Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (24 page)

The struggle between Allbaugh and Carney disrupted the whole campaign. Carney decided to disengage once Allbaugh came in, and had told Perry as much. Allbaugh believed Carney had gone AWOL. “They clashed on everything, and it wasn’t really any issue or strategy, it was just Dave can be difficult and he decided to be difficult about everything. And Joe overreacted,” said one Perry loyalist. “Joe approached it in a somewhat ham-handed way. He has done well at being sort of the battlefield commander, but coming in and giving speeches about taking care of the Perrys and being loyal to the Perrys to people
who have been working for them for ten years, when you’ve been there for ten minutes, doesn’t go over very well.”

Some of the other newcomers, who had a relationship with neither Perry nor Allbaugh, were equally alarmed at what they found when they arrived. Warfield assumed Perry’s team had a comeback to the immigration issue. He assumed Orlando would be a momentary setback. He described what happened: “We’re all on board now, we’re the team, so okay, and we’re all together, we’ve taken the pledge, we’re all part of the brotherhood. Let’s see your polling. Well, we don’t have any. Aw, come on guys. No, no survey work. None. Zero. Zip. None. Not a national, not a state, nothing. I mean, it is stunning. . . . In Texas obviously it was manageable, this immigration tuition deal, [but] they had no answer because they’d done no polling. They had no awareness of the power of the issue and since they’d done nothing to frame a response they had no chart out of it.” One of the veteran advisers said, “If we had had more information, more data, there might have been ways we could have fixed things faster and better. We had to do it from scratch real quick. The [new] team was very critical of that, from day one—to Carney, to anybody that would listen to them. They would say, ‘This is nuts.’”

•   •   •

Perry was now a significantly diminished figure, but he survived the two October debates better than those the month before. At the Dartmouth debate on October 11, he no longer was placed in the center—the result of his plunging poll numbers. At the Las Vegas debate on October 18, he decided he would not let Romney put him on the defensive again on immigration. He reprised an old attack against Romney for having hired a lawn service that employed undocumented workers. As Perry kept interrupting, Romney got testy. “I’m speaking. I’m speaking. I’m speaking,” Romney sputtered. He explained the rules to Perry, looked plaintively to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, noted Perry’s poor performances in earlier debates, and generally lost his cool. Perry’s charge was mostly spurious, but he had finally gotten under Romney’s skin.

The next debate was on November 9 in Michigan. Perry’s team vowed that he would be more rested and better prepared than in the first debates and scheduled his arrival in the state well before the forum. But the warfare between Allbaugh and Carney spilled into the debate preparations, at least according to several advisers. “Carney had done something which really ticked me off,” Allbaugh said. “I called the governor, who was on his way to the airport, and I said, ‘Governor, this is not going to work, I have tried.’ He said, ‘Well, you do what you need to do, I understand, this is a different game.’ I knew better at the time and I knew the governor well enough that he would probably stew about this.” The
night before the debate, other members of Perry’s team got wind of what was happening. “The debate prep room was overflowing with angst,” said one person in the room that night. But no two memories of that night are the same. By one account, Deirdre Delisi, the campaign’s policy director and a long-standing adviser to the governor, had approached Perry to plead the case for Carney’s continued role as the chief strategist in the campaign. By another, Delisi did not think she was trying to get anything reversed. She felt she knew the roles Perry wanted people to play. She felt it was her responsibility to raise it with the candidate.

Perry said he had no recollection of a debate prep room in turmoil. In fact, he said he felt as well prepared for that debate as any other he did. Before going onstage the night of the debate, he took his customary trip to the restroom. He saw Herman Cain standing just behind him. The Michigan debate came shortly after
Politico
reported that two women had accused Cain of inappropriate behavior when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. The Cain campaign accused one of Perry’s new advisers of leaking the story, a charge that was denied by Perry’s campaign. Perry recounted to me later what happened next. “He looks over at me and he’s always got that big smile on his face and I said, ‘Herman, how you doing, you big stud?’ That’s a term of endearment that I would use. Then he kind of had a funny look on his face and I was like, ‘God, I bet he thinks I’m making some derogatory remark at him because of what’s happened here in the last week.’ I walked out of there and I came in and told that story [to his advisers] and everybody was laughing. I walked onto that stage probably as kind of confident and loose as I had been—and then had that little brain fart.”

That “little brain fart” was one of the most embarrassing self-inflicted mistakes any candidate has experienced at a presidential debate—a moment that came to indelibly stamp Perry’s candidacy as one of the most inept anyone could recall. It happened two-thirds of the way through the debate, as Perry tried to outline the cuts he would make in Washington if he were president. “I will tell you, it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the, um, uh—what’s the third one there? Let’s see.” Ron Paul chimed in. “You need five,” he said. “Oh, five, okay,” Perry replied, still tongue-tied. Romney suggested maybe EPA was the third. “EPA, there you go,” Perry replied. CNBC’s John Harwood, co-moderating the debate, sought clarification. “Seriously, is EPA the one you were talking about?” “No sir. No sir,” Perry replied, too honest for his own good at that point. Harwood pressed, incredulous that Perry could not remember the third. “The third agency of government I would—I would do away with, the Education.” He paused again until someone said, “Commerce.” “Commerce,” he continued, “and let’s see. I can’t.
The third one, I can’t.” He paused again, head down. “Sorry,” he said with a sense of finality. “Oops.”

In the press area, reporters watched in disbelief as it unfolded. Curt Anderson, a Perry adviser, was at home watching the debate with his wife. He had drifted off just before it happened. He heard his wife shout, “Oh no!” “I’m like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘Uh, uh, uh, uh.’ And she’s trying to explain to me. And she says, ‘Get the, get the DVR.’ So we replayed it, and I was just like everybody else.” In the Perry viewing room at the debate, Delisi broke into tears. “It’s like people describe earthquakes,” said Nelson Warfield, who was in the Perry green room with the others. “The first shake and people go, ‘Oh shit, it’s an earthquake.’ But real bad earthquakes keep going. So it just kept going. He just couldn’t get out of it, and the ‘oops’ put a little cherry on top. Honestly, it’s sort of like a collision. I can only remember bits and pieces. I remember my head hitting the computer top.” Ray Sullivan and Mari Will, who had been brought on to take charge of debate preparations, spoke to Perry as he came off the stage and urged him to go into the spin room to take some of the sting out of the moment. Sullivan, Will, and Warfield came up with a one-liner to make light of what happened. “I’m glad I’ve got my boots on, because I really stepped in it out there,” Perry told reporters over and over.

Overnight, the campaign team rearranged the governor’s schedule. They set up a series of interviews on the morning shows and scheduled Perry to appear that night on
Late Night with David Letterman
to do Letterman’s Top Ten list, where after negotiating away a couple of the most noxious suggestions from Letterman’s staff, he laughed off his brain freeze with more one-liners. “The governor came down to the live shows on Thursday morning, he was pretty beaten down,” Sullivan said. “It would have been really easy for him and to some extent all of us to curl up and ride it out. By the end of the day he felt good. He had a good time. He felt as we all did that it was successful.”

But Perry’s already reeling campaign could not recover.
Jay Root of the
Texas Tribune
later wrote that “oops” turned Perry’s misadventures into “a hall-of-fame disaster.” Later that month, Carney and Allbaugh had a final parting. The relationship had deteriorated further. Allbaugh said, “I said, ‘Dave, you ought to go to New Hampshire and not come back unless you’re specifically invited.’ That was the last time we had a conversation.” Carney said Allbaugh’s words were conveyed in a voice mail, not a direct conversation, after he had already decamped back to his home in New Hampshire, having told Perry early on that he did not intend to stay in Austin with Allbaugh in charge. On the eve of the Iowa caucuses,
Politico
ran a brutal story about a campaign that had met none of the expectations set for it. It was, said one beleaguered adviser, “like a nuclear bomb
in the middle of the campaign.” Long after Perry was out of the race, the divisions remained deep, as Perry advisers played and replayed events, wondering whether it was ever possible for him to have been a serious competitor.

Perry later looked back at the “oops” moment with some humor. His campaign by then, he later concluded, was already fatally wounded. “My low moment happened in Orlando,” he told me. “I told somebody the ‘oops’ moment was kind of just one of those things that happens in life and I knew I was going to see it over and over and over again, but it wasn’t anything. I think I went back and actually slept that night.”

My interview took place in the governor’s office in the Capitol building in Austin in the spring of 2012. Perry was upbeat, as he generally is, showing photos he had taken with his iPhone on a recent trip. I asked him why someone who seemed to fit the party as well as he did could not have been a more serious contender. “I go back and I don’t think I’m putting too much emphasis on the “Orlando debate,” he answered. I think that was a very, very damaging moment both in words and in visual at the end of the debate when we were trying to tag Mitt [as a flip-flopper].” But he said there were other lessons from his experience. “The big thing that I learned out of this was you got to start early. You’ve got to start early and you better be prepared for a grinding process, have yourself physically, mentally fit and be ready to go and have a great deal of luck on your side as well.” When we talked he was already thinking about another campaign for president. He said, “You would see a substantially different campaign and even a different candidate from the standpoint of preparation and strength of physical and mental capability.”

Perry had one brief moment of redemption after he quit the race. He was the Republican speaker at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington on March 24, 2012. He poked fun at others but mostly at himself. One line brought down the house. He said, “It was the weakest Republican field in history, and they kicked my butt!” That was the story of Rick Perry’s campaign.

•   •   •

Matt Rhoades kept a memento of Romney’s battle with Perry in his office in Boston. It was a fever chart on a single sheet of paper. The headline said, “Rick Perry Decline.” It showed Perry’s standing in the polls from the day he announced until late November. Perry started at 13 percent in early August, jumped to 38 percent in one poll by the end of the month. Then, as the attacks from the Romney campaign began, he declined steadily until he was at 4 percent in late November. The center of the chart was highlighted in yellow, and in smaller type was a heading that read, “Perry’s decline: 6 weeks.” The chart noted that Romney’s campaign had issued a dozen press releases attacking on Social
Security during September and another seven on immigration in October. The chart underscored what Perry had concluded: He was out of contention long before he ever said “Oops.”

“Rick Perry was a formidable opponent,” Rhoades said later. “Go back and read all the covers that all of you wrote about him as he got into this. He was the only governor that was creating tons of jobs, conservative from Texas, he was a very formidable candidate. And I think people rewrite his decline and rewrite how potent a candidate he was because of some of the things that happened later in the primary process. But if you look at this graph you can find out what happened to Rick Perry and how it was Governor Romney and the campaign we ran that really diminished Rick Perry’s chances of winning, and it was on the issues. . . . So this isn’t a trophy, but this is something. It’s the truth, and this guy was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”

Strange Interlude

T
he demise of Rick Perry left Romney in an enviable position more than two months before the first votes would be cast in Iowa. Five current or former governors, the pool that so often has provided presidential nominees, were now out of the running: Pawlenty, Perry, Christie, Barbour, and Daniels. Left standing in his way was a collection of candidates who were either unelectable, implausible, or simply underfunded long shots to become the Republican nominee. His real opponent then was the sizable portion of the Republican base that remained tepid in its enthusiasm for the former Massachusetts governor. They were still shopping for an alternative, and the final weeks of 2011 would show they were prepared to grasp at almost any shiny object that caught their eye. That produced high drama and low farce, beginning with the rise and fall of Herman Cain.

Without the Tea Party, Herman Cain might not have become a presidential candidate in 2012. Cain was a businessman, a radio talk show host, and a charismatic speaker. He graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, did graduate work at Purdue University, and went to work in the food industry. He worked for Coca-Cola and later Pillsbury, where he became a regional vice president for its subsidiary Burger King. With his success there, he was named president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza in 1986 and turned around the failing chain. A decade later he joined the National Restaurant Association as chairman and CEO. Along the way he served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and as an economic adviser to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. In 2004, he waged an unsuccessful Senate campaign in Georgia.

The rise of the Tea Party fueled Cain’s presidential ambitions. His motivational speeches drew enthusiastic audiences. In March 2010, speaking at a forum sponsored by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, he put on his cowboy hat and said, “I have a message for President Obama. Mr. President, in 2012 there could be a new sheriff in town.” Shortly after that appearance, Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin Republican operative, and fellow strategist Linda Hansen met Cain for dinner in Las Vegas. They asked him how serious
he was about running. “I just want to see what kind of buzz I can create,” he told them. A turning point came in the fall when several thousand people showed up in Dayton, Ohio, to hear him. On New Year’s Day 2011, Cain spoke at a restaurant in Milwaukee, where he got another big reception. He returned to his hotel. “He sat in the atrium, called the producer of his radio show,” Block said, “and I’m listening to him and [Cain says], ‘Pete, I’m calling to resign.’ We all were thinking, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’ve made my mind up.’ And he gave his notice, he quit.” A few weeks later, Cain formed a presidential exploratory committee and was off and running.

Few took Cain seriously as a candidate. For all his charisma and his talents as a motivational speaker, he was woefully unprepared for the presidency. But he pursued an energetic travel schedule, while courting conservative bloggers and Tea Party followers, and soon enough was drawing positive notices from Republican activists. He was a hit at the first Republican debate in South Carolina, though the more he was exposed to questioning, the more it became clear he had plenty of rough edges as a candidate, particularly on foreign policy. The day after he formally announced his candidacy, he appeared on
Fox News Sunday
. When the interview turned to Middle East issues, host Chris Wallace asked him, “Where do you stand on right of return?” Cain stared blankly. “The right of return?” He paused. “The right of return?” He paused again until Wallace explained the issue of whether Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their land in the 1948 pact that created the state of Israel should have the right to return to Israeli territory as part of a Middle East settlement. Cain should have known this and would have if he had taken time for a briefing before the program. He was not easily embarrassed by what he didn’t know.

By late summer, he had come forward with the signature policy of his campaign, a tax reform plan he called “9-9-9”—a 9 percent individual income tax rate, a 9 percent corporate income tax rate, and a new 9 percent national sales tax. The plan was a huge hit with the party’s grassroots economic conservatives and gave Cain something no other presidential candidate had, an easy-to-understand policy that could fit on a bumper sticker. When Perry stumbled at the debate in Orlando, Cain’s candidacy took off. In the first post–Labor Day poll by the
Washington Post
and ABC News, Cain had been in sixth place with just 5 percent. Little more than a week after the Orlando debate, he had leaped into a tie for second with Perry at 17. By the first week of November, at 23 percent to Romney’s 25 percent, he was in a statistical tie for the lead.

His surprise success brought predictable scrutiny, which he did not handle well. At a debate in Las Vegas in early October, his rivals pummeled him over his tax plan. Rick Santorum said it would mean higher taxes for 84 percent of
Americans. Perry said it wouldn’t fly in the states because it created a new tax. Cain said his opponents were mixing apples and oranges—state and federal tax systems. Romney said apples and oranges would be in the same bucket—all taxable. CNN host Anderson Cooper turned to Newt Gingrich. “Speaker Gingrich,” he said, “you have said in recent days that Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would be a harder sell than he lets on. How so?” Gingrich replied, “Well, you just watched it.”

Weeks later Cain was interviewed on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly and ended up in a verbal joust with the host over his views on Iraq and Iran. O’Reilly challenged Cain over his proposal to put more Aegis warships in the Persian Gulf, which the host suggested would provoke a response by the Iranians. “That would be perfectly all right,” Cain said, “because I believe we have a superior capability.” Do you really want a shooting war? O’Reilly asked, incredulous. “Well, I don’t want that,” Cain said. “But if they fire first, we are going to defend ourselves and . . . they are no match for our warships.” He had a similar dustup with Charles Krauthammer on Fox News’
Special Report
that same night. He seemed to have contradictory positions on abortion, saying the decision should be left to a woman, her family, and her doctor while also saying he somehow favored outlawing all abortions, too. He hardly looked ready for the presidency.

On the night of October 30
,
Politico
posted a story on its Web site that said two women had accused Cain of sexually inappropriate behavior when he was head of the National Restaurant Association and that paid settlements had been negotiated with the women. Cain spokesman J. D. Gordon, who had been alerted by
Politico
ten days earlier, had a response ready. When the story broke, he e-mailed it to about fifty outlets. Exhausted, he fell asleep. As he later recalled the succession of events, he was awakened by a phone call from Geraldo Rivera’s brother Craig, who wanted him on Geraldo’s program. Gordon, who was friendly with Craig, said he had nothing more to say. Craig said to hold on. “He says, ‘Talk to Geraldo at the break.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’ He says, ‘Hold on.’” What he heard next was Geraldo’s voice, as he sat up in bed and watched the host holding a BlackBerry up to his lapel microphone on live television. “Geraldo’s like, ‘You’re live, J.D., you’re live.’” Geraldo pressed Gordon about whether there had been a settlement. Gordon, who knew none of the details, froze. “It was horrific,” he later said.

Cain was in Washington the next day with a full schedule of public appearances and interviews, and the media were in hot pursuit. He found himself confronted by cameras and shouting reporters in a parking garage. Later at a luncheon at the National Press Club, he got more questions. He kept digging the hole deeper with an ever-changing series of explanations. He first said that he was “vaguely familiar” with the incidents. Then he said he knew nothing
about a settlement. Later in the afternoon, he told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that he recalled there was “some sort of settlement or termination.” Details of the incidents remained hazy, but the candidate was now caught in a familiar scandal routine. Other news organizations joined in pursuit of the story. Within a week two more women were accusing Cain of inappropriate behavior. The fourth accuser, Sharon Bialek, was the first to allow her name to be used. She appeared with celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred at a press conference at the Friars Club in New York. “I want you, Mr. Cain, to come clean,” she said. Cain called all the charges “baseless, bogus, and false” and remained defiant. “We are not going to allow Washington or politics to deny me the opportunity to represent this great nation,” he said.

In the midst of the uproar over the allegations, Cain committed another major gaffe during a videotaped interview with editors and reporters at the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
. He was asked a straightforward question about whether he had supported President Obama on Libya. He paused and stammered, “Okay, Libya.” He paused again. “President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, ‘Yes, I agreed,’ or ‘No, I didn’t agree.’ I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason—nope, that’s a different one.” Another pause. “I gotta go back and see. I got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me that I agree or not disagree with Obama?” His advisers blamed it on lack of sleep.

On November 28, a fifth woman came forward. Ginger White, an Atlanta woman, said she had engaged in a thirteen-year affair with Cain. She had cell phone records showing calls and text messages from a number that belonged to Cain. The candidate again denied the allegations. He said they were friends, that he had tried to help her, but that there was no sexual relationship.
Cain’s lawyer appeared to contradict
the candidate by saying a consensual affair between adults was not a legitimate news story.
Four days after White made her statement
, Cain told the
Union Leader
newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire, that he had frequently given her money to help out with expenses. He said he had never told his wife, Gloria, about the payments or about his relationship with White. Cain also said he was reassessing his candidacy.

His campaign was in free fall. Contributions, which had spiked after the first allegations, had dropped off by almost 90 percent within a day or two of White’s allegation. On Saturday, December 3, 2011, Cain announced that he was suspending his campaign. He was defiant to the end, saying that he would establish a new organization to promote the ideas he had championed during the campaign. “I am not going to be silenced and I am not going away,” he said.
As quickly as he had risen to the top of the Republican field, he was gone and forgotten. His candidacy ended as a bizarre sideshow. Once it was over, it was even more unimaginable that he had virtually led the race for the nomination at least for a few weeks. Such was the state of the Republican Party as the year 2011 neared its conclusion.

•   •   •

What followed Cain’s destruction was almost as surprising: the reemergence of Newt Gingrich as Romney’s next apparent challenger. No one had started the campaign with more fumbles and missteps than the man who had led Republicans to power in Congress in 1994. His personal balance sheet included as many liabilities as assets. The liabilities included two messy divorces, an admission of adultery, extravagantly harsh and divisive rhetoric toward his opponents, a tumultuous record as Speaker, a capacity to be childish, and, often, turmoil in his wake. The other reality was that by sheer force of intellect, energy, and ambition he had managed to stay in the forefront of the public debate longer than almost any other contemporary member of his party.

For three decades, Gingrich had been a leader of Republicans. He started as a House backbencher roiling the old guard of his party in the 1980s. Once elected to the leadership, he led his party to its first House majority in forty years. After a government shutdown that cost his party politically, he worked with Bill Clinton to produce a major reform of the welfare system and a balanced budget. For a time, he was the face of the GOP, for better and worse. He survived a coup attempt by some of his lieutenants in 1997, then stepped down as Speaker after his party suffered embarrassing losses in the 1998 midterms as he and other Republicans were pushing to impeach Clinton for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Soon after, he left Congress entirely. That could have ended his public career. But he resurrected himself and became the CEO of an idea-generating mini-conglomerate that was uniquely his. He was a brilliant provocateur. The question was whether Gingrich could show the steadiness, the calm, and the maturity that voters seek in a president. Did he have the discipline required of all successful presidential candidates—the discipline to keep his focus, to avoid meaningless fights, to ignore barbs from his critics, to show statesmanship?

In the spring of 2011, the answers all came back negative. He stumbled toward the starting gate, delaying again and again the formation of a presidential campaign committee as he extracted himself from his tangled business empire. In May, more than a month after Paul Ryan put forward his Republican budget plan, Gingrich belittled it on NBC’s
Meet the Press
. “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very
good way for a free society to operate.” Conservatives trashed him, from Rush Limbaugh to the
Wall Street Journal
to his friend Bill Bennett, who gave him a public tongue-lashing on his radio show the next day. “To salvage your candidacy, say you blew it,” Bennett said. Gingrich did. He spent the next few days doing mea culpa after mea culpa with conservative media while apologizing to Ryan. “He called and he was very, very apologetic,” Ryan said. “I said, ‘Look, that’s fine, just take it back, because it doesn’t hurt me personally, it hurts our cause, our efforts.’” Gingrich did take it back. He said he was wrong to say what he’d said. He said he liked the Ryan plan and would have voted for it. He said he shouldn’t have answered a “hypothetical baloney question,” though what David Gregory had asked him was quite straightforward and not in the least a hypothetical. True to form, he found a way to turn his mistake into a warning to the Democrats not to try to exploit it. “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate,” he told Greta Van Susteren. Meanwhile, spokesman Rick Tyler issued a purple-prose statement attacking Gingrich’s critics. “The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness,” the statement said. “They fired timidly at first. Then the sheep, not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list, unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.” He said Gingrich emerged from “the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia” ready to lead “those who won’t be intimidated by the political elite.” While Gingrich was engaging in damage control over his interview about Ryan’s budget,
Politico
reported that he and his wife, Callista, had a revolving line of credit of up to $500,000 at Tiffany’s earlier in the decade. Gingrich said his purchasing habits were no one’s business and that, anyway, any debts had been paid off.