Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (15 page)

The presentation outlined the state-by-state strategy Romney’s advisers believed he would have to follow to win the nomination. There were five entries under “Must wins”: New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida, Michigan, and a “majority of delegates on Super Tuesday.” The list was revealing for what it said about Romney’s strengths—and weaknesses—as the Republican front-runner. For starters, he was prepared to lose two of the first three contests (Iowa and South Carolina) and still become the nominee. In the modern history of Republican presidential campaigns, no one had ever done that. Four years earlier, he had played hard to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, only to lose them both. This time Iowa would be a wait-and-see state, a target of opportunity rather than a must-win. Iowa’s caucus electorate did not favor Romney—too many evangelicals and too many social conservatives for the Mormon from Massachusetts. At that point, Romney’s team had decided he would neither write off the state nor commit far in advance to a major effort. But the assumption was that someone else likely would win the caucuses, which made New Hampshire the first firewall of 2012. Given Iowa’s treacherous terrain, it was better to throw everything into the Granite State than to shortchange it by spending too much time elsewhere. Romney had made the mistake of getting caught between the two states in the first campaign. New Hampshire would become the first priority for 2012. He would campaign there more frequently than in other states, and the campaign would invest the resources to build a network of support that could withstand a defeat in Iowa.

The other three states on the list highlighted why Romney had doubts about his ability to win over his party. Given the assumption that he might lose both Iowa and South Carolina, he would need a strategy to bounce back immediately. South Carolina had a perfect record in Republican presidential nomination battles, dating back to 1980 when Ronald Reagan won the state. Nobody since had lost South Carolina and gone on to become the nominee. But South Carolina was even more problematic for Romney than Iowa, given its religious and cultural makeup. Romney had ducked the state in 2008 and finished fourth behind McCain, Huckabee, and Fred Thompson. He couldn’t exactly duck it as the early front-runner, but his advisers were loath to mark it as a must-win state, despite its history. Could he survive losing South Carolina? They concluded he could, but only if he could rebound with victories elsewhere, which put the focus on both Nevada and Florida. At the time of the meeting in Boston, the nominating calendar was still in flux, caught in the quadrennial jockeying by states jealous of Iowa and New Hampshire’s status as first-in-the-nation caucus and primary. Florida was threatening to move into February, in violation of party rules. The timing of Nevada was not set, but it would be one of the first five contests of the year, and fortunately so. Romney had won the caucuses there in 2008, and the state set up well for him because of its sizable Mormon population. Florida also played to other Romney strengths. It was big, diverse, and conservative—but not dominated by the Christian right. It was also hugely expensive. Florida consumed campaign cash, which was needed to run television ads in every market. Romney would have the money to compete there. His team saw it as a place he could not afford to lose—though they were not certain he could end the race there given new party rules about distributing delegates in early states on the basis of proportionality rather than winner-take-all. Among the questions on the agenda that day was, “Do we need to win a southern state? Does FL count?” Romney’s advisers were sensitive to the challenge of becoming the nominee of a southern-based party without having any particular affinity with or broad support in the region. The implicit answer to the first question was almost certainly yes, which meant that Florida would have to become that state. There were few others that appeared likely to back Romney at that point.

•   •   •

The calendar posed one kind of threat to Romney. Health care posed another, even larger obstacle as the campaign was taking shape. Health care was to Romney what Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vote to authorize the war in Iraq in 2002 was to her candidacy in 2008, a red flag to the party’s base that opened a portion of the primary electorate to another candidate with a different position. The Massachusetts health care plan was the crowning achievement of
Romney’s single term as governor. He had signed the bill on April 12, 2006, in a ceremony that included Democratic leaders of the Massachusetts legislature and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who had defeated Romney in the 1994 Senate race and now had come to mark the moment with his onetime rival. Ryan Lizza of the
New Yorker
would later write, “
Romney had accomplished
a longstanding Democratic goal—universal health insurance—by combining three conservative policies. Massachusetts would help the uninsured buy private insurance; it would create a deregulated online marketplace; and it would require that everyone carry insurance. Uninsured citizens no longer would use the emergency room as a primary-care facility and then fail to pay their bills.” Romney said later, “It’s a Republican way of reforming the market.” Romney was so proud of the achievement that when he posed for his official portrait, which would later hang in the Massachusetts State House, he insisted that a copy of the bill be included in the painting. The portrait shows Romney sitting on the edge of his desk, a picture of Ann Romney off his left forearm and the legislation next to it.

By the spring of 2011, the Massachusetts plan was a problem to be solved rather than an accomplishment to be trumpeted. For advice on his health care plan, Obama had drawn on some of the same people who had shaped Romney’s thinking as governor. And he had appropriated many of the main outlines of the Massachusetts plan as the blueprint for the legislation he forced through Congress over united Republican opposition. The parentage was unmistakable. Obama’s and Romney’s plans were identical in so many ways. Most offensive to conservatives was Obama’s individual mandate, the requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance or pay some kind of penalty. As a candidate, Obama had opposed the individual mandate. Clinton had included it in her proposal, but Obama had argued that there were other ways to achieve near-universal coverage. But as president he had pushed hard for it during the torturous deliberations in 2009 and 2010 that finally led to the bill’s passage. The individual mandate came straight out of the Massachusetts plan (and out of the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s). But in a Republican Party now infused with the constitutional absolutism of Tea Party activists, the individual mandate was seen as an infringement on individual freedom. Obama’s new plan was the target of a series of lawsuits from states led by Republican governors or attorneys general that were working their way toward the Supreme Court. The challenges argued that the individual mandate was unconstitutional and should be struck down. Repealing Obamacare became a rallying cry on the right. Everyone thinking of running for president was committed to dumping the law and going back to the drawing board. Conservatives
competed with one another to declare their opposition to the heinous infringement on individual rights.

Romney was caught in the middle, eager to curry favor with the right but attached to the Massachusetts plan. He was under enormous pressure to repudiate what he had done. Advisers said the pressure was unrelenting. “Every single one of the core team probably had fifteen people a day tell them you’re crazy, he needs to repudiate it, it’s a mistake, ask for forgiveness,” Rhoades said. Rhoades arrived to run Romney’s political action committee a few weeks after Obama had signed the act into law. “I just had moved into my apartment here, so it was just about two and a half weeks and Obamacare clears the Congress. People are like, ‘He’s done! Come back! It’s over!’” he said. Romney donors saw it as potentially lethal and wanted Romney to give some clear sign that he regretted what he had done, that he had undergone a change of heart, that he recognized now that what he had done was in error. Lanhee Chen, the campaign’s policy director, said the team was under “tremendous amounts of pressure” to back away from the Massachusetts plan.

Romney thought otherwise. Neil Newhouse, who had polled for Romney in his gubernatorial race, went to Boston in 2009 to make his pitch to become the pollster for the 2012 campaign. He had conducted a poll on his own to gauge sentiment about Romney among Republicans in two of the early states, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and concluded even then that health care could be a serious problem in the nomination battle. He said Romney had three options: First, embrace it and defend it; second, put distance between the act and himself by, say, claiming that his successor as governor, Democrat Deval Patrick, had turned the measure into something unrecognizable; third, say it was a mistake, that he shouldn’t have done it, that he had learned an important lesson and that he was now smarter about how to deal with the problem. “My presentation is really going well until we get to that point and Mitt says, ‘I’m not walking away from it.’” Romney never wavered on that question, and no one among his core advisers pressed for a reevaluation of this decision to stand firm. “What would I say?” one adviser said. “You should pretend you hate it, that you’re embarrassed of it?”

However much Romney believed he had done the right thing, there was another reason to stand behind it. To admit error, to suggest in any way that he had had a change of heart on health care, would reopen the criticism of him as a flip-flopper, as a politician willing to bend his views and his convictions, an ambitious political climber willing to adapt his positions to fit the circumstances of the next challenge. In 2008, he never quite solved that problem, and it was inevitable that it would arise again in 2012. If he did anything
in the early stages of the race to draw attention to his changes in position on other issues, the consequences could be devastating. Changing his position would expose Romney to the fundamental question for every candidate who seeks the presidency, the question of who you are and what your character is. One adviser said they saw health care as both a character issue and a policy question. If he changed course, it likely would lead to a whole different set of questions that might have been as difficult to deal with as the similarity between the Massachusetts plan and Obama’s.

Romney’s solution was to defend the Massachusetts law, attack Obamacare, and offer an alternative to it, and he scheduled a speech for May 12, 2011, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to make his case.
The morning of the speech
, the
Wall Street Journal
greeted him with a scorching editorial entitled “Obama’s Running Mate,” which included some of the harshest criticism ever of Romney and his legacy from Massachusetts. “It’s no accident that RomneyCare’s most vociferous defenders now are in the White House and left-wing media and think tanks,” the editorial said. “They know what happened, even if he doesn’t. For a potential president whose core argument is that he knows how to revive free market economic growth, this amounts to a fatal flaw. Presidents lead by offering a vision for the country rooted in certain principles, not by promising a technocracy that runs on ‘data.’ Mr. Romney’s highest principle seems to be faith in his own expertise. More immediately for his Republican candidacy, the debate over Obamacare and the larger entitlement state may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible. If he does not change his message, he might as well try to knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.”

Very early on the day of the speech, Tagg Romney, who was heading to the airport for a 6 a.m. flight to New York, got a message from his father. The prospective candidate was scheduled for a conference call with his staff at 7 a.m. to discuss the
Journal
editorial. Romney told his son, “I’m going to tell them I’m out.” “He said there’s no path to win the nomination,” Tagg Romney told me. “At that moment he thought his chances were zero.” Tagg Romney was alarmed by his father’s statement. He remembers thinking, “This can’t happen.” He believed that he and his mother were gradually winning the battle to make his father fully comfortable with running again. Now his father was somehow convinced that the party he sought to lead would never accept him as its nominee. Here was the most conservative major newspaper in the country bashing him and calling him a liberal. He didn’t see how he could win a primary under those conditions. Why waste everybody’s time and money? On the call, his advisers—Rhoades, Fehrnstrom, and Myers among them—were insistent. This will pass, they said. Be patient. This is part of the process. There will be good days and
bad. You don’t need to worry about it. At the end of the call, Romney accepted their advice. He never shared the private thoughts he had expressed to his son. His campaign advisers never knew that he had awoken that morning ready to quit the race. “There were many other times between December and May where my dad had made up his mind not to run,” Tagg Romney said. “He was hoping for an exit. I think he wanted to have an excuse not to run.”

•   •   •

Romney’s Ann Arbor speech was a PowerPoint presentation with twenty-five slides. He delivered it almost flawlessly in extemporaneous fashion. He had command of the material, even if he was making a questionable political argument. The presentation reflected his true personality, that of the wonkish private equity executive who enjoyed nothing more than breaking down a problem, analyzing numbers, weighing options, and finding a technocratic solution. He drew distinctions between his plan and Obama’s. He had solved the problem for Massachusetts without raising taxes. Obama had okayed hundreds of billions in new taxes and in cuts to Medicare. He called for the repeal of Obamacare and then laid out the principles that he said would guide him in trying to provide insurance to the more than forty million Americans without health insurance while doing something to hold down the rising costs of health care.

The next morning
, the
Wall Street Journal
carried a story about the speech and a letter from Romney responding to the previous day’s editorial. “I was not surprised to read yet another editorial in the
Journal
yesterday criticizing the health-care reforms we enacted in Massachusetts,” he wrote. “I was, however, not expecting the distortions of what we accomplished.” But the
Journal
’s editorial page editors were still on the offensive, with another editorial critical of Romney’s Ann Arbor presentation. “
The likely Republican presidential candidate
fulfilled the White House’s fondest wishes, defending the mandate-subsidize-overregulate program he enacted as Massachusetts Governor in 2006 even as he denounced President Obama’s national reprise,” the editorial said. “He then proposed his own U.S. reform that is sensible and might do some actual good, but which also runs against the other two plans. These are unbridgeable policy and philosophical differences, though Mr. Romney is nonetheless trying to leap over them like Evel Knievel heading for the Snake River Canyon. . . . Who knows what GOP voters will make of all this, but we won’t be surprised if Mr. Romney’s campaign suffers as many broken bones (433) as Knievel.”