Playbook 2012 (8 page)

Right-wing bloggers and talkers rallied to Cain as the victim of a liberal media “witch hunt.” “A high-tech lynching,” said conservative commentator Ann Coulter, alluding to the sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings in 1991. But then, on Wednesday—Day Four, with the scandal running its predictable course—Cain accused the Perry campaign of leaking the allegations. The Perry campaign
promptly suggested that the Romney campaign was to blame. “Not true,” said a Romney spokesman. A lawyer for one of the women asked the National Restaurant Association to free his client from her confidentiality agreement. Although she later issued a statement, at the time she did not want to get into the details—she did not want to become “another Anita Hill,” the lawyer said, referring to Clarence Thomas’s accuser. But she wanted to make a public statement to the effect that Cain had, in fact, sexually harassed her.

On November 7, a former restaurant association employee, Sharon Bialek, held a press conference to say that Cain had groped her while the two sat in a car in Washington. Cain denied the charge as “baseless, bogus, and false,” and offered to take a lie detector test (“if I think it’s necessary,” he hedged). The Cain campaign worked to discredit his accusers, and many conservatives remained loyal, suspicious of a Democratic plot. But Cain began to slip in the polls.

Cain may have been Romney’s chief challenger throughout much of the fall, but the Romney camp did not welcome Cain’s demise. A Romney adviser said he was sorry to see Cain tangled up in a scandal. “We didn’t want oppo on him coming out,” the adviser explained. “We wanted him to stay where he is. He keeps Perry down.” With two months remaining before the Iowa caucuses on January 3, Romney was stuck at no more than 25 percent or so in the polls in Iowa. His Mormonism was a real, if largely unspoken, issue among many of Iowa’s Christian GOP activists, the sort of voters who are willing to come out on a winter’s night to stand around a caucus meeting for two hours.

The Romney camp wanted to keep Cain in the race to divide up the true-believer conservative vote in Iowa. If Cain fell away, that left an opening for a charge by a conservative, possibly Rick Perry, who was launching a big TV buy in Iowa. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s campaign strategist, was worried about Perry stealing a march in Iowa. Stevens was weighing whether to make a real push in Iowa—and risk an early disaster if Romney was surprised, as he had been by Huckabee in 2008. Stevens was fretting that if Perry really camped out in Iowa and talked incessantly about his own Christian faith, he could make a late run. Most Iowa voters remained undecided. Should Romney try to lower expectations in Iowa? Or accept his front-runner status and go for the early kill in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Perry, meanwhile, was self-immolating. Throughout the fall, Perry repeatedly disappointed influential audiences who wanted to see his policy chops. In early November, he flew into Washington for an unusual meeting with unaligned lobbyists, hosted by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. Perry started strong, saying of his rocky launch: “The first three weeks was a lovefest. And the last three weeks was an ass-kicking.” It was all downhill from there, according to several participants. His worst moment was when a financial lobbyist asked him his view of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform. “Repeal it!” said Perry, apparently not realizing there were parts of the new law that the financial industry embraced, and that his audience did not favor wholesale repeal. “He couldn’t talk about it in any detail at all,” one attendee said. Another later took Perry aside to warn that the governor’s shallow understanding of such a key issue would be hazardous in debates. By mid-November, the Texas governor was fighting for his political life. At the November 9 GOP debate in Michigan staged by CNBC, Perry grandly announced that he would eliminate three federal agencies. He named two (Commerce and Education) and then—for an agonizing minute that seemed like an hour—could
not remember the third (Energy, he later recalled). “Oops,” Perry said. In the spin room after the debate, Perry’s aides looked shell-shocked; there was no stopping a mud slide of bad press. Cleaning up after Perry had become an increasingly onerous task. In that rocky late October, Perry had seemed so incoherent that his host, Kevin Smith, director of the conservative group Cornerstone Action, had felt compelled to publicly deny that Perry had been drunk at the time.

The Romney camp was keeping an eye on Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker’s campaign had nearly collapsed over the summer amidst the stories about Callista and the Tiffany charge account as well as the mass exodus of his staff. Gingrich still had no ground operation to speak of, no armies of volunteers to knock on doors, and he had not raised much money for ad buys. He was regarded by the political pros as a hapless manager. (“From a policy perspective, I would probably agree with Newt on more things than any other person in the field,” said a former Haley Barbour adviser. “But, look, Newt would fuck up a two-car funeral procession.”) At his Iowa appearances, he sometimes seemed to be chattering in a different language than his workaday supporters. One of his staple proposals is applying the management fad “Lean Six Sigma” to the federal government, which can be a bit of a head-scratcher for rural audiences.

Still, Gingrich had impressed in the September-October debates, particularly the last two, in New Hampshire and in Nevada, by standing back and offering a Wise Man’s view of the political shenanigans onstage and in Washington generally. “Gingrich is the only person—if you watch the dial groups [voters recruited by pollsters to turn up a dial to express enthusiasm while watching a debate] and you look at the polling and you look at the focus groups and you look at the audience analysis that’s out there after the debates, Gingrich is the only guy up there who
looks like a president other than Mitt,” said a Romney adviser. “The rest of them look like comedians.”

Gingrich was feeling pleased with his comeback when he spoke to us in mid-November. He acknowledged that his campaign had nearly sunk over the summer. Borrowing a comment he’d heard on CNN, he described himself as the Bruce Willis character in the movie
The Sixth Sense
: “I was the only guy in the room who didn’t know I was dead.” June and July, he said, had been “the two hardest months in my life. It was just excruciating.” After his staff quit en masse and the pundits mocked his trip to the Greek islands and his Tiffany expense account, “traditional money raising was almost impossible,” he said. “We went through two sets of finance people who just burned out because they couldn’t take the negatives.”

But he survived and created what he called “a substance-based, volunteer-centered, Internet-based system.” He boasted that he was inventing a revolutionary new model of campaigning. “I told somebody at one point, ‘This is like watching Walton or Kroc develop Walmart and McDonald’s.’ ” Gingrich turned over operations to his wife and her close friend from college Michael Krull. He credits Callista in part for his resurgence. “We privately discuss everything. She sees all the [email] traffic that matters,” he said. “She is very, very good at certain kinds of editing and she is very, very good at visuals. She is a very good surrogate. She is increasingly comfortable going out and talking and giving speeches and visiting with people.” The “closest analog” to his wife “is Nancy Reagan,” he said, in that “Nancy was extraordinarily close to Ronnie and that they discussed virtually everything.”

He scoffed at his former staffers who had put down his wife. “They were worried about Callista’s impact in South Carolina. I mean, to a degree that was absurd.” We asked what he meant. “Well, just being the younger wife that would turn people off, et cetera, et cetera, that
people would do dirty tricks. And every time she goes out she is wildly received. Our volunteers are begging her to go out and do more meetings and have more coffees and see more people. And what I concluded was that we were surrounded by a bunch of guys who had learned politics twenty-five years ago and they had no idea how much the world had changed.” He added, “By the way, all of them except [Rick] Tyler went to Perry, and I’ll let you decide how successful they’ve been.” He insisted that Perry had been talked into running by his former advisers, including David Carney, who had been Gingrich’s strategist before he signed on with Perry. “I think it’s 100 percent why Perry ran,” said Gingrich. “I think had I been as strong in June as I am today, Perry wouldn’t have run. He had no intention of running and didn’t want to run.”

Romney, said Gingrich, “has the Giuliani problem, which is he can’t find any place to win. Remember, Giuliani didn’t go to Iowa because he couldn’t win. He didn’t go to New Hampshire because he couldn’t win. He didn’t even go to South Carolina because he couldn’t win—which somehow magically is going to turn around in Florida? “I just spent two days in New Hampshire. I didn’t find any place where there’s enthusiasm for Mitt Romney. The only place that’s enthusiastic for Mitt Romney is the elite media, who keep saying he is inevitable.”

The Romney team expected that eventually Republican voters would come around, after parking their votes here and there, and get behind Romney. Most Romneyites credited campaign manager Matt Rhoades for relentless “message discipline,” a quality the political pros worship the way nuns venerate chastity.

To be sure, the likability issue was nagging. Even Romney’s fellow investment bankers didn’t love him. In an interview with POLITICO, one of them described having dinner with Romney a couple of years ago, when Romney was looking for supporters. “I think he comes across as, first of all, very intelligent, very comfortable with himself, but when he asks you a question, it feels like he processes the answer—he takes the answer, finds the file folder in his brain about where he’s supposed to store it in case he needs it later, files it, and then moves on to the next thing. It’s like he’s in data collection mode, but not at a gut but an intellectual, almost robotic level,” said the banker. The banker marveled that Romney—a flip-flopper from the moderate Northeast—could have apparently snatched the nomination from true believers like Governor Perry, who was much more in step with the GOP zeitgeist.

Romney had by and large avoided slipups on the campaign trail, but in Ohio in late October, an old Romney bugaboo—flip-flopping—had resurfaced. Ohio voters were set to vote on a referendum on whether collective bargaining by public employees should be banned—a cause dear to conservatives, but controversial in an old pro-labor state. In remarks to reporters, Romney waffled back and forth on the measure. The press corps jumped on this reemergence of the Old Romney, as did the conservative blogs. “Two, three more of those between now and the end of the year and we’re done. We will lose,” said a Romney adviser. Some Romney aides worried that withering attacks from Obama and the various Democratic groups would eventually get under Romney’s skin. Yes, Romney was a much tougher, more disciplined candidate than he had been in 2008. But he was not a superman, and, at least where his family’s honor was concerned, he was susceptible to what friends called “Mittfrontations.” At the Las Vegas debate, he had allowed Perry to bait him a bit, to make him turn red-faced, over the home lawn care flap.

Already, the Obama warriors were moving into position. “When David Axelrod [Obama’s chief strategist] says ‘weird’ [referring to Romney], that equals Mormon, and he says it all the time, and he’s tried to get under his skin,” said an adviser. “If Romney shows he can’t take a hit, can’t take punches, they’re going to hit him where he doesn’t like to be hit, which is the Mormon stuff.”

The Obama camp was preparing to cast Romney as a “cheater.” At the end of October, a White House insider, a well-connected consultant, offered some insights. The consultant sounded almost gleeful about running against Romney. “You could not have from our perspective a more perfectly positioned rich guy than Mitt Romney,” said the insider. “He didn’t make a product or start a chain of restaurants or do whatever. He made it on Wall Street. And if you look at anything in the polling, in the focus groups, or the zeitgeist of the country, that was the cheater way to go. The guy is going to be a cheater,” the consultant said. “There’s no question that that’s going to be the message frame that the Obama team puts around him, whether Bain & Company made their money by buying up companies, firing people, putting their money offshore, having questionable financial products. It’s all going to land in Mitt Romney’s lap. And that’s going to appeal to independents. It’s not just going to be a lefty argument. It’s going to be like this guy didn’t play by the rules and now he wants to be president.”

Obama himself doesn’t have much instinct for the jugular, the insider said, with some evident regret. Earlier in the fall, his staff had sent the president out to key states to bash Republicans for not passing his jobs bill. “That lasted about a week on the campaign trail,” said
the insider. “Did you notice? He went out there and started beating them up and then he’s like, Eww, I don’t really like doing this.” (Obama may be aloof from the political hurly-burly, but he follows it closely. Unlike most presidents, who get their information from news summaries prepared by staff, Obama reads
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, and
The Wall Street Journal
, sometimes on paper, sometimes on his iPad.)

Some of Obama’s key staffers were demoralized, according to the insider. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s friend and confidante, was already thinking more about Obama the man and his place in history than she was about what he might accomplish in the last year of his term. “She cares about Barack Obama as opposed to President Obama,” said the insider. If Obama was going to be a one-term president, it was already time to look to his legacy. Jarrett was not happy with her own situation at the White House, said the insider. Jarrett had tried to reach out to the business leaders, only to be thwarted by the other senior staffers. “She just stopped getting out there as much because, if you’re her, like what the fuck am I going to keep talking to them for and put myself on a limb when I come back and get my head shot off?” said the insider. “It feels like the boys will never leave her alone. Why do they hate her so much? Is it because it bugs them that she could walk in [to the Oval Office] anytime and see him after hours? I don’t know, it just feels like, no matter what, somebody is after her. Like Rahm [Emanuel] walked out the door and said to [Bill] Daley, Make sure you keep the pressure on Valerie.”