Game Change_ Obama And The Clintons, McCain And Palin, And The Race Of A Lifetime Part 9

What's going on? Clinton asked her campaign manager. Where do things stand?

Solis Doyle had antic.i.p.ated this talk and had been dreading it. The polling, the money, the press-all were deeper in the s.h.i.+thouse than Hillary knew, and the implications even grimmer. Someone has to be straight with her Someone has to be straight with her, Solis Doyle thought. Who else is gonna tell her? Who else is gonna tell her?

But Patti didn't want to tell her then, not just as Hillary was about to head out for her last full day of campaigning before the primary. You're gonna be late for your first event, Solis Doyle said. You don't want to have this conversation now.

I want to do it now, said Hillary.

Solis Doyle sat down across the table from her boss and sketched out the dismal picture. Penn's data matched the public polls: Hillary was going to lose New Hamps.h.i.+re, probably by a lot, and it was even possible that she would finish third, behind Edwards. The most influential union in Nevada, the culinary workers, had decided to endorse Obama, which would likely tip the caucuses there two weeks later to him. After Obama's win in Iowa, African Americans were swinging hard his way, and given the size of the black vote in South Carolina, Hillary would definitely lose there, too. She had $18 million in the kitty to get her through Super Tuesday, when twenty-two states would hold contests awarding more than half the total pledged delegates at stake. But once she lost New Hamps.h.i.+re, her fund-raising was bound to dry up, while Obama's would go through the ceiling.

Hillary was taken aback. What do you think I should do? she asked.

Look, I love you, Solis Doyle said. My primary concern is you and your future. We need to think about how four straight losses are going to look. You're an icon now, but if you stay in the race and embarra.s.s yourself, that could be destroyed. Maybe the right thing to do is just drop out after New Hamps.h.i.+re.

Hillary reeled. From the start, people had warned her not to put Solis Doyle in the campaign manager's chair. And Hillary knew well that Patti had her weaknesses. But she had decided to ignore all that, to disregard the risks, because of Solis Doyle's signal virtue: a loyalty so fierce that she would run through a wall for Hillary. But after one setback, one lousy loss, Patti was ready to surrender. The person she thought would be the last to abandon her had turned out to be the first. She struggled for air. She struggled for words. She muttered a few things.

I don't want women out there to see me as a quitter, Hillary said limply.

Solis Doyle, on the brink of tears, forced herself to continue. If you're gonna stay in, she said, you're gonna have to make a show of shaking up the campaign. You're gonna have to fire people, and bring in some new ones.

As they talked, Bill walked in and asked what was going on. Hillary told him that Solis Doyle was raising the idea that she drop out. It rang familiar. Sixteen years earlier, in his darkest hour in New Hamps.h.i.+re, some of Bill's aides had recommended that he withdraw. But his credo then was the same as it was now: Fighting hard and losing was honorable. Throwing in the towel was not. Strange stuff happens in campaigns. He had well earned his reputation as a survivor, and in her own way, Hillary had, too. So much bound them together, but one ingredient at that moment was predominant: Clintons aren't quitters.

"As long as you have enough money for an airline ticket," Bill told Hillary, "you should go out there and make your case about why you would make the best president."

The Clintons were both running late for their first events of the day. Solis Dolis told her boss, We're definitely going to talk about this later; this isn't a closed conversation.

Hillary went downstairs, got on her bus, and set off for her morning stop: a roundtable with undecided voters at a coffeehouse in Portsmouth. Huma Abedin noticed that Hillary seemed out of sorts, emotional, and raw. Inside the cafe, in her sapphire-blue pantsuit with the black piping, she sat down and took questions. Someone asked innocuously how she kept herself looking so good despite the rigors of campaigning. "It's not easy," she started to answer, "and I couldn't do it if I didn't pa.s.sionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don't want to see us fall backward."

The next thing she knew, her eyes were welling up, her voice was quaking, and words were escaping from her lips that sounded like they'd come from someone else . . . someone vulnerable. "You know," she said, "this is very personal for me-it's not just political, it's not just public. I see see what's happening." what's happening."

On TV, the talking heads said (wrongly) that tears were streaming down her cheeks. Solis Doyle was in a meeting when she heard that Hillary had broken down. A wave of guilt rushed over her.

f.u.c.k. I did this, she thought.

OBAMA WAS ON HIS campaign bus that Monday morning, rolling between events in Lebanon and Rochester, when one of his aides pulled up video on his laptop of Clinton's display. The members of his brain trust issued a collective snort of derision. Some called it a "Muskie moment"-a reference to Ed Muskie in 1972 weeping in the back of a flatbed truck in Manchester, thereby dooming himself in New Hamps.h.i.+re. Others thought Hillary was faking it. But Obama expressed some sympathy for his shaken rival. "You know what, guys?" he said to his team. "This isn't easy."

Then again, Obama could afford to be gracious. He was staring at a certain loser.

The past three days had been an exultant blur for Obama, a march to a.s.sured victory. He had sailed into New Hamps.h.i.+re with the winds of history and destiny apparently gusting at his back. Everywhere he went, the crowds were ma.s.sive, overflowing, with lines of people stretching for blocks, waiting for hours in the frigid air to catch a glimpse of him, soak up his soaring cadences. Even the most hard-bitten members of the press were agog at what was unfolding before their eyes. Obama's donors were flying in from around the country to witness the coronation.

Obama took it all in stride. This was how it was supposed to happen-the dominoes were falling in just the way that Axelrod and Plouffe had predicted. His brain trust told him about the offer that Daschle had conveyed from Edwards the night before: that the North Carolinian was prepared to drop out of the race and become Barack's running mate, driving a stake through Clinton's heart. Obama rejected the entreaty out of hand. By winning the Granite State, he could plunge that dagger in all by himself. What did he need Edwards for?

Obama's confidence in New Hamps.h.i.+re was overwhelming-and overweening. On his first day in the state, he declared to Newsweek Newsweek, "At some point people have to stop a.s.serting that because I haven't been in the league long enough, I can't play. It's sort of like Magic Johnson or LeBron James who keep on scoring and their team wins. But people say they can't lead their team because they're too young."

Obama had won just one caucus, but that didn't faze him. He was cruising now. In Iowa, his campaign had been relentless in responding to attacks. But in New Hamps.h.i.+re, when Hillaryland sent out direct mail a.s.sailing him for voting "present" on abortion legislation in the Illinois state senate, the Obamans more or less let it slide. The candidate was too busy talking about hope to stoop to refutation. He didn't add a jot of substance to his economic message (this in a state where kitchen table issues were always paramount). He went from mega-rally to mega-rally, eschewing town hall meetings. All of a sudden, the narrative line of 2007 was flipped on its head. The insurgent candidate was running on inevitability. He was going to win because he was going to win.

But if Obama was unperturbed by Clinton's near-tears moment, his brain trust was slightly rattled. The last thing Obama needed was people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. The suits cringed at Edwards's ungallant reaction: "I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business."

Back at Obama's New Hamps.h.i.+re headquarters, Plouffe monitored the wall-to-wall media coverage of Clinton in the cafe. Now dominating the final news cycle before the voting began, it threatened to scramble the dynamic in unpredictable ways.

Plouffe, his stomach churning, phoned Axelrod and said, "I don't like this."

HILLARY DIDN'T LIKE IT, either. She thought it was a Muskie moment, too. Having labored so long to highlight her strength, to prove to the world she was tough enough to be commander in chief, she worried that she had blown it with one ill-timed display of the turmoil bubbling just below the surface. One of her aides tried to ease her mind by pointing out that crying had become fas.h.i.+onable in politics: "Bush can tear up! Mitt Romney can tear up! All the guys are tearing up!" Hillary couldn't see how the a.n.a.logies applied. "I didn't cry," she kept insisting. It made you seem real, seem human, some of her advisers argued. But the realm of emotional resonance was, for her, a foreign country. "I'm an information information person," she said. person," she said.

The rest of Hillary's day was no less eventful. At her next stop on the trail, a gym in Dover, she gave an interview to Fox News in which she responded to Obama's claim that she was denigrating the value of leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., whose stock in trade was the raising of hopes. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson pa.s.sed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to get it done."

Hillary's point was that words alone weren't enough to effect change. But the interview caused a flap on cable TV and the blogs, where it was cast by some as a slight against King. The Clinton campaign realized immediately that what Hillary had said was problematic, and she moved quickly to walk it back, inserting remarks into an early evening speech in Salem effusively praising King.

While Hillary was trying to dance delicately through a minefield of racial sensitivities, Bill was working the remote western and northern parts of the state. At a town hall meeting at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, he uncorked the argument that he and Penn had been longing to make for a year. Hoa.r.s.e-voiced and finger-wagging, he ripped into Obama's claims of antiwar purity and the media's complicity in letting those claims go unchallenged: "It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through fifteen debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time-not once!-'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since.'

"Give . . . . . . me me . . . . . . a a . . . . . . break" break" the former president moaned. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen!" the former president moaned. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen!"

And Clinton was just getting warmed up. "What did you think about the Obama thing, calling Hillary the 'Senator from Punjab?' Did you like that?" he continued. "Or what about the Obama handout that was covered up, the press never reported on, implying that I was a crook, scouring scouring me, me, scathing scathing criticism over my financial reports. . . . The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that's in the media doesn't mean the facts aren't out there." criticism over my financial reports. . . . The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take. Just because of the sanitizing coverage that's in the media doesn't mean the facts aren't out there."

Bill was infinitely pleased with his performance. "I thought that was good, didn't you?" he said to an aide as he pulled out of Hanover. Back at the Centennial afterward, he told Penn and others, "I finally was able to get the whole case out there."

THE MORNING OF THE PRIMARY, the Clintons woke up girding themselves for defeat. But Hillary kept working with manic intensity all day, scrounging for every last vote. She visited four polling places and a Dunkin' Donuts (shades of 1992 again) before noon, then interrupted an afternoon nap to cram in one last campaign event in Manchester.

The rest of her day was a swirl of intrigue and whispered conversations. If Hillary was to be defeated in New Hamps.h.i.+re, the Clintons had decided they would hang a silver lining around the loss. For days before Solis Doyle suggested a shake-up, the couple had been discussing a retooling of Hillary's plainly dysfunctional campaign. After Iowa, their friends, a.s.sociates, and informal advisers had started filling their ears with long-suppressed complaints about Solis Doyle and Penn. The chief strategist's bond with the Clintons was too durable for Penn to get the axe. ("You're indispensable," Hillary emailed him.) But Solis Doyle, her relations.h.i.+p with Hillary irreparably ruptured by their conversation the previous day, would be demoted. And a clutch of old Clinton hands would be imported to right the s.h.i.+p: Texan adman Roy Spence; Bill's former White House political director, Doug Sosnik; and Hillary's former chief of staff, Maggie Williams, whom she wanted to run the show.

Solis Doyle was getting ready for breakfast with a reporter when an email arrived from Hillary. Its subject line: "Moving forward." A number of our friends who have our best interests at heart have suggested that we need a new team, Hillary wrote with odd formality. Solis Doyle would retain her t.i.tle but would relinquish much of her responsibility to Williams.

Patti read the message and cried. She'd suggested that Hillary needed to make changes, but never really thought she'd be the one to take the hit. Hillary loved her like a daughter. (Supposedly (Supposedly, Patti thought.) Being dumped via email-the indignity was almost as bad as the betrayal. (Pick up the phone, at least!) (Pick up the phone, at least!) Solis Doyle believed that she'd done a good job, that many of the campaign's flaws could be laid at Hillary's feet. She was prepared to take her share of the blame. But keep her job in name only and let Williams run everything? No way. Solis Doyle believed that she'd done a good job, that many of the campaign's flaws could be laid at Hillary's feet. She was prepared to take her share of the blame. But keep her job in name only and let Williams run everything? No way.

I understand, she emailed Clinton, but I really don't want to stay on. I'll do everything I can to help with the transition, but I don't want my t.i.tle. I'll just go home to my kids.

Hillary emailed her back: I don't accept your resignation.

For the next several hours, Solis Doyle's closest friends in Hillaryland streamed in and out of her room. Wolfson, Tanden, Ickes, Henry-all sat s.h.i.+va with Solis Doyle, who alternated between disbelief and hysteria. Everyone agreed that if Hillary lost, they would quit en ma.s.se. Everyone agreed that it should have been Penn who was given the boot.

By late afternoon, as word seeped out into the campaign, Hillary started hearing from those who thought getting rid of Solis Doyle would be a mistake. Too many people in b.a.l.l.ston are loyal to Patti, Ickes told Clinton. The move would cause too much chaos at a time when order-and the perception of order-was vital.

Hillary hated personal conflict, avoided it like the plague-hence the demotion via email. But around five o'clock, she went up to Patti's room and knocked on the door.

"Let's talk turkey," Hillary said with forced cheer as she walked in, trying to lighten the mood. And then, even more awkwardly, "Let's talk ham. Let's talk tortillas."

The attempt at levity did nothing to lessen Solis Doyle's discomfort. Sitting down on the bed, Hillary asked her to stay: People are gonna leave if you leave, they need you around, you're the glue, I can't do this without you, she said. Solis Doyle told Hillary she'd think about it. What she told herself was, I'm outta here. I'm outta here.

After Hillary left, Wolfson trundled in, bearing data from the first wave of exit polls.

"Can you believe this?" he said. "We may only lose by single digits."

Solis Doyle tried to be happy. But it felt to her like someone had died.

BARACK AND MICh.e.l.lE HAD a bad feeling the whole day. Mich.e.l.le was especially edgy. At lunch at their hotel in Nashua, though the polls had been open only a few hours, she dispatched Jarrett to Axelrod and Plouffe's table to ask if they'd heard anything about how things were going.

The first wave of exit polls from the networks late that afternoon began to provide an answer, and not the one the Obamans were expecting. The early returns from blue-collar Manchester were terrible, the first indication that Obama might have trouble with white working-cla.s.s voters. The suits kept Obama apprised as the numbers went from worrying to scary to depressing. Standing in the hallway in front of his boss's suite, Axelrod said dejectedly, "It looks like she may inch us out."

Jarrett came up from her room and found the Obamas swallowing hard to choke down the bitter pill. What on earth am I going to say to make this okay? What on earth am I going to say to make this okay? she thought. she thought.

But before Jarrett had a chance to open her mouth, Barack put one hand on her shoulder and said, "This is going to be a good thing. You'll see."

Mich.e.l.le was steelier, less rea.s.suring. "This is going to be a test," she said. "It's going to be a test to see if they're really with us or not."

In the Clinton suite up in Concord, however, there was less certainty that the primary was truly over. Hillary, who made a practice of never watching election returns on TV, was nowhere to be seen. Her husband, in a pair of jeans and a sweater, his reading gla.s.ses perched on his nose, presided over the room with his game face on, serious and concerned.

Bill was closely monitoring the late returns from the Hanover area, eager to see if his broadside at Dartmouth had worked. But now, as he sifted through pages of precinct-level results, Clinton reached a dispiriting conclusion. If Obama wins Hanover by three to one, we're gonna lose this thing, he said. One minute, the networks were about to call the race for his wife; the next, they were saying, hold on, we're not so sure.

Clinton's knowledge of New Hamps.h.i.+re allowed him to be his own decision desk, more finely tuned than the networks' data models and teams of a.n.a.lysts. Clinton phoned Clemons, from whom he'd been hoovering fresh numbers every fifteen minutes all evening. A new batch from Hanover had just come in. "We're gonna win it!" Bill exclaimed.

It was after ten o'clock when excitement finally washed over the room. The networks had certified Hillary's win. The candidate came in and hugged everyone. "I felt it all day," she said. Bill boasted about how his "fairy tale" attack had been pivotal to the outcome-it had held down Obama's margins in Hanover.

Racing out of the hotel, they sped to Manchester for Hillary's victory speech. "I come tonight with a very, very full heart," she began. "Over the last week, I listened to you, and in the process, I found my own voice."

When it was over, Hillary marched down a hallway backstage, with her husband and Chelsea at her side. She looked like a quarterback who'd just completed a last-second Hail Mary pa.s.s in overtime-pointing at her aides, high-fiving them, smiling from ear to ear. "This is amazing," one of them said. "I'm so proud of you! You did this! You did this!"

Hillary nodded and puffed out her chest.

"I get really tough when people f.u.c.k with me," she said.

IT WOULD TAKE a while for Obama and his brain trust to figure out what happened in New Hamps.h.i.+re. The sight of Hillary being bludgeoned in the debate, her tearing up, and her gritty performance at the end-all of it while Obama was coasting-had done exactly what Penn said Clinton needed to do: bring home the women voters who had been with her before but who had drifted briefly, in the wake of Iowa, into the undecided column or into a flirtation with Obama.

Obama's initial a.n.a.lysis was more rudimentary. Back at his hotel late that night with friends, he compared himself to a comet-and the next morning, at a fund-raising breakfast in Boston, to Icarus. But his calm philosophizing masked a deeper disquiet about his situation after New Hamps.h.i.+re. The candidate wondered again if he might benefit from a broader circle of advisers, something he'd been pus.h.i.+ng for, albeit sporadically, since the summer of 2007. His brain trust was gobsmacked. The campaign's internal polls had been just as far off base as the public ones-Clinton ended up winning by three points-and its strategy was in tatters. The momentum out of Iowa that was supposed to carry Obama to the nomination had been stopped in its tracks just five days later. With one win of her own, Hillary had changed the game again.

Obama looked at the calendar and took no comfort in what he saw. Super Tuesday, February 5, was Hillary's firewall; she'd been saying for months that the race would be decided that day, when a gaggle of the big states where her support was robust would render their verdict. Obama realized that, for him to prevail, the contest would have to continue well into the spring-and he was already exhausted. In Boston, one of his donors asked him what the New Hamps.h.i.+re loss might mean.

"It means I'm not gonna get any sleep," he said. "And I'm dying to get some sleep."

Chapter Eleven.

Fear and Loathing in the Lizard's Thicket.

THE b.a.l.l.sTON HEADQUARTERS OF Hillaryland occupied three floors in a building that once belonged to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service-and looked the part. The place was charmless, soulless, drab, and gray, suburban-office-park neo-brutalist in every detail. The single homey touch was Solis Doyle's conference table, which in an earlier era had been the Clintons' kitchen table in the Arkansas governor's mansion.

The day after New Hamps.h.i.+re, Hillary convened a rolling meeting around that nostalgic piece of furniture, beneath seven framed covers of Time Time magazine that bore her image. The meeting ran from the late afternoon until nearly midnight and included a sprawling cast of characters: Bill, Chelsea, the original high command, and many of the old-guard Clintonites now being hauled into service. The only person missing from Solis Doyle's office was . . . Solis Doyle. (The staff had tried to find her all day long; her whereabouts were unknown.) magazine that bore her image. The meeting ran from the late afternoon until nearly midnight and included a sprawling cast of characters: Bill, Chelsea, the original high command, and many of the old-guard Clintonites now being hauled into service. The only person missing from Solis Doyle's office was . . . Solis Doyle. (The staff had tried to find her all day long; her whereabouts were unknown.) Hillary rarely ran a campaign meeting, but this was an exception. She wanted to get her arms around the situation facing her in the weeks ahead. Having just staged a once-in-a-lifetime comeback, she should have been flying high. Instead, she was acting like she'd just been annihilated-she was angrier even than she was after Iowa, angry in a way that the old hands in the room hadn't seen since Bill's impeachment. She began with a seething soliloquy that lasted fifteen minutes but seemed a whole lot longer.

"I'm not putting up with this anymore," she fumed.

Everyone stared down at their shoes.

The sources of Hillary's ire were manifold, each more maddening than the last. A year into her campaign, her advisers were still squabbling over what her message should be. Don Baer, who had served as Bill's communications director during his second term and was now an a.s.sociate of Penn's at Burson-Marsteller, suggested she adopt a new motif: "the politics of common purpose." Grunwald advocated an update of her husband's old theme of "putting people first." Doug Sosnik said that she should focus on "the future"; Roy Spence argued for "solutions." At this late date, it was as if they were starting from scratch.

Wasn't there any lesson to be drawn from what had worked in New Hamps.h.i.+re? The Clintons thought so: Hillary had won because they'd attacked Obama, she at the debate and Bill at Dartmouth. The faction of Hillaryland that for months had been pressing for her to show a softer side had a different view. Wolfson offered an a.n.a.logy to the movie The Queen. The Queen. You know how, at the end, Queen Elizabeth becomes sympathetic when she displays her humanity? he said. That's what happened in New Hamps.h.i.+re. You know how, at the end, Queen Elizabeth becomes sympathetic when she displays her humanity? he said. That's what happened in New Hamps.h.i.+re.

Hillary looked uncomprehendingly at Wolfson, as if he were speaking Portuguese.

Having no message was one thing. Having no money was another. Historically, nothing agitated the Clintons more than the prospect of being outspent in a campaign; the fear of it drove them to such extremes as the renting out of the Lincoln Bedroom. Hillary had raised more than $100 million in 2007. She'd known that if she lost Iowa, her wherewithal would be strained-but she never imagined it would be this bad, that she would basically be broke.

"The cupboard is bare," Ickes said. And replenis.h.i.+ng it would not be easy: Clinton's donors were tapped out. "We have to win in order to raise," said her finance director, Jonathan Mantz. "If we don't win, we're not gonna raise."

But Hillary didn't even want to compete in the next two contests. So certain was she of losing both, she thought it was pointless. Next on the calendar was Nevada, another caucus state. It would be like Iowa, only worse, she said, with caucus sites in the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip rife with fraud and abuse, and the culinary union rigging the outcome for Obama. As for South Carolina, turnout was likely to be at least 50 percent African American. Meaning, she was screwed.

"You can't skip Nevada and and South Carolina," Sosnik said emphatically, and the rest of the room agreed. With the campaign running on empty, losing two in a row before Super Tuesday would be debilitating-and, who knows, maybe even fatal. South Carolina," Sosnik said emphatically, and the rest of the room agreed. With the campaign running on empty, losing two in a row before Super Tuesday would be debilitating-and, who knows, maybe even fatal.

Worn down, Hillary relented and agreed to play in Nevada, where both her team and her support among Hispanics were solid. (A decision about South Carolina was deferred.) But she could scarcely comprehend the situation in which she now found herself-gasping for air after just two contests, her campaign on the edge of bankruptcy, with no clear plan for how to win.

The person Clinton blamed most for her predicament was the one who wasn't there: Solis Doyle. Yet in the last twenty-four hours, Hillary had reaffirmed that she couldn't afford to dispense with Patti after all. She didn't need any more instability, and dumping Solis Doyle would invite mayhem. She didn't want to deal with awkward questions from the press. And she couldn't risk a backlash among Hispanics over the firing of the highest-ranking Latino political operative in the country; in an awful lot of the states ahead, Hillary was relying on the votes of that community to pull her through.

Solis Doyle had gone off the grid to think things over. She had little desire to stay, but Hillary implored her, and Patti caved. The next day, she resurfaced and began talks with Williams about finding a workable modus vivendi for their jointly running the campaign. Williams was busy with a consulting business and had clients demanding her time. Her appet.i.te for being in b.a.l.l.ston was as minimal as Patti's-but her loyalty to Clinton was deep. The conversations between Williams and Solis Doyle were uneasy and tense. Once, they had been close friends, the two most powerful women in Hillaryland; now they were the usurper and the usurped. It was a recipe for, if not disaster, then paralytic discord.

Hillary, meanwhile, was gone-off to Nevada, South Carolina, Super Tuesday, and beyond. Winning in New Hamps.h.i.+re had given her new life, but had also allowed her to defer the hard choices required to right her operation. Solis Doyle and Penn were still in place, augmented now by a corps of reluctant conscripts. n.o.body in b.a.l.l.ston knew who was in charge. n.o.body wanted wanted to be in charge. to be in charge.

In politics, though, as much as in the realm of physics, nature abhors a vacuum. And in this case, nature-or, at least, a force of nature-promptly stepped in to fill it.

BILL CLINTON PICKED UP the phone a few days later and called an old friend, a member of Congress to whom he and Hillary had long been close. I knew we could do it and I was right, he crowed about the victory in New Hamps.h.i.+re. The congressman congratulated Clinton, expressed his admiration for the upset that Hillary had pulled off. But he was discomfited by the way that Bill was claiming credit for the win. He urged Clinton to step back, to give his wife some running room. "It's her campaign, Mr. President," the congressman said. "You have to let her win this thing herself. You have to let go."

But Clinton couldn't let go-especially now that the situation was so perilous that everyone was (finally) reaching out to grasp his hand. In the days since the b.a.l.l.ston meeting, Williams and Sosnik had swiftly moved to incorporate him into the campaign in a way Solis Doyle and the other Hillarylanders had resisted. For the first time, he was provided with a briefing book on the campaign's policies and plans. A morning conference call was set up to give him talking points and a read on the day's press coverage. And he was a.s.signed the task of calling countless superdelegates, whom Hillary continued to fail to court.

One day that week, over takeout Chinese food in the dining room at Whitehaven, Clinton received from the campaign's high command his maiden formal presentation on the road ahead. Hillary's newish political director, Guy Cecil, explained that they faced a lengthy war of attrition over delegates. For all the talk about Super Tuesday being Hillary's firewall, the reality was that, having poured so much cash into Iowa, the Clintonites hadn't conducted a poll in almost any of the February 5 states; in many of them, their operations were skeletal or nonexistent. Cecil put a chart in front of Bill that laid out Hillary's best-case scenario on Super Tuesday: a net gain of no more than sixty delegates out of nearly seventeen hundred up for grabs that day.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Clinton said, the familiar flush coloring his cheeks. "What are we doing?" Studying the chart, he shook his head. "All this money, all this work, and this is all we're going to get out of it?"

The deeper Clinton delved into the workings of his wife's campaign, the more upset he got. But in truth he was even more agitated about what was going on beyond b.a.l.l.ston. Seemingly out of nowhere, the race had suddenly turned racial, with both Bill and Hillary being accused of insensitivity at best and perniciousness at worst.

The dynamic had been unleashed the night of New Hamps.h.i.+re, when the talking heads on TV began to speculate about whether Obama's collapse in the nearly all-white state was due partly to racial factors-and the Clintons' comments of the previous day came in for closer inspection. The next morning, January 9, The New York Times The New York Times published a scalding editorial that accused the Clintons of running an "angry campaign" that "came perilously close to injecting racial tension" into the contest, citing Hillary's remark about MLK and LBJ and Bill's "bizarre and rambling attack" on Obama at Dartmouth. Two days later, the published a scalding editorial that accused the Clintons of running an "angry campaign" that "came perilously close to injecting racial tension" into the contest, citing Hillary's remark about MLK and LBJ and Bill's "bizarre and rambling attack" on Obama at Dartmouth. Two days later, the Times Times published a front-page story in which South Carolina representative James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, echoed those charges, focusing on the former president and what Clyburn saw as a broad a.s.sault on Obama's candidacy. "To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us," Clyburn said. published a front-page story in which South Carolina representative James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress, echoed those charges, focusing on the former president and what Clyburn saw as a broad a.s.sault on Obama's candidacy. "To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us," Clyburn said.

Clinton's first reaction was astonishment, followed shortly by rage. Bill had been talking about Obama's record on the war-nothing more. Hillary had been making a historical observation-nothing more. Their words were being twisted, bent out of shape in a way that suggested that something more malign than mere misinterpretation was behind it.

The Times Times made Bill especially mental. I can't believe these a.s.sholes are sitting there writing this, he wailed to one of many friends he called that week to complain about the editorial. After everything I did for civil rights in Arkansas! After everything I did in the White House! They know d.a.m.n well I don't have a racist bone in my body! made Bill especially mental. I can't believe these a.s.sholes are sitting there writing this, he wailed to one of many friends he called that week to complain about the editorial. After everything I did for civil rights in Arkansas! After everything I did in the White House! They know d.a.m.n well I don't have a racist bone in my body!

What cranked up the thermostat on Clinton's umbrage were signs he saw that the Obama campaign was stirring the pot with liberal media outlets and black radio and websites. A few days after New Hamps.h.i.+re, a memo surfaced, produced by Obama's South Carolina operation, that grouped together MLK/LBJ and "fairy tale" along with other race-freighted incidents-including Billy Shaheen's and Penn's invocations of Obama's youthful cocaine use-to suggest that the Clintons were playing the race card. Then there was Illinois congressman and Obama campaign co-chair Jesse Jackson, Jr., who went on MSNBC and noted that while Clinton had teared up in New Hamps.h.i.+re, she never cried over Hurricane Katrina. "Those tears also have to be a.n.a.lyzed," Jackson said, "particularly as we head to South Carolina, where forty-five percent of African Americans will partic.i.p.ate in the Democratic contest."

To Bill, the picture was all too clear. By accusing him and Hillary of slapping the race card on the table, the Obama campaign was doing exactly that itself. And though it infuriated him, he couldn't help but respect the artfulness of the play. The Obamans were tough; they weren't just sitting back and letting the nomination slip away. I wish our people were more like that, Bill said.

Clinton could see the danger of the racial back-and-forth to Hillary's campaign, and also to his own reputation. Seeking to contain the fallout, he made the rounds on black talk radio, clarifying his statements, defending himself-even talking up Obama. "There's nothing fairy tale about his campaign," Clinton told Al Sharpton on his syndicated show a few days after New Hamps.h.i.+re. "It's real, strong, and he might win."

What Clinton might have added, if he were being candid, was: But not if I can do anything to stop it.

OBAMA AND HIS BRAIN TRUST arrived in Nevada determined to apply the lessons of New Hamps.h.i.+re. They would home in laser-like on kitchen table issues, from health care to the subprime mortgage mess.

They would scale down their mega-rallies, and instead hold town halls and roundtables with average voters. But now they found a race bomb had been dropped in their laps-and it blew that plan to pieces.

On Obama's first full day in the Silver State, the Sunday before the Sat.u.r.day caucuses coming up on January 19, the campaign learned that across the country in South Carolina, Bob Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, had become the latest Clinton surrogate to bring up (albeit obliquely) Obama's drug use. Defending the Clintons' record on race with Hillary at his side, Johnson declared that they had been "deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood-and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book." He then went on to compare Obama to the Sidney Poitier character in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.