Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  Christie came armed with a three-minute video that he insisted be played before he spoke. It was an ode to himself and to New Jersey, as was much of his speech. Lumbering out onstage, clapping his hands, Christie talked for twenty-four minutes—the first sixteen devoted to his mother and father, his biography, his achievements in his state. He mentioned the nominee just seven times, speaking of Mitt purely in the abstract. Christie’s only criticism of Obama was implicit: “It’s time to end this era of absentee leadership in the Oval Office and send real leaders to the White House.” He never uttered the incumbent’s name. There was little humor and no spark.

  Many of the reviews of Christie’s speech were pans. From the left, Rachel Maddow called it “one of the most remarkable acts of political selfishness I have ever seen.” From the right, National Review’s Byron York wrote that the speech “failed to convey the spirit—the essential Christie-ness—that millions have seen in YouTube videos of the New Jersey governor in action.” On Fox News, Chris Wallace gibed, “For a moment, I forgot who was the nominee of the party.” But the appraisal that got the most attention was from Politico, which declared it “a prime-time belly-flop.”

  For the past three years, Christie had been on an uninterrupted roll. The keynote was supposed to be his shining moment. Instead it was his first significant national failure.

  Much as Christie attempted to ignore the chorus of criticism, he couldn’t put the Politico story out of his mind. The piece included a sentence—“Several political figures close to Mitt Romney made acerbic comments to reporters, making clear they thought Christie laid an egg”—that convinced him the whole thing was a Boston-fueled hatchet job. Christie believed he had laid himself on the line for Mitt, done everything the campaign had asked. Now, between Politico and the New York Post, he had been shat on twice in forty-eight hours by people he was trying to help. The treatment was galling, infuriating. More than that, it was hurtful.

  Rhoades’s assessment was that the Post story had poisoned the well for Christie’s speech, much as Romney’s Brian Williams interview wrecked his foreign trip right out of the gate. On Wednesday morning, he called Christie to apologize for any Boston involvement in the Politico story.

  “You guys had this speech for a week before it was given,” Christie told Rhoades. “You did not ask me to make one change in the speech. Now you fucking guys are cutting my nuts off. You know what, Matt? I’m tired of it. I’ve worked hard for Governor Romney. I like him. And I see that you guys, for whatever reason, are playing this game.”

  Christie simmered and brooded for much of Wednesday. On the phone with Schriefer, he sounded irked and defensive. “You wanted me to mention Romney sooner?” he said. “You wanted me to do something else? You wanted me to attack Obama? You should have told me.”

  That evening, Christie arrived later than usual to a high-end donor dinner at the Hyatt Regency hosted by Dan Loeb and Paul Singer. Expecting the typical Christie bravado, the two hundred donors in the room were slack-jawed at what they got instead. Midway through his speech, Christie drifted into a point-by-point rebuttal of the Politico piece and the punditry on that day’s Morning Joe—a riposte that consumed half of his time onstage. Never before had anyone seen Christie evince insecurity, but it was oozing out of him now.

  When the dinner was done, Christie hustled to the convention hall, where he had interviews to do with Hannity and Piers Morgan. He ran into Ron Kaufman, Mitt’s pal and Washington smart guy.

  “Guvanah,” Kaufman said in his thick Boston accent, “I want you to know that this stuff did not come from the campaign.”

  Christie had been endeavoring to swallow his anger all day long. He assumed that Stevens was behind the Politico story. (“Your fucking partner did this,” he told Schriefer. “I know it and you know it.”) His opinion of Boston in toto was scarcely better, though. In the preceding months, he had become convinced that Romney’s operation was a gaggle of clowns who couldn’t organize a one-ring circus. Now here was Kaufman claiming that the guys in greasepaint weren’t trying to feed Christie to the lions—no! They loved him, they respected him, they wanted to buy him a bushel of cotton candy.

  It was just too much.

  Standing on a public concourse, in front of the Churchill Lounge cigar bar, with delegates streaming by, the governor of New Jersey started bellowing at the top of his lungs, putting the perfect punctuation mark on his day, his time in Tampa, and his feelings about Boston:

  “Don’t bullshit me, Ron!”

  And: “You’re a fucking liar!!”

  And: “I’m tired of you people!!!”

  And: “Leave me the fuck alone!!!!”

  And then—with Kaufman chasing after him, crying, “Guvanah! Guvanah! Guvanah!”—Christie stalked off down the concourse to go be on TV.

  • • •

  ROMNEY REASSURED CHRISTIE that he thought the speech was boffo. Rhoades told Mitt that the television reaction shots of his face suggested otherwise: that he looked angry during the keynote. Romney had known the cameras were on him, of course. I was trying to look interested and supportive! he fretted. His team suggested he stay out of the hall until his own speech Thursday night. Mitt grudgingly agreed. The most important address of his life, an oration that would be watched by thirty million people, was twenty-four hours away, but Romney had yet to practice it once. Because it wasn’t finished.

  The Romney speechwriting operation was still the same mess it always had been—only worse. Following the CPAC and Detroit Economic Club fiascos, repeated attempts had been made to bring order to the chaos spawned by the Mitt-and-Stuart system of mutual dependency. Rhoades authorized the hiring of a veteran GOP speechwriting duo: Matthew Scully and John McConnell, who had worked with 43 and Cheney. Wary of Stevens’s reaction, Rhoades arranged to put them on contract secretly. Myers and Flaherty were maddened by Stuart’s grip on speechwriting, but powerless to break it. After taking a few stabs at easing Stevens away from his compositional monopoly, Gillespie gave up. It’s like sticking your hand into a wood chipper, he thought.

  The convention address represented the culmination of this dysfunction. By the time Romney arrived in Tampa on Tuesday, he had rejected four or five drafts by the outside writer brought on board to pen the speech, former Bush 43 adviser Pete Wehner. He had rejected a draft by Scully and McConnell. Another draft, by Hayes’s team, was floating around, unread. Romney and Stevens, commencing seventy-two hours earlier, had cobbled together still another clump of words, which was now the operative draft—and which much of the Boston brain trust considered mediocre.

  That afternoon, they gathered in Romney’s eighteenth-floor suite in the Marriott across the street from the hall. Unhappiness suffused the room. The Wehner draft had been imperfect, they all agreed. But there was no reason to have scrapped it and started over from scratch. Everyone had seen this movie before, but the stakes this time were incomparably higher. Romney had a huge amount of political damage to repair. The eyes of the world would be upon him as never before. Yet here they were, endeavoring to bind up a wound that was entirely self-inflicted, with no doubt in the room about who was to blame.

  Crammed around the dining room table in the suite, the brain trust paged through the working draft, saying little that was complimentary. Fehrnstrom had a fair number of notes; Gillespie had even more. As the cacophony of suggestions swelled, Stevens became increasingly agitated.

  I have a bunch of edits and a bunch of questions, Gillespie said, placing a piece of paper on the table.

  Picking up a pen, holding it like a knife, Stevens silently stabbed at the paper, scrawling an X through Gillespie’s offerings.

  Through it all, Mitt remained unaccountably calm. He, too, had seen this movie before, and it didn’t faze him—even though it was apparently shaping up to be a box-office bomb.

  As the meeting broke up, Romney sat at the table, studying the Scully-McConnell draft on his iPad. Coming upon a section about his father and mother, who were married f
or sixty-four years, he began to read aloud: “If you wonder what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist. Because every day Dad gave Mom a flower. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died—she went looking for him, because, that morning, there was no flower.”

  Choking up, Romney said softly, “That’s beautiful—that’s absolutely beautiful.” It would be nice to find a way to work it in, he added. Maybe that’s the conclusion.

  Yeah, sure, maybe, we’ll figure it out, Stevens said dismissively.

  Romney’s chief strategist had a heaping amount on his plate already—but he just kept piling on more and more, like John Belushi at the buffet in Animal House. In addition to Romney’s speech, Stuart had pulled an all-nighter to write Ann’s. And now he was sticking his nose into the drafting of Ryan’s.

  The seventeen days since his selection had been a whirlwind for Fishconsin. In terms of policy expertise and media savvy, Ryan was infinitely better equipped than Palin to handle the sudden glare. But in terms of electrifying the right, his selection was similar to hers. And because he hadn’t expected to be picked, the upending of his life was nearly as disorienting. Returning to his home in Janesville, he was thunderstruck by the motorcade that ferried him to his house. Seeing his neighborhood turned into a Badger State Green Zone by the Secret Service, he wondered, What did they tell my neighbors? To his lead adviser, Dan Senor, he kept saying, “This is an out-of-body experience.”

  Just like Palin in 2008, Ryan was determined not to disappoint the man who had elevated him to new heights. He was desperate to hit a home run in Tampa and kick butt in his debate with Biden. With his convention speech, Ryan planned to push big conservative ideas and take a cudgel to Obama. By that Tuesday, not only was the speech locked, but Ryan had memorized it. When Stevens attempted to stick his oar in—plumping for more plaudits for Mitt, passages about how he played with his grandkids on the campaign bus—Senor and the rest of the Ryan camp shut him down. This isn’t how Paul operates, they said. If we start making changes now, it’ll mess with his performance.

  Fabulous, Stevens said. So what we’re gonna get is a great delivery of a crappy speech.

  Ryan tried to calm his nerves on Wednesday by watching movies with his wife in his hotel—but the gambit had the opposite effect. By sheer coincidence, they happened to catch an airing of the HBO film Game Change, about Palin’s travails. Ryan was riveted, but soon regretted it. What the hell was I doing watching that? he asked Senor later.

  In his speech that night, Ryan didn’t prove to be the magnetic performer that Palin was. But the hall embraced him anyway. Both in the building and in the broader precincts of Right Nation, Ryan’s anti-Barack bon mots—including a pointed barb about dispirited college graduates “staring up at fading Obama posters,” wondering when they would find a job—were gobbled up like bonbons. The problem for Boston was that Ryan’s speech, like Christie’s, did little to present Romney in a new light. That task would basically be reserved for (or relegated to) the convention’s final evening.

  The reintroduction began a little after 8:30 p.m. on Thursday night, and was so compelling that many wondered why it hadn’t started weeks or months earlier. Ann and Tagg had pushed for the inclusion of personal testimonials, helping Schriefer and his team identify people who could attest to Mitt’s character. Leading the way were the Oparowskis, Ted and Pat, an elderly couple who told the story of their leukemia-stricken son, David, and how Romney, whom they knew through church, visited the dying fourteen-year-old, helped him write a will, and gave the eulogy at his funeral. Pam Finlayson told the story of her daughter, born prematurely with brain damage. Romney, Finlayson’s clergyman, visited the girl in the ICU, where he “didn’t just see a tangle of plastic and tubes—he saw our beautiful little girl, and was clearly overcome with compassion for her.”

  The Oparowskis and Finlayson brought many in the hall to tears. They were followed by Bob White, at last allowed to shine a light on the nobility of Bain. The work of White and his SWAT team was featured in two videos, which made the case that Mitt was a job creator, not a ruthless corporate raider. Tom Stemberg, the boss of Staples, proclaimed that Romney “knew the value of a dollar.” Ray Fernandez, the Hispanic CEO of Vida Pharmacy, declared, “My life today is better because of Bain Capital.” Jane Edmonds, an African American liberal Democrat who served under Romney in the Bay State, extolled his virtues. Three Olympians did the same. They were followed by a ten-minute biographical video that even the Obamans conceded was a thing of beauty.

  Altogether, the humanization of Romney consumed close to two hours. By any standard, it was a supremely effective stretch of political stagecraft. The only trouble was that none of it appeared in the prime-time broadcast hour, so it was seen only by the comparatively tiny cable TV audience.

  In terms of time, Schriefer’s flexibility was limited. Almost the entirety of the 10:00 p.m. hour would be swallowed up by the night’s marquee speeches: Marco Rubio and Romney. That left about seven minutes to work with. He had considered filling them with the bio video, but network producers told him they would not run it, using the airtime for commentary instead. Under other circumstances, Schriefer might have been willing to gamble that they would change their minds. But not when he had an ace up his sleeve: a guest star so glamorous and iconic that the cameras would find it impossible to turn away.

  • • •

  CLINT EASTWOOD’S PRESENCE in Tampa was supposed to be a surprise, but in the late afternoon, the convention orchestra started practicing the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—and the jig was up. Eastwood’s appearance had come together in less than a month. Boston’s desire to have him onstage was driven by many impulses: the quest for ratings, the yen for excitement, and a degree of political logic. Yet the idea would never have been on the table at all had Romney not been starstruck.

  Mitt first met the eighty-two-year-old star in late July in Carmel, California, the seaside town near Monterey Bay where Dirty Harry had once been the mayor. A Romney donor, former Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, arranged a dinner for Mitt and Ann with Eastwood, his wife, Dina, McNealy, and McNealy’s wife, Susan, at Eastwood’s Tehama Golf Club. The club was closed, but Clint brought in a chef, and the six of them had a ball. Romney was struck by how much Eastwood-in-the-flesh was like the celluloid version. He looks like Clint Eastwood, he sounds like Clint Eastwood—hey, it’s Clint Eastwood! Mitt thought. And that Dina—what a hoot! This is just so . . . cool!

  It had already occurred to Romney how terrific it would be to lure the actor to Tampa. Earlier in the year, Eastwood had appeared in a Super Bowl ad for Chrysler called “Halftime in America,” which many conservatives viewed as a tacit endorsement of Obama and the auto bailout. Having Eastwood at the convention would be a chance to recapture the flag. Without asking directly, Romney started to bait the hook. Look, I’d love your help, he told Clint. I’d like to stay in touch.

  On August 3, Eastwood turned up in a battered Jeep Wagoneer at a Romney fund-raiser in Sun Valley. Mitt called him up onstage. “I was doing a picture in the early 2000s called Mystic River in his home state,” Eastwood said of Romney. “I said, God, this guy is too handsome to be governor, but he does look like he could be president. As the years have gone by, I’m beginning to think even more so that. He’s going to restore a decent tax system that we need badly so that there is a fairness and people are not pitted against one another of who’s paying taxes and who isn’t. Also, we don’t want anybody taking away the Olympic medals, taxwise, from the Olympic athletes. The government is talking about getting a couple of nickels. It’s now more important than ever that we need Governor Romney, and I’m going to be voting for him, as I know most of you will be. We’ve got to just spread the word and get the whole country behind this, because it’s going to be an exciting election.”

  Taking back the microphone, Romney said excitedly, “He just made my day—what a guy!”

  Romney instructed his team
to try to make the convention thing happen. “Clint doesn’t say a lot, but he says it well, and he’s a big presence,” Mitt explained. It would make a difference in places like Michigan and Ohio. We don’t have many Hollywooders on our team. It would be great to have him.

  Schriefer planned to have Eastwood speak on Wednesday, but the compression of the schedule pushed the star’s appearance to Thursday. That morning, Eastwood and the McNealys boarded Scott’s private jet in San Jose and headed to Tampa. The Romneyites had conveyed that they wanted Clint to speak for five to seven minutes and say something similar to what he’d said in Sun Valley. Eastwood, however, was playing it loose; McNealy, even looser. The tech executive was an ardent libertarian and Obama scold. He had made a top-ten list of Clint’s movies with politically incorrect subtitles that skewered the president, and showed it to Eastwood on the plane. Clint got a kick out of that.

  On the ground in Tampa, the traveling party made its way to the Marriott in a black SUV. At the security checkpoints and in the hotel, cops and Secret Service agents greeted Eastwood like a hero: Hey! Clint! In the Line of Fire!

  “Would you take a bullet?” Eastwood growled back, quoting one of the movie’s signature lines.

  Schriefer, Stevens, and Zwick paid a call on the star in his hotel suite late in the afternoon. Eastwood’s turn onstage was a few hours away, and Schriefer still wasn’t sure they were on the same page regarding content. Eastwood had brought a DVD with him and played it for the Romney people. It featured a clip from The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which the Native American character Ten Bears says, “It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.”

  You can use that for my introduction if you want, Eastwood said.