Double Down: Game Change 2012 (25 page)

Some of the Obamans were even sharper. At the state dinner that night, Axelrod sidled up to Huntsman and probed him. Huntsman squirmed and said, “Well, this is all blown way out of proportion”—a non-denial that annoyed Axelrod for its shiftiness. For months thereafter, Axe would stalk into the Oval Office, brandishing stories about Huntsman 2012, braying to Obama, Have you seen what this guy has done now?

Bill Daley, at this point new to his job as chief of staff, was even less amused. On January 27, after reading a
Washington Post
article on Huntsman’s inner circle, including Weaver, Anderson, and Ashdown—“a team of political operatives and fundraisers [that] have begun informal talks and outreach to ensure he could rapidly ramp up”—Daley phoned Huntsman in the middle of the night in Beijing.

“This is a pretty shitty way to treat someone who gave you the opportunity of a lifetime,” Daley flared. Huntsman stammered something about being unaware of what all the fuss was about.

“Go down the hall and ask your chief of staff,” Daley grumbled, and hung up.

Two nights later, the Huntsmans were back in Washington for the annual Alfalfa Club Dinner. From the stage, Daley went after Jon again, this time with humor rather than the hammer. “It’s also good to see . . . our ambassador to China,” Daley needled. “Or as we call him around the White House: the Manchurian Candidate.”

Jon was abashed; Mary Kaye, mortified. The situation was becoming
untenable. On January 31, they had lunch with Bader and his wife at Cafe Milano, in Georgetown. Huntsman handed his friend his letter of resignation, effective May 1, to submit to the White House.

Obama expressed no surprise, and little irritation. Huntsman was doubtless being disloyal, the president told his aides, but more striking was the fancifulness of the quest on which the ambassador was embarking. Among the potential GOP challengers, Obama remarked to Plouffe, “he’s the sanest of the group.” But how could that be an asset in seeking the nomination of
this
Republican Party?

•   •   •

H
UNTSMAN’S SANITY WAS
the least of Weaver’s problems. From a standing start, the strategist had three months to assemble an organization, create momentum, and begin fashioning a national brand for a candidate who was virtually unknown to the Republican electorate. A candidate who lived on the other side of the world, who hadn’t firmly committed to running, and with whom Weaver was effectively prohibited from conferring. Man.

Weaver didn’t shrink from the task. He sank his canines in deep. Though the press fixated on his brooding idealism, Weaver was at bottom a hard-boiled operator. He knew the game, the players, the secret passageways, and the way to win, even if he didn’t always reach the finish line. He had no compunction about bending the rules; those who played strictly by the book were suckers, he thought. In 2000, McCain’s operation saw itself as a pirate ship, and Weaver was its remorseless captain. (He referred to himself as “the icy hand of death.”) Now a different metaphor applied. In the absence of a candidate, he and his acolytes were building a test-tube campaign, with Weaver as the chief mad scientist.

Their laboratory announced that it was open for business on February 22, with the launch of a website for the newly rechristened Horizon PAC. While making no mention of Huntsman, the site’s home page featured a bright red
H
and the coy slogan
MAYBE SOMEDAY
. Its unveiling was accompanied by an e-mail to reporters from a PAC staffer describing the committee as a “campaign-in-waiting.”

The site stirred up a flurry of stories raising thorny questions: about whether it was proper for such a PAC, which could accept unlimited
contributions, to be financing what appeared to be the precursor of a presidential campaign; about the possibility that, if Huntsman was encouraging the outfit’s activities, he was violating the Hatch Act. Weaver insisted that Horizon PAC’s purpose was to raise money for a new generation of conservative candidates. As for Huntsman, the strategist told Politico that his last contact with the diplomat had come in the form of a Christmas card. “There’s no other channel, there’s no Wo Fat from
Hawaii Five-O,
there’s no carrier pigeons,” he said. “None of that.”

In truth, Horizon PAC was doing nothing to identify like-minded candidates to fund (and never would); its function was to pay the salaries of Weaver’s crew and lock up consultants for a Huntsman presidential campaign. While there were no carrier pigeons roosting on Weaver’s window, by February he was talking regularly with Huntsman Sr., who said that he communicated with his son every day—and who visited him in China that spring and discussed the impending race. I’m a riverboat gambler, the elder Jon told the younger. Romney will be the favorite, but I like your odds.

The test-tubers also had other open channels to Beijing. They started an e-mail list for the daily distribution of news clips about the shadow campaign; among the recipients were Ashdown and Mary Kaye. Mrs. Huntsman monitored the clips closely, continuing to pepper Weaver with e-mails about the race to come. After Politico ran a story about Jon’s youthful dabblings in a rock band, she indicated that the ambassador was “a bit worried about” the piece. She pushed to enlist elite opinion-mongers to Jon’s cause. (“Peggy Noonan would be a good one to write something,” she suggested.) She kept Weaver abreast of efforts to set up a meeting between her husband and David Gergen. She worked with the team to finalize arrangements for Jon’s commencement address in South Carolina in May.

The clips Mary Kaye was receiving showed that the test-tubers were doing a bang-up job of generating buzz. The doubts about Romney and the nonexistence of exciting alternatives had created a vacuum, and Weaver’s lab mates aggressively stepped in to fill it. Press hand Tim Miller massaged the Beltway media, whispering scooplets to Politico and tweeting Huntsman tidbits. Adman Fred Davis toured the country, urging donors to hold off on Mitt until Jon’s return. Turning Huntsman’s status as a missing
person to their advantage, they stoked the image of him as international man of mystery.

The careful burnishing of the Huntsman brand seemed to falter only once—with the April revelation, by the conservative Daily Caller, of the “remarkable leader” letter he sent to Obama when he set off for China. Many assumed that the missive had been leaked by the administration, but it was actually the work of the test-tubers. Having dug the letter up in Huntsman’s gubernatorial archive in Utah, they wanted to lance the boil before his return.

In Beijing, Mary Kaye was upset at the reaction to the story on the right. (“The uniqueness about HE is his civility and respect for others,” she e-mailed Weaver. “He is tough but diplomatic. The fact that one is criticized for being gracious, instead of filled with hate for someone who might be of a different party, is very sad.”) But in the White House, Plouffe was struck by the savviness of the move.
Where the hell did that letter come from?
he thought. Followed by,
This son of a bitch is pretty smart.

All the while, Weaver was scaling up the campaign-in-waiting at a breakneck pace. To make up for Romney’s head start, Team Huntsman had to get big fast. By the end of April there were a dozen staffers, five outside firms, and thirty-two fund-raising consultants (including one dedicated solely to raising money from the gay community) on the Horizon PAC payroll.

Weaver was legendary for his capacity to burn through cash; his profligacy had been one cause of his split with McCain. But he assured his crew that finances would be no problem this time. In his talks with Huntsman Sr., Weaver said, the old man had flatly declared, “My son will not lose because of money,” pledging that he would plow big bucks into the PAC and eventually into a pro-Huntsman super PAC. He also promised that he would be the campaign’s de facto finance chair, tapping his millionaire and billionaire pals, and claimed that dozens of Huntsman relatives would open their checkbooks, too. And all of that was apart from Jon Jr. himself, who Weaver asserted was worth north of $100 million and ready to pony up for his campaign.

Most of Weaver’s lab assistants had never laid eyes on Huntsman. Their labors on his behalf required a willing suspension of disbelief—which was enabled by the dancing dollar signs before their eyes. The shadow
campaign’s fund-raiser, Jim McCray, conceived of “Daddy Huntsman,” as they all called him, as a latter-day Joe Kennedy.
We’re gonna fly around the country in his G5,
McCray fantasized.
We’re just going to fucking crush it.

For the press and the rest of the political realm, the Huntsman family’s loadedness lent Jon’s putative candidacy a final measure of credibility—further fueling the aura of anticipation that awaited him at the Correspondents’ Dinner. He was handsome, he was smart, he was raring to go. And by self-funding his campaign, he could match Romney dollar for dollar.

The morning after the dinner, Weaver and one of his people, Susie Wiles, walked over from the Hilton to Huntsman’s home and rang the bell. Jon answered the door in a flannel shirt and jeans.

“Hi, I’m Susie,” Wiles chirped, extending her hand. “I’m gonna manage your campaign.”

And with that, the test-tube phase abruptly ended—and something even more bizarre began.

•   •   •

A
PART FROM A QUICK
breakfast with Rupert Murdoch, Huntsman spent his first day in years as a private citizen in a marathon meeting with his soon-to-be campaign team. Brutally jet-lagged but hot to trot, he signed the paperwork to form an exploratory committee. “We’ve decided we want to do this,” he announced.

Huntsman had never worked with consultants or operatives back in Utah, let alone high-end hired guns. He was dimly aware of Weaver’s reputation as a mercurial fomenter of internal strife; Cindy McCain had recently passed through Beijing and warned him and Mary Kaye to watch their backsides. But Huntsman had already placed a lot of faith in Weaver, and the team assembled in his living room seemed first-rate. He accepted them lock, stock, and barrel, with no questions asked, and issued several directives: that his campaign be civil, substantive, and have “no drama.”

The next three weeks were a parade of public triumphs for Huntsman, as supply met pent-up demand. In Washington, he paid courtesy calls on Capitol Hill and found senators stacked up to meet him; receptions with lobbyists and young D.C. professionals were standing room only. In New York, he was greeted by a receiving line of the business elite: Kravis, Ron Perelman,
Herb and Jeanne Siegel, Jimmy Lee. His foray to South Carolina on May 7 was a resounding hit. “‘The consensus was,
Holy crap, this guy looks like a president,’
said one [insider],” CNN’s Peter Hamby wrote. “‘I have never seen anybody sweep into this state . . . and get as much accomplished in forty-eight hours.’”

Eleven days later, a swarm of boom mics and cameras trailed Huntsman on a five-day swing through New Hampshire: to a Harley-Davidson dealer in Manchester, where he bemoaned his lack of time lately on his own hog; to a gun shop in Hooksett, where, when asked what he liked to hunt, he replied “large varmints” (a sly shot at Romney, who in 2008 offered that his favored prey was rodents and rabbits, “small varmints, if you will”); and all the way to Kennebunkport, in next-door Maine, where he was warmly received by 41 and Barbara Bush. The coverage was as ample and consistently glowing as any Republican received in all of 2011.

Huntsman was in his hotel room in New Hampshire when Daniels announced that he wouldn’t run. Catching the news on MSNBC, he was dumbfounded to hear the anchor mention his name first among the viable candidates left standing.
I can’t get my mind around this,
Jon thought. What he would have found even harder to fathom was that, unwittingly and indirectly, he had played a role in the Daniels saga: it was his own communications-director-to-be, Matt David, and not Romney’s Matt Rhoades, who had shopped the cell-phone number of the ex-wife of Cheri Daniels’s ex-husband to reporters.

The Daniels decision only fed the perception that everything was falling into place for Huntsman with astonishing swiftness. But just beneath the surface of the boomlet, doubts were creeping in among Weaver’s crew. After several meetings with the candidate, Fred Davis noted in a journal he kept that the candidate was “a tad too sheepish and way too self-effacing.” Huntsman relentlessly referred to himself as “we”—“I” was a four-letter word for Jon. Meeting members of Congress, he was too reticent to ask for support, fund-raising rosters, or volunteer lists; instead of saying he was running, he would hedge, “We’re kicking the tires.” (“What was
that
about?” one member of Congress texted Huntsman’s Capitol Hill sherpa, Al Shofe.) With potential bundlers and contributors, Huntsman would say, “We don’t want your money right now. We just want you to be our friend.”

The failure to close the deal with donors would have been worrying enough on its own. But it was coupled with three money-related messages that threw Weaver’s crew for a loop. First, Huntsman told them, “My net worth is a lot smaller than you all think.” Second, he indicated that he had no intention of self-funding. And third, he said, “If I run, I want to do it without my father’s help.”

Almost immediately, the campaign was thrust into a state of abject financial panic. On the premise that money would be no object, Weaver was building an operation that was “a Cadillac, not a Kia,” as Davis put it. The initial budget the two men drafted called for spending an astronomical $110 million from May 2011 through March 2012. There were already twenty paid staffers in New Hampshire. A lease had been signed for office space to house a headquarters in Orlando, Florida, to the tune of $66,000 a month. Due largely to the size of the Huntsman family road contingent, the campaign was blowing through $25,000 a week in travel expenses. And almost nothing was coming in.

In conversations with McCray, Huntsman Sr. offered to write a $5 million check; Huntsman Jr. not only ordered that it be turned down but said he didn’t want his father involved in any way in raising money. With the launch of Huntsman’s exploratory committee, a new federal PAC had been created to help finance the operation: HPAC. By the end of May it had $500,000 in bills to pay and no way to cover them.