Game Change (35 page)

Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slashing at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his apparent corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. McCain routinely called Romney an “asshole” and a “fucking phony.” Giuliani opined, “That guy will say anything.” Huckabee complained, “I don’t think Romney has a soul.”

His own team’s view was more generous, but no less damning. For all Romney’s business acumen and affectations—he sometimes gave PowerPoint presentations instead of stump speeches—his advisers found him indecisive, an incorrigible vacillator. He would wait and wait, asking more and more questions, consulting with more and more people, ordering up more and more data. The internal debates over his message and even his slogan went on for months, without end or resolution.

By the summer, Romney was stuck in single digits almost everywhere except New Hampshire, where his status as a former Bay State governor and the owner of a vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee made him a quasi-hometown boy. In trying to explain his failure to catch on, his advisers pointed to another issue, which they shorthanded as TMT—The Mormon Thing. For the Evangelical portion of the Republican base, with its suspicions about Mormonism, Romney’s religion was a significant roadblock. (Friends of President Bush would call him from Texas and say of Romney’s chances, You’ve got to be kidding; he’s in a cult.) Compounding the problem was the candidate’s unwillingness to talk openly about his faith, until it was too late.

Worse, Romney had a propensity for stumbling into the wrong kind of headlines. There was the story about how his gardeners were illegal aliens. There was the one about the time that he and his family went on vacation and put their dog in a crate strapped to the roof of their car for the twelve-hour drive. Oh, and also the one about his “lifelong” devotion to hunting, which turned out to mean he’d done it twice. “I’m not a big-game hunter,” Romney said, then explained that his preferred prey were rodents, rabbits, and such—“small varmints, if you will.”

Romney found his failure to break through frustrating. “It’s not fair,” he said to his aides. He was being defined as a flip-flopping Mormon—or a Mormon flip-flopper. He couldn’t fathom why the caricature of him was sticking, had no ability to see himself as others might. When Romney’s staff showed him the devastating You-Tube video, his first reaction was, “Boy, look how young I was back then.”

THAT TWO CANDIDATES as flawed as Giuliani and Romney were the best poised to step in and capitalize on McCain’s implosion was stark testament to the weakness of the rest of the Republican field.

There was Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. He was looking good in Iowa, with his cheeky quips and syrupy drawl. But he was raising no money and had limited appeal outside his rural, religious conservative base.

There was Fred Thompson, around whom buzz continued to build all summer as he dithered over taking the plunge. But once he finally hit the trail in September, his candidacy was one long snoozefest, both for the voters and apparently for him; Thompson behaved as though he would rather have been anywhere but on the hustings, ideally in his La-Z-Boy.

And then there were the other entrants: Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Tommy Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Jim Gilmore, all of whom were such long shots that they were better described as no shots.

Of course, that described McCain, too. Or so everyone in politics thought.

“HEY, BOY, IT’S JOHN. How ya doing?”

By the summer of 2007, McCain had added a new number to the speed-dial list on his phone. The cell phone was the one piece of modern technology he understood, and it was indispensable to him. McCain lived by the speed dial, was forever calling up and checking in with a wide and sundry orbit of confidants and confreres. The circle of calls was a perfect reflection of McCain’s character and of his approach to politics and campaigns. He wanted to hear from a lot of people. He wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, not what he was supposed to talk about. He wanted to do it spontaneously, randomly, on his schedule. McCain would listen to everyone, take in their advice, then bounce that advice off the next person in the loop, and so on, ad infinitum. The circle of calls was not designed for the making of firm decisions. More often, it abetted avoiding them. It fed McCain’s solipsism; he was the only fixed point. But although the circle was an infinite loop, it wasn’t a closed circuit. Every so often, a brand-new voice would be jacked in.

Steve Schmidt lived in Sacramento, California, and barely knew McCain, though in their handful of encounters they’d hit it off. At thirty-six, with a Kojak-bald head, a linebacker’s frame, and a Bluetooth headset invariably plugged into his ear, Schmidt was a strategist who had run the rapid-response unit for the 2004 Bush campaign, headed up Dick Cheney’s press shop, and orchestrated the confirmation hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Wanting out of national politics, he’d moved to California to manage the reelection campaign of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was put on retainer by the McCain campaign when it was still operating under the Bush model, but he had given up his fee in March when the roof started to cave in.

With his campaign in free fall, McCain called and asked Schmidt, “Will you help me?”

“I will help you, but it’s your campaign now,” Schmidt said. “Everyone assumes it’s over. You have nothing left to lose. You should do what you want to do.” Schmidt’s assessment of McCain’s prospects matched those of Davis and Black: McCain probably wasn’t going to be the Republican nominee. But it wasn’t impossible, and at least now he had a clean slate on which to redraw his approach.

Schmidt’s conversations with McCain quickly grew in frequency. He was talking to the candidate at least three times a day now, trying to help guide him toward a path to revival—but occasionally thinking,
Holy shit, how the fuck did I get in the middle of this monstrosity?

The first call would come like clockwork around eight in the morning, as Schmidt took his dog on a six-mile walk past the manicured lawns of the gated communities that surrounded the one where he lived. One August morning when Schmidt and McCain were gabbing, the talk turned to Iraq. The two men had a bond on the subject of the war. As a White House staffer, Schmidt had been sent to Baghdad to help figure out how to sell the conflict to a skeptical American public. He’d come back from his assignment so disillusioned that he declined to prepare a written report on his findings. He told the White House chief of staff that it wasn’t in the administration’s interest to have him commit his pessimistic views to paper. Like McCain, Schmidt believed that the war had to be won and that the Bush administration had bollixed the job. Both men had devoured the recent spate of books that chronicled just how bad things were; both had close relatives serving in Iraq.

When McCain talked to Schmidt on the phone, the candidate was always resolute: under the leadership of Army general David Petraeus, the troop surge was working. But on TV, McCain was hedging, saying it might work, it could work, it was working in some ways. Rather than run away from his own position, Schmidt insisted, McCain should embrace it. The Senate was about to debate the surge policy, with the Democratic candidates pushing their party to the left and forcing a vote that would mandate a troop withdrawal ahead of what the White House planned. This is a big, defining issue, Schmidt told McCain.

Your strategic imperative is completely different from every other candidate’s, Schmidt said. Romney’s strategic imperative is to win the Iowa caucuses. Giuliani’s is to win in New Hampshire, then take Florida. Yours is to create a comeback narrative. You are a reader of literature. You understand what a narrative arc is. You were on top and then you fell, and now we’re at the part of the story where, before you can have any hope of winning, we have to create the comeback. And the way you create the comeback is by making this race about something other than your political fortunes. It’s gotta be about a cause greater than self, which is what your campaign is supposed to be about. The thing this campaign ought to be about now is stopping the Democrats from surrendering in Iraq at the moment when we’re winning.

Schmidt proposed a low-budget campaign tour of the key states, with McCain accompanied by some of his POW buddies and other veterans. Put together a caravan, the strategist said. Stay in cheap hotels. Do American Legion halls and VFW posts. Down some beers at night. Have some fun.

McCain loved the idea. The campaign, once so big and bloated, now was reduced to a simple mission, just as it should be. “That’s right. I’m gonna do it,” he told Schmidt. “I’m gonna do it.”

On September 5, Schmidt’s galvanizing advice about his message on Iraq still ringing in his ears, McCain appeared with the other candidates at the University of New Hampshire for a debate. With Petraeus scheduled to testify before Congress the following week on the progress of the surge, Romney was asked a question about his attitude toward troop withdrawals. “I don’t have a time frame that I’ve announced,” Romney said. “The surge is apparently working. We’re going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus . . . very soon.”

McCain spoke next—and let Romney have it. “Governor, the surge
is
working. The surge is working, sir. It is working.”

“That’s just what I said,” Romney replied.

“No, not
apparently,”
McCain said sharply, cutting him off. “It’s working!”

A week later, the No Surrender Tour commenced in Waterloo, Iowa, and from there continued to New Hampshire and South Carolina. The crowds were small, the staging often ragged, the events in cramped, dark, smoky rooms. But the impact was apparent—and not just on the press narrative, but on McCain himself. He was now at the center of a high-profile fight where he had moral certainty that his cause was just and his fear of the opposition was nil. He was distancing himself from the White House’s mushy rhetoric and slamming the totems of the left. Surrounded by friends, he started joking again, enjoying himself, some of his confidence returning. Fatalistic as ever, he tried to keep his excitement in check. But his political nerve endings began to tingle.

My God, I might be pulling this thing back in
, he thought.

MCCAIN FLEW DOWN TO Florida to raise some money. A fund-raising event had been set up for him on October 2 at the Governors Club in Tallahassee. As long as he was in the neighborhood, he arranged to pay a call on the governor himself. If he couldn’t get Crist to endorse him, at least he might be able to hold him neutral.

One of McCain’s top Florida supporters, Kathleen Shanahan, was with him when he finished up the donor event. On the way to the statehouse, she verbally took McCain by the lapels and shook him. She was worried that if she didn’t say something, McCain, being McCain, would almost certainly sit down with Crist, make small talk, tell some jokes, and waste the moment.

“Don’t go over there and bullshit your way through this meeting,” Shanahan said. Crist was under all sorts of pressure from Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson, and there was no telling which way he might jump. “You have to be serious; you’ve got to tell him why you need Florida, why you need Charlie, why you can win.”

“I hear you,” McCain assured her.

McCain marched into Crist’s office and got down to business. He followed Shanahan’s script to the letter. No one likes Rudy Giuliani more than me, McCain said, but he’s not going to be the nominee of this party, and you’d be wasting your support if you endorsed him. There’s no way he’s going to win. You should support me. I’m going to win this nomination. My campaign is revived.

Afterward, Crist told his advisers that he cared about McCain, was grateful for his backing in the governor’s race. He might not endorse John in the end, Crist said, but otherwise, the senator’s speech had convinced him. He intended to remain neutral—for now.

A few weeks later, in early November, the Giuliani people got the word from Florida that Crist’s endorsement was being suspended until further notice. Giuliani tried to reach Crist, but he was out of the country, on a Latin American trade mission—having taken Giuliani’s nomination strategy with him.

Giuliani’s campaign was in a precarious place. Bernard Kerik, the mayor’s former driver and then police commissioner and business partner, whom Giuliani had lobbied Bush to nominate as federal director of homeland security, had just been indicted on corruption and tax evasion charges. Worse, on November 27, Politico reported that Giuliani’s mayoral office had allegedly used murky accounting practices to cover up government funding of his security during secret visits to Judith’s Southampton condo when she was his mistress. Together, the stories created the kind of political-personal reek around Giuliani that many had predicted would be as likely to derail his presidential bid as would his liberal positions on social issues.

Without Crist’s endorsement, Florida was almost certainly gone for Giuliani, though he would gamely continue to stump there. Where else did he have to go? Among the first four states, Giuliani’s people believed New Hampshire was their only shot. But his poll numbers there were falling fast, which led him to throw in the towel on the Granite State. In doing so, Giuliani was making the single significant change—in strategy, personnel, or message—he ever attempted in reaction to his campaign’s decline. He was also helping pry the door open for the resurgence of McCain.

NEW HAMPSHIRE WAS THE only state that mattered to McCain. He knew he was in a binary situation: If he lost the primary, he was through; if he won it, he’d be the front-runner again, and this time, when it counted. Had it been any other state, McCain’s emerging sense of optimism would have been even more guarded than it was. But being all-in on New Hampshire? That wasn’t too bad. Man, he loved that place.

And why not? New Hampshire had given McCain his nineteen-point win over Bush in 2000, the greatest political victory of his life. More important, it was the perfect place for the kind of campaign that he had to run now. It was small, intimate, pure retail, and everybody already knew him. McCain was flat broke, after all. He had no staff. He had no pollsters. All of it was gone. Instead of the Cadillac campaign that his advisers once had in mind, he was driving around in the political equivalent of a Ford Pinto—with a hamster wheel for an engine, and Rick Davis sprinting furiously on the thing to keep it spinning. And weird as it might sound, McCain preferred it this way. Living off the land, guerilla-style, hand to mouth. In a way, the collapse of his campaign had been the best thing for McCain, because when the campaign disintegrated, so did the crippling campaign dysfunction.