Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  • • •

  BOB WHITE SAW IT as clearly as Cassandra previsioned the fall of Troy. At fifty-six, White had been at Romney’s side for most of his adult life. After growing up working class in Woburn, Massachusetts, he went to work for Mitt at Bain and Company in 1981 and was Bain Capital’s first hire three years later. From the Olympics through the statehouse and into the presidential arena, White was Mitt’s alter ego, aide-de-camp, in-house historian, personnel vetter, and gut-checker, all on a volunteer basis. (A part owner of the Boston Celtics, he was as rich as Romney.) Mitt called him “my wingman” or TQ—short for The Quail, a nickname based on the family of birds that includes the bobwhite. White called himself “Friend of Candidate.” His devotion to Mitt was matched by and bound up in his devotion to Bain. Now he was laboring to save both of his four-letter loves from being left in ruins.

  White recalled all too well the way Ted Kennedy had used Bain against Romney in 1994: to knock down his claims to being a job creator and cast him as a job destroyer. White viewed those famous laid-off-worker ads as impugning not only Mitt’s business acumen but his (and Bain’s) integrity. White considered the claims infuriating, unjust, despicable. He expected even worse in 2012.

  Mitt’s friend was bound and determined that Boston be ready. In April 2011, before Romney entered the race, White stood at a whiteboard, drawing charts and matrices, trying to elucidate the intricacies of private equity for Mitt’s political schlubs. White believed there was a positive story to tell about Bain: the successful ventures, the charitable endeavors. But he was more concerned with Bain investments that presented political vulnerabilities: deals where the firm got fat but the portfolio companies failed; companies that laid off workers, engaged in offshoring, or were guilty of malfeasance. We need deep dives on all of these, White said. We need to be set up for rapid response when the attacks come.

  For the better part of the next year, White immersed himself in researching the problem investments. By April 2012, he had timelines, fact sheets, and contact lists for them all. On a parallel track, he identified workers and executives at thriving companies to provide on-camera testimonials. That month, he established a three-person SWAT team, as he called it, dedicated solely to Bain.

  White took little comfort from the Booker/Clinton backlash in late May. After its initial steelworker spot, Priorities rolled out another, then another, and then another in its Kennedy-style campaign. The ads didn’t have much money behind them, but they lit up cable and the Web, especially one called “Stage,” released in late June. It featured a former employee of an Indiana paper company bought by Bain, who told the story of coming in to work and being instructed to build a thirty-foot dais—from which it was announced that he and his co-workers were fired. “Turns out that when we built that stage,” the hard hat said, “it was like building my own coffin.”

  The Obamans tested hundreds of spots in 2012; none was as effective as “Stage,” which quickly racked up three million hits on YouTube. But even more problematic for Boston was a June 21 story in The Washington Post alleging that when “Romney was actively involved in running Bain . . . it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components” in “low-wage countries like China and India.”

  Chicago knew the story was coming a week in advance, even before the reporter called Boston for comment. The Obamans had learned from the first Bain flare-up how combustible the issue was; a single spark could ignite a blaze. Their plan had been to wait until July to torch Romney on Bain and his income taxes. The Post piece caused them to grab their flamethrowers ten days early, queuing up a series of ads citing the paper’s report that would unfurl over the next few weeks.

  On the stump, Obama seized on the story with gusto and perfect pitch. “It was reported in The Washington Post that the companies [Romney’s] firm owned were ‘pioneers’ in the outsourcing of American jobs to places like China and India,” Obama said. After pausing pregnantly for three long beats, he exclaimed, in a tone that mixed incredulity and disgust, “Pioneers!” Another beat. “We don’t need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office. We need a president who will fight for American jobs and fight for American manufacturing.”

  Up in Boston, the Post story set White’s hair on fire and his SWAT team into action. The piece was full of inaccuracies, White believed, but the errors weren’t easy to prove. There were a lot of firms involved, more facts to gather, executives to contact. Six days later, ducks in a row, the campaign sent a delegation to the Post to demand a retraction, which was not forthcoming, then released a detailed rebuttal of the story to the press. The document was comprehensive, and White was proud of that. But in the era of Twitter and the freak show, the six-day turnaround scarcely qualified as rapid response.

  Hobbling White’s ability to move more swiftly was a factor hidden from the outside world: the staunch refusal of Bain to assist Boston on defense. A decade removed from the firm, Romney was a distant memory to all but a few executives; the institutional loyalty to Mitt was minimal, and the desire to wade into partisan politics nil. Bain’s upper management and employees were split among Republicans and Democrats. There were even some Obama bundlers, who pleaded with Messina and Axelrod not to drag the firm into the campaign—extracting only a concession that Chicago would refrain from using an infamous photo of a young Mitt and some Bain associates clutching greenbacks.

  The Bain brigade found the attacks on the firm upsetting, but hurt feelings were less important than protecting the franchise. The best way to do that, the firm’s leadership decided, was to keep their heads down and avoid anything that resembled taking sides—publicly or privately. The only point of contact between Bain and Romneyland was managing director Sean Doherty, who spoke exclusively to White. Far from colluding with The Quail, Doherty more often gave him the stiff arm. In the spring, White had asked if Bain might provide an official breakdown of Romney’s tenure: deals, revenues, and so on. Doherty politely refused. When the Post story broke, Doherty saw factual problems with it, too. But his attitude was: Problem for the campaign, not a problem for Bain.

  Rationally, White was sympathetic to the firm’s point of view. “Bain isn’t in the campaign business,” he would tell his colleagues on Commercial Street. But White wasn’t unemotional when it came to Bain. He and Mitt were Bain men through and through. Bain had shaped them, Bain had made them, Bain was their fountainhead; their reverence for the firm was so encompassing that it left them with a massive Bain blind spot. But now Romney was being “Bain-boated,” as White put it, and Bain would do little to help. For TQ, the situation was agonizing, torturous.

  The intransigence of Bain was just one of the hurdles White was facing. In meeting after meeting at campaign headquarters, he argued, sometimes heatedly, that the time had come to man the barricades. To fight back against the falsehoods and stand up for Romney’s work in private equity. To air ads featuring the pro-Bain testimonials they had collected. What White wanted was a robust defense coupled with a muscular offense. What he found was that Boston didn’t have the inclination to do either—and that even if the will had been present, the wallet, astonishingly, was not.

  • • •

  MYERS, RHOADES, AND STEVENS drove from Boston to Wolfeboro on July 3 to see Romney, who had slipped off the trail for a holiday break with his family. The day was picture-perfect, cloudless and calm. Sitting down with Mitt and Ann on the back deck of the house overlooking Lake Winnipesaukee, the trio took no pleasure in introducing dark clouds into such a postcard setting. But they really had no choice. The cupboard was bare, and unpleasant measures were required to refill it.

  That Boston found itself impoverished was dumbfounding on its face. The campaign was about to release its combined fund-raising number with the RNC for June: a record $100 million–plus total. From casual observers to sophisticated students of the interplay between politics and money, everyone and his mother a
ssumed that Commercial Street was swimming in simoleons.

  Yet the money that Zwick’s team was collecting now was mostly for the general election, which meant it couldn’t be spent until after Mitt officially became the nominee in Tampa. Boston had always known that this interregnal period would be tough. But the nomination fight had gone on longer and been costlier than expected, and the campaign’s wealthy contributors had already written checks for the maximum allowable donations—leaving Romneyland with scant resources until the convention. Now, with the Obamans having robbed their autumn budget to saturate the summer airwaves, Romney was being outspent three or four to one in many markets.

  Messina was keeping close tabs on Boston’s finances. Just a month after the pivotal White House spending meeting, he was startled to discover what Boston knew all too well. On the basis of Federal Election Commission filings, he sketched out an estimate of what Romneyland’s summer budget might look like and showed it to Obama.

  “They have no small donors,” Messina said. “They’re gonna run out of money.”

  Obama studied the papers and said, “I bet he writes a check.”

  Given Romney’s wealth and history of check writing, much of the world assumed the same. Yet from the outset in Boston, that option had been off the table. Whenever the subject was raised, Myers would say curtly, “Not gonna happen.” After doling out $45 million in 2008, Romney felt he had reached his personal lifetime dollar limit in the pursuit of the presidency. Stevens and Rhoades, moreover, believed self-funding would exacerbate Mitt’s image problems. Here’s the rich guy trying to buy the race, thought Rhoades. Not good.

  The unwillingness of the rich guy to take advantage of being a rich guy for fear of looking like a rich guy was a chain of logic too Ouroborosian to ponder for too long. The Boston brain trust had come up with a potential alternative: using forthcoming general election funds as collateral for a $20 million line of credit. But there were campaign finance hoops to jump through to borrow the money, and in the worst-case scenario, Romney might have to personally guarantee the loan.

  Perched next to Mitt at the picnic table on the deck, Rhoades laid out the direness of Boston’s straits. Guv, we’re getting crushed on the air, he said, and ran through the numbers for his boss.

  What about the super PACs? asked Romney. What about Restore?

  The super PACs are doing what they’re doing, Rhoades replied. They’re spending money, but we don’t see it having much impact. We think this line of credit is the only way to go.

  Romney said he wanted time to talk it over with Ann. In 2008, self-funding had been a necessary evil. In 2012, his reluctance derived in part from not wanting donors to think, If he’s going to write a check, why should I? But a line of credit was different. In all likelihood, Boston would be able to secure the loan without Romney putting himself on the hook. And even if it came to that, the optics would hardly be as damaging as if he simply whipped out his checkbook. The next day, Romney informed Rhoades that he was in.

  Stevens was relieved that Boston’s coffers would soon be replenished. The $20 million infusion would provide air cover until Tampa—but only bare cover. Which made the question of how to spend it all the more pressing. The scarcity of dollars was one reason Stevens had no interest in running pro-Bain ads, but his aversion was driven by more than economics.

  Unlike White, Stevens had been skeptical that Chicago would fixate on Bain. There were many things Mitt could be hit for: his Bushist policies, his Massachusetts record, social issues, flip-flopping, whatever. That Bain happened to be front and center did little to alter Stuart’s uncluttered strategic view: Boston had to attack more than defend, prosecuting Obama on the economy and not letting Chicago put Romney on trial over Bain. How many people in 2008 thought Obama was a Muslim? Stevens mused. How many in 1992 thought Bill Clinton was a womanizer who had problems telling the truth? The Obama and Clinton campaigns prevailed by not letting themselves be embroiled in those matters day after day. They ran on what they wanted to run on. The Romneyites had to do the same.

  Stevens’s desire not to litigate Bain put him at loggerheads with White. Stuart respected TQ but thought his feelings for the firm clouded his judgment; when Bob spoke of Bain, it sounded as if he were cooing over one of his children. (This is why you shouldn’t referee your own kids’ soccer games, Stevens would joke.) The testimonials touting the firm struck him as beside the point. He reminded White that, just as Bain wasn’t in the campaign business, the campaign wasn’t in the Bain business. Mitt’s problem wasn’t that he worked in private equity. His problem was that private equity made him so rich that many voters believed he couldn’t relate to them. We can convince people Mitt’s not a bad person because he was involved with Bain, Stevens thought. But that won’t get him elected president.

  Romney wished there were a silver bullet that would accomplish both objectives. Bain had been his bane since the 1994 Senate campaign, and no one had come up with a way of neutralizing the issue. The campaign produced and focus-grouped a number of TV commercials, but none did the trick.

  The outsourcing charges against him were weak on the merits, Mitt believed. The bad stuff had happened after he left Bain. He took great satisfaction in the number of newspaper fact-checkers who ruled against the Washington Post. But Romney assumed that Chicago knew there were Bain deals in which he’d been involved that were more damning, including a health care company that committed Medicare fraud, on whose board he had served. His suspicion was that the Obamans were trying to lure him into the briar patch. As soon as I respond to one Bain attack with an ad, they’ll hit me with the next one, then the next one, then the next one, Romney thought. Pretty soon, the whole campaign will be about Bain. Close as he was to White, Romney not only deferred to Stevens on politics but agreed with him about one basic principle: “If you’re explaining in politics, you’re losing.”

  • • •

  WHEN HALEY BARBOUR HEARD that line out of Boston, he laughed and thought of another adage, one that he considered more apt: “An attack unanswered is an attack admitted.”

  Boston’s quietude on the air regarding Bain was mystifying to Barbour, who was raising money for Crossroads, and to the other Republican super-PAC guys. Although they underestimated the extent of the financial crisis in Romneyland, they had known all along that the campaign would be far from flush over the summer—and it was their job to fill the void. Restore’s Larry McCarthy kept waiting for a smoke signal from Boston that it wanted help on Bain. Rove was sending up white puffs of his own. He pushed Crossroads to do a Bain response ad to alert Team Romney that the group was willing to lend a hand. Give us a message, Rove thought, and we’ll follow you.

  Chicago viewed Boston’s unwillingness to engage with puzzlement but a certain admiration. My God, they’re disciplined, thought Messina. They’ve got a theory and they’re sticking to it.

  The Obamans were determined to unstick them. To the extent that Romney had tried to rebut the Bain attacks, he claimed that the outsourcing, offshoring, plant closings, and layoffs at the companies in question had occurred after he left the firm in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Games. But on July 12, the Boston Globe ran a story saying Romney had signed Securities and Exchange Commission documents listing him as the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” of Bain from 1999 to 2002.

  The Obamans had been aware of the documents for some time. They were ready to pounce. On a conference call with reporters that afternoon, Cutter let fly: “Either Mitt Romney, through his own work and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments.”

  The fundamental laws of freak-show physics dictated the shorthanding of the Cutter comment in the media coverage: she had accused Romney of being a felon.

  In all the internal debate in Boston over Bain, Romne
y had never exerted decisive control over how to respond. But he did now. Both outraged by the supposed insinuation of criminality and vaguely gleeful at the opportunity for umbrage, he instructed his staff to arrange a round-robin of interviews the next day with all five TV news networks. Romney’s staff often tried to hold Mitt back from the media. There was some hesitation now. But Romney was insistent.

  “I want to go out there on this,” he said. “Full-bore.”

  The Romney round-robin took place in Wolfeboro and offered a reminder of how much—for all the emphasis on strategy and strategists, polling and pollsters, media and message—basic candidate skills matter at the presidential level. And of the Grand Canyon–size gap that existed in that regard between Romney and 44. Halting, abstruse, and unconvincing, Mitt managed to create only a greater muddle with his attempt at clarity.

  “How should we be thinking about this?” asked Jan Crawford of CBS News. “What was your role? You were the sole owner until 2002?”

  “I was the owner of the general partnership, but there were investors, which included pension funds and various entities of all kinds that owned, if you will, the investments of the firm,” Romney replied. “I was the owner of an entity which was a management entity. That entity was one which I had ownership of until the time the retirement program was put in place. But I had no responsibility whatsoever after February of 1999 for the management or ownership—management, rather—of Bain Capital.”

  Obama hadn’t been happy about Cutter’s insertion of the word “felony” into the conversation. It put the focus on her—and, by extension, him—rather than keeping it on Romney, where he wanted it. But Mitt’s round-robin returned the pink to the presidential cheek.

  “I guess he doesn’t have an answer on this yet,” Obama said wryly to Plouffe.

  Just as heartening was Romney’s response regarding his income tax returns, another story that the Obamans had been pushing frantically alongside Bain for the past two weeks. Feeding oppo to the AP had yielded a story about a Bermuda-based holding company that had never appeared in Romney’s financial disclosures. In a speech to the National Council of La Raza, Biden had hit him: “Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his.” Yet Mitt refused to budge. “People always want to get more,” he told CNN. “Two years [is all] that people are going to have.”