Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (6 page)

By the end of his term as governor, Romney’s approval ratings had fallen sharply into negative territory. He chose not to run for reelection, a race he likely would have lost. Instead he ran for president. The once moderate Romney perceived a vacuum on the right in a race where the two best-known candidates—John McCain and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani—were at odds with the party’s conservative base. Romney tried to fill the space by emphasizing social issues rather than running on his strengths as a businessman and problem solver. In late 2006, as the race was just beginning, McCain’s campaign pointed reporters to the tapes of the Kennedy-Romney debates and to other Romney statements from his first campaign. The flip-flop label stuck to him then and stayed with him throughout the campaign. He had some early successes in 2007—he won the Iowa Straw Poll in August of that year—but lost the Iowa caucuses to Mike Huckabee and the New Hampshire primary to McCain.

By February 2008 he was out of the race—a candidate who not only had proved to be an underachiever but whose political identity remained in question. Romney’s response was to start working on a book in the late spring of 2008, a project he hoped would allow him to express his political philosophy and policy ideas more clearly than he had as a candidate. By the time Obama was getting ready to take the oath of office, Romney had retreated to the sidelines. He and Ann Romney, who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, were at their home in La Jolla. “He was out in California, Ann was undergoing these treatments [for breast cancer], and he was working on his book,” said Beth Myers, his gubernatorial chief of staff and 2008 campaign manager. “That’s where his head was. He was listening to the waves at night. We were certainly not on the phone saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get you to New Hampshire four times.’”

•   •   •

How these two politicians, so different in so many ways, dealt with the challenges of defining or redefining themselves and reconnecting with the voters helped to decide the outcome of the 2012 election. But as the campaign cycle began, that general election contest was still far in the future. It may have been predictable, as Axelrod said, that Obama and Romney would face each other, but before they could do that, they had other battles to fight and win.

Under Siege

B
arack Obama’s road to reelection began inauspiciously. Just after 1 p.m. on November 3, 2010, the president stood impassively in the White House East Room. The day before, his party had absorbed the worst midterm election defeat in more than half a century. Democrats lost sixty-three seats in the House, the biggest midterm loss by a party since 1938. They lost six seats in the Senate—a number that easily could have been worse were it not for the deeply flawed GOP candidacies of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell (the wackiest of all the candidates, who ran an ad declaring she was not a witch), Nevada’s Sharron Angle, and Colorado’s Ken Buck. All three were products of the Tea Party movement that had shaken up the Republican Party before concentrating its anger on the president and his Democratic majorities in Congress. In the states, the wreckage was even greater as the conservative tidal wave swept aside years of Democratic advances. Republicans captured a majority of the governorships, and Democrats were lucky not to have lost more. Republicans picked up nearly seven hundred state legislative seats and now controlled legislatures in twenty-six states. In twenty-one states, Republicans held both the governor’s mansion and the legislature. The reflexive rejection of Obama and his party was so powerful that in the days after, Democrats privately lamented that it could take a decade to recover in some states.

Obama met the press that afternoon for a familiar post-election ritual. In these circumstances, the embattled leader is expected to show humility and contrition, all to demonstrate that he has gotten the message of the voters. Other recent presidents had been there. Ronald Reagan had seen his party stumble in 1982 during the deep recession of that decade. Bill Clinton saw Democrats lose control of Congress in 1994 after forty years in power in the House. What Obama had experienced was as bad as that, if not worse. Two years after his historic victory he was asked to explain a historic defeat. He repeated shopworn lines from his campaign appearances that fall, while showing little emotion. He blamed the economy, not himself or his policies, for the public’s frustrations. He had some grounds to do so. The unemployment rate
stood at 9.6 percent, more than a point and a half higher than his economic advisers unadvisedly had said would be the ceiling if Congress enacted the president’s $800 billion stimulus package in the spring of 2009. Whatever Obama had promised for restoring the economy had not come to pass. In all other ways, Obama resisted interpretations that suggested shortcomings on his part. Not the big health care initiative that had divided the country. Not the government spending that so many independents objected to. Not the distance that now existed between the country and a young leader whom so many Americans had embraced with such passion just two years earlier.

Only in the final moments did the stoic façade begin to crack. “I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night,” he said to laughter from reporters. “I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons.” Finally TV had its sound bite and the press its headline. He called the election part of a process of growth and evolution. “The relationship that I’ve had with the American people is one that built slowly, peaked at this incredible high, and then during the course of the last two years, as we’ve together gone through some very difficult times, has gotten rockier and tougher. And it’s going to, I’m sure, have some more ups and downs during the course of me being in this office.”

Two days after the election, he taped an interview for CBS’s
60 Minutes
. Correspondent Steve Kroft pressed him repeatedly to explain the midterm results. “I think that there are times where we said, ‘Let’s just get it done,’ instead of worrying about how we’re getting it done. And I think that’s a problem,” he said. Later he explained, “In terms of setting the tone and how this town operates, we just didn’t pay enough attention to some of the things that we had talked about. And, you know, I’m paying a political price for that.” For supporters, Obama’s performances were dismaying. “You can’t govern if you can’t tell the country where you are taking it,” Frank Rich, once one of the president’s most ardent advocates, wrote in the
New York Times
. “If he has such a plan, few, if any, Americans have any idea what it is.”

•   •   •

Obama immediately set about to rebalance his presidency and his White House. Over a period of weeks, he invited a series of outsiders into the Oval Office for private conversations. After a few official photographs, it was just the president and his invited guest. No staff members were included; often they didn’t know who was on his schedule. Obama sometimes brought a pad of paper and took careful notes in his precise handwriting. To at least one visitor he looked older—his hair was noticeably grayer than during the campaign—and thinner. Obama was drinking milkshakes to keep his weight up, one visitor said he was told. In these conversations, his visitors did not find Obama defensive.
“Friendly, not downbeat,” said one. “Probing.” But he was clearly concerned about his presidency and his White House. One visitor said, “He knew things were off the rails.”

The group that came to see the president included Washington veterans of both parties. One was Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and an early Obama supporter whose former staffers now played key roles in Obama’s White House. Another was Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director, who later became defense secretary. Panetta’s résumé included being Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and budget director, and before that a respected House member. A third was David Gergen, who had advised presidents of both parties and was now stationed at Harvard, from where he dispensed political insights for CNN. The group also included John Podesta, another Clinton White House chief of staff; Kenneth Duberstein, who had served as Ronald Reagan’s last chief of staff; Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman and a Harvard Law School classmate of the president’s; and Matthew Dowd, a former senior political adviser to George W. Bush who later broke with Bush over Iraq.

Obama’s visitors offered constructive criticism about how he had handled himself during his first two years. “I remember telling him I thought he had lost his narrative,” one of the visitors recalled. “I didn’t think that he knew what his presidency was really about and that—and everybody told him this—he wasn’t nearly as inclusive as he needed to be in terms of even his own staff, cabinet, and supporters.” This person told Obama, “I bet if I go down the street and talk to ten people about what your presidency is about I’ll get probably ten different answers.” Another visitor said, “I think he clearly got that his presidency had been defined by the worst of the congressional skirmishes . . . , that he was like the chief butcher in the sausage factory and that’s all [people] knew about him.”

Obama may not have been defensive, but he was not passive in these conversations or reticent to challenge his visitors. He knew which of his guests had been critical of his presidency or his leadership and made a point to let them know that he knew. He wondered aloud about whether other leaders had found moments of doubt when they had run into problems, implying that he had gone through those moments himself—an unusual admission from a politician who exuded a self-confidence that his opponents regarded as arrogance. But those who saw him in those days said he was not like Bill Clinton had been after his political battering in 1994. “Bill Clinton took it a lot more personally and Obama is much more philosophic, more detached, more willing to let it roll off,” said one person who saw him.

Obama heard other criticism from his visitors. “I think the way I put it was
the business community hates you,” one said. “There was no mincing about that.” Another guest said, “I told him there are cabinet members who told me that they hadn’t talked to him personally in over six months and they felt excluded, they felt unused, they felt locked out in ways publicly that were very harmful to him in his effort to try to do something.” Others told him he needed to improve relationships on Capitol Hill and that there was no one in the White House, including himself, who had shown any capacity or willingness to build bridges to those who might be on the other side. “You reach out only when you need something, not to build a relationship for relationship’s sake,” one person recalled telling the president. Obama acknowledged that the two sides “were just shouting at one another,” but seemed reluctant to try to develop those relationships. When he was urged at several different points to reach out more directly and more personally in informal settings to incoming House Speaker John Boehner or to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, he almost blanched at the thought.

His visitors also reminded Obama that he had failed to change the culture of politics in Washington. “I said, ‘This is not to relitigate, but if your goal was to bring the country together, you haven’t fixed the means of governing, you’ve concentrated on the ends of governing,’” one person said. This person told Obama that the reason he had gotten so little political benefit from passing health care was that it was done in such a polarizing way. Obama responded that the White House had a communications problem. “I said, no, it wasn’t really a communications problem. If you really want to fix this problem directly you’ve got to fix the problems of governing.” This visitor had seen other White Houses. “It’s hard not to get bubbled in in this office,” he told the president. “You have to reach out. If you depend on the staff it will never happen.” Obama said that’s what he was doing by setting up these meetings.

•   •   •

Those private conversations were only part of the reorientation of Obama’s presidency as he prepared for coming battles with congressional Republicans and began setting up the machinery for his reelection campaign. He focused his immediate attention on a lame-duck session of Congress, which included a long list of pressing business: what to do about expiring Bush era tax cuts, an arms treaty with the Russians that needed to be ratified, an unfulfilled promise to repeal the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on gays in the military. In a flurry of activity, he accomplished almost everything on his list. With Vice President Biden’s help, he brokered a tax deal with Republicans. Congressional Democrats hated it. They thought he had caved on key features of the agreement. But Bill Clinton made the case that those Democrats were wrong and the president was right. When Obama signed the legislation,
then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid didn’t show up, but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had said defeating Obama in 2012 was the Republicans’ highest priority, did. Repealing the Pentagon’s ban on gays threatened the arms treaty ratification, but Obama got both through. When he signed the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” at an emotional ceremony at the Department of the Interior, the audience chanted, “Yes we did! Yes we did!” Someone yelled out, “You rock, Mr. President.” Joe Solmonese, then the executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, was backstage with the president. Obama gave Solmonese a hug and said to him, “You really got beaten up over this.” Solmonese replied, “So did you.” “Yeah,” the president said, “but I get beaten up every day.”

When Obama departed for Hawaii, where he would join his family for two weeks of Christmas vacation, one member of the traveling party said he was “as happy as I’ve ever seen him.” In Hawaii, he lingered. No world events interrupted his time away. No terrorist put explosives in his underwear and tried to blow up an airplane, as had happened the year before. No natural disasters hit the continent. Obama was free to enjoy his family and friends on the islands where he grew up. As the date of his departure neared, he extended his stay another day. Whatever success he had wrung out of the lame-duck session, Obama knew the coming year would be far more challenging. “He knew he was stepping back into a new world,” one adviser said.

•   •   •

Among those who traveled with the presidential party to Hawaii was Jim Messina, who was preparing to leave the White House to become campaign manager for Obama’s reelection committee. Messina was tall, rangy, and intense. “My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” he said. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore. [The Republicans] may have a plan to beat my guy. My job is to punch them in the face.” Before joining the Obama team, Messina had worked for Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus was like a father to him. In the summer of 2008, when Plouffe was on the verge of leaving the Obama campaign because he was burned out, Messina was recruited to shoulder many of the day-to-day responsibilities of running the campaign. After the election, he was named White House deputy chief of staff and troubleshooter and was almost immediately slotted to become campaign manager for the reelection effort. In one of his early conversations with the president, Messina asked for a pledge that they not rerun the 2008 campaign. Obama looked puzzled. “You know we won that one,” he deadpanned. Messina explained that in their bids for reelection, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush had both tried to rerun their first campaigns. Clinton
and George W. Bush threw the rulebook out and ran a different race. Obama accepted what Messina said but reiterated his insistence that he wanted to run a grassroots-based campaign for a second time. He did not want to lose that connection.

In Hawaii, Messina began to devour everything he could about past campaigns, reading books and other materials. His Christmas reading list included Karl Rove’s
Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight
. He made sticky notes as he read and pasted them around the room. This is looking like a scene from Russell Crowe in the movie
A Beautiful Mind,
he thought. To make other notes, he used a whiteboard and a roll of butcher paper. “I went all the way back to the Johnson [campaign in 1964] and just kind of tried to find advice.” The two most relevant campaigns were Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 2004, but of the two, 2004 offered the most compelling lessons and parallels. Messina was not alone in that conclusion. “The brilliance of the George Bush campaign in 2004 was they thought they were going to run on the strength of a triumphant war,” David Axelrod said. “The war turned sour, everybody hated the war. They rotated the message and the message became, ‘Here’s a guy who had the courage to do an unpopular thing because he knew it was in the interests of the country.’ And they turned it into a character point and against Kerry it was particularly effective.”