Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (40 page)

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One big question remains. Was all this advertising effective? Did the summer attacks on Romney fundamentally change the dynamic of the election? Was the campaign decided before the conventions or the debates took place? After the election, everyone had an opinion—and some data to back it up. John Sides of George Washington University and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA, two political scientists who studied the race closely for their book
The Gamble,
argued in a
New York Times
piece in December 2012 that there was no compelling
evidence to show that the summer ad wars changed the race. They looked at changes in the overall race and changes in Romney’s image, nationally and in the battleground states. “
The political science research
and this initial evidence from 2012 suggests that the Obama campaign’s blitz of early advertising did little apparent damage to Mr. Romney in the minds of voters,” Sides wrote.

Leaders of the two campaigns came to a different conclusion. Plouffe said the goal wasn’t to increase support for Obama but to make it harder for Romney to overtake him in the end. “We were already bumping up against our ceiling in a lot of these places,” he said. “It wasn’t that Barack Obama in the summer was going to start pulling 53 [percent]. It was to retard Romney’s progress, and that’s what we were able to do. Basically putting a lot of weight on him so it’s harder for him to elevate. We accomplished that big time. Two, I think we turned the election more into a choice. We know that from our research.”

Certainly the overall state of the race remained close. Obama had a three-point lead in the battleground states at the beginning of May and a four-point lead at the end of August, according to the campaign’s internal numbers. Romney’s campaign research found that the candidate actually gained a tiny bit of ground, though he remained well behind in their numbers. Obama advisers said the summer attacks helped to cement impressions of Romney—wealthy, out of touch, and not the job creator he claimed—that he was never quite able to repair with the voters he needed most at the end of the campaign. Romney advisers agreed that the relatively small changes in the overall numbers masked the real damage that took place. “We knew it had damaged Mitt’s image,” Neil Newhouse said. “The long steady drumbeat over the summer of negative advertising had a significant impact in the campaign.” Romney recovered some ground just before the conventions but was fighting an uphill battle throughout the rest of the campaign. He came out of the primaries with liabilities and did nothing of note to erase them during the heat of the summer.

The Running Mate

T
he chemistry was unmistakable. Two days before the Wisconsin primary, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan shared a stage in Middleton, just outside of Madison. Tall and handsome, with dark hair and a lean physique, Ryan looked like he could be another of Mitt and Ann Romney’s sons. At forty-two, he was of the same generation as the candidate’s children. Chairman of the House Budget Committee and the main architect of the Republican blueprint to shrink government, he was the darling of conservatives. He had endorsed Romney’s candidacy a few days earlier and was at Romney’s side during the last days of the primary that settled the Republican nomination contest. Before arriving in Madison, he had joined with Romney’s staff to play an April Fool’s prank on the candidate, giving a full-throated introduction—“and the next president of the United States”—to what Romney thought was a packed pancake brunch rally. Romney learned it was an empty room only when he came out from behind the curtain. Now in the late afternoon they were holding a rally and town hall before a friendly audience in a hotel ballroom. As Ryan introduced him, Romney beamed. The youthful congressman put a positive sheen on Romney’s sometimes corny personality. He called it “Midwest earnest.” When questions came from the audience, Romney answered but then deferred to Ryan, who picked up where the candidate left off, confident that he was not overshadowing the future nominee.

The next day, as the two continued their tour of the state, the bond seemed to grow. Romney joked about Ryan’s youthfulness, noting that the congressman was just ten years old when Ronald Reagan was elected president. “I did have a Reagan bumper sticker on my locker in the third grade,” Ryan interjected to laughter. Ryan was part geek, part nerd, and part fitness-obsessed. He drove a truck, enjoyed hunting deer with bow and arrow, and was, like most Wisconsin residents, a devoted Green Bay Packers fan. He connected with his blue-collar constituency in southern Wisconsin in ways Romney couldn’t. People in the crowds saw the growing bond as the two men campaigned together.
Sherry Magner, a pharmacy clerk
, told my
Post
colleague Philip
Rucker, “I was watching each one as the other spoke, and there was not only respect, but a smile they gave each other.” Jeff Burns, a boat parts supplier, saw the combo as ideally suited to deal with the economy. “This election’s going to turn on the economy, and you’ve got two guys who know what it takes to fix the economy. You’re talking about a very successful businessman and the most knowledgeable congressman available.”

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Mitt Romney knew something about picking a vice president. Four years earlier when John McCain was deciding on a running mate, Romney saw it from the perspective of someone in the running—the intrusiveness, the uncertainty, the speculation, and of course the media frenzy. He lost that competition to Sarah Palin—though it was his multiple homes that really hurt his chances after McCain was asked and couldn’t remember how many properties he and his wife owned. A McCain-Romney ticket would be just too much real estate, McCain’s advisers concluded. Romney got enough of a taste of what the process involved to have clear ideas about how he wanted to make his own selection. He wanted it to be as orderly as McCain’s was not, as private as he could make it to protect those under consideration, and as contained as possible inside his own operation to guard against leaks that could embarrass those in the running or damage his own political reputation. He started early and hoped to finish early.

In the early stages of the campaign, Beth Myers kept four folders on her desk. One said, “transition.” Another said, “convention.” The third said, “victory,” the fourth, “VP.” These were the big projects Romney’s advisers knew they would need to manage if, as they expected, he was successful in winning the nomination. Myers was one of Romney’s closest and longest-serving political advisers. She had been with him in his campaign for governor, served as chief of staff in the governor’s office, and managed the 2008 presidential campaign. She had worked closely with him when he went through the vice presidential process with the McCain campaign and had spent considerable time talking with Romney about what he wanted as 2012 approached. As early as January 2012, she began to compile a lengthy informal list of potential running mates—“a whole host of folks inside and outside the box, expected and unexpected candidates, and that was the Beth Myers view of the world,” she said. By early spring, she had compiled general background materials on all of the potential candidates and began to talk more formally to Romney about the process. It was then that he announced she would head the selection team, and by the end of April the initial list had been pared down, though it still numbered in the teens. She then assembled background bios on them, running
about twenty-five pages each. Romney looked them over, and around the first of May he created a much shorter list of contenders—none of them out-of-the-box candidates.

Romney personally began making the calls. Tim Pawlenty was at the chiropractor’s office, dealing with a bad back from a spill during an old timers’ hockey game, when the call came. Pawlenty had been the runner-up to Palin in 2008 and had no burning desire to go through it all again. He had resolved in his own mind that he was an unlikely candidate to be Romney’s running mate. He was then a national co-chairman of Romney’s campaign, and as he looked at the politics of the choice, he had concluded that, because he was a former governor like Romney and from a state that wasn’t likely to be a battleground, he wouldn’t ever be the choice. “I had kind of resolved with my wife, Mary, earlier that if I did get asked that we would respectfully decline,” he said. When Romney called, Pawlenty tried to put him off. “I said, ‘If you’re doing this as a friend to throw me a bone, you really don’t need to do this. I’ve been through this before.’ It’s an honor to be asked, but it comes with a fair amount of distraction because you have to fill out the paperwork and it becomes kind of a press deal. And I said . . . , ‘I don’t need the headache of the process if it’s just a bone.’” Romney was insistent. He assured Pawlenty that he would be under serious consideration. Pawlenty talked to his wife and to Myers, who outlined what kind of documents the campaign wanted him to submit. “I said, ‘Tell me a little bit about the process,’ and she said, ‘Like the McCain form, it’s exactly the McCain form,’” he recalled. “‘It’s the McCain form plus or minus two questions.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’” Four years earlier, as a sitting governor, Pawlenty and his wife had spent hours compiling everything for McCain’s vetting team. “We were buying three-ring binders and going to Kinko’s and copying tax returns and writing and word processing answers to questionnaires in our living room. I’ve got documents kind of spread around the living room trying to compile the years of the taxes and investment forms and other stuff and it was a ton of work.” While he was talking to Myers, a lightbulb went off in his head. He remembered that he still had a copy of everything he had submitted to McCain. “I still had the stuff on a disk and I had to go in and update from ’08 to ’12. Literally we put the whole thing together in a night, so part of the attraction of going forward with it was [that it was] easier than last time.”

Chris Christie didn’t expect a call either. “I think there’s certain personalities that would fit well as vice president, maybe others that would look [like] a little bit more of a tight fit,” he said, “and I think I’d be a little more of a tight fit.” When I asked him to explain what he meant by “tight fit,” he said, “I just think that my personality is kind of big and I don’t think that you necessarily
always want to pick big personalities for vice president. That can be problematic in the execution of the job if you win, less so in the campaign.” So when Romney called him he had the same response as Pawlenty. “I said, ‘If this is just like that the guy who endorses you earliest and you want me to be on the list because it would be nice for you to do for me, I get that,’ but I said, ‘I don’t see you picking me.’ So I said, ‘Why go through it?’ He goes, ‘No, no, no, that’s not it at all, I’m very serious about this and you will be very seriously considered.’”

Romney outlined the documents he would need from Christie, who said he would discuss it with his wife, Mary Pat. The next day Christie told Romney he would be honored to be on the list for consideration. By early June, he had submitted the paperwork—tax returns
*
and other personal material and a questionnaire that ran to about seventy-five questions. He recalled that the form included a series of questions about the candidates’ personal lives, including whether they had had an extramarital affair or whether someone could credibly claim they did. “Asked about stuff with your kids, any issues with your children, obviously criminal record, mental health issues, drinking history, drug history,” Christie said. “Their cutoff line on drugs was, ‘used any drugs anytime since you graduated from college.’ They didn’t ask you about college or before, but since you graduated from college have you used any illegal drugs, that kind of thing.” Romney’s team wanted every tweet or Facebook entry as well. “It was all intrusive stuff,” he said.

Rob Portman was at home on a weekend day when Romney called. Romney told Portman he was asking only a few people to go through the process. He said that having been through it himself he knew it wasn’t easy. It was as if he were saying he was sorry to have to put Portman through it. Portman too was reluctant to become a candidate, for family reasons. He wasn’t going to agree to go through the process unless his wife and children were all in. The family conversations included discussion of one potentially difficult issue. Portman’s son Will had told his parents earlier that he was gay. They knew that if Portman was selected, this would become public, but agreed that it should not be a barrier to Portman entering the vice presidential sweepstakes. As the family deliberated, Portman called Beth Myers to tell her about his son. Without checking with Romney, Myers offered an unequivocal response. That was not a problem and would have no bearing on Portman’s potential selection. Later Portman called Romney to say he would be happy to undergo the vetting process. Romney also assured him that he considered the fact that his son was gay a nonissue in the selection process.

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The vice presidential selection process is one of those irresistible stories for the media, a classic example in which hype, speculation, handicapping, and analysis quickly outrun any facts or real knowledge of the process. The Romney campaign, like others before it, was determined to ignore all this chatter. Its plan was not to respond to leaks or speculation, however accurate or off the mark. That was the plan, at least until June 19, when ABC News reported that Marco Rubio was not being vetted by the campaign. Rubio had seemed an obvious choice to be under consideration. He was a new and fresh face in the Republican Party, wildly popular with Tea Party activists, and a Cuban American who might help Romney solve some of his problems with Hispanic voters. When the news broke early that day, some other news organizations picked it up. It was a textbook case of how the media seize on a single piece of information to make it the only topic of conversation until something else happens along to crowd it out. On this day, there were few “confirmations” of the report but plenty of discussion about its implications. The Romney camp was caught totally unaware. At the time of the report, Rubio had already sent in his questionnaire to the campaign, Myers later said. Romney officials privately warned some reporters off the story but would not respond publicly. When it was clear something more definitive was needed, they sent Romney to snuff it out. “There was a story that originated today, apparently at ABC, based upon reports of supposedly outside unnamed advisers of mine,” he said while campaigning in Michigan. “I can’t imagine who such people are, but I can tell you this: They know nothing about the vice presidential selection or evaluation process. There are only two people in this country who know who are being vetted and who are not, and that’s Beth Myers and myself.” He called the story “entirely false” and added, “Marco Rubio is being thoroughly vetted as part of our process.” Romney had taken the drastic step of violating the campaign’s code of silence on the vice presidential search process, a sign of how sensitive the Latino issue was in the campaign and the regard with which the team held Rubio. “Everyone just felt this is silly,” Myers explained to me later. “It’s not helpful and it’s not true and let’s just clear this up.”

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On July 15, Chris Christie called a close friend. “You won’t believe the conversation I just had with Mitt Romney,” he said. Christie was in a car on his way back to New Jersey after attending the National Governors Association meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. Romney wanted to discuss a problem that imperiled Christie’s chances of being on the ticket. The problem involved an SEC ruling, known as the “pay to play” rule, an outgrowth of a previous regulation issued by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board. In essence, the rule
prohibited financial institutions—big banks and bond companies—whose employees contributed money to certain state and local elected officials from doing bond business in those states. The MSRB rule had been in place for years, with only minor effects on some previous candidates, but because all presidential nominees accepted federal funds for the general election until 2008, fund-raising for the fall campaign had never been affected, for either a presidential or vice presidential nominee. After the 2008 campaign, the Securities and Exchange Commission put through a more stringent rule that affected more financial institutions and prospective donors. Coincidentally, by 2012, no one was taking federal funds for either the primaries or the general election. The two changes made the rule come into play as never before.

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Earlier in the 2012 campaign, it turned into a major headache for Rick Perry. According to William Canfield, Perry’s campaign counsel, when Perry began trying to raise money in New York, lawyers for Goldman Sachs told the firm that none of its employees could donate to his campaign. Perry’s campaign hired former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt to examine the issue. Pitt said there was no way around it, and Perry’s campaign essentially wrote off any efforts to raise money from the financial community in New York, a potentially sizable source of funds for any candidate. Romney was not covered because he was a former governor, but his campaign team wrestled with its limitations whenever it wanted a sitting governor to sponsor a fund-raising event. As Perry learned, the lawyers for the bond houses were extremely conservative in their interpretation of the rule and told their employees not to risk the severe penalties for violations.