Double Down: Game Change 2012 (29 page)

Mountains ahead,

Best, Mitt

•   •   •

R
OMNEY WASN’T THE ONLY
one spooked by Perry’s ascent. The entire GOP establishment was in a tizzy, and nowhere was the alarm greater than in Bushworld, which had helped spawn the creature it now considered a sort of Frankenstein.

Perry had begun his political career as a Democrat, but in 1989 Rove persuaded him to switch parties and then ran his campaign for Texas agriculture commissioner. Eight years later, when Perry sought the lieutenant governorship, the Bush machine was behind him. Since Rove was working full-time for W. on his gubernatorial reelection and nascent presidential effort, he installed Carney as Perry’s lead strategist. But the consultants wound up clashing bitterly over tactics, with Rove at one point threatening to withhold use of an ad in which Bush 41 endorsed Perry. Carney capitulated and Perry eked out a win, but the too-close-for-comfort margin left a nasty aftertaste on both sides.

Feuding consultants are as commonplace in politics as camera hoggery, but in the years that followed, Perry personally escalated the noisomeness as he sought to distance himself from a patrician dynasty with which he felt scant kinship. In 2002 he opposed the appointment of Robert Gates, Bush père’s CIA director, as president of Texas A&M, annoying 41 and Barbara, and then publicly attacked their son. Campaigning for Giuliani in 2007, Perry volunteered that 43 “was never a fiscal conservative” in Texas—“I mean, ’95, ’97, ’99, George Bush was spending money.” Lashing back, Bush the Elder and his wife endorsed Hutchison in her primary challenge to Perry, as did several of their son’s lieutenants, including Rove, who had come to view his former protégé as an ungrateful clown.

As Perry stepped into the presidential race, Rove was ready to pounce at the first opportunity. In short order, out in Iowa, Perry provided two: an intemperate eruption regarding Fed chairman Ben Bernanke (“If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas”) and an unsubtle poke at Dubya’s privileged breeding (“I went to Texas A&M; he went to Yale”). The next day on Fox, Rove unloaded, calling Perry’s Bernanke comments “over-the-top” and “not presidential” and adding that
“this pattern of sounding like he’s being dismissive of the former president is not smart politics.”

Jeb Bush sought to squelch the story that his clan was at war with his brother’s successor. “I’ve never heard anybody in my family say anything but good things about Rick Perry,” he told Fox News, which suggested Jeb was either deaf or not listening carefully. Up in Kennebunkport, his mother was hyperventilating over Perry. His brother was steaming, too. At a dinner party in Washington, the forty-third president vented to a Romney ally. “You can’t take Perry seriously,” Bush said. “He’s a chickenshit guy.”

The Romneyites, like their boss, were taking Perry very seriously. Heading into Labor Day, he had established himself as the front-runner, seizing the lead in nine consecutive national polls, by as much as nineteen points. Scouring his Texas record, Romney’s researchers noted that Perry supported letting the children of undocumented immigrants pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges—a lethal position in GOP primaries around the country. But when Newhouse tested the issue in Iowa focus groups, the reaction was disturbing: Republican voters were so enamored of Perry that they refused to believe he could hold such a liberal position.

Amid the chorus of concern in Boston, Stevens was a lone dissenter. Though he’d been worried about Pawlenty, Perry looked like a paper tiger to him.
He’s a guy running against government who has been a government employee for most of his life,
Stevens thought. Perry grabbing credit for prosperity in his home state? What a joke. Texas was a business paradise long before Perry took office, and the unemployment rate was lower on the day he was sworn in than it was now. On social issues, Perry would be nailed from the right by Bachmann; on foreign policy, he was clueless.

And that was before Stevens had a chance to read
Fed Up!
Once he did, he changed his view of Perry from paper tiger to clay pigeon. The book’s assertion that Social Security was unconstitutional, the equivalent of a pyramid scheme, caught Stevens’s attention first. And the more he studied the text, the more wacky stuff he found. At headquarters, on plane rides, on the bus, with his colleagues and with Romney, Stevens obsessively whipped out his Kindle and read passages aloud. The guy wants to legalize
marijuana! he bayed. He thinks Obamacare is somehow connected to the
Dred Scott
decision!

Soon everyone in the Commercial Street headquarters was poring over the book. On the cover of his copy, Rhoades placed a yellow Post-it on which he’d scribbled an apostrophe so that the title read
F’d Up!

Romney found his staff’s preoccupation with
Effed Up,
as they referred to it in conversation, sort of funny. But he assumed that they were gilding the lily in describing some of Perry’s positions. “You’re just paraphrasing,” Romney would say. “Come on.” He was especially disbelieving that Perry’s views on Social Security were as out-there as Stevens claimed—until his strategist sat him down and made him watch a Perry TV appearance that proved the point.

But none of it really served to soothe Romney’s fears. When he heard about Perry’s Bernanke comments, he said, “I bet the base will love that.”

On September 6, in an effort to parry Perry on jobs, Romney unveiled in Nevada a tract of his own that was considerably more sober than
Fed Up!
: a 161-page “business plan for the American economy” containing fifty-nine discrete policy proposals. From there he flew on to California, where he would go toe-to-toe with Perry for the first time, at a debate at the Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley, not far from where Ann Romney engaged in one of her hobbies—dressage horseback riding.

The morning of the debate, the Romneys, Stevens, and a handful of other aides gathered for a final round of prep at a guesthouse on the stable grounds where Ann kept her horses. Rhoades and other staffers in Boston were piped in via speakerphone. Stevens was happy to be past what he dubbed the “snakes on a plane” free-for-all dynamic of the early debates, and confident to the point of cockiness about Mitt’s ability to win a “strength versus strength” showdown with Perry.

Romney remained unpacified, his innate political pessimism running rampant. He’s hitting me hard, he’s scoring points, Mitt said. We keep talking about the problems, about his weaknesses, but we never get specific about how I’m supposed to respond. I want model answers. We don’t have them. And the debate’s a few hours away.

Stevens could see that Perry was in Romney’s head, and tried to calm him down.

Don’t let him psych you out, Stevens said. You’re so much better than he is. You’re gonna kill him.

Don’t tell me that, Romney snapped. He’s a natural. He was great at the Iowa State Fair.

Give me a break, Stevens said, his voice rising. He’s an agriculture commissioner who went to an ag fair! He’s an accidental governor! Just go out there and be the hunter!

You keep telling me this race is all about jobs and the economy, Romney retorted. He’s got a great jobs record in Texas. He’s got a great narrative. Don’t underestimate him!

He’s the guy George Bush thinks is an idiot! Stevens said, now shouting.

Romney pushed back from the table and walked out of the room. Stuart was making him crazy; Romney needed to cool off. Rhoades dispatched an e-mail to Stevens: Did Mitt just leave? Did you really just yell at him? Is that what’s happening there?
What the fuck is going on?

Mitt’s just worried about Perry, Ann said, breaking an awkward silence in the room.

He’s gonna kill him, Stevens repeated. It won’t be close.

By the time the debate started, Romney had regained his composure. He slapped at Perry for being a career politician. Citing
Fed Up!,
he smacked him on Social Security. And, most aggressively, he sought to undermine him on jobs. “Texas has zero income tax,” Romney said. “Texas has a right-to-work state, a Republican legislature, a Republican supreme court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground. Those are wonderful things, but Governor Perry doesn’t believe that he created those things. If he tried to say that, well, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.”

Perry wasted no time in hitting back: “Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt.” But Romney was ready for him: “Well, as a matter of fact, George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did, Governor.”

Romney wasn’t alone in bashing away at Perry; by the middle of the debate, the newcomer had been socked so often by his rivals that he was moved to exclaim, “I kinda feel like the piñata here.” When one of the moderators asked about a fresh criticism from Rove, who had said that day on
Good Morning America
that Perry’s likening of Social Security to a Ponzi scheme
was “toxic,” Perry strayed far from any imaginable script and took a pop at his tormentor. “Karl has been over-the-top for a long time in some of his remarks,” Perry groused. “I’m not responsible for Karl anymore.”

The media verdict on the debate was that Perry had started out strong but sagged visibly partway through. Romney thought Perry had done okay, but just okay; the Texan could be had.

“See?” Stevens said. “The guy’s not in your league.”

But for Romney’s strategist, the memory that stuck from the evening wasn’t what took place on television. It was something Stevens said he’d witnessed on-site before the debate: Perry, clearly in pain, requiring help from two members of his security detail to get up a short flight of steps.

“There’s something wrong with him,” Stevens told Romney.

“What do you think?” asked Mitt.

“I don’t know,” Stevens said. “But I’m glad it’s not me.”

•   •   •

P
ERRY HEADED SOUTH
from Simi Valley to San Diego for a fund-raiser the next morning. Then back north to Newport Beach, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Palo Alto, and Fresno—for more fund-raisers. Chasing dollars was job one for Perry at this point. There wasn’t time for much else. He had to put a big third-quarter number on the board, and was well on his way to the $17 million he would report at the end of September. In addition, six pro-Perry super PACs had been formed, including one pledging to spend $55 million on his behalf. With cash pouring in and poll numbers aloft, a middling debate debut seemed survivable.

But out of public view, both Perry and Perryville were melting down. Ten days earlier, Perry had attended a closed-door meeting with many of the country’s most prominent evangelical leaders at a ranch in central Texas, where he was pointedly questioned about the persistent rumors that he was gay. “I can assure you that there is nothing that will embarrass you if you decide to support me,” Perry told them.

What Perry didn’t reveal was that his campaign had just received an e-mail filled with detailed and incendiary allegations from a Huffington Post reporter who had been pursuing the story doggedly all summer. Perry’s aides believed the charges were ridiculous but feared that their airing at the
moment the candidate was introducing himself to the country could be devastating. So Austin lawyered up, hiring the famed libel attorney Lin Wood to send a letter to HuffPo’s owner, AOL, threatening to sue if the story was published.

Perry was all for firing a loud shot across the website’s bow.
If you’re gonna try to destroy my reputation,
he thought,
you better be certain that you’ve got your information extremely correct.
Flagrant as the story was, his opponents were sure to flog the daylights out of the charges.
Last thing we need is two weeks of doing nothing but responding to a bunch of fabrications.

Just dealing with the HuffPo inquiries was a considerable distraction. Perry’s aides were engaged in a furious scramble—pulling schedules and personnel records, since some of the allegations involved interns—to prove a negative. The process consumed huge amounts of staff time and energy that otherwise would have been devoted to dealing with the real issues Perry faced, of which there were many.

The most serious was his health. Since Perry’s surgery, he had been in constant discomfort. A complication of his nerve decompression emerged almost immediately. First his right foot started tingling, then the tingle spread up his leg and the feeling changed to something more like burning. He was strapped in a brace to deal with lingering back pain. He was wearing orthopedic shoes. He couldn’t sit still or stand stationary for too long. Most debilitating, he was no longer able to go running, and that in turn was causing him to suffer from insomnia.

Perry had sleep issues going back to the early seventies; he found it hard to shut his mind down at night. In the eighties, he took up jogging to ease his stress—and once he started jogging, he started sleeping. The virtuous cycle had turned him into a fiend for roadwork. If there was one addiction Perry had in life, he often said, it was to his daily run.

Robbed of that capacity, Perry was now like any addict deprived of his fix: sleepless and strung out. To try to stop the burning in his foot and leg, he took Lyrica. It didn’t work. To try to shuttle himself into shut-eye, he tried warm baths. No luck there, either. On some nights, Perry’s slumber was fitful. On others, he didn’t sleep at all; he just lay there, staring at the ceiling.

Perry was well wired into his state’s medical community. At the
evangelical summit, a doctor friend of his from Tyler, Texas, slipped into his tent, examined him, and recommended that he visit a sleep lab.

The weekend after the Reagan Library debate, Perry checked himself in for a stay at a facility in Austin. The doctors strapped probes to him and monitored his behavior overnight. The result was a diagnosis of apnea—blockages of the upper airways that caused temporary lapses in breathing, robbing him of REM sleep. Perry doubted the diagnosis but assented to the prescription: a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, which involved placing a plastic mask over his mouth and nose at night. But that was a washout, too; Perry’s wakefulness continued. His campaign was less than a month old, and he was already comprehensively out of gas.