Double Down: Game Change 2012 (27 page)

F’D UP

R
OMNEY HAD NO HESITATION
or regrets about raising his hand at the Ames debate. He stuck it up and then glanced over at the candidates immediately to his left: Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty. Mitt was keeping his eye on those two, and for the same reason. Bachmann and Pawlenty—despite Romney’s ostensible front-runner status—had taken up a lot of space in the race that summer. While one was rising and the other falling, both were in a position to stake a robust claim in Iowa. For Romney, it remained an open question as to how vigorously he would compete in the Hawkeye State. And the answer hinged to no small extent on the viability of the Minnesotans.

Bachmann was actually born in Iowa, but in her teens she moved to a town not far outside the Twin Cities; Pawlenty was raised in the meatpacking burg of South Saint Paul. Bachmann was elected to Congress in 2006, the year that Pawlenty won his second term as governor of the North Star State. They shared a reverent evangelical faith and a biting distaste for each other. (Bachmann considered Pawlenty a weak-kneed fraud; he disparaged her as “dangerous” and “insane.”) But in 2012, what would bind them together was their emergence as twin illustrations of a verity of presidential
politics: that a single aberrant moment can demolish a candidacy—if the candidate is sufficiently fragile.

Pawlenty hadn’t appeared flimsy in the run-up to the race. In 2008, he was McCain’s second choice for the VP slot, after Palin. He had governed successfully in a Democratic state, balancing the budget and enacting a market-friendly health care law. With a blue-collar background (his dad drove a milk truck) and regular-guy tastes (“I’m pro-beer and pro-hockey”), he had a natural connection to Sam’s Club Republicans. He ritually watched clips from
Talladega Night
s on an iPad, and mimicked Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby on the stump. “I’m very thankful for my red-hot smoking wife, the first lady of Minnesota,” he would say.

But Pawlenty never seemed comfortable with his image or identity as a presidential contender. He was consumed by the search for pithy concepts to match each moment, which he called “swing thoughts.” He bristled when pundits knocked him as plain vanilla, hiring speech and style advisers. In his introductory campaign video, he struck the pose of a hero in a Michael Bay action movie; in early forays on the trail, he seemed to affect a southern accent. And he was roundly mocked for both.

Republican elites and the national press corps liked Pawlenty. But his early travails made them skeptical of his ability to hit big-league pitching. His operation had a small-time feel and labored to lift off. Fund-raising was tough, especially after T-Paw’s finance chairman moved to China. He had trouble luring top talent to Minnesota. When he finally landed Nick Ayers as his campaign manager, tension arose between Ayers and Pawlenty’s wife, Mary, who was intimately involved in her husband’s political strategizing and placed a high value on his “Minnesota nice” reputation.

After months of fits and starts, Pawlenty gained a modicum of traction in late May. His official announcement, in which he cast himself as a truth teller, went decently. His economic plan received favorable notices, including a glowing editorial in
The Wall Street Journal
. With the Republican field presumed closed, Pawlenty had a chance to seize the status of Romney alternative if he could dispel the suspicion that he was soft. And he had an ideal setting to do so: a CNN-sponsored debate in New Hampshire on Monday, June 13, where Romney would make his first appearance alongside his rivals.

The Friday before the debate, Pawlenty and his squad mulled a plan to hit Romney where it hurt—on health care. Pawlenty suggested conjoining Romney’s and Obama’s reforms in a single word: Obamneycare.

Pawlenty was jazzed up.
(Great swing thought!)
So were Ayers and the rest of his advisers. Bachmann would also be making her debut that night, even before she formally entered the contest. Her presence posed another challenge to Pawlenty, as she threatened to siphon off some of the Iowan and evangelical support on which T-Paw was counting. But if Pawlenty executed the Romney smackdown, it would be the lead story of the debate, elevating him and smothering Bachmann in one swoop.

Team Pawlenty agreed that the candidate would preview the attack in an appearance that weekend on
Fox News Sunday
. It would all but guarantee that the debate moderator the next night, CNN’s John King, would then ask a question about the new coinage. And that was what Pawlenty did, delivering the line with relish to Fox’s Chris Wallace.

Twenty-four hours later, however, Pawlenty began backpedaling. When a reporter on Monday asked whether he would invoke Obamneycare at the debate, T-Paw replied, “Probably not.”

Ayers wigged out, knowing that if his man failed to deliver the punch he had telegraphed, it would reinforce all the doubts about his muscle. When T-Paw’s advisers reminded him that afternoon about the imperative of following through, Pawlenty shut the conversation down, putting on his headphones, turning up his music, and staring off into the distance.

In the holding room not long before the debate began, after some rousing country music and a quiet prayer, Pawlenty retreated into a corner for a call with Mary, whose dismay at her husband’s advisers had been growing steadily. She was angry with them for manipulating Tim and just as peeved at her husband’s docility in allowing them to do it. She hadn’t come to New Hampshire for the debate and was out of the loop on the Obamneycare plan. Now, on the phone with her spouse for the first time in days, Mary was surprised at the gambit and expressed pointed reservations about hitting Mitt. When he got off the call, Pawlenty seemed pensive and flaccid to his aides.

Before showtime, as the candidates waited to go onstage, Romney approached Pawlenty. Mitt was expecting the Obamneycare hit, of course; in
preparing for the debate, his advisers had urged him to counterpunch, and hard. But Romney was planning a smother-him-in-sweetness move for when the time came in the debate, and laid the groundwork now. He greeted Pawlenty like a long-lost brother: Hey, Tiiiiim! How’ve you been? How’s Mary?

By the time the cameras went live, T-Paw’s head was screwed on sideways. King asked him about Obamneycare. Pawlenty let the pitch go by. King asked again. Strike two. Practically placing the ball on a tee, King tried one last time—and Pawlenty whiffed again.

Pawlenty would spend the next few days in denial about his strikeout. But the political world’s umpires rendered a swift, definitive ruling. The media decried him as feckless and fainthearted. Prominent pols who had been talking to Ayers about endorsing Pawlenty foreclosed the option. Already skittish potential donors simply shut down.

Team Pawlenty maintained that their guy could bounce back in August with strong showings at the Ames debate and straw poll. But from the New Hampshire debacle forward, T-Paw’s star was in steep descent—and eclipsed by a supernova that burned more brightly but flamed out just as quickly.

•   •   •

C
LASSIC PAWLENTY,”
Bachmann said, smirking over T-Paw’s Obamneycare fluff. She had no respect for shrinking from a fight. Bachmann was plenty nervous herself before the debate, bordering on terrified. First impressions mattered, particularly for a woman, most particularly for her. But she’d spent a full week, at least a hundred hours, prepping for that night. In the green room, she prayed with her husband, Marcus, for a long while. Then she walked onstage, announced that she had filed her papers to run, and proceeded to steal the show with her verve, composure, and sharp sound bites.

Bachmann’s poise made it clear that she was a kind of performance artist. In her brief time on Capitol Hill, she had achieved little besides a reputation for churning through staffers as if they were disposable razors. But her pyretic opposition to Obama—whom she accused of holding “anti-American views”—and camera-ready flair made her a Tea Party darling. Long before
she entered professional politics, Bachmann was splashing in the conservative media puddle, gamely trying to call in to Rush Limbaugh’s show as an ordinary dittohead. Yet mere months after being rebuffed in her bid to join the House Republican leadership in late 2010, she found herself receiving encouragement to run for the White House from the yakkers she idolized and who had hoisted her to prominence: Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and even Rush himself.

Bachmann knew zilch about the presidential process, but she was keenly aware that she needed a badge of credibility. To captain her campaign, she turned to Ed Rollins, who was at loose ends after the Huckabee eschewal. Up until that point, Rollins had been an avowed Bachmann skeptic. But the lure of being in the mix (and getting a paycheck) proved too enticing for Ed to resist.

Rollins understood that Bachmann’s image needed softening, which meant a focus on her biography as a mother of five, as well as a foster mother to twenty-three children over the years. More essential, she had to quash widespread perceptions that she was dim-witted, nuts, or both, which were often twinned with comparisons to Sarah Palin. Rollins and Bachmann’s other new advisers were surprised to discover how bookish, frugal, and un-diva-like she was. (She paid $19 to have her hair styled at Fantastic Sams.) For her part, Bachmann considered the Palin analogies far-fetched. She often observed, modestly, that Sister Sarah was much prettier than she was. On the other hand, Bachmann, a tax attorney, saw herself as brainier than Palin.
Name three Supreme Court cases I disagree with?
Bachmann thought.
No problem!

But Bachmann’s efforts to strut her IQ were undermined by gaffes galore. In New Hampshire, she hailed the state for being “where the shot was heard round the world in Lexington and Concord.” (That blast emanated from Massachusetts.) On June 27, the day of her official announcement in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, Bachmann proclaimed in a Fox News interview that “John Wayne was from Waterloo.” (Wayne was in fact from Winterset, Iowa; serial killer John Wayne Gacy was from Waterloo.) From now on, her son Lucas razzed his mother, “you can’t say George Washington was the first president unless we Google that shit first.”

•   •   •

T
HEN THERE WAS THE COMPLICATION
of Bachmann’s headaches, which were no laughing matter. In July, the Daily Caller reported that she suffered from chronic, stress-induced migraines, which “occur once a week on average and can ‘incapacitate’ her for days at time” and had landed her in the hospital at least three times. Bachmann’s response was to put out a statement shooing away the story: her “ability to function effectively [had] never been impeded” by her condition, it said.

Blowing past controversies was Bachmann’s way. Unless they penetrated the Fox News cocoon, they were like gnats to be waved off. Instead she focused on her rapid rise in the polls, especially in Iowa, where she was suddenly leading the field—and where she saw a chance for another big score at the straw poll. Rollins advised her to stay out of it, to hoard her resources. Between cash left over from her congressional race and funds she had raised since June, she had nearly $4 million in the bank. But Bachmann was willing to spend pretty much every penny to pistol-whip Pawlenty, for whom the straw poll was now a make-or-break event.

In preparing for the Ames debate, Bachmann received some sub-rosa assistance from Boston, which still saw T-Paw as the real threat. Through back channels, Rhoades’s research minions slipped a file to Bachmann’s people—a dossier detailing Pawlenty’s deviations from conservative orthodoxy as governor.

The day before the debate, however, panic struck the Bachmannsphere. The candidate was lying in the dark in her hotel in the fetal position, trying to ward off an intracranial onslaught. A doctor was placed on standby. A hospital was notified. A hefty dose of drugs was obtained and administered—and, glory be, the meds worked.

On the debate stage, Bachmann deployed the Romney-supplied oppo to tear into Pawlenty. Two days later, August 13, the strength of her performance carried over to the straw poll. She became the first woman ever to win it, edging out Ron Paul and consigning Pawlenty to a distant third. On her campaign bus, Bachmann wept tears of joy. The next morning, her happiness was magnified a thousandfold when Pawlenty announced that he was dropping out of the race.

Bachmann was fluttering like a Japanese kite, telling Rollins that she
was on her way to the nomination, that it was what God intended. But she was also exhausted, having risen at 3:00 a.m. to do five morning shows, and she had a long day ahead. She would stop by a hospital to visit a woman who had been injured at the straw poll. She would ride two hours to Waterloo, check in on an aging relative, then speak at the Black Hawk County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner. There she would come face-to-face with Rick Perry, who had announced his candidacy in Charleston, South Carolina, the day before while the straw poll was taking place in Iowa.

Bachmann had originally turned down an invitation to the dinner, but when her staff learned it was part of Perry’s announcement tour, they muscled her in. The Texas governor was entering the race to much fanfare; a sizable contingent of the national press corps would be tailing him in Bachmann’s hometown. Rollins wanted her to defend her turf and take the wind out of Perry’s sails. The manly Lone Star Stater had been a “yell leader” in college at Texas A&M; Bachmann had waved the pom-poms in high school. So Rollins crafted a playful but edgy greeting for his candidate to deliver: “From one former cheerleader to another, welcome to Iowa!”

Bachmann at first embraced the gambit, but when her bus pulled up outside the Electric Park Ballroom, her feistiness deserted her. She seemed flustered, intimidated. While Perry was inside addressing the crowd, Bachmann was telling her aides that she preferred to stay in her coach until he left. “I don’t want to be in the room with him,” she said. She wished she hadn’t come at all. And she wasn’t going to say the cheerleader line.