Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (18 page)

•   •   •

Sarah Palin rolled into the Pentagon parking lot on the back of a Harley-Davidson on the morning of May 29, 2011, and all hell broke loose. As she prepared to join the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle event, she was swarmed by a horde of television cameras, still photographers, and reporters. “Get out of here before someone gets hurt,” a burly biker in a white T-shirt and black vest shouted angrily, waving his hands at the cameras. A woman shouted above the noise, “We love you, Sarah!” The former Alaska governor was dressed in black—black helmet, black leather jacket, black T-shirt, and black jeans. Large sunglasses shielded her eyes. As she moved through the crowd, she was swallowed up by the gawkers and reporters.
She turned to Jason Recher
, her traveling adviser. “Okay,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

That was the question on everyone’s mind that morning. Palin was at the start of a campaign-style bus tour that would take her to historic sites and monuments along the East Coast. It had been announced only a few days earlier, and the wild scrum that quickly formed around her spoke not only to her appeal as one of the biggest political celebrities in America but also to the never-ending speculation about whether she too would join the 2012 Republican presidential field. She had ended the 2008 campaign at the center of a raging battle over whether John McCain should have picked her as his vice presidential nominee. Books about the 2008 campaign recounted her missteps, and one of them, by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, later became the basis of an Emmy Award–winning movie by HBO called
Game Change
.

Palin returned to Alaska to resume her governorship and was hit with a series of ethics complaints. In July 2009, she abruptly resigned her office,
drawing more criticism. What kept the interest in her alive was both the media’s unrelenting fascination with all things Palin and the passion she stirred among many of the Tea Party activists who had made their influence felt in the 2010 elections. She was the antiestablishment voice at a time when the party establishment was on its heels.

As 2011 opened, Palin suffered another political setback. After the shootings in Tucson in January 2011, some liberals blamed the violence in part on the climate they said had been created by right-wing zealots. Palin was singled out for having issued a list of Democrats she said deserved defeat in 2010, with crosshairs on their congressional districts. Palin was at first perplexed, then frustrated, and finally angry. Advisers warned her to respond carefully. Instead she struck back with a video released the morning Obama was on his way to Arizona to deliver remarks at a memorial service for the victims.
In the video, Palin said
, “If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.” Palin’s reference to “blood libel,” which had been used in a
Wall Street Journal
op-ed piece earlier, produced a storm of criticism, and not just from predictable liberal quarters.

For all of the exposure she had gained as McCain’s running mate and all of the speculation about her ambitions, she and her husband, Todd, were still just an Alaska couple whose sophistication about presidential politics and campaigns was extremely limited. They knew next to nothing about navigating the early states, the primary-caucus calendar, filing deadlines, delegate selection rules, what it took to build a network of bundlers, or any of the other components of a successful campaign. What she had was an instinctive talent for knowing what she wanted to say and a fearlessness to take on anyone she chose. When she began her Memorial Day bus tour, no one around Palin knew whether she planned to run for president. None of them knew whether she knew, but most doubted that she did either. Even Palin advisers were startled to see the frenzy the bus trip created. They did not expect to see fifty journalists waiting for her when she arrived at the National Archives. They were surprised to see live reports on cable from Gettysburg when they got there. They were shocked at the sight of hovering helicopters as she arrived in Philadelphia.

Political professionals scoffed at the notion of Palin as a serious candidate. They dismissed the bus tour as so unconventional as to be ridiculous as a model for a campaign. Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, put it this way in an e-mail to me as the bus tour was under way: “She just repeats what Republicans already believe, in an emotional and energetic way, true. But
when she leaves, Republican voters are left right where they were standing when she entered the room. She doesn’t take us anywhere. Until she does, her stature will continue to diminish, not because she is not running, but because she is not leading.” Palin shrugged off such criticism. “I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media,” she told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.

She dominated news cycles as she traveled up the eastern seaboard. New Hampshire was her eventual destination. She crossed the New Hampshire state line just after Romney made his formal announcement. There, she invited an eclectic group of people—some political and some not—for a casual clambake in Seabrook. With her daughter Piper at her side, she fielded questions from reporters. “I had a sense the whole thing was ramping up when we started the bus tour, and more so when we ended that bus tour,” said one of her advisers.

After the bus tour came a movie called
The Undefeated,
a piece of cinematic hagiography about Palin’s tenure in Alaska. Palin’s team had approached filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon about making the movie and gave him full access to material. He said he retained editorial control. The premiere was held at the century-old Pella Opera House in Pella, Iowa, on June 28, 2011. By then, Palin had competition from another conservative woman, Michele Bachmann, who had just announced her candidacy in her hometown of Waterloo. The movie premiere drew predictable media attention, but Palin was not satisfied. Acting on an invitation, she decided to return in August for the Iowa State Fair, which has become a favorite stop for presidential candidates the year before every election. She arrived the morning after a candidate debate in Ames and the day before the Iowa Straw Poll. “I don’t think I’m stealing any spotlight,” she said. She continued to play coy about running for president. She scheduled one more major event in Iowa a month later, a speech on September 3 to a Tea Party gathering in Indianola, south of Des Moines. The night before, she was mobbed by supporters chanting, “Run, Sarah, Run,” at a suburban Des Moines restaurant. Some had traveled hundreds of miles to be there, many believing she would use her appearance to announce her candidacy. They were the true believers. One said he was “99.9999 percent sure” she would run. The next day, the Tea Party crowd gathered in the rain in a balloon field to hear her. Palin delivered the best speech she had given in many months, a populist broadside at “a permanent political class” that enriched themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans through “corporate crony capitalism.” At that, the audience leaped to their feet, chanting, “Sar-ah! Sar-ah! Sar-ah!”

Two days after Labor Day, Tim Crawford, who was the treasurer of Palin’s political action committee, and Mike Glassner, her chief of staff, flew to Phoenix to meet the Palins for the first serious conversation about what running would entail. They presented them with a package of information: deadlines,
schedules, what each day might look like. They explained the constant fund-raising demands, the time required to court voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, and what those voters had come to expect. They warned that running would mean nonstop travel without weekends off. The meeting went on for several hours. The Palins had many questions, nuts-and-bolts inquiries about what to expect if she ran. That was the last of it. A month later, she issued a statement saying she would not be a candidate in 2012. “I believe that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office—from the nation’s governors to Congressional seats and the Presidency.” By the time she made the announcement, the political world had passed her by. For once, her sense of timing failed her.

•   •   •

The annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington is a winter carnival for conservatives, with huge portions of red meat tossed from the podium to a hungry audience of mostly young conservatives. It is a proving ground for would-be Republican stars, a place to compete for outrageous sound bites or the most memorable attacks on the opposition. On the night of February 12, 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels broke all the rules—and made himself into a viable candidate for the Republican nomination. Rather than red meat, he talked about a new “red menace,” the threat to America from the ocean of red ink produced by a succession of budget deficits that he said under Obama were growing at an alarming rate. “We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before,” he said. “We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a great white.”

If Haley Barbour represented a threat to Romney because of his political smarts and fund-raising ability, Daniels offered the potential to challenge Romney because it was so clear what he stood for. He was a politician with a long résumé in and out of government and with deep ties to a generation of Republicans who had served in Washington and the states. Before becoming governor, he was George W. Bush’s budget director and earned the nickname “the Blade” for his efforts to reduce spending (though spending rose rapidly during Bush’s presidency). He was a senior vice president at Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant based in Indianapolis, and before that he ran the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. On his way up the ladder in Washington, he served as chief of staff to Indiana senator Richard Lugar, as executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and as political director in Ronald Reagan’s White House.

His consideration of a candidacy was anything but conventional. When speculation surfaced in the fall of 2009 that he might become a candidate,
Daniels did everything he could to douse it. His informal kitchen cabinet tried to encourage him that fall, and he was dismissive to them.
In January 2010, Daniels
had met with a small group of longtime advisers in Scottsdale, Arizona. He told them that if he were to undertake a candidacy, no one around him was going to tell him what to say, and he gave them a taste of it, a chilling warning about the fiscal catastrophe he saw looming. It was a forerunner of the speech he would deliver at CPAC more than a year later. He had another precondition. He would have to have the full support of his family, which was something he knew would be difficult to get, particularly from his wife, Cheri. She and Daniels had married many years earlier, long before elective office was in his future. In the mid-1990s, she had left him and their four young daughters to marry another man. Three years later, after divorcing the second man, she returned to Daniels and their daughters. They reconciled and were married for a second time. It was a happy ending, but it was not a story either wanted to see examined in the glare of a presidential campaign.

Around the same time, Daniels had a conversation with George W. Bush, who also encouraged him to seriously consider running in 2012. I heard about the conversation, and when David Broder
*
and I sat down with him at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association in February, I asked him about it. He said it wasn’t just Bush but others who were encouraging him not to close the door on running. “Just to get them off my back, I agreed to a number of people that I will now stay open to the idea,” he told me. Mark Lubbers, a longtime political adviser to Daniels, saw a Google Alert flash on his computer the afternoon an item saying he was open to running was posted on the
Post
Web site. He called Daniels’s cell phone. “You just created page-one news in tomorrow morning’s
Indianapolis Star,
” Lubbers told him. “I didn’t make any news,” Daniels insisted. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Lubbers responded. And then, for a year, Daniels did nothing. Good to his word, he concentrated on being governor. One thing he did was to call for a truce on what he called “so-called social issues” to allow politicians in both parties to focus on the fiscal crisis. Social conservatives took it as an expression of unilateral disarmament, and as talk of a Daniels candidacy rose, some of his potential rivals tried to disqualify him. In spite of that, the interest in him continued to build, a function of the weakness of the Republican field and doubts about Romney as a committed conservative who could truly rally the party in a general election.

Daniels wrote the CPAC speech himself, and it was by far the most sophisticated address of the conference, a big-league piece of political and policy rhetoric. Referring to federal entitlement programs, he said an obese Washington
needed “bariatric surgery.” He sounded a call to arms but demonstrated flexibility too. “It is up to us to show, specifically, the best way back to greatness, and to argue for it with all the passion of our patriotism,” he said. “But, should the best way be blocked, while the enemy draws nearer, then someone will need to find the second best way, or the third, because the nation’s survival requires it.” He challenged his party to look outward for support. “We must be the vanguard of recovery, but we cannot do it alone. We have learned in Indiana, big change requires big majorities. We will need people who never tune in to Rush [Limbaugh] or Glenn [Beck] or Laura [Ingraham] or Sean [Hannity]. Who surf past C-SPAN to get to
SportsCenter
. Who, if they’d ever heard of CPAC, would assume it was a cruise ship accessory.”

•   •   •

Two months after the CPAC speech, I went to Indianapolis to see Daniels. We talked at some length about the issues he had raised in the speech and about the president. I said I had the feeling that he quietly hoped the clock would run out on him, that by the time he finished his legislative business and his deliberations about a candidacy, it would be too late to mount an effective campaign. He didn’t disagree. “I don’t know about wishing, but I had accepted that that was probable. . . . Look, I have had a sort of ‘let this cup pass’ feeling. It’s a biblical reference.” Asked about family considerations, he went quiet. “I don’t have much more to say about that,” he said. “It’s just a very important factor.”