Double Down: Game Change 2012 (17 page)

“I don’t think I want to do this anyway,” Murphy replied. “But no, I couldn’t.”

For most politicians, such a blunt rejection would have been the end of the story. Not Romney. His feelings for Murphy, the man who’d engineered the one political victory of his life, were slightly fetishistic. Romney would continue to seek out Murphy’s counsel at critical junctures in the 2012 race,
almost always keeping the communications secret—specifically from his second choice as chief strategist, with whom he was now having lunch.

Stuart Phineas Stevens was a decade older than Murphy and even more colorful. Mississippi-born, educated at Colorado College, Middlebury, Oxford, and UCLA film school, he was an ad maker, travel writer (
Feeding Frenzy
), TV writer (
Northern Exposure),
film consultant (
The Ides of March)
, and extreme-sports fanatic who had skied to the North Pole, and ridden the Paris–Brest–Paris bicycle race while hopped up on steroids, chronicling his exploits for
Outside
magazine. Charming, flirty, and superficially laconic, yet capable of prickly combativeness, Stevens spoke in a lazy drawl that could devolve into a mumble or elevate to a wheeze. His political clients tended to be moderate Republicans such as Bob Dole and former Florida governor Charlie Crist, but there were notable exceptions: Stevens helped elect Bush 43 and prepared Dick Cheney for his 2004 vice-presidential debate with John Edwards.

Stevens, too, inspired animus in rival consultants, Murphy vehemently among them. (“It’s not that we don’t like each other,” Murphy told friends. “I just think he’s an idiot.”) The lineage of their feud had been lost in the mists of time. But it was fueled by the fact that, looks aside—with Stevens a ringer for Thomas Haden Church and Murphy resembling Philip Seymour Hoffman—they had much in common, from galaxy-size egos (about their writing, celebrity shoulder-rubbing, bon mots, ad making, and facility at fricasseeing opponents) to Hollywood connections, unconventional lifestyles, and a propensity to procure real estate the way normal people acquire shoes.

Stevens had been in the running for the Romney account in 2002 until Murphy beat him out. But in 2007, after a brief spell working for McCain, he and Schriefer were appended to the bloated Boston talent roster and were now at the core of Romneyland. Stevens worked closely with Mitt on
No Apology,
and while they sometimes seemed to hail from different planets, and possibly even different species, they somehow clicked. Both were hyper-literate book and film junkies, introspective, watchful—and not entirely obsessed with politics. Their relationship was something like the one between the patrician Bush 41 and his southern-fried savant, Lee Atwater: odd, affectionate, respectful, sustained by mutual curiosity.

Now, in November 2010 in Belmont, Romney was ready to take the next step to cement their bond. For ninety minutes, they ran through the putative 2012 game plan, with Stevens ticking off a series of homespun maxims that would be the first principles of a second Romney campaign.

To begin with, Stevens said, Romney was “gonna have to steal the nomination.” The Republican Party was increasingly a southern, populist, evangelical beast. Romney was northeastern, buttoned-down, and Mormon. Much of the base would see him as an establishment figure, even though the Beltway crowd, to which he had few ties, regarded him as an alien.

“The party will not drift to you,” Stevens continued. You’re going to have to win it over. And winning it over would be possible for one reason: the depth of the desire of Republican voters to oust Obama. If you can convince them you’re the guy who can beat him, you can win.

In order to do that, Stevens said, “we gotta dig the ditch we’re gonna die in.” In 2008, Romney had essentially conducted multiple campaigns, each with its own tactics, to convince every important Republican faction that he was the most conservative candidate in the field. In 2012, they would focus squarely and almost exclusively on the economy and jobs, articulating a forceful critique of Obama’s failed management and agenda—the same themes they would drive in the general election, assuming that they got there. You have to say, This is what I bring to the table; come eat at this table, Stevens argued.

Finally, Stevens said, “You have to be willing to lose to win, and you’re going to lose a lot”—a lot of votes, a lot of states. “No one gets elected president without being humiliated. How you deal with the humiliation is the key.”

Romney had never suffered public humiliation until the 2008 campaign. Enduring it then had been excruciating, but it had also hardened his shell—and that was only one of the ways in which having run last time would give him a leg up on any first-time candidates who challenged him this go-round. With the passage of time and plenty of postmorteming, he had come to understand the perils of chasing the news cycle and letting the freak show drag him down. And he had learned how damaging it could be to allow a negative meme to spread and fester, as it had with him on the question of flip-floppery.

He recognized that he was now in a straitjacket, with none of the latitude that other candidates had to shift or shade his positions. What he had said in 2008 and written in
No Apology
would be his gospel in 2012. The flip-flopper tattoo had left a scar; he did not intend to reopen the wound.

On all of these dimensions, Romney believed that having run once before equipped him to run better and smarter this time. But the question lingered: Did he really want to?

Over the Christmas holiday, the Romney family went on vacation on Maui. Four years earlier, when Mitt had polled his brood on whether he should run, the result was unanimously in favor. But now four of his sons were against the idea, with only Tagg voting aye. It’s grueling, hard on your health, the majority said. You’ve written your book, said what you need to say—move on. Romney didn’t disagree. “Why go through the process just to lose again?” he asked, only partly rhetorically.

There was, however, one other dissenter besides Mitt’s eldest boy. In the more than two years since she’d expressed adamant opposition to another run, Ann Romney had gradually but inexorably shifted her position. Watching the news, she had become more and more alarmed by Obama and the deteriorating state of the nation.

Ann asked her husband if he thought he could fix the mess. Mitt said that he did. So why wasn’t it obvious that he simply had to run? Why on earth was he dragging his feet?

Romney spent the next couple of weeks brooding some more about what to do. He’d answered Ann honestly: He believed that his background and skills placed him in a near-unique position to put America back on track. Just as important, he doubted that the other plausible entrants in the race could beat the incumbent.

Many insiders were high on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels.
Good record,
Romney thought, but Daniels lacked the requisite charisma. Others praised South Dakota senator John Thune. Romney had talked to him.
Terrific guy
. Didn’t have what it took to win. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was a favorite of the establishment, but his history as a lobbyist would make him toxic. Huckabee?
Good candidate,
Romney mused, but easily marginalized as a staunch evangelical. Tim Pawlenty?
Credible,
Romney
thought, but too weak on the fund-raising side. Then there was Jeb Bush, whom Romney saw as the real deal.
Burdened by his family’s name, but great record, great organization, great guy.
Romney talked to Jeb, too, however, and it seemed clear that the former Florida governor had no interest in running.

Romney understood his own limitations and vulnerabilities; he knew that capturing his party’s nomination would be an uphill slog. But the more he considered the situation, the more apparent it was to him that he was the only Republican thinking of jumping in who possessed a genuine chance of unseating Obama—the only one who could save the country. Although Romney had no inferno raging in his gut, he realized that his wife was right: he simply had to run.

In mid-January 2011, in their living room in La Jolla, Romney told Ann he had come around, then he conveyed the news to his team. Ann was thrilled. So was the Lexington crew.

Up in L.A., Murphy shook his head. For two years, Romney had basically been asking himself, Am I crazy enough to put myself through this, take on this horrible mission? The answer turned out to be no. And yet—out of a mixture of duty, ambition, and self-aggrandizement—he was doing it anyway. In a sense, it was admirable, Murphy thought. But it was also a recipe for trouble, especially in light of one bracing fact: much of the Republican Party believed that Romney didn’t stand a chance.

•   •   •

T
HE SOURCES OF THIS
skepticism were many, but none was greater than the millstone around Mitt’s neck known as Romneycare. In 2006, near the end of his gubernatorial tenure, Romney had enacted a sweeping reform of the Massachusetts health care system, the centerpiece of which was an individual mandate to buy insurance. The signing ceremony took place at Faneuil Hall and was elaborate and festive. “I want to express appreciation to Cecil B. DeMille for organizing this event,” Romney joked, and then, with Ted Kennedy hovering over him, he put fourteen pens to paper to turn the bill into law.

In 2008, Romneycare didn’t pose political difficulties for the candidate; quite the contrary. The individual mandate, with its roots at the Heritage
Foundation, was seen as a sound free-market idea for dealing with the problem of the uninsured driving up health care costs. Romney’s having passed it through a Democratic legislature was seen as a sign of his legislative moxie. South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, the farthest-right member of the Senate, singled out the achievement when he endorsed Romney for president. “He has demonstrated, when he stepped into government in a very difficult state, that he could work in a difficult partisan environment, take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured,” DeMint said.

But Obamacare changed everything, rendering the individual mandate anathema and turning Romneycare into an albatross. In 2009, as the health care debate erupted in Washington and around the country, Mitt’s earnest, bespectacled new pollster, Neil Newhouse, found that the Massachusetts law was the candidate’s gravest liability among Republican primary voters in New Hampshire. In South Carolina, it came in second, after Romney’s Mormonism.

The issue was equally noxious among Republican elites. All through 2010 and into 2011, Romney was pummeled with hostile health care questions by big-ticket donors—often waving copies of
The Wall Street Journal,
whose op-ed page was waging a serialized jihad against Romneycare. Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge-fund operator who was among the party’s most sought-after bundlers, refused to sign on with Romney largely over the issue. Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, was on Romney’s team but urged him repeatedly to repudiate the law and apologize for passing it. Karl Rove, with whom Romney had quietly nursed a phone and e-mail relationship, offered the same advice. You gotta disavow it, Rove told him. You gotta say, Look, we set out to do something, but it didn’t work the way I wanted.

Thus was Romney faced with his first test of the Stevens axiom that he had to be willing to lose to win. At a meeting at the PAC in early 2011, Romney asked Newhouse if it would be better for him politically to walk away from the law. The pollster chuckled. Would it be better to change to a position that 95 percent of the party agrees with? he said. You’re asking me this? Um, yes, it’d be better.

“Do you think it’ll cost me the nomination if I don’t switch?” Romney asked Stevens.

“I have no idea,” Stevens replied. “Possibly.”

But Romney was not going to back away from Romneycare. He still believed what he’d said when he signed the bill at Faneuil Hall: that it was “a Republican way of reforming the market,” that “having thirty million people in this country without health insurance and having those people show up when they get sick, and expect someone else to pay, that’s a Democratic approach.” Romney had a wonky knowledge of health care policy. He thought the law worked in Massachusetts and that voters there were happy with it.

There was, however, another impetus for Romney’s resoluteness. Switching his position on health care would be the flip-flop to end all flip-flops—and he would be rightly slaughtered for it. I am not going to let that happen, he said. I’m not going to backtrack one inch.

Romney’s unwillingness to capitulate heartened Stevens and the rest of his outfit, but the political quandary remained. In Lexington that spring, his team deliberated endlessly over how Mitt could stand his ground without alienating the Republican base. With the help of Newhouse’s focus groups, the Romneyites settled on a three-part strategy: stress that the Massachusetts plan was a state-level solution, not a federal takeover; point out that Romney’s plan didn’t raise taxes or increase the debt, unlike the president’s; and pledge up and down that, if elected, the first thing Romney would do in office was repeal Obamacare.

No one was certain it would work. On the table was a proposal for him to make a major health care speech before he formally entered the race. Some of Romney’s advisers were nervous about calling attention to the issue, but the candidate was gung ho. Romney had written a book called
No Apology,
and he wanted to let the world know he wouldn’t be apologizing for a policy he was proud of.

Yet Romney’s swagger went only so far. When the paperback version of his book hit shelves that February, observers noted that one line from the hardback, about the success of Romneycare, had been expunged: the author’s hopeful boast that “we can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country.”

•   •   •

T
HE APARTMENT IN BOSTON’S
Back Bay belonged to Ron Kaufman, the longtime lobbyist who served as Romney’s unofficial ambassador to the Beltway political class. Kaufman split his time between Washington and Boston. He had purchased this pad on Beacon Street years earlier from an aging Irish lady, in as-is condition—and left it that way. There were chintz-covered couches, plaid lampshades, floral wallpaper, a gaudy chandelier; the bookcases were still stocked with the biddy’s books. The only personal touches were some pictures of Kaufman from his time in the Bush 41 White House, along with a bust of Winston Churchill on a marble pedestal.