Playbook 2012

by Mike Allen

  A presidential candidate has to make hundreds, if not thousands, of calls to potential donors. Less than two months into his campaign, Perry had made a total of twenty calls. “I think the governor was talked into running,” the fundraiser told us. “And I think he was also promised he wouldn’t have to work all that hard to get it.” In early October, she left the campaign “by mutual agreement.” Her biggest regret—and vexation—was, as she put it, “just spending lots of time with him and traveling with him and not seeing a real burning desire that I’ve seen with every other candidate I ever worked with.”

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  Perry’s frequent gaffes led to gallows humor around his campaign. One night, when we asked one adviser how his day had been, he replied slyly, “We didn’t have anything to correct by 3 P.M.” The Perry campaign now operates out of a former steam laundry at Eighth and Congress Streets, near the capitol in downtown Austin. Carney and the campaign manager, Rob Johnson, share space in what used to be a bank vault, within the same building. The door, combination lock and all, is still there, but it stays open because no one knows the combination. Mark Miner, the national press secretary, penned a sign over the door that says, “PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BEARS.” The office is decorated by a sword and golf clubs, and all eight of the chairs around the low conference table are mismatches. Poking fun at themselves, the operatives have left the big dry-erase board empty except for the words “Secret Plan,” then an arrow to “JOBS.”

  Within weeks of Perry’s announcement, his small headquarters staff was distressed to learn that Jason Cherkis, a Huffington Post reporter, was in Austin prowling around on a story that had been gossiped about for years in the Texas capital: is Perry gay? The episode illustrates the kind of off-the-wall queries that campaigns field. A Perry official described the rumors as “bullshit”: the governor has been married for twenty-nine years to Anita Thigpen—the two met at an elementary school piano recital. But that hasn’t stopped the gossip around the Texas capital, where a detailed story about a supposed assignation with a former state official continues to make the rounds. Perry aides feared the distraction and tawdriness of the story line Cherkis seemed to be pursuing. They took comfort in the Huffington Post’s roots on the left, which gave the Perry staff hope that mainstream outlets would ignore the story. The Perry official said that Cherkis at one point approached the campaign about the story: “[T]he problem we had was he had unnamed sources. We felt it was shoddy reporting. He used an example of someone who wouldn’t answer his question, so that means he’s confirming.… He would interpret that as ‘Ah-ha!’ ” Cherkis left Austin and wound up posting a harmless rehash, “Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’ Includes Crowded Homeless Shelters, Low-Wage Jobs, Worker Deaths.”

  In late September, the campaign was caught by surprise when a Washington Post reporter called to ask about a Perry family hunting camp that was known as “Niggerhead,” with the name at one point painted on a rock at the entrance. The reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, later told a blogger that the name was “pretty much common knowledge among people who knew Perry and his father, Ray.”

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  Watching Perry flub his attacks on Romney at the Orlando debate, the mood in the room was “ecstatic. I was coming out of my shoes,” a Romney confidante recalled. “I’m like, This is awesome. We’ve won.” Watching Romney with an admiration verging on awe was Tim Pawlenty. In early October, Pawlenty sat down with us and contrasted Romney’s performance with that of every other GOP candidate, including himself. “I think he’s put on a clinic, the varsity versus the junior varsity. The others aren’t even in the same league,” said Pawlenty.

  After Pawlenty dropped out of the race, Romney asked him and his wife, Mary, to come up to Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, to spend the weekend with him and Ann. There were boat rides, just the four of them, and a quiet dinner on Saturday night. Pawlenty came back impressed with his host. “There’s this theory that somehow he’s different in person than he is in public,” Pawlenty said of Romney. “That’s just not true. He is a perpetually optimistic, upbeat, gracious person. Mary and I went up to his place in New Hampshire and spent some time with him and Ann. They’re just gracious, fun, upbeat people. And this idea that he’s somehow always stiff and there’s a dissonance between his public life and how he behaves in other settings, I just don’t buy that.” Romney later asked Pawlenty for his endorsement. Pawlenty said yes.

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  The 2012 GOP campaign would be remembered for the candidates who didn’t get in the race, predicted a veteran GOP operative. Wooed by GOP heavies from Henry Kissinger to Nancy Reagan, New Jersey’s Chris Christie stirred one last will-he-won’t-he drama by playing coy in late September.

  But Christie’s “heart wasn’t in it,” said the operative, who spoke to Christie several times (“though he did have second thoughts after talking to Nancy Reagan”). The operative wrote a 120-day fundraising plan while other operatives worked on getting Christie on state primary ballots. A person who knew Christie’s mind phoned us to say why he wouldn’t take the bait: “One, he genuinely believes that he’s not prepared on an issue and substance basis to address all of the things you have to address as a candidate, and he’s leery of learning on the fly. Two, the performance of Perry [in the debates] shows the dangers of late entry. And while others use that as a reason for him to get in, for him, it’s the opposite—it’s the reason that validates his decision not to get in this late. And the third is that you sit and look at the map, and the path for Chris Christie [to get more delegates than Romney] is difficult to chart.”

  Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana had conjured a full-fledged campaign organization before he bailed out in May 2011. “Mitch actually had this thing ready to go,” said the operative. “It was totally baked.” (“We could have been up and running the next day,” said Indiana GOP chair Eric Holcomb, a top Daniels adviser.) But Daniels did not want to run against the wishes of his wife and daughters, who feared that the media would wallow in Daniels’s divorce from his wife in the late 1990s. “Everybody talked about family values in the Republican Party, how important they are, and they checked their families at the door while they go to another level of power,” said the operative. Daniels at least had put family values first, he said. (A close associate of the governor said he also feared the loss of his own privacy. “It’s no secret that Mitch likes to lose his tiny state detail when he’s out riding his motorcycle in Indiana,” the friend said.)

  The operative’s real candidate had been Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. Bush resisted; he said it was too soon for another Bush to run for president. “You’re missing it,” the operative told him. “You think there is some negative out there; there’s not. We can manage whatever there is.” Al Hoffman and Jack Oliver, the financial wizard behind George W. Bush, both urged Jeb to run. But a friend said Bush felt strongly that it “was not time to run,” suggesting he hoped to go in 2016. Could he win? “Absolutely!” insisted a close friend. But Jeb Bush did his calculating in the reverse order that Mitch Daniels had. Daniels let supporters convince him that he could win, then got a firm no from his family. Bush, convinced this was the wrong time for his family, never indulged in victory scenarios, even with close friends. Asked about his thinking, Jeb Bush emailed: “[T]he conventional belief [was] that because my last name is Bush, 2012 was not the year for me to run. I don’t believe that is true, and my decision not to run was based on personal private reasons, and not based on political assessments.” And many of those who bowed out had the same thought: Mitt Romney wanted it more than they did.

  The operative said, “Jeb could have won [the nomination], I think Mitch could have won, I think Christie could have won.” Christie, he said, made a mistake by waiting, thinking he could get the nomination in 2016. “I would have helped Christie in a heartbeat,” said the operative. “But you know what? If it’s him versus Jeb, we’re going to beat the shit out of him. We’ll smoke him. We will smoke him.”

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  “I can’t stand politics,” said Dave Carney, Perry’s chief strategist, as he sat outside the diner in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in mid-October. We asked him why he would say that.

  “Have you ever met anybody in politics?” asked Carney, obviously enjoying himself (“He likes to be the Mad Genius,” said the Perry fundraiser.) “The political people, political operatives?” We pointed out that working in politics had “made a nice living for your family.” Carney responded, “Oh, yeah, I enjoy it, but there are some people who obsess politics, who are—like I’m sure there’s football junkies and baseball junkies—but there’s more to life than how many electoral votes Herbert Hoover got.”

  We noted that we were sitting with him in a diner in New Hampshire.

  “I’m just as guilty as the rest of them. I wouldn’t want to hang around with me if I was a normal person,” Carney said, laughing.

  Carney may dislike politics, or some aspect of politics, but he definitely likes political intrigue. During the conversation, while discussing Romney, he let slip, “The number one vulnerability in their own research is the flip-flops.”

  How would Carney know what was in Romney’s research?

  “People worked on the campaign,” he said. Did that mean he had a mole from Romney’s 2008 campaign? Who? “These are just friends of mine,” he went on. Speaking elliptically, using a sardonic double negative, Carney remarked that Romney “hired every mercenary in the country four years ago and didn’t hire them this time. One thing about mercenaries is that they don’t like not to be on the payroll of somebody.”

  Carney was in a mischievous mood. His candidate had basically lost the “Washington primary”—the race for money and endorsements and the backing of the establishment. Perry might, with his great skill at retail politics, win voters one by one on the stump, working the small towns of Iowa. But what he really needed was for Romney to stumble. Perry needed to find a way to trip up his rival.

  “Everybody knows the book on Romney is that it has to be his way or no way,” said Carney. “He’s very stubborn. He’s very thin-skinned … storms out of meetings when it doesn’t go his way. And people who are involved in debate prep in the last cycle”—here, Carney was apparently alluding to his mole from the 2008 Romney campaign—“basically told us that he would react badly to someone challenging his narrative. He just is incapable of acknowledging that there may be a different interpretation of something.”

  Carney warmed to the subject of Romney’s allegedly volatile temper. “Unbelievably temperamental … in that [if] he thinks that it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, it’s three o’clock no matter what time it is.… He’s totally easy to get off stride, discombobulated.” At debate prep in 2008, according to Carney’s source, Romney would turn “beet-red. He’s known to get unbelievably flushed.”

  The Perry team needed to find a way to crack Romney’s cool, to make him turn beet-red. They had an idea, which they rehearsed. Carney played down his own candidate’s debate prep, but apparently it had grown more serious and formal since Carney’s relaxed chats on the plane with Perry back in September. Now there was a real rehearsal, with someone playing Romney. “Who?” we asked. “Different people,” said Carney, ducking the question.

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  Perry took his shot halfway through the GOP debate in Las Vegas on October 18. The debate had turned to immigration, and Perry wheeled to face Romney. “Mitt, you lose all your standing from my perspective because you hired illegals in your home. And you know for—about it for a year. And the idea that you stand before us and talk about that you’re strong on immigration is, on its face, the height of hypocrisy.”

  Romney responded, at first, with his “hah-hah-hah” stage laugh. “Rick, I don’t think that I’ve hired an illegal in my life. And so I’m—I’m looking forward to finding your facts on that.” Perry just glowered at him. “It’s time for you to tell the truth.” The two men began talking at once, with Romney almost shouting, “I’m speaking, I’m speaking, I’m speaking! I’ve got thirty seconds …” When Perry plowed ahead Romney cried out, “Anderson!,” appealing to the moderator, Anderson Cooper. Romney seemed to hear himself—crying, as it were, for mommy—and stiffened into a scornful manner. Turning to Perry, he said, “This has been a tough couple of debates for Rick, and I understand that, and so you’re going to get—you’re going to get testy.”

  The “truth” was a Boston Globe story from 2006. The Globe found that a lawn care company employed by Romney to cut his grass in Belmont, Massachusetts, had hired illegal immigrants. A year later, the paper discovered, the company still had illegals on the payroll. In the debate, Romney spluttered that he had remonstrated with the company. He said he couldn’t have anything to do with hiring illegals because, as he put it, “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake!”

  The blogs had fun with that answer, and some pundits declared that Romney had appeared petulant and condescending. He had put his hand on Perry’s shoulder, violating an old debater’s rule against invading your opponent’s space. Perry had succeeded in his ploy to bait Romney, to break his rival’s cool facade. But nevertheless the audience had booed Perry for striking a low blow. Neither man improved his image. On the Romney beat, whenever minor frustrations or delays occurred, reporters began mockingly crying out, “Anderson!” Perry stayed mired in fifth place in national polls.

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  Stuck at the bottom of most polls was the Republican candidate the Obama camp had feared the most. “I think that our guys were worried about Huntsman, I think he was the one who people were most worried about,” said a White House insider who speaks frequently with members of the Obama high command, in an interview with us in Manchester, New Hampshire, in late October. GOP operatives were always scornful of Jon Huntsman’s candidacy, regarding him as the sort of media darling who appeals to liberal pundits and no one else. “He’s an absurd candidate. He’s running from the left in a Republican primary,” said one longtime Republican consultant in late August. Like many GOP operatives, this one was dubious about Huntsman’s chief strategist, John Weaver, a maverick in the trade who had devoted himself to John McCain in 2008 until he was pushed aside in a campaign shake-up. It was Weaver who, more than any other political pro, persuaded Huntsman to take a shot in 2012. “This is the little movie that John Weaver has in his head,” said the rival consultant. “It’s a crazy little movie but it’s not going to happen.” (“The money guys don’t like Weaver,” added a Romney adviser. “Too much strife.”)

  If Huntsman had a chance, he probably missed it at his first GOP debate, in Ames, Iowa, in August. The moderator, Fox News’s Bret Baier, had a question for the eight candidates: “Say you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal, 10 to 1, spending cuts to tax increases.… Who on this stage would walk away from that deal?” All of the candidates raised their hands—including Huntsman. Here had been his moment to break out of the pack, and he passed.

  Huntsman casts himself as an anti-politician and truth teller. He is the only GOP candidate who has refused to sign the “No New Taxes” pledge passed around by conservative activist Grover Norquist. In his conversation with us, Huntsman went on at some length to describe how much he dislikes compromising his principles to play for votes. Using a red pen and yellow highlighter, he said that he pores over his campaign speeches. “You go through the paragraphs and you say, Is this hype? Is it pandering? Is it true? Is it reality? Is it the truth? I hate pandering stuff. I hate phrases like Drill, Baby, Drill kind of stuff. I hate that. I hate political bromides.” We ventured, “But they’re effective,” and Huntsman shot back, “Well, I understand they are, and maybe that’s one of the hard lessons for me and [Ron] Paul. I hate that stuff. People say, Repeal Obamacare, everybody cheered. I hate that stuff. Unless you’re willing to say what you’re going to do when you say Repeal Obamacare, you hadn’t ought to be up there saying Repeal Obamacare. It’s hollow language, and we shouldn’t have any patience for that i
n politics. We need solutions today more than ever before and we’re just not getting them.”

  Asked why he didn’t take a chance at the Ames debate, Huntsman struggled to come up with a clear answer. “I regret I didn’t use the opportunity to say, Here is how I would do it. I would raise the revenue and reinvest it in the tax code.” Huntsman fell back on an excuse. “You’re playing out in real time on live television the idea that you’ve got a split second to respond to a fundamentally important issue.…” He tried again: “My first debate, and say I’m not even going to get a chance to rebut, they don’t allow you to do that or raise a hand, where do you feel on this, as opposed to knowing now, that’s a BS question, give me a chance to respond to it, and let me tell you how we’d raise revenue and reinvest it in the tax code and lower the rate.” Huntsman was apparently referring to his proposal to reform taxes by getting rid of loopholes and lowering rates. But even months after the event, he couldn’t quite find the words to express himself.

  Sitting unrecognized in the lobby of the Hilton Garden in Manchester, Huntsman told how his wife, Mary Kaye, scolded him for not greeting the front desk clerks. “You’ve walked by this counter a hundred times and you failed to shake hands with certain people, and they remember that.” Now he shakes their hands. He can’t believe he’s one of thirty-eight people running for president in New Hampshire.

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  “Why am I here?” Congressman Ron Paul sometimes wondered as Romney, Perry, and the others tangled in the early autumn debates. Paul’s Libertarian philosophy won pockets of strong support around the country, and in national polls he often stood just behind Romney and Herman Cain. But the mainstream press ignored him as a candidate who could not win, in large part because he favored dismantling vast chunks of the federal government. The low moment had come in August, when he had nearly tied the winner, Michele Bachmann, at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Paul was exhausted, determined to get home to Lake Jackson, Texas, where he lives in a comfortable house with biking trails and a well-stocked library. “I’ve got to go home now,” Paul said to his handlers. In a phone interview with us in early November, Paul replayed the dreary conversation: “They said, What?” Paul recalled. His longtime aide, Jesse Benton, wanted to “put out a feeler,” to see if Sunday shows wanted to interview him in light of his surprising success. “Well, all right,” Paul said. A little while later, Benton returned, looking “a little chagrined.” The press secretary said, “I guess we can go.” Not a single news organization wanted to interview the candidate. “They don’t want to interview me?” Paul asked. He tried not to feel hurt and looked forward to getting home for his bicycle ride. Bachmann appeared on five network news shows the next morning.