Double Down: Game Change 2012 (69 page)

The snap polls made the debate a draw. Boston and much of the conservative media accused Biden of being rude and borderline unhinged. (“It was like the Joker showed up,” Romney remarked to Stevens.) Democrats were elated, as was Obama, who caught the debate on TV on Air Force One as he flew back to Washington after a day of campaigning in Florida.

“You did a great job,” he told Biden by phone. “And you picked me up.”

In thirty-six hours, Obama would set off for another three-day debate camp, in Williamsburg, Virginia. But watching his understudy had already provided him with one helpful insight.

“These are not debates,” Obama observed to Plouffe. “These are gladiatorial enterprises.”

•   •   •

T
HE FIRST LADY WORRIED
about her Maximus and his return to the Colosseum. In truth, she had fretted over the debates even before Denver. In July, around the time her husband’s prep started, she met with Plouffe and expressed firm opinions. That Barack had to speak from the gut, in language that regular folks could understand. Had to avoid treating the debates like policy seminars. Had to keep his head out of the clouds. (Michelle’s advisers paraphrased her advice as “It’s not about David Brooks; it’s about my mother.”) FLOTUS loved POTUS like nobody’s business, but she knew his faults well.

In the wake of Denver, she was unfailingly encouraging with her husband: Don’t worry, you’re going to win the next one, just remember who you’re talking to, Michelle told him. Before a small group of female bundlers, she pronounced that Barack had lost only because “Romney is a really good liar.”

Privately, however, Michelle was unhappy about how her spouse’s prep had been handled. The late arrival in Denver. The rushed meal at the crappy hotel. Not being able to reach Sasha and Malia by phone. He seemed overscheduled, overcoached, and underrested. At first, she conveyed her displeasure via Jarrett, who flooded the inboxes of the debate team with pointed e-mails, employing the royal “we.” But the day before debate camp in Williamsburg, Michelle delivered marching orders directly to Plouffe: If the president wants our chef there, he should be there; if he wants Marty Nesbitt there, he should be there. Barack’s food, downtime, exercise, sleep, lodging—all of it affects his frame of mind. All of it has to be right.

Plouffe saluted sharply and thought,
I guess the first lady understands the stakes here.

That same Friday, October 12, Obama’s debate team gathered again in the Roosevelt Room for a final pre-camp session. The president was presented with a piece of overarching advice and a memo, both of which would
have been inconceivable before Denver. The advice was: Be more like Biden, whose combativeness, scripted moments, and bluff calls on Ryan (“Not true!”) had all proved effective tactics. The memo was an alliterative flash card to remind Obama of what it called “the Six A’s”:

Advocate (don’t explain)

Audience

Animated

Attacks

Answers with principles and values

Allow yourself to take advantage of openings

Klain had no shame about such contrivances—whatever worked. His relationship with the president was not straightforward or particularly close. In 2010, Klain had wanted to graduate from Biden’s chief of staff to become Obama’s when Rahm Emanuel departed, but he was rebuffed directly by 44, who told Klain that he was insufficiently no-drama to step in after Emanuel’s polarizing reign. Klain, not for the first time, ditched government for private-sector enrichment. But he found the intellectual challenges and sheer buzz of politics impossible to resist. Right after the Denver disaster, he offered to resign from the debate team, but Obama refused to let him. Klain’s ego, pride, and future ambitions were all wrapped up in fixing what had gone wrong in the Mile High City.

He turned Obama’s prep regime upside down: new strategy, new tactics, new structure. In Williamsburg, there would be an intense concentration on performance, including speeding up Obama’s ponderous delivery. There would be less policy Q&A and more rehearsal of set pieces and lines that popped. Less emphasis on programmatic peas and spinach, more on anecdote and empathy. Contrary to Clinton’s advice, there would be plenty of punching to go along with the counterpunching. Fixating on likability was out; following instinct was in.

Camp commenced on Saturday at the Kingsmill Resort, on the James River. Lush and green, the site had none of the funky juju of Lake Las Vegas, though there was a touch of weirdness: the hotel was hosting a “Ferraris on
the James” event, so the lawn out front was a shimmering sea of souped-up sports cars.

Two levels down from the lobby of the Resort Center, on the precisely built replica of the Hofstra town hall set, the president spent most of Saturday sharpening his answers with Klain and Axelrod. That night, his mock went better than any in Henderson or at the DNC. The debate team wasn’t ready to declare victory yet, but they were relieved. Obama’s friend Nesbitt was exultant. “That’s some good shit!” he told the president, patting him on the back. “That’s my man! He’s back!”

In the Sunday daytime sessions, Obama showed still more improvement, honing a solid attack on the 47 percent and another on his rival’s economic agenda. (“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan; he has a one-point plan, and that’s to make sure folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”) As the team took time off for dinner before Obama and Kerry went at it again, Klain thought,
Okay, we’re getting to a better place
. Plouffe thought,
He’s locked in.

A little before 9:00 p.m., they returned to the Resort Center. Obama and Kerry grabbed their handheld microphones and took their places—and the president proceeded to deliver the Mock from Hell.

Even before Nasty Obama snarled at Kerry-as-Mitt and Anita Dunn as CNN’s Candy Crowley at the 39:35 mark, Klain was mortified. The president’s emotional flatness from Henderson and Denver was back. He was making no connection with the voter stand-ins asking questions. He was wandering aimlessly, digressing compulsively, not merely chasing rabbits but stalking them to the ends of the earth. His cadences were hesitant and maple-syrupy slow: phrase, pause, phrase, pause, phrase. His answers were verbose and utterly devoid of message.

In Klain’s career as a debate maestro, he had been involved in successes (Kerry over Bush three times in a row) and failures (Gore’s symphony of sighs in 2000). But he had never seen anything like this. After all the happy talk from Obama and his consistent, if small, steps forward, the president was regressing—with forty-eight hours and only one full day of prep between them and Hofstra.

Obama and Nesbitt went back to the Pettus House, a colonnaded
redbrick mansion on the riverbank, where they were bunking. Nesbitt knew the mock had not gone well; Anita Dunn had asked him to talk it over with Obama. He and the president stayed up late playing cards, watching football, hashing out what hadn’t worked, how the president was still struggling to find the zone. “You can’t get mad” at Romney’s distortions, Nesbitt said. “You come off better when you just say, ‘Now, that’s fucking
ridiculous
.’ When you laugh, that shit works, man.”

In Obama’s hold room at the Resort Center, his staff was moving past puzzlement and panic toward practical considerations. “What are we going to do?” asked Plouffe. The lesson that he had taken from Denver was that you could no longer count on fourth-quarter Obama; what you saw in practice was what you got on the debate stage. If he doesn’t have a good mock tomorrow, there’s no reason to believe that it’ll get fixed when he gets to New York, Plouffe said.

Two schools of thought quickly emerged within the team. The first, pushed by Bob Barnett—who in addition to his super-lawyer status was a longtime debate prepper and was there serving on Kerry’s staff—was that Obama needed to be shown video in the morning. “This is what we did with Clinton,” Barnett sagely noted. The other, advanced by Favreau, was that Obama should be given transcripts. He’s a writer, Favreau argued. Words on the page will make a deeper impression.

The full transcript was in hand within forty-five minutes—and became a source of gallows humor. As the clock ticked well past midnight, Favreau stagily read aloud some of Obama’s most dreadful answers. Soon his colleagues joined in, with Axelrod, Benenson, and Plouffe offering recitations and laughing deliriously over the absurdity and horror of the circumstances.

Klain regarded the video-versus-transcripts dickering as beside the point. Every day in Henderson and Williamsburg, the team had put Obama in front of a video monitor. Every day they explained what he needed to do to improve. Every day he said, “I got it.” But apart from momentary flashes of adequacy, nothing had changed; the idea that further illustration of his badness would fix things was folly.

Barnett and others believed that Obama’s playbook had to be stripped down more dramatically, to a series of simple and crisp bullet points on the most likely topics to come up in the debate. Klain agreed and wanted to go
a step further. In 1996, Democratic strategist Mark Penn had devised something called “debate-on-a-page” for Gore in his VP face-off with Jack Kemp. Klain suggested they do the same for Obama: a sheet of paper with a handful of key principles, attacks, and counterattacks.

Axelrod and Plouffe thought something more radical was in order. For the past six years, they had watched Obama struggle with his disdain for the theatricality of politics—not just debates, but even the soaring speeches for which he was renowned. Obama’s distrust of emotional string-pulling and resistance to the practical necessities of the sound-bite culture: these were elements of his personality that they accepted, respected, and admired. But they had long harbored foreboding that those proclivities might also be a train wreck in the making. Time and again, Obama had averted the oncoming locomotive. Had embraced showmanship when it was necessary. Had picked his people up and carried them on his back to the promised land. But now, with a crucial debate less than two days away—one that could either put the election in the bag or turn it into a toss-up—Obama was faltering in a way his closest advisers had never witnessed. They needed to figure out what had gone haywire from the inside out. They needed, as someone in the staff room put it, to stage an “intervention.”

The next morning, October 15, Klain stumbled from his room to the Resort Center, eyes puffy and nerves jangled. He’d been up all night hammering together and e-mailing around his debate-on-a-page draft. In Obama’s hold room, the team gathered and laid out their plan for the day. They would screen video for the boss. They would show him transcripts. They would present him with his cheat sheets. They would devote the day to topic-by-topic drills until he had his answers memorized.

Normally, the whole group would now meet with the president to critique the previous night’s mock. Instead, everyone except Axelrod, Klain, and Plouffe cleared the room just before 10:00 a.m. Obama was on his way. The intervention was at hand.

•   •   •

W
HERE’S EVERYBODY ELSE?”
Obama asked as he ambled in across the speckled green carpet, with Jack Lew at his side. “Where’s the rest of the team?”

We met this morning and decided we should have this smaller meeting first, one of the interventionists said.

Obama, in khakis and rolled-up shirtsleeves, looked nonplussed. Between his conversation with Nesbitt the night before and a morning national security briefing with Lew, he was aware that his people were unhappy with the mock—but not fully clued in to the depth of their concern.

The president settled into a cushy black sofa at one end of the room. On settees to his left were Axelrod, Plouffe, and Lew; to his right, in a blue blazer, was Klain, now caffeinated and coherent.

“We’re here, Mr. President,” Klain began, “because we need to have a serious conversation about why this isn’t working and the fundamental transformation we need to achieve today to avoid a very bad result tomorrow night.” We’re not going to get there by continuing to grind away and marginally improve, Klain went on. This is not about changing the words in your debate book, because the difference between the answers that work and the answers that don’t work is just 15 or 20 percent. This is about style, engagement, speed, presentation, attitude. Candidly, we need to figure out why you’re not rising to and meeting the challenge—why you’re not really
doing
this, why you’re doing . . . something else.

Obama didn’t flinch. “Guys, I’m struggling,” he said somberly. “Last night wasn’t good, and I know that. Here’s why I think I’m having trouble. I’m having a hard time squaring up what I know I need to do, what you guys are telling me I need to do, with where my mind takes me, which is: I’m a lawyer, and I want to argue things out. I want to peel back layers.”

The ensuing presidential soliloquy went on for ten minutes—an eternity in Obama time. His tone was even and unemotional, but searching, introspective, diagnostic, vulnerable. Psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, he was placing his cards face up on the table.

“When I get a question,” he said, “I go right to the logical.” You ask me a question about health care. There’s a problem and there’s a response. Here’s what my opponent might say about it, so I’m going to counteract that. Okay, we’re gonna talk about immigration. Here’s what I’d like to say—but I can’t say that.
Think about what that means.
I know what I want to say, I know where my mind takes me, but I have to tell myself,
No, no, don’t do that—do this other thing.
It’s against my instincts just to perform. It’s easy for me to
slip back into what I know, which is basically to dissect arguments. I think when I talk. It can be halting. I start slow. It’s hard for me to just go into my answer. I’m having to teach my brain to function differently. I’m left-handed; this is like you’re asking me to start writing right-handed.