Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  But Romney had told Rath that he wanted to “preserve the option,” and he meant it. For most of 2009, he retreated into semi-seclusion to write a book, as Rath suggested in his memo. Nothing bothered Mitt and Ann more than his having been painted a coreless opportunist during the campaign. Romney blamed himself for having failed to articulate his beliefs clearly and cleanly. The book would be a remedy for that blunder: a campaign manifesto if he ran again, pure catharsis if he didn’t. Eschewing treacly personal anecdotes, Romney focused on international and economic issues, laying down his positions in a flurry of mini-lectures. There was also a hefty dose of censure for Obama, with Romney singing in harmony with the Palin/Limbaugh/Fox News choir that the president was “eager to note all of America’s failings, real and perceived, and reluctant to speak out in defense of American values.”

  The book’s working title was The Pursuit of the Difficult, which came from a bit of wisdom his father once imparted: “The pursuit of the difficult makes men stronger.” But Romney was unsatisfied with it. One day at a meeting with his aides before the manuscript shipped to the printer, a staffer piped up with No Apology—and Mitt was instantly sold.

  Hawking No Apology was a whole other production. Romney knew that Palin, with her 2009 memoir Going Rogue, made it to number one on the Times best-seller list—and he was eager to match her. To get there, his people employed a variety of methods, some legit and many dodgy. His PAC set up a website, NoApology.com, to sell the book. On Romney’s book tour, some venues were required to buy copies in large numbers. On the lecture circuit, he would forgo his fee and have clients put the money toward book purchases. Mormon groups bought No Apology in quantity; so did Romney’s PAC. Mitt retained an expert who knew the tricks of the trade to shimmy a book onto the Times list.

  The resulting fishy sales patterns did not go unnoticed. When a book’s ranking was the result of bulk orders, the Paper of Record denoted that with a dagger symbol. When No Apology debuted at number one in March 2010, there were double daggers.

  • • •

  BY THEN ROMNEY WAS doing more than writing to preserve the option. At the cramped, drab PAC headquarters in Lexington, he installed a passel of his top advisers from 2008. To run the shop, he tapped Rhoades, a thirty-six-year-old from upstate New York with a pronounced air of imperturbability but a temper below the surface. Rhoades’s orientation was tactical and operational—he was a pure mechanic. He had earned his bones as a dirt-digger, running opposition research for the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. He was famous for having a direct pipeline to Matt Drudge; colleagues claimed (only half-jokingly) that he had a chat window on his computer open 24/7 with the freak show’s primo online impresario. Averse to publicity, allergic to appearing on TV, Rhoades had cultivated a Keyser Söze–ish mystique. Romney liked him for his loyalty, discipline, and intense focus.

  The hiring of Rhoades was one sign that Romney was starting to cast an eye toward 2012, but there were others. He dispatched his close friend and former Bain partner Bob White to travel around the country and conduct more postmortems to glean lessons from the last campaign. Mitt had been despised by his 2008 rivals, not just McCain, for his slashing attacks and apparent lack of conviction. Now he reached out to Giuliani and Huckabee to mend fences (and subtly gauge their intentions about running again). That summer, Mitt trouped a parade of donors up to Wolfeboro, taking them on boat rides, feeding them crab salad, and telling them he wouldn’t put in his own money this time—if he ran. He invited reporters to off-the-record barbecues by the lake and dinners in D.C. He knew they considered him distant and robotic, and he wanted to combat that perception. (Success rate: low.)

  With the 2010 midterms ahead, Romney also tapped his donor network, turning his PAC into a powerhouse, establishing offshoots in New Hampshire and Iowa that allowed him to tiptoe around donation limits to local officials. Largely under the radar, he hit the trail on behalf of congressional and state-level candidates, doing more than a hundred events in thirty states, handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the likes of future governors Nikki Haley, in South Carolina, and Terry Branstad, in Iowa.

  The ramp-up in Romney’s political activities coincided with two developments, the first being his swelling sense of Obama’s deficiencies. On policy, Romney disagreed with most of what the president had done, from the fatback-festooned stimulus to the heavy-handed Dodd-Frank reform. He disdained the fervidly partisan approach that the supposedly post-partisan Obama had taken on health care reform and so much else. And then there was the BP oil spill. As governor, Romney had always been hands-on, from micromanaging the plows when blizzards came to personally overseeing the crisis when a concrete panel collapsed in Boston’s Fort Point Channel Tunnel in 2006. On learning that many weeks had passed after the Deepwater Horizon explosion without Obama calling BP’s CEO, Romney barked, “He’s the leader of the free world! He hasn’t picked up the phone?”

  The second development was the rise of the Tea Party. That January, Romney had been among the earliest supporters of Scott Brown, the Republican candidate in a special election to fill the Senate vacancy created by Ted Kennedy’s death. With the Tea Party rallying to Brown’s side and opposition to Obamacare at the center of his campaign, the Republican’s victory was an indication of the president’s vulnerability and the movement’s gathering force. And while Romney was not in sync with its hot-eyed fury, he thought the Tea Party’s focus on spending, deficits, and debt played to his strengths.

  Yet Romney’s ambivalence remained—unspooling in ways that would later haunt him. Out in La Jolla, he was planning a renovation of Fin de la Senda. It was by no means a mansion, at three thousand square feet and with three bedrooms, hardly enough room for his and Ann’s sons, daughters-in-law, and sixteen grandkids to visit. On top of that, the house was at the end of a pinched cul-de-sac in a neighborhood virtually devoid of street parking. Romney wanted to bulldoze the structure and build a new one with nearly four times the space, including an expanded split-level garage with a hydraulic lift to move cars around inside.

  Romney knew he would be criticized for the elaborateness of the construction when the plans became public, as they surely would—if he ran. And he knew that if he won the presidency, it would all be for naught, because the Secret Service could never protect the house: it was on a public beach. But when some of his aides, including Fehrnstrom and Rhoades, suggested he put the renovation on hold, Romney squirmed and went looking for the answer he wanted to hear, turning to Stuart Stevens.

  Stevens had been a part of Romney’s media team in 2008, providing an idiosyncratic voice that had often been drowned out. Since then, however, he increasingly had Mitt’s ear.

  “Should I not build this house?” Romney asked Stevens.

  You don’t know if you’re gonna run, Stevens said. You know you’re gonna be alive. There are a million reasons for people not to vote for you. If you run, they’re gonna say you’re rich. You are rich. If you want to build a house, you should build a house. “You’ve got to live your life,” he said.

  • • •

  ROMNEY INVITED STEVENS AND his business partner, Russ Schriefer, to have lunch with him in Belmont, where he and Ann had recently purchased a modest townhouse in a condominium complex. (For more than a year after selling their old Belmont digs, the couple claimed a basement flat in their son Tagg’s nearby home as their legal Massachusetts residence.) It was November 2, 2010, midterm Election Day, and Romney was starting to get antsy about making the decision he had put off for so long. He had a job offer to extend to the consultants—conditionally.

  One of Romney’s insights from his and White’s autopsy of 2008 was that his campaign had been plagued by too much talent. He had approached his candidacy as if it were a Bain consulting project: throwing bodies and big brains at the endeavor. Romney didn’t mind a cacophony of brilliant if conflicting voices. He liked to bring clever people together, let them duke it out at length. But he also had a tendency to vacillate
, to want more data, to reprise every internal debate. Taken together, these elements had yielded paralysis, pettifoggery, and a terminally muddy message. This time (if there was a this time), Romney swore that his outfit would be lean and mean instead of top-heavy, and guided by a single and singular chief strategist.

  The Svengali Romney wanted for 2012 was Mike Murphy, a rumpled, blond, forty-eight-year-old image maker based in Los Angeles. Murphy’s résumé was replete with high-profile clients: John McCain, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the sharp-elbowed world of political hired guns, he had as many detractors as admirers, but no one gainsaid his self-promotional chops. Glib and quotable, Murphy was a frequent TV presence, a kind of Republican James Carville—but with irony and sarcasm substituting for bug-eyed apoplexy. He cheerfully trumpeted his reputation as Murphy the Mudslinger; for a time, the vanity plates on his Porsche read GO NEG.

  Murphy had masterminded Romney’s successful 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But in 2008, with two former clients in the presidential hunt, he sat on the sidelines, to Romney’s great regret. Ever since, in e-mails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, the governor had labored to draw Murphy back into the fold. Tagg Romney paid a recruiting visit to the consultant in L.A., double-teaming him.

  Murphy was happy on the West Coast, working various Hollywood angles. The idea of moving to Boston struck him as a stone-cold bummer, but he gave the matter serious consideration. He liked Romney, thought he would make a good president. The trouble was that the governor had surrounded himself with mediocrities. Murphy told Romney that if he took the job, he would want to fire half of his team. Mitt blenched. Maybe you could find a way to work with everybody, he said weakly.

  “I don’t think I want to do this anyway,” Murphy replied. “But no, I couldn’t.”

  For most politicians, such a blunt rejection would have been the end of the story. Not Romney. His feelings for Murphy, the man who’d engineered the one political victory of his life, were slightly fetishistic. Romney would continue to seek out Murphy’s counsel at critical junctures in the 2012 race, almost always keeping the communications secret—specifically from his second choice as chief strategist, with whom he was now having lunch.

  Stuart Phineas Stevens was a decade older than Murphy and even more colorful. Mississippi-born, educated at Colorado College, Middlebury, Oxford, and UCLA film school, he was an ad maker, travel writer (Feeding Frenzy), TV writer (Northern Exposure), film consultant (The Ides of March), and extreme-sports fanatic who had skied to the North Pole, and ridden the Paris–Brest–Paris bicycle race while hopped up on steroids, chronicling his exploits for Outside magazine. Charming, flirty, and superficially laconic, yet capable of prickly combativeness, Stevens spoke in a lazy drawl that could devolve into a mumble or elevate to a wheeze. His political clients tended to be moderate Republicans such as Bob Dole and former Florida governor Charlie Crist, but there were notable exceptions: Stevens helped elect Bush 43 and prepared Dick Cheney for his 2004 vice-presidential debate with John Edwards.

  Stevens, too, inspired animus in rival consultants, Murphy vehemently among them. (“It’s not that we don’t like each other,” Murphy told friends. “I just think he’s an idiot.”) The lineage of their feud had been lost in the mists of time. But it was fueled by the fact that, looks aside—with Stevens a ringer for Thomas Haden Church and Murphy resembling Philip Seymour Hoffman—they had much in common, from galaxy-size egos (about their writing, celebrity shoulder-rubbing, bon mots, ad making, and facility at fricasseeing opponents) to Hollywood connections, unconventional lifestyles, and a propensity to procure real estate the way normal people acquire shoes.

  Stevens had been in the running for the Romney account in 2002 until Murphy beat him out. But in 2007, after a brief spell working for McCain, he and Schriefer were appended to the bloated Boston talent roster and were now at the core of Romneyland. Stevens worked closely with Mitt on No Apology, and while they sometimes seemed to hail from different planets, and possibly even different species, they somehow clicked. Both were hyper-literate book and film junkies, introspective, watchful—and not entirely obsessed with politics. Their relationship was something like the one between the patrician Bush 41 and his southern-fried savant, Lee Atwater: odd, affectionate, respectful, sustained by mutual curiosity.

  Now, in November 2010 in Belmont, Romney was ready to take the next step to cement their bond. For ninety minutes, they ran through the putative 2012 game plan, with Stevens ticking off a series of homespun maxims that would be the first principles of a second Romney campaign.

  To begin with, Stevens said, Romney was “gonna have to steal the nomination.” The Republican Party was increasingly a southern, populist, evangelical beast. Romney was northeastern, buttoned-down, and Mormon. Much of the base would see him as an establishment figure, even though the Beltway crowd, to which he had few ties, regarded him as an alien.

  “The party will not drift to you,” Stevens continued. You’re going to have to win it over. And winning it over would be possible for one reason: the depth of the desire of Republican voters to oust Obama. If you can convince them you’re the guy who can beat him, you can win.

  In order to do that, Stevens said, “we gotta dig the ditch we’re gonna die in.” In 2008, Romney had essentially conducted multiple campaigns, each with its own tactics, to convince every important Republican faction that he was the most conservative candidate in the field. In 2012, they would focus squarely and almost exclusively on the economy and jobs, articulating a forceful critique of Obama’s failed management and agenda—the same themes they would drive in the general election, assuming that they got there. You have to say, This is what I bring to the table; come eat at this table, Stevens argued.

  Finally, Stevens said, “You have to be willing to lose to win, and you’re going to lose a lot”—a lot of votes, a lot of states. “No one gets elected president without being humiliated. How you deal with the humiliation is the key.”

  Romney had never suffered public humiliation until the 2008 campaign. Enduring it then had been excruciating, but it had also hardened his shell—and that was only one of the ways in which having run last time would give him a leg up on any first-time candidates who challenged him this go-round. With the passage of time and plenty of postmorteming, he had come to understand the perils of chasing the news cycle and letting the freak show drag him down. And he had learned how damaging it could be to allow a negative meme to spread and fester, as it had with him on the question of flip-floppery.

  He recognized that he was now in a straitjacket, with none of the latitude that other candidates had to shift or shade his positions. What he had said in 2008 and written in No Apology would be his gospel in 2012. The flip-flopper tattoo had left a scar; he did not intend to reopen the wound.

  On all of these dimensions, Romney believed that having run once before equipped him to run better and smarter this time. But the question lingered: Did he really want to?

  Over the Christmas holiday, the Romney family went on vacation on Maui. Four years earlier, when Mitt had polled his brood on whether he should run, the result was unanimously in favor. But now four of his sons were against the idea, with only Tagg voting aye. It’s grueling, hard on your health, the majority said. You’ve written your book, said what you need to say—move on. Romney didn’t disagree. “Why go through the process just to lose again?” he asked, only partly rhetorically.

  There was, however, one other dissenter besides Mitt’s eldest boy. In the more than two years since she’d expressed adamant opposition to another run, Ann Romney had gradually but inexorably shifted her position. Watching the news, she had become more and more alarmed by Obama and the deteriorating state of the nation.

  Ann asked her husband if he thought he could fix the mess. Mitt said that he did. So why wasn’t it obvious that he simply had to run? Why on earth was he dragging his feet?

  Romney spent the next couple of weeks brooding some more about what to do. He’d a
nswered Ann honestly: He believed that his background and skills placed him in a near-unique position to put America back on track. Just as important, he doubted that the other plausible entrants in the race could beat the incumbent.

  Many insiders were high on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Good record, Romney thought, but Daniels lacked the requisite charisma. Others praised South Dakota senator John Thune. Romney had talked to him. Terrific guy. Didn’t have what it took to win. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was a favorite of the establishment, but his history as a lobbyist would make him toxic. Huckabee? Good candidate, Romney mused, but easily marginalized as a staunch evangelical. Tim Pawlenty? Credible, Romney thought, but too weak on the fund-raising side. Then there was Jeb Bush, whom Romney saw as the real deal. Burdened by his family’s name, but great record, great organization, great guy. Romney talked to Jeb, too, however, and it seemed clear that the former Florida governor had no interest in running.

  Romney understood his own limitations and vulnerabilities; he knew that capturing his party’s nomination would be an uphill slog. But the more he considered the situation, the more apparent it was to him that he was the only Republican thinking of jumping in who possessed a genuine chance of unseating Obama—the only one who could save the country. Although Romney had no inferno raging in his gut, he realized that his wife was right: he simply had to run.

  In mid-January 2011, in their living room in La Jolla, Romney told Ann he had come around, then he conveyed the news to his team. Ann was thrilled. So was the Lexington crew.

  Up in L.A., Murphy shook his head. For two years, Romney had basically been asking himself, Am I crazy enough to put myself through this, take on this horrible mission? The answer turned out to be no. And yet—out of a mixture of duty, ambition, and self-aggrandizement—he was doing it anyway. In a sense, it was admirable, Murphy thought. But it was also a recipe for trouble, especially in light of one bracing fact: much of the Republican Party believed that Romney didn’t stand a chance.