Double Down: Game Change 2012 (66 page)

Klain delivered a frank warning to Obama in the Roosevelt Room: incumbents almost always lose their first debate. Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, Reagan in 1984, Bush 41 in 1992, and Bush 43 in 2004 all were clobbered, and the reasons were straightforward. For any challenger, sharing the stage with a sitting president—behind identical podiums, in nearly identical costumes—obliterated the gap in stature between them. Incumbents suffered from high expectations: voters assumed they would be good. But incumbents were invariably rusty: for four years they had been focused on governing, not giving timed answers with an opponent up in their grille. Challengers were in fighting shape after debate-filled nomination contests. Challengers had ample time to prep; incumbents were, well, busy.

Obama was determined to defy those precedents and structural forces. All summer, he lugged around thick briefing books on Romney’s policies and record, filling the margins of the documents with questions and
dispatching them to his team for answers. (In September alone, he made more than a hundred such requests, many at a level of detail that had Klain thinking,
This is insane.
) The more Obama internalized Romney’s agenda, the more he champed at the bit to lay bare its contradictions and outlandishness. “I can’t wait to debate this guy,” Obama told his team in August.

He conducted three mock debates in Washington before leaving for camp. Like Portman, John Kerry put great effort into inhabiting his role—a process he found distasteful, given his feelings for Mitt. Kerry had been at his pal Ted Kennedy’s side during the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race; he recalled Teddy’s denunciations of Romney as a grasping fraud. To anyone in earshot and absent the faintest whiff of self-awareness, Kerry unloaded on Mitt: He’s an arrogant, stiff, inauthentic, patrician elitist with no common touch at all. As Kerry boned up on Romney’s economic proposals, he was galled by their make-believe-ism.
The hardest part about playing this guy,
he thought,
is always having to go to this place of total bullshit.

Kerry’s contempt for Romney was nothing compared with Obama’s, however. The president disliked a fair number of Republicans. But even Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell didn’t cause the bile to gurgle in his throat the way Romney did. (
At least Cantor and McConnell have
some
principles,
Obama thought.) Mitt’s lurches to the right, his denial of the shared genetic code between Romneycare and Obamacare, and the travesty of trickle-down gimmickry that was his tax and budget plan had convinced Obama that his opponent was a sham. Benghazi and the 47 percent had persuaded him that Romney lacked any character or moral compass. Obama’s scorn was so open and searing that Plouffe suggested he tone it down in front of junior White House staffers; it was unseemly.

Obama took the point. I’m gonna have to be careful in the debates, he said. I just can’t stand this guy and it’s gonna be too obvious.

But in Obama’s three Washington mocks, held in the basement of the DNC, the president was unable to disguise his disgust. Questions about Romney’s business background reflexively brought out his sarcastic, aloof, condescending side, notorious in his debate history and deeply feared by his team.

When Bain came up, Obama was supposed to say something such as,
Governor Romney had a distinguished career as a businessman, and I have no quarrel with that; but it’s different being a businessman than a president. Instead, Obama sneered. Governor, you and I have both made choices, he said to Kerry-as-Romney at one point. We both went to Harvard Law School. I came out and became a community organizer, helping displaced steelworkers. You chose to make money—and that’s . . .
okay.

Nasty Obama wasn’t the only Bad Obama who cropped up in the DNC basement. There was also Pedantic Obama, who was almost as problematic. On topic after topic, the president was a font of facts and figures but bereft of a sharp message. Challenged by Kerry, he habitually succumbed to a tendency his team referred to as “chasing rabbits”: litigating strenuously and endlessly, answering in pointillist detail, abandoning his broader objective to take a detour into the tall grass. Asked about health care, he didn’t tout the benefits of the Affordable Care Act or hit Romney for wanting to voucherize Medicare. Rather, he disgorged a skull-numbing explanation of the ACA’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the entity Sarah Palin once decried as a “death panel.”

Obama’s twin weaknesses were glaring, but the current political context made them seem less threatening. Benenson’s polling of the battleground states showed the president with an even wider lead than Newhouse’s did: six to eight points. For Obama, unlike Romney, there was nothing do-or-die about Denver; all he needed from the first debate was a near draw. For his team, that meant keeping both Nasty POTUS and Pedantic POTUS out of camera range.

Before Obama boarded Air Force One for Vegas that Sunday, September 30, he was handed a five-page memo, drafted by Anita Dunn and Klain, that laid out the final strategy for Denver. Its implicit premise was the paramount importance of concealing both Bad Obamas. Its explicit goals were to preserve the president’s likability advantage over Romney and highlight his economic agenda for a second term—something many undecided voters doubted he actually possessed. Its tactical thrust was that Obama would refrain from attacks, be positive and visionary, hover above the fray. Its essence was summed up by a pithy Axelrod coinage featured in the memo: “The bigger you are, the harder he falls.”

•   •   •

T
HE SITE OF OBAMA’S
debate camp was the Westin Lake Las Vegas, which wasn’t actually in Vegas at all. Seventeen miles east of the Strip, in Henderson, Lake Las Vegas was a 3,600-acre monument to the collapse of the real estate bubble—a palm-fringed sprawl of unfinished lots, half-built homes, and desiccated golf courses. The hotel grounds featured a replica of the Ponte Vecchio, some canals with lonely gondolas, and not a soul in sight. When the presidential motorcade came to a halt outside the lobby, Jay Carney scoped out the scene and thought,
It looks like we’re in Venice after the zombies have taken over.

For the next three days, Obama toiled with his team in this strange stockade. In the mornings and afternoons, they ran through drills on the six topics that the Commission on Presidential Debates had announced would be in play in Denver: the economy and job creation, the deficit, entitlements, health care, the role of government, and dealing with gridlock in Washington. Each evening, Obama and Kerry conducted a ninety-minute mock debate. In between, the president reviewed video, worked with style coach Michael Sheehan, and studied postmortem memos written by Klain.

Obama made no secret that he wasn’t having fun with any of it. “This is stupid,” he said. “I hate this,” he said. “I’m counting down the days until this is over,” he said. He wasn’t exactly bitching and moaning; often, there was a smile on his face when the words came out of his mouth. But they reflected the underlying antipathy to debates that he had labored for months to suppress.

Obama’s dyspepsia was compounded by his hardening views of how Romney would behave onstage. Over the summer, he’d studied a DVD compilation of his opponent’s best moments in the GOP debates and concluded that the way Romney won was by bullying his rivals. (I’m not gonna let him bully
me
, Obama told Klain.) Now the president was simply incredulous at the charges that Kerry-as-Mitt hurled at him. “This guy will say
anything
,” Obama marveled.

The president’s disdain for the process and for Romney was combined with a discomfort with the punch-pulling strategy that his debate team had devised. Obama grasped intellectually the need to preserve his likability,
but he strained against the strictures of that imperative. “I really feel like I need to pop him,” Obama said. If I can’t, there’s no way I can score.

Klain reached for a basketball metaphor that would resonate with the hoops-mad Obama. He cited Paul Westphal, the former NBA All-Star guard who had no defensive game but put a ton of points on the board. Look, Klain said, the goal here is for you to go into the debate, talk about your agenda, talk to the American people about your plans to make things better. You’re at your podium making jumper after jumper—that’s how you score. And even though Romney is at his podium making buckets, too, you’re scoring more. You win the game, like, 150–130.

Yeah, fine, Obama said. “But what am I supposed to do when he starts spewing his bullshit?”

The president’s team did not advise total disengagement. But with the need to stifle Nasty Obama uppermost in their minds, they counseled pivots and counterpunches. One memo drafted on the fly in Henderson carried a telling title: “Key Romney Attacks, and How You Move Away.” Equally revealing was their approach to the 47 percent video, which, dreading ugliness, they advised Obama not to raise on offense. Instead they prepared a counterpunch to deliver if Romney smacked him over food stamps or dependency:

Now, there are people who game the system at the bottom and at the top, and we shouldn’t tolerate either. But when Governor Romney writes off nearly half the country—47%—as victims who will never take responsibility for their lives, let’s understand who he’s talking about. Most of these Americans are working. They pay plenty of taxes. Most of the rest are senior citizens who’ve worked a lifetime, and are living on the Medicare and Social Security they’ve earned. Then there are students and veterans and soldiers who are serving us today. These are folks we should be fighting for—not dismissing.

The president dutifully rehearsed the 47 percent counterpunch along with his other jabs, delivering them decently in the afternoon sessions, only to stumble in the nighttime mocks. Though he managed to keep Nasty
Obama at bay, Pedantic Obama was ever present. He not only returned to the IPAB but did it twice in a single session. When the team showed Obama the video afterwards, the president chuckled. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “That didn’t work.”

Yet even as he acknowledged the folly of chasing rabbits, Obama kept diving into any hole in sight, then trying to justify his excursions to his team. You guys don’t want me to explain anything, he said plaintively. You say when I’m explaining I’m losing. But sometimes explaining can be effective.

What was going on in the president’s mind was difficult for his team to discern. But his invocations of the virtues of explanation made it sound as if Bill Clinton had taken up residence there. For four years, Obama’s policies and achievements had been trivialized. His own White House had often failed to sell them effectively. Republicans had lied about them shamelessly. In Charlotte, 42 had earned raves for a wonky, backward-looking exculpation of Obama’s tenure—while 44 was panned for a forward-gazing, risk-free address driven by the same theory that underlay his debate strategy now. Obama wanted
his
chance to set the record straight.

The push-and-pull between Obama and his team went on for three days. The debate format—which allowed each candidate a two-minute statement on each topic, followed by nine minutes of free-form discussion—played to the president’s worst instincts, feeding his sense that he had plenty of time to make multiple, complex points. I just thought I could explain it, Obama kept saying. I thought there’d be a second question. I thought I’d get back to it in the discussion period. I thought . . . I thought . . . I thought.

But digressiveness was only part of the problem with his mocks. He was low-energy, slow-talking, soporific. He was inconsistent, all over the place, never delivering the same lines twice. There were no anecdotes, personal touches, or human texture—just meandering data dumps.

When Obama’s team raised concerns with him, he occasionally expressed mild exasperation: “Aren’t you guys ever satisfied?” More frequently, he said, “I hear ya—I’ll get it next time.”

But he did not. In the first mock, on Sunday night, Obama turned in a desultory performance. On Monday, he was mildly better. On Tuesday, he took a step backwards, relapsing to Sunday’s level.

In the staff room after the final mock, Plouffe voiced alarm upon reviewing video of cutaway shots that showed Obama’s expressions while Kerry-as-Mitt was talking. Sheehan had advised the president to glance down at his notes when he wasn’t speaking, but sporadically and briefly. Obama was doing it for interminable stretches without looking up, and he was scowling and grimacing.

“These cutaways are
terrible,
” Plouffe said. We have to show him more video, we’ve got to talk to him. This is
not good.

For the past forty-eight hours, the debate team’s senior members had mulled the question of what to do. Their strategy of papering over Obama’s flaws having proved a failure, they considered the idea of confronting the president in a more fundamental, forceful way—but decided against it. Obama was in a rotten mood. Nobody wanted to make it worse. And nobody wanted to dent his confidence so close to Denver. Axelrod repeatedly reminded his colleagues that Obama was the ultimate game-day player. Not once in his political career had he ever suffered a major performance failure; he always found a way to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. After all, he was . . . Barack Obama.

Obama himself had reassured his team in Henderson. You know, this is just practice, he said. “When it’s real, I’ll dial it up.”

The Obamans crossed their fingers and hoped that it was true.

But as they flew out of Vegas for Denver that Wednesday morning, October 3, the doubts among them were pervasive. Klain was especially broody. Back in July, when he’d laid out for Obama the reasons why history would be against him in the first debate, the president had replied with brio, Let’s see if we can break the string. But now Obama was throwing Klain’s lecture back at him, talking about how his inflated lead over Romney and the media’s desire for a comeback story made it all but impossible for him to win. Klain had served on every Democratic presidential debate prep team for the past twenty years. Never had he seen a candidate less revved up to take the stage.