by Balz, Dan
The 47 percent video hit less than a week after Romney had created controversy over the Obama administration’s handling of protests in Egypt over an American-made video attacking the Prophet Muhammad and later that day the killing of four Americans in Libya, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens. On September 11, protests erupted in Cairo as demonstrators angry over the American video stormed the U.S. embassy climbed over the wall, took down the American flag, and replaced it with a black flag bearing an Islamic inscription. Before the demonstrations turned violent, the embassy had issued a statement that appeared to be an effort to mollify the protestors. “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others,” the statement said. Meanwhile, a separate confrontation was unfolding in Benghazi, though it would take hours before either the White House or the State Department realized how deadly it had become.
As reports continued to update developments, the Romney campaign decided to weigh in. This was an opportunity, advisers believed, to attack the president for siding with Islamic militants rather than defending American values of free speech, however repugnant the video that sparked the demonstrations was. Romney had long accused the president of apologizing for America, and this seemed a perfect example. Romney was on an airplane as the campaign worked out the language. When he was able to read it, he gave his approval. The statement was issued at about 10 p.m. that night, though it initially carried a midnight embargo. Within minutes, the embargo had been broken. “It’s disgraceful,” the statement said, “that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” At that point, the full extent of the tragedy in Benghazi was not yet known. Romney’s advisers did not know that the ambassador and the other Americans had been killed. By morning, however, everyone knew. Nonetheless, rather than step back, Romney went before the cameras to repeat his criticism. “Apologizing for America’s values is never the right course,” he said. His criticism of the embassy’s statement was certainly justified—even members of the administration were outraged that it had been issued and told reporters it had not been cleared in Washington—but his timing was poorly chosen. At a moment when the nation was absorbing the shocking deaths of four Americans, Romney appeared more interested in scoring political points. His comments drew a sharp rebuke from the president. “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,” he said. But criticism of Romney also came from prominent Republicans.
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Romney was suffering from other problems in September. On September 17, Peter Hart convened another of his focus groups. He went to Fairfax, Virginia, for a second time, assembling a group of undecided voters. As the two-hour discussion unfolded, two things became clear. Even voters who said they were undecided had more or less made up their minds. Of the twelve members of the group, only four seemed truly undecided. The other revelation was the degree to which Obama’s attacks on Romney over abortion, contraception, and family planning had reached the targeted audience of women voters and threatened Romney’s hopes of narrowing the gender gap.
The Obama White House had begun the year on the defensive over whether religiously affiliated facilities—mainly hospitals and universities—would be required to provide free contraception even if doing so violated their religious beliefs. But the Republicans in Congress mangled the public relations of their response, turning what had been a problem for the White House into a weapon in the contest to win the women’s vote. The Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee scheduled hearings on the contraceptive issue but declined to hear testimony from any women. Sandra Fluke, a thirty-year-old Georgetown University law student, had asked to be included on the list of witnesses. When she later told her story and argued for free contraception, Rush Limbaugh attacked her as a “slut” and a “prostitute” who wanted to be “paid to have sex.” (Under pressure, Limbaugh later apologized for the remarks.) Democrats declared that Republicans were waging a “war on women.” Romney had stepped carefully through that winter controversy, but he was on record calling for an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The Obama campaign ran a series of ads over the summer attacking Romney and the GOP as extremists. As with other attacks, the Romney campaign decided not to respond, though that was not a unanimous view among the senior staff. Some Romney advisers thought he was taking an unnecessary risk not putting ads on television rebutting the attacks.
Inside the focus group facility in Fairfax, Hart had asked all of the participants to outline the issue of greatest concern to them. Nine people cited the economy, while two said it was health care. But as Hart probed the reasons why the truly undecided still were not certain about their vote, another reality revealed itself. “One thing that hasn’t come up is women’s rights and women’s health,” one of the women said. Hart asked which candidate she thought would be better on those issues. “Obama,” she said. He asked another woman, a McCain voter from 2008, why she was not yet firmly in Romney’s column. “You know, it should be locked down,” she replied. “And I think part of it has to do with the Republican platform and the women’s health issues, which should not be an issue.” An Obama voter from 2008 said there were aspects of Romney’s career and ideas that she liked. “One of the things he has going for him is he has a history of working well with the other party, and that’s what we need right now. But part of me can’t get past some of the other little things.” Like what? Hart asked. “Women’s health, gay issues, the right for everybody to marry, those types of things kind of hold me back.”
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Romney’s explanation about the 47 percent comment did nothing to quell the controversy. His advisers could see that it seemed to confirm everything his critics had been saying about him, that he was out of touch with ordinary Americans, or that he saw the world through a prism that made it impossible for him to identify with the lives and aspirations of the middle class or the working class. Prominent conservatives in the media joined others to attack him. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said, “This is dangerous—not because he’s going to lose that 47 percent of the vote—but because you’re going to start seeing suburban voters, swing voters, storm away from the campaign as quickly as possible unless he fixes it.” New York Times columnist David Brooks likened Romney to Thurston Howell III, the wealthy, aristocratic New Englander from the old television series Gilligan’s Island. “Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not—some sort of cartoonish government-hater,” he wrote. “But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign.” Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote a blistering critique headlined “Time for an Intervention.” “What should Mitt Romney do now?” she wrote. “He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly. And then he needs to snap out of it and move.” Leaders of some of the Republican super PACs began to discuss whether they should shift their substantial funds out of the presidential race into competitive House and Senate contests.
As the 47 percent controversy was gathering momentum, Phil Rucker and I met in Boston to take the temperature of the Romney’s advisers. In our conversations, they were defiantly upbeat, determined not to show how worried they were. As political professionals, they were trying to win the election, not wallow in their problems. To the outside world, they displayed a united and, without totally straining credibility, positive face. The race was not lost in the least, they asserted. But privately they were deeply wor
ried. They had absorbed the worst body blow of the general election and were not sure at that point how lasting the damage might turn out to be. They had only one night of polling by the time we arrived, so they could be safely constrained in their assessment. Neil Newhouse later said he had actually stopped polling after the video was disclosed. “We know what it’s going to look like,” he later said. “We’ve got to dig our way through this, we’ve got to push our way through it, and there’s nothing in the polling right now that’s going to [help]. We know what we’ve got to do and how we’ve got to do it.”
If the Romney campaign stopped polling, nobody else did, and the findings grew progressively worse as the days went along. Every other day a new poll was published showing Romney slipping in one of the battleground states. Within two weeks of the video being revealed, three polls showed Romney trailing Obama in Ohio by eight, nine, and ten points. In Florida and Virginia, two other must-win states for the challenger, Obama was holding a small but consistent lead. More than the poll numbers turned against Romney. It was impossible to find a story or commentary that did not suggest the race was almost over. A Democrat close to Obama called me one day in late September. “Is it over?” he asked. That was typical of the prevailing sentiment, even if the polls didn’t quite show it. Romney taped an interview with CBS anchor Scott Pelley for 60 Minutes. “You are slipping in the polls at this moment,” Pelley said. “A lot of Republicans are concerned about this campaign. You bill yourself as a turnaround artist. How are you going to turn this campaign around?” Romney replied, “Well, actually, we’re tied in the polls. We’re all within the margin of error. We bounce around, week to week, day to day. . . .” “Governor, I appreciate your message very much,” Pelley said. “But that wasn’t precisely the question. You’re the CEO of this campaign. A lot of Republicans would like to know, a lot of your donors would like to know, how do you turn this thing around? You’ve got a little more than six weeks. What do you do?” Romney wouldn’t hear it. “Well, it doesn’t need a turnaround. We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president [of] the United States.”
Another shift came the week after the video. Gillespie issued a memo that finally jettisoned the idea that the election was largely a referendum on the president’s record. “This election is a choice,” he wrote, as if starting to take lines from an Obama stump speech. “And the simple fact is we can’t afford four more years of Obama’s failed policies.” Paul Ryan was one of the catalysts for the change. One Romney adviser said Ryan was outspoken during conference calls about the need to draw a sharper contrast. “He didn’t see the referendum stuff was working,” the adviser said. He thought Romney had specific plans and proposals that were more attractive than the president’s but did not think people were hearing the distinctions clearly enough.*
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It had become clear to everyone that trying to explain away the 47 percent comment was failing. But it would take Romney almost three weeks to say publicly that what he said at the Florida fund-raiser was wrong, rather than just inelegant. He was asked about the comment during an interview with Fox News. “Well, clearly in a campaign, with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right,” he said. “In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.” One adviser likened the decision to finally admit error to trying to land a huge fish. “At some point, you just cut the line and let that fish drop back into the water and not try to get it in the boat,” he said.
At Obama headquarters, the president’s advisers tried to keep the race in perspective. Their overall battleground state survey showed Romney dropping three points—from 47 to 44 percent—in the days after the video became public, with Obama’s number rising from 50 to 51. They dismissed some of the more optimistic public polls from individual battleground states. Their own numbers showed a tighter race. Plouffe warned others that the public numbers were artificial and subject to change. This was still a close race, he told the team. From Boston, I flew to Chicago to see how the Obama team assessed everything. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager and a veteran of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, told me, “I’m realistic that Romney’s had a couple of bad weeks. But there’s lots of time for him to recover. John Kerry was behind George Bush significantly at this point and he completely recovered after the debates. That’s what Mitt Romney’s banking on.” But even for a team that trusted in its data, it was difficult to believe that the massive hit Romney had taken could not be changing the race.
CHAPTER 24
Debacle in Denver
At 6:59 p.m. Denver time on the evening of October 3, Jim Messina tweeted the following message: “We are back stage in our hold room, Obama staff together eating pizza and fired up. 1 minute left. #forwardnotback.” A minute later, a light on a nearby television camera glowed red, and the more than sixty million people watching could hear the familiar voice of a veteran newsman and debate moderator: “Good evening from the Magness Arena at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. I’m Jim Lehrer of the PBS NewsHour and I welcome you to the first of the 2012 presidential debates between President Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee.” As Lehrer made the introductions, Newark mayor Cory Booker, as if holding his breath in anticipation of what was about to unfold on the stage, tweeted, “Here we go! #debate.”
The incumbent and the challenger were dressed in the team colors of red and blue America. Obama wore a dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie. Romney wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. The political narrative for the encounter had been fixed two weeks earlier with the release of the 47 percent video. Romney had arrived in Denver on the defensive, with his party demoralized. He appeared at risk of letting the contest slip away from him a month before election day. Polls showed the president with his biggest lead of the campaign. But the fired-up message from Messina belied considerable nervousness inside Obama’s reelection campaign. Preparations for Denver had gone badly. Everyone around the president was worried about what might happen.
Over the next ninety minutes, 10.3 million tweets would chronicle the Denver debate. At its high point, the debate generated almost 159,000 tweets per minute. This medium, which barely existed four years earlier, became the arbiter and the real-time spin room of one of the most important presidential debates in history, a pithy, running national conversation that was at turns devastatingly incisive in its judgments of the two men or hilariously funny at pointing out their foibles. The 10.3 million tweets eclipsed the tweets-per-minute pace set during the two political conventions a month earlier and marked, if not the coming of age of this medium, then at least an irrefutable confirmation of its power to shape elite opinions and perceptions. As Obama and Romney sparred onstage, they were oblivious to this running stream of commentary that was rendering judgment long before time was called at the end.
“Gentlemen, welcome to you both,” Lehrer said. “Let’s start the economy, segment one, and let’s begin with jobs. What are the major differences between the two of you about how you would go about creating new jobs?” Obama, by coin toss, went first. “There are a lot of points that I want to make tonight,” he said, “but the most important one is that twenty years ago I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me. And so I just want to wish, sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now, we will not be celebrating it in front of forty million people.” He appeared slightly stiff as he delivered his lines. He segued into the economy, reminding viewers of the problems he had inherited. He claimed progress but said it was not enough. He drew a contrast with his opponent. “The question here tonight is not where we’ve been but where we’re going. Governor Romney has a perspective that says if we cut taxes skewed towards the wealthy and roll back regulations that we’ll be better off. I’ve got a different view.”
When it was Romney’s turn, he too began by mentioning the president’s wedding day. “Congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary,” he said. “I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine—here with me.” The audience laughed. Then he turned to what he called the “very tender topic” of the economy. Romney spoke of people he and his wife had met along the campaign trail who had lost their job or their home. He outlined his plan to restore the economy. He drew a contrast with the president, countering criticism that his approach was a return to “trickle-down economics.” “The president has a view very similar to the view he had when he ran four years ago, that a bigger government, spending more, taxing more, regulating more—if you will, trickle-down government—would work. That’s not the right answer for America. I’ll restore the vitality that gets America working again.”
On Twitter, Chuck Todd of NBC said, “An old Clinton trick by Romney, using real people stories to make his point.” Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic tweeted, “Romney did better on the subject of Obama’s anniversary than Obama did on the subject of Obama’s anniversary.” Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin tweeted, “Obama rambled. Romney gets off to strong start by recounting mtg w/woman in Dayton OH w/hubby out of work.” New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow noticed Obama’s body language. “Obama looks like he’s biting his tongue,” he tweeted. Conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham saw Romney in fighting form. “Romney killed first answer,” her tweet read. David Frum, a Bush White House speechwriter, said of the president, “Obama uncombative. He must have good poll news.” At 9:14 p.m., Michael Tomasky, editor of the liberal journal Democracy, observed, “Obama isn’t aggressive enough, not countering Romney enough.” A tweeter dubbed @LOLGOP sent out a comparable message: “I think Mitt Romney had his first Frappuccino tonight,” suggesting that Romney might have had extra energy because he had violated Mormonism’s prohibition on caffeine. In the Obama war room, Stephanie Cutter could see what was happening. The debate was being lost in the opening fifteen minutes because of a medium that had not even played a role in the campaign four years earlier. Cutter exclaimed to her colleagues, “We’re getting killed on Twitter!” David Plouffe turned to White House chief of staff Jack Lew. “This is a disaster,” he said.