Double Down: Game Change 2012 (62 page)

Clinton strayed far into the weeds. He cited reams of facts and figures. He merrily carved up today’s Republicans while singing odes to Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43—purposely leaving out a litany of Democratic presidents, in order to cloak himself in bipartisanship. Bumper sticker after bumper sticker rolled off his tongue: “We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle-down.”

Between his wanderings off script and the nonstop punctuations of applause, Clinton not only blew past his allotted time, he nearly doubled it. The only question was whether, well past 11:00 p.m., the networks would cut away. But the images of Clinton mid–tour de force were irresistible to any producer with a pulse. Looking on agog, the Obamans began to wonder if he would go on all night, while up on stage, Clinton radiated as much palpable pleasure as he ever had in public. A few hundred feet in front of the podium, delegates could almost feel the breeze from his tail wagging.

For all of the joshing in the suite about Clinton free-forming his conclusion, that was exactly what he did. “I love our country so much,” he said. “I know we’re coming back. For more than two hundred years, through every crisis, we’ve always come back. People have predicted our demise ever since George Washington was criticized for being a mediocre surveyor with a bad set of wooden false teeth. And so far, every single person that’s bet against America has lost money, because we always come back. We come through every fire a little stronger and a little better.”

Seconds later, Obama emerged from the wings and joined Clinton on the dais. Turning to meet him, Clinton enacted a deep bow. The two men shook hands and shared a long clinch—both smiling broadly, Obama patting and rubbing Clinton’s back. The crowd lost its mind.

The Obamans departed the arena in a state of delight: two nights, one grand slam and one no-hitter. Clinton’s old hands were even more ecstatic. Through the years, they had seen the boss deliver many speeches, including addresses at every convention since 1988. They had seen him more poetic, more dramatic, more emotional—but never more effective. “When you add
in his age and that he’s been retired from office for twelve years,” one said, flipping the metaphor from pitcher to slugger, “it’s like Ted Williams flirting with .400 at the age of thirty-nine.” Late that night, well past midnight, Clinton summoned them back to his suite, where he was holding court. Picking at a plate of vegan bean dip, Clinton told story after story about conventions past, barely mentioning his speech or the election at hand. But then someone asked about Obama—if they’d talked backstage, how their conversation had gone, what advice Clinton had given 44.

I told him that when I was in the hospital with my heart condition, I got flowers and poems, which was nice, Clinton said. But what made me feel better was an explanation from the cardiologist: This is what we’re gonna do, this is how it’s gonna work, here’s your prognosis, here’s why you’re going to be all right. I told Obama the same thing I’ve been telling you all: explanation is eloquence.

•   •   •

A
S CLINTON REVELED AND
reminisced, Joe Biden was huddled in a tiny room beneath the stage at the convention hall, staring into a teleprompter, fussing with the presentation of his speech. Joe hated the prompter. Always had. He was a stutterer as a kid, and stutterers have trouble reading aloud. So there he was with Sheehan—another stutterer, by chance—at 2:30 a.m., reformatting his speech for Thursday night, underlining certain words and phrases, trying to get the text . . . just so. Clinton, he knew, had raised the bar again, but Biden was certain he could clear it. He told people all the time: Hey, man, as a speaker, I’m every bit as good as Bill!

Traditionally, Biden would have had a night to himself during the convention, like he did back in 2008. But then they shortened the event to three days—and wanted to give Wednesday to Clinton. When Axelrod first brought up the idea to Obama, the president had only one hesitation: “What’s Joe going to say?” he asked.

Biden said he wanted to think it over. His team did some historical research on convention TV ratings and concluded that speaking on the final night, just before Obama, might put Joe in front of a bigger audience. Let’s do it, Biden said.

By Thursday, the plan for Biden and Obama to speak outdoors at the stadium had been washed out by fear of rain. (Wednesday saw buckets of it.) That night in the hall, Biden strode onstage and pointed to his wife and Mrs. Obama in the front row; Michelle flashed a thumbs-up back. His speech was replete with crowd-pleasing lines: “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” It was filled with pellets fired at Mitt: “Romney said that as president, he would take a jobs tour. Well, with his support for outsourcing, it’s going to have to be a foreign trip.” The next day, it received scant media coverage, but that was okay with Joe—especially when he learned that his TV ratings were right up there with Clinton’s.

Obama and his team were braced for a lukewarm reception for his speech. In a sense, he would be competing against his wife, his predecessor, and his own history and reputation. At the previous two Democratic conventions, his turns at the rostrum had been historic: the first launching him into outer space, the second accepting the first major-party nomination bestowed on an African American. That magic would be impossible to rekindle even with a speech that shot for the stars.

Obama’s advisers had been insistent that his speech pursue more earthbound objectives in any case. Their goal was to have him put forth an agenda for the future without going much beyond what he had laid out in January’s State of the Union. Obama was forever pushing for bigger and bolder policy ideas. But his people saw no point in taking needless risks when they were playing a winning hand. They wanted Obama to look forward—not loftily, not lyrically, not audaciously, but in a subdued tone and plainspoken language that might appeal to wavering independents.

In a blue suit, blue tie, and white shirt that night in the arena, Obama enacted those instructions. The first two-thirds of the speech combined the laundry-list quality of a SOTU with a sledgehammer-like repetition of the theme that the election was a choice. (He used that word or a variant of it twenty times.) There was a conspicuous nod to humility that cited Lincoln. The broadsides at Romney were fairly flaccid. (“You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.”) There were no memorable lines. The only part of the speech he appeared to relish was the final bit, in which he returned to a leitmotif
from 2008. “The election four years ago wasn’t about me,” he said. “It was about you. My fellow citizens—you were the change.”

The reviews, as expected, were not kind. When Favreau complained that the speech was being treated unfairly, Obama shrugged. You know how it goes, he said. The media’s gonna take their shots.

Obama was skillful at concealing his frustrations from his aides, but frustrated he was. In the press and among political professionals, the verdict on Charlotte was that the convention had been a triumph—to a large extent because of Clinton, not Obama. The current president was grateful for what the former had done for him. But the gushing accolades for Bill’s speech reminded Obama of the political constraints that kept him from being as wonky, backward-looking, or defensive as he instinctively wanted to be. That’s the kind of speech I’d like to give, he said to his aides. Even though I know that I shouldn’t.

It would take some time for the tangible effects of Clinton’s stem-winder to sink in fully. But in Boston, the early signs were startling. Before Charlotte, Neil Newhouse was certain that no convention could have an appreciable impact on voters’ perceptions of whether the country was on the right or the wrong track. Those perceptions, overwhelmingly pessimistic, had been locked in place since the start of the campaign, boding ill for Obama. But within seventy-two hours of Charlotte’s finale, the right-track/wrong-track numbers had begun to move—dramatically—in favor of the Democrats. Romney’s pollster was dumbfounded. When his colleagues asked him to explain the phenomenon, Newhouse shrugged and offered one word: Clinton.

Mitt’s Bill problem was going to be much bigger than a single speech, however—for the Maximum Canine, having first shed his muzzle, was now straining at his leash. Provoked by Boston, empowered by Charlotte, Clinton was eager to hit the trail. He called Messina and started plotting a schedule that would turn him into Obama’s general-election supersurrogate: a tireless ally with a massive megaphone and the capacity to talk the owls down from the trees.

His first foray took place five days after the convention closed, on September 11, when Clinton headlined a grassroots rally at Florida
International University in Miami. Though political hostilities were customarily halted in observance of national unity on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America, Clinton demonstrated only a modicum of restraint. In for a dime and a dollar, he opened fire on the GOP ticket over Medicare, providing the first nasty shot in a day that would have many—and would wind up haunting Romney right through to November.

20

THE WAR COUNCIL

M
ITT’S CELL PHONE BUZZED AT
around 9:30 p.m. on September 11. He was on the runway in Jacksonville, having just landed after a flight from Reno. On the line was Lanhee Chen, calling from Boston with a clamant matter to discuss: the campaign’s response to fires blazing in the Middle East.

Taking off from Nevada in the afternoon, Romney had been dimly aware of the tumult in the region. That morning, in an effort to quell a burgeoning fundamentalist street protest in Cairo over a crude anti-Islam video originating in the United States and circulating on YouTube, the American embassy in Egypt had released a statement saying it “condemn[ed] the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” But the protest only escalated, with rioters breaching the Cairo embassy’s walls, tearing down the American flag, and hoisting up a black banner bearing a Muslim declaration of faith.

While Romney was airborne, a more serious upheaval flared in Libya. Armed with rocket-propelled grenades and antiaircraft weaponry, Islamist militants stormed and torched a lightly defended U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. There were news reports that a U.S. citizen had been killed.
Scuttlebutt on the Hill was that the dead American was a State Department officer.

A conference call was thrown together on Commercial Street, with Chen, Rhoades, Stevens, and Gillespie taking part. In the conservative blogosphere, the Cairo embassy’s statement (reaffirmed via Twitter after the breach of its perimeter) was being cast as an apology for free speech and an expression of sympathy for the demonstrators. Requests for comment on the breaking Mideast news were pouring into Boston. In Egypt and Libya, circumstances on the ground were chaotic; in the States, facts were scant and hazy. The initial consensus on the call was to wait until morning, see where things stood. But one Romneyite, Rich Williamson, had a different posture.

Williamson was a longtime Republican foreign policy majordomo and an outside adviser to the campaign. His résumé included stints in the Reagan and both Bush administrations; under 43, he had held two UN ambassadorial posts. He had also been a U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois and chairman of the state’s Republican Party. He viewed Obama through a Fox News prism with a Windy City overlay: as a feckless Hyde Park peacenik. The zotzing of bin Laden and Obama’s drone policy meant nothing to Williamson—he saw them as fig leaves. The Cairo embassy’s statement struck him as an outrage and an expression of the president’s proclivity for appeasement. The notion that some anti-Islam Internet video had anything to do with anything was pure bullshit. What was happening in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the region was obvious: Obama’s Middle East policy was unraveling.

Williamson made that argument on the call, and vehemently. The governor needs to speak out on this, the ambassador rumbled. Williamson considered Romney brilliant but unmotivated by ideas, and regarded Boston as defensive and amateurish. Winning the White House meant whipping out a switchblade, he believed:
Axelrod gets in a knife fight every morning to work up an appetite for breakfast
. To Williamson, Egypt and Libya offered a chance to start a scrap. If Romney got cut up, that was okay—voters would see that he cared enough to bleed.