Double Down: Game Change 2012 (42 page)

But the depletion of Santorum’s kitty made it impossible for him to be a factor in such a vast and vastly expensive state. Sagging again in the polls, absent from his own bed for a month, Santorum had another reason for going home: having challenged Mitt to release his tax returns, he felt obligated to do the same. Unlike Romney, however, Santorum had no task force in the wings to put his finances in order. All he had was his home computer and TurboTax.

•   •   •

O
N JANUARY 30, ROMNEY
held his last event on the eve of the Florida primary: a massive rally at the Villages. Everything about the Villages was massive, truth be told. A sprawling retirement community fifty miles northwest of Orlando, it had nearly 100,000 residents, 63 recreation centers, 540 holes of golf, and a conservative political bent. Owned by Gary Morse, a co-chair of Romney’s Sunshine State campaign, the Villages had given a corporate donation of $250,000 to Restore Our Future; Morse’s wife, Renee, had written the super PAC a matching personal check. If any place in Florida was Romney Country, this was it.

As the campaign bus rolled toward the event in the early evening, White and Romney were gabbing in the back. Mitt’s recitation of “America the
Beautiful” had become a standard trope of his stump speech—roundly derided by the press, cringed at by some of his own donors, but beloved by the candidate and his pal Bob. Hey, White said. Why don’t you
sing
it tonight?

Really?
Romney’s young trip director, Charlie Pearce, thought—as visions of Mike Dukakis in the tank, looking like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, raced through his mind.

Um, I’m not sure about that, Bob, Pearce said. Can the governor actually sing?

At Pearce’s urging, Romney rendered a muted, a capella audition right there on the bus.

Not bad, Pearce said.

Not bad at all, White agreed.

The serenade Romney offered from the stage was slightly off-key. The five-thousand-strong crowd didn’t seem bothered; plenty of them sang along. The video hit YouTube instantly and went viral just as quickly. Any mockery slid off Romney’s back. He had a ball doing it; he considered himself quite the crooner.

The victory Romney racked up the next day was every bit as impressive as Gingrich’s had been ten days earlier. The top-line totals—46 for Mitt, 32 percent for Newt, 13 for Santorum—told only some of the story. In addition to whipping his main rival within the constituencies that were part of Romney’s bedrock electoral coalition (the affluent, the educated, the moderate, the non-evangelical), Mitt carried conservatives and Tea Party supporters, and tied Newt among Christian conservatives.

That Romney had won big in the Sunshine State was beyond dispute. But there was no denying that he also had won ugly. The degree of the unprettiness was causing qualms among GOP leaders, who feared that the damage Mitt and Newt were inflicting on each other might prove hard to heal in time for the general election.

In his victory speech in Tampa, Romney sought to allay those concerns. “Primary contests are not easy,” he declared. “As this primary unfolds, our opponents in the other party have been watching, and they like to comfort themselves with the thought that a competitive campaign will leave us
divided and weak. But I’ve got news for them. A competitive primary does not divide us—it prepares us, and we will win. And when we gather back here in Tampa seven months from now for our convention, ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America.”

Yet the Republican establishment’s jitters about Romney were rooted in more than the harsh tone of the Florida contest. In the last three primaries, Mitt’s core claim—electability in the fall—had taken a beating. A new NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll found that his unfavorability rating among independent voters had risen twenty points, from 22 to 42 percent, since December. Two months earlier, Romney had been beating Obama 47–34 among those voters. Now the numbers were reversed: Obama was besting Mitt 44–36.

Some of that damage was attributable to the Gingrich and Perry broadsides on Mitt’s Bain tenure and his income taxes. But much of it had been self-inflicted, most notably by the string of flubs—from his fear of pink slips to his enjoyment of firing people to his “not very much” in speaker’s fees—which gave the impression he suffered from a hybrid of affluenza and Tourette’s. At the debate in Tampa, Romney had piled one more brick on his back: his statement that, when it came to immigration, “the answer is self-deportation.” And the morning after the primary, he added yet another.

Making his victory lap on the morning shows, Romney was asked by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien if he understood the “needs of average Americans.”

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney said. “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich; they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

With his ostensible dismissal of “the very poor,” Romney hadn’t quite snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The triumph in Florida was still real enough: the nomination was within his grasp now—everyone knew that. Later that day, he would become the first Republican candidate to receive Secret Service protection; his code name would be Javelin; Ann’s would be Jockey.

But in Boston, no one doubted that “very poor” would leave a mark. There was nothing to be done. The candidate’s stumbles and fumbles were a part of the environment, like oxygen. Faced with a choice between wringing their hands or keeping their eyes on the prize, his people picked the latter. Rhoades had even developed a catchphrase to ward off frustration with his guy’s gaffes. Whenever the candidate stuck his foot in his mouth, the campaign manager would shrug and say, “Mitt happens.”

13

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE MOTOR CITY

A
GAINST A BACKDROP OF
royal blue drapes, flanked by American flags, the Romneys stood before a swarm of reporters just off the lobby of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. It was February 2, two days after Florida and two days before the Nevada caucuses, and Mitt was there to receive a prize he had sought with ardor but also ambivalence: the endorsement of the Donald.

Since his decision to forgo a pursuit of the presidency in favor of his TV paycheck, Trump had played a noisy—and, in the view of many establishmentarians, noisome—role in the race. He had tried in December to moderate his own Republican debate, which fell apart for lack of interest. He had switched his political affiliation to independent and was fulminating about waging a third-party bid. But none of this had kept most of the GOP candidates, actual and potential, from queuing up outside Trump Tower to kiss his ring. Palin, Huckabee, Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain: all had called or met with the Donald in search of his favor.

And so had Romney, first paying a visit to Trump in New York in September and then staying in touch by phone. The Donald took a shine to Mitt, who struck him as looser and funnier than he came across on TV. And Romney liked Trump, too. For a man of such extreme squareness, Romney
took curious pleasure in the company of oddballs and showboats. After encounters with Trump, he would say to his aides, “Isn’t he fun?”

Jollity wasn’t the only motivating factor in Romney’s romancing of Trump. The Donald was a Tea Party favorite and a potential fund-raising dynamo. (Some in Boston wondered whether Trump could be to Romney what George Clooney was to Obama.) He had also been endowed by the freak show with a puissant bully pulpit—and Romney preferred to see Trump bullying Mitt’s rivals rather than him.

But Romney was aware that hitching his wagon to Trump entailed political risks. The birther issue was nothing but trouble, Mitt thought: ludicrous on the merits, repellent to swing voters, and a needless distraction from Obama’s real vulnerabilities.
(If we stay focused on the economy, we can beat this guy; shut up about Kenya, please.)
And Romney knew that many New York donors and members of the mainstream media considered Trump a punch line. For the Mitt-Donald meeting in Gotham, Rhoades had Will Ritter fly down from Boston to execute one firm directive: “No fucking pictures.” So Ritter played decoy, holding court with the press outside Trump Tower—standing by the wrong entrance so that Romney could enter and exit through a different door, undetected and unmolested.

Boston tried to approach the endorsement itself with similar delicacy. When Romney learned he had won the Trump Primary, it was a few days before the vote in Florida. The Donald suggested he bestow the honor there, but Newhouse polled the matter and found that it made more sense to wait until Nevada; that Trump wasn’t popular in either place, but he was less unpopular in the Silver State. Trump pushed for a splashy event at his hotel just off the Strip—
Tallest building in Las Vegas!
—but Boston seized control of the logistics. Fearing an iconic rich-guy photo in front of a gaudy waterfall or gold-encrusted columns, Ritter spent a bundle to install a setup that was as drab as possible. (Trump later deemed it “gorgeous.”)

Yet even as the stagehands were at work, Romney and Rhoades were wondering if they were being played. The night before, a number of top-shelf media outlets—from
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
to CNN—reported that the Trump endorsement was going to Gingrich. Rhoades couldn’t believe Trump would have the gall to set them up that
way. On the other hand, the campaign manager thought,
This is a circus, and Trump’s an entertainer.

Romney’s doubts didn’t fully abate until he and Ann saw Trump in the flesh in his hotel suite that morning. Trump had been waxing exuberant to Romney’s staff about the media horde on hand. (“Biggest crowd of press you’ve ever gotten!”) He was eager to take questions from the reporters after the endorsement. Envisioning a birtherfest, Boston wanted no part of it. Three times already, Trump had tried to cajole Mitt’s press secretary, Andrea Saul, into having a Q&A. Three times, she waved him off. Now, in the elevator on the way downstairs, Trump implored Romney, We’re going to take questions, right?

“I’m not taking questions,” Mitt replied, digging in his heels. “
You
can take questions.”

Trump could live with that.

Team Romney had no idea what Trump was going to say as he took the podium. Mitt and Ann gazed on, arms stiff at their sides, frozen half smiles on their faces. Watching the spectacle on TV in Boston, Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s communications director, shook her head and thought,
This looks like a hostage situation.

Liberation came quickly, at least. Trump’s comments consumed less than two minutes. Mitt’s remarks took three minutes—and included a pair of the most candid sentences of 2012. “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” he said. “This is one of them.”

•   •   •

J
UST AROUND THE CORNER
on the Strip, Gingrich was bunkered in a hotel owned by a different billionaire—
his
billionaire, Sheldon Adelson—wondering why anyone ever thought he was about to receive the Donald’s blessing. Newt and Callista were members of Trump National Golf Club, in Virginia. They considered its proprietor a friend. But that was irrelevant. “Trump plays the odds,” Newt told his aides, and the odds were obviously in Romney’s favor.

After Florida, Gingrich felt he needed to regroup. So he had pitched up at the Palazzo and convened an extended retreat with his consultants, major
donors, and the ragtag crew that made up his campaign staff. For the better part of four full days, while Romney was beating the bushes for votes in Nevada, Gingrich and his allies were tucked away in windowless warrens and private dining rooms, eating and drinking, scheming and dreaming, and yak-yak-yakking.

Gingrich himself spent most of the first two days grousing and griping. The anger that started bubbling in Iowa and simmered through Florida had now reached a boil. Over and over, Newt berated Romney and his henchmen as a pack of lying liars whose level of mendacity he could scarcely comprehend. He also lashed out at his own people, yelling at them, insulting them (“That’s a stupid thing to say”), ridiculing their suggestions (“You think that we’re going to find the votes we need in
Maine
?”). Newt’s staff averted their eyes. Never had they seen him quite so seethingly out of sorts.