that questions like the one posed by a journalist during Obama’s
first week in the Senate—“What is your place in history?”—would
dissipate, allowing him to focus on the interests of Illinois and
build toward bigger things. Nothing foreclosed larger ambitions. “Would
I tell you that it never came up in any discussion, anytime, anywhere—that
sometime in the future, Barack Obama would run for national office?” Obama’s
chief adviser, David Axelrod, asked me. “If I told you that,
you’d turn your tape recorder off, and we’d end this
conversation, because you’d think everything I told you was
a lie.” But in early 2005, the context of those discussions
was at least 10 years in the future.
Initially,
Obama did try to avoid publicity, turning down repeated requests
to appear on national television, as well as invitations
to speak before Democratic groups. “We wanted to be mindful
of our place,” Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, told me. Even
on the issue of Iraq, which dominated 2005, Obama, an opponent
of the invasion from the beginning, passed up the chance to speak
out. “He could have been the moral voice, the moral authority
on Iraq,” one of Obama’s closest advisers told me. “But
he was just a freshman senator. It would have been presumptuous
of him to take that lead.” In January of 2006, appearing
on Meet the Press, Obama reiterated his intention to serve a full
six-year term.
But
something changed—and fairly rapidly. Obama diverged
from the Clinton path and decided to challenge the former first
lady for the presidency.
Clinton,
focused at the time on the challenge posed by John Edwards, was
blindsided.
She, too, could have run for president shortly
after winning a Senate seat. In 2003, Bill Clinton suggested that
his most discreet pollster, Mark Penn, measure how his wife would
fare against the Democrats then running for president—and
confirmed that she would handily defeat them all. But Clinton herself
was not ready. Even after the 2004 election, both Clintons feared
that if New Yorkers caught wind of her presidential preparations,
they would conclude that the ever-ambitious Hillary Clinton was
using New York as a stepping-stone. Nothing was more important
to Clinton’s presidential prospects, they calculated, than
establishing her own political identity. So, while maintaining
her popularity with the Democratic base, she spent six productive,
if unglamorous, years in the Senate.
Obama’s starkly different choice had several immediate effects.
It forced Democrats to think anew about Clintonism, not in comparison
to a Republican alternative, as would have been the case, but to
a Democratic one whose chief attributes—freshness, vigor,
reform—put Clintonism in a harsh light. More broadly, it
threatened to upend the way politicians have traditionally pursued
the presidency: through years of careful preparation and positioning.
But first he would have to get past the woman whose advice he solicited,
then spurned.
What
caused Obama to suddenly decide to run? The conventional explanation
is that Democrats implored him to. “It was the
closest thing to a draft that I’ve seen in my years of participating
in politics,” Axelrod told me. Obama, having invested considerable
time and effort studying the traditional path to the presidency,
seems to have concluded that his unique biography perfectly suited
the historical moment. (Obama’s friends speak of this process
as his “calling.”)
Many
Obama friends and advisers believe that the realization he actually
could be president first hit Obama on December 1, 2006,
which happened to be World AIDS Day. Obama appeared at the megachurch
in Orange County, California, run by Rick Warren, the best-selling
author of The Purpose Driven Life and an emerging force in national
politics. Sam Brownback, the Republican senator from Kansas, spoke
first. “Welcome to my house,” he said to Obama, as
the crowd laughed. When Obama rose to speak, he replied, “There
is one thing I’ve got to say, Sam: This is my house, too.
This is God’s house.” Before an audience of socially
conservative evangelical Christians, Obama then called for “realism” and
advocated the use of condoms to control the spread of AIDS. As
the next day’s Orange County Register described it, Obama
received a “hearty standing ovation.” Could any other
Democrat, Obama wondered, talk to evangelicals about condoms in
Africa?
Another
theory, held by longtime advisers like Dan Shomon, who was Obama’s chief of staff in the Illinois state senate,
is that an ambitious, action-oriented politician was propelled
toward the presidential race by the Senate’s sluggish pace
and partisan provincialism. Obama told me that he did not find
the Senate boring. But in more jocular moods, such as when he appeared
on The Daily Show, he has admitted that the Senate “is paralyzing,
and it’s designed for you to take bad votes.” He confessed
to Illinois’ other senator, Dick Durbin, “It’s
hard for me to believe that it’s a lot harder to get something
done here than [as a state senator] in Springfield.”
In
the spring of 2006, the presidency was clearly on Obama’s
mind when he told his friend Martha Minow that his wife would have
to give her assent to a run. “Michelle was the boss, and
he said he couldn’t do it unless she agreed,” Minow
told me. At the time, one of Michelle Obama’s friends told
me that she worried her husband would be targeted by white supremacists
and wind up a martyr like Robert F. Kennedy. She also worried that
his advisers were pushing him too hard to consider a run and, knowing
her husband’s healthy ego, that he wasn’t in the proper
frame of mind to think seriously about it.
When
Obama went on tour in the fall of 2006 to promote his second
book,
The Audacity of Hope, some of his friends encouraged him
to be open about his presidential ruminations. The result was a
sustained wave of national publicity. Time put Obama on the cover
with the headline “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.” The
public responded, too. An appearance in Seattle sold out in two
hours, leaving scalpers to profit from Obama’s popularity.
Appearing on Meet the Press in October, when Tim Russert played
a clip from the January 2006 show in which Obama had said he wouldn’t
run, Obama simply responded that he had begun to think seriously
about it.
On
November 8, the day after Democrats took control of Congress,
Obama, his
wife, and his brain trust crowded into a fourth-floor
conference room in the brick building in Chicago’s Loop that
houses Axelrod’s consulting firm. “I want you to show
me how you’re going to do this,” Michelle Obama said,
according to an aide. “You need to show me that this is not
going to be a bullshit fly-by-night campaign.” A month later,
at an all-day meeting in Chicago billed as “the Summit,” the
would-be campaign manager, David Plouffe, returned with a budget,
an outline of early strategy, and a list of tasks to be accomplished
before any campaign could begin. The conversation in the second
meeting “had an existential quality to it,” according
to a participant. “Why do you want to do this? What does
this mean for us? What’s our motivation? What will get us
through the hard times?”
The
group gave surprisingly little thought to other candidates, especially
Edwards,
who was positioning himself as the alternative
to Clinton. Axelrod had worked for Edwards in the 2004 campaign
until he left over strategic differences. Others in the campaign
considered Edwards—a multimillionaire trial lawyer—an
obvious phony, and assumed voters would see him that way, too.
This left Obama as the purist’s choice, the natural home
for what they expected to be a large anti-Hillary vote. There was
ample evidence to support this supposition: When word spread that
the Obama aide Steve Hildebrand had been put in charge of hiring
staff for the early-primary states, Obama’s office was flooded
with more than 1,000 résumés.
Donors,
too, lined up in support. A month before the midterm election,
Mark
Warner, the former Virginia governor and a top-tier hopeful,
suddenly decided not to run for president. Warner had occupied
the same political space that Obama would inhabit: fresh face,
new ideas, the “change” candidate. Warner’s fund-raising
operation expected to raise $50 million in the first half of 2007.
(Obama’s would eventually raise $56 million for the primaries
in that period.) Many of his major donors had rejected, privately
and in some cases formally, overtures from the Clinton campaign,
and thus they gravitated naturally toward Obama.
Obama
didn’t immediately take to fund-raising, and he pressured
his schedulers to limit the time he spent soliciting donations,
but he nonetheless succeeded spectacularly. “He worked much
harder at this than I thought he would as a first-timer,” William
Daley, the former commerce secretary and an adviser to Obama, told
me. “He was very good about calling people and asking for
money, asking for big dollars. Other politicians have trouble with
that. John McCain hates that. Still hates it. Barack didn’t
have a problem with that.”
In
mid-December, after a successful trip to New Hampshire and a
surprise appearance
on Monday Night Football, Obama met former
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, once a presidential hopeful
himself, for dinner at Tosca, one of Daschle’s favorite Washington
restaurants, and had what Daschle describes as a four-hour “heart-to-heart.” Daschle’s
message was clear: “Don’t think that you’re going
to have another opportunity in 2012 and 2016,” he told Obama. “You
might. But—like me—you might not.”
Throughout
this period, Obama was meeting with the major interest groups
in the party establishment, and he often made a point of
doing so on his own terms. One meeting stands out as characteristic
of the aloof way in which Obama has dealt with the groups that
compose the party’s foundation: a dinner Obama had with some
of the Democrats’ most powerful African American women, who
jokingly refer to themselves as “the Colored Girls”—political
veterans, some of whom had struggled for decades to achieve stature
in an arena dominated by white men. Several, such as Minyon Moore,
the former political director of the DNC, had already committed
to Clinton.
Obama
swept in “as if he owned the table,” an aide
admitted later; he brushed aside questions about his preparedness
to run and declared—offending some in the room—that
race would not be a big factor, because he did not anticipate making
it a large part of his campaign. To an audience well versed in
the subjects of race and politics, Obama’s naïveté,
and his apparent desire to simply wave away the question of establishment
dues-paying, didn’t sit well. Obama, however, seems to have
drawn a kind of sustenance from the dinner.
“A lot of those women are good friends; they’d all
be supporters of mine if I just stayed in the U.S. Senate,” he
told me. “Talking with them about potentially running for
president caused some conflicts, because a sizable number of them
are very close to Senator Clinton. I think there’s no doubt
that it would be easier for a lot of people in Washington if I
had decided that I was going to take a pass and wait my appropriate
turn, which might be, from their perspective, 10 years from now,
or at least once the Clintons had exhausted all possibilities of
running any further.”
Obama
clearly felt that the Clintons had already exhausted their possibilities
as leaders. They “have been the dominant political
force in the Democratic Party for 20 years,” he said. “A
sizable number of prominent Democrats in Washington, the sort of
government-in-waiting, all came in with the Clintons. There’s
enormous loyalty there, as there should be. What’s interesting
is that they all came in as outsiders; most of them came in as
outsiders running against Washington. They’re now Washington,
and I don’t think there’s any denying that Washington
established a set of rules that people get comfortable with about
how you play the game.”
Indeed,
candidate Obama has ignored the old rules. To an audience of
Detroit auto
executives, for example, he proposed tough new
fuel-economy standards. Before black pastors, he spoke about eradicating
homophobia from black churches. To the National Education Association,
he used a phrase—merit pay—that’s practically
an epithet. Unlike Clinton, who was solicitous of every conceivable
interest group, Obama was selective. He stiffed firefighters in
New Hampshire and the AARP in Iowa. He nearly skipped the winter
meeting of the Democratic National Committee, which would have
been a very big deal (the campaign didn’t want to waste money
hosting parties for DNC members); in the end, Obama appeared before
the jubilantly partisan crowd just long enough to deliver a broadside
against partisanship, and left.
This
approach to the Democratic establishment and the Clintons, which
would
ultimately become the core of Obama’s campaign
message, is what Washington insiders refer to as “process-oriented”—it
is concerned less with specific policies and positions than with
broad themes related to politics itself, such as the party’s
architecture, its larger purpose, and the roles that various political
actors play.
In late December, Obama went with his family to his native Hawaii.
He took long walks, ate lots of food, and spent a good deal of
time with his family as he inched closer to a decision. On Tuesday,
January 2, he spent four hours with Axelrod in his Chicago office.
On Sunday, Obama called Daschle at home and broke the news: He
was going to run.
One of the mysteries of this presidential cycle is how the Clinton
operation, with its vaunted foresight, failed to see Obama coming.
Politically, the Clinton presidential team did very little early
on, aside from holding a series of meetings among a very small group
of advisers: Penn, campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, communications
adviser Howard Wolfson, media strategist Mandy Grunwald, and occasionally
the veteran Democratic operative Harold Ickes and a few other confidants.
In the spring of 2006, they were still eyeing John Edwards. After
Edwards took a far more aggressive policy approach than Team Clinton
had anticipated, Hillary Clinton responded by delivering a series
of policy speeches, now largely forgotten. (Aides insisted she was
not responding to Edwards, but many Clinton insiders say otherwise.)
Barack Obama barely registered. Penn had not yet included him in
his occasional surreptitious polls of the primary electorate.
A
few Clinton advisers did detect danger. On September 17, 2006,
when Obama
gave the keynote address at Senator Tom Harkin’s
annual steak fry in Iowa, Steve Hildebrand was spotted shepherding
Obama through the crowd. The next day, Solis Doyle e-mailed
Hildebrand to make clear that she knew he had been there.
One
Clinton adviser admitted to me that it wasn’t until
late January of this year when, in a short period of time, Obama
got fund-raising pledges from four of the party’s top fund-raisers—Orin
Kramer, a New York hedge-fund manager; Alan Solomont, a Boston
venture capitalist; Mark Gorenberg, who was one of John Kerry’s
top bundlers; and Steve Westly, the former California controller—that
Clinton’s inner circle finally understood the threat
Obama posed.
Obama’s rise was particularly worrisome for two reasons.
First, money is the mechanism by which the Clintons exert leverage
over the party. Some Clinton supporters believed the couple’s
sway over the party’s money machinery is even more important
than their popularity with the Democratic base. So the defection
of major fund-raisers was a serious blow.
Second,
part of the grand strategy for Hillary Clinton’s
run at the White House was to build a movement around her gender
and the possibility of electing the first female president. Penn,
the campaign’s visionary, believed that presenting Clinton’s
candidacy as a historic occasion would reinspire voters badly disillusioned
after eight years of George W. Bush. But Obama, the first credible
black candidate, assumed the symbolic role that Clinton’s
team had in mind for her. His reception by voters and the media
was rapturous. Obama’s potential appeal had occurred to Clinton’s
advisers, but as several of them later admitted, they failed
to anticipate the intensity with which the Democratic Party
and the
national media would embrace him.
In
April, after Obama announced his record fund-raising total for
the primaries,
the Clinton campaign began to panic. Basic
strategy was called into question. Senior advisers began to fight
with each
other. In an extraordinary interview with Time, Terry McAuliffe,
Clinton’s campaign chairman, seemed to blame Clinton herself
for not working hard enough. Obama, McAuliffe said, “works
the phones like a dog. He probably did three to four times the
number of events she did” since the start of the campaign. “No
matter who I call, he has already called them three or four
times.”
On behalf of the Clinton camp, James Carville continued to try
to tamp down excitement over Obama by saying publicly that he expected
Al Gore to get in the race. Worried advisers to Bill Clinton unsuccessfully
tried to oust Solis Doyle, who had never run a campaign. A Clinton
staffer told me that going to work was like stepping into a snake
pit.
Then
came a pivot point—the moment when Clinton’s
campaign felt the idealized view of Obama suddenly snap into alignment
with the reality, and in doing so realign the contours of the race
to emphasize precisely the asset Clinton had cultivated: her immediate
readiness to become commander in chief. The moment came at the
first Democratic debate, in South Carolina. The moderator, Brian
Williams of NBC, asked the candidates to respond to a scenario
in which two American cities were hit by terrorists and the responsible
parties were identified. “The first thing we’d have
to do,” Obama answered, “is make sure that we’ve
got an effective emergency response, something that this administration
failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans. And I think
that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only
a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.” Only after
that did Obama suggest that he might “take potentially some
action to dismantle that network.” Clinton spotted her opening,
and pounced. “I think a president must move as swiftly as
is prudent to retaliate,” she declared. “If we are
attacked, and we can determine who is behind that attack, and if
there are nations that supported or gave material aid to those
who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.” Obama
immediately recognized his error, and circled back a few moments
later: “But one thing that I do have to go back on, on
this issue of terrorism: We have genuine enemies out there
that have
to be hunted down, networks [that] have to be dismantled.”
But
Williams’s trap—the question designed to draw
out contrasts between the candidates—had already snared Obama.
Later, Obama concluded that Clinton had weathered enough Republican
attacks to understand where the minefields lay. “So if the
question comes up on terrorism,” he told me, putting himself
in her mind, “your goal is to look tough, and the first
thing out of the box is retaliate.”
“What happened,” Axelrod told me, “was that
he got asked the question, and I think he started answering it
based on ‘What would you do if there were a terrorist attack?’ without
focusing on the second half of the question, which was to change
our military strategy.” Axelrod insisted that voters accepted
Obama’s answer. But he conceded that for Clinton and the
press, “it was pivotal, and helped fuel a story line
that they ran with. I give the Clinton people credit: They
did a great
job of spinning it, hard, and I think they may have gotten
some benefit out of it.”
As
the race settled into a summer lull, this cycle would repeat
itself, the
Clinton campaign exploiting anything it believed
was a gaffe—such as when Obama answered a question in another
debate by saying he would meet with morally dubious world leaders
in the first year of his presidency without preconditions. The
media’s willingness to accept each campaign’s preferred
narrative—Clinton’s “experience” versus
Obama’s “judgment”—helps explain why Obama’s
answer was considered to be faulty. “That’s sort of
the pitfalls of the sound bite. He fell into that,” Obama’s
friend Marty Nesbitt told me.
Here,
Obama’s novelty worked against him. The national press
corps places tremendous importance on consistency with an established
narrative. Lacking a basis to judge Obama’s neophyte foreign-policy
views, reporters were much more willing than they otherwise might
have been to accept the Clinton campaign’s charge that Obama’s
answer was naive. They weren’t nearly as willing to accept
the countercharge from the Obama campaign that Clinton herself
had flip-flopped in answering the question (earlier in the year,
while criticizing Bush’s recalcitrance about meeting with
rogue leaders, she had expressed practically the same sentiment
as Obama), because such a slip-up didn’t track with the emerging
campaign narrative of Clinton as disciplined and savvy. Nor could
Obama’s campaign deploy, as Clinton’s did, an army
of surrogates to flood the airwaves and drive home a point. In
August, Obama told a reporter that under no circumstances would
he use a nuclear weapon to destroy terrorist bunkers in Afghanistan
or Pakistan. The Clinton campaign again pressed charges of inexperience.
A year earlier, as it turned out, Clinton had said essentially
the same thing as Obama in response to Bush administration posturing
about nuclear weapons. But reporters largely ignored this fact,
because it wasn’t in character for Clinton to mess up.
Perhaps
the ultimate example of hard-won experience is the relationship
that
developed last year, brokered by an outside ally, between
the Clinton campaign and a man who was once a sworn enemy:
Matt Drudge, the Internet pioneer. (News of the Monica Lewinsky
scandal
first broke on the Drudge Report.) In a Democratic primary,
news that the Clinton campaign is funneling information to Drudge
is potentially explosive—few figures inspire more liberal wrath
than Drudge. (When I confronted the mole, she confirmed the connection
to Drudge, but first asked for anonymity.) Still, Drudge has proved
a useful tool for the campaign in framing media coverage. When
it became clear that Obama had raised more first-quarter money
for the primary race than Clinton had, the Clinton campaign minimized
the damage by preemptively leaking its own numbers to Drudge. “Clinton
Blows the Field Away” was the headline on an exclusive
Drudge story claiming she had raised $36 million. Only later,
with much
less fanfare, did it become clear that only $19 million would
count toward the Democratic primary.
The
Clinton campaign has also used Drudge to go on offense. In one
example,
an aide confirmed that the campaign sent Drudge
a link to a story in which Michelle Obama seemed to take a swipe
at Hillary Clinton over Bill’s infidelity. The story was
presented—from Clinton to Drudge to the public—in a
manner that was badly out of context, with a link to an exclusive
videotape of Michelle Obama’s comment. But it nevertheless
dominated the news cycle for 24 hours.
The
major problem with a process-oriented campaign, as Democrats from
Gary
Hart to
Bill Bradley have discovered, is that it tends
to appeal to elites, who vote aspirationally, rather than to the
much broader pool of primary voters, who tend to focus on tangibles,
such as health-care benefits and tax credits. Clinton has won support
with policies targeted at older voters, women, and those without
a college degree—what political analysts term “downscale
voters,” who also happen to dominate the Democratic electorate
in places like Iowa, which holds the first presidential caucus. Another
tension in process campaigns is behavioral. Practitioners can
become handcuffed by their own idealism. Having pledged to
run “a different kind of campaign” that wouldn’t
traffic in the mudslinging and personal attacks so common to politics
today, Obama boxed himself in. “The campaigns shouldn’t
be about making each other look bad,” he declared in his
brief appearance at the DNC winter meeting. “They should
be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious
country of ours. That’s our mission. And in this mission,
our rivals won’t be one another, and I would assert it won’t
even be the other party. It’s going to be cynicism that we’re
fighting against.” This kind of sentiment is a large part
of Obama’s appeal. But it’s also a good illustration
of why process-oriented campaigns often run into trouble. Committing
himself to a higher standard of conduct meant that either Obama
would refrain from doing much of what campaigns do to jockey
for position or he would endure criticism for failing to live
up to
his own standard. In a campaign staffed by talented, though conventional,
operatives, this would prove problematic.
In
June, Obama’s staff slipped reporters a memorandum about
the Clintons’ financial ties to Indian American entrepreneurs
who benefited from job outsourcing—an act well within the
norm of political conduct, though the memo did have a rather tasteless
title (“Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab”). A Clinton aide
caught wind of it and, no doubt inspired by Obama’s call
for better conduct, persuaded a reporter for a Capitol Hill newspaper
to disclose its source. Obama was forced to apologize.
But
he pointedly did not pledge to refrain from disseminating such
information
about his opponent. Belatedly, his campaign
has learned to fight back. In August, Obama’s team scored
a significant hit by helping to place a story in several newspapers
revealing
that Norman Hsu, a major Clinton donor, had skipped town after
having pleaded no contest to a charge of grand theft 15 years
earlier and still faced an outstanding warrant. Hsu fled once more
(he
was captured in Colorado in September) and ignited a costly media
frenzy for Clinton, who decided to return $850,000 in donations
that he had arranged for her. (Hsu had also contributed to Obama.)
But
Obama seemed to recoil from many of the tasks that have come
to be expected
of someone serious about running for president.
Cerebral and loquacious, given to lengthy disquisitions, Obama
chafed at the sound-bite culture of politics and disliked criticizing
opponents by name. One day in New Hampshire, caught up in the
moment, he called Hillary “Bush-Cheney lite”—a phrase
he never again repeated. Occasionally, Obama behaved as if conventional
expectations were beneath him and an insult to voters’ intelligence. “The
one thing I am absolutely certain of,” Obama told me, “is
that if all I’m offering is the same Democratic narrative
that has been offered for the last 20 years, then there’s
really no point in my running, because Senator Clinton is going
to be very adept at delivering that message. What makes it worthwhile
for me to run is the belief that we can actually change the narrative
and create a working majority that we haven’t seen in a very
long time—and that, frankly, the Clintons never put together.” Though
he dislikes cattle-call interest-group forums, he prepared diligently
for a June forum on black issues at Howard University in Washington,
D.C., understanding that, by dint of his race and life experience,
he had a chance to shine. Obama believed he’d excelled during
the debate, and was stunned when press coverage focused on a single
applause line—from Hillary Clinton. “If HIV/AIDS were
the leading cause [of] the death of white women between the ages
of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country,” she
had declared. Obama, by contrast, was chided for his long-winded
answers. “He was very, very frustrated,” one of his
friends recalls.
Two
weeks later, at an NAACP forum in Philadelphia, Obama, according
to The New
Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, “played to the
crowd.” The press rewarded him. A friend e-mailed him a note
of congratulations. “Well, but all I did was throw sound
bites back at them,” Obama wrote back.
His
campaign staffers, too, have become frustrated by the focus of
the media’s attention, specifically that the press has
not covered Clinton in the way they expected it would. During an
interview this summer, Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett said
to me, unbidden, “He is a man who is devoted to his wife.
There aren’t going to be any skeletons in his closet in terms
of his personal life at all. Period.” And at a campaign event
in Iowa, one of Obama’s aides plopped down next to me and
spoke even more bluntly. He wanted to know when reporters would
begin to look into Bill Clinton’s postpresidential sex
life.
Before
Obama decided to run, his advisers spent little time debating
strategy
and focused instead on how their candidate would maintain
his sense of self—his “authenticity,” as one
of them put it to me. This helps to explain why they regarded
so many of his early stumbles as insignificant instances of simply
failing to conform to the standard way of running for president.
But as the race for the nomination heads into the final stretch,
many of the things they thought would unfold have so far failed
to materialize.
Early
on, Obama’s aides sneered at the Clinton campaign
for subordinating strategy to tactics and boasted that Obama had
explicitly rejected the day-to-day combat that consumed Clinton’s
team. “It was a deliberate choice we made,” one of
Obama’s closest advisers told me. “And I think it was
a mistake.” This adviser added that many of the assumptions
about Hillary Clinton were flawed, too. In particular, Obama
and his aides assumed that Democrats would judge Clinton to be
too
polarizing to win; so far the polls do not bear that out.
Axelrod
won’t concede that the campaign misread Clinton. “If
we underestimated anything,” he said, “it was the degree
to which people would assign credit to her for the years of the
Clinton administration—that that was sort of quasi-executive
experience, whether warranted or not warranted. The name itself
implied a certain mastery; she gets bonus points for that, to
a degree that I think was surprising. I think those come with
challenges,
but she gets them.”
One
great surprise to the Obama team was Clinton’s remarkable
transformation on the one issue where Obama indisputably trumped
her in the eyes of the party’s electorate: the Iraq War.
By summer’s end, Obama’s advisers believed that Clinton
had largely neutralized their attacks. Clinton’s advisers
cite two reasons for their success: first, that her congressional
voting record on Iraq was virtually identical to his; and second,
that Clinton deftly exploited the vicissitudes of congressional
debate, which focused almost exclusively on how and when to withdraw
troops. Reasoning, correctly, that Democratic voters were as interested
in what should be done now as in who voted for the war then, she
used clear, forward-looking language: “If George Bush doesn’t
end this war before he leaves office, when I’m president,
I will.” It worked.
Last
February, I asked Hillary Clinton to describe how she has changed
since
leaving the White House. At the time, her answer
struck me as typical Clinton boilerplate: She brought to the
presidential race a “unique combination of experience both from my life
prior to the White House and the eight years in the White House
and now my full term in the Senate, where I’ve learned
even more about how to get things done in the Senate, about how
to build
coalitions.”
Looking
back now, on the eve of the Democratic primaries, her answer
seems
a lot more credible. Clinton spent six years in
a nonexecutive role. She gained firsthand experience working with
her enemies. She spent four years as the chair of the Democratic
Steering and Outreach Committee, ordinarily a thankless bureaucratic
post that requires fielding complaints from every conceivable
corner
of the party, but in Clinton’s case an invaluable opportunity
to listen and connect. And when the chance arrived, in 2004,
to cut short her apprenticeship and seek the White House, she
passed.
“I always felt that it was a good thing that she spent all
those years in the Senate, and maybe didn’t meet with as
many fund-raisers as she could have,” a high-level Clinton
campaign official told me. “At the end of the day, this created
a texture—a knowledge—that really comes out.”
Most
surprising, Clinton has even managed to repair her relationship
with the
press, a change that seems to have made her more secure
in her political identity than she’s generally given credit
for being. For all the criticism she’s endured as being calculating
and politically opportunistic, Clinton has steadfastly ignored
entreaties from some advisers and criticism from the press, and
refused to apologize for her 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War.
Her private refrain, say insiders, is the same as her public one: “I’ve
done nothing wrong, so I have nothing to apologize for.”
In
the weeks ahead, Obama is likely to argue that Democrats cannot
trust Clinton
to create the change they’re longing for, while
Clinton will embrace the role of nominee-apparent. Obama’s
advisers believe Edwards will fade before the Iowa caucuses and—assuming
those who don’t yet support Clinton probably don’t
want to—that his support will naturally flow to Obama. And
they’re convinced that the Democratic Party’s decision
to invalidate Florida’s delegates as punishment for holding
an early primary provides a great benefit for Obama by giving him
a pretext to bypass an expensive early state. Axelrod maintains
that doubts about Clinton will grow as the primaries draw nearer,
and that Obama’s cautious campaign will ultimately prevail.
One important advantage Obama has over insurgent-idealists who
preceded him (like Hart and Bradley) is that he has the money
to keep pace with the front-runner.
In
the end, though, Hillary Clinton may be the candidate who best
understood
the Democratic electorate—she certainly understood
and accepted the demands placed upon anyone serious about winning.
A primary that Obama hoped would be a referendum on how politics
is practiced may be decided not over questions of protocol and
process, but instead over something more basic. After eight long
years in the wilderness, Clinton senses that what Democrats want
most is victory.
Marc Ambinder is
an associate editor at the Atlantic and a contributing
editor to both the Hotline and National Journal. He's
a 2001 graduate of Harvard. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's note: This
commentary was originally published by Atlantic
Monthy,
January 9, 2008.Petroleumworld
reprint this article in the interest of our readers.
