Double Down: Game Change 2012 (60 page)

Boston feared that the coverage of Romney’s speech would be swamped by the Clint imbroglio. They were right to be worried. On TV and the Web, and in newspapers around the country, Mitt’s speech was mostly an
afterthought, criticized for being substance-free on policy and failing to mention the troops in Afghanistan. But it was Eastwood who got most of the ink. On
Meet the Press,
Tom Brokaw observed, “Four years ago, the Republican convention gave
Saturday Night Live
Sarah Palin. This time we’ll be seeing a lot of Clint Eastwood.” On
The Daily Show,
Jon Stewart opined, “Amidst the tired rhetoric, empty platitudes, and overwrought attacks, a fistful of awesome emerged in the night, where it spent twelve minutes on the most important night of Mitt Romney’s life yelling at a chair.”

Boston pointed to an uptick in Romney’s favorability ratings to suggest that Tampa had been a success. Schriefer and others clung to the fantasy that Eastwood hadn’t been so bad. The Romneys had a different point of view. Ann and Tagg Romney were dismayed by the Thursday-night fiasco: How could this have happened? they kept asking.

Mitt’s nose was out of joint, too. The critical hour of the last major event before Election Day that was under the campaign’s complete control had been riddled with unforced errors—not just Eastwood but the omission of mention of the troops. And yet, as was the case after the foreign trip, no one was called on the carpet or fired. Denominationally, Romney was a Mormon, but temperamentally he was a stoic WASP from top to toe. Flying out of Tampa to New Orleans to tour the storm damage from Isaac, he swallowed his upset and pushed forward, while Eastwood was winging back to California.

It would be a little while before Clint understood what a kerfuffle he had caused. (McNealy called him an “improvisational genius.”) And when he did, it didn’t bother him a bit. “If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to say something,” Eastwood remarked, “they’re gonna have to take what they get.”

What the Republicans had gotten was an object lesson in the dangers of celebrity casting. The Democrats were paying close attention. Their convention in Charlotte would commence just five days after Tampa, and it, too, would feature an intergalactic mega-star up onstage. In some ways, the risks for the Obamans would be smaller, because the performer was a politician. But in some ways they would be greater. Because the fellow’s role would be no mere cameo—and his last name happened to be Clinton.

19

OFF THE LEASH

T
HE FORTY-SECOND PRESIDENT
had been lazing around the Hamptons during the Republican convention. Yet Bill Clinton’s televisual presence in Florida (and the other battleground states) that week was ubiquitous, inescapable. On the eve of the GOP hoedown, Chicago had released an ad that featured Clinton speaking direct-to-camera: touting Obama’s “plan to rebuild America from the ground up,” arguing that “it only works if there is a strong middle class,” observing that “that’s what happened when I was president,” and concluding that “we need to keep going with his plan.” The commercial ran sixteen thousand times, more than all but two other Obama spots in 2012. It was a mere trailer, though, for the role that Clinton would play in Charlotte.

The impending Democratic convention forced a pair of challenges on the Obamans. Having spent the spring and summer turning the tables on Romney—framing the race as a referendum on
him
rather than on the incumbent—they had managed to distract attention from the president’s economic record and defer debate about his plans for a second term. But neither issue had disappeared by any means. The one area where Romney consistently led Obama in the polls was the ability to manage the economy, which remained the paramount concern of voters. For all the missed opportunities
and miscues in Tampa, the Republicans had done a creditable job of portraying Obama as a well-meaning but ill-equipped CEO, whose performance merited a handshake, a gold watch, and early retirement. In Sunday-show interviews the weekend between the conventions, Axelrod and Plouffe were asked the most basic question: Is the country better off today than four years ago? Both were flummoxed.

The task of providing a compelling answer in Charlotte had been bequeathed to Clinton. While Obama pivoted to the future, Bubba would revisit the past. When it came to distillation, exposition, and validation, Clinton was peerless—if he was on his game, that is, which he sometimes wasn’t these days.

The heft of the burden being laid on his shoulders was difficult to overstate. And so was the degree to which the reconciliation between him and Obama remained a work in progress.

In the months since the Obamans made their pilgrimage to visit 42 in Harlem in November 2011, they had been engaged in a full-court Clinton press. In early December, 44 agreed to appear with him at an event in Washington promoting green buildings, a pet cause of Clinton’s. Both presidents tossed bouquets to each other, but Obama’s were especially fragrant.

“When Bill Clinton was president, we didn’t shortchange investment,” Obama said. “We lived within our means. We invested in our future. We asked everybody to pay their fair share. And you know what happened? The private sector thrived, jobs were created, the middle class grew—its income grew. Millions rose out of poverty. We ran a surplus. We were actually on track to be able to pay off all of our debt. We were firing on all cylinders. We can be that nation again.”

After the event, a reporter called out, “President Clinton, do you have any advice for President Obama about the economy?” A grinning Obama interjected, “Oh, he gives me advice all the time,” as Clinton looked on, beaming.

Behind the scenes, however, things were less smiley. Though Clinton had agreed to appear in the Davis Guggenheim Obama documentary and take part in some joint fund-raisers, his participation became ensnarled in a nasty hangover from four years earlier. Hillary Clinton had concluded the 2008 Democratic nomination fight with $20 million of debt. Over time, she
had paid down most of it, but a stubborn $263,000 remained. Now, Bill Clinton’s gatekeeper, Doug Band, issued an ultimatum to the Obamans: the price of WJC’s involvement in the campaign was the retirement of HRC’s balance due.

The first reaction of Messina and Plouffe was:
Fuck this.
The second was to wonder whether Bill and Hillary were aware that the extortionate demand was being made, or if Band, whom the Obamans code-named “Douchebag,” was acting unilaterally.

Obama volunteered to call the former president to check it out. Messina said no way.

“I’m never going to ask you to talk to Bill Clinton about
this
,” Messina said. “That’s crazy.”

The Obamans contacted Clinton intimate and former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe. You know what? McAuliffe said. I can’t tell you for sure—it might just be Doug. But I can tell you that Hillary’s debt is important to President Clinton. Maybe you oughta just pay it off.

The Obamans detested being held hostage. It reminded them of everything they hated about Clintonworld. But Obama finance chair Matthew Barzun believed that the money could be scratched together, albeit with great effort. (Obama donors knew that part of the debt was owed to Hillary’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, whose harsh anti-Obama posture in 2008 left a bitter aftertaste among Barack’s supporters.) Messina and Plouffe decided that it made more sense to switch than fight. They sorely needed Clinton. We don’t have a choice, Plouffe said.

The series of Obama-Clinton fund-raisers kicked off in late April at McAuliffe’s stone manse in McLean, Virginia. For the first and maybe the last time in history, Clinton was early and Obama late. Watching a golf tournament on TV in a back room, Clinton caught a news report about the federal sex-and-money trial of John Edwards—prompting him to offer an energetic disquisition on the flaws in Edwards’s legal strategy, how it was lunacy for the defendant to have admitted this or that about his relationship with his mistress, Rielle Hunter. (One Obaman in the room thought:
Awwwkward.
)

When Obama arrived, the two men hugged, chatted about golf, and wolfed down a fast dinner. It was the first personal time they had spent
together since their strained outing on the links seven months earlier. The atmosphere was friendly enough, but the table talk superficial.

Under a big white tent in McAuliffe’s backyard, packed with six hundred donors, Clinton took the microphone to introduce Obama, who stood with his arms folded, looking pensive, apprehensive, and uneasy. “I’m going to tell you a couple of things I hope you’ll remember and share with others,” Clinton began—and then uncorked a detailed and lusty defense of Obama’s term. The stimulus? Sliced two points off the jobless rate. The auto bailout? Saved 1.5 million jobs. Obamacare? Consumers and employers were about to get $1.3 billion in refunds from insurance companies. The slowness of the economic recovery? Financial crises after housing collapses take at least ten years to come back from.

“Why do I tell you this?” Clinton said. “Because somebody will say to you, ‘Maybe, but I don’t feel better.’ And you say, ‘Look, the man’s not Houdini; all he can do is beat the clock.’ He’s beating the clock.”

Obama had never heard Clinton talk about him this way. Heading back to the White House, he was bowled over by his predecessor’s forcefulness—and touched by his effusiveness. “That was kind of great,” he said marvelingly to Messina. “
He
was pretty great.”

The sweetness of Barack and Bill’s second date didn’t spark a flaming romance, however. Obama found hanging out with Clinton wearing, at times exasperating. In New York for another night of fund-raising a month after the McAuliffe event, Clinton held Obama captive in the presidential limo, curbside at the Waldorf, regaling him with a lengthy anecdote, grabbing his hand when Obama tried to hop out of the car before Clinton finished. (Bill, we have to go, Obama kept saying. Just one more second! Clinton kept insisting.) Upstairs at the hotel, they were supposed to share a one-on-one meal, but Obama couldn’t handle any more undiluted Clinton. Casting about for buffers, he invited a gaggle of aides—Band, Gaspard, Jarrett, Lew—to join them, and spent much of the dinner asking the underlings about their kids rather than picking the fellow-presidential brain.

It was Clinton’s political indiscipline that rankled Chicago and the West Wing. The obvious example was his comment in May about Romney’s “sterling” business career. No one in Obamaworld believed that Clinton was
trying to harm the reelection effort. Many did assume, though, that he was currying favor with the private equity kingpins—both for the sake of his philanthropic fund-raising and for his wife if she sought the White House in 2016. (Hillary’s private reaction to “sterling” was, in fact, not dissimilar to Chicago’s. “Bill can’t do that again,” she told her aides disapprovingly.)

But the Obamans continued to grin, bear it, and pull Clinton closer. In early June, with 42 in Chicago for a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) session, Axelrod and Messina met with him for another polling-and-strategy download. While the state of the race was less forbidding than in November, the contest remained too tight for comfort, and the Obaman desire for Clintonian engagement greater than ever. The campaign wanted him in ads, on the stump, on the fund-raising circuit—for as much time as he could spare. Clinton apologized for “sterling” and said again he was game to help.

Axelrod had been thinking about adding another item to the wish list: that Clinton deliver the speech in Charlotte placing Obama’s name in nomination—something no ex-president had ever done before. Chicago’s research was unequivocal: On the economy, Clinton’s credibility with voters was off the charts. There was no one who could vouch for Obama’s stewardship more powerfully, Axelrod believed. And no one who could more deftly rip Mitt and the Republicans a new one. When Axelrod put the idea to Obama, the president instantly saw the logic.

Barack called Bill from Air Force One on July 25 to offer him the marquee speaking slot on the convention’s penultimate night. Stunned and delighted, Clinton accepted on the spot—and then dove headlong into his assignment. For four years, his most acute frustration with Obama had been over 44’s inability or unwillingness to make the case for his own achievements, to sell them to the country. Now Clinton saw an opportunity, and even a responsibility, to remedy the shortcoming. All through August, as he brainstormed the speech with his erstwhile White House lieutenants, Clinton repeated a three-word sentence like a mantra: “Explanation is eloquence.”