Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  “Look, we just all need to tighten our games,” Obama said sternly. “And that includes me.”

  The tightening commenced immediately in Obamaworld as Plouffe and Messina rejiggered responsibilities between Chicago and the West Wing. But Obama failed to heed his own directive quite so quickly. On June 8, facing reporters in the White House briefing room, the president was asked, “What about the Republicans saying that you’re blaming the Europeans for the failures of your own policies?” To which Obama replied: “We created 4.3 million jobs over the last twenty-seven months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”

  Pfeiffer marched into the Oval Office to inform Obama that he’d gaffed. Anything that could be construed (or purposely misconstrued) as suggesting that he was content with the performance of the private sector was a problem. Obama was defensive at first. Everyone knows I don’t think the economy is fine, he protested, because I say so every day. But a few hours later, during a White House photo op, Obama grudgingly revised his comments.

  Coming on top of the other hiccups, the flub alarmed Plouffe. It wasn’t just the private-sector part, with its implication of out-of-touchness, that he thought was problematic. The second half, which could be interpreted as the president believing that public-sector employment was the remedy for what ailed the economy, was also bad. Talking like a macroeconomics professor, Plouffe thought, always leads to trouble. Which in this case meant handing Boston a gift-wrapped Big Bertha with which to tee off on Obama.

  The Romneyites had been gleefully knocking the ball down the fairway since the Morning Joe Democrat backlash had begun. Stitching together the Booker, Ford, Rattner, and Rendell rebukes, Boston compiled a video titled “Big Bain Backfire.” On CNBC, Romney crowed, “I think Bain Capital has a good and solid record. I was happy to see President Clinton made a similar statement . . . and called my record superb.” Now the campaign went on the air with an ad called “Doing Fine?” It was a frame-by-frame imitation of a devastating 2008 Obama spot that had maced McCain for saying—the day after Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis—“The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” with the president’s “private sector” gaffe a literal and figurative echo.

  After months of wallowing in gloom-shrouded dismay, Republicans saw a ray of hope. For the past four years, Obama and the Obamans had been swaddled in a mythos about their command of the dark arts and sweet science of electioneering. Even on the right, there was a grudging admiration that went along with overarching contempt for the president. Obama had proven ill-equipped for governing, sure, but nobody doubted that he and his people knew how to run a campaign.

  For Republicans, however, the past month had punctured that perception as Chicago seemed to have suffered an epic failure to launch. Meanwhile, Team Romney had just released its latest fund-raising numbers: a staggering $77 million for May, fully $17 million ahead of what Team Obama had managed. This figure alone would have been enough to set conservative hearts aflutter, but there was more. Romney’s positive ratings were rising. The gender gap was narrowing. The Gallup daily tracking poll had Mitt two points ahead of Obama. Suddenly, Republicans were seized with a thought at once heretical and thrilling: maybe their guy wasn’t irretrievably doom-struck after all.

  16

  BAIN PAIN

  AN ARMADA OF GLEAMING white private jets descended on Russ McDonald Field, twenty minutes outside Park City, Utah, where their passengers were met and whisked away by a fleet of black cars. It was June 22, a sun-splashed day in the Wasatch Mountains, and nine hundred donors were arriving for the start of what Boston had billed as the First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat, a reward for the campaign’s most generous contributors and bundlers. In the lobby of the Chateaux at Silver Lake, the nabobs were handed canvas tote bags with BELIEVE IN AMERICA stitched on the side. For the next three days, they would revel in a veritable Mittapalooza.

  The retreat was a Spencer Zwick production, brimming with star power. The scene sometimes seemed like a ski-lodge simulacrum of a Republican convention. There were party leaders such as Jeb Bush and McCain, statesmen including James Baker III. There were rising stars and potential VP nominees: Tim Pawlenty, Paul Ryan, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, Ohio senator Rob Portman. There were conservative media eminences: Fred Barnes, Mary Matalin, Bill Kristol. There were business titans: Ken Langone, Meg Whitman. There was Charlie Spies, from Restore Our Future, hitting up donors, and there was Karl Rove, doing much the same for Crossroads. There was Condoleezza Rice, stealing the show with an impassioned speech that brought the attendees to their feet. There was the Boston brain trust, patiently answering question after question about polling, strategy, and the electoral map.

  Mitt and Ann seemed to be everywhere at once, giving talks at private dinners for top-dollar bundlers (him) and at a Women for Romney Victory Tea with figure skater Dorothy Hamill (her). On Friday night, both Romneys spoke at a cookout in Olympic Park, at the base of a training mountain surrounded by ski jumps. Ann was funny and personal, playfully roasting her sons, four of whom were in attendance, and offering a warm tribute to her husband. Mitt delivered his stump speech with greater fire and fluency than usual. You know what? thought Langone. I was wrong—this guy can connect!

  For Romney, the retreat was something close to nirvana. He had lived in Park City for three years when he was heading the 2002 Olympics, so the event was a sort of homecoming, and Zwick made sure it ran like clockwork. Surrounded by his family and by individuals of means who needed no persuasion about the virtues of capitalist achievement, Romney was in his element. The donors were loving him and loving the retreat, and he loved that.

  But Romney’s joy derived as much from a different embrace: that of the party’s panjandrums. Never before had the Republican establishment fully accepted him. Never had there been a laying on of hands. In Park City, his back was emblazoned with the palm prints of the great and the good.

  On the Friday night before his speech, he was introduced by Jim Baker, the former secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and White House chief of staff. Nicknamed the Velvet Hammer, Baker was for Republicans of a certain age the gold standard of probity, wisdom, streetwise caginess, and streetfighter moxie. His words about Romney were glowing, all about how Mitt was uniquely suited to occupying the Oval Office at this moment in history.

  Talking to reporters afterwards, Baker reminisced about a similar event in Vail in 1976, when Gerald Ford had asked Baker to run his general election campaign. “That’s what I see going on here,” the Velvet Hammer said. “We are going to have a different result. This year we are going to win.”

  Romney had no doubt that the race ahead would be tough and close, but he was optimistic. He had brought on board a well-regarded outsider, former Bush 43 counselor and RNC chair Ed Gillespie, as a senior adviser. He had assigned Beth Myers to manage his vice-presidential selection process, and Mike Leavitt to handle his presidential transition planning. With the horrors of the nomination fight well and truly behind him, Romney rolled out of Park City firmly focused on the future—and blissfully unaware of how viciously his past was about to bite him in the ass.

  • • •

  WASHINGTON AWOKE TO SWELTERING heat and high expectations on June 28. For weeks, the political world had been awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in National Federation of Independent Business et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al.—the case to decide the constitutionality of Obamacare. This was the last day before the Court’s summer recess. The clock was down to zero.

  Since March, when oral arguments in the case were seen as having unfolded abominably for the administration, a consensus had formed on all sides about the likely outcome: in part or in toto, the Affordable Care Act would be overturned. The White House and Chicago were braced for that eventuality, but Obama was serene. His private prediction w
as that the law would be upheld, 5–4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court’s liberal bloc.

  Obama was watching CNN in a room just off the Oval when the network errantly reported that the individual mandate had been struck down. Five interminable minutes passed before White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler burst in with a smile and two thumbs up. Obama had been proven both right and wrong: the Court vindicated the mandate as constitutional, but with Kennedy dissenting and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority—on the argument that the penalty contained in the ACA for failing to obtain insurance was not an illegitimate regulation of commerce but instead a legitimate tax.

  The Obama administration disagreed with that reasoning, but who cared? All that mattered was the verdict. Speaking in the East Room, Obama was at pains not to gloat. “Whatever the politics,” he said, “today’s decision was a victory for people all over this country whose lives will be more secure because of this law.” But among his people there were tears of joy and cheers of exultation. On Twitter, Gaspard blurted, “It’s constitutional. Bitches.”

  Despite all the controversy around the ACA, Obama’s team had come to view it as an electoral winner. Anyone who had turned against 44 because of the law was already lost; undecided voters had factored it into their thinking and remained on the fence. But across the coalition of the ascendant, Chicago’s research found that the ACA was a plus. For months the campaign had been developing direct mail and ads aimed at women and young voters that homed in on health care reform’s specific benefits for them. Guaranteed coverage was popular with African Americans and Hispanics, whose rates of uninsurance were high. Chicago was already on the air with Spanish-language spots touting the ACA. Now Grisolano would crank the volume of that advertising up to eleven.

  Romney was in Washington when the Court issued its ruling. Before the cameras on a balcony across the street from the Capitol in the scorching sun, Romney said, “What the Court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States. And that is, I will act to repeal Obamacare.”

  For Romney, the Court’s decision was the worst of all worlds. Boston had been praying for the ACA to be struck down, allowing Mitt to spend the fall attacking Obama for wasting a year, in the midst of an economic crisis, pushing an unconstitutional law—a position that might have held broad attraction in the middle of the electorate, which repeal did not. On the right, the only solace in Roberts’s decision was that it deemed the individual mandate a tax. But for Boston, that caused further squeamishness, as it raised questions about whether the mandate in Romneycare was one, too. Confronted on the topic a few days later on MSNBC, Fehrnstrom said that Mitt believed the mandate was not a tax at either the state or federal level, thus agreeing with the administration and infuriating conservatives.

  The depth of the muddle was depressing to Mitt. Maybe Santorum was right about me and Obamacare, he thought. Rick could just scream, “The mandate! The mandate!” But I can’t.

  From Washington, Romney flew up to New York for a meeting arranged by Langone at the Union League Club, off Park Avenue. The attendees were the same sort of machers—Rupert Murdoch, Lloyd Blankfein, Stanley Druckenmiller, and about thirty others—that the Home Depot founder had put together to lure Christie into the race. Only this time the purpose was to give Mitt advice about how to beat Obama.

  Romney showed up and dove right into the discussion. Langone jostled him to make more noise about Simpson-Bowles. The Court’s health care ruling was raised. Education was broached. But the most heated topic on the table was immigration.

  Obama had thrust the issue into the news two weeks earlier, when he announced that he would use executive authority to enact a modified DREAM Act. Frustrated by the months of internal debate, the president had brought the issue to a head with Jack Lew and Ruemmler. Don’t make my political decision for me, he said. Don’t tell me it’s going to hurt me or will be seen as overreaching. I just want to know if I have the legal authority or not. With Ruemmler maintaining that he did, Obama was all in, unveiling what he called “a temporary stopgap measure” that would “lift the shadow of deportation” from 800,000 young illegal immigrants who had entered the country under age sixteen.

  The Obamans knew that the move put Romney in a bind, given his DREAM Act veto pledge. But Plouffe and Messina assumed that Mitt would swiftly side with the president to avoid worsening his dismal numbers with Hispanics.

  Romney felt trapped. On the one hand, he was still worried about upsetting the right, from which he needed energy and big turnout in November; he also feared that shifting his position would leave him open to charges of expediency. On the other, he understood that he couldn’t risk further alienating Latinos.

  So he attempted to split the difference. In one halting swoop, Romney praised Marco Rubio, who was working on his own DREAM Act alternative; criticized Obama for making it “more difficult to reach a long-term solution” by taking his action outside the context of comprehensive immigration reform; but indicated that, even so, he would not repeal the order if he were elected.

  Messina was flabbergasted. “They couldn’t have fucked this up any worse,” he said in a staff meeting the next morning. “Their people are pissed, Latinos are pissed, and he looks like an asshole.”

  Obama was perplexed, too. “I’m surprised,” the president said, pondering Romney’s behavior. He seems to have latitude with his party now, or he wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to try and heal himself a little bit. But apparently he doesn’t believe he has enough latitude to go the whole nine yards. It was weird, Obama thought.

  In truth, everything about Hispanics was vexed in Romneyland. Mitt had been talking since December about releasing a comprehensive immigration plan. Chen and the rest of his policy team agreed that doing so might help with Latinos, but they couldn’t figure out what to put on paper that wouldn’t enrage the GOP’s anti-amnesty ranters. Rhoades had no thirst for any issue that would distract from the economy or inflame the right. Stevens believed that Romney could never escape the positions he’d taken during the nomination fight, as well as four years earlier. The president will pull out what you said in 2008, Stevens said. No matter what you say now, that stuff is gonna be there.

  Ed Gillespie shook his head when he heard the conversations. From his experience with Bush, who garnered upwards of 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, Gillespie knew it was possible for a Republican to compete for that demographic. And that unless Romney did, he was doomed in Florida, a state he had to win. But here was Stevens, resisting running Spanish-language ads because he considered them a low priority for a cash-strapped campaign. And here was Romney, arguing that it was better to stick to lethal positions than be charged with inconsistency—talking as if this were a fundamental test of character.

  The Langone gang at the Union League Club agreed with Gillespie, starting with Univision CEO Randy Falco. As I’m sure you know, our network has extraordinary reach in the Latino community, Falco said to Romney. The president has been on our air a dozen times. You’ve been on once. Consider this an open invitation; you can contact me directly.

  “You’re allowing other people to paint you as the anti-immigrant candidate,” Falco went on. Whether you think Hispanics will agree with you or not, they deserve to hear your point of view. “Even if you don’t agree with what I just said, if you don’t start paying attention to our community, there won’t be a Republican Party in ten to fifteen years,” Falco added forcefully.

  Before Romney could respond, Murdoch slammed his hand on the table and said, “He’s right!”

  The News Corp chief had only grown more vociferous and cantankerous in his disdain for Mitt in the course of the nomination battle; a few days before the Iowa caucuses, he tweeted that Santorum was the “only candidate with genuine big vision for [the] country.” Now he laid into Romney on immigration.

  I don’t know if it’s you or your advisers, but you’ve put yourself in a very bad way
on this issue, Murdoch said. Talking about self-deportation—it’s ridiculous. You’re going to need to soften your rhetoric and come up with a more humane policy. If you can’t figure out a way to appeal to Hispanics, there’s no way for you to win.

  Taken aback, Romney turned defensive. Obviously, I understand the significance of the Hispanic vote, Mitt said weakly. Latino outreach is important. (He noted that one of his sons spoke Spanish.) I know I took some positions in the primary that are difficult to deal with in the general election, Romney went on. But my positions are my positions. I don’t have the option of changing them.

  “I am not going to be seen as a flip-flopper,” Romney said.

  Murdoch left the meeting unimpressed, and wasn’t shy about letting the world know. “When is Romney going to look like a challenger?” he tweeted later that afternoon. “Seems to play everything safe, make no news except burn off Hispanics.”

  Langone understood Romney’s aversion to being cast as a flip-flopper. But he also thought that if Mitt didn’t fix his Latino problem, he was done for. A week after swooning in Park City, Langone was having doubts again.

  And he was not alone—though the source of the misgivings among others at the Union League Club was different. After a respite, the Obamans were starting to open up again on Romney with both barrels over Bain. One of the machers suggested that Mitt do more to defend his record in private equity. Romney waved off the suggestion and spouted boilerplate about class warfare.

  Murdoch’s lieutenant, Joel Klein, could barely believe the candidate’s insouciance. Klein had worked in the Clinton White House. He knew a thing or two about negative campaigning.

  Obama is about to make Bain a synonym for organized crime, Klein thought. And this poor schmuck doesn’t even see it coming.