Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (19 page)

Toward the end we returned to the key questions, apart from his family. If none of the other candidates were prepared to address these issues directly, was he obligated in some way to run to ensure that they were aired out under the lights of a presidential campaign? And conversely, did he fear that the cause about which he felt such passion would be set back if he were to run and do poorly? Daniels was forthright in his belief that the debate needed to be at the center of the presidential campaign. “Whether it’s me or somebody else, I hope it will become central to the Republican alternative next time. We’ve got a very fundamental choice to make. It’s not just about dollars and cents and safety net. To me the questions that are bound up in that are classic questions—which sector’s in charge of life in America, public or private? Is the public sector there to support the flourishing of the private economy, voluntary associations, states, cities, and communities, or is life now so complex that we poor victims out here have to be looked over, tended carefully, and overseen by our benevolent betters? I hope again that it will, one way or another, become a very large part of the alternative that our party, whoever it is, will present to the country. I think it would be a default on our part not to do that.”

Six weeks later, Daniels announced that he would not run, citing family considerations. He was never able to persuade Cheri Daniels, who held a veto
power over the decision and was reluctant to give up her and her family’s privacy. His decision left a void to be filled—a missing candidacy focused on the issue that, other than the state of the economy, defined the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Daniels’s candidacy was in many ways a long shot, but the interest in his running reflected the fear among some establishment conservatives—and Tea Party activists too—that their presidential field was defaulting on one of the biggest issues before the country.

For Romney, one less obstacle stood between him and the nomination.

Chris Christie’s Story

A
fter Mitch Daniels said no, attention turned to another governor, Chris Christie of New Jersey. He was no ordinary politician, which was why he was in demand even though he had been elected to office only in November 2009. He embodied his state’s image with a blunt, in-your-face personality that made him a star in the YouTube era. He relished sparring with political adversaries and ordinary citizens who questioned his decisions, and the confrontations often went viral. Even if they did not, he kept them alive by recounting those moments before other audiences. That he was considerably overweight only added to the intimidation factor that he projected. Republicans loved him.

Christie was born in Newark
, son of a father of Scotch-Irish descent and a mother of Sicilian descent. As he once said, that combination “has made me not unfamiliar with conflict.” He went to law school at Seton Hall University and started to practice law. In 1992, he took a leave from his firm and volunteered in George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign. Through that campaign he became friends with Bill Palatucci, a politically connected lawyer who ran the Republican presidential campaign efforts in the state during that time and later became a Republican national committeeman. After the 1992 campaign, Christie urged Palatucci to join his law firm, and the two became friends and political allies. “He was a lawyer who was tired of practicing law and wanted to get involved in politics,” Palatucci said. “I had been a guy at that point who’d spent over a decade in politics, essentially working for Tom Kean [a former governor of New Jersey], and wanted to know how to practice law. So it was a really good partnership. I kind of showed him the ropes of politics and he showed me the ropes of practicing law. It was very much a mutual relationship.” A year after George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Christie was named U.S. attorney for New Jersey. He was a prosecutorial bulldog and relentlessly pursued cases involving corruption by public officials. He won convictions in more than a hundred such cases, including a Hudson County executive, an Essex County executive, a former state senate president, and Sharpe James, the longtime former mayor of Newark.
Republicans approached him to run for governor. “
He was indisputably
the state’s most visible law enforcement officer, a finger-wagging prosecutor with Jersey roots who made a name convicting so many corrupt public officials that state GOP leaders practically begged him to ride his white horse into Trenton,” wrote John Martin, a New Jersey political writer.

In January 2009, he filed papers to challenge incumbent Democratic governor Jon Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs executive who had poured tens of millions of his own fortune into winning a U.S. Senate seat and later into his 2005 race for governor. Corzine was vulnerable, but it had been more than a decade since Republicans had won a statewide election in New Jersey. Christie ran as the antithesis of the wealthy Corzine. He was the Springsteen-loving Jersey boy who promised to take on entrenched political interests to bring the state’s finances into balance without raising taxes. His upset victory in November 2009, along with that of Robert McDonnell in Virginia, marked the beginning of a Republican comeback that would hit with fuller force the following year in the 2010 elections.

He faced a budget deficit estimated at $11 billion, and to close it he enacted deep spending cuts, layoffs of state workers, and cuts in education. He vetoed a millionaire’s tax approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature. He rejected $3 billion in federal assistance when he canceled plans for a rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan, saying his state could not afford its portion of the costs. He belittled critics at town hall meetings around the state, and his staff made sure the videos reached a wide audience. He took on state employee unions with a vigor that caught them and others by surprise. He demanded concessions on benefits and took his fight public. In October 2010, NBC’s Jamie Gangel profiled him on
The Today Show
. She asked Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, whether she thought her husband would make a good president. “Oh absolutely,” came the reply. “But Christie says he’s not ready,” Gangel reported. To Christie, she said, “Everyone in the Republican Party but you is talking about that you should be on the ticket in 2012 to run for the White House. You say?” Christie responded, “No way.”

Chris Christie’s position would never change, but it would take a full year finally to bring an end to the speculation that he might run for president in 2012. The story of that courtship by the Republican rank and file, by fellow elected officials, and especially by wealthy contributors and others is best told by the colorful governor, who savored every moment of the experience. I sat down with him in the fall of 2012 to talk about it. When I asked him about his initial reaction to the talk that he should run for president, he said, “Headshaking. I didn’t expect it. I’ve been in the job six, eight, nine months and I just was shocked and I didn’t think that’s the way it worked. . . . I just remember
thinking, ‘This is just completely surreal and not what I expected,’ and little did I know . . . that it would get a lot crazier.”
As talk of a candidacy continued
, Christie gave a series of responses to say he wasn’t going to run. He said he didn’t think he was ready. He told reporters in Trenton, “Short of suicide, I don’t really know what I’d have to do to convince you people that I’m not running.” His wife hated that comment. “It made a lot of people laugh, so I kept using it even if she hated it and making her, as she’s done for the last twenty-seven years, just kind of throw up her hands and go, ‘I’m doing the best I can.’” He said his comment that he wasn’t ready was misinterpreted. “It wasn’t me saying I wouldn’t be ready to do the job, although I don’t know that anybody is ever absolutely ready to do that job,” he said. “But what I meant by it was I know what it’s going to take to run and you have to absolutely believe in your mind that it’s the right time for you to do it and that you’re absolutely ready for the challenge and I knew me. If I did it and I didn’t feel completely ready, the first time something went wrong, which invariably it would, I would be sitting there in some bad hotel room in Cedar Rapids saying to myself, ‘I knew it, I knew it.’”

•   •   •

Meanwhile, the real candidates were courting Christie’s favor. He hosted small dinners with some of his New Jersey political allies and brought candidates in individually—Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney. Christie had some rules of the road for the other candidates. He said he would make a decision about endorsing someone on his own timetable. In the meantime, he didn’t want candidates trolling for support or raising money in his state. If and when he endorsed, he would bring everyone with him. “Governor Romney didn’t like that too much, and when he came [for dinner], we had a discussion about it,” Christie said. “He pressed me really hard that he wanted to start raising money in New Jersey, and I said, ‘If you raise money in New Jersey in any kind of aggressive organized way, it’s going to make it very unlikely that I’ll be able to support you.’ So it was a rather tense conversation between the two of us in February of ’11 and I heard later from others that he left not very happy with the approach I took. But I took the same approach with everybody.”

Christie said Romney was direct in asking for support: “His pitch was, ‘I’m the one best prepared for this from having run last time. I know the mistakes I made the last time. I’m not going to make the same mistakes this time.’ He told me that he was the one whose experience was best for the problems facing the country economically, that he’d be able to make the best pitch to be the guy who replaces the president, and he told me that he was going to have the best and most successful fund-raising effort that any Republican presidential candidate ever had and that he was not going to be outspent by the president. He
said, ‘You put those three factors together, Governor, and I think that makes me the likely nominee and a very good chance to be president, and you’re going to want to be on board with me before anybody else.’” Christie said he told Romney he was not ready to endorse.

Of all the dinner guests he hosted, Christie said, Barbour was the most entertaining. Compared to the others he was “much more humorous, much more affable, kind of just exactly what you’d expect.” He said Barbour broke up the room when someone asked him that night what kind of election campaign he thought it would be if he were the nominee against the president. He said that Barbour replied, “Well, it would remind me of what my high school football coach used to say to us in the locker room before we played a game against our crosstown rival. He would say, ‘Boys, turn Mama’s picture to the wall, she ain’t gonna want to see this.’” Christie added that Barbour was very relaxed and at ease: “He was very conversant in the issues, he answered everybody’s questions, but he did it with great humor and kind of what you’ve come and we’ve all come to expect from Haley Barbour.”

Pawlenty made a different impression. “In the bigger group,” Christie said, “he was kind of reserved and actually more reserved than Tim is one-on-one and more reserved than even he was one-on-one with me that night. . . . In fact, the person who really sold Tim that night was Mary [Pawlenty]. She really sold Tim’s story much more aggressively than Tim did at that dinner, and everybody walked away impressed with Tim but really impressed with Mary.”

•   •   •

Once Daniels and Barbour made their decisions not to run, the pressure on Christie started to ramp up once again. “Craziness,” he recalled. “Unsolicited phone calls from people all over the country. One of those, he said, was from Henry Kissinger, who asked Christie to meet him in his New York office. Christie had first met Kissinger in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium in 2010: “I walked in and I saw Henry Kissinger in a satin Yankees warm-up jacket, which I just never thought I’d see Henry Kissinger in a satin Yankees warm-up jacket, but there he was in a satin warm-up jacket. . . . When he called me in to his office, he just said, ‘The country needs a change and you connect with people in a way that I haven’t seen a politician connect with someone in a long time and you need to think about doing this.’ I said, ‘That’s very flattering, but I don’t think I’m going to do it. I just think I need to be governor and I love the job I have and I don’t see it.’ He told me I was wrong and that he had known ten or eleven presidents, I forget the exact number he said, but he said, ‘You can do this.’ I said, ‘I haven’t given any deep thought to foreign policy.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about that, we can work with you on that.’ He said, ‘Foreign policy is instinct, it’s character, that’s what foreign policy is.
It’s instinct and it’s character that determines who are the great foreign policy presidents and who aren’t.’ I just said, ‘It’s been great talking to you, thanks.’” He said Kissinger called again and invited him and Mary Pat to dinner. When they arrived, the guests included the CEOs of several major corporations, some of whom urged him to run.

Christie said he continued to get calls of encouragement during the summer, from elected officials in Washington, from politically connected people around the country, from some other governors. He compared notes with Paul Ryan, who was also getting encouragement to run from some of the same people. What was notable about the interest in Christie was that it was taking place as the Republican race was already under way. Romney was an announced candidate, and yet many of the people urging Christie to consider running were donors who could or should have been with Romney but were still on the sidelines. It was a measure of their lack of confidence in the supposed front-runner that they continued to openly push the New Jersey governor, despite his professed lack of interest.
*
Ken Langone, a wealthy New Yorker who helped found Home Depot, began to apply more serious pressure in private meetings with Christie. In July, he invited Christie to breakfast at the Rocker Club in Manhattan. “The way he sold it to me was that this was going to be a small group of his friends who were going to sit and talk with me about why I needed to do this for our country, and that was Ken’s big sales pitch,” Christie said.

Christie arrived that morning accompanied by his wife; his son Andrew; Mike DuHaime, his top political strategist; and Maria Comella, his communications director. What they saw and heard stunned them all. “It was jaw-dropping,” DuHaime said. Instead of a few people, there were dozens. Christie estimated the group at sixty. Instead of an intimate setting, the room was arranged formally, with the guests’ chairs lined up facing a pair of chairs flanking a small table. A telephone sat on the table. “So we sit down and Langone stands up and says, ‘Governor, all these people are here today for one reason. If you’re willing to announce for president of the United States, we’re with you, and everyone in this room has committed that to me and everyone in this room will raise every dollar you need to have raised to have a successful campaign. You won’t have to worry about raising the money.’” He said Langone then announced that several people could not attend because they were out of the country. Christie then described what happened. “All of a sudden you hear John Mack [former CEO of Morgan Stanley] on the phone. [Langone] said, ‘David Koch is out of the country. David, are you there?’ Yes. David starts
talking.” After several others had made the case for him to run, Christie said, Langone asked Kissinger to speak for everyone. “So Kissinger’s got the cane and helps himself up, walks to the front of the room,” Christie said, “and he says, ‘I’ve known X number of presidents. Being a successful president is about two things, courage and character. You have both and your country needs you.’ Then he turned around and sat back down. They all applauded.”
*

Christie said he was as close to speechless at that moment as he could ever remember being: “I basically said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to mislead you, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that I won’t do this, but I cannot walk out of a room like this after people like you have asked me to consider it and tell you I won’t consider it. So I’m going to take some time and Mary Pat and I are for the first time going to deliberate about this and we’ll get back to you. I won’t hold you for a long time, I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.’”