Going Into Battle

Salter would later say that the tone of the letter was perhaps more bitter than McCain intended (though McCain did sign the letter). Obama, for his part, seemed genuinely startled by McCain's acid-tipped arrow. He wrote McCain, "The fact that you have questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you or my willingness to find a bipartisan solution to this problem."

Obama further alienated McCain on the immigration issue. McCain took great political risks on immigration, defying the GOP faithful who wanted to build a wall across the Mexican border and arrest and detain illegal immigrants. Working with Ted Kennedy and a bipartisan group, McCain came up with compromise legislation to create a guest-worker program. Obama asked to join the group. The senators agreed to hang together to vote against amendments from both the right and the left. Some very conservative senators honored the agreement, voting against conservative amendments—but Obama did not, voting in favor of a number of liberal amendments. After one meeting, Kennedy chewed Obama out for his fickleness. (Months later, asked by a colleague why he had endorsed Obama for president, Kennedy gave a one-word answer: "Caroline.") With his aides, McCain initially took a forgiving tone toward Obama. When Salter ranted to his boss that Obama was being spineless on immigration reform, McCain responded, "He's a rookie, he's a rookie. Maybe he'll grow into something." But on the campaign trail in late July 2008, with the election less than four months away and McCain hanging in close behind the front runner, when Schmidt and others pressed to go negative and mock Obama, McCain did not hold them back.

There was a notable lack of diversity at the top of the Obama campaign, a situation that Obama himself occasionally complained about, though not so strongly that anything was done to add on more minorities. Hillary Clinton had put two black women (campaign manager Maggie Williams and chief of staff Cheryl Mills) in charge, replacing her first campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who is Hispanic. More gay men found high-level positions on her staff as well.

After Clinton bowed out in June and Obama's staff bulked up for the general election, one newcomer, settling into the open workspace at 233 North Michigan Avenue, noticed something else different from Hillaryland. The campaign veteran took note of the "No-Drama Obama" atmosphere, but observed to a NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's drama in Obama. People just whisper, not yell." David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, ordered his staff to welcome the Clinton refugees (reportedly threatening that if they did not, "I will hunt you down"). There was a slight hitch when Clinton's top fundraisers were folded into Obama's finance committee. According to one of Obama's moneymen, the Clinton people wanted to know what their job titles would be and were taken aback when they were informed that the Obama fundraisers had no titles. (Several wealthy women who had raised money for Clinton decided instead to raise money for McCain; one of them, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, later said that Obama was an "elitist" who talked down to "rednecks.")

The former Clinton adviser noticed that the atmosphere felt different from Hillaryland in another way. "People walk around there," the Clintonista said, gesturing to the tower on Michigan Avenue, "thinking there is no possible way he can lose." The adviser came from an alternate universe, one with a healthier sense of impending disaster. "I worked in the Clinton White House," the adviser recalled, "and we assumed that if something could go wrong, it would go wrong."

By early August, however, the true believers in the Obama campaign were beginning to have a few doubts. They were bothered that McCain's "celebrity" ad had apparently penetrated Obama's image armor, even though their own internal polls still seemed to be holding up. To the former Clinton aide, it seemed, some of the top Obamaites were operating under the illusion that they had weathered the worst from Hillary Clinton. "They live in a world where they think Hillary was the meanest she could be," the aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter. The Clintonista believed that Hillary had held back—noting that when Hillary was asked in a debate if Obama was electable, she said yes, which was not what she was saying privately.

There were some Obamaites bracing for the worst. Media man Jim Margolis took notice of the fact that McCain had announced that he would not "referee" between the 527s, the independent-expenditure groups. If there was any racist or truly low-road attack on Obama, it was likely to come from the 527s, which are prohibited by law from communicating with presidential campaigns—and are thus free to sling mud with impunity. It had been a 527, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, that did the most harm to John Kerry in 2004, by questioning his war record in Vietnam. The Internet was constantly buzzing with viral assassins who spread rumors that Obama was a Muslim, that he had attended a madrassa and that there was a video of Michelle making a crack about "Whitey." "It's a lie," Margolis told a NEWSWEEK reporter in June. "We're going to be aggressive." That same day, the Obama campaign launched a Web site called Fightthesmears.com to rebut the various falsehoods.

Obama's own approach was, as usual, to play it cool. In April, when Clinton was beginning to push the line by saying that she stood for "hardworking, white Americans," Obama told a crowd in Raleigh, N.C., "When you're running for president, then you've got to expect it, and you've kind of got to let it …" He paused, shrugged and made a brushing motion with his right hand, as if flicking some dust off his right shoulder, then his left. The crowd, which included many African-Americans, burst into surprised laughter and applause, and many stood to cheer as Obama gave a self-satisfied smile and an exaggerated nod, and then said, "That's what you gotta do." He was playing off the popular song "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" by the hip-hop artist Jay-Z. ("If you feelin' like a pimp nigga, go and brush your shoulders off/Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off/Niggaz is crazy baby, don't forget that boy told you/Get that dirt off your shoulder.")

With McCain's "celebrity" ad, the Obama camp saw a warning shot. Obama's aides did not think the McCain campaign would ever explicitly play the race card, but by raising questions about Obama's experience, McCain's message makers hoped to fuel fears that Obama was not trustworthy and that he was somehow "other" from mainstream voters, particularly working-class older whites. At least that's the way it looked to Obama's spinmeisters, so they began feeding Obama lines aimed at inoculating voters. In Springfield, Mo., on July 30, the same day the "celebrity" ad first aired, Obama told the crowd, "So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have [sic] the real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky." Obama repeated the same message at two more stops along the trail of mostly white voters in Missouri.

At McCain headquarters, righteous indignation was the order of the day. Political campaigners rarely lack for excuses to describe the opposition as wicked and evil, but the race issue seemed to strike a particularly sensitive chord among the McCain advisers. Republicans as well as Democrats learned (or perhaps overlearned) the lesson of the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry in 2004: don't wait to hit back. At McCain headquarters, voices were raised against Obama for daring to suggest that McCain was using racial innuendo. It was decided to play a little jujitsu and have Rick Davis accuse Obama of playing the race card himself. "Barack Obama has played the race card, and played it from the bottom of the deck," Davis declared in a press release.

That afternoon, Davis did a phone interview with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC to defend his comments and the "celebrity" ad. "Explain to me, Rick, how is what he said playing the race card?" Mitchell asked in a skeptical tone. Davis accused the Obama campaign of telling reporters and liberal bloggers that McCain's attacks "had racial overtones." Mitchell challenged Davis about the increasingly negative feel of the campaign, and the conversation grew testy. Davis regarded Mitchell's tone as condescending, and he grew so hot arguing with her that he forgot he was on a phone call being played over the air to hundreds of thousands of MSNBC viewers. When he hung up the phone, he barged out of his office to clear his head, and he was startled to receive a standing ovation from his staff.

On the campaign trail, McCain was asked about Davis's "race card" remarks. McCain looked uneasy and tepidly endorsed his campaign manager's remarks, but said that the campaign needed to return to debating the issues. After a brief kerfuffle, the press let the matter drop. Reporters are as uncomfortable as the politicians they cover about discussing race.

Still, among the punditocracy and on the blogs, there was some chatter. As they sat around in greenrooms waiting to go on cable-TV talk shows, pundits and reporters engaged in some cynical speculation. Had the McCain campaign attacked Obama for playing the race card precisely to bring up the whole question of race? To remind voters that race was an issue—the elephant in the room? There was a certain logic to these suspicions. In many polls, the generic Democrat defeated the generic Republican by 10 points or more, simply because voters were ready for a change after eight years of Republican rule. Yet Obama and McCain, by midsummer 2008, were essentially tied. Why wasn't Obama doing better? McCain's supporters argued that McCain outperformed the generic Republican candidate because he was a maverick attractive to independent voters and because he was a more experienced leader than Obama. But some polling experts suspected (though they couldn't quite prove, since polling on race is so difficult) that Obama was held back by the color of his skin.