Double Down: Game Change 2012 (19 page)

Now, with 2012 approaching, Rove was working the levers to increase the odds of dethroning Obama, a prerequisite to reviving his long-held dream of a durable Republican majority. The fund-raising turned out to be the easy part; donors were handing over checks as fast as he could cash them. The hard part was finding a good horse to ride. Given the dismal economy and the unpopularity of Obama’s policies, the presidency was ripe for the picking. But to Rove’s eyes, the existing Republican field was a stableful of nags, and the front-runner destined to falter before the finish line.

In many ways, Romney was Rove’s kind of candidate. Despite Mitt’s underwhelming 2008 national debut, there was a sense that it was now his turn, no small thing in a party governed by primogeniture. Between his personal wealth and fund-raising network, Romney would never be shy of cash. His corporate experience would contrast nicely with Obama’s obliviousness about the private sector. And Romney had ingratiated himself with the Bushes; 41 and his wife, Barbara, enjoyed Mitt’s company.

But Rove saw Romney’s plasticity and inability to connect as substantial flaws. He considered Romneycare a high hurdle in the nomination race, and an insurmountable one in a general election; he was certain it would cause the Republican base to stay home and also alienate independents. He had advised Romney to repudiate it, but instead the candidate played the federalism card.
What you’re saying,
Rove thought,
is “The Tenth Amendment guarantees that the federal government can’t fuck up the country, but gives us the right to fuck up Massachusetts.” Not exactly a compelling argument.

Rove’s feelings toward Romney truly were emblematic of the GOP establishment. Among elected officials, strategists, and lobbyists in Washington, Romney wasn’t liked
or
disliked—he was a stranger. Apart from Ron Kaufman, it was difficult to locate a soul who was energetically and
unreservedly for him. Instead they were frantically casting about for a more palatable alternative.

To Rove and much of the establishment, the beau ideal was Jeb Bush. But the former Florida governor was telling everyone the same thing he’d told Romney: he planned to stay on the bench. It wasn’t so much concerns about a Bush hangover that were keeping Jeb there. It was his bank account.

You don’t understand, Bush would say to the Republican pooh-bahs begging him to run. I was in the real estate development business in my state. There was a huge bubble, but I missed out because I was governor for eight years. So I’m starting from scratch. If, God forbid, I’m in an accident tomorrow—I’m in a wheelchair drooling, saliva coming from my mouth—who’s going to take care of me? What are my wife and kids going to do? I’ve got to look after my family. This is my chance to do it.

With Jeb determined to stay out, the establishment, like the Romney campaign, monitored the movements of Barbour, Daniels, and Huckabee, while rolling its collective eyes at the theatrics of Trump. The four shared little in common biographically, politically, or characterologically. But when it came to 2012, each held several truths to be self-evident: that if he sought the Republican nomination, the battle would boil down to him versus Romney; that when it did, he would prevail; and that, in a country evenly split, he would stand a fighting chance in a general election against Obama.

In presidential politics, this level of certainty was as rare as a patch of white truffles sprouting in the Bronx. Almost always, when someone who believed he
should
occupy the White House—that the country would be well served by his presence in the big chair—also saw victory as attainable, he took the plunge. That four such men would stand down in the same year was almost unthinkable.

•   •   •

R
OVE, FOR ONE,
was sure that Haley Barbour would dive in. The bulk of the political world agreed. On April 14, the Mississippi governor was meeting-and-greeting in New Hampshire. The next night he was in South Carolina, speaking to the Charleston County Republican Party and winning its presidential straw poll. A month earlier, he had stumped in Iowa, held finance meetings in California, and given a major economic address in
Chicago. Behind the scenes, he had enlisted an all-star cast of campaign hands in the early states; his Washington brain trust had drawn up plans for an announcement tour in the first week of May. To all outward and inward appearances, Barbour was go, go, go.

He had been a central player in his party for thirty-five years: in the eighties as an operative (political director in the Reagan White House); in the nineties as one of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists and chair of the RNC; in the aughts, as the two-term chief executive of his native state. Barbour was sixty-three now, with the body of a cannonball, a taste for bourbon, and a strategic brain as acuminate as Rove’s. His connections and fund-raising capacity were unrivaled, his candidate skills top-notch. He was beloved by reporters for doling out dictums dripping in his syrupy twang: “In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse”; “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Barbour had considered entering the 2008 field. Less than halfway through his first term as governor, he convened a secret meeting in Jackson of his closest advisers and his wife, Marsha, to start planning a White House run. But then Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005 and blew it all away. Barbour realized he had no choice but to seek a second gubernatorial term to complete the recovery efforts.

With Barbour’s handling of Katrina having won wide praise, the presidential buzz began building around him four years later. Over breakfast at the governor’s mansion in late 2009, Rove raised the subject with Haley. “Ain’t no way the country’s ready for a fat white southerner with an accent who’s been a lobbyist,” Barbour joked, seeming to brush Rove off.

But the following summer, Barbour took the first step toward putting the pieces in place for a 2012 bid. He tasked his friend Scott Reed, who had managed Dole’s 1996 campaign, to undertake a study of his vulnerabilities—and dredge up any slime his opponents might strive to smear him with. Barbour was serving as chair of the Republican Governors Association, a perch he could turn into a presidential launching pad if the party’s candidates scored in the midterms. But he was careful to avoid the perception that he was using the job for his own advancement; he and other governors resented Romney for having done just that as RGA chair in 2006.

To say Barbour and Romney were oil and water severely understated the
case. Romney respected Barbour’s political mind and instincts but was astonished by how much Haley drank. Barbour, meanwhile, respected almost nothing about Romney professionally, considered him self-centered, tin-eared, and inauthentic. “The guy’s never said a sentence to me that’s spontaneous,” Barbour told his people. What bothered him even more were the implications of Romney as front-runner. He’s got a ceiling of 30 percent support for the nomination, Barbour said. His weakness will attract a large, unruly field, and that’ll be bad for the party.

Barbour’s views were broadly shared by the other Republican governors. Two weeks after the midterms—in which the GOP’s candidates nearly pulled off a sweep on the back of Haley’s massive RGA fund-raising haul—they met in San Diego, where an animated conversation broke out in one of the working groups about the looming presidential campaign. “It can’t be Mitt,” yelped Ohio’s Kasich. “He’s terrible!” Rick Perry of Texas concurred. New Jersey’s Chris Christie was more diplomatic but no less unenthused.

The governors wanted one of their breed to be the nominee. Barbour took several aside and said he was thinking of running, winning pledges of support from some, such as Kasich, on the spot. But Barbour was having another set of conversations, too—a three-way discourse with Jeb and Mitch Daniels, a close pal of Barbour’s. Over the phone and in person, they agreed that Romney had to be stopped and that one of them should step up to do it. Barbour and Daniels urged Bush to set aside his hesitancy, telling him they would stay out if he got in. But Bush refused to reconsider. Meanwhile, Barbour and Daniels, whose friendship stretched back to the Reagan era, lobbied each other to assume the mantle. Their importunings had a certain
Alphonse and Gaston
flavor, with each man clucking over his own weaknesses, praising the other’s strengths, and saying, in effect,
After you!

By late December 2010, Barbour was sitting in his statehouse office reviewing the dirt on himself, dug up by Scott Reed. The self-opposition research file was bulky, filling up the better part of a banker’s box. It contained a long list of unsavory lobbying clients, including repressive foreign governments in places such as Kazakhstan and Eritrea, for whom Barbour’s firm had labored. It laid out the areas where Barbour, as governor, had failed to improve his state’s cellar-level national rankings, such as health and education. (
This won’t be a “Mississippi miracle” type of campaign,
Reed thought.)
The strategist also talked to Barbour about his personal life, which for years was rumored to be nearly as vivacious as Bill Clinton’s; as Barbour’s former lobbying partner Ed Rogers liked to put it, “There is no skeleton in Haley’s closet, but there is a bag of bones.”

Barbour was unfazed. The lobbying stuff was old news, he said, and the Mississippi record he could talk his way through. As for any charges about his personal comportment, Barbour said, “I can handle that.” With the Mississippi legislative session scheduled to end in early April, the governor set himself a May 1 decision deadline.

Not everyone shared Barbour’s devil-may-careness about his influence-peddling background. In the Romney and Obama camps, it was considered poisonous enough to make him unelectable. Rove thought Barbour might be able to surmount the lobbyist label in the nomination fight but would be killed for it in the general—and told Haley so in a private meeting at CPAC in February 2011, mentioning his former firm’s work for foreign governments.

That weekend, Barbour appeared on
Fox News Sunday
. The host, Chris Wallace, questioned him twice on lobbying, including references to Kazakhstan and Eritrea. Barbour smelled a rat. He and Rove had never been close; they existed in a state of subtle but distinct competition for the title of Smartest Guy in the GOP. With Rove’s ties to Fox, the idea that Wallace’s line of questioning was a coincidence struck Barbour as absurd.
I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t LAST night,
he thought.

Serious as the lobbying issue might become, Barbour had a more pressing predicament, which involved the topic of race. On the same December day as his meeting with Reed, the conservative
Weekly Standard
magazine published a Barbour profile in which he discussed his boyhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Asked why his hometown, unlike many in the state, had been able to integrate its schools without violence, Barbour replied, “Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it. You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town.”

As it happened, Stuart Stevens, just back from a three-week trip to the
Arctic Circle, was also in Jackson that day to see Barbour, an old friend for whom he had made ads. Stevens had come to see whether Haley was planning to run, warn him that his chances were scant, and let him know that if Barbour did get in, the consultant’s conflicting loyalties would probably cause him to sit out 2012.

Being from the Magnolia State, Stevens knew that the Citizens’ Councils weren’t as benign as Barbour made them sound; that although they’d squelched Klan violence to protect local businesses, they had been formed specifically to oppose school integration
.
“This is gonna be a problem,” Stevens said to Barbour. “What are you going to do about it?”

Haley waved him off. “Nah,” he said, “I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem.”

This wasn’t the first dismissive comment Barbour had made in his career on matters racial. But after a day of scorching criticism on cable and the Web, he released a statement calling the Citizens’ Council “indefensible, as is segregation.”

Then, in February, another racial brouhaha erupted when Barbour rejected an appeal from the NAACP to denounce a southern heritage group’s proposal for a state-issued license plate honoring an early KKK leader, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. “I don’t go around denouncing people,” Barbour said. “There’s not a chance it will become law.”

Barbour’s advisers believed that Haley had a blind spot on the issue. Their greatest fear was that he would be portrayed as Boss Hogg. Thinking back on the way Clinton—Bill Clinton!—had been cast as a race-baiter in 2008 by the Obamans, they knew that Barbour was a quadruply juicy target for caricature. If Haley were running the campaign of a candidate identical to himself, he would have seen it, too, and enforced an exaggerated degree of racial sensitivity as a political shield. Instead he retreated into defensiveness, failing to grasp the divide between what he believed about himself—
I don’t have a racist bone in my body—
and his public image.

He laid off the bourbon, losing twenty pounds, and slipped away to the Mayo Clinic in April to secure a clean bill of health. His trips to the early states were going well; he was receiving a warm reception for his stances on three big issues on which he planned to run to Romney’s (and much of his
party’s) left: immigration reform, a fairly quick exit from Afghanistan, and cutting defense spending.

But he was starting to flag physically on the trail, and jovially complained about being subjected to his own Bataan Death March. By Easter weekend he had conferred extensively with his family—Marsha and their two sons, Reeves and Sterling. Even though all three said they were behind him, his wife had recently told a Biloxi TV reporter how she felt about Haley running. “It horrifies me,” she admitted. Sterling, too, had said publicly, “I am a private person and don’t want him to run.”