The Long Siege

Sometimes it seemed as though Hillary Clinton's campaign staffers were more interested in destroying each other than Obama. Patti Solis Doyle was finally fired on Feb. 10, and a messy scene greeted her replacement, Maggie Williams.

Staffers were trying to work, sort of, and ignore the sounds coming from the office of communications director Howard Wolfson. "He's going to ruin this f–––ing campaign!" shouted Phil Singer, Wolfson's deputy. No one was quite sure who "he" was, but most assumed it was Penn, the chief strategist who was in more or less constant conflict with Hillary's other top advisers. Wolfson said something indistinct in response, and Singer cut loose, "F––– you, Howard," and stormed out of his office. Policy director Neera Tanden had the misfortune of standing in his path. "F––– you, too!" screamed Singer. "F––– you," Tanden started. "And the whole f–––ing cabal," Singer, now standing on a chair, shouted loudly enough to be heard by the entire war room. "I'm done." Within a week or two Singer was back, still steaming and swearing. "If the house is on fire, would you rather have a psychotic fireman or no fireman at all?" Wolfson explained to Williams. A former top aide to Bill Clinton, Williams was regarded as a grown-up, but she wasn't eager to play hall monitor. She had been living quietly with her husband on Long Island, away from the Clinton melodrama, and she didn't appear to have her heart in the battle when a reporter later met with her in the spring of 2008. At the time, commentators were beginning to accuse Hillary of running as the White Candidate. An African-American woman, Williams seemed almost despondent worrying about the effect on young staffers, black and white, of being accused of racism.

Even though the campaign raised more than $100 million before Iowa, money was chronically short. "The cupboard is bare," Harold Ickes announced after New Hampshire at a stunned staff meeting. No one seemed quite sure where it had all gone, though there were a lot of bitter jokes about Hillary's penchant for G4 business jets and Mark Penn's hefty bills for polling and direct mail. Fundraising was getting tougher that winter. A top aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "Our donors were so disillusioned, particularly with Bill Clinton. The whole Clinton mishegoss—people said, if she can't control him in the campaign, how could she control him in the White House? We took a pounding." The campaign aides suggested that the Clintons loan $5 million from their personal fortune before the Super Tuesday primaries on Feb. 5. "Let's do it," Bill Clinton said immediately, but Solis Doyle could hear hesitation in Hillary's voice. She came around, and when word got out that she was tapping her own money, contributions poured in—many from women.

Shortly after Williams took over, she called a major meeting for senior staff. Penn was given the floor, and he began to walk through all the iterations of Hillary slogans: "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.