This book should be dedicated to an unfailing source of inspiration for me: the California recall race. If it had not happened and if I had not run for governor, this would simply be a book of criticism and outrage. These are perfectly legitimate responses to our current political landscape. But my temporary transformation from pundit to candidate brought me face-to-face with the inadequacy of criticism and outrage, no matter how witty, quotable, or justified.
Don’t get me wrong: In the pages ahead there will be plenty of criticism of the fanatics who now run the Republican Party and the fools guiding the Democratic Party who have enabled the fanatics to prevail. But the heart of the book is my newfound conviction that to win in November, the Democratic nominee will have to propose a return to the idealism, boldness, and generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.
The 2004 presidential election will be a political event with unprecedented significance for our lives and the lives of our children. Bush Republicans have offered a messianic vision of a new world built on tax cuts. This call has proven incredibly alluring: it’s clear, it’s broad, and it’s accessible. Democrats need to present a vision that is equally clear, broad, and accessible, and that answers the fundamental question: what sort of America do we want to live in? Do we want an America that’s fair and generous and demands the best of its citizens, an America where equal opportunity is a reality, not an empty slogan, an America that is respected around the world for its commitment to freedom and justice, an America that takes on the mantle of superpower in order to confront repression, relieve suffering, and preserve world peace? Can we aspire again to creating a country where full-time work yields a living wage and where good schools and good health care forge a stronger America in which every citizen is better off?
If the question is accurately framed, the Bush Republicans’ one-note answer doesn’t even have the virtue of self-interest. An America where the gulf between rich and poor is not so grotesque, where hard work is rewarded, where every child can get a decent education, and where health care is available to everyone is a stronger America for us all — including Bush Republicans.
These are long-standing American ideals, not inventions of the left. But an indication of how successful the Republican machine has been at framing the overarching political debate is that even in times of dire emergency, when a state like California is facing the prospect of bankruptcy, tax increases, which should be a viable fiscal lifeline, are instead seen as a suicide pill. We’ve gotten to the point in this country where you can’t raise taxes to repel an invasion from Mars unless you are able to disguise them as an economic stimulus package.
So here we are, watching the social contract go up in flames, not just in California, but in the entire country. It’s a blaze ignited by the fanatics and watched helplessly by the fools. But ushering Bush and his band of fanatics out of the White House in 2004 is going to take more than just a critique, however masterful, of what they’ve done to our country. It’s going to take a moral vision that replaces the dark grasping of the Bush administration. And given the stakes, and the way our political system is currently structured, it’s going to have to be the Democratic presidential candidate who provides it.
There you have it. This is my endorsement for president in 2004: The Democrat. Although the story I’m about to tell you of fanatics and fools, of evil villains and even one or two heroes, is very much a political thriller, I’m violating one of Tom Clancy’s golden rules: I’m starting with a surprise beginning rather than concluding with a surprise ending. That I should pick a side for 2004, especially one I’ve been criticizing as tired, intellectually bankrupt, and complicit in the current crisis, rather than advocate some new progressive coalition, is a big turnaround for me. In the years that have passed since my Republican interlude, I’ve been more comfortable on the outside of the two-party system because only from the outside, I believe, is the true geography of our national crisis visible. But from that perspective I have seen the crisis deepen alarmingly in recent times. We can’t wait any longer for some sort of tectonic change. So while keeping the fires of reform burning, I’m sticking my nose in the Democratic tent, hoping that the Democratic nominee will offer the progressive transformation this country so desperately needs.
I suppose my optimism about the future comes down to what I think about human nature. If I thought that we were just material beings, driven purely by self-interest, then I would have to concede that we have no hope of rallying people around a noble alternative to the rescue fantasy offered by Rummy, Cheney, Cowboy George, or Arnold the “Terminator.” If on the other hand I believed — and I do — that we are capable of both good and evil, then it’s time to appeal to what is best in us, to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Only then are we likely to build a nation where community and caring and compassion are not just throat-clearing openings to commencement addresses.
I’ve always believed this should be the goal of a healthy democracy. But I’ve had quite a journey when it comes to deciding the best means for getting there.
One stop along the way was on January 24, 1993, at a “Conservative Summit,” in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Review. I gave a speech entitled “Can Conservatives Have a Social Conscience?” The event was kicked off in bombastic style by Master of Ceremonies Charlton Heston, who smugly announced that he was “one of the most politically incorrect people” because “I am heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, married to the same woman for 49 years, and not the recipient of any entitlement of any kind.”
That type of statement tends to set a certain tone. Sitting on the dais, scanning my notes, I listened with mounting horror to the speaker who preceded me, Brent Bozell, who had been the national finance chairman of the legendarily inclusive ’92 Buchanan for President campaign. As Bozell’s hard-right homilies were paraded in front of what, in the interest of fairness, can only be described as an adoring crowd, I asked myself two questions: “How can he and I both call ourselves Republicans?” and “Where is the nearest exit?”
Approaching the podium with trepidation, I wondered what the audience that applauded the previous speakers’ harsh brand of conservatism would do with mine, which challenged the audience to rise to what I considered the core of true conservatism — the biblical admonition that we shall be judged by what we do for the least among us.
In its article on the event, the New York Times reported that “Mrs. Huffington’s goal is the redemption of the Republican Party. If she had her way, greed and selfishness will be banished forever, to be replaced by altruism, compassion, and the ‘kinder, gentler’ world that George Bush talked about but failed to deliver.” The Times reporter, Karen De Witt, went on to express the opinion, “It is an odd notion to link altruism and compassion with conservatives, considering last year’s Republican convention.”
I too had been appalled by the 1992 Republican convention — particularly Pat Buchanan’s divisive speech (the one Molly Ivins memorably nailed as probably sounding better in the original German). But I believed at the time — wrongly, as it turned out — that I could challenge the Republican Party by harking back to the nobler traditions of its past.
The problem is not with rank-and-file Republicans but with the party’s leaders. The same conservative audience that gave a standing ovation to Bozell gave a standing ovation to me. We just appealed to different parts of their brains and their psyches. I reached out to classic conservatism that sees individuals as the spiritual center of society, and expects them to obey the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Indeed, they are expected to follow the biblical precept, “To whom much is given, from him that much more shall be expected.” Individuals, not government, have the responsibility to form communities, to weave a social fabric that sustains the weak, cares for the young, and nurtures those who have grown old. Without this component of social conscience, the potent doctrine of individual responsibility is reduced to an exclusively material self-interest. And individuals are reduced to little more than economic entities: producing and consuming units.
I believed just as deeply in the need for social responsibility during my Republican days as I believe in it now. But these days I draw very different conclusions from that basic principle. The reason is very simple. The social challenge I issued that morning during my speech, a gauntlet I kept throwing down until my final disillusionment with the Grand Old Party, was never taken up. The hope and expectation that people would roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty to solve social problems at the local level was never fully realized. There were never enough volunteers, never enough donations, never enough model partnerships and pilot projects set up to prove what we conservatives claimed: that we could solve America’s ills without “big government.”
Feeling that the whole system had to be shaken up, I cast my vote in 2000 for neither Bush nor Gore. Instead I marked my ballot for “none of the above” as a protest against the broken status quo. But that wasn’t enough. So I helped organize the Shadow Conventions to coincide with the Republican convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic convention in Los Angeles and put the media spotlight on the fact that neither major party was addressing three key issues facing us: 1) the painful truth that we’ve become two nations, separated by an ever-widening economic gulf — not just in income but in educational opportunities, access to health care, even in the quality of the air we breathe and our statistical chances of living to an old age; 2) the way money is corrupting our politics and campaign contributors are buying public policy; and 3) the nation’s failed $40-billion-a-year war on drugs, which has turned into a war on the poor and minorities.
Then came the Bush White House — and all it has brought with it, including Iraq, multitrillion-dollar tax cuts, corporate scandals, the gutting of environmental regulations, a record-breaking number of lost jobs, and the neglect of millions of struggling Americans. Despite this abysmal performance, there was no “loyal opposition.” There was some bickering, a little partisanship, a bit of token jockeying from the other side of the aisle, but no clear alternative vision to rally around.
Last year, during the course of a thirteen-city college speaking tour, I came to a realization: it wasn’t just me. To put it bluntly, Americans young and old, northerner and southerner, city slicker and country cousin, rich and poor (OK, maybe not the Bush rich) are all royally pissed off. But the pain, rage, and anxiety that came pouring out as soon as I opened the floor to questions and comments signaled that indignation had risen to a whole new level. This was not the dry, intellectual harrumphing found on the op-ed page. This was the cry of people who were ready to stop just talking and start acting.
I knew how they felt. I’ve always had a hard time just identifying wrongs and leaving it at that. I too wanted to take action, to move beyond the confines of jousting punditry. Which brings us to January 2003. That’s when the Oregonian newspaper abruptly decided to stop carrying my syndicated column, giving as a reason: “She has dragged herself across the line from being a commentator to being an activist.” The truth is that I have always seen myself as a crusading journalist in the tradition of my heroes Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell. I have always wanted to walk my talk, which is why, two years after I helped organize the Shadow Conventions, I cofounded the Detroit Project with my friends and fellow activists, Lawrence Bender, Laurie David, and Ari Emmanuel. It’s a grassroots campaign to prod Detroit to stop building gas-guzzling SUVs and start producing cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars that will allow us to break our addiction to foreign oil. That was what constituted crossing the line, in the Oregonian’s memorable phrase.
Two months after the Detroit Project, I helped create the Bermuda Project to expose corporate America’s growing use of shady offshore tax havens to avoid paying its fair share.
While the Shadow Conventions, the anti-SUV campaign, and the anti-tax-haven campaign were actually extensions of what I had been doing for my whole life, my next campaign definitely broke new personal ground. I ran for governor.
Though I didn’t support the recall effort, once it was set in motion — once it was definitely going to happen — I felt it was foolish to assume it would be defeated. And I was drawn by the unprecedented opportunity it offered to elect a truly progressive governor to the world’s fifth-largest economy. And to give a voice to all the people of California, not just those who could afford to buy public policy.
I also wanted to connect the dots between California’s plight and the reckless economic policies of the Bush administration. And, as I ended up saying again and again and again over the course of the campaign, there was nothing more laughable than hearing Bush Republicans prattling on self-righteously about the fiscal irresponsibility of Gray Davis while ignoring the orgy of fiscal irresponsibility that the White House and the Republican Congress are hosting.
But I learned on the campaign trail that laying out clearly articulated policies and a clear critique of your opponent is not enough. And it will definitely not be enough to beat Bush in 2004. The Democratic nominee will have to have a powerful narrative to counter the very simple but very compelling “tax cuts, more tax cuts, and further tax cuts” fairy tale being put forth by the Bush White House. What I have realized is that the narrative must be exceptionally bold — transcending not just what passes for the current Democratic vision but even the vision of the politically successful Clinton years. It has to go back to the founding of our country, to the spiritual absolute the Founding Fathers grounded America in when they declared “all men are created equal” — a premise Abraham Lincoln called “the father of all moral principle.”
It’s the same moral principle FDR gave expression to when he said that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” It’s the same moral principle Bobby Kennedy echoed amid the social upheaval of the 1960s: “I believe that as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”
Not only have we become unmoored from those principles, we’ve drifted tragically far from them. Which is why, as I learned on the campaign trail, stopping any more Republican takeovers has an urgency that supersedes the larger imperative of breaking the stranglehold of two party politics in order to challenge the broken status quo.
This difference between the urgent and the important is exactly what prompted me to drop out of the recall race when it became clear that I wouldn’t win. If I had not, and Arnold Schwarzenegger had eked into the governor’s office, I would not have been able to forgive myself. And even though my withdrawal ultimately proved futile, the sense of foreboding that motivated it was validated when, in his first budget, the new governor proposed cutting $4.6 billion from health care, education, and welfare programs. He had already repealed the car tax without having alternative funding for the essential local government services — things like police and fire departments — that the $4 billion from the car tax was earmarked for.
It’s clear that the damage being done by the Republican fanatics — whether in Washington or Sacramento — is such that we cannot afford the kind of protest votes that are geared toward long-term reform. I didn’t have a problem with Ralph Nader’s running in 2000. But that was then and this is now. Now we have seen George Bush’s true colors. We have seen what has happened in Iraq. We have seen what has happened to the goodwill we once enjoyed around the world. We have seen the results of his regressive economic policies. We have seen who benefits and who loses in the world according to George Bush. It’s folly to pretend that it doesn’t make a difference whether Bush or his Democratic opponent is in the White House. It’s like trying to unring the last three years’ carillon of alarms.
It’s all well and good to dream about how wonderful it would be to remodel your home, but when your house is going up in flames, your first priority must be putting the fire out. Our collective priority for the near term must be to evict the Crawford squatter from the White House. Only then can we set about remodeling our democratic home. We simply can’t do it in reverse.
In a very real way, the California recall race was a microcosm of everything that is going on in the country today, a showcase for the strengths and weaknesses of the two political parties. The Bush Republicans’ greatest strength was the simplicity of their antitax, anti-regulation message, hand-delivered by a charismatic messenger. The Democrats’ greatest failing was a partywide lack of insight, courage, and strategic acumen.
So this book is divided into four parts. The first is a chapter-and-verse diagnosis of the fanaticism that drives the Bush White House. It also offers a clear-eyed prescription: Bush cannot be treated, let alone cured. He has to be surgically removed. The second part is a close-up look at a remarkable breakthrough in Bush Republican cloning — the rise of the charming antitax fanatic Arnold Schwarzenegger. The third part recounts and examines the Democratic Party leadership’s congenital inability to stop shooting itself in the foot. It comes with a prescription: the Democrats need more than Bushwhacking and a better Medicare drug plan to regain the White House in November. Precisely what this “more” is will be found in the fourth part of the book — my hard-earned-in-the-trenches political donation to the Democratic presidential nominee.
It’s the secret weapon for beating Bush.
A president once said: “You are the generation that must decide. Will you ratify poverty and division with your apathy — or will you build the common good with your idealism? Will you be the spectator in the renewal of your country — or a citizen?” That president, believe it or not, was George W. Bush. He said it at a commencement address at Notre Dame in May 2001. (The transcript does not note whether he had a straight face or not.)
But he’s actually getting good at saying things like this. For George W. Bush, this rhetoric is designed to mask the reality of how he governs. It’s a spoken word Potemkin village. If he were speaking the truth, he would have said, “I have ratified poverty by increasing it by 3 million people. Increased poverty and growing middle-class casualties have in turn enlarged the divisions between us. Even though I never speak about apathy except in commencement addresses, I understand it because my actions can only produce a certain grinding hopelessness after a time. So do me a favor and stay on the sidelines: The last thing I need at this point is a bunch of concerned citizens in my way. And by the way, let’s win one for the Gipper!”
According to Catholic teachings, “the corruption of the best is the worst.” George Bush’s corrupt use of the concept of “the common good” muddies the water to such a shameful degree that the idea loses all meaning. The point of government is to provide for the common good, but on George Bush’s lips it is transformed into an empty platitude. The Democratic nominee has the difficult task, made harder by the clever cynicism of Bush’s message mavens, of resurrecting the idea of our common good and breathing real meaning into it.
And as Bush demonstrated at Notre Dame, you cannot talk about the common good without talking about lifting people from poverty. But notice how, in the course of a single presidential pronouncement, poverty suddenly became the responsibility of apathetic college students. It’s subtle trickery to equate concern and caring with a cure. Sure, a cure starts there. But, as Bush points out in the same speech, “a determined assault on poverty will require both an active government and active citizens.”
This book will show how those sentiments are exactly what the Democratic nominee has to express — and mean — as the foundation of a vision that will defeat Bush in November. This vision must link the compelling mission of the moment — to strengthen our country so that it can stand up to the assaults of this new millennium — with the pursuit of the common good. A truly strong America is one that can help the less fortunate, can admit mistakes, can once again excite the admiration of people around the world, regardless of their prejudices, by its fine example.
If you accept the inherent link between the common good and a strong America, then the list of what needs to be done becomes obvious. You cannot have a strong America if one-third of eighth graders can’t read. You cannot have a strong America if millions of our citizens don’t have the basic resources to take care of their health. You cannot have a strong America without strong families. And you cannot have strong families with two parents each working two-and-a-half jobs just to make ends meet.
This is not a left-wing vision. People of good faith, regardless of party, understand that fairness — rules of the game that all must abide by — is essential to the public welfare. But fairness and nurturing and a strong safety net do not mean babying our citizens and removing life’s inevitable obstacles. The common good is achieved, in large measure, through the incentives that come from competition — as long as competition takes place on a level playing field.
Here’s the message President Bush offered his audience of idealistic college grads: “The methods of the past may have been flawed, but the idealism of the past was not an illusion. Your calling is not easy, because you must do the acting and the caring. But there is fulfillment in that sacrifice, which creates hope for the rest of us. Every life you help proves that every life might be helped. The actual proves the possible. And hope is always the beginning of change.”
If you closed your eyes, you would think you were listening to the ideal Democratic nominee — not the words of a zealous right-wing ideologue who used “compassion” as a campaign slogan, then tossed it aside like a soiled tissue as soon as he stepped into the Oval Office. But when the Democratic candidate uses the same rhetoric it will have to be matched with action.
Different times require different leaders and different strategies. This book is about the coming presidential election, and an alternative moral vision of strength. Without this vision, the public will be fooled again by the Republican fanatics selling strength but meting out punishment and weakness. Ultimately, this book will argue, the Democratic nominee will have to counter the White House’s culture of fear and disunity with a bold vision that acknowledges uncertainty and evil in the world without being intimidated by them. Security isn’t just about protecting America from terrorists. Security is also about protecting America’s families from poverty and a bleak future for their children. True strength will emerge from a vision of New Responsibility that extends beyond caring for your own family to caring for your fellow man.
Excerpted with permission from “Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America,” by Arianna Huffington (Miramax Books)
“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
– President Barack Obama, May 1, 2011
1.
This is how history breaks in 2011. I was watching AMC’s “The Killing” last night when my daughter walked into the living room around 11 p.m. and said, “Osama bin Laden is dead.”
“What? Are you sure? Where did you hear this?”
“It’s online.”
The texts and calls and tweets and Facebook posts and cable news ticker feeds piled up from there, morphing into that familiar buzzing audiovisual din. Our other atmosphere.
At first there was no actual news, just rumor and speculation. Finally the Sunday night shows were interrupted by reports that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida mastermind and America’s most wanted criminal, might finally be dead, nine-and-a-half years after the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil.
On NBC’s East Coast affiliates, the announcement of an impending presidential address cut into the final moments of “Celebrity Apprentice,” starring would-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Take that, you combed-over bigot.) Obama did not appear for another hour. After he spoke — confirming that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Joint Special Operation Command forces working with the CIA — NBC and CBS returned to previously scheduled programming. ABC and the cable news channels stuck with the story. “The minute I heard that the president was doing an announcement at 10:30 and breaking into TV, I sort of guessed, I thought, ‘They got bin Laden,’” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told New York’s WABC. “They wouldn’t break into TV for any other reason.”
Fox News Channel somehow managed to deliver comprehensible audio over the collective, bloody grinding of teeth, even when relaying a statement from ex-President George W. Bush congratulating Obama: “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”
“This will probably prove to be one of the most significant, if not the most significant accomplishments of the president,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told anchor Brian Williams, in a bloc of live MSNBC coverage that displaced a taped program titled “Sex Slaves UK.”
On ABC, Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of the hijacked flight that struck the Pentagon, told anchor George Stephanopoulos, “This has been a long time coming. It’s been rough because it pretty much dominated my life, all of these national security issues. And we’re not out of the woods yet, George, but this is really big.”
Yes.
So big that after a certain point, a New York-based TV columnist can no longer sit in his living room, typing on a laptop while stealing glances at a TV. Next stop, ground zero.
2.
The Cortlandt Street R train stop deposits riders on the perimeter of ground zero, in front of the Century 21 department store on Church Street, meters away from a chain link fence festooned with banners detailing the splendors that will appear on the former World Trade Center site: Freedom Tower. Reflecting pool. High-end retail shops.
At first the street seemed unnervingly quiet. Yes, it was 1:30 Monday morning at the the start of a work week, but this was supposed to be V-E Day all over again, at least in theory. Where were all the people?
Two blocks away, as it turned out: Klieg lights. Waving flags. The distant roar of a crowd’s cheer building and cresting:
“HhhhhhhhhhRRaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
How many people were there? Thousands, I’m told.
They’d stuck bunches of red and white roses into the fence and taped up signs: “Thanks, Barack!” “USA WINNING.” There was a scrawny young man in a red, white and blue top hat, and a tearful man with a hand-lettered sign that read, “He’s dead,” and a man holding an iPhone with a viewscreen spelling out, in huge letters, “OBAMA 1 OSAMA 0.” One woman came dressed in an Old Glory jumpsuit complete with hoodie.
“It feels like the world’s guiltiest criminal is now gone from this earth,” said Eric Brehm of Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting New York with his girlfriend, Megan Sander. “I’m happy for the people of New York and happy for the world.” Sander recalled watching the second plane hit on TV almost a decade ago. “My boss’ sister was a flight attendant on that plane,” she said.
A number of celebrants wore American flags as capes. “It’s an amazing night,” said one flag-caped celebrant, Juan Rodriguez of Cliffside Park, N.J. “I feel like I can breathe again.” He said the flag around his shoulders once belonged to his grandfather, who served in the Pacific during WWII.
Archie Archipolo, who grew up on the Lower East Side and has lived in lower Manhattan for over a decade, recalled the madness in this neighborhood nine-and-a-half years ago. “The Red Cross set up a station with bottles of water. There were tanks in the streets.”
Archipolo was wearing a VFW cap that belonged to his grandfather, who served in the 1st Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was there with his girlfriend, Danielle Cristiani, and her godson Max Sperling, a teenager who was 5 when the towers fell. “It was like a war zone down here,” Sperling recalled. “But it was so quiet that first night.”
“We lost friends, cousins that day,” Archipolo said. “Everyone did. Now I think we’re on the way back. But we have to be careful. It could happen again any time. It might not be as big as it was before. It could be some guys strapped with C-4.”
A young Navy officer in dress blues and a sailor in white joined a drunken civilian teenager atop a lamppost at the corner of Church and Vesey and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
3.
What didn’t come through in the TV feeds and newspaper stories was the peculiar character of the crowd: half in-the-moment, half outside of it.
There were engaged, ecstatic — and over time, increasingly tipsy — revelers. There were news vans and trucks with broadcast-quality cameras and bright lights and rumbling generators. There were roving reporters with notepads and hand-held digital tape recorders. I saw people collecting video and audio with their iPhones. One woman circled the outer edge of the crowd, holding her iPad slightly above her head, getting a smooth tracking shot around the edges of the gathering and double-checking her framing by glancing up at the screen.
In some sectors of the designated celebration zone — a two-block area ringed by cops and barricades — witnesses to history appeared to outnumber participants.
Then again, the distinction between participants might be a false one. Nowadays just about everybody has the ability to record his or her life at any time, for any reason, via digital stills, video, audio. And there was a whole lot of recording going on last night. Three young men in kilts climbed on top of a bank of pay phones and gave an impromptu bagpipe concert; the strobe-flash illumination of shutterbugs was so intense that they might as well have been performing on the floor of a disco. There were people taking video and still photos of cops, construction workers, Marines, sailors and civilians wrapped in American flags or carrying signs. There were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures. And there were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures.
Clouds of pot smoke occasionally wafted through the scene, and as the celebration wore on, it became harder to move through the throng without accidentally kicking an empty beer bottle and sending it clattering down the street.
If you stood back and squinted at the crowd, hundreds of rectangles of electronic light seemed to bob like embers on a dark wave. People were showing each other their iPhones, sharing Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, uploaded and downloaded photos, YouTube clips, streaming video from CNN. They were discussing the coverage, repeating what they’d heard, saying what they did or didn’t believe.
“They should show pictures of the raid, pictures of the body, a picture, something,” a man holding a bottle of water told a man holding a tall can of Budweiser. “They have to show proof that he’s dead, that it’s him they shot, otherwise the tinfoil hats come out.”
And yet despite the anxiety and intense self-consciousness, there was a bustling energy to the gathering, with undertones of joy, relief and hope — plus a brute satisfaction than somebody finally tracked the son of a bitch down and put one in his brain. Songs and chants erupted and faded, some merely patriotic, others belligerent: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America the Beautiful.” “You ess AY! You ess AY” “Nah nah NAH nah!/Nah nah NAH nah!/Hey HEY-YYYYY/Good BYE!” One especially wasted young man lunged at a TV camera and yelled, “Iran is next! I don’t care what anybody says! Iran is next!”
Jonathan Jirack, formerly of Pittsburgh, left his apartment near ground zero around 2 a.m. bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, “We cheer for [PEACE SYMBOL], not death.” He walked through the crowd for hours holding it over his head. “I saw the gathering on TV and I thought, ‘I need to go down there and try to put an asterisk on the event,’” he said. “I understand the jubilation. I can feel it. But a lot of people are watching this thing on TV, and I’m afraid what we’re putting out there can be manipulated or misinterpreted.”
“That’s noble,” said Kevin Caslava, a San Diego-born writer who has lived in New York off and on for a decade, indicating Jirack’s sign. “But you’ve also got people here chanting, ‘Fuck Osama,’ so it’s not like what you’re describing is the only subtext out here.”
They argued politely about the sign — Jirack insisting that most of the people here were more relieved and happy than bloodthirsty, even though it might not come across that way on TV, and Caslava was taking a more skeptical view.
“Look, I get it,” Caslava said. “I feel a deep-rooted satisfaction, but also a sense of, ‘Should I be cheering because a man got shot?’ I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve met people who argued for bin Laden as a freedom fighter, as somebody who had reasons for what he did. When you hear them talk, intellectually you understand the reasons, even though you have a visceral hatred of what happened in this country, right here on our own soil. Deep inside us, there’s a very strong voice for war. You try to be rational, but there’s that voice inside that says, ‘Fuck this.’ That’s the voice I’m hearing here, mostly.”
“And,” he added, “when you’re watching news from Middle Eastern countries and you see people holding up signs in Arabic, how do you know what they’re saying? If you can’t read Arabic, you can’t know. You might think what’s on that Arabic sign was a message of peace when it’s actually something like, ‘Fuck all y’all!’ How do you know that somebody in another country where they don’t speak English won’t look at your sign and just not understand it at all? Or misinterpret it?”
“That’s why I put the peace symbol on there,” Jirack said.
4.
Back in Brooklyn again after a brief subway ride in an R train car filled with mostly sleeping people and other awake persons — fellow pilgrims to ground zero who thought the timing of Obama’s announcement was a bit too convenient, that maybe the president delayed the raid, or delayed announcing the news, until tonight because it would put a lid on the celebrations.
“They were building up to this raid for weeks,” a man said. “He didn’t give the go-ahead last night. Why? Because if he’d done it last night, Saturday night, around the same time as tonight, the word would have gone out when half the people in America were already half-drunk, and then what would the TV have shown? It would have been insanity. So he waits until late Sunday night. Everybody’s happy, but they’re tired. They want to celebrate, but they also gotta go to work in the morning.”
“Not everything is a conspiracy,” another rider said.
“They’re very precise in how they manage the country,” the first rider said. “They got shaping P.R. down to an exact science.”
Home at last. The kids were zonked out. On CNN, Steve Bernstein, whose brother Billy died on 9/11 when Cantor-Fitzgerald’s World Trade Center offices went up in smoke, said that when he heard about bin Laden, “I felt like my brother could finally rest in peace. I felt the same way.”
Then the newscast cut to correspondent Ted Rowlands reporting live from “a hookah lounge in Anaheim, California” at 2 a.m. Pacific. His topic: the reaction of Muslim-Americans. He sidled over to one side of the club and approached a couple of attractive young women. “Leila,” he said, extending his microphone to one of them, “as a Persian-American, give it to me: What is your reaction to Osama bin Laden being killed?”
“We’re elated that someone who is the biggest symbol of terrorism is finally gone now,” Leila said. “And I can’t wait to see his picture now, to be honest with you.”
Rowlands led the camera crew toward the back of the club, where the owner was waiting for him. Ninety minutes earlier, Rowlands explained, the owner — a U.S. armed forces veteran — had been the victim of a drive-by egging. There was still a splotch of yolk on his shirt.
“This is Mohammed, the establishment’s owner,” Rowlands explained. “He was actually hit in the neck by an egg.”
“Good job, U.S. Army, and Marines, everybody, Obama, we’re glad that’s over with,” Mohammed said.
Rowlands followed up: ”Does it help? Do you think this is the beginning of the end of discrimination here in America, or no, is it an ongoing thing?”
“It’s gonna be an ongoing thing as long as we have a lot of the biased media and ignorant people out here,” Mohammed said. “Hopefully, this brings a little closure … We’re happy that he’s dead, we’re happy that he’s gone.”
I glanced down at my laptop. In my Twitter feed was a link to a wire story saying that Osama bin Laden’s corpse had already been buried at sea.
It’s hard to imagine another political couple, much less one residing in the White House, agreeing to sit down with a reporter from the New York Times Magazine to discuss the intimate particulars of their marriage as the Obamas did for a cover story in this Sunday’s magazine. Or perhaps the reverse is true: It’s hard to imagine that most reporters would find the particulars of a good political marriage a newsworthy topic. The Clintons’ marriage, portrayed as mercenary at best, was fodder for torrid speculation and political character assassination; the Bushes made everyone wonder how an elegant book-reading woman with seemingly moderate views put up with her smirking frat boy of a husband (a puzzle that inspired, among other things, Curtis Sittenfeld’s splendidly nuanced fictional take on their marriage, “An American Wife.”) But the Obamas are the fairy tale; our Bama-lot, a suave, sexy, undeniably modern couple who inspire speculation not for their sins, but their virtues. Instead of mockery, they make us ask: Dude, how can we get some of that?
The Obamas’ answer is usually some variation of: “Work really fucking hard for it.” Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the couple is that while their marriage is most often held up by others as an ideal to aspire to — or flat-out envy — the two people in it, when asked, spend much of their time dissecting the ways in which they have failed each other. “The image of a flawless relationship,” writes Jodi Kantor, is, according to Michelle, “the last thing we want to project. It’s unfair to the institution of marriage, and it’s unfair to young couples trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn’t exist.”
Although it seems paradoxical that one of the most envied couples in the nation is also one of the most vocal about the hardships of marriage, it makes a certain amount of sense. Certainly, the Obamas wouldn’t have the luxury of nitpicking at the flaws, major and minor, of their relationship if others made a habit of doing so, too. But they have quite a bit of distance to fall before they would succeed in knocking themselves off their own pedestal. And in many ways, it’s entirely consistent with the rest of their philosophy: Just as one’s accomplishments shouldn’t be limited by birth, marriage isn’t about who you are, it’s about what you do. And just as you’d expect, the Obamas see yet another “teachable moment” in describing the mechanics of their marriage.
The first couple recognizes that their personal life is political; Kantor even describes it as central to Barack’s overall “political brand.” But politics itself is the thing that, for a time, made their personal life nearly untenable. She writes: “Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.”
In fact, when you read the Obamas’ account of their marriage, the shocking thing is that any family manages to combine the stress of marriage and politics, much less endure the unfortunate side effect of having their marriages scrutinized by an unforgiving public. Let’s just start here: Until moving into the White House, the family had not lived full-time under the same roof since 1996, two years before Malia was born. To repeat: Barack has been at least a part-time absent father and husband for nearly 13 years.
This left Michelle, obviously, to care for their two children largely on her own. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” says Susan Sher, her former boss and current chief of staff, who remembers that Michelle showed up for her interview at University of Chicago Medical Center carrying newborn Sasha, because her sitter had canceled. Not only was she left with the bulk of the childcare, but Barack’s political career wasn’t enough to pay the bills, leaving her to earn the income as well. As Barack recalls, “She said, ‘Well, you’re gone all the time and we’re broke. How is that a good deal?’” (Note that the guy who put her in the situation is also the guy who remembers just exactly what he did.)
How indeed? The answer, it seemed to be, was that Michelle just happened to find herself married to a Great Man, though neither of them knew it yet. “Barack doesn’t belong to you,” Michelle’s friend Yvonne Davilia recalls telling her back in the mid-’90s, when Barack was finishing up his memoir and considering getting into politics. But at first, Michelle “just wasn’t ready to share” her husband. Which begs the question: With what? His future destiny as leader of the free world? And would that destiny have been possible had a Great Woman, who also happened to be his intellectual and professional equal, not stepped in to look after the more prosaic concerns of raising the children and collecting a paycheck? “That was sort of an eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard,” says Michelle. “But going into it, no one tells you that. They just tell you, ‘Do you love him? What does the dress look like?’”
At this point it might be worth noting that in seeing a temporary absence from his family as a fair price to pay for greater goals, Barack was not simply following the model of his father (who had “fleeting” relationships with his wives and children), but also the model of his mother, who spent long periods of time away from her children while working as an anthropologist in Indonesia. Michelle had to point out to him, according to Sher, that a lot of parenting is about “sheer physical presence, which wasn’t something he was used to.”
The very essence of marriage is finding ways to calibrate individual aspirations with the cumbersome, day-to-day workings of a larger family unit. And it’s beyond ludicrous that those people whose individual achievements make their family lives most visible — politicians, actors, writers, musicians — are often those whose family lives are most compromised by the costs of individual achievement. But in asking us to take a good long look behind the curtain of their marriage, the Obamas have given us a better lesson in the real costs and benefits of family values than any fairy tale could.
It’s crunch time. There’s only a week to go in this seemingly interminable 2008 presidential election. The consensus from the national polls is that Democrat Barack Obama enjoys a lead in the mid-to-high single digits and he looks to be strong in key battleground states as well. Obama’s lead at this late stage contrasts starkly with the position in which Al Gore and John Kerry found themselves, respectively, during the closing week of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Though many superstitious Democrats around the country refuse to let the thought even enter their minds, much less pass from their lips, the truth is that the 2008 presidential election is, at this point, Barack Obama’s to lose. That said, today we ask a very simple question: What should Obama and his campaign do now to close out his presidential bid?
Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean’s successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee’s national field effort that helped produce Al Gore’s national popular vote victory.
Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I’d like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.
Kenneth Baer: I think right now it’s not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can’t get people saying, “My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don’t need to go out and vote. It’s cold out, it’s rainy.” [You can't have] staff people who are like, “I don’t need to work that hard, we’re going to win this anyway.” Just really keeping motivated, that’s the big challenge.
Steve McMahon: Obama’s got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it’s dangerous. The best thing to do when you’re winning is to keep doing what you’re doing because that’s the reason you’re winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he’s done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they’ve got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it’s important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.
Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that’s definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They’re just going into high gear, right?
Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that’s what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.
Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn’t tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS — jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?
Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we’re in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s about, it’s about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it’s basically been the same thing. And it’s working. It’s a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you’re doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.
McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn’t really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn’t really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they’ve set a frame for Barack Obama’s campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it’s very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it’s very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it’s also pretty clear because they’ve set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they’ve stuck to very, very religiously and that is he’s John McSame. He’s going to just give us four more years of George Bush.
If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That’s really what he’s struggling with and the fact that he’s now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They’re now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.
Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?
Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they’re voting for. They know what they’re going out and casting their ballot for and that’s a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they’re so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, “Oh well, it just won’t matter if I get to the polls that day.” You have to convince them that’s not the case, that it actually does matter.
Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don’t know if it’s the night before or Sunday night, but he’s going to have this 30-minute segment. We’ve seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It’s usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?
McMahon: I actually think it’s the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address — which, by the way, I don’t think there are at this point — it gives him an opportunity to address those. It’s a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it’s something that’s going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.
Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it’s feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it’s a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven’t seen.
Baer: It’s interesting listening to you two guys because I’ve actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don’t?
Moskowitz: There won’t be any Greek columns.
McMahon: No, I’m just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we’re fixing to find out.
Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we’ve seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you’re Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you’re ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?
McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn’t. I don’t think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it’s smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who’s not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it’s going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain’s name.
Baer: I think that you can’t look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they’re throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don’t mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can’t let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It’s not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it’s going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.
Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it’s just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?
Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny’s right in the sense that the campaign can’t let up. We don’t want them to and we can’t afford to. This isn’t going to be a landslide. We’ll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they’re throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.
Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it’s already performing.
Moskowitz: It’s definitely real. It’s phenomenal. And I think, whether it’s a buzzword or not, it’s organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that’s having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it’s definitely a new operation the likes of which we’ve not seen before.
Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it’s more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?
Moskowitz: No, it’s not more command and control. Again, there’s framework, there’s structure, there’s goals. But again, they’ve really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They’ve provided them with a slate of tools to use. They’ve really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They’ve definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who’s running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn’t matter; as long they’re willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they’re included in the operation.
Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign’s use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?
Baer: Well, maybe. There’s something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he’s breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that’s exhilarating, is that you just don’t know if it’s going to work or not. This is the field program that you’ve dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like “The West Wing.” We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it’s exhilarating partly because we don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a huge gamble.
We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That’s how you win. Registering a million new voters like they’ve done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that’s a high-risk strategy, and it’s exhilarating. Because if it works, we’ve just done something great. It’s great for democracy. I hope it works. And there’s every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it’s a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn’t been successful because it’s done the tried and true. It’s been successful because it has done things differently.
Moskowitz: I think what’s also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that’s not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I’m even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don’t necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They’re going door to door, they’re getting people to vote early, they’re making phone calls from their homes, they’re doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.
Schaller: It’s been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?
McMahon: I don’t think it’s a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama’s staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it’s just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He’s organized; even in places where he’s not necessarily competitive, they’ve got campaigns. They’re going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.
Moskowitz: Steve’s absolutely right. They’re not going to go do this where it doesn’t help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they’re not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.
Schaller: Ken, you’ve written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?
Baer: That’s a good question. It’s a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you’re not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it’s a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we’ve got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era — or it’s an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it’s screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.
Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he’s already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don’t count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It’s definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?
McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.
Baer: Hire Steve.
McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you’ve got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I’m sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I’m sure he’d be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that’s what I’d encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.
Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That’s a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.
Baer: I look at it differently. I’m sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it’s a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That’s expanding the map. It’s a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let’s just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let’s not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that’s sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?
Schaller: We’ve reached the final question. We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.
Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They’re already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Hold your breath for the last day.
McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don’t go to church at Rev. Wright’s church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.
Baer: Yeah, that’s very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that’s a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don’t talk to your transition team. Don’t even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.
Schaller: That’s some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.
Patrick McHenry 
Perched on another's shoulders, Ryan Burtchell, of the Brooklyn borough of New York, center, waves an American flag over the crowd as they respond to the news of Osama Bin Laden's death early Monday morning May 2, 2011 by ground zero in New York. President Barack Obama announced Sunday night that Osama bin Laden was killed in an operation led by the United States. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)(Credit: AP) 
Ken Mehlman 
