“All of us stand with the president and support every effort to bring to justice those responsible for these despicable crimes.”
– Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, Sept. 11, 2001
“We will speak with one voice.”
– Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Sept. 11, 2001
“The fact that the administration used 9/11 in the last election, that they seemed intent on using the president’s role as commander-in-chief as a way of soliciting votes, has created a hardening of partisan lines that will be felt until the end of this administration.”
– Democratic Congressman Chakah Fatah of Philadelphia, January 2003
In light of the bitter partisan divisions that now characterize our politics, it is hard to remember the depth of national unity that immediately followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It seems fanciful that there was once a time when Democrats blunted all criticisms of George W. Bush, united behind him, and prayed for his success. Literally: prayed.
I will never forget a conversation I had shortly after 9/11 with a Democratic consultant, a happy warrior who loves to defeat Republicans and has no particular sympathy for the president. Asked about his attitude toward Bush in the wake of the attack, he replied: “I actually went into church and knelt down and prayed that he’d be successful. He’s ours. He’s all we’ve got. Pray God that he’s going to do what’s best for our country.”
The national crisis meant that Republicans and Democrats stopped throwing loaded lockboxes at each other. They stopped challenging each other’s moral standing. The talk — of which I was part — was of a new seriousness in politics and the possibility of rolling back the bitterness of the last decade.
Bush himself seemed to change. His foreign policy in the months immediately after 9/11 lost some of the unilateralist tinge that colored so many of his early foreign policy choices and statements — and later ones. Winning the battle against terror required an end to unilateralism and the construction of a broad international coalition. The fact that the world rallied to the United States made hopes for such a coalition realistic. And the need for such an alliance immediately raised the profile and operational responsibilities of Secretary of State Colin Powell. This, too, had positive political effects. Powell, the quintessential coalition-builder, was the cabinet officer most popular among independents and Democrats.
A president who had said he was not “into” nation-building showed signs of understanding that nation-building was exactly what Afghanistan needed. The United States’ failure to help rebuild Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet invasion in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the rise of the very forces the United States confronted on Sept. 12, 2001. It turned out there was a practical side to humanitarianism. This sentiment was shared across party lines, but it was especially important to Bush’s new Democratic allies.
Bush’s post-9/11 rhetoric had particular appeal to his ideological adversaries. Early on, Bush stood up in defense of the rights of America’s Muslim community. In assailing the Taliban, the president emphasized the aspects of its rule — its denials of religious liberty, its repression of political opponents, and, especially, its war against gender equality — most offensive to liberals and the political left. In his speeches, Bush grafted the language of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to the martial rhythms of Ronald Reagan.
Bush even seemed to abandon his pre-Sept. 11 approach to domestic issues. Instead of trying to win legislative battles by uniting his own party and picking off as few Democrats as narrow victories required, he sought broad majorities on emergency spending and war policy. He won over not only dissidents but also the Democratic leadership. For a moment, at least, Bush transformed a partisan administration into a kind of coalition presidency. Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican and one of his party’s best political analysts, saw Bush as having the opportunity “to reshape the image of the party from the top down.” One could even imagine the reappearance of something like Eisenhower Republicanism.
The evidence of a new, less confrontational politics was everywhere. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt had almost nothing to do with each other until they were brought together by the need to agree on measures to combat terrorism. Suddenly, Republicans and the administration were rewriting the emergency anti-terror spending bills to accommodate the Democrats. Gephardt and Hastert joined to shepherd the $40 billion anti-terror appropriation to passage. In both houses, Democrats worked with Republicans to pass a war resolution promising retaliation for the attacks. Initially, Republicans hoped to ram through their own versions of both measures. Instead, they made concessions. “They could have rolled over us,” said a very loyal and partisan Democratic leadership aide who resented the Republicans’ initial approach but appreciated the spirit of compromise.
Yet eight days after 9/11, the Wall Street Journal editorial page was urging Bush to advance his whole conservative domestic agenda right away because “the bloody attacks have created a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their president.” Drill for oil in the Arctic, the Journal preached, speed up the tax cut — this while the country was spending tens of billions more than anyone anticipated before the crisis — and even insist on pushing through confirmation of conservative judges. What did judges have to do with this war? Nothing, but the Journal’s editorial writers saw political opportunity: “Democrats in the Senate will hesitate to carry out borkings that clearly undercut Mr. Bush’s leadership.” Bush, they concluded, should “use the moment to press a broad agenda that he believes is in the national interest.”
So much for national unity.
Democrats lamented that such an approach would inevitably court bitterness. “To use this crisis as a launching pad for objectives that are unrelated” to the war on terror, said Representative Sandy Levin, a Michigan Democrat, “would unravel the bipartisanship that’s needed even before it had a chance to work.” And that is what happened.
For there was a flip side to the politics of national unity. It was the politics of terrorism. The new war on terror afforded Republicans a chance to regain all the advantages they had enjoyed during the last decade of the Cold War and then lost when it ended.
“Mr. President, the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.” So said Sen. Arthur Vandenberg to President Harry Truman in 1947. Vandenberg, a Republican, was giving Truman advice on how to get Congress to vote for aid to help Turkey and Greece in their fight against Communist insurgents. Vandenberg might as well have been laying out rule number one in the politics of the Cold War. From 1947 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country was scared as hell about Soviet power and the threat of nuclear war. And these fears dominated political life.
If Vandenberg’s words have a familiar ring, it’s because the new politics of terrorism were remarkably similar to the old politics of the Cold War. Fear once again became a powerful tool and motivator.
Consider President Bush’s speech to religious broadcasters in February 2003 as he built the case for war against Iraq. “Chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained,” he declared. “Secretly, without fingerprints, Saddam Hussein could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own. Saddam Hussein is a threat. He’s a threat to the United States of America.”
Bush scared the hell out of the country, and we followed him to Iraq. Vandenberg might have approved.
Fear provides political actors — especially incumbents — with new ways of beating back and intimidating opposition. In the post-9/11 period, Republicans became experts at the political version of Whack-a-Mole. Any time Democrats poked up their heads to challenge the president, especially on terrorism, they were beaten down and accused of lacking patriotism.
Leading Democrats — Senators Tom Daschle and John Kerry and Rep. Richard Gephardt — all received this treatment. Typical was House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s comment about Daschle’s criticism of Bush’s diplomacy before the Iraq War. Daschle, Hastert said, had “come mighty close” to “giv[ing] comfort to our adversaries.” That is Cold War talk — guilt by association. This time, the bad associations were with Saddam and the French, not the Soviets.
The new politics of terrorism also revived the issues that had naturally favored Republicans. For three consecutive presidential elections beginning in 1980, foreign policy toughness was a central pillar of Republican strategy, causing defections to the GOP among neoconservative intellectuals and working-class New Dealers alike.
The importance of the Cold War to Republicans was underscored by the differences between the last election of the Cold War, in 1988, and the first post-Cold War election, in 1992. In both elections, George H.W. Bush was the GOP nominee. In both elections, he won large majorities among voters who listed foreign policy as a primary concern. The big difference? By the time Bush was running for reelection, foreign policy had receded as a central issue for most voters, despite the military victory that Bush had orchestrated in Kuwait. In 1992, most of the country voted on economics and other domestic issues. The Republicans were routed. George Will, the conservative columnist, captured the elder Bush’s problem perfectly: “George Bush prepared all his life to conduct the Cold War, only to have it end, leaving him (almost literally) speechless.” The president’s son was to gain back some of the advantages his father lost when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
A national threat served George W. Bush in another way: When voters look for security, especially from foreign enemies, they look to the executive branch of government. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this in 1940 as war raged across Europe. His reelection slogan then was, “Don’t change horses in midstream.” In 1940, the horse was a Democrat; this time, the horse is a Republican.
There is one important difference between Roosevelt’s approach and Bush’s. FDR saw fear as something that could paralyze a nation and prevent action. Bush (like Harry Truman and Vandenberg before him) saw fear as moving the nation to action. Each new terrorist alert reminded the nation of the dangers it faced and pushed other issues to the background. A cynic might say that the only thing Republicans had to fear was the end of fear itself. Whatever doubts Americans had about Bush’s handling of the economy, polls showed — at least until 2004 and despite doubts about the Iraq venture — that they saw him as a strong and steadfast leader facing down the menace of terror.
And because the war on terrorism, like the Cold War, would be long, shadowy and difficult, there was no telling when it would be declared over. The toppling of those Saddam statues was not like the fall of the Berlin Wall. The capture of Saddam was not like the hanging of Mussolini. After Saddam, even after Osama bin Laden, there would be other enemies to slay, other terror cells to break up.
An open-ended campaign served Bush’s political interests far better than a shorter but all-consuming conflict. World War II had demanded the total mobilization of American resources and sacrifices from all sectors of society. The sacrifices in the war on terrorism were asked mostly of members of the military, police, and firefighters — and of few others. Bush could give patriotic speeches on even days and tax-cutting speeches on odd ones. War, it was presumed, could coexist with tax cuts without end.
In the narrowest political terms, Bush was shrewd to avoid total mobilization or anything close to it. Consider, after all, the fate of Winston Churchill. Despite his brilliant leadership, the British prime minister was bounced from office in 1945 by voters whose wartime sacrifice and solidarity encouraged them to embrace the Labor Party’s program of social reform. Bush’s rhetoric gave nods to the ideas of service and sacrifice but demanded little — and certainly none at all from his political base. There was no talk from the White House of the sort of social solidarity that paved the way for Labor’s victory in Britain.
Instead, the president and his lieutenants seized advantages none of them had anticipated when Bush assumed office. Thus did a war on terrorism that began in national unity end in partisan division and recrimination.
The breakdown of post-9/11 bipartisanship happened gradually. Even in this heyday of bipartisanship, there was evidence that partisanship would come back. Most disturbing to Democrats, there were signs that Republicans were prepared to use the call to national unity as a means of silencing all criticism of Bush, especially criticism related to the handling of terrorism. If opposition is unpatriotic, what is an opposition to do?
One turning point came in May 2002, when word leaked that an intelligence report on August 6, 2001, had warned of the possibility of terrorist hijackings. For the first time, Bush faced sharp questioning over what he knew and did not know in advance of the events of 9/11. One striking aspect of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the discipline (staunch partisans later saw it as timidity) that Democrats showed in not pressing the administration for answers on possible intelligence failures. The report that the president might have had at least some sort of warning brought forth questions that another administration — Bill Clinton’s, for example — might have faced immediately after the attacks.
The Democrat who faced the sharpest attacks that May was House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. Even Democrats were uneasy with his use of the Watergate era “what-did-the-president-know-and-when-did-he-know-it?” formulation to challenge Bush on the August memo. But the White House’s war against any and all Democrats who dared utter a critical word was so furiously partisan that it suggested a defensiveness about Sept. 11 no one knew was there.
Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, declared that anyone who dared criticize the administration too hard was getting in the way of the war on terrorism. “Incendiary” commentary by opposition politicians, the vice president said, “is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war.”
This effort to suppress dissent was too much even for the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, which flatly labeled Cheney’s remarks as “wrong.” It added: “It’s precisely because we’re in a war that we need to find out where we failed.”
The most important political episode of 2002 began playing out in June. Bush had resisted establishing a Department of Homeland Security, which was originally proposed by Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman. On June 6, Bush abruptly announced on national television that he had switched sides and now embraced a new department. Why, exactly, and why then?
For weeks, the news had again been dominated by stories reporting the failures of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement in the period leading up to the terrorist attacks. Suddenly, Congress was asking the obvious question: How could this have happened?
It was not a line of inquiry the administration welcomed. Bush’s speech endorsing the homeland security department happened to come on the very first day of testimony from whistle-blower Colleen Rowley, the chief legal counsel of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, who had brought her agency’s pre-9/11 failures to public attention.
Not surprisingly, Bush overshadowed Rowley.
Dan Balz, chief political reporter for The Washington Post, noted the next day that Bush appeared on television as he was “struggling to regain the initiative” on security issues. While the president retained the confidence of the country, Balz wrote, “his administration is no longer immune from questions or criticism about what happened before Sept. 11, and whether everything is now being done to make the homeland safer.
“In recent weeks,” Balz continued, “Bush has faced the first sustained scrutiny since the terrorist attacks.” The result: “signs of declining public confidence in the government’s ability to combat future terrorism.”
Given this opening, did the Democrats respond to Bush’s speech with partisanship? No. As they did so often after Sept. 11, they turned the other cheek. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, regularly vilified by the Republicans as a mad partisan, called Bush’s remarks “encouraging.” Rep. Jane Harman of California, one of the Democrats’ leading voices on security, called Bush’s proposal “bold and courageous.”
The natural move from here would have been authentic bipartisanship to get a bill passed. After all, the differences between Bush and the Democrats were so small that Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) noted that 95 percent of the homeland security bill that was eventually approved after the 2002 elections had been written by Democrats.
But getting a department created before the election was clearly less important to the president than having a campaign issue. He picked a fight over union and civil service protections for its employees that Democrats had inserted into the bill. Republican senators filibustered various efforts to reach a compromise. In late September, Bush went so far as to charge that the Senate — meaning its Democratic majority — was “not interested in the security of the American people.”
Because Bush succeeded in evading debate over what happened and what was known in the months before 9/11 — and because Republicans defied tradition in the midterm elections by recapturing the Senate and gaining seats in the House — Bush’s maneuverings could be seen as brilliant politics. But it was brilliance bought at a high price. More than any single episode, the homeland security maneuver broke the spirit of bipartisanship. It permanently alienated Democratic leaders and, eventually, the party’s base. This happened before the Iraq War, which is often taken as the central cause of the political divisions in the Bush years. It was not.
In no 2002 contest did the Republicans’ use of the homeland security issue more enrage Democrats than Georgia’s Senate race. Rep. Saxby Chambliss pilloried Democratic incumbent Max Cleland in a vicious advertisement that used pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — surely the ultimate in guilt-by-association — to portray Cleland as soft on terrorism because of his insistence that the homeland security bill include civil service protections. The ad accused Cleland of voting against Bush’s “vital homeland security efforts 11 times,” which only meant that, in the legislative maneuverings, Cleland had insisted on the Democrats’ version of the bill over Bush’s.
What made the implication that Cleland was an ally of terror especially shameful was Cleland’s record as a Vietnam War hero who, near the end of his tour, lost an arm and both of his legs in a grenade explosion. “I served this country, and I don’t have to prove my patriotism to anybody,” said an angry Cleland, who noted that Chambliss used four student deferments to escape service before receiving a medical deferment because of “an old football knee.”
It is impossible to overemphasize how the attacks on Cleland hardened Democratic attitudes toward Bush — who campaigned hard for Chambliss — and the Republican Party. “This is something that gnaws at us,” Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois said months after the election. “A decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran would be discredited because of his stand in the homeland security debate?”
Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu poured Tabasco on her comments about Cleland. “He left three limbs in Vietnam. He’s already served his country in more ways than any of us ever will. The president came in with a very personal and very vicious attack, using the homeland security issue to unseat a man who fought on the Armed Services Committee to give the guys in the battlefield everything they need. It didn’t mean a thing to this president.”
Landrieu had her own issues with Bush. A Democratic hawk, she strongly supported him on Iraq, and called for even higher levels of defense spending than Bush did. She had voted for the Bush tax cut. In an early ad, she boasted of how often she had backed the president.
But the Republicans’ campaign against Landrieu confirmed that for Democrats in the House or Senate, it did not matter how they voted or what they said or how patriotic they were. The Bush machine would do all it could to defeat them anyway. A lesson was learned: there was no percentage in making nice with an administration willing to politicize security issues in pursuit of a long-term Republican majority.
Landrieu’s victory only hardened her attitude toward Bush. “For Democrats who were trying to work with the president on national security issues and support a more hawkish stand than might seem natural for a Democrat, this president discounts it, ignores it and acts as if it’s not relevant,” she said after the election. “Any time the country is poised for war and about to engage on behalf of the security of the country, it’s very important that the president make that the priority and make everything else come in second. Unfortunately, the president has done exactly the opposite of that.”
Yes, Landrieu lamented, the country was deeply polarized along partisan lines. “Unfortunately, the president has earned this polarization,” she said. “It hasn’t just happened. He pushed it to happen.”
Landrieu’s victory in the runoff was a counterpoint to Cleland’s defeat. If the overall message of the 2002 election was that timidity loses, the message of Landrieu’s runoff victory was that toughness wins. Bush threw everything except poisoned gumbo into the fight to defeat her. She hit back where it hurt, on the economy, and threw sugar in the president’s eyes. She told the voters in a pro-Bush state that they had a choice between a Bush rubber-stamp and an independent voice. Independence beat Bush.
Landrieu had an advantage over all other Democrats running for the Senate in 2002. Under Louisiana’s unusual election system, an open primary is held on Election Day, and if no candidate wins a majority, a runoff is held in December. This gave Landrieu time to digest the meaning of the November results. She defeated her Republican opponent, Suzanne Haik Terrell, because in a single month, she and her campaign changed course.
The Republican Party deluged the state with cash to support fierce attack ads against Landrieu. Even Republicans thought the tone and quantity of the spots bred a backlash. Rep. John Cooksey, a Republican who lost out to Terrell in the first round of voting, told The Advocate of Baton Rouge that Louisiana voters rebelled against “outside money and influence telling them how to vote.”
Al Quinlan, Landrieu’s pollster, noted the change in tone between the two rounds of voting: “We ran a much more aggressive, tougher race” after realizing that the campaign “had to be sharper, had to be more focused on economic issues.” It was easier for Landrieu to push economics because the homeland security issue disappeared between the two rounds of voting. Congress gave Bush the homeland security bill he wanted in a lame duck session after the November election. You could tell how much Republicans longed to keep the issue alive — and how important it had been to their takeover of the Senate — when Karen Hughes, Bush’s former top aide, came to the state and criticized Landrieu for “taking a whole year to decide that she ought to work with President Bush to protect our homeland.”
It didn’t work, and Quinlan argued that the attacks on Landrieu for failing to support Bush on everything only reinforced her declaration of independence. It also helped bring Democrats to the polls, especially African-Americans, who had not voted in large numbers in the first round. In the runoff, Landrieu sought black votes with a new energy, and her victory speech played off on an old civil rights saying. “My feet are tired, but my soul is inspired,” she declared. Yet even as Landrieu was reassuring African-Americans, she did better among white voters than she had six years earlier. Jobs and political independence proved to be themes that could reach across racial and ideological lines.
Mary Landrieu’s lesson, which her party took to heart, was that losers allow their opponents to set the terms of the competition. Winners change the terms and fight back. Democrats took a long time to learn that. The tone of 2003 and 2004, the rise of Howard Dean, the toughening of the response of Democrats such as John Kerry and John Edwards to Bush — all reflected lessons learned the hard way.
“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 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 
