Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  Ricketts had long dabbled in politics, but after the Court’s 2010 ruling, he stepped up his game. That year, he started an advocacy group (Taxpayers Against Earmarks) and a super PAC (the Ending Spending Action Fund), both of which had some success. He was keen to play in the presidential and ready to dole out $10 million to defeat Obama.

  Ricketts wasn’t interested in just dashing off a check to Crossroads, though. He was a solo act, an entrepreneur; he wanted his own deal. But in a presidential contest in which total spending might top $2 billion, a mere $10 million was a pittance. So Ricketts was in the market to maximize the bang for his buck—which was what led him inexorably to the door of Dr. Demon Sheep.

  After the collapse of the test-tube candidacy, Davis was on the hunt for some new deep pockets into which he could dip his paw. He pitched Ricketts’s political fixer, a youngish Washington climber named Brian Baker, for the business. An edgy West Coast avant-gardist like Davis and a doughy midwestern septuagenarian like Ricketts weren’t a natural fit. But the potential combination was a sign of the times, and just the kind of thing that was causing jitters in Obamaworld. Whether the match turned out to be made in heaven or in hell, it was all but certain to produce mischief.

  In January, Ricketts, his sons Pete and Todd, and Baker flew out and met Davis in his sleek aerie high in the Hollywood Hills. The adman regaled them with war stories and showed some of his work. With Ricketts on his feet, apparently ready to leave, Davis put on a spot he cut for McCain that included Reverend Wright, which the candidate had refused to air. Over images of McCain recovering from his Vietnam wounds, the narrator praised him for “honor[ing] his fellow soldiers by refusing to walk out of a prisoner-of-war camp,” and hit Obama for not “walk[ing] out of a church where a pastor was spewing hatred.” The screen filled with a clip of Wright fulminating: “Not God Bless America! God Damn America!” Followed by the tagline “Character matters, especially when no one’s looking.”

  Ricketts was overwhelmed. “If the nation had seen that ad,” he declared, “they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

  Two months later, the same cast of characters plus two of Davis’s associates met at Ricketts’s palatial apartment on the seventy-seventh floor of the Time Warner Center, in Manhattan. The failure of McCain to use Wright against Obama came up again, along with a broader discussion of an article of faith on the right: that the mainstream press had failed utterly to vet Obama in 2008. After two hours, Davis and his team left the meeting with the assignment to put together a $10 million proposal. They also left with a reading list from Ricketts, which included Dinesh D’Souza’s latest best-seller, The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

  Davis and his team spent the next six weeks drafting the proposal. Conservative though they were, the consultants weren’t pursuing an ideological agenda; they were chasing a fat paycheck. The plan was designed to pander to what they believed were Ricketts’s predispositions. Davis’s colleague Bill Kenyon penned the “metrosexual” line. Davis winced but left it in, because he thought Joe would like it. The decision to build their proposal around Wright was based on Ricketts’s admiration for the Davis ad: “Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain wouldn’t let us do,” they wrote. Starting in Charlotte, they imagined rolling out a national TV and print campaign, including newspaper ads based on Wright’s infamous post-9/11 sermon about how “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” One proposed ad had the copy “Not God Bless America . . .” superimposed over a picture of the pastor. Another featured a close-up of an angry-looking rooster.

  The group convened again on the morning of May 10, at Todd Ricketts’s home in Wilmette, on Chicago’s North Shore. Joe Ricketts didn’t attend but had deputized his sons to handle the meeting. The consultants ran through the proposal and heard no objections from Todd or Pete; it seemed to Davis and Kenyon that both brothers were enthused. The only naysayer in the room was Baker, who thought the singular focus on Wright was a big mistake. Tom Ricketts, the chairman of the Cubs, was negotiating with City Hall for financial help in rebuilding Wrigley Field. “This will cause a massive problem for your brother, and for the team,” Baker said. “This will not go over well in Chicago.”

  When the meeting ended, just after noon, Baker drove Davis to his next appointment: an Evanston lunch with Bruce Rauner, a Republican private equity multimillionaire considering a run for Illinois governor in 2013. In the car, Baker told Davis he was nervous about what the Romney camp would think of a Wright-centric super-PAC effort. They’re going to hate it, Baker thought. This thing is a shit show. “What’s Plan B?” he asked Davis.

  The adman had brought ten copies of the proposal with him to Wilmette. Some remained with the Rickettses, some with Baker, and some with Davis and his team. Within two hours, however, one of the originals was in the hands of the Mystery Brunette—and soon after on the desk of Giangreco, just one block away from the restaurant where Baker had dropped Davis off for his lunch with Rauner.

  • • •

  GIANGRECO DELIVERED THE DOCUMENT to One Prudential Plaza late that afternoon. Flipping through its pages, Messina muttered, “Jesus Christ. Can you believe this? Can you believe it?”

  The question was what to do next. Once Messina was convinced that the proposal was legit and not some elaborate ruse, he convened an Obamaworld conference call to strategize. Giangreco told the story of how the manila envelope had come over the transom. (He looked at security video from the lobby of his building to see if he recognized the Mystery Brunette; he did not.) Giangreco knew Tom Ricketts slightly; their kids played hockey together. But given the situation with the Cubs and the city, it made no sense to Giangreco that anyone in the Ricketts family would want to make the proposal public.

  Messina, Plouffe, and Axelrod didn’t care where the document came from. They wanted to slip it to the press tout de suite. Four years earlier, when Wright posed an existential threat to Obama, the idea of injecting the reverend voluntarily into the media bloodstream would have seemed nuts. Now it seemed obvious. Exposing the Ricketts proposal would kill it in the crib, and that was no small thing; the plan could have wreaked havoc in Charlotte. A gale of negative publicity might also take Wright off the table for other super PACs. It would send a message to conservative mega-donors and Republican operatives that if they crossed the line when it came to race, there would be a price to pay. And it would stir up indignation in Obama’s base, especially among African Americans.

  The Obamans didn’t want their fingerprints on the disclosure, so they used a third-party cutout to funnel the Ricketts document to The New York Times. To preserve deniability, Obama wasn’t told about the scheme. Plouffe only informed him that a story about a super PAC planning to smear him with Wright would be appearing soon in the Times.

  “That’s probably going to make some people . . . uncomfortable,” the president said.

  Davis’s team was more than discomfited when reporters from the Times got in touch on May 16. “Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck—oh, fuck!” Kenyon yelped.

  Rickettsworld was no more pleased. A frantic round of speculation and investigation broke out as to how the document had leaked—one that continued for months thereafter. Fingers from the Davis side pointed at Baker, on the theory that he feared his objections to the plan would be overridden and was somehow trying to curry favor with Boston by killing it, albeit messily. Others pointed at Todd Ricketts’s wife, who was in the Wilmette house during the presentation, or his domestic help. Another theory involved Davis’s lunch with Rauner, who was close to Mayor Emanuel. But no culprit was ever definitively identified.

  The Times played the story on page one the next day and splashed it all over the Web—posting the proposal, storyboards it contained for a Wright ad, and graphic multimedia spreads on the players behind the plan and the Ricketts family.

  As the Obamans hoped it would, all hell summarily broke loose. From the left, there were calls to boycott TD Ameritrade and other Ricketts businesses. In C
hicago, Emanuel put out word through an aide that he was “livid” and cut off communication with the family: “The Rickettses have tried to contact the mayor, but he’s said that he does not want to talk with them today, tomorrow, or anytime soon,” the aide said. Laura and Tom Ricketts quickly issued statements distancing themselves from the plan. That afternoon, Joe Ricketts did the same; the proposal was dead, Baker told the Times. Davis was cast as a scurrilous race-baiter and began receiving death threats.

  The Obamans were determined that Ricketts-related splatter would get all over Romney, too. Chicago’s rapid-response queen, Lis Smith, discovered that in February Mitt had invoked Wright in a radio interview with Sean Hannity. In reaction to a truncated clip of Obama saying, “We are no longer a Christian nation”—without the next bit, in which the president rattled off a litany of other religions in the American mosaic of faith—Romney told Hannity, “I’m not sure which is worse: him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we . . . must be a less Christian nation.”

  First thing in the morning on May 17, Smith fed the quote to reporters traveling with Romney in Florida, while Axelrod got on Twitter to wonder whether the Republican would disavow the Ricketts plan “or allow the purveyors of slime to operate on his behalf?” On a flight out of Miami, Mitt was asked about the Times’s story and claimed he hadn’t read the papers yet. In the afternoon, the campaign hastily arranged a press availability at the River City Brewing Company, in Jacksonville, at which Romney repudiated the proposal—but then was hit with the planted question about what he had said on Hannity.

  “Do you stand by that?” a print reporter asked. “And do you believe that President Obama’s worldview was shaped by Reverend Wright, and if so do you see evidence of that in his policies?”

  Mitt’s face radiated radical discombobulation, and his words comically followed suit.

  “I’m not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was,” he sputtered—carrying his commitment to avoid flip-flopping to its reductio ad absurdum extreme.

  Even before Romney twisted himself into that pretzel, he was already bent out of shape. After his flight, he had marched through a four-part fund-raising event. He had given a series of local interviews, one of which had to be redone because the reporter accidently failed to record the session. He had held a round table on debt and spending, followed by a speech—during which the clouds opened up and soaked the crowd. But Romney still had more miles to go before he slept, and more torments as well. From Jacksonville, he would fly to Palm Beach for another set of money-raising gigs.

  The ceaseless dash for cash was the greatest agony of Mitt’s existence, and one of the largest ironies. A fantastically rich man, he spent an inordinate amount of time begging other rich people for moola. Pitted against Obama’s fund-raising prowess, and with his own campaign’s coffers in urgent need of refilling for the general election, Mitt believed he had no choice. His buck-raising schedule was physically punishing: he was tired all the time. It was psychically irritating: he hated being lectured on electoral strategy by know-nothing donors. (His staff referred to rope lines at fund-raising events as “advice lines.”) And it was politically dangerous. Like many politicians, Romney had a weakness for talking like a cable TV yakker instead of a candidate. “Don’t be a pundit,” Rhoades nagged him, but that was easier said than done—especially with donors, who incessantly asked pundit-type questions.

  The sense of financial desperation also placed Romney in dodgy venues, as was the case with his last event of that night: a fund-raising soiree for thirty at the Boca Raton home of Marc Leder.

  Romney had known Leder for years, but he was a dubious character. A private equity hotshot with a net worth in the neighborhood of $600 million, he had run a firm, Sun Capital, whose portfolio was replete with investments in companies that had gone belly-up. The New York Post delighted in writing about the debauched bacchanals Leder threw at his home in Southampton. (NUDE FROLIC IN TYCOON’S POOL was one headline.) Under any normal standard of political discretion, Romney would never have been allowed in the same zip code with a Leder-hosted function. But Zwick’s shop, in its fund-raising freneticism, had on this occasion lowered the campaign’s vetting bar for event hosts to ankle level.

  The scene at Leder’s house when Romney arrived at around 8:00 p.m. was fit for Tom Wolfean lampoonery: a bonfire of the gaucheries. The massive Italianate house was decorated in the style of an opulent Olive Garden. The guests came in pairs—the men older, finely suited, and stentorian, the women young, nipped and tucked, tight-dressed, and dutifully silent. There were rhinestone-encrusted Romney 2012 pins as party favors for the ladies. Leder’s date was a towering Russian with pulled-back platinum hair and a name like Tatiana.

  Romney wanted no part of any of it. He was as exhausted as anyone had ever seen him, his hair disheveled, bags under his eyes. His body guy, Garrett Jackson, thought his boss could use a catnap—just fifteen minutes would help. With the guests still arriving, he found a quiet room, Leder’s home office, with a comfy chair and deposited Romney in it. “Rest,” Jackson said.

  Out in the dining area, Jackson and trip director Charlie Pearce swept the room for cameras. In April, there had been a kerfuffle when someone posted a video of Mitt speaking at a donor event in Kentucky, and another when he and his wife were overheard by the press at a Florida fund-raiser. (Ann was caught describing Hilary Rosen’s comments as an “early birthday present.”) To guests brandishing cell phones, Jackson and Pearce whispered, Pictures are fine, just please no recording.

  Romney emerged from his nap time little more refreshed than before. Seated at the head of a U-shaped table next to Leder, he started taking questions from the dinner guests at close to 9:00 p.m. Some were on foreign policy (Iran, Israel). Some were more exhortations than queries (“Why don’t you stick up for yourself?”). A great many invited punditry, causing Romney to lapse into Brit Hume mode. Then, well along in the back-and-forth, one attendee asked him this: “For the last three years, all everybody’s been told is ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?”

  “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said. “All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it . . . These are people who pay no income tax; 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.”

  Several Romney aides, including Stevens, were within earshot but not really paying attention. They had no reason to think anything Romney said would leave the room, no idea that a camera had, in fact, been running.

  When the dinner ended, Mitt was pleased that May 17 was over. The day had been long and brutal, although not as bad for him as it was for Ricketts and Davis. Unlike them, Romney wasn’t writhing in agony on the floor—not yet. It would be several months before his own chickens came home to roost.

  • • •

  THE BANG AND CLATTER of the Ricketts ruckus obscured a story that caught the notice of Obama and his people. That same day, the Romney campaign announced that, with the help of the RNC, its fund-raising total for April was $40 million, less than $4 million shy of what the Democratic side had registered for the month. Romney’s fanatical buck-raking a
ppeared to be working—even as the money situation in Chicago was causing the Obamans palpitations.

  The most visible source of concern was the steep fund-raising drop-off that had occurred from March to April: $53 million to $43.6 million. While Obama’s shift to a more populist, partisan stance might have helped him politically, it had done him no favors with the donor class. Wall Street and much of the Fortune 500 were shut off to him now. And while Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the gay community (fully one in six of Obama’s bundlers fell into the last category) were keeping the campaign afloat, its vaunted Web fund-raising machine was sluggish. Small-dollar givers were withholding their largesse, thinking that the president faced little peril from Romney. Plouffe was bullish that the money would eventually turn around. But Messina was so panicked that he quietly instituted a one-month hiring freeze.

  Obama remained as detached from his fund-raising efforts as ever. Even as he attended more donor events than any presidential incumbent in history, he was airily oblivious to the people ginning up millions of dollars on his behalf. One day, the president asked Messina, “Who’s Franklin Haney?”

  Messina explained that Haney, a real estate baron, was one of Obama’s top ten bundlers.

  “Jim, I couldn’t tell you who the top five are—I just have no idea,” Obama said, then noted that he did know at least two bundlers: Vogue high priestess Anna Wintour and his national finance chair, Matthew Barzun.

  Messina didn’t mind the president’s nonchalance. What he minded was the increasingly likely possibility that the campaign would be financially outmatched. Messina and Plouffe’s initial estimate had been that conservative super PACs might raise and spend, at most, $200 million against Obama. Now Rove was boasting publicly that Crossroads on its own would meet or exceed that figure.