In Iowa, a Scrambling Lesson for Clinton

By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 13, 2007; A01

DES MOINES, Dec. 12 -- When senior advisers to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton awakened to the fact that they faced a serious problem in Iowa, they knew they needed a summit. For the divided staff, the question was where.

It made sense to fly to Iowa, where support for Clinton (N.Y.) was flagging and her aides were scrambling to make up ground. But a key member of her inner circle, Harold Ickes, warned that a crowd of Arlington-based operatives descending on the Plains en masse might set off alarm bells, triggering "campaign in panic mode" stories, according to two people with inside knowledge of the Clinton operation.

In a symbolic twist, they met halfway -- in Chicago, the back yard of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). The irony was not lost on increasingly worried members of the Clinton team, and it was in many ways emblematic of the challenges in turning around a lumbering national organization as events unfolded to the benefit of their less experienced, and nimbler, rival.

On Thursday, Clinton heads into the final Democratic debate before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses with her earlier aura of inevitability gone. She is essentially tied with Obama and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) in Iowa, and her edge in New Hampshire is eroding as well.

If advisers were worried about appearing panicked in early October, some are less able to hide it now. Bill Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, raised questions on Wednesday about Obama's admission that he had tried drugs, a risky tactic that telegraphed the nervousness within the Clinton campaign.

"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight . . . and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use," said Shaheen, the husband of former governor Jeanne Shaheen, adding that Obama's candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions.

"It'll be 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?' " Shaheen said. "There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

Shaheen later sought to backtrack, saying, "I deeply regret the comments I made today and they were not authorized by the campaign in any way." But the attempt to raise questions about Obama's electability met with a sharp reaction from his camp.

"Hillary Clinton said attacking other Democrats is the 'fun part' of this campaign, and now she's moved from Barack Obama's kindergarten years to his teenage years in an increasingly desperate effort to slow her slide in the polls," wrote campaign manager David Plouffe. "Senator Clinton's campaign is recycling old news that Barack Obama has been candid about in a book he wrote years ago, and he's talked about the lessons he's learned from these mistakes with young people all across the country. He plans on winning this campaign by focusing on the issues that actually matter to the American people."

Some prominent Clinton supporters said that, while they expected the race to tighten, they are now being forced to scramble. "The level of worry is, they feel like they're in a damned close race," said James Carville, who was a strategist for Bill Clinton and maintains close ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

"I don't really think there's going to be any kind of, quote, shake-up or anything like that," Carville said. "But will there be some moving around? Sure."

With three weeks before the caucuses, Clinton's advisers are stepping up their criticism of Obama and are planning a final push that they said will draw distinctions between her level of experience and electability and his. Clinton brought in her mother and daughter to campaign with her here last weekend, and her husband made a swing through key college campuses this week. Her national campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, has more or less moved to Iowa as part of a wave of senior staff members relocating to the state.

From the outset, Clinton faced an uphill fight in Iowa, a state in which her husband was never forced to develop an infrastructure in his two runs for the White House. But in this campaign, her rivals moved quickly to assemble teams of veteran operatives.

Still, her initial strategy did not put special emphasis on the caucuses, treating them as part of a national campaign. Obama, meanwhile, assembled a team of advisers with lengthy track records in Iowa and frequently made the short trip from his home state to lay the groundwork for his bid. Edwards never lost his grip on a core of supporters from his 2004 campaign.

The chief concern, one person with immediate knowledge of the campaign said, was that Clinton simply did not visit Iowa enough over the summer and early fall -- a common complaint in national campaigns, but one that the Clinton team was unaccustomed to. No one on her senior staff has ever been through the grueling caucus process, which emphasizes direct contact with voters and is difficult to measure through traditional polls. In one infamous incident, a campaign memo from deputy director Mike Henry floated the idea of skipping the caucuses altogether -- further offending some in the state, but ultimately forcing the campaign to publicly recommit itself to campaigning in Iowa once the memo was rejected.

Another challenge facing Clinton's organizers, officials said, was sheer logistics. About 60 percent of her supporters say they have never been to a caucus, making it critical that she devise a strategy to lure them out on Jan. 3.

It was not until October that senior officials at Clinton headquarters realized there was something of a disconnect between the candidate and the sentiments of participants in Iowa's quirky system, two campaign insiders said. And it was Clinton who sounded the alarm bell, they said.

"She got it before anybody else, and she dragged them kicking and screaming to take it seriously and to focus," said one person who has worked for both Clintons. "She recognized you couldn't manage a state from a thousand miles away. You had to get in there, you had to be on the ground, and see and feel what she was seeing and feeling."

Teresa Vilmain, a veteran of the caucus process who was brought in as Clinton's state director in Iowa in late spring, said the caucuses are "first and foremost about relationships -- that is what you start with." For Clinton, she said, the challenge was building up those relationships over the relatively short course of the year.

"We have a game plan, we've had one from the day I got here, which was to introduce Hillary Clinton to this state, remind them of what she has done," Vilmain said. She said that it was for that reason that the campaign held organizing events around each of Clinton's visits in the summer, such as her major speeches on Iraq, the economy and health care.

Still, the October meeting in Chicago prompted the senior staff in Arlington to focus on how competitive the race had become and what the ramifications would be if she lost or finished third. Shortly thereafter, the campaign dramatically increased its staff on the ground in Iowa, bought additional advertising time and moved a senior communications specialist to Des Moines. Former governor Tom Vilsack, a key Clinton surrogate in the state, was quoted the next month as saying the candidate had not initially understood the importance of relationship-building in Iowa -- but that she had figured it out.

"We were being out-organized," one person directly involved with the effort said flatly.

Mark Penn, Clinton's chief strategist, said she never expected to glide to victory in Iowa; if anything, she was simply pleased that "at some point this became a competitive race."

"It's really a three-way, close race" in Iowa, Penn said. "It's an extremely close race all around."