Double Down: Game Change 2012 (58 page)

The cancellation of the convention’s first night untied the Trumpian knot, as the Donald was otherwise engaged for the rest of the week. Boston heaved a heavy sigh of relief, and an even deeper one when Isaac veered away from the southwest Florida coast. By Monday, the meteorological storm had passed without incident—just as the second tempest, the human typhoon, rolled into Tampa.

•   •   •

B
IG BOY HAD BEEN LOOKING
forward to his big night in the Big Guava. Christie’s Tuesday keynote would be his first speech to a national audience, a chance to launch himself into orbit in the same way that Obama had at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. Christie been working on the text for weeks, editing and revising, churning out umpteen drafts. He was fired up and ready to go. But what greeted him on Monday morning in the
New York Post
enflamed him in a different way.

FAT CHANCE
read the blaring banner on the front page, beneath a photo of him pointing a finger, mouth agape. The accompanying story bore the headline
CHRISTIE CHOSE NJ OVER MITT’S VP ROLE DUE TO FEARS THAT THEY’D LOSE.
Citing “sources” including an unnamed “Romney source,” the piece reported that Boston had “demanded” Christie step down from the governorship if he wanted to be Mitt’s running mate; and that Christie refused because he was “certain Romney was doomed.”

Christie was flabbergasted. However unhelpful Trenton had been during the VP vetting, Christie thought the process was sacrosanct. He blamed the story on Boston—which in turn blamed it on Christieworld, with its self-promoting ways. Schriefer, headed to an interview on
Fox and Friends,
called his New Jersey client to ask if he or his people were the “sources” for the
Post.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Christie barked. “You think
I
had something to do with this? This came from
you
guys! Not from me! What the hell is my incentive to get involved in this? I’m about to give the keynote—I’m on a run here. I’m gonna get involved in that? For what reason?”

“I didn’t think so, Chris, but I had to ask,” Schriefer said meekly. “I’ve been told to ask.”

“Well, yes, and that’s the answer,” Christie said. “You knew the answer before you even asked.”

In addition to managing the convention, Schriefer had been playing point with Christieworld on the governor’s keynote, with which Boston was satisfied in almost every way. There was only one hang-up: a conflict between a theme in Ann Romney’s remarks (“Tonight, I want to talk to you about love”) and a line in Christie’s (“Tonight, we choose respect over love”). But after going back and forth with Palatucci over the matter in multiple phone calls and making little headway, Schriefer finally relented—proving once again that Big Boy could be both an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

There was a whole lotta love in Ann’s speech that night at the Tampa Bay Times Forum: love for children, grandchildren, the country, and her fellow females. (“I love you,
women
!” she shouted.) But mostly her speech was about “the deep and abiding love I have for a man I met at a dance many years ago.” Besides Mitt himself, no one was in a better position than Ann to humanize her husband. She praised him as a “warm and loving and patient” man who is “there when late-night calls of panic come from a member of our church whose child has been taken to the hospital.” The crowd ate it up. Watching from a box in the hall, Mitt thought,
She knocked it out of the park.

Christie came armed with a three-minute video that he insisted be played before he spoke. It was an ode to himself and to New Jersey, as was much of his speech. Lumbering out onstage, clapping his hands, Christie talked for twenty-four minutes—the first sixteen devoted to his mother and father, his biography, his achievements in his state. He mentioned the
nominee just seven times, speaking of Mitt purely in the abstract. Christie’s only criticism of Obama was implicit: “It’s time to end this era of absentee leadership in the Oval Office and send real leaders to the White House.” He never uttered the incumbent’s name. There was little humor and no spark.

Many of the reviews of Christie’s speech were pans. From the left, Rachel Maddow called it “one of the most remarkable acts of political selfishness I have ever seen.” From the right,
National Review
’s Byron York wrote that the speech “failed to convey the spirit—the essential Christie-ness—that millions have seen in YouTube videos of the New Jersey governor in action.” On Fox News, Chris Wallace gibed, “For a moment, I forgot who was the nominee of the party.” But the appraisal that got the most attention was from Politico, which declared it “a prime-time belly-flop.”

For the past three years, Christie had been on an uninterrupted roll. The keynote was supposed to be his shining moment. Instead it was his first significant national failure.

Much as Christie attempted to ignore the chorus of criticism, he couldn’t put the Politico story out of his mind. The piece included a sentence—“Several political figures close to Mitt Romney made acerbic comments to reporters, making clear they thought Christie laid an egg”—that convinced him the whole thing was a Boston-fueled hatchet job. Christie believed he had laid himself on the line for Mitt, done everything the campaign had asked. Now, between Politico and the
New York Post,
he had been shat on twice in forty-eight hours by people he was trying to help. The treatment was galling, infuriating. More than that, it was hurtful.

Rhoades’s assessment was that the
Post
story had poisoned the well for Christie’s speech, much as Romney’s Brian Williams interview wrecked his foreign trip right out of the gate. On Wednesday morning, he called Christie to apologize for any Boston involvement in the Politico story.

“You guys had this speech for a week before it was given,” Christie told Rhoades. “You did not ask me to make one change in the speech. Now you fucking guys are cutting my nuts off. You know what, Matt? I’m tired of it. I’ve worked hard for Governor Romney. I like him. And I see that you guys, for whatever reason, are playing this game.”

Christie simmered and brooded for much of Wednesday. On the phone
with Schriefer, he sounded irked and defensive. “You wanted me to mention Romney sooner?” he said. “You wanted me to do something else? You wanted me to attack Obama? You should have told me.”

That evening, Christie arrived later than usual to a high-end donor dinner at the Hyatt Regency hosted by Dan Loeb and Paul Singer. Expecting the typical Christie bravado, the two hundred donors in the room were slack-jawed at what they got instead. Midway through his speech, Christie drifted into a point-by-point rebuttal of the Politico piece and the punditry on that day’s
Morning Joe
—a riposte that consumed half of his time onstage. Never before had anyone seen Christie evince insecurity, but it was oozing out of him now.

When the dinner was done, Christie hustled to the convention hall, where he had interviews to do with Hannity and Piers Morgan. He ran into Ron Kaufman, Mitt’s pal and Washington smart guy.

“Guvanah,” Kaufman said in his thick Boston accent, “I want you to know that this stuff did not come from the campaign.”

Christie had been endeavoring to swallow his anger all day long. He assumed that Stevens was behind the Politico story. (“Your fucking partner did this,” he told Schriefer. “I know it and you know it.”) His opinion of Boston in toto was scarcely better, though. In the preceding months, he had become convinced that Romney’s operation was a gaggle of clowns who couldn’t organize a one-ring circus. Now here was Kaufman claiming that the guys in greasepaint weren’t trying to feed Christie to the lions—no! They loved him, they respected him, they wanted to buy him a bushel of cotton candy.

It was just too much.

Standing on a public concourse, in front of the Churchill Lounge cigar bar, with delegates streaming by, the governor of New Jersey started bellowing at the top of his lungs, putting the perfect punctuation mark on his day, his time in Tampa, and his feelings about Boston:

“Don’t bullshit me, Ron!”

And: “You’re a fucking liar!!”

And: “I’m tired of you people!!!”

And: “Leave me the fuck alone!!!!”

And then—with Kaufman chasing after him, crying, “Guvanah! Guvanah! Guvanah!”—Christie stalked off down the concourse to go be on TV.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY REASSURED CHRISTIE
that he thought the speech was boffo. Rhoades told Mitt that the television reaction shots of his face suggested otherwise: that he looked angry during the keynote. Romney had known the cameras were on him, of course.
I was trying to look interested and supportive!
he fretted. His team suggested he stay out of the hall until his own speech Thursday night. Mitt grudgingly agreed. The most important address of his life, an oration that would be watched by thirty million people, was twenty-four hours away, but Romney had yet to practice it once. Because it wasn’t finished.

The Romney speechwriting operation was still the same mess it always had been—only worse. Following the CPAC and Detroit Economic Club fiascos, repeated attempts had been made to bring order to the chaos spawned by the Mitt-and-Stuart system of mutual dependency. Rhoades authorized the hiring of a veteran GOP speechwriting duo: Matthew Scully and John McConnell, who had worked with 43 and Cheney. Wary of Stevens’s reaction, Rhoades arranged to put them on contract secretly. Myers and Flaherty were maddened by Stuart’s grip on speechwriting, but powerless to break it. After taking a few stabs at easing Stevens away from his compositional monopoly, Gillespie gave up.
It’s like sticking your hand into a wood chipper,
he thought.

The convention address represented the culmination of this dysfunction. By the time Romney arrived in Tampa on Tuesday, he had rejected four or five drafts by the outside writer brought on board to pen the speech, former Bush 43 adviser Pete Wehner. He had rejected a draft by Scully and McConnell. Another draft, by Hayes’s team, was floating around, unread. Romney and Stevens, commencing seventy-two hours earlier, had cobbled together still another clump of words, which was now the operative draft—and which much of the Boston brain trust considered mediocre.

That afternoon, they gathered in Romney’s eighteenth-floor suite in the Marriott across the street from the hall. Unhappiness suffused the room.
The Wehner draft had been imperfect, they all agreed. But there was no reason to have scrapped it and started over from scratch. Everyone had seen this movie before, but the stakes this time were incomparably higher. Romney had a huge amount of political damage to repair. The eyes of the world would be upon him as never before. Yet here they were, endeavoring to bind up a wound that was entirely self-inflicted, with no doubt in the room about who was to blame.

Crammed around the dining room table in the suite, the brain trust paged through the working draft, saying little that was complimentary. Fehrnstrom had a fair number of notes; Gillespie had even more. As the cacophony of suggestions swelled, Stevens became increasingly agitated.

I have a bunch of edits and a bunch of questions, Gillespie said, placing a piece of paper on the table.

Picking up a pen, holding it like a knife, Stevens silently stabbed at the paper, scrawling an X through Gillespie’s offerings.

Through it all, Mitt remained unaccountably calm. He, too, had seen this movie before, and it didn’t faze him—even though it was apparently shaping up to be a box-office bomb.

As the meeting broke up, Romney sat at the table, studying the Scully-McConnell draft on his iPad. Coming upon a section about his father and mother, who were married for sixty-four years, he began to read aloud: “If you wonder what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist. Because every day Dad gave Mom a flower. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died—she went looking for him, because, that morning, there was no flower.”

Choking up, Romney said softly, “That’s beautiful—that’s absolutely beautiful.” It would be nice to find a way to work it in, he added. Maybe that’s the conclusion.

Yeah, sure, maybe, we’ll figure it out, Stevens said dismissively.

Romney’s chief strategist had a heaping amount on his plate already—but he just kept piling on more and more, like John Belushi at the buffet in
Animal House.
In addition to Romney’s speech, Stuart had pulled an all-nighter to write Ann’s. And now he was sticking his nose into the drafting of Ryan’s.

The seventeen days since his selection had been a whirlwind for
Fishconsin. In terms of policy expertise and media savvy, Ryan was infinitely better equipped than Palin to handle the sudden glare. But in terms of electrifying the right, his selection was similar to hers. And because he hadn’t expected to be picked, the upending of his life was nearly as disorienting. Returning to his home in Janesville, he was thunderstruck by the motorcade that ferried him to his house. Seeing his neighborhood turned into a Badger State Green Zone by the Secret Service, he wondered,
What did they tell my neighbors?
To his lead adviser, Dan Senor, he kept saying, “This is an out-of-body experience.”

Just like Palin in 2008, Ryan was determined not to disappoint the man who had elevated him to new heights. He was desperate to hit a home run in Tampa and kick butt in his debate with Biden. With his convention speech, Ryan planned to push big conservative ideas and take a cudgel to Obama. By that Tuesday, not only was the speech locked, but Ryan had memorized it. When Stevens attempted to stick his oar in—plumping for more plaudits for Mitt, passages about how he played with his grandkids on the campaign bus—Senor and the rest of the Ryan camp shut him down. This isn’t how Paul operates, they said. If we start making changes now, it’ll mess with his performance.

Fabulous, Stevens said. So what we’re gonna get is a great delivery of a crappy speech.