A Leader In The Making

The Age

Saturday January 10, 2009

EVAN THOMAS

Amid threats from cyber-hackers, internal division, failed strategies and a few out-there ideas, the Obama presidential campaign was a long and sometimes roller-coaster journey.

IN MIDSUMMER 2008, the Obama campaign's computers were attacked by a virus. The campaign's tech experts spotted it and took standard precautions, such as putting in a firewall. At first, the campaign figured it was a routine "phishing" attack, using common methods. Or so it seemed. In fact, the campaign had been the target of sophisticated foreign cyber-espionage.

The next day, the Obama headquarters had two visitors: from the FBI and the Secret Service. "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," said an FBI agent. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The Feds were cryptic and did not answer too many questions. But the next day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten. "You have a real problem," Bolten told the Obama aide. "It's way bigger than you guys think and you have to deal with it."

By late afternoon the campaign's chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, was on the phone with the FBI field agent who was running the investigation out of Los Angeles. Slaby was told that the hackers had been moving documents out of Obama's system at a rapid rate. Potentially, Obama's entire computer network had been compromised.

The campaign brought in a top tech-security firm to scrub its system. On August 18 an Obama official was summoned to FBI headquarters in Chicago for a briefing, only to be told that the White House had ordered the FBI not to give the briefing. The Obama official asked why, and was told that three hours earlier the Feds had learned that the McCain campaign had been compromised as well.

The security firm retained by the Obama campaign was finally able to remove the virus. (The campaign's fund-raising records were kept on a different computer system and were never compromised.) On August 20 the Obama campaign got its briefing from the FBI. The team was told that its system had been hacked by a "foreign entity". The official would not say which "foreign entity", but indicated that US intelligence believed that both campaigns had been the target of political espionage by some country - or foreign organisation - that wanted to look at the evolution of the Obama and McCain camps on policy issues, information that might be useful in any negotiations with a future Obama or McCain administration. There was no suggestion that terrorists were involved; technical experts hired by the Obama campaign speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.

Barack Obama himself was briefed, and his personal laptop was examined and found not to have been hacked. The campaign took steps to better secure its computer system, including encrypting any documents used by the policy and transition teams. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents, which was sort of reassuring. A senior McCain official confirmed to Newsweek that the campaign had been hacked and that the FBI had become involved. White House and FBI officials had no comment.

To David Axelrod, the stretch of August between Obama's triumphal tour abroad and the Democratic convention were "lost weeks". Looking back after the convention, Obama's chief strategist felt that the campaign had been in a "rut". Though the campaign publicly scoffed at McCain's "celebrity" ad as a bit of desperate fluff on the part of the McCainiacs, the more honest Obama advisers conceded that Obama had been knocked a little off stride, made more cautious. Axelrod decided to tone down the rock-star aspect of the campaign. The candidate was no longer scheduled into mega-rallies but rather performed at smaller, more subdued events.

Axelrod was a little uneasy about the coming Democratic convention in Denver. The campaign had already declared that Obama would address a football stadium full of supporters in Denver on the last night. The intention was to mimic John F. Kennedy, who in 1960 had departed the crowded convention hall to deliver his acceptance speech under the lights at the massive Los Angeles Coliseum.

At Invesco Field in Denver, the production staff of the Democratic National Committee proposed erecting enormous white columns on either side of the podium with all sorts of lights and adornments. To Axelrod, the whole setup looked like an over-the-top version of ancient Greece - or, more likely, a scene from the movie Star Wars - and he asked for something more modest and sober, simple but presidential. The designers came back with some white columns that vaguely resembled the arcade between the West Wing and the White House, still a little presumptuous, perhaps, but better than trying to recreate Mount Olympus.

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 Clinton 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 Obama at the home of Senator Dianne Feinstein a few days later, she told him 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 favourite 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 towards 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 US 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 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 judgement, 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, towards 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 memorised 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 stagey 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.

A few hours later, at 7.30pm, Obama walked slowly down a curtained hallway, dark and claustrophobic, to a small waiting area behind the stage. (The night before, Axelrod had ordered the setting toned down a little more - fewer lights, more American flags.) Obama paced in a slow circle, hand on chin, eyes downcast. He stopped, folded his arms, turned to face the stage for a few moments, then strode out, the roar of 80,000 people crashing around him.

His speech was solid, workmanlike, inspirational at moments, but not nearly as rousing as his stump speech in the primaries. Through much of the speech, Obama looked like just another Democratic presidential candidate reading from a list of promises. Obama was accepting the nomination of his party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. Standing before the fake pillars on the Invesco Field stage, Obama briefly referred to "a young preacher from Georgia", but he did not mention King by name. Whether he was merely being poetic or avoiding using a name that still polarises some white working-class voters, his advisers would not say.

But his closest aides were profoundly moved, perhaps less by the speech than by the distance they had come. Axelrod, who stood, crying, through the entire speech, appeared drained, all done in by the long march to this history-making night. Plouffe, the stoical campaign manager, looked nearly as wound tight as ever, but he confessed: "I cried. I was just shaking my head. You think back to all you've seen over 18, 19 months, and it's just hard to describe. Now we have 9 weeks to make it a reality."

This is an edited extract from A Long Time Coming: the inspiring, combative 2008 campaign and the historic election of Barack Obama, by Evan Thomas and the Newsweek Team, published by Scribe.

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© 2009 The Age

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