Double Down: Game Change 2012 (48 page)

Biden’s communications director, Shailagh Murray, informed Biden that Obama
was
upset—and why. Oh, Joe said. On Wednesday morning, hours before the Robin Roberts interview and right after the president’s daily intelligence briefing, Biden hung back and apologized to Obama for the fuss he’d caused. I’m sorry I put you in a tough spot, the VP said. But he also raised the issue of the West Wing pile-driving him in the press. Are you telling these people to do this? Tell them to stop! What’s the deal?

The act of contrition was all the president needed to hear to put him back on Biden’s side.

Don’t worry about what you said, Obama told him. Don’t worry about the staff sniping. Don’t worry about the media. The most important thing, Joe, is that you and I don’t let other people divide us. Whatever comes down the road, we’re in this thing together, and that can never go astray.

•   •   •

A
T A CERTAIN POINT,
I’ve just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” the president said, a touch awkwardly, on camera with Roberts in the Cabinet Room. The statement meant nothing in terms of policy. The politics were up for grabs. But when Obama walked back into the Oval Office, it was as if a crushing weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I feel so good about that,” he said to Plouffe.

Out in Oklahoma City, where he was campaigning, Romney felt less swell. Having declined to answer a reporter’s rope-line question about gay marriage earlier in the day, he held a brief afternoon news conference to address Obama’s move. His tone was far from strident. “This is a very tender and sensitive topic, as are many social issues, but I have the same views I’ve had since running for office.” Invited to skewer the president for the sin he himself had so often been charged with—flip-flopping—Mitt again trod lightly. “I believe that based upon the interview that he gave today, he had changed his view, but you’re a better judge of that than I.”

Romney and his people saw Obama’s decision as a naked effort to appeal to his base—pure and simple constituency politics. But they saw no advantage in trying to play the game in reverse. With few exceptions, Mitt’s senior advisers were personally moderate or liberal on most social issues; they had no lust for a contentious debate on gay marriage. Their core calculus heading into the general election was that any day spent talking about topics besides the economy was a day out the window. The trouble was that this left the candidate betwixt and between: holding positions on paper that the Obamans could use to rile up their supporters, but failing to capitalize on their appeal to social conservatives with a full-throated articulation.

In the White House, Plouffe greeted Romney’s reaction to the news with guarded but growing optimism. With gay marriage, the president and his
people had done something for which Mitt and his team had so far demonstrated no appetite: taking a considerable, if calculated, risk. And while it was far too early to render a verdict on its impact, the early signs were encouraging to the Obamans. When the administration repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” and ceased defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, the president’s people had put on their flak jackets, but the public outcry was close to nil. Now the same muted reaction greeted the president’s statement on same-sex unions. And despite all the worries that Biden had stolen his boss’s thunder, Obama was showered with press coverage that was salutary and often glowing—his new posture interpreted not as cravenly expedient but as coming clean.

In the days ahead, Obama would reap some unexpected political benefits from endorsing gay marriage. Just as Bush 43’s courtship of African American voters played well with white suburbanites in 2000, the president’s stance proved resonant with college-educated women. Some in Chicago had worried about alienating churchgoing black voters, but the campaign’s research saw not the slightest evidence of that. Instead, Obama’s imprimatur had the effect of dramatically increasing support for gay marriage among African Americans—an outcome in which the president took enormous pride.

And then there were the anticipated dividends. The night after the Roberts interview, May 10, Obama attended a fund-raising dinner at the Hollywood home of George Clooney. The organizer of the supper was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation and a near billionaire, who led his introduction of the president with a hosanna—“Yesterday, he did the right thing yet again”—that drew loud applause and cheers from the star-studded crowd. But the evening yielded more than praise: an extraordinary $15 million haul.

For much of the past year, Obama had been determined to keep his mind on his job and push off the preoccupations of the campaign. Yet the one worry he could never banish from his brain was money. As low as his opinion of Romney was, the main reason Obama believed he could still be beaten was that he might be outspent, not by Boston per se but by Mitt’s operation in combination with the Republican super PACs. The
conservative millionaires and billionaires conspiring against Obama had always unsettled him and still did. The question was what kind of defenses his campaign might deploy against them. What Obama didn’t know was that his arsenal had been enhanced earlier that day—with the anonymous delivery of a mysterious envelope, like something out of John le Carré.

15

FAILURES TO LAUNCH

T
HE MYSTERY BRUNETTE WALKED
into the lobby of the Bank One Building, in Evanston, Illinois, and took the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Reaching the office that was her destination, she asked to see Pete Giangreco, but was told he had stepped out. “He doesn’t know me,” the brunette said. “It’s probably good that he’s not here—just give him this.” And handed over an unmarked manila envelope.

Giangreco was a Democratic direct-mail maven and Obaman in good standing, a veteran of the 2008 campaign and consultant to the current one. When he returned to his office and opened up the envelope, Giangreco found a bound, fifty-four-page booklet that made his eyes get as big as saucers. The first page bore the title
THE
DEFEAT OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA
and that day’s date, May 10. The next fifty-three laid out a $10 million plan to trash the president and disrupt the Democratic convention: TV spots, outdoor ads, aerial banners over Charlotte, all designed to revive the 2008 furor over Obama’s incendiary former pastor. “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” the document said. “The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician” who has “brought our country to its knees.”

I can’t believe someone put this in writing,
Giangreco thought at first.
Am I being set up?
But the level of detail and names in the document made him suspect otherwise. Behind the plan were a bevy of brand-name Republican operators, including former Huntsman ad maker Fred Davis. And its ostensible financial backer was Joe Ricketts, the seventy-year-old founder of TD Ameritrade and patriarch of the family that owned the Chicago Cubs.

The Obamans were always on a hair trigger in matters of race. A scheme fusing race with major dollars put Giangreco in full Defcon mode. Grabbing the phone, he called Messina and said, “I need to come see you.”

Um, okay, Messina replied. When?

“Right the fuck now,” Giangreco replied.

The genesis of what the document called “The Ricketts Plan” was a parable of the post–
Citizens United
era. The man who commissioned it was another billionaire with the bit between his teeth. A native Nebraskan based in Wyoming, Ricketts presided over a politically divided clan. His eldest son, Pete, was the Republican national committeeman in the Cornhusker State. His three other kids lived in the Windy City and ran the Cubs: Todd was conservative, Tom was apolitical, and Laura was an Obama bundler and lesbian activist. Their father had been a Democrat, then a Republican, and was now an independent. But his driving cause was fiscal restraint, and his distaste for Obama intense.

Ricketts had long dabbled in politics, but after the Court’s 2010 ruling, he stepped up his game. That year, he started an advocacy group (Taxpayers Against Earmarks) and a super PAC (the Ending Spending Action Fund), both of which had some success. He was keen to play in the presidential and ready to dole out $10 million to defeat Obama.

Ricketts wasn’t interested in just dashing off a check to Crossroads, though. He was a solo act, an entrepreneur; he wanted his own deal. But in a presidential contest in which total spending might top $2 billion, a mere $10 million was a pittance. So Ricketts was in the market to maximize the bang for his buck—which was what led him inexorably to the door of Dr. Demon Sheep.

After the collapse of the test-tube candidacy, Davis was on the hunt for some new deep pockets into which he could dip his paw. He pitched Ricketts’s political fixer, a youngish Washington climber named Brian Baker, for
the business. An edgy West Coast avant-gardist like Davis and a doughy midwestern septuagenarian like Ricketts weren’t a natural fit. But the potential combination was a sign of the times, and just the kind of thing that was causing jitters in Obamaworld. Whether the match turned out to be made in heaven or in hell, it was all but certain to produce mischief.

In January, Ricketts, his sons Pete and Todd, and Baker flew out and met Davis in his sleek aerie high in the Hollywood Hills. The adman regaled them with war stories and showed some of his work. With Ricketts on his feet, apparently ready to leave, Davis put on a spot he cut for McCain that included Reverend Wright, which the candidate had refused to air. Over images of McCain recovering from his Vietnam wounds, the narrator praised him for “honor[ing] his fellow soldiers by refusing to walk out of a prisoner-of-war camp,” and hit Obama for not “walk[ing] out of a church where a pastor was spewing hatred.” The screen filled with a clip of Wright fulminating: “Not God Bless America! God
Damn
America!” Followed by the tagline “Character matters, especially when no one’s looking.”

Ricketts was overwhelmed. “If the nation had seen that ad,” he declared, “they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

Two months later, the same cast of characters plus two of Davis’s associates met at Ricketts’s palatial apartment on the seventy-seventh floor of the Time Warner Center, in Manhattan. The failure of McCain to use Wright against Obama came up again, along with a broader discussion of an article of faith on the right: that the mainstream press had failed utterly to vet Obama in 2008. After two hours, Davis and his team left the meeting with the assignment to put together a $10 million proposal. They also left with a reading list from Ricketts, which included Dinesh D’Souza’s latest best-seller,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

Davis and his team spent the next six weeks drafting the proposal. Conservative though they were, the consultants weren’t pursuing an ideological agenda; they were chasing a fat paycheck. The plan was designed to pander to what they believed were Ricketts’s predispositions. Davis’s colleague Bill Kenyon penned the “metrosexual” line. Davis winced but left it in, because he thought Joe would like it. The decision to build their proposal around Wright was based on Ricketts’s admiration for the Davis ad: “Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain wouldn’t let us do,” they wrote. Starting in
Charlotte, they imagined rolling out a national TV and print campaign, including newspaper ads based on Wright’s infamous post-9/11 sermon about how “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” One proposed ad had the copy “Not God Bless America . . .” superimposed over a picture of the pastor. Another featured a close-up of an angry-looking rooster.

The group convened again on the morning of May 10, at Todd Ricketts’s home in Wilmette, on Chicago’s North Shore. Joe Ricketts didn’t attend but had deputized his sons to handle the meeting. The consultants ran through the proposal and heard no objections from Todd or Pete; it seemed to Davis and Kenyon that both brothers were enthused. The only naysayer in the room was Baker, who thought the singular focus on Wright was a big mistake. Tom Ricketts, the chairman of the Cubs, was negotiating with City Hall for financial help in rebuilding Wrigley Field. “This will cause a massive problem for your brother, and for the team,” Baker said. “This will
not
go over well in Chicago.”