Double Down: Game Change 2012 (33 page)

There were other powerful factors on the positive side of the ledger. With Langone and his billionaire brethren behind him, Christie believed that, one way or the other, he could clear the money bar. With Murdoch and Ailes squarely in his corner, he had already won the Fox Primary without even entering the race. Rove had told him that clear paths to the nomination were a thing of the past, and Christie agreed. But after gleaning so much information from his weeks of explorations, he could see a route that was distinctly marked and mapped. His head told him he could win.

What was holding Christie back wasn’t intellectual, however. It was instinctual. There was his failed General Assembly bid in 1995, when he tried to jump to a state legislative seat after just a few months as a local official; he had stuck his chin out too far, too soon, and wound up on the canvas. Not wanting to repeat the error, he resisted pleas to run for governor in 2005, and his patience was rewarded four years later.
To run for president,
you have to know deep down it’s the right time,
he thought.
Because if you don’t, when things go sideways—and they always do—you’re going to be sitting there kicking yourself and saying, “I shoulda trusted my gut.”

Christie had hoped to have reached a decision by Sunday night. But when Monday dawned, his gut and his head were still at war—as every word he’d heard from office holders, party leaders, strategists, and billionaires raced through his mind. All day at work, he was in a muddle, not focused on his job. Being driven home, he finally reached his breaking point.
You know what? Screw it? I’m not doing this,
he thought. The burden lifted, he reclined his seat—and promptly fell asleep. Arriving at his house, he walked in and announced to his family, “Listen, guys, Dad’s made a decision: I’m not running.” Mary Pat smiled, and all four kids burst into applause.

The next day, Christie called a midday news conference at his office in Trenton and pulled the plug. “Over the last few weeks I’ve thought long and hard about this decision,” he said, acknowledging publicly for the first time
that he had seriously considered it at all. “In the end, what I’ve always felt was the right decision remains the right decision today. Now is not my time . . . So New Jersey, whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”

Christie then phoned Romney and suggested they get together soon. Four days later, Ann and Mitt arrived for lunch on Corey Lane. After two hours of idle chat and goofing around with two of the Christie kids on the patio, Romney asked what he needed to do to finally bring the governor on board.

“Nothing,” Christie said. “I’m in.”

Gobsmacked, Mitt turned to Ann and said, “Wow—Christmas in October.”

Smiling brightly, Ann said gratefully to Christie, “Governor, you don’t know how important and big this is.”

Actually, Christie said, “I do.”

For Christie, the ease of the endorsement reflected mainly the grimness of the other options. Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Huntsman, Paul, Perry, Santorum: if those were the seven brides, Christie would abstain from being a brother.

Romney was at least a serious person, with an outside chance of winning—though Christie doubted his capacity to tackle Obama. Behind Mitt’s back, Chris mocked his Fred MacMurray affect and antiquated vocabulary. On the night after the Romneys came for lunch,
Saturday Night Live
did a cold-open sketch about Mitt and Chris, in which Jason Sudeikis portrayed Romney as an uptight priss (“Heck it all to fudge!”) and Bobby Moynihan played Christie as a coarsely charming favorite of the press (“After this poor bastard loses, I’ll get a nice head start, I’ll run in four years, it’ll be great—fat president, come on, it writes itself!”). Christie promptly memorized the skit and performed his part at private functions all over the country.

Three days later, on October 11, Christie flew up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to bestow his blessing publicly on Mitt. Romney was eager to unveil the endorsement before the next Republican debate, that night at Dartmouth—in particular because he hoped that it would rattle Perry. In a conference room at a small hotel crammed with national reporters, Christie delivered such a big, bold performance that it made Boston’s long wait since
Drumthwacket well worth the angst. “America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama,” Christie proclaimed. “Mitt Romney’s the man we need to lead America, and we need him now.”

After the endorsement, Christie delivered in another way. On a pair of conference calls arranged by Zwick—one with the campaign’s national finance committee, another with donors who had written checks for less than the full legal limit—Christie threw his financial support to Romney. Mary Pat and I have just written personal maxed-out checks, Christie announced to the contributors on the second call. You should do the same.

The move was pure theater, pure symbolism, but the gesture was a rarity among elected officials, and it packed a terrific wallop. In the days ahead, as Christie called around to the members of the billionaires’ club who had courted him so ardently, he urged them, too, to cast their lot with Mitt. The disappointment of the billionaires with Christie’s decision was acute. But one by one, they began their inexorable migration. Druckenmiller, Griffin, Loeb, Singer, Jones, Tepper: within weeks they would all be bundling for Romney, with many also writing massive checks to Restore Our Future. Leading the way was Ken Langone, who kept his word and jumped in with Mitt the moment Chris was out.

“Looks like we know who the horse is gonna be,” Langone told a friend. “Now all we gotta do is get the horse to finish the race.”

10

THE DATING GAME

R
OMNEY HAD EVERY REASON
to feel emboldened by the Christie endorsement. In a normal race, in a normal year, it would have been a landmark moment in his march to the nomination. With twelve weeks to go before the caucuses in Iowa, he had been spared a potentially destabilizing October surprise, and the donors who worshipped the New Jersey governor had seen the writing on the wall. It was Bill Clinton who once pithily captured the contrast between the two parties when it came to selecting a presidential standard-bearer: “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.” Now, finally, the GOP establishment seemed prepared to pile in behind Romney.

But Republican voters in the 2012 cycle were behaving like Democrats of yore. Even after their party’s most eligible bachelors had declined to enter the dating pool, they continued to resist a marriage of convenience to Mitt—they were still searching for true romance. Over the course of the next two months, they would engage in torrid flings with a pair of new paramours, each an unlikely leading man. And such fickleness would encourage the spurned suitors to stick around, hoping for another roll in the hay.

The first heartthrob on deck was Cain, the former pizza-peddling CEO
who stood out from the pack for his self-promotional exuberance and the color of his skin. On the stump, Cain blessed his audiences with what he called “The Hermanator Experience,” a phrase he legally trademarked, and took delight in winking references to himself as the “dark horse” candidate.

Brassiness had brought Cain his first national notice back in 1994, when, as a member of the audience at a televised presidential town hall, he had challenged Bill Clinton over the contention that restaurateurs with part-time employees would bear little new cost under Clintoncare. (“With all due respect, your calculation on what the impact would do, quite honestly, is incorrect,” Citizen Cain brusquely informed 42.) From there it was on to a failed U.S. Senate run in Georgia, a successful stint as an Atlanta talk radio host, and a sprint into the arms of the Tea Party.

Cain approached public policy in much the same way he did pepperoni pies: with a greater concern for marketing than nutrition. His campaign’s signature economic proposal was developed by a Cleveland-based Wells Fargo wealth management adviser with no training in economics, who wanted to scrap the existing federal tax code and replace it with three 8.7 percent taxes, on sales, personal income, and business transactions. “Goddammit!” Cain bellowed. “Nobody’s gonna remember 8.7, 8.7, 8.7. We’re rounding it up—it’s 9-9-9!”

Bolstered by the catchy simplicity of 9-9-9 and a series of flamboyant debate performances, Cain rose to the top of the polls nationally and in Iowa by the middle of October. On Fox News, Sarah Palin offered complimentary words about the new star, while also pegging him as “the flavor of the week” (and repeatedly referring to him as “Herb”). But Cain rejected the notion that he was a passing fancy. “I happen to believe that there’s ice milk and there’s Häagen-Dazs,” he told Jay Leno. “I’m Häagen-Dazs Black Walnut. It lasts longer than a week.”

Cain’s candidacy began to melt under the glare of scrutiny almost as soon as those words left his lips. “I’m ready for the ‘gotcha’ questions,” he told one TV interviewer. “When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I’m gonna say, ‘You know, I don’t know.’” More troubling to conservatives was Cain’s position on abortion, which he conveyed to CNN’s Piers Morgan as being essentially the same as (if less
coherently formulated than) Mario Cuomo’s: personal opposition to the procedure but also to the government doing anything to prohibit it.

What reduced Cain to a puddle on the floor were personal accusations dating back to his tenure in the nineties as head of the National Restaurant Association. Alumni of the group remembered Cain as a flagrant tomcat who had been accused of sexual harassment. When he began climbing in the polls, they assumed the tales (there were many) would get out, and sure enough, they did. On October 31, Politico reported that two women had received financial settlements after lodging complaints that he had behaved inappropriately toward them. A few days later, a story about a third woman surfaced, and then a fourth, and then a fifth—the last alleging that she’d had a thirteen-year affair with Cain.

Publicly and privately, Cain denied it all, though his inconstant memory and evasive answers strained credulity even among his sympathizers. When he told former RNC chair Michael Steele that his wife was “upset, but she understands,” Steele upbraided Cain: “Herman, you’re married to a sister. You’re going to sit here and tell me she’s just finding this out and she’s cool with it? Come on, man!”

Cain insisted he was being taken down by an organized plot. His acrimony toward the establishment had always been high. (“Don’t trust the bastards in Washington,” he said to his staff; also, the media is “out to slash my tires.”) But now he directed his paranoia at his GOP rivals. Cain’s top adviser, Mark Block, went on Fox and accused Team Perry of “despicabl[y]” instigating the scandal. “This is one of the actions in America that is the reason people don’t get involved in politics,” Block said. “Rick Perry and his campaign owe Herman Cain and his family an apology.”

•   •   •

P
ERRY DIDN’T OWE HERMAN
anything but a swift kick in the teeth, he thought. Team Perry had had nothing to do with the stories, and Cain had been a burr under the Texas governor’s saddle for some time. In early October, shortly after the Orlando debate debacle,
The
Washington Post
had published a piece about a hunting camp leased by the Perry family, which for years had a rock by its entrance that bore the ranch’s appellation,
“Niggerhead.” Perry claimed his father had painted over the word in the early eighties. But Cain, who had already declared that Perry was the one Republican he could not support as his party’s nominee, went on TV and accused him of racial “insensitivity” anyway. Perry couldn’t figure out what he’d done to turn Cain into Al Sharpton.

The Perry campaign was nurturing plenty of other resentments for its misfortunes. Carney was certain that Rove had planted the Niggerhead story, and not long after, Anita Perry complained publicly that her husband was being “brutalized by our opponents and our party” because of the depth of his faith. When Perry delivered an antic speech in New Hampshire in which he appeared soused, stoned, or both, clips of it went viral on YouTube; his advisers, who swore he was sober (if a tad hyper-exuberant), bitterly blamed liberal websites for editing the video unfairly.