Playbook 2012 (7 page)

Carney warmed to the subject of Romney’s allegedly volatile temper. “Unbelievably temperamental … in that [if] he thinks that it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, it’s three o’clock no matter what time it is.… He’s totally easy to get off stride, discombobulated.” At debate prep in 2008, according to Carney’s source, Romney would turn “beet-red. He’s known to get unbelievably flushed.”

The Perry team needed to find a way to crack Romney’s cool, to make him turn beet-red. They had an idea, which they rehearsed. Carney played down his own candidate’s debate prep, but apparently it had grown more serious and formal since Carney’s relaxed chats on the plane with Perry back in September. Now there was a real rehearsal, with someone playing Romney. “Who?” we asked. “Different people,” said Carney, ducking the question.

Perry took his shot halfway through the GOP debate in Las Vegas on October 18. The debate had turned to immigration, and Perry wheeled to face Romney. “Mitt, you lose all your standing from my perspective because you hired illegals in your home. And you know for—about it for a year. And the idea that you stand before us and talk about that you’re strong on immigration is, on its face, the height of hypocrisy.”

Romney responded, at first, with his “hah-hah-hah” stage laugh. “Rick, I don’t think that I’ve hired an illegal in my life. And so I’m—I’m looking forward to finding your facts on that.” Perry just glowered at him. “It’s time for you to tell the truth.” The two men began talking at once, with Romney almost shouting, “I’m speaking, I’m speaking, I’m speaking! I’ve got thirty seconds …” When Perry plowed ahead Romney cried out, “Anderson!,” appealing to the moderator, Anderson Cooper. Romney seemed to hear himself—crying, as it were, for mommy—and stiffened into a scornful manner. Turning to Perry, he said, “This has been a tough couple of debates for Rick, and I understand that, and so you’re going to get—you’re going to get testy.”

The “truth” was a
Boston Globe
story from 2006. The
Globe
found that a lawn care company employed by Romney to cut his grass in Belmont, Massachusetts, had hired illegal immigrants. A year later, the paper discovered, the company still had illegals on the payroll. In the debate, Romney spluttered that he had remonstrated with the company. He said he couldn’t have anything to do with hiring illegals because, as he put it, “I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake!”

The blogs had fun with that answer, and some pundits declared that Romney had appeared petulant and condescending. He had put his hand on Perry’s shoulder, violating an old
debater’s rule against invading your opponent’s space. Perry had succeeded in his ploy to bait Romney, to break his rival’s cool facade. But nevertheless the audience had booed Perry for striking a low blow. Neither man improved his image. On the Romney beat, whenever minor frustrations or delays occurred, reporters began mockingly crying out, “Anderson!” Perry stayed mired in fifth place in national polls.

Stuck at the bottom of most polls was the Republican candidate the Obama camp had feared the most. “I think that our guys were worried about Huntsman, I think he was the one who people were most worried about,” said a White House insider who speaks frequently with members of the Obama high command, in an interview with us in Manchester, New Hampshire, in late October. GOP operatives were always scornful of Jon Huntsman’s candidacy, regarding him as the sort of media darling who appeals to liberal pundits and no one else. “He’s an absurd candidate. He’s running from the left in a Republican primary,” said one longtime Republican consultant in late August. Like many GOP operatives, this one was dubious about Huntsman’s chief strategist, John Weaver, a maverick in the trade who had devoted himself to John McCain in 2008 until he was pushed aside in a campaign shake-up. It was Weaver who, more than any other political pro, persuaded Huntsman to take a shot in 2012. “This is the little movie that John Weaver has in his head,” said the rival consultant. “It’s a crazy little movie but it’s not going to happen.” (“The money guys don’t like Weaver,” added a Romney adviser. “Too much strife.”)

If Huntsman had a chance, he probably missed it at his first GOP debate, in Ames, Iowa, in August. The moderator, Fox News’s Bret Baier, had a question for the eight candidates: “Say
you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal, 10 to 1, spending cuts to tax increases.… Who on this stage would walk away from that deal?” All of the candidates raised their hands—including Huntsman. Here had been his moment to break out of the pack, and he passed.

Huntsman casts himself as an anti-politician and truth teller. He is the only GOP candidate who has refused to sign the “No New Taxes” pledge passed around by conservative activist Grover Norquist. In his conversation with us, Huntsman went on at some length to describe how much he dislikes compromising his principles to play for votes. Using a red pen and yellow highlighter, he said that he pores over his campaign speeches. “You go through the paragraphs and you say, Is this hype? Is it pandering? Is it true? Is it reality? Is it the truth? I hate pandering stuff. I hate phrases like Drill, Baby, Drill kind of stuff. I hate that. I hate political bromides.” We ventured, “But they’re effective,” and Huntsman shot back, “Well, I understand they are, and maybe that’s one of the hard lessons for me and [Ron] Paul. I hate that stuff. People say, Repeal Obamacare, everybody cheered. I hate that stuff. Unless you’re willing to say what you’re going to do when you say Repeal Obamacare, you hadn’t ought to be up there saying Repeal Obamacare. It’s hollow language, and we shouldn’t have any patience for that in politics. We need solutions today more than ever before and we’re just not getting them.”

Asked why he didn’t take a chance at the Ames debate, Huntsman struggled to come up with a clear answer. “I regret I didn’t use the opportunity to say, Here is how I would do it. I would raise the revenue and reinvest it in the tax code.” Huntsman fell back on an excuse. “You’re playing out in real time on live television the idea that you’ve got a split second to respond to a fundamentally important issue.…” He tried again: “My first debate, and say I’m not even going to get a chance to rebut, they don’t allow you to do that or raise a hand, where do you feel on this, as opposed to knowing now, that’s a BS question, give me a chance to respond
to it, and let me tell you how we’d raise revenue and reinvest it in the tax code and lower the rate.” Huntsman was apparently referring to his proposal to reform taxes by getting rid of loopholes and lowering rates. But even months after the event, he couldn’t quite find the words to express himself.

Sitting unrecognized in the lobby of the Hilton Garden in Manchester, Huntsman told how his wife, Mary Kaye, scolded him for not greeting the front desk clerks. “You’ve walked by this counter a hundred times and you failed to shake hands with certain people, and they remember that.” Now he shakes their hands. He can’t believe he’s one of thirty-eight people running for president in New Hampshire.

“Why am I here?” Congressman Ron Paul sometimes wondered as Romney, Perry, and the others tangled in the early autumn debates. Paul’s Libertarian philosophy won pockets of strong support around the country, and in national polls he often stood just behind Romney and Herman Cain. But the mainstream press ignored him as a candidate who could not win, in large part because he favored dismantling vast chunks of the federal government. The low moment had come in August, when he had nearly tied the winner, Michele Bachmann, at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll. Paul was exhausted, determined to get home to Lake Jackson, Texas, where he lives in a comfortable house with biking trails and a well-stocked library. “I’ve got to go home now,” Paul said to his handlers. In a phone interview with us in early November, Paul replayed the dreary conversation: “They said, What?” Paul recalled. His longtime aide, Jesse Benton, wanted to “put out a feeler,” to see if Sunday shows wanted to interview him in light of his surprising
success. “Well, all right,” Paul said. A little while later, Benton returned, looking “a little chagrined.” The press secretary said, “I guess we can go.” Not a single news organization wanted to interview the candidate. “They don’t want to interview me?” Paul asked. He tried not to feel hurt and looked forward to getting home for his bicycle ride. Bachmann appeared on five network news shows the next morning.

Rick Santorum was visiting Adams, the smallest of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties, looking for voters anywhere he could find them. Late on a raw early November night, he stopped in at Kay’s Kafé in the town of Corning and found six patrons watching the last game of the World Series on TV. Into the bar walked Joe Klein, the
Time
magazine columnist. “I had no idea he was going to be there,” said Santorum. “I just thought, How weird is this?” A couple of patrons said to Santorum, “You got my vote. If anybody comes to Corning, you’ve got my vote.” Despite eight town meetings that day, Santorum did not have a drink—he does not even touch caffeine.

His relaxation is Fantasy League Baseball. At a candidates’ forum in Iowa, in the middle of a Newt Gingrich speech, the camera caught him surreptitiously checking his tablet to see how his team was doing. We asked Santorum if the process is humiliating. “It’s humiliating if you’re not humble,” he answered.

Herman Cain seemed to be having a good time. The former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza had jumped into national prominence by running for president. Improbably, by late October “the Hermanator” led the race for the Republican nomination in some national polls, and trailed Romney by only a point or two in others. To be sure, Cain seemed more like a protest vote than a real choice. At a focus group conducted by pollster Peter Hart for the Pew Charitable Trusts, voters were asked to think back to their fifth grade experience to describe the candidates. Asked to choose from a list of adjectives, the voters described Romney as “pompous” and Perry as “the bully.” Cain was called “the kid everyone respects.” A little taken aback, Hart asked, “Do you think this person could be president of the United States? Is anybody willing to raise your hand and say, I would be comfortable if he became the next president of the United States?” Not a hand went up.

Still, people seemed to like Cain’s cheeky bluntness. When other candidates attacked his 9-9-9 flat tax plan (9 percent flat income tax, 9 percent corporate tax, 9 percent national sales tax) as politically impossible, a revenue loser, and a burden on the poor, Cain just shrugged and kept on smiling and joking. He may have been a little weak on the facts—he apparently was unaware that China possessed a nuclear arsenal—but he had a simple, clear slogan (“9-9-9!”) and a sly sense of humor. Half in-your-face, half tongue-in-cheek, a Cain for President ad showed his campaign manager, Mark Block, offering an earnest testimonial to Cain, then impassively dragging on a cigarette. The ad became a sensation on the Internet, instantly going viral.

The fun ended for Cain on Sunday morning, October 30, or, possibly, a few days earlier. Outside the Washington bureau of CBS downtown, Cain was leaving the set of
Face the Nation
when he was approached by POLITICO reporter Jonathan Martin. For more than a week, Martin
and several other POLITICO staffers had been working on a story that Cain had been accused of sexual harassment during his time as head of the National Restaurant Association. POLITICO’s digging showed that in the late 1990s, as a fun-loving boss residing on weekdays in Washington apart from his wife and family (who continued to live in Omaha, Nebraska), Cain had sometimes indulged in humor and physical jests with the sort of suggestive innuendo that, at least in the opinion of two younger female employees, crossed the line into sexual harassment. Two of the women had filed complaints with the restaurant association and left the organization with financial packages and nondisclosure agreements typical in these matters. The most explosive reporting was that one woman claimed he invited her to his hotel room and made “an unwanted sexual advance.” POLITICO eventually found six people who knew details of the tense encounter. Off the record, reporters were given much more vivid accounts. Within a week, at least a half dozen women were making allegations to reporters across Washington. For ten days, beginning on Thursday, October 20, Martin and other POLITICO reporters sought a response from the Cain campaign. POLITICO emailed campaign manager Block and spokesman J. D. Gordon with the name of one of the women who had allegedly taken a cash payment from the restaurant association and signed a nondisclosure agreement. On Saturday night, October 29, Martin emailed the Cain campaign to say that POLITICO was in “the final stages” of a story reporting on the sexual harassment charges—and pleaded with the campaign to put Cain on the phone. When he got no response, Martin decided to drive down to the CBS Washington bureau on Sunday morning.

Martin did not want to confront Cain while there were other reporters standing around outside the bureau, so he waited until Cain had walked down the block to sign some autographs from passing tourists. “Mr. Cain,” the reporter said, “I’m Jonathan Martin of POLITICO. I’m
working on a story about two allegations of sexual harassment during your time at the National Restaurant Association. Do you have a comment on that, sir?”

Cain began by saying that he had been in business for years and “it’s real easy for someone to make these accusations.” Martin said he had the names of two women. Cain cut in, “But you won’t tell us who these people are.” Martin said that POLITICO had given his campaign the name of one of the women, and then repeated the name. Cain said nothing. A security man intervened, saying, “Step back.”

Martin tried again. “Have you ever been accused, sir, of sexual harassment?”

Cain responded, “Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

“Have a nice day,” said Martin, and headed back to his car.

The inevitable feeding frenzy was on. Cain meant to spend the next day talking about his economic plan to the National Press Club, the American Enterprise Institute, and various news outlets. But he was surrounded by reporters who wanted to know about his alleged misdeeds. He struggled with damage control. He denied any impropriety, but offered shifting explanations. At first he said he knew nothing about any financial settlements, but then amended his answer to admit an “agreement” to pay one of the women. He tried to suggest his behavior had been essentially harmless—teasing a woman about her height—but acknowledged that the woman might have felt uncomfortable.