Double Down: Game Change 2012 (54 page)

Obama hadn’t been happy about Cutter’s insertion of the word “felony” into the conversation. It put the focus on her—and, by extension, him—rather than keeping it on Romney, where he wanted it. But Mitt’s round-robin returned the pink to the presidential cheek.

“I guess he doesn’t have an answer on this yet,” Obama said wryly to Plouffe.

Just as heartening was Romney’s response regarding his income tax returns, another story that the Obamans had been pushing frantically alongside Bain for the past two weeks. Feeding oppo to the AP had yielded a story about a Bermuda-based holding company that had never appeared in Romney’s financial disclosures. In a speech to the National Council of La Raza, Biden had hit him: “Romney wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his.” Yet Mitt refused to budge. “People always want to get more,” he told CNN. “Two years [is all] that people are going to have.”

That night, Chicago released a new TV spot titled “Firms.” A few days earlier, on a conference call with the campaign’s advertising team, someone had thrown out the idea of creating an ad that tied up all of Romney’s financial pathogens in one package: the tax havens, the outsourcing, the works. Harking back to the Republican nomination contest, Axelrod observed, It’s ironic that a guy who goes around singing “America the Beautiful” has all these foreign problems—and the ad guys were off and running.

The resulting spot used as its soundtrack Romney’s off-key rendition of the song at the Villages on the eve of the Florida primary. As Mitt warbled, empty factories and offices appeared on-screen, along with newspaper headlines about Bain shipping jobs to Mexico, China, and India, followed by more about Romney’s Swiss bank account, Bermuda, and the Caymans. “Mitt Romney’s not the solution,” read the final slate. “He’s the problem.”

After “Stage,” “Firms” was the ad that tested best of all the spots run in 2012. The Obamans ran it more than thirteen thousand times around the country, one of the heaviest buys of the cycle.

For Romney, “Firms” was the final body blow of a punishing six weeks. For Bob White, it was worse. The Quail, after all, was the one who had
convinced Romney to sing “America the Beautiful” that night in Florida. Now his whimsy had been subverted—its results transformed into a weapon by Mitt’s enemies, and a soundtrack for a summer of pain.

•   •   •

I
N LATE JULY,
Romney set off on a seven-day foreign trip to England, Israel, and Poland. The idea of an overseas expedition had been kicked around Boston for months, and had an obvious precedent. Four summers earlier, the Obamans had staged a sojourn for their candidate so ambitious it would have tested the mettle of a sitting president and his team: eight countries in ten days, including two war zones (Afghanistan and Iraq). Their execution was flawless, the images beamed back home priceless.

The Romneyites had more modest aims and approached their man’s trip less exactingly. The lynchpin was the London leg, about which Mitt was adamant. As a former president of an Olympic organizing committee, he always attended the Games, and with Ann’s dressage horse, Rafalca, in competition this year, there was no way he wouldn’t be there. The next two stops were chosen haphazardly, after other options in the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and Canada were discarded. While Romney’s foreign policy advisers were in favor of the trip to burnish his global credentials, the rest of his team saw little upside. No one was really in charge of the thing. No senior political or communications advisers would be along for the ride. The itinerary was a jam-packed jumble of photo ops, interviews, and fund-raisers, with no coherent message strategy.

A small handful of Mitt’s people were nervous about the lack of preparation. One of them was Kevin Madden, Romney’s 2008 spokesman and a shrewd operative who had just rejoined the team. This kind of junket is a high-stakes high-wire act, Madden kept telling the Boston brain trust. “There’s a big difference,” he said, “between building a schedule and planning a trip.”

And Romney wasn’t even thrilled with the schedule. After spending several days on an exhausting West Coast fund-raising swing, he woke up in Santa Monica around 5:00 a.m. on July 24, and flew to Reno, Nevada, to give a speech on foreign policy; it was the last time he would feel free to criticize Obama before his stint abroad. He then boarded his jet for the two-flight,
eleven-hour schlep to London, with a stop in Boston to pick up Ann. Settling into his seat and getting his first gander at his calendar for the next week, Romney moaned, “You guys are killing me.”

The Gulfstream 5 ferrying him and Ann across the pond touched down at Heathrow early the next morning. When the flight attendant jostled him awake, he looked like death warmed over: barely able to open his eyes, his usually perfect hair sticking every which way. (Ann applied some water to try to tame the multitude of cowlicks.) Arriving at the IOC Hilton, he had four hours of downtime before sitting for an interview with NBC News’s Brian Williams. To the extent that there was a strategy for the London piece of the trip, it was for Romney to strut his Olympic credentials and bask in the glow of the Games in sessions with Williams,
Today
’s Matt Lauer, and CNN’s Piers Morgan.

In a drawing room at the Tower of London, Williams asked about dressage; Mitt professed ignorance. (“This is Ann’s sport,” he said.) Then the anchor tendered an innocuous question about the Games: “In the short time you’ve been here in London, do they look ready to your experienced eye?”

“You know, it’s hard to know just how well it will turn out,” Romney said, and referenced press reports about various challenges the Games were facing. “There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging . . . [Then there are] the people of the country. Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment? And that’s something which we only find out once the Games actually begin.”

The Olympic comments were not included in the package that Williams aired that night. But in Chicago, a young Obaman on the digital rapid-response team named Matthew McGregor noticed them in the NBC News transcript. British-born, a former Labour Party and union operative, McGregor shipped the transcript to some pals in the British press, flagging the potentially rankling bits.
The Times
of London turned a piece around fast, splashing the story on its website the next morning, under the headline
MITT ROMNEY CASTS DOUBT ON LONDON 2012 PREPARATIONS
.

The Obamans had been trying to throw a spanner in Romney’s works
for days: deriding the trip as an exercise in expatriate buck-raking, critiquing his management of the 2002 Games for their reliance on taxpayer subsidies. But McGregor’s intercession turned the frame into Romney-as-not-ready-for-prime-time-player—and one-man special-relationship wrecking crew.

In London, Prime Minister David Cameron aimed an obligue shot at Romney’s achievement in Salt Lake: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.” The city’s mayor, Boris Johnson, took a contemptuous jab—“There’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we are ready!”—eliciting anti-Mitt booing from a crowd of sixty thousand in Hyde Park. The story led local, national, and international newscasts, and set the Web ablaze. Before the day was out, Mitt had committed two more gaffes, apparently forgetting Labour leader Ed Miliband’s name when they met and blurting out that he’d sat down with the head of Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6—when such sessions were normally kept on the down-low. By midday, Mitt had earned his own Twitter hashtag: #Romneyshambles.

On Commercial Street, panic set in—not just about what was unfolding in Britain but about the rest of the trip. In a tizzy, Stevens packed a bag, bought an airline ticket, and flew to London. When he arrived, the front page of the Murdoch-owned
Sun
was carrying the banner headline
MITT THE TWIT
.

Romney’s private reaction was annoyance with the entire brouhaha: he had answered truthfully, as a former Olympic organizer, referring to problems that were well known. In public, he furiously, slavishly backpedaled. “I’m
absolutely
convinced that the people here are ready for the Games,” he told Lauer that day, before attending the opening ceremonies.

Romney called Rhoades to see how badly the coverage of trip was playing back home.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” Rhoades said dejectedly. “It’s not very good.”

The mood in the White House was decidedly more jovial. National security aide Ben Rhodes recounted in detail the Boris Johnson rally for
Obama. The president cracked up. It’s a good rule, when you go to a country, not to insult the people who live there, Obama said. And then, if you’re gonna do it, don’t do it more than once.

As Romney flew off to Israel, he knew that the whole trip was already ruined; after London, nothing else would break through or matter. He was wrong and right. In both the Holy Land and Polonia, Mitt delivered decent speeches that were ignored. But both legs of the trip produced more bad headlines—largely as a result of what had become an openly hostile atmosphere between Mitt, Ann, and the Romney staff and the press on the plane. When reporters in Warsaw shouted questions at Mitt, a young press aide, Rick Gorka, snapped, “Kiss my ass.” The Romneys were not displeased.

On his way back to Boston on July 31, Mitt sent an e-mail summarizing the foreign trip to a handful of his aides: “A+ work by the team . . . Operations was extraordinary—smooth as a Swiss watch, no offense to non-Swiss peoples. I can only imagine what the media looks like at home. And I don’t think I want to find out.”

For Democrats and Republicans alike, Mitt’s adventure abroad capped a period that called into question the basic competence of the candidate and his campaign. In the space of just six weeks, Romney had traveled from the triumphalism of Park City to the humiliation of Piccadilly Circus. Mitt was beat up and bummed out; he knew he needed to turn the page. But he took comfort in the fact that a huge chance was close at hand.

The morning after his return stateside, Romney tramped into Commercial Street for a hastily arranged meeting. He wanted to hear, one last time, the views of his brain trust about who his running mate should be. After months of cogitation, Mitt had nearly arrived at his vice-presidential destination—though the road that had delivered him there had been neither straight nor smooth.

17

PROJECT GOLDFISH

I
N CONVENTIONAL POLITICAL TERMS,
Romney’s challenge in picking a VP presented a complex puzzle. With Tampa less than a month away, he was running four to six points behind the incumbent in the national polls. He was hurting with women, hurting with Hispanics, hurting with blue-collar whites. His standing in the industrial Midwest and the West was shaky. The Republican base remained unenthused by him and the middle of the electorate unimpressed. The quandary was which of these maladies he should try to heal with his running mate. For many members of the Republican smarty-pants set, one thing was increasingly clear: Romney needed a game changer.

Romney didn’t see it that way, at least not at the start. When he tapped Beth Myers to lead the search for his VP, Mitt put forth two criteria and a precept. The criteria applied to the candidates: that they be qualified, and immediately
perceived
as qualified, to be commander in chief; and that there be nothing in their backgrounds that could become a distraction for the campaign. The precept applied to Myers and her assignment. When decision time came, Romney said, he wanted to have a choice—not be informed, with the clock ticking, that there was really only one viable option.
What Mitt was looking for was an orderly process and a no-drama pick. For his veepstakes to be, in other words, as un-Palinesque as possible.