Double Down: Game Change 2012 (2 page)

The faith of the president’s people that he would do the same at Hofstra was what sustained them in the wake of Denver. For a year, the Obamans had fretted over everything under the sun: gas prices, unemployment, the European financial crisis, Iran, the Koch brothers, the lack of enthusiasm from the Democratic base, Hispanic turnout in the Orlando metroplex. The one thing they had never worried about was Barack Obama.

But given the spectacle they had just witnessed at Kingsmill, the Obamans were more than worried. After spending ten days pooh-poohing the widespread hysteria in their party about Denver, Obama’s debate team was now the most wigged-out collection of Democrats in the country, huddling in a hotel cubby that had become their secret panic room. Three hours had passed since the mock ended; it was almost 2:00 a.m. Obama’s team was still clustered in the work space, reading transcripts and waxing apocalyptic.

“Guys, what are we going to do?” Plouffe asked quietly, over and over. “That was a disaster.”

Among the Obamans, there was nobody more unflappable than Plouffe—and nobody less shaken by Denver. The campaign’s research showed that
there was a deep well of sympathy for Obama among voters; in focus groups after the first debate, people offered excuse after excuse for his horrific presentation. In Florida, one woman said, almost protectively, “I just bet you he wasn’t feeling well.”

But what the research also told Plouffe was that Obama was “on probation” after Denver. The public might brush off a single bad debate showing; two in a row would not be so readily ignored. With Hofstra less than forty-eight hours away, the Obamans essentially had a day to diagnose the malady afflicting their boss—the sudden sickness that had robbed their great communicator of his ability to communicate under pressure—and find a remedy. What was wrong? What
would
they do? No one had a clue.

All Plouffe knew was that, if Obama turned in a performance at Hofstra like the one they had seen that night, the consequences could be dire.

“If we don’t fix this,” Plouffe said emphatically, “we could lose the whole fucking election.”

•   •   •

T
HE MOST HELLISH DAYS
of 2012 for Obama were heaven on earth for Mitt Romney. Before his turn on the debate stage in Denver, Romney had never achieved a moment in the campaign that was politically triumphal and, to his mind, revealing of who he was. His performance as a candidate was unartful, and in exactly the ways that both the Obamans and the GOP establishment had predicted at the start of the race. His greatest credential for the Oval Office—his enormous success in the private sector—was savagely turned against him. His public image from his first national run, in 2008, had been that of a flip-flopping Mormon; in 2012, he was rendered a hybrid of Gordon Gekko and Mr. Magoo. But at that first debate, the Romney in whom his advisers, friends, family, and supporters believed made a powerful appearance: a good and decent man with a formidable intellect, economic expertise, problem-solving know-how, and patriotic zeal. In an instant, the former Massachusetts governor looked like a plausible president. It was a conquest that propelled Romney toward the finish line with new fervor, and one he would savor long after the votes were counted.

With the benefit of hindsight, innumerable analysts would declare that the result of the election was foreordained: that Obama always had it in the
bag. But the president and his people spent all of 2011 and most of 2012 believing nothing of the sort. The economic headwinds that Obama faced were ferocious and unrelenting. His approval ratings during his first term rarely edged above 50 percent. The opposition inspired by his presidency was intense and at times rabid, from the populist ire of the Tea Party to the legislative recalcitrance of the congressional wing of the GOP to the wailing and gnashing of the anti-Obama caucus in the business world and on Wall Street especially. The country was split almost cleanly down the middle, and more polarized than ever.

The two sides had few beliefs in common, but one of them was this: the outcome of the election mattered, and not a little. The ideological contrast between the parties had rarely been starker. In terms of specific policies, the size and role of government and the fundamental priorities of the nation, the practical implications of which man won were vast.

With so much at stake, the 2012 election had the feel of a big casino, as the players took on the complexion of compulsive gamblers, pushing more and more chips into the center of the table. On the right, a phalanx of millionaires and billionaires doubled down on Romney even after his flaws were all too clear, pouring gargantuan sums into his campaign and conservative super PACs. The Republican nominee, in turn, not only doubled down on the orthodoxies of the right but on his own controversial statements and positions. On the left, the Obamans were engaged in their own doubling down: on the coalition that had elected their man in 2008; on their pioneering use of new technology; on their grassroots get-out-the-vote machine. But no doubt the biggest wager they placed was on Obama.

On that mid-October night in Williamsburg, with the election three weeks away, it remained unclear who would leave the casino flush and who would exit with picked-clean pockets. In the end, the answer would lie in the hands of the president of the United States—who, at that hour, far from the cameras, was more imperiled than anyone imagined, his greatest gift having deserted him at the worst possible time. After four years of economic hardship, nagging uncertainty, and disappointment that change had come so slowly when it came at all, Obama would have to rise to a different kind of challenge—a challenge from within himself—before the country would double down on him.

PART ONE

1

MISSIONS ACCOMPLISHED

B
ARACK OBAMA WAS BACK
in Chicago and back on the campaign trail, two realms from which he had been absent for a while but which always felt like home. It was April 14, 2011, and Obama had returned to the Windy City to launch his reelection effort with a trio of fund-raisers. Ten days earlier, his people had filed the papers making his candidacy official and opened up the campaign headquarters there. Five hundred and seventy-two days later, the voters would render their judgment. To Obama, Election Day seemed eons away—and just around the corner.

Working his way from two small events for high-dollar donors at fancy restaurants to a crowd of two thousand at Navy Pier, the incumbent served up the old Obama fire. He invoked the memory of the last election night in Grant Park, “the excitement in the streets, the sense of hope, the sense of possibility.” He touted his achievements as “the change we still believe in.” He ended the evening with a “Yes, we can!”

But again and again, Obama cited the burdens of his station. Although he’d always known that as president his plate would be full, the fullness was staggering—from the economic crisis to the swine flu pandemic, the BP oil spill, and the hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates. (“Who thought we were going to have to deal with pirates?”) He acknowledged
the frustrations of many Democrats at the fitfulness of the progress he’d brought about, the compromises with Republicans. He apologized for the fact that his head wasn’t fully in the reelection game. “Over the next three months, six months, nine months, I’m going to be a little preoccupied,” Obama said. “I’ve got this day job that I’ve got to handle.”

The president’s preoccupations at that moment were many and varied, trivial and profound. In public, he was battling with the GOP over the budget and preparing for a face-off over the federal debt ceiling. In secret, he was deliberating over an overseas special-ops raid aimed at a shadowy target who possibly, maybe, hopefully was Osama bin Laden. But the most persistent distraction Obama was facing was personified by Donald Trump, the real estate billionaire and reality show ringmaster who was flirting with making a presidential run under the banner of birtherism—the crackpot conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya and thus was constitutionally ineligible to preside as commander in chief.

Obama had contended with birtherism since the previous campaign, when rumors surfaced that there was no record of his birth in Hawaii. The fringe theorists had grown distractingly shrill and increasingly insistent; after he won the nomination in June 2008, his team deemed it necessary to post his short-form birth certificate on the Web. The charge was lunacy, Obama thought. Simply mental. But it wouldn’t go away. A recent
New York Times
poll had found that 45 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of voters overall believed he was foreign born. And with Trump serving as a human bullhorn, the faux controversy had escaped the confines of Fox News and conservative talk radio, reverberating in the mainstream media. Just that morning, before Obama departed for Chicago, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos had asked him about it in an interview, specifically citing Trump—twice.

As Obama made his fund-raising rounds that night, he avoided mentioning Trump, yet the issue remained much on his mind. What confounded him about the problem, beyond its absurdity, was that there was no ready solution. Although Trump was braying for his original long-form birth certificate, officials in Obama’s home state were legally prohibited from releasing it on their own, and the president had no earthly idea where his family’s copy was. All he could do was joke about the topic, as he did at his final
event of the night: “I grew up here in Chicago,” Obama told the crowd at Navy Pier, then added awkwardly, “I wasn’t born here—just want to be clear. I was born in Hawaii.”

Obama was looking forward to spending the night at his house in Kenwood, on the city’s South Side—the redbrick Georgian Revival pile that he and Michelle and their daughters left behind when they took up residence in the White House. He arrived fairly late, after 10:00 p.m., but then stayed up even later, intrigued by some old boxes that had belonged to his late mother, Ann Dunham.

Dunham had died seven years earlier, but Obama hadn’t sorted through all her things. Now, alone in his old house for just the third night since he’d become president, he started rummaging through the boxes, digging, digging, until suddenly he found it: a small, four-paneled paper booklet the world had never seen before. On the front was an ink drawing of Kapi‘olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, in Honolulu. On the back was a picture of a Hawaiian queen. On one inside page were his name, his mother’s name, and his date of birth; on the other were his infant footprints.

The next morning, Marty Nesbitt came over to have breakfast with Obama. The CEO of an airport parking-lot company, Nesbitt was part of a tiny circle of Chicago friends on whom the president relied to keep him anchored in a reality outside the Washington funhouse. The two men had bonded playing pickup basketball two decades earlier; their relationship was still firmly rooted in sports, talking smack, and all around regular-guy-ness. After chatting for a while at the kitchen table, Obama went upstairs and came back down, wearing a cat-who-ate-a-whole-flock-of-canaries grin, waving the booklet in the air, and then placing it in front of Nesbitt.

“Now, that’s some funny shit,” Nesbitt said, and burst out laughing.

Clambering into his heavily armored SUV, Obama headed back north to the InterContinental hotel, where he had an interview scheduled with the Associated Press. He pulled aside his senior adviser David Plouffe and press secretary Jay Carney, and eagerly showed them his discovery.

Plouffe studied the thing, befuddled and wary:
Is that the birth certificate?
he thought.

Carney was bewildered, too, but excited:
This is the birth certificate?
Awesome.

Obama didn’t know what to think, but he flew back to Washington hoping that maybe, just maybe, he now had a stake to drive through the heart of birtherism, killing it once and for all—and slaying Trump in the bargain. Striding into a meeting with his senior advisers in the Oval Office the next Monday morning, he reached into his suit pocket and whipped out the booklet, infinitely pleased with himself.