Double Down: Game Change 2012 (67 page)

Sitting on the plane next to Carney, Klain turned and sighed.

“His head is in the wrong place,” Klain said. “This isn’t gonna be a good night.”

•   •   •

T
HE RIGHTNESS OF ROMNEY’S
head was evident for all to see. Months earlier, when he began his prep, he had said with some agitation to his team, “Guys, guys, I need to know my stuff—I’m going up against the
president of the United States.
” But now similar words were coming out of him all gee-whizzy: “I can’t believe I’m about to go debate the president of the United States!” Romney joked with Stevens about his wardrobe for the big night. Maybe he would wear a dress shirt buttoned up all the way but no tie. The press would go crazy if he sported “the Ahmadinejad look,” Mitt cracked.

Romney had arrived in Denver two days before Obama, giving himself time to get acclimated. His hotel, the Renaissance, turned out to be a nightmare: forty-five minutes from the University of Denver debate site and overlooking railroad tracks. The trains rumbled loudly and around the clock; guests found hotel-provided earplugs in their bathrooms. The first night, Mitt barely caught a wink. But his mood was so upbeat, he offered no complaint. (The next night, on the eve of the most important political event of his life, his shut-eye was dependent on a box fan placed in his room to drown out the noise.)

Obama was staying not far away, at the Doubletree. Arriving in the afternoon, he had minimal downtime before the debate. His dinner came late; he had to eat in a rush. For reasons surpassing understanding, he was unable to find a phone line to connect him to his daughters in Washington. Romney, meanwhile, was backstage at the debate site, surrounded by his kids and grandkids, playing Jenga.

A few minutes before the 7:00 p.m. start time, Romney huddled with Stevens and Myers for a final pregame pep talk. “You control this debate from four corners,” Stevens said. “Don’t take the rhythm of the debate from him. It all comes to you. You control it. All these people wanted to be here, at this moment. You’re here. You’re gonna own this.”

Romney smiled and said, “I think we’ll have fun.”

The paradigm for the entire debate was established in the first five minutes. October 3 was, by coincidence, Barack and Michelle’s twentieth wedding anniversary. In his opening statement, Obama met the eyes of his wife in the front row. “I just want to wish, sweetie, you happy anniversary and let
you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of forty million people,” he said.

Rob Portman had predicted that Obama would do this very thing. In every one of Romney’s ten pre-Denver mocks, Fauxbama opened with a shout-out to Michelle. Gillespie had supplied Romney with a funny follow-up, which he delivered in his opening. “Congratulations to you, Mr. President, on your anniversary; I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine—here with me,” he quipped. The audience laughed. Even Obama laughed. Mitt was off and running.

For the next ninety minutes, Romney put on a clinic. He was clear, crisp, confident, energetic, fluent on policy, and in complete command of his bullet points. His indictments of Obama were sharp without being shrill. He was tough but likable, aggressive but not off-putting, convincingly presidential but recognizably human. He came across as a pragmatist and a manager, the very sort of Mr. Fix-It that many around him had wanted him to be in 2008 and again in 2012—like the Mitt who ran for office in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002.

Tonally and substantively, Romney aimed for the middle of the electorate. He touted his record in the Bay State, especially on education, and talked up bipartisanship. He declared that “regulation is essential” and hit Obama from the left on Dodd-Frank, calling it “the biggest kiss that’s been given to New York banks I’ve ever seen.” Some of his claims were false, such as the boast that his health-care plan covered folks with preexisting conditions. Others were disputable, notably an assertion that his budget plan did not entail a $5 trillion tax cut tilted toward the wealthy (as many independent analysts maintained). “I know that you and your running mate keep saying that,” Romney said to Obama. “Look, I’ve got five boys. I’m used to people saying something that’s not always true but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it. But that is not the case.”

Through it all, the president was the man who wasn’t there—passive and somnolent, enduring the experience rather than embracing it, not an ounce of verve or fight or passion in him. Stylistically, Obama’s performance was Henderson redux, only worse. The split-screen shots captured him staring down at his notes even more than in the mock video that had unnerved Plouffe. Though Nasty Obama made no appearances, Peevish Obama did.
When Jim Lehrer tried to cut him off—“Two minutes is up, sir”—the president protested, “No, I had five seconds before you interrupted me.”

In the Obama staff room backstage, the president’s team wondered if their man was suffering from aphasia. Midway through the debate, Romney tossed a hanging curve into Obama’s wheelhouse, remarking, in an exchange about tax policy, “I maybe need to get a new accountant.” Axelrod waited for the president to swing:
The last thing you need, Mitt, is better accountants; yours seem to be doing a bang-up job already
. But Obama let the pitch sail by. A little later, the debate team groaned when he mentioned the IPAB. When he did it a second time, they groaned louder. When, astoundingly, he did it a third time, a hush fell on the room.
A triple IPAB?
thought Klain.
This debate is over.

In the Romney staff room, the excitement was so great that people found it hard to remain in their chairs. At the end of the ninety minutes, when Lehrer signed off with “Thank you, and good night,” a whoop went up. Myers shouted, “That was a game changer!”

Romney exited the stage and headed back to his side’s holding room, where he found the hall lined with his people as if it were the locker-room runway at Notre Dame. Cheering, screaming, huzzahing at the top of their lungs, they hailed the conquering hero. Mitt and Ann embraced. “Dad, you crushed him!” Tagg exclaimed.

Romney could hardly contain himself. Bewildered by Obama’s limp performance, he was most stupefied by the absence of any mention of the 47 percent. “I was ready for it!” Mitt insisted.

Stevens found Romney minutes later. “You were right,” Stuart said. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it
was
fun,” Romney said.

Back at the Renaissance, Gillespie came into Mitt’s suite and gave him a hug. Garrett Jackson had read Romney some of the Twitter reaction, but Mitt had no idea how the story was being covered otherwise.

“I feel like it went well,” he said to Gillespie. “How’s it playing?”

“All you have to do is turn on MSNBC to know,” Gillespie answered, grinning. “They’re in tears.”

The consensus that Romney had cleaned Obama’s clock wasn’t confined
to the left, let alone its institutional voice on cable. A CNN instant poll found that 67 percent of viewers gave Mitt the win; a Democracy Corps focus group showed a spike in his favorable ratings on the basis of the debate. From the right, Bill Kristol blogged that Romney had turned in “the best debate performance by a GOP candidate in more than two decades.” From the center, Politico’s Roger Simon said it looked as if “someone had slipped [the president] an Ambien.”

But the caterwauling from Obama devotees was earsplitting indeed. On Twitter, super-blogger Andrew Sullivan spat out a series of harsh judgments: that Obama had shown himself “too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously,” that the debate had been “a disaster” for the president. On MSNBC, as Gillespie indicated, the reaction was something akin to a collective primal scream.

“I don’t know what [Obama] was doing out there!!!” Chris Matthews bayed. “I don’t know how he let Romney get away with the crap he threw at him tonight! . . . Where was Obama tonight?! . . . What was he doing tonight?! He went in there disarmed!!! . . . What was
Romney
doing? He was
winning
!!!”

Lawrence O’Donnell was more subdued, but no less pointed. “The president clearly came in with what I would call a presidential strategy in the debate,” he said. “Team Obama might want to look at that tonight and say, ‘We’ve got to change that.’”

•   •   •

O
BAMA BEELINED IT BACK
to the Doubletree after the debate for a small anniversary party with his wife, Jarrett, his friend Marty Nesbitt, and a few others. Momentarily unconnected to the mediasphere, he was unaware of the universal perception that he’d bombed.
Romney did fine, but I did fine, too,
Obama thought.
I got my points across.

Michelle and Valerie had sat next to each other during the debate, as was their wont in 2008, and both were stunned by the strength of Romney’s performance. Leaning over and nudging Michelle, Jarrett whispered, “Boy, he’s good.” Back at the Doubletree, they were slightly shaken by what had occurred; there was no doubt in FLOTUS’s mind that her husband had lost.

Once POTUS had a chance to sample the coverage on his iPad, he began to get the picture—but even then, he resisted the world’s verdict. When Plouffe arrived at the hotel after a futile half an hour with the press, trying to spin the unspinnable, he met Obama in the hallway outside his suite.

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” the president said.

“Yeah, it was that bad,” Plouffe replied. “We just have to figure out how to fix it.”

Klain was on his way to the hotel, too, but became snarled in traffic. Eventually his cell phone rang, with Obama on the line.

“It didn’t feel that bad to me, but it seems like it’s pretty bad,” said 44. “I feel like I executed the strategy.”

“I think we had a failure of strategy and execution both,” Klain said.

Klain went on to tell Obama that he would have scored the debate 60/40 for Romney, but it was being covered as an 80/20 wipeout. The disparity, Klain said, was due largely to the meltdown of the Democratic base and the novel impact of social media, especially Twitter, which amplified every meme with a fierce instantaneity. (During the ninety minutes of the Denver debate, there were 10.3 million tweets about it.) In the past, presidential debate performances had been judged by their effect on undecided voters. Here, Obama was being pilloried not for failing to move to the middle but for missing opportunities to decapitate Romney.

Obama’s high command convened an emergency meeting at the hotel, which ran well into the early hours of the morning. Every presidential campaign starts out with a game plan, but aware that it is provisional, that unexpected events will inevitably arise and compel the coaches and players to go back to the drawing board. Chicago’s execution hadn’t always been flawless, but it had never once been forced to deviate from its playbook. Now it was reformulating its strategy on the fly and under pressure.

Obama had two rallies scheduled for Thursday: the first in Denver and the second in Madison, Wisconsin. Given the base-driven dynamics the debate had laid bare, his people decided that the first crucial step was for the president to come out strong and fiery—to counteract the perplexity, disappointment, and pissed-offedness of his supporters.

That morning, just before 10:00 a.m., Plouffe rode with Obama in the
presidential limo to the event in Sloan’s Lake Park. Listen, the body language here is as important as what you say, Plouffe explained. You need to really bring it.

Obama rolled his eyes and said, “I got it, I got it.”

I know you’re annoyed by this, but it’s really important for the news, Plouffe continued. People have to see you picking yourself up, because we’re asking them to pick themselves up, too.

The president reminded Plouffe that they had been in similar straits before: in 2008, when Obama’s shocking loss in the New Hampshire primary to Hillary threatened to eclipse his victory in Iowa and sink the whole enterprise. The day after, Obama did an event in Boston where he came out swinging, buoying his downcast backers. For the president, that moment had always been a touchstone.
I have to keep my head up,
Obama thought.
I know what I have to do here.

In Denver, the president met a crowd twelve thousand strong; in Madison that afternoon, the throng was nearly three times as large. In both places, Obama offered no excuses and ripped into Romney, advancing Chicago’s agreed-upon line that Mitt had essentially lied his way to victory the previous night. “Governor Romney may dance around his positions,” Obama said in Wisconsin. “He may do a tap dance and a two-step. But if you want to be president, then you owe the American people the truth.”

For the president’s adherents, the rallies and the headlines that they generated might have been heartening. But for Obama, they were something else. On the rope lines in Denver and Madison, his fans called out, We’ve got your back! Obama knew they were well-intentioned. But their words also forced a painful reckoning with his loss—with the fact that he had let millions of his people down.

Heading back to Washington, he told Jarrett, “I have to fix it.”

The question for the Obamans was not just how to repair the damage from Denver but how much there was to repair. After less than twenty-four hours, the impact on voters was impossible to gauge; Benenson’s next round of numbers would begin to tell the tale. On a conference call with Chicago’s crew of pollsters, Axelrod was already looking toward the second debate, on October 16 at Hofstra University, in New York. There, Obama
would have his best chance to clean up the mess he’d created in the Mile High City.

Paul Harstad, who’d been polling for Obama since his 2004 Senate race, conveyed a grim sense of urgency about the task ahead.

The next debate
better
turn things around, Harstad said. Another performance like this one could be fatal to the campaign.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY FLEW OUT OF DENVER,
landing late that afternoon in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley—where Gillespie noticed the change instantly. The state troopers on the tarmac were standing a little more straight-backed than before. The road to Mitt’s rally with Paul Ryan in Fishersville was bumper-to-bumper; the size of the crowd, upwards of ten thousand, was causing tie-ups. Gillespie had experienced this moment before with other Republican nominees, when all at once people started looking at them and seeing a president. Normally, the party convention was what did it; for Romney, it was Denver. On the way to the event, Gillespie said, “Governor, I think something really did happen last night.”