Double Down: Game Change 2012 (72 page)

The Trump thing turned out to be not an announcement
about
Obama but an offer
to
Obama—a deal that, the Donald said, “I don’t believe he can refuse.” In a YouTube video, Trump sat hunch-shouldered at his desk, face streaked by shadows and coiffure refulgent under pale gold lights, coming across like a combination of Howard Beale and Ron Popeil. “If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications . . . and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give to a charity of his choice . . . a check
immediately
for $5 million,” he fulminated.

As the offer was being made, Obama set off on a marathon campaign swing that would take him from Iowa to Colorado, California, Nevada, Florida, Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio in the space of forty-eight hours. In L.A., he stopped by the set of
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,
where the host inquired about Trump’s fixation on Obama. “It’s like me and Letterman,” Leno quipped. “What has he got against you?”

“This all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya,” Obama replied, straight-faced at first. “We had constant run-ins on the soccer field.” Now the president grinned. “He wasn’t very good, and resented it. When we finally moved to America, I thought it would be over, but . . .” Obama trailed off into giggles.

The Obamans had been slyly mocking Trump for months—at Romney’s expense. Back in May, photographers had snapped pictures of Mitt coming off of his campaign plane in Las Vegas; looming right behind him was the Donald’s own logo-sporting plane. (A logistical snafu had delayed Romney’s exit, allowing the cameras to be in position for the shot; the holdup involved a meeting between Mitt and Sheldon Adelson.) At first, Axelrod and Grisolano were hesitant about using the photo in ads, thinking it was a tad gratuitous. Their hesitancy didn’t last long. Chicago’s research showed that, no matter how briefly the image appeared, voters always noticed and remembered Romney juxtaposed with a private jet branded
TRUMP
.

Soon the Obamans were wedging the photo into spot after spot, using it as evocative shorthand for Romney’s wealth and out-of-touchness. Starting in August, there were seven such commercials, on topics ranging from education to outsourcing to taxes. The final one was released while Obama was in the midst of his coast-to-coast ramble—a brutal 47-percent-themed attack
ad, titled “No One Was Looking,” that would run sixteen thousand times in the election’s final days.

Obama found the whole thing hilarious: the Donald’s antics, Romney’s inexplicable loyalty to him, Chicago’s mischief-making. The president made a point of reviewing and signing off on all his campaign spots. Every time he glimpsed the now iconic jet shot in one of them, he cracked up. Hey, hey, look, Obama would say, pointing at the screen. They got Trump in there again!

•   •   •

R
OMNEY WAS BESET BY
troubles with his allies in the homestretch. Every time he turned around, someone who ostensibly wanted to help him win was inflicting harm instead. The day after Boca, Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, to whom Romney had provided a glowing endorsement video, declared that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended.” Later in the week, both Sarah Palin and John Sununu provoked race-related dustups, with Palin attacking Obama on Facebook for his “shuck and jive shtick with these Benghazi lies” and Sununu suggesting that Colin Powell’s endorsement of the president, announced on October 25, had been made out of black-brotherly solidarity.

The night the Sununu flap broke, Romney was in Defiance, Ohio, sixty miles southwest of Toledo, while Obama was in Cleveland. Both sides were courting the Buckeye State with all their might. A week earlier, the president had enlisted Bruce Springsteen to the cause, sending him to Parma for a gig with Bill Clinton. Now Romney tried to match the Boss and the Big Dog with a celebrity of his own: Meat Loaf.

What Mr. Loaf lacked in glamour, he made up for with enthusiasm. Cloaked in a tentlike black tunic, he performed a sweaty set and exhorted the crowd, “We need Oooohiiiiiioooo!” Backstage, the Meat pumped up Romney in true
Bat Out of Hell
style. “I hate to say this, but I mean it with all my heart,” he told Mitt. “If you don’t win this election, we’re
fucked
.”

For Romney, winning the election more or less came down to carrying Ohio. The analysis that Messina had given Obama in August was now clear
to all: every one of Romney’s plausible roads to 270 ran through that state. And even under the optimistic readings of Newhouse’s polls, Mitt was several points behind there.

Nowhere other than Michigan had Romney been more haunted by the legacy of “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The car industry directly touched eighty-two of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties. With the state’s economy steadily improving, Obama had been relentless in touting the auto bailout as a crucial driver of the turnaround and hammering Romney for his opposition to it. For weeks, Rob Portman had been beseeching Boston to cut an ad that took on the issue directly, both to defend Mitt against Chicago’s onslaught and to advance the argument that he would be better for the industry. Many scripts were written. All were nixed. No auto ad had aired yet.

On October 27, that changed—but the attempted cure only served to make the patient sicker. On TV and radio in Ohio, Team Romney went up with ads suggesting that, as a result of the administration’s restructuring of the auto industry, GM had started offshoring U.S. jobs to China and Chrysler was planning to shift production of Jeeps from the Buckeye State to the Middle Kingdom.

The ads kicked up a mega-fuss, provoking fierce repudiations from fact-checkers, the national press, the local press, Chicago, and, most significantly, the car companies in question. Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne labeled the ads “inaccurate.” “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe,” GM spokesman Greg Martin said, rebuking Boston’s gambit as “campaign politics at its cynical worst.”

For Romney, the backlash felt like the final chapter in a chronicle of a death foretold. From the moment he had seen the headline of his
New York Times
op-ed four years earlier, he knew it would be trouble. He tried and tried to defuse the problem, to no avail. Now his campaign’s desperate, last-ditch effort was backfiring in the most important state on the map, turning him into an object of scorn for the industry his father helped build. On his daily conference call with Boston, Romney vented: Why are we doing this? Why are we fighting in an area where we’re vulnerable in the closing days?

“This would be like Obama running an Obamacare ad in the last week of the election,” he said.

The political storm raging in Ohio, however, was a charming summer squall compared with the baroscopic beast bearing down on the East Coast: Hurricane Sandy. By nightfall on Sunday, October 28, twenty-four hours before Sandy slammed into New Jersey and New York with unprecedented force, it was clear that the normal order of campaigning would be suspended until further notice. For the next four days, Obama would be America’s full-time, omnipresent, can-do chief executive. And Romney would be . . . what?

Mitt’s instinct was to figure out a way to be involved, to stay in the story. Stuck in the Midwest, he asked his team if there was any way for him to get to New Jersey. Just find a shelter, where people are hurting, so I can go and show that I care, he said. But the practical impediments were nearly insurmountable and the political risks were high; anything storm-related that Romney did would look small next to Obama’s official duties and was likely to be perceived as exploitative. Then there was another problem: the Garden State’s governor wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat.

In a phone call that Sunday, Christie told Romney that the storm was likely to keep him off the grid all week. Appearing on
Fox and Friends
on Tuesday morning, after a harrowing and sleepless night during which his state’s shoreline was ravaged, Big Boy was asked by cohost Steve Doocy, “Is there any possibility that Governor Romney may go to New Jersey to tour some of the damage with you?”

“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” Christie said. “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

Christie went on to heap praise on Obama, as he would repeatedly all week long—calling him “outstanding,” “wonderful,” “tremendous,” and deserving of “great credit.” The next day, Christie and Obama surveyed the destruction together. “I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion,” the governor said at their joint press conference afterwards.

Watching Christie wrap Obama in a bear hug left most of the Romneyites somewhere between annoyed and irate. They understood that Big Boy had to act in the best interests of his battered state, but they found the frequency and extravagance of the encomiums excessive.
That’s not a bear hug—it’s a French kiss,
Ron Kaufman thought.

Mitt tried not to be irritated. By now Romney had become a student of Christie; he had seen so much over the course of the campaign, he practically had an advanced degree in Big Boy studies. He was sure that Chris wasn’t trying to hurt him; the man just lacked self-control. Even so, Romney cringed when he spotted a picture on Drudge of Christie and Obama literally in each other’s arms.
Oh, boy,
Romney thought.
This really isn’t helping.

For all the fretting by the Obamans about exogenous events that might fundamentally alter the race, when Sandy huffed and puffed, it was Romney’s house that took the hit. Through no fault of his own, Mitt found himself irrelevant, without a role to play. He was dealt the cruelest fate imaginable for a presidential challenger: an effective news blackout in the election’s last week. Stevens feared that the storm had halted Romney’s momentum, allowing Obama to project both leaderly strength and (with Christie’s help) a bipartisan aura. For the first time in two years, Stevens confided to his boss that he thought they could lose. And if we lose, Sandy will be why, Stuart said.

But while Stevens now accepted that Romney could lose, he didn’t think he
would
lose. Neither did anyone else in Boston. And neither did Mitt.

Romney wasn’t measuring the proverbial drapes for the Oval Office yet, or starting to ponder whether Ann could stable Rafalca in the parking lot of the Old Executive Office Building. In his rational, doubtful management consultant’s mind, he believed the race was a toss-up. But Newhouse’s polls had him running ahead in Florida, Colorado, and other battlegrounds; in Ohio, he was leading among independent voters, a reliable barometer of impending victory. Then there was the matter of Republican intensity, which Romney was experiencing firsthand—the size of the crowds, the rabid enthusiasm, the way Believe in America voters, for the first time, were really believing in
him.
All of it had Romney’s gut screaming that he was going to win.

That instinct was reinforced on Friday night, November 2. In West Chester, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati, the Romney campaign staged a sprawling rally in the Square at Union Centre. Some 25,000 souls turned out on a bitterly cold night to see Mitt, but the backstage scene was what fueled Romney’s sense of destiny. Along with almost the entire Boston brain trust, a star-studded cast of Republican heavies was on hand, including many
former rivals who once detested him. There were the haters from 2008: McCain and Giuliani. The haters from 2012: Perry and Santorum. The local-boy extreme doubters: Boehner and Kasich. The war councillors: Ayotte, McDonnell, and Portman. Every last one was brimming with optimism. All of them said that Romney was bound for glory, and seemed to believe it. The good vibes were so pervasive that Stevens sidled up to Perry and introduced himself.

“I know who you are,” the Texas governor said, smiling. “You’re the guy who likes my book.”

There was only one character notably missing from the upbeat,
This Is Your Life
–like finale: Christie, who remained pinned down in Jersey. Given the media attention to his mash session with Obama, Boston still hoped to get him in a picture next to Romney before Election Day. On Sunday night, November 4, the campaign would be holding a rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—just ten miles from Trenton and thus a golden opportunity.

Christie had no intention of attending the event. He was exhausted, frazzled, still consumed by the aftermath of Sandy. But there was another factor. Shortly before the storm hit, Christie had swung through Ohio to campaign for Romney—and come away convinced that Mitt was going to lose the state and the election.
These are Ohio people,
Big Boy thought, attuning his political radar to the crowds.
They’re not voting for Mitt Romney.

Christie was receiving a lot of incoming about the Bucks County event: Romney donors who knew how badly Boston wanted him there were phoning him, nagging him, hassling him, bugging him. The calls were getting on Mary Pat’s nerves, too. The couple assumed that the Romneyites were whispering to the press that Chris might show up. On Saturday night, Mary Pat finally couldn’t take it anymore. “This is bullshit,” she said to her husband. “You need to call Russ.”

Christie picked up the phone and spent the next ten minutes screaming at Schriefer. But the gist of his message required all of one second: Stop fucking with me, Russ.

On Sunday evening, though, when Romney arrived in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, the Christie contretemps was quickly forgotten (if not forgiven). Mitt hadn’t held a rally in the Keystone State since the Republican primary. His late-stage incursion was an outward sign of Boston’s brio;
thirty-six hours before Election Day, the campaign seemed to be putting a new battleground in play.

What awaited Romney at Shady Brook Farm was another 25,000-strong crowd. People had been massing all day in an enormous open field, listening to the Marshall Tucker Band, amped up and full of holler. As the Romney bus cruised onto the farm grounds, Mitt, Ann, and Mitt’s brother, Scott, huddled up front, gazing out the window, waving and gawking at the five-deep lines of supporters on the side of the gravel road.