Double Down: Game Change 2012 (70 page)

Throughout the campaign, Obama had been criticized for the thin gruel of his second-term agenda. Now he acknowledged that it bothered him, too, and posed a challenge for the debates.

You keep telling me I can’t spend too much time defending my record, and that I should talk about my plans, he said. But my plans aren’t anything like the plans I ran on in 2008. I had a universal health care plan then. Now I’ve got . . . what? A manufacturing plan? What am I gonna do on education? What am I gonna do on energy? There’s not much there.

“I can’t tell you that, Okay, I woke up today, I knew I needed to do better, and I’ll do better,” Obama said. “I am wired in a different way than this event requires.”

Obama paused.

“I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

Obama’s advisers sat silently at first, absorbing the extraordinary moment playing out in front of them. In October of an election year, on the eve of a pivotal debate, the president wasn’t talking about tactics or strategy, about this line or that zinger. He was talking about personal contradictions and ambivalences, about his discomfort with the campaign he was running, about his unease with the requirements of politics writ large, about matters that were fundamental, even existential.
We are in uncharted territory here,
thought Klain.

More striking was Obama’s candor and self-awareness. The most self-contained president in modern history (and, possibly, the most self-possessed human on the planet) was laying himself bare, deconstructing himself before their eyes—and admitting he was at a loss.

All through his career, Obama had played by his own rules. He had won the presidency as an outsider, without the succor of the Democratic establishment. He owed it little, offered less. He had ignored the traditional social niceties of the office, from the White House Christmas party photo lines to the swanky Georgetown soirees. He had largely resisted the media freak show, swatting away its asininities. He had refused to stomp his feet or shed
crocodile tears over the BP spill, because neither would plug the pipe spewing oil from the ocean floor. He had eschewed sloganeering to sell his health care plan, although it meant the world to him.

Now he was faced with an event that demanded an astronomical degree of fakery, histrionics, and stagecraft—and while he was ready to capitulate,
trying
to capitulate, he found himself incapable of performing not just to his own exalted standards but to the bare minimum of competence. Acres of evidence and the illusions of his fans to the contrary, Barack Obama, it turned out, was all too human.

Axelrod was more intimate with Obama than anyone in the room. The president’s humanity and frailties were no secret to Axe—nor was 44’s capacity for self-doubt. Since Denver, Obama had been subjected to a hailstorm of criticism, a flood of panic, and a blizzard of psychoanalysis. Like every president, he claimed he was impervious to it. But Axelrod knew it was a lie.
All this shit is in his head,
the strategist thought.

Look, said Axelrod softly, we know that you find these debates frustrating, that they’re more performance than substance. It’s why you are a good president. It’s why all of us feel so strongly about your winning. But you have to find a way to get over the hump and stop fighting this game—to play this game, wrap your arms around this game.

For the next hour, the three Obamans tried to carry the president across the psychic chasm. Plouffe reminded him of the stakes. “We can’t have a repeat of Denver tomorrow night,” he warned. “Right now, we’re not losing any of our vote, but we’re on probation. If we have another performance that causes people to scratch their heads, we’re gonna start losing votes. We gotta stop this now.”

Over Obama’s despair about his lack of an agenda, Plouffe and Axelrod took him on. “You
do
have an agenda, goddammit!” Plouffe said. “This isn’t a bunch of BS you’re selling. This is an agenda the American people support and believe in. But they’re not gonna believe in it if you don’t treat it that way, by selling it with great fervor. If you sell your agenda and Romney sells his agenda with equal enthusiasm, we will win.

“Think about this,” Plouffe went on. “You have two debates left. So take out Romney, take out moderator questions: you’ve got basically seventy-five to eighty minutes left of doing this in your entire life. That’s less than
the length of a movie! You can do this! I know it’s uncomfortable. I know it’s unnatural. But that’s all. That’s the finish line, you know?”

Klain abandoned Paul Westphal in favor of a new sports analogy. The Tennessee Titans lost the Super Bowl a couple of years ago because their guy got tackled on the one-yard line, he said—the one-yard line! That’s where we are. The hardest thing for any candidate in a debate is to know the substance. You have that down cold. All we need is a little more effort on performance. You need to go in there and talk as fast as you can. You need to add a little schmaltz, talk about stuff the way that people want to hear it. This isn’t about starting over, starting from scratch. We’ve got most of it right. The part we have left to get right is small. But as the Titans proved, small can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Obama’s aides couldn’t tell if their words were sinking in. “I understand where we are,” the president said finally. I’m either going to center myself and get this or I’m not. The debate’s tomorrow. There’s not much we can do. I just gotta fight my way through it.

As the meeting wound to a close, the Obamans felt relief mixed with trepidation. Oddly, for Klain, the president’s lack of confidence about his ability to turn himself around was comforting. After all the blithe I-got-its of Henderson, Obama for the first time was acknowledging that a genuine and serious modification of his mind-set was necessary.

Plouffe felt less reassured. “It’s good news/bad news,” he told Favreau afterwards. “The good news is, he recognizes the issue. The bad news is, I don’t know if we can fix it in time.”

The full team reconvened in Obama’s hold room. Klain ran through his memo on the previous night and explained to the president the
new
new format for his prep: for the rest of the day until his final mock, they were going to drill him incessantly on the ten or so topics they expected to come up in the debate, compelling him to repeat his bullet points over and over again. Klain also presented Obama with his debate-on-a-page:

MUST REMEMBER

1. (Your) Speed Kills (Romney)
   
2. Upbeat and Positive in Tone
   
3. Passion for People and Plans
   
4. OTR [Off the Record] Mindset—Have Fun
   
5. Strong Sentences to Start and End
   
6. Engage the Audience
   
7. Don’t Chase Rabbits
   

BEST HITS

1. 47%
   
2. Romney + China Outsourcing
   
3. Heaven & Earth
   
4. 9-11 Girl
   
5. Sketchy Deal
   
6. Mass Taxes—Cradle to Grave
   
7. Pre-existing and ER
   
8. Women’s health
   
9. Borrow from Your Parents
   

REBUTTAL CHEAT SHEET

1. Jobs—The 1 point plan
   
2. Deficits—$7 trillion and The Sketchy Deal
   
3. Energy—Coal plant is a killer
   
4. Health—Pre-existing fact check and the ER
   
5. Medicare—He wants to save Medicare . . . by ending it!
   
6. Bus Taxes—60 Mins in rebuttal (i.e., pivot to personal taxes)
   
7. Pers Taxes—Tax cuts for outsourcing (i.e., pivot to job creation)
   
8. Gridlock—Romney brings the lobbyist back
   
9. Benghazi—Taking offense
   
10. Education—Borrow from your parents and/or Size Doesn’t Matter
    

That the intervention had had some effect on Obama was immediately apparent, though how much was unclear. He brought a new energy and focus to his afternoon drills. When he delivered an imperfect answer, he stopped himself short: “Let’s do that again.” In Henderson, Obama had been so intent on escaping camp that he took off one day for a visit to the Hoover Dam. Now he refused even brief breaks for a walk by the river. As the
afternoon went on, the debate team concocted cutesy catchphrases to cue him at the slightest hint of backsliding.

“Fast and hammy! Fast and hammy!” Klain would say when his delivery was too lugubrious.

“Punch him in the face!” Karen Dunn chipped in when he missed a chance to cream Kerry-as-Mitt.

For Klain, the turning point came that afternoon, during a session in which Obama was fielding questions from junior members of the team who were standing in as voters. Tony Carrk, a researcher, introduced himself as Vito, a barbershop proprietor from Long Island, and asked which tax plan—Obama’s or Romney’s—would be better for small-business owners like him. Without missing a beat, the president savaged Mitt’s plan with verve, precision, and bite, closing with some good-natured joshing about Vito’s shop.

The perfect town hall answer,
Klain thought.

That night, for the final mock, Kerry was instructed to bring his “A” game. With the team on pins and needles, Obama earned a solid B-plus. The contrast with the previous night was so dramatic, it called to Axelrod’s mind the triumphant scenes in
Hoosiers.
When it was over, the team rose in unison and gave Obama a standing ovation.

“All right, all right, all right,” the president said, waving them off, smiling abashedly.

The next morning, before setting off for Hofstra, the team gathered once again in Obama’s hold room to review the mock. No one was remotely certain they were out of the woods. The past three days had carried them too close to the abyss for firm convictions of any kind. But the president’s mood could not have been more buoyant. Running through the team’s critique, he reveled in their praise of a particularly strong answer.

“Oh, you guys liked that?” Obama said, grinning broadly. “That was fast and hammy, right?”

•   •   •

A
S THE PRESIDENT HAD
been suffering his dark night of the soul, Romney was basking in the bright sunshine that had been bathing him since Denver. In Virginia on the day that the Pew poll put him ahead in the race, he stopped his motorcade to greet a gaggle of elementary school kids lining the
road to wave as he rolled by. Everywhere he went, his crowds were big and boosterish, telling him he was going to win the election—especially after he laid another beat-down on Obama in the next debate.

Romney’s Kingsmill was a Marriott in Burlington, just north of Boston, where he prepped with his team on the Sunday and Monday before Hofstra. Mitt was armed with his own debate-on-a-page, though his was even more miniature than Obama’s, containing just four bullet points. The second, third, and fourth were concrete and unambiguous: “Meet the attacks from the president head-on”; “Don’t just answer the question; speak to the questioner”; “Give specific contrast points on issues.” The first was more ineffable but also most essential: “The same Mitt Romney shows up” as the one who did in Denver.

Acclimating Romney to the town hall format was a central component of his prep. More than one presidential candidate had been tripped up by being untethered from a lectern (the grandpa-in-search-of-a-bathroom wanderings of McCain) or the vagaries of interacting with voter-questioners (Bush 41 staring at his watch). And Mitt’s awkwardness around actual human beings on the campaign trail had been amply demonstrated. Portman predicted that Obama would try to press his likability advantage by turning the debate into a touchy-feely-fest. In one of the mocks, Portman illustrated the point by answering a question from Myers while moving closer and closer and closer to her—and then plopping into her lap as he finished.

The Romneyites were worried about another element of Hofstra: Candy Crowley. In negotiations between Boston, Chicago, and the debate commission, an agreement had been reached that the town hall moderator was to serve only as a neutral facilitator. But in a number of interviews, Crowley suggested that she intended to play a more active role. “Once the table is kind of set by the town hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’” she said.

Romney was a stickler for rules of every kind, and had tangled (to no good effect) with debate moderators repeatedly during the Republican nomination fight. With Chicago in concurrence, Boston complained about Crowley’s comments to the debate commission to try to head off conflict later. But that did nothing to stanch Romney’s trepidation. At one point in
Burlington, with Peter Flaherty playing the moderator in a purposefully aggressive fashion, Romney snapped, “Oh, be quiet, Candy!”

Team Romney assumed that Obama, having left so many bullets in the chamber in Denver, would come out brandishing Uzis in both hands at Hofstra. On the 47 percent, Mitt had his answer down cold; on Bain, he immersed himself in mind-numbingly detailed briefing materials on the firm’s investments. Bob White proposed another tactic: pointing out that Obama’s own financial portfolio included a fund with a distant connection to the Cayman Islands. That Sunday in Burlington, White showed up bearing research that illustrated the attenuated linkage. Though some of the Romneyites were dubious, Mitt was intrigued.

No topic in Romney’s prep for Hofstra was more vexed than Benghazi. In the month since the tragedy, the right had seized on the story in all of its dimensions: the security lapses beforehand; the limited military response the day of the attack; the administration’s explanation in the aftermath, especially the suggestion by UN Ambassador Susan Rice that the uprising had been a spontaneous demonstration as opposed to a premeditated terrorist attack. In Obama’s Rose Garden remarks on September 12 and two other speeches, the president had used the phrase “acts of terror” in the context of Benghazi. But on three other occasions when he was asked directly whether the attack was the work of terrorists, he had declined to say yes—fueling charges from the right that the administration was seeking to limit the president’s political exposure. Fox News was wall-to-wall Benghazi. John McCain was on the warpath and pressing Mitt by phone on the exigency of joining him there. On every rope line, all Paul Ryan heard was Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.