Double Down: Game Change 2012 (74 page)

The finger-pointing commenced the day after the election. The billionaires’ club trained its fire on Rove, his Crossroads empire, and the rest of the conservative super PACs, which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars—much of it from the billionaires’ bank accounts—to run a jillion ads that yielded squat.
Holy shit, we were duped,
thought Langone. Next time, he and his compadres would be damn sure to demand accountability from the likes of Karl before opening up their wallets again.

With the exit polls showing that 15 percent of voters rated Obama’s handling of Sandy as the most important factor in their decision—and 73 percent of that subset backing the president—blame was cast on Christie, too. The imputations prompted an uncharacteristic defensiveness on the part of Big Boy, who worried that any lingering perception of party recreancy might hurt him if he ran in 2016.
I’m a loyal guy!
Christie thought.
No one worked harder or did more for Mitt than me!

Big Boy’s sense of where the real fault lay was crystal clear: with the clowns on Commercial Street. On the phone with Ryan two days after the election, Christie listened while Fishconsin talked about how he, too, had been certain that he and Mitt were headed for the White House. “On election morning,” Ryan said, “they told me and my wife we were going to win.”

“Well, that just shows how shitty they were,” Christie harrumphed.

As the poison darts flew hither and yon, the Romneys were in Boston, saying their farewells to the campaign and still trying to wrap their minds around what had occurred. The morning after the election, they both addressed a major-donor breakfast; later that day, they spoke to the entire staff on Commercial Street. The emotional bifurcation was the same as on election night. Mitt was gracious and comforting, but his upper lip remained stiff. Ann was kind and thankful, but damp-eyed and on the verge of losing it—spouting Manichaean warnings about what Obama’s reelection meant.

“It will become more clear to you as the days go on and you see what’s going to happen to our country,” she said in her speech to the staff. “This was a turning point in the history of the nation.”

Little in the campaign had gone as planned for Ann. At the start, Boston had touted her to the press as Mitt’s secret weapon. Nearly two years later, she remained a mystery to many voters. In Chicago’s focus groups, her name rarely came up. Her convention speech was supposed to have been her breakout moment, but it was forgotten within days. The campaign acknowledged once or twice that she wasn’t feeling well; in truth, her MS limited her travel and public appearances more than Boston let on. And there were those occasions when she
did
make an impression, just not the right one: in a series of interviews, her pique surfaced, and she sounded sharp or shrill.

Ann hadn’t wanted Mitt to try again after his 2008 washout. But once she reversed her position and decided he had to take on Obama to set things right, her psychic investment in the race was stratospheric. The torments Mitt suffered at the hands of Chicago, the press, and the GOP establishment made her ballistic. “Stop it—this is hard,” she complained in one media appearance, after Peggy Noonan and others had heaped censure on her husband over the 47 percent. “You want to try it? Get in the ring.” Tartly, she dismissed the swell of criticism as “nonsense and the chattering class.” On
Meet the Press,
she griped that Mitt “really has been demonized.” During her husband’s autumn upswing, Ann thought that people were finally seeing the Mitt she knew and cherished. The election was a crushing blow to that illusion; she couldn’t comprehend how her fellow citizens had gotten it so wrong.

Mitt believed that the nation had made a mistake, but he didn’t feel deflated.
The voters chose to double down,
he thought.
That’s their right.
He
was grateful to have had the national platform that his father dreamed of but never achieved.
Who would have ever guessed that a kid with skinny legs from Cranbrook School would get to run for president and speak to the entire country? I got a chance to say the things I wanted to say.

Obama and his people saw Romney as pure ambition. In truth, Mitt was about as ambivalent as any nominee in modern history. He had left a good life to run, and a good life awaited him back at Fin de la Senda when he was finished. In the course of the campaign, he created endless problems for himself but rarely addressed them with pull-out-all-the-stops urgency or last-dog-dies determination. The one weakness he did try to combat was the perception that he was a flip-flopper; but in refusing to deviate an iota from his 2008 positions, he generated fiercer headaches and harsher headlines. He allowed Chicago to define him as a heartless plutocrat without offering an alternative image. (In the exit polls, Romney led Obama on three out of four key candidate qualities—“strong leader,” “shares my values,” and “vision for the future”—but was crushed, 81 to 18 percent, on the question of who “cares about people like me.”) As that perception took hold during the campaign, his attitude toward it seemed to be,
Oh, well, Mitt happens.

Even so, Romney’s management-consultant instincts took hold in the aftermath of November 6. He wanted to understand why he lost, how he lost.

On the Thursday after the election, he met with his brain trust to come up with answers—for both himself and the press, which was clamoring for enlightenment as to why Boston had misjudged the race so badly in the homestretch. In the familiar third-floor conference room, they all gathered one last time. With the exception of Gillespie, it was the same core group that Romney had started out with. Mitt was proud that they’d come through intact, that there had been so much camaraderie and so little infighting—although at that moment, some in the room, such as Zwick, were seething at Newhouse and Beeson for polling numbers and a ground game that had been, respectively, so wrong and so feeble.

Newhouse ran through the exit poll data, explaining that Chicago had dramatically pulled off its coalition-of-the-ascendant play—turning out an electorate even more diverse than in 2008, not less, as Newhouse assumed would be the case. Nationally, the white vote fell from 74 to 72 percent, while
the black proportion held steady at 13. Participation among Hispanics rose from 8 to 10 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama’s share of each of those blocs ranged from commanding to overwhelming: 93 percent of African Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 55 percent of women (and 67 percent of unmarried women), and 60 percent of young voters.

Gillespie argued that Obama had won by advancing a series of “rifle-shot policies” aimed at those electoral slices: free contraceptives for women, the DREAM Act for Latinos, cuts in student-loan interest rates for the kids. Gillespie had been spot-on about Romney’s need to heal himself with these groups. Now he said of the Obamans, “They played small ball, but they went small in a big way.”

Romney found the logic compelling. Obamacare was another example, he said. A majority of the country was against it, but the president’s base loved free health care.

Someone mentioned welfare reform—the federal waivers to state work requirements. The administration announced its new policy the day before Biden gave a speech to the NAACP. The base-stroking going on there was pretty blatant, no?

Let’s leave that one off the list, guys, Gillespie interposed. We don’t want to turn this into a racial thing.

On a certain level, there was nothing especially controversial about the Gillespie-Romney analysis. Sitting presidents of both parties had used the power of incumbency to sweeten the deal for key constituencies since the dawn of the republic. But in Mitt’s clumsy hands, the interpretation was a loaded gun aimed at his own foot.

A few days later, on a November 14 conference call with dozens of top donors, Romney offered his take on how Obama had defeated him: “What the president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote.” Rattling off some examples of the benefits to which he was referring, he kept invoking the word “gift.” Listening in on the call, Ron Kaufman thought,
Fuck, this is not good.

Of course, Mitt believed he was speaking confidentially, in a private call,
with contributors. Of course, that was foolish—especially for a man who already had been incinerated by a secret video from a donor dinner. Of course, there were journalists listening in on the call, and “gifts” made headlines within hours.

Even after the election was over, the most gaffe-prone nominee in anyone’s memory was still coughing up verbal miscues. In offering an explanation for his failure, he explained more than he knew.

•   •   •

O
BAMA LAUGHED WHEN HE
heard that Romney had described him as Santa Claus in chief, doling out presents to the freeloaders gathered around the White House Christmas tree. “He must have really meant that 47 percent thing,” the president remarked to his aides.

Obama and his people weren’t surprised that Boston was still reeling. On election night, when Mitt called the president to concede, he had congratulated Obama for his side’s turnout efforts—specifically expressing his own team’s astonishment at the numbers in Cleveland and Milwaukee, where African American participation was off the charts. When Obama related Romney’s comment to Axelrod, Messina, and Plouffe, they all had the same bemused reaction. What Boston was saying, in effect, was, Holy cow, where did all these mysterious minorities come from?

Heading into the race, the perception among political professionals and the press had been that the rival campaign squadrons were more or less evenly matched. But as the smoke cleared, a consensus quickly emerged that the Democrats had methodically been building an atomic clock while the Republicans were trifling with Tinkertoys. Chicago’s mockery of Boston was hushed but withering.

The president himself devoted little time to pawing over the entrails of the election. Four years earlier, the moment his epically antagonistic fight with Hillary Clinton ended, any rancor on Obama’s part toward her had fallen away. The same happened with regard to Romney.

On the very day that Mitt offered up his theory of electoral dispensations, Obama held a press conference in the East Room of the White House. In his speech on election night, the president had indicated that he intended to sit down with Romney to “talk about where we can work together to move this
country forward.” Asked about that proposition now, Obama averred that he was serious and offered praise for the man he and his team had spent the past year dismembering.

“I do think he did a terrific job running the Olympics,” Obama said. “That skill set of trying to figure out how do we make something work better applies to the federal government . . . He presented some ideas during the course of the campaign that I actually agree with. And so it’d be interesting to talk to him about something like that. There may be ideas that he has with respect to jobs and growth that can help middle-class families that I want to hear.”

For Obama, the 2012 election had been harder and uglier than 2008 but also more gratifying. Four years earlier, he had ignited something in the electorate. But he also had been a mere vessel: an antidote to the eight-year reign of George W. Bush and a symbol of racial progress. In 2008, Obama told his advisers, people were betting on hope. In 2012, they were rendering a judgment on his record and leadership. The substantive stakes of the race were huge; if Obama had lost, much of what he had accomplished, starting with health care reform, would have been reversed by Romney and the GOP Congress. But the personal stakes were equally vast. More than he let on, Obama felt the mantle of history heavy on his shoulders, and he had a writer’s understanding of the provisional nature of narrative. Had he fallen short in his quest for reelection, his story would have changed overnight, with his presidency recast from a heroic landmark to a failed, one-term accident. In victory, he secured his legacy as a transformative figure—and won the chance to become a great president.

During the campaign, Obama often argued that, with such a clear philosophical and ideological choice before the voters, reelection would give him a mandate, and the upper hand with the GOP. “My hope is that if the American people send a message to [Republicans],” he told
Rolling Stone, “
there’s going to be some self-reflection going on—that it might break the fever. They might say to themselves, ‘You know what, we’ve lost our way here. We need to refocus on trying to get things done for the American people.’”

But the weeks and months after Election Day demonstrated that he had been whistling in the dark. On issue after issue, from the budget to climate
change to immigration, Republicans remained as intransigent as ever, and Obama remained . . . Obama. In the cauldron of his debates with Romney, the president had been forced to perform against his nature. But his core predilection to play by his own rules emerged undisturbed. The same flaws and foibles that had bedeviled his first term continued to plague his second—and threatened to haunt him to the end. In terms of Obama’s ability to govern, the 2012 election did nothing to change the game.

Among Democrats, however, no one doubted the election’s long-range political meaning. In consolidating the coalition of the ascendant, Obama had created a template on which his party might build for years to come. With 2016 already looming, the question was who might inherit the Obama base, the Obama machine, the Obama imprimatur.

One obvious possibility was his vice president, whose flirtation with 2016 grew increasingly overt. On Election Day, Biden was asked whether this would be the last time he voted for himself. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied. That night and over the next two days, he worked his way down a list of Democrats on the 2012 ballot, placing personal phone calls to them all. He courted prominent party leaders from Iowa and other early states. In media interviews, he touted the tightness of his relationship with Obama. (“We’re totally simpatico,” he pronounced.) And he reveled in high-profile assignments from the president: managing negotiations with the GOP over the fiscal cliff at year’s end and heading up the administration’s gun-control task force after the horrific school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.