Game Change

by John Heilemann

  Three successive communications teams tried to assist her, but found it hard sledding. She refused to provide the background information that would enable them to defend her and which only Judith had at her disposal. When they asked about the details of the puppy story, she professed selective amnesia. “I don’t remember exactly what happened back then,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

  She was equally evasive about her whereabouts, insisting that aides never call or email her directly, but instead stay in touch through her assistant. So mysterious was she that Rudy would joke, I’m going to make her the head of the CIA if I win.

  One cool night that summer, in the private room of a New York restaurant, the Giulianis convened a group of about a dozen campaign advisers and friends of Judith’s to discuss rehabilitating her image; she called them Team J. As they sat down to dinner, each attendee was handed a sheet of paper by Judith’s assistant: a nondisclosure agreement that swore them to silence about the evening’s talk.

  With wine flowing, Judith observed that her press coverage had not been to her liking. She wasn’t being handled well, wanted to get back to basics. “What role should I play?” she asked the group.

  Rudy’s pollster, Ed Goeas, tried to be helpful. “First of all, you’re his third wife. What you should be is humble,” he said.

  Judith scrunched up her face and pouted.

  Humility wasn’t Judith’s strong suit. Nor was leaving Rudy to his business. She called him constantly when he was traveling without her, no matter where he was or what he was doing. On several occasions the calls arrived when Giuliani was meeting with donors or making speeches. He invariably picked up the phone. “Hello, dear,” he said when she interrupted him while he was onstage addressing the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. “I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello?”

  His staff concluded that Giuliani had no choice but to answer Judith’s calls, because ignoring her risked dire consequences—more dire than wrecking some speech. To the NRA members, Rudy apologized, but added, “It’s a lot better that way.”

  TEAM GIULIANI FACED a problem more imperiling, if less sensational, than Judith. Of the early-voting states, Iowa and South Carolina had proved inhospitable to the mayor’s liberal leanings, and New Hampshire voters, who should have been a natural fit, were not taking to him, either. The campaign had always been premised on the notion that Giuliani was a national candidate—that his strength in places such as New York and California would carry him through. The question was how he could survive until those states started voting on Super Tuesday. The answer was Florida.

  The Florida primary on January 29 was the fifth contest in the Republican race. The Giuliani strategy was to do well enough in New Hampshire to allow him to stay alive until the vote in the Sunshine State, then win there and be off and running.

  Taking Florida was a credible objective. Replete with transplants from New York and elsewhere in the Northeast, and with large urban and suburban pockets of centrist Republicans, the state seemed fertile ground for Giuliani’s pitch. It was one place where McCain’s expected immolation would boost Giuliani on primary day. But the mayor had his eye on a more concrete asset that he wanted to swipe from John: Florida governor Charlie Crist.

  Crist had been elected the year before to the top job in the ultimate battleground state. With his lean frame, snow-white hair, and perpetual tan, he was the most popular elected official in Florida, a prodigious fund-raiser, and a topic of endless fascination. Though Crist’s political skills were respected, many insiders saw him as something of a cipher. In becoming governor, he had won a bitterly contested GOP primary after facing down dual allegations of having fathered a child out of wedlock and being gay.

  McCain had endorsed Crist in his primary fight; Giuliani had remained neutral. Crist expressed gratitude to McCain on a regular basis, including several reaffirmations of a promise to endorse McCain’s presidential bid. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there at the right time,” Crist assured him.

  But now that McCain was tanking, Crist seemed to be reconsidering his options. “I campaigned my ass off for him,” McCain groused to his lieutenants. “And now that fucker is not going to keep his end of the bargain.”

  McCain was right to be worried, for even Crist’s closest allies often said of him, “Charlie is all about Charlie.” Crist’s political team was aggressive and demanding. Jim Greer, his handpicked Florida state party chairman, started actively exploring what the governor could receive in return for his endorsement, suggesting to Giuliani directly that a “right of first refusal” on the VP slot might do the trick. The Charlie Bazaar was open for business.

  One fine July weekend, Giuliani made his play, inviting Crist to fly up and spend the weekend in the Hamptons. Giuliani and Crist played a round of golf. They smoked cigars at the Giulianis’ home in Bridge-hampton. And they shared an epic meal. Sitting outside under a stand of trees with Judith and a handful of their respective advisers, they talked long into the night about the paths that had carried them to prominence. The evening went splendidly, the Giulianis thought. Crist was reveling in the courtship. The endorsement seemed within Rudy’s grasp. He invited Crist back to his house the next morning for a private conversation.

  When Crist arrived, Giuliani made his appeal—and was thrilled with the reply.

  “I’d like to support you,” Crist said.

  The next day, Giuliani shared the news with his aide Tony Carbonetti. “I think we got him; it went very well,” Giuliani said.

  Carbonetti was familiar enough with Giuliani’s lexicon to know what that meant: Rudy thought it was a done deal. Seeing Giuliani’s strong poll numbers in Florida, Crist had apparently concluded that Rudy was the horse to ride. Carbonetti, a no-nonsense fixer who’d been Rudy’s chief of staff at City Hall, followed up with Crist’s main political guy, George LeMieux, flying to Tallahassee to meet with him and plan the endorsement.

  Giuliani’s team so valued their new prize that they proceeded to build their entire fall strategy around it. Their secret plan was to start running TV ads in New Hampshire in November, followed shortly thereafter by a surprise trip to Florida to claim the Crist endorsement. Then a classic fly-around to all the state’s major cities, for a series of press conferences and fund-raisers. After that, Crist and Giuliani would travel together to New Hampshire for some joint campaigning. The publicity, money, and show of force that Crist would confer in Florida would so impress the national media and the voters of New Hampshire that the endorsement would have a gigantic spillover effect.

  Over the next few months, Giuliani was buoyed by the confidence of having a prepackaged bombshell tucked in his breast pocket. Crist’s close friend and top fund-raiser, Harry Sargeant, was helping Giuliani raise money, a heartening sign that the political families were engaged. Even as he began to slip in the polls, Rudy remained serene.

  Until, that is, his campaign began hearing the same message over and over from their allies in Florida. No one could quite pin down what it meant, but the message filled Giuliani with unease: There’s a problem with Crist.

  THE CANDIDATES LINED UP at the urinals, Giuliani next to McCain next to Huckabee, the rest all in a row. The debate was soon to start, so they were taking care of business—and laughing merrily at the one guy who wasn’t there. Poking fun at him, mocking him, agreeing about how much they disliked him. Then Willard Mitt Romney walked into the bathroom and overheard them, bringing on a crashing silence.

  Romney was the guy on whom much of the smart Beltway money had been betting from the start. His resume was impressive: former CEO of Bain and Company and founder of Bain Capital; savior of the blighted 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; one-term governor of Massachusetts. His pedigree was glittering: his father, George, had been a governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate, too. His personal life was impeccable: he had married his high school sweetheart, Ann, with whom he had had five strapping sons. He was well spoken
and terrific looking, with blindingly white choppers, a chiseled jaw, and a helmet of glossy dark hair.

  Romney was running a textbook Republican campaign. He had hired a squad of A-list consultants, pollsters, and media wizards. He’d raised more money than anyone in the field and had millions of his own to draw on. He’d courted the GOP Establishment; worked to neutralize the most vocal potential sources of opposition; racked up oodles of endorsements; and carefully tailored his policy positions to appeal to social, economic, and national security conservatives, the three legs of the Republican stool.

  But Romney’s efforts to get right with the right landed him in trouble. For most of his life, he had been a middle-of-the-road, pro-business pragmatist, unequivocally pro-choice, moderate on tax cuts and immigration. Running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he pledged that he’d do more for gay rights than his opponent, and declared, “I don’t line up with the NRA” on gun control. By 2008, Romney had reversed himself on all of this, which quickly gave rise to charges of hypocrisy and opportunism. Even before he announced his candidacy, a YouTube video began making the rounds that captured him firmly stating his liberalish social views, comically juxtaposing them with his newly adopted arch-conservative stances. From then on, the flip-flopper label was firmly affixed to Mitt’s forehead.

  Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slashing at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his apparent corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. McCain routinely called Romney an “asshole” and a “fucking phony.” Giuliani opined, “That guy will say anything.” Huckabee complained, “I don’t think Romney has a soul.”

  His own team’s view was more generous, but no less damning. For all Romney’s business acumen and affectations—he sometimes gave PowerPoint presentations instead of stump speeches—his advisers found him indecisive, an incorrigible vacillator. He would wait and wait, asking more and more questions, consulting with more and more people, ordering up more and more data. The internal debates over his message and even his slogan went on for months, without end or resolution.

  By the summer, Romney was stuck in single digits almost everywhere except New Hampshire, where his status as a former Bay State governor and the owner of a vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee made him a quasi-hometown boy. In trying to explain his failure to catch on, his advisers pointed to another issue, which they shorthanded as TMT—The Mormon Thing. For the Evangelical portion of the Republican base, with its suspicions about Mormonism, Romney’s religion was a significant roadblock. (Friends of President Bush would call him from Texas and say of Romney’s chances, You’ve got to be kidding; he’s in a cult.) Compounding the problem was the candidate’s unwillingness to talk openly about his faith, until it was too late.

  Worse, Romney had a propensity for stumbling into the wrong kind of headlines. There was the story about how his gardeners were illegal aliens. There was the one about the time that he and his family went on vacation and put their dog in a crate strapped to the roof of their car for the twelve-hour drive. Oh, and also the one about his “lifelong” devotion to hunting, which turned out to mean he’d done it twice. “I’m not a big-game hunter,” Romney said, then explained that his preferred prey were rodents, rabbits, and such—“small varmints, if you will.”

  Romney found his failure to break through frustrating. “It’s not fair,” he said to his aides. He was being defined as a flip-flopping Mormon—or a Mormon flip-flopper. He couldn’t fathom why the caricature of him was sticking, had no ability to see himself as others might. When Romney’s staff showed him the devastating You-Tube video, his first reaction was, “Boy, look how young I was back then.”

  THAT TWO CANDIDATES as flawed as Giuliani and Romney were the best poised to step in and capitalize on McCain’s implosion was stark testament to the weakness of the rest of the Republican field.

  There was Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. He was looking good in Iowa, with his cheeky quips and syrupy drawl. But he was raising no money and had limited appeal outside his rural, religious conservative base.

  There was Fred Thompson, around whom buzz continued to build all summer as he dithered over taking the plunge. But once he finally hit the trail in September, his candidacy was one long snoozefest, both for the voters and apparently for him; Thompson behaved as though he would rather have been anywhere but on the hustings, ideally in his La-Z-Boy.

  And then there were the other entrants: Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Tommy Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Jim Gilmore, all of whom were such long shots that they were better described as no shots.

  Of course, that described McCain, too. Or so everyone in politics thought.

  “HEY, BOY, IT’S JOHN. How ya doing?”

  By the summer of 2007, McCain had added a new number to the speed-dial list on his phone. The cell phone was the one piece of modern technology he understood, and it was indispensable to him. McCain lived by the speed dial, was forever calling up and checking in with a wide and sundry orbit of confidants and confreres. The circle of calls was a perfect reflection of McCain’s character and of his approach to politics and campaigns. He wanted to hear from a lot of people. He wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, not what he was supposed to talk about. He wanted to do it spontaneously, randomly, on his schedule. McCain would listen to everyone, take in their advice, then bounce that advice off the next person in the loop, and so on, ad infinitum. The circle of calls was not designed for the making of firm decisions. More often, it abetted avoiding them. It fed McCain’s solipsism; he was the only fixed point. But although the circle was an infinite loop, it wasn’t a closed circuit. Every so often, a brand-new voice would be jacked in.

  Steve Schmidt lived in Sacramento, California, and barely knew McCain, though in their handful of encounters they’d hit it off. At thirty-six, with a Kojak-bald head, a linebacker’s frame, and a Bluetooth headset invariably plugged into his ear, Schmidt was a strategist who had run the rapid-response unit for the 2004 Bush campaign, headed up Dick Cheney’s press shop, and orchestrated the confirmation hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Wanting out of national politics, he’d moved to California to manage the reelection campaign of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was put on retainer by the McCain campaign when it was still operating under the Bush model, but he had given up his fee in March when the roof started to cave in.

  With his campaign in free fall, McCain called and asked Schmidt, “Will you help me?”

  “I will help you, but it’s your campaign now,” Schmidt said. “Everyone assumes it’s over. You have nothing left to lose. You should do what you want to do.” Schmidt’s assessment of McCain’s prospects matched those of Davis and Black: McCain probably wasn’t going to be the Republican nominee. But it wasn’t impossible, and at least now he had a clean slate on which to redraw his approach.

  Schmidt’s conversations with McCain quickly grew in frequency. He was talking to the candidate at least three times a day now, trying to help guide him toward a path to revival—but occasionally thinking, Holy shit, how the fuck did I get in the middle of this monstrosity?

  The first call would come like clockwork around eight in the morning, as Schmidt took his dog on a six-mile walk past the manicured lawns of the gated communities that surrounded the one where he lived. One August morning when Schmidt and McCain were gabbing, the talk turned to Iraq. The two men had a bond on the subject of the war. As a White House staffer, Schmidt had been sent to Baghdad to help figure out how to sell the conflict to a skeptical American public. He’d come back from his assignment so disillusioned that he declined to prepare a written report on his findings. He told the White House chief of staff that it wasn’t in the administration’s interest to have him commit his pessimistic views to paper. Like McCain, Schmidt believed that
the war had to be won and that the Bush administration had bollixed the job. Both men had devoured the recent spate of books that chronicled just how bad things were; both had close relatives serving in Iraq.

  When McCain talked to Schmidt on the phone, the candidate was always resolute: under the leadership of Army general David Petraeus, the troop surge was working. But on TV, McCain was hedging, saying it might work, it could work, it was working in some ways. Rather than run away from his own position, Schmidt insisted, McCain should embrace it. The Senate was about to debate the surge policy, with the Democratic candidates pushing their party to the left and forcing a vote that would mandate a troop withdrawal ahead of what the White House planned. This is a big, defining issue, Schmidt told McCain.

  Your strategic imperative is completely different from every other candidate’s, Schmidt said. Romney’s strategic imperative is to win the Iowa caucuses. Giuliani’s is to win in New Hampshire, then take Florida. Yours is to create a comeback narrative. You are a reader of literature. You understand what a narrative arc is. You were on top and then you fell, and now we’re at the part of the story where, before you can have any hope of winning, we have to create the comeback. And the way you create the comeback is by making this race about something other than your political fortunes. It’s gotta be about a cause greater than self, which is what your campaign is supposed to be about. The thing this campaign ought to be about now is stopping the Democrats from surrendering in Iraq at the moment when we’re winning.

  Schmidt proposed a low-budget campaign tour of the key states, with McCain accompanied by some of his POW buddies and other veterans. Put together a caravan, the strategist said. Stay in cheap hotels. Do American Legion halls and VFW posts. Down some beers at night. Have some fun.

  McCain loved the idea. The campaign, once so big and bloated, now was reduced to a simple mission, just as it should be. “That’s right. I’m gonna do it,” he told Schmidt. “I’m gonna do it.”