Playbook 2012

One of the prerogatives of being POLITICO editor-in-chief is the ability at any time to feel I know what’s really going on in Washington. All I need to do is sidle up to Mike Allen, our senior reporter and the star of our show, and ask, “What’s going on?”

Mike, a friend of two decades since our days as young reporters in Richmond, Virginia, will smile and, custom-designing his stories around what he knows of the specific interests of his audience, announce enthusiastically, “YOU will love this …”

Then will pour forth a torrent of the latest news about high-level maneuverings among familiar names at the White House or Congress or presidential campaigns, along with low-level scuttlebutt about their triumphs and tantrums, break-ups and make-ups, humor and hubris—all the quotidian details that establish these people might be human beings after all.

These conversations with Mike are the pure and unfiltered version of what Mike gives to readers every day in his now famous POLITICO Playbook: the feeling (and even some of the reality) of being an insider.

My reaction to talking with Mike is usually the same: “Man, it would be great to get some of this stuff on the site.” Sometimes we can, or already have. Other times we can’t, or intend to but don’t, or whatever—life rushes by too fast, or it would look strange to order up a whole story just so we can find a home for one juicy morsel.

So some portion of Mike’s tips, like those of other great POLITICO reporters, stays dormant—tantalizing but undeveloped.

The prospect that more of Mike’s reporting and analytical intelligence could be shared with readers was one reason—among many—that we were so intrigued by the idea Random House editor Jon Meacham presented us some months back. His proposal was to write a series of eBooks telling, in serialized form, the story of the 2012 presidential campaign. The hope is that this format will allow the revival of the kind of detail-laden, insider narratives the newsmagazines used to publish immediately in the wake of presidential campaigns. These stories made for arresting special editions of the magazines, and were often expanded to be published in book-length form. Instead of waiting to produce one giant text, why not use the speed and dexterity made possible by digital publishing to produce these accounts in something more like real time?

He also threw in an irresistible bonus: Mike could collaborate with the brilliant writer Evan Thomas, someone all of us in the leadership of POLITICO had known and admired for many years.

Meacham and I are kindred spirits of sorts. We are of the same generation (it turns out he knew my wife, from their shared time at
The Washington Monthly
, before I did). We both grew up and prospered professionally, he at
Newsweek
and me at
The Washington Post
, in what I think of as the media old order—a world in which big and powerful news brands had robust business models and awesome editorial power to set the national agenda. At mid-career, with the old order diminished in some places or crumbled altogether in others, we both face the same imperative to answer the question, “What’s next for our business and the kind of journalism we think is important?”

POLITICO began five years ago, in January 2007, with Mike, Jim VandeHei, and me as co-founders in the newsroom, in large measure out of an urgent desire to arrive at a good and
preferably prosperous answer to this question. We found an answer that works for us with a niche publication—producing content aimed at people who share our intense, even obsessive, interest in national politics and the workings of Washington. But our work is forever incomplete. POLITICO’s publisher, Robert Allbritton, and CEO, Fred Ryan, are constantly encouraging us to find new arenas of experimentation. The Random House collaboration is one of those important arenas.

Jon Meacham’s work at Random House is likewise a manifestation of someone obsessing over the question “What’s next?” Like people at POLITICO, he and his Random House colleagues are not content to live their lives in a defensive crouch, squinting longingly through the mist at a fast receding golden era. Far better to aim to create a new golden era based on the abundant publishing opportunities that exist in the here and now.

Optimism in the media business is partly a choice—a matter of willpower. But it is more than that. It is true, undeniably, that the digital age has not on balance been friendly to long-form narrative and argument. The Web has instead put a premium on speed, brevity, and monomania for the story of the moment. No problem with that, I must hasten to add, as editor of a publication that has prospered through speed, brevity, and monomania. But I agree strongly with a view advanced by my colleague Jim VandeHei: these traits, while absolutely necessary on certain types of stories, no longer constitute a distinctive comparative advantage. In the age of Twitter, there are virtually infinite competitors on these fronts. A publication like POLITICO must harness its future to original content that cannot easily be replicated by competitors. We have seen many times of late—most recently during POLITICO’s reporting on Herman Cain’s travails with accusations of sexual harassment—the ability of enterprise reporting to “drive the conversation,” in the parlance of our newsroom, in national politics.

People in the new era, like those in the old era or in any era, like good stories. It is how we understand human experience and human character. This timeless truth is combining with technological advances—iPads and Kindles and their competitors—to make reading in-depth stories in electronic form a far more congenial experience. In sum: long-form narrative may be making a revival in the digital age. At least we are prepared to put some chips on that square.

If this volume works, it is in large measure due to the special chemistry between Evan and Mike. At first, their differences seem most striking. From the magazine world, Evan has been writing stories like this one his entire career. From a newspaper background, Mike grew up telling stories in staccato bursts. But these first-blush appearances can be misleading. Evan has an intensely topical and news-driven sensibility. We need car chases, he would sometimes say when describing what he wanted in the narrative. Mike, meanwhile, beneath his hard-news facade is not simply an in-the-moment reporter but one keenly perceptive of character and the long-term forces that shape any given day’s news.

We see the results of their journalistic rapport on every page of this chronicle of the opening phase of the 2012 contest, with its special emphasis on the Republican side: in the stories of Mitt Romney’s efforts to turn weakness into strength and claim the mantle of inevitability, to Rick Perry’s blastoff and (partial) return to earth as voters and donors alike came to inspect the goods, the Cain imbroglio, and even the fateful decisions of people like Sarah Palin and Haley Barbour
not
to run for president. As Barbour discovered, there’s nothing quite like reading a campaign “oppo report” on yourself.

What Mike and Evan do in this first volume is what we try to do every day at POLITICO: defend and vindicate traditional journalism and its cardinal values, even while updating the craft for the new age we live in.

That they do it so well is one more reason for optimism—and for more experimentation—about the future of things we care about.

—John F. Harris, Editor-in-Chief

When Mitt Romney ran for president the first time around, in 2008, he started out too cocky and wound up gun-shy. One day, as he was getting off a plane shuttling between Iowa and New Hampshire, turning to Stuart Stevens, the latest in a series of consultants who seemed to come and go in the Romney campaign, Romney said, “You know, I’ve done stuff in my life. I started companies, I ran companies, I ran the Olympics, and was governor. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done by, like, twenty times.” Romney laughed ruefully and said, “I just had no idea. Why didn’t somebody tell me?” Stevens, who had been working in presidential campaigns since 1996, said, “Yeah, it’s a monster. You didn’t ask me.”

Recalling this story four years later, as Romney seemed headed for the GOP nomination in 2012, a Romney adviser said, “You just have to accept the fact that no one gets elected president without being humiliated.” Not only did Romney not mind being humiliated, he didn’t mind doing virtually whatever it took to win.

In a sense, Romney never really stopped running. The Romney 2012 campaign was born in February 2008, when Senator John McCain forced Romney out of the race by taking Super Tuesday. Romney immediately started campaigning for McCain—in part, to win friends if he needed them for 2012.

Romney confidants now talk about how lucky they were that he lost in 2008: you’re not going to win a pure personality contest with Barack Obama if you’re Mitt Romney. To win in 2012, his advisers knew, he needed a crowded race for the nomination to dilute the competition, and he needed the election to be about the economy. “If it was, he would win,” an adviser recalled. “If it wasn’t, he would lose.”

Romney, who made his fortune by turning around companies that were in precarious financial shape, saw himself as fundamentally data-driven. He wanted to see if Barack Obama was beatable before deciding, for certain, whether to run in 2012. Shortly after Election Day, Romney was cruising the Caribbean with conservative activists while Washington and much of the nation swooned over the new president. True, Obama looked pretty unbeatable, but things change fast in politics. “Give him a year,” Romney told a friend.

The dawn of 2009 was supposed to inaugurate a new political age. After a decade of war and a year of epic economic collapse, a young Democratic president unscarred by the cultural conflicts of the Clinton years promised a “post-partisan” ethos for a world more familiar with Facebook than with FDR. Conservatism was said to be dead.

Except it wasn’t. Beginning in early 2009, dispirited Republicans, exhausted by the George W. Bush regime, decided that while the presidency may have seemingly come easily to Barack Obama, nothing else would. The new president was under sustained assault from the start. From the initial stimulus bill and then with the health care battle, Obama faced an implacable GOP opposition and a dissatisfied Democratic Party. The left wing thought him too timid; the centrists, watching the rise of the Tea Party and mourning the political deaths of Blue Dogs and other moderate colleagues, believed him too liberal.

At least since Theodore White began his Making of the President series in 1960, Americans have tended to see campaigns for the White House in the most ancient of narrative terms, as an odyssey in which the protagonists undergo a series of tests in search of the ultimate prize. (Politicians like to see themselves in this light, too: two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson referred to the Founders as “Argonauts of old.”) In this first installment of the Playbook 2012 eBook series, the seekers range from Obama himself, in the White House amid crisis after crisis,
to Mitt Romney, shrewdly staying out of the second-by-second Web wars while slowly building support the old-fashioned way: Lincoln Day dinner by Lincoln Day dinner, congressional-race funder appearance by congressional-race funder appearance. And there were the flavors of the month (or week), manifestations of a profound American uneasiness with the pervasive sense of drift and decline that Obama has failed to change.