This Town (33 page)

As in 2008, the Obama campaign was a young, grass-roots-oriented and data-driven machine that, it is now clear, ran circles around the opposition. But in contrast to 2008, the grind-it-out reelection campaign was rife was internal dramas and ego clashes that became public. A series of e-books by Politico—namely
Obama’s Last Stand
by Glenn Thrush—provided an in-progress repository for leaks about internal conflicts, like the heated one between Axelrod and Stephanie Cutter over who would get a high-profile TV appearance.

In the early summer of 2012, one of the campaign’s celebrated computer whiz kids was forced to apologize to the senior staff after being caught leaking proprietary technology information to a reporter in Europe. And a young aide volunteering for Obama’s Convention team was fired after leaking the campaign’s convention plan to Mike Allen.

Obama did his best to stir the old magic on the stump. He talked a lot about how his hair was really gray now—which was about as interesting the two thousandth time he said it as his interminable “I have big ears” line was four years earlier. (Physical self-depreciation, check.) The president’s stump speeches could carry the forced air of a Van Halen reunion tour with Sammy Hagar in for David Lee Roth. It was as if the Big O were just checking days off a calendar. I saw him speak at an event in Mansfield, Ohio, in July—and in Akron later that day, and Loudoun County, Virginia, in early August, when he annoyingly kept droppin’ his
g
’s, talkin’ real to the hardworkin’ voters of the middle class about how the Republicans wanted to go back to that whole trickle-down economics that we keep hearin’ so much about. That’s POTUS, playin’ the folksy card.

Obama still had his moments, often suffused in nostalgia for the last go-round. In the middle of August, he partook of a beer-soaked bus tour of Iowa that harked back to his cornfield halcyons of ’08. There were chants of “Four more beers!” Michelle came too. “Our family has so many wonderful memories of our time here in Iowa,” the first lady said. She asked Barack what he had eaten at the state fair. “Pork chop and beer,” he said to laughter, his beaming manner suggesting ample volumes of the latter. “He’s so pleased with himself,” Michelle said. Yes, he was.

•   •   •

A
t a certain point in the summer, Obama and his top brass became convinced that Romney was hitting the “too much of a douche bag to be elected” threshold. This seemed to coincide, conveniently, with Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid hitting a new “I REALLY don’t give a damn what I say” threshold, much of which was directed at his fellow Mormon, Romney. Reid, whose wife had just completed a brutal course of chemotherapy to treat an advanced case of breast cancer, seized on Romney’s refusal to release his past tax returns, which he kept mentioning over and over. Reid noted that if Romney were up for a cabinet position, the tax-return issue would make it impossible for him to win Senate confirmation. “He not only couldn’t be confirmed as a Cabinet secretary,” Reid said, “he couldn’t be confirmed as a dog catcher, because a dog catcher—you’re at least going to want to look at his income tax returns.” (It’s unclear exactly when the Senate started confirming dog catchers.)
The majority leader also noted that George Romney had been happy to release twelve years of tax returns in 1967 when he was running for president. “His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son,” Reid told the Huffington Post of George Romney, who, embarrassed or not, had been dead for seventeen years. And, citing a friend at Bain Capital, Reid claimed that “the word is out” that
Mitt had not paid taxes for ten years.

I later asked Reid if he had something personal against Romney, which very much seemed to be the case. “He and I come from different worlds,” Reid said after a long pause. “So at the very beginning, there was kind of a friction there, no matter how hard I try. I have a hard time thinking someone like that understands what I’ve been through in my life.” Reid said he kept giving his “information” about Romney’s not paying taxes to people in the White House and campaign, but no one ever did anything with it. “So I said the heck with it, I’ll do it,” Reid said. “If I hadn’t done it, it probably never would have been done.” When I asked Reid if anyone at the White House or the campaign ever asked him to tone it down a little, he just smiled.

The wise guys settled on Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota known as “T-Paw,” as Romney’s most likely running mate. He was, for a time, at the head of a so-called “short list” of possible choices that circulated in the genius ether in the preannouncement dog days. Pawlenty, who had been a short-time candidate for the GOP nomination in 2011 and a VP short-lister in 2008, seemed to badly want the job. He endorsed Romney shortly after he gave up his race, did endless spin-room duty, and served as a national co-chairman of Romney’s campaign. Pawlenty was the prevailing guess in Chicago, where the T-Paw‒Mittens fit was seen as potentially formidable. One of his chief assets was that he was a Republican luminary who did not instantly evince the starched-shirt zillionaire’s aura of a Mitt Romney or a Donald Trump.

The son of a milk truck driver, Pawlenty talked constantly of his stint as a hockey player, his upbringing in a Minnesota “meatpacking town,” and his penchant for Sam’s Club, the discount retail warehouse. He portrayed himself as a little-guy poster child of the American Dream and was even the rare Republican who dared to criticize Wall Street. Before his presidential campaign ended in 2011, Pawlenty vowed in a TV interview that his “truth message to Wall Street was going to be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough.’”

Unfortunately for Pawlenty, Romney’s truth message to him on the running-mate gig was that he was “going in another direction.” T-Paw was disappointed at being passed over—again—but pro forma gracious in defeat, and vowed to keep campaigning for Romney.

And then, in a predictable twist on his American Dream, Pawlenty swerved into the trough himself. He was named CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group representing the elite Wall Street banks.

•   •   •

R
omney ultimately settled on U.S. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to be his running mate, ending our quadrennial season of fun.

Ryan, a forty-two-year-old Wisconsinite with an excellent physique, was well received by the Republican base and hailed by many in the media as the kind of “bold pick” they had assumed the cautious Romney would never make. Over the years, Ryan had also acquired a coveted Washington reputation as a Man of Substance. He had, after all, studied the federal budget. He also talked a lot about his “love of ideas.”

Ryan read the works of the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand as a teen—and there’s nothing like a dog-eared copy of
Atlas Shrugged
to get a guy laid in high school. In Congress, he was the author of a stripped-down budget plan that was viewed as a fiscal Magna Carta by House Republicans in 2010. Many of the intellectual conservatives who bemoaned the ascendance of Sarah Palin in 2008 celebrated Ryan. He wore the Halo of the Wonk.

Romney’s selection of Ryan salved two of the nagging insecurities on the right: one was that their standard-bearer, Romney, was a closet moderate; the other was that Tea Party conservatism had acquired a dangerously anti-intellectual strain, embodied by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and especially the last Republican running mate, Sarah Palin. Palin’s name was verboten inside the Romney bubble. One person close to Romney’s running-mate search told me that “No Palins” was a working imperative throughout the selection process. Meaning, Mittens wanted no vetting surprises, no prima donnas, no lightweights. At a town hall meeting I attended in Orlando not long after Ryan was chosen, the running mate took a question from a man about “the death panels we are going to have” as a result of the Obama health-care bill. “Well, that’s not the word I’d choose to use to describe it,” Ryan said, fleeing immediately from the term—“death panels”—that Palin popularized in 2009 during the health-care donnybrook.

Ryan looked even younger and more angular in person than he did on television. Capitol police officers would routinely mistake him for an intern or a young Hill staffer. He had a general appearance that seemed to conjure other familiar figures. He told me he was teased as a child for looking like Eddie Munster because of his black widow’s peak; I also heard people liken him to Greg Brady; Will Schuester, the music club director in
Glee
; Kyle MacLachlan, who played Special Agent Dale Cooper on
Twin Peaks
; a bat; an owl; an eagle; and Boner from
Growing Pains
.

Unlike Romney, Ryan did not convey any sense that a chandelier was about to fall on his head at any moment. He did not emit a pre-traumatic gaffe anxiety at all times. He could talk football, fishing, or bow hunting. In an interview aboard the new Romney–Ryan campaign bus, Ryan told me that the first firearm he owned was a squirrel gun. At which point I was compelled to mention “varmints,” referring to Romney’s ridiculed claim in 2007 that he was a hunter of “small varmints, if you will.” Ryan chuckled. “Tastes like chicken,” he said, and then asked his press secretary, Michael Steel, “Did I just say that on the record?”

Ryan was especially strong on popular culture awareness, with a Generation X bent that counterbalanced the Lawrence Welkish Romney, who was twenty-three years older. In Orlando, a woman raised her hand and signaled her desperation to ask a question with a cry of “OH, OH, OH” until Ryan called on her. “I feel like Horshack,” the woman said, referring to Sweathog Arnold Horshack from
Welcome Back, Kotter
, who was known for a similar gesture. One could imagine at this moment Romney being baffled, perhaps thinking that “Horshack” referred to a small home that one of Ann’s dressage horses could live in. Ryan missed nothing.

“I’m old enough to know that Horshack joke, actually,” he said. I asked Ryan later if he was aware that the actor who played Horshack, Ron Palillo, had died earlier in 2012, as did Robert Hegyes, who played the character of Juan Epstein (bad year for the Sweathogs). “Yes, I thought about that,” Ryan told me. “I almost said something. But then I thought, huh, maybe I shouldn’t say that, it might ruin the moment.”

Romney seemed to acquire an instant lightness after his Ryan selection—like a shy eight-year-old transformed by a new pet turtle. At a rally in Norfolk, Virginia, in which Romney unveiled his selection of Private Ryan, “the Gov” (as his staff called him) was actually seen bouncing in his shoes. It looked as if he was actually enjoying himself, not playing “enjoying himself” according to stage direction.

It became clear to the Romney-bots that Mittens really wanted his running mate around. His mood was much improved. (They used to say the same thing about Michael Dukakis when his wife, Kitty, was around.) They decided after a few days that they would unite the ticket on the stump whenever possible. Bottom line, the Mittens–Ryan bromance was worth celebrating. Ryan described for me a personal e-mail that Romney had sent him after he had successfully completed his first solo campaign events. “He said, ‘I basically picked you because I thought you could help me govern,’” Ryan said. “‘I never knew you’d be decent at campaigning and you turned out to be pretty good at that, too. So thanks.’” It was a curious thing for Ryan to volunteer, showing Ryan to be more transparently insecure than he usually betrayed. Message: Mittens approved!

Political reporters also approved. They tend to love the “these guys have real rapport” story, anyway. They’re easy to do. You can read body language from joint appearances. Plus, campaign aides love sharing the easy feel-good tales about how close the two candidates are—at least until the campaign ends and they start dishing out all the stories about rogue running mates and unease between the families and whatnot.

In general, the political media loved Ryan’s selection, in large part because he met another key requirement: he was nice to the political media. This was an exotic practice on the Romney bus, which had endured a series of clashes between its overwhelmed flacks and the media zoo animals tired of being fed the daily lint of the Mittens all year. The low point occurred in July, during Romney’s junior week abroad, in which the press became increasingly frustrated over Romney’s refusal to talk to them. It came to a head in Warsaw during a visit by Romney to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there. As the former governor walked to his car, reporters shouted questions at him about his earlier mishaps. “Kiss my ass,” admonished Romney’s traveling press aide, Rick Gorka. “Show some respect. This is a holy site for the Polish people.” Channeling Fonzie, Gorka also instructed Jonathan Martin of Politico
to “shove it.” Some in the political echo-system treated this as a major international incident, a skirmish between weary but still potent superpowers—the press, the Romney campaign—that conjured Cold War–like tensions. After Gorka’s unsacred words raced around the world, the jackals rechristened the Polish holy site “Gorka Park.”

Ryan, on the other hand, actually inquired into the well-being of the jackals when he saw them on the plane (Romney and Obama typically never did). He joined the reporters assigned to his campaign for two off-the-record dinners, one in Roanoke, Virginia, and the other in Cincinnati. The campaign reporters, most of them in their twenties, bought Ryan and his top aides doughnuts during a stop at Voodoo Doughnut in Portland, Oregon, for which Ryan dutifully walked back on the plane to say thanks. (He then tossed out most of the blueberry cake doughnut, which offended his health consciousness and which he later conceded that he found disgusting.)

Ryan’s anointment led wise guys on both sides to declare that his selection would lead to a more high-minded and ideas-based debate. And again, this had to be true because William Kristol said so. “The selection has changed the nature of the 2012 presidential contest,” the conservative oracle wrote in the
Weekly Standard
. “It means we now have a big campaign, about big issues and big choices.” He called Ryan “the Republican party’s intellectual leader.”