Double Down: Game Change 2012 (64 page)

“Yeah,” Plouffe said. “This is going to be a thing.”

Plouffe thought back to Obama’s experience in 2008, when he was secretly audiotaped at a San Francisco fund-raiser talking about small-town people who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.” Bad as that was politically, Plouffe knew that if the gaffe had been captured on video, it would have been far worse. He fully expected Romney to try to kill the story with an apology. When Mitt didn’t, Plouffe thought,
We’re off to the races here!

Obama and his people instantly twigged to the most damaging part of Romney’s remarks: that he had said of half the country, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” The president considered it cynical in the extreme, but not unexpected. This shows who the real Mitt Romney is, Obama told his aides.

The next night, Obama was scheduled to be a guest on the
Late Show with David Letterman.
Letterman was sure to raise the 47 percent topic, giving the president his first chance to comment publicly on the controversy. Plouffe and Pfeiffer saw the appearance as a big moment; they carefully rehearsed an answer with Obama that would dovetail with the theme of the negative TV ads being ginned up in Chicago. To Letterman’s question, Obama replied devastatingly but without rancor.

“When I won in 2008, 47 percent of the American people voted for John McCain,” he said. “They didn’t vote for me. And what I said on election night was, even though you didn’t vote for me, I hear your voices and I’m going to work as hard as I can to be your president.”

Around the same time Obama was taping his chat with Dave, Romney was on Fox News’s
Your World with Neil Cavuto.
Not giving an inch, he more or less repeated what he had said at Leder’s house: “Those that are dependent upon government and those that think government’s job is to redistribute, I’m not going to get.” By the next night, Mitt’s tune had changed, albeit only slightly. In Miami at a televised Univision forum, he addressed the 47 percent issue implicitly. “My campaign is about the 100 percent of
America,” he said, “and I’m concerned about them.” The following day, in an interview with
60 Minutes,
he repeated that formulation. His tone remained static, remote, and abrupt, even as the story, with its “secret video” irresistibility, continued to reverberate on every TV channel, in every corner of the Internet, and on every inky op-ed page across the country.

In private, Romney was engaged in an orgy of rationalization and self-censure. Reviewing the now available transcript, he fixated on the query that had prompted his infamous reply: “How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?”
What an idiotic question,
Romney thought. He told himself that the part of his answer about not worrying about the moochers applied only to those two months; he couldn’t persuade them to change their lives
before
Election Day. He cursed himself for answering at all; he was only trying to be polite. (
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
) Lying awake at 4:00 a.m., brooding on another self-administered gut punch, he remembered something Mike Leavitt once told him: In politics, for good or ill, we’re defined by things we never would have imagined would define us. For Leavitt, it was the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; for Jimmy Carter, Desert One. Mitt wondered if 47 percent would define him—a painful possibility.
The only reason I’m in this race is to help people who are hurting,
he thought.
The rich will do fine with or without me; it’s the rest who need my experience and economic direction.

Yet for all of Romney’s personal angst, in the days after the 47 percent story broke, he took no decisive steps to ameliorate the fallout. Unlike Obama in 2008 after the Jeremiah Wright eruption, Romney didn’t push to give a major speech to set the record straight and slay the dragon. He didn’t insist on doing an op-ed or a sit-down interview devoted to the topic. He didn’t call his team together for an all-hands-on-deck brainstorm. He simply stewed.

Romney’s passivity baffled many members of the Boston brain trust. They believed the video conveyed a misimpression of the man they knew. They also saw it as politically ruinous—reinforcing the plutocratic image that the Obamans had spent millions to burn into the minds of voters. Stevens, meanwhile, was unconvinced that Romney needed to do more to heal himself. “I can’t tell you we’re gonna win,” Stuart said to Mitt. “But I don’t think we’re gonna lose because of this.”

The campaign’s paralysis brought forth venom from a GOP establishment that had always distrusted Romney’s operation. On the eve of the 47 percent video’s surfacing, Politico had published a lengthy exposé on Romneyland’s managerial dysfunction, zeroing in on its chief strategist as the main culprit. All around Washington, fellow consultants were sniping at Stevens, incredulous at the wide influence Romney granted him. “You never let the artist run the art gallery,” one of Haley Barbour’s confidants quipped. “If you sent Stuart to the 7-Eleven and said, ‘Get a loaf of bread and a quart of milk,’ he might not show up for a week and a half.”

The establishment’s dismay was made manifest by a string of top-shelf conservative pundits. Bill Kristol deemed Romney’s 47 percent remarks “stupid” and “arrogant,” adding that Mitt had “little substance to say about the future of our country.” David Brooks compared him to Thurston Howell III. Peggy Noonan captured the Republican disenchantment with Boston most comprehensively. “It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one,” Noonan wrote. “It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change.”

At the highest levels of Romneyland, some were agitating for a transformation from within—notably Fishconsin. When Ryan was chosen for the ticket, he had assumed (like the rest of the political world) that his selection signaled a full-on acceptance of framing the election as a choice. Instead, his month on the ticket had been marked by strategic muddle, with Stevens continuing to shape the campaign as a referendum. As for the sharp knives in Ryan’s drawer, such as his Medicare plan, Romney had handled them wearing hazmat gloves.

The 47 percent crisis crystallized Ryan’s discontent. Unless the campaign affirmed the choice paradigm, the election would boil down to dueling referenda—and Romney-Ryan was likely to lose. On Sunday, September 23, Mitt and much of his brain trust gathered for a post-47-percent strategy meeting in L.A., where the nominee was back on the fund-raising hamster wheel. Ryan, holed up at home to prep for his debate against Biden, videoconferenced in from Wisconsin. With ardor, the running mate made his case, articulating the perils of a pure referendum, pressing for big ideas, opining that they had a duty to give the American people a clear choice.
Stevens sat sulkily, arms folded, deaf to Ryan’s premise, saying little. By the end, Ryan had prevailed.

The next morning, a public memo went out from Gillespie consecrating Fishconsin’s apparent victory: “The election is a choice,” it baldly stated. Both its content and its authorship suggested to many campaign Kremlinologists that Stevens had been sidelined.

But Ryan wasn’t the sole force for change in Romney’s orbit. By the time of the L.A. meeting, an external faction was taking shape: a group of prominent Republicans, mostly elected officials, who feared Mitt was falling into an outright death spiral and hoped to pull him out. Although the gathering was still in its formative stages, it was slated for the next Sunday, September 30. And though it had no formal name, everyone who knew about the assembly was calling it the War Council.

•   •   •

T
HE WAR COUNCIL LOOMED
on Romney’s calendar but was distant from his mind. In periods of chaos, Mitt went into task-management mode. He liked the tangibility and specificity of a mission-critical undertaking. To no small extent, what kept him from obsessing over the 47 percent—perhaps to his detriment—was the presence of just such an activity: preparing for his first debate with Obama in Denver on October 3.

Romney had started debate prep unusually early and sunk a gargantuan amount of time into the endeavor. In June, he had assigned its organization to Myers, alongside her veepstakes duties. On the unexceptionable theory that he would enter October trailing or at best neck and neck in the race, Mitt believed that pretty much the whole election could come down to the debates. He told Myers that he wanted to treat prep as “the Manhattan Project of the campaign.” His first session had taken place at the Park City donor retreat, in June. Since then, he had logged countless hours on drills, briefing books, and a three-day debate camp in Vermont during the Democratic convention. A week out from Denver, he had already done seven full mock debates; between now and showtime, he would do another three.

The funny thing was, Romney had always detested debate prep. When he ran for governor, Myers, then his sparring partner, whipped him again and again; Mitt became so annoyed one time, he threw his notes on the
floor. In 2008, he found the multiplayer mock debate format particularly uncongenial. All the stand-ins had boned up on the questions beforehand; he was hearing them for the first time, stumbling through his answers, his self-esteem plummeting. No more mock debates! Mitt decreed.

But mocks were a nonnegotiable part of preparing to face off against Obama, especially given that Romney had not partaken in a one-on-one debate since 2002. Portraying the president was Rob Portman, who had earned a reputation as the GOP’s most skillful doppelganger. Over the years, Portman had enacted the roles of Lamar Alexander against Bob Dole, Al Gore against George W. Bush, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards against Dick Cheney, and Obama against McCain. His imitation of the president in mocks with Mitt was pure Method acting. Every detail—from the phrases and intonations to the monochrome ties—was letter-perfect. His immersion was so complete that, on more than one occasion, Portman fell into character by mistake during stump speeches in Ohio. (
Oh, God, I’ve become Obama!
he thought.) Rhoades routinely compared Portman to Daniel Day-Lewis; he was Fauxbama.

Portman was no believer in playing soft to build a candidate’s confidence. In the early mocks, he pounded Romney into the dirt. Sometimes Fauxbama would throw the kitchen sink at Mitt: a long string of charges related to Bain or his Massachusetts record. Other times, he would mischaracterize Romney’s policies or refuse to let him have the last word. Or he would slyly try to provoke Mitt with passing references to Swiss bank accounts, Olympic sweetheart deals, or Mormonism. (“As a man of faith, would you agree . . . ?”)

Then there was a charge that drove Romney batty, which Fauxbama deployed in two or three different mocks: Governor Romney, not because you work, but because you’re relying on your investments, you make more in one day than the typical American family makes in a year. How can you relate to what’s going on out there in Ohio, in Iowa? In each instance, Romney was irritated—and never came up with an answer. “What am I going to say to
that?
” he complained.

Presiding over the process strategically and stylistically was Stevens. Even as his influence in Boston was being diminished by Gillespie, the chief strategist still had the conch when it came to the image Romney would
project in front of the cameras. Just as Stevens’s adages undergirded the campaign at the start, they hovered over the run-up to Denver. Stuart wanted Romney to be likable, comfortable, to look as if he was enjoying himself (so that voters would think they would enjoy watching him be president). He wanted Mitt to control the stage; he wanted a kinetic debate. “Remember, Custer was
chasing
the Indians,” Stevens said, warning Romney not to let Obama bait him. “Let’s don’t debate this guy; let’s dominate this guy.”

By the end of September, Romney was engaged in some form of debate prep almost every day. Though he and Portman had been virtual strangers just months before, the Ohio senator was gradually being incorporated into Mitt’s innermost circle—no longer serving only as Fauxbama but called upon as a general-purpose adviser. With Portman’s help, Romney’s mock performances were getting stronger and stronger, and his substantive chops were showing through elsewhere. On Univision and
60 Minutes,
Mitt had been so impressive that the Obamans had taken note, crediting his debate prep for his newfound ease and fluency. In both appearances, the only question on which he whiffed was the 47 percent.

The candidate and his debate team had zero doubt that the subject would come up in Denver, either as part of an attack by Obama or in the form of a question by moderator Jim Lehrer. On Saturday, September 29, in a meeting at Mitt and Ann’s townhouse in Belmont, any number of suggested responses were put on the table: variations on “I care about the 100 percent” and “I misspoke.” Someone proposed rebutting Obama by saying, Well, Mr. President, I’m sure there are things you’ve said that you’d like to take back—like your comment about bitter people clinging to firearms and God. But Romney shot the rejoinder down; it would be like trying to kill a pterodactyl with a flyswatter.

Early the following afternoon, Romney and Portman took the stage in John Hancock Hall, in Boston’s Back Bay, for their one formal, full-dress pre-Denver mock. After the 47 percent video, Rhoades’s paranoia about secret tapes was high; he had the campaign’s advance team repeatedly sweep the building for bugs or hidden cameras. Romney turned in a terrific performance; Portman was proud. The only flaw was Mitt’s response regarding the 47 percent, which was woefully wishy-washy. Watching in the hall, Mike Leavitt shook his head. “That’s not good enough,” he said to Myers.

When the team gathered downstairs in a conference room for a postmortem, no one disagreed—including Romney. With Denver just three days away, he and his people still had not come up with a decent answer to the evening’s $64,000 question. It wasn’t even as if they had narrowed the options to A and B. They were still trying to cobble together a solution out of options A through F. After listening to Stevens and others toss out more ideas, Romney finally said, “Guys, is this terminal?”