The venue for that speech was the annual white-tie Gridiron Dinner in Washington, one of the Beltway upper echelon’s haughtiest and hottest tickets. And Daniels’s selection as the Republican toaster spoke volumes about his status on the national stage in early 2011. Far from being put off by his lack of magnetism, the GOP’s potentates were coalescing around him, on the theory that Daniels would present the ideal contrast with the incumbent: he was the un-Obama.
The establishment attraction to Daniels was easy to understand. He had a gold-plated insider’s résumé: staffer to Indiana senator Richard Lugar, Barbour’s predecessor as Reagan’s political director, top executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, head of OMB under Bush 43. He won the Indiana governorship narrowly in 2004 and by eighteen points in 2008, even as Obama became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1964. Daniels was a fiscal hawk and institutional reformer whose mixture of tough love and the common touch—he rambled around in an Indiana-made RV or on a Harley—earned him approval ratings north of 60 percent, even at the nadir of the recession.
Daniels’s experiences as a candidate in the Hoosier State informed his dim view of Romney, whom he saw as the antithesis of authentic, a pre-programmed automaton. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice once told Daniels that when Mitt visited Stanford, where she had returned after her time in government, she watched astonished as he emitted a canned stump speech to a sophisticated, techie crowd—then repeated the faux pas at a small private dinner she hosted for him afterwards.
Even more problematic for Daniels was Romney’s plutocratic demeanor. If you wear the Republican uniform, Daniels thought, you have a stereotype stuck on you. You don’t whine about it. You do something about it. You prove it isn’t true—you prove that you’re for the policies you’re for because they’re good for poor people, good for people on the way up. And Daniels had done just that, winning 20 percent of the black vote and a majority of the youth vote in 2008. But when he looked at Romney, all he could think was He’s never going to get there.
Daniels spent much of 2010 trying to recruit a Romney alternative. Besides making runs at Jeb and Haley, he pressed hard on two others: Fred Smith, the founder, chairman, and CEO of FedEx, and former Senate majority leader Bill Frist. But neither took the bait.
At the same time, a handful of Daniels’s political and business cronies inspirited him to dangle his own toes in the water. Daniels believed the ballooning debt under Obama posed an existential threat to the country, and his friends maintained that he was the best person to defuse it. He had shrunk the government in Indiana, turning an inherited $200 million deficit into a $1.3 billion surplus, and his D.C. experience taught him where the bodies were buried in the federal budget. “Here’s the thing,” one of his buddies said. “Do you have any doubt you are competent to be president?”
Daniels had never aspired to occupy the Oval Office. “When I look in the mirror,” he often said, “I don’t see a president.” But posing the question in terms of competence made him think differently. I don’t know if anybody is ever really ready for that job, Daniels said, but I’m as ready as anybody.
Quietly, Daniels began holding private dinners in Indianapolis for donors, bundlers, and policy mavens while publicly floating a number of trial balloons that looked more like Hindenburgs. In a Weekly Standard profile, Daniels declared the need “to call a truce” on volatile social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. To Newsweek, he said that tax increases might be necessary to tame the deficit. In a speech in October, he talked favorably about a European-style value-added tax and tariffs on imported oil. Daniels anticipated that the reaction to these statements on the right might blow up the whole Mitch-for-president thing. But they detonated with only a dull pop—and even that sound was squelched by hosannas from other quarters.
By the end of 2010, Daniels had plenty of reasons to feel emboldened, but he also had a source of weighty discouragement, which had been there all along: his family. His wife, Cheri, was a private person who had been dead set against her husband running for governor. Mitch talked her into it with an ironclad promise: If we do this, I’ll never ask you to go anywhere and sit there looking fawningly up at me; come or don’t come to any event you want; it’s my job, not yours. Cheri took him up on it, presiding as a popular but low-profile first lady. But Mitch couldn’t guarantee similar seclusion in a presidential campaign. Her attitude toward the idea was I don’t even want to talk about this.
There was another wellspring of Cheri’s reluctance. In 1994, after sixteen years of marriage, she had left Mitch for a doctor in California with a wife and children of his own, breaking up that household and divorcing her husband. In the court proceedings, Mitch succeeded in keeping their four daughters, then ages eight to fourteen, in Indiana. Cheri married the doctor, then soon left him and reconciled with and remarried Mitch. In the years since, she had never spoken publicly about the turmoil, and Mitch had done so only once—pithily telling The Indianapolis Star, “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story.”
Cheri dreaded the prospect of the intimacies of her marriage being dredged up and dissected by the freak show. She wanted a life filled with golf and grandchildren, not state dinners. The Daniels daughters were equally appalled by what a campaign would entail. And Mitch was no keener on the distortions and nastiness that would come. It was known that, as an undergraduate, he had spent two nights in jail for possession of marijuana. But there was more to his infraction, including LSD and prescription drugs, which would be turned into tabloid fodder.
In early February 2011, Daniels flew down to Dallas for the weekend of the Super Bowl, which Indianapolis would be hosting the next year, and found himself summoned to a meeting with George W. Bush. The former president’s purpose was clear: he wanted Mitch to run. You’re nuts if you don’t seize this opportunity, Bush said. The party ain’t got much on the field; the nomination’s yours for the taking. Now, I can’t come out and support you. Not right for a former president to play that role. But my network, my people on the money side, will be with you, I’m sure of it.
When Daniels rattled off his and his family’s qualms, Bush was dismissive. You’re only looking at the downsides, 43 said. There are huge upsides, including for your family. You think Laura and the girls wanted me to run? Of course they didn’t. But it all worked out great for them.
Six days later, Daniels took the podium at CPAC and delivered what sounded like a full-blown campaign speech. Devoted almost entirely to debt (which Daniels labeled “the new red menace, this time consisting of ink”), entitlements, and economic restoration, the address was adamantine in its conservatism. But it was also laced with calls for compromise, civility, and inclusion, and featured a gentle but unmistakable poke at the flying monkeys of the right-wing media circus. “We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities,” Daniels said. “We will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn [Beck] or Laura [Ingraham] or Sean [Hannity].”
Daniels’s speech didn’t light up the fire-breathers in the room the way that Trump’s did. But outside the hall, cooler heads took notice. Over at the White House, Plouffe printed out a copy for Obama, who was impressed by Daniels’s tone. “There’s a reasonableness here,” the president said. “I think I’d enjoy debating Daniels.” Bill Clinton’s ears pricked up, too. I know a lot of Republicans, and Daniels is one of the smart ones, he said publicly some time later—and told the governor privately, I watched that speech, and then I watched it again.
Seeing Daniels apparently teetering on the brink, the Republican establishment scurried to lasso and yank him in. Rove rang up to counsel him about placeholding with key fund-raisers and operatives. McCain called to convey a message similar to Bush’s: As the previous nominee, I shouldn’t endorse anyone—but you oughta run, and my people will be behind you. Christie, Jeb, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker added their names to what Daniels thought of as his “fictional letterhead.” Dick Cheney an
d Dick Armey, the former House majority leader now enmeshed in the Tea Party, were also phantom signatories, as was the august columnist George Will. Major league bundlers were beating a path to Mitch’s door.
Daniels was candid with everyone: his family was still a problem—the problem, in fact. Which triggered a full-court press on Cheri from all directions. Inside the Daniels household, Mitch probed his daughters for any changes in his wife’s thinking—“What’s Mom said to you about it?” “Have you said any more to Mom?” Daniels’s staff sent Cheri favorable press clips. The cronies who had originally induced him to test the waters sat down with her and pled their case. One day, the phone rang, Cheri picked it up, and W. and Laura Bush were together on the line, offering to address her concerns, attempting to wheedle her along. Cheri politely but firmly told them she didn’t want to be pushed.
Then, out of nowhere, the Indiana Republican Party announced that Cheri would be keynoting its fund-raising dinner in Indianapolis on May 12. Mrs. Daniels had never given a high-profile political speech. More than a thousand people would be in attendance, along with much of the national media. Among politicos and the press, speculation was rampant that the speech represented a crack in the ice—or at least an attempt by Daniels’s advisers to increase Cheri’s comfort level in the spotlight, even as her appearance would smoke out unpleasant news stories about the couple’s marital troubles.
Those stories arrived on schedule and en masse, popping up in newspapers and all over the Web days before the speech. Little information in the pieces was new or sordid, although an article in The Washington Post included an ominous sentence: “In exchange for anonymity, an official for another GOP prospect provided contact information for the ex-wife of the man Cheri Daniels married.” (The ex-wife lashed out at Cheri to at least one reporter, calling her “vengeful” and a “narcissist.”)
In the Daniels orbit, all fingers pointed at the Romney camp, and in particular at Rhoades, for shopping the ex-wife’s cell-phone number and e-mail address to the press. Daniels didn’t care—he already knew that the jig was up. For all the efforts at persuading his family, the sorority never budged. Unlike Ann Romney, Cheri didn’t see her husband as some kind of savior. As for the Daniels girls, the idea of their father being president held zero attraction. “Dad, you don’t get it,” his daughter Meredith said. “We’re not afraid that you’ll lose. We’re afraid that you’ll win.”
On Saturday, May 21, Daniels arranged a conference call with his cronies. He told them he had prepared a statement to release to The Indianapolis Star saying that he would not run. Like Barbour, Daniels rarely let his emotions show; but just as Barbour’s voice had broken when he bailed out, so Daniels’s did now. “Look, guys, I know you don’t agree, and you’re disappointed, and I’m sorry I’ve let you down,” he said. “I love my country, but I love my family more.”
One of Daniels’s friends on the call suggested he include that last bit in his statement to the Star. Mitch agreed, and a few hours later the line was in, the word was out, and the fourth little Indian was gone.
• • •
MANY MONTHS WOULD PASS before the implications of the wave of Republican nolo contenderes in the spring of 2011 were fully visible. But even in the moment, it was clear they had yielded a freakish historical anomaly. With a vulnerable Democrat in the White House and a winnable election on the horizon, many of the GOP’s most adept and accomplished potential candidates had decided not to bother. Their reasons were by turns political, personal, financial, generic, and idiosyncratic, but the upshot of their insufficient appetites was undeniable: the weakest Republican field in modern times—and an unloved, unsteady, unlikely front-runner blessed with a degree of blind shithouse luck that would make a Vegas gambler weep.
But Romney wasn’t feeling as if he’d hit the jackpot. After months of internal back-and-forth in Lexington, his big speech on health care had been scheduled to take place at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Romney was deeply and fussily immersed in preparing the presentation. Lapsing into full Bain mode, he wanted to build his address around a PowerPoint deck, as he had sometimes done in the 2008 campaign. After asking his policy maven Lanhee Chen to put together the slides, Mitt looked them over, tossed them out, and then sketched out a new set on his own, by hand.
On the mid-May morning of the speech, Mitt woke up to find that The Wall Street Journal editorial page was at it again—with a scathing and supersize prebuttal of his defense of Romneycare, under the headline OBAMA’S RUNNING MATE. Mitt had been trying to win over Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, since the 2008 campaign. But Murdoch thought Romney was unconvincing and wooden from the get-go. And his resistance was revved up by the Journal’s editorial-page editor, Paul Gigot, who considered Romney the epitome of fraudulence and led the paper’s fatwa against him.
“Have you read this?” Romney asked Chen in their Ann Arbor hotel.
“Yeah, it’s not good,” Chen replied.
“It’s really not good,” Romney said—and things would go downhill from there as the reviews of the speech came back and were as bad, politically and substantively, as the Journal’s preview. The left and the right agreed that calling Romneycare common sense and Obamacare lunacy was “a logical contradiction,” as National Review put it. The lampoonery of Mitt’s reliance on PowerPoint was so pervasive—especially among conservatives, who ritually chided Obama for his dependence on a teleprompter—that Romney would never use it again in the campaign.
On June 2, Romney made his candidacy official with another speech, this one at Bittersweet Farm, in Stratham, New Hampshire. The setting was bucolic and gorgeous, but there were two problems with it. Bittersweet was a hay farm, and Romney suffered from hay fever; and the farmhouse was filled with cats, to which he was also allergic.
While Romney’s mortified traveling aides scrambled for drops to salve his rheumy eyes, he and the rest of his team discussed another unwanted distraction of the day: the intrusion of Sarah Palin. A week earlier, Palin had embarked on a haphazard bus tour of historic sites along the Eastern Seaboard. That morning, Team Romney learned that she would be pitching up later in the day at a clambake in Seabrook, New Hampshire, a site of no historic import that just happened to be a mere twelve miles from Bittersweet Farm.
Some of Romney’s aides were irate about what they saw as an obvious attempt by Palin to step on Mitt’s headlines. (Just before his announcement, Palin addressed reporters on Bunker Hill and attacked Romneycare.) Ann Romney shared their irritation, grousing around the farmhouse that Palin’s incursion was “classless.”
The candidate himself shrugged Palin off. Sure, she was angling for attention. Sure, she was a pest. But how annoyed can you get at Sarah Palin? Romney thought. All that mattered was that there was no way she was going to run—Romney was sure of it. He had plenty of real things to worry about and wasn’t going to let himself be distracted by shiny objects. But he wasn’t particularly pleased by what he saw in the New Hampshire Union Leader the next morning: a huge front-page photo of Palin, with the story about his formal entry in the race tucked inside on page A3.
Romney was still absorbing that affront when he sat down for an interview via satellite that same morning with CBS’s The Early Show as part of his announcement tour. Obama was headed to Toledo, Ohio, that day to tour a Chrysler plant and trumpet the news that the company would be paying back its $7.6 billion government loan in full and ahead of schedule. The program’s anchor, Erica Hill, asked Romney about his 2008 Times op-ed, citing its provocative headline. Wasn’t he wrong to have advocated allowing Detroit to go bankrupt?
“Bankruptcy, as you understand, is not liquidation of an enterprise,” Romney replied. “It’s allowing an enterprise to go through the bankruptcy court so that they can reorganize and come out stronger. And that’s precisely what finally happened . . . The president recognized I was right . . . and the company finally went through bankruptcy, went through a managed bankruptcy, came out of bankruptcy, an
d now is recovering.”
Hill seemed unsatisfied with Mitt’s answer. She kept trying to interrupt as he continued to explain. “But, sir,” Hill said, breaking through at last, “the company actually had to go through bankruptcy before that bailout.”
To Romney, the anchor’s comment was, on its face, at once redundant and a non sequitur; Hill was playing back his precise argument to him as if she were challenging his logic.
Romney paused, blinked his eyes twice, raised his eyebrows, and smiled tightly.
“Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly what I said,” Mitt replied, his voice betraying annoyance. “The headline you read, which said ‘Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,’ points out that those companies needed to go through bankruptcy to shed those costs.”
The interview went on in this vein for another few minutes—Hill still pressing, Romney ever more irritated. (“Erica, I think you’re misunderstanding.”) But the damage was already done. All along, Romney knew that the politically problematic aspect of his op-ed was not the content but the headline. And yet now he had committed the grave faux pas of repeating the four poisonous words on camera.
Romney realized the mistake would almost certainly come back to bite him. That he would see that footage again someday in ad after ad, assuming that he made it to the general election. The prospects of his getting there had been improved by so many heavy hitters deciding to stay on the sidelines—about that there could be no doubt. But even now, Romney continued to suspect that someone else would inevitably suit up. There was talk of Paul Ryan, talk of Rick Perry, and talk of Chris Christie, all of whom would be formidable.
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