Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  But Romney’s other advisers had proposed a different path. He and Rath recalled a fateful meeting two years earlier in Boston, at which Romney’s pollster, brandishing a wad of survey data, argued that the Mr. Fix-It lane was occupied by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani—and that Romney should present himself as a more conservative alternative. With some reluctance, Romney acquiesced. He spent much of 2007 lunging to the right on social issues, emphasizing positions on everything from abortion to immigration that were at variance with his past. His plan was to steal the Iowa caucuses, where grassroots evangelicals ruled, then take New Hampshire, where his status as a former neighboring governor and his ownership of a spread on Lake Winnipesaukee made him a quasi hometown boy.

  Instead, Romney’s rightward swerve let his rivals and the media tattoo the lethal “flip-flopper” label on his forehead. He also demonstrated an unfortunate capacity for stumbling into cringe-making headlines: about how his gardeners were illegal immigrants; about his “lifelong” devotion to hunting when in fact he’d done it twice; about the time he and his family went on vacation and put their dog, Seamus, in a crate strapped to the roof of the car for a twelve-hour drive.

  The quick knockout he envisioned administering to his rivals was inflicted on him instead. In Iowa, the evangelicals rejected him soundly, fueling a nine-point thumping by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Limping into New Hampshire, where he had led in the polls throughout 2007, Romney was beaten by John McCain—and that was pretty much all she wrote.

  A month later, on February 7, 2008, Romney left the race, announcing his withdrawal at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. Afterwards, sitting around a U-shaped table with an array of the conservative movement’s leaders, he listened as they expressed dismay at the impending nomination of McCain, whom they had never trusted, and declared Mitt the future of the party. Thank you for accepting me, Romney said. On the causes and ideas you stand for, I still stand with you. “You haven’t heard the last of me,” he added.

  Rath was determined to make sure of that. Romney had started the race as an unknown commodity to Republicans nationally. At a cost of $110 million, including $45 million of his own money, he established a profile and name recognition, but there was more work to do. “You’ve got to make friends,” Rath told him in February. “You’ve created an asset. You need to tend the asset.”

  Rath codified his plan for tending the asset in a three-page memo. For the duration of 2008, Rath wrote, “we need to be the proverbial good soldier.” Romney should support McCain vigorously, raising money and campaigning for him and for GOP congressional candidates, doing whatever he was asked to do—“the more the better.” He should form a PAC to dole out dollars to down-ticket Republicans. He should have an organized presence at the party’s convention. He should be on TV regularly. He should write a book. “Some of this may seem elementary, but I wanted to lay it out,” Rath wrote. “Were the Democrats to win in November, the 2012 cycle begins that night.”

  Romney did everything Rath suggested. He did so much for McCain that by the eve of the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the rumor mill was churning up talk that he might receive the VP nod. Romney had taken some nasty shots at McCain during the nomination fight, but his solid soldiering seemed to have brought a thaw in their relationship. He submitted to being vetted, turning over years of income tax returns—a Mount Kilimanjaro of paper—to McCain’s people. Romney’s finance chair, Spencer Zwick, kept hearing from donors in Arizona that Mitt’s selection was a done deal.

  On the late-August morning when McCain revealed his vice-presidential pick, Romney and Zwick woke up in Los Angeles planning to catch a flight back to Boston—or straight to join McCain, if the call came. They were on a shuttle bus from the airport Marriott to LAX when Zwick’s cell phone rang, with McCain on the line for Romney. After several mute seconds, Romney thanked McCain for calling and said, “I don’t know Governor Palin very well, but best of luck with everything,” while Zwick tapped Sarah Palin’s name into Google on his smartphone to try to figure out who she was.

  For the week of the convention, Romney’s team rented out space on the bottom floor of the Saint Paul Hotel to host receptions for donors and supporters, but everyone could see that he was blue. Apart from the pain of being passed over for the ticket, Romney was downcast about playing the courtier at a shindig that should have been his coronation. His speech in the hall was ignored, credentials for his people were hard to come by, the whole thing was just . . . difficult.

  Mitt’s wife, Ann, was even more upset—and it was all about Palin. The Romneys had been married for thirty-nine years. Ann thought her husband hung the moon. She could barely comprehend McCain choosing anyone but Mitt, but this moose-hunting woman from Wasilla, Alaska? Really?

  The night of Palin’s speech, the Romneys expected to watch from the convention hall. They tried to get into a VIP suite, but their entourage was turned away at the door. Let’s get out of here, they said, and hightailed it back to the hotel, where a private room was waiting. There they could watch the speech without the eyes of the media upon them—and Mitt’s team could freely hoot at the woman who took the slot their man deserved. Even as Palin lit up the stage, Romney’s crew chorused, You woulda crushed it, Guv, this is ridiculous. But Mitt’s reaction was more subdued.

  “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe it,” he said. “Wow.”

  For the next two months, Romney continued to suck it up. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG, he emerged as one of McCain’s most visible and energetic surrogates. During the nomination contest, the Arizona senator had routinely referred to Romney as a “fucking phony,” and neither he nor his advisers ever seriously considered putting Mitt on the ticket. But McCain nevertheless came to have a grudging respect for him that fall. “I know the guy isn’t holding his breath hoping I win,” McCain told his team. “But, hey, give him credit—he’s been terrific.”

  Romney’s performance during the financial crisis only heightened his sense of what a missed opportunity 2008 had been. In the heat of battle, he and Ann had ascribed his problems to factors beyond his control: his Mormonism, his money, his roots in liberal Massachusetts—the three Ms. But now, in Lexington, two weeks after Election Day, Romney was starting to think he had been foolish to turn himself into a candidate of ideology rather than competence. “If I had listened to you,” he told Rath, “I might have won.”

  As the talk turned to the future, Rath suggested some additional ideas for how Romney could stay in the mix. Though the afterglow of Obama’s victory was still burning bright, “there’s going to be another election,” Rath said, “and you’ve got something.”

  But 2012 seemed a long way off to Romney. He was tentative, noncommittal. “I’m going to play it out, do some of the things you tell me to do,” he said. “I’m going to preserve the option.”

  In fact, Romney told Rath, he’d written an op-ed that would appear the very next day in The New York Times. Its subject was the auto industry, a topic close to Romney’s heart; his late father, George, had been chairman of American Motors and governor of Michigan in the fifties and sixties. Almost as much as the banking sector, Detroit was in free fall, and Romney had a plan to save it. The scheme, which was bold but contrary to what the industry wanted, might raise eyebrows.

  “It’s going to seem strange coming from me,” Romney said.

  • • •

  HE WROTE THE OP-ED on his BlackBerry on the beach in front of his newest home, in La Jolla, California. A Spanish-style sanctuary on Dunemere Drive, it was called Fin de la Senda—the End of the Road. He and Ann had bought the place earlier that year for $12 million. Mitt loved that you could hear the waves crashing outside the window. And there was no better place than the sand down below to tap out big thoughts on the Lilliputian keyboard of his handheld device.

  The argument in his op-ed was straightforward. The auto industry’s leaders were clamoring for a ba
ilout; a bill was being debated on Capitol Hill to divert to the Big Three $25 billion from the $700 billion bank-rescue fund. Romney thought such a move would doom Detroit by letting it evade the root-and-branch restructuring he regarded as necessary: new labor agreements to wring out the costs crippling the industry; new management that would work better with the unions; a renewed focus on investment and innovation. What the industry needed was “a managed bankruptcy,” Romney wrote, which “would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”

  Romney’s chief media adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, a former journalist with a combative edge who had worked for Mitt since his statehouse days, took the op-ed first to The Wall Street Journal, which had published pieces by the governor before but passed this time. His second pitch was to the Times, where Fehrnstrom had tried to place op-eds repeatedly, to no avail. David Shipley, the paper’s op-ed editor, quickly e-mailed back: Send it along, I’ll take a look.

  Shipley enjoyed featuring Republican voices on the op-ed page, and liked it even more when they were at variance with the official positions of the Times’s editorial board. Romney’s biography made the piece extra appealing—not just his Detroit heritage but his Bain pedigree, too. It’s a no-brainer, Shipley thought, assuming the op-ed was any good.

  And, lo and behold, it was: tightly argued, highly prescriptive though not wildly controversial, what with the public outrage over bailouts generally and the auto unions in particular. Shipley made it a rule never to publish anything without receiving a final sign-off from the author. When Mary Duenwald, the editor assigned to handle the piece, called Fehrnstrom to suggest several tweaks, the flack said, “You need to talk to Mitt.” A few seconds later, Romney was on the line, accepting the changes uncomplainingly or proposing his own. What a nice guy, Duenwald thought.

  The headline—LET DETROIT GO BANKRUPT—was the only thing, per long-standing Times tradition, that the author didn’t see beforehand. Shipley’s view was that it captured the essence of Romney’s argument and fit the space. The Timesman understood that a structured bankruptcy was a specific thing; even so, he thought, A bankruptcy is a bankruptcy. No one at the op-ed page considered the title unfair or raised a red flag. Nor did anyone from Romneyland protest when the piece was posted to the Web on the night of November 18, when Shipley still had time to alter the headline before it appeared in the paper.

  The next morning, the reactions were all over the map. In the Bush White House, the president’s counselor and former GOP chair Ed Gillespie glimpsed the headline and thought, That’s pretty stark, figuring Romney was already angling for 2012 by taking an anti-bailout line that would resonate with the Republican base. Matt Rhoades, Romney’s 2008 communications director, thought the opposite: Kinda seems like the Guv’s having a Bulworth moment; maybe he’s not gonna run again. Romney’s supporters and donors from Michigan called Zwick and others, shocked by the headline. Romney’s people were freaked about it, and piqued at the Times.

  When Romney woke up and saw the headline, he was angry, too—but mainly at Fehrnstrom.

  Eric, never, ever, ever again will we let anyone write a headline without our approval, Romney repined. We’ve got to go out and communicate that The New York Times wrote this, not us.

  We’re never going to convince the American people that the newspaper writes the headline, Fehrnstrom replied. We’re gonna have to live with it.

  Well, then, let’s get on the air so I can talk about the substance and people will see that I’m trying to save the industry, Romney pressed.

  In the next forty-eight hours, Romney attempted to explain himself on CNN, Fox, CBS’s The Early Show, and NBC’s Today. His people assured him the furor would pass, that it would all blow over. Romney was not so sure. He had been mighty pleased about making his debut in the Times, but the Paper of Record had handed his opponents a gnarly club with which to whack him. And while the next election was four years away, he kept thinking about Michigan and Ohio, electorally critical states full of autoworkers, all believing that he wanted to put their employers—their lives—in liquidation.

  “Guys, guys, guys—this could be it,” he told his aides. “This could sink me.”

  • • •

  IRREPRESSIBLY AND UNSHAKABLY OPTIMISTIC about America and her prospects, Willard Mitt Romney was often panicky when it came to his own political circumstances—and dark, dark, dark. The first trait sprang from his devout Mormon faith, which held doctrinally that the United States was divinely inspired—not just the ideals of freedom and self-determination, but the design of the federal government and the Constitution itself. The second outlook owed at least in part to the experiences of his father, whom Romney revered.

  In the sixties, George Romney had embodied the embattled strain of paternal progressivism in the GOP, championing civil rights and resisting extremism in all its forms. He waded into the 1968 presidential campaign as a front-runner for his party’s nomination. But in attempting to explain his turn against the Vietnam War, he committed a fateful gaffe, telling an interviewer that his earlier support for the war had been the result of a “brainwashing” he received from generals he met with in Saigon in 1965. The word connoted weakness, paranoia, and naïveté, but Romney refused to take it back. Soon his candidacy was reduced to rubble. Trailing Richard Nixon by a five-to-one margin in the polls, he withdrew before the New Hampshire primary. In a letter to Mitt, then serving in France as a Mormon missionary, his father wrote, “Your mother and I are not personally distressed. As a matter of fact we are relieved.” But four years later, when he resigned from the Nixon cabinet and more or less retired from public life, Romney ruefully told an aide, “Politics will break your heart.”

  The family never expected Mitt to run for office. Politics was not his passion growing up. But in 1994, shortly before his death, George Romney encouraged his son to challenge Senator Edward Kennedy. Eight years after being thrashed in that race, Romney won the Bay State’s governorship, and four years later he launched his presidential bid—announcing it in Michigan, where he’d never lived as an adult, in front of a Nash Rambler, the car central to his father’s turnaround of American Motors. The suspicion that Mitt was running to complete George’s legacy was hard to avoid.

  The political world assumed that Romney would take another shot at the White House in 2012. But as 2008 turned to 2009, his ambivalence about the prospect was abiding—and much of it came down to Ann.

  Romney met Ann Davies, a pretty, perky, non-Mormon blonde, in high school and had been doting on her ever since. She converted to his religion, and they raised five strapping sons, all now married and with kids of their own. Ann put Mitt at ease and brought him a kind of contentment that he experienced nowhere else: not in business, not in politics, not with close friends, of which he had remarkably few. Obligation, aspiration, and curiosity compelled his forays into public life, but those adventures always seemed vaguely forced. Mitt truly felt at home only when Ann was by his side, which was where he wanted her as much as possible, ideally all the time. She was his comfort zone.

  The worst day of Mitt’s life was when Ann received her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis just before Thanksgiving 1998. For a time, she was desperate, scared, and very sick, but Mitt—and an array of treatments, from medication to reflexology, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy—brought her back to health. She was far more outwardly emotional than her husband and took the loss in 2008 harder than he did. When it was over, they discussed whether he would run again. Absolutely not, she said.

  Just a couple of weeks after Election Day 2008, Ann learned that she had breast cancer. The doctors had caught it at stage zero, but she was terrified, having lost her mother and grandmother to ovarian cancer and her great-grandmother to breast cancer. Elizabeth Edwards phoned to talk through her own experiences with the disease. Obama called, too, to wish her a speedy recovery, which impressed Mitt. “Ann and I have you in our prayers,” he said.

  Ann ha
d a lumpectomy and received radiation treatment but was spared chemotherapy. Even so, her recovery that winter was slow. Her failure to snap back threw her husband and increased his sense that 2012 might not be in the cards. In the spring of 2009, they began a fresh chapter. They sold their hulking Colonial in Belmont, Massachusetts, their main residence for twenty years, and their chalet in Park City, Utah, leaving them with the places in La Jolla and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire—a home on each coast, both on the water, both idyllic.

  The Romneys started talking about the new kind of life they could build around those abodes, especially the Wolfeboro compound. Mitt was sixty-two years old, with a couple hundred million dollars in the bank. He could imagine a mellow, cozy semi-retirement, surrounded by a swarm of kids, grandkids, cousins, nieces, and nephews in the high Mormon fashion. Three of his sons were entrepreneurs; he could dabble in their firms. (I’ll be an unpaid adviser, he thought. Or moderately paid.) He took pleasure in the idea of being free of the responsibilities, anxieties, and colonoscopic scrutiny that politics entailed, not to mention the pressures of public performance, at which he floundered.

  Exacerbating his ambivalence was the specter of another loss. The odds of becoming your party’s nominee are never as good as fifty-fifty, he thought. Beating an incumbent president is hard to do. Coming out of 2008, the conventional wisdom was that Obama would marshal an awesome array of reelection assets: his grassroots army, inspirational flair, and ability to raise funds—maybe $1 billion. Like the president, Romney was a competitive guy who hated losing even more than he relished winning. He had no desire to dive headlong into a propeller.