Double Down: Game Change 2012 (52 page)

Since March, when oral arguments in the case were seen as having unfolded abominably for the administration, a consensus had formed on all sides about the likely outcome: in part or in toto, the Affordable Care Act would be overturned. The White House and Chicago were braced for that eventuality, but Obama was serene. His private prediction was that the law would be upheld, 5–4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court’s liberal bloc.

Obama was watching CNN in a room just off the Oval when the network errantly reported that the individual mandate had been struck down. Five interminable minutes passed before White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler burst in with a smile and two thumbs up. Obama had been proven both right and wrong: the Court vindicated the mandate as constitutional, but with Kennedy dissenting and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority—on the argument that the penalty contained in the ACA for failing to obtain insurance was not an illegitimate regulation of commerce but instead a legitimate tax.

The Obama administration disagreed with that reasoning, but who cared? All that mattered was the verdict. Speaking in the East Room, Obama was at pains not to gloat. “Whatever the politics,” he said, “today’s decision
was a victory for people all over this country whose lives will be more secure because of this law.” But among his people there were tears of joy and cheers of exultation. On Twitter, Gaspard blurted, “It’s constitutional. Bitches.”

Despite all the controversy around the ACA, Obama’s team had come to view it as an electoral winner. Anyone who had turned against 44 because of the law was already lost; undecided voters had factored it into their thinking and remained on the fence. But across the coalition of the ascendant, Chicago’s research found that the ACA was a plus. For months the campaign had been developing direct mail and ads aimed at women and young voters that homed in on health care reform’s specific benefits for them. Guaranteed coverage was popular with African Americans and Hispanics, whose rates of uninsurance were high. Chicago was already on the air with Spanish-language spots touting the ACA. Now Grisolano would crank the volume of that advertising up to eleven.

Romney was in Washington when the Court issued its ruling. Before the cameras on a balcony across the street from the Capitol in the scorching sun, Romney said, “What the Court did not do on its last day in session, I
will
do on my first day if elected president of the United States. And that is, I will act to repeal Obamacare.”

For Romney, the Court’s decision was the worst of all worlds. Boston had been praying for the ACA to be struck down, allowing Mitt to spend the fall attacking Obama for wasting a year, in the midst of an economic crisis, pushing an unconstitutional law—a position that might have held broad attraction in the middle of the electorate, which repeal did not. On the right, the only solace in Roberts’s decision was that it deemed the individual mandate a tax. But for Boston, that caused further squeamishness, as it raised questions about whether the mandate in Romneycare was one, too. Confronted on the topic a few days later on MSNBC, Fehrnstrom said that Mitt believed the mandate was not a tax at either the state or federal level, thus agreeing with the administration and infuriating conservatives.

The depth of the muddle was depressing to Mitt.
Maybe Santorum was right about me and Obamacare,
he thought.
Rick could just scream, “The mandate! The mandate!” But I can’t.

From Washington, Romney flew up to New York for a meeting arranged
by Langone at the Union League Club, off Park Avenue. The attendees were the same sort of machers—Rupert Murdoch, Lloyd Blankfein, Stanley Druckenmiller, and about thirty others—that the Home Depot founder had put together to lure Christie into the race. Only this time the purpose was to give Mitt advice about how to beat Obama.

Romney showed up and dove right into the discussion. Langone jostled him to make more noise about Simpson-Bowles. The Court’s health care ruling was raised. Education was broached. But the most heated topic on the table was immigration.

Obama had thrust the issue into the news two weeks earlier, when he announced that he would use executive authority to enact a modified DREAM Act. Frustrated by the months of internal debate, the president had brought the issue to a head with Jack Lew and Ruemmler. Don’t make my political decision for me, he said. Don’t tell me it’s going to hurt me or will be seen as overreaching. I just want to know if I have the legal authority or not. With Ruemmler maintaining that he did, Obama was all in, unveiling what he called “a temporary stopgap measure” that would “lift the shadow of deportation” from 800,000 young illegal immigrants who had entered the country under age sixteen.

The Obamans knew that the move put Romney in a bind, given his DREAM Act veto pledge. But Plouffe and Messina assumed that Mitt would swiftly side with the president to avoid worsening his dismal numbers with Hispanics.

Romney felt trapped. On the one hand, he was still worried about upsetting the right, from which he needed energy and big turnout in November; he also feared that shifting his position would leave him open to charges of expediency. On the other, he understood that he couldn’t risk further alienating Latinos.

So he attempted to split the difference. In one halting swoop, Romney praised Marco Rubio, who was working on his own DREAM Act alternative; criticized Obama for making it “more difficult to reach a long-term solution” by taking his action outside the context of comprehensive immigration reform; but indicated that, even so, he would not repeal the order if he were elected.

Messina was flabbergasted. “They couldn’t have fucked this up any worse,” he said in a staff meeting the next morning. “Their people are pissed, Latinos are pissed, and he looks like an asshole.”

Obama was perplexed, too. “I’m surprised,” the president said, pondering Romney’s behavior. He seems to have latitude with his party now, or he wouldn’t have taken the opportunity to try and heal himself a little bit. But apparently he doesn’t believe he has enough latitude to go the whole nine yards. It was weird, Obama thought.

In truth, everything about Hispanics was vexed in Romneyland. Mitt had been talking since December about releasing a comprehensive immigration plan. Chen and the rest of his policy team agreed that doing so might help with Latinos, but they couldn’t figure out what to put on paper that wouldn’t enrage the GOP’s anti-amnesty ranters. Rhoades had no thirst for any issue that would distract from the economy or inflame the right. Stevens believed that Romney could never escape the positions he’d taken during the nomination fight, as well as four years earlier. The president will pull out what you said in 2008, Stevens said. No matter what you say now, that stuff is gonna be there.

Ed Gillespie shook his head when he heard the conversations. From his experience with Bush, who garnered upwards of 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, Gillespie knew it was possible for a Republican to compete for that demographic. And that unless Romney did, he was doomed in Florida, a state he had to win. But here was Stevens, resisting running Spanish-language ads because he considered them a low priority for a cash-strapped campaign. And here was Romney, arguing that it was better to stick to lethal positions than be charged with inconsistency—talking as if this were a fundamental test of character.

The Langone gang at the Union League Club agreed with Gillespie, starting with Univision CEO Randy Falco. As I’m sure you know, our network has extraordinary reach in the Latino community, Falco said to Romney. The president has been on our air a dozen times. You’ve been on once. Consider this an open invitation; you can contact me directly.

“You’re allowing other people to paint you as the anti-immigrant candidate,” Falco went on. Whether you think Hispanics will agree with you or not, they deserve to hear your point of view. “Even if you don’t agree with
what I just said, if you don’t start paying attention to our community, there won’t be a Republican Party in ten to fifteen years,” Falco added forcefully.

Before Romney could respond, Murdoch slammed his hand on the table and said, “He’s right!”

The News Corp chief had only grown more vociferous and cantankerous in his disdain for Mitt in the course of the nomination battle; a few days before the Iowa caucuses, he tweeted that Santorum was the “only candidate with genuine big vision for [the] country.” Now he laid into Romney on immigration.

I don’t know if it’s you or your advisers, but you’ve put yourself in a very bad way on this issue, Murdoch said. Talking about self-deportation—it’s ridiculous. You’re going to need to soften your rhetoric and come up with a more humane policy. If you can’t figure out a way to appeal to Hispanics, there’s no way for you to win.

Taken aback, Romney turned defensive. Obviously, I understand the significance of the Hispanic vote, Mitt said weakly. Latino outreach is important. (He noted that one of his sons spoke Spanish.) I know I took some positions in the primary that are difficult to deal with in the general election, Romney went on. But my positions are my positions. I don’t have the option of changing them.

“I am not going to be seen as a flip-flopper,” Romney said.

Murdoch left the meeting unimpressed, and wasn’t shy about letting the world know. “When is Romney going to look like a challenger?” he tweeted later that afternoon. “Seems to play everything safe, make no news except burn off Hispanics.”

Langone understood Romney’s aversion to being cast as a flip-flopper. But he also thought that if Mitt didn’t fix his Latino problem, he was done for. A week after swooning in Park City, Langone was having doubts again.

And he was not alone—though the source of the misgivings among others at the Union League Club was different. After a respite, the Obamans were starting to open up again on Romney with both barrels over Bain. One of the machers suggested that Mitt do more to defend his record in private equity. Romney waved off the suggestion and spouted boilerplate about class warfare.

Murdoch’s lieutenant, Joel Klein, could barely believe the candidate’s
insouciance. Klein had worked in the Clinton White House. He knew a thing or two about negative campaigning.

Obama is about to make Bain a synonym for organized crime,
Klein thought.
And this poor schmuck doesn’t even see it coming.

•   •   •

B
OB WHITE SAW IT
as clearly as Cassandra previsioned the fall of Troy. At fifty-six, White had been at Romney’s side for most of his adult life. After growing up working class in Woburn, Massachusetts, he went to work for Mitt at Bain and Company in 1981 and was Bain Capital’s first hire three years later. From the Olympics through the statehouse and into the presidential arena, White was Mitt’s alter ego, aide-de-camp, in-house historian, personnel vetter, and gut-checker, all on a volunteer basis. (A part owner of the Boston Celtics, he was as rich as Romney.) Mitt called him “my wingman” or TQ—short for The Quail, a nickname based on the family of birds that includes the bobwhite. White called himself “Friend of Candidate.” His devotion to Mitt was matched by and bound up in his devotion to Bain. Now he was laboring to save both of his four-letter loves from being left in ruins.

White recalled all too well the way Ted Kennedy had used Bain against Romney in 1994: to knock down his claims to being a job creator and cast him as a job destroyer. White viewed those famous laid-off-worker ads as impugning not only Mitt’s business acumen but his (and Bain’s) integrity. White considered the claims infuriating, unjust, despicable. He expected even worse in 2012.

Mitt’s friend was bound and determined that Boston be ready. In April 2011, before Romney entered the race, White stood at a whiteboard, drawing charts and matrices, trying to elucidate the intricacies of private equity for Mitt’s political schlubs. White believed there was a positive story to tell about Bain: the successful ventures, the charitable endeavors. But he was more concerned with Bain investments that presented political vulnerabilities: deals where the firm got fat but the portfolio companies failed; companies that laid off workers, engaged in offshoring, or were guilty of malfeasance. We need deep dives on all of these, White said. We need to be set up for rapid response when the attacks come.

For the better part of the next year, White immersed himself in researching the problem investments. By April 2012, he had timelines, fact sheets, and contact lists for them all. On a parallel track, he identified workers and executives at thriving companies to provide on-camera testimonials. That month, he established a three-person SWAT team, as he called it, dedicated solely to Bain.

White took little comfort from the Booker/Clinton backlash in late May. After its initial steelworker spot, Priorities rolled out another, then another, and then another in its Kennedy-style campaign. The ads didn’t have much money behind them, but they lit up cable and the Web, especially one called “Stage,” released in late June. It featured a former employee of an Indiana paper company bought by Bain, who told the story of coming in to work and being instructed to build a thirty-foot dais—from which it was announced that he and his co-workers were fired. “Turns out that when we built that stage,” the hard hat said, “it was like building my own coffin.”

The Obamans tested hundreds of spots in 2012; none was as effective as “Stage,” which quickly racked up three million hits on YouTube. But even more problematic for Boston was a June 21 story in
The Washington Post
alleging that when “Romney was actively involved in running Bain . . . it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components” in “low-wage countries like China and India.”

Chicago knew the story was coming a week in advance, even before the reporter called Boston for comment. The Obamans had learned from the first Bain flare-up how combustible the issue was; a single spark could ignite a blaze. Their plan had been to wait until July to torch Romney on Bain and his income taxes. The
Post
piece caused them to grab their flamethrowers ten days early, queuing up a series of ads citing the paper’s report that would unfurl over the next few weeks.