Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (20 page)

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Christie began to solicit advice about what a campaign would entail. The process lasted many weeks. He said he talked to Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, and Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman who had managed Bush’s 2004 campaign. He spoke with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who had run unsuccessfully in 2008 for the Republican nomination. Then one day he got a call from George W. Bush. “He said, ‘I’m sitting on the front porch at Kennebunkport, got some time, wanna talk?’ ‘Yes sir, Mr. President, sure,’” Christie said he replied. “We spoke for probably about forty-five minutes and he just gave me his observations and his advice, didn’t say anything like you should or you shouldn’t, didn’t say he’d be with me or not, just kind of gave me his observations about what he felt the state of the race was, what he thought it would take for somebody like me to get into the race at that point, and then kind of practical things to consider. And he kind of asked me then what was I thinking, what were the impediments in my mind, what were the concerns, so that he could try to play a sounding board for me on that. It was an amazing conversation.”

Christie called Palatucci. “I was down on the Jersey shore,” Palatucci said. “He called me late that evening and told me he had just gotten off the phone with President Bush. That made him stand up and take notice. Obviously you were talking about someone who had been through the fire of making that decision and then running, and getting the perspective of someone who had been there and done that was very helpful. The president I think helped him to provide a structure for making the decision in his own head. Again, because
the president was taking him so seriously, Chris in his own mind said, ‘If people are taking me seriously, I’ve got to take it seriously.’”

Mary Pat Christie was at work on the trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald one day when the phone rang. It was Barbara Bush, who had spoken to her son about his conversation with Christie and decided to call Mary Pat. She took no position about whether the governor should run but sought to reassure Christie’s wife that living in the White House with children was, on balance, a plus, that she had seen the benefits in her two granddaughters, and that from all she knew about the Christies, they could keep their children well grounded in that environment. “Mary Pat had about a ten-minute conversation with her and called me up and it was probably the most exciting moment of the process for Mary Pat,” Christie said. “She called me here [at the governor’s office] and I’m sitting at the desk and she said, ‘You won’t believe who just called me!’ I’m like, ‘Who now?’ I’m thinking it’s another incredibly rich person who’s trying to convince her that she should get in my ear and get me to run. She’s like, ‘Barbara Bush called me.’”

The previous April, Christie had received a handwritten note from Nancy Reagan inviting him to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. The event had been on the governor’s schedule for months, set for September 27, 2011. With presidential discussions swirling, everyone around Christie knew the speech would dramatically feed public speculation that he might enter the race after all. Christie also knew that the speech he intended to deliver, in which he would sharply criticize the president, would only add to the frenzy. “I didn’t want to come to the Reagan Library and not talk about issues that are bigger than just ‘here’s what’s happened in New Jersey the last year and a half.’ We consciously made the decision—this is before the Langone meeting—that we wanted to have a speech that was kind of giving my perspective on foreign policy but from a different perspective, that we’re failing at foreign policy because we’re failing at home, and that until we get our act together at home we cannot be a dominant force for good in the world because people won’t want to emulate us.” Christie said he considered whether to scrap that speech and just talk about New Jersey, but decided to proceed with his original speech. “But I knew that the cost of that was you had like a week after the Reagan speech to make a decision and then you were going to start to annoy people,” he said.

Christie recalled the trip to California as one of the most exhilarating experiences of his life. The director of the library met him and Mary Pat, and as they came around the first corner they could hear the strains of “Hail to the Chief” and Reagan taking the oath of office. Palatucci noticed that the
Christies were holding hands throughout the entire tour. Nancy Reagan then came to see them. “She came and sat down next to me and she said, ‘You know, this is the fastest sellout we’ve had in the history of these talks at the museum?’ I said, ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that, Mrs. Reagan.’ She says, ‘Hmmm, that says something, doesn’t it, Governor?’ ‘Yes ma’am, I guess.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Do you know this is the second most press credentials ever asked for for a museum speech, except for when President Bush 43 came here to speak?’ I said, ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that either.’ She goes, ‘Hmmm, a lot of excitement tonight, do you have a good speech?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ She says, ‘It better be.’”

That night he slowly escorted the former First Lady into the room where he was to speak. “Reagan is the first guy I voted for when I was a freshman in college, so there was a lot of emotion running through me,” he said. “And then the last thing she said to me was, we sat down and the director of the museum was giving my introduction and she turned to me and she said, ‘Do you see that podium?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She goes, ‘That was one of Ronnie’s podiums from the White House.’ I said, ‘Really?’ She goes, ‘Uh-huh.’ I sat there for a second and I just turned to her and I said, ‘You’re bad, you know that?’ She had this big smile on her face. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

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The speech came little more than a month after the collapse of the debt ceiling negotiations in Washington. Christie slammed Obama and the climate of governing in the nation’s capital, which he compared unfavorably to New Jersey. “Still we continue to wait and hope that our president will finally stop being a bystander in the Oval Office,” he said. “We hope that he will shake off the paralysis that has made it impossible for him to take on the really big things that are obvious to all Americans and to a watching and anxious world community.” In the question-and-answer period, he got a predictable question about running for president. He encouraged everyone to look at a video compilation of his various expressions of disinterest that had been posted on
Politico
’s Web site. But he was stopped short when a woman in the balcony pleaded with him to run. “We can’t wait another four years to 2016,” she said. “I really implore you as a citizen of this country to please, sir, to reconsider.” When she finished, the audience rose spontaneously and applauded. “It’s extraordinarily flattering,” Christie said in response. “But by the same token, that heartfelt message you gave me is also not a reason for me to do it. That reason has to reside in me.”

On the flight home, Christie said he talked with his father: “He said to me, ‘Let me just ask you something, do you love your job?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said to me, ‘You’re forty-eight years old, why are you leaving it if you love it? If you love
a job at forty-eight years old why are you leaving it?’” The following Tuesday, October 4, Christie held a press conference to announce, for the last time, that he would not run for the nomination.

Toward the end of our interview, I asked him whether he saw that decision as a gift to Mitt Romney, who was now freed of another potentially strong rival for the nomination. “The enormous gift was the next week,” he replied. When I looked puzzled, he reminded me that he had endorsed Romney the following week. “For me to make that decision that quickly and to be willing to put myself out there for him that early, when no one else really had, I think was a real leap of faith and a gift politically because nobody else was willing to do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t have used the word ‘gift,’ but since you did it seems to fit, it seems appropriate.” The weekend after his decision, after a call from Romney, Christie and his wife hosted Mitt and Ann Romney for lunch at their home. “We talked for two hours before we finally got to the point,” Christie said, “and he just said to me, ‘You know, I’d love to know what I need to do to get you on the team.’ I said, ‘Nothing, I’m in.’ He got this shocked look on his face and he turned to Ann almost as validation that his ears had worked right, and she had this big smile on her face and she was nodding. And he looked at me and said, ‘What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘You don’t have to do anything.’ ‘You want to be national chairman of the campaign?’ I said, ‘No. Use that title for somebody who you need to use it for to get them. I’m in.’ He turned to Ann and he said, ‘Wow, Christmas in October,’ and she smiled and she looked at me and she said, ‘Governor, you don’t know how important and big this is,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”

First Casualty

I
n the spring of 2010, Mitt Romney came to Minnesota during the promotional tour for his book,
No Apology
. While there he spent some time with Tim Pawlenty, who was in his second term as governor. The two men knew and liked each other, having both been elected in 2002. They were a pair of Republican leaders in northern, traditionally Democratic states. Both were weighing campaigns for the White House in 2012. Pawlenty invited Romney back to the governor’s residence, where they talked that day not as potential rivals but as friends. Romney was not dismissive of the younger man’s ambitions or prospects and offered advice based on his own unsuccessful campaign in 2008. The most important thing, he told Pawlenty, was to build a campaign structure that could withstand the adversities of a long and grueling battle. “He had done it before and we talked about the magnitude of the effort financially, the magnitude of the effort organizationally, the magnitude of the effort personally, and the importance of having all the tools to go the distance,” Pawlenty later recalled. “Clearly that was one thing he was trying to convey to me.”

Pawlenty’s goal was the same as every other Republican who gave consideration to running in 2012, which was to become the alternative to Mitt Romney. He would need to draw attention to himself as early as possible, as Romney had done in 2008, to establish his political and financial credentials as a potential top-tier candidate. His path to the nomination, like that of other underdogs of the past, depended on the strongest possible finish in the Iowa caucuses. He believed if he moved quickly, he could attract support from Tea Party activists who were skeptical of Romney because of the Massachusetts health care plan, from social and religious conservatives who doubted that Romney’s conversions on some of their issues were genuine, and from establishment Republicans who found Romney not to their liking. “We thought that if that non-Mitt space could be aggregated early enough and strong enough, you could put together a viable candidacy,” Pawlenty said. Neither he nor his advisers could foresee the potentially catastrophic consequences of acting on those assumptions in a year that would play out against all conventional expectations.

The early months of the Republican race were in many ways the story of what happened to Tim Pawlenty, because his story so clearly helps to explain the unusual nature of the Republican nomination contest. Pawlenty had modeled his campaign on dark horse candidates of the past. Given his limited resources and lack of national recognition, he had no other choice. But he never gave his candidacy what Romney had advised, which was the wherewithal to go the distance. His failure was one more stroke of good fortune for Romney.

Instead of building a campaign capable of surviving, Pawlenty ended up with one that bent with the first signs of trouble and eventually crumpled under the weight of unexpected setbacks, internal tensions, miscalculations, and mistakes. A year and a few months after he and Romney had talked about what it would take to mount a successful candidacy, Pawlenty’s campaign for president was in ruins as he became the first of the announced candidates to quit the race. Pawlenty was gone so quickly that he became an asterisk in the campaign. This was a great irony, because in Boston he was regarded as the one likely candidate who might be able to fill the “not Mitt” slot, gain traction, and go the distance. Romney advisers worried about what might happen if Pawlenty began to catch fire. “We always viewed Governor Pawlenty as the strongest, most viable Romney alternative,” said Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, “and we always felt that if he got up around Mitt and ended up winning the Iowa caucuses, he was the type of candidate who could do what we failed to do the last time. That he could come out of Iowa and be a candidate who could then win New Hampshire. He could box us out and he could take over a lot of Mitt Romney space, and that would be a dangerous thing.”

Though Pawlenty and Romney were governors of blue states, the similarities mostly stopped there. Pawlenty had none of the privileged aura that Romney exuded. He was blue-collar, not blueblood. He grew up the youngest of five children in South St. Paul, a community of stockyards, Catholic and Orthodox churches, Serbian and Croatian halls.
Former Minnesota senator David Durenberger
once said of Pawlenty’s hometown, “It was the [Minnesota] Iron Range shrunk to the size of one city.” Pawlenty’s family was classic Reagan Democrat—working class, Roman Catholic, socially conservative—who eventually migrated to the Republican Party. His father was a truck driver, his mother a homemaker. She died when Pawlenty was sixteen, but not before she had made clear her desire to see him become the first in the family to go to college. In high school, he was a good student, active in sports—hockey and soccer—but not stamped with obvious future success. Doug Woog, a South St. Paul native and later hockey coach at the University of Minnesota, once told the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
that rather than seeing Pawlenty as the “most likely to succeed” in his high school class, he would have tagged him as “most unlikely to
become governor.” “
Not because he was negative
, but because he wasn’t flamboyant,” Woog said. “This must be inside [of him], the drive.”

An internship in Durenberger’s Washington office pushed Pawlenty toward a career in politics. Marriage to Mary Anderson, whom he met in law school, prompted him to leave the Catholic Church to become a member of the evangelical congregation at Wooddale Church in the Twin Cities suburb of Eden Prairie. In 2002, he was elected governor in a three-way race, winning with 46 percent of the vote. He succeeded Jesse Ventura, the independent former wrestler whose publicity-hungry style contrasted sharply with the modest sensibilities of Pawlenty. Minnesota had elected other Republican governors, but none as conservative as Pawlenty. Facing a Democratic legislature, he held the line in his first year against tax increases to deal with a sizable budget deficit that he inherited. He took a hard line during a transportation strike and won. As a Republican in a Democratic state, he could see earlier than many others in his party the wave building in 2006 and felt his party was indifferent to its problems. He gently prodded Republicans to wake up and braced himself for a difficult reelection. He won a second term by just one percentage point after his Democratic opponent imploded in the final week of the campaign. Two years later, he had vetoed thirty-four bills, a gubernatorial record.

After his reelection in 2006, he began to try to raise his national profile. South St. Paul became Pawlenty’s calling card as he tried to nudge his party away from its image as the party of the rich. In reality, the party was changing. His roots mirrored the shift within the party to a base that now included more of the white working-class voters who populated the town where he grew up, who made up his own family. Republicans, he said, should become the party of Sam’s Club, not the country club. In 2008, he was the runner-up to Sarah Palin in the vice presidential sweepstakes, a competition that in the final stages also included Romney.

Pawlenty left the 2008 campaign empty-handed, but with an appetite to run in 2012. First he had to decide whether to seek a third term as governor in 2010. He sought advice from others, including some who had faced a similar decision. He recalled that one former governor told him, “My third term wasn’t my best work. I wouldn’t recommend it.” Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman, told him, “No good comes from a third term,” according to Pawlenty. In Pawlenty’s mind, the choice was to run either for president or for a third term as governor. Like Romney four years earlier, he did not believe he could do both. Had he known that Republicans would capture control of the Minnesota legislature in 2010, he later said, he might have made a different decision. Instead, on June 2, 2009, Pawlenty announced he would not seek a third term.

As he mulled whether to run for president, Pawlenty also sought out Mike Huckabee, who had begun his 2008 campaign as a little-known former governor. What Huckabee told him weighed on Pawlenty throughout his campaign for the White House. Huckabee, who like Pawlenty was of modest means as a governor, ended his 2008 campaign with his bank account virtually depleted. He told Pawlenty, Make sure you’ve got some financial sturdiness under you, because this can get very demanding on your family and on you financially. Otherwise, in the middle of the campaign, you’ll be running off to give a speech to the coconut producers somewhere. Pawlenty and his wife persuaded themselves that they had enough at least to start a campaign. But money was always an issue for Pawlenty.

As he sized up the potential field, Pawlenty doubted that any of those most likely to run, other than Romney, could ever become president. (He didn’t think either Barbour or Daniels would become candidates.) His advisers came up with the slogan they wished they could use to become the alternative to the front-runner: “Pawlenty. Because there’s no one else.”

He wrote a book,
Courage to Stand,
and in the first weeks of 2011 did an obligatory tour to attract publicity. On March 21, 2011, he formed a presidential exploratory committee. His embryonic campaign began to produce a series of Web videos, created by then twenty-three-year-old Lucas Baiano, which quickly became the talk of the political community. They included dramatic musical scores that seemed more Hollywood than Washington. As iconic American images flashed across the screen, Pawlenty’s amped-up voice provided a message of strength and fortitude: “Valley Forge wasn’t easy. Going to the moon wasn’t easy. Settling the West wasn’t easy. We are the American people. We have seen difficulties before and we have always overcome them. This is about rolling up our sleeves . . . putting our head down, and getting it done.” The videos seemed the antithesis of the candidate. He had more fire as a speaker than he was often given credit for, but he could get lost in a party that included media magnets like Sarah Palin and Chris Christie.
On one occasion
during the 2010 campaign, he nearly faded from view on a stage in his own state when he joined Palin at a reelection rally for Michele Bachmann. “Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann Rally Thousands in Minneapolis,” CBS News reported on its Web site.

Pawlenty formally announced his candidacy on May 23, 2011, at a rally in Des Moines. His advisers called the announcement tour “A Time for Truth.” He came out against ethanol subsidies in Iowa. He told senior citizens in Florida that it was time to means-test Social Security. In New York, he told the financial community there should be no more bailouts and that the era of too big to fail was over. In Washington, his last major stop, he took a hard line
against federal workers’ salaries and benefits. Two weeks later, he delivered a speech about the economy at the University of Chicago, where he called for deep cuts in taxes and spending and a reduction in government regulations. He said the country should not be satisfied with the 2 percent growth rates that existed under Obama. “Let’s grow the economy by 5 percent,” he said. The wildly ambitious target drew criticism from many economists and editorial writers, but conservative economists and commentators widely praised the speech as a rebirth of supply-side economics.
CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow
called it a “blockbuster” of a speech.
Jack Welch, the former CEO
at General Electric, said on CNN, “Everything I see [him] say in the last month appeals to me.”

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Never before had debates played such a central role in presidential campaigns as in 2012. They had become a staple of nomination and general election battles dating back decades, and virtually every campaign included memorable moments from candidate forums. There was Ronald Reagan’s “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green” moment in Nashua, New Hampshire, in early 1980. There was Walter Mondale putting down Gary Hart in 1984 with “Where’s the Beef?” There was Michael Dukakis’s halting answer to a question of what he would do if his wife were brutally raped and murdered. There was Dan Quayle rebuked as “no Jack Kennedy” by Lloyd Bentsen. Barack Obama, never a skilled debater, uttered his most memorable and self-damaging line in a debate in New Hampshire days after his victory in the Iowa caucuses when he turned to Hillary Rodham Clinton and said, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” By 2008, debates had proliferated in both parties. They were generally unwieldy and more often than not unsatisfying for the candidates, six or nine or more of whom were arrayed across a stage, mostly looking to avoid a gaffe and if possible put an opponent in an awkward position.

That’s what everyone expected again in the 2012 Republican nomination contest: sideshows. Instead, debates became a dominant feature of the campaign, reality TV shows for millions of Americans who followed them week by week, and above all a proving ground for candidates unlike anything seen before. They were often hilarious, sometimes bizarre, always entertaining, and sometimes decisive in winnowing the field of candidates. Cable networks competed to stage the debates, knowing they would produce audience and ratings. Some networks partnered with state Republican parties or Tea Party affiliates and filled the hall with rabid partisans who hooted and cheered or booed the participants, adding to the feel that the debate was an extension of some ancient spectacle of gladiators clashing to the death. CNN debates opened with packaged introductions of the candidates more fitting of the Super Bowl or professional wrestling than the nomination of a major-party candidate for
president. Boxing metaphors ran rampant in the pre-debate chatter on television. Performance, not substance, became the measure for judging.

The candidates teamed together to fight back against the debate sponsors, who determined which candidates would and would not be invited, where they would stand on the stage (generally determined by the most recent polls), and the format and ground rules for questioning. When the
Washington Post
and Bloomberg News teamed up to sponsor a debate on economic issues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in October 2011, there was a lengthy and sometimes contentious negotiation over a proposal for a segment in which candidates would be allowed to question one another. The candidates’ representatives hated the idea. They argued that this would turn the debate into a food fight, as Romney’s lead debate negotiator, Ben Ginsberg, argued repeatedly in calls and e-mails with me and Bloomberg’s Al Hunt. The segment went ahead as planned. But the conflict between the campaigns and the sponsors reflected everyone’s appreciation that the debates could have enormous influence on the outcome of the nomination battle.