Playbook 2012 (2 page)

The experiences of men such as Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty shed light on the perils, absurdities, and realities of running for the highest office. Campaigns are the most human of undertakings—exhausting and brutal, yet thrilling and irresistible.

The rebirth of the right is an extraordinary tale. By historical standards it was a rapid shift, on par with the 1966 conservative backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society after the 1964 landslide. And as conservatives well know, that drama ended with the election of a Republican president in 1968.

This eBook tells the story not only of the last three months or weeks but of the last three years. Setting out, we asked the most basic question of all: how did American politics get from the “there” of a new Age of Obama to the “here” of a resurgent right? Part of the answer is cultural: Americans tend to elect Republican presidents, not Democratic ones. (In the last three quarters of a century, only two Democrats, FDR and Clinton, have been reelected; four Republicans have.)

The bloodless Romney’s ruthless, disciplined campaign appeared built to last, while his more colorful opponents rose and fell, distracting fire from Romney and allowing him to build his machine quietly. The swashbuckling Perry team misjudged their man and the moment at every turn, and the also-rans didn’t have what it takes. (You will read later about candidates who wanted days off—a natural human reaction to the grind of a campaign, but presidential contests
are about overcoming natural human reactions.) When Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie got out, Romney essentially had the nomination and big Republicans were left pining for what might have been. They know that a Romney-Obama general election will be almost a mechanical effort to turn out voters.

Here is the tale of how the right fought back to even (or better) with Obama—the intrigues and the plotting, the ground games and the quests for cash. It is the story of what’s happening behind the scenes, but also the story of who we are right now—and what we may be becoming.

Obama’s positive rating, which started in the mid-60s, fell throughout 2009 and into 2010. His negative rating, which started in the low 20s, steadily rose. The lines crossed in mid-2010. Unemployment stood stubbornly over 9 percent. Pundits visiting the White House began to hear a note of self-pity in the explanations of the Obama spinners. Privately, Obama began to identity with George H. W. Bush, a one-termer who was slowly being redeemed by history. Obama often invited Bush 41 to the White House when the former president was in town and would call him from time to time, just to talk. He awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with another father figure: Warren Buffett.

Shortly before Christmas in December 2010, the Romney clan and top advisers met in the living room of Romney’s house in La Jolla, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Ann Romney, who already suffered from MS, had been laid low by radiation treatment for early stages of breast cancer, but she was doing better. Her husband had been cagey about his plans for 2012, even inside his own family. “I might not do this, Tagg,” Romney had been telling his oldest son. “You keep assuming that I’m going to do this, but I might not.”

Stuart Stevens, who had been holding informal strategy sessions with Romney’s inner circle in Washington, gave a presentation. Frugality and discipline were the themes; there would be no replay of Romney’s high-spending, scattershot 2008 campaign. Stevens told the group that Romney 2.0 would be lean and mean. Still shaken by the 2008 debacle, some of Romney’s advisers had their doubts. “Are we completely crazy?” one recalled thinking. Romney himself had seemed more Zen-like in the aftermath of his failed first run. “He wasn’t like, Hey, I’ll never be president, and he wasn’t like [Richard] Nixon, You’ll never have Romney to kick around,” recalled one adviser, who would visit Romney from time to time. Romney was trying to write a book about what he believed. “He’d be sitting at his kitchen table, writing away and happy as a clam,” the adviser recalled. “The game came to him. I don’t think there’s any way to imagine that he’d be running if there was a decent economy—no way.”

The book,
No Apology: The Case for American Greatness
, seemed to give Romney a sense of purpose and even comfort. He wrote it at his kitchen table in Belmont, Massachusetts, and sitting on the beach at his waterfront home in La Jolla (born in Michigan, educated at Stanford, Brigham Young University, and Harvard business and law schools, Romney has had homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah, and California). Aides had hired a writer for
him, but Romney was so possessive about the project that the guy was eventually sidelined. (“The thought was Mitt would sit down with a writer, give him ideas, and then the writer would put some words on paper and then Mitt would edit,” said the aide. “It didn’t work that way, even slightly. The writer wrote a chapter and Mitt completely rewrote it, and then the writer wrote another chapter and Mitt completely rewrote it, and then we were like, You know, why don’t we do it in reverse? Why doesn’t Mitt write a chapter and you kind of buff it up? It was sort of painful, awkward, but the guy was great. He was like, Sure.” He became a glorified fact checker.)

At the La Jolla confab that December, Mitt and Ann Romney never said so explicitly, but the others could tell it was a “go.” Romney instantly became the GOP front-runner. “If he wins,” marveled a top southern operative who supports Romney, “he will have completely stolen the nomination. He is a northeastern Republican governor with a reputation for moderate-to-liberal tendencies on things that matter a lot to what is essentially a southern-western party right now.”

Democrats and even a few Republicans hoped that the end of the George W. Bush years meant an end to Karl Rove, the Bush adviser who won in 2000 and 2004 but who could not devise a political strategy to avoid the 2006 midterm defeats for Republicans or raise Bush’s ratings in the final years of the presidency. And in fact Rove seemed plenty happy in his new life as a columnist, author, and Fox News Channel expert. But in April 2010, at his modest home on
Weaver Terrace in Northwest D.C., Rove served his favorite chicken pot pie lunch to a score of his fellow Republican operators, figuring out how, in effect, to create a shadow political juggernaut to raise money for the Republicans. The way had been opened three months earlier by
Citizens United
, a Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited donations to political action committees.

By the summer of 2010, Rove was secretly flying around the country for a new organization called American Crossroads, harvesting checks from wealthy donors. An organizer ticked off the bounty: “A $4 million check, a $3.5 million check, a bunch of million-dollar checks, a $7 million check that came in the form of a $5 million check and two $1 million checks, and one $10 million contribution that came in tranches of $2.5 million. And I think $69 million of our money came in contributions of $100,000 or more.” When one Californian asked Rove what his cut was and was told it was zero, the wealthy patron doubled his gift.

The first employee of American Crossroads was a well-connected Washington operator named Steve Law. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Law, chief counsel of the Chamber of Commerce, had been sitting in a kabob place on Route 7 in the Virginia suburbs, half watching MSNBC, when he noticed something. The cable network was running a split screen, showing President Obama on one side, exhorting Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill. On the other side was “a rolling scroll of all the junk that was in the bill,” recalled Law. “I thought, you know, if MSNBC, definitely not a Republican-oriented station, is even starting to nick this guy—I wondered: he just started all of a sudden looking like a politician.” Law quit his job and, for the half the salary, became the head of American Crossroads.

The new organization got a boost when it was publicly attacked by President Obama in October of 2010. “When the president of the United States called us out, it was a tipping point
where the pledged donations came in, the folks on the fence came off the fence, and folks who had previously been prospects suddenly started writing very large checks,” said Jonathan Collegio, Law’s number two at American Crossroads. “We raised $13 million in two days.” So, we asked, Did Obama ensure your longevity? “He did,” answered Collegio.

What It Takes
, Richard Ben Cramer’s book about the 1988 presidential election, documented the physical, mental, and emotional toll of running for president. The book has taken on a cult status among political aficionados, in part because it shows the human cost of running for president and the extreme dedication required to win.

In the 2012 campaign for the GOP nomination, one candidate steadily plowed ahead. Mitt Romney was boring at times, almost invisible much of the time, but his campaign was essentially error-free and unflappable. The others self-destructed in memorable, sometimes colorful ways.

Haley Barbour’s campaign-in-waiting for the Republican nomination was so far advanced in the winter of 2011 that his staffers had looked at houses in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi and putative Barbour campaign headquarters. They had planned each stop of the announcement tour, starting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, hitting New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina, and winding back home to Jackson for a hero’s welcome and mega-fundraiser.
A Washington operative who was likely to join the team had even planned an all-Google technology infrastructure, to save money using free tools, but also to create the unlikely profile of Haley Barbour, tech-savvy. The Mississippi governor and head of the Republican National Committee was a prodigious fundraiser. He had even begun to eat and drink less, shedding twenty pounds. (Though even Barbour himself joked that his idea of cutting back was less bourbon and more Cabernet.)

But there was a catch. Following the practice of many campaigns, Barbour’s advisers had collected “oppo,” opposition research on their own candidate. “It was a big file,” recalled one adviser. Flashing red lights included foreign clients of Barbour’s lobbying business. “The assumption was: if we can find it within ten or twelve weeks, then we have to assume that already
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times
, POLITICO, or
The Wall Street Journal
already have this or will have this.” Some of the material was so embarrassing that Barbour was briefed in private. “There was a decision made that we would not be together as a group to present it to him. We thought that was disrespectful and unbecoming of what a professional team should do. So Scott [Reed, Barbour’s chief adviser] was the only one to take the file and go present it to Haley privately, just the two of them,” said the adviser. “He took it like a man,” Reed told the others. Not long after, in late April, Barbour decided not to run.

Callista Gingrich, a former staffer on the House Agriculture Committee and Newt Gingrich’s third wife, was deeply involved in her husband’s professional life. Gingrich had given control of his communications company to Callista, easing out his daughter, who had been in charge for the
prior decade. Gingrich’s aides say that Callista is cheerful and smiling. “She’s not the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s a nice person. She was fun to be around,” said one. But she is a perfectionist and demanding. She insisted that aides follow her revisions of routine memos to the letter. (“When I send you changes, I expect them to be made.”) She wanted to fly on private planes, but not just any plane—only ones she deemed safe (a Hawker 800 or a Citation 10). At the same time, she threw Newt’s down-to-the-minute schedule off track. “Well, you know, women want to go back to the hotel and freshen up and things like that, and that’s understandable, but freshening up to me is, you know, fifteen minutes, and there were times when it was forty-five minutes or an hour, and that was problematic,” said an adviser.

After making a lot of money giving speeches and writing books, Gingrich may have become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Certainly Callista was. In the early summer of 2011, just as the campaign was getting going, Gingrich took his wife on a Greek cruise. At about the same time, it came out that Gingrich had kept a line of credit of close to half a million dollars at Tiffany & Co. to buy gifts for his wife. Already frustrated, Gingrich’s top advisers were further exasperated when Callista refused to let her husband spend a full week campaigning in Iowa. “It’s not how you run a presidential campaign,” a former aide said. “You can’t do it as a day here and a day there—you’ve got to dedicate the time.” Advisers planned an intervention, a massive confrontation, with aides and advisers flying in from around the country. The message was that Gingrich was going to have to leave the campaign to the professionals and stop listening to Callista. He was going to have to spend more time in the early states—and stay overnight, which she wouldn’t like. He was going to have to downsize the campaign—“live off the land,” as an adviser put it—and stop giving in to her demands that he attend so many screenings of a Gingrich Productions movie that he had been promoting on the side. But this adviser decided that
a big come-to-Jesus meeting could backfire. “He would get his back up,” the adviser said. So just a couple of aides met with Gingrich so he wouldn’t be put on the spot in front of a group—but he was incensed, anyway. The session was over in twenty minutes. Sam Dawson, the campaign’s strategist, called Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesperson, on his cell phone to say everyone was quitting. “We’re done and the state teams have left,” Dawson said. Gingrich did not ask them to stay.

Tim Pawlenty was in some ways an obvious choice: a genial, successful midwestern governor, an evangelical Christian with strong ties to the right. He comes across as “Minnesota nice.” Some say his wife, Mary, is the more forceful partner.