make room for grass-roots organizers. The freeze on freebies added to a chorus of complaints from Capitol Hill and the K Street Corridor: the Obama campaign wasn’t listening, wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t seeking their advice—all of which was essentially true. The campaign did have Peter Rouse, who had been a top aide to Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and close adviser to Obama. Rouse half-jokingly referred to himself as a “fixer.” He proposed an elaborate outreach program to members of Congress, but the idea was rejected as too cumbersome and not really necessary. As one top adviser explained it, “Everyone loves a winner.” If Obama won, all would be forgiven, the adviser said. And if he lost, well, it wouldn’t matter. The Obama campaign did not want to get caught up in trying to satisfy all the interest groups that make up the modern Democratic Party—the one that had lost seven of the last 10 presidential elections. The John Kerry campaign set up elaborate liaison offices dedicated to ethnic groups, organized labor, groups for the disabled, for women, for gays and lesbians. Somewhat grudgingly, the Obama campaign agreed to have a single staffer devoted to each of these constituencies, but later decided the whole thing was a waste of manpower and dispersed the interest-group liaisons to go work in the field on get-out-the-vote operations.
There was some nervousness that the Clintons, with an eye on 2012, might try to steal the show, perhaps by demanding a noisy floor vote that would show how close Hillary had come to winning the nomination. The Obamaites figured that the Clintons could be counted on to do just enough to say that they tried to help Obama—but maybe not so much that he won in November. The Obama staff was petrified because nobody had seen a copy of Bill Clinton’s speech, recalled Michael Sheehan, the veteran Democratic speech coach. There were two possible explanations: one, that Clinton planned to say something controversial that he didn’t want to share beforehand; and, two, that Clinton was continually rewriting his speech. Knowing Clinton’s work habits, Sheehan assured them it was the latter.
In truth, Hillary Clinton was on better terms with John McCain than she was with Barack Obama. The former First Lady and the four-term senator from Arizona had downed shots together on Senate junkets; they regarded each other as grizzled veterans of the political wars and shared a certain disdain for Obama as flashy and callow. In early June, on the night she officially lost the Democratic nomination, Hillary had enjoyed a long and friendly phone conversation with McCain. When Hillary finally did meet with Obama at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein a few days later, she told Obama that she did not want to go through a full-scale vetting for vice president unless he was serious about choosing her. The vetting process was onerous, requiring very full financial disclosure, and even included questions about romantic and marital indiscretions. As the financial crisis deepened in the summer, Eric Holder, Obama’s chief veep vetter, added more questions about mortgages and problematic financial deals.
Obama was not inclined to choose Hillary, not so much because she had been his sometime bitter rival on the campaign trail, but because of her husband. “You don’t just get Hillary, you get Bill,” said a top Obama adviser. The Obamaites had benefited from Bill Clinton as a loose cannon in the primary campaign. They did not want to be wounded by him in the general election. Still, from time to time, as Hillary’s name came up in veep discussions, and Obama’s advisers gave all the reasons she should be kept off the ticket, Obama would stop and ask, “Are we sure?” He needed to be convinced one more time that the Clintons would do more harm than good.
The caution that had settled over the campaign in the wake of the “celebrity” ad crept into Obama’s veep deliberations. Obama’s personal favorite was Tim Kaine, the young governor of Virginia, a reformer who could win red-state votes. Like Obama, Kaine had come from a poor background but graduated from Harvard Law School. “I really like this guy,” Obama said of Kaine. The one-term Virginia governor was the easiest to vet—”He’s as pure as this,” said Holder, waving a blank white sheet of paper. But, with the Republicans banging on about Obama as too inexperienced, Kaine was deemed to be too risky a choice. Early in the process, Obama announced, “I’m leaning toward Biden,” the six-term senator from Delaware. Joe Biden had experience as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a regular-guy manner that played well with the blue-collar vote. He talked too much and could put his foot in his mouth, but there was no meanness about him.
Holder, a former deputy U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration and an old Washington hand, was struck by Obama’s half-open, half-inscrutable manner during the nearly eight hours of meetings they spent together going over potential veeps. Obama was diligent, bringing up small morsels of information hidden in the fat briefing books, and he acted like a law professor who calls on reluctant pupils (“I haven’t heard from you,” he’d say to anyone around the table who had been silent too long). A lot of politicians pretend to be inclusive; Obama actually was. But “at the end, you didn’t know where he stood. When you got down to the final judgment, I had a sense, but I didn’t have any kind of certainty.” Holder thought Obama was being shrewd to not signal his intentions too clearly—since “people want to say what the boss wants to hear, and if they don’t know, you’ll get more honest advice.”
At the democratic convention in Denver, there were no unpleasant surprises. Both Clintons gave stellar speeches that stirred the base, the true believers in the hall and millions of Democrats watching on TV. (It did not go unnoticed in Obamaland that Hillary, toward the end of the convention, reportedly assembled her closest advisers in a hotel room to discuss her prospects for 2012.) Well aware that she would be watched in some living rooms with a coldly critical eye, Michelle Obama made sure that her speech was finished a month early and memorized it. Lest there be any doubt, in the speech she distinctly declared how much she loved her country. On opening night, she was visibly nervous before the cameras, but nonetheless elegant and beautiful. Michelle and her two precocious girls engaged in some stagy but cute banter by video with Barack, who had been planted in the living room of a white middle-class family in the Midwest to watch her speech. Obama pulled his usual all-nighters to draft his Thursday-night address. He was finally rehearsing the most important speech of his life with a teleprompter in his suite at the Hyatt when there was a knock on the door. The candidate stopped the speech to go to the door. It was room service. “All right,” Obama said. “Who ordered the salad?” Axelrod sheepishly raised his finger and everyone laughed. […continued on page 3]