Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  Pawlenty felt he needed a breakout moment, and to gain one he had to strike directly at Romney. “Our perspective until then was that it probably was not a great idea to pick a fight with Mitt early on because his resources were so overwhelming that until you’re strong enough to be able to fight back or sustain the fight, it’s not in our best interest to pick a fight,” he later told me. “We weren’t there yet. But we also started to realize that days and weeks were going on, and if you’re figuring to become the main alternative to Mitt, you’ve got to lay claim to it in some fashion.” Pawlenty’s team looked to the second debate, scheduled for June 13 in New Hampshire, as the moment. It would be the first in which Romney would participate.

  His team arrived in New Hampshire days ahead of the debate and settled into a Manchester law firm for prep sessions. Those in attendance included Nick Ayers, the new campaign manager; Phil Musser, a longtime political counselor to Pawlenty; Sara Fagen, the White House political director in George W. Bush’s administration; Alex Conant, the campaign communications director; and Jon Lerner, the campaign’s pollster. All agreed that Pawlenty should confront Romney directly over the Massachusetts health care plan as the template for Obama’s new law. Pawlenty came up with the phrase “Obamneycare” to connect Romney to the legislation that conservatives hated. His advisers decided to preview their strategy during Pawlenty’s appearance on Fox News Sunday the day before the debate. The strategy worked beautifully, setting up a Pawlenty versus Romney narrative for the debate. Pawlenty’s advisers, determined to leverage the debate to boost the campaign, had lined up possible endorsements and were ready to drop a new direct mail fund-raising appeal they believed would provide substantial returns.

  • • •

  Behind the scenes, however, another reality was playing out. Nick Ayers had been a late arrival to the campaign, and his presence brought a different tone and tighter circle, to the dismay of some of Pawlenty’s longtime friends and advisers. Ayers was considered a wunderkind in the Republican ranks. As a college student he worked in the successful campaign of Georgia governor Sonny Perdue; at twenty-two he was tapped to run Perdue’s reelection campaign. He joined the Republican Governors Association in 2007, when Perdue was still the chairman, and remained in that post through the 2010 elections. He was a highly regarded talent. When he was announced as Pawlenty’s campaign manager, he sent out an e-mail to his personal network recounting the decision-making process that led him to take the job: “I accepted the position with peace of mind and a deep confidence in the candidate, his family, and the mission ahead, but it was not an easy decision. . . . Opportunities in the private sector were serious and abundant and would have allowed me to achieve a degree of personal financial security that my family has not yet had (at least as much financial security as any of us can have during the Obama presidency). Over the past six months, I have prayed deeply about my purpose in life and how best to utilize the talents God has given me. I wanted my decision to be wholly about how best to serve Him, not what was most politically or financially expedient for my family and me. . . . As He often does in walks of faith, He has called me to a higher purpose. I believe that our Nation is truly on the wrong path. We need a new direction that is positive and hopeful. Simply said, we need new leadership. I believe that Governor Pawlenty is best positioned to provide that leadership.” The e-mail ricocheted through the incestuous world of political consultants and reporters, drawing instant scorn and derision for what seemed to be the self-obsession of Pawlenty’s new campaign chief. Ayers thought he was doing what Pawlenty wanted by tapping his extensive network of contacts in behalf of the campaign. The e-mail caught Pawlenty’s eye, but he chose not to broach it with Ayers. “I know it raised a few eyebrows in some quarters,” he said. “But it didn’t concern me particularly.”

  With Ayers’s arrival, others who had been part of Pawlenty’s wider circle of advisers began to feel frozen out. Among them was Vin Weber, the former congressman from Minnesota, one of the party’s most respected strategists and a longtime friend of the candidate. For a time, Mary Pawlenty, the candidate’s wife, also was kept on the outside. Dealing with a candidate’s spouse is often one of the most delicate jobs campaign advisers face. One member of the team said, “Nick’s approach was not, ‘How do I turn her into an ally?’ but ‘How can I sideline her?’ He just had no respect for her.”

  Mary Pawlenty had opposed the decision to denounce ethanol subsidies during the announcement tour that started in Iowa. Her view was that Pawlenty needed all the help and support he could get in that state, given its importance to his strategy. She thought it was foolhardy to start picking fights over something so significant to the Iowa economy and something that presidential candidates dating back many cycles had embraced as the price of wooing Iowa voters. She did not take the rejection of her recommendation on ethanol subsidies well and suggested to others that they not come looking to her for advice. Long after the campaign, Pawlenty tried to explain the situation. “There clearly was miscommunication with respect to Mary and her involvement and all of that,” he said. “But it got squared away and got dramatically better.” But not before the New Hampshire debate.

  • • •

  The New Hampshire debate was held on the campus of Saint Anselm College just outside Manchester. A huge media contingent filled the gymnasium that served as the press filing center, their appetites whetted by the prospect of a clash between the perceived front-runner and one of his most serious challengers. The script was being written in advance, but what no one could see were two developments backstage. The first, described by two of Pawlenty’s advisers, occurred when Romney and Pawlenty met each other before the debate. Romney smothered Pawlenty with kindness. “It was genius. It was genius,” Ayers said. “It worried me, because Tim’s a nice guy and Tim likes Mitt Romney. I didn’t think it would change anything, but I thought in the world of would you rather have them palling around for five minutes or not, you’d choose to not.” Pawlenty has no distinct memory of the incident.

  The second occurred when Pawlenty’s traveling assistant placed a call to Mary Pawlenty so the candidate could have a few words before going onstage. Instead, it became a potentially confidence-shattering moment. “She questioned the strategy,” Pawlenty said. “For various reasons she hadn’t been as fully in the loop on this as perhaps she should have been.” There could hardly have been a more awkward moment for a candidate and his spouse to have this kind of conversation. “It wasn’t in the form of, ‘You know, don’t you dare do this, this is stupid,’” he recalled. “It was more in the form of, ‘What’s the strategy? Why are you doing this now? How does this help in terms of the overall picture?’” Pawlenty knew there was no way to turn back at that point. “Once you’d teed it up on Fox News Sunday, the time to have the concern wasn’t in the ten minutes before we started the debate,” he said.

  CNN played host, with John King as the moderator. The format included questions from citizens in remote locations. A few minutes into the forum, Sylvia Smith, a woman from Littleton, asked the candidates what they would do to defund Obama’s health care law. The first response came from Michele Bachmann. “I will not rest until I repeal Obamacare,” she said. “It’s a promise. Take it to the bank, cash the check.” King then asked Romney about Pawlenty’s “Obamneycare” comment two days earlier. Romney explained that there were important differences between the Massachusetts law and Obama’s. He pledged to repeal the federal law if he became president. King turned to Pawlenty. “Governor, you just heard Governor Romney rebut your characterization, ‘Obamneycare.’ Why?” Pawlenty faltered. He began to respond to the question. King interrupted. “The question, Governor, was why ‘Obamneycare’?” Again, Pawlenty didn’t answer directly. Twice more King served up the question that Pawlenty and his advisers had prepped to answer. Twice more Pawlenty flinched. Watching, Ayers turned to another Pawlenty adviser. “Devastating,” he said in a whisper. Others on the team co
uld see the damage playing out in real time. “We looked down at our Twitter feeds,” one adviser recalled, “and just went, ‘Fuck.’”

  Only later would Pawlenty recognize the damage he had done to his candidacy. “We set the expectation this was going to happen,” he said. “Nobody forced it on us. . . . The frustrating thing is that it was very simple. It was not a complicated deal. We set the expectation. The opportunity arose in a fairly predictable manner early in the debate. Should have just ditched talking to the screen or bashing Obama and said, ‘You know, of course it’s an appropriate phrase, and here’s why.’ . . . We teed up the ball and then missed it. I missed it, right? And nothing more complicated than that.”

  • • •

  If Pawlenty was the big loser in the New Hampshire debate, the surprise story that night was Michele Bachmann. As Pawlenty stumbled, she turned in a forceful performance. Bachmann was a just third-term member of the House but already a star among conservatives. A devout Christian, she was staunchly opposed to abortion. A former tax attorney, she was a hawk on fiscal issues. An opponent of big government, she was as outspoken as anyone in her party about repealing Obama’s health care plan. She was an outsider in the clubby world of Washington politics. After the 2010 elections, she decided to seek a leadership post in the House. Opposition from Eric Cantor, the new majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the Budget Committee, helped defeat her. She formed a Tea Party caucus and on the night Obama delivered his 2010 State of the Union address offered her own “Tea Party” response in competition with the GOP’s official response. She was both a fearless advocate for her beliefs and someone with a reputation for playing loose with the facts to fit her ideological leanings.

  Bachmann had three goals for the New Hampshire debate: first, to establish herself as a player in the presidential race; second, to dispel perceptions that, as one adviser put it, “she’s crazy, says crazy things, is not smart”; and third, to make a splash by actually announcing her candidacy. She drew strong reviews from conservatives and the media. Veteran reporter Walter Shapiro wrote on the Web site of the New Republic, “Instead of playing her familiar role as a tea party troubadour, she came across as a right-winger who offered quiet competence and legislative experience.”

  Bachmann was just beginning to put together a presidential campaign. She had high name identification within the party and an established ability to raise money through direct mail, but lacked virtually everything else. “There was nothing,” said Keith Nahigian, who began as a senior strategist and later became her campaign manager. “There was no logo, there was no Web site, there was no infrastructure of any kind.” During the spring, Bachmann had reached out to Brett O’Donnell, the former debate coach at Liberty University, to help her prepare for those forums. Like Nahigian’s, his role too expanded over time. “His job description is debate coach,” wrote Amy Gardner in the Washington Post. “But he’s more accurately described as the candidate whisperer, because that’s what he does all day.” Ed Goeas, available after Barbour decided not to run, was hired as the campaign pollster.

  She recruited Ed Rollins, who was the campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, to run her operation, but only after a wobbly start in their relationship. “It wasn’t a great first date,” Rollins said of their initial lunch in May in New York. He said they disagreed about how to run the campaign and he told her he would not agree to come aboard unless she agreed to give him full authority, in essence to do as he told her. They parted without a deal. She later called him while he was on a Greek cruise, saying she wanted him and was prepared to work on those terms. “I foolishly said yes quickly,” he said. “I should have thought about it.” Their relationship never improved. Nonetheless, Rollins recruited others with whom he had been preparing for a Huckabee campaign. Among them were David Polyansky, who became deputy campaign manager, and Alice Stewart, who became Bachmann’s chief spokeswoman. There was tension from the start between the candidate and her campaign manager. “Someone had told her, and I don’t know who, that she needed to have a big-name strategist to manage her campaign,” said one Bachmann adviser. “So she followed that advice, and the only name that she could get to agree to it was Ed.”

  That mattered little in the days after the New Hampshire debate. Bachmann was now the new and hot candidate of the right. She pulled off a flawless announcement in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, and suddenly became a major obstacle in Pawlenty’s path. A week before the New Hampshire debate, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Bachmann with the support of only 4 percent of Republicans, tied with Pawlenty. A month later, she had leaped to second place with 16 percent. Pawlenty, meanwhile, had ticked down to 3 percent.

  Pawlenty never thought Bachmann would get into the race. When she did, he judged her as a short-term threat but nothing more than that. He said, “My view was she’s going to be formidable at least for a while because she has a lot of skill and ability and appeal at kind of the grassroots organizing level. And so it was a matter of making sure we didn’t do things that were disrespectful or unfair or anything like that but just let time take care of itself.” Nick Ayers said, “The day she formally announced in Waterloo, we said, ‘Look, she’s going to be for a while a real problem until she blows herself up.’ And we knew that we couldn’t blow her up, that we’d have to wait on her to do it, and eventually she would.” But instead of letting her burn out naturally, Pawlenty allowed himself to be drawn into a direct confrontation with her. It was perhaps the biggest strategic mistake of his campaign.

  • • •

  On June 9, Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, announced that his candidate would not participate in the August 13 Iowa Straw Poll. “We respect the straw poll process,” Rhoades said. “In the last presidential campaign we were both strengthened as an organization and learned some important lessons by participating in them. This time we will focus our energies and resources on winning primaries and caucuses.” One of the lessons Romney and his team had taken away from the 2008 campaign was that the straw polls resulted in an enormous drain in resources and energy for only a modest political return. Romney had won the Iowa Straw Poll in 2007, but not before spending several million dollars and heightening expectations for his performance in the caucuses. Rhoades was determined to avoid that mistake again. Skipping the straw poll was therefore an easy decision.

  Another piece of Romney’s strategy that was less evident at the time played out in spectacular fashion for his candidacy. Romney’s team wanted to consciously increase the pressure on Pawlenty to win in Ames. “We’d been to Iowa before,” Rhoades said. “We knew that the straw poll vote, what it took to go into it, the time commitment, the resource commitment to do it the right way. We really kind of hoped to get him out there on the prairie and [let him] essentially use up all his resources and just starve, for a better word.” Pawlenty had started the month of June with a strategy of turning the Republican race into a two-person contest between him and Romney. After the debate, he now found himself facing off against Bachmann for a costly and potentially meaningless prize in Ames.

  • • •

  All presidential campaigns hit moments of adversity. The best of them find a way through the problems. Pawlenty’s situation now became a downward spiral. Each new development fed on the others. The added pressure to do well at the straw poll meant more resources devoted to Ames. With Bachmann’s entry, skipping the straw poll might have been the wisest decision, but because of the disastrous debate performance, that seemed unthinkable. It would be seen as a further sign of weakness by a campaign bleeding openly. “The decision to go all in in Ames was made the day he got in the race and never revisited,” said Alex Conant, the campaign’s chief spokesman. Only Bob Schroeder, Pawlenty’s chief of staff as governor, raised the question of whether they should reconsider the strategy. He was a minority of one. Pawlenty said, “I think in hindsight we would have been better served, once
she got in the race, to pull back and live to fight over a longer period of time. But again this is all hindsight. At the time, I was comfortable with the decision, in fact signed off on the decision to keep going full steam ahead in Ames.”

  On June 25, the Des Moines Register published the results of its latest poll of the Republican field. Romney led with 23 percent, but Bachmann had vaulted to second at 22 percent. Pawlenty, at 6 percent, also trailed Cain, Paul, and Gingrich. The Register’s Jennifer Jacobs wrote, “Pawlenty has spent 26 days in Iowa during this election cycle, has hired an A-list team of Iowa campaign operatives and was the first major candidate to air television ads in Iowa.” It was not quite an obituary. “The Register poll was like a two-by-four to the face,” Phil Musser said. Pawlenty had staked everything on Iowa and had hired several veterans of Iowa politics, but his campaign was not coming together. After the announcement tour, his advisers had tried to measure the impact in Iowa. “When we started to do some minimal kind of phone calling into Iowa amongst likely caucus attendees, the awareness wasn’t high and our support levels were modest,” Pawlenty said. Fund-raising was lagging even more after the New Hampshire debate. In early July, little more than a month before the straw poll, Ayers recruited Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mike Huckabee’s daughter, to overhaul the Iowa operation.

  The candidate’s fragile position forced another decision that proved fateful. Determined to raise Pawlenty’s profile in the weeks remaining, the campaign invested heavily in radio and television commercials. “The idea, rightly or wrongly, behind the TV was we can’t get grassroots, on-the-ground support until we create an environment where people feel like they have some familiarity with you,” Pawlenty said. “TV was a way to do that.” Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times starkly explained Pawlenty’s position in a July 7 article. “Tim Pawlenty was first in line to enter the Republican presidential race,” he wrote. “He is now fighting to avoid becoming the earliest major candidate to be shown the door.”