Double Down: Game Change 2012 (45 page)

The drafting of the speech had been a replay of CPAC, only worse. The version Romney saw that morning was such a mess, it lacked any mention of the auto industry. After madly making edits on the bus ride to the stadium, Stevens printed out the pages on a balky portable printer while Romney sat in the hold room wondering where the final text was. With no time for a run-through, he took the stage and opened with an ad-lib. “This feels good,
being back in Michigan,” he said. “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”

The combination of the atrocious visuals and another Richie Rich gaffe turned Ford Field into a debacle for Romney—one Democrats did their level best to abet. The white-knight plotters’ fear that Mitt would be hobbled by an ugly and protracted nomination fight was the Obamans’ dearest hope. To stir the pot, the DNC had mobilized a spirited demonstration outside the stadium, with union workers marching and chanting in protest of Romney’s stance on the auto bailout. A circling truck bore a huge sign with a menacing picture of Mitt and the message
LET ROMNEY GO BANKRUPT
.

Even more than Romney anticipated, his
Times
op-ed had shadowed him from the moment he arrived in Michigan. An editorial-board meeting with the
Detroit Free Press
was the nastiest he’d ever endured. Everywhere he went, even outside the Motor City, the bailout was all reporters wanted to cross-examine him about. True to form, Romney instructed them to read the op-ed and ignore the title, but it was no use. “That headline is killing me,” he told Rhoades.

The first ad the campaign aired in the state slapped the favorite-son card on the table. Behind the wheel as he tooled around Detroit, Romney reminisced about attending the city’s auto show as a boy with his father. (The tagline: “Michigan’s been my home, and this is personal.”) But in Newhouse’s focus groups, the spot’s theme backfired: voters either didn’t care he was a Wolverine State native, didn’t believe it, or resented the suggestion—asking, in effect, If you’re from here, where have you been?

Michigan presented Romney with a vexing confluence of circumstances and imperatives. The need to win the primary. The hope of putting the state in play in the general election. The backlash against him on the bailout. The emotional resonance for him and Ann of returning to the place they were born and raised, surrounded by relatives, old friends, and free-floating ghosts. The cumulative force of it all cracked Mitt’s shell of hyperrationality. A week out from the primary, undone by the coldness and hostility he was encountering, Romney threw up his hands. “Why are we even wasting our time?” he asked Gage. “Maybe we should just pull out.”

And that was before Ford Field—and what followed two days later. On a
quick trip to Florida for the Daytona 500, Romney got drenched with rain, was booed by fans, and made three comments for which he was roundly mocked by the press: a declaration of his love for “cars and sport”; his chiding of some onlookers for their ponchos, which he called “fancy raincoats . . . you really sprung for the big bucks”; and a Richie Rich reference to his “great friends who are Nascar team owners.”

Back in Michigan, Ann Romney was steaming at the coverage Mitt was receiving. “All of us in this room know the media loves Barack Obama—they don’t want anyone who has a chance of defeating him,” she said at a luncheon in Midland. “I am so mad at the press, I could just strangle them!”

But even as the Romneys were teetering emotionally, Mitt was pulling even with Santorum in the state polls. From the air, Boston was bombarding its foe for supporting “billions in earmarks,” while Restore blitzed him with a series of spots, including one that Larry McCarthy regarded as the cycle’s toughest. Called “Values,” it went after Santorum for voting to increase the debt limit (five times), supporting the notorious Bridge to Nowhere, and siding with Hillary Clinton about “let[ting] convicted felons regain the right to vote.”

The attacks were “disgusting,” Santo told his team. But, unlike Newt, he could withstand them. “I’m not Gingrich,” he said. He knew his own record. He was proud of his record. He could defend his record, every jot and tittle of it, and damn well intended to. His media adviser, John Brabender, was used to these traits of Rick’s: the chip on the shoulder, the compulsion to litigate, to forget about driving a message and instead behave like he was chairing a Senate subcommittee hearing. There was nothing to be done about it, Brabender thought. But, boy, it could be a pain.

The scale of the problem had become clear a few days earlier at the twentieth (and final) debate of the nomination fight, in Mesa, Arizona. For the first time, Santorum was in the crosshairs of his rivals. Rattled by the boisterous disapproval of the crowd, which had been stacked by Team Romney, he was snappy, equivocal, and deep in the Washington weeds. Explaining his vote for a provision that funded Planned Parenthood in spite of his “moral objection” to the program, he said it was part of “a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things.” Of his vote for No Child Left Behind, he argued that it was important to President Bush and that
“sometimes you take one for the team.” When Ron Paul labeled him a “fake,” he protested, “I’m real, I’m real, I’m real.”

Santorum thought the debate went fine. His advisers thought it was a disaster—as did Karen, who had been frustrated for some time by her husband’s refusal to do debate prep.
(I know my record!)
Now she was furious with him. After letting her cool down, Rick asked for her opinion, and she minced no words.

“You blew it,” she said.

Santorum had been blowing it for a while. He had started out in Michigan intent on delivering an economic message (
blue-collar, bailouts, manufacturing
, he thought). But, like an iron filing to a magnet, Santorum couldn’t resist being drawn to social issues. In the days before the debate, he found himself defending past statements (that “the Father of Lies has his sights” on America), making newly controversial ones (that Obama’s policies were not “based on the Bible”), and carping about contraceptives. Now, on the eve of the primary, he attacked Obama for “wanting everybody in America to go to college—what a snob!” Asked by ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos about his reaction to JFK’s famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state, he said it made him want “to throw up.”

Santorum’s unforced errors dominated the closing hours of coverage before Michigan. When his advisers pointed out that attacking JFK wasn’t exactly a wise strategy for luring Catholic Democrats and independents (who could vote in the open primary), Santorum shrugged. “They’re not real Catholics,” he said. When his team upbraided him for his lack of discipline, he shrugged again. Speaking his mind, no matter how inconvenient or impolitic it was, had gotten Santorum this far; he wasn’t about to hold back now. Even if he could will himself to do so, which he manifestly couldn’t.

“I’m the Popeye candidate,” he told Brabender. “I am what I am.”

•   •   •

W
HAT SANTORUM WAS ON
February 28 was the loser of Michigan, and Romney its survivor. The last hours were tense for Mitt and Ann, who surrounded themselves with dozens of relatives and friends to wait for the results at the Diamond Center, in suburban Detroit. Newhouse’s final poll had the candidate up by just a point or two; Beeson believed that if the vote
had taken place a day earlier, Romney would have lost. Instead he narrowly edged Santorum, 41 to 38 percent. “We didn’t win by a lot, but we won by enough,” Mitt said in his victory speech. “And that’s all that counts.”

The next morning, Romney flew to Ohio, where he sat down for a local TV interview. Two weeks earlier, Obama, seeking to defuse the fury over the birth control mandate, had offered a compromise along the lines of the Hawaii model that the president had initially been told was unworkable. In the Senate, a number of conservative counterproposals had been offered that were about to be voted on, including one submitted by Missouri senator Roy Blunt, which would have allowed employers to refuse to include contraception in health care coverage if it violated their religious or moral beliefs.

“Blunt-Rubio is being debated, I believe, later this week,” the interviewer asked Romney, confusingly. (A less sweeping contraceptive proposal had been put forward by Florida senator Marco Rubio, which Blunt supported separately from his own.) “Have you taken a position on it?”

“I’m not for the bill,” Romney replied. “The idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”

Romney had never been asked a question about the Blunt provision publicly before. That he was hearing it now was no accident. All throughout the GOP nomination fight, Lis Smith, the Obama campaign’s director of rapid response, had been feeding questions to reporters to pose to Romney, with the aim of inducing him to tack to the right—and that was what had happened here. But Mitt’s response disappointed Chicago. Apparently, he was already beginning to pivot toward the center and into general election mode.

The moment the news broke, Flaherty’s phone began ringing in Boston. The right was riled up. Flaherty knew that Romney was, in fact, in favor of the Blunt amendment; he’d simply been beclouded by it being called Blunt-Rubio. Moving quickly to clean up the mess, the campaign set up an interview for Mitt with Beantown radio host Howie Carr. “I didn’t understand his question,” the candidate said. “Of course I support the Blunt amendment.”

Champagne corks popped in Chicago: Mitt could now be hit not only for conservative extremism but for flip-flopping too. And soon he would be open to charges of poltroonery on a related controversy. On the same day as
the Blunt back-and-forth, Rush Limbaugh had taken a spin down the low road and attacked Sandra Fluke—a Georgetown law school student who testified before Congress in favor of employers being required to provide contraception in their health care plans, regardless of religious objections—as a “slut” and a “prostitute” who “wanted taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” When Romney was asked about the remarks, he replied wanly, “It’s not the language I would have used.”

Romney’s former guru Mike Murphy had e-mailed Mitt and urged him to take on Rush, whom Murphy saw as a paper tiger and a good foil—the perfect target for a “Sister Souljah moment.” (The reference was to a famous incident in 1992, when Bill Clinton criticized an intemperate rapper to signal to centrist voters his willingness to confront extreme elements of his party’s base.) Murphy received no reply from Romney, who was squeamish about the issue and wished it would just go away. His Boston brain trust, meanwhile, believed that taking on any prominent conservative was too risky for a candidate who was struggling to win the nomination and whose ideological bona fides were forever in doubt.

Struggling was how the Romneyites saw themselves, even as the outside world assumed Mitt had the nomination sewn up. They were staring down the barrel of eleven more contests on Super Tuesday, March 6, with polling that showed Mitt behind Santorum in many states. They were looking at a system of proportional delegate allocation that could make the climb to 1,144 agonizingly slow and painful. In Santo, they were facing a rival more in tune with large swaths of the GOP base. And in Newt, a maniac who might hang around indefinitely just to spite them.

“We could still lose this nomination!” Rhoades barked out at a strategy meeting at HQ in early March, startling Mitt. “We gotta break their fucking backs! We gotta break their will to win!”

The breaking of Santorum and Gingrich would take just a little more than a month—but it was not an easy stretch. Romney only narrowly beat Santorum in Ohio on Super Tuesday, and then was defeated by him in Alabama and Mississippi. But with a double-digit victory in Illinois on March 20, Mitt began to pull away. The next day, Jeb Bush endorsed him; a week later, Rubio climbed on board. A few days before the Wisconsin primary, on April 3, Ryan did the same and linked arms with Romney on the campaign
trail. “I’m just convinced now that if we drag this thing on through the summer,” Ryan told Fox News, “it’s going to make it that much harder to defeat Barack Obama.”

Few Republicans would have disagreed—and yet the doubts about Romney that had troubled so many for so long had not disappeared. The nomination fight had laid bare many weaknesses of Mitt’s, some long known, others brand spanking new. From Bain and his tax returns to his array of Richie Rich gaffes, Romney’s public image had taken a hellacious beating. His campaign had shown itself to be capable enough, but also insular and thoroughly tactical. His fund-raising operation was impressive but spent, and the campaign was running on fumes. The Republican base remained wary of him; independents thought far worse. Maybe most problematic, the man who set out to run as Mr. Fix-It on the economy had saddled himself with far-right positions on a panoply of social and cultural issues that put him in a bad way with critical voting blocs: women, Latinos, young voters.

Boston professed no worries about any of this. The nomination fight was over. A new world lay ahead. “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Fehrnstrom told CNN the morning after the Illinois primary. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Fehrnstrom’s gaffe was greeted with gales of derision, but no surprise. That Romney needed to reset was plain for all to see. That he would sprint to the center was taken for granted. What no one imagined was that the candidate didn’t see it that way at all—that what Romney had in mind wasn’t to Etch A Sketch but instead to double down.

PART THREE

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