The two presidents were reunited on Saturday, November 3, for a massive jamboree at the Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater, in Bristow, Virginia, forty miles outside Washington. Dressed in a brown leather baby boomer’s bomber’s jacket, Clinton was hoarse and raspy: “As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,” he said as he began his remarks. But soon Clinton was rocking the place, wallowing in the applause, praising Obama to the skies, and eviscerating Romney with lightheartedness and humor.
“Barack Obama decided that America could not afford to let the automobile industry die, and he saved it,” Clinton said. “Mitt Romney opposed what he did. And now he’s tied himself in so many knots over this automobile deal, he could be hired as the chief contortionist for the Cirque du Soleil.”
Backstage, Obama sat glued to a monitor, marveling at the joy and intensity radiating from the stage. “He’s really having fun doing this, isn’t he?” Obama said to one of Clinton’s aides.
When 42 finished, 44 jogged out to the podium in a rush. “I was enjoying listening to President Clinton so much, I had to run up to get my cue,” he said. “I was sitting there, just soaking it all in.”
Obama called Clinton “the master” and “a great president” and “a great friend.” At the end of the event, they hugged warmly onstage as the sound system kicked in with “Don’t Stop”—not just a nod to the past, but a subtle sign of deference that would have been inconceivable four years earlier.
With the finish line in sight, thoughts of 2008 were inescapable for Obama and his people. The next morning, the current and former presidents, Axelrod, and Plouffe boarded Air Force One and flew to New Hampshire for another joint rally. As Obama’s limousine carried them north up the Everett Turnpike from Manchester to Concord, Clinton gazed out the window and announced, “Man, I love New Hampshire”—calling to mind both his own comeback-kid revival there in 1992 and Hillary’s in 2008, at the expense of the Obamans.
Even a few months earlier, before the 42-44 bond had been cemented, Plouffe might have bitten his tongue. Instead he shot back, “We like it here, too, but we like Iowa a little bit more.”
Everyone laughed.
Iowa was where the Obamans found themselves thirty-six hours later. They had trekked to Des Moines for the president’s final rally of the campaign and of his career as a candidate—an event custom-built for uplift, for nostalgia, for the bittersweetness that always comes with the end of something.
Obama managed to restrain his feelings for much of the last day. At his first stop, in Madison, and his second, in Cleveland, he was his usual self. But on the flight into DSM he began to wax nostalgic, particularly when he was told about a staff plan that had been foiled. The idea was to fly in Edith Childs—the hat-proud South Carolina councilwoman who had inspired Obama’s famous 2008 chant of “Fired up! Ready to go!”—to introduce him that night. But Ms. Childs declined the invitation: North Carolina was still in play, and she planned to be there on Election Day to help get out the vote.
That’s too unbelievably good to be true, a tickled Obama said. I’m gonna put that in my speech.
Air Force One and the first lady’s plane both touched down at around 9:00 p.m. Obama met his wife on the tarmac, at the foot of the aircraft stairs. When their limo pulled up in Des Moines’s East Village, the scene was like something out of a movie. A crowd of twenty thousand stretched for block after block from the podium up East Locust Street. Beyond the crowd, a massive American flag flew in the distance. Beyond the flag were the columns and golden dome of the state’s majestic capitol building.
Obama’s original campaign headquarters was behind the stage—an unassuming, low-slung brick building that now housed a church. Before his speech, the president walked slowly, pensively, through the space, recalling where certain staffers had sat four years earlier, reminiscing about the frigid New Year’s Eve when The Des Moines Register’s poll announced to the world what the campaign already believed: that he, Barack Hussein Obama, was going to win the nearly all-Caucasian caucuses.
Michelle Obama held her husband’s hand. As she traveled around that fall, the first lady had been in a terrific mood about what she was seeing. Perhaps most gratifying was the lack of a backlash against her husband’s change of posture on same-sex unions. Gay marriage was supposed to have been the most scalding of hot-button issues, but it had turned out to be a damp squib—and she found that a cause for overwhelming optimism. We’ve come a long way, the first lady thought.
Close to 10:00 p.m., she took to the rostrum and, clearly moved, put the finest point possible on the moment. “As you know, this is a pretty emotional time for us, because this is the final event of my husband’s final campaign,” Michelle said. “So this is the last time that he and I will be onstage together at a campaign rally. And that’s why we wanted to come here to Iowa tonight. Because truly this is where it all began.”
A few minutes later, her husband was up there with her. They shared a kiss, a long embrace, and some whispered words.
“I’ve come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your vote,” Obama began. “I came back to ask you to help us finish what we’ve started. Because this is where our movement for change began. Right here. Right here. Right behind these bleachers is the building that was home to our Iowa headquarters in 2008. I was just inside, and it brought back a whole lot of memories. This was where some of the first young people who joined our campaign set up shop, willing to work for little pay and less sleep because they believed that people who love their country can change it. This was where so many of you who shared that belief came to help. When the heat didn’t work for the first week or so, some of you brought hats and gloves for the staff. These poor kids, they weren’t prepared! When the walls inside were bare, one of you painted a mural to lift everybody’s spirits. When we had a Steak Fry to march to, when we had a J-J [Jefferson-Jackson] Dinner to fire up, you brought your neighbors and you made homemade signs. When we had calls to make, teachers and nurses showed up after work, already bone-tired but staying anyway, late into the night. And you welcomed me and Michelle into your homes. And you picked us up when we needed a lift. And your faces gave me new hope for this country’s future, and your stories filled me with resolve to fight for you every single day I set foot in the Oval Office. You inspired us.”
As Obama spoke, he made no effort to conceal the emotions to which his wife referred; the president’s heart was festooned on his sleeve. His voice, at once gravelly and trembly, repeatedly cracked. First one tear, then two, and then more streamed down his cheeks.
He punctuated his Iowa rhapsody with a “Yes, we can!”
The crowd let loose a roar.
At great length, he told the story of Edith Childs, adding its new kicker: “She said, I’d love to see you, but I think we can still win North Carolina . . . I’ve got to knock on some doors. I’ve got to turn out the vote. I’m still fired up, but I’ve got work to do. And that shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room. And if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state, it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”
As Obama built to his crescendo, so did the din around him. Finally, finally, he led the audience in the valedictory call-and-response.
“Are you fired up?”
“READY TO GO!”
“Are you fired up?”
“READY TO GO!”
More than a year earlier, Axelrod had told the president that, in order to win in 2012, he would have to recapture the Barack Obama of 2008—he would have to find his way home. On some days during the campaign, he had come close; on others, the distance seemed too great to span. Now, back in Iowa, on the final night, Obama was all the way there: the circle was complete.
For half an hour after his speech, Obama worked the rope line. The temperature outside was just around freezing. Though he wasn’t wearing an overcoat, he seemed
unfazed by the chill. Back inside the old headquarters, he signed some books and posters, whatever people put in front of him. He talked about the familiar faces he had glimpsed from the stage. They believed in me when nobody else did, Obama said.
The hour was late. It was time to go. But Obama lingered. Taking a last, long look around, he turned to Plouffe and motioned to the door. His expression was rueful, reflective, and satisfied all at once.
“I guess that’s it,” Obama said—and then strode out into the cold night air.
EPILOGUE
IT WAS NEARLY 2:00 a.m. on November 7 when Mitt and Ann walked into the campaign-staff suite at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel. Not long before, Romney had phoned President Obama to concede the election, then delivered a five-minute elegy in the ballroom downstairs. “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader,” Romney said. “So Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.”
The size and sweep of Obama’s victory staggered the Romneys and their people. Twelve hours earlier, they had been convinced that Mitt would prevail—or, at worst, that the race would be a nail-biter. Instead, the Democratic incumbent was on his way to an emphatic 51–47 percent win, in which he carried all but one of the battleground states (North Carolina), pocketed 332 electoral votes, and outdistanced Romney by five million popular votes out of 129 million cast.
Mitt and Ann sat down with a clutch of advisers: Stevens, White, Myers, Kaufman, Zwick. Ann had been crying; she was jagged, inconsolable. “How did this happen?” she asked over and over, saying she feared for the future of America.
Her husband, by contrast, was downcast but composed. In the frantic final hours on the trail, Mitt had told his aides that he was excited about winning but if he lost, that would be okay, too; he would be perfectly happy returning to his normal life, spending more time with his kids and grandkids. Now Romney looked up and saw a commercial playing on TV. It was former Tennessee senator and failed presidential candidate Fred Thompson, hawking reverse mortgages for a company called AAG. Staring at the screen, Mitt indulged in some dark humor.
That could be me next, he said.
The Republican Party royalty was just as stunned as Boston but took the loss with less equanimity than did Mitt. Rupert Murdoch, who had watched the election returns with a four-star general, was dismayed. When Obama claimed victory, the officer presented an apocalyptic vision of the president’s second term: an anemic America, on its knees, capitulating to Middle Eastern thugs. Expressing a sentiment common among the high command of the right, Murdoch muttered, “Our nation is ruined.”
The finger-pointing commenced the day after the election. The billionaires’ club trained its fire on Rove, his Crossroads empire, and the rest of the conservative super PACs, which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars—much of it from the billionaires’ bank accounts—to run a jillion ads that yielded squat. Holy shit, we were duped, thought Langone. Next time, he and his compadres would be damn sure to demand accountability from the likes of Karl before opening up their wallets again.
With the exit polls showing that 15 percent of voters rated Obama’s handling of Sandy as the most important factor in their decision—and 73 percent of that subset backing the president—blame was cast on Christie, too. The imputations prompted an uncharacteristic defensiveness on the part of Big Boy, who worried that any lingering perception of party recreancy might hurt him if he ran in 2016. I’m a loyal guy! Christie thought. No one worked harder or did more for Mitt than me!
Big Boy’s sense of where the real fault lay was crystal clear: with the clowns on Commercial Street. On the phone with Ryan two days after the election, Christie listened while Fishconsin talked about how he, too, had been certain that he and Mitt were headed for the White House. “On election morning,” Ryan said, “they told me and my wife we were going to win.”
“Well, that just shows how shitty they were,” Christie harrumphed.
As the poison darts flew hither and yon, the Romneys were in Boston, saying their farewells to the campaign and still trying to wrap their minds around what had occurred. The morning after the election, they both addressed a major-donor breakfast; later that day, they spoke to the entire staff on Commercial Street. The emotional bifurcation was the same as on election night. Mitt was gracious and comforting, but his upper lip remained stiff. Ann was kind and thankful, but damp-eyed and on the verge of losing it—spouting Manichaean warnings about what Obama’s reelection meant.
“It will become more clear to you as the days go on and you see what’s going to happen to our country,” she said in her speech to the staff. “This was a turning point in the history of the nation.”
Little in the campaign had gone as planned for Ann. At the start, Boston had touted her to the press as Mitt’s secret weapon. Nearly two years later, she remained a mystery to many voters. In Chicago’s focus groups, her name rarely came up. Her convention speech was supposed to have been her breakout moment, but it was forgotten within days. The campaign acknowledged once or twice that she wasn’t feeling well; in truth, her MS limited her travel and public appearances more than Boston let on. And there were those occasions when she did make an impression, just not the right one: in a series of interviews, her pique surfaced, and she sounded sharp or shrill.
Ann hadn’t wanted Mitt to try again after his 2008 washout. But once she reversed her position and decided he had to take on Obama to set things right, her psychic investment in the race was stratospheric. The torments Mitt suffered at the hands of Chicago, the press, and the GOP establishment made her ballistic. “Stop it—this is hard,” she complained in one media appearance, after Peggy Noonan and others had heaped censure on her husband over the 47 percent. “You want to try it? Get in the ring.” Tartly, she dismissed the swell of criticism as “nonsense and the chattering class.” On Meet the Press, she griped that Mitt “really has been demonized.” During her husband’s autumn upswing, Ann thought that people were finally seeing the Mitt she knew and cherished. The election was a crushing blow to that illusion; she couldn’t comprehend how her fellow citizens had gotten it so wrong.
Mitt believed that the nation had made a mistake, but he didn’t feel deflated. The voters chose to double down, he thought. That’s their right. He was grateful to have had the national platform that his father dreamed of but never achieved. Who would have ever guessed that a kid with skinny legs from Cranbrook School would get to run for president and speak to the entire country? I got a chance to say the things I wanted to say.
Obama and his people saw Romney as pure ambition. In truth, Mitt was about as ambivalent as any nominee in modern history. He had left a good life to run, and a good life awaited him back at Fin de la Senda when he was finished. In the course of the campaign, he created endless problems for himself but rarely addressed them with pull-out-all-the-stops urgency or last-dog-dies determination. The one weakness he did try to combat was the perception that he was a flip-flopper; but in refusing to deviate an iota from his 2008 positions, he generated fiercer headaches and harsher headlines. He allowed Chicago to define him as a heartless plutocrat without offering an alternative image. (In the exit polls, Romney led Obama on three out of four key candidate qualities—“strong leader,” “shares my values,” and “vision for the future”—but was crushed, 81 to 18 percent, on the question of who “cares about people like me.”) As that perception took hold during the campaign, his attitude toward it seemed to be, Oh, well, Mitt happens.
Even so, Romney’s management-consultant instincts took hold in the aftermath of November 6. He wanted to understand why he lost, how he lost.
On the Thursday after the election, he met with his brain trust to come up with answers—for both himself and the press, which was clamoring for enlightenment as to why Boston had misjudged the race so badly in the homestretch. In the familiar third-floor conference room, they all gathered one last
time. With the exception of Gillespie, it was the same core group that Romney had started out with. Mitt was proud that they’d come through intact, that there had been so much camaraderie and so little infighting—although at that moment, some in the room, such as Zwick, were seething at Newhouse and Beeson for polling numbers and a ground game that had been, respectively, so wrong and so feeble.
Newhouse ran through the exit poll data, explaining that Chicago had dramatically pulled off its coalition-of-the-ascendant play—turning out an electorate even more diverse than in 2008, not less, as Newhouse assumed would be the case. Nationally, the white vote fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black proportion held steady at 13. Participation among Hispanics rose from 8 to 10 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama’s share of each of those blocs ranged from commanding to overwhelming: 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 55 percent of women (and 67 percent of unmarried women), and 60 percent of young voters.
Gillespie argued that Obama had won by advancing a series of “rifle-shot policies” aimed at those electoral slices: free contraceptives for women, the DREAM Act for Latinos, cuts in student-loan interest rates for the kids. Gillespie had been spot-on about Romney’s need to heal himself with these groups. Now he said of the Obamans, “They played small ball, but they went small in a big way.”
Romney found the logic compelling. Obamacare was another example, he said. A majority of the country was against it, but the president’s base loved free health care.
Someone mentioned welfare reform—the federal waivers to state work requirements. The administration announced its new policy the day before Biden gave a speech to the NAACP. The base-stroking going on there was pretty blatant, no?
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 54