Obama- An Oral History Read online

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Hillary was a big favorite to win, and I ended up getting to know Obama and the senior team well because I was just driving around with them in vans across New Hampshire. I’d walk into a coffee shop. I’d scan the room. I’d walk back out and say, “Hey, Senator, you’re going to see the mayor of Keene on the left. You’re gonna see this woman in the corner on the right—that’s his niece.” I got to know the team well. If Axelrod spilled ketchup on his shirt in Indiana, I’d run to the store and grab him a new shirt at Target. I picked up sandwiches and stocked the vans with candy. When they needed an extra person on the basketball court, I would play. I would run in to the events before Obama and hang the “Hope” or the “Change” signs on the podium, and I was in heaven.

  ERIC LESSER

  There was a crew of us from Cambridge that basically went up every weekend to help out. I just kind of moved to New Hampshire and [worked on the scheduling and] advance [team] for a while. I took a few trips to Iowa and eventually settled as one of the permanent advance staffers.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  I met Eric on a connecting flight to Des Moines. He had just graduated from Harvard, and I had just graduated from Cornell. We were both so idealistic and drawn to Obama and the message that he was conveying and what he represented, but this was early on. He was behind in the polls. We were in Iowa in, like, middle-school gyms or at farms in Independence with eighty people.

  SHOMIK DUTTA

  I couldn’t tell you the number of lawyers and folks I reached out to who would say, “You know, you’re a good kid. I will make sure there’s a job for you in the Clinton administration.” There was this air of expectancy that never went away on them, which I found, of course, appalling.

  BRANDON HURLBUT

  Deputy Director of Cabinet Affairs, White House (2009)

  Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief of Staff, US Department of Energy (2009–2013)

  Bill Clinton was a legend in New Hampshire. That’s where the “Comeback Kid” story happened. We would always bump up against that. We were always down in the polls in New Hampshire. We started working weekends very early in the process. If you were not in the campaign office on Sunday, April of 2007, or May, when you’re thirty points down in the polls, people were asking questions.

  ERIC LESSER

  At this stage of the campaign, the events were small. There’s very little security. There’s very little hoopla. We were literally planning house parties in living rooms and stops at ice-cream parlors—visits to VFW halls.

  HERBIE ZISKEND

  Campaigning is hard. You’re not really sleeping much. You’re eating terrible food. But you’re seeing towns across the country that you’d normally never go to. You wouldn’t go to Kokomo, Indiana, or Toledo, Ohio, or Butte, Montana. And so this incredible bond was created, especially because Obama was an underdog, and to be part of that team from the beginning and watch it grow, extraordinary relationships were formed.

  DAVID AXELROD

  Chief Strategist, Obama for America (2007–2008)

  Senior Advisor to the President, White House (2009–2011)

  Senior Strategist, Obama for America (2011–2012)

  Obama was, by his own admission, not a very good candidate for the first months of the campaign, and, you know, at one point actually said, “I’m not a good candidate now, but I will learn to be a good candidate. Just give me a little time here.” You know, the enthusiasm that was out there for him, and the resources that we were able to raise—grassroots contributions, propelling a lot of it—gave him the time.

  JEREMY BIRD

  I was the field director down in South Carolina. No one knew how to pronounce his name. We were down massively with African American voters. We were losing with African American women by like forty points, and as people started to learn who we were, there was a feeling: Well, he can’t win. Even if I like what I’m hearing, I’m not sure I’m going to get behind him.

  JIM MESSINA

  National Chief of Staff, Obama for America (2007–2008)

  Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, White House (2009–2011)

  Campaign Manager, Obama for America (2011–2012)

  Between her and her husband, Clinton had been organizing the early states for forever. The traditional Democratic machine was completely sewn up. It forced Senator Obama to develop this new model and find new people. At the beginning, the traditional establishments in places like Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire, and, like, DC operatives, they all had gone to Clinton.

  JEREMY BIRD

  We didn’t have the political establishment with us. We had almost no elected officials supporting us from the beginning. We didn’t have the ministers on board. So we built something that was incredibly ambitious. We ran a real community-organizing plan. The people who were with us were really with us. On the staff side they were young and really committed to him. Then the volunteers signed up on the website, had come to our rallies, and we’re recognizing pretty early on that these people were ready for this guy. I didn’t see that kind of energy in other campaigns.

  JON CARSON

  National Field Director, Obama for America (2007–2008)

  Chief of Staff, Council on Environmental Quality, White House (2009–2011)

  Director, Office of Public Engagement, White House (2011–2013)

  We had a level of empowerment and responsibility to these supervolunteers, the likes of which I’d never done before. We gave them access to the voter files. We gave them login accounts. This was met with all sorts of worries that people would corrupt the data. We never really saw that at scale, and taking that leap of faith was the only real way to tap into the true energy that was out there.

  JEREMY BIRD

  We hired a lot of people who had never worked on any campaign. The people I had the most trouble with were the people who had worked on campaigns before. They expected something different, but we flipped that model. We were saying, “It’s not going to be about how many voters that you as an organizer called today. It’s going to be about how many people we can recruit to be volunteer leaders.” The only way we were going to get to scale was if [our message] came from people that [the voters] knew, trusted, and respected. If it got in the barbershops, the beauty salons, the churches, and the schools, that’s actually how we’d build this thing.

  SETH HARRIS

  Acting Secretary and Deputy Secretary, US Department of Labor (2009–2014)

  Empowerment, that’s exactly what the labor movement’s all about. He talked about that all the time. “Yes we can” was the punch line, but there were paragraphs leading up to that about how The power is in you, it’s not in me. That distinguished him from the top-down, longtime establishment, well-connected-at-the-elite-and-opinion-leader-level that then Senator Clinton had, and that would really distinguish him from George Bush and John McCain. They would never have used that kind of rhetoric and language.

  JACKIE NORRIS

  I was a huge believer in the role that our organizers played. These were typically kids, eighteen to twenty-three years old, getting paid next to nothing. It’s door-to-door salesmanship. And they all ran the same circuit—Clinton, Edwards, Obama. Every candidate had their field organizer at every soup supper and wingding. They really were all in the same boat doing the same thing . . . The tension, I think it’s fair to say, was more around the Edwards folks, because we saw them as a competitor for caucus voters.

  TEDDY GOFF

  I had much more distaste for John Edwards than I did for Clinton. I kind of liked the Clintons. That was how it was for the longest time, and then it started to get ugly as the [Iowa] caucus happened and as the South Carolina primary, in particular, happened. It was really fairly friendly for all of 2007, but it got worse.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  Campaign Manager, Obama for America (2007–2008)

  Senior Advisor to the President, White House (2011–2013)

  Every quarter, candidates had to release how
much money they raised, and we had an amazingly strong first quarter. Our suspicion was we either outraised Clinton or it would be close, and we knew that would be seen as a big moment. And so we decided not to [immediately] put our numbers out. Generally if you have a good number you wanna rush it out there to prove your viability, and we thought that what would be really interesting [would be] to let the Clinton people go first. They’d announce their money, and then we’d come in over top of it and completely drown them out.

  SHOMIK DUTTA

  Those days were my favorite. We ended up beating Hillary Clinton in the first [six months] of fundraising 2007, which really put us on the map.

  JIM MESSINA

  Everyone expected Clinton to have a huge fundraising number. All of Washington was going, Oh my God, he might be for real.

  DAVID PLOUFFE

  More often than not, when we showed discretion and played the chess game out a little bit, as opposed to the traditional checkers game, we were better off for it.

  ADAM HITCHCOCK

  Special Assistant, Office of the Chief of Staff, White House (2009–2010)

  Chief of Staff, Council of Economic Advisers, White House (2010–2011)

  We knew that if we lost Iowa, it was over. And we knew that if we won Iowa, that just meant this thing would be drawn out and could possibly go all the way through all the primaries . . . At that point we were down in Iowa. The polling showed us way behind Hillary, and people started to say, “Oh, the strategy isn’t working.”

  SHOMIK DUTTA

  You remember Punjab-gate? We dropped an opposition-research memo on Hillary for being too close with an Indian donor, and someone in the research shop had put “Clinton (D-Punjab)” instead of “(D-NY).” The senator was in the air at the time. He hadn’t seen or approved the memo, but it became an uproar, of course, because a New York Times reporter leaked the memo, which he was given on background. I think it was Patrick Healy. So the president landed, heard about this, was furious—canceled meetings. I was in the fundraising office across the street from the Hart Senate Building and got a call: “Senator’s coming in two minutes.” He was not on the schedule. I thought I was going to get fired because I was a superaggressive fundraiser . . . I had sort of an impression in mind of what I needed to be. I would hang up on donors, yell and curse, do whatever I had to do to raise money.

  BRAD JENKINS

  Associate Director, Office of Public Engagement, White House (2011–2015)

  This was early ’07 when Hillary was up like thirty points.

  SHOMIK DUTTA

  I was nervous as hell. I went downstairs to open the office. The senator looked at me. “Upstairs, right now.” And he said, “Bring Ravi Gupta, too.” Ravi was my assistant at the time, another Indian guy who had taken off a couple years of Yale Law School to work on the campaign. I was like, Shit. He’s gonna clean house. And so we went up there and he said, “Guys, I just wanted to stop by to apologize to the two of you for this memo that came out. I know that you have families and friends in the community, and I don’t want them to think any less of you or what this campaign stands for because of something like this.” Ravi and I looked at each other like, What? You never have to apologize to us for anything.

  VALERIE JARRETT

  Senior Advisor to the President, White House (2009–2017)

  Director, Office of Public Engagement, White House (2009–2017)

  He had been spending a lot of time out on the campaign trail and I think was feeling a bit disconnected. He wanted to make sure the team was running the kind of campaign that he wanted them to run, and they weren’t making big decisions without him being in the loop. In retrospect, [it was] very natural that the folks at headquarters were working 24/7 and cranking out events, fundraisers, and rallies. They just had their heads down, and I think the purpose of the [July 17] dinner [senior meeting at my Chicago town house] was for him to say, This has to be my campaign and I have to own it if I’m going to enjoy it. And if I’m not enjoying it, then that’s going to show.

  MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS

  Chief Counsel and Deputy Chief of Staff, US Senator Barack Obama (2005–-2008)

  Office of Governmental Affairs and Public Engagement, White House (2009–2011)

  Counselor for Strategic Engagement, White House (2010–2013)

  Valerie was somebody who was Michelle and Barack Obama’s mentor, and they were mine. Valerie was kind of one level above, when we were in Chicago, and wasn’t somebody I had dealt with that much. But . . . as the campaign began, we both found that we really had the same mind-set. We wanted to see them be successful.

  VALERIE JARRETT

  The dinner began his seizing control of the tempo, and the momentum turned around. I also think it gave him an opportunity to encourage the team to bring more people into the tent. That’s hard to do when you’re going 180 miles an hour. So it was kind of a “Pause” button, and going forward from there he felt like it was his campaign. I’m not sure he owned it as much as he wanted to, or needed to, before that dinner.

  DAVID AXELROD

  There was a swing through Iowa in the summer of 2007 where I really felt like he was hitting his stride.

  SHOMIK DUTTA

  One of the things that made the senator unique was he was so normal, that he would still engage in normal, sort of lowbrow things. There was this early organizer in Iowa. He came from Texas, and the [senator pulled] him aside. “I love you. I know you’re doing a great job. Thank you for all these volunteer pull-asides. You’re introducing all these supervolunteers to me. It’s important.” And the [senator] said, “But are you sure that every volunteer from Texas is a twenty-two-year-old blonde girl named Ashley?”

  DAVID AXELROD

  What distinguished him from the others became more central to his presentation. You know, campaigns are exercises in market differentiation, and the clearer and more distinct your message is, the better you’re going to do.

  SETH HARRIS

  The war was one of the means by which Senator Obama distinguished himself from then Senator Clinton. She voted for the war. He had spoken out against the war. It was a very important distinguishing characteristic.

  ARUN CHAUDHARY

  Official White House Videographer (2009–2011)

  On foreign policy, they had an absolutely binary difference. You had someone who was, from the beginning, very much opposed to the Iraq War, and another candidate who had voted for it and who had been somewhat unwilling to even publicly commit to its having been a mistake. The idea that we could have a president who was going to come into office being antiwar, especially being anti this stupid war that we got ourselves involved in, meant that I was 100 percent behind him from the beginning.

  JOE LIEBERMAN

  I felt we did the right thing going into Iraq. It wasn’t a 100 percent easy call. We totally messed it up after we overthrew Saddam, but now that we were there and the place was bleeding, if we just walked away, it would have diminished our strength in the world and made the world more dangerous for us and everybody else.

  DAVID AXELROD

  There were moments that seemed, to the conventional scorekeepers, [to be] setbacks, that actually helped propel him forward, both in his own mind and in the larger contest. One was this YouTube-sponsored debate in South Carolina in which he got a question about whether he would sit down with hostile leaders—Castro, Ahmadinejad, and so on—and he said he would, to advance America’s agenda. His opponents jumped on him for being naive, for coddling dictators and so on, and he felt very strongly about this.

  MARK LIPPERT

  Chief of Staff, National Security Council, White House (2009)

  Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and Pacific Security Affairs, US Department of Defense (2012–2013)

  Chief of Staff, Office of the Secretary of Defense (2013–2014)

  Ambassador to Republic of Korea, US Department of State (2014–2017)

  He went more off the script than anybody anticipated
, but he believed it and delivered on it. It wasn’t as though you had a candidate who tried to simply recall talking points. It was someone clearly comfortable with the subject matter, and I think that came through. This was a guy who was very comfortable and, therefore, combined with his analytics skills and strong intellect, was well suited to have a strong grasp of foreign policy.

  DAVID AXELROD

  It was very rare for him to get on our morning strategy calls. The next morning, after the debate, I was in a car with him and he said, “I wanna get on this call.” And he got on the call, and he said, “I don’t want anybody backing off one inch from what I said. I meant what I said.” And he said, “I think this notion that, you know, we’re somehow punishing these people by not being willing to talk to them is not what I believe. I don’t think it’s smart.”

  DAN SHAPIRO

  Senior Director for the Middle East and North Africa, National Security Council, White House (2009)

  Ambassador to Israel, US Department of State (2011–2017)

  It’s true that he didn’t have years of deep experience dealing with foreign policy, although he had spent a few years on the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee. He obviously had an interest in the Middle East, including Israeli-Palestinian peace and issues surrounding the Iraq War, how it started, and how it should end.

  DAVID AXELROD

  This debate continued through the summer. It came up several times. He was steadfast in his belief, and it gave him a chance to say, you know, The same people who are saying this are the people who thought invading Iraq was a good idea. I remember him saying, “This helps me. It’s crystallized in my mind what my place in this campaign is, why I’m doing this.”

  DAN SHAPIRO

  I always found that I was dealing with a person whose judgment and analytical abilities were superior to anybody else’s in the room. I always felt I had to be at the top of my game, because there was a good chance that he’d already thought of the arguments—and maybe the counterarguments—that we needed to be thinking about. He’d have a theory of the case for what he was trying to do.