by Balz, Dan
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At 4 a.m. on election day, eighty members of the Obama team got a robo-call: Wake up! It’s election morning! Polls in Virginia opened at 6 a.m. eastern time, 5 a.m. in Chicago. The campaign had set up its war room on the seventh floor of One Prudential Plaza, and it was open for business before sunup. Messina had briefed everyone the day before. Tomorrow will be the most amazing day of your life, but also the hardest, he told them. Whatever happens, we’re ready. He gave three instructions: First, no panicking; if something goes wrong, fix it. Second, understand the goal for the day, which is to turn out every vote in every precinct in every battleground state. Everyone’s job on election day is to help the field team. Third, he said, hydrate. It will be a long day. And no drinking tonight. Tuesday morning, Axelrod arrived in the war room after a round of television appearances. Can I say something? he asked Messina. This is the last campaign I’m ever going to work on, he told those assembled, and I just want to tell you that you’re the best I’ve ever seen and I’m proud of each and every one of you. But as I look around, you all look terrified, and I want to tell you one thing that’s going to make you feel better. If we lose, everybody is just going to blame Messina, and if we win, everyone wins, so come on! The room broke up with laughter.
Obama’s team was supremely confident as the polls opened. Dan Wagner’s analytics team had done its modeling, and it showed Obama winning between 50 and 51 percent of the popular vote. Of the battleground states, only North Carolina was pretty much gone. Joel Benenson’s final polling matched the findings of the analytics team. Everybody had written down predictions. Plouffe said Obama would win 332 electoral votes that night.* Messina, ever cautious, predicted 291. Earlier, Messina had asked Wagner to remodel the battlegrounds. The Obama team could see the size of Romney’s rallies and the enthusiasm of the crowds. Messina wanted Wagner to ratchet up their estimate of Republican turnout well above the campaign’s projections. What happens if that happens? he wanted to know. On Sunday morning, Wagner came back with the answer. Even if the Republicans were five points above what Wagner’s models were predicting for turnout, Obama would still win at least 270 electoral votes. Jim, he said to Messina, we’re going to win.
In Boston, there was optimism tempered with concern. The campaign’s final poll in Ohio, conducted Sunday night, showed Romney down two points. He had slipped there. In other places he was competitive but not over the hump. Neil Newhouse, the campaign’s pollster, called the mood “cautiously optimistic.” They knew that it was still uphill, as many analysts were predicting, but that Romney had a genuine chance to win. The reason was not just what they were seeing in their polls but also what they could see and feel on the ground. Enthusiasm among Republicans was incredibly strong. Hurricane Sandy a week earlier had set the campaign back, they believed, as Romney and running mate Paul Ryan were forced to the sidelines as the president carried out his responsibilities to help organize the cleanup and comfort the victims. Chris Christie’s warm embrace of the president hadn’t helped either, nor had Christie’s decision not to attend a rally with Romney across the New Jersey border in Pennsylvania in those final days. But the feeling in Boston was that if they were a point or two down they could overcome that with a surge of votes on election day.
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Obama had voted two weeks earlier, so there was no ritual visit to mark his ballot that morning. Instead he visited a field office near his home to thank the volunteers and make calls. “Hi, is this Annie?” he asked. “This is Barack Obama. You know, the president.” When he hung up the phone, he said, “She was very nice to me even though she initially didn’t know who I was.” He made brief remarks to the press pool and cameras. “I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited campaign. I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out.” From there he was taken to the Fairmont Hotel for a round of satellite interviews to Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Washington, D.C., for voters in northern Virginia. Just after 1 p.m., he arrived at the Attack Athletics facility on West Harrison Street for his traditional election day basketball game. He was home for dinner before 6:30 p.m.
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Romney began his day at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, with several radio interviews. Ann, he said to his wife after he was done, it’s trash day. The candidate didn’t want to miss the trash pickup, and before he left the house that morning he started to clean out the refrigerator. This is bad, he would say as he pulled a jar from the refrigerator and tossed it in the trash bag. An aide watched, thinking, By the end of the day this man could be president-elect and he’s worried about missing trash day. At 8:40 a.m., his motorcade arrived at the Beech Street Center, where he cast his ballot. Tagg Romney and his wife had just voted in another part of town, and as they were taking their children to school they noticed a traffic jam. He realized his father’s motorcade was going to the Beech Street Center. He and his wife decided to go watch. They arrived just after his father had voted. Romney was getting into his car and looked over. Do you want to come along? Tagg had not spent a day on the road with his father during the entire general election. With his wife’s assent, he and his eleven-year-old son, Joe, jumped in for the day’s quick fly-around to Ohio and Pennsylvania. Romney felt good. On the plane, he and Bob White sat next to each other, and one of the other staffers took a photo of the two business partners with big smiles on their faces. White asked how Romney had slept. “I slept great,” Romney replied. “I feel good. I feel like I’ve done everything we could do to put ourselves in a position to win.”
Romney’s first stop was Cleveland, where he joined up with Paul Ryan for a visit to a campaign office in Richmond Heights. “Thanks for your work,” he said. “It’s all coming together today.” As he spoke, some of the campaign volunteers standing in the hallway began to sing “God Bless America.” Romney whistled for everyone to come into the main room, where Ryan introduced him as “the next president of the United States.” “We are about to change America,” Romney said. “The country has been going in the wrong direction. We are going to steer it back onto a course that is going to help the American people have a brighter future.” The crowd chanted, “Rom-ney! Rom-ney!” As Romney worked a makeshift rope line outside, an Obama supporter standing nearby shouted, “Four more years!” A Romney supporter turned to her as everyone was leaving and said, “You will be flushing Obama down the toilet.”
Romney’s plane landed at the Pittsburgh airport at 3 p.m. As the plane taxied to a stop, the traveling party looked out in amazement. On the edge of the airport, fenced off from where they were, was a parking garage. Hundreds and hundreds of people—maybe even a thousand or more—were standing in the garage cheering and applauding. They had heard that Romney was coming to Pittsburgh and spontaneously created a welcoming committee. Romney quickly exited the plane and with a swift step went over to the fence to thank them for coming out. He turned to the press pool accompanying him. “Well, that’s when you know you’re going to win,” he said. He got into his car with his son and grandson and Garrett Jackson. Boxed pizza was on the seat. Romney was overcome with the emotion of the moment. He repeated what he had said to the press pool. It was the first time he had openly shown his confidence about the outcome. Tagg Romney too was moved by what he had witnessed. He had rarely seen such passion in the campaign. “That was the first moment where I let myself believe we’re going to win,” he said. He was hardly alone in that belief, though by most objective measures his father’s chances were hardly good at that point.
Romney’s charter left Pittsburgh about 4:20 p.m. and touched down at Logan Airport in Boston about 5:45 p.m. A cheer erupted from the staff and reporters to mark the charter’s last flight. As the plane was landing, everyone aboard checked cell phones. Romney switched
on his iPad. The first round of exit polls was now ricocheting across the blogosphere. The numbers were not good. In the staff van, the mood turned grim. Senior adviser Ron Kaufman spit out an expletive. “This is not going to end up where we want it to end up,” he told the others. Romney was taken to the Westin Hotel, where he would have dinner with his family. He had talked with campaign manager Matt Rhoades and political director Rich Beeson. He knew what the numbers meant but tried not to show any emotion. Tagg’s wife was excited when the group arrived at the hotel, but she could instantly sense something was wrong.
CHAPTER 2
Obama and Romney
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney shared little in common, save for love of family, degrees from Harvard Law School, and a mutual disrespect for the ideas and policies espoused by the other. They were both strivers but they came from different generations. Romney was part of the early stage of the baby boom and Obama the very end of that demographic bubble, though Obama seemed more a child of the counterculture sixties than did the straitlaced Romney. They grew up in circumstances that were worlds apart—Romney in privilege and comfort in the American heartland, Obama in far more modest circumstances on the island state of Hawaii and for a time in the exotic environs of Indonesia. Romney was raised in a traditional two-parent household, Obama by an often absent single mother and by grandparents who gave him love and shelter but only humble surroundings. In their early adult years, Obama was a searcher, in quest of his identity as the child of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. Romney was a striver, the devoted son of a self-made man who had run a Detroit automobile company and was elected governor of Michigan three times. The biggest of all differences were the paths each followed into politics—Obama as a community organizer, and Romney through the world of business and private equity. Beyond their far different childhoods, if there was anything that shaped their distinctly different views of the world, it was this. Obama saw the world through the experiences of Chicago’s South Side and the capacity of ordinary people to challenge established power. Romney saw things from the perspective of a venture capitalist and a business owner. When he talked about the economy, it was through the eyes of those who started and ran businesses, rarely through the eyes of the workers. It was no wonder they had such different solutions to the country’s economic and other problems.
David Axelrod said he told Obama not long after the 2008 election that his Republican opponent in 2012 would be Mitt Romney. Yet as Obama was preparing to take the oath of office for the first time, Romney was thinking about everything but a second campaign. He came out of the 2008 experience disappointed that he had lost the nomination and dispirited over John McCain’s defeat at the hands of Obama. A person who knew them well said of Mitt and Ann Romney, “They were done.” After that campaign, according to the recollections of a friend, Ann had pulled aside a videographer from the staff. She wanted her views recorded for posterity. Get this on tape, she said. I will never let Mitt run again. We’re done with this. It’s too hard. But it was Axelrod who proved correct. Sometimes political strategists do see the road ahead more clearly than the politicians and their families.
The two protagonists met on the political battlefield of 2012 as representatives of the major political parties in the United States. But their campaign was also a clash between two individuals—one brainy, cool, and seemingly aloof, the other also brainy and with the energy and demeanor of a born salesman rather than a natural politician. But who were they really? Were they both just pragmatic technocrats who thrived on rational analysis, or were they actually closet ideologues coming at each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum? At the start of the campaign many Americans wondered whether they truly knew either man. David Maraniss, who authored a brilliant biography of Bill Clinton and another of Barack Obama that was published in the summer of 2012, wrote, “As Obama approached the fourth year of his presidency, many people considered him more of a mystery than when he was elected. This seemed especially true for those who supported him and wanted him to succeed but were frustrated at various points by his performance in office.” For Romney, the 2008 campaign cast its own shadow of uncertainty. He was on the national stage for such a short time that most voters hardly took a measure of him. But for those who had, he was, if not exactly an enigmatic figure, then something of an unknown quantity, in large measure because of the contradictions in his own political profile. Was the Romney who had run and lost in 2008 the real Romney or a political poseur hesitant to reveal his true self to the people? Did he have convictions or simply ambitions? Answers to questions about each candidate became part of the calculus of the election.
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If Americans wondered exactly who Barack Obama was, it was in part because he seemed to hold himself at bay as president. He almost always spoke, in formal and some informal settings, with the aid of a teleprompter, though he could be an effective extemporaneous speaker. An Obama friend once suggested to me that the teleprompter was a perfect metaphor for the president, a physical symbol of how he kept the world at arm’s length. He was famous for not enjoying schmoozing with other members of Congress. He despised what he once called the “Kabuki dance” of Washington—the political posturing before serious work can begin. He was impatient with the petty niceties of the capital, as well as the incessant chatter of the cable and Twitter culture. Like all other politicians he took energy from crowds, but he was no Bill Clinton along a rope line. As a politician he seemed dependent on a very small number of people. He was not really the product of the Chicago political machine, though his Republican opponents always like to say he was. During his rise to power, and particularly his run for the White House, he was not identified with any particular constituency or group or faction in the party, whether organized labor or party centrists, though he took advantage of those drawn to him. His ties even to the institution of the Democratic Party were minimal. The enterprise he oversaw politically—whether known as Obama for America or Organizing for America—was first and foremost about the care and feeding and protection of Barack Obama. The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson, in an article headlined “Obama, the Loner President,” wrote that Obama maintained “a political image unattached to the racial, ethnic and demographic interests that define constituencies and voting blocs.” There is another way to put it, as someone did to one of the most senior officials in the Obama White House during the transition after the 2008 election. This person said of Obama, “This guy travels light.”
Until after he was elected president and real biographies finally appeared, Obama had largely written his own story. What people knew about him pre-politics—particularly his youth—came almost entirely from Obama. Most of that was from the autobiographical book Dreams from My Father. An elegantly written memoir published before he was a public figure, it was largely, but not entirely, a work of nonfiction. His unusual upbringing fed right-wing conspiracies that he was Muslim, not Christian, and that he was born in Kenya or somewhere else, not in the United States. When Obama chose to tell the story of America, he invariably put himself in the middle of it. When John Kerry asked Obama to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, his first instinct was that he would use his own story to deliver the message of unity that he wanted to give that night. Dreams from My Father is also a reminder that while he owed a debt to trailblazers before him, he was very much a singular character who made his own way. If he kept his distance from almost everyone, it was because he had learned to rely on himself. His mother may have been the single greatest influence on him, but he had found his own path and his own identity. Though he had a few close friends and he listened to a handful of trusted advisers, his greatest confidence was in himself. I once asked him what was the best advice he had received during the last months of 2006 when he was consulting with close friends and advisers about whether he should run for president. “Well,” he replied, “I would have to say it was advi
ce I gave to myself.”
Obama also remained politically opaque to many people. Just how liberal was he? Was he the Barack Obama who as a candidate for the U.S. Senate opposed the Iraq War, or the Obama who in 2008 favored escalating the war in Afghanistan? Was he the president who bragged about ending two wars, or the president who ordered a dramatic increase in the use of unmanned aerial drones to hunt down and kill enemies? Was he the president who pushed for the biggest social program since the Great Society (the Affordable Care Act), or the president who made clear his ambivalence about a public option as part of his health care reform? Did his long period of reluctance to embrace same-sex marriage reflect a person genuinely wrestling with a difficult decision, or a politician afraid to say what he really believed? Was he someone willing to take on the toughest of fights for his agenda, or a president too willing to cave in to pressure from Republicans?