Double Down: Game Change 2012

by John Heilemann

  No, it’s not, Eric Fehrnstrom said. If Obama goes after you on the 47 percent, you don’t need to apologize or soft-pedal. You need to express outrage. You need to be indignant.

  Slipping into character as Romney, Fehrnstrom cut loose: It’s offensive and insulting, Mr. President, to suggest that I don’t care. I served as a missionary. I served ten years as a pastor in my church. I served the Olympics without pay. When I was governor, every child in my state had health care, and we had the best schools in the nation. Under your administration, Mr. President, more people are in poverty, more are on food stamps, the poor are getting crushed. How dare you say that I want to write off half of the country? How dare you say that I don’t care?

  Romney was furiously scribbling notes. When Fehrnstrom finished, Mitt was all fired up. In an instant, he took the lines and made them his own—reciting his version with more passion than some in the room had ever seen from him before. When Romney finished, his people burst into applause.

  There was more to go over, but they had been in the theater for three hours now. Leavitt and Portman had already left; they had somewhere else to be, and so did Romney. While the mock had been winding down, the War Council was convening on Commercial Street.

  We’ve got to get going, Myers said. Everybody is there.

  • • •

  THE IDEA FOR THE WAR Council emanated from Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay and GOP nominee for the California governorship in 2010, who had been friendly with Romney since working for him at Bain and Company in the eighties. Whitman thought Mitt was in serious trouble and needed to hear a sampling of advice from outside his bubble. She proposed the notion to Myers, who handed off its execution to Portman.

  Portman worried about rattling Romney, messing with his head so close to Denver. But he, too, believed the campaign was on the brink. One of the oddest things about Mitt, Portman had come to recognize, was that he had so few close friends, particularly in national Republican circles. With much of the establishment flogging the candidate, Portman thought that his new chum could use a hug—along with a bit of tough love on the 47 percent—from some high-level GOP allies.

  Portman invited nine people to be war councillors. Three of them (Christie, Pawlenty, Rubio) had scheduling conflicts. The other six were now seated with Portman around the long rectangular table in the third-floor conference room at Romney HQ: Whitman, Leavitt, New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu. The Boston brain trust lined the periphery.

  By the time Romney arrived from his Back Bay dress rehearsal, the War Council had heard a presentation by Neil Newhouse on the campaign’s internal polling. For several days after the release of the 47 percent video, Newhouse had simply shut down Boston’s research and waited for the earth to stop trembling. Nearly two weeks later, it was clear that the damage had been severe. Romney was at least three or four points behind in every battleground state—with Obama at 49 percent nationally. In Ohio, the gap was closer to eight points; in Virginia, what had been a dead heat was now trending dramatically in the president’s favor. I knew things were bad, McDonnell thought. But we’re in a lot worse shape than I thought.

  Once Mitt was seated at the head of the table, Whitman quickly commanded the floor. Whitman’s own gubernatorial campaign had been torn to bits by a 47-percent-like imbroglio, when her former housekeeper of nine years, an undocumented Latina, accused Whitman of “throwing me away like a piece of garbage” after she asked for help with her legal status. Reflecting on that experience, Whitman told Romney bluntly, From where I sit, you have a lot of work to do. The 47 percent is killing you. You haven’t dealt with it, and you must. You need to show compassion. You need to connect. You need to apologize—not in the debate or after the debate, but before the debate, in a speech, in an interview, somewhere.

  Leavitt seconded Whitman’s recommendation, with no small degree of emotion. You’ve got to get this behind you, he told Romney. You have to do it before the debate. This is a moment where people want to hear you say, “Sometimes we choose the wrong words. What I said is not what is in my heart. I feel badly that people found it hurtful.” You need to have that conversation with the American people. You have to say you’re sorry, and you have to do it tomorrow.

  McDonnell wasn’t sure Romney had to bow and scrape, but his appraisal of the candidate’s public image was harsh. “Mitt, let’s just be honest,” McDonnell said. “You’d be a great president. Your policies are right. I believe deeply in them. But for some reason, people don’t like you.”

  McDonnell had ideas about how to counteract the picture of Romney as an unfeeling, out-of-touch fat cat: Mitt had to be a friendly, optimistic, happy warrior, talking about pocketbook issues in the way that voters did around their kitchen tables. He should start telling intimate and authentic stories, start sharing himself. You and your wife are good people, McDonnell said. You’ve given back. Folks need to see that. They need to see your heart.

  Haley agreed. I’ve seen you on the campaign trail, she said. I know what kind of person you are. You need to let your guard down and show people the real you. You can turn this around. People want to hear that you understand their struggles. You don’t need to be sharing their struggles, but they need to know you know that their struggles exist.

  Listening to some of the councillors’ suggestions, Romney’s advisers labored not to roll their eyes. Stevens had had reservations about holding the meeting at all; now he slouched in the corner, eating fruit, saying nothing. (When he finally piped up, Sununu swiveled in his chair and cracked, “Stuart? You’re here? I thought you were dead.”) That the 47 percent remarks remained an open wound was indisputable. But trying to heal it in the three days before Denver struck the Romneyites as impractical—and the councillors’ ideas about how to do so, half-baked. How do you speak from the heart from a teleprompter? Rhoades wondered. Or is Mitt supposed to get up there and do a Jimmy Swaggart?

  At the end of the table, Romney listened intently, taking notes, occasionally pushing back or cutting in. To the councillors he seemed tired, very tired, and also taken aback by their level of candor. Romney had walked into the War Council thinking that it was a supercharged surrogates meeting, not a come-to-Jesus huddle. The bizarreness of the whole affair was lost on no one. Though the councillors wanted Mitt to win, most of their relationships to him were politically and personally remote. Glancing around the table, Leavitt thought, If you were looking to reach the soul of Mitt Romney, you probably wouldn’t pick this group.

  But for Romney, the show of support was touching—and also clarifying. After an hour of back-and-forth around the room, there was no escaping two things: the depth of the crisis Romney was facing and the necessity of a greater degree of self-exposure. There was so much talk about Mitt’s myocardium, the room full of politicians sounded like a cardiologists’ convention. Romney took the point.

  When it came to the 47 percent, Mitt was with his advisers: Denver would be his chance to get past the controversy. In front of a television audience of tens of millions on Wednesday night, he would have the opportunity to create a genuine moment.

  All along, Romney had understood that the debates would be critical. But now the stakes were infinitely greater. At the start of the meeting, Rhoades had laid out a five-point plan for the resuscitation of Romney’s staggering campaign. The plan’s first point was: score a knockout in Denver. If Mitt failed to pull that off, Rhoades admitted, the other four points were moot. The race would basically be over.

  The direness of that forecast was an echo of the media consensus: DENVER DEBATE DO-OR-DIE FOR MITT ROMNEY ran a recent Politico headline. Few Republicans in the capital or anywhere else in the land disagreed. For a brief shining moment in Park City, Romney and his party’s leaders had seemed bonded in solidarity. But that had proven to be a mirage. The upper spheres of the GOP—from elected officials to donors to the conservative super PACs�
�were ready to walk away from Romney unless he triumphed in the Mile High City. In 1996, after Bob Dole lost his first debate to Bill Clinton, his campaign had spent the full month before Election Day circling the drain. That same sinkhole now confronted Romney.

  The slim reed to which Mitt clung was his readiness for Denver. Earlier in the week, he had called Christie, pleading with him to appear on three network Sunday shows and make the case that Romney wasn’t a goner. Christie happily complied. “I have absolute confidence,” he told George Stephanopoulos, “that when we get to Thursday morning, George, all of you are going to be shaking your head, saying it’s a brand-new race with thirty-three days to go.”

  And Romney believed it. He had mastered his material, tapered his attacks, and chiseled his counterattacks. The only question was what kind of game his opponent would bring. As Fauxbama, Portman had shown Romney a variety of looks—the president as aggressor, the president as defender, the president as rope-a-doper. But all were based on one faulty assumption: that the Obama who showed up wouldn’t make Clint Eastwood appear prophetic.

  21

  MILE-HIGH MELTDOWN

  THREE HOURS AFTER the War Council ended and nearly three thousand miles away, Obama took the stage under a harvest moon at Desert Pines High School, in Las Vegas. The president had pitched up outside Sin City for three days of debate camp ahead of Denver. In a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pale blue tie loosened at the neck, Obama opened his remarks by saying he was looking forward to the forthcoming cage match. “I know folks in the media are speculating already on who’s gonna have the best zingers,” he noted. “Governor Romney, he’s a good debater. I’m just okay.”

  Obama’s self-deprecation made headlines, and was widely seen as spin—part of a systematic effort by Chicago to lower expectations. But, in truth, it was pretty much on the money. Obama had never been an agile debater or much enjoyed debating. His general aversion to political exhibitionism was magnified exponentially when it came to televised forensics. He saw debates as phony through and through: stagy, hokey, superficial, and insubstantial, judged on the basis of clever sound bites (a.k.a. zingers) by political pundits under the misimpression that their job was to act like Siskel and Ebert—and revealing of nothing about the qualities required for a successful presidency.

  None of which was to say he hadn’t been hankering to kick Romney’s ass. Over the summer, Obama surprised his advisers with his zest for going mano a mano with Mitt. More than once he declared to Axelrod, Messina, and Plouffe, If you guys can get me to the first debate in a tie race, I’ll put this thing away.

  Like his opponent, the president had started prepping early—earlier than in 2008 and earlier than most incumbents. His first meeting with his debate team was in the Roosevelt Room in mid-July. Around the table were familiar faces: Axelrod, Bauer, Benenson, Lew, Plouffe, and Anita Dunn. Karen Dunn (no relation to Anita), a former Hillary Clinton staffer, was on board to help manage the operation and plot strategy.

  Captaining the squad was Ron Klain, who had co-led Obama’s prep in 2008. At fifty-one, Klain was a brainy, sometimes brusque lawyer who had clerked for Supreme Court justice Byron White and then morphed into a Beltway super-aide. On Capitol Hill, he had worked for Biden and Tom Daschle; in the White House, he had overseen Clinton’s judicial nominations and served as vice-presidential chief of staff to both Biden and Al Gore. As Gore’s point man in the 2000 hanging-chad battle in Florida, Klain had suffered a heartbreaking defeat. But it had led to his being played by Kevin Spacey in the HBO movie Recount, which made him semi-hemi-demi-famous.

  Klain delivered a frank warning to Obama in the Roosevelt Room: incumbents almost always lose their first debate. Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, Reagan in 1984, Bush 41 in 1992, and Bush 43 in 2004 all were clobbered, and the reasons were straightforward. For any challenger, sharing the stage with a sitting president—behind identical podiums, in nearly identical costumes—obliterated the gap in stature between them. Incumbents suffered from high expectations: voters assumed they would be good. But incumbents were invariably rusty: for four years they had been focused on governing, not giving timed answers with an opponent up in their grille. Challengers were in fighting shape after debate-filled nomination contests. Challengers had ample time to prep; incumbents were, well, busy.

  Obama was determined to defy those precedents and structural forces. All summer, he lugged around thick briefing books on Romney’s policies and record, filling the margins of the documents with questions and dispatching them to his team for answers. (In September alone, he made more than a hundred such requests, many at a level of detail that had Klain thinking, This is insane.) The more Obama internalized Romney’s agenda, the more he champed at the bit to lay bare its contradictions and outlandishness. “I can’t wait to debate this guy,” Obama told his team in August.

  He conducted three mock debates in Washington before leaving for camp. Like Portman, John Kerry put great effort into inhabiting his role—a process he found distasteful, given his feelings for Mitt. Kerry had been at his pal Ted Kennedy’s side during the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race; he recalled Teddy’s denunciations of Romney as a grasping fraud. To anyone in earshot and absent the faintest whiff of self-awareness, Kerry unloaded on Mitt: He’s an arrogant, stiff, inauthentic, patrician elitist with no common touch at all. As Kerry boned up on Romney’s economic proposals, he was galled by their make-believe-ism. The hardest part about playing this guy, he thought, is always having to go to this place of total bullshit.

  Kerry’s contempt for Romney was nothing compared with Obama’s, however. The president disliked a fair number of Republicans. But even Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell didn’t cause the bile to gurgle in his throat the way Romney did. (At least Cantor and McConnell have some principles, Obama thought.) Mitt’s lurches to the right, his denial of the shared genetic code between Romneycare and Obamacare, and the travesty of trickle-down gimmickry that was his tax and budget plan had convinced Obama that his opponent was a sham. Benghazi and the 47 percent had persuaded him that Romney lacked any character or moral compass. Obama’s scorn was so open and searing that Plouffe suggested he tone it down in front of junior White House staffers; it was unseemly.

  Obama took the point. I’m gonna have to be careful in the debates, he said. I just can’t stand this guy and it’s gonna be too obvious.

  But in Obama’s three Washington mocks, held in the basement of the DNC, the president was unable to disguise his disgust. Questions about Romney’s business background reflexively brought out his sarcastic, aloof, condescending side, notorious in his debate history and deeply feared by his team.

  When Bain came up, Obama was supposed to say something such as, Governor Romney had a distinguished career as a businessman, and I have no quarrel with that; but it’s different being a businessman than a president. Instead, Obama sneered. Governor, you and I have both made choices, he said to Kerry-as-Romney at one point. We both went to Harvard Law School. I came out and became a community organizer, helping displaced steelworkers. You chose to make money—and that’s . . . okay.

  Nasty Obama wasn’t the only Bad Obama who cropped up in the DNC basement. There was also Pedantic Obama, who was almost as problematic. On topic after topic, the president was a font of facts and figures but bereft of a sharp message. Challenged by Kerry, he habitually succumbed to a tendency his team referred to as “chasing rabbits”: litigating strenuously and endlessly, answering in pointillist detail, abandoning his broader objective to take a detour into the tall grass. Asked about health care, he didn’t tout the benefits of the Affordable Care Act or hit Romney for wanting to voucherize Medicare. Rather, he disgorged a skull-numbing explanation of the ACA’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the entity Sarah Palin once decried as a “death panel.”

  Obama’s twin weaknesses were glaring, but the current political context made them seem less threatening. Benenson’s polling of the battleground states showed the president
with an even wider lead than Newhouse’s did: six to eight points. For Obama, unlike Romney, there was nothing do-or-die about Denver; all he needed from the first debate was a near draw. For his team, that meant keeping both Nasty POTUS and Pedantic POTUS out of camera range.

  Before Obama boarded Air Force One for Vegas that Sunday, September 30, he was handed a five-page memo, drafted by Anita Dunn and Klain, that laid out the final strategy for Denver. Its implicit premise was the paramount importance of concealing both Bad Obamas. Its explicit goals were to preserve the president’s likability advantage over Romney and highlight his economic agenda for a second term—something many undecided voters doubted he actually possessed. Its tactical thrust was that Obama would refrain from attacks, be positive and visionary, hover above the fray. Its essence was summed up by a pithy Axelrod coinage featured in the memo: “The bigger you are, the harder he falls.”

  • • •

  THE SITE OF OBAMA’S debate camp was the Westin Lake Las Vegas, which wasn’t actually in Vegas at all. Seventeen miles east of the Strip, in Henderson, Lake Las Vegas was a 3,600-acre monument to the collapse of the real estate bubble—a palm-fringed sprawl of unfinished lots, half-built homes, and desiccated golf courses. The hotel grounds featured a replica of the Ponte Vecchio, some canals with lonely gondolas, and not a soul in sight. When the presidential motorcade came to a halt outside the lobby, Jay Carney scoped out the scene and thought, It looks like we’re in Venice after the zombies have taken over.

  For the next three days, Obama toiled with his team in this strange stockade. In the mornings and afternoons, they ran through drills on the six topics that the Commission on Presidential Debates had announced would be in play in Denver: the economy and job creation, the deficit, entitlements, health care, the role of government, and dealing with gridlock in Washington. Each evening, Obama and Kerry conducted a ninety-minute mock debate. In between, the president reviewed video, worked with style coach Michael Sheehan, and studied postmortem memos written by Klain.