Double Down: Game Change 2012 (56 page)

Stevens e-mailed a video link of the speech to Romney. Take a look at this, he wrote. A little while later, Stevens’s cell phone rang. It was Romney, having just watched the speech. “Wow,” he said.

In the nine months since Christie’s endorsement of Romney, Boston had formed a mixed view of Big Boy. He was a fund-raising dynamo, but he and his staff were overbearing and hard to work with, demanding in ways that would have been unthinkable from any other surrogate. Trenton insisted on private jets, lavish spreads of food, space for a massive entourage. Romney ally Wayne Berman looked at the bubble around Christie and thought,
He’s not the president of the United States, you know?

Chronically behind schedule, Christie made a habit of showing up late to Romney fund-raising events. In May, he was so tardy to a donor reception at the Grand Hyatt New York that Mitt wound up taking the stage to speak before Christie arrived. When the Jersey governor finally made his grand entrance, it was as if Mitt had been his warm-up act.

Punctuality mattered to Romney. Christie’s lateness bugged him. Mitt also cared about fitness, and was prone to poke fun at those who didn’t. (“Oh, there’s your date for tonight,” he would say to male members of his traveling crew when they spied a chunky lady on the street.) Romney marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down the narrow
aisle of the campaign bus. Watching a video of Christie without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, “Guys! Look at
that
!”

But Mitt was grateful for Christie’s endorsement and everything else he’d done. He appreciated Chris’s persona, his shtick, his forcefulness, his intuitive connection with voters. That night at the Grand Hyatt, at a high-dollar dinner after the main event, Christie’s argument for Mitt was more compelling than anything the nominee could manage. Romney was aware of how jaundiced Stevens was about Christie—which made Stuart’s advocacy for choosing the guy as VP all the more suasive.

On July 8, the vetting of Pufferfish restarted. A list of questions arising out of the public record and Christie’s incomplete file from June was drafted. Mark Nielsen, who had been Romney’s general counsel as governor, was put on the case. What commenced was an eleven-day crash operation, filled with eighteen-hour deskbound stints for the vetters. The scenario wasn’t precisely Palinesque; her vet had consumed less than a week. But in some ways, it was worse. With Romney about to set off on his West Coast fund-raising swing and then on to the foreign trip, Project Goldfish was up against the clock—and running headlong into more intransigence from Trenton.

The sole interface between Commercial Street and Christieworld was Myers and Palatucci. The calls were not infrequent. Trenton’s view of the vet was unusual, but par for the course when it came to Christie: We’ll help you, but on our terms and timing, and if that’s not sufficient, go pound sand.

Palatucci thought Myers was erratic and hysterical; Christie agreed. Myers had questions not only for Palatucci but
about
him. Aware of a series of stories in
The New York Times
about a shady chain of New Jersey halfway houses owned by a company at which Palatucci was an executive, she instructed her team to start vetting the aide
.
Calling around to politically plugged-in friends, Myers asked, What’s the deal with Palatucci? Does he have baggage? Is there a cloud over him in the tri-state area?

The list of questions about Christie to which the vetters wanted answers was extensive and troubling. More than once, Myers reported back that Palatucci’s response was, in effect, Why do we need to give you that piece of information? Myers told her team, We have to assume if they’re not answering, it’s because the answer is bad.

For the past two and a half years, Christie had received skin-blanching exposure from the klieg lights of the national media. But the vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice Inspector General’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels such as the Four Seasons. (Beyond the expense abuse, the report raised questions for the vetters about Christie’s relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many of the trips.) There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies such as former attorney general John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie, arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all of that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on Myers’s team: Christie’s other lobbying clients; his investments overseas; the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament; and the status of his health.

Some of these were probably nothingburgers—though the vetters still needed answers. Some were inarguably disturbing, such as the IG report. (Lanhee Chen, who normally lent a hand on the vetting on policy matters, thought the Justice Department report was troubling enough to take it up directly with Romney.) But, added together, they were a potential political nightmare.

Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under Myers, had come into the vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying
the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty.

•   •   •

E
ARLY SUNDAY MORNING, JULY 15,
Romney got on a conference call with the Boston brain trust to talk about the veepstakes. For the first time, he revealed to his senior team who was on his short list and asked for their opinions, without tipping his own hand.

The overwhelming consensus was for Ryan. Rhoades, Newhouse, Gillespie, and Peter Flaherty were all in Camp Fishconsin. The arguments in Ryan’s favor were many. He was young, telegenic, Irish Catholic, with blue-collar appeal, and might put his state in play. He would rouse the base and sharpen the policy contrast with Obama. While the Ryan budget and Medicare plan were political cons, Romney was half pregnant with them anyway—so why not marry their most articulate defender? Mike Leavitt and Bob White argued that Mitt should pick the best governing partner; privately, both expressed support for Ryan. Look, Mitt, you’ve never worked in Washington, Leavitt said. Having someone who can swing a bat for you on the Hill and knows the budget inside out makes a lot of sense.

But Stevens remained unconvinced about Ryan, and adamantly in favor of Christie. Shielded from the crash vet and what it was turning up, Romney’s chief strategist was making a purely political argument—one that contradicted the considered judgment of virtually everyone else on whom Mitt relied for advice. Such was the potency of the Romney–Stevens bond that Mitt kept Christie in the pack.

Romney was somewhat shielded from the Pufferfish vet, too, but knew it wasn’t going smoothly. Myers informed him that a significant problem had not been solved: the strictures of the same pay-to-play regulations that kept Christie from tapping Wall Street cash in New Jersey.

Romney’s lawyers were still looking into the matter. It was complicated. One possibility was that, if Christie were picked as VP, Romney would no longer be able to raise money from many financial institutions for the rest of the campaign. Not great, but manageable, maybe. Another possibility was
that Boston would have to return the cash it had already raised on the Street—unacceptable. The attorneys had been exploring workarounds; none was watertight. Myers had pressed Palatucci for help figuring it out; none was forthcoming.

The easiest solution would be for Christie to resign as governor if he got the nod. A few hours after the conference call, Romney phoned him to float that notion. “Are there any circumstances in which you’d consider resigning to become the nominee?” Mitt asked.

Christie asked for time to think it over.

Romney said that his lawyers were still working on the pay-to-play conundrum.

“Why don’t you talk to your counsel and see what happens?” Christie said.

Romney hung up the phone convinced by Christie’s reaction that resignation was not in the cards. (He was correct.) “Look, let’s find out if we can get an answer” on pay-to-play, he told Myers. But let’s keep pushing on the vet—and pushing on Trenton.

Four nights later, on July 19, Myers’s team put the finishing touches on the Pufferfish vetting dossier. Included was a DVD with some of Christie’s most outlandish or unnerving YouTube hits: his castigating a pro-gay-marriage New Jersey assemblyman as “numb nuts,” his angrily berating a constituent while chasing him down the Seaside Heights boardwalk, brandishing an ice cream cone. But the main event was the thirty-five-page written report titled “Chris Christie memo 71912 FINAL.”

After eleven days of teeth-gnashing labor, several of the issues that the vetters had unearthed around Christie were still unresolved. Though the New Jersey governor believed that he and Palatucci had been fully cooperative, Myers and her team viewed Trenton as recalcitrant. Newton and Nielsen were sticklers. They were uncomfortable producing a final report they considered incomplete. Nielsen, who drafted the document, made a point of being meticulous about framing and flagging the problems, including a refrain in bold applied to a number of items.

On Todd Christie’s securities-fraud settlement: “[Governor] Christie has been asked to disclose whether Todd Christie incurred any monetary or
other penalty as a result of the SEC/NYSE action.
If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, this item should be obtained.
” On Christie’s defamation lawsuit: “Christie has been asked to provide the terms of the settlement of this matter.
If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, this item should be obtained.”
On Christie’s household help: “Christie has been asked to provide the names and documented status of all domestic employees. This material has not been received.
If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, these items should be obtained.”
On Christie’s lobbying clients: “Christie has provided only one of the twelve or so [public disclosure] filings made [in the time he was a lobbyist] . . .
If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, these items should be obtained.
”

Then there was this: “In response to the questionnaire, Governor Christie indicates that he has no health issues that would hinder him from serving as the vice-presidential nominee. Published reports indicate that Christie suffers from asthma and was briefly hospitalized last year after he suffered an asthma attack. He is also obese and has indicated that he struggles with his weight. ‘The weight exacerbates everything,’ he is quoted as saying. Christie has been asked to provide a detailed medical report. Christie has been asked to provide a copy of all medical records from his most recent physical examination.
If Christie’s possible selection is to move forward, this item should be obtained.
”

Romney reviewed Christie’s vetting materials the next day. At the outset of his VP search, Mitt had wanted an orderly process. The frantic, late Pufferfish crash vet had blown that desire sky-high. But Romney still hewed to the criteria he’d set out, one of which was to avoid a running mate who might become a distraction. Despite the language in the report indicating that Christie had not been sufficiently forthcoming with his medical records, Romney and Myers agreed that what he had provided put their minds at ease about his health. But the dossier on the Garden State governor’s background was littered with potential landmines. Between that and the pay-to-play snag, there was no point in thinking about Christie further. With the clock running out, Romney pulled the plug again, this time for good.

During the foreign trip, Mitt meditated on the choice that now seemed
inevitable: Ryan. Beyond all the political pros and cons, Romney felt comfortable with Paul. He reminded Mitt of junior partners he used to work with at Bain: eager, earnest, solicitous, smart, and not at all threatening. White had a phrase for these buttoned-down go-getters, which he applied to Ryan: “client-ready.”

On the flight home from Poland, Romney inhaled a long profile of Ryan in
The New Yorker,
which traced the congressman’s ascendancy to the position of de facto intellectual and ideological leader of the GOP. Impressed by what he read, he gave the piece to Stevens, who paged through it on the plane, too. What do you think now? Romney asked.

“I can’t tell you who to fall in love with,” Stevens said with a shrug.

The impromptu meeting in Myers’s office the day after Romney returned home took up about forty-five minutes. With Christie out of the picture, Stevens switched to making the case for Portman. Romney remained mum about which way he was leaning.

When the meeting was over, he stayed behind with Myers. In five days, she noted, a so-called protective pool of reporters would start accompanying him at all times, making it difficult to orchestrate the kind of secret maneuvers that a vice-presidential unveiling entailed. Unless we want to get real cloak-and-dagger, you should probably make up your mind pretty soon, Myers said.