The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Romney was stung by the ferocity of the media backlash. He had expected some naysayers, sure, but not this kind of virulence. What in the world? he kept thinking. A few weeks ago everybody wanted me to run. What happened?

  Many in Romney’s inner circle were convinced they knew the answer. They believed that Murphy—a long-ago Romney adviser who was now working as Jeb’s message maven—was behind the anti-Mitt onslaught in the press, using a well-lubricated pipeline of Bush connections to transport hit pieces into influential news outlets. “No one really thinks Peggy Noonan wrote that piece without encouragement from Bush World,” grumbled one loyal Romney adviser. “She did it to thank her sponsors.”

  Romney kept plugging away for three hectic and increasingly miserable weeks—diligently working through his call sheet every day, poring over polling data, and delivering a carefully crafted speech in San Diego designed to test potential themes for a 2016 campaign (more stories about his church service, fewer hymns to the American job creator). On January 22, 2015, he made a last-ditch effort to regain the upper hand when Jeb flew to Utah for a one-on-one meeting at Romney’s home in Park City. The appointment had been on the books for months, but recent developments had turned the powwow into a major news event, with reporters and cameramen ambushing Jeb at the Salt Lake City airport and camping out at the perimeter of Romney’s property. That afternoon, beneath the soaring cathedral ceilings of his rustic Deer Valley mansion, Romney produced a portfolio of private polling data that one of his former donors had commissioned. Based on thousands of survey respondents across twenty states, the strikingly thorough report revealed widespread support for Romney among Republican primary voters—and serious vulnerabilities for Jeb.

  But Bush was undeterred. He was confident the voters would come around eventually—they always did. For now, what mattered was winning the invisible primary, wooing the insiders, and staying the course on his shock-and-awe assault. With his operation flush with fund-raising cash, Jeb began vacuuming up the party’s best consultants and operatives with frightening speed and efficiency. The hiring spree created plenty of apparent organizational redundancies, but the point wasn’t to effectively staff his future campaign: it was to make sure that other candidates couldn’t staff theirs. “Jeb’s pitch is one word: juggernaut,” said a Republican consultant who was courted by the campaign. “They say, ‘We’re going to be the Death Star, and you’re either on it or you’re not.’ For guys in my business, a pitch like that is very compelling.”

  The final blow for Romney came one day late in January, when Republican strategist David Kochel called him to break the news that he was signing on with Jeb. Romney was crushed. A seasoned Iowa-based operative, Kochel had played a senior role in both of his presidential campaigns, and they had logged countless late nights and long bus rides together on the trail. Romney considered Kochel a friend and confidant, and they had kept in close contact since 2012: in recent weeks, Kochel had even participated in conference calls with Mitt and his inner circle, offering up strategy advice and enthusiastically encouraging him to run again. Of course, it was precisely because of his close ties to Romney that Jeb’s team had been so determined to poach him. Closing the deal wasn’t easy, but in the end, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: when Jeb officially announced his candidacy, Kochel was promised, he would be named national campaign manager.

  Romney’s loyalists were enraged when they found out about the defection, ranting to one another about Kochel’s unconscionable betrayal and branding him a “Benedict Arnold.” But Mitt himself didn’t feel angry—just demoralized. The past three weeks had offered a rattling glimpse at how vicious and driven Jeb could be, and Romney now realized it was a fantasy to think he could win the nomination by gliding above the fray: the 2016 primaries were going to be a bloodbath. Already, his sons and their wives—still suffering from a kind of PTSD after their last two tours of duty—were dreading the prospect of a third campaign. Could he really justify dragging his family back into a political war zone now that he knew how savage the fight would be? Then there were the political realities to weigh. Romney’s trove of polling data still had him convinced that he would win the nomination if he ran again, but he now worried that he would emerge from the primaries so bruised and bloodied that Clinton would roll right over him in the general election. And frankly, the thought of losing another presidential race was almost too much to bear.

  Late on the evening of January 29, top Romney supporters across the country received an email inviting them to join Mitt on a conference call the next morning for an “update.” The cryptic note was immediately leaked to the press and prompted a twelve-hour frenzy of media speculation, with the general consensus being that Romney was going to declare his intentions to run.

  In reality, he was holed up in a Manhattan hotel suite, drafting a statement that explained his decision to bow out, and fending off the inner circle dissenters who were pleading with him to reconsider. Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door. They contended that even if he didn’t want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running. They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party—divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates—fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney—the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman—for salvation.

  Your party might still need you, Mitt’s loyalists insisted. The country might still need you!

  All the last-minute lobbying gave Romney pause. Was he certain this was the right choice? Their appeals to his deeply felt sense of duty were compelling. He spent his final hours before the conference call consulting with his family and praying for guidance—and by Friday morning, he had inserted a bit of rhetorical wiggle room into his draft. “I’ve been asked, and will certainly be asked again, if there are any circumstances whatsoever that might develop that could change my mind,” he wrote toward the end of his statement. “That seems unlikely.” Unlikely. The word managed to appease the die-hards in his orbit, and it served to keep hope alive among some of his most loyal donors. As one of Romney’s 2012 fund-raisers would tell me months later, “There are bitter-enders who have read that statement a hundred times, and they think it’s going to happen—maybe on the floor of the convention.” Some even began to devise the crude outline of a strategy to jump-start a “draft Mitt” movement from the floor, which would involve flipping the delegates in Mormon-heavy states like Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. In the meantime, the statement gave Romney that rare peace of mind afforded by political flexibility. Yes, he was withdrawing from the race for now—but if, come summer of 2016, his party needed a savior, Mitt Romney would be ready.

  On the afternoon of January 30, he got on the conference call—which was now being live-streamed on home pages across the Web—to announce his decision. Reading from his prepared remarks, he thanked the supporters who had stuck with him over the past few weeks and gave them permission to seek out other 2016 candidates if they wished. But he also made a point of steering them away from one particular contender. “I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well-known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the nominee,” he said. Translation: Anybody but Jeb.

  Jeb’s team didn’t mind Mitt’s passive-aggressive parting shot. Their shock-and-awe campaign was working: one rival had surrendered, others were cowering in fear, and the entire political world was now buzzing about the ruthless efficiency with which Jeb’s lieutenants had disposed of Romney.

  But while the political world looked on at the implacability of Jeb’s team, his top lieutenants refused to show their han
d. When a reporter at Politico asked Bradshaw how they had managed to take the entire GOP field by surprise with such an ambitious and sophisticated launch, she replied, “We just do what people who work for Jeb Bush always do, which is to build the plan, execute the plan, and don’t talk about it.”

  When new hires would show up for their first day of work at the Tallahassee offices of Florida governor Jeb Bush, they would find on their desks a bound copy of an 1899 essay titled “A Message to Garcia.” Even in its nineteenth-century prose, the 1,500-word pamphlet was a breezy read that could easily be skimmed in the space of a coffee break—but the aides who wanted to thrive were expected to fully internalize its thesis.

  In the essay, author Elbert Hubbard relates the story of a U.S. army officer assigned by President William McKinley to deliver an important message to the Cuban rebel general Calixto Garcia, deep in the island’s jungles. The exemplary officer takes the order “without asking any idiotic questions,” and exhibits none of the “foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and halfhearted work” that plague so many in the lower ranks. Instead, he dutifully sets off on a boat, disappears into the jungle, and emerges weeks later having executed his mission flawlessly. Praising the officer’s quiet diligence, Hubbard writes, “There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book learning young men need… but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing—‘Carry a message to Garcia!’”

  Inside each pamphlet, the governor’s aides would find a handwritten inscription from their new boss: “Be a messenger.”

  Some of the new staffers no doubt interpreted the gift as little more than a well-intentioned bit of fortune cookie management theory. But the ones who would become the governor’s most trusted aides were those who received it as it was intended: a new creed to live by, an invitation to convert. From those baptized into the Bush inner circle, Jeb demanded fierce obedience, a bullet-blocking sense of loyalty, and a monomaniacal drive to get the job done by whatever means necessary. Across Florida, allies and adversaries alike marveled at his Vader-like grip on his troops. “He instills something weird in you,” David Johnson, one of Jeb’s longtime loyalists, told me. “You really want to please him. It doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or fifty. You want to make Jeb Bush happy with your work, happy with your competence.” And often the fastest way to earn the boss’s “Attaboy”s was with sharpened knives and a killer instinct.

  Indeed, beneath the glossy exterior of his public profile—that of the compassionate conservative, the happy warrior, the good-natured reformer—Jeb possessed a hard-edged, often ruthless political style that ran through his entire rise and reign in the Sunshine State. “He’s been the big bad kid,” Chris Smith, a leading Democrat in the Florida house, complained toward the end of Jeb’s term. “And he’s wielded that power mercilessly.”

  Jeb had harbored a tendency toward bully tactics ever since he was a prep school giant hulking over pip-squeak classmates at Andover—but he didn’t begin to channel that aggression toward politics until after his 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Jeb had viewed the race as a chance to finally take his rightful place in the monarchy—to conquer Florida and bring it under the Bush clan’s banner. He spent the year traveling the state in a campaign bus named Dynasty and solemnly told the Miami Herald, “I want to be able to look my father in the eye and say, ‘I continued the legacy.’” But on election night—while his screwup brother, George, was celebrating his ascent to the Texas governorship—Jeb found himself sitting on a bed in Miami’s downtown Crowne Plaza hotel, smoking his first cigarette in years and wondering what had gone wrong. He was a loser.

  He didn’t wallow for long. Instead, with the 1998 governor’s race now in his sights, Jeb became ferociously, almost single-mindedly driven to win, according to friends who knew him at the time. It was as though experiencing those first, unfamiliar stabs of professional failure—combined with the feeling of letting down his family—had caused him to mutate into a whole new beast, muscles ballooning, clothes tearing, an angry growl roaring from his deepest viscera. He began plotting his comeback with a coterie of devoted allies, who set about systematically clearing the field of potential Republican rivals, wooing the would-be candidates who seemed open to some sort of quid pro quo arrangement and kneecapping the ones who weren’t. He had polling commissioned so that he could show it to all potential comers and convince them, in blunt, uncompromising terms, that they had no chance at beating him. He leaned on the mischievous chairman of the Florida GOP—a man who proudly embraced the title “Boss,” inspired by corrupt Chicago political operators of yore—to stack the state party with Bush loyalists and steer Republican donors away from other candidates. Jeb’s lieutenants, meanwhile, spread rumors, traded favors, and twisted arms—whatever they needed to do to “carry the message.” By the time the campaign arrived, they had done away with every single one of Jeb’s serious primary opponents.

  “We ground them into dirt,” one Jeb ally would recall proudly. “It was as though that ninety-eight campaign was marching to liberate Paris.”

  Once in office, Jeb didn’t let up. He had the good fortune of being sworn in at a time when Republicans were in control of both chambers of the legislature, and the state’s first-ever term limits for lawmakers were about to go into effect—a perfect political storm that would precipitate a massive shift of power from the legislature to the governor’s mansion. “Before, members would tell a governor, ‘Screw you, you’re out in eight years, and I’ll be here for twenty,’” said Chris Smith, who served as House Minority Leader during Jeb’s governorship. “But now that we have term limits, members think, ‘I’m gonna be out of here in a few years. I don’t want to have the governor mad at me.’”

  Jeb made no secret of when he was mad, meting out retribution to any and all who deigned to cross him. There was the Republican legislator from Miami who pushed back too hard against one of the governor’s power plays, only to see money taken away from a children’s brain tumor center in his district. Or the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee, who made a public crack about Dubya’s country-club upbringing, and then had a pet road project killed as punishment. Or the three GOP senators who refused to toe the party line on a proposed limit to medical malpractice lawsuits, and then discovered that the governor’s office was seeking out Republican candidates in their district to challenge them in the next primaries.

  “We’ve had some wars,” one of the senators, Mike Bennett, would tell a reporter a couple of years after the episode. “I made Bush so mad that when he ran for reelection, he actually sent my campaign contribution check back to me. But I gotta tell you, I admired that. Who wants to fight a pussy?” Of course, not all of Jeb’s victims were so generous in their assessment of his tactics. Tallahassee’s mayor at the time, Scott Maddox, viewed the governor’s retaliation against him as a temper tantrum thrown by a spoiled son of privilege. “Governor Bush never really had to work hard for anything,” he fumed. “If you’re always used to being given what you want, you react poorly when you are opposed.”

  But whatever his motives, the efficacy of Jeb’s tactics were indisputable. In his eight years as governor, he pursued an aggressive education agenda that dramatically expanded access to charter schools, he rammed through billions of dollars in tax cuts, and he signed dozens of pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-business bills into law. Jeb’s strong-arming made him one of the most productive and powerful governors in state history, a lesson that he—and one of his young constituents—wouldn’t forget.

  As soon as Romney was knocked out of 2016 contention, the chatter in GOP campaign circles began revolving around a single question: which rival would the Jeb Bush juggernaut direct its firepower at next?

  The answer quickly became obvious to many of the still-uncommitted donors, consultants, and big wheels in the party once Jeb’s lieutenants came knocking. “They
’re going after Rubio next,” said one California bundler who heard from Jeb’s team the same day Romney bowed out. “It’s like whack-a-mole. They’re going to try to take out everyone before the primaries even start.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Homeland Security

  Marco Rubio was exhausted but wired when he arrived in the Southern California desert on Sunday afternoon. It was January 26, 2015, and he had just come off a forty-eight-hour whirlwind weekend strategizing with his top political donors in Miami Beach when he then hopped a coast-to-coast flight to Palm Springs for the winter meeting of the billionaire Koch brothers’ libertarian political operations. The exclusive annual gathering at the Rancho Mirage Ritz-Carlton resort was known for attracting many of the Republican Party’s most deep-pocketed contributors—and this year Rubio had been invited to audition for them. He would be participating in a foreign policy forum alongside Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, answering questions from a moderator while the conservative moneymen in the audience sized up the potential 2016 horses.

  To the small band of strategists working to get Rubio’s presidential campaign off the ground, today’s event was being treated like a make-or-break moment. With Jeb Bush now in the picture there was widespread skepticism in political circles about whether a second Florida-based candidate could pull in enough money to fund a 2016 bid. Rubio’s two chief advisers, Terry Sullivan and Todd Harris, believed they needed to raise at least $30 million in the first half of the year to show they were serious. If they fell short, no one in the party would see the campaign as credible—donors would scatter, staffers would flee, and the Beltway opinion makers would start prewriting their Rubio obituaries. On the other hand, if they could make a splash with this crowd, it seemed likely that they could gain the momentum they needed to hit their goal.