Romney left Drumthwacket incredulous at Christie’s diktat and the backroom delivery—it was like something out of The Sopranos. Are you kidding me? Mitt thought. He’s going to do that?
Up in Boston, Stevens was equally astonished at Christie’s imperiousness. There were plenty of New Jersey donors who’d given money to Mitt in 2008; now Chris was trying to impose a gag order on talking to them? “He sounds like the biggest asshole in the world,” Stuart griped to his partner, Russ, about their mid-Atlantic client.
Rhoades was no more pleased with the prohibition, but he counseled prudence. The earlier we get Christie, the better—but better late than not at all, he said. When members of Zwick’s finance team complained about being blocked from pockets of ready Garden State cash, Rhoades always offered the same verbal slap upside the head: Shut the fuck up. Don’t go into Jersey. We have plenty of time.
But as winter turned to spring and spring turned to summer, with no Christie endorsement in sight, doubts crept in on Commercial Street. Although the governor continued to issue denials of any 2012 ambitions, his comments were increasingly freighted with self-regard. In late June, he appeared on Meet the Press, where David Gregory asked him who in the current field might garner his support.
“Any one of them could if they’re willing to be authentic,” Christie said. “That’s what allows you to do the big things like we’re doing in New Jersey. It’s not that I’m universally loved; we know I’m not in New Jersey. But what they do say in New Jersey is ‘We like him and we think he’s telling us the truth.’ I think we need to have that type of politics on the national level.”
Romney’s luck regarding would-be rivals had been miraculous so far. The later it got, the less likely it was that anyone plausible would jump in. But Mitt worried that Christie might be an exception. The establishment loved him. The Tea Party adored him. The punditocracy pined for him. And then there were the blandishments of the billionaires’ club—which even politicians with smaller egos than Big Boy’s would find difficult to ignore.
• • •
ON THE SAME JUNE Sunday that Christie made his latest turn on Meet the Press, three hundred of the fantastically rich and colossally conservative were waiting for him in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The plutocrats were gathered at the Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch, for a secret retreat hosted by the Koch brothers. Christie was jetting in from Washington to deliver the coveted dinnertime keynote.
That afternoon, the attendees heard from Perry, who at that point was still weighing whether to enter the race and had managed to wangle a speaking slot. The billionaires and millionaires were curious about this character who was ginning up so much chatter. But by the end of the speech, the air had gone out of the room. Instead of laying out a vision for the nation, Perry boasted ceaselessly about Texas. Raising five fingers, he declared that he had a four-point plan to solve something or other; after ticking off its planks, he was left with one digit extended awkwardly in the air. In the back of the room, one of the Kochs’ political advisers thought, If this dude runs, he’ll be done after the second debate.
The contrast with Christie could not have been more striking. After being introduced lavishly by David Koch—who called him a “true political hero,” professed to being “inspired by this man,” and declared him to be “my kind of guy”—Christie spoke for nearly an hour and had the crowd in the palm of his hand. He regaled the group with tales of his battles with the unions. In the Q&A, he drew laughs with references to MTV’s Jersey Shore and some sly mockery of the Lone Star State (and, by implication, its governor): “We all love Texas, okay? The greatest place in the world, it’s wonderful, it’s fabulous, it’s amazing. We all love Texas. Great. So we dispense with that first.”
The Koch retreat was Christie’s first stop on a summer tour of mogul-fests. Two weeks later, he was in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual Allen & Company media-and-technology conference. Interviewed onstage by Tom Brokaw, Christie blew the room away again, eliciting kudos not just from Republicans but from Democrats, independents, and the studiously apolitical members of the info-royalty.
One sovereign in particular left Sun Valley burbling about Big Boy: Rupert Murdoch. Still sour on Romney and un-enamored of the rest of the field, News Corp’s chairman returned to New York determined to draw Christie into the race. He’s energetic, sure-footed, and electable, Murdoch gushed to a confidant of many years—who had never seen the old man with such a crush on a candidate. Murdoch knew that Roger Ailes had been urging Christie to run for months and had gotten nowhere. But Rupert also knew someone who seemed to be making more progress.
That someone was Ken Langone, who had appointed himself as the unofficial chief of the Draft Christie conspiracy. Seventy-five years old, Langone, the son of a plumber, had bootstrapped himself to the top of a financial empire, playing in venture capital and investment banking. Blustery and impatient, with a quick temper and a gutter mouth, he was conservative but idiosyncratically so. In 1992, he had been a key backer of Ross Perot, a close friend. In 1996, he raised dollars for Dole but ended up being happy that Clinton prevailed. In 2000 and 2004, he favored Bush, but only because he saw Gore and Kerry as so much worse.
Although Langone had nominally supported McCain, he greeted Obama’s presidency with high hopes. Langone was passionate about education reform and chaired a charter school in Harlem. On election night in 2008, he went to bed thinking, Isn’t this wonderful? Minority kids have a new role model—not a football player, not a rapper, but a president of the United States. But to Langone, it was all downhill from there as Obama revealed himself to be a rank ideologue, demonizing wealth to divide the electorate to his political advantage. If it wasn’t for us fat cats and the endowments that we fund, Langone thought, every university in the country would be fucked.
In contemplating who should replace Obama, Langone had latched on to Christie in 2010. He loved the governor’s clashes with the teachers’ unions, his aversion to political correctness, and his penchant for telling critics to shove it—not least when Christie caught flak from some on the right for appointing a Muslim American judge. Comparatively, Romney was a yawn. At a meeting in Langone’s office that summer, the billionaire told Mitt that he would support him, but only in the breach. “Governor, I’ll make it easy,” Langone said. “If my guy doesn’t run, as I look at what else is out there, you’re it.”
By then Langone had been cajoling Christie for months, in person and by phone, and enlisting Murdoch and others to do the same. This is a gang bang, Langone thought. The more the merrier.
The apotheosis of Langone’s lobbying took place on July 19 at the Racquet and Tennis Club, on Park Avenue. The financier had invited Christie to meet with a few folks who wanted to make their case to him directly about why he should run—a full-scale rollout of the Draft Christie brigade in all its moneyed glory. Druckenmiller, Schwab, Schwarzman, real estate magnate Mort Zuckerman, and former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso were in the house (with a combined net worth of more than $20 billion). Patched in via speakerphone were Singer, Jones, David Koch, Carl Icahn, former GE chairman Jack Welch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, and former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack.
When Christie arrived with his wife, Mary Pat, seventeen-year-old son Andrew, and DuHaime, they were startled and staggered by the firepower on display. Christie told the group he was there to listen. They had a great deal to say. Langone pledged that everyone in the room would be behind him, and that money would be no object. Druckenmiller and others argued that the fate of the American economy rested on Christie’s shoulders.
But perhaps the most powerful plea came from a non-billionaire who was also present. Henry Kissinger had been taken with Christie since they first met at a Yankees game a year earlier. The foreign policy éminence grise had then invited the governor to dinner. Rising now with the aid of his cane, Kissinger said, “If you ask me whether Governor Christie knows anything about foreign policy, I’d have to say he doesn’t kn
ow anything about foreign policy. But if you ask me whether he should run, I think we need a candidate with character and courage—and I think he’s got both.”
Christie was rarely at a loss for words, but this silenced him. Listen, he said finally, I don’t want to mislead you. The overwhelming likelihood is that I won’t do this. But I can’t tell you I’m not moved by what I have heard just now. And after everything you all have said, I can’t walk out of here and not at least consider this thing. So Mary Pat and I are going to take some time and figure out what we think.
No one in the room was deluded enough to believe that Christie had undergone a conversion, or foolish enough to dismiss his reticence. But few doubted that, for the first time, he had left the door ajar—which was enough for Langone to leave the meeting thinking, Mission accomplished.
• • •
WORD OF THE CHRISTIE-LANGONE powwow leaked to Politico almost immediately. The governor was asked about it at a press conference in Trenton later that afternoon. “There are some people who believe that I should leave this job and go for another one,” Christie said. “I’m always willing to sit and listen to folks who want to make that argument to me, but I said nothing different to [Langone and Co.] today than I’ve said to other folks in the past.”
Disingenuous though it was, Christie’s public posture wouldn’t waver for the next ten weeks: Nothing has changed, I’m not considering a run, and please get off my back. But behind the scenes, the period was fraught and frantic with deliberations, to-ing and fro-ing, and solicitations of advice.
Mary Pat Christie’s main focus was the impact on her four children, all under age eighteen, but she also had less motherly concerns. An investment banker at Cantor Fitzgerald, she was politically astute and protective of her husband’s public image and long-range potential. She feared that if he ran and failed to win the nomination, the setback would imperil his reelection as governor—and thus his future on the national stage. Embedded professionally in the financial sector, she had savvy questions about the fund-raising hurdles Chris would have to surmount. New Jersey had “pay-to-play” restrictions limiting the contributions he could collect from Wall Street, which had handicapped him in his war with Corzine. What effect would those rules have on a national bid? Were Langone and his crew really good for the astronomical sums they were promising?
The governor had a lot of questions, too. In getting a handle on the logistics and mechanics of a late entry—the filing deadlines, debates, prospective travel schedules—he could rely on DuHaime and Palatucci. Christie’s sharpies were receiving oodles of unsolicited intel from party bigwigs, name-brand strategists, and early-state operatives. They also had presidential experience of their own: Palatucci with Bush 41 in 1992, and DuHaime with Bush 43 in 2004 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
But Christie’s consultations extended far beyond his immediate orbit. He talked to Barbour, Kasich, and Giuliani, all of whom pledged their support. He talked to Paul Ryan, who was himself receiving presidential entreaties from members of the billionaires’ club. He talked to Ken Mehlman, manager of Bush’s 2004 operation and later chair of the RNC, who told him his pugnacity and reform-mindedness were ideally suited to the political moment. And he talked to the fellow Mehlman had helped steer to reelection: calling from Kennebunkport one August day, Dubya jawed with Christie for forty-five minutes, playing sounding board as the governor ran through the pluses and minuses of a run.
Mary Pat’s phone rang at her desk at Cantor Fitzgerald some days later. Barbara Bush was on the line, offering encouraging words detailing the kid-friendliness of White House life. After hard-edged conversations about buck-raking and consultations with Mehlman (independent of Chris) regarding the prospects for a race, Mary Pat found chatting with the GOP’s First Grandma a breath of soothing fresh air.
Rare was the colloquy of any consequence in Bushworld that didn’t get back to Rove. And rare was the day he didn’t receive at least one call from a palpitating Langone. On August 15, Rove turned up on Hannity and touted—teasingly, tantalizingly—what he knew to be true about the altered state of Christie’s disposition.
“I talked to a number of people who had picked up the phone and called Christie to tell him they thought that he ought to run,” Rove said. “I’m starting to pick up some sort of vibrations that these kinds of conversations are causing Christie . . . to tell the people who are calling him, ‘Well, you know what, I owe it to you. I think I will take a look at it.’”
On cable, on the Web, and in the political world writ large, Rove’s vague pronouncement stirred up a fuss. Two days later, Christie was asked about it at another Trenton press event. Feigning bafflement, he replied, “I listened to that four or five times . . . because I was interested to hear what he was saying . . . [My] answer isn’t changing and I don’t see any reason why it would.”
Christie was indeed interested in hearing what Rove had to say about his entering the race. So interested that the two already had a meeting inked in their calendars. For the day after tomorrow.
Rove rolled up in a town car in front of Christie’s family home in Mendham on the evening of August 19. He came directly from Fox, where he had pretaped a segment of The O’Reilly Factor in which he again talked up a Christie run. Now, as he took a seat at the kitchen table at 46 Corey Lane, Rove doffed his pundit’s beanie and donned his strategist’s chapeau—and spent the next three hours with the Christies, DuHaime, and Palatucci, running the traps on a Big Boy bid.
Rove addressed the central question first: Was it too late for Christie to get in? Not at all, Rove argued. In fact, it would probably be better to wait until late September, when there was a lull after the first three Republican debates. But, look, he went on, you can’t spend the next month sitting here like a monk, cloistered in the abbey. You need to spend the time in a way that lays down a predicate: consulting policy experts, setting in the foundation for a finance operation, reaching out to players in the early states.
Beyond that, Rove explained, Christie had to do more to stoke the rising fever among his fans. “You need to keep this thing fluid,” he said. Every day that goes by, bundlers, operatives, and electeds are making commitments to other candidates; to the degree people think that you might be getting in, it keeps them from signing on with someone else. “So put a little gasoline on the campfire,” Rove counseled. “Make certain the blaze is bright enough so that people can see it back in the woods.”
Christie asked Rove about Romney point-blank: Can I take him?
I think you can, Rove said. But this won’t be about winning any one state or picking off votes here and there. For you to win, you have to galvanize people around the country. “You’ve got to blow a couple of pylons off of the edifice called Romney by being a northeastern governor who actually has confidence, consistency, compassion, and energy,” Rove said. You can do it by just being yourself: the tough-talking straight shooter who took on the teachers’ union in New Jersey. And if you pull that off, you can be credible in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida—and everywhere else.
Christie hoisted up his and Mary Pat’s reservations. Rove shot them down one by one. On fund-raising: “Langone is a bullshit artist,” Karl said affectionately, but he’s a significant guy who can raise a lot, and money’s not going to be your problem anyway. On betraying New Jersey voters by abandoning them to chase a grander ambition: Clinton did it, Bush did it, Perry’s doing it now; voters are in on that joke. On the fear that if Christie ran and lost, it would make his reelection in the Garden State tougher: Sure, Rove said, but there’s a solution to that: “Don’t run and lose!”
Rove had the sense that Mary Pat was warming to the idea, but that DuHaime and Palatucci were wary. As for Christie himself, Karl couldn’t quite tell. When Rove went to leave, the governor accompanied him to the door, and they stood talking on the porch for another half an hour. I think I understand why all this is happening, Christie said. People keep telling me that our country is at risk and I
’m the one who can save it. But I gotta say, I’m not sure I’m ready.
I get that, Rove said. But we’re talking about the presidency here. “There’s a difference between feeling like you’re ready for the job and that you can do the job. Do you think you can do the job?”
“Probably,” Christie replied.
“Well, the guy we’ve got in there now is clearly not up to it,” Rove said. “And you’d be a hell of a lot better than him.”
• • •
THE LOCUS OF ROVE’S LOW regard landed at Newark airport, disembarked from Air Force One, and met Christie on the tarmac. It was September 4, the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, and Obama was in New Jersey to survey the damage from Hurricane Irene, which had torn its way up the East Coast at the end of August. Four days earlier, the president had declared the Garden State a disaster area. More than $1 billion in damage had been inflicted on 200,000 homes and buildings, making Irene the costliest natural calamity in New Jersey history.
Obama and Christie hadn’t spent much time together, but they greeted each other warmly, locking arms and patting shoulders. The picture they presented was a study in physical and political contrasts. Next to Christie, Obama resembled a stick figure; next to Obama, Christie looked like a dirigible. On the heels of the debt-ceiling fracas, Obama’s popularity and potency were at low ebb; in the midst of the will-he-or-won’t-he guessing game, Christie’s were at new heights. Christie thought Obama was an atrocious chief executive, passive and disengaged, but he knew that the president’s caginess and magnetism would make him tough to beat. Obama had devoted less thought to his companion as a potential opponent, but his advisers saw the dangers in Christie’s blue-collar-friendly charisma. Though Plouffe believed that an entry this late would be absurd, Messina thought there was no harm in being prepared. From Corzine’s old team he cadged a hard drive filled with Christie oppo—and the stuff was pure gold.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 23