Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (62 page)

“I told the senior staff today that we dodged a lot of bullets in the past couple of weeks—immigration, health care, jobs numbers that could have been worse. Like Churchill said, ‘Nothing is as exhilarating as the sound of bullets whizzing past your head.’ All we have to survive now are four more jobs reports, maybe a European crisis or two, three debates, and the occasional gaffe. And then we’re home free!”

 • • • 

Throughout August, we held a narrow but steady three- to four-point lead in our own polling. Our gamble to front-load our media had paid off. Now, even with the burdens of a fragile economy and the onslaught of ads blaming us for it, I liked our chances as we rounded the turn into the final stretch.

If the front end of presidential campaigns is dominated by advertising, the back end is focused on the big set pieces—conventions and debates, orchestrated extravaganzas that take place when most Americans are just beginning to focus on their choices.

Romney got a little buzz heading into his convention by choosing Paul Ryan, the conservative House budget chairman, as his vice-presidential nominee. It was a surprising pick. I expected Romney to reach out for a moderate. Instead, he picked the author of the radical, tax-cutting, Medicare-voucherizing Republican budget that Obama had consistently flayed to such great effect. The choice tied Romney closer to the unpopular Republican Congress. Still, it was clearly a genuine meeting of the minds. Romney shared Ryan’s economic views, and the young, attractive, and telegenic congressman was a favorite of the social conservatives and Tea Party activists who would fill the seats in Tampa.

When the Republican convention began, however, a day late due to a Democratic-leaning hurricane named Isaac, Romney seemed something of an afterthought at his own coming-out party. Ryan got a warmer reception from the delegates, many of whom were committed to primary candidates Romney had dispatched in bruising fashion. Chris Christie, the imposing governor of New Jersey, spent sixteen minutes at the podium sharing his own life story before he even mentioned the Man of the Hour. Also, full-throated denunciations of Obama produced far more enthusiastic responses than any tributes to Romney. Yet the biggest head-scratcher came on the night of Romney’s acceptance speech.

I was alone in my office watching the preliminaries on cable when a very evocative and moving biographical video aired that presented Romney as a loving father and husband, a leader in his church community, a generous and caring person. Where has
this
guy been? I wondered. And why hadn’t they run this video in prime time, to introduce Romney to the largest possible audience? We ran a similar video in 2008 and would again in 2012. It’s free advertising, and the networks would surely have run all or part of Romney’s.

Instead, when the prime-time hour kicked off, I watched as Clint Eastwood strode out to the podium. Using a nearby chair as a surrogate for Obama, Eastwood proceeded to ad-lib a routine that was by turns offensive and incomprehensible. TV occasionally punctuated the bit with cutaways of an unsmiling Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, who apparently shared my bewilderment at how the convention planners could have squandered this precious time on this bizarre piece of performance art.

I got up and walked next door to Grisolano’s pizza- and beer-littered office, where a bunch of the media team was taking in the show. “Is it just me, or is this a fuckup of monumental proportions?” I asked, wondering if I was missing something. They all howled with laughter. Though Romney would follow with a decent speech, he would be upstaged in media coverage by Dirty Harry’s onstage meltdown. Our postconvention poll showed no bump in support for Romney; but Obama’s personal ratings had actually gone
up
.

Compared to the Republican train wreck, our convention in Charlotte the next week ran like a Swiss watch—even though an old master played with the clock.

Two months before the convention, I suggested an unusual candidate to deliver the nominating speech. No former president had ever put a sitting president’s name in nomination. Yet who better than Bill Clinton to take apart the Republican economic argument?

Clinton eagerly agreed. But now, twelve hours before his prime-time appearance, we still hadn’t seen a draft of the speech.

A little concerned, I asked two of our senior people and old Clinton hands, Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling, to see if they could pry a draft from their former boss—but they promptly disappeared into Clinton’s Bermuda Triangle, going radio silent for hours before, finally, responding to one of my countless e-mails: “getting closer.” I finally had to pay a small ransom, offering Clinton a little more time in the program to accommodate his case.

Ninety minutes before the start of the scheduled speech, the draft finally arrived. Smart, punchy, colloquial—it was classic Clinton, a joyful gutting of the Republican economic plan along with a strong endorsement of the president’s. Favs and I made a couple of small suggestions and sent it back. And at about twenty-seven minutes, it would fit well within the window of the hour of network coverage we had planned.

Or so I thought.

From the moment Clinton took the stage, smiling and clapping his hands in response to a tumultuous welcome, he was an artist at work, deploying telling statistics and folksy aphorisms to lethal effect.

“We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle-down,” he said. “Think about this: President Obama—President Obama’s plan cuts the debt, honors our values, brightens  the future of our children, our families and our nation. It’s a heck of a lot better.”

Standing at the side of the stage, I found it a thrill to watching one of the greats at work—so much so that it took me a while to realize he was ad-libbing half his speech.

From my vantage point, I could see the large teleprompter in front of Clinton that was scrolling along with his text. At some point I realized that the prompter was stopping frequently, sometimes for minutes, while Clinton rolled on. Before long I realized that he hadn’t cut his speech at all. He had simply memorized long passages that weren’t included in the draft he sent us. But who cared? Clinton was so good that the networks stayed with him for the duration, through fifty rollicking minutes.

Of course, he had barely finished before the talking heads began speculating about whether Obama could rise to Clinton’s standard in his acceptance speech the next night. “I don’t care about that crap,” said the president, who rose to the challenge the following night. “He did exactly what we hoped.”

We left Charlotte with our polls showing we had a 51–46 lead. Obama’s approval ratings were his highest of the year, and Romney’s were once again underwater. We had not just survived one more critical test, but passed with flying colors.

Ten days after the convention, Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager who oversaw our communications shop, and Ben LaBolt, our press secretary, walked into my office and shut the door. Stephanie was a brilliant and seasoned campaign veteran, who had seen just about everything. But what she was about to report was a gaffe beyond anything she had experienced. “There’s a story breaking and we wanted to know what you think we should say,” Stephanie said. They explained that a videotape had surfaced showing Romney at a closed fund-raiser. On it, he disparaged 47 percent of Americans as tax-shirking loafers content to live lives of perpetual dependency. It was almost too good to be true. “What do you think we should we say?” Stephanie asked. “Not much,” I replied. “When your opponent is blowing himself up, just get out of the way.”

The full tape was even worse than they had described, including Romney’s coda: “And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

It was stunning to see him blithely dismiss half the country as slackers. It made everything in our ads ring even truer. A year earlier, I had described campaigns to reporters as “like an MRI for the soul—whoever you are, eventually people find out.” Now people were staring at Romney’s soul scan, and it was a disturbing image.

Hours after the tape surfaced, I got a late-night call from the president, who was not at all surprised by Romney’s sentiments, but amazed that he would voice them in front of others. “Man,” Obama said, “we’d better not lose to
this
guy! I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!”

Seven points up with seven weeks to go—a year earlier, you could have made a fortune in Vegas betting on that scenario. Yet before we could drop the balloons and toast our good fortune, we would have our own MRI moment.

T
HROUGHOUT
MODERN
CAMPAIGN
HISTORY
,
the first presidential debate has been a perilous turn for sitting presidents.

It’s not all that surprising. Presidents haven’t debated for four years, while the challenger is generally well practiced, having run a gauntlet of candidate debates and forums on the path to nomination. Presidents have spent almost four years on a pedestal. Now the challenger, standing just a few feet away, is on equal footing, poking, jabbing, and treating the Leader of the Free World with little of the deference to which presidents become accustomed. The mere act of standing toe to toe with the president of the United States elevates the opponent and levels the playing field. So, on my campaign calendar, I had one date circled in red: October 3, the evening in Denver when Obama and Romney would debate for the first time.

Obama’s mentality had changed since the last time he walked onto a debate stage. By the fall of 2008, after the long primary contest with Hillary, Obama had accepted, albeit grudgingly, that these events are performances. The goal is to drive a message relentlessly, land a telling quote or two that underscores the contrast with your opponent, and in a way that connects with the American people. Obama, who stumbled at first, had mastered this skill over the course of the 2008 campaign. Now he had tumbled back to viewing the debate as a teaching moment.

He pored through the 364-page book on Romney’s record and then produced a voluminous follow-up memo that demanded more information and answers. He followed the same pattern when we presented him with a thick book on his own record. By complying with his requests for endless research, we were abetting the president’s worst instincts.

Our fears were confirmed in mid-August, when we held our first informal mock debate at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. To play our opponent, we had recruited John Kerry, who, as a fellow Bay Stater, knew Romney well and would be adept at channeling him. Kerry also understood the mentality of a presidential challenger, having proven a strong debater in his three encounters with George W. Bush in 2004. Knowing the candidate and the terrain, he would make a formidable sparring partner for the president.

In their first session, it was Kerry who looked like the champion and the president a not-ready-for-prime-time contender. Knowing that Romney had shown a penchant for needling opponents in his primary debates, Kerry frequently baited the president into a series of defensive answers and snarky attacks that betrayed Obama’s irritation with both Romney and the format while doing little to advance our arguments. “Don’t interrupt me,” Obama snapped at one point, when Kerry had cut in hoping to provoke just such testiness.

It was only the first practice, five weeks before the real debate, but the consensus of our prep team—led once again by Ron Klain, a brilliant and seasoned debate strategist—was that we needed to do a lot of work. “No surprises for first outing, but too much time spent on Romney’s side of the field,” Plouffe e-mailed after the session. “Too much defense throughout.”

So we worked the president. We held informal sessions in which we fired off likely questions and tried to hone his answers, his timing, and his overall demeanor. We provided him with a few “zingers”—witty lines aimed at neutralizing Romney’s attacks—but not too many barbs, lest he sully himself in the process. At times, Obama delivered compelling answers, but too often he retreated into a defensive posture, explaining a program or problem in mind-numbing detail without evoking the fundamental contrast with Romney on economic values and vision. He was decidedly a work in progress but we consoled ourselves that we had a three-day debate camp at the end of September when he could refine his approach and lock in his answers.

If there were harbingers of impending disaster, one might have been our drive from the airport to our debate prep site at a resort in Henderson, Nevada. Henderson, a burgeoning suburb with easy access to the Vegas Strip, had been devastated by the mortgage crisis that began in 2008. Now, as we wound our way through the sprawling city, we passed what appeared to be mostly abandoned subdivisions with browned lawns and rows of foreclosure signs—sober reminders of the crisis that had dominated so much of the president’s term, and the lagging recovery that he would be forced to defend.

If the scene outside the hotel was dispiriting, what unfolded inside of our cordoned-off ballroom over the next three days was truly alarming. Practice was not making perfect. Too often and too easily, Kerry could knock Obama off his game, prompting the president to eschew the pithy answers he had rehearsed in favor of long, detailed, and defensive discourses. While there were moments when Obama movingly invoked the stories of the people he’d met in office, he regularly retreated into dreary recitations of tedious facts.

When a candidate is well prepared, the debate prep team can almost always anticipate every answer, sometimes mouthing the exact words as they are being delivered. Yet twenty-four hours before the first presidential debate, none of us could predict with certainty how the president would answer
any
question. Obama had absorbed reams of material, but it was not clear that he had also absorbed our counsel. Openly disdainful of the artifice the process demanded of him, he refused to indulge us by rehearsing his answers again and again until he had memorized them.

All the problems and pitfalls were in evidence during our final run-through, on the night before the Denver debate. Many of the notes I typed as I watched the final practice foreshadowed what was to come: “Threw away the contrast,” I wrote after one answer. “Wonkfest,” after another. “Wants to wonk it up on Medicare cost curves,” I noted after an answer on health care. “No humanity” was the distressing synopsis of another exchange. As Obama and Kerry sparred, the team sat stone-faced, trying not to betray our increasing anxiety, but it seemed clear that our man wasn’t ready.

As had been customary through two elections, Klain asked the speech coach, Michael Sheehan, and me to go over the night’s practice session with Obama before he turned in. When we got into the makeshift tape screening room where Michael would offer performance pointers, the president said, “I think that went pretty well, don’t you?” I could have nodded affirmatively on the theory that it was too late to affect much of a change. Instead, I opted to tell him the truth.

“There were some good moments, but there’s some stuff we need to clean up,” I said. Before I could launch my critique, however, the president indicated he’d already heard enough. “Motherfucker’s never happy,” he harrumphed, bolting up and heading briskly out of the room. “Well, that went well, don’t you think?” I said to Sheehan, as we stared in shock and dismay at the double doors through which the president had just exited.

That was a first. Obama and I had been working together for a decade, through some pretty hairy moments, but he had never before lost his temper in this fashion. He had certainly never attacked me quite so harshly, especially in front of others. I had no doubt irritated him, but there was more to it. My sense was that the president knew he wasn’t ready. His mind-set, his reluctance to embrace this game, had been wrongheaded from the start, and now it was clearly hurting him.

Nothing was said about our testy exchange the next day on the flight from Vegas to Denver. The unnerved folks on our debate team passed the time trying to reassure themselves that, somehow, it might work out. “Trust me, he’s a gamer,” I told Klain, who stared back at me poker-faced. We all knew the truth. It would take an act of Providence or some major gaffe by Romney for us to have a good night.

A few minutes before the debate began, Plouffe and I visited the president in his hold in a locker room in the University of Denver’s hockey arena. Four years earlier, in another locker room before the first presidential debate, a focused, confident Obama said, “Just give me the ball!” Now, in Denver, he appeared distracted, even disinterested—and immune to our last-minute pep talk. “Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,” he said. These were not exactly the parting words you hoped to hear as you sent your candidate out to do battle.

The debate fell on Obama’s twentieth wedding anniversary, and we had the idea that he should give a nod to his widely admired wife at the beginning of his opening statement.

“There are a lot of points I want to make tonight, but the most important one is that 20 years ago I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me,” the president said, in one of the few practiced bits he had committed to memory. “And so I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now, we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.”

It turns out that intimacies delivered in front of forty million people are difficult to pull off. Obama’s attempt appeared somewhat phony and forced. Worse, Romney’s debate prep had forecast this very exchange, so Mitt was, as they say in baseball, “laying on the pitch.”

“And congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary. I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine—here with me,” he cracked, when it was his turn to speak. If Obama’s awkward line seemed canned, Romney’s came off as spontaneous, charming, and self-effacing.

After reading all the stories about the “47 percent” tape, Americans being introduced to Romney for the first time might have been expecting Mr. Burns, the misanthropic corporate executive from
The Simpsons
. Instead Romney was, from start to finish, warm, confident, and well prepared. He flawlessly delivered line after line, tweaking the president frequently without overstepping any boundaries. We watched as Romney, who had spent most of his campaign pandering to the Right, brazenly yet deftly repositioned himself as a moderate on issue after issue. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” Romney said unabashedly, walking away from what had long been a centerpiece of his economic plan.

The president performed about how he had in prep, occasionally scoring message points, but mostly following the questions and Romney’s parries down rabbit holes. When he explained for a third time the rationale behind the cost-cutting commission empaneled by his health care act, there were audible groans in our staff room. While he defended his record to a fault, indulging in esoterica, Obama was remarkably passive, seldom challenging Romney or, especially, Romney’s cynical reinvention of himself. Worse, the president looked disengaged, in stark contrast with a challenger who was in command of the moment.

“We’re dead,” Klain said ten minutes into the debate. We were all staring at dial group findings streaming across the bottom of the CNN screen that showed Romney’s answers getting consistently higher ratings than the president’s. Our own dial groups, while marginally better, would also give Romney a decided edge. The chatter among political reporters on Twitter was painful to read: Romney was aggressive, Obama was halting. Some on our team simply shut their computers in despair.

I braced myself for the postdebate pandemonium of the “spin room,” where I would try to redirect reporters’ attention to Romney’s blatant distortions of his own record. It was a futile effort, as if I were trying to ticket Romney for double-parking when everyone wanted to know about the president’s car wreck. The greatest outcry emanated from our own supporters, particularly progressives who were livid that the president hadn’t strafed Romney over Bain Capital or hit the giant “47 percent” target Romney had on his back. Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC pulled me out of a scrum of reporters. “You might want to get on our air,” he said. “They’re ripping your guy apart.”

In truth, I didn’t want to go on the air. I just wanted to get out of there. When I finally escaped, my cell phone rang. It was Marvin Nicholson, the president’s body man. “The boss wants to speak to you,” he said.

Obama was on his way back to the hotel, but he had already scanned the early reviews on his ubiquitous iPad.

“So I guess the view is that we didn’t have a very good night,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “I think that’s pretty much the consensus.”

“I just didn’t feel that way up there,” he said. “I knew we hadn’t won big in any way, but I felt it was at worst a draw.”

I couldn’t help but think about all the ways in which we had failed him—the brutal assault of briefing papers; our reluctance to butt heads with the president by insisting on drilling specific answers until they were second nature. Back at the hotel, we tried to regroup, rewriting the president’s remarks for the following day to demonstrate the fight that had been missing during the debate. “We have to come out swinging and show we have a pulse,” I told Favs as we worked up a new script.

We had long planned a rally in Denver the morning after, to build on the debate’s momentum. Now, absent any momentum, we instead had to reassure worried supporters. I grabbed Obama as he was leaving the hotel for the event. “Everyone’s going to be taking their cues from you,” I said. “You need to come out on fire or it will just prolong the story line.”

“I know, I know,” he said, as he took off down the hall and headed to the waiting motorcade. It turned out he did know. He came out with all the energy, and many of the arguments, that had been missing the night before.

“When I got onto the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who
claimed
to be Mitt Romney,” the president said, launching into the satirical trope we had prepared about the stranger who had debated the president the night before. “But it
couldn’t
have been Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow onstage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”

The crowd ate it up. Just the sound of laughter was somewhat soothing, but only so much. A reporter e-mailed me midway through Obama’s speech to ask the obvious: “Where was this guy last night?”