by Balz, Dan
More than anyone else in the operation, Stevens established and articulated the strategic framework that guided Romney. He told others that this would not be a Match.com election, his shorthand for 2008, when so many people felt so positive about Obama. It would be a Monster.com campaign—all about jobs and the economy. “My take on the whole thing has always been it’s going to be easy or impossible,” he said that April morning in Wisconsin. “It wouldn’t seem easy but that it would be. And that it was going to be an economically driven election.” During the 2010 election cycle, Stevens had begun traveling to jobs fairs around the country, filming the stories of people in the lines as they sought work. He talked constantly about the suffering of the unemployed and the state of the country under Obama. He urged everyone he knew to read the story by Michael Luo, published in the New York Times in August 2010, about one woman’s descent from a middle-class existence to life in a cheap motel hundreds of miles from home after losing her job and later her unemployment benefits. He launched a project to find and film people who had gone from hope to despair during Obama’s presidency. One member of the creative team at the campaign, Jim Ferguson—“Fergie” to everyone—had read about a young man in Iowa who had lost his job and was now digging graves. Ferguson went to Iowa and somehow found him and filmed him and made a poignant video about how hope and change had not worked out for some Americans. Stevens was virtually certain that the campaign would turn on the economy and voters’ dissatisfaction with the president’s performance. He ticked through the statistics of Obama’s presidency: More Americans were out of work, more Americans had lost their homes, more Americans had fallen into poverty. “They can’t blame Romney for that,” he said.
Where are you at this point? I asked him that morning. “Doesn’t matter where we are, it’s just where he is. [If] his job approval’s at 43 [percent], the guy’s got problems. Forty-eight? That’s better for him, if it stays there.” He said the president seemed intent on trying to play off dissatisfaction with what George W. Bush had done in office. “He’s trying to reformulate an argument here he would use against Bush. The problem is, he’s president. It’s not an MRI of the soul,” he said. “It’s an MRI of his record. And they can’t change that.”
Obama’s advisers understood everything Stevens said about the economy. They believed that Obama’s biggest opponent would be the economy itself, more than any of the Republicans. But they also saw the challenger as particularly ill-suited to run in a year in which their research showed that people were looking for someone who would champion the middle class, someone whom they could touch and feel, not just a jobs mechanic. It was David Axelrod, Stevens’s counterpart on the Obama campaign, who had been saying that presidential elections were an “MRI of the soul” for the candidates, and that summed up precisely how the Chicago team saw the campaign. Though they had long assumed Romney would become the Republican nominee, Obama’s advisers also believed he was the wrong candidate for the times. Jim Messina said throughout the spring and summer that Romney was a bad fit in the industrial Midwest, with his profile as a corporate executive who had shuttered factories. Axelrod believed Romney reflected two aspects of contemporary life that were most troubling to people. One was the general unfairness, the feeling that things were tilted toward the wealthy or the bosses. The other was the belief that too many politicians were more interested in self-preservation than problem solving. He believed that voters would come to see Romney that way, particularly if the Obama campaign did its job. They watched him through the nomination battle, as he was pummeled by his opponents or made his own mistakes—dealing with his tax returns, for example—and saw the attacks exposing genuine vulnerabilities that they could exploit in the general election. After the election was over, Axelrod put it this way: “On paper, Romney seemed like a good candidate because of [being a] businessman, job creator, and a lot of that stuff. But at the end of the day he was maybe the worst candidate to speak to this. . . . Nobody knew Mitt Romney really at the beginning. I don’t think they knew him at all. [What] they knew in the first instance was businessman, and the businessman patina was valuable. . . . It was very important for us to fill in the blanks. If he had just been allowed to be this cardboard-cutout successful businessman, he conceivably could have won.”
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The attacks on Romney were months in the making. Obama’s advisers assembled a huge database on Romney. They hired financial researchers and experts on SEC filings to pore over the records of Bain’s investments. They dissected his record as governor of Massachusetts. When Romney was governor, all his public appearances and statements were videotaped. The Obama campaign got copies of the videos and transcribed them all. They sent people to the Cayman Islands to dig into the investment entities associated with Romney. They began finding and filming people who had been hurt when companies owned by Bain were closed down.
Stephanie Cutter, who shifted from the White House to Chicago in late 2011 to become a deputy campaign manager, pushed hard to drive attention to Bain and Romney’s record as early as possible. She was an alumnus of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and knew what an incumbent president’s reelection campaign could do to a challenger. She was determined to use whatever resources were available to do the same to Romney, starting long before he was the nominee. She sent what the campaign called “Bain victims” into Iowa and New Hampshire during the GOP caucus and primary campaigns to tell their stories at press conferences. When Newt Gingrich took up the issue as the GOP candidates were moving from New Hampshire into South Carolina, she became alarmed that it could lose its potency because of the way both Gingrich and Romney handled it. Cutter described Gingrich’s Bain attack as overshooting the runway. Gingrich’s attacks, along with those of his super PAC, allowed Romney to turn the issue in his favor—in a Republican primary at least—by accusing his critics of launching an attack on free enterprise. The Obama campaign intended to fight a different battle. They would marry it with attacks on Romney’s unwillingness to release his tax returns and his Swiss bank account and Cayman Islands investments. To them this would be a debate not about the free enterprise system but about the character and values of the Republican nominee.
Romney’s team was far from indifferent or lackadaisical about the role Bain would play in the election. They knew it had been a factor in every campaign Romney had run, starting in 1994 against Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and in 2002 when he ran for governor. Like the Obama team, their preparation began in the fall of 2011. Bob White, a cofounder of Bain and one of Romney’s closest confidants, oversaw the project. He believed deeply in what Bain had done and in the integrity of the partners and the company. White conducted a seminar for the Romney team: What is Bain Capital? What is a private equity firm? How does one work? The discussions included lines of attack they could expect—such as Bain profiting even when companies went out of business, or the role of outsourcing or offshoring of jobs. They discussed a small group of companies whose stories would provide fodder for Obama’s attacks, companies that had been used before by Romney’s opponents. White oversaw the creation of an internal team to deal with the coming attacks—a lawyer, researchers, and communications experts who could respond instantly. They put together case studies of companies, timelines of what had happened, all the vulnerabilities they could compile. They reached out to CEOs of companies Bain had owned to check their facts and to find documents. “We had CEOs crawling around up in their attics looking for records,” Eric Fehrnstrom said.
The team also searched out the positive stories about Bain. White believed there was a good story to tell—specifically, more than 120 investments in about a hundred companies, the vast majority of which were successful. As the Obama team was filming victims, the Romney team started to film testimonials featuring people from CEOs to middle managers to younger workers. Ashley O’Connor, who coordinated the advertising operation, sent crews out around the country to build an archive of good news. The inventory inclu
ded nearly two dozen positive statements ready to be used when needed. But they came to realize that tit-for-tat wasn’t sufficient. “[The Obama campaign] very cleverly also made it a character issue about Mitt,” Fehrnstrom later said, “and I think it contributed to this sentiment that Mitt ‘doesn’t understand people like me.’”
Bob White argued for another approach as well, which was to do more to fill in Romney’s biography. He was a consistent advocate for doing more to introduce people to Romney, to enhance his image, to show him in settings and with stories and language that contrasted with the stereotyped figure in the Democrats’ attacks. He believed that the time to do that was in the summer before the conventions—or much earlier. “We need to define him,” he would say. Beth Myers and Tagg Romney believed the same thing but were never forceful enough to change things. Tagg had pressed at the earliest stages of the campaign, even before the primaries, for more attention to humanizing his dad. Eventually he stopped getting invitations to campaign strategy meetings.
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Obama’s two-minute “Steel” ad was intended mostly as a conversation starter and an experiment, rather than a full-fledged paid advertising campaign. The campaign spent less than $100,000 to put it on television. But it was discussed (and played) repeatedly on cable news shows, and the amplification effect gave the topic widespread prominence in the public conversation about the race. The ad produced immediate results—though not exactly as the Obama campaign might have hoped. Newark mayor Cory Booker, on NBC’s Meet the Press, said he found attacks on the morality of private equity to be “nauseating.” Steve Rattner, who had served as Obama’s auto czar and was a prominent Democratic donor, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe the day after Booker made his comments. “I think the ad is unfair,” he said. He said Bain had operated within the rules and had earned a good reputation doing so. While decrying the loss of jobs for some workers, he added, “This is part of capitalism. This is part of life, and I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.” Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, told BuzzFeed, “I think they’re very disappointing. I think Bain is fair game, because Romney has made it fair game. But I think how you examine it, the tone, what you say, is important as well.” Those criticisms reflected the long-standing connections many Democrats had with private equity firms. Obama had received a substantial amount of money from Bain employees.
The day after Booker’s criticism, Obama was asked about the Bain attacks during a press conference at a NATO summit in Chicago. He said they were not a distraction but the essence of what the campaign was about. “If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about,” Obama said. “It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity. But that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.” Asked whether he thought Romney was responsible for the job losses cited in the attacks, Obama said, “Mr. Romney is responsible for the proposals he is putting forward for how he says he is going to fix the economy. And if the main basis for him suggesting he can do a better job is his track record as the head of a private equity firm, then both the upsides and the downsides are worth examining.”
The next week, Bill Clinton weighed in and appeared to create more heartburn for Chicago. In a CNN interview, he gave Romney high marks for his business record and defended the role of private equity in the economy, noting that not all investments in failing companies turn into success stories. He saw nothing disqualifying in Romney’s biography. “The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold [to be president],” he said. Obama’s team stood its ground. His advisers dismissed the criticism by Booker and Rendell and commentators as a conversation among the elites who lived in television green rooms rather than the real world. Three days after the president responded, I was in Chicago and sat down with Axelrod. “All we’re saying is, it certainly doesn’t qualify him to be president and he’s offering it as a qualification,” he said. “That really is the linchpin of his whole argument, that he’s an economic whiz who can get under the hood and fix the economy, and that’s a very dubious proposition. It was dubious ten years ago when he pitched it to the people of Massachusetts, and it didn’t turn out well, and it’s dubious now.” Then he got to the bottom line. “We just got out of the field yesterday in the battleground states and there’s nothing in that polling that tells me that this has been a bad week for us.”
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On May 26, Obama met with his political advisers in the Roosevelt Room in the White House. The campaign had run almost forty hours of positive ads that month aimed at establishing Obama’s credentials as a protector of the middle class and reminding voters of the economic conditions when he took office. That same plan, set out much earlier, anticipated a shift to ads attacking Romney beginning in June. But Messina had a significant change in plans to present to the president. What he put on the table was new—a proposal to radically rearrange how and when the campaign would spend its money. Messina, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Grisolano had been talking about the importance of the summer months and the potential for Republican super PACs to bring their collective resources to bear in attacking Obama. “We were concerned that the super PACs would overwhelm us in the summer and we needed to be fortified for that,” Axelrod said. “But the bigger thing was, we needed to define him in the race in the summer, because my read of history was that there has never been a race that’s been determined by an ad that appeared after Labor Day.” Messina told the president he wanted to take $63 million already budgeted for the fall media and spend it during the summer. The proposal called for taking about half of the money slotted for September and about 40 percent allocated for October and shoving it to June and July and August. Messina also made clear that if the president signed off, the campaign risked being dramatically outspent on the air by the Romney campaign in October, unless it exceeded its fund-raising projections, which at that moment appeared problematic. The campaign had missed one of its fund-raising targets that spring, a rarity for an operation that always seemed flush with cash. Messina had quietly ordered a monthlong hiring freeze.
Most of the post-election attention on the May 26 meeting focused on the advertising budget, but another part of the discussion was equally important. Messina also recommended that the president sign off on an immediate and substantial expansion in the field operation. He was worried about the pace of the campaign’s grassroots organizing. The number of persuadable voters was minuscule. To win, the Obama campaign needed to change the electorate in the battleground states, and the only way to do that was through a more intensive effort to register voters and then get them to the polls. Without a more robust registration effort, which was labor-intensive, Obama would face substantial difficulties winning several of the battleground states. If the campaign wanted to stay competitive in as many places as possible, Messina believed, he needed Obama to approve this as well. Messina and Plouffe knew how important it was to beef up the ground operation, but they faced strong internal pressure to scale it back. Then and later, others in the campaign pushed hard to take money from the organizing budget—did the campaign really need eight hundred paid staff in Florida?—and put it into advertising. Messina fought hard and prevailed.
Enthusiasm was another problem that a more robust ground operation could address. One official said the campaign also had received a wake-up call on May 5, when Obama formally began his campaign with rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia. Four years earlier, it took almost no effort by the Obama team to build a crowd for campaign events, once Obama was truly launched. But on this Saturday in May, the crowds did not fill either of the arenas. One official said the campaign subsequently made two hundred thousand phone calls to make sure they filled a three-thousand-seat venue in Iowa at one of the president’s next e
vents.
Messina succinctly framed the decision he asked Obama to make that day: “Are we going to dump the kitchen sink now?” Obama generally trusted his team and their decisions. He did not get into the weeds of strategy the way Bill Clinton did. In this case, however, he wasn’t ready to sign off without raising concerns. “He didn’t just say, ‘Okay guys, that’s great,’” Plouffe said. “He wanted to understand what it would mean. It’s one of the few times where after we make a decision he still is asking, ‘Are we sure this is going to be okay?’” Obama wanted a better sense of how much he might be buried by Romney ads in the final days if the campaign raised less than projected. He said to Messina, “Jim, what happens if we miss?” Messina said he replied, “Then we’re in real trouble, but I don’t think we’re going to miss.” Julianna Smoot, the deputy campaign manager in charge of fund-raising, had come to this meeting specifically to address the president’s concerns about the money. We’ll be fine, she assured him.*
The same weekend that Obama and his team were making the decision to front-load their spending, the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA began its attacks on Romney, using Bain Capital as the foil. Within weeks, it started to air one of the most powerful and effective ads of the campaign. Like “Steel,” in shorthand it told the story of what happened when Ampad, which Bain owned, bought a paper company in Indiana. One of the workers, Mike Earnest, was featured in the ad, describing how he and others were asked one day to help build a stage. It was from that stage that a few days later the plant managers announced they were shutting down the factory. Earnest said, “Turns out that when we built that stage it was like building my own coffin—and it just made me sick.”