Double Down: Game Change 2012 (50 page)

Messina and Plouffe were kicking themselves over the miscalculation, for it had led them to badly botch the job of setting up a pro-Obama super PAC. From the start, the White House had been tied in knots over the topic. Given the president’s opposition to
Citizens United
and his railing against outside money in the midterms, his advisers believed there was no way he could place his imprimatur on such a group. But with Messina convinced that a super PAC would be needed on their side, there were discussions in late 2010 about dispatching a trusted Obaman to run one. Robert Gibbs, Larry Grisolano, and even Plouffe were all names floated but shot down.

The question was ultimately decided by default, when two young aides
on their way out of the White House in early 2011 volunteered for the assignment. Bill Burton, the deputy White House press secretary, had just been passed over for Gibbs’s job; Sean Sweeney, Emanuel’s chief of staff, had just lost his boss to Chicago. That they had no experience in fund-raising didn’t bother the Obama brain trust. Messina and Plouffe’s expectations were minimal: a super PAC to take up the slack and be a nuisance for the Republicans.
Who do we trust enough to put outside to not fuck this up?
was the only question in Messina’s mind. Besides, he thought,
Jeffrey will always make it right.

Jeffrey was Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had rustled up a wad of cash for Obama in 2008 and intended to do the same in 2012. But he was also itching to insert himself into the super-PAC game. He had thought about doing so during the midterms but decided to defer because he sensed that the president would disapprove. But the sight of Rove, the Kochs, and their ilk outspending the Democratic side by $100 million in 2010 made him toss aside his qualms. “We’re not sitting the next one out,” Katzenberg said to his political attaché, Andy Spahn.

Katzenberg was fine with Burton and Sweeney running Obama’s outside group, so long as they brought in a front man. Someone facile, fierce, and good on TV, he said. “Someone who can answer Rove.” Spahn met the boys in Washington and suggested Paul Begala, James Carville’s tangy Texan partner from the Clinton years. The boys agreed, securing $2 million in seed capital from Katzenberg.

In April 2011, Burton and Sweeney announced the formation of Priorities USA Action, with a goal of raising $100 million by Election Day—and then stormed into a brick wall. Everywhere they went, Democratic millionaires told them thanks but no thanks. There were those who objected on the grounds that super PACs were corrupt, corrupting, and terrible for the country. Those who had no stomach for funding negative ads. Those who held back because they had no clue who Burton and Sweeney were. And those who balked because they believed that Romney could never win.

Increasingly desperate, the boys tried another tack. Whenever a fund-raising event appeared on Obama’s schedule, they would fly there and position themselves nearby, grabbing his donors and making their plea. But rather than lighting up his contributors, Obama was bumming them out. “I
just gave him $70,000 and four hours of my life,” one of the richest men in the country told Begala. “I’m much less happy with him now than I was before.”

By the end of the year, Priorities had raised only $6 million, including the initial DreamWorks deuce; in January, the group brought in a negligible $58,000. Katzenberg and Spahn were pounding Messina and Plouffe to convince the president to drop his holier-than-thou-ism and endorse the group. Watching Priorities stagger and Crossroads et al. soar, the advisers agreed that the price of principle had grown too high. At a Sunday meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Messina presented Obama with the Priorities numbers and a revised figure for what the Republican super PACs were likely to raise: $660 million.

“How sure are you?” Obama asked, slightly staggered.

“Very sure,” said Messina. “I think we need to switch our position” on Priorities. They’re sinking without us. Until people understand that it’s important to you, they’re not going to give. The Clinton donors don’t care enough, and our people have never been million-dollar check writers. You gotta give it your seal of approval or it’s not gonna work.

Obama detested looking like a hypocrite almost as much as being one. But he hated the idea of losing even more. In early February, it was announced that Obama was officially backing Priorities. Although he, Michelle, and Biden would do nothing actively for the group, his staff and cabinet members would be allowed to attend Priorities fund-raising events.

Obama’s reversal was met with multiple yawns: from the press, his grassroots supporters, and donors. Come May, three months later, Priorities still hadn’t crossed the $10 million threshold.

For Burton, Sweeney, and Begala, the scarcity of funds imposed strict discipline in terms of mission. They needed to pick a narrow lane and make as much noise with their ads as possible. From the outset, Begala was adamant about three things: that the GOP nominee would be Romney, that he would run on his business credentials, and that Priorities should therefore focus on destroying his economic credibility with the middle class. In his 1994 Senate race against Mitt, Ted Kennedy had run a storied series of ads with laid-off workers from companies controlled by Bain. Seizing on a tried and tested formula, Priorities would do the same.

Priorities’ first Bain ad debuted on May 15, two days before the Ricketts story broke. It was called “Heads or Tails” and featured a former worker for GST Steel, a Kansas City mill that went under in 2001 after being bought by Bain. “[Romney] promised us the same things he’s promising the United States,” the worker said. “He’ll give you the same thing he gave us: nothing. He’ll take it all.”

“Heads or Tails” went up almost simultaneously with the Obama campaign’s first Bain ad, a spot called “Steel” that also highlighted workers from GST. “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer,” said one. Another referred to Romney’s former firm as a “vampire.”

Priorities was hoping to crank up the reverb in the free-media echo chamber, and its spot in tandem with “Steel” achieved that. The problem was much of the uproar was negative—and voiced by Democrats. Former Obama administration car czar and private equity pooh-bah Steve Rattner disparaged the attacks on Bain as “unfair,” saying that the firm had done nothing “they need to be embarrassed about.” Former Tennessee Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr. proclaimed, “Private equity is not a bad thing. Matter of fact, private equity is a good thing in many, many instances.” Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell deemed the ads “very disappointing.”

And then there was Cory Booker, the African American mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who also happened to be an Obama campaign surrogate. “If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, it ain’t—they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to me, I’m very uncomfortable with,” Booker said on
Meet the Press
that Sunday, May 20. High on his horse, Booker went on and on with little prompting from David Gregory, finally tying up Bain and Ricketts in a bow. “This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides. It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright. This stuff has got to stop.”

•   •   •

T
HE THOUSAND-POUND SHITHAMMER
landed on Booker about thirty minutes later. When the call came from Patrick Gaspard, the mayor didn’t realize what was about to hit him. I got a little outside the lines, Booker said
sheepishly. No, Gaspard replied. You used the word “nauseating” about us. You got more than a little outside the lines.

Campaign aides to both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were notoriously aggressive about corralling allies who strayed from the farm. The Obamans handled such wanderers with electric-tipped cattle prods. Rendell would receive a zap from Messina, Rattner a poke from his friend Larry Summers. But bringing Booker—a media-savvy rising star seen by some in the party and the press as the next Obama—to heel required a higher-megawatt jolt. Already the RNC was blasting out e-mails touting what Booker had said; surely the Romney campaign would be next. His apostasy could not stand.

Booker and Gaspard went round and round that Sunday afternoon. Booker made the mistake of saying that he wasn’t the only Democrat who felt the way he did—and then named some of his many backers in the financial sector. “Cory, we’re making a point about the thing Mitt Romney uses as his chief qualifier to be president,” Gaspard said. “You gotta fix this.”

Let me figure it out, Booker said. Maybe do another interview. Maybe send out a tweet.

“You don’t fucking get it!” Gaspard screamed. “You gotta fix this now!”

The Obamans wanted Booker to put out a simple, declarative statement walking his comments back. Instead, on his own, he filmed a three-minute-and-forty-eight-second, straight-to-camera video that he tweeted out. Under fluorescent lights, his laptop open beside him, face pallid with distress, Booker looked like a well-fed captive. Instead of retracting what he’d said, he restated the same points he made on
Meet,
but less colorfully.

Obamaworld was apoplectic. Messina told colleagues that he was “off the Cory Booker train forever.” Obama himself was vocally annoyed. He’s grandstanding and sucking up to his donors, the president told his aides—at our expense.

The pounding of Booker by the Obamans continued unabated for the next twenty-four hours. On Monday night, after announcing he would not do interviews, Booker appeared on MSNBC’s
The Rachel Maddow Show
and heaped praise on the president and his political team. “They have never pressured me to do anything,” he said, and then tweeted, “Let me be clear, #IStandWithObama.”

At a NATO summit in Chicago that day, Obama was asked at a news conference about his ally’s critique. After praising Booker perfunctorily as “an outstanding mayor,” Obama took issue with his use of the word “distraction” regarding Bain. “The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience,” he said. “When you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot . . . This is what this campaign is going to be about.”

The Obamans expected pushback from some Democrats when they began their Bain battery. Until then, they had restricted themselves to subtler and less visible forms of tweaking Mitt as an out-of-touch plutocrat. In March, Chicago had fed research to Politico on the extensive renovations that the Romneys mapped out for their La Jolla house, including the plans for a hydraulic auto lift—which the story called a “car elevator,” just as the campaign intended. Not even the most delicate Democratic flower would have accused them of playing class warfare over something like that.

Attacking Bain struck at the heart of the Democratic donor class—and the politicians who relied on it for funds. Yet it was seen by Chicago as indispensable to winning. The Obamans had been doing research on Bain since mid-2011, and marrying it up with Benenson’s polling on attitudes about the economy. What they found was that many middle-class voters associated the thirty-year decline in living standards with phenomena such as offshoring, outsourcing, downsizing, and the enrichment of the 1 percent—all things that Bain could be made to symbolize. Going after Romney on private equity wasn’t merely about making him look rapacious. It was about instilling a sense of distrust in his ability to rebuild a middle class that people like him had done much to undermine.

Far from putting the brakes on their Bain attacks, the Obamans planned to ram the accelerator to the floorboard. For weeks, Axelrod, Grisolano, Messina, and Plouffe had been mulling a plan to shift millions of dollars from the campaign’s budget from the fall into the summer—much of it to be spent on negative ads against Romney. Their opponent was still depleted from the nomination fight. He remained a hazy figure in the minds of
undecided voters, and thus vulnerable to being defined by the Obamans. By hitting him early and mercilessly on his record in Massachusetts, his tax returns, and especially his time running Bain, they might send him into his convention so hobbled that he would find it impossible to recover.

There was another argument for striking preemptively. All along, the Obamans had feared that Crossroads would come in early in the year and drop a boulder on the president’s head. Grisolano, who commanded Chicago’s ad budget, had set millions of dollars aside to respond to Rove’s attacks. But Crossroads had decided to husband its resources, thinking the money would be better spent in defense of the GOP nominee once he was chosen, and especially after Labor Day. The Obamans were relieved but perplexed by the choice. Axelrod and Grisolano were convinced that the airwaves would be oversaturated in the fall, and voters so disgusted with political ads that they would tune out.

All of this argued for a splurge-now strategy, but there was a huge risk involved. The Obamans were talking about moving roughly half the cash budgeted for September and October into June, July, and August. If Chicago didn’t hit its fund-raising projections, the campaign would be dramatically outspent in the fall.

The high command sat down with Obama in the Roosevelt Room on the balmy, lazy afternoon of Saturday, May 26, to present him with their gambit. The president liked the aggressiveness, liked the strategy; but, as with any sane gambler, he had concerns about betting on the come. Though Obama usually left the nitty-gritty of campaign strategy to his team, he had a lot of questions now. If we raise less than we’re supposed to in September and October, what are we looking at? What if the other side raises a lot more than we expect? Are we locked in here? If our money’s going worse, can we pare down in June? If we fall short, what do we do then?

Messina told Obama there were no guarantees about fund-raising, not with the recent trends. Plouffe told him he should assume that they would have only bare air cover in the fall. Axelrod told him he thought that even the worst-case scenario would be survivable—probably. All of them told him they believed this was the way to go. But they were nervous. They needed the president to sign on with his eyes wide open.
We’re staring into the abyss here,
thought Plouffe.
He needs to stare into it, too.