“Solutions for America,” “Ready for Change, Ready to Lead,” “Big Challenges, Real Solutions: Time to Pick a President …” Penn marched down the long list.
But then he seemed to get a little lost. “Um, uh, ‘Working for Change, Working for You’ …” There was silence, then sniggers, as Penn tried to remember all the bumper stickers, which, run together, sounded absurd and indistinguishable. “Ehhh … ‘The Hillary I Know’ …” Penn trailed off, and the meeting moved on.
But it was Penn who finally came up with an ad that worked, on the eve of the Ohio and Texas primaries in early March, when the Clinton campaign was in true do-or-die mode. It began with the sound of a phone ringing in the hours before dawn. Accompanied by portentous music, the ad played to the insecurities of the so-called security moms, who had been shaken by 9/11 and had voted heavily for George W. Bush in 2004. Penn called the “Red Phone 3 a.m.” ad a “game changer.” Mandy Grunwald, the campaign’s ad maker, had opposed it. When someone in the room at a senior staff meeting said, “Great ad!” Grunwald, who was talking by speakerphone, snapped, “This is Mark’s ad, not my ad.”
Morale was at a low ebb in the Clinton campaign by early March. Incredibly, the campaign had been caught by surprise by Obama’s tortoise-and-hare strategy. While Hillary won some big states on Super Tuesday, including New York, California, New Jersey and—take that, Ted Kennedy!—Massachusetts, Obama had been racking up delegates in smaller states, particularly caucus states, where he was organized and Clinton was not. Given the way delegates were apportioned, Obama had amassed a nearly insurmountable lead by the time of the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. At one meeting around the time of Super Tuesday, Ickes tried—for the umpteenth time, it seemed—to explain the mechanics of proportional representation. When President Clinton said, “Oh, hell, we didn’t have this stuff in 1992,” Ickes nearly “fell off his chair,” as he later put it, because the system had been essentially the same back then. Ickes grumbled to reporters that Penn didn’t even know that California wasn’t winner-take-all; Penn denied it.
But Hillary did win Ohio and she did win Texas, though narrowly, and once more she had stepped back from the brink. For Obama, there was some disturbing news in the breakdown of the voting results. He had crossed over the demographic divide in industrial Wisconsin in February, winning older and blue-collar voters, white as well as black. But in Ohio the gap stubbornly returned: Hillary was the darling of older, white working-class voters. The Obama camp was beginning to suspect that the Clinton campaign, while assiduously avoiding any race baiting by the candidate or her senior staff or advisers, was perfectly content to let others do the dirty work, operating through surrogates and the bottom-feeding press. A picture of Obama in Somali garb was leaked to the Drudge Report. Clinton surrogate Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio (who was African-American) said that Obama shouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in his “native clothes.” In Youngstown, Ohio, the president of the International Machinists Union endorsed Clinton; its president, Tom Buffenbarger, took a swipe at Obama at a Hillary rally, shouting, “I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing trust-fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! He won’t stand a chance against the Republican attack machine!” Reporters noticed that in the bathroom there were copies of an infamous “Obama is a Muslim” e-mail printed out and strewn about.
Obama was not one to cast blame, at least not too obviously or too loudly. After his campaign spent $20 million to win Texas and still lost, he ran through a list of mistakes with his staff, not laying any blame on anyone in particular. He stood up to leave, and as he walked out of the conference room of campaign headquarters on Michigan Avenue, he turned around and said, “I’m not yelling at you guys.” He took another few steps and turned around again and said, “Of course, after blowing through $20 million in a couple of weeks, I could yell at you. But …” He paused. “I’m not yelling at you.” He laughed and walked out the door.
Obama had to strain to stay cool when the Reverend Wright fiasco hit in mid-March. Later that spring, after the hubbub had abated and Obama sat down to give his version of events, he was puzzled, chagrined and a little defensive. His advisers saw Jeremiah Wright as a true threat to Obama’s candidacy. For Obama, the fiery and vain reverend was a continuing source of vexation and personal pain.
Obama told a NEWSWEEK reporter that he had known from the beginning that Wright could be trouble. Shortly before Obama announced for the presidency in February 2007, Wright had made some “pretty incendiary” remarks to Rolling Stone magazine, Obama recalled. Still, he had not wanted to sever his ties to Wright. Obama had long regarded the preacher as a kind of “uncle.” In his memoirs, he had credited Wright with “bringing me to Jesus”—as well as showing him the power of the black church as a community organizer. Wright had married Obama and baptized his daughters. Obama told the NEWSWEEK reporter that, though he had been Wright’s parishioner at Trinity United Church of Christ for almost two decades, he was often away campaigning, which meant attending other churches, or doing something else with his young family on Sunday mornings. He had, he said, missed many of Wright’s sermons.
But back in early February 2007, as he read Wright’s heated rhetoric about racial injustice in America, printed in the Rolling Stone story titled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama,” Obama had thought to himself, “This doesn’t sound real good.” In a few days, Wright was scheduled to give the invocation at Obama’s announcement ceremony at the state capitol in Springfield, Ill. Partly because he wanted to protect Wright’s church from getting entangled in politics, Obama called Wright and told him, “You know what, you probably shouldn’t introduce me. There’s going to be about 500 press credentials there; you don’t want a whole bunch of mikes suddenly stuck in your face without any preparation or expectation.” Wright, as would later become excruciatingly clear, loved microphones, the more the better, but this time he got the message. He would stay offstage. “I know that disappointed him,” Obama recalled, “and I think he might have felt some anger about that.”
Wright did not stay quiet for long. He soon gave his version of what happened between him and Obama to a reporter from The New York Times. He told the Times that one of […continued on page 5]