Turning It Around

Gallery

Hillary's Big Comeback

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton narrowly won the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on Jan. 8, 2008, a surprise victory for the onetime front-runner that reenergized her campaign and reshaped yet again the fight for the party's nomination.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

More small gaffes continued to plague the campaign. Two volunteers were ousted for forwarding e-mails suggesting falsely that Obama is a Muslim, and Clinton's New Hampshire co-chairman, Billy Shaheen, was forced to resign after telling The Post that Republicans would jump on Obama's admitted drug use as a youth. By the end of December, Clinton was still trailing Obama in Iowa.

The campaign decided that the Des Moines Register endorsement would make or break her in Iowa, and Hillary and Bill Clinton peppered the newspaper's editorial board with lobbying calls. If she did not get the endorsement, a top adviser said, the campaign was prepared to start moving resources to New Hampshire.

Around 6 or 7 p.m. on Dec. 15, someone started screaming in Clinton's Des Moines headquarters and pointing to a Web site. The Register had endorsed her. "That was a game-changer," a campaign aide said.

But not enough of one. Clinton aides woke up last Thursday morning convinced they were peaking while Obama had flat-lined. The truth did not become clear until about 7:20 p.m., when the turnout numbers started coming in.

In a "boiler room" set up on the third floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, advisers cringed when they heard turnout was 180,000, not 160,000. That meant that the young people Obama had vowed to get to the polls had in fact gone. Then someone yelled out that it would be 220,000 and they knew it was over. The final turnout would be 240,000 -- about 50 percent more than the Clinton model.

After the concession speech, Clinton, stung and exhausted, gathered her staff in a suite. She pushed her way into a jammed room steaming with all the bodies and pent-up frustration, climbed onto a chair, steadied herself by holding McAuliffe's shoulder and vowed to go on. Then after everyone cleared out, she and senior advisers sat down to figure out how.

* * *

Like refugees from a war zone, the Clinton team flew out of Iowa in the middle of the night, taking the wounded campaign to New Hampshire, where they had barely five days to turn things around. Within hours, they were working the phones to do damage control. The team had arranged to staff 175 call centers to target small donors with personal appeals urging continued support. Six conference calls were set up, led in succession by Clinton, her husband and four top campaign officials.

"She spoke very candidly about her pleasures and displeasures with the way things had gone," said Michael Bronfein, a Baltimore financier who was on the call with the candidate. "She reminded us not to lose perspective. That this was a marathon, not a sprint."

Other Clinton fundraisers began registering their concerns. Suzy Tompkins Buell, a top bundler from the San Francisco Bay area, called finance director Jonathan Mantz to say that "Hillary has been too reserved about her emotions." The caution was hurting her in comparison to Obama. "Hillary has to be very guarded, where he's been very open, from his personal indiscretions or his cocaine or whatever," Buell said she told Mantz.

Clinton decided she had to show her passion and at the same time take the gloves off against Obama. On Friday, campaign officials discussed running a negative television ad about him, but decided time was too short before the primary to do so. Instead, she would take him on during a Saturday debate and on the stump.

During the debate, she flashed anger when Obama and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) teamed up against her. Aides initially blanched, worried that she would look like she had lost control. But they came to the conclusion that she looked determined. They also panicked briefly on Monday when word first came via BlackBerry and telephone that the candidate had broken down during a stop at a diner. In fact, she had not cried, but choked up as she talked about how important the race is for her and the country.

Emotions whipsawed throughout those frenetic days. On Saturday, with the approval of the Big Five, Penn publicly issued a memo mocking the Obama campaign for not capitalizing on its Iowa win, titled "WHERE IS THE BOUNCE?" The bounce showed up in the polls the very next day. Bill Clinton defended Penn during a campaign stop Monday night. "It wasn't his best day," Clinton explained. "He was hurt. He felt badly we didn't do better in Iowa."

So did the former president, and now his rage was on display. "It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war" when he said in 2004 he did not know how he would have voted on the Iraq resolution, Clinton told students at Dartmouth College on the eve of the primary. "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

No one in the Clinton camp woke up Tuesday thinking she would win New Hampshire. The dining room of the Centennial hotel in Concord, where they were staying, was subdued as Ickes and Grunwald sat down to breakfast and other exhausted aides wandered downstairs for a meeting. Penn and other advisers plotted how they would recover, looking ahead to Super Tuesday on Feb. 5.

Hillary Clinton was busy planning a staff shake-up. No one would be forced out, but other new advisers would be "layered on," including Maggie Williams, her chief of staff when she was first lady; Douglas B. Sosnik, Bill Clinton's White House political director; and Roy Spence, an advertising ace and longtime Clinton friend. The question was whether to announce the moves as votes came in to shift the story line away from the defeat.

And then a funny thing happened. She won. Clinton was as surprised as anyone and went to her campaign party to deliver what originally was to be a concession speech. The message was no longer that she was in it simply to win, but to win for a greater cause. "Let's give America," she said, "the kind of comeback New Hampshire has just given me."

Staff writers Matthew Mosk and Alec MacGillis and washingtonpost.com staff writer Chris Cillizza contributed to this report.