with Salter, he had agreed to talk about his POW experience. Salter had privately worried that McCain might choke up, but McCain just said to Salter, “Sit where I can see you, OK?” The speech ended with a dramatic kick, as McCain implored the crowd, “Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight!” Salter leaped up in the front row, clapping and furiously gesturing for McCain to “surf the wave” of crowd response.
McCain had been too wound up to get to sleep, calling Graham at 1 a.m. (“What’d ya think, boy?” “Home run.”) He was still soaring eight hours later. In Cedarburg, Wis., he gestured toward Palin and exclaimed to the crowd, “Isn’t this the most marvelous running mate in the history of this nation?” McCain’s crowds were usually dwarfed by his rival’s rallies. But with Palin by his side, the crowds suddenly swelled to Obama-size numbers—5,000, 10,000, 15,000 people. It didn’t bother McCain that the people were there to see Palin.
Patti Solis Doyle, Neera Tanden and Karen Dunn, ex-Hillary Clinton aides working for Obama, watched Palin’s convention speech on the TV. They looked at each other. “This woman’s trouble,” said one.
The mood at the normally staid Obama headquarters had been giddy when the news of McCain’s veep choice was first announced. “OK, game over,” someone ventured on the morning staff phone call. But anxiety soon set in. Axelrod was offended when one staffer dared to suggest that Palin was almost as good a politician as Obama. He said he was sure that the untested rookie Alaska governor would eventually implode. Plouffe was his usual “No-Drama Obama” self, urging everyone to calm down and wait for Palin mania to pass.
One senior aide would later recall that when Obama dipped in the polls and McCain appeared to nose ahead, thanks largely to a surge of new women supporters, he wasn’t so much worried about the polls as about the impact on Obama headquarters. “People went a little Kerry and Dukakis there for a couple of days,” he recalled. They seemed back on their heels, unsure of how to strike back at a woman who had so gleefully mocked Obama in her convention speech.
There wasn’t real panic at Obama headquarters on North Michigan Avenue—such emotionalism (normal in most campaigns) was taboo. But Palin was so unexpected a choice that some staffers were rattled. So this aide, a veteran of some nasty campaigns, would go up to staffers and say, “Get her out of your head! It’s McCain!” It was an effort to force the slightly dazed staffers to see that they needed to stay focused on McCain, not his running mate.
The vast flow of information unleashed by the revolution in media technology defined issues and character at warp speed. For months, the worst rumors and conspiracy theories had been aimed at Obama: the Illinois senator had been educated in a Muslim madrassa, he had taken his oath of office on a Qur’an, he was close friends with a former Weatherman bomber from the ’60s. But Obama’s aides began to notice that the media and blogosphere were now buzzing with comments attributed to Palin—that she wanted to privatize Social Security, that she read the magazine of the ultrarightist John Birch Society, that she had been a member of a political party that wanted Alaska to secede from the United States. The Obama campaign did not have to do anything but watch the rumors fly. “A lot of this is being generated by people in the outside world,” the Obama aide noted, adding with a smile that “I believe our rumors are, at worst, truthy,” borrowing comic Stephen Colbert’s definition of information that sounds true, even if it isn’t. The rumor mill was starting to drag down Palin in some key places like the swing state of Florida, where she was regarded in the senior citizens’ condos as a dangerous right-winger.
This aide’s other metaphor for the world of TV pundits and Internet bloggers was a kids’ soccer game. The swarm moved from topic to topic (and target to target) in a pack, like a herd of yelping kids chasing the ball at Saturday-morning soccer. The trick was to try to nudge the ball in a certain direction so all the kids would follow. Sometimes this was as simple as linking news stories and sending them out to Web sites. As reporters descended on Alaska to look into charges that Palin had removed the chief of Alaska’s state troopers because he refused to fire Palin’s ne’er-do-well ex-brother-in-law, the Obama campaign had only to make sure the stories got wide distribution. As Palin’s nomination stirred a feeding frenzy, reporters shifted their attentions from Obama to Palin. Though the Obama campaign had seeded the ground with some oppo research on Palin, with the arrival of investigative reporters like NEWSWEEK’s Michael Isikoff “there’s no point for us to be on it,” the Obama aide noted in mid-September. Isikoff had been writing about Obama’s ties to Tony Rezko. Now he was writing about Troopergate. “I thought, ‘Go, Mike!’ ” the aide said. “Especially with the cover-up dynamic.”
In mid-September, McCain was in Florida when the financial crisis broke. First the venerable investment-banking house Lehman Brothers announced it would file for bankruptcy, then the giant insurer AIG sought an emergency loan from the Federal Reserve, then the giant Merrill Lynch collapsed in a fire sale to Bank of America. At a rally in Jacksonville, McCain trotted out a familiar line from his stump speech. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” McCain insisted, as he had for months. “But these are very, very difficult times … I promise you, we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government.”
At Obama headquarters, the oppo team wasted no time. “We’re grabbing up YouTube, we’re driving it, everywhere,” an aide recalled. “McCain says economy ‘strong’,” read an e-mail from the Democratic National Committee. In Colorado, Obama openly mocked McCain, in a way that not too subtly depicted the 72-year-old senator as mentally out of it. “It’s not that I think John McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of most Americans. I just think he doesn’t know. Why else would he say, today, of all days, just a few hours ago, that the fundamentals of our economy are strong? Senator, what economy are you talking about?”
Now it was McCain’s turn to seem caught unawares, to appear knocked back and unsteady. His campaign tried to explain that by “fundamentals,” he meant American workers, and if Obama disagreed with that, well, then the Illinois senator was clearly […continued on page 6]