Double Down: Game Change 2012 (16 page)

The family never expected Mitt to run for office. Politics was not his passion growing up. But in 1994, shortly before his death, George Romney encouraged his son to challenge Senator Edward Kennedy. Eight years after being thrashed in that race, Romney won the Bay State’s governorship, and four years later he launched his presidential bid—announcing it in Michigan, where he’d never lived as an adult, in front of a Nash Rambler, the car central to his father’s turnaround of American Motors. The suspicion that Mitt was running to complete George’s legacy was hard to avoid.

The political world assumed that Romney would take another shot at the White House in 2012. But as 2008 turned to 2009, his ambivalence about the prospect was abiding—and much of it came down to Ann.

Romney met Ann Davies, a pretty, perky, non-Mormon blonde, in high school and had been doting on her ever since. She converted to his religion, and they raised five strapping sons, all now married and with kids of their own. Ann put Mitt at ease and brought him a kind of contentment that he experienced nowhere else: not in business, not in politics, not with close friends, of which he had remarkably few. Obligation, aspiration, and curiosity compelled his forays into public life, but those adventures always seemed vaguely forced. Mitt truly felt at home only when Ann was by his side, which was where he wanted her as much as possible, ideally all the time. She was his comfort zone.

The worst day of Mitt’s life was when Ann received her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis just before Thanksgiving 1998. For a time, she was desperate, scared, and very sick, but Mitt—and an array of treatments, from medication to reflexology, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy—brought her back to health. She was far more outwardly emotional than her husband and took the loss in 2008 harder than he did. When it was over, they discussed whether he would run again. Absolutely not, she said.

Just a couple of weeks after Election Day 2008, Ann learned that she had breast cancer. The doctors had caught it at stage zero, but she was terrified, having lost her mother and grandmother to ovarian cancer and her great-grandmother to breast cancer. Elizabeth Edwards phoned to talk through her own experiences with the disease. Obama called, too, to wish her a speedy recovery, which impressed Mitt. “Ann and I have you in our prayers,” he said.

Ann had a lumpectomy and received radiation treatment but was spared chemotherapy. Even so, her recovery that winter was slow. Her failure to snap back threw her husband and increased his sense that 2012 might not be in the cards. In the spring of 2009, they began a fresh chapter. They sold their hulking Colonial in Belmont, Massachusetts, their main residence for twenty years, and their chalet in Park City, Utah, leaving them with the places in La Jolla and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire—a home on each coast, both on the water, both idyllic.

The Romneys started talking about the new kind of life they could build around those abodes, especially the Wolfeboro compound. Mitt was sixty-two years old, with a couple hundred million dollars in the bank. He
could imagine a mellow, cozy semi-retirement, surrounded by a swarm of kids, grandkids, cousins, nieces, and nephews in the high Mormon fashion. Three of his sons were entrepreneurs; he could dabble in their firms. (
I’ll be an unpaid adviser,
he thought.
Or moderately paid.
) He took pleasure in the idea of being free of the responsibilities, anxieties, and colonoscopic scrutiny that politics entailed, not to mention the pressures of public performance, at which he floundered.

Exacerbating his ambivalence was the specter of another loss.
The odds of becoming your party’s nominee are never as good as fifty-fifty,
he thought.
Beating an incumbent president is hard to do
. Coming out of 2008, the conventional wisdom was that Obama would marshal an awesome array of reelection assets: his grassroots army, inspirational flair, and ability to raise funds—maybe $1 billion. Like the president, Romney was a competitive guy who hated losing even more than he relished winning. He had no desire to dive headlong into a propeller.

But Romney had told Rath that he wanted to “preserve the option,” and he meant it. For most of 2009, he retreated into semi-seclusion to write a book, as Rath suggested in his memo. Nothing bothered Mitt and Ann more than his having been painted a coreless opportunist during the campaign. Romney blamed himself for having failed to articulate his beliefs clearly and cleanly. The book would be a remedy for that blunder: a campaign manifesto if he ran again, pure catharsis if he didn’t. Eschewing treacly personal anecdotes, Romney focused on international and economic issues, laying down his positions in a flurry of mini-lectures. There was also a hefty dose of censure for Obama, with Romney singing in harmony with the Palin/Limbaugh/Fox News choir that the president was “eager to note all of America’s failings, real and perceived, and reluctant to speak out in defense of American values.”

The book’s working title was
The Pursuit of the Difficult,
which came from a bit of wisdom his father once imparted: “The pursuit of the difficult makes men stronger.” But Romney was unsatisfied with it. One day at a meeting with his aides before the manuscript shipped to the printer, a staffer piped up with
No Apology
—and Mitt was instantly sold.

Hawking
No Apology
was a whole other production. Romney knew that Palin, with her 2009 memoir
Going Rogue,
made it to number one on the
Times
best-seller list—and he was eager to match her. To get there, his people employed a variety of methods, some legit and many dodgy. His PAC set up a website, NoApology.com, to sell the book. On Romney’s book tour, some venues were required to buy copies in large numbers. On the lecture circuit, he would forgo his fee and have clients put the money toward book purchases. Mormon groups bought
No Apology
in quantity; so did Romney’s PAC. Mitt retained an expert who knew the tricks of the trade to shimmy a book onto the
Times
list.

The resulting fishy sales patterns did not go unnoticed. When a book’s ranking was the result of bulk orders, the Paper of Record denoted that with a dagger symbol. When
No Apology
debuted at number one in March 2010, there were double daggers.

•   •   •

B
Y THEN ROMNEY WAS
doing more than writing to preserve the option. At the cramped, drab PAC headquarters in Lexington, he installed a passel of his top advisers from 2008. To run the shop, he tapped Rhoades, a thirty-six-year-old from upstate New York with a pronounced air of imperturbability but a temper below the surface. Rhoades’s orientation was tactical and operational—he was a pure mechanic. He had earned his bones as a dirt-digger, running opposition research for the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. He was famous for having a direct pipeline to Matt Drudge; colleagues claimed (only half-jokingly) that he had a chat window on his computer open 24/7 with the freak show’s primo online impresario. Averse to publicity, allergic to appearing on TV, Rhoades had cultivated a Keyser Söze–ish mystique. Romney liked him for his loyalty, discipline, and intense focus.

The hiring of Rhoades was one sign that Romney was starting to cast an eye toward 2012, but there were others. He dispatched his close friend and former Bain partner Bob White to travel around the country and conduct more postmortems to glean lessons from the last campaign. Mitt had been despised by his 2008 rivals, not just McCain, for his slashing attacks and apparent lack of conviction. Now he reached out to Giuliani and Huckabee to mend fences (and subtly gauge their intentions about running again). That summer, Mitt trouped a parade of donors up to Wolfeboro, taking
them on boat rides, feeding them crab salad, and telling them he wouldn’t put in his own money this time—if he ran. He invited reporters to off-the-record barbecues by the lake and dinners in D.C. He knew they considered him distant and robotic, and he wanted to combat that perception. (Success rate: low.)

With the 2010 midterms ahead, Romney also tapped his donor network, turning his PAC into a powerhouse, establishing offshoots in New Hampshire and Iowa that allowed him to tiptoe around donation limits to local officials. Largely under the radar, he hit the trail on behalf of congressional and state-level candidates, doing more than a hundred events in thirty states, handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to the likes of future governors Nikki Haley, in South Carolina, and Terry Branstad, in Iowa.

The ramp-up in Romney’s political activities coincided with two developments, the first being his swelling sense of Obama’s deficiencies. On policy, Romney disagreed with most of what the president had done, from the fatback-festooned stimulus to the heavy-handed Dodd-Frank reform. He disdained the fervidly partisan approach that the supposedly post-partisan Obama had taken on health care reform and so much else. And then there was the BP oil spill. As governor, Romney had always been hands-on, from micromanaging the plows when blizzards came to personally overseeing the crisis when a concrete panel collapsed in Boston’s Fort Point Channel Tunnel in 2006. On learning that many weeks had passed after the Deepwater Horizon explosion without Obama calling BP’s CEO, Romney barked, “He’s the leader of the free world! He hasn’t picked up the phone?”

The second development was the rise of the Tea Party. That January, Romney had been among the earliest supporters of Scott Brown, the Republican candidate in a special election to fill the Senate vacancy created by Ted Kennedy’s death. With the Tea Party rallying to Brown’s side and opposition to Obamacare at the center of his campaign, the Republican’s victory was an indication of the president’s vulnerability and the movement’s gathering force. And while Romney was not in sync with its hot-eyed fury, he thought the Tea Party’s focus on spending, deficits, and debt played to his strengths.

Yet Romney’s ambivalence remained—unspooling in ways that would later haunt him. Out in La Jolla, he was planning a renovation of Fin de la Senda. It was by no means a mansion, at three thousand square feet and
with three bedrooms, hardly enough room for his and Ann’s sons, daughters-in-law, and sixteen grandkids to visit. On top of that, the house was at the end of a pinched cul-de-sac in a neighborhood virtually devoid of street parking. Romney wanted to bulldoze the structure and build a new one with nearly four times the space, including an expanded split-level garage with a hydraulic lift to move cars around inside.

Romney knew he would be criticized for the elaborateness of the construction when the plans became public, as they surely would—if he ran. And he knew that if he won the presidency, it would all be for naught, because the Secret Service could never protect the house: it was on a public beach. But when some of his aides, including Fehrnstrom and Rhoades, suggested he put the renovation on hold, Romney squirmed and went looking for the answer he wanted to hear, turning to Stuart Stevens.

Stevens had been a part of Romney’s media team in 2008, providing an idiosyncratic voice that had often been drowned out. Since then, however, he increasingly had Mitt’s ear.

“Should I not build this house?” Romney asked Stevens.

You don’t know if you’re gonna run, Stevens said. You know you’re gonna be alive. There are a million reasons for people not to vote for you. If you run, they’re gonna say you’re rich. You
are
rich. If you want to build a house, you should build a house. “You’ve got to live your life,” he said.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY INVITED STEVENS AND
his business partner, Russ Schriefer, to have lunch with him in Belmont, where he and Ann had recently purchased a modest townhouse in a condominium complex. (For more than a year after selling their old Belmont digs, the couple claimed a basement flat in their son Tagg’s nearby home as their legal Massachusetts residence.) It was November 2, 2010, midterm Election Day, and Romney was starting to get antsy about making the decision he had put off for so long. He had a job offer to extend to the consultants—conditionally.

One of Romney’s insights from his and White’s autopsy of 2008 was that his campaign had been plagued by too much talent. He had approached his candidacy as if it were a Bain consulting project: throwing bodies and big brains at the endeavor. Romney didn’t mind a cacophony of brilliant
if conflicting voices. He liked to bring clever people together, let them duke it out at length. But he also had a tendency to vacillate, to want more data, to reprise every internal debate. Taken together, these elements had yielded paralysis, pettifoggery, and a terminally muddy message. This time (if there was a this time), Romney swore that his outfit would be lean and mean instead of top-heavy, and guided by a single and singular chief strategist.

The Svengali Romney wanted for 2012 was Mike Murphy, a rumpled, blond, forty-eight-year-old image maker based in Los Angeles. Murphy’s résumé was replete with high-profile clients: John McCain, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the sharp-elbowed world of political hired guns, he had as many detractors as admirers, but no one gainsaid his self-promotional chops. Glib and quotable, Murphy was a frequent TV presence, a kind of Republican James Carville—but with irony and sarcasm substituting for bug-eyed apoplexy. He cheerfully trumpeted his reputation as Murphy the Mudslinger; for a time, the vanity plates on his Porsche read
GO NEG
.

Murphy had masterminded Romney’s successful 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But in 2008, with two former clients in the presidential hunt, he sat on the sidelines, to Romney’s great regret. Ever since, in e-mails, phone calls, and in-person meetings, the governor had labored to draw Murphy back into the fold. Tagg Romney paid a recruiting visit to the consultant in L.A., double-teaming him.

Murphy was happy on the West Coast, working various Hollywood angles. The idea of moving to Boston struck him as a stone-cold bummer, but he gave the matter serious consideration. He liked Romney, thought he would make a good president. The trouble was that the governor had surrounded himself with mediocrities. Murphy told Romney that if he took the job, he would want to fire half of his team. Mitt blenched. Maybe you could find a way to work with everybody, he said weakly.