by Brian Abrams
JIM MESSINA
The polls said we had lost it 89 to 11 percent. Who knows who those 11 percent were? They had to be related to Barack Obama or me, and so we all got on the plane and flew back to Chicago to get ready for the spin the next morning. Then Pete Rouse called me from the White House and said, “You have to get on a plane. House and Senate Democrats are losing their minds. They want you to tell them it’s going to be okay.” I literally got on a plane, flew to Washington, appeared in front of the House and Senate caucuses, walked them through the tracking numbers from the night before, and explained why it was okay. I remember a senator, whom I love very much and could never bullshit, pulling me aside: “I have no idea if you’re right, but I feel much better.” I remember thinking to myself, I hope I’m fuckin’ right, too.
YOHANNES ABRAHAM
It was really one of the first times where it was approximate enough to Election Day that I was really, truly scared that we would lose. That’s what made the vice-presidential debate so energizing. I think I nearly dislocated my shoulder, like, pumping my fist after the vice-presidential debate. We were all so proud of the vice president, and obviously he did a really great job in a really key moment for us.
MICHAEL STEEL
The vice president clearly felt a mandate to get the ticket off the mat. So we expected him to be over the top, but he was borderline unhinged in his debate performance. He was clearly trying to show some fight, show the Obama-Biden ticket was back in the game, and I thought he was comically over the top at times. And a little factually challenged on some of his attacks.
TEDDY GOFF
But it’s true that a gaffe that seems to confirm what people already think is the gaffe that does the most damage. In the second debate, a moment like “binders full of women,” by the standards of Trump it’s so quaint, right?128 It’s like, why do we even care? But in the context of that election, Romney had a women problem. He said all these sorts of lousy things—Planned Parenthood, he wanted to get rid of that. He did kind of cut a figure of this almost Eisenhower-era debonair patrician, which was nostalgic for some people but also representative of an era when women didn’t have equal rights.
MICHAEL STEEL
At the time, Governor Romney said things that were mocked or belittled but turned out to be prescient. He’s a smart, smart man who had done a great deal of preparation, not just to run for president but to be president. Part of that meant learning and thinking deeply about foreign policy, and I thought [his remarks on Russia in] the third debate were a good example of President Obama going for a cheap line or a cheap joke that, on thoughtful reflection, was very off base.129
STUART STEVENS
Yeah, it was bad. Obama, the New York Times, and others basically scolded Romney. They dismissed Romney’s concerns about Russia, the same as Trump. They’re both based upon an assumption that Russia was not a threat. Go back and read the New York Times editorial about this.130 It’s the same worldview as Trump: Russia’s our friend. We don’t need to worry about Russia. There was plenty of evidence in 2012, if you wanted to open your eyes.
BRANDON HURLBUT
We’re days out from the election, and Hurricane Sandy hit DC pretty hard. The Metro wasn’t running. There were no cabs. Luckily I didn’t live too far from the DOE. I think I walked to work that day, and when I got in, it was pretty sparse. Of course, [Secretary Chu] arrived and we needed to get on a videoconference in the Situation Room with the president, and so all the senior staff was there. The president said, “The world is watching, and I’m gonna be judged by my response.” He looked at us and said, “You guys gotta get that power back up.” Another thing that he said that played out later was, “I have zero tolerance for red tape in this. If I hear of any red tape going on and bureaucratic snafus, there’s gonna be a problem. So get this done and no red tape.”
TEDDY GOFF
Romney made a big mistake. He made this charity drive [in Dayton, Ohio]. I didn’t know how we got tipped off to it, but his own staff had bought stuff at a [Walmart] and put it in cardboard boxes with handwritten signs.131 Then, by contrast, President Obama—who, arguably his best political skill was sort of his calmness under pressure, which was not stagecraft—did come through. That he was crisp, efficient, and decisive in that kind of situation. So, you know, you had Romney being clownish in his response and President Obama being perfectly pitched and poised in executing actual federal response.
STUART STEVENS
I never felt good about the race after Sandy. We were tracking a couple stats, like “Who do you think has momentum?” and “Who do you think’s gonna win?” They’re not always predictive, but they’re always kind of interesting. And there was a forty-point shift in that during Sandy. Every time I’ve beaten an incumbent, you know, it’s really like an NBA game. You really had to control the ball until the very end, and Sandy took away any ability to do that.
ARNE DUNCAN
Obviously you get better at being president by being president. His growth over time was pretty remarkable. Honestly, the thing that stood out for me the most was what didn’t change. He and I obviously were friends. Our families were friends. And so we had a relationship going in, but his values and what his family meant to him, what his daughters meant to him, what his wife meant to him, the way he treated people and the way he treated staff—way beyond kind to my wife and kids, which he didn’t need to be—it wasn’t part of any contractual arrangement. What blew me away was how little those values changed.
DAVID AXELROD
That’s, of course, why I loved working for him. He didn’t run for office simply to hear “Hail to the Chief” or enjoy the trappings of it. He did it because he wanted to get important things done for the country, and was willing to risk his own political well-being to do it. So he was willing to do the hard things. That will be to his everlasting credit.
ARNE DUNCAN
On the day of the election, we played basketball in Chicago. We used to do that just to relax. It was looking good—probably 60–40 at that point, 55–35, against Romney—and I was in knots. I asked him how he was feeling, and he just sort of said, “I’m good. I got a wife who loves me and I got two great kids. Whatever happens, I’m gonna be fine.” I never forgot that. Of course, he definitely wanted to win and it would have been devastating to lose, but he was telling the truth. He was really going to be fine, and I think of so many politicians who get consumed by the power and consumed by the role and the pageantry of it. That stuff’s just not interesting to him. For me, the biggest lesson was, the presidency couldn’t help but change you. But how little it changed his core values and what’s really most important to him, it didn’t change an inch.
STUART STEVENS
The race basically boiled down to one key factor: 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of the white vote and won a forty-four-state landslide. Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and lost. That’s it, and that’s really the whole race. That’s the whole dynamic. So ask any question—could this have been different or could that have been different? Could Romney have done this or that? The essential question to ask would have been, “Would it have increased his share of nonwhite vote?” If the answer wasn’t yes, then it wouldn’t have had any impact on the race.
SCOTT BROWN
They spent a tremendous amount of money against me . . . and they wanted the Kennedy seat back. The president went all out, full steam, and Mayor Menino threw me under the bus. We had had a great relationship. I had worked with him as a state rep and a state senator, and I looked at him as a mentor. We invited him over the house for barbecues, and then, when he came back from the Democratic Convention, he wouldn’t even look at me. I said to my wife, “It’s over.”
ROB ANDREWS
The Affordable Care Act was one of the main issues of the 2012 presidential race, and unemployment [had been at] five percent or five and a half, and the president won decisively. So the state of the economy was the major driver. Anyway, that’s just m
y own view.
TYLER MORAN
Postelection, obviously the president’s numbers with Latinos were, like, huge. Percentages in some of the states were impressive enough that people felt really confident about immigration. That’s when the senior advisors decided that the White House would make a push on some kind of immigration reform, and it was in November that the president instructed us to have a bill ready for him, I think by the end of Christmas break. That was a delightful Christmas.
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
After the election, they moved in the Senate and in the House; we were working with the Republicans.
TYLER MORAN
We saw a bipartisan effort there in the House, and we provided support to them, not as intensely as the Senate, because it was in the drafting stages. And the president did tons behind the scenes—phone calls that were not public, asking, “What can we do?” Boehner would say, “Well, back off. Give us some space.” “Okay, we can do that.” . . . Some Republicans sort of looked at the party’s position on immigration and felt like, We can’t be the party that’s going to stick with the old white men. Like, We’re going to become dinosaurs, and if we don’t start talking to people outside of ourselves, we’re not gonna survive as a party. That was kind of the postmortem that Priebus took the lead on after the election.132
JEREMY BIRD
After the election was over, I went to that thing they do at Harvard, where people from both sides spend a couple days talking through what it was like. It was really interesting, and they asked the Romney people, “How’d you get it so wrong?” He bought [$25,000] worth of fireworks for the Boston victory party. Basically, [Stuart Stevens] and Neil Newhouse said, “Well, we just got the composite of the electorate wrong.” They thought it was going to look much more like ’10 than ’08.
ALLYSON SCHWARTZ
President Obama was pretty self-assured. After his reelection I said, “We really worked hard for you in Pennsylvania!” There was this moment at the end of the campaign where Paul Ryan came into Harrisburg to do a final rally. It was this sort of final push, and [Obama] said, “Well, we were never really too worried about Pennsylvania.” Oh, that’s good. We were all fighting to make sure that was true, but he was probably smart to know that it was really not in play.
SHOMIK DUTTA
The overconfidence was definitely on the Romney side. The Romney people were as surprised as the Hillary people [in 2016]. We had so much faith in our data. There was never a moment of real angst, other than the first debate. For me, at least, and my friends, we were enormously confident. And maybe we shouldn’t have been, because the macro headwinds were daunting. There’s never been a president elected with unemployment that high and with dissatisfaction that high. And yet we kind of threaded the needle, and our data guys were right.
PETE SOUZA
He was riding high. He’d just won reelection, and a month later, about a week away from his annual Christmas vacation, was the worst day of his presidency.
NICK SHAPIRO
I was the one who interrupted the Oval Office to first tell them about Sandy Hook. It was during the PDB. At first, we thought a small number of kids had been shot; only later did we learn the full extent. But it was a school. They were young, and this was actually out of the news for a really long time, and that’s not normal. The early reporting, they really didn’t know anything. And the FBI called for [Homeland Security Advisor John] Brennan. I said he was in the PDB. They said, “Well, Nick, you gotta know this” . . . and so I made the decision to go interrupt the PDB and hand Brennan a note about what had happened, even though he was already in the room with the president.
FERIAL GOVASHIRI
I actually sat next to Nick Shapiro in the NSC office when that was happening. He frantically ran up there, right as fast as he could, just bolting upstairs.
NICK SHAPIRO
I walked in and handed Brennan the note, and the president looked kind of shocked, because it was very abnormal to interrupt the PDB. And he kind of looked at me, and then Brennan looked at me and said, “Go ahead.” Again, the scale of what had happened was not in the news yet, and I said out loud what had happened. And they said, “Okay.” Then I left to let them discuss and told them I’d be back if there was more information.
ARNE DUNCAN
None of us ever anticipated a school shooting like that. No one ever anticipated twenty babies, five teachers, and a principal being killed. I had spoken to people who were not the first responders, but who were in the second wave that drove to the school: “Arne, this is bad. This is really, really bad.”
CODY KEENAN
The president said that was his worst day in the White House. That was true for everybody. Favs and I shared an office in the West Wing, and we both found out at the same time. We had MSNBC on, and somebody had a news alert. We checked Twitter, and Alyssa Mastromonaco came down to the office. She was deputy chief of staff of operations at that point, so she’d been talking to the FBI and Brennan. She’d been getting updates. “Guys, this is worse than the news knows. The president’s going to have to say something. All we know is that there are children who are dead. We don’t know how many.”
DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD
I always dragged the bulk of my team to an outing at least one day every year, and we were planning a trip to go ice skating in Navy Yard. But I remember calling Alyssa, who was the deputy chief of staff. “Hey, you know, I heard . . .” It was early, when the first reports had happened. “Do we know anything more about it?” And she said, “I need you to come to my office.”
NICK SHAPIRO
Shortly thereafter, Brennan came out and got on the phone with the FBI and started working through the details. There’s an incredible picture of John Brennan in the Oval Office that day, talking to the president one-on-one about the shooting. That’s when we heard the new report about just how many kids had been killed. It’s the only picture you’ll ever see of John Brennan in the Oval Office without his jacket on. The Oval Office was something everyone treated with respect, and John was someone who would never be without his jacket. But he went so quickly. That’s when we learned the scale of it.
John Brennan briefs the president on Sandy Hook, Connecticut. December 14, 2012. Pete Souza, White House
PETE SOUZA
I think John had come up to the Oval like three different times, updating the president. I’m pretty sure this particular photo was when John confirmed to the president that twenty of the people killed were six or seven years old, first graders. Shit. I’m going to start crying as I think about this, because, you know, he’s obviously being told this as a president, but I think he was reacting as a parent. He’s putting himself in the shoes of every one of those parents. You send your kids off to school in the morning, and you never see them again because some madman just shot them to death.
CODY KEENAN
We started following the news and paying attention. Favs had been working on the second inaugural at the time, because that was coming up in a month. So I got to work on a statement, and Favs and I took it up to the Oval Office to show the president, and he said “This is right,” except he took out one paragraph. I remember exactly what was in it. He just crossed out one paragraph and said, “I won’t be able to get through this. It’s too raw.”
DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD
I’d never seen the president look like that.
CODY KEENAN
He kept parts about “[We’ve endured too many of] these tragedies in the past few years, and each time I learn the news, I react not as a president but as anybody else would, as a parent. [And] that was especially true today.” And I had a couple lines in there, him thinking about his own girls in their classrooms, what it would be like if he got that call, what it would take to stop him from running in that school as fast as he could, how he wouldn’t be able to breathe until he knew his own children were safe. He took all that out and changed it to, “I know there is not a parent in America who doesn’t feel
the same overwhelming grief that I do.” He modified a line I had in about the kids themselves and changed it to “beautiful little kids between [the ages of] five and ten years old” and that [was] where he stopped and paused.
PETE SOUZA
He started crying from the podium. He, like me, would always get emotional thinking about that.
CODY KEENAN
Everybody kept saying how remarkable it was that members of Congress would tear up, and I remember people mocking the president for crying that day. Gimme a break. I cried. Anyone in America who didn’t should take a look at themselves.
DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD
Eventually we got on the phone with the mayor of Newtown, and talked about what their plans were. They were initially going to have the memorial in a very small space, and it was one of those things where you couldn’t push. This happened in their town. You had to figure out what worked for them, and what’s the best way to help them so it’s not chaos. So we had our teams jump in cars and drive there, and they got there early the next morning and snapped into action helping them plan the service.
CODY KEENAN
That was a Friday, and we moved quickly. The eulogy was on Sunday,133 and that was extremely tough. How do you eulogize twenty little kids? Speechwriting is all about empathy. It’s about being able to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. But there are limits. If you don’t have children, there’s a limit to your empathy. You could do your best to imagine what a parent’s going through. Terry Szuplat suggested that bit about being a father is like “having your heart outside your body [all the time], walking around.” The president liked that and tweaked it a little bit. It was one of those speeches where he basically kept the first two pages intact and when he was in the car on the way to Newtown—it was a long drive from whatever airport we flew into—wrote a lot of it on yellow legal paper.
TERRY SZUPLAT
It’s something that I mentioned to Cody. Obviously I didn’t know if it was an actual quote that was attributed to anybody originally, but it’s certainly one of those phrases that I had heard before and always held on to. As a parent myself, it really captured the daily tension in your life as you wanted these little beings to be safe and protected but you also wanted them to go out into the world and be independent, and what that’s like, as a parent, to have to do that every day.