Double Down: Game Change 2012 (71 page)

Both despite and because of all the heat that the issue was generating, Boston wanted no part of it. The campaign’s research showed (as did Chicago’s) that Benghazi meant next to nothing to the small slice of voters who remained undecided. Stevens saw it through his usual prism: as a distraction from the economy. But debate prep forced the issue on Romney. He had to figure out what to say if the subject came up at Hofstra—which was likely, given the amount of news coverage it was generating.

The Burlington deliberations on the matter were interminable and quibbly. Romney feared that advancing any of the right’s main lines of attack on
Benghazi would leave him vulnerable to being blindsided by information to which Obama had access but Mitt did not. This isn’t a level playing field, he said. I need to be on solid ground.

In the end, Romney settled on soil that was not only solid but ultrasafe: critiquing Obama for traveling to Las Vegas for a political event on September 12, in the aftermath of the attacks. If it had been me, Mitt said, I would have stopped everything, called all hands on deck, managed this thing. That’s what I did in Boston when we had the Big Dig tunnel accident.

With conservatives craving raw, red rib eye, Romney was planning to serve up tofu. Yet even the prospect of delivering this wan attack made Mitt slightly queasy. His grapplings with Benghazi had already inflicted too much damage on the campaign.

You know, he told Portman, I’m just not sure this is a winner for us.

•   •   •

B
ENGHAZI WAS MUCH ON
Obama’s mind, too. The answers he rehearsed in Williamsburg on the topic were among his best: fiery and full of conviction. The way that the right was piling on Rice made him furious. His national security aide Ben Rhodes was convinced that Romney would assail Obama for having not labeled Benghazi a terrorist attack. Now, a few hours before the debate, as Obama ran through some final prep at a Marriott on Long Island, Rhodes walked him through the transcript of his Rose Garden speech, with its “acts of terror” language. The president rehearsed his answer again, with gusto.
Boy, he nailed that,
Rhodes thought.

For all the progress Obama had made in his Monday night practice session, his team was anything but serene as the witching hour approached. Backstage at Hofstra, Klain was a nervous wreck.
One pretty good mock, one disaster in the past forty-eight hours,
Plouffe thought.
So which Obama shows up?

Just then, the president emerged from his holding room, a few minutes before heading onstage. He found Klain, Plouffe, Axelrod, and Jim Messina in the hallway.

“Guys, I’m going to be good tonight,” Obama said. “I finally figured this out.”

When the lights went up at Hofstra, it took all of one answer for the
Obamans to realize that the president wasn’t kidding. Replying to the first questioner, a twenty-year-old college student worried about finding work after graduation, Obama locked eyes with the young man and spoke crisply and pointedly. In the space of six sentences, the president plugged higher education and touted his job creation record, his manufacturing agenda, and his rescue of the auto industry—plunging an ice pick into Romney by invoking “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” When Mitt cited his five-point economic plan in answer to a follow-up from Crowley, Obama let loose with his one-point-plan zinger. He was fast. He was hammy. He was gliding around the stage.

In the staff room, Obama’s increasingly giddy team kept track of his progress, using his debate-on-a-page as a scorecard, ticking off the hits one by one as he delivered them. On outsourcing to China (“Pioneers!”), immigration (self-deportation), women’s issues (Planned Parenthood), and more, the president was not only proving himself an able student but making Romney pay for every rightward lunge he had taken during the nomination contest.

Romney responded aggressively but with visible annoyance as he found himself forced to keep doubling back to answer attacks from minutes earlier, which made him appear petty and threw him off-rhythm. In Denver, Mitt’s propensity for gaffes had vanished as if by magic; at Hofstra, presto-chango, it returned. Boasting of his commitment to gender equity in the Massachusetts statehouse, he referred to the résumés he reviewed for cabinet posts as “binders full of women.” (On Twitter, the Obamans were all over it: #bindersfullofwomen.)

About two-thirds of the way through the ninety minutes, Romney tried to roll out Bob White’s hit on Obama’s financial portfolio. “Mr. President, have you looked at your pension?” Romney asked.

“You know, I don’t look at my pension,” Obama said without missing a beat and with a mile-wide smile. “It’s not as big as yours, so it doesn’t take as long.”

The debate was now a little more than an hour old. The next question from the audience had to do with Benghazi. Obama explained the steps he had taken in the wake of the killings and then turned his attention to his opponent. “While we were still dealing with our diplomats being
threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points,” the president said sternly.

Romney got in his jab about the inappropriateness of Obama’s political jaunt on September 12. But, as Rhodes predicted, Romney went further. “There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration or actually whether it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.”

Obama summoned his highest dudgeon and responded: “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror. And I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime. And then a few days later, I was there greeting the caskets coming into Andrews Air Force Base and grieving with the families. And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our UN ambassador—anybody on my team—would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.”

Obama returned to his stool and took a sip of water. Romney, incredulous, began to splutter.

“You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration? Is that what you’re saying?”

With an icy stare, Obama set a trap: “Please proceed, Governor.”

“I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror,” Romney insisted.

“Get the transcript,” Obama said—at which point Candy Crowley interceded just as she had promised (or threatened) she would.

“He did, in fact, sir,” Crowley said to Romney. “He did call it an act of terror.”

“Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” Obama said, twisting the knife in Romney’s back. The crowd burst into laughter and applause.

Romney was incensed with Crowley, so much so that he momentarily
seemed to forget about Obama and started quarreling with her. In the Romney staff room backstage, Mitt’s people completely lost their cool. The moderator had stepped in as a fact-checker, intervening on the president’s side in a dispute that was far from cut-and-dried—and where a case could be made that Crowley was wrong. Ben Ginsberg called the control room and shouted, “What the hell was that?”

Minutes later, the debate was over. The Obamans were ebullient. The president’s performance hadn’t been perfect, but judged against the standards of Denver (or the Mock from Hell) it was pure genius. As he came off the stage, Obama thought he had done well. But having initially misjudged his performance the last time out, he was slightly tentative. “That was good, right?” he asked his people.

Yes, sir, they said. It was.

Backstage in his holding room, Romney paced the floor in a rage, fulminating about Crowley. Ann was equally livid: How could she do this? How could she make herself part of the debate?

Mitt demanded to see a transcript of Obama’s Rose Garden remarks. Astonishingly, in all of his prep on Benghazi for Hofstra, no one on his team had ever bothered to review it with him. Romney wanted to get out of the hall and back to his hotel ASAP. Instead he was told he had to cool his heels and wait for the president’s motorcade to leave first—the evening’s final indignity.

Six nights later, on October 22, the candidates met again, for the third and final debate, in Boca Raton, Florida, on foreign policy. For Romney at this point, the topic could hardly have been less inviting. Snakebit twice on Benghazi, convinced that the media deck was stacked against him, and dismayed that the left was painting him as a warmonger, Romney agreed with Stevens that there was no mileage in doing anything other than hugging Obama, moving past the debate, and returning to campaigning on the economy.

The president’s team suspected that Boston might run this play but assumed that Romney would try to redeem himself on Benghazi—if for no other reason than to placate the increasingly fervid right. The first question of the night, from moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS, placed the issue of Libya directly before Romney. Ducking it completely, he spent two minutes
talking instead about Syria, Mali, Egypt, and Iran and congratulating Obama for having eliminated Osama bin Laden.

Just as Hofstra left Romney scalded, it had emboldened Obama. In preparing for Boca, he abandoned any visible signs of resistance to the thespianism and dramaturgical devices that his team urged on him. Klain’s instruction shifted from “fast and hammy” to “ham with cheese delivery.” Obama laughed at that—and couldn’t help cracking up every time the diminutive (and very pregnant) Karen Dunn reminded him to pop Mitt in the kisser.

The most memorable line of the night demonstrated that Obama had taken both pieces of advice to heart. In response to a Romney charge that the president was reducing the military too much and too swiftly, Obama said contemptuously: “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships; it’s what are our capabilities.”

The pundits and the insta-polls all but unanimously rated the debate a blowout for Obama. In the space of eight days, the president had gone from the Mock from Hell through the crucible of Hofstra to the cakewalk at Boca. The final challenge of the campaign—and his career as a candidate—was behind him. Backstage, he walked over to Klain and put his hand on the debate coach’s shoulder. His delight and relief were both evident.

You know, I really
have
finally figured this out, Obama said. Just in time for the last debate I’ll ever do.

23

LIKE A HURRICANE

B
ARACK OBAMA AND MITT ROMNEY
exited Boca on October 23 and entered the homestretch: the final, frantic, two-week sprint to Election Day, November 6. While a brand-new NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll made the race a dead heat nationally, Chicago’s internal numbers showed the president narrowly ahead in almost all of the battleground states. Boston’s research painted a more encouraging picture for Mitt. With the Denver debate having already uncorked one October surprise, with 2012 having been a year in which the wackadoodle was de rigueur, and with the bar for crazy always low in the final fortnight of a general election, the Obamans and Romneyites braced for the unexpected.

The next day, as if on cue, the Donald reemerged. On Twitter the previous week, Trump had teased that he would soon be making a “major announcement on President Obama.” As with all things Trump, it would be big, big, big. A game changer for sure.

Romney was in a mild panic over what his most volatile supporter might have in the works; the last thing Mitt needed in the election’s closing days was to be force-fed a shitburger. Does anyone know what this Trump thing is? Romney kept asking his aides. Shouldn’t we find out?
How
do we find out?