Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  There were, however, two things about which Boston and the rest of the political world were not aware regarding Portman: that his son Will, a junior at Yale, was gay; and that Portman was planning at some point soon to publicly abandon his opposition to same-sex marriage.

  When Romney called with the short-list news, Portman put him off, saying that he wanted to consult his family—his wife, his two other children, and Will. Although Will was out of the closet at Yale, he wasn’t ready to be out on the national stage, and Portman wasn’t prepared to announce his newfound support for gay marriage. Father and son had been talking about going public together for a while, but they wanted to do it on their own timetable. If Portman were picked, that plan would be out the window.

  A week later, Portman called Romney and declined to go forward, without explaining about Will. Portman hoped that would be the end of the story—but it wasn’t. Instead, speculation was rampant in the press about whether his name was on the short list. Reporters inquired constantly if he was being vetted. Portman didn’t want to lie, and hated being coy. In late May, he asked Myers if she had any objection to his putting out a statement saying that he had chosen not to be considered.

  “Oh, no, don’t do that!” Myers exclaimed. That wouldn’t be smart, and it would be harmful to us. You need to talk to Stuart.

  Portman was a Stevens client; more, the two were friends. Soon, Stuart was on the line explaining the source of Boston’s distress. On May 21 on Fox News, Mitch Daniels had given Romney a kick in the shins when he told an interviewer “Of course not” when asked if he was being vetted. “If I thought that call was coming,” Daniels added, “I would disconnect the phone.”

  Stevens pleaded with Portman not to add injury to insult. If you put out a statement saying you turned us down, Democrats will jump all over it: Nobody wants to be with Romney! What does that tell you about the guy? Et cetera. Why don’t you just put your name in the mix and see what happens?

  Portman sympathized with Boston’s plight, had no desire to do anything to hurt Romney. But he also didn’t want to continue living this lie, he told Stevens—and decided to come clean with him and Myers about Will. Both of the Romneyites assured Portman that his son’s sexual orientation was irrelevant. Doesn’t help us, doesn’t hurt us, Stevens said. Portman made clear that if he were picked, he would also announce that he was changing his position on gay marriage. That might cause the campaign heartburn, he said. No, it’s fine, Myers and Stevens replied. There’s no reason for any of this to preclude you from being on the short list.

  Portman’s circumstances were mighty strange—not just living a lie but living it in no-man’s-land. What he cared about most was his family, and especially protecting Will. But between the freak show and the press corps’s obsession with the veepstakes, removing himself from the short list would raise more questions than it answered. Reporters would furiously try to figure out why he was standing down, possibly beating a path to New Haven.

  Portman went back to his family and told them about his talks with Boston. I haven’t been very successful in convincing the media that I’m not on the list, he said. If I continue to stay off it, the press is gonna get to the bottom of this soon and maybe start saying, “It’s because your son is gay.”

  Portman’s wife and kids were in favor of whatever he was in favor of.

  If this is something you want, Dad, I’m ready to go, Will said cheerfully.

  With that, the fifth man joined the short list in mid-June—even as one of the other four was behaving as if he wanted to be scratched off it. Although Christie had agreed to be considered more than a month earlier, the vetters were having a hard time extracting information from Trenton. Christie’s material was coming in late, and what came in was incomplete.

  Myers’s irritation was palpable and acute. Project Goldfish had already missed its Memorial Day deadline; a new one was set for July 1. Myers planned to deliver final vetting dossiers to Romney on the same visit to New Hampshire in which they would discuss the campaign loan. As the end of the month drew near, four of the files were in fine shape: those of Rubio (Pescado), Pawlenty (Lakefish), Portman (Filet-O-Fish), and Fishconsin. But the one belonging to the candidate that the vetters dubbed Pufferfish was still an awful mess.

  • • •

  MYERS AND ROMNEY MET in Wolfeboro to go over the quartet of completed final dossiers and the ragged Pufferfish file. Four of the candidates were less than ideal in various dimensions. Rubio was fresh-faced but inexperienced, falling short in the ready-to-be-president department. Pawlenty packed little political punch. For all of Portman’s attractive qualities, his downsides were abundant, too. His executive-branch experience came under Bush 43, from whose legacy Mitt wanted distance, not further association; and Portman, though not nearly as rich as Romney, was a multimillionaire.

  Then there was Christie. The initial research on the New Jersey governor set off warning bells for Romney. Among other items, there were stories about an investment scandal involving Christie’s brother, Todd. Russ Schriefer tried to ease Mitt’s mind regarding the assorted contretemps, saying, Oh, all that stuff was vetted in the governor’s race. Romney scoffed. Nothing is vetted in a governor’s race! he thought. A presidential race is a whole different ball game!

  Now, as he looked over the Christie vetting file, the conclusion was inescapable: the Pufferfish option was kaput, making Fishconsin seem like the best catch in the aquarium.

  The likelihood that Romney would wind up with Ryan was met with unhappiness by Stevens. Stuart didn’t see Ryan as the only answer—or any answer at all. Stevens liked Paul personally, but he was wary about being forced to take ownership of his budget and Medicare plans; he feared that Mitt would be sliced and diced by the blades in Ryan’s drawer. Stevens had little idea what was going on with the vetting. Myers kept him out of that loop. Right around the time that Mitt was giving up on Christie, Stevens began strenuously pushing for him.

  The irony here was thick, given Stevens’s strident opinions about Christie’s behavior during the Hamlet of Drumthwacket period. But Chicago’s financial superiority and the pounding that Romney was taking from its negative ads had convinced Stevens that Boston would have to rely on earned media to compete. It was here that Christie was golden. The press scorned Mittens, but loved Big Boy. His voice was like an air horn, cutting through the clutter. There was no one better at making the referendum case against Obama, at nailing the president to the wall with ferocity and caustic humor. Christie’s temperament was ideally suited to the unfolding tenor of the race.

  “We’re in a street fight, and he’s a street fighter,” Stevens told Romney. “He’s the best street fighter—and he’s comfortable saying things that you’re not comfortable saying.”

  A few days later, Stevens happened to catch Christie on C-SPAN giving a speech in Washington at the Brookings Institution. It was bighearted brawlerism at its best: direct, no-nonsense, confident, and self-congratulatory, unflinchingly conservative but comfortably nudging up against centrism, with nods to bipartisan cooperation. At the end, Christie unfurled an anecdote about visiting his cancer-stricken mother in the hospital in her dying days. “She reached over, and she grabbed my hand, and she said, ‘Go to work, it’s where you belong,’” Christie said. “‘There’s nothing left unsaid between us.’”

  Stevens e-mailed a video link of the speech to Romney. Take a look at this, he wrote. A little while later, Stevens’s cell phone rang. It was Romney, having just watched the speech. “Wow,” he said.

  In the nine months since Christie’s endorsement of Romney, Boston had formed a mixed view of Big Boy. He was a fund-raising dynamo, but he and his staff were overbearing and hard to work with, demanding in ways that would have been unthinkable from any other surrogate. Trenton insisted on private jets, lavish spreads of food, space for a massive entourage. Romney ally Wayne Berman looked at the bubble around Christie and thought, He’s not the president of the United States, you know?

/>   Chronically behind schedule, Christie made a habit of showing up late to Romney fund-raising events. In May, he was so tardy to a donor reception at the Grand Hyatt New York that Mitt wound up taking the stage to speak before Christie arrived. When the Jersey governor finally made his grand entrance, it was as if Mitt had been his warm-up act.

  Punctuality mattered to Romney. Christie’s lateness bugged him. Mitt also cared about fitness, and was prone to poke fun at those who didn’t. (“Oh, there’s your date for tonight,” he would say to male members of his traveling crew when they spied a chunky lady on the street.) Romney marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down the narrow aisle of the campaign bus. Watching a video of Christie without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, “Guys! Look at that!”

  But Mitt was grateful for Christie’s endorsement and everything else he’d done. He appreciated Chris’s persona, his shtick, his forcefulness, his intuitive connection with voters. That night at the Grand Hyatt, at a high-dollar dinner after the main event, Christie’s argument for Mitt was more compelling than anything the nominee could manage. Romney was aware of how jaundiced Stevens was about Christie—which made Stuart’s advocacy for choosing the guy as VP all the more suasive.

  On July 8, the vetting of Pufferfish restarted. A list of questions arising out of the public record and Christie’s incomplete file from June was drafted. Mark Nielsen, who had been Romney’s general counsel as governor, was put on the case. What commenced was an eleven-day crash operation, filled with eighteen-hour deskbound stints for the vetters. The scenario wasn’t precisely Palinesque; her vet had consumed less than a week. But in some ways, it was worse. With Romney about to set off on his West Coast fund-raising swing and then on to the foreign trip, Project Goldfish was up against the clock—and running headlong into more intransigence from Trenton.

  The sole interface between Commercial Street and Christieworld was Myers and Palatucci. The calls were not infrequent. Trenton’s view of the vet was unusual, but par for the course when it came to Christie: We’ll help you, but on our terms and timing, and if that’s not sufficient, go pound sand.

  Palatucci thought Myers was erratic and hysterical; Christie agreed. Myers had questions not only for Palatucci but about him. Aware of a series of stories in The New York Times about a shady chain of New Jersey halfway houses owned by a company at which Palatucci was an executive, she instructed her team to start vetting the aide. Calling around to politically plugged-in friends, Myers asked, What’s the deal with Palatucci? Does he have baggage? Is there a cloud over him in the tri-state area?

  The list of questions about Christie to which the vetters wanted answers was extensive and troubling. More than once, Myers reported back that Palatucci’s response was, in effect, Why do we need to give you that piece of information? Myers told her team, We have to assume if they’re not answering, it’s because the answer is bad.

  For the past two and a half years, Christie had received skin-blanching exposure from the klieg lights of the national media. But the vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice Inspector General’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels such as the Four Seasons. (Beyond the expense abuse, the report raised questions for the vetters about Christie’s relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many of the trips.) There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies such as former attorney general John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie, arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all of that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on Myers’s team: Christie’s other lobbying clients; his investments overseas; the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament; and the status of his health.

  Some of these were probably nothingburgers—though the vetters still needed answers. Some were inarguably disturbing, such as the IG report. (Lanhee Chen, who normally lent a hand on the vetting on policy matters, thought the Justice Department report was troubling enough to take it up directly with Romney.) But, added together, they were a potential political nightmare.

  Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under Myers, had come into the vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty.

  • • •

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, JULY 15, Romney got on a conference call with the Boston brain trust to talk about the veepstakes. For the first time, he revealed to his senior team who was on his short list and asked for their opinions, without tipping his own hand.

  The overwhelming consensus was for Ryan. Rhoades, Newhouse, Gillespie, and Peter Flaherty were all in Camp Fishconsin. The arguments in Ryan’s favor were many. He was young, telegenic, Irish Catholic, with blue-collar appeal, and might put his state in play. He would rouse the base and sharpen the policy contrast with Obama. While the Ryan budget and Medicare plan were political cons, Romney was half pregnant with them anyway—so why not marry their most articulate defender? Mike Leavitt and Bob White argued that Mitt should pick the best governing partner; privately, both expressed support for Ryan. Look, Mitt, you’ve never worked in Washington, Leavitt said. Having someone who can swing a bat for you on the Hill and knows the budget inside out makes a lot of sense.

  But Stevens remained unconvinced about Ryan, and adamantly in favor of Christie. Shielded from the crash vet and what it was turning up, Romney’s chief strategist was making a purely political argument—one that contradicted the considered judgment of virtually everyone else on whom Mitt relied for advice. Such was the potency of the Romney–Stevens bond that Mitt kept Christie in the pack.

  Romney was somewhat shielded from the Pufferfish vet, too, but knew it wasn’t going smoothly. Myers informed him that a significant problem had not been solved: the strictures of the same pay-to-play regulations that kept Christie from tapping Wall Street cash in New Jersey.

  Romney’s lawyers were still looking into the matter. It was complicated. One possibility was that, if Christie were picked as VP, Romney would no longer be able to raise money from many financial institutions for the rest of the campaign. Not great, but manageable, maybe. Another possibility was that Boston would have to return the cash it had already raised on the Street—unacceptable. The attorneys had been exploring workarounds; none was watertight. Myers had pressed Palatucci for help figuring it out; none was forthcoming.

  The easiest solution would be for Christie to resign as governor if he got the nod. A few hours after the conference call, Romney phoned him to float that notion. “Are there any circumstances in which you’d consider resigning to become the nominee?” Mitt asked.

  Christie asked for time to think it over.

  Romney said that his lawyers were still working on the pay-to-play conundrum.

  “Why do
n’t you talk to your counsel and see what happens?” Christie said.

  Romney hung up the phone convinced by Christie’s reaction that resignation was not in the cards. (He was correct.) “Look, let’s find out if we can get an answer” on pay-to-play, he told Myers. But let’s keep pushing on the vet—and pushing on Trenton.

  Four nights later, on July 19, Myers’s team put the finishing touches on the Pufferfish vetting dossier. Included was a DVD with some of Christie’s most outlandish or unnerving YouTube hits: his castigating a pro-gay-marriage New Jersey assemblyman as “numb nuts,” his angrily berating a constituent while chasing him down the Seaside Heights boardwalk, brandishing an ice cream cone. But the main event was the thirty-five-page written report titled “Chris Christie memo 71912 FINAL.”

  After eleven days of teeth-gnashing labor, several of the issues that the vetters had unearthed around Christie were still unresolved. Though the New Jersey governor believed that he and Palatucci had been fully cooperative, Myers and her team viewed Trenton as recalcitrant. Newton and Nielsen were sticklers. They were uncomfortable producing a final report they considered incomplete. Nielsen, who drafted the document, made a point of being meticulous about framing and flagging the problems, including a refrain in bold applied to a number of items.

  On Todd Christie’s securities-fraud settlement: “[Governor] Christie has been asked to disclose whether Todd Christie incurred any monetary or other penalty as a result of the SEC/NYSE action. If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, this item should be obtained.” On Christie’s defamation lawsuit: “Christie has been asked to provide the terms of the settlement of this matter. If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, this item should be obtained.” On Christie’s household help: “Christie has been asked to provide the names and documented status of all domestic employees. This material has not been received. If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, these items should be obtained.” On Christie’s lobbying clients: “Christie has provided only one of the twelve or so [public disclosure] filings made [in the time he was a lobbyist] . . . If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, these items should be obtained.”