Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  “There’s something wrong with him,” Stevens told Romney.

  “What do you think?” asked Mitt.

  “I don’t know,” Stevens said. “But I’m glad it’s not me.”

  • • •

  PERRY HEADED SOUTH from Simi Valley to San Diego for a fund-raiser the next morning. Then back north to Newport Beach, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Palo Alto, and Fresno—for more fund-raisers. Chasing dollars was job one for Perry at this point. There wasn’t time for much else. He had to put a big third-quarter number on the board, and was well on his way to the $17 million he would report at the end of September. In addition, six pro-Perry super PACs had been formed, including one pledging to spend $55 million on his behalf. With cash pouring in and poll numbers aloft, a middling debate debut seemed survivable.

  But out of public view, both Perry and Perryville were melting down. Ten days earlier, Perry had attended a closed-door meeting with many of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders at a ranch in central Texas, where he was pointedly questioned about the persistent rumors that he was gay. “I can assure you that there is nothing that will embarrass you if you decide to support me,” Perry told them.

  What Perry didn’t reveal was that his campaign had just received an e-mail filled with detailed and incendiary allegations from a Huffington Post reporter who had been pursuing the story doggedly all summer. Perry’s aides believed the charges were ridiculous but feared that their airing at the moment the candidate was introducing himself to the country could be devastating. So Austin lawyered up, hiring the famed libel attorney Lin Wood to send a letter to HuffPo’s owner, AOL, threatening to sue if the story was published.

  Perry was all for firing a loud shot across the website’s bow. If you’re gonna try to destroy my reputation, he thought, you better be certain that you’ve got your information extremely correct. Flagrant as the story was, his opponents were sure to flog the daylights out of the charges. Last thing we need is two weeks of doing nothing but responding to a bunch of fabrications.

  Just dealing with the HuffPo inquiries was a considerable distraction. Perry’s aides were engaged in a furious scramble—pulling schedules and personnel records, since some of the allegations involved interns—to prove a negative. The process consumed huge amounts of staff time and energy that otherwise would have been devoted to dealing with the real issues Perry faced, of which there were many.

  The most serious was his health. Since Perry’s surgery, he had been in constant discomfort. A complication of his nerve decompression emerged almost immediately. First his right foot started tingling, then the tingle spread up his leg and the feeling changed to something more like burning. He was strapped in a brace to deal with lingering back pain. He was wearing orthopedic shoes. He couldn’t sit still or stand stationary for too long. Most debilitating, he was no longer able to go running, and that in turn was causing him to suffer from insomnia.

  Perry had sleep issues going back to the early seventies; he found it hard to shut his mind down at night. In the eighties, he took up jogging to ease his stress—and once he started jogging, he started sleeping. The virtuous cycle had turned him into a fiend for roadwork. If there was one addiction Perry had in life, he often said, it was to his daily run.

  Robbed of that capacity, Perry was now like any addict deprived of his fix: sleepless and strung out. To try to stop the burning in his foot and leg, he took Lyrica. It didn’t work. To try to shuttle himself into shut-eye, he tried warm baths. No luck there, either. On some nights, Perry’s slumber was fitful. On others, he didn’t sleep at all; he just lay there, staring at the ceiling.

  Perry was well wired into his state’s medical community. At the evangelical summit, a doctor friend of his from Tyler, Texas, slipped into his tent, examined him, and recommended that he visit a sleep lab.

  The weekend after the Reagan Library debate, Perry checked himself in for a stay at a facility in Austin. The doctors strapped probes to him and monitored his behavior overnight. The result was a diagnosis of apnea—blockages of the upper airways that caused temporary lapses in breathing, robbing him of REM sleep. Perry doubted the diagnosis but assented to the prescription: a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, which involved placing a plastic mask over his mouth and nose at night. But that was a washout, too; Perry’s wakefulness continued. His campaign was less than a month old, and he was already comprehensively out of gas.

  The question for Carney and Johnson was what do about it. The next two weeks held in store a pair of debates in Florida, the first sponsored by the Tea Party in Tampa and the second in Orlando in conjunction with the Presidency 5 straw poll, which the campaign was pushing to win. If Perry was able to run this gauntlet successfully, Carney thought, they could dial back his schedule and deal with the sleep issue properly.

  But the plan went awry immediately. At the Tampa debate, on September 12, Perry was once again manhandled by the entire field. This time he turned in a performance glaringly more unsteady than the one in Simi Valley. With the stakes for the Orlando debate now appreciably higher, most political observers assumed that Perry would devote much of the next ten days to preparing himself. Instead he returned to the fund-raising circuit, traveling from Florida to Massachusetts to Virginia to New York to Iowa and then back to New York.

  While Perry was in Gotham, he met with Trump, who introduced him to Kim Kardashian. He also did an interview with Parade magazine, which would not be published until October, in which his sit-down with the Donald reared its head. After saying, “I don’t have a definitive answer” as to whether Obama had been born in the United States, Perry went on to note that “I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night . . . He doesn’t think [Obama’s birth certificate] is real.” And what did Perry think? “I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter. He’s the president of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.”

  When Perry arrived back in Orlando, he was a mess. In advance of the straw poll, his Florida team had set up a string of meetings with delegates, donors, activists, and legislators. But Perry was so distant, unfocused, and uncommunicative that most of the meetings had to be canceled—and his debate prep sessions, though lengthy, were scattered and ineffective.

  By now Carney was on the phone almost daily with Perry’s doctors, including sleep specialists consulting on how to address the problem. But the exercise in futility continued. The morning of the debate, September 22, Perry’s team learned he hadn’t caught a wink the night before. In the holding room, Carney and Johnson girded for trouble. What they got was a disaster.

  It arrived midway through the debate, when Romney went after him on the issue of in-state tuition benefits. “If you’re a United States citizen from any one of the other forty-nine states, you have to pay $100,000 more” than the child of an “illegal alien” for four years at the University of Texas, Romney said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Perry had been copiously prepared for this attack, which had come up in Tampa, too. And the start of his answer, touting his commitment to border security, was uncontroversial. But then Perry went further, blurting out a sentiment that none of his aides had ever heard him enunciate before. “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own,” he said, “I don’t think you have a heart.”

  For Perry’s advisers, the debate was now effectively over. Providing in-state tuition to the kids of undocumented workers was a defensible position, if not a popular one among Republican primary voters. But calling those who disagreed heartless was an act of political suicide.

  Perry wasn’t quite finished committing verbal seppuku, however. Toward the end of the debate, after Romney offered a defense of his Massachusetts health care law, Perry attempted to slam his rival as a flip-flopper, a rejoinder he had been rehearsing for at least a week. In fact, he had it written out on a piece of paper in front of him, but it c
ame out sounding like the ravings of a drunk:

  “I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of, against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it, was before, he was before the social programs from the standpoint of—he was for standing up for Roe vs. Wade before he was against first Roe vs. Wade? He was for Race to the Top. He’s for Obamacare and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and, and, and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.”

  The next day in the halls of the P5 event, Perry’s pratfalls were all anyone could talk about. A day earlier, he was primed to claim victory at the straw poll; now his erstwhile supporters were defecting in droves. Twenty-four hours later, he was walloped by Herman Cain, who took 37 percent of the vote to Perry’s 15.

  Nothing would ever be the same for Perry after Orlando. Republican elites, circumspect about him from the get-go, dug a grave for him and covered it with a metric ton of scorn. In The Weekly Standard, William Kristol pronounced the debate performance “close to a disqualifying two hours.” On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume observed that “Perry really did throw up all over himself” and was “half a step away from almost total collapse.”

  The Republican base was no kinder. For the first time, Boston saw movement in its polling and focus groups away from Perry, almost entirely over immigration. Romney demonstrated no reluctance about exploiting the issue. As part of his rightward repositioning on social and cultural matters in 2008, Mitt had become an immigration hawk, denouncing Giuliani for turning New York into a “sanctuary city” for illegals and hoisting Huckabee on the in-state-tuition petard. (Romney had vetoed a similar bill in Massachusetts.) While Mitt wanted to stay focused on the economy this time around, what he wanted more was to win—and immigration was looking like Perry’s Achilles’ heel.

  Coming out of Orlando, Team Romney pounded away at the Texan on the issue for a solid month. When Perry next visited New Hampshire, Rhoades and one of the campaign’s Granite State operatives arranged to have him greeted by protesters, including one who was wearing a sombrero and holding a placard that read THANKS FOR THE IN-STATE TUITION.

  From the announcement of his candidacy until the second Florida debate, Perry had topped every national poll, sixteen of them. From Orlando onward, he would never lead again. As was the case with Pawlenty after Obamneycare and Bachmann after Waterloo, Perry was now the walking dead—a victim of a hair-trigger Republican electorate, a hyper-drive media, and his own catastrophic foibles.

  The governor’s people knew he had inflicted awful damage on himself. But like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, they weren’t aware that their cause had passed from the land of the living. Perry was still armed with millions of dollars in the bank and half a dozen super PACs on his side, along with a conviction that someone would emerge as the conservative alternative to Romney. For a little while, that alternative had been Perry himself. What the Texan couldn’t fathom was why it couldn’t be again.

  9

  BIG BOY

  THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB NEVER thought much of Governor Goodhair. Perched at the pinnacle of the Republican donor pyramid, the club comprised a loose affiliation of financial titans, industrial tycoons, and media machers. They were for the most part northern sophisticates, urban and urbane. They were adamantly conservative on matters of taxes, spending, and regulation, decidedly moderate on social issues, uniformly repelled by evangelical fervor and dum-dum populism of any flavor. They found the holy-rollerism of The Response hideous, and the rough talk about Bernanke preposterous. But they agreed with Perry about one thing: Romney just wouldn’t do.

  The billionaires’ reluctance to rally around Mitt was surprising but undeniable. Nearly four months after his official entry into the race, many of the party’s most bodacious bundlers remained seated on their hands: hedge-fund goliaths Stanley Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, Dan Loeb, Paul Singer, Paul Tudor Jones, and David Tepper; über-financiers Steve Schwarzman and Charles Schwab; Home Depot founder Ken Langone. Romney was hungry for the support of them all. None found him objectionable: he was a member of their tribe, sound on economic policy, and infinitely preferable to Obama—all in all, a stand-up guy. But even now, in late September, the billionaires were still looking for more than that. They were looking for the guy. A candidate without any phoniness about him. A candidate with a pair of clanging brass balls you could hear from around the corner. A candidate they were sure could win.

  Christopher James Christie was the man they had in mind, and he made for an unlikely object of desire. He was not yet fifty, less than two years into his first term as governor of New Jersey, suave as sandpaper, and morbidly obese. He was also one of the most intriguing figures in American politics.

  Christie’s ascent to this rarefied air had been rapid and unexpected. Born in Newark, he spent the nineties as a lawyer-lobbyist, serving on the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders and losing a bid for the New Jersey General Assembly. In 2000, he cast his lot early with George W. Bush, visiting Austin three times, becoming acquainted with the candidate and Rove. His prodigious fund-raising earned him an appointment as his state’s U.S. attorney and a signature W. nickname: Big Boy.

  In 2009, after a six-year stint in law enforcement, Christie hurled himself at the governorship, which was occupied by Democratic multimillionaire Jon Corzine. The race was tight, obstreperous, and mean. Corzine ran ads swiping at Christie for “throwing his weight around.” Christie showcased a capacious personality and a coriaceous hide (“If you’re going to do it, at least man up and say I’m fat”) but presented mainly platitudes and no clear agenda. The Wall Street Journal editorial page predicted that if he won, he would “arrive in Trenton with a mandate to do what he campaigned on—nothing.”

  Christie’s victory was narrow, by less than four points, but the dervish-like governance that followed confounded every expectation. He capped local property taxes, slashed spending, and laid off state workers. He waged pitched battles with the Democratic legislature over a ballooning budget shortfall and with public-sector unions over unfunded pension liabilities. His style was equal parts take-no-prisoners and take-no-shit. He ritually sparred with voters and the press in public forums, exchanges captured on video by his staff and filed in the library of smackdowns that was his YouTube channel. (To a constituent asking him to justify cutting funds for public education while sending his kids to private school: “Hey, Gail, you know what, first off it’s none of your business.” To a reporter noting his confrontational tone: “You should really see me when I’m pissed.”)

  Less than a year into his tenure, Christie had emerged as a certified shooting star, beloved by conservatives, moderates, and populists alike. In the run-up to the 2010 midterms, he was besieged by questions about a White House run in 2012. His answers were unvarying and emphatic. “Short of suicide, I don’t really know what I’d have to do to convince you people that I’m not running,” he told reporters in Trenton the day after the Republicans retook control of the House. “I’ve said I don’t want to. I’m not going to. There is zero chance I will. I don’t feel like I’m ready to be president.”

  What Christie was ready to do, however, was flex his newfound national muscle. With the help of his two main political advisers, Bill Palatucci and Mike DuHaime, he convened a series of intimate dinners at Drumthwacket, the grand nineteenth-century mansion in Princeton that served as the New Jersey governor’s official residence. On the guest list were the presidential aspirants deemed worthy by Team Trenton. On the table was Christie’s endorsement, along with access to New Jersey’s copious crop of rich Republican donors, over whom he exercised ironclad control.

  Romney arrived one night in late January, the first to be granted an audition. He and Christie weren’t personally close, but the ties between their worlds ran deep. Schriefer and Stevens had served as consultants and ad makers on Christie’s campaign; Rhoades’s girlfriend
was a Christie appointee; DuHaime and Romney’s political director, Rich Beeson, were pals; and Jets owner Woody Johnson was mates with both Mitt and Chris. When Christie had faced a primary challenge in 2009, Romney endorsed him and heaped money in his coffers. Now Mitt was hoping for a payoff on that investment.

  Packing into Drumthwacket’s formal dining room were a couple dozen of Christie’s associates; Romney brought with him Johnson and Spencer Zwick. The case Mitt made over the meal was forceful and direct. His 2008 bid had taught him invaluable lessons; he wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. He would run an all-economy-all-the-time campaign, hammering Obama for his fecklessness and failures. Only he had the business background and sagacity to fix the mess that the country was in. Only he would have a fund-raising operation capable of matching the president’s. He was far and away the party’s likeliest standard-bearer and best chance to reclaim the White House.

  Romney was even more aggressive after dinner, when he and Christie repaired to the library for a private talk. I am going to be the nominee, Mitt declared. You should get on board now, before anybody else. The earlier you give your endorsement, the more it will mean.

  Christie told Romney he wasn’t going to back anyone in the near future. It’s too soon, he said, I’m not ready. (What Christie thought was less diplomatic: This guy will be delighted with my endorsement whenever I decide to make it.) He also told Romney something else—that until Christie made up his mind, he wanted none of the candidates, including Mitt, to raise money in New Jersey.

  Romney found the stipulation galling, and voiced his displeasure. As Christie dug in his heels, the atmosphere got tense. Look, Christie said, when I decide to support someone, it will be more powerful if I bring everyone along with me. Just be patient; it’ll be fine. But let’s be clear: if you jump the gun and start raising money here, you can almost certainly kiss my support good-bye.