Double Down: Game Change 2012 (68 page)

Before the rally, Romney and Ryan sat for a satellite interview with Sean Hannity. Toward the end, the host asked Mitt the question inexplicably absent in Denver. “The left seems furious at this tape where you talked about the 47 percent,” Hannity said. “Why didn’t President Obama bring that up? What would you have said if he did bring it up?”

“Well, clearly, in a campaign with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you are going to say something that doesn’t come out right,” Romney replied. “In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.”

Romney was caught off-guard by Hannity’s question. He didn’t expect Sean, of all people, to ask about the 47 percent. Mitt was still saving up his indignant answer for the next debate. All he meant to say was that the 47 remark had
come out of his mouth
completely wrong; he wasn’t planning on apologizing or making news. But across the media spectrum, his comments were read as the next step in a strategy of center-tacking reinvention that had begun in Denver. Romney couldn’t quite believe it. Without trying, he had somehow found the antivenom, at least as far as the press was concerned.

The next twelve days would be the most magical of the Romney campaign. From the moment he walked off the stage in Denver, the money poured in. Every donor Zwick talked to was infused with the sudden certainty that Mitt was going to win. In Washington, Karl Rove’s phone was ringing off the hook; the billionaire banker Harold Simmons, who had already contributed more than $10 million to Crossroads, called to say, If you need more, I’ll donate more. Even journalists were giving Romney the benefit of the doubt. His press secretary, Andrea Saul, thought,
Now I know what it’s like to work for a Democrat!

Newhouse cranked up his numbers machine on Thursday night. What he saw by Friday morning was a rapid tightening of the race; Romney had gone from three points down in the battleground states to one point up. More powerful to Newhouse’s eye was the shift in what pollsters call information flow—the universe of news about the candidates and whether the mentions are positive or negative. By this metric, Romney went from a minus 17 to a plus 5.
You just don’t ever see numbers move like that,
Newhouse thought.

Romney arrived in Florida that day, October 5. On the campaign bus, he and Stevens began discussing how to build on the new interest after Denver, the way more people were seeing Mitt for who he actually was rather than Chicago’s fat-cat caricature. Stevens suggested that Romney finally open up, start telling personal stories on the stump, maybe weave the Oparowskis, from the convention, into his standard speech. Romney had long been reticent about going there, about exploiting his good deeds for political gain. But Ann and Tagg had been urging him to show his true self. His war councillors had recommended the same.

That night in St. Petersburg, at a downtown water park, Romney told the crowd about a graduate school classmate who had become a quadriplegic and devoted himself to spinal injury research. He told the tale of his relationship with fourteen-year-old David Oparowski, how he’d helped the boy write out his will. “I’ve seen the character of a young man like David,” Romney said. “He had his eyes wide open. There’s a saying: ‘Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.’ David couldn’t lose. I loved that young man.” The
Washington Post
wrote up the story of Mitt-as-tearjerker for the next day’s paper, in glowing terms.

For Romney, the challenge now was to sustain the incredible roll he was on. Mitt understood the importance of the next debate as clearly as the Obamans did. The format for Hofstra would be a town hall meeting, with questions posed by voters. In Orlando that Saturday, he met with his debate team to start prepping. Brimming with confidence though he was, Romney knew that the second debate would be radically different from Denver—and not just in terms of structure. Obama’s going to be tougher to beat next time, he told Portman. We really have to practice.

Obama was taking the day off. He needed time to think. Three days after Denver, advice was pouring in from every Democratic quarter about what he should do. Almost no one on the planet could understand what he was going through or up against. The next day, however, the president was heading out to Beverly Hills, where he would be hanging with someone who did. For perhaps the first time in his life, Barack Obama was genuinely curious to hear what Bill Clinton had to say.

22

INTERVENTION

T
HE $35 MILLION ESTATE
of Jeffrey Katzenberg sat on Loma Vista Drive at the top of Beverly Hills, occupying six acres, with a majestic view of the City of Angels sprawled out below. Obama and Clinton arrived there that Sunday afternoon, October 7, for lunch with Katzenberg and a handful of the rich and famous. Though the White House publicly described the event only as a “thank you” for a “small group of donors,” it was, in fact, a Priorities USA function—the sort of shindig that Obama had sworn never to attend.

For Katzenberg, having two presidents in his concert-hall-size living room was a fitting reward; no Democratic buck-raker had raised more dough in 2012. Katzenberg pitched the lunch to invitees as a once-in-a-lifetime experience—what he called “unobtainium.” He recommended that they donate $1 million to Priorities, and bagged three checks in that amount just the Friday before. He pledged to keep his guests’ presence secret. (To ferry them to a public campaign fund-raiser afterwards, there would be a private shuttle with tinted windows.) In the end, nine tycoons from the worlds of Hollywood and high tech turned up: Reid Hoffman, Irwin and Joan Jacobs, Vinod Khosla, Seth MacFarlane, Sean Parker, Mark Pincus, Eric Schmidt, and Steven Spielberg.

Obama wasted no time in addressing the debacle in Denver—cutting off Katzenberg before he had a chance to offer opening remarks. “I had too many voices in my head,” Obama began. The advice I got from my team was good, but in the moment I couldn’t sort it all out. I know what I need to do now. It won’t happen again.

Clinton, too, offered reassurance to the kingpins arrayed on Katzenberg’s couches. I don’t think the president did so bad, and I’m sure he’ll be better the next time out, Clinton said. Each one of these debates is its own deal. And, listen, no one’s ever won the second debate by winning the first debate.

Until Denver, Clinton had watched in wonder as Obama caught break after break. Although the economy wasn’t roaring back to life, neither the European banking crisis nor the unrest in the Mideast had caused it to nosedive. Meanwhile, Romney’s ineptness staggered Clinton. After the release of the 47 percent video, he remarked to a friend that, while Mitt was a decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. (“He really shouldn’t be speaking to people in public.”) As for Obama, Clinton trotted out for his pals the same line again and again: “He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.”

Though the first debate brought the incumbent’s streak of good fortune to a crashing halt, Clinton was insistent that the Obamans not overreact. On the phone to Axelrod, 42 counseled restraint at Hofstra, warning that if 44 was too hot or negative in a town hall debate it would backfire. Now, at the end of the Priorities event, the presidents went off to huddle on one of Casa Katzenberg’s two immense porches, where Clinton repeated the advice. Don’t try to make up the ground you lost, he said. Just be yourself.

Obama faced a more immediate challenge, which was to arrest the metastasizing panic among his supporters. In 2008, Plouffe had airily dismissed Democrats who lost their minds in the midst of Palinmania as “bed-wetters.” But now there was a similar drizzle as the public polls sharply narrowed—and worse. On October 8, Pew Research released a survey that put Romney ahead 49 to 45 percent among likely voters. “Did Barack Obama just throw the entire election away?” blared the title of another Andrew Sullivan blog post.

Chicago’s internal polling strongly suggested that he had not. After tightening for seventy-two hours post-Denver, the numbers stabilized, with
Obama still holding a 50–47 lead over Romney. The only fallout, by Benenson’s reckoning, was that Republican-leaning independent voters who fled Romney’s column in the wake of the 47 percent had returned there. What Denver had done was wash away the Democratic gains of September. The race was back to where it had been following the conventions.

Benenson’s data made it easier for Obama to do what he had to do: buck up his supporters, his staff, and himself. As the full desultoriness of his Denver performance sank in, the president was consumed by a sense of responsibility for the fallout—and shadowed by fears, for the first time in months, that his reelection was at risk. Outwardly, he took pains to project the opposite. When his staffers asked how he was doing, he replied, extra-emphatically, “I’m GREAT.” To Plouffe, who had volunteered to soothe Sullivan, Obama joked, Someone’s gotta talk him off the ledge!

Returning from the West Coast to the White House, the president conducted his first post-Denver national television interview, with ABC News on October 10. Faced with an onslaught of debate-related questions from Diane Sawyer—“What
happened
?” “
Why
did it happen?” “Was it the altitude?” “What did Mrs. Obama say?”—he maintained a steadfast composure. In a radio interview with Tom Joyner, he was coolly assertive: “As some of these e-mails that go around with my picture on them say—and I can’t quote the entire thing, but—
I got this!
”

That afternoon, Obama met with his debate team in the Roosevelt Room. He opened by saying he had read a memo drafted by Klain a few days earlier about what went wrong in Denver and how to fix it before Hofstra, now six days away. He agreed with most of it but wanted everyone to know that they hadn’t failed him; he had failed them. “This is on me,” Obama said.

“I’m a naturally polite person,” he went on. Part of my problem is “erring on the side of being muted. We have to get me to a place where internally I’m not biting my tongue . . . It’s important for me to be fighting.”

There’s a lot at stake in this election, Obama continued, and I think we’re still in good shape. But we need to win these next two debates—and that’s what I intend to do. I only wish we didn’t have to wait another week. I really want to get back out there.

The debate team was buoyed by Obama’s energy and determination.
And they received another boost twenty-four hours later from his second in command, when Biden took on Ryan in the vice-presidential debate in Danville, Kentucky.

The undercard had been elevated from sideshow to marquee event the moment that Romney selected Ryan. But Obama’s bellyflop in Denver upped the stakes even more, with Chicago desperately needing a win—and a certain type of win—to calm the party’s base. Klain, Axelrod, and others on Obama’s debate team parachuted from Denver into Biden’s prep sessions in Delaware to urge the VP to be ferocious. “This is the storyline: goal-line defense, and you force a fumble,” Michael Sheehan told him.

Biden needed little encouragement. Having been in the spotlight four years earlier—when his televised tangle with Palin drew a larger TV audience than any of Obama’s toe-to-toes with McCain—the vice president had been cramming to tackle Ryan on policy. His confidence level was high. Now the Obamans were telling him that, for once, he didn’t need to ratchet down his Bidenness—he could just be himself.
Hallelujah,
Biden exulted.
I never thought I’d see this day.

Ryan, meanwhile, took the stage in Danville feeling nervous—burdened by the sky-high expectations of the right, which was certain that he would massacre the boobish Biden, and by his own persistent worries about letting Romney down. Mitt’s been slaving away at this for five years, Ryan told his aides. I don’t want to make some gaffe and screw it up for him.

Ryan’s measured performance embarrassed neither himself nor the man who picked him. But Danville was Uncle Joe’s show. Before the opening bell, Biden was reminded by his advisers to smile. Onstage, he mugged, chortled, cackled, sniggered, guffawed, and threw his hands skyward. Seven minutes in, he accused Ryan of peddling “a bunch of malarkey.” A few seconds later, the Obamans, having learned a lesson in social-media insta-spin from Denver, were all over Twitter with #malarkey.