"Bittergate"

Alain Issock / Reuters In an exclusive excerpt from David Plouffe’s memoir, The Audacity to Win, the Obama campaign aide recounts how his team handled the candidate’s infamous comments about guns and religion—and how Obama took the blame.

Things had stabilized in Pennsylvania until Obama made his biggest unforced error of the entire campaign. I happened to be in western Pennsylvania, doing a round of interviews about the primary and meeting with some of our volunteer team leaders, when all hell broke loose.

The popular blog Huffington Post ran a story from a woman named Mayhill Fowler. Fowler, who had actually contributed to our campaign and was part of Huffpost’s citizen journalist brigade, had attended a recent San Francisco fund-raiser featuring Obama and surreptitiously made an audio recording of Barack’s speech.

In it, Obama made some cringe-worthy remarks: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

“I felt like we were really beginning to hit our stride again,” [Obama] said. “And this will set us back again. I can’t blame anyone but me for this. I’m sorry.”

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory. By David Plouffe. 352 pages. Viking. $27.95. Fowler reportedly agonized for days about whether to post and release the comments. She knew it would cause us major problems. Finally she talked to an editor who told her she had an obligation to make them public. Fowler agreed, and suddenly we were back in major damage-control mode.

The first problem was that once again we were blindsided. None of us knew he had made the comments. The event staff hadn’t flagged it. We normally recorded everything Obama said, but, inexplicably, we had failed to do so at this event. We never made that mistake again.

I couldn’t imagine a worse context for him to have made such boneheaded comments: standing in a room full of wealthy donors in San Francisco—to much of the country a culturally extreme and elitist city with far-out views—speaking in anthropological terms about the middle of the country; describing the setting, it really couldn’t sound much worse.

I called Obama immediately. He began to make a somewhat halfhearted effort to explain what had happened. First, he focused on the fact that he did not know he was being taped.

“C’mon,” I said to him, “in the world we live in, you know there’s a terrific chance that anything you say anywhere could be captured.”

He quickly shifted gears. “It should be clear what I was trying to say,” he argued. “But I really did mangle the words. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that I had misspoken, but looking at the transcript now, I really don’t know how the hell I constructed my point like that.”