Double Down: Game Change 2012 (51 page)

Okay, Obama said. If you guys say so, go for it. I just hope we don’t end up naked at the end.

When the meeting broke up, the president asked to see Messina privately. They went out to the Rose Garden patio and had lunch in the warm sunshine.

“Are you sure?” Obama asked. “What if the money doesn’t come?”

“I’m sure,” Messina said, but he wasn’t going to lie. “There’s a real chance we are destroyed on TV at the end.”

•   •   •

O
NE OF THE OBAMANS
was destroyed on TV five days later, when Axelrod made an ill-fated foray to Boston. Chicago’s plan was to spend the month of June assailing Romney for his Bay State record. Axelrod was slated to kick things off by leading a rally on the statehouse steps. The decision to send him was odd on its face, but the campaign’s communications shop knew that national reporters would be sure to flock to Axe. Basically, he was bait.

The campaign intended for the rally to be a surprise, but a local reporter tweeted out the word the night before. Romney advance man Will Ritter sprung instantly into action, and by the time Axelrod mounted the podium, Ritter had turned the site into a circus of the surreal—complete with air horns, a bubble machine, a heckler-amplifying speaker system, Ritter’s dog, bikes, placards, and an army of Romney interns chanting, “Axel-fraud! Axel-fraud! Axel-fraud!”

Axelrod put on a brave face and tried to muddle through, declaring the spectacle “the pageant of democracy” and quipping, “You can shout down speakers, my friends, but it’s hard to Etch A Sketch the truth away.”

Obama caught the coverage on cable—CNN carried the rally live—and at first seemed to find it amusing. Outside the Oval, he remarked to Pfeiffer, “Seems like Axelrod had a tough day today.” But then he sounded perturbed. Why would we have an event with Axe on the statehouse steps, right near Romney headquarters? Obama asked, and walked away.

That night on CNN, Bill Clinton appeared on CNN’s
Piers Morgan Tonight,
guest-hosted that evening by his friend the film producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein asked Clinton about Romney’s Bain experience and its relevance to promoting economic growth. “I don’t think that we ought to
get into the position where we say this is bad work—this is good work,” the former president said of private equity, and then added that Mitt’s “sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”

The collective reaction in Obamaworld was instantaneous, splenetic, and reflexively paranoid. What the fuuuck? Is this intentional? Is he trying to screw us? Such were the themes of the e-mail chain that rocketed around the campaign’s upper rantes.

The next morning, the Obamans confronted Clinton through his aide Doug Band. At first, 42 insisted that he’d done nothing wrong: that he made clear Romney was inferior to Obama on policy, on what he would do as president. Within a few hours, Clinton relented, clarifying what he meant—that Romney “crosses the qualification threshold” but “he shouldn’t be elected”—and flaying the press for taking him out of context. But the damage had been done.
He handed Romney an ad on a platter,
thought Plouffe.

Obama wasn’t any more pleased to see Clinton jumping on the Booker bandwagon. But more troubling were the monthly employment numbers handed to him by Gene Sperling the next day, June 1. Only 69,000 new jobs had been created in May. The unemployment rate had ticked up to 8.2 percent, the first increase since June 2011.

At his regular Sunday strategy meeting in the Roosevelt Room two days later, Obama vented. In the month since the campaign officially took flight, his team hadn’t been firing on all cylinders. The president pointed to his two-stop announcement tour; in Columbus, Ohio, there had been tons of empty seats. (Noting the desultory atmosphere,
The New York Times
wrote that Obama’s maiden general election rally “had the feeling of a concert by an aging rock star.”) Between Clinton, Booker, and what the Obamans derisively referred to as the “
Morning Joe
Democrats,” the Bain rollout hadn’t gone smoothly. Then there was Axel-fraud, which seemed to annoy Obama most of all. It was amateurish, tactical, and lame.

“Look, we just all need to tighten our games,” Obama said sternly. “And that includes me.”

The tightening commenced immediately in Obamaworld as Plouffe and Messina rejiggered responsibilities between Chicago and the West Wing. But Obama failed to heed his own directive quite so quickly. On June 8,
facing reporters in the White House briefing room, the president was asked, “What about the Republicans saying that you’re blaming the Europeans for the failures of your own policies?” To which Obama replied: “We created 4.3 million jobs over the last twenty-seven months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”

Pfeiffer marched into the Oval Office to inform Obama that he’d gaffed. Anything that could be construed (or purposely misconstrued) as suggesting that he was content with the performance of the private sector was a problem. Obama was defensive at first. Everyone knows I don’t think the economy is fine, he protested, because I say so every day. But a few hours later, during a White House photo op, Obama grudgingly revised his comments.

Coming on top of the other hiccups, the flub alarmed Plouffe. It wasn’t just the private-sector part, with its implication of out-of-touchness, that he thought was problematic. The second half, which could be interpreted as the president believing that public-sector employment was the remedy for what ailed the economy, was also bad.
Talking like a macroeconomics professor,
Plouffe thought,
always leads to trouble.
Which in this case meant handing Boston a gift-wrapped Big Bertha with which to tee off on Obama.

The Romneyites had been gleefully knocking the ball down the fairway since the
Morning Joe
Democrat backlash had begun. Stitching together the Booker, Ford, Rattner, and Rendell rebukes, Boston compiled a video titled “Big Bain Backfire.” On CNBC, Romney crowed, “I think Bain Capital has a good and solid record. I was happy to see President Clinton made a similar statement . . . and called my record superb.” Now the campaign went on the air with an ad called “Doing Fine?” It was a frame-by-frame imitation of a devastating 2008 Obama spot that had maced McCain for saying—the day after Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis—“The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” with the president’s “private sector” gaffe a literal and figurative echo.

After months of wallowing in gloom-shrouded dismay, Republicans saw a ray of hope. For the past four years, Obama and the Obamans had been swaddled in a mythos about their command of the dark arts and sweet
science of electioneering. Even on the right, there was a grudging admiration that went along with overarching contempt for the president. Obama had proven ill-equipped for governing, sure, but nobody doubted that he and his people knew how to run a campaign.

For Republicans, however, the past month had punctured that perception as Chicago seemed to have suffered an epic failure to launch. Meanwhile, Team Romney had just released its latest fund-raising numbers: a staggering $77 million for May, fully $17 million ahead of what Team Obama had managed. This figure alone would have been enough to set conservative hearts aflutter, but there was more. Romney’s positive ratings were rising. The gender gap was narrowing. The Gallup daily tracking poll had Mitt two points ahead of Obama. Suddenly, Republicans were seized with a thought at once heretical and thrilling: maybe their guy wasn’t irretrievably doom-struck after all.

16

BAIN PAIN

A
N ARMADA OF GLEAMING
white private jets descended on Russ McDonald Field, twenty minutes outside Park City, Utah, where their passengers were met and whisked away by a fleet of black cars. It was June 22, a sun-splashed day in the Wasatch Mountains, and nine hundred donors were arriving for the start of what Boston had billed as the First National Romney Victory Leadership Retreat, a reward for the campaign’s most generous contributors and bundlers. In the lobby of the Chateaux at Silver Lake, the nabobs were handed canvas tote bags with
BELIEVE IN AMERICA
stitched on the side. For the next three days, they would revel in a veritable Mittapalooza.

The retreat was a Spencer Zwick production, brimming with star power. The scene sometimes seemed like a ski-lodge simulacrum of a Republican convention. There were party leaders such as Jeb Bush and McCain, statesmen including James Baker III. There were rising stars and potential VP nominees: Tim Pawlenty, Paul Ryan, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, Ohio senator Rob Portman. There were conservative media eminences: Fred Barnes, Mary Matalin, Bill Kristol. There were business titans: Ken Langone, Meg Whitman. There was Charlie Spies, from Restore Our Future, hitting up donors, and there was Karl Rove, doing much the same for Crossroads.
There was Condoleezza Rice, stealing the show with an impassioned speech that brought the attendees to their feet. There was the Boston brain trust, patiently answering question after question about polling, strategy, and the electoral map.

Mitt and Ann seemed to be everywhere at once, giving talks at private dinners for top-dollar bundlers (him) and at a Women for Romney Victory Tea with figure skater Dorothy Hamill (her). On Friday night, both Romneys spoke at a cookout in Olympic Park, at the base of a training mountain surrounded by ski jumps. Ann was funny and personal, playfully roasting her sons, four of whom were in attendance, and offering a warm tribute to her husband. Mitt delivered his stump speech with greater fire and fluency than usual.
You know what?
thought Langone.
I was wrong—this guy can connect!

For Romney, the retreat was something close to nirvana. He had lived in Park City for three years when he was heading the 2002 Olympics, so the event was a sort of homecoming, and Zwick made sure it ran like clockwork. Surrounded by his family and by individuals of means who needed no persuasion about the virtues of capitalist achievement, Romney was in his element. The donors were loving him and loving the retreat, and he loved that.

But Romney’s joy derived as much from a different embrace: that of the party’s panjandrums. Never before had the Republican establishment fully accepted him. Never had there been a laying on of hands. In Park City, his back was emblazoned with the palm prints of the great and the good.

On the Friday night before his speech, he was introduced by Jim Baker, the former secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and White House chief of staff. Nicknamed the Velvet Hammer, Baker was for Republicans of a certain age the gold standard of probity, wisdom, streetwise caginess, and streetfighter moxie. His words about Romney were glowing, all about how Mitt was uniquely suited to occupying the Oval Office at this moment in history.

Talking to reporters afterwards, Baker reminisced about a similar event in Vail in 1976, when Gerald Ford had asked Baker to run his general election campaign. “That’s what I see going on here,” the Velvet Hammer said. “We are going to have a different result. This year we are going to win.”

Romney had no doubt that the race ahead would be tough and close, but he was optimistic. He had brought on board a well-regarded outsider, former Bush 43 counselor and RNC chair Ed Gillespie, as a senior adviser. He had assigned Beth Myers to manage his vice-presidential selection process, and Mike Leavitt to handle his presidential transition planning. With the horrors of the nomination fight well and truly behind him, Romney rolled out of Park City firmly focused on the future—and blissfully unaware of how viciously his past was about to bite him in the ass.

•   •   •

W
ASHINGTON AWOKE TO SWELTERING
heat and high expectations on June 28. For weeks, the political world had been awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in
National
Federation of Independent Business et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al.
—the case to decide the constitutionality of Obamacare. This was the last day before the Court’s summer recess. The clock was down to zero.