Game Change (34 page)

After one last climactic shouting match in the Senate office, Nelson announced that he was quitting, jumping before he was pushed. Weaver, out of frustration, disdain for Davis, and solidarity with Nelson, decided to say sayonara, too.

McCain wanted Weaver to stay. They were brothers-in-arms from 2000, and no one, including McCain himself, had spent anything like the amount of time that Weaver had thinking about how to get him elected president. But too much poison had flowed between them.

With Weaver’s conspicuous departure, McCain lost his wingman, and was visibly uncomfortable answering reporters’ questions about the situation. “I’m very happy with the campaign,” he repeated stiltedly, making himself seem deluded in addition to desperate.

McCain was on the verge of losing Salter, too. Close to Weaver, disillusioned by the spiteful family feud, he told McCain that he’d continue to write his speeches, but little more. But McCain pleaded with Salter to stay—“Forget about this shit; we’re friends, we’ve been friends for twenty years”—and Salter relented.

McCain’s highest priority was fixing the money situation. Davis took over the shriveled operation, its staff shrunk by Nelson at McCain’s insistence from nearly three hundred to around forty, and zeroed out every other possible expense. Publicly, the moves were seen as the slow winding down of the operation. McCain had gone from a campaign bleeding internally to spilling its entrails all over the carpet.

The candidate gave pep talks to his remaining staff, his donors, his backers. In every case, he tried to be upbeat about his chances without sounding ridiculous. He showed more emotion than usual in thanking people for sticking by him.

With his closest friends, he was more torn. “I guess I never should have fucking run,” he said. “I’m gonna do what I need to do, everything I need to do, and then we’ll probably lose.” He knew he risked further embarrassment, but he was willing to take the hit: I know they’re gonna make fun of me. I know what they’re gonna say. I watch cable. I get it.

McCain went to New Hampshire on July 13, trailed by national reporters who hadn’t covered him for months but who wanted to be present at the cremation. Jimmy McCain, who almost never campaigned with his father, came along. The senator was quietly defiant, vowing to stay in the race, with the Granite State the key to his comeback.

Cindy and Salter weren’t dreaming of a resurrection. They were worried about John, about his entire career being defined by a botched mission of a few months. Their goal was to wrap up the campaign without further damage to his reputation or a plunge deeper into debt. “He’s not gonna be the nominee,” Salter told one of his colleagues. “I just want the campaign to last long enough so we can tell people one last time, ‘Go fuck off. We made it this far.’”

McCain had a series of conversations with Charlie Black, a longtime friend and Republican strategist—and another Washington lobbyist. Despite all the speculation, McCain wasn’t inclined to leave the race right away, but he wanted to know if he still had a chance to win. He was irritated and sad, burdened with a sense of responsibility for letting everyone down.

There was a narrow path back, Black told McCain, mostly because the other candidates seemed so weak. Giuliani? He would never roll up his sleeves and do the hard work. Romney? Conservatives would never fall in behind him; he was the moderate former governor of Massachusetts, for heaven’s sake. The others? Please. McCain stood head and shoulders above them all. It was like what happened with Ronald Reagan in 1980, Black reminded McCain. The Gipper had been the front-runner, but his campaign ran out of money at the end of 1979 and his staff was in turmoil. Reagan had come back, and so could McCain.

Black advised McCain that he needed to adopt a distinctly un-McCain-like approach: he needed to lower his profile. He had to do whatever he could to get as little national media attention as possible. “Every time you get covered it’s going to be, ‘That idiot McCain was the front-runner and screwed up his campaign,’ ” Black said. “So our goal is to be off the radar screen.

“Look,” Black added, “for the next three months, all the stories are just gonna say, ‘McCain’s dead and buried.’ Your only job is to keep your head down, go to those early states, and keep right on campaigning. We’ll see where we are after Labor Day. If we aren’t dead and buried, we’re in this.”

RUDY GIULIANI TOOK LITTLE personal pleasure in the prospect of McCain’s demise. The two men were friends, and not just faux political friends. They actually liked each other. They’d first met at New York’s City Hall in the late nineties, when Giuliani was mayor. They bonded over sports, baseball in particular, with Giuliani touting his beloved Yankees and McCain his Arizona Diamondbacks. In that awful autumn after the Twin Towers fell, when their teams met in the 2001 World Series, they’d made a show of attending several of the games together. More than once in the course of the 2008 presidential, Giuliani had said publicly that if he weren’t running, he would probably be supporting McCain.

Not that Giuliani didn’t see the political upside for him in the unraveling of his pal’s campaign. He would’ve had to be blind to miss that—and Giuliani had an eagle eye when it came to his own advancement. Since he entered the race in February, he had led the field in virtually every national poll, riding his celebrity as “America’s Mayor” and his brassy reputation as a hero of 9/11. With his hawkish profile on national security and moderation on social issues, Giuliani was chasing many of the same voters as McCain. In the wake of the maverick’s meltdown, he seemed positioned to scoop them up, along with a chunk of McCain’s donors. He looked like the new front-runner.

Yet to the members of the politico-industrial complex, Giuliani’s candidacy was a chimera. The idea that the Republican Party would select a man of his background and views as its nominee struck them as implausible when they were being polite, risible when they were being honest. They contended that Romney was the runner to watch in the aftermath of McCain’s implosion. Or maybe Fred Thompson would be the one to seize the moment; the former Tennessee senator and Hollywood actor, familiar from his regular role on
Law & Order
, had been making noises for months about a late entry into the race. But Hizzoner? No way.

McCain himself agreed. Even at his lowest depths, he never felt threatened by Giuliani. Asked why by his advisers, McCain would shrug and say, “Rudy’s Rudy.”

Giuliani’s defects, from a conservative point of view, were readily apparent. He was pro-choice, pro—gay rights, pro—gun control. He was thrice married, and had carried on a public affair with wife number three while going through a messy divorce from wife number two. When the latter, Donna Hanover, kicked him out of Gracie Mansion, he cohabited with two gay men. There were pictures all over the Internet of him in drag—face painted in rouge, head adorned with a blond wig, shoulders draped in a feather boa—from a New York variety show.

And those were just the liabilities that Giuliani brought into the campaign with him. The past six months had exposed more. He had fallen far short of his fund-raising goals. He had failed to master the retail politics rituals of Iowa and New Hampshire, never shedding his swollen entourage or his preference for photo ops over town hall meetings and intimate voter coddling.

Most puzzling was his timidity. Giuliani was supposed to be a tough guy, but in the face of attacks by his opponents, his performance had been as limp as an overcooked Chinatown noodle. Challenged in debates, he would bare his cartoonishly big teeth and respond with lame jokes. When his advisers, trying to fire him up, showed him vicious direct-mail attacks on him by the Romney forces, Giuliani would just chortle. He never discouraged his aides from producing negative TV ads against his foes, but whenever they showed him a new spot or proposed script, he invariably rejected it.

Giuliani’s aides were at a loss to explain his softness. Some attributed it to his bout with prostate cancer in 2000. Others thought he feared that getting tough would provoke retaliation. Still others believed Giuliani didn’t want to be president badly enough to assail his fellow Republicans. But mostly, when his advisers were trying to make sense of the bizarreness of Giuliani’s behavior, they talked about his wife—and the operatic piece of psychotropic theater that was the Rudy and Judi Show.

JUDITH NATHAN HAD BEEN in the spotlight since 1998, after she and Giuliani collided one night at a cigar bar. The tabloid coverage of her had never been flattering, but once her husband entered the presidential race in early 2007, it turned into a horror show.

First came the story that Judith had actually been married twice—not once, as she had previously suggested—before wedding Rudy in 2003. (“JUDI GIULIANI’S SECRET HUSBAND REVEALED.”) Two weeks later, she suffered a far worse headline: “JUDI’S JOB WITH PUP-KILLER FIRM.” Years earlier, it seemed, she had worked for a medical supply firm that, yes, exterminated puppies as part of its sales demonstrations.

Rudy’s famously thin skin was a suit of armor compared to the gossamer sheath that enveloped Judith; after every negative story, she became hysterical. The press hates us, she howled to her husband’s advisers. They hate Rudy. They love Donna. And, “They’re fucking me!”

Judith had the same view, also loudly expressed, of the press staffers assigned to her. They’re all out to get me, she’d say. Nobody gives a shit about me.

Three successive communications teams tried to assist her, but found it hard sledding. She refused to provide the background information that would enable them to defend her and which only Judith had at her disposal. When they asked about the details of the puppy story, she professed selective amnesia. “I don’t remember exactly what happened back then,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

She was equally evasive about her whereabouts, insisting that aides never call or email her directly, but instead stay in touch through her assistant. So mysterious was she that Rudy would joke, I’m going to make her the head of the CIA if I win.

One cool night that summer, in the private room of a New York restaurant, the Giulianis convened a group of about a dozen campaign advisers and friends of Judith’s to discuss rehabilitating her image; she called them Team J. As they sat down to dinner, each attendee was handed a sheet of paper by Judith’s assistant: a nondisclosure agreement that swore them to silence about the evening’s talk.

With wine flowing, Judith observed that her press coverage had not been to her liking. She wasn’t being handled well, wanted to get back to basics. “What role should I play?” she asked the group.

Rudy’s pollster, Ed Goeas, tried to be helpful. “First of all, you’re his third wife. What you should be is humble,” he said.

Judith scrunched up her face and pouted.

Humility wasn’t Judith’s strong suit. Nor was leaving Rudy to his business. She called him constantly when he was traveling without her, no matter where he was or what he was doing. On several occasions the calls arrived when Giuliani was meeting with donors or making speeches. He invariably picked up the phone. “Hello, dear,” he said when she interrupted him while he was onstage addressing the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association. “I’m talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say hello?”

His staff concluded that Giuliani had no choice but to answer Judith’s calls, because ignoring her risked dire consequences—more dire than wrecking some speech. To the NRA members, Rudy apologized, but added, “It’s a lot better that way.”

TEAM GIULIANI FACED a problem more imperiling, if less sensational, than Judith. Of the early-voting states, Iowa and South Carolina had proved inhospitable to the mayor’s liberal leanings, and New Hampshire voters, who should have been a natural fit, were not taking to him, either. The campaign had always been premised on the notion that Giuliani was a national candidate—that his strength in places such as New York and California would carry him through. The question was how he could survive until those states started voting on Super Tuesday. The answer was Florida.

The Florida primary on January 29 was the fifth contest in the Republican race. The Giuliani strategy was to do well enough in New Hampshire to allow him to stay alive until the vote in the Sunshine State, then win there and be off and running.

Taking Florida was a credible objective. Replete with transplants from New York and elsewhere in the Northeast, and with large urban and suburban pockets of centrist Republicans, the state seemed fertile ground for Giuliani’s pitch. It was one place where McCain’s expected immolation would boost Giuliani on primary day. But the mayor had his eye on a more concrete asset that he wanted to swipe from John: Florida governor Charlie Crist.

Crist had been elected the year before to the top job in the ultimate battleground state. With his lean frame, snow-white hair, and perpetual tan, he was the most popular elected official in Florida, a prodigious fund-raiser, and a topic of endless fascination. Though Crist’s political skills were respected, many insiders saw him as something of a cipher. In becoming governor, he had won a bitterly contested GOP primary after facing down dual allegations of having fathered a child out of wedlock and being gay.

McCain had endorsed Crist in his primary fight; Giuliani had remained neutral. Crist expressed gratitude to McCain on a regular basis, including several reaffirmations of a promise to endorse McCain’s presidential bid. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there at the right time,” Crist assured him.

But now that McCain was tanking, Crist seemed to be reconsidering his options. “I campaigned my ass off for him,” McCain groused to his lieutenants. “And now that fucker is not going to keep his end of the bargain.”

McCain was right to be worried, for even Crist’s closest allies often said of him, “Charlie is all about Charlie.” Crist’s political team was aggressive and demanding. Jim Greer, his handpicked Florida state party chairman, started actively exploring what the governor could receive in return for his endorsement, suggesting to Giuliani directly that a “right of first refusal” on the VP slot might do the trick. The Charlie Bazaar was open for business.

One fine July weekend, Giuliani made his play, inviting Crist to fly up and spend the weekend in the Hamptons. Giuliani and Crist played a round of golf. They smoked cigars at the Giulianis’ home in Bridge-hampton. And they shared an epic meal. Sitting outside under a stand of trees with Judith and a handful of their respective advisers, they talked long into the night about the paths that had carried them to prominence. The evening went splendidly, the Giulianis thought. Crist was reveling in the courtship. The endorsement seemed within Rudy’s grasp. He invited Crist back to his house the next morning for a private conversation.

When Crist arrived, Giuliani made his appeal—and was thrilled with the reply.

“I’d like to support you,” Crist said.

The next day, Giuliani shared the news with his aide Tony Carbonetti. “I think we got him; it went very well,” Giuliani said.

Carbonetti was familiar enough with Giuliani’s lexicon to know what that meant: Rudy thought it was a done deal. Seeing Giuliani’s strong poll numbers in Florida, Crist had apparently concluded that Rudy was the horse to ride. Carbonetti, a no-nonsense fixer who’d been Rudy’s chief of staff at City Hall, followed up with Crist’s main political guy, George LeMieux, flying to Tallahassee to meet with him and plan the endorsement.

Giuliani’s team so valued their new prize that they proceeded to build their entire fall strategy around it. Their secret plan was to start running TV ads in New Hampshire in November, followed shortly thereafter by a surprise trip to Florida to claim the Crist endorsement. Then a classic fly-around to all the state’s major cities, for a series of press conferences and fund-raisers. After that, Crist and Giuliani would travel together to New Hampshire for some joint campaigning. The publicity, money, and show of force that Crist would confer in Florida would so impress the national media and the voters of New Hampshire that the endorsement would have a gigantic spillover effect.

Over the next few months, Giuliani was buoyed by the confidence of having a prepackaged bombshell tucked in his breast pocket. Crist’s close friend and top fund-raiser, Harry Sargeant, was helping Giuliani raise money, a heartening sign that the political families were engaged. Even as he began to slip in the polls, Rudy remained serene.

Until, that is, his campaign began hearing the same message over and over from their allies in Florida. No one could quite pin down what it meant, but the message filled Giuliani with unease: There’s a problem with Crist.

THE CANDIDATES LINED UP at the urinals, Giuliani next to McCain next to Huckabee, the rest all in a row. The debate was soon to start, so they were taking care of business—and laughing merrily at the one guy who wasn’t there. Poking fun at him, mocking him, agreeing about how much they disliked him. Then Willard Mitt Romney walked into the bathroom and overheard them, bringing on a crashing silence.

Romney was the guy on whom much of the smart Beltway money had been betting from the start. His resume was impressive: former CEO of Bain and Company and founder of Bain Capital; savior of the blighted 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; one-term governor of Massachusetts. His pedigree was glittering: his father, George, had been a governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate, too. His personal life was impeccable: he had married his high school sweetheart, Ann, with whom he had had five strapping sons. He was well spoken and terrific looking, with blindingly white choppers, a chiseled jaw, and a helmet of glossy dark hair.

Romney was running a textbook Republican campaign. He had hired a squad of A-list consultants, pollsters, and media wizards. He’d raised more money than anyone in the field and had millions of his own to draw on. He’d courted the GOP Establishment; worked to neutralize the most vocal potential sources of opposition; racked up oodles of endorsements; and carefully tailored his policy positions to appeal to social, economic, and national security conservatives, the three legs of the Republican stool.

But Romney’s efforts to get right with the right landed him in trouble. For most of his life, he had been a middle-of-the-road, pro-business pragmatist, unequivocally pro-choice, moderate on tax cuts and immigration. Running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he pledged that he’d do more for gay rights than his opponent, and declared, “I don’t line up with the NRA” on gun control. By 2008, Romney had reversed himself on all of this, which quickly gave rise to charges of hypocrisy and opportunism. Even before he announced his candidacy, a YouTube video began making the rounds that captured him firmly stating his liberalish social views, comically juxtaposing them with his newly adopted arch-conservative stances. From then on, the flip-flopper label was firmly affixed to Mitt’s forehead.