Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  In many ways, Romney was Rove’s kind of candidate. Despite Mitt’s underwhelming 2008 national debut, there was a sense that it was now his turn, no small thing in a party governed by primogeniture. Between his personal wealth and fund-raising network, Romney would never be shy of cash. His corporate experience would contrast nicely with Obama’s obliviousness about the private sector. And Romney had ingratiated himself with the Bushes; 41 and his wife, Barbara, enjoyed Mitt’s company.

  But Rove saw Romney’s plasticity and inability to connect as substantial flaws. He considered Romneycare a high hurdle in the nomination race, and an insurmountable one in a general election; he was certain it would cause the Republican base to stay home and also alienate independents. He had advised Romney to repudiate it, but instead the candidate played the federalism card. What you’re saying, Rove thought, is “The Tenth Amendment guarantees that the federal government can’t fuck up the country, but gives us the right to fuck up Massachusetts.” Not exactly a compelling argument.

  Rove’s feelings toward Romney truly were emblematic of the GOP establishment. Among elected officials, strategists, and lobbyists in Washington, Romney wasn’t liked or disliked—he was a stranger. Apart from Ron Kaufman, it was difficult to locate a soul who was energetically and unreservedly for him. Instead they were frantically casting about for a more palatable alternative.

  To Rove and much of the establishment, the beau ideal was Jeb Bush. But the former Florida governor was telling everyone the same thing he’d told Romney: he planned to stay on the bench. It wasn’t so much concerns about a Bush hangover that were keeping Jeb there. It was his bank account.

  You don’t understand, Bush would say to the Republican pooh-bahs begging him to run. I was in the real estate development business in my state. There was a huge bubble, but I missed out because I was governor for eight years. So I’m starting from scratch. If, God forbid, I’m in an accident tomorrow—I’m in a wheelchair drooling, saliva coming from my mouth—who’s going to take care of me? What are my wife and kids going to do? I’ve got to look after my family. This is my chance to do it.

  With Jeb determined to stay out, the establishment, like the Romney campaign, monitored the movements of Barbour, Daniels, and Huckabee, while rolling its collective eyes at the theatrics of Trump. The four shared little in common biographically, politically, or characterologically. But when it came to 2012, each held several truths to be self-evident: that if he sought the Republican nomination, the battle would boil down to him versus Romney; that when it did, he would prevail; and that, in a country evenly split, he would stand a fighting chance in a general election against Obama.

  In presidential politics, this level of certainty was as rare as a patch of white truffles sprouting in the Bronx. Almost always, when someone who believed he should occupy the White House—that the country would be well served by his presence in the big chair—also saw victory as attainable, he took the plunge. That four such men would stand down in the same year was almost unthinkable.

  • • •

  ROVE, FOR ONE, was sure that Haley Barbour would dive in. The bulk of the political world agreed. On April 14, the Mississippi governor was meeting-and-greeting in New Hampshire. The next night he was in South Carolina, speaking to the Charleston County Republican Party and winning its presidential straw poll. A month earlier, he had stumped in Iowa, held finance meetings in California, and given a major economic address in Chicago. Behind the scenes, he had enlisted an all-star cast of campaign hands in the early states; his Washington brain trust had drawn up plans for an announcement tour in the first week of May. To all outward and inward appearances, Barbour was go, go, go.

  He had been a central player in his party for thirty-five years: in the eighties as an operative (political director in the Reagan White House); in the nineties as one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists and chair of the RNC; in the aughts, as the two-term chief executive of his native state. Barbour was sixty-three now, with the body of a cannonball, a taste for bourbon, and a strategic brain as acuminate as Rove’s. His connections and fund-raising capacity were unrivaled, his candidate skills top-notch. He was beloved by reporters for doling out dictums dripping in his syrupy twang: “In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse”; “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

  Barbour had considered entering the 2008 field. Less than halfway through his first term as governor, he convened a secret meeting in Jackson of his closest advisers and his wife, Marsha, to start planning a White House run. But then Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005 and blew it all away. Barbour realized he had no choice but to seek a second gubernatorial term to complete the recovery efforts.

  With Barbour’s handling of Katrina having won wide praise, the presidential buzz began building around him four years later. Over breakfast at the governor’s mansion in late 2009, Rove raised the subject with Haley. “Ain’t no way the country’s ready for a fat white southerner with an accent who’s been a lobbyist,” Barbour joked, seeming to brush Rove off.

  But the following summer, Barbour took the first step toward putting the pieces in place for a 2012 bid. He tasked his friend Scott Reed, who had managed Dole’s 1996 campaign, to undertake a study of his vulnerabilities—and dredge up any slime his opponents might strive to smear him with. Barbour was serving as chair of the Republican Governors Association, a perch he could turn into a presidential launching pad if the party’s candidates scored in the midterms. But he was careful to avoid the perception that he was using the job for his own advancement; he and other governors resented Romney for having done just that as RGA chair in 2006.

  To say Barbour and Romney were oil and water severely understated the case. Romney respected Barbour’s political mind and instincts but was astonished by how much Haley drank. Barbour, meanwhile, respected almost nothing about Romney professionally, considered him self-centered, tin-eared, and inauthentic. “The guy’s never said a sentence to me that’s spontaneous,” Barbour told his people. What bothered him even more were the implications of Romney as front-runner. He’s got a ceiling of 30 percent support for the nomination, Barbour said. His weakness will attract a large, unruly field, and that’ll be bad for the party.

  Barbour’s views were broadly shared by the other Republican governors. Two weeks after the midterms—in which the GOP’s candidates nearly pulled off a sweep on the back of Haley’s massive RGA fund-raising haul—they met in San Diego, where an animated conversation broke out in one of the working groups about the looming presidential campaign. “It can’t be Mitt,” yelped Ohio’s Kasich. “He’s terrible!” Rick Perry of Texas concurred. New Jersey’s Chris Christie was more diplomatic but no less unenthused.

  The governors wanted one of their breed to be the nominee. Barbour took several aside and said he was thinking of running, winning pledges of support from some, such as Kasich, on the spot. But Barbour was having another set of conversations, too—a three-way discourse with Jeb and Mitch Daniels, a close pal of Barbour’s. Over the phone and in person, they agreed that Romney had to be stopped and that one of them should step up to do it. Barbour and Daniels urged Bush to set aside his hesitancy, telling him they would stay out if he got in. But Bush refused to reconsider. Meanwhile, Barbour and Daniels, whose friendship stretched back to the Reagan era, lobbied each other to assume the mantle. Their importunings had a certain Alphonse and Gaston flavor, with each man clucking over his own weaknesses, praising the other’s strengths, and saying, in effect, After you!

  By late December 2010, Barbour was sitting in his statehouse office reviewing the dirt on himself, dug up by Scott Reed. The self-opposition research file was bulky, filling up the better part of a banker’s box. It contained a long list of unsavory lobbying clients, including repressive foreign governments in places such as Kazakhstan and Eritrea, for whom Barbour’s firm had labored. It laid out the areas where Barbour, as governor, had failed to improve his state’s cellar-level national rankings
, such as health and education. (This won’t be a “Mississippi miracle” type of campaign, Reed thought.) The strategist also talked to Barbour about his personal life, which for years was rumored to be nearly as vivacious as Bill Clinton’s; as Barbour’s former lobbying partner Ed Rogers liked to put it, “There is no skeleton in Haley’s closet, but there is a bag of bones.”

  Barbour was unfazed. The lobbying stuff was old news, he said, and the Mississippi record he could talk his way through. As for any charges about his personal comportment, Barbour said, “I can handle that.” With the Mississippi legislative session scheduled to end in early April, the governor set himself a May 1 decision deadline.

  Not everyone shared Barbour’s devil-may-careness about his influence-peddling background. In the Romney and Obama camps, it was considered poisonous enough to make him unelectable. Rove thought Barbour might be able to surmount the lobbyist label in the nomination fight but would be killed for it in the general—and told Haley so in a private meeting at CPAC in February 2011, mentioning his former firm’s work for foreign governments.

  That weekend, Barbour appeared on Fox News Sunday. The host, Chris Wallace, questioned him twice on lobbying, including references to Kazakhstan and Eritrea. Barbour smelled a rat. He and Rove had never been close; they existed in a state of subtle but distinct competition for the title of Smartest Guy in the GOP. With Rove’s ties to Fox, the idea that Wallace’s line of questioning was a coincidence struck Barbour as absurd. I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t LAST night, he thought.

  Serious as the lobbying issue might become, Barbour had a more pressing predicament, which involved the topic of race. On the same December day as his meeting with Reed, the conservative Weekly Standard magazine published a Barbour profile in which he discussed his boyhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Asked why his hometown, unlike many in the state, had been able to integrate its schools without violence, Barbour replied, “Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it. You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town.”

  As it happened, Stuart Stevens, just back from a three-week trip to the Arctic Circle, was also in Jackson that day to see Barbour, an old friend for whom he had made ads. Stevens had come to see whether Haley was planning to run, warn him that his chances were scant, and let him know that if Barbour did get in, the consultant’s conflicting loyalties would probably cause him to sit out 2012.

  Being from the Magnolia State, Stevens knew that the Citizens’ Councils weren’t as benign as Barbour made them sound; that although they’d squelched Klan violence to protect local businesses, they had been formed specifically to oppose school integration. “This is gonna be a problem,” Stevens said to Barbour. “What are you going to do about it?”

  Haley waved him off. “Nah,” he said, “I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem.”

  This wasn’t the first dismissive comment Barbour had made in his career on matters racial. But after a day of scorching criticism on cable and the Web, he released a statement calling the Citizens’ Council “indefensible, as is segregation.”

  Then, in February, another racial brouhaha erupted when Barbour rejected an appeal from the NAACP to denounce a southern heritage group’s proposal for a state-issued license plate honoring an early KKK leader, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. “I don’t go around denouncing people,” Barbour said. “There’s not a chance it will become law.”

  Barbour’s advisers believed that Haley had a blind spot on the issue. Their greatest fear was that he would be portrayed as Boss Hogg. Thinking back on the way Clinton—Bill Clinton!—had been cast as a race-baiter in 2008 by the Obamans, they knew that Barbour was a quadruply juicy target for caricature. If Haley were running the campaign of a candidate identical to himself, he would have seen it, too, and enforced an exaggerated degree of racial sensitivity as a political shield. Instead he retreated into defensiveness, failing to grasp the divide between what he believed about himself—I don’t have a racist bone in my body—and his public image.

  He laid off the bourbon, losing twenty pounds, and slipped away to the Mayo Clinic in April to secure a clean bill of health. His trips to the early states were going well; he was receiving a warm reception for his stances on three big issues on which he planned to run to Romney’s (and much of his party’s) left: immigration reform, a fairly quick exit from Afghanistan, and cutting defense spending.

  But he was starting to flag physically on the trail, and jovially complained about being subjected to his own Bataan Death March. By Easter weekend he had conferred extensively with his family—Marsha and their two sons, Reeves and Sterling. Even though all three said they were behind him, his wife had recently told a Biloxi TV reporter how she felt about Haley running. “It horrifies me,” she admitted. Sterling, too, had said publicly, “I am a private person and don’t want him to run.”

  For months, Barbour had seemed to be sprinting like a scalded dog toward yes. But all along, he was shadowed by doubt. He thought about former Tennessee senator and actor Fred Thompson, whose ballyhooed 2008 campaign had gone nowhere. He thought about Gingrich, whom he bumped into in Iowa, bubbling about the crowds coming to see him. (Jesus, don’t let me run just because I get so full of myself because everybody’s listening, Haley mused.) He thought about the general election—how winning could turn the endeavor into a ten-year commitment, with two on the trail, four in office, and four more if he were reelected. For a man his age, the presidency would amount to “a life sentence,” he said. Did Haley really want that? What about Marsha? When does she get her turn? he wondered.

  Then there was the likelihood that he’d lose. It would be hard for anybody from Mississippi to beat the first black president, Barbour told Daniels, who didn’t disagree. And given the premium in the GOP on electability, that meant it would be difficult for a Mississippian to claim the nomination. Barbour thought back to 2008 and how Katrina had dashed his plans. In presidential politics, he believed, your time only comes around once, and maybe that was it—maybe, Haley thought, he’d missed his moment.

  The next day, April 25, Barbour got on a conference call with his embryonic campaign team and pulled the plug. “I decided I don’t have the fire in my belly to make this race,” he said, choking up. “I hope I haven’t misled you all, or disappointed you too much.”

  Actually, the people closest to Haley heaved a sigh of relief. Over the months of gearing up, most of them had become convinced that if he ran, he would be destroyed. Donors were already expressing misgivings about his race-related blunders. (“He didn’t just touch the third rail,” said one. “He hugged the motherfucker.”) Sadly, reluctantly, Barbour’s inner circle concluded that a drinking, drawling, corpulent ex-lobbyist stood little chance of being elected president in modern America. In other words, that Haley had been right all along.

  • • •

  BARBOUR’S BAILING OUT WAS good news for Huckabee in at least two ways. It left him as the only potential southern charmer in the field, and it opened up the possibility of Haley endorsing him, which Huckabee thought conceivable. A couple of weeks earlier, the two had chatted when Huckabee was down at Mississippi College for a speech. Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah, a political operative, had been angling for a job on Haley’s team, in case her dad chose not to run. The two men joked about that, and about Barbour becoming Huckabee’s campaign chairman if the decision went the other way.

  Beyond their regional roots, silver tongues, and bulging waistlines, Huck and Haley were as different as could be. The former Arkansas governor was unimpeachably pious, a long-serving Baptist pastor. In terms of his policies, personality, and barely concealed resentments, he was a populist to his core. At political banquets, he often observed, I’ve got more in common with the people working in the kitchen than the ones at
the head table. And unlike Barbour, Huckabee inspired trepidation in the Romneyites (because of his potency in the early states and with evangelicals) and the Obamans (because of his likability, folksiness, and optimism).

  In 2008, that combination of qualities had carried Huckabee further than anyone expected: to second place in terms of delegates. (It made him crazy when pundits called Romney the runner-up. “Excuse me? Can you add?” he fumed.) Yet Huckabee was dismissed by the party’s big shots. His offers to campaign for McCain were ignored, and he wasn’t shortlisted for VP. Not long before the Republican convention, Huckabee received a call from the organizers, offering a speaking slot—five minutes to talk about education at 5:00 p.m. on the opening day. They might as well ask me to set up a hot dog cart in front of the arena, he thought.

  The campaign had left Huckabee more than bruised; he was also basically broke. To finance his bid, he had taken out a second mortgage on his house, cashed in his annuities, retirement plan, and life insurance, and run up a debt of nearly $100,000. So into Rove mode he went. In quick succession, Huckabee signed deals to be a political analyst and weekend host on Fox, do daily radio commentaries for ABC, and write a book. He started traveling constantly, Willy Loman style, giving speech after speech.

  By the end of 2010, Huckabee Inc. had made him fiscally whole again—and then some. He and his wife, Janet, had grown up poor, and Huckabee had spent his adult life in the ministry and public service. For the first time, he had some bread in his basket and was enjoying the taste. Mike and Janet were building a reported $3 million beachside home down in Walton County, Florida, near Pensacola. When they inspected the property, they burst out giggling at their good fortune. The first apartment they shared had cost $40 a month, they reminded each other, and would have fit inside one of the closets of their manse-in-the-making.