Double Down: Game Change 2012 (44 page)

Stevens and Hayes, working in shifts, pulled an all-night revision session. When Mitt showed up at the hotel where CPAC was being held, Stevens was still editing the speech. Romney had just one chance to practice it on the prompter, and even then, his people were still tweaking it as he did so.

To Romney, the point of the address was to explain that, while he wasn’t a classic movement conservative, he had come to the creed through experience and now embraced it deeply. And for the first few minutes, he was cruising. “Not everyone has taken the same path to get here,” he told the audience of activists. “My guess is some of you got here by reading Burke and Hayek. When I was your age, you could’ve told me that they were infielders for the Detroit Tigers.”

But when Romney pivoted to defending his record in Massachusetts, his delivery seemed a mite awkward—in the manner of a speaker not
completely comfortable or familiar with his text. “I fought against long odds in a deep-blue state,” he said. “But I was a
severely
conservative Republican governor.”

“Severely” was nowhere in Romney’s script. The moment the modifier escaped his lips, Flaherty and Chen, seated in the front row, turned and gaped at each other, silently mouthing the offending word at the same time. Flaherty was Mitt’s designated liaison to the right. He found the adjective superfluous and odd, and knew others would, too.
It’s like in
A Few Good Men,
when Demi Moore gets up and says, “I strenuously object!”
he thought.
You either object or you don’t object—there are no gradations.

Romney fed himself happy talk about his performance.
Five standing ovations
,
glowing media reports—the speech was a hit,
Mitt thought. “Severely conservative” didn’t trouble him too much.
I meant “severely” in the sense of “strictly.” What a silly kerfuffle.

The Obamans were certainly pleased to be provided with video of Romney touting the severity of his right-wingery. But Flaherty was correct that the reaction among conservatives would be equally strong. Among establishmentarians such as Rove, Romney’s employment of the qualifier was a sign of his lack of confidence in his connection to the animating spirit of the party. To fire-breathers such as Limbaugh, it was an occasion for more mockery. “I may be a little giddy here,” Rush chortled on his show that day. “I have never heard anybody say, ‘I am
severely
conservative.’ No, I’ve
never
heard anybody
say
it!”

Frazzled, fried, and missing his wife, Romney wanted a respite—a weekend jaunt to La Jolla to see Ann and collect himself. It had been a month since he’d spent a night in any of his homes. But the next day in Maine, there were caucuses happening, and Romney decided he couldn’t afford a fourth straight loss in one week. From CPAC, he flew up to Portland for a hastily arranged town hall meeting that night and visits to a pair of caucus sites on Saturday. His plan was to bug out to California from there—but that itinerary was thwarted by an emergency strategy meeting called by Rhoades for Sunday in Boston.

Romney and his inner circle gathered in the third-floor conference room on Commercial Street at noon. Their mood was by turns dispirited, clear-eyed, and suffused with a sense of urgency. On the back of his trifecta,
Santorum had seized the momentum in the race; in the first national poll taken since his wins, he had jumped to an eye-popping fifteen-point lead. As the sole survivor, Santorum was now in a position to consolidate the large bloc of anti-Romney GOP voters behind him. Rhoades was adamant that if Santorum caught fire, he could be the nominee. Everyone agreed that the fuse had been lit—and they had to douse it immediately.

The next two contests were primaries in Michigan and Arizona on February 28, two weeks away. While the latter was safe territory for Romney, the former was not. Before the trifecta, Newhouse’s polls had him up by ten points in the Wolverine State. But that lead had already evaporated, as Santo stormed ahead. Given Mitt’s historical Michigan ties, the expectations of his winning there would be sky-high—and the reaction if he lost all the more debilitating.

Romney was under no illusions about his status in the state. Sure, he was the scion of George Romney. Sure, he was a Michigan native. Sure, he had won the primary there in 2008. On the other hand, Mitt hadn’t lived in Michigan in forty years. He had been the governor of another state. Almost all of the voters who had supported his father were now dead. Then there was “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” which had already been a problem with Motor City donors and over which he suspected he would take major flak in the primary. The state’s Republican electorate had swung hard to the right; the Tea Party was ascendant. Though Mitt wasn’t pleased to be running behind Santo, he wasn’t shocked, either.

None of which made the prospect of losing Michigan any less daunting to him, or the scale of the challenges he faced any less dismaying. Before the meeting, he had raised with Stevens the possibility of skipping Michigan. “Is this winnable?” Mitt asked. “Because if it’s not, we shouldn’t go in there and spend millions of dollars just to lose.”

Team Romney was certain that Michigan was winnable, and over the next several hours they laid out a plan to win it. Deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage, who was also a native of the state, proposed that they treat the two weeks before the primary as if it were a gubernatorial race—reminding Michiganders of Mitt and Ann’s roots there, keeping them both stumping hard on the ground as much as humanly possible. As for dealing with Santorum, his years in Washington and his record on matters ranging
from earmarks to spending presented plenty of juicy targets. Just as they had strafed Gingrich in Florida, they would carpet-bomb Santorum in Michigan.

Romney headed to the airport, where he hopped a small private jet with his Secret Service detail for La Jolla. Flying private was less an indulgence than an indignity. With the cost of the nomination fight now stretching the campaign’s finances thin, he had decided to pay for his flight home out of his pocket, leaving his staff and the media behind.

He was resolved to do what was necessary to halt the Santo surge.
If I lose Michigan, I’ll lose Ohio,
he thought.
If I lose Michigan and Ohio, I’ll lose Illinois and Wisconsin. Then it’s game over.

Romney took a dim view of Santorum.
He’s sanctimonious, severe, and strange,
Mitt thought. But he believed that Santorum was now as likely to be the nominee as he was. Between the trifecta, the contraception issue coming to the fore, and Mitt’s vulnerability on health care, Santo was positioned to seize the momentum and send Romney packing.
At least it’s not Newt,
Romney thought, recalling with a chuckle a recent line by Dick Armey, who said that Gingrich’s “second-rate campaign has become a first-rate vendetta.”

On the flight to California, Romney thought about what losing to Santo would mean.
La Jolla, family, and horses for Ann—not a bad outcome. I’m resigned to whatever happens. I know it’ll be hard to get up for campaigning if I’m behind in the polls and my prospects don’t look great, but I’ll follow the course wherever it leads. And I won’t stay in the race beyond the point of being able to win. If we can’t reasonably get there, I’ll exit the race to give Rick the best chance of beating Barack.

For many in the Republican establishment, the specter of a Santorum coronation was too horrid to contemplate. But watching a flawed and faltering Romney struggle to put away the nomination was enflaming fears that his elevation might prove nearly as awful. In the wake of the trifecta, the salons of the Beltway’s right-leaning potentates and pundits were abuzz with speculation about an alternative scenario. About the possibility of a white-knight candidate galloping onto the nominating field for a handful of contests late in the spring. About the desirability of a brokered convention that summer.

Mitt had heard the mutterings and dismissed them out of hand.
This talk of a brokered convention is nuts,
he thought—and maybe it was. But it was also getting louder and emanating from some serious sets of lips.

•   •   •

H
ALEY BARBOUR PICKED UP
the phone and called Scott Reed to bewail the state of the race. That Romney was proving an inept candidate—incapable of connecting with voters, inspiring conservatives, or restraining himself from planting his penny loafers in his piehole—was no surprise. What troubled them more was that Mitt was winning only by burying his rivals in an avalanche of money and manure. On his present course, Romney seemed destined to implode or emerge from the nomination fight so grievously injured that he would be easy pickings for Obama.

Barbour and Reed started gaming out the white-knight scenario. They agreed that if Mitt won Michigan and fared well on Super Tuesday, a week later, there would be no denying him the prize. But they were unconvinced he would do either. The key question, then, was how many primary and caucus ballots a late entrant could still qualify for after March 6. Reed did the research and discovered that the answer was seven—including those in the mega-states of California, New Jersey, and Texas. If a white knight ran the table, he could collect about five hundred delegates—far short of 1,144, but enough to deny that number to Romney or Santorum and then take the fight to Tampa.

Dole’s former campaign manager wasn’t the only A-list GOP operator digging into such details. Ballot-access spreadsheets were circulating like samizdat all over the capital. Stan Anderson, a senior U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who had worked for Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan, had put together a similar document and provided it to eager governors, congresspeople, and fund-raisers. In the Senate and the House, on K Street and at the RNC, the phone lines were burning up with chatter about the who, when, and how of enlisting a savior if Romney continued to stumble.

Barbour was doing more than kibitzing. He had taken on the mantle of the establishment’s de facto white-knight headhunter. Among those who had considered running and declined in 2011, there were two Haley thought had the cachet required to sweep the party off its feet: Christie and Daniels.
In the days leading up to Michigan, Barbour sat down with each in Washington and beseeched him to step forward.

Christie was again receiving entreaties from far and wide, and he could understand why. If Santorum were the nominee, he thought, the race would be over the day after the convention. Gingrich was the worst human being he had ever met in politics. Romney, by contrast, he had come to like—though he believed that Mitt had been too guarded and timid, that he might not be edgy enough for the mood of the party or the country.

But Christie, after consulting with his political wizard DuHaime about the filing deadlines and dynamics of a brokered convention, evinced little interest in picking up a lance at this late date. The task of knocking Romney off his steed, saddling up in Tampa, then putting together and funding a campaign in the sixty-seven days between the convention and November 6—against Obama’s $1 billion machine—sounded to him like career suicide.

Daniels was less dismissive of the idea, more in sync with his friend Haley and others about how wretched the race had been and how piss-poor Romney’s performance. (
As I predicted,
Mitch thought.) Daniels had delivered the Republican State of the Union response in late January, at Boehner’s behest. The speaker had been briefed on the mechanics of a white-knight entry, and was increasingly warm to the notion. He made sure Daniels knew he wanted the Hoosier to reconsider his 2011 abjuration, while at the same time encouraging Paul Ryan to step into the fray.

Mitch consulted his daughters to see whether there had been a change of heart, once again making the case that he was being asked to run for the good of the country. But the Daniels sorority was no more open to the idea than it had been a year earlier.

Foiled once again, Daniels turned his attention to some white-knight recruiting of his own. His two favored candidates were Jeb (with whom he got nowhere) and Ryan, who Daniels knew had doubts about Romney. The Wisconsin congressman kept talking about how he was trying to “fix” Mitt, prod him into being more substantive and ideologically rigorous. But so far, no dice.

One day, amid the alternative-hunting flurry, Daniels sent a text message to Ryan: “When you get a minute, give me a call.”

A few seconds later, Daniels’s phone rang.

“Paul! Oh, hey! Didn’t expect you so quick!” Daniels said, then launched into his white-knight pitch. When Mitch paused to take a breath, he heard Ryan sigh.

“Well, shit,” Ryan said—I thought you texted to tell me that
you
were going to do it!

Boston was barely aware of the mid-February scramble. Only Ron Kaufman and Wayne Berman—a Republican strategist and bundler who had become Romney’s other key Beltway wise man—had even an inkling of the establishment’s consternation. For now, the maneuvering hardly mattered; it was a big circle jerk. The question was whether it would remain so after February 28.

If Mitt falls apart in Michigan, Reed said, we might be in business.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY STRODE OUT OF
the vomitory at Ford Field, in Detroit, and took in the vomitous scene. Near the twenty-yard line of the football stadium was the stage from which he would deliver what his aides had billed as a major economic address. In front of it were twelve hundred folding chairs, not all of them filled; behind it, acres of empty AstroTurf; and, surrounding that, 65,000 vacant seats.

It was just before noon on February 24, the Friday before the primary on Tuesday. The Ford Field event was supposed to be the kickoff for Romney’s sprint to the finish line, but it had morphed into a logistical nightmare. A few days earlier, the Detroit Economic Club, which was hosting the lunchtime speech, had switched the venue from the stadium’s atrium to the field—raising alarms in Boston that went unheeded on the ground in Michigan. When Rhoades, at HQ, saw the setting on cable, he yelled, “Motherfucker!” and hurled a water bottle at the TV.