Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (10 page)

“People thought the president was doing a pretty good job under the circumstances,” Grisolano added. “They were angry about the economy but fair-minded about what he walked into. But they didn’t feel they had a sense of the bigger picture. Where was he driving, where was he taking the country, how are we going to get there?” The president’s advisers concluded that he would make the campaign less about the state of the economy and all about who would look after the interests of the middle class during a time of economic transition. “The beauty of this framework was that it helped us slip the noose on the economy,” Grisolano said. “We knew the Republican message was, ‘The economy sucks, Obama’s responsible, fire him.’ By going to the issue of which candidate could be trusted with the country’s long-term economic future, we kind of sidestepped the . . . ‘throw the bums out’ thinking.”

•   •   •

Preparation for the attacks on Mitt Romney also began early. The Democratic National Committee had done some of the initial work before the Obama team decamped for Chicago. Once settled in their new offices, the campaign’s opposition research team, led by Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean, dug into the former Massachusetts governor’s record. Every Friday, the campaign’s different department heads met with Messina to rate the Republican challengers. Romney began as number one and never slipped lower, even when others were ahead of him in the polls. Their reasoning was that Romney had run for president before, could raise the money needed to wage a long campaign, and was running against an improbable group of rivals. As someone with extensive business experience, Romney fit Axelrod’s long-held belief that in times of stress or dissatisfaction, voters look for a remedy, not a replica. “He seemed the most distinct from Obama, the solid businessman, no gloss,” Axelrod said. Certainly Romney had flaws, and the campaign was looking to exploit them. And they knew that after 2010 the nomination battle would push him to the right. Axelrod said he told the president after the midterms that the seeds had been planted for his reelection, “because the gravitational pull in the Republican Party was now so far to the right that anybody who was going to be the nominee had to go through that tollbooth and they would have to pay a very high toll.”

By the fall of 2011, Obama’s advisers began to worry that Romney was successfully avoiding attacks from his Republican rivals. Plouffe was concerned that the likely challenger’s image was too positive. The team decided they couldn’t wait for one of the Republicans to do it. If they wanted their likely opponent framed up for the general election, they would have to take on the job themselves. On October 30, 2011, Plouffe went after Romney on NBC’s
Meet the Press
. “He has no core,” Plouffe said. “I can tell you one thing working a few steps down from the president, what you need in that office is conviction. You need to have a true compass, and you have got to be willing to make tough calls. You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.” The Democratic National Committee released an online video attack with the same theme. “From the creator of ‘I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake,’ comes the story of two men trapped in one body: Mitt versus Mitt,” the narrator said. Using footage of Romney taking positions on both sides of different issues, the narrator added, “Two Mitts, willing to say anything.”

Around that time, Bill Clinton met with Messina, Axelrod, and Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director who was now at the DNC, in Harlem. Be careful here, he told them. You do not want to paint Romney as a flip-flopper. His reasoning was born of his own experience. Republicans had
tried the tactic on him and he had learned that people sometimes came to the conclusion that a politician with such a reputation eventually could end up on the right side of an issue. Swing voters, especially, thought that way. If voters thought Romney in the end might do the right thing, they would be more comfortable voting for him, especially if they had real doubts about Obama’s ability to deal with the economy. Clinton told the trio from the Obama campaign that they should hold Romney accountable for the conservative positions he was espousing as a candidate, not provide him with an escape hatch by suggesting he didn’t believe them.

Clinton’s advice helped refocus the Obama team. Going after him as a flip-flopper might be attractive, but Romney’s real vulnerabilities were the positions he was taking and his record in private industry. Romney was using his business experience as his principal calling card as a candidate, a way to draw contrast with a president who had no private-sector experience. Obama’s team set out to turn it into Romney’s biggest liability. Near the end of 2011, I talked with Axelrod about this. He said, “The two things that concern folks the most are an economy that, not just over the last three years, but over the long term, feels like it’s been rigged against hardworking, responsible everyday people. And politics in which people too often are willing to subjugate fundamental principles to their own ambition. And when you think about the two things that most distress people, you wouldn’t necessarily come up with Mitt Romney as the answer, because he in many ways represents those things in the economy that concern people the most.”

Obama’s advisers had done their own research on Romney’s vulnerabilities. At first blush, voters saw Romney’s business experience in a generally positive light. They accepted some of the harsher business practices that Bain and other private equity firms engaged in—the downsizing of companies, layoffs, elimination of benefits—as standard operating procedure in a competitive world. They saw Romney’s success as a sign of his toughness, a quality they thought might be useful in a president dealing with such a stubborn economic crisis. Did he break the law? they asked the moderator. The campaign team then decided to ask another series of questions focused not on the legality of what private equity firms did but on the issue of whether it was the right thing to do. It may have been legitimate, but was it right? One Obama adviser told me later, “Once we began introducing that, it allowed us to make the following argument, which was effective: He may get the economy, he may know how to make money, he may have made hundreds of millions for him and his investors. But every time he did, folks like you lost your pensions, lost your jobs, jobs got shipped overseas. And that became the best way for us to define his business experience, his strength, in a way that then served to really hurt him at the same time, to
separate technical experience from the values around it.” In October 2011, the campaign had conducted focus groups in three battleground states—Ohio, Florida, and New Hampshire—and had shown participants a famous photo taken of Romney and his partners at Bain as they were forming the company. They were holding dollar bills and smiling broadly, and more bills were stuffed in their pockets and in their mouths and in their shirt collars. After seeing that, Messina said, “People were like, ‘Game over.’”

Fall Offensive

A
ugust 2011 was the lowest month of Obama’s presidency, lower even than November 2010, when Democrats lost the House and Senate. At least Obama and his team had seen that coming. August 2011 was worse too than the first month of 2010, when Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts had shocked the Democrats and seemed to signal the death of health care. August 2011 was, in the words of one presidential adviser, “indescribably bad.” It was the low point not only because it brought Obama’s hopes of a grand bargain on the deficit crashing down, but also because the collapse damaged the president almost as much as it hurt the Republicans—something White House officials had never anticipated. Obama’s team worried all summer about a possible default. They were, said another senior official in the White House, “scared shitless” that the government would default, with all the consequences for the economy that would bring. They began the negotiations with minimal expectations; mostly they wanted to avoid a catastrophic default. “It wasn’t like this was driven by, ‘Hey, let’s have something here where we’re just dancing with John Boehner and we look like the compromisers and that’ll help us politically,’” Plouffe told me at the time. “That’s not what drove the strategy. What drove the strategy was, ‘Okay, we actually have a chance here to do something meaningful on the debt and the deficit.’” John Boehner’s apparent interest in a grand bargain, which the president believed was genuine, raised expectations that something serious might result. When it came crashing down, the debris hit everyone—including the president. “We knew absolutely that when this fell apart we’d be left holding the bag of shit,” the president’s adviser said. “You just knew you were going to be in terrible shape.”

It turned out to be much worse than they imagined. All through the long summer of negotiations, White House officials calculated that Obama’s advocacy for a balanced package of spending cuts and tax increases would make him seem to be the reasonable partner, the adult in the room. In contrast to the president’s reasonableness, they argued, Republicans were doing something extraordinary by holding an increase in the debt ceiling hostage to their
own ideological demands for spending cuts, just as their base expected. As Eric Cantor had told the freshmen at the beginning of the year, they were using their leverage when it could be felt most. No party had ever done that with a debt ceiling increase—posturing, yes,
*
but never this. White House officials believed that if the talks broke down, the public would blame the Republicans for their intransigence. Instead, the public saw a dysfunctional Washington playing Russian roulette with the good faith and credit of the United States. Obama could not escape the blame.

In the aftermath of the debt ceiling negotiations, Standard & Poor’s lowered the country’s credit rating for the first time ever. The ratings agency said the decision was based less on economic conditions than on the broken politics of Washington. The country’s leaders had failed to instill confidence that they could solve its fiscal problems. Consumer confidence plunged sixteen points, the kind of decline associated with cataclysmic events like 9/11 or the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Almost 80 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way the political system was working. More than seven in ten said they had little or no confidence in Washington’s ability to solve problems.
Bill McInturff, one of the nation’s
leading pollsters, analyzed a month of data and found the numbers appalling for what they said about the country. “The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling negotiation led to an immediate collapse in confidence in government and all the major players, including President Obama and Republicans in Congress,” he wrote.

The debt ceiling debacle put Obama in a sour mood. He was most frustrated by the failure to strike a deal with Boehner and the Republicans, but he was also deeply unhappy over the portrait that was emerging of him, that of a leader who could not work his will with Congress, no matter that the Republicans were united in their opposition. The public understood the obstacles Obama faced with the opposition party, but many people still thought the president should find a way to make the system work. He was the president, after all. He was the daddy figure. “The president thought he got a good deal, thought he had tried to do the right thing, and was basically being portrayed as feckless and weak by people on his side, driven almost entirely by the editorial board and the op-ed pages of the
New York Times,
” one senior White House official said. “The right was saying the same thing about the president the left was saying, and that’s a bad place to find yourself in.” During the summer negotiations, Obama had met with a group of columnists for an off-the-record
conversation. David Brooks made an observation. You’ve lost control of your narrative, he told the president, according to someone else present. Obama was quick to respond. David, he said, the problem is not my narrative. The problem is the economy. We have a terrible economy. But in fact, Obama
had
lost control of the narrative. “He was very exasperated by how broken Washington was in this case and how Boehner just couldn’t make the deal even if it was the right thing to do for the country,” a senior campaign adviser said. “And surprised by, with notable few exceptions, how the press never just chased the story full-time. Cable’s the biggest driver of this, but there was a controversy, and that just kind of drove a narrative that in our mind wasn’t true.” Obama was not just exasperated. “He was exhausted,” said one person who saw him at the time. “He looked tired, was tired, and I think he had done everything he could to pull that thing together.” Another adviser said Obama was “as low as I’ve seen him.”

As long as he had been running for president or in the White House, Obama had experienced trouble during the summer. In 2007, his campaign appeared stalled and his major donors were in rebellion. In 2008, after Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate gave the Republican ticket a jolt of energy, he had to rally his campaign team to step up its game when polls showed the Republican ticket overtaking him. His first summer as president was marked by the rise of the Tea Party, protests at congressional town hall meetings, and a decline in his poll numbers. The following summer White House officials could see the thunderclouds building for the fall elections. Now there was another summer of discontent. The promise of winter and spring—the eloquent speech in Tucson, the first signs of economic recovery, and the prospect of possible cooperation with the Republicans on deficit negotiations—had given way to an ugly and rancorous summer. He was frustrated at how he was being characterized, frustrated that his party and his allies were so openly attacking him. He thought it was mightily unfair. Could they not see all the things he had accomplished during his first two and a half years in office, from health care—which other presidents over half a century had failed to enact—to saving the automobile industry, to preventing another Great Depression, to passage of financial regulatory reform, all over ferocious Republican opposition?

One article in particular
stung the White House, written by Drew Westen of Emory University and published in the
New York Times
on August 6 with the headline, “What Happened to Obama?” It was as searing an indictment as anyone who purported to be an ally of the president had made. “The president is fond of referring to ‘the arc of history,’ paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” Westen wrote. “But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics—in which
conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time—he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.” He argued that Obama should have dealt harshly with the Wall Street transgressors who brought on the economic collapse. He said Obama had chosen to “avert his gaze” from the economic inequality and corporate influence harming the country. Westen blamed Obama for not listening to those in and out of his administration who had called for a larger stimulus package—without taking into account how difficult it would have been to enact something larger than the $800 billion package. “The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy,” he wrote. Westen said he and others who supported Obama in 2008 had overlooked “disquieting aspects” of the candidate’s biography—“that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president”—and said the country was now led by a president “who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.” He offered a final thought on why Obama’s presidency had come to this point: “He ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.”

•   •   •

The president’s advisers said he was thoroughly irritated with Westen’s piece. Once published, it shaped the post–debt ceiling conversation. It was proof, some analysts said, that Obama’s base was in revolt. There was little evidence that his real base—African Americans in particular—was defecting. But among liberal elites there
was
great dissatisfaction and disappointment. Westen’s piece also burned the president’s advisers, who paid far more attention to such writings than many people might assume. “It got to their liberal nerves,” a leading Democrat said of the White House staff. The decision was, “We’ve got to stop the quacking by the professional base.”

The White House responded by getting Obama out of Washington. On August 15, the president landed in Minneapolis for the start of a three-day bus tour that would take him to small towns in eastern Iowa and western Illinois. As he traveled across the gently rolling landscape near the Mississippi River, Obama’s motorcade numbered almost twenty vehicles. The president rode aboard a new, armored black bus, a behemoth of a vehicle with flashing lights and tinted windows that seemed to match the determined—even dark—mood of the White House team. Iowa was always therapy for Obama, and the bus trip was as much designed as a restorative for the president as it was a time to
try to reframe the debate and stand clear of the wreckage back in Washington. But the president received a jarring welcome when he arrived in Iowa—a front-page editorial in the
Dubuque Telegraph Herald
that said he should have stayed in Washington. “
While many folks here are flattered
that you are spending time with us in the Dubuque area, we respectfully ask what will be accomplished,” the editorial said. “Will this be a productive session with positive outcomes and clear direction, or is it a publicity-generating event to bolster your re-election campaign?” The editorial said the money spent on the trip would have been better used for flood victims in the region. It ended with another jab at the president for lack of leadership: “We don’t need your attention as much as we need your leadership. We need a president who won’t tell the people what they
want
to hear but a leader who tells us what we
need
to hear.”

Slate
’s John Dickerson tweeted, “The president is on a political bus tour which he says isn’t . . . political where he will tell Republicans to stop behaving politically.” The truth was that the president wasn’t quite ready to show his hand for the next battle with the Republicans. He was in Iowa and Illinois in a holding pattern. His White House and political teams were still working out their fall plans. And so for three days, his problems traveled with him. The crowds were generally friendly and polite. It was the Midwest, after all.
On his second day
, Obama left the Hotel Winneshiek in tiny Decorah, Iowa, and someone shouted out, “Welcome to the 50s.” The comment could have been a reference to the time warp of small-town, heartland America. It was actually a reference to the fact that a few weeks earlier the president had just turned fifty, now noticeably grayer than when he first came to eastern Iowa in 2007 to ask people, improbably, to help make him president. He stopped often in between his scheduled town halls. He bought ice cream at DeWitt Dairy Treats. He went into a high school gymnasium to say hello to members of a women’s volleyball team. In Decorah, one woman yelled, “We love you. We’re behind you.”

But if people were friendly, their questions conveyed the seriousness of the times. In Atkinson, Illinois, a Realtor from nearby Geneseo said that after the debt ceiling, the phones in her office had stopped ringing. “We have no consumer confidence after what has just happened,” she said. A farmer registered dissatisfaction with government regulations that he said hindered his ability to produce a crop.
The
New York Times
’ Mark Landler
wrote, “Mr. Obama got tough questions from people who said they were fearful about their future, frustrated by the paralyzed job market and fed up with a political culture in Washington that produced the debt-ceiling imbroglio.” Obama soaked up the criticism and pushed back against the Republicans. He said some of his opponents were willing to engage in political brinksmanship “even if it costs the country.” Many of the people in the audiences expressed support.
At his last
stop, in Alpha, Illinois, a college student said to Obama, “I just want to let you know one thing. I am not disappointed in you like Michele Bachmann wants everyone to believe.” The president responded, with an ironic smile, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

While Obama was on his bus tour, the Gallup organization reported that approval of his handling of the economy had plunged to 26 percent, the lowest of his presidency. The day after he returned to Washington, he left the capital for his summer vacation. The day after he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, the Dow fell more than four hundred points.