Double Down: Game Change 2012 (46 page)

THE PUGNACITY OF HOPE

B
ARACK OBAMA ARRIVED AT
the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, in Washington, bouncing on the balls of his feet and bearing the eye of the tiger. It was April 4, the day of the Republican primary in Wisconsin, and Obama had ventured three miles from the White House to address a lunch hosted by the Associated Press. He’d been looking forward to this speech, not least because journalistic protocol dictated that there would be no applause. He had an argument to make and wanted to make it without interruption. The speech was a reprise of the one he delivered in Osawatomie, only hotter and more partisan. His two main targets, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, were in the Badger State, still scavenging for primary votes for Mitt. But for Obama, the general election started now—with a bang and not a whimper.

He refrained from assailing Ryan by name, but he blistered the newly released Republican House budget, of which the congressman was the chief architect. “A Trojan horse,” he called it. “Thinly veiled social Darwinism.” “So far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.” Turning to his soon-to-be opponent, Obama continued, “Governor Romney has said he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency. He even called it
‘marvelous’—which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.” The audience laughed, and Obama added drily, “It’s a word you don’t often hear generally.”

Though Obama had never seen Romney in the best light, Mitt’s performance as he scrabbled to the nomination had ratcheted down the dimmer switch. Before, Obama perceived Romney the way many others did: as a man with no compass or true north, whose only convictions were that wealth was good and being wealthy qualified him to be president. But watching Romney extol the Ryan budget, toe the hard-right line on immigration, and refrain from Sister Souljahing anyone—not Limbaugh, not Trump—made Obama wonder. “Maybe he really believes these things,” he said to Plouffe.

Obama was alternately heartened and sobered by Mitt’s difficulties in dispatching his cloddish rivals. His first thought was:
They’re not exactly Hillary Clinton.
His second was:
And yet he could still beat me.
The juxtaposition caused him to shake and scratch his head. He said in amazement to his aides, “This guy’s having trouble with Rick Santorum, but I could still lose to him.”

Chicago and the West Wing agreed, and lived every day in fear. Their boss’s position had improved appreciably since its autumn nadir, but not enough for any kind of comfort. The president’s approval rating had inched up to 47 percent—decent, yet still shy of the 50 percent required for an incumbent to feel secure. The economy remained a ten-ton anvil around Obama’s neck. His people had been praying for the kind of slow but steady improvement on the jobs front that would let them run an updated version of Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Instead they had been handed a succession of fits, starts, and false dawns, in which respectable jobs reports were followed by anemic ones, creating in the electorate a widespread, free-floating angst—with just a third of voters saying the economy was improving and two-thirds believing the country remained on the wrong track. Gas prices were rising. European banks were teetering. The Middle East was a mess. Plouffe constantly wrung his hands over “an external threat to the main engine.” So did Obama, who told a friend, “I’m really running against the economy, Iran, and energy prices.”

The Obamans could see why Romney wanted to wage an
all-economy-all-the-time campaign. But they believed that both the candidate and his operation were flawed. Boston was certainly good at killing, Plouffe pointed out—and that was hardly unimportant. He and Obama were impressed by how the Romneyites had played the super-PAC game; if not for Restore Our Future, they were convinced, Santorum would have prevailed. But Boston was all tactics and no strategy, Axelrod argued, which explained the campaign’s rightward lunges to survive each battle, with no regard for the war to come.

That war, to be sure, would largely be fought on the economy. But by staking his entire claim to the presidency on his superiority in that sphere, Romney had endowed the Obamans with a dead-simple strategic imperative: to disqualify him as an economic steward. And thanks to Bain, the Ryan budget, and Mitt’s job-creation record in Massachusetts, the president’s team believed they had ample material to work with.

Then there were questions of character. The Obamans had been polling and focus-grouping on Romney for months. What they had discovered was that, while voters liked him on paper—successful businessman, governor, family man, close to his church—the more three-dimensional exposure they had to him, the less favorable their impressions were. The Bain and income tax controversies, along with his Richie Rich gaffes, had fed perceptions of him as an alien to the middle class at best and a Wall Street greedhead at worst. According to Joel Benenson’s research, 90 percent of voters had opinions about Mitt; his ratings on the “cares about people like me” scale were abysmal. A surprising number of focus group participants even brought up the Seamus story as a sign of his callousness. (Plouffe was almost as fixated on trying to figure out how to exploit the car-roof-riding canine as he was on keeping the Strait of Hormuz open.)

“You live in Pittsburgh and you’ve got dirt under your fingernails, who do you want to have a beer with?” a senior strategist for the reelect observed to a reporter. “It ain’t Mitt Romney. You’re like, ‘Shit, I’d rather have a beer with the black guy than him.’”

The disembowelment the Obamans had in mind would be savage—and a stark deviation from the animating spirit of 2008. Although they had hit McCain hard four years earlier, running more negative ads than any campaign in history, the balance between hope-and-change and
search-and-destroy had still tilted to the sunnier side. Tearing Mitt to pieces posed risks to Obama, whose likability was among his main political assets. And it ran contrary to his self-image as a herald of an elevated brand of politics. But Obama was resigned to running a nastier, grittier campaign this time. I’m an incumbent, he told his team. This goes with the territory. The country can’t afford for us to lose.

Yet one aspect of 2008 would be not only revived but also amplified in 2012: the expansion of the electorate and the appeal to what Messina called the “Obama base.” With the nation evenly divided, the GOP nominee all but guaranteed 47 or 48 percent at the polls, and Obama’s standing less than robust with independent voters, the reelect would have to rely on turnout among the ascendant coalition that had fueled his landslide four years back: minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters.

For Obama, this would mean employing the powers of incumbency to jazz up those voting blocs. But it would also entail another angle on the disqualification of Romney. Over the past months, Chicago had staged incursions into the Republican arena, with ads and media hits aimed at Romney’s seeming lack of core convictions—to give him fits with the right and elongate his season in the barrel. Now the campaign shifted gears. “He’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater,” Plouffe told
The New York Times.

When it came to the Obama coalition, the president’s team saw it as critical to keep Romney from shimmying to the center—even as they continued to stoke his image as spineless. Plouffe believed there was precedent for merging the two threads into a single yarn: Bush 43’s indictment of Kerry as both a flip-flopping phony and a liberal extremist.

“When Romney tries to Etch A Sketch, we’re not just gonna say, ‘Oh, there goes old Mitt Romney again! Who knows where he stands?’” Plouffe explained. “We’re gonna say, ‘He is once again showing he’ll say anything—he has no core.’ But we’re also gonna say, ‘Don’t be fooled, we know where he stands. Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration issues. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.’”

But the Obamans intended to go beyond painting Romney as
excessively conservative. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” one Chicagoan said. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This fucking guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’”

•   •   •

E
VERY WEDNESDAY NIGHT,
the members of the Obama high command convened at One Prudential Plaza. On April 11, they were in Messina’s office when someone walked in and reported that Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist and CNN pundit, had just said something stupid on TV. Appearing on
Anderson Cooper 360,
Rosen was talking about Romney’s approach to gender issues. “[He is] running around the country saying, ‘Well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing,’” she said. “Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.”

Rosen had just slammed a stay-at-home mother of five and breast cancer survivor with MS; Twitter was blowing up over her comments. The reaction in Chicago was instantaneous and unanimous: We have to denounce her—so who’s going to send the first tweet?

Messina did: “I could not disagree with Hilary Rosen any more strongly. Her comments were wrong and family should be off limits. She should apologize.” Followed by Axelrod: “Also disappointed in Hilary Rosen’s comments about Ann Romney. They were inappropriate and offensive.” Followed by Cutter: “Families must be off limits on campaigns, and I personally believe stay at home moms work harder than most of us do.”

Rosen was putting her own kids to bed in Washington when she heard a cacophony of chirping from incoming tweets on her desktop computer. That thousands were condemning her from the right came as no surprise, but Chicago’s piling on seemed inexplicable—until she received an e-mail from Cutter a few minutes later. We have to protect Michelle, it said.

The urgency in Obamaworld about shielding the first lady was high. She remained by far the most popular figure in the administration. In a role reversal from 2008, she was less polarizing than her husband; she was a crossover figure who energized volunteers while appealing to the middle.
The campaign feared that if she became a lightning rod again, she would retreat. And the best way of keeping her from being attacked was to declare spouses and families a no-go area, as Cutter had been doing since the last campaign, when she served as Michelle’s chief of staff.

No one was more adamant about that prohibition than the president himself. A month earlier, he’d been furious when Santorum brought up Malia in an interview with Glenn Beck, questioning her taking a spring break trip to Mexico despite State Department travel warnings. (Messina phoned Santo’s strategist Brabender and warned, “If he talks again about the girls, we’re going to have a problem.”)

Obama barely knew who Rosen was. Does she work for the campaign? he asked Plouffe in the Oval Office the morning after the foofaraw flared up. No, she doesn’t, Plouffe replied. Doesn’t matter, Obama said. We need to be unambiguous. Families are off-limits, period. This isn’t how we play.

A few hours later, a message went out from Michelle’s official Twitter account: “Every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected.” Next it was her husband’s turn. “There’s no tougher job than being a mom,” he told an Iowa TV anchor in an interview in the Diplomatic Room. “When I think about what Michelle’s had to do . . . that’s work. Anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement.”

The Romneys were both chagrined about Rosen’s comments, but quickly clocked the potential upside. “She said
what?
” Ann exclaimed to Katie Packer Gage over the phone. Well, that’s offensive to me, Mrs. Romney went on. And, boy, it’s stupid politically. We can really go after them on that.

And Boston promptly did, signing Ann up for Twitter and having her send her maiden missive: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.” Within twenty-four hours, the campaign was selling bumper stickers that read
MOMS DRIVE THE ECONOMY
, the RNC was hawking coffee mugs (
MOMS DO WORK: VOTE GOP
), and Beth Myers blasted out a fund-raising e-mail with the subject line “War on Moms” that read, “If you’re a stay-at-home mom, the Democrats have a message for you: you’ve never worked a day in your life.”

That Rosen had said nothing of the sort was irrelevant in Romneyland. Since the start of the contretemps over contraception, Democrats had been
pummeling Republicans for waging a “war on women,” to no small effect. Romney was on the wrong side of a yawning gender gap: nineteen points, 57–38, according to a mid-April ABC News/
Washington Post
poll. Anything that might begin to close that margin and reverse the overarching dynamic was worth trying. And the sight of the White House and Chicago tossing Rosen under the bus (and then rolling back and forth over her on the pavement) encouraged the Romneyites to keep flogging the flap.

The Obamans were dubious that
l’affaire
Rosen would budge a single vote, so deeply burned in were Romney’s problems with the fairer sex. A year earlier, in April 2011, with his rivals on the right all having pledged to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood, Romney joined them. A year later, at a March campaign event in Missouri, he shorthanded his position thus: “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”

The degree to which that quote stuck to Romney startled the reelect’s research director, David Simas. In focus group after focus group, undecided female voters voiced hostility toward Mitt for his supposed desire to abolish Planned Parenthood; they saw him as paternalistic and controlling. (One member of Mitt’s ad team described the quote to colleagues as the “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” of social issues.) By contrast, even at the height of the Rosen ruction, not a soul in the focus groups brought her comment up.