“The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”
It was a fair point, poorly stated—but the potency of poorly stated points was not lost on us, having hung “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” around John McCain’s neck in 2008. Few Americans believed the “private sector” was “doing fine,” and Romney quickly pointed to the remark as evidence of a president disconnected from the reality of the American economy.
“I’m sorry to make your job more challenging,” Obama said, in a call a few days later. ”I hate being sloppy. That was sloppy.” I told him we should never have thrown him out there to answer questions when he was sleep-deprived after an exhausting West Coast trip. “I was a little tired,” he acknowledged. “But no excuses. It was a screwup and it was mine.”
Romney seized on the theme of Obama as a naïve crypto-socialist, and many on Wall Street, eager for one of their own in the Oval Office, were all in. Shortly after Romney clinched the nomination, he arrived in Washington to a hero’s welcome at the Business Roundtable, an elite group of CEOs formed in the 1970s to lobby against regulation and corporate taxes. “The president and his folks just don’t understand how the private sector works,” he said with a pitying smile, as the crowd nodded in agreement.
The scene was galling. Obama had taken the difficult steps necessary to save an economy that, thanks to a lack of rules, had been sabotaged by egregious abuses of the market. Now the Dow was up 70 percent, corporate profits were robust, and the CEOs cheered lustily as Romney smarmily chided Obama for his lack of understanding.
I wasn’t the only one irritated by Romney’s performance. The president was clearly peeved when he called me that night. “I saw him over there, all full of swagger,” Obama said, after watching an account of Romney’s speech. “A homecoming of the plutocrats!”
No one doubted that Romney knew “how the private sector worked.” He had the fortune to prove it. Yet if his storied career in private equity made him a favorite at the Business Roundtable, it wouldn’t, as more details of his business practices emerged, garner the same applause from most Americans outside that room. Only a week later, the Washington Post ran an explosive investigative piece on Bain’s business practices.
“During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private-equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” the Post reported, noting that China and India were among the beneficiaries of the outsourced jobs.
“Pioneers” in outsourcing! The Post had added new findings and important validation to our research, including a filing by one Bain-owned company offering “a range of services that provide our clients with a one-stop shop for their outsource requirements.”
It would be a devastating story, particularly in battleground states such as Ohio and North Carolina, which had suffered deep job loss to outsourcing. What made it worse was that Romney had been barnstorming the country for a year promising to get tough on China, giving us a raft of videotape with which to hang him.
“Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs,” closed one ad we rushed on the air. Another began with Romney sermonizing during a primary debate about the need to get tough on China. “The Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future, and I’m not willing to let that happen,” he earnestly promised. “He made a fortune letting it happen,” the ad responded, presenting the facts from the Post story.
The hypocrisy was breathtaking, and it went to the heart of Romney’s campaign. He was going to be the jobs president, the businessman who knew how the private sector worked. Yet now he looked more like a businessman who had worked the system at the expense of American jobs.
After pounding away at other aspects of Romney’s business practices, we shifted to his policy proposals, including a familiar-sounding fiscal plan: heavy tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and paid for with deep spending cuts and greater burdens for the middle class. In one ad, we flayed him on the impact of his college aid plan, replaying Romney’s priceless counsel to America’s youth to “borrow money if you have to from your parents” to pay for an education.
With separate and discrete tracks of advertising, we spoke directly to women, replaying some of Romney’s harsh positions on a woman’s right to abortion, contraception, and equal pay. We launched Spanish-language media in May, to run through the election, stressing the differences in position on education, job training, and health care.
By the end of July, Romney would be “underwater” in Benenson’s battleground state polling, with a majority expressing a negative opinion of him, and Obama would break into a four-point lead, hitting the magic mark of 50 percent.
We were helped along by two developments, one orchestrated by the president and the second coming from a surprising source.
The president had announced in mid-June an executive order deferring deportation proceedings against hundreds of thousands of students and military personnel who were the children of undocumented immigrants. Though not the permanent answer he still sought through the DREAM Act and more comprehensive reform, it brought relief to some young people and produced the expected outcry from Republicans that would only drive Hispanic voters and young people farther away from the GOP.
Then came some news that was far more meaningful than any mere boon to the campaign. The Supreme Court had been considering the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and given the conservative bent of the Court’s majority, the outcome was in doubt. We had spent many hours pondering the political implications if the justices were to throw out Obama’s signature accomplishment. Would it galvanize our base and sympathetic swing voters? Or would it become a symbol of overreach and failure? Yet for millions of people without coverage, people with chronic illnesses like my daughter’s, the stakes were even greater.
On the day the Court was to rule, the loud din that normally engulfed our campaign headquarters in Chicago was reduced to an anxious murmur as hundreds of workers and volunteers crowded around television screens, awaiting word from Washington. I watched with Jim Messina in his office. We had waged the health care battle together in the White House, where Jim was the deputy chief of staff. Now health care and maybe even our election chances hung in the balance.
I was glancing out the window when Messina let out a pained grunt. “That’s it,” he said glumly, staring at his computer and a tweet from CNN. “They killed it.”
Before I could ask much or absorb the meaning of what he had said, we heard loud cheers and applause from the sprawling bull pen outside his closed door. “Then why the hell is everyone so happy?” I asked as we scanned the coverage. We quickly discovered that CNN had gotten it wrong. The law had been upheld—and by the vote of Chief Justice Roberts, no less.
Messina’s eyes welled up with tears. Jim was a hard-core political operative, an occasional mercenary with whom I had issues in the past and would again in the future. Even so, we were both proud of the health care law and deeply invested in its survival. We gave each other a big, relieved hug, and then plunged into the celebration outside.
Later that day, the president called.
“I call a lot when things are bad. Just wanted to chew on some good news for once,” he said. “I plan to win, but whatever happens, I feel like we’ve locked something in that will help a lot of people. And that feels good.” Before he hung up, he cheerfully shared a data point that he had picked up on one of his regular tours of his iPad. “The one poll I’ve seen lately that makes me feel good is that sixty-five percent sa
y I would do a better job of dealing with extraterrestrials! Can’t beat that!”
It was classic Obama, a sense of what’s important coupled with a wry detachment that helped him survive some of the most trying and tumultuous years in American political history. A few days later, at a Fourth of July pool party on the White House Lawn, Kathy Ruemmler, the White House counsel, asked the president if he “didn’t every once in a while just want to punch someone in the face.”
“No, not really,” he said. “There was an old critic who said, ‘Everything is either a comedy or a tragedy, and the difference is whether you are on the inside, or on the outside, looking in.’ I try to remember that, and step outside on those tough days and see the absurdity of some of these scenes. Plus, we’ve been at this a long time—lots of ups and downs. You just get used to it.”
The next day, we were heading out on a two-day bus tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania. The president was looking over his remarks and practicing his opening. “You know, I’d like to start by saying, ‘This is my last campaign. And so I’ve been thinking lately about my first campaign, and why I got into this business in the first place.’” As he spoke, I recalled the first time I met Obama, a newly minted law graduate. He saw politics as a calling, as a way to give people a fighting chance. Now, as he sat in the forward cabin of Air Force One reserved for the president of the United States, he was summoning that same spirit as he prepared to make his case to folks at venues ranging from big-city rallies to small-town squares to rolling farms. This is the guy, I thought, as I watched him throw away his notes and speak from his heart. This is the guy I know.
Though he lacks the grab-your-elbow, stare-into-your eyes shtick of a Bill Clinton, Obama enjoys people and relishes escaping Washington and getting into the factories, diners, and taverns where folks are interested in more than the Gallup daily tracking poll. He called following the trip, still jazzed by the chance to mix with regular people and by the encouragement they offered.
“I told the senior staff today that we dodged a lot of bullets in the past couple of weeks—immigration, health care, jobs numbers that could have been worse. Like Churchill said, ‘Nothing is as exhilarating as the sound of bullets whizzing past your head.’ All we have to survive now are four more jobs reports, maybe a European crisis or two, three debates, and the occasional gaffe. And then we’re home free!”
• • •
Throughout August, we held a narrow but steady three- to four-point lead in our own polling. Our gamble to front-load our media had paid off. Now, even with the burdens of a fragile economy and the onslaught of ads blaming us for it, I liked our chances as we rounded the turn into the final stretch.
If the front end of presidential campaigns is dominated by advertising, the back end is focused on the big set pieces—conventions and debates, orchestrated extravaganzas that take place when most Americans are just beginning to focus on their choices.
Romney got a little buzz heading into his convention by choosing Paul Ryan, the conservative House budget chairman, as his vice-presidential nominee. It was a surprising pick. I expected Romney to reach out for a moderate. Instead, he picked the author of the radical, tax-cutting, Medicare-voucherizing Republican budget that Obama had consistently flayed to such great effect. The choice tied Romney closer to the unpopular Republican Congress. Still, it was clearly a genuine meeting of the minds. Romney shared Ryan’s economic views, and the young, attractive, and telegenic congressman was a favorite of the social conservatives and Tea Party activists who would fill the seats in Tampa.
When the Republican convention began, however, a day late due to a Democratic-leaning hurricane named Isaac, Romney seemed something of an afterthought at his own coming-out party. Ryan got a warmer reception from the delegates, many of whom were committed to primary candidates Romney had dispatched in bruising fashion. Chris Christie, the imposing governor of New Jersey, spent sixteen minutes at the podium sharing his own life story before he even mentioned the Man of the Hour. Also, full-throated denunciations of Obama produced far more enthusiastic responses than any tributes to Romney. Yet the biggest head-scratcher came on the night of Romney’s acceptance speech.
I was alone in my office watching the preliminaries on cable when a very evocative and moving biographical video aired that presented Romney as a loving father and husband, a leader in his church community, a generous and caring person. Where has this guy been? I wondered. And why hadn’t they run this video in prime time, to introduce Romney to the largest possible audience? We ran a similar video in 2008 and would again in 2012. It’s free advertising, and the networks would surely have run all or part of Romney’s.
Instead, when the prime-time hour kicked off, I watched as Clint Eastwood strode out to the podium. Using a nearby chair as a surrogate for Obama, Eastwood proceeded to ad-lib a routine that was by turns offensive and incomprehensible. TV occasionally punctuated the bit with cutaways of an unsmiling Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, who apparently shared my bewilderment at how the convention planners could have squandered this precious time on this bizarre piece of performance art.
I got up and walked next door to Grisolano’s pizza- and beer-littered office, where a bunch of the media team was taking in the show. “Is it just me, or is this a fuckup of monumental proportions?” I asked, wondering if I was missing something. They all howled with laughter. Though Romney would follow with a decent speech, he would be upstaged in media coverage by Dirty Harry’s onstage meltdown. Our postconvention poll showed no bump in support for Romney; but Obama’s personal ratings had actually gone up.
Compared to the Republican train wreck, our convention in Charlotte the next week ran like a Swiss watch—even though an old master played with the clock.
Two months before the convention, I suggested an unusual candidate to deliver the nominating speech. No former president had ever put a sitting president’s name in nomination. Yet who better than Bill Clinton to take apart the Republican economic argument?
Clinton eagerly agreed. But now, twelve hours before his prime-time appearance, we still hadn’t seen a draft of the speech.
A little concerned, I asked two of our senior people and old Clinton hands, Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling, to see if they could pry a draft from their former boss—but they promptly disappeared into Clinton’s Bermuda Triangle, going radio silent for hours before, finally, responding to one of my countless e-mails: “getting closer.” I finally had to pay a small ransom, offering Clinton a little more time in the program to accommodate his case.
Ninety minutes before the start of the scheduled speech, the draft finally arrived. Smart, punchy, colloquial—it was classic Clinton, a joyful gutting of the Republican economic plan along with a strong endorsement of the president’s. Favs and I made a couple of small suggestions and sent it back. And at about twenty-seven minutes, it would fit well within the window of the hour of network coverage we had planned.
Or so I thought.
From the moment Clinton took the stage, smiling and clapping his hands in response to a tumultuous welcome, he was an artist at work, deploying telling statistics and folksy aphorisms to lethal effect.
“We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle-down,” he said. “Think about this: President Obama—President Obama’s plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens the future of our children, our families and our nation. It’s a heck of a lot better.”
Standing at the side of the stage, I found it a thrill to watching one of the greats at work—so much so that it took me a while to realize he was ad-libbing half his speech.
From my vantage point, I could see the large teleprompter in front of Clinton that was scrolling along with his text. At some point I realized that the prompter was stopping frequently, sometimes for minutes, while Clinton rolled on. Before long I realized that he hadn’t cut his speech at all. He had simply memorized long
passages that weren’t included in the draft he sent us. But who cared? Clinton was so good that the networks stayed with him for the duration, through fifty rollicking minutes.
Of course, he had barely finished before the talking heads began speculating about whether Obama could rise to Clinton’s standard in his acceptance speech the next night. “I don’t care about that crap,” said the president, who rose to the challenge the following night. “He did exactly what we hoped.”
We left Charlotte with our polls showing we had a 51–46 lead. Obama’s approval ratings were his highest of the year, and Romney’s were once again underwater. We had not just survived one more critical test, but passed with flying colors.
Ten days after the convention, Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager who oversaw our communications shop, and Ben LaBolt, our press secretary, walked into my office and shut the door. Stephanie was a brilliant and seasoned campaign veteran, who had seen just about everything. But what she was about to report was a gaffe beyond anything she had experienced. “There’s a story breaking and we wanted to know what you think we should say,” Stephanie said. They explained that a videotape had surfaced showing Romney at a closed fund-raiser. On it, he disparaged 47 percent of Americans as tax-shirking loafers content to live lives of perpetual dependency. It was almost too good to be true. “What do you think we should we say?” Stephanie asked. “Not much,” I replied. “When your opponent is blowing himself up, just get out of the way.”
The full tape was even worse than they had described, including Romney’s coda: “And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
It was stunning to see him blithely dismiss half the country as slackers. It made everything in our ads ring even truer. A year earlier, I had described campaigns to reporters as “like an MRI for the soul—whoever you are, eventually people find out.” Now people were staring at Romney’s soul scan, and it was a disturbing image.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 57