by Balz, Dan
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Obama liked to believe—and told people—that he was a better candidate than he had been in 2008. Yet he was anything but mistake-free. On June 8, he held a press conference to warn that economic problems in Europe could spill over into the United States, something both his economic and political advisers were deeply worried about at the time. But he made a mess of it when, in trying to talk about the state of the U.S. economy, he said, “The private sector is doing fine.” He was trying to draw a distinction between job growth, however tepid, in the private sector and job cuts in the public sector, but that was quickly lost. Republicans pounced. “Is he really that out of touch?” Romney said in a coordinated attack by GOP leaders. Obama’s advisers realized instantly that what the president had said was a big mistake and urged him to clean it up quickly. Later that day, during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, Obama tried to walk it back. “Listen,” he said, “it is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing well.”
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The summer months were eventually remembered for the battle over Bain. But a closer look at the Obama ad spending shows a different early focus. The Obama team had prepared various attacks—on Romney’s record at Bain, on his tenure as governor, on his tax returns and investments. But before they did that, Obama’s advisers ran positive ads whose main purpose was to remind people of the problems Obama had inherited. As bad and as recent as it had been, the campaign’s research found that people had forgotten. Once they had laid down that foundation, they would turn to Romney’s record in Massachusetts and then his finances and business record. One reason for starting the negative ads with Massachusetts was that at the time, the campaign’s research showed that Romney had an advantage over Obama on who was better equipped to create jobs. “We felt that if we exposed people to the Massachusetts record we could erode those attributes, and that taking that away from him would be detrimental to his candidacy,” Grisolano said. If they could “pop that balloon,” as media adviser Jim Margolis put it, they could undermine the entire rationale for Romney’s candidacy. The Massachusetts ads began in early June and continued throughout the month. The campaign invested close to $50 million in attacking Romney’s record as governor.
On June 21, the Washington Post published an article that caused another shift in the ad strategy. Citing SEC documents, reporter Tom Hamburger wrote, “During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components.” The story went on to say that an investigation of the records “shows the extent of Bain’s investment in firms that specialized in helping other companies move or expand operations overseas. While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment.”
The Obama campaign quickly turned the story into television commercials. Independent fact-checking organizations said the ads distorted the Post article, but the Obama camp ignored those critiques. The Romney team attacked both Obama and the Post. Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s communications director, called then executive editor Marcus Brauchli to say the story was incorrect and needed either a correction or a retraction. Brauchli also said she accused the Post of doing the Obama campaign’s bidding, and he took umbrage at Gitcho’s accusation that the newspaper and the Obama campaign were in cahoots on the story. Gitcho demanded that the editors meet with the campaign the next day. “I said I was sure we could find time, or we could meet later in the week or even next week,” Brauchli said. “That set [Gitcho] off. She said, approximately, ‘You don’t understand. We’re taking on water. Every day, every hour we wait, we’re taking on water.’” The next day Gitcho and Matt McDonald, whom Bob White had put in charge of handling the details of the Bain issue, came to the Post. Before they arrived, someone leaked to Politico their intention to demand a retraction. Brauchli, who had been a reporter in Asia when American firms were expanding their overseas production facilities and knew the history of their activities, held firm during the meeting and refused to issue either a retraction or a clarification.
The Romney campaign’s relationship with the press was always tense and difficult. Reporters complained that the Romney team in Boston was rarely willing to engage at the front end on investigative stories but was quick to be critical after they appeared. Nor was the campaign particularly effective at pushing positive stories about their candidate, particularly his good work for his church. The traveling press corps was given little access either to the candidate or to senior staffers who could explain what the campaign was doing. From the perspective of Romney’s advisers, the press was a hostile group that cut the candidate no breaks no matter what they tried to do.
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On June 28, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling on the constitutionality of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. With Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion, the Court held, by a five-to-four vote, that the law was constitutional. Roberts’s reasoning surprised everyone, including many constitutional scholars. The Court held that, contrary to what the Obama administration had long argued, the individual mandate, the provision most disliked by conservatives, was not justified under the commerce clause that gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. But he said it was constitutional under Congress’s taxing power. This was novel and unexpected legal reasoning that avoided a huge breach between the executive and judicial branches of government and protected the Court from accusations that it was acting politically as an arm of the Republican Party.
Disappointed Republicans, who had made repeal a central theme of the campaign, nonetheless seized on the chief justice’s opinion to attack Obama as a tax raiser. A few days later, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that Romney disagreed with the Court, that he believed the mandate was not a tax. He said it should be considered a fee or a fine, as it had been defined in Massachusetts. Republicans responded angrily to Fehrnstrom’s comments, which contradicted their attacks on the president and suggested that Fehrnstrom take a vacation. Two days later, Romney reversed course. In an interview with CBS News, he said, “The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax.”
The Supreme Court decision effectively ended the debate over Obama’s health care law. If the decision had gone the other way, if the Court had overturned the law and thus rejected the signature domestic policy accomplishment of the Obama presidency, it might have done considerable damage to the president’s prestige and political standing. Instead, what had been seen as a potentially supercharged moment in the campaign quickly faded as a topic of political discussion.
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In July a Boston Globe story touched off another skirmish—the nastiest yet—between the two campaigns. The story raised questions about when Romney had actually severed ties with Bain. The candidate had said it was 1999, but the Globe found documents from 2002 that listed him as the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president.” Stephanie Cutter feared that reporters weren’t taking the story seriously enough, that they saw it as minor flap. She decided to make certain it got more attention and set up a conference call that included the campaign’s counsel, Robert Bauer. “Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony,” she said. “Or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments.” That inflammatory charge drew a response from Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades, who generally stayed out of the press unless he wanted to send a strong
message. “President Obama’s campaign hit a new low today when one of its senior advisers made a reckless and unsubstantiated charge to reporters about Mitt Romney that was so over the top that it calls into question the integrity of their entire campaign. President Obama ought to apologize for the out-of-control behavior of his staff, which demeans the office he holds.” The next morning, Obama was interviewed by Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning, and again defended the attacks on Bain. He said the private equity firm’s role was to make money, not create jobs. “That’s part of the system,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole, because as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.” Romney went on Fox News to denounce the Obama campaign. He called Cutter’s allegation that he was either a felon or a liar “ridiculous.” He said, “And of course it’s beneath the dignity of the presidency and of his campaign.” He added of the president, “He really needs to rein in his team and to finally take responsibility for what they’re saying. This is really absurd.”
During the month of July, the Obama attack ad campaign shifted from the governor’s Massachusetts record to the Bain record and to his taxes and investments. The campaign poured another roughly $50 million into the July attacks, sledgehammer pounding backed up by a sophisticated ad-buying strategy that ultimately put their ads on more than forty different cable networks—far more than any campaign had ever done. The most memorable ad Obama ran that month was an omnibus attack on Romney’s business record and wealth that stood out from the others because the entire audio was of Romney singing (a cappella) “America the Beautiful” at a campaign rally. As Romney’s voice played in the background, the mocking ad included text rolling across the screen that said Romney’s companies had shipped jobs to Mexico and China and outsourced jobs to India. Citing news accounts, the ad pointed out that the Republican nominee had “millions in a Swiss bank account . . . tax havens in Bermuda . . . and the Cayman Islands.” Romney wasn’t the solution, the ad concluded. “He’s the problem.”
The onslaught continued through the end of August, just as the conventions were beginning. In August, the Obama ad campaign shifted again, this time with about another $50 million worth of ads devoted to drawing direct contrasts between Obama and Romney. From May 1 until the end of August, the Obama campaign spent between $125 million and $150 million on its advertising campaign to tear down the Republican nominee. Kantar Media figures show that the campaign ran their ads 247,183 times. In that same period, Romney’s campaign spent about $50 million for about 90,500 ads. None of that money went for ads responding to the attacks on Bain. During that period, Republican super PACs stepped in to fill the gap. An analysis prepared by the Obama campaign showed that with the GOP outside groups, Romney and the Republicans remained at parity with the Obama campaign and in some weeks outspent the combined forces of Obama and Democratic outside groups. But in the candidate-to-candidate competition, there was no comparison. Obama overwhelmed Romney during the summer months. He could do that, Rhoades said, because he had the money, not because the Obama team made a brilliant strategic choice to front-load its advertising. “I don’t think there were people sitting here like, ‘Oh my gosh, TV doesn’t matter right now,’” he said. Ed Gillespie said, “To the Obama campaign’s credit, they were loaded for bear. They were waiting to unload and we were constantly reacting. For the challenger to be reacting as much as we were was frustrating. We were constantly taking incoming and constantly reacting. . . . I think the summer was pretty decisive.”
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The Romney campaign’s response, or lack of response, to the attacks on him during the summer became one of the biggest questions of the entire election. Why didn’t they answer with ads of their own? Why didn’t friendly super PACs pick up the slack? Did the Romney team even have a strategy for responding? What was really going on in Boston during three of the most important months of the campaign? If there was one lingering question about the summer battle, this was it.
Through April 2012, the campaign had raised $100 million and spent $91 million. They had just $9.2 million in cash on hand. Stuart Stevens said the campaign had four options for how to spend that money. “There’s a Mitt Romney story to be told, and you can break that story into just an overall story, sort of agent of change, turnaround artist,” he said. “You can break it down to the business bio stuff, a man for this moment, economic focus, this is what we need, we’re at war, this is Patton. You can do it on the personal qualities, this is a good and decent man and here are these ways to tell you about that. You can do the [Massachusetts] record. Here are the things this guy has done, proves he can do it. Overwhelmingly what people wanted to know is what he would do as president, and it became a threshold question that, before they would listen to the other, they needed to know that.”
Stevens said it would have been ideal to be able to do everything everyone was proposing (or that critics later said the campaign should have done). “Whenever people tell me things like this, I say, ‘You’re right about everything,’” he said. “They say, ‘It would have been better to talk about the business [record], it would have been better to talk more about his personal life and everything he did in charity.’ You’re right. It’s the same way they say it would have been better to spend more time in Des Moines. Absolutely. It would have been better to spend more time in Richmond. It would have helped. It would have been better to run more ads early. No question. Every day in the campaign, every moment is Sophie’s Choice.”
The day that Obama’s “Steel” ad was unveiled, the Romney campaign responded with an ad of its own. It told the story of Bain’s role in helping to build a different steel company, SDI, or Steel Dynamics, Inc., of Indiana. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in,” the ad claimed. It had a positive message, but it was only available online. The response that day set the pattern for the campaign. “We were prepared,” Rhoades later said in response to criticism that Romney’s campaign had stood by passively in the face of Obama’s attacks on Romney’s tenure at Bain. “We did everything else but paid Bain [ads].” The communications team, armed with the documents prepared by White’s research project, attempted to knock down every charge from the Obama campaign and critical story in the press. The response strategy also included an aggressive digital effort designed to push people toward positive stories about Romney and Bain, using the tools of Internet search. This was based on the theory that once people hear or see something, they look for more information. “When someone was going in to find [information about an attack] we would roadblock in front of it and say, ‘If you read one thing this is what you should read,’” Zac Moffatt said. “We would have a very concise response to whatever the allegation was. The links would say something like, ‘Learn the facts, learn the truth, learn how Mitt created jobs.’” The campaign hoped that this would leave a psychological impression that the charges lacked merit, or at least that there was a different version of events. One member of the campaign team, however, said, “We could do as many Web videos until we’re blue in the face, we could put out as many quotes about Bain as we could. But that wasn’t seeping in. It wasn’t making a difference. It definitely wasn’t breaking through.”
Lack of money was a serious problem. Fund-raising picked up immediately after Gingrich and Santorum finally dropped out, but most of the money that was being raised was only for use in the general election. Raising money that could be used between May and the convention was far more difficult. Most of the people who were willing to give Romney the maximum contribution of $2,500 had already done so. At every fund-raising event in the spring and early summer, a portion of what was raised went to immediate use, but at each event much more went to Romney’s general election account or to the Republican National Committee’s victory fund.
The campaign did have some money for television a
ds, but decided not to use any of it to respond to the Bain attacks. “There was no umbrella answer that you could give that would put the thing to bed,” Russ Schriefer said later. “So the question became, what do you spend your limited resources on? Do you spend them on defending on Bain and let them play this out, or do we try to open up a front on something of our own and try to define Romney as best as we can?” Attacking Obama was problematic as well. The Romney team found in its research that voters were still resistant to direct attacks on the president. Many voters were disappointed in Obama, including supporters from 2008, but they liked him personally and recoiled against some of the kinds of personal attacks common in campaigns. “This guy is a tough guy to hit,” Rhoades said of the president. “If it went too far it wasn’t going to work.”
Romney chose to spend his advertising dollars on commercials explaining what he would do as president, rather than responding to the attacks. The campaign aired a series of commercials called “Day One” that laid out in general terms the actions he would initiate once he became president. Eric Fehrnstrom said, “We were resource-limited and our research told us that what people wanted to know most about Mitt was not a response to the Bain attacks but what was he going to do as president.” Equally important, the Romney team did not want to spend the summer litigating Bain. “That’s not where we wanted to fight the campaign, that’s not the fight we wanted,” Fehrnstrom said. “So we fought back hard in the earned media. We had an aggressive Web video program that we did around Bain. But ultimately the decision was not to go up on TV with the response.” Campaign officials also talked about putting together a surrogate operation composed of former business associates of Romney who could tell his story in personal terms. Everyone agreed this was a good idea, but it never got done, another example of a lost opportunity by the Romney team. It was, as one official later said, “the urgent driving out the important.” But it came at a cost to the candidate.