Campaign Inc.: How Leadership and Organization Propelled Barack Obama to the White House

7. In Crisis, Stay on Offense

117| 7. In Crisis, Stay on Offense May 3, 2008:“We’ll try not to fuck it up while you are gone,” Plouffe shouted from behind me as I left his office for my family vacation. I hollered back that I wouldn’t know since I’d be stuffing my BlackBerry in a drawer. Eight days later, I turned on the TV and slowly sank onto the edge of our hotel bed, shocked at what I saw. Something had gone really wrong during our time at sea. Spun Out It felt like March 4 took forever to arrive, but it quickly turned into a distant memory after the elections ended. Even though Hillary Clinton’s victories from that day were being trumpeted in the media as some sort of game changer, she ultimately earned less than a handful more delegates from that four-state battle. Thus, the race remained mostly unchanged, except for the sharpening reality that Hillary was losing runway fast. We went on to take Wyoming on Saturday the eighth and Mississippi the following Tuesday. In Mississippi, we won with an astonishing 61 percent of the vote. Unlike Clinton’s March 4, however, these two victories went mostly unnoticed in the press. This was aggravating since our combined nine-delegate pickup wiped out any of her gains from the week before. In fact, for the month of March, we actually won a half-dozen more delegates than the Clinton campaign. But the media seemed to be following the script exactly as Senator Clinton had written it. She had long looked beyond Wyoming and Mississippi to instead plant a flag in Pennsylvania, billing that contest nearly two months out as some sort of winner-take-all playoff. Hillary also began hinting at her openness to a Clinton-Obama dream ticket. I thought that an interesting proposition from the trailing candidate. 118 | chapter seven Casting Doubts The month and a half that separated Mississippi from Pennsylvania on the campaign calendar looked like a desert. There were no races. This lull would mark perhaps the most uncomfortable period in the entire campaign to date. It went by painfully slowly. Every day that Senator Clinton remained in the race fortified the troubling anxiety inside Obama for America that there was no way of slaying this giant. Clinton’s determination to stay in the race infuriated many of us. Even more worrying, Senator McCain had secured the Republican nomination on March 4. This offered him a nearly two-month head start in preparing for the general election. That was a lifetime in politics. These tensions were heightened by a scorching media blitz we had battled for weeks that caused the temperature to noticeably spike inside headquarters. Frankly, we were all a little more tuned into the election reporting during this stretch than we needed to be. This was a problem since there was little in the news to comfort us. With the white-hot spotlight of the media now firmly trained on our organization, the outside chatter started getting into our heads. Once that happened, it became easy for doubts to prevail. In this hyped-up environment, staff became increasingly sensitive to the incoming political mortar. Anxiety ran throughout the organization, and the stress affected everyone differently. It was demoralizing to have won March, yet watch as Clinton was somehow touted as the victor. Curiously, even a surprising number of our own staff genuinely accepted the prevailing media viewpoint that we had actually lost. While a measure of fear worked to our advantage and kept us fiercely motivated, it became increasingly difficult to keep a realistic perspective. State of the Race I remained concerned. I had no objection to Clinton staying in, but the nature of her attacks wouldn’t help our chances in November against McCain. I calmly reassured complaining staff that it was good for us to compete in every state if it really was her intention to take it to the end. Privately, however, I worried that our candidate and campaign would 119 in crisis, stay on offense | be too badly damaged to contend with the Republican machine after the nomination was secured. It was disconcerting to watch Clinton sow the seeds of an ugly case against us that was certain to be embraced and adopted more heartily by the Republicans in the fall. On March 12, a day after we’d won Mississippi, Clinton was still parading...