Double Down: Game Change 2012 (73 page)

Mike Leavitt walked up and joined the Romneys. For months, the former governor of Utah had been working diligently on Mitt’s transition plan for his entry into the White House. But in the past few weeks, Leavitt’s labors had ramped up as victory seemed more and more likely. It was all coming together: the huge throngs, the sunny numbers from Newhouse and so many other Republican pollsters, the growing certainty that after four years of Obama the country was pining for a different kind of change. Leavitt was in awe of how far his friend had come. Two nights from now, Romney would be the president-elect of the United States.

Leavitt leaned in and told Mitt that he wouldn’t be staying for his speech.

Oh, too bad, Romney said. Why’s that?

“I have to go start the engine and warm it up,” Leavitt said.

•   •   •

C
HICAGO VIEWED
Boston’s Pennsylvania play as a sign of desperation or delusion. The public polls, with few exceptions, indicated that Obama was destined for reelection, and the president’s team had crossed the threshold from confidence to certainty. Chicago’s research showed him ahead in every battleground but North Carolina. Early voting had been going on for weeks in many of those states; in Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, and others, Obama had built up a lead that bordered on insurmountable. To test the proposition, Messina asked his analytics team to run worst-case projections—with GOP turnout through the roof, minority and youth participation in the cellar. That Sunday, the results came back: no matter how the data jockeys twiddled the knobs in Romney’s favor, Obama still wound up with more than 270 electoral votes.

The previous week had been a strange one for Obama, all but extracting
him from politics entirely. On the eve of the storm, he was in Orlando for a joint event the next morning with Clinton. As Sandy’s scale became apparent, the White House decided that Obama had to scurry back to Washington. But before leaving, he was able to sneak in a half-hour meeting with his predecessor.

You go be president, Clinton told Obama. Don’t worry about the campaign. I’m here for you. Whatever you need me to do this week, I’ll do it.

For the next four days, Obama was off the trail. Instead of giving speeches, working rope lines, or doing media interviews, he was on the telephone with the governors of the storm-affected states, dealing with FEMA, playing disaster-relief quarterback. Unlike in Romney’s world, the Sandy-related political angst around Obama was close to nil. The president knew that he was winning. He had a job to do. Not once did anyone hear him express anxiety about his absence from the hustings.

Clinton, meanwhile, was making good on his word, campaigning as if his own name were on the ballot. For the past three general elections, he had been a nonfactor in the homestretch. In 2000 and 2008, Gore and Obama, for different reasons, had kept him on the bench; in 2004, he was in the hospital, recovering from heart surgery. Still basking in the afterglow of Charlotte, he had told Messina following the Boca debate that he would give control over his schedule to Chicago for the final week. The Sandy factor fired him up even more. In the six days after he and 44 parted in Orlando, Clinton headlined a head-snapping twenty-one events in seven states—all the while prodding the campaign, Why don’t you add a few more stops? The cost of moving Clinton around the country was enormous: $1 million plus.
It’s worth every fucking penny,
Messina thought.

The two presidents were reunited on Saturday, November 3, for a massive jamboree at the Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater, in Bristow, Virginia, forty miles outside Washington. Dressed in a brown leather baby boomer’s bomber’s jacket, Clinton was hoarse and raspy: “As you can see, I have given my voice in the service of my president,” he said as he began his remarks. But soon Clinton was rocking the place, wallowing in the applause, praising Obama to the skies, and eviscerating Romney with lightheartedness and humor.

“Barack Obama decided that America could not afford to let the
automobile industry die, and he saved it,” Clinton said. “Mitt Romney opposed what he did. And now he’s tied himself in so many knots over this automobile deal, he could be hired as the chief contortionist for the Cirque du Soleil.”

Backstage, Obama sat glued to a monitor, marveling at the joy and intensity radiating from the stage. “He’s really having fun doing this, isn’t he?” Obama said to one of Clinton’s aides.

When 42 finished, 44 jogged out to the podium in a rush. “I was enjoying listening to President Clinton so much, I had to run up to get my cue,” he said. “I was sitting there, just soaking it all in.”

Obama called Clinton “the master” and “a great president” and “a great friend.” At the end of the event, they hugged warmly onstage as the sound system kicked in with “Don’t Stop”—not just a nod to the past, but a subtle sign of deference that would have been inconceivable four years earlier.

With the finish line in sight, thoughts of 2008 were inescapable for Obama and his people. The next morning, the current and former presidents, Axelrod, and Plouffe boarded Air Force One and flew to New Hampshire for another joint rally. As Obama’s limousine carried them north up the Everett Turnpike from Manchester to Concord, Clinton gazed out the window and announced, “Man, I love New Hampshire”—calling to mind both his own comeback-kid revival there in 1992 and Hillary’s in 2008, at the expense of the Obamans.

Even a few months earlier, before the 42-44 bond had been cemented, Plouffe might have bitten his tongue. Instead he shot back, “We like it here, too, but we like Iowa a little bit more.”

Everyone laughed.

Iowa was where the Obamans found themselves thirty-six hours later. They had trekked to Des Moines for the president’s final rally of the campaign and of his career as a candidate—an event custom-built for uplift, for nostalgia, for the bittersweetness that always comes with the end of something.

Obama managed to restrain his feelings for much of the last day. At his first stop, in Madison, and his second, in Cleveland, he was his usual self. But on the flight into DSM he began to wax nostalgic, particularly when he
was told about a staff plan that had been foiled. The idea was to fly in Edith Childs—the hat-proud South Carolina councilwoman who had inspired Obama’s famous 2008 chant of “Fired up! Ready to go!”—to introduce him that night. But Ms. Childs declined the invitation: North Carolina was still in play, and she planned to be there on Election Day to help get out the vote.

That’s too unbelievably good to be true, a tickled Obama said. I’m gonna put that in my speech.

Air Force One and the first lady’s plane both touched down at around 9:00 p.m. Obama met his wife on the tarmac, at the foot of the aircraft stairs. When their limo pulled up in Des Moines’s East Village, the scene was like something out of a movie. A crowd of twenty thousand stretched for block after block from the podium up East Locust Street. Beyond the crowd, a massive American flag flew in the distance. Beyond the flag were the columns and golden dome of the state’s majestic capitol building.

Obama’s original campaign headquarters was behind the stage—an unassuming, low-slung brick building that now housed a church. Before his speech, the president walked slowly, pensively, through the space, recalling where certain staffers had sat four years earlier, reminiscing about the frigid New Year’s Eve when
The Des Moines Register’
s poll announced to the world what the campaign already believed: that he, Barack Hussein Obama, was going to win the nearly all-Caucasian caucuses.

Michelle Obama held her husband’s hand. As she traveled around that fall, the first lady had been in a terrific mood about what she was seeing. Perhaps most gratifying was the lack of a backlash against her husband’s change of posture on same-sex unions. Gay marriage was supposed to have been the most scalding of hot-button issues, but it had turned out to be a damp squib—and she found that a cause for overwhelming optimism.
We’ve come a long way,
the first lady thought.

Close to 10:00 p.m., she took to the rostrum and, clearly moved, put the finest point possible on the moment. “As you know, this is a pretty emotional time for us, because this is the final event of my husband’s final campaign,” Michelle said. “So this is the last time that he and I will be onstage together at a campaign rally. And that’s why we wanted to come here to Iowa tonight. Because truly this is where it all began.”

A few minutes later, her husband was up there with her. They shared a kiss, a long embrace, and some whispered words.

“I’ve come back to Iowa one more time to ask for your vote,” Obama began. “I came back to ask you to help us finish what we’ve started. Because this is where our movement for change began. Right here. Right here. Right behind these bleachers is the building that was home to our Iowa headquarters in 2008. I was just inside, and it brought back a whole lot of memories. This was where some of the first young people who joined our campaign set up shop, willing to work for little pay and less sleep because they believed that people who love their country can change it. This was where so many of you who shared that belief came to help. When the heat didn’t work for the first week or so, some of you brought hats and gloves for the staff. These poor kids, they weren’t prepared! When the walls inside were bare, one of you painted a mural to lift everybody’s spirits. When we had a Steak Fry to march to, when we had a J-J [Jefferson-Jackson] Dinner to fire up, you brought your neighbors and you made homemade signs. When we had calls to make, teachers and nurses showed up after work, already bone-tired but staying anyway, late into the night. And you welcomed me and Michelle into your homes. And you picked us up when we needed a lift. And your faces gave me new hope for this country’s future, and your stories filled me with resolve to fight for you every single day I set foot in the Oval Office. You inspired us.”

As Obama spoke, he made no effort to conceal the emotions to which his wife referred; the president’s heart was festooned on his sleeve. His voice, at once gravelly and trembly, repeatedly cracked. First one tear, then two, and then more streamed down his cheeks.

He punctuated his Iowa rhapsody with a “Yes, we can!”

The crowd let loose a roar.

At great length, he told the story of Edith Childs, adding its new kicker: “She said, I’d love to see you, but I think we can still win North Carolina . . . I’ve got to knock on some doors. I’ve got to turn out the vote. I’m still fired up, but I’ve got work to do. And that shows you what one voice can do. One voice can change a room. And if it can change a room, it can change a city. And if it can change a city, it can change a state. And if it can change a state,
it can change a nation. And if it can change a nation, it can change the world.”

As Obama built to his crescendo, so did the din around him. Finally, finally, he led the audience in the valedictory call-and-response.

“Are you fired up?”

“READY TO GO!”

“Are you fired up?”

“READY TO GO!”

More than a year earlier, Axelrod had told the president that, in order to win in 2012, he would have to recapture the Barack Obama of 2008—he would have to find his way home. On some days during the campaign, he had come close; on others, the distance seemed too great to span. Now, back in Iowa, on the final night, Obama was all the way there: the circle was complete.

For half an hour after his speech, Obama worked the rope line. The temperature outside was just around freezing. Though he wasn’t wearing an overcoat, he seemed unfazed by the chill. Back inside the old headquarters, he signed some books and posters, whatever people put in front of him. He talked about the familiar faces he had glimpsed from the stage. They believed in me when nobody else did, Obama said.

The hour was late. It was time to go. But Obama lingered. Taking a last, long look around, he turned to Plouffe and motioned to the door. His expression was rueful, reflective, and satisfied all at once.

“I guess that’s it,” Obama said—and then strode out into the cold night air.

EPILOGUE

I
T WAS NEARLY
2:00 a.m. on November 7 when Mitt and Ann walked into the campaign-staff suite at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel. Not long before, Romney had phoned President Obama to concede the election, then delivered a five-minute elegy in the ballroom downstairs. “I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader,” Romney said. “So Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.”

The size and sweep of Obama’s victory staggered the Romneys and their people. Twelve hours earlier, they had been convinced that Mitt would prevail—or, at worst, that the race would be a nail-biter. Instead, the Democratic incumbent was on his way to an emphatic 51–47 percent win, in which he carried all but one of the battleground states (North Carolina), pocketed 332 electoral votes, and outdistanced Romney by five million popular votes out of 129 million cast.

Mitt and Ann sat down with a clutch of advisers: Stevens, White, Myers, Kaufman, Zwick. Ann had been crying; she was jagged, inconsolable. “How did this happen?” she asked over and over, saying she feared for the future of America.

Her husband, by contrast, was downcast but composed. In the frantic
final hours on the trail, Mitt had told his aides that he was excited about winning but if he lost, that would be okay, too; he would be perfectly happy returning to his normal life, spending more time with his kids and grandkids. Now Romney looked up and saw a commercial playing on TV. It was former Tennessee senator and failed presidential candidate Fred Thompson, hawking reverse mortgages for a company called AAG. Staring at the screen, Mitt indulged in some dark humor.

That could be
me
next, he said.

The Republican Party royalty was just as stunned as Boston but took the loss with less equanimity than did Mitt. Rupert Murdoch, who had watched the election returns with a four-star general, was dismayed. When Obama claimed victory, the officer presented an apocalyptic vision of the president’s second term: an anemic America, on its knees, capitulating to Middle Eastern thugs. Expressing a sentiment common among the high command of the right, Murdoch muttered, “Our nation is ruined.”