8/25/08 Roger Simon, Politico's Chief Political Columnist, Has Been a Respected Name in American Journalism Since the 1970S —

8/25/08 Roger Simon, Politico's chief political columnist, has been a respected name in American journalism since the 1970s — and an authoritative voice in American politics for just as long. After the historic contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama finally came to an end in June, Simon launched an intensive effort to get behind the scenes — and to the bottom — of what happened and why. He interviewed scores of well-placed people at all levels of both campaigns, many of whom have been sources of his for years. This project, which Simon named "Relentless" to reflect what he saw as the animating spirit of Obama's remarkable campaign, is the result of Simon's two years of reporting on this campaign, and decades of observing political personalities in action. – John F. Harris Introduction: The path to the nomination By: Roger Simon August 24, 2008 09:09 AM EST In the summer of 2006, Patti Solis Doyle offered David Axelrod a job. Hillary Clinton was running for reelection to the Senate and Solis Doyle was her campaign manager, but everybody knew Clinton was soon going to run for president. And Clinton wanted Axelrod onboard. Axelrod was a highly experienced and successful political consultant and just what Clinton needed. But he declined. Presidential campaigns were mentally taxing, physically exhausting and emotionally draining. There were easier ways to make a buck. Unless. “I wasn’t planning to work in a presidential race,” Axelrod told me, “but if Barack might run, well, he would be the only guy to cause me to get in.” It was not impossible. As early as November 2004, even before his swearing-in to the United States Senate, Barack Obama was having conversations about the possibility of a presidential run in 2008. The conversations were very preliminary, however, just a toe in the water. And Hillary Clinton was not worried. In May 2006, Clinton herself had interviewed another experienced campaign consultant, Steve Hildebrand, but had turned him down. The time was not right. And she had plenty of time. But it would prove to be a costly mistake. A few months later, Steve Hildebrand would play a key role in persuading Barack Obama to run for president. Hillary still was not worried. She would put together a great campaign team, a Dream Team. It did not turn out that way. “Happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy famously wrote. “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Hillary Clinton campaign was an unhappy family. I was told by Clinton campaign staffers that Mike Henry, the deputy campaign manager, stalked Clinton headquarters in Ballston, Va., with a baseball bat in his hand. I was told that Patti Solis Doyle stayed in her office watching soap operas and refused to return the phone calls of governors, members of Congress and Bill Clinton. I was told that there were suspicions that Mark Penn, the campaign’s pollster and chief strategist, “cooked the books” in presenting his polling results. (All denied the accusations.) It was that kind of campaign. In the very beginning, the Obama campaign felt it would have to do everything right in order to beat Clinton. The mere thought of running against her was intimidating. “We thought we had to be almost a perfect campaign to win,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, told me, “because she was so strong.” The Obama campaign would not turn out to be a perfect campaign, of course. No campaign is. But it didn’t need to be. Months after Hillary Clinton announced in January 2007 that she was running for president, her campaign was still disorganized, inept and, in a word used over and over again by her top campaign aides, “dysfunctional.” One of those aides said: “I don’t think we knew what a political operation was. It was the weakest I have ever experienced. It was dismally weak.” The campaign would improve as time went by, becoming more coherent, better planned and much less arrogant. But by the time it improved, it was already too late. Barack Obama had wrapped up the nomination, cleverly, skillfully, relentlessly. Always relentlessly. Both campaigns made mistakes. But whenever Obama suffered a setback, he always had a Plan B ready, waiting and often already under way. “It was a game of chess, and we thought methodically,” said Axelrod, who would become Obama’s top strategist. “We took a pawn here and there.” In the end, it would be enough. In the end, the pawns would create a king. Presidential campaigns have grown so vast and complex, with so many moving — and sometimes clashing — parts that few candidates feel they are actually in control. But, in the end, they are responsible. Solis Doyle, Clinton’s presidential campaign manager, who was later replaced, said, “I would not make any major decisions without her. She was very hands-on.” Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, said Clinton “assembled a team that she had a lot of confidence in and let them operate and implement, but she was certainly involved in setting the overall strategic direction of the campaign.” In the end, Hillary Clinton might not have gotten the campaign she deserved, but she got the campaign she created. It was a campaign that had many people who were knowledgeable about media and messaging but who never got the math, those tricky little rules that led one candidate to victory and the other to defeat. “Ninety-five percent of the campaign staff didn’t know the rules,” a top Clinton aide told me. And the 5 percent who did felt nobody ever listened to them. Obama’s campaign was proud not only of what it had but also of what it lacked: drama. When David Plouffe, the campaign manager, ordered that all the printers be set up to print on both sides of each page, that was considered a dramatic moment at headquarters. (Hey, figure it out: You use half as much paper that way.) The twin-stall unisex restroom at Obama headquarters (with posted instructions reminding men to lift the seat) might have been considered dramatic, but nobody seemed to mind much. There were certainly tough moments during the campaign: the unexpected loss of the New Hampshire primary, the incendiary remarks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s comments on small-town Americans becoming “bitter,” and the mishandling of the Ohio and Texas primary campaigns, to name some. “But one of Barack’s strengths is that he is never too high and never too low,” Axelrod said. “He doesn’t pump his fists in the air and whoop when things go well, and he doesn’t holler when they don’t.” His staff was remarkably like him in temperament. “We had a job to do, and we did it,” Axelrod said. “The experience of this campaign has been an absolute joy, but we had a few challenges that looked very, very significant — Rev. Wright was one — but we kept our heads and moved on.” Inexorably, grindingly, relentlessly, they moved on. This series is based on the interviews that I conducted with 25 staff members and advisers to the Obama and Clinton campaigns after the end of the primary season. It is an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at two campaigns that were strikingly different in temperament, planning and execution. The Barack Obama campaign, as this article will show, was hoping for a quick, knockout punch of Hillary Clinton but was already calling superdelegates in March 2007 just in case the campaign became a drawn-out battle. The Clinton campaign would not wake up to the importance of superdelegates for months and, in fact, would have more basic problems. “We didn’t have a superdelegate strategy?” said Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s campaign chairman. “We didn’t have a pledged delegate strategy.” The Obama campaign did not prepare just for its victories, but, just as importantly, it prepared for its defeats: It had a careful plan in place to keep Clinton’s delegate victories to the narrowest margins possible. Virtually all of the Obama top staff understood the math that would lead to the nomination. Hardly anyone in the Clinton campaign did. Obama secretly began his general election campaign before the primaries were over, quietly moving staff and resources into key November states well before Hillary Clinton conceded defeat. The Clinton campaign could look back on a number of paths not taken: The campaign seriously discussed having Hillary apologize for her vote in favor of the Iraq war, but she never did so. And Bill Clinton, against the advice of top staffers, who felt he was “delusional,” insisted the campaign make a serious effort in South Carolina because of what he considered his strong relationship with black voters. Although the Clinton campaign would improve and Hillary would do better in the latter part of the primary season, by then it would not matter. In North Carolina, a few weeks before the end, Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa and a Hillary supporter, sat in the back of a car with Bill Clinton going from event to event. It was the end of a long day, and Vilsack remembers the former president looking for any ray of sunshine amid the gloom, anything to have made the joyless campaign worthwhile. “Even if she doesn’t win, they will know Hillary better and like her better,” Bill Clinton finally said. “She’s a complex person. They just didn’t know her. If you know her, you just love her.” © 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC Part One: The improbable plan By: Roger Simon August 24, 2008 09:15 AM EST In May of 2006, when Hillary Clinton was publicly running for reelection to the U.S.

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