Hours after the tape surfaced, I got a late-night call from the president, who was not at all surprised by Romney’s sentiments, but amazed that he would voice them in front of others. “Man,” Obama said, “we’d better not lose to this guy! I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!”
Seven points up with seven weeks to go—a year earlier, you could have made a fortune in Vegas betting on that scenario. Yet before we could drop the balloons and toast our good fortune, we would have our own MRI moment.
THIRTY-ONE
TURBULENT RIDE, SMOOTH LANDING
THROUGHOUT MODERN CAMPAIGN HISTORY, the first presidential debate has been a perilous turn for sitting presidents.
It’s not all that surprising. Presidents haven’t debated for four years, while the challenger is generally well practiced, having run a gauntlet of candidate debates and forums on the path to nomination. Presidents have spent almost four years on a pedestal. Now the challenger, standing just a few feet away, is on equal footing, poking, jabbing, and treating the Leader of the Free World with little of the deference to which presidents become accustomed. The mere act of standing toe to toe with the president of the United States elevates the opponent and levels the playing field. So, on my campaign calendar, I had one date circled in red: October 3, the evening in Denver when Obama and Romney would debate for the first time.
Obama’s mentality had changed since the last time he walked onto a debate stage. By the fall of 2008, after the long primary contest with Hillary, Obama had accepted, albeit grudgingly, that these events are performances. The goal is to drive a message relentlessly, land a telling quote or two that underscores the contrast with your opponent, and in a way that connects with the American people. Obama, who stumbled at first, had mastered this skill over the course of the 2008 campaign. Now he had tumbled back to viewing the debate as a teaching moment.
He pored through the 364-page book on Romney’s record and then produced a voluminous follow-up memo that demanded more information and answers. He followed the same pattern when we presented him with a thick book on his own record. By complying with his requests for endless research, we were abetting the president’s worst instincts.
Our fears were confirmed in mid-August, when we held our first informal mock debate at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. To play our opponent, we had recruited John Kerry, who, as a fellow Bay Stater, knew Romney well and would be adept at channeling him. Kerry also understood the mentality of a presidential challenger, having proven a strong debater in his three encounters with George W. Bush in 2004. Knowing the candidate and the terrain, he would make a formidable sparring partner for the president.
In their first session, it was Kerry who looked like the champion and the president a not-ready-for-prime-time contender. Knowing that Romney had shown a penchant for needling opponents in his primary debates, Kerry frequently baited the president into a series of defensive answers and snarky attacks that betrayed Obama’s irritation with both Romney and the format while doing little to advance our arguments. “Don’t interrupt me,” Obama snapped at one point, when Kerry had cut in hoping to provoke just such testiness.
It was only the first practice, five weeks before the real debate, but the consensus of our prep team—led once again by Ron Klain, a brilliant and seasoned debate strategist—was that we needed to do a lot of work. “No surprises for first outing, but too much time spent on Romney’s side of the field,” Plouffe e-mailed after the session. “Too much defense throughout.”
So we worked the president. We held informal sessions in which we fired off likely questions and tried to hone his answers, his timing, and his overall demeanor. We provided him with a few “zingers”—witty lines aimed at neutralizing Romney’s attacks—but not too many barbs, lest he sully himself in the process. At times, Obama delivered compelling answers, but too often he retreated into a defensive posture, explaining a program or problem in mind-numbing detail without evoking the fundamental contrast with Romney on economic values and vision. He was decidedly a work in progress but we consoled ourselves that we had a three-day debate camp at the end of September when he could refine his approach and lock in his answers.
If there were harbingers of impending disaster, one might have been our drive from the airport to our debate prep site at a resort in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson, a burgeoning suburb with easy access to the Vegas Strip, had been devastated by the mortgage crisis that began in 2008. Now, as we wound our way through the sprawling city, we passed what appeared to be mostly abandoned subdivisions with browned lawns and rows of foreclosure signs—sober reminders of the crisis that had dominated so much of the president’s term, and the lagging recovery that he would be forced to defend.
If the scene outside the hotel was dispiriting, what unfolded inside of our cordoned-off ballroom over the next three days was truly alarming. Practice was not making perfect. Too often and too easily, Kerry could knock Obama off his game, prompting the president to eschew the pithy answers he had rehearsed in favor of long, detailed, and defensive discourses. While there were moments when Obama movingly invoked the stories of the people he’d met in office, he regularly retreated into dreary recitations of tedious facts.
When a candidate is well prepared, the debate prep team can almost always anticipate every answer, sometimes mouthing the exact words as they are being delivered. Yet twenty-four hours before the first presidential debate, none of us could predict with certainty how the president would answer any question. Obama had absorbed reams of material, but it was not clear that he had also absorbed our counsel. Openly disdainful of the artifice the process demanded of him, he refused to indulge us by rehearsing his answers again and again until he had memorized them.
All the problems and pitfalls were in evidence during our final run-through, on the night before the Denver debate. Many of the notes I typed as I watched the final practice foreshadowed what was to come: “Threw away the contrast,” I wrote after one answer. “Wonkfest,” after another. “Wants to wonk it up on Medicare cost curves,” I noted after an answer on health care. “No humanity” was the distressing synopsis of another exchange. As Obama and Kerry sparred, the team sat stone-faced, trying not to betray our increasing anxiety, but it seemed clear that our man wasn’t ready.
As had been customary through two elections, Klain asked the speech coach, Michael Sheehan, and me to go over the night’s practice session with Obama before he turned in. When we got into the makeshift tape screening room where Michael would offer performance pointers, the president said, “I think that went pretty well, don’t you?” I could have nodded affirmatively on the theory that it was too late to affect much of a change. Instead, I opted to tell him the truth.
“There were some good moments, but there’s some stuff we need to clean up,” I said. Before I could launch my critique, however, the president indicated he’d already heard enough. “Motherfucker’s never happy,” he harrumphed, bolting up and heading briskly out of the room. “Well, that went well, don’t you think?” I said to Sheehan, as we stared in shock and dismay at the double doors through which the president had just exited.
That was a first. Obama and I had been working together for a decade, through some pretty hairy moments, but he had never before lost his temper in this fashion. He had certainly never attacked me quite so harshly, especially in front of others. I had no doubt irritated him, but there was more to it. My sense was that the president knew he wasn’t ready. His mind-set, his reluctance to embrace this game, had been wrongheaded from the start, and now it was clearly hurting him.
Nothing was said about our testy exchange the next day on the flight from Vegas to Denver. The unnerved folks on our debate team passed the time trying to reassure themselves that, somehow, it might work out. “Trust me, he’s a gamer,” I told Klain, who stared back at me poker-faced. We all knew the truth. It would take an act of Providence or some major gaffe by Rom
ney for us to have a good night.
A few minutes before the debate began, Plouffe and I visited the president in his hold in a locker room in the University of Denver’s hockey arena. Four years earlier, in another locker room before the first presidential debate, a focused, confident Obama said, “Just give me the ball!” Now, in Denver, he appeared distracted, even disinterested—and immune to our last-minute pep talk. “Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,” he said. These were not exactly the parting words you hoped to hear as you sent your candidate out to do battle.
The debate fell on Obama’s twentieth wedding anniversary, and we had the idea that he should give a nod to his widely admired wife at the beginning of his opening statement.
“There are a lot of points I want to make tonight, but the most important one is that 20 years ago I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me,” the president said, in one of the few practiced bits he had committed to memory. “And so I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now, we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.”
It turns out that intimacies delivered in front of forty million people are difficult to pull off. Obama’s attempt appeared somewhat phony and forced. Worse, Romney’s debate prep had forecast this very exchange, so Mitt was, as they say in baseball, “laying on the pitch.”
“And congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary. I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine—here with me,” he cracked, when it was his turn to speak. If Obama’s awkward line seemed canned, Romney’s came off as spontaneous, charming, and self-effacing.
After reading all the stories about the “47 percent” tape, Americans being introduced to Romney for the first time might have been expecting Mr. Burns, the misanthropic corporate executive from The Simpsons. Instead Romney was, from start to finish, warm, confident, and well prepared. He flawlessly delivered line after line, tweaking the president frequently without overstepping any boundaries. We watched as Romney, who had spent most of his campaign pandering to the Right, brazenly yet deftly repositioned himself as a moderate on issue after issue. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” Romney said unabashedly, walking away from what had long been a centerpiece of his economic plan.
The president performed about how he had in prep, occasionally scoring message points, but mostly following the questions and Romney’s parries down rabbit holes. When he explained for a third time the rationale behind the cost-cutting commission empaneled by his health care act, there were audible groans in our staff room. While he defended his record to a fault, indulging in esoterica, Obama was remarkably passive, seldom challenging Romney or, especially, Romney’s cynical reinvention of himself. Worse, the president looked disengaged, in stark contrast with a challenger who was in command of the moment.
“We’re dead,” Klain said ten minutes into the debate. We were all staring at dial group findings streaming across the bottom of the CNN screen that showed Romney’s answers getting consistently higher ratings than the president’s. Our own dial groups, while marginally better, would also give Romney a decided edge. The chatter among political reporters on Twitter was painful to read: Romney was aggressive, Obama was halting. Some on our team simply shut their computers in despair.
I braced myself for the postdebate pandemonium of the “spin room,” where I would try to redirect reporters’ attention to Romney’s blatant distortions of his own record. It was a futile effort, as if I were trying to ticket Romney for double-parking when everyone wanted to know about the president’s car wreck. The greatest outcry emanated from our own supporters, particularly progressives who were livid that the president hadn’t strafed Romney over Bain Capital or hit the giant “47 percent” target Romney had on his back. Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC pulled me out of a scrum of reporters. “You might want to get on our air,” he said. “They’re ripping your guy apart.”
In truth, I didn’t want to go on the air. I just wanted to get out of there. When I finally escaped, my cell phone rang. It was Marvin Nicholson, the president’s body man. “The boss wants to speak to you,” he said.
Obama was on his way back to the hotel, but he had already scanned the early reviews on his ubiquitous iPad.
“So I guess the view is that we didn’t have a very good night,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “I think that’s pretty much the consensus.”
“I just didn’t feel that way up there,” he said. “I knew we hadn’t won big in any way, but I felt it was at worst a draw.”
I couldn’t help but think about all the ways in which we had failed him—the brutal assault of briefing papers; our reluctance to butt heads with the president by insisting on drilling specific answers until they were second nature. Back at the hotel, we tried to regroup, rewriting the president’s remarks for the following day to demonstrate the fight that had been missing during the debate. “We have to come out swinging and show we have a pulse,” I told Favs as we worked up a new script.
We had long planned a rally in Denver the morning after, to build on the debate’s momentum. Now, absent any momentum, we instead had to reassure worried supporters. I grabbed Obama as he was leaving the hotel for the event. “Everyone’s going to be taking their cues from you,” I said. “You need to come out on fire or it will just prolong the story line.”
“I know, I know,” he said, as he took off down the hall and headed to the waiting motorcade. It turned out he did know. He came out with all the energy, and many of the arguments, that had been missing the night before.
“When I got onto the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” the president said, launching into the satirical trope we had prepared about the stranger who had debated the president the night before. “But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow onstage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”
The crowd ate it up. Just the sound of laughter was somewhat soothing, but only so much. A reporter e-mailed me midway through Obama’s speech to ask the obvious: “Where was this guy last night?”
We had nearly two weeks until the next debate, and I knew it would be an endurance test. I remembered the frenzy that erupted after Reagan flubbed his first debate with Walter Mondale, briefly breathing life into Mondale’s moribund campaign—at least in the minds of a news media eager for a contest. I believed the same thing was happening now.
Still, we almost certainly couldn’t afford a second straight rout. We needed a return to form, just like the one Reagan executed on his way to a forty-nine-state landslide.
By the next day the president had read and heard enough to understand that the first debate had been a lost night. One commentary in particular had caught his eye. “What Matt Bai wrote in the Times really kind of made sense,” the president said of a blog post headlined “Obama’s Enthusiasm Gap.” In it, the columnist wrote about Obama’s reticence to perform, linking it to a “lack of neediness” that drives most politicians. “It turns out, though, that craving validation is a useful political trait. It makes you want to explain yourself and prevail in the argument,” Bai wrote.
It was interesting that the president embraced this commentary, among the many he’d read, to explain his failure. And it reminded me of the conversation in 2007 when I told Obama that he might not be “pathological enough” to run for president. Now, as he contemplated his rare stumble on a large stage, I heard his competitive instincts kicking in. “I’m not going to let him beat me again,” the president said. “Ever! I’m disappointed that I didn’t make a stronger case to the country.”
The day after the debate, I got an unexpected call from Bill Clinton. Generally, when things go badly wrong, you receive a lot of unsolici
ted strategic advice. Yet President Clinton’s was different and welcome.
“Listen, everybody is beating up on the president,” he said. “But only a few of us know what it’s like to be up on that stage. It’s not easy. I hope everyone cuts him a little slack. He’ll be all right.”
Klain took the debate particularly hard and offered to resign, a gesture Obama quickly and properly refused, and when the debate group reconvened with Obama the following week, the president was shouldering all the blame. “I know everyone in this room feels a responsibility,” he said. “But this one was on me.” He promised to be ready for the next encounter, a town hall–style debate, now just one week away.
As we flew to Williamsburg, Virginia, for our second debate camp, I sensed that the president had genuinely reengaged. Biden had done well in his debate with Paul Ryan. But Obama understood that only he could put to rest any lingering doubts brought on by Denver. Our early prep sessions were encouraging, with Obama performing well in the first night’s run-through.
It sure felt as if we were in a better place and that, with continued practice and improvement, he’d be ready in three days’ time. However, the next night, when Kerry returned to the attack, the wheels came off. Once again Obama allowed himself to be baited into long explanations rather than delivering prescribed lines and messages that would resonate with the audience. He dealt peevishly with Kerry’s interruptions, whining that the moderator needed to intervene. Benenson, Plouffe, and I watched the mock debate on a closed-circuit feed in a nearby room so that we could share our thoughts openly. “Holy shit,” Benenson said, succinctly capturing our collective sentiment over this recurring nightmare.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 58