Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  Publicly and privately, Cain denied it all, though his inconstant memory and evasive answers strained credulity even among his sympathizers. When he told former RNC chair Michael Steele that his wife was “upset, but she understands,” Steele upbraided Cain: “Herman, you’re married to a sister. You’re going to sit here and tell me she’s just finding this out and she’s cool with it? Come on, man!”

  Cain insisted he was being taken down by an organized plot. His acrimony toward the establishment had always been high. (“Don’t trust the bastards in Washington,” he said to his staff; also, the media is “out to slash my tires.”) But now he directed his paranoia at his GOP rivals. Cain’s top adviser, Mark Block, went on Fox and accused Team Perry of “despicabl[y]” instigating the scandal. “This is one of the actions in America that is the reason people don’t get involved in politics,” Block said. “Rick Perry and his campaign owe Herman Cain and his family an apology.”

  • • •

  PERRY DIDN’T OWE HERMAN anything but a swift kick in the teeth, he thought. Team Perry had had nothing to do with the stories, and Cain had been a burr under the Texas governor’s saddle for some time. In early October, shortly after the Orlando debate debacle, The Washington Post had published a piece about a hunting camp leased by the Perry family, which for years had a rock by its entrance that bore the ranch’s appellation, “Niggerhead.” Perry claimed his father had painted over the word in the early eighties. But Cain, who had already declared that Perry was the one Republican he could not support as his party’s nominee, went on TV and accused him of racial “insensitivity” anyway. Perry couldn’t figure out what he’d done to turn Cain into Al Sharpton.

  The Perry campaign was nurturing plenty of other resentments for its misfortunes. Carney was certain that Rove had planted the Niggerhead story, and not long after, Anita Perry complained publicly that her husband was being “brutalized by our opponents and our party” because of the depth of his faith. When Perry delivered an antic speech in New Hampshire in which he appeared soused, stoned, or both, clips of it went viral on YouTube; his advisers, who swore he was sober (if a tad hyper-exuberant), bitterly blamed liberal websites for editing the video unfairly.

  Perry and his team hoped they could turn the corner by unveiling a comprehensive economic plan with a flat tax as its centerpiece. But the rollout, in late October, got overshadowed when, two days prior, Parade published its September interview with Perry. Although his birtherish comments provoked the most controversy, what caught the attention of Bushworld was his response when asked to explain the differences between himself and Dubya: “We grew up differently. We have different value sets.”

  It wasn’t long before Rove heard that Barbara Bush, having taken the quote as an affront to her parenting, was on the verge of going nuclear on Perry. Rove called Ray Sullivan and read him the riot act. “There’s a gray-haired little old lady who spends half the year in Kennebunkport and half the year in Houston, and I’m giving you fair warning that she is no longer under control,” Rove said. “I’ve spent nearly forty years trying to stay on her good side. You think you’ll win a battle with Barbara Bush? You go ahead.”

  Watching Perry lurch from one PR disaster to another, his debate performances still desultory, Romney was baffled. “Why is he running if he doesn’t want to do this?” Mitt asked his advisers. Boston was befuddled, too, but had no intention of removing its boot from Perry’s throat. With his cash in the bank and evangelical support, Perry could still stage a comeback in Iowa—and if he did, he might pose a real threat in South Carolina and beyond.

  By the time Perry arrived in Auburn Hills, Michigan, for the next debate on November 9, his organization was in something close to complete disarray. At Anita’s urging, he had shaken up his campaign staff, bringing in a pack of Washington hired guns known internally as “the consulterati,” along with a Bush veteran, Joe Allbaugh, to put the train back on the rails and get it running on time. Perry’s old hands from Austin were chafing under Allbaugh and bickering with the consulterati. Carney, feeling sidelined, was about to quit. The candidate himself, dealing with a new debate prep system, let the mushrooming chaos go unchecked, which further rattled his team.

  Despite all this, Perry’s performance was unusually adept for much of the night, as he touted the Texas economic record and his new flat tax plan. But when he tried to pivot to institutional reform, he got his mental shoelaces tangled. “I will tell you,” Perry said, “it’s three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education, and the, uh, uhm . . . what’s the third one there? Let’s see . . .”

  “You need five!” Ron Paul interjected, splaying his bony fingers in the air.

  Perry tried again: “Commerce, Education, and the, uhm, uh, ahh . . .”

  “EPA?” Romney chimed in helpfully.

  “EPA! There you go!” Perry said, waving a hand at Mitt. “No . . .”

  The audience was in hysterics now, but the moderator, John Harwood of CNBC, would not let go. “Seriously?” Harwood asked. “Is EPA the one you were talking about?”

  “No, sir. No, sir,” Perry admitted.

  “You can’t name the third one?”

  “The third agency of government,” Perry said, shoulders sagging, staring at his lectern, defeat washing over him. “I would do away with the Education, the, uh, Commerce, and, let’s see . . . I can’t, the third, I can’t, sorry.” Perry paused briefly, tilted his head, and said, “Oops.”

  In the Perry staff room, all noggins sank in unison. Sullivan whispered to one of his colleagues, “I don’t know if we can recover from this.” The Romneyites (and everyone else in America watching on the tube) concurred. For weeks, Perry had been the walking dead. Now, rigor mortis was setting in.

  Afterwards, Romney again expressed surprise at Perry’s incapacity. “I don’t understand why he didn’t take my lifeline,” Mitt said.

  Someone pointed out that he had provided Perry with the wrong answer; the right one was the Department of Energy.

  Who cares? Romney said. “He should have just taken it and bluffed.”

  • • •

  JON AND MARY KAYE HUNTSMAN felt awful for Perry. They had been friends with Rick and Anita before the campaign and were even closer now—especially the wives, who spent the debates texting words of encouragement to each other as their husbands flailed around onstage. After Perry expectorated his “oops,” Mary Kaye glanced over and caught Anita’s eye; the look on her face said, Oh, no.

  The Huntsmans’ level of sympathy for Cain was a good deal less heightened. When Jon gazed across any debate stage, he could scarcely believe the mediocre caliber of his competitors. It’s the B-list, Huntsman thought—and the Hermanator barely rated a gentleman’s C. As Cain rose to the top of the polls, Huntsman puzzled over what had gone awry with his party. His campaign, though, had a more active thought: Let’s take Cain out.

  After getting a tip from a donor, Huntsman’s researchers had dug into Cain’s past, discovered the first two sexual harassment claims, and fed the story to Politico. Not that Cain was seen by Team Huntsman as a particular barrier to their man. But the Utahan’s people were increasingly desperate, looking for any opportunity to upend the prevailing dynamic. Also, their attitude was: Any bullet left in the chamber is a bullet wasted.

  The perfidy here was thick and double-barreled. Huntsman put himself forward as a clean-hands candidate, owing to his almost pathological refusal to criticize his opponents. And his operation was panned among political pros as flawed and faulty. But, as the cases of Cain and Daniels demonstrated, Weaver’s crew was ruthlessly efficient at one thing: serving as a secret conveyor belt for the kind of dirt the candidate claimed he could not abide. As they waited for Politico to turn their tip into a story, members of Huntsman’s circle asked each other when the “high heel” was going to drop on Cain.

  Huntsman, however, had more problems of his own. In late September, running low on cash and mired at 1 or 2 percent
in national polls, Huntsman had shut down his Florida headquarters and switched focus exclusively to New Hampshire. By then his alienation from Weaver and the rest of his advisers had become corrosive. They fought about debate prep. (Huntsman simultaneously thought himself too good for the exercise and irremediably terrible at it.) They clashed over media strategy. (Huntsman cared more about Manhattan glossies than the conservative press.) The squabbling over money only worsened (with Weaver and David at one point enlisting Huntsman’s daughter Abby to beg her dad to write another check). As autumn unfolded, Huntsman’s advisers finally, fully came to dismiss their candidate as a lazy, whiny wuss. Huntsman came to disdain his adjutants as soulless mercenaries.

  Gradually, Huntsman retreated into the embrace of his family, relying more and more on his wife and daughters for political advice. And this, in turn, produced another layer of friction with the professionals. Mary Kaye was forever scouring the Web for fresh poll numbers or blog posts about Jon, reading them back to him instantly, even if they were harshly negative (as they often were), threatening his mood and focus. Eventually Huntsman’s advisers banned her from debate prep.

  The Huntsman girls, meanwhile, became pseudo celebrities; they had a joint Twitter feed and released a series of cheeky videos. Their final effort had to be quashed by the campaign. A spoof on Fox News morning show Fox and Friends, the clip was entitled “Foxes and Friends” and featured the lasses gussied up in blond wigs, interviewing a Romney bobblehead doll.

  But the biggest source of tension between Huntsman’s family and his advisers revolved around a less trivial matter: the possibility that Jon might quit the Republican Party and wage an independent bid for president.

  Huntsman had first placed the idea on the table immediately after the Tea Party debate in Tampa. Beforehand, he was skittish about the crowd. “These aren’t my people,” he told David. “They’re going to boo me.”

  Seated in the audience, Mary Kaye and Abby were aghast at the right-wing chatter they heard all around them. When the debate was over, they came into the green room, Huntsman’s wife in tears, Abby shocked and offended. As David drove home from Tampa to Orlando, his cell phone rang. “I want to go independent,” Huntsman said. “I think we should do it sooner than later.”

  For some time, a number of Huntsman’s supporters in New York had been encouraging him to hop in the vehicle being built by a new group called Americans Elect. Formed and partly funded by Peter Ackerman, a wealthy financier and majority shareholder in Web-based grocer FreshDirect, Americans Elect was spending millions to gain ballot access in all fifty states for an independent “unity” ticket to be chosen through an online nominating convention in June 2012.

  That much was public knowledge. But Ackerman and his associates were also secretly meeting with potential big-name candidates including former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Bill Bradley, retired army generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. The group had its eye on Huntsman, too.

  Jon’s advisers told him that hooking up with Americans Elect defied reason. The outfit seems legit, they admitted. But Ackerman and his buddies are only going to secure ballot access for their nominee; they’re not going to finance the campaign. If you can’t raise money for this campaign, what makes you think you could raise it for an independent run?

  Huntsman could see their point, but he couldn’t let the idea go. Mary Kaye and his daughters kept prodding him: You’re not yourself. You’re not happy in this campaign. You don’t do red meat, you don’t pander, you’re stuck at 2 percent in the polls. This is not your party. People come up to you all the time—liberals, conservatives, moderates—saying you should run as an independent. Why not do it? You could do it. You should be yourself.

  On Friday, November 18, the Huntsmans traveled to New York City so that Jon could appear on Saturday Night Live the next day. That evening, they met Mike Bloomberg and Diana Taylor, his significant other, for dinner at one of the mayor’s favorite restaurants, Gabriel’s, just off Columbus Circle. Huntsman queried the mayor about his past noodlings over an independent bid. Bloomberg said that the hurdles remained formidable, that he had never been able to discern a path to the White House taking that route. Even so, the idea remained seductive, Bloomberg went on, then dropped a flattery bomb on Huntsman. You’re the embodiment of the perfect independent candidate, he said.

  In a few days, Huntsman was supposed to deliver a major speech on American’s “trust deficit.” Returning home to Washington, he called David and said that the independent plan was back on. “The trust speech is perfect for this,” Huntsman said. “That’s where I’m going to make the announcement.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Weaver asked when he got Huntsman on the phone. If you do this, Weaver continued, you’ll be doing it alone; pretty much everyone who works for you will quit. Huntsman had no real plan. He told Weaver he would continue to campaign in New Hampshire, even though he would not be competing in the primary there. It was senseless. Weaver and others pointed out that switching would make Huntsman look weak and petulant, as if he were leaving his party because he was getting creamed. You can still finish second in New Hampshire, they told him. If you do, you can use that as a launching pad for an independent run—if the idea is still appealing then.

  Huntsman thought it over. His daughter Abby was wavering on the wisdom of his leaving the GOP. His father was adamantly against it. Jon was still young; whatever happened in 2012, he had a viable future as a Republican. Huntsman grudgingly agreed. Maybe it was more reasonable to try to reform his party from within.

  Ackerman and Americans Elect ran up against that kind of logic every day. More than ballot access, more than money, it was by a wide margin the greatest hindrance to getting an independent bid off the ground. Ackerman had on his side an array of heavy-hitting allies: former and current senators David Boren, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Ben Nelson, Alan Simpson, and Sam Nunn; former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles; and former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman. All were concerned that the two-party duopoly had run its course, that the Republican and Democratic parties were so tightly in the grip of the far right and the far left that good governance had become impossible. What they wanted to see in 2012 was a campaign that would drag the political conversation to the sensible center. What they had witnessed so far in the Republican race filled them with dread that the opposite would occur. Huntsman’s inability to gain traction was one worrying sign. Romney’s tenuous standing was another. But scariest of all was the identity of the new front-runner—a man to whom a zillion different adjectives had been applied, but “sensible” and “centrist” certainly not among them.

  • • •

  NEWTON LEROY GINGRICH NEVER aspired to be president of the United States, which wasn’t to say that his political goals were any less grandiose. From the time he was in college, Gingrich wanted to be speaker of the House and a transformational historical figure. And in his pyrotechnic twenty-year congressional career, he achieved both aims, not only leading Republicans to control of the lower chamber for the first time in forty years but also doing more than any other individual to refashion American politics around the principle of total war.

  Gingrich felt the bite of the presidential bug in 1995, the initial heady year of his speakership, but shrugged it off. In 2000, two years after he was driven ignominiously from office, the political and personal wounds were still too fresh for him to run. In 2008, he briefly mulled the concept, but for the first time in his life he was making serious money (through a web of consulting and grassroots advocacy enterprises) and wading gingerly into the waters of bipartisanship (collaborating with Hillary Clinton on a health care initiative, appearing in a climate change TV ad with Nancy Pelosi). In 2012, though, he would be sixty-eight years old. This was his last chance.

  Gingrich’s political makeup seemed to accord with the laws of Newtonian physics: every salutary attribute was balanced by an equ
al and opposite toxicity. He was at once articulate and verbose, unusually fluent in policy and painfully didactic, refreshingly spontaneous and chronically undisciplined, and also consumed by insatiable appetites and a need for perpetual attention. (“I’m a hot dog,” he would say.) Like his nemesis from the nineties, Bill Clinton, with whom he shared a great many of these yin-yang qualities, Gingrich lived a life governed by a ceaseless cycle of triumph, disgrace, and rejuvenation—up and down, up and down, wash, rinse, and repeat.

  Or at least the old Newt Gingrich did. Heading into 2012, the people closest to him swore that there was a new incarnation in the house—not displacing but coexisting with the original. The Old Newt might still occasionally snarl at Obama over his Kenyan, anticolonial leanings, or label him the “food stamp president,” but the New Newt was less gruff, less grandiloquent, more contemplative and self-aware. Nearly seven decades of brashness, bomb throwing, and priapism had tuckered him out. The New Newt was a churchgoing grandfather of two who required naps to stay sharp.

  The catalytic element in the creation of the New Newt was his third wife, Callista, whom he married in 2000 after they carried on a six-year affair. Callista was forty-five, with a helmet of platinum blond hair and unblinking ice-blue eyes, and Newt was gaga for her. He draped her in opulent jewelry from Tiffany, where the couple maintained a $500,000 interest-free line of credit. He lavished her with expensive travel. She was a Catholic; he converted. (“One of the happiest moments of my life,” she said.) She loved opera; he joined the Kennedy Center. She played golf; he took up the game.

  Callista, while a devoted spouse, wanted no part of a presidential campaign. She worried about the financial impact of Newt abandoning his lucrative ventures. She fretted over the intrusions of the press. Most of all, she quivered—with both fear and rage—at their marital history being picked over. (She detested being referred to as Newt’s former mistress and third wife; “I’ve only been married once,” she protested again and again.) Gingrich’s close friend and longest-serving political adviser, Joe Gaylord, cautioned him against a run. Gingrich’s personal and political baggage was so heavy, Gaylord argued, that lugging it down the road would be mighty painful and likely lead nowhere good.