Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (61 page)

“Every impactful ad I can think of in presidential elections over the past thirty years aired before Labor Day,” I told him. “That’s when the Swift Boat ads ran against Kerry. Roger Ailes ran most of the ads that sunk Dukakis in the summer of eighty-eight. People don’t know Romney. We have to fill in the picture and do it with force before the end of summer. We can always raise more money. We can’t raise more time.”

After a month of positive advertising about the president’s leadership, we launched a new flight in June recalling Romney’s economic record as governor. If, as he had been suggesting, he had the secret sauce to repair the economy, how had it worked out in Massachusetts? The answer from our research team: not so well. Under his tenure as governor, the state fell from thirty-sixth to forty-seventh in job creation. When Romney left office, Massachusetts ranked number one in having more per capita debt than any state in the nation.

Our ad makers had a field day taking the Romney record apart. In order to spotlight their good work, we decided to stage a press conference and rally at the State House in Boston, featuring local officials who could attest to Romney’s weaknesses as governor. Our communications folks urged me to attend mostly as bait for the national news media. Yet it wasn’t just reporters I lured.

In setting the rally on the State House steps, our team had neglected to calculate that Romney’s national headquarters was just a few blocks away. As I walked over, someone casually mentioned that there might be a few protesters. I was confronted by what was more like a mob: a herd of young Romney workers who had angled on over to “welcome” me personally to Boston—even if they didn’t get my name right.

“Tell the truth, Axelfraud!” they shouted, as I took to the podium. The hecklers were only about fifteen feet away, forcing me to shout over them. I kind of enjoyed this theater of the absurd. But the whole thing looked ridiculous on TV—as the president reminded me when he called that night.

“I see you had an interesting day,” he said dryly. “It didn’t look like a very good expenditure of your time.”

If the event was a flop, our ads were successful in establishing some initial doubts about Romney, his public record, and the image he was selling as an economic savior. There were larger and more damaging questions to come about his business record. Romney had made a fortune as the founder and chairman of Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought underperforming businesses, forced management and operational changes to wring out greater profits, and then sold them, often at a tidy profit. Those changes often involved wage and benefit reductions for workers, bankruptcy filings to reduce pension obligations, and the outsourcing of plants to low-wage nations. While these practices had helped enrich Romney and his partners, workers—including many who had devoted much of their lives to a company—were sometimes left in the lurch. It was ground zero for an economic values argument.

A super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich had released a vicious video attacking Romney on Bain during the primaries, and we began to revive the issue with the media in May, as a prelude to ads we planned to air in June. Yet Bain, a company with a bipartisan set of partners, had a lot of powerful friends on both sides of the aisle. Without warning and apparently much forethought, Bill Clinton sprang to Romney’s defense at the end of May. “I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say, ‘This is bad work. This is good work,’” Clinton said on CNN, before praising Romney’s “sterling business career.”

We were furious, and conveyed that message through Clinton’s staff. When the former president arrived in Chicago a few days later for a meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative, he summoned Messina and me to his hotel. “Guys, I am really sorry,” he said. “I just kind of wandered into that one. You know, the truth is, I’m a little rusty.” Clinton muted his commentary after that.

No one is immune to gaffes, as Obama would demonstrate a few days later. Nearing the end of a press conference in the White House Briefing Room about worse-than-expected jobs numbers, the president served up a choice sentence that would quickly find its way into Republican ads.

“The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone.
The private sector is doing fine
. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government.”

It was a fair point, poorly stated—but the potency of poorly stated points was not lost on us, having hung “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” around John McCain’s neck in 2008. Few Americans believed the “private sector” was “doing fine,” and Romney quickly pointed to the remark as evidence of a president disconnected from the reality of the American economy.

“I’m sorry to make your job more challenging,” Obama said, in a call a few days later. ”I hate being sloppy. That was sloppy.” I told him we should never have thrown him out there to answer questions when he was sleep-deprived after an exhausting West Coast trip. “I was a little tired,” he acknowledged. “But no excuses. It was a screwup and it was mine.”

Romney seized on the theme of Obama as a naïve crypto-socialist, and many on Wall Street, eager for one of their own in the Oval Office, were all in. Shortly after Romney clinched the nomination, he arrived in Washington to a hero’s welcome at the Business Roundtable, an elite group of CEOs formed in the 1970s to lobby against regulation and corporate taxes. “The president and his folks just don’t understand how the private sector works,” he said with a pitying smile, as the crowd nodded in agreement.

The scene was galling. Obama had taken the difficult steps necessary to save an economy that, thanks to a lack of rules, had been sabotaged by egregious abuses of the market. Now the Dow was up 70 percent, corporate profits were robust, and the CEOs cheered lustily as Romney smarmily chided Obama for his lack of understanding.

I wasn’t the only one irritated by Romney’s performance. The president was clearly peeved when he called me that night. “I saw him over there, all full of swagger,” Obama said, after watching an account of Romney’s speech. “A homecoming of the plutocrats!”

No one doubted that Romney knew “how the private sector worked.” He had the fortune to prove it. Yet if his storied career in private equity made him a favorite at the Business Roundtable, it wouldn’t, as more details of his business practices emerged, garner the same applause from most Americans outside that room. Only a week later, the
Washington Post
ran an explosive investigative piece on Bain’s business practices.

“During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private-equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” the
Post
reported, noting that China and India were among the beneficiaries of the outsourced jobs.

“Pioneers” in outsourcing! The
Post
had added new findings and important validation to our research, including a filing by one Bain-owned company offering “a range of services that provide our clients with a one-stop shop for their outsource requirements.”

It would be a devastating story, particularly in battleground states such as Ohio and North Carolina, which had suffered deep job loss to outsourcing. What made it worse was that Romney had been barnstorming the country for a year promising to get tough on China, giving us a raft of videotape with which to hang him.

“Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs,” closed one ad we rushed on the air. Another began with Romney sermonizing during a primary debate about the need to get tough on China. “The Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future, and I’m not willing to let that happen,” he earnestly promised. “He made a
fortune
letting it happen,” the ad responded, presenting the facts from the
Post
story.

The hypocrisy was breathtaking, and it went to the heart of Romney’s campaign. He was going to be the jobs president, the businessman who knew how the private sector worked. Yet now he looked more like a businessman who had worked the system at the expense of American jobs.

After pounding away at other aspects of Romney’s business practices, we shifted to his policy proposals, including a familiar-sounding fiscal plan: heavy tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and paid for with deep spending cuts and greater burdens for the middle class. In one ad, we flayed him on the impact of his college aid plan, replaying Romney’s priceless counsel to America’s youth to “borrow money if you have to from your parents” to pay for an education.

With separate and discrete tracks of advertising, we spoke directly to women, replaying some of Romney’s harsh positions on a woman’s right to abortion, contraception, and equal pay. We launched Spanish-language media in May, to run through the election, stressing the differences in position on education, job training, and health care.

By the end of July, Romney would be “underwater” in Benenson’s battleground state polling, with a majority expressing a negative opinion of him, and Obama would break into a four-point lead, hitting the magic mark of 50 percent.

We were helped along by two developments, one orchestrated by the president and the second coming from a surprising source.

The president had announced in mid-June an executive order deferring deportation proceedings against hundreds of thousands of students and military personnel who were the children of undocumented immigrants. Though not the permanent answer he still sought through the DREAM Act and more comprehensive reform, it brought relief to some young people and produced the expected outcry from Republicans that would only drive Hispanic voters and young people farther away from the GOP.

Then came some news that was far more meaningful than any mere boon to the campaign. The Supreme Court had been considering the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, and given the conservative bent of the Court’s majority, the outcome was in doubt. We had spent many hours pondering the political implications if the justices were to throw out Obama’s signature accomplishment. Would it galvanize our base and sympathetic swing voters? Or would it become a symbol of overreach and failure? Yet for millions of people without coverage, people with chronic illnesses like my daughter’s, the stakes were even greater.

On the day the Court was to rule, the loud din that normally engulfed our campaign headquarters in Chicago was reduced to an anxious murmur as hundreds of workers and volunteers crowded around television screens, awaiting word from Washington. I watched with Jim Messina in his office. We had waged the health care battle together in the White House, where Jim was the deputy chief of staff. Now health care and maybe even our election chances hung in the balance.

I was glancing out the window when Messina let out a pained grunt. “That’s it,” he said glumly, staring at his computer and a tweet from CNN. “They killed it.”

Before I could ask much or absorb the meaning of what he had said, we heard loud cheers and applause from the sprawling bull pen outside his closed door. “Then why the hell is everyone so happy?” I asked as we scanned the coverage. We quickly discovered that CNN had gotten it wrong. The law had been upheld—and by the vote of Chief Justice Roberts, no less.

Messina’s eyes welled up with tears. Jim was a hard-core political operative, an occasional mercenary with whom I had issues in the past and would again in the future. Even so, we were both proud of the health care law and deeply invested in its survival. We gave each other a big, relieved hug, and then plunged into the celebration outside.

Later that day, the president called.

“I call a lot when things are bad. Just wanted to chew on some good news for once,” he said. “I plan to win, but whatever happens, I feel like we’ve locked something in that will help a lot of people. And that feels good.” Before he hung up, he cheerfully shared a data point that he had picked up on one of his regular tours of his iPad. “The one poll I’ve seen lately that makes me feel good is that sixty-five percent say I would do a better job of dealing with extraterrestrials! Can’t beat that!”

It was classic Obama, a sense of what’s important coupled with a wry detachment that helped him survive some of the most trying and tumultuous years in American political history. A few days later, at a Fourth of July pool party on the White House Lawn, Kathy Ruemmler, the White House counsel, asked the president if he “didn’t every once in a while just want to punch someone in the face.”

“No, not really,” he said. “There was an old critic who said, ‘Everything is either a comedy or a tragedy, and the difference is whether you are on the inside, or on the outside, looking in.’ I try to remember that, and step outside on those tough days and see the absurdity of some of these scenes. Plus, we’ve been at this a long time—lots of ups and downs. You just get used to it.”

The next day, we were heading out on a two-day bus tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania. The president was looking over his remarks and practicing his opening. “You know, I’d like to start by saying, ‘This is my last campaign. And so I’ve been thinking lately about my first campaign, and why I got into this business in the first place.’” As he spoke, I recalled the first time I met Obama, a newly minted law graduate. He saw politics as a calling, as a way to give people a fighting chance. Now, as he sat in the forward cabin of Air Force One reserved for the president of the United States, he was summoning that same spirit as he prepared to make his case to folks at venues ranging from big-city rallies to small-town squares to rolling farms. This is the guy, I thought, as I watched him throw away his notes and speak from his heart. This is the guy I know.

Though he lacks the grab-your-elbow, stare-into-your eyes shtick of a Bill Clinton, Obama enjoys people and relishes escaping Washington and getting into the factories, diners, and taverns where folks are interested in more than the Gallup daily tracking poll. He called following the trip, still jazzed by the chance to mix with regular people and by the encouragement they offered.