Hillary: What’s in a Name? | Newsweek Periscope

CAMPAIGN 2008
Sit Back, Relax, Get Ready to Rumble
Richard Wolffe
How do you know if Barack Obama is unhappy with what you're saying— or not saying? At meetings of his closest advisers, he likes to lean back, put his feet on the table and close his eyes. If he doesn't like how the conversation is going, he will lean forward, put his feet on the floor and "adjust his socks, kind of start tugging at them," says Michael Strautmanis, a counselor to the campaign. Obama wants people to talk, but he doesn't want to intimidate them. "If you haven't said anything, he'll call on you," says Strautmanis. "He's never said it, but he usually thinks if somebody is very quiet it's because they disagree with what everybody is saying … so Barack will call on you and say, 'You've been awfully quiet'." There are no screamers on Team Obama; one senior Obama aide says he's heard him yell only twice in four years. Obama was explicit from the beginning: there was to be "no drama," he told his aides. "I don't want elbowing or finger-pointing. We're going to rise or fall together." Obama wanted steady, calm, focused leadership; he wanted to keep out the grandstanders and make sure the quiet dissenters spoke up. A good formula for running a campaign—or a presidency.
The Editor’s Desk
Daniel Klaidman
Presidential campaigns eventually settle into contrasting narratives of the candidates' biographies, character and ideology. The central fault line in the seemingly endless Democratic race has been change vs. experience. Hillary Clinton has argued relentlessly that her years in the White House and Senate have made her battle-hardened and best suited to be president. Barack Obama, by contrast, has questioned the value of Washington experience, contending that his wide-ranging background has imbued him with superior judgment. But the truth is that until recently, neither of them had run anything as unwieldy and unpredictable as a modern presidential campaign. Now they have, and as Obama stands poised to capture his party's nomination, we examine the organization he assembled and has quarterbacked for the last 18 months. Richard Wolffe, the coauthor of our cover story with Evan Thomas, has covered three White House campaigns starting with George W. Bush's in 2000. He knows that though campaigns are not true measures of the potential for presidential greatness, they offer meaningful glimpses into character. "Campaigns offer voters a stress test that shows the candidate under fire—a dry run of the pressures in the West Wing," says Richard. Obama has passed the first heat, building a formidable $250 million machine from scratch and mapping out a sophisticated 50-state strategy that's drawn on huge grass-roots enthusiasm. But now comes the hard part for the O Team. Can they withstand an onslaught from John McCain and the Republicans, who've been biding their time while the Dems have been roughing each other up?
Perspectives
ELECTIONS
How Global Politics Got Starbucked
Tony Dokoupil
For western democracies, the U.S. presidential race is more than a source of spectacle—it's a preview of a key American export: campaign tactics. "Elections have become as similar as Starbucks," writes London Times editor James Harding, whose stinging new book, "Alpha Dogs," traces the international campaign playbook back to the Sawyer Miller Group, a U.S. firm launched in the 1970s that married Madison Avenue with Pennsylvania Avenue, selling candidates like consumer goods in an "electronic democracy." It was among the first political consultancies to wrap intellectual voter appeals in emotional clothes—and it was good at it, steering to victory four senators, six governors and overseas leaders including Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel and Israel's Shimon Peres before dissolving in the early 1990s. Today, Sawyer Miller has acolytes inside the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. And its techniques—nonstop polling, sloganeering, attack ads—have become worldwide staples.
Now On to ‘Florigan’!
Jonathan Alter
Yogi Berra, meet the Clintons. "It ain't over till it's over" neatly defines their current philosophy on the presidential race. Forget the brilliant Berra ambiguity of the word "over." How about "it"? What is the game they're now playing? The math is clear: Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president unless he's caught on tape taking cash from Tony Rezko or vacationing in Hawaii with Louis Farrakhan. But the only thing dependable about the Clintons is that they never quit. Hillary has more than enough delegates to hassle Obama with the threat that she'll go all the way to the Denver convention or otherwise jeopardize party unity if he doesn't seat Florida and Michigan exactly as she wants. And she may rally her millions of supporters to demand that Obama offer her the No. 2 slot. Don't put it past her.
LETTERS
A Candidate Perceived as Being Elitist