Double Down: Game Change 2012 (57 page)

“Oh, okay,” Romney said. “Then I’ve made my choice—I’ll pick Paul Ryan.”

Romney called Ryan and asked him to come to Boston for a sit-down.

Ryan hung up the phone, stunned. Are we ready? he asked his wife, Janna. I think this is it.

Ten days later, it was.

•   •   •

O
BAMA WAS EN ROUTE
from the White House to Chicago when the Romney-Ryan ticket debuted on the deck of the USS
Wisconsin
in Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday, August 11. The president was headed to the Windy City for a belated fifty-first birthday party cum fund-raiser at his Kenwood home and a meeting at One Prudential Plaza. He was surprised
by the Ryan pick, couldn’t fathom the political calculation that led Mitt to choose the front man for a set of policies that were so broadly unpopular.

I don’t get it, Obama said to Plouffe and Pfeiffer. Why is he doubling down?

When the president arrived at Chicago HQ, he greeted the troops and settled in for a presentation from Messina. The campaign manager addressed the Ryan pick and, more broadly, the state of the race on the eve of the conventions. Back in May, when the campaign made its decision to front-load its spending, money had been a huge worry. No longer. Chicago’s fund-raising was starting to crank, as enthusiasm rose in the Democratic base and small donors began coming back to the fold.

In that same springtime discussion in the Roosevelt Room, Messina had walked Obama through a variety of plausible pathways to 270 electoral votes. Three months later, all of them were still operative. The only thing that had changed was that, by Chicago’s calculations, the dynamics of the electoral map had shifted: whereas in May the most crucial state had been Colorado, now it was Ohio. If we can block him there, Messina said, there’s almost no way he can win the election—and Ohio was looking better for Obama every day. The attacks on Romney over Bain, outsourcing, and taxes were turning the industrial Midwest into a “killing field” for Mitt, Messina said.

Romney’s weakness with working-class voters was one reason why many of the Obamans assumed he would pick Pawlenty as his running mate. Obama had predicted T-Paw, too. Though Boston had forsworn doing running-mate research, Chicago had not. The Obamans polled and focus-grouped extensively on Romney’s options in order to be ready to respond. Their research showed that Pawlenty’s “pro-beer, pro-hockey” persona might have helped ameliorate the nominee’s case of affluenza. The second-best pick was Portman, who would have given Romney a small but significant bump in Ohio.

Putting Ryan on the ticket, by contrast, did nothing good for Romney, in Chicago’s view. Not only did his presence highlight Medicare and the budget, where the Obamans believed that they were playing the winning hand, but it would let them twin up Romney with the terminally unpopular
congressional wing of the GOP. It also seemed to represent a bedrock strategic surrender. For more than a year, Boston had doggedly pursued Stevens’s vision of the race as a referendum, trying to keep the focus on Obama’s economic mismanagement, high unemployment, and moribund GDP growth. The elevation of Ryan seemed to signal a sharp U-turn, highlighting the issues of deficits, entitlements, and taxes—and, in so doing, accepting Chicago’s framing of the election as a choice.

The mainstream media interpreted Romney’s move precisely that way: as a bracing attempt to change the game. “The selection of Mr. Ryan . . . was an effort to reset the race with President Obama after a withering assault on Mr. Romney by Democrats” was the take of the
New York Times
’s story on the VP pick. “The decision instantly made the campaign seem bigger and more consequential, with the size and role of the federal government squarely at the center of the debate.”

Yet the month of August made a mockery of stipulations of largeness or significance. Day by day, the freak show looked like more of a freak circus as cable and the Web were consumed with wild-eyed eruptions on the left and right: over a Priorities ad suggesting that Romney was responsible for killing the wife of a man who lost his health care coverage after a Bain takeover of his employer; over a comment on the stump by Biden, before a largely black audience, that the Romney-Ryan plan to “unshackle Wall Street” would “put ya’ll back in chains”; over a TV interview by the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, Todd Akin, in which he employed the phrase “legitimate rape” (after which, Akin said, “the female body has ways to try to shut” down any resulting pregnancy); and over charges by Senate majority leader Harry Reid regarding Romney’s income taxes.

Reid’s dislike for his fellow Mormon stretched back years, but his feelings had come to a boil during the nomination contest, when Romney spoke of self-deportation. Determined to take Mitt down, Reid had spent much of July harping on his taxes. In an interview with the Huffington Post, the Nevadan brazenly claimed he had spoken to a Bain investor who informed him that Romney “didn’t pay any taxes for ten years.” Two days later, Reid took to the Senate floor to repeat the accusation.

The resulting brouhaha was a sight to see. Boston accused Reid of
McCarthyism; RNC chair Reince Priebus called him a “dirty liar”; South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham seconded the motion. Reid’s office fired back, calling Priebus and Graham “cowards” and “henchmen for Romney.” Reid refused to back down an inch, believing he had a gold-plated source. The conversation he cited in the Huffington Post had been with another member of his and Romney’s church: Jon Huntsman Sr. As the story persisted, fingers were pointed at Huntsman in the press. Huntsman denied being the source for Reid. The Nevadan didn’t care; he remembered the conversation well. More important, Reid was accomplishing his goal: flooding the media zone and forcing Romney to play defense.

Reid shared with the Obamans that his source was Huntsman Sr. Plouffe and Messina were over the moon about the stunt; their boss expressed no disapproval of it, either. Obama’s affection for Reid was warm and long-standing; the majority leader had been among the first and most influential Democrats to urge him to seek the White House back in 2007. Watching Reid’s antics now, the president chuckled. “Harry’s just like a dog with a bone,” Obama said. “He’s not going to let go of this.”

That Reid was getting under the Romneys’ skin was all too apparent. On August 16, Mitt held a brief press availability in South Carolina, where he tersely claimed that he had never paid an effective tax rate of less than 13 percent in the past ten years. That night, in a taped interview with NBC’s
Rock Center,
Ann expressed the couple’s emotions more nakedly. Asked why they had refused to be “more transparent” and release more tax returns, she visibly tensed up and snapped, “Have you
seen
how we’re attacked? Have you
seen
what’s happened?”

Boston was seeing more than the attacks. Romney’s pollsters were weighing the effects of the air assault by the Obamans and Reid’s dominance of free media. In the campaign’s focus groups, the tax returns came up all the time—and in the form of questions about Romney’s character. When Newhouse studied transcripts of the sessions, one phrase jumped out again and again: “What’s he hiding?”

For countless voters, Romney’s finances weren’t the only thing that was obscured. In the course of a cruel and bloody summer, the Obamans had succeeded in blotting out any redeeming elements of Mitt’s biography and
character: his business acumen, his devotion to his faith, his love of family. What was left was the image, as Haley Barbour put it, of Romney as “a quintessential plutocrat married to a known equestrian.”

For Boston, the next chance to repaint the picture would come at the Tampa convention. The goals of the show they intended to put on were straightforward: to reintroduce America to Romney, to render him softer, sympathetic, likable—human. Vast amounts of planning had been devoted to the effort. Then two hurricanes and a Hollywood star swept into Florida and blew those plans to bits.

18

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

T
HE DOPPLER RADAR IMAGES
started looking dodgy a week out, around the time the first tempest swept by the southern coast of Guadeloupe and into the Caribbean Sea. That was when the weather authorities upgraded the swirling mass of wind and rain to Tropical Storm Isaac. By Saturday, August 25, two days before the Republican convention was slated to begin, Isaac had developed an eye and was passing over Haiti—and Rhoades was on the ground in Tampa, acting like a FEMA director.

Although the programming of the convention was Russ Schriefer’s responsibility, the decision about whether to cancel the first day came down to the campaign manager. The pressure not to abort was intense. The RNC apparatchiks reminded Rhoades of the mayor of Amity Island in
Jaws
: There is no shark! But with Isaac barreling straight toward Tampa Bay, Rhoades gritted his teeth and pulled the plug on Monday. A scrambling Schriefer was left to cram four nights of activities into three, including pushing Ann Romney’s speech to Tuesday, when Chris Christie would deliver the keynote address.

Heavy weather was becoming a tradition at Republican conventions. Four years earlier, almost to the day, McCain’s team had shut down the first night of their shindig in St. Paul as Hurricane Gustav pounded the Gulf
Coast—to avoid discussion of the Bush administration’s failure to handle Katrina. For the McCainiacs, though, Gustav was a blessing in disguise. It allowed them to dispense with a speech by Dick Cheney and relegate 43 to a short talk by video hookup from the White House.

Boston had been luckier in terms of awkward guests. Neither Dubya nor his dad was interested in addressing the delegates in Tampa; both would be out of the country. Cheney made it clear well in advance that he would not attend. While the Romneyites felt compelled to invite Sarah Palin, they were jittery about slotting her into the 10:00 p.m. broadcast network TV hour, as they assumed she would demand. Happily, Palin declined to appear at all before such negotiations became necessary.

That left only Donald Trump to contend with. Since his endorsement of Romney in February, Trump had been a regular presence in Romneyland. He had done robocalls
(Phenomenal robocalls!)
slamming Santorum in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. He had hosted a fund-raiser for Romney in Vegas on the night in May when Mitt locked up the nomination. But Trump had turned out to be less Clooneyesque as a fund-raising magnet than Boston had hoped. And some of those with Romney’s ear suggested that the billionaire was ripe for Sister Souljahing. Mike Murphy e-mailed Mitt, You’ve got the best sound bite in the world: “Trump, you’re fired.” I’m hoping to hear that.

Romney wanted to keep the Donald inside the tent pissing out. To sate Trump’s desire to be a presence at the convention without letting him give a speech, Boston had settled on having him introduce a brief video onstage on Monday night. (It featured the Donald sacking an Obama impersonator.) Still, Rhoades and others worried about Trump ranging freely amid the press scrum in Tampa. They decided to take an unorthodox step: to dispatch a communications professional to give Trump media training.

Boston first asked former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to conduct a session with Trump, to tamp down his birther talk at the convention. But there was no way Fleischer would take on that assignment without hazard pay. So one of Rhoades’s loyalists, Brian Jones, was called into duty. Jones flew to New York, handed the Donald a stack of documents with precise talking points, and then walked him through his training, playing to Trump’s sense of persecution by the liberal press.

You know how reporters are, Jones said. They’re going to try to get you off-message. Don’t let ’em. Just stay focused on the economy and Governor Romney’s unique qualifications and credentials.

Yeah, yeah, I get it, Trump said.

No one knew if he really did, though, or if he would stay on script. The Washington lobbyist and longtime McCain hand Charlie Black, who had served as Trump’s Beltway fixer for a dozen years, warned Schriefer, “Look, if he’s out there, you just wasted a night’s news, because no matter what else happens,
he’s
the news.”