Double Down: Game Change 2012 (18 page)

It was the morning of April 8, 2011, opening day at Fenway Park, a few blocks away. Arrayed around Kaufman’s living room were Mitt, Ann, and the members of the Romney high command. For the next few hours, they would run through pretty much everything about the campaign ahead, from message and money to calendar and competitors, actual and potential. Three days from now, they would announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee, and soon after that shift their base of operations from Lexington to Boston’s North End, where they had rented the same building on Commercial Street that had housed Romney’s effort in 2008. Final check-off time was upon them.

Almost everyone in the room had served Romney since the last campaign or even further back. In addition to functioning as chief strategist, Stevens would oversee advertising along with Schriefer; Rhoades would manage the campaign. A trio of Bostonian arch-loyalists would act as senior advisers: Beth Myers, a seasoned jack-of-all-trades who had served as Mitt’s statehouse chief of staff and run the 2008 campaign; Peter Flaherty, a former homicide prosecutor and a rare social conservative in Mitt’s orbit (a devout Catholic, he kept a statue of the Virgin Mary on his desk); and Fehrnstrom. Bob White would play the role of personal counselor without portfolio. Zwick, a polished go-getter in his thirties who was sometimes described as the sixth Romney son, would oversee the finance operation. Lanhee Chen, a pugnacious wonk with four degrees from Harvard, would pilot the policy shop.

The degree of continuity was striking. In almost every other respect, Romney was consciously seeking to steer clear of the mistakes of 2008: he
would embrace the Mr. Fix-It persona, as opposed to the Conservative for All Seasons; downplay cultural issues in favor of a laser-like economic focus; abandon fantasies of a fast nomination-fight knockout; and avoid flip-floppery as if it were Ebola. But when cementing his team, he was essentially sticking with his 2008 crew—and while the familiarity was likely to provide him with maximum comfort, the question was whether it would also yield maximum performance.

The well-worn discussions of message and money were dispensed with quickly. Stevens’s back was acting up, so he circled the room while dispensing his adages. Everyone was grappling with the new financial terrain created by
Citizens United.
Zwick laid out his fund-raising targets for the next year: at least $50 million, but ideally $75 million. Romney reiterated his reluctance to pony up his own dough this time; he worried that self-funding would again spark accusations that he was trying to buy the brass ring. On the helpful side, Myers and Rhoades had recruited some former Romney aides to start a so-called super PAC to support his candidacy. On the disquieting side, a rumor was circulating that Team Obama planned to spend $100 million during the Republican nomination brawl specifically to batter Romney. “A hundred million is a lot of money!” Mitt exclaimed.

Rhoades spoke at length about the mechanics of securing the nomination. Historically, the GOP had relied mainly on winner-take-all primaries to select its standard-bearer. But in the lead-up to 2012, the Republican National Committee (RNC) changed the rules: the 2,286 delegates who would vote at the national convention the next summer in Tampa, Florida, would be allocated proportionally to a candidate’s share of the vote in any given contest. This only heightened the campaign’s conviction that the race would be a marathon, not a sprint.

Even so, four early-voting states—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida—would be critical. Romney was obsessed with the Granite State, to the point of insisting that his formal entry into the race occur before a debate scheduled to take place there in mid-June. We need to show New Hampshire it’s special, he said; missing the debate would be disrespectful. He and his team saw Florida as fertile ground, too. More problematic, however, were Iowa and South Carolina, each with heavy concentrations of evangelical voters deeply suspicious of Mormonism.

Angst about Romney’s faith and its political repercussions had suffused his campaign the last time. Among his advisers, it was a given that The Mormon Thing—which they shorthanded as TMT—hurt him badly with evangelicals, a significant number of whom regarded the religion as a cult. The sting was felt sharply by members of the Romney clan, particularly in Iowa. Both Tagg and Josh Romney talked emotionally about encountering out-front anti-Mormon prejudice when they toured the Hawkeye State in 2007. Mitt’s brother, Scott, told the campaign team that if he ever had to drive from Michigan to Colorado, he would detour around Iowa. Zwick vividly recalled a meeting with a group of Christian leaders in Iowa at which one of them said, Look, we care about two things: this country and the salvation of souls. But the salvation of souls is more important than the temporary well-being of this country. We think Romney probably understands the economy. But if we vote for him, we’re conceding that Mormons are Christians—and that’s not going to happen.

Aside from his family, Romney cared about nothing more passionately than his faith. But he was painfully uncomfortable talking about it publicly, and refrained from doing so in 2008 until it was too late. The campaign’s strategy this time would be, in effect, to pretend the issue didn’t exist or pose a threat. (Meanwhile Zwick was quietly raising bushels of money from wealthy Mormons, whom Mitt’s aides referred to as “the Mos.”)

The question of whether to play to win in Iowa, though, couldn’t be ignored. Stevens thought it was a sucker’s game; so did Rath, who believed it was nearly impossible to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. But Romney sided with others who argued that a small investment in Iowa would allow them to defer the decision until later. For all the pain the state had caused him and his family, Mitt wanted, as usual, to preserve the option.

Ultimately, resolving the Iowa question would depend on who else was running. Thune had announced that he was out. Indiana congressman and conservative darling Mike Pence was also taking a pass. Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Herman Cain, an Atlanta talk radio host and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, had formed exploratory committees; Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Texas congressman Ron Paul, and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum were about to do the same.

Gingrich would be a factor, the Romneyites allowed, but his checkered
history and reflexive indiscipline would likely preclude him from winning the nomination. Zwick concurred with Romney that Pawlenty would be handicapped financially; others noted that his performance skills were untested. Bachmann, Cain, and Santorum provoked guffaws. Surveying the field as currently constituted, Romney’s people thought the same thing that David Plouffe did when he looked at the Republicans: Our guy might not be perfect, but we’d rather be us than them.

The field, however, was almost certainly about to change. For months, the political world had been waiting on decisions from Barbour, Daniels, and Huckabee about whether they would heave themselves into the scrum. Each possessed estimable endowments: Barbour’s fund-raising prowess and strategic sagacity, Daniels’s executive experience and fiscal rectitude, Huckabee’s abundant charm and evangelical ardor. And then there was Donald Trump, with his nearly infinite capacity to consume media oxygen, currently at or near the top of the polls and ostensibly weighing a run.

As the meeting at Kaufman’s wound to a close, the Romneyites professed a lack of concern about this potpourri, while at the same time holding their breath. A bunch of them headed over to Fenway Park, hopes high at the start of the new season, and were treated to the sight of the Bosox battering the Yankees, 9–6.

Politics, like sports, was a superstitious business, and the portents here were cheery. But no one would have predicted the extreme good fortune headed Team Romney’s way: that Mitt was about to hit a grand slam without even swinging the bat.

6

FOUR LITTLE INDIANS

K
ARL ROVE CHECKED
his in-box and saw another e-mail from Romney. It was April 12, the day after the candidate announced his exploratory committee. “Well, I took the next step to get in,” Romney wrote to Rove. “It won’t be an easy road . . . Any advice? Best, Mitt.”

Rove had loads of advice for Romney. Of course he did—he was Rove. He thought of himself as an open-source consultant to the party now, offering brass-tacks tips or grandiloquent theories to any presidential candidate, actual or hypothetical, who reached out to him. And they all did. Twelve years after piloting Dubya into the White House and four years after exiting the building, Rove was back in the thick of the action. At sixty, he had emerged as the quintessential political entrepreneur, a wired-up, plugged-in, multi-platform presence whose blend of media and monetary clout made him arguably the central Republican figure of the 2012 election cycle.

His resurgence was an unexpected development. Rove’s departure from the West Wing had come on the heels of five grand jury appearances in the Valerie Plame leak case and the Republican wipeout in the 2006 midterms, and was followed by Obama’s election and the expansion of the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate—all of it seeming to signify a conclusive end to the Rovean era.

But Rove was a resourceful and resilient man. Bush’s nickname for him, after all, was Turd Blossom—a flower that blooms from shit. And at the outset of Obama’s reign, the GOP was certainly in the crapper. The party was without a unifying leader, de facto or de jure. Its freshest new face, Sarah Palin, had chosen celebrity over credibility when she quit the Alaska governorship before finishing her first term. The new RNC chairman, Michael Steele, had ridden into office declaring his intent to promote conservative principles in “hip-hop settings” and his belief that abortion was an “individual choice.” Being neither blind nor stupid, Rove spied a power vacuum—and then systematically set about filling it.

Rove’s first step was to build up his personal brand; for all his influence inside the Bush White House, he had never been its front man. Rove also was hungry for cash, with legal bills having tapped his coffers and a divorce in the offing. Aided by Washington superlawyer Bob Barnett, he landed twin gigs at Fox News and the op-ed page of
The
Wall Street Journal,
inked a book deal, and hit the lecture circuit. When his memoir,
Courage and Consequence,
was published in March 2010, he embarked on a marathon promotional tour, barnstorming 111 cities in ninety days. Between January and November, he wrote sixty-one
Journal
columns, appeared on Fox News eighty-three times, and dashed off fourteen hundred tweets.

In parallel, Rove built the Crossroads empire. Even before
Citizens United,
he and his partner, Ed Gillespie, had been pitching donors on an outside group that would, in effect, supplant the RNC. Panicked by Obama’s agenda and the sight of their party reeling around dazed and headless, the bundlers who had funded the Bush ascendancy flocked to Rove, who offered a track record of winning, a road map out of the wilderness, and even a willingness to take on the task without pay. Rove’s outfits—American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the latter designated a “social welfare” organization under the tax code, allowing its donors to remain undisclosed—raised $71 million ahead of the midterms and flooded the airwaves with tens of thousands of ads in support of Republican candidates.

Rove had long been the bête noire of the left, but his new role provoked the wrath of the Tea Party as well. On the populist right, he was seen as the embodiment of the Republican establishment, despised for his backing of the Bush-initiated bank bailout and budget-busting Medicare
prescription drug benefit, and resented for taking public swipes at Palin and Christine O’Donnell, the failed Senate candidate in Delaware. Yet Rove’s dual portfolios—raising his profile on the one hand, raising cash for Crossroads on the other—allowed him to mind-meld simultaneously with the grassroots (on his book tour and at speeches to activists and local party stalwarts) and the elites (at paid corporate talks and donor meetings). It placed him in a unique position to understand his party and its challenges while imbuing him with outsize influence.