Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  Biden said he wanted to think it over. His team did some historical research on convention TV ratings and concluded that speaking on the final night, just before Obama, might put Joe in front of a bigger audience. Let’s do it, Biden said.

  By Thursday, the plan for Biden and Obama to speak outdoors at the stadium had been washed out by fear of rain. (Wednesday saw buckets of it.) That night in the hall, Biden strode onstage and pointed to his wife and Mrs. Obama in the front row; Michelle flashed a thumbs-up back. His speech was replete with crowd-pleasing lines: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” It was filled with pellets fired at Mitt: “Romney said that as president, he would take a jobs tour. Well, with his support for outsourcing, it’s going to have to be a foreign trip.” The next day, it received scant media coverage, but that was okay with Joe—especially when he learned that his TV ratings were right up there with Clinton’s.

  Obama and his team were braced for a lukewarm reception for his speech. In a sense, he would be competing against his wife, his predecessor, and his own history and reputation. At the previous two Democratic conventions, his turns at the rostrum had been historic: the first launching him into outer space, the second accepting the first major-party nomination bestowed on an African American. That magic would be impossible to rekindle even with a speech that shot for the stars.

  Obama’s advisers had been insistent that his speech pursue more earthbound objectives in any case. Their goal was to have him put forth an agenda for the future without going much beyond what he had laid out in January’s State of the Union. Obama was forever pushing for bigger and bolder policy ideas. But his people saw no point in taking needless risks when they were playing a winning hand. They wanted Obama to look forward—not loftily, not lyrically, not audaciously, but in a subdued tone and plainspoken language that might appeal to wavering independents.

  In a blue suit, blue tie, and white shirt that night in the arena, Obama enacted those instructions. The first two-thirds of the speech combined the laundry-list quality of a SOTU with a sledgehammer-like repetition of the theme that the election was a choice. (He used that word or a variant of it twenty times.) There was a conspicuous nod to humility that cited Lincoln. The broadsides at Romney were fairly flaccid. (“You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.”) There were no memorable lines. The only part of the speech he appeared to relish was the final bit, in which he returned to a leitmotif from 2008. “The election four years ago wasn’t about me,” he said. “It was about you. My fellow citizens—you were the change.”

  The reviews, as expected, were not kind. When Favreau complained that the speech was being treated unfairly, Obama shrugged. You know how it goes, he said. The media’s gonna take their shots.

  Obama was skillful at concealing his frustrations from his aides, but frustrated he was. In the press and among political professionals, the verdict on Charlotte was that the convention had been a triumph—to a large extent because of Clinton, not Obama. The current president was grateful for what the former had done for him. But the gushing accolades for Bill’s speech reminded Obama of the political constraints that kept him from being as wonky, backward-looking, or defensive as he instinctively wanted to be. That’s the kind of speech I’d like to give, he said to his aides. Even though I know that I shouldn’t.

  It would take some time for the tangible effects of Clinton’s stem-winder to sink in fully. But in Boston, the early signs were startling. Before Charlotte, Neil Newhouse was certain that no convention could have an appreciable impact on voters’ perceptions of whether the country was on the right or the wrong track. Those perceptions, overwhelmingly pessimistic, had been locked in place since the start of the campaign, boding ill for Obama. But within seventy-two hours of Charlotte’s finale, the right-track/wrong-track numbers had begun to move—dramatically—in favor of the Democrats. Romney’s pollster was dumbfounded. When his colleagues asked him to explain the phenomenon, Newhouse shrugged and offered one word: Clinton.

  Mitt’s Bill problem was going to be much bigger than a single speech, however—for the Maximum Canine, having first shed his muzzle, was now straining at his leash. Provoked by Boston, empowered by Charlotte, Clinton was eager to hit the trail. He called Messina and started plotting a schedule that would turn him into Obama’s general-election supersurrogate: a tireless ally with a massive megaphone and the capacity to talk the owls down from the trees.

  His first foray took place five days after the convention closed, on September 11, when Clinton headlined a grassroots rally at Florida International University in Miami. Though political hostilities were customarily halted in observance of national unity on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America, Clinton demonstrated only a modicum of restraint. In for a dime and a dollar, he opened fire on the GOP ticket over Medicare, providing the first nasty shot in a day that would have many—and would wind up haunting Romney right through to November.

  20

  THE WAR COUNCIL

  MITT’S CELL PHONE BUZZED AT around 9:30 p.m. on September 11. He was on the runway in Jacksonville, having just landed after a flight from Reno. On the line was Lanhee Chen, calling from Boston with a clamant matter to discuss: the campaign’s response to fires blazing in the Middle East.

  Taking off from Nevada in the afternoon, Romney had been dimly aware of the tumult in the region. That morning, in an effort to quell a burgeoning fundamentalist street protest in Cairo over a crude anti-Islam video originating in the United States and circulating on YouTube, the American embassy in Egypt had released a statement saying it “condemn[ed] the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” But the protest only escalated, with rioters breaching the Cairo embassy’s walls, tearing down the American flag, and hoisting up a black banner bearing a Muslim declaration of faith.

  While Romney was airborne, a more serious upheaval flared in Libya. Armed with rocket-propelled grenades and antiaircraft weaponry, Islamist militants stormed and torched a lightly defended U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. There were news reports that a U.S. citizen had been killed. Scuttlebutt on the Hill was that the dead American was a State Department officer.

  A conference call was thrown together on Commercial Street, with Chen, Rhoades, Stevens, and Gillespie taking part. In the conservative blogosphere, the Cairo embassy’s statement (reaffirmed via Twitter after the breach of its perimeter) was being cast as an apology for free speech and an expression of sympathy for the demonstrators. Requests for comment on the breaking Mideast news were pouring into Boston. In Egypt and Libya, circumstances on the ground were chaotic; in the States, facts were scant and hazy. The initial consensus on the call was to wait until morning, see where things stood. But one Romneyite, Rich Williamson, had a different posture.

  Williamson was a longtime Republican foreign policy majordomo and an outside adviser to the campaign. His résumé included stints in the Reagan and both Bush administrations; under 43, he had held two UN ambassadorial posts. He had also been a U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois and chairman of the state’s Republican Party. He viewed Obama through a Fox News prism with a Windy City overlay: as a feckless Hyde Park peacenik. The zotzing of bin Laden and Obama’s drone policy meant nothing to Williamson—he saw them as fig leaves. The Cairo embassy’s statement struck him as an outrage and an expression of the president’s proclivity for appeasement. The notion that some anti-Islam Internet video had anything to do with anything was pure bullshit. What was happening in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the region was obvious: Obama’s Middle East policy was unraveling.

  Williamson made that argument on the call, and vehemently. The governor needs to speak out on this, the ambassador rumbled. Williamson considered Romney brilliant but unmotivated by ideas, and regarded Boston as defensive and amateurish. Winning the White House meant whipping out a
switchblade, he believed: Axelrod gets in a knife fight every morning to work up an appetite for breakfast. To Williamson, Egypt and Libya offered a chance to start a scrap. If Romney got cut up, that was okay—voters would see that he cared enough to bleed.

  By the end of the call, Williamson had stampeded the Boston brain trust into a pristine state of groupthink. Everyone now saw it as essential for Romney to weigh in—a slam-dunk show of strength. The language they drafted was not as provocative as Williamson would have liked, but it was still plenty spicy. The campaign planned to blast a press release to reporters, embargoing it until midnight, when 9/11 would be over. All that remained was for Chen to secure Romney’s sign-off.

  On the phone with the candidate, Chen quickly ran through the day’s Mideast chronology, then read Romney the statement that would be going out in his name: “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

  “Do you like the statement?” Romney asked. “Is this the group’s consensus?”

  Chen said that he did and that it was.

  “Okay, this sounds right to me,” Mitt said. “Let’s do it.”

  Romney got off the plane and headed to his hotel to meet Ann, who was awaiting him. Even with his campaign’s all-economy-all-the-time focus, he had long hoped that the pungent critique of the administration’s foreign policy in No Apology would gain some traction—and been frustrated that he had not dented Obama’s rock-solid commander-in-chief ratings. Now, suddenly, the turmoil in the Middle East and the administration’s cravenness had presented him with a mile-wide opening. Apology in the face of an attack on America and an American—unimaginable! he thought.

  In his suite, Mitt found Ann sacked out. He was exhausted, too. But as he lay there in bed, his excitement and agitation kept him tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. Not wanting to wake his wife, he slipped out from under the blanket, settled in on the couch, and popped an Ambien—thinking all the while, Boy, Obama is going to be in a world of hurt tomorrow.

  • • •

  THE MORNING LIGHT SHONE HARSHLY on Romney’s fitful reverie. Just before eight o’clock, he jumped on a conference call with his team and listened as Chen ran down what had taken place overnight, as September 11 ticked into September 12.

  At a little past 10:00 p.m., as Boston was delivering its statement to the press, the White House had disavowed the communication from the Cairo embassy as “not cleared by Washington” or “reflect[ing] the views of the United States government.” The Romneyites took this as a cue to break their embargo a full ninety minutes before midnight, thus mugging Obama on 9/11 and making their tactical injection of campaign gamesmanship into a multifaceted international crisis all the more incendiary. Chicago duly expressed outrage: “We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack,” said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.

  That the situation in Egypt had been eclipsed by Benghazi became clearer early that morning: not one but four American consular personnel were dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. On the question of the Cairo embassy statement, the press was poking holes in Romney’s criticism that it had been “the administration’s first response” to the attacks—when in fact the statement had preceded the incursion and it now appeared that the embassy had been acting on its own. The cable pundits were flaying Boston for making a “rush to judgment,” for behaving in a “patently political” fashion, for desperately chasing the news cycle.

  Listening to Chen, Romney tensed up as he realized that he’d jumped the gun by leaping into a rapidly shifting situation with piecemeal information. Leaning back in his chair and gripping both armrests, he raised his voice to cut off the conversation on the call.

  “Guys, we screwed up,” Romney said. “This was a mistake.”

  The question was what to do now. The press was asking whether Romney was standing by his statement. His team was unequivocal: to give any quarter would only deepen the hole he was in; he would look weak, vacillating, flip-floppy. Romney was scheduled to visit his local headquarters that morning for a rally, which could be converted into a press conference. You have to step up and fight through this, Gillespie said. Paul Ryan agreed: “Mitt, we can’t back off.” So did Williamson: “We have no reason to be apologetic.”

  Romney was right there with them. The man who had written No Apology wasn’t about to apologize, especially when he still believed that his rival had committed that sin on America’s behalf. Although Romney acknowledged that he had reacted too soon, he thought he was correct on the merits: the Cairo embassy had reaffirmed its statement after its walls had been breached; the embassy was part of the administration; the president, therefore, was ultimately responsible for the misguided attempts to placate the agitators.

  The press conference was held two hours later at Romney’s Jacksonville campaign digs, a small space one door down from an exotic reptile shop in a scruffy strip mall. After Romney read a prepared statement that expanded on the previous night’s press release, he opened the floor to questions—and felt as though the room had been invaded by pygmy rattlesnakes and frilled dragons from next door. With each tough question, Mitt’s rhetoric became more inflammatory. Invoking the word that was on his mind but not in his written remarks, Romney said, “The statement that came from the administration was . . . akin to apology and, I think, was a severe miscalculation.”

  Romney had confidence in his ability to explain himself when he felt he was on solid ground. When his footing was shaky, as it often was on foreign policy, he tended to get hot—too hot. In the space of a few minutes, he hurled some variant of the word “apology” at the administration seven times. Watching from Boston, Rhoades saw another political nightmare blossoming on the screen, picked up his phone, and called Madden in Jacksonville. “Let’s end this—now,” he said urgently.

  A few minutes later, Obama appeared in a setting more august than a storefront next to Blazin’ Reptiles. From the presidential podium in the Rose Garden, he spoke about the loss of Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans in Libya with a mixture of solemnity and resoluteness. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said. “Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake: justice will be done.”

  Joe Biden had caught Romney’s press conference live on TV that morning. The VP’s reaction was brief and to the point: “He’s a horse’s ass.”

  Obama had been too busy preparing his Rose Garden remarks to pay much attention to Mitt. But afterwards, standing in the Outer Oval Office with Carney, Pfeiffer, and Ben Rhodes, the president noticed clips of Romney in Jacksonville being shown on cable.

  So what did he say? Obama asked his aides.

  “You’re not going to believe it, but he’s doubling down,” Carney said.

  Obama was astounded. In the past twenty-four hours, protests had erupted at U.S. diplomatic missions in a dozen countries. Chris Stevens was the first serving American ambassador killed in hostilities since 1979. The corpses in Benghazi were still warm. And here was Romney, the Republicans’ choice to be commander in chief, trying to score cheap political points.

  “It’s practically disqualifying,” Obama said.

  Obama’s disgust was still evident a few hours later, when he was asked about Romney’s gambit in an interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. After noting that the Cairo embassy statement “came from folks on the ground who are potentially in danger,” Obama added acidly, “My
tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack when they’re in that circumstance rather than try to question their judgment from the comfort of a campaign office.” And then he stuck the boot in once more: “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.”

  The heaping of scorn on Romney by the White House and other Democrats came as little surprise. But the GOP was almost as unforgiving. Within hours of Mitt’s press conference, former advisers to McCain, Bush 43, and Reagan had torn into the nominee on the record. “It almost feels like Sarah Palin is his foreign policy adviser,” Dubya’s 2004 chief strategist, Matthew Dowd, sneered. Speaking on background, Republican critics were even more blistering: “This was a deliberate and premeditated move, and it totally revealed Romney’s character . . . as completely craven and his candidacy as serving no higher purpose than his ambition,” said one. On Capitol Hill, party leaders declined to echo Romney’s criticism or rise to his defense; when reporters asked Mitch McConnell about Mitt’s comments, he turned and walked away.

  By the end of the day, Romney recognized that he had erred again. The conclusion he drew from the episode was stark: on national security, the media narrative was tilted so lopsidedly in Obama’s favor that prosecuting the topic was a fool’s errand. Lesson learned, Mitt thought.

  That deduction would have unforeseen consequences for Romney down the line. It also elided the nature and scale of the screwup. In truth, the Benghazi tragedy was a horrendous failure on the part of the administration; the unrest unspooling across the Middle East was just the kind of externality that had worried the president’s team for a year. But by inserting himself in the story—not once but twice—and deliberately repeating a mistake that had been roundly criticized, Romney had distracted attention and scrutiny away from the White House. A potentially brutal blow to the president had been deflected by the man who hoped to replace him.