Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (37 page)

The country had seen some of the same during the presidency of George W. Bush. He became the most polarizing president in American history, measured by the gulf in his approval rating between Republicans and Democrats, until Obama came into office. Obama as polarizer was always there in plain sight, particularly in the late stages of the 2008 campaign when there were ugly expressions about him at Republican rallies. But it was either overlooked or ignored.
Gary Jacobson of the University of California
, San Diego, noted that Obama had won 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, the highest percentage for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide. But he also pointed out that Obama’s coalition included one of the smallest shares ever of voters who did not identify with the party of the winning candidate.

Geographic voting patterns were more fixed than ever. Fewer counties were up for grabs. Bill Bishop, a journalist and geographic demographer and author of the book
The Big Sort,
tracked the change over time in presidential margins by county.
In 1976, about a quarter
of the population lived in counties where the winner’s victory margin was twenty points or more. By 2008, about half the population lived in counties where the winner’s margin was twenty or more. A close look at the decade’s election returns showed the rigidity of county-by-county leanings. Between Bush’s win in 2004 and Obama’s in 2008, just 382 of 3,147
counties in the United States went from one party to the other. Most of those—338—had moved toward the Democrats.

Partisan self-identification defined the critical differences in attitudes far more than traditional demographic measures, which once had been the standard.
A Pew Research Center study
reported, “As Americans head to the polls this November, their values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years. Unlike in 1987, when this series of surveys began, the values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than gender, age, race or class divides.” Over a series of forty-eight measures of values, the average difference between Republicans and Democrats had doubled in a quarter century. And nearly all of the increase, the study said, occurred during Bush’s and Obama’s presidencies.
The summer 2012 study
by the
Washington Post
and the Kaiser Family Foundation compared attitudes with a similar study done fourteen years earlier. The findings underscored how the partisan divisions had become the new normal in America. In 1998, 41 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats called themselves “strong” partisans. In the new study, 65 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats now identified themselves that way. As in the Pew survey, there was a wide and growing gulf in attitudes about the federal government. A solid majority of Republicans offered consistently high scores on limiting government’s role, while a solid majority of Democrats were clustered at the other end of the scale—sharp changes from fourteen years earlier. On social issues, the gaps were similarly large.

With so many families worried about the economy, Obama had little hope of matching his performance in his first campaign. He would have to keep his losses to a minimum. With the country divided along partisan and ideological lines, each candidate would have to play to his base. And given the depth and breadth of the polarization, fewer voters were going to be truly up for grabs, no matter how it appeared at first blush. Mobilization would become more important than persuasion. The conditions pointed to an ugly and grinding general election campaign.

Defining Battle

O
n May 15, 2012, the Obama campaign began airing a television commercial called “Steel.” It was unusually long for a political ad—two minutes rather than the customary thirty seconds—and it aired in only a few markets. The ad profiled a steel company, GST Steel in Kansas City, after Bain Capital had purchased it. The story was told from the point of view of workers who lost their jobs and their health and retirement benefits when the company eventually went bankrupt. The ad was understated in tone, devastating in content. It opened with one of the workers, Joe Soptic, who said, “I was a steelworker for thirty years. We had a reputation for quality products. It was something that was American made. And we weren’t rich, but I was able to put my daughter through college. . . . That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital.” The ad cut to a still photo of a younger Mitt Romney at Bain and then video of candidate Romney on the stump saying, “I know how business works. I know why jobs come and why they go.” As weathered newspaper clips reporting on the plant’s closure flashed across the screen, Soptic provided the voice-over: “They made as much money off it as they could and they closed it down and filed for bankruptcy without any concern for the families or the communities.” Joe Cobb, identified as a steelworker for thirty-one years, delivered a sound bite that was played over and over in the days following. “It was like a vampire,” he said. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” As the screen filled with images of an abandoned factory site, Soptic said with an air of sadness, “It was like watching an old friend bleed to death.” Romney reappeared on the screen. “As I look around at the millions of Americans without work,” he said, “it breaks my heart.” The ad continued on these themes for another minute, ending with more words from Soptic about Romney: “He’s running for president, and if he’s going to run the country the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there. He would be so out of touch with the average person in this country. How could you care? How could you care for the average working person if you feel this way?”

The two-minute ad marked the opening volley in the long-awaited contest
to define Mitt Romney and the beginning of one of the most critical phases of the campaign. The general election had been taking shape for several weeks as Romney scrambled to complete a lengthy to-do list—from repairing some of the damage inflicted by the primary campaign to meeting the urgent need to expand a lean operation into one capable of matching the muscle and sophistication of the incumbent, whose team had spent the prior year preparing for this moment. From one angle, and particularly in retrospect, the battle to define Romney appeared to be a one-sided contest. Obama’s campaign attacked and attacked and attacked, pouring tens of millions of dollars into the battleground states for advertising that scored Romney’s record in business and government—with almost no pushback by the challenger. It was as if the Obama team had caught Romney flat-footed, as if Romney simply forfeited the most crucial definitional period of the election. But the reality was not that simple. Romney’s team was short on funds and therefore limited in its ability to respond. But his advisers were hardly caught by surprise. In fact, his advisers had begun preparing for the moment—and even the specific attacks—as far back as the previous fall. How and why they responded as they did was not just because of an imbalance in resources, although that was a critical factor. Their response also grew out of fundamentally different strategic assumptions about what the campaign ultimately was about and how it would or could be won—assumptions that would be the target of criticism and second-guessing once the campaign ended.

•   •   •

“We’re going to beat Obama,” Stuart Stevens said. It was April 3, the morning of the Wisconsin primary, and we were having breakfast at the Marriott Milwaukee West in Waukesha, a Republican stronghold outside of Milwaukee. Stevens, the chief strategist for the Romney campaign, was a charming and sometimes mercurial political strategist who with business partner Russ Schriefer ran one of the leading Republican advertising firms in the country. At one point in the campaign, he was featured on the cover of the
New Republic
in the likeness of the don in the Dos Equis beer commercials, with the headline “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” Stevens, a Mississippi native, indeed was an interesting man. He was a fitness freak. His office in the Romney headquarters was a cross between a workout room and a pharmacy. It included a ski machine and a bicycle, assorted other fitness gear and clothing, and a desk piled with containers of vitamins and other nutrients. In between campaigns, Stevens was an adventure seeker. He roamed the world, competing in marathon cross-country ski races or bicycle races. He wrote a book,
Feeding Frenzy,
about a monthlong dash through Europe in which he ate in twenty-nine different restaurants with Michelin stars. He wrote for the television series
Northern Exposure
. He was part of the advertising team that
helped George W. Bush win two elections. In 2008 he started with John McCain and then jumped to Romney. In the 2012 Romney campaign, he wore many hats, including that of chief strategist, chief communicator, ad maker, and chief speechwriter. Too many, as it would become clear, as others on the campaign chafed at the disorganization he sometimes brought to deliberations. He had the ear of the candidate, though they could hardly have been more different. They were the campaign’s examples of left brain versus right brain, seeming opposites in personality and demeanor.

More than anyone else in the operation, Stevens established and articulated the strategic framework that guided Romney. He told others that this would not be a Match.com election, his shorthand for 2008, when so many people felt so positive about Obama. It would be a Monster.com campaign—all about jobs and the economy. “My take on the whole thing has always been it’s going to be easy or impossible,” he said that April morning in Wisconsin. “It wouldn’t seem easy but that it would be. And that it was going to be an economically driven election.” During the 2010 election cycle, Stevens had begun traveling to jobs fairs around the country, filming the stories of people in the lines as they sought work. He talked constantly about the suffering of the unemployed and the state of the country under Obama.
He urged everyone he knew
to read the story by Michael Luo, published in the
New York Times
in August 2010, about one woman’s descent from a middle-class existence to life in a cheap motel hundreds of miles from home after losing her job and later her unemployment benefits. He launched a project to find and film people who had gone from hope to despair during Obama’s presidency. One member of the creative team at the campaign, Jim Ferguson—“Fergie” to everyone—had read about a young man in Iowa who had lost his job and was now digging graves. Ferguson went to Iowa and somehow found him and filmed him and made a poignant video about how hope and change had not worked out for some Americans. Stevens was virtually certain that the campaign would turn on the economy and voters’ dissatisfaction with the president’s performance. He ticked through the statistics of Obama’s presidency: More Americans were out of work, more Americans had lost their homes, more Americans had fallen into poverty. “They can’t blame Romney for that,” he said.

Where are you at this point? I asked him that morning. “Doesn’t matter where we are, it’s just where he is. [If] his job approval’s at 43 [percent], the guy’s got problems. Forty-eight? That’s better for him, if it stays there.” He said the president seemed intent on trying to play off dissatisfaction with what George W. Bush had done in office. “He’s trying to reformulate an argument here he would use against Bush. The problem is, he’s president. It’s not an MRI of the soul,” he said. “It’s an MRI of his record. And they can’t change that.”

Obama’s advisers understood everything Stevens said about the economy. They believed that Obama’s biggest opponent would be the economy itself, more than any of the Republicans. But they also saw the challenger as particularly ill-suited to run in a year in which their research showed that people were looking for someone who would champion the middle class, someone whom they could touch and feel, not just a jobs mechanic. It was David Axelrod, Stevens’s counterpart on the Obama campaign, who had been saying that presidential elections were an “MRI of the soul” for the candidates, and that summed up precisely how the Chicago team saw the campaign. Though they had long assumed Romney would become the Republican nominee, Obama’s advisers also believed he was the wrong candidate for the times. Jim Messina said throughout the spring and summer that Romney was a bad fit in the industrial Midwest, with his profile as a corporate executive who had shuttered factories. Axelrod believed Romney reflected two aspects of contemporary life that were most troubling to people. One was the general unfairness, the feeling that things were tilted toward the wealthy or the bosses. The other was the belief that too many politicians were more interested in self-preservation than problem solving. He believed that voters would come to see Romney that way, particularly if the Obama campaign did its job. They watched him through the nomination battle, as he was pummeled by his opponents or made his own mistakes—dealing with his tax returns, for example—and saw the attacks exposing genuine vulnerabilities that they could exploit in the general election. After the election was over, Axelrod put it this way: “On paper, Romney seemed like a good candidate because of [being a] businessman, job creator, and a lot of that stuff. But at the end of the day he was maybe the worst candidate to speak to this. . . . Nobody knew Mitt Romney really at the beginning. I don’t think they knew him at all. [What] they knew in the first instance was businessman, and the businessman patina was valuable. . . . It was very important for us to fill in the blanks. If he had just been allowed to be this cardboard-cutout successful businessman, he conceivably could have won.”

•   •   •

The attacks on Romney were months in the making. Obama’s advisers assembled a huge database on Romney. They hired financial researchers and experts on SEC filings to pore over the records of Bain’s investments. They dissected his record as governor of Massachusetts. When Romney was governor, all his public appearances and statements were videotaped. The Obama campaign got copies of the videos and transcribed them all. They sent people to the Cayman Islands to dig into the investment entities associated with Romney. They began finding and filming people who had been hurt when companies owned by Bain were closed down.

Stephanie Cutter, who shifted from the White House to Chicago in late 2011 to become a deputy campaign manager, pushed hard to drive attention to Bain and Romney’s record as early as possible. She was an alumnus of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign and knew what an incumbent president’s reelection campaign could do to a challenger. She was determined to use whatever resources were available to do the same to Romney, starting long before he was the nominee. She sent what the campaign called “Bain victims” into Iowa and New Hampshire during the GOP caucus and primary campaigns to tell their stories at press conferences. When Newt Gingrich took up the issue as the GOP candidates were moving from New Hampshire into South Carolina, she became alarmed that it could lose its potency because of the way both Gingrich and Romney handled it. Cutter described Gingrich’s Bain attack as overshooting the runway. Gingrich’s attacks, along with those of his super PAC, allowed Romney to turn the issue in his favor—in a Republican primary at least—by accusing his critics of launching an attack on free enterprise. The Obama campaign intended to fight a different battle. They would marry it with attacks on Romney’s unwillingness to release his tax returns and his Swiss bank account and Cayman Islands investments. To them this would be a debate not about the free enterprise system but about the character and values of the Republican nominee.

Romney’s team was far from indifferent or lackadaisical about the role Bain would play in the election. They knew it had been a factor in every campaign Romney had run, starting in 1994 against Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and in 2002 when he ran for governor. Like the Obama team, their preparation began in the fall of 2011. Bob White, a cofounder of Bain and one of Romney’s closest confidants, oversaw the project. He believed deeply in what Bain had done and in the integrity of the partners and the company. White conducted a seminar for the Romney team: What is Bain Capital? What is a private equity firm? How does one work? The discussions included lines of attack they could expect—such as Bain profiting even when companies went out of business, or the role of outsourcing or offshoring of jobs. They discussed a small group of companies whose stories would provide fodder for Obama’s attacks, companies that had been used before by Romney’s opponents. White oversaw the creation of an internal team to deal with the coming attacks—a lawyer, researchers, and communications experts who could respond instantly. They put together case studies of companies, timelines of what had happened, all the vulnerabilities they could compile. They reached out to CEOs of companies Bain had owned to check their facts and to find documents. “We had CEOs crawling around up in their attics looking for records,” Eric Fehrnstrom said.

The team also searched out the positive stories about Bain. White believed there was a good story to tell—specifically, more than 120 investments in about a
hundred companies, the vast majority of which were successful. As the Obama team was filming victims, the Romney team started to film testimonials featuring people from CEOs to middle managers to younger workers. Ashley O’Connor, who coordinated the advertising operation, sent crews out around the country to build an archive of good news. The inventory included nearly two dozen positive statements ready to be used when needed. But they came to realize that tit-for-tat wasn’t sufficient. “[The Obama campaign] very cleverly also made it a character issue about Mitt,” Fehrnstrom later said, “and I think it contributed to this sentiment that Mitt ‘doesn’t understand people like me.’”