Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (33 page)

A Romney adviser e-mailed me two days later to take issue with the criticism of the speech. “The subject of this speech is much more about the nature of conservatism and a challenge to conservatives that this next election is a test of an ability to lead, a test that implicitly has been met with mixed results in prior elections. Romney is not tying himself in knots trying to be like many in the crowd. In fact, he is explicitly saying that [they] may come from different backgrounds. And he is offering a criticism of the professional conservative DC class.” He added, “It’s a simple fact that Romney has received more conservative votes than any candidate in the R[epublican] primary, so it’s hard to argue that conservatives have a huge problem with Romney. I believe that a great deal of this comes from the dynamic not so much that Romney isn’t a conservative but that Romney is not one of them or does not seem dependent upon their approval. . . . They want to be the vetting authority. Never mind that they never meet voters.”

Romney had good reason to be nervous. A public poll of Michigan
Republicans taken at the weekend by Public Policy Polling showed Santorum leading Romney by fifteen points. The campaign’s internal poll taken a few days later put Santorum’s advantage at eight points—enormously troubling to his team for a state where he had deep family roots and had won in 2008. Katie Packer Gage, who was directing the Michigan effort, was deeply worried and during one morning staff meeting let her emotions get the better of her. “I felt like nobody thought we could win Michigan,” she later said. “And I believed that if we lost Michigan that our campaign could be over. Pretty tough to explain to our donors how he would lose a state he won the time before and a state where his dad had been governor and a state we had always sort of said we were going to win. We were very committed to that.” Rich Beeson sent her an e-mail at the end of the meeting: Hang in there, he said.

Until now, Santorum had had the luxury of picking his battles as Romney fought state by state. This was another oddity of the 2012 Republican race. Challengers came and went and came back again as the most conservative voters swung back and forth in what seemed an unfocused search for an alternative to the front-runner. Had the old rules applied, Santorum would have been dealt out of the race after South Carolina, having failed miserably to capitalize on his surprise showing in Iowa. But those rules were out the window in 2012. Now, however, Santorum could not avoid certain confrontations with Romney. He could duck Arizona, but not Michigan.

•   •   •

Michigan was the first state in the Republican race where the president’s bailout of the auto industry came into play. Romney was a car guy but a small government businessman as well. He had opposed the government bailout of the industry, a position widely shared among conservatives even though the infusion of money had begun under George W. Bush. Romney wrote an op-ed for the
New York Times
in November 2008, before Obama was even sworn in, opposing more government funds and calling for a managed bankruptcy. He submitted the article just after auto executives had testified in Washington asking for more help—having flown in on their private jets in a display of arrogance that turned their appearance into a public relations disaster. “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye,” Romney wrote. “It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” The headline, which Romney did not write, left a killer impression: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Whenever Romney or his surrogates went to Michigan, all reporters wanted to talk about was his position on the bailout. Santorum too had opposed what Obama did, but on bailouts he at least could argue that he was consistent. He had also opposed the bank bailout. Romney had supported
bailing out the banks but not the auto companies. Santorum said Romney was for helping Wall Street while leaving to fend for itself the industry that defined his home state and that had brought power, financial security, and prominence to his father.

Santorum’s challenge to Romney, unlike all the others he had faced, seemed to offer the purest example yet in the nomination contest of the long-simmering conflict between the GOP’s business and populist wings, the party establishment and its insurgent grass roots, the country clubbers and the religious conservatives. Perry once had the potential to lead that fight against Romney but fizzled as a candidate. Santorum, through dogged determination and little more, now had the opportunity—if he could take advantage of it. One senior Romney adviser said, “It was not inconceivable that the Republican Party could nominate Rick Santorum, whereas I think we all thought that it would be a stretch for the Republican Party to nominate Newt.” Romney’s team went to work to prevent a potentially devastating defeat. In the words of one adviser, “We built a fortress around Michigan. Mitt was there. Ann was there. We were in every media market. We were in every corner of the state.” Another adviser described the strategy this way: “Campaign hard, campaign real hard. I mean, just campaign as much as we could in Michigan. Upped our media buys some. Really worked our local surrogates, our talk radio surrogates. Worked out endorsement networks. But just to try to flood the zone as much as we could.”

Romney and his team made one other crucial decision as they looked at the challenge from Santorum, a choice that bought short-term advantages in exchange for long-term problems. The week before the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Romney unveiled a new tax plan that called for cutting marginal income tax rates an additional 20 percent. That would reduce the rate on the highest earners from 35 percent, the level where it had stood since George W. Bush’s presidency, down to 28 percent. Romney said he would avoid enlarging the deficit or giving a special break to wealthy taxpayers by eliminating unspecified deductions and exempting those earning less than $200,000 from capital gains taxes while maintaining them on wealthier taxpayers. There were several motivations for a more detailed tax plan, but the timing was dictated by the emergence of Santorum, whom Romney labeled “an economic lightweight,” as a credible challenger. Romney was looking for other ways to prove to conservatives that he was truly one of them. “There were certainly some economic conservatives that thought pretty strongly that we need a more forceful articulation of a tax reform proposal,” one Romney adviser said. “But there was also a sense beyond what everyone else may have been saying that if we were going to be the candidate of the economy and of improving the economy, it was going to be hard to advance that discussion much further without fleshing out the tax
discussion.” Romney’s team saw it for what it was politically. As the adviser put it, “This was going to be the coup de grâce in some ways. And I think it was very helpful in the primary. There’s no question about it.”

•   •   •

The only debate ahead of the two primaries was held February 22 in Mesa, Arizona. As in Florida, Romney came well prepared with an intimate knowledge of Santorum’s record in Congress. Santorum had spent much of the day campaigning. He was always indifferent to debate preparation and paid a high price for his failure to anticipate Romney’s attacks and work up responses. “This day particularly was in my mind idiotic because they flew and did events in multiple cities and [that] should never have been the case,” Brabender said. “We would do debate prep right before the debate, literally, and he had not had a chance to read the material that was put together for him.”

Santorum had never been in a debate like this in the presidential campaign. Most times he struggled to get the attention of the moderator as he begged to be heard. In Mesa, he was the target of all the attacks. Romney sought to revive his campaign by destroying his opponent’s credibility as a fiscal conservative and by painting Santorum as another deal-cutting Washington insider. He attacked Santorum for supporting earmarks, and when Santorum noted that Romney had sought federal money to help the Salt Lake City Olympics, Romney responded, “When I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere.” Romney tripped Santorum up over his true feelings about Title X family planning funding. When Santorum said he had supported it because it was part of a larger appropriation, Romney countered by saying he had recently watched a clip of Santorum stating positively that he had supported Title X itself, not because it was included in a larger bill. Santorum tried to put Romney on the defensive over the Massachusetts health care plan, but he was up against a superior candidate that night. Santorum’s worst moment came when the discussion turned to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reform, which most conservatives now saw as a usurpation of the rights of states, localities, and parents to run their schools. “I have to admit, I voted for that,” Santorum said. “It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.” The audience began to boo him.

Santorum finished the debate believing he had dealt with that question effectively, by suggesting that while he thought the measure could be improved, it was better than nothing at all. “When he came off the stage he thought he did beautifully with that answer,” recalled Hogan Gidley, Santorum’s spokesman. “He said it was a signature piece of legislation for a Republican president. They understand that. I said, ‘No, they don’t understand.’” Brabender said of
the debate, “Rick was tired, did not prepare particularly well, and was also the centerpiece. You had Romney, who frankly was a little bit on the ropes at that time. They did the right thing. They spent, they prepared well, Romney had a good performance. We didn’t. Do I think it affected some votes? Absolutely.”

•   •   •

Over the next few days, neither candidate looked like a winner. Romney scheduled a “major speech” on the economy for Friday, February 24, before the Detroit Economic Club. But he had already unveiled the guts of the speech, his new tax plan. The day’s story became a logistical foul-up that left the candidate speaking to his audience on the artificial turf of Ford Field, the Detroit Lions’ football stadium, with more than sixty thousand empty seats visible all around him. When one of the club officials enthusiastically showed the venue to Katie Packer Gage, she responded, “I don’t know. All I can see are sixty thousand empty seats. Can you send some clowns in here so the press will be distracted?” Reporters tweeted photos throughout the speech. Then came questions and answers, and more trouble. “This feels good, being back in Michigan,” Romney said, trying to play the hometown candidate. “You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just fine.” He had used those lines before, but not what came next. “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles,” he said. “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” Once again, inexplicably, he had stumbled into the stereotype his campaign was trying to avoid.

The next morning, Santorum made his own mess. Speaking at a conference sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group funded in large part by the Koch brothers, he was trying to highlight his blue-collar heritage by talking about his grandfather, a coal miner. He launched into an attack on the country’s elites. “Elites come up with phony ideologies and phony ideas to rob you of your freedom and impose government control on your lives.” So far not so bad, but then this: “President Obama once said he wants everyone to go to college,” he said. And then, oozing contempt, he added, “What a snob!” The conservative, Obama-hating audience loved it, but it was obviously a major mistake on Santorum’s part. The next day he made another. On ABC’s
This Week
program, host George Stephanopoulos asked him about a comment he had made about John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to Baptist ministers in the 1960 campaign, in which Kennedy had talked about his Catholic faith and his belief in the separation of church and state. Santorum had said watching the speech made him want to vomit. Stephanopoulos asked why. “Because the first line, the first substantive line in the speech says, ‘I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,’” Santorum said. “I don’t believe in an
America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . You bet that makes you throw up.” The back-to-back comments underscored the absence of message discipline by the candidate and made clear he had no strategy for or even interest in reaching beyond his narrow base.

As the primary day neared, the polls in Michigan tightened. A week out, Romney’s polling showed that his deficit was now just three points. A few days later, Romney’s numbers showed him leading Santorum by three points. Santorum’s negatives had doubled in that time, though Republicans still had a mostly positive impression of him, as they did of Romney. The more people were hearing from Santorum, the more unfavorably they viewed him. By the weekend before the primary, Romney’s advisers were increasingly confident. Then, by Monday, they were nervous again. “I’m not sure any of us understand what’s happening,” said one Romney adviser I talked to that day. “I don’t think anybody puts this away easily.” He was puzzled at how candidates who in past campaigns would have been out of the race were able to keep going. “Gingrich is still being treated as a significant figure and he only won one state and he isn’t even playing right now,” he said. “We were in a stronger position four years ago and [yet] we were out of the race. . . . And yes, some of this is us. We haven’t lit up. Mitt Mania has been kept under restraint.”

On the Sunday before the primary, Romney’s team decided to send him to the Daytona 500. It would be a way to show his affinity for cars and for a constituency important to the Republican Party. But the weather was rainy enough to wash out the race, and Romney managed to commit another of his verbal gaffes. As he was having his picture taken, someone asked him about his connection to NASCAR racing. “I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners,” he replied. By the time he returned to Michigan, Romney was in a bad mood, believing he had wasted the day when he could have been campaigning in Michigan, where it counted. On primary day, he spoke with his traveling press corps. One reporter asked what he would say to Republicans who were critical that he so far had not been able to excite the party’s base. “You know, it’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments,” he replied. “We’ve seen throughout the campaign that if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative and attacking of President Obama that you’re going to jump up in the polls. You know, I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am.” Another reporter asked whether he realized that comments like those he had made about his wife’s two Cadillacs and the NASCAR team owners were hurting him. “Yes. Next question,” he replied. Then a reporter tried to follow up about Romney not being willing to light his hair on fire. That produced, finally, a touch of humor. “I’m not going
to do it,” the gelled candidate said. “I don’t care how hard you ask. It would be a big fire, I assure you.”