Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (38 page)

Bob White argued for another approach as well, which was to do more to fill in Romney’s biography. He was a consistent advocate for doing more to introduce people to Romney, to enhance his image, to show him in settings and with stories and language that contrasted with the stereotyped figure in the Democrats’ attacks. He believed that the time to do that was in the summer before the conventions—or much earlier. “We need to define him,” he would say. Beth Myers and Tagg Romney believed the same thing but were never forceful enough to change things. Tagg had pressed at the earliest stages of the campaign, even before the primaries, for more attention to humanizing his dad. Eventually he stopped getting invitations to campaign strategy meetings.

•   •   •

Obama’s two-minute “Steel” ad was intended mostly as a conversation starter and an experiment, rather than a full-fledged paid advertising campaign. The campaign spent less than $100,000 to put it on television. But it was discussed (and played) repeatedly on cable news shows, and the amplification effect gave the topic widespread prominence in the public conversation about the race. The ad produced immediate results—though not exactly as the Obama campaign might have hoped. Newark mayor Cory Booker, on NBC’s
Meet the Press,
said he found attacks on the morality of private equity to be “nauseating.” Steve Rattner, who had served as Obama’s auto czar and was a prominent Democratic donor, appeared on MSNBC’s
Morning Joe
the day after Booker made his comments. “I think the ad is unfair,” he said. He said Bain had operated within the rules and had earned a good reputation doing so. While decrying the loss of jobs for some workers, he added, “This is part of capitalism. This is part of life, and I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.”
Ed Rendell, the former governor
of Pennsylvania, told BuzzFeed, “I think they’re very disappointing. I think Bain is fair game, because Romney has made it fair game. But I think how you examine it, the tone, what you say, is important as well.” Those criticisms reflected the long-standing connections many Democrats had with private equity firms. Obama had received a substantial amount of money from Bain employees.

The day after Booker’s criticism, Obama was asked about the Bain attacks during a press conference at a NATO summit in Chicago. He said they were not a distraction but the essence of what the campaign was about. “If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about,” Obama said. “It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity. But that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.” Asked whether he thought Romney was responsible for the job losses cited in the attacks, Obama said, “Mr. Romney is responsible for the proposals he is putting forward for how he says he is going to fix the economy. And if the main basis for him suggesting he can do a better job is his track record as the head of a private equity firm, then both the upsides and the downsides are worth examining.”

The next week, Bill Clinton weighed in and appeared to create more heartburn for Chicago. In a CNN interview, he gave Romney high marks for his business record and defended the role of private equity in the economy, noting that not all investments in failing companies turn into success stories. He saw nothing disqualifying in Romney’s biography. “The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold [to be president],” he said. Obama’s team stood its ground. His advisers dismissed the criticism by Booker and Rendell and commentators as a conversation among the elites who lived in television green rooms rather than the real world. Three days after the president responded, I was in Chicago and sat down with Axelrod. “All we’re saying is, it certainly doesn’t qualify him to be president and he’s offering it as a qualification,” he said. “That really is the linchpin of his whole argument, that he’s an economic whiz who can get under the hood and fix the economy, and that’s a very dubious proposition. It was dubious ten years ago when he pitched it to the people of Massachusetts, and it didn’t turn out well, and it’s dubious now.” Then he got to the bottom line. “We just got out of the field yesterday in the battleground states and there’s nothing in that polling that tells me that this has been a bad week for us.”

•   •   •

On May 26, Obama met with his political advisers in the Roosevelt Room in the White House. The campaign had run almost forty hours of positive ads that month aimed at establishing Obama’s credentials as a protector of the middle class and reminding voters of the economic conditions when he took office. That same plan, set out much earlier, anticipated a shift to ads attacking Romney beginning in June. But Messina had a significant change in plans to present to the president. What he put on the table was new—a proposal to radically rearrange how and when the campaign would spend its money. Messina, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Grisolano had been talking about the importance
of the summer months and the potential for Republican super PACs to bring their collective resources to bear in attacking Obama. “We were concerned that the super PACs would overwhelm us in the summer and we needed to be fortified for that,” Axelrod said. “But the bigger thing was, we needed to define him in the race in the summer, because my read of history was that there has never been a race that’s been determined by an ad that appeared after Labor Day.” Messina told the president he wanted to take $63 million already budgeted for the fall media and spend it during the summer. The proposal called for taking about half of the money slotted for September and about 40 percent allocated for October and shoving it to June and July and August. Messina also made clear that if the president signed off, the campaign risked being dramatically outspent on the air by the Romney campaign in October, unless it exceeded its fund-raising projections, which at that moment appeared problematic. The campaign had missed one of its fund-raising targets that spring, a rarity for an operation that always seemed flush with cash. Messina had quietly ordered a monthlong hiring freeze.

Most of the post-election attention on the May 26 meeting focused on the advertising budget, but another part of the discussion was equally important. Messina also recommended that the president sign off on an immediate and substantial expansion in the field operation. He was worried about the pace of the campaign’s grassroots organizing. The number of persuadable voters was minuscule. To win, the Obama campaign needed to change the electorate in the battleground states, and the only way to do that was through a more intensive effort to register voters and then get them to the polls. Without a more robust registration effort, which was labor-intensive, Obama would face substantial difficulties winning several of the battleground states. If the campaign wanted to stay competitive in as many places as possible, Messina believed, he needed Obama to approve this as well. Messina and Plouffe knew how important it was to beef up the ground operation, but they faced strong internal pressure to scale it back. Then and later, others in the campaign pushed hard to take money from the organizing budget—did the campaign really need eight hundred paid staff in Florida?—and put it into advertising. Messina fought hard and prevailed.

Enthusiasm was another problem that a more robust ground operation could address. One official said the campaign also had received a wake-up call on May 5, when Obama formally began his campaign with rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia. Four years earlier, it took almost no effort by the Obama team to build a crowd for campaign events, once Obama was truly launched. But on this Saturday in May, the crowds did not fill either of the arenas. One official said the campaign subsequently made two hundred
thousand phone calls to make sure they filled a three-thousand-seat venue in Iowa at one of the president’s next events.

Messina succinctly framed the decision he asked Obama to make that day: “Are we going to dump the kitchen sink now?” Obama generally trusted his team and their decisions. He did not get into the weeds of strategy the way Bill Clinton did. In this case, however, he wasn’t ready to sign off without raising concerns. “He didn’t just say, ‘Okay guys, that’s great,’” Plouffe said. “He wanted to understand what it would mean. It’s one of the few times where after we make a decision he still is asking, ‘Are we sure this is going to be okay?’” Obama wanted a better sense of how much he might be buried by Romney ads in the final days if the campaign raised less than projected. He said to Messina, “Jim, what happens if we miss?” Messina said he replied, “Then we’re in real trouble, but I don’t think we’re going to miss.” Julianna Smoot, the deputy campaign manager in charge of fund-raising, had come to this meeting specifically to address the president’s concerns about the money. We’ll be fine, she assured him.
*

The same weekend that Obama and his team were making the decision to front-load their spending, the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA began its attacks on Romney, using Bain Capital as the foil. Within weeks, it started to air one of the most powerful and effective ads of the campaign. Like “Steel,” in shorthand it told the story of what happened when Ampad, which Bain owned, bought a paper company in Indiana. One of the workers, Mike Earnest, was featured in the ad, describing how he and others were asked one day to help build a stage. It was from that stage that a few days later the plant managers announced they were shutting down the factory. Earnest said, “Turns out that when we built that stage it was like building my own coffin—and it just made me sick.”

•   •   •

Obama liked to believe—and told people—that he was a better candidate than he had been in 2008. Yet he was anything but mistake-free. On June 8, he held a press conference to warn that economic problems in Europe could spill over into the United States, something both his economic and political advisers were deeply worried about at the time. But he made a mess of it when, in trying to talk about the state of the U.S. economy, he said, “The private sector is doing fine.” He was trying to draw a distinction between job growth, however tepid, in the private sector and job cuts in the public sector, but that was quickly lost. Republicans pounced. “Is he really that out of touch?” Romney said in a coordinated attack by GOP leaders. Obama’s advisers realized instantly that what the president had said was a big mistake and urged him to
clean it up quickly. Later that day, during a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, Obama tried to walk it back. “Listen,” he said, “it is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing well.”

•   •   •

The summer months were eventually remembered for the battle over Bain. But a closer look at the Obama ad spending shows a different early focus. The Obama team had prepared various attacks—on Romney’s record at Bain, on his tenure as governor, on his tax returns and investments. But before they did that, Obama’s advisers ran positive ads whose main purpose was to remind people of the problems Obama had inherited. As bad and as recent as it had been, the campaign’s research found that people had forgotten. Once they had laid down that foundation, they would turn to Romney’s record in Massachusetts and then his finances and business record. One reason for starting the negative ads with Massachusetts was that at the time, the campaign’s research showed that Romney had an advantage over Obama on who was better equipped to create jobs. “We felt that if we exposed people to the Massachusetts record we could erode those attributes, and that taking that away from him would be detrimental to his candidacy,” Grisolano said. If they could “pop that balloon,” as media adviser Jim Margolis put it, they could undermine the entire rationale for Romney’s candidacy. The Massachusetts ads began in early June and continued throughout the month. The campaign invested close to $50 million in attacking Romney’s record as governor.

On June 21, the
Washington Post
published an article that caused another shift in the ad strategy. Citing SEC documents, reporter Tom Hamburger wrote, “During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components.” The story went on to say that an investigation of the records “shows the extent of Bain’s investment in firms that specialized in helping other companies move or expand operations overseas. While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment.”

The Obama campaign quickly turned the story into television commercials. Independent fact-checking organizations said the ads distorted the
Post
article, but the Obama camp ignored those critiques. The Romney team attacked both Obama and the
Post
. Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s communications director, called then executive editor Marcus Brauchli to say the story was incorrect and needed either a correction or a retraction. Brauchli also said she accused the
Post
of doing the Obama campaign’s bidding, and he took umbrage at Gitcho’s accusation that the newspaper and the Obama campaign were in cahoots on the story. Gitcho demanded that the editors meet with the campaign the next day. “I said I was sure we could find time, or we could meet later in the week or even next week,” Brauchli said. “That set [Gitcho] off. She said, approximately, ‘You don’t understand. We’re taking on water. Every day, every hour we wait, we’re taking on water.’” The next day Gitcho and Matt McDonald, whom Bob White had put in charge of handling the details of the Bain issue, came to the
Post
. Before they arrived, someone leaked to
Politico
their intention to demand a retraction. Brauchli, who had been a reporter in Asia when American firms were expanding their overseas production facilities and knew the history of their activities, held firm during the meeting and refused to issue either a retraction or a clarification.