Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America
Page 56
Wisconsin:
as battleground state, 319
collective bargaining as issue in, 319
election results in, 333
Republican nomination contest in, 224, 233, 247
Ryan campaigning in, 263, 319
WMUR-TV, 183
Wofford, Harris, 211
Wonder, Stevie, 12
Woog, Doug, 128–29
Wright, Jim, 193
YouTube, 118, 204, 294, 352
Zeleny, Jeff, 139
Zwick, Spencer, 89, 234, 274, 285, 338
About the Author
Dan Balz is the chief correspondent of the Washington Post and has covered American politics and government for four decades. A native of Freeport, Illinois, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and spent three years in the U.S. Army. He joined the Post in 1978 and served as national editor, political editor, White House correspondent, and Southwest regional correspondent before beginning full-time work as a national political reporter. He has won numerous awards for his coverage of politics and the presidency. He is coauthor of two previous books, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival with Ronald Brownstein, and The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election with Haynes Johnson. A collection of his columns about the 2012 election, Obama vs. Romney: “The Take” on Election 2012, was published as an e-book. He is a regular panelist on PBS’s Washington Week and on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown and appears frequently on many other public affairs programs.
*Iowa senator Tom Harkin held an annual steak fry, which Obama and all the other 2008 presidential candidates attended in the fall of 2007. His supporters marched together into the field where the event was held.
*Plouffe had long predicted a comfortable victory. He told me in June 2011 that he thought Obama would win more than 300 electoral votes, with a popular vote margin of two to three points.
*Among those also under consideration for the job was Jon Huntsman Jr., a former diplomat, the son of one of Utah’s richest and best-connected businessmen, and a future governor and rival to Romney.
*As a new senator, Obama had voted against raising the debt ceiling as a symbolic protest of rising deficits.
*DeMint announced his resignation from the Senate in December 2012 to become president of the Heritage Foundation.
*David Broder died on March 9, 2011.
*Many of these donors eventually became fund-raisers and bundlers for Romney.
*Kissinger’s office did not make the former secretary of state available for an interview for this book.
*In Tampa, he also came under attack for having supported mandatory vaccinations for teenage girls to prevent the spread of human papillomavirus, better known as HPV, a common sexually transmitted disease. Had Bachmann, who led the charge, not made a post-debate misstatement of her own, that line of attack might have hurt him more.
*Some super PACs also established separate entities that were regulated by the Internal Revenue Service and were not required to disclose the names of their donors.
*A week later, a Gingrich spokesman admitted that the candidate’s claim had been false. The campaign had offered only his two daughters to rebut Marianne Gingrich’s allegations, not several other people as Gingrich had said.
*“Earned media” is a term used by campaign strategists to describe their efforts to produce coverage by the media favorable to their candidates or harmful to their opponents.
*At the time of the 2012 campaign, the Santorums had seven living children.
*As it turned out, a decision that looked risky in May turned out not to be risky at all. Fund-raising began to surge again in August and never slowed. The campaign had all the money it could spend in the final weeks.
*Christie recalled that Romney’s team wanted twelve years of tax returns. This was at a time when Romney had agreed to make public only two years of his own returns.
*Rivera lost his bid for reelection in November 2012.
*Romney told me later he paid little attention to the ongoing debate in his campaign about whether the election would be a referendum or a choice. He said he also thought it was as much a choice as anything else.
*The Obama campaign had a similar breakdown with similar technology on election day 2008. An Obama official told me after the 2012 election, “That’s not why they lost. It was never going to be a reason they were going to win either.”
*The Washington Post’s Fact Checker said the Obama ads were a distortion of an article the Post had run describing companies in which Bain had invested as “pioneers” in outsourcing and offshoring.
*Organizing for Action pledged transparency by making its donors public.