Double Down: Game Change 2012 (63 page)

By the end of the call, Williamson had stampeded the Boston brain trust into a pristine state of groupthink. Everyone now saw it as essential for Romney to weigh in—a slam-dunk show of strength. The language they drafted was not as provocative as Williamson would have liked, but it was
still plenty spicy. The campaign planned to blast a press release to reporters, embargoing it until midnight, when 9/11 would be over. All that remained was for Chen to secure Romney’s sign-off.

On the phone with the candidate, Chen quickly ran through the day’s Mideast chronology, then read Romney the statement that would be going out in his name: “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

“Do
you
like the statement?” Romney asked. “Is this the group’s consensus?”

Chen said that he did and that it was.

“Okay, this sounds right to me,” Mitt said. “Let’s do it.”

Romney got off the plane and headed to his hotel to meet Ann, who was awaiting him. Even with his campaign’s all-economy-all-the-time focus, he had long hoped that the pungent critique of the administration’s foreign policy in
No Apology
would gain some traction—and been frustrated that he had not dented Obama’s rock-solid commander-in-chief ratings. Now, suddenly, the turmoil in the Middle East and the administration’s cravenness had presented him with a mile-wide opening.
Apology in the face of an attack on America and an American—unimaginable!
he thought.

In his suite, Mitt found Ann sacked out. He was exhausted, too. But as he lay there in bed, his excitement and agitation kept him tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. Not wanting to wake his wife, he slipped out from under the blanket, settled in on the couch, and popped an Ambien—thinking all the while,
Boy, Obama is going to be in a world of hurt tomorrow.

•   •   •

T
HE MORNING LIGHT SHONE HARSHLY
on Romney’s fitful reverie. Just before eight o’clock, he jumped on a conference call with his team and listened as Chen ran down what had taken place overnight, as September 11 ticked into September 12.

At a little past 10:00 p.m., as Boston was delivering its statement to the press, the White House had disavowed the communication from the Cairo
embassy as “not cleared by Washington” or “reflect[ing] the views of the United States government.” The Romneyites took this as a cue to break their embargo a full ninety minutes before midnight, thus mugging Obama on 9/11 and making their tactical injection of campaign gamesmanship into a multifaceted international crisis all the more incendiary. Chicago duly expressed outrage: “We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack,” said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.

That the situation in Egypt had been eclipsed by Benghazi became clearer early that morning: not one but four American consular personnel were dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. On the question of the Cairo embassy statement, the press was poking holes in Romney’s criticism that it had been “the administration’s first response” to the attacks—when in fact the statement had preceded the incursion and it now appeared that the embassy had been acting on its own. The cable pundits were flaying Boston for making a “rush to judgment,” for behaving in a “patently political” fashion, for desperately chasing the news cycle.

Listening to Chen, Romney tensed up as he realized that he’d jumped the gun by leaping into a rapidly shifting situation with piecemeal information. Leaning back in his chair and gripping both armrests, he raised his voice to cut off the conversation on the call.

“Guys, we screwed up,” Romney said. “This was a mistake.”

The question was what to do now. The press was asking whether Romney was standing by his statement. His team was unequivocal: to give any quarter would only deepen the hole he was in; he would look weak, vacillating, flip-floppy. Romney was scheduled to visit his local headquarters that morning for a rally, which could be converted into a press conference. You have to step up and fight through this, Gillespie said. Paul Ryan agreed: “Mitt, we can’t back off.” So did Williamson: “We have no reason to be apologetic.”

Romney was right there with them. The man who had written
No Apology
wasn’t about to apologize, especially when he still believed that his rival had committed that sin on America’s behalf. Although Romney
acknowledged that he had reacted too soon, he thought he was correct on the merits: the Cairo embassy had reaffirmed its statement after its walls had been breached; the embassy was part of the administration; the president, therefore, was ultimately responsible for the misguided attempts to placate the agitators.

The press conference was held two hours later at Romney’s Jacksonville campaign digs, a small space one door down from an exotic reptile shop in a scruffy strip mall. After Romney read a prepared statement that expanded on the previous night’s press release, he opened the floor to questions—and felt as though the room had been invaded by pygmy rattlesnakes and frilled dragons from next door. With each tough question, Mitt’s rhetoric became more inflammatory. Invoking the word that was on his mind but not in his written remarks, Romney said, “The statement that came from the administration was . . . akin to apology and, I think, was a severe miscalculation.”

Romney had confidence in his ability to explain himself when he felt he was on solid ground. When his footing was shaky, as it often was on foreign policy, he tended to get hot—too hot. In the space of a few minutes, he hurled some variant of the word “apology” at the administration seven times. Watching from Boston, Rhoades saw another political nightmare blossoming on the screen, picked up his phone, and called Madden in Jacksonville. “Let’s end this—now,” he said urgently.

A few minutes later, Obama appeared in a setting more august than a storefront next to Blazin’ Reptiles. From the presidential podium in the Rose Garden, he spoke about the loss of Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans in Libya with a mixture of solemnity and resoluteness. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” Obama said. “Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake: justice will be done.”

Joe Biden had caught Romney’s press conference live on TV that morning. The VP’s reaction was brief and to the point: “He’s a horse’s ass.”

Obama had been too busy preparing his Rose Garden remarks to pay
much attention to Mitt. But afterwards, standing in the Outer Oval Office with Carney, Pfeiffer, and Ben Rhodes, the president noticed clips of Romney in Jacksonville being shown on cable.

So what did he say? Obama asked his aides.

“You’re not going to believe it, but he’s doubling down,” Carney said.

Obama was astounded. In the past twenty-four hours, protests had erupted at U.S. diplomatic missions in a dozen countries. Chris Stevens was the first serving American ambassador killed in hostilities since 1979. The corpses in Benghazi were still warm. And here was Romney, the Republicans’ choice to be commander in chief, trying to score cheap political points.

“It’s practically disqualifying,” Obama said.

Obama’s disgust was still evident a few hours later, when he was asked about Romney’s gambit in an interview with Steve Kroft of
60 Minutes.
After noting that the Cairo embassy statement “came from folks on the ground who are potentially in danger,” Obama added acidly, “My tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack when they’re in that circumstance rather than try to question their judgment from the comfort of a campaign office.” And then he stuck the boot in once more: “Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later.”

The heaping of scorn on Romney by the White House and other Democrats came as little surprise. But the GOP was almost as unforgiving. Within hours of Mitt’s press conference, former advisers to McCain, Bush 43, and Reagan had torn into the nominee on the record. “It almost feels like Sarah Palin is his foreign policy adviser,” Dubya’s 2004 chief strategist, Matthew Dowd, sneered. Speaking on background, Republican critics were even more blistering: “This was a deliberate and premeditated move, and it totally revealed Romney’s character . . . as completely craven and his candidacy as serving no higher purpose than his ambition,” said one. On Capitol Hill, party leaders declined to echo Romney’s criticism or rise to his defense; when reporters asked Mitch McConnell about Mitt’s comments, he turned and walked away.

By the end of the day, Romney recognized that he had erred again. The conclusion he drew from the episode was stark: on national security, the media narrative was tilted so lopsidedly in Obama’s favor that prosecuting the topic was a fool’s errand.
Lesson learned,
Mitt thought.

That deduction would have unforeseen consequences for Romney down the line. It also elided the nature and scale of the screwup. In truth, the Benghazi tragedy was a horrendous failure on the part of the administration; the unrest unspooling across the Middle East was just the kind of externality that had worried the president’s team for a year. But by inserting himself in the story—not once but twice—and deliberately repeating a mistake that had been roundly criticized, Romney had distracted attention and scrutiny away from the White House. A potentially brutal blow to the president had been deflected by the man who hoped to replace him.

From the London fiasco to Tampa to Benghazi, self-sabotage was becoming a leading leitmotif of the Romney enterprise—and was costing him dearly. Twelve days into September, with Election Day less than eight weeks away, Obama’s narrow edge in the battleground states had widened to three or four points. Across the ideological spectrum, a storyline was setting in: Romney was losing, knew he was losing, and was starting to panic.

In fact, Mitt was unnaturally calm. Up against an incumbent president who had badly outspent him over the summer, he was running inside the margin of error, with plenty of time and three debates ahead. All Romney needed was to catch a break, just a little luck, to spring him from his rut and into a stretch of sunlight. What he got instead was an icy blast from the past.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY HOPPED INTO HIS
Suburban outside the FBI building on Wilshire Boulevard, in L.A. It was the afternoon of Monday, September 17. He had just received his first national security briefing from the intelligence community and was on his way to an evening of fund-raising in Orange County. Mitt was in a chipper mood, wearing a coy I’ve-got-a-secret look after his classified download from the spooks—when he heard Garrett Jackson behind him, saying, “Guv, we’ve got a problem.”

Back in May at the Marc Leder fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Romney had lit a fuse with his unvarnished disquisition about the 47 percent of voters he believed were beyond his reach. Now the bomb had detonated on the website of
Mother Jones,
which had posted surreptitiously recorded video of Mitt’s after-dinner Q&A. The source of the footage was unknown. (It would
turn out to be a disgruntled bartender.) The video was grainy, but the audio was clear. The story was rapidly mushrooming into a monster.

Romney spent the next hour in the car, headed to Costa Mesa, on a conference call with Boston. By turns contrite and combative, he argued that his words were being wrenched from their proper context. All he had done was talk about the electorate, about the 47 percent that constituted Obama’s base, about how he was focused on the middle, on persuadable voters. I’ve probably said something like this a hundred times, Romney said. This time it just came out badly.

The Romneyites knew they were dealing with more than an ordinary flap, knew they had to respond. Precisely how wasn’t obvious, though. Stevens insisted that Romney needed to say something on camera that night so the TV coverage wouldn’t feature only the offending video. The question, then, was whether Mitt should offer a full-throated mea culpa. But the sand traps with that option were many.
Mother Jones
had posted only a few clips from the Leder fund-raiser, not the full video. Boston had no clue what might be coming next, or whether footage from other events with Mitt saying roughly the same thing might be floating around. There was also the
No Apology
conundrum, yet again—and the fact that, even if the book had not been thusly titled, Romney didn’t believe he had anything to apologize for.

A press conference was arranged for Romney between events at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Just after 7:00 p.m. local time, the candidate read a brief statement and took three questions. The closest he came to expressing regret was to say that his remarks about the 47 percent were “off the cuff” and “not elegantly stated.” He noted that he had been playing pundit, “talking about the political process of drawing people into my campaign.” He offered analysis of his analysis: he could have “state[d] it more clearly in a more effective way.” As to the substance of his comments, Romney said, “It’s a message which I’m going to carry and continue to carry.” Then he added, “Of course I want to help all Americans—all Americans—have a bright and prosperous future.” His affect was detached and his tone impersonal throughout.

Obama was in Ohio for a pair of campaign events when the 47 percent story broke. In the presidential limo, Plouffe showed him the video on an
iPhone. It’s gonna be hard for Romney to say he misspoke, Obama said. That’s a genuine sentiment he expressed, not some slip of the tongue.