Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  12

  MITT HAPPENS

  ROMNEY FLEW OUT OF DES MOINES that Wednesday morning, January 4, arrived in Manchester before noon, and headed to a rally at a nearby high school gym. As his blue-and-white campaign bus deposited him at the entrance, Romney was bedraggled from lack of sleep but upbeat about being back on home turf. In the Granite State as in no other, he had led in the polls from the start, and by a country mile. No non-incumbent Republican had ever carried the caucuses and the first-in-the-nation primary in the same year. Now, after months of seeing his front-runner status serially usurped by Pierrots and pretenders, Mitt was poised to make history when the votes were counted six days later.

  The event at Central High was designed to cement his position in the catbird seat. With Romney onstage was John McCain, there to confer his endorsement. Four years earlier, the idea of McCain standing behind Romney—unless he was preparing to slit his throat—would have seemed as likely as a terrier reciting Tennyson. And some awkwardness was still apparent. After offering his approbation of Romney, McCain couldn’t resist disgorging a morsel of sarcasm: “By the way, we forgot to congratulate [Mitt] on his landslide victory last night!”

  Like most of McCain’s political judgments, his endorsement was based on a mixture of caprice, calculation, and comparative chagrin. Huntsman he disdained for his service to the president (“Why the fuck would he do that?” he asked Weaver) and going soft on Afghanistan. Newt he detested for being “a moron.” Santorum he despised not only for backing Romney in 2008 but also for recording robocalls that ripped McCain for lacking presidential “temperament.” All of which left Mitt, among the extant options, on the bottom rung of McCain’s pecking order of pique. And Romney alone had a prayer of beating Obama—who was, of course, at the top.

  Still, the strangeness of the situation wasn’t lost on either man. Afterwards, on Romney’s bus, McCain cracked wise about it. “The choice in the Republican Party has come down to the dog-on-roof guy or the man-on-dog guy?” he said. “I’m with the dog-on-roof guy.”

  Romney spent the next twenty-four hours with McCain, traipsing with him from Manchester to Peterborough to Salem, agog at his inability to complete three sentences without dropping an f-bomb. (Romney employed prim substitutes for profanities: “blooming” for “fucking,” “grunt” for “shit.”)

  The oddity of their coupling notwithstanding, Romney took comfort in having the 2000 and 2008 New Hampshire winner at his side. Since his final push in Iowa, Romney had been working his worry beads over how a victory there might come back to bite him in the next contest. He recalled a theory his Granite State guru, Tom Rath, had propounded: that Live Free or Die voters were congenitally incapable of rubber-stamping the results of the caucuses. Romney would never forget the way Obama had come flying out of Iowa four years earlier, only to be greeted by an extended middle finger in New Hampshire, as the state simultaneously flipped the bird to Mitt.

  To the extent that his nervousness had a tangible focus, it was Huntsman. After months of camping out in the Granite State, the Utahan’s poll numbers had ticked up into double digits, though he remained twenty points off the lead. Stevens kept telling his candidate to ignore Huntsman. But Romney, having restrained himself for months, was itching to pop his Mormon rival in the puss.

  The opportunity presented itself that Saturday night, in a debate at Saint Anselm College, outside Manchester, when Huntsman scolded Romney for being jejune about China.

  “I’m sorry, Governor,” Romney shot back. “You were, the last two years, implementing the policies of this administration in China. The rest of us on this stage were doing our best to get Republicans elected across the country and stop the policies of this president from being put forward.”

  Huntsman’s retort was literally incomprehensible: he gibbered something in Mandarin.

  After the debate, Huntsman’s aides were beside themselves, and this time the candidate was, too. Stung by McCain’s endorsement of Romney—which, given Huntsman’s abandonment of Mitt for Mac in 2006, struck Jon as a piquant betrayal—he retreated to his hotel and engaged in a fit of full-bodied self-flagellation. By a quirk of the schedule, the candidates would meet again for a debate the next morning in Concord. Huntsman’s wife and daughters, along with his advisers, all agreed: for the sake of his dignity, if nothing else, Huntsman needed to come out swinging.

  The next morning, Stevens warned Romney, “He’s gonna come after you,” and Huntsman did. “I was criticized last night by Governor Romney,” Jon said. “While he was out raising money, [I was] serving my country—yes, under a Democrat, like my two sons are doing in the United States Navy. They’re not asking what political affiliation the president is. I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and this country: I will always put my country first.”

  For Huntsman and his team, the moment represented the high point of his campaign: a flash of principle and a flogging of Mitt, with McCain’s 2008 campaign slogan thrown in for added oomph. When the debate was over, Stevens reminded Romney, “I told you he was gonna come after you.”

  “It was worth it,” Mitt merrily replied.

  Less easily laughed off was a line of attack pushed by Gingrich in the debates that weekend, assaulting Romney’s record in private equity. The former speaker had taken a glancing swipe at Mitt’s Bain background a few weeks earlier, then let the matter lie. But now came news that the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson had written a $5 million check to the pro-Newt super PAC Winning Our Future, which had just bought the rights to a twenty-eight-minute video, King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, and reserved half-hour blocks of airtime to run it in South Carolina.

  Gingrich didn’t distance himself from the charges in the video, which depicted Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider. Instead, over the next forty-eight hours, he amplified them as if through a bullhorn, describing Bain’s endeavors as “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” Down in South Carolina, Perry, who had surprised everyone the morning after Iowa and decided to stay in the race, chimed in on Bain—comparing firms such as Romney’s to “vultures.”

  Romney had always expected to be assailed on Bain, just not so soon, and not by Republicans. Stevens was surprised, too, but not terribly concerned. History told the strategist that when incendiary issues were aired out during a nomination fight, they tended to fade away before the general election. Think of Reverend Wright, Stevens mused. Think of Gennifer Flowers. Better that we go through this now against Gingrich than later against Obama.

  There were other reasons for the Bain broadsides not to bother Boston. They distracted Mitt’s opponents from harping on Romneycare and presented Mitt with a chance to seize the conservative high ground. With Gingrich and Perry sounding more like Daily Kos commenters than Republicans, Romney could champion the glories of market capitalism, rallying the right (for once) to his cause.

  Executing this jujitsu move required a dexterity that Romney had rarely evinced. Starting that summer, when he’d cheerfully referred to himself as “unemployed” at a Florida coffee shop and blurted out in Iowa that “corporations are people,” and continuing through his proposed $10,000 bet with Perry, the candidate had shown a propensity for faux pas when talking about money. Now, in the waning hours before the New Hampshire vote, he coughed up two more gems: his claim that, in his vaunted private sector career, “there were a couple of times I wondered whether I was gonna get a pink slip”; and his comment, in discussing the virtues of shopping around for health care purveyors, that “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

  Boston collectively blanched. Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman pounced. And yet, when the results tumbled in that Tuesday night, January 10, none of it seemed to matter. All week long, the flashbacks from four years earlier had been vivid in Mitt’s mind: the stricken look on Ann’s face as the exit polls arrived, the sense of being kicked in the teeth by Iowa and then punched in the gut by . .
. his neighbors. But not tonight. In the campaign’s war room at Southern New Hampshire University, the Romneys were as much relieved as ebullient when they learned the final tally: with 39 percent of the vote, Mitt had whipped Ron Paul by sixteen points and Huntsman by twenty-two.

  For his victory speech, Romney’s advance team wanted an image of him solo in the arena, surrounded by a teeming crowd—a shot announcing, This is over. But Romney insisted his family join him on the podium. Flanked by Ann and his five sons, he offered his indictment of Gingrich and Perry with a clarity that eluded him in less carefully scripted settings. “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Romney said. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

  Half an hour later, Huntsman delivered his concession speech at the Black Brimmer bar, in Manchester. Since the Concord debate, Jon had been bolstered by a sense of momentum that convinced him he could finish a close second. Mary Kaye saw a promo ad on MSNBC that echoed her husband’s new “country first” message and was sure that Jon had inspired the spot. Huntsman Sr. was talking to Weaver and Davis about putting $10 million into the super PAC, though Jonny continued to resist. (In the end, the father contributed just over $2 million to Our Destiny.)

  The distant third crushed the Huntsman family’s spirits; Mary Kaye and the girls were in tears. Onstage, Jon proclaimed, “I’d say third place is a ticket to ride—hello, South Carolina!” But no one believed it. When Abby Huntsman brought the New Hampshire exit polls to her father, she could tell from the look on his face that it was over. Six days later, he dropped out and anemically endorsed Mitt.

  The morning after New Hampshire, at the Westin Boston Waterfront, Zwick gathered three hundred donors to hear from Romney, Newhouse, and Mike Leavitt about the road ahead. For a year, the campaign had stressed again and again that securing the nomination would require a long slog, and Leavitt’s presentation on the path to the required 1,144 delegates, repeated the point.

  In that heady moment, however, many in the room dismissed Leavitt’s sobriety as perfunctory kill-joyism. With Romney’s back-to-back victories, he had achieved the unprecedented. Gingrich had campaigned like crazy in New Hampshire and placed fourth again. Santorum, receiving no lift from Iowa, had come in fifth. The South Carolina primary, the winner of which had gone on to claim the Republican nomination in every election since 1980, was ten days away. And while the Palmetto State—with its intensely conservative and evangelical electorate—had always been Romney’s weakest link among the first four contests, Newhouse informed the crowd that Mitt had surged to a healthy lead both there and in the Sunshine State.

  All of a sudden, the triumphal speech from the night before seemed like more than spin. All of a sudden, everyone was thinking Romney had a chance to run the table, and even Mitt allowed himself to drift into reverie. If I can win South Carolina and Florida, it’s game over, he thought.

  But when Romney was told how far ahead Boston’s polling had him—34 percent to 15 over Newt in South Carolina, 45 to 15 in Florida—his usual doubts crept in. The numbers are too good to be true, he fretted. The question was what Gingrich would do next. Romney hadn’t a clue, but he feared it would not be pretty. As a Republican senator had said to him recently about Newt, “When that watermelon falls to earth, you don’t want to be anywhere around.”

  • • •

  GINGRICH HIT THE PAVEMENT in South Carolina with a splat, shaken to his core, and not just by his second straight rout. Romney’s defense of free enterprise had turned the conservative echo chamber into an amen corner. Limbaugh likened Newt to Elizabeth Warren and Oliver Stone. Giuliani compared him to Saul Alinsky. Even Romney’s nemeses at The Wall Street Journal weighed in against Gingrich and Perry. “These candidates are desperate,” noted the paper’s editorial page, “but do they have to sound like Michael Moore?”

  Being compared to this lineup of left-wing loonies blew Newt’s mind. But with South Carolina now “make it or break it” for him, as he put it to Callista, he was more convinced than ever that he had to render Romney septic, and that tarring the front-runner as an out-of-touch plutocrat remained his best chance. In a tactical retreat, Newt slunk away from his Bain attacks, calling on Winning Our Future to soften or take down its video—while in the next breath calling for Mitt to release his tax returns.

  Romney’s personal finances were less the elephant in the room than a full herd of pachyderms. Since the start of his Massachusetts governorship, in 2003, most of Mitt’s assets had resided in blind trusts he set up for himself, Ann, and his sons. His fortune was not only staggering in size but Byzantine in structure: some $250 million or more wrapped up in a mazelike assemblage of holdings. There were stakes in more than a dozen Bain funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands; foreign accounts in other exotic locales—Switzerland, Luxembourg, Bermuda—that were notorious as tax havens; investments in offshore shell companies and so-called blocker corporations; an IRA that had somehow swollen in value to as much as $100 million.

  Overseeing Romney’s trust was Brad Malt, the chairman of Boston’s largest law firm, Ropes & Gray, and Mitt’s personal attorney. Malt had great expertise in the area of private equity. (He and Mitt had met through Bain.) But he had no political background or orientation; he saw his responsibility as maximizing his client’s wealth, not protecting his public image. In 2007, when Romney’s foreign holdings first came to light, Malt told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t care whether it’s the Caymans or Mars, if it’s organized in the Netherlands Antilles or the Jersey Islands. That means nothing to me. All I care about is whether it’s a good fund or a bad fund.”

  Romney expressed no qualms about Malt’s management of his money or its potential political implications. He knew that his offshore investments and Swiss bank account would be targeted by the Democrats if he won the nomination. But Romney believed there was nothing untoward about the Swiss account, on which he paid full taxes. As for the Cayman, Bermudan, and other Bain-related vehicles, not only did they produce prodigious returns, but Romney (as a former partner in the firm) was allowed to invest in them without paying a management fee. Just because someone is going to be critical, I’m going to pass up a deal that good? Romney thought. No, sir.

  In 2007 and 2011, Romney had filed the personal financial disclosure statements required by federal law. But they provided nowhere near as clear a picture as would his taxes, which he had refused to make public all throughout his political career. With Democrats agitating on the topic, Romney was asked in separate appearances on MSNBC in December if he would release his returns. “I don’t intend to,” he told Chuck Todd; questioned by Andrea Mitchell, he declined to commit to doing so even if he became president. For Chicago, those replies were chum in the water. From Obama’s official Twitter account came a tweet—“Why won’t Mitt Romney release his tax returns?”—with a link to a DNC video entitled “What Is Mitt Romney Hiding?”

  Romney’s private stance was a bit more yielding than his public one. If he became his party’s standard-bearer, he told Malt, Bob White, and Rhoades, he would feel compelled to release at least a summary of some of his tax returns. But he and Ann (who was even more emphatic about the privacy issue than her husband) wanted to reveal as little as possible as late as possible, and certainly nothing unless and until he had the nomination sewn up. In Rhoades’s mind, that translated to Let’s get to April.

  What Romney hadn’t counted on was that his Republican rivals would take up the Democratic banner on his returns, just as some of them had done on Bain. In the run-up to a Fox News debate in Myrtle Beach on Monday, January 16, Santorum joined Gingrich in seizing on the issue, and at the first opportunity onstage, Perry raised it unprompted. “Mitt, we need for you to release your income tax so the people of this country can see how you made your money,” he said. “We cannot fire our nominee in
September. We need to know now.”

  Romney’s debate prep on the tax question had been weak and inconclusive—and it showed. “I looked at what has been done in campaigns in the past with Senator McCain and President George W. Bush and others,” Mitt said when asked the question. “They have tended to release tax records in April, or tax season. I hadn’t planned on releasing tax records, because the law requires us to release all of our assets, all the things we own. That I have already released. It’s a pretty full disclosure. But, you know, if that’s been the tradition and I’m not opposed to doing that, time will tell. But I anticipate that most likely I am going to get asked to do that around the April time period, and I’ll keep that open.”

  While Mitt was serving up a mile-high stack of waffles, Gingrich was tossing chunks of raw red meat to the well-lubricated crowd, which had availed itself of cocktails aplenty at the pre-debate receptions. Discussing the merits of negotiating with the Taliban, Gingrich blood-lustily invoked a favorite son of the Palmetto State: “Andrew Jackson had a good idea what to do with our enemies—kill them.” He argued that Obama aimed “to maximize dependency” and did not believe “work is good.”

  Gingrich was challenged by the African American moderator, Juan Williams, who asked if he could understand how some of his rhetoric, including his suggestion that poor kids be put to work as janitors, might be seen “as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans.” Newt replied sternly, “No, I don’t see that,” and launched into a soliloquy that ended with the claim that “only the elites despise earning money.”

  Williams brought up Gingrich’s frequent references to Obama as “the food-stamp president” and suggested that “it sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.”

  Newt’s eyes flashed like twinkle lights on a Christmas tree. “Well, first of all, Juan,” he said in a tone dripping with condescension, “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” The crowd roared approval. “Now, I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable,” he went on, lecturing Williams for another sixty seconds. The audience hooted, hollered, and delivered Gingrich two standing ovations.