Double Down: Game Change 2012 (26 page)

In Orange County, on a West Coast fund-raising swing, McCray corralled Huntsman in the lobby of the health care company Allergan. Given Jon’s unwillingness to let his father be involved and his refusal to make hard asks of donors, self-funding was the only option. You’re going to need to loan HPAC $2 million, McCray told him, and then infuse the campaign, once you officially announce, with another $5 million.

“
Nobody
had this conversation with me,” Huntsman said icily. “I am not going to mortgage my family’s future for this presidential race.”

Davis was along on the West Coast sojourn, and Huntsman asked him to take a drive. A shaggily silver-haired Oklahoman who plied his trade in the Hollywood Hills, Davis had worked on scores of Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, Dan Quayle’s presidential exploratory bid in 2000, and McCain-Palin in 2008. He was responsible for many of the most outré
political ads and videos of recent vintage, from Carly Fiorina’s “demon sheep” to Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch.” Davis had been impressed by Huntsman in 2007, when they first met on a shoot for an Environmental Defense Fund spot, but he was starting to think that Jon was lazy and entitled. (The provisional title of the adman’s personal campaign journal was
Kicking and Screaming.
) Huntsman called Davis “creative” in a way that sounded like he meant “freaky-deaky.”

They pulled up to the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach and headed for the sand. For the next two hours they sat in the sun, sweating, their ties cinched up. Huntsman was fairly out of sorts, having second thoughts about getting in. Is this really what running for president is supposed to be like? he asked. He had questions about his team, about the spending, and, pointedly, about Weaver. Is he the right guy for this? Is he doing a good job? Huntsman wondered if maybe 2016 made more sense than 2012.

Davis vouched for Weaver’s savvy as a strategist and attempted to soothe Huntsman. There are always hiccups, Davis said. This is the right year, the right race for you. There’s a path to victory.

“What did you tell Dan Quayle
his
path to victory was in 2000?” Huntsman asked snarkily.

Huntsman’s announcement was scheduled to take place in a month, on June 21. Yet Davis couldn’t tell whether his candidate was in or out. Huntsman flew to Utah with McCray, where they met with Senior, who demanded to see the campaign budget. The document hadn’t yet been finalized, but McCray coughed up what numbers he could. Huntsman Sr. considered the spending obscene, and suspected that Weaver was as interested in milking the family as in electing his son president. Huntsman Jr. didn’t disagree, but he thought that Weaver could be managed—and that firing him would cause the campaign to collapse.

A few days later, at an emergency meeting in Houston, Huntsman agreed to loan HPAC the $2 million that McCray had requested, though not happily. (His team was shocked to discover that Jon Jr.’s net worth was just $11 million, including real estate.) McCray suggested that Huntsman Sr. could ease the burden by offering his son an unsecured loan. Huntsman declared again, with a trace of petulance, “My father is not going to be involved in this. I’m doing it on my own.”

The relationship between father and son was a central riddle of the Huntsman campaign—as was the question of how the expectations of Weaver’s crew had ended up so far out of line with reality. One theory was that Jon Jr. had massive daddy issues. Another was that Weaver was playing a con, saying what was necessary to get the train rolling and hoping that, one way or the other, there would be gravy on it. Still another was that Huntsman Sr. wasn’t as wealthy (or liquid) as people thought, that he was making promises he couldn’t keep, and that his son was straining to protect him. And yet another was that the Huntsmans had bluffed Weaver, gambling that the illusion of self-funding would get Jon’s late entry off the ground and that once it had taken flight, the campaign could be financed through normal channels.

Whatever the case, father and son were together with the entire family a month later when Jon Jr. reached the starting line: his announcement in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, the same venue from which Reagan had launched his general election campaign in 1980, with the big copper lady as its backdrop.

The event was a mess in almost every way, starting with Huntsman’s speech. His advisers were determined that, to assuage concerns among the base about his moderate stances on some issues, the address present him as a conservative, and that it include a direct contrast with Obama, to lessen the political drag of his tenure with the administration. Huntsman refused to countenance either insertion. He detested the impugning of the president on the right. The furthest he would go was to say, “He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love.” And in draft after draft of the speech, he struck the word “conservative.”
Never used it before,
he thought,
and I’m not about to.

The logistics were more glaringly awful. The crowd was tiny, with nearly as many reporters on hand as supporters—most of whom were bused-in college Republicans. The credentials for guests and the press misspelled the candidate’s name as “John.” The generators died just before the speech, only coming back to life in the nick of time. The buses ferrying the Huntsmans, their staff, and the press to Newark airport for a flight to New Hampshire were held at the gateway to the tarmac for half an hour. Finally let through,
they drove first to the wrong plane and then to the right one, which had no pilot.

Huntsman Sr. was furious, demanding that someone be fired immediately. Huntsman Jr., who had worked as an advance man in the Reagan White House, was humiliated. When he saw the sparse crowd, his heart sank. In a restroom at the airport hangar, he stared into the mirror and thought,
Most important day of my life politically, and we’re in shambles.
While on the plane to New Hampshire, with his father ballistic, he sat shaking silently in his seat. Mary Kaye leaned over, squeezed his arm, and whispered in his ear.

“They let you down,” she said.

•   •   •

T
HE CLOWNS IN ORANGE WIGS,
the person in the gopher costume, and the Uncle Sam on stilts had already ambled down Boston Post Road when the main sideshow at the Amherst, New Hampshire, Fourth of July parade took place: Huntsman and Romney meeting face-to-face for the first time since Jon entered the race. As they prepared to start marching, Mitt spotted Huntsman, jogged over, clasped his hand, patted his shoulder—and then stuck in the shiv.

“Welcome to New Hampshire!” Romney trilled, as if greeting a foreign tourist. “It’s not Beijing, but it’s lovely!”

“The air is breathable,” Huntsman muttered in reply.

Afterwards, a reporter asked him about the colloquy, inducing an outlandish lie. “It was a nice exchange,” Huntsman said. “A nice greeting, wishing each other luck, and being friends.”

Romney’s staff had tried to keep him away from Huntsman; they didn’t want pictures of the two together in the paper. But Romney couldn’t resist, and didn’t really want to. Huntsman’s headlong dive into the race had only ratcheted up Romney’s level of contempt for what he saw as shameless opportunism. Huntsman had dumped Mitt for McCain in 2008 when that seemed the safe bet; then he abandoned the Republican Party and joined up with Democrats when it appeared Obama would be a two-term president; and now that the incumbent was vulnerable, he was running to replace him.
Boston’s Mormon regiment—the Romneys, Zwick, and Mike Leavitt, who after the Olympics had become a close friend and adviser to the candidate—also suspected that part of Jon Jr.’s and (especially) Jon Sr.’s motivation was simply to toss a monkey wrench into Mitt’s plans.

The non-Mormon Romneyites found the feud as impenetrable as a Tolkien subplot rendered in Elvish. Rhoades, Myers, Fehrnstrom, Flaherty: none of them took Huntsman remotely seriously as a threat. Stevens was most dismissive of all, telling Romney, “Mitt, don’t even think about it. The two words Republican voters hate most are ‘Obama’ and ‘China.’ And this is a guy who has been
working
for Obama—in China.
It’s absurd.”

But no amount of logic could dislodge Huntsman from Romney’s craw. In recruiting support in the Granite State and elsewhere, Mitt made it clear that there would be no hard feelings toward those who chose to back another Republican—as long as it wasn’t Jon. Of all the endorsements Mitt snared, few pleased him more than that of Jason Chaffetz, Huntsman’s former chief of staff and now a Utah congressman.

Huntsman had choice words for Chaffetz when he learned that his former protégé was backing Mitt. “Asshole” was one of them. “Liar” was another. “Backstabber” was a third.

To the dismay of Weaver’s crew, however, Huntsman could never summon sufficient ire to rip into Romney himself. As with asking for money, he and Mary Kaye seemed to believe that hitting his opponents was beneath his dignity. In July, at a donor event in Utah, Davis unveiled an ad contrasting Huntsman’s job-creation record in Utah with Romney’s in Massachusetts, featuring a beat-up baseball glove as a metaphor for Mitt. In front of several dozen contributors, Mary Kaye objected. That’s
way
too negative! she exclaimed. That’s not who we are. We’re going to run on Jon’s positive message for America.

Weaver’s team had started out thinking that Mary Kaye was a gamer. By midsummer they had decided that she reinforced the worst aspects of her husband’s personality, of which they felt there were quite a few. The candidate was slothful, incessantly lobbying to lighten his schedule. He suffered from severe dark spells, especially in the morning. He and Mary Kaye were both like candle-drawn moths to the liberal glitterati; the approval of Tina
Brown and Diane Von Furstenberg made them swoon. One day, Mary Kaye called Miller and bubbled, “Arianna Huffington wants to help!”

Mary Kaye, honestly, said Miller, if Arianna Huffington wants to help, you should tell her to book herself on television right now and talk about how she has misjudged Jon Huntsman—he’s far too conservative.

As the summer wore on, it was becoming clear that the Huntsman cause was in fact beyond help. The financial woes of the campaign were only getting worse. On July 12, Weaver, after studying the latest fund-raising projections, dispatched a morose e-mail to Wiles: “We should fold our tent. What has happened is malpractice.”

Nine days later, Wiles was replaced by Matt David as campaign manager. After the horror show of an announcement, Huntsman had lost faith in her; she considered him weak and hopeless. Around the same time, Weaver threatened to leave the campaign, together with Davis, to run the long-discussed pro-Huntsman super PAC. Jon Jr. and Jon Sr. were both sick to death of Weaver; they were privately considering replacements such as Rove or Scott Reed. But the younger Huntsman still believed that losing Weaver might be too destabilizing to survive, especially coming on top of Wiles’s departure.

A story in Politico on August 4 revealed some of the turmoil swirling in Huntslandia. With Jon readying himself for his first debate appearance a week later, in Ames, Iowa, Weaver’s crew was disconsolate. A candidate they had believed was a Triple Crown thoroughbred had turned out to be a neddy. Brooding over their misjudgment, they speculated that Huntsman had been pushed into running by his father and Mary Kaye—or that, having lived a life where so much had come so easy, he found the sheer difficulty of the pursuit of the presidency more than he’d bargained for. Whatever the case, the test-tubers shared a unified view, which was summed up by Davis: “Everything was a hundred percent positive . . . until he came back.”

Huntsman’s assessment of the situation was nearly as grim. Having wanted little more than an enterprise free of drama, he was drowning in it. Three months after his return to the States, his support stood at 2 percent in the national polls, and it was scarcely better in the early states. Huntsman endeavored to keep his chin up, reassuring himself that at least he’d
conducted himself with dignity and swearing that he would continue to do so for as long as he was in the race. The pressure to veer from principle, to pander, was ever present. He knew it would be upon him on the debate stage at Ames. He vowed to resist.
I’ve always stood tall, I’m the man that I am, I’ve got the record I’ve got,
he thought.

Making his debut alongside his rivals on the night of August 11 in Iowa—a state where Huntsman wasn’t even planning to compete because of the right-wingness of the caucus electorate—he tried to muddle through. Huntsman hated the artificiality of debating, the enforced brevity, the tyranny of the thirty-second timer. At just around the halfway point, one of the moderators, Bret Baier of Fox News, asked a gimmicky but revealing question of the nine Republican candidates.

Say you had a budget deal that contained ten dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar in tax increases, Baier said. “Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes, you’d walk away on a ten-to-one deal?”

Huntsman had no doubt about what he believed. Of course he wouldn’t walk away from that deal—and neither would Ronald Reagan. But another thought raced through his mind as well:
Oh shit. If I don’t raise my hand, the anti-tax hounds will dog me for the rest of my campaign. I can either tell the truth or just sleaze by.

With only a split second to make up his mind, Huntsman took the hindmost. Poking his hand in the air, he felt regret and not a little shame—as it dawned him that he was just another candidate after all.

8