Playbook 2012 (3 page)

For campaign manager, Pawlenty hired a twenty-eight-year-old operative named Nick Ayers. The young Ayers insisted on total control. “His point of view was, If I come to you with advice, you will do what I say,” said a person who participated in the negotiations to hire him. One of Ayers’s first moves was to cut Mary Pawlenty out of scheduling decisions and debate preparation, leaving the candidate caught between his manager and his wife. She was especially upset when he took her off several campaign email chains. Headquarters staffers, particularly women, were not happy with Ayers. He would bark orders (“Move those calls!”) at the slightest scheduling mishap. One young woman was near tears after Ayers summoned her to his office to talk about “Medicare” and berated her for the next twenty minutes. Ayers accused her of telling a reporter that he had talked openly of the possibility that Michele Bachmann was taking “happy
pills.” Ayers had made the “happy pills” remark about Bachmann in front of several staffers, and the woman has told colleagues she was not the leaker.

Pawlenty was not a scintillating campaigner, so advisers hired two “style coaches”: how to sit forward in the chair when being interviewed, how to hold his hands, how to speak more dynamically.

The coaching never quite took. He began shouting to show anger he didn’t really feel, and botched his best chance to attack his chief rival, Mitt Romney. The day before the second GOP debate in June 2011, Pawlenty had declared on Fox News, “President Obama said that he designed Obamacare after Romneycare and basically made it Obamneycare.” At the debate, an audience member asked Pawlenty about health care. Hoping for an onstage confrontation between Pawlenty and Romney, the moderator, CNN’s John King, kept trying to get Pawlenty to repeat his “Obamneycare” remark. Pawlenty whiffed at the chance, and the pundits immediately branded him as feckless.

What was going on in Pawlenty’s mind? In early October, Pawlenty sat down with us at Evan Thomas’s dining room table in Washington to describe what it’s actually like to be a presidential candidate. Pawlenty tried to re-create his thought process, what churned through his mind as he stood onstage. Using an expression familiar to weekend golfers, who are supposed to keep simple thoughts in their mind as they swing, Pawlenty began:

“The consultants say, If you get a question from the screen, you’ve got to answer the person on the screen because otherwise it’s disrespectful of the citizen. So whatever her name is gets up on the screen and says, I have a health care question. So my first swing thought is, I’ve got to answer the screen. So I say to the woman, Betty or Nancy or whatever your name is, that’s a great question about health care, and I’m doing that [answering by talking about Obamacare],
and John King doesn’t want to hear any of that. He wants to hear me whack Romney. So he interrupts me the first time and says, Well, what about this thing you said about Romney and what you called ‘Obamneycare?’ And then I start to whale on Obama because my second swing thought is, After you do the screen, no matter what question you get, you’ve got to whale on Obama because the base loves that, and they like nothing better than when you criticize Obama and then pivot to whatever point you’re going to make. So I’m thinking, Screen, whale Obama, nick Mitt. So this is my three-point swing thought, so I’m through swing thought one on the screen, and King’s interrupted me. When I’m into swing thought two about Obama, he doesn’t want to hear that, either. He wants me to nick Mitt, and I’m fully prepared to do it, and we get into this awkward, I’m trying to say something, he’s trying to get me to get to the point. At that point I’m focused on Obama, and I thought it was a legitimate point to whale on Obama, but I decided to stay with that and not finish it with Mitt.”

Phew. Pawlenty later conceded that his wife had urged him not to go after Romney with the “Obamneycare” line, which was swing thought number four, and, possibly, the one that really bollixed him.

One of Pawlenty’s top advisers questioned whether the candidate’s heart was really in the race. Pawlenty always seemed to want to get back to the hotel to see if there was a good hockey game he could watch in the sports bar with his body man, this adviser said. On the day before the Ames, Iowa, straw poll on August 13, 2011, which the Pawlenty team had targeted as make-or-break, with thousands of hands still to shake, Pawlenty wanted to quit early, said this adviser. His spokesman, Alex Conant, did not dispute this, though he offered a more benign explanation. “Unlike every candidate I’ve ever worked for, he wanted to make sure that there was ample
downtime and that the days were not so long that by the end of them he was not making sense anymore,” said Conant.

In his interview with us, Pawlenty said, “The idea we sloughed off is complete BS.” Pawlenty was eager, however, to drop out of the race if he badly lost the Ames straw poll. He did not want to have a big campaign debt. On the eve of the straw poll, Pawlenty’s wife, Mary, confronted campaign manager Ayers in their hotel suite. “What happens if we get out on Sunday morning?” she asked. “Is there going to be debt?” Ayers answered, “No.” Pawlenty finished a distant third and dropped out of the race.

As he drove home from Iowa, he received a stream of consoling phone calls from well-wishers, like George H. W. Bush (a fan) and Mitt Romney, who was angling for T-Paw’s endorsement. Then one of the people riding in the car heard Pawlenty exclaim, “I don’t even know what to say about that. That’s jaw-dropping.” Riding in the backseat, his wife, Mary, was suddenly alert. She began asking her husband, “What? What? What? What are you saying?” Pawlenty looked crestfallen. He explained that he had just learned that the campaign was more than a half million dollars in the red.

Mary Pawlenty believed that Ayers had flat-out lied about the campaign debt. (Ayers denied this.) The campaign office had been so dysfunctional in the early going that Pawlenty probably would have fired Ayers, but Ayers had been on the campaign such a short time that it would have made the candidate look weak.

Ed Rollins, Michele Bachmann’s chief strategist, remained skeptical even after he was retained. She left their get-to-know-you meeting in Manhattan to do Fox News, and stuck him with the check. “Not only did I give free advice,” he later complained, “I paid thirty bucks for a cup of coffee.” (Bachmann had met Rollins at AJ Maxwell’s Steakhouse, a high-priced midtown restaurant.)

At that first meeting in October 2010, Rollins insisted to Bachmann, as Ayers had to Pawlenty, that he would have to exercise total control over the campaign. (Veteran political strategists generally cannot abide candidates who try to micromanage their own campaigns.) Bachmann “didn’t respond,” Rollins recalled. “I would say, what it was, it was like a first date and neither of us cared whether we had a second date.” But a few days later, Bachmann called Rollins and said, “I want you to do the campaign. I will give you total control.”

Rollins put together a small, tightly controlled operation—at times, a phantom campaign. Her red-white-and-blue bus emblazoned with “Michele Bachmann” drove around Iowa without her aboard, giving the impression that she was everywhere (she often had to be back in Washington casting votes in Congress). Rollins himself worked from 7
A.M.
to 11
P.M.
, sometimes later. Despite her hands-off pledge, Bachmann would email him at all hours. “She was kind of a high-strung candidate,” recalled Rollins. “I found myself waking up at 2
A.M.
, and my beeper going off, and her emailing me on stupid little things.” Bachmann would be upset by some small glitch or setback, said Rollins—“You know, this particular pastor went for Pawlenty.”

Rollins, sixty-eight, was recovering from a stroke in November 2010 that has left him with a slight limp when he gets tired. After a few weeks of the Bachmann campaign, his wife, Shari, was blunt with him: “You’re going to die. You’re going to have a heart attack or another
stroke—and she ain’t gonna be president, so why are you doing this?” Meanwhile, Rollins’s sixteen-year-old daughter was uncomfortable with Bachmann’s stance on gay rights. She was saying to him, recalled Rollins, “You know, I’ve got 450 kids on my Facebook who are writing me little notes about who your daddy is working for.”

Bachmann, meanwhile, “always bitched about the scheduling,” recalled Rollins. “The weekend of the hurricane [Irene, August 27–28], she wanted to go on vacation. She was getting worn out from the campaign trail, she wanted a day off every week totally free of everyone, and she wasn’t making her finance calls [calls to potential campaign donors, critical to presidential campaigning].” Bachmann wanted to spend $300,000 to compete in the September 24 Florida straw poll, a waste of time and money as far as Rollins was concerned. When another Bachmann aide insisted to Rollins that the candidate should go for the straw poll, saying that former Florida governor Jeb Bush had told Bachmann she could win the state, Rollins threatened to play the sort of hardball at which political consultants delight. According to Rollins, he told the aide, “I’ll tell you, the quickest way to stop that is I’ll go leak that story to POLITICO. I’ll go tell Maggie [Haberman, a POLITICO reporter] that Governor Bush basically said that you [meaning Bachmann] could win Florida, and you’ll see how long it takes him to drop that rumor real quick.”

In early September, Bachmann, who continued to avoid making fundraising calls herself, wanted to fire two of her fundraisers. That was it for Rollins. “I don’t need this shit,” he told her over the phone. “Let me give you thirty days’ notice.” The next day Bachmann called him at campaign headquarters and said, “If you’re going to leave you might as well leave now.”

While Gingrich and Bachmann were losing staff and Pawlenty was fizzling out, Sarah Palin remained sure she could win. “In our small group, there was no question that she would win the nomination,” one of her closest advisers recalled. At a meeting at the new Palin home in Arizona in early summer, the Palin team talked about potential campaign consultants and war-gamed how to raise money for a race.

Palin herself was obsessed with running, said the adviser. “She wanted to be updated moment to moment” on the race, said the adviser, just in case she suddenly decided to take the plunge. He marveled at “the intensity and detail that she knew about all the candidates, all the process, all the debates, everything that went on. I read Playbook every morning and [the] Drudge [Report] and POLITICO, refresh every hour and keep up on the blogs and try to keep track of everything that’s going on, but many times I was caught off guard by her having more information than I do.”

At one point, Palin, who is privately shy and introverted despite her public brassiness, complained to aides that Mitt Romney had somehow “rigged” the primary schedule to favor his candidacy, although she was never quite clear how. Determined to be an idol of the masses, Palin wanted to protect her turf from all intruders, including Donald Trump, the first and least serious of the early front-runners. Looking for a good catfight, the press played up her rivalry with Michele Bachmann and Palin’s apparent intent to upstage Bachmann by appearing in Iowa just as the congresswoman was announcing her candidacy. But Palin insiders say that she wasn’t particularly insecure about Bachmann, that the Palin v. Bachmann smackdown was mostly a media creation.

Still, she was upset when a reporter caught her by surprise with the news that Bachmann had won the Ames straw poll. “We were in Dixon, Illinois,” a longtime aide recalled. “I told [her husband] Todd but I had not told her. An NBC reporter jumped out of a bush somewhere, popped a question at her—it just literally had just happened. So they were clearly tracking us, waiting to get the response. And I hadn’t told her yet. I should have said something.” A scolding followed. She was frustrated “that [she] was caught off guard, didn’t know the information. [The] schedule should have been such that we were watching the straw poll results, as opposed to doing some other activity.” For each debate, Palin insisted on having a place to watch if she was on the road, and afterward wanted to deconstruct the debate with advisers.

Some Palin advisers wanted her to run, even if briefly and quixotically, to renew her fans’ loyalty. People around the Palins felt they had been signaled to be ready to go, but aides were disappointed when Palin’s road trips in August didn’t seem to generate much excitement. They were planning on running a few small tests in September to measure her fundraising ability, but it was too late. Palin announced she would not run on October 5.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie knew he wasn’t ready, and repeatedly resisted what was one of the most intensive lobbying efforts anyone in Republican politics could recall. Encountering Christie in the skybox of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, George W. Bush told the governor: “You got what it takes to do this if you want to do it.” Witnesses said the encounter was a little awkward because Johnson is one of Mitt Romney’s national chairmen.

In July, fifty of the most prized donors in national politics, including several hedge fund
billionaires who are among the richest people in the world, schlepped to a Manhattan office or hovered around speakerphones as their host, venture capitalist Ken Langone, a co-founder of the Home Depot, implored Christie to reconsider. The governor declined eloquently and firmly, as paraphrased by a close source for POLITICO Playbook readers at the time: “I’m not running, but I came because Langone is so aggressive, he basically just physically shook me into doing it. I’ve weighed this carefully; I didn’t dismiss it out of hand. There were four considerations. 1) One question was: Where’s my wife? She’s not enthused. 2) The second is: I looked ahead at the potential for two years of running, and not seeing my kids. If I won, six years of not seeing them. If I won a second term, ten years of not seeing them. Missing my kids growing up is a big deal to me, and it was a big reason. The wife was the biggest. The children were the second. 3) I’m staying in New Jersey. I am not just going to quit halfway through my term. The people trusted me, and I feel like I owe that trust and faith some fidelity. 4) And fourth: Could I win? Could I really do it? I think I would win—not saying I would win, but I could win. I brought my oldest son today because, first of all, I wanted him to wake up early. [Laughter] And, second of all, to have to put on his one suit and tie. [More laughter] But I wanted him to listen because if I did run, which I’m not going to—but if I did in the future—it’s going to affect him. There’s six people in the family—I’m just one. I recognize that not all of you would immediately commit, but it certainly makes me realize that if I were to run, and had this group behind me, I certainly wouldn’t have any problem raising money.”