Playbook 2012

by Mike Allen

  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

  For campaign manager, Pawlenty hired a twenty-eight-year-old operative named Nick Ayers. The young Ayers insisted on total control. “His point of view was, If I come to you with advice, you will do what I say,” said a person who participated in the negotiations to hire him. One of Ayers’s first moves was to cut Mary Pawlenty out of scheduling decisions and debate preparation, leaving the candidate caught between his manager and his wife. She was especially upset when he took her off several campaign email chains. Headquarters staffers, particularly women, were not happy with Ayers. He would bark orders (“Move those calls!”) at the slightest scheduling mishap. One young woman was near tears after Ayers summoned her to his office to talk about “Medicare” and berated her for the next twenty minutes. Ayers accused her of telling a reporter that he had talked openl
y of the possibility that Michele Bachmann was taking “happy pills.” Ayers had made the “happy pills” remark about Bachmann in front of several staffers, and the woman has told colleagues she was not the leaker.

  Pawlenty was not a scintillating campaigner, so advisers hired two “style coaches”: how to sit forward in the chair when being interviewed, how to hold his hands, how to speak more dynamically.

  The coaching never quite took. He began shouting to show anger he didn’t really feel, and botched his best chance to attack his chief rival, Mitt Romney. The day before the second GOP debate in June 2011, Pawlenty had declared on Fox News, “President Obama said that he designed Obamacare after Romneycare and basically made it Obamneycare.” At the debate, an audience member asked Pawlenty about health care. Hoping for an onstage confrontation between Pawlenty and Romney, the moderator, CNN’s John King, kept trying to get Pawlenty to repeat his “Obamneycare” remark. Pawlenty whiffed at the chance, and the pundits immediately branded him as feckless.

  What was going on in Pawlenty’s mind? In early October, Pawlenty sat down with us at Evan Thomas’s dining room table in Washington to describe what it’s actually like to be a presidential candidate. Pawlenty tried to re-create his thought process, what churned through his mind as he stood onstage. Using an expression familiar to weekend golfers, who are supposed to keep simple thoughts in their mind as they swing, Pawlenty began:

  “The consultants say, If you get a question from the screen, you’ve got to answer the person on the screen because otherwise it’s disrespectful of the citizen. So whatever her name is gets up on the screen and says, I have a health care question. So my first swing thought is, I’ve got to answer the screen. So I say to the woman, Betty or Nancy or whatever your name is, that’s a great question about health care, and I’m doing that [answering by talking about Obamacare], and John King doesn’t want to hear any of that. He wants to hear me whack Romney. So he interrupts me the first time and says, Well, what about this thing you said about Romney and what you called ‘Obamneycare?’ And then I start to whale on Obama because my second swing thought is, After you do the screen, no matter what question you get, you’ve got to whale on Obama because the base loves that, and they like nothing better than when you criticize Obama and then pivot to whatever point you’re going to make. So I’m thinking, Screen, whale Obama, nick Mitt. So this is my three-point swing thought, so I’m through swing thought one on the screen, and King’s interrupted me. When I’m into swing thought two about Obama, he doesn’t want to hear that, either. He wants me to nick Mitt, and I’m fully prepared to do it, and we get into this awkward, I’m trying to say something, he’s trying to get me to get to the point. At that point I’m focused on Obama, and I thought it was a legitimate point to whale on Obama, but I decided to stay with that and not finish it with Mitt.”

  Phew. Pawlenty later conceded that his wife had urged him not to go after Romney with the “Obamneycare” line, which was swing thought number four, and, possibly, the one that really bollixed him.

  One of Pawlenty’s top advisers questioned whether the candidate’s heart was really in the race. Pawlenty always seemed to want to get back to the hotel to see if there was a good hockey game he could watch in the sports bar with his body man, this adviser said. On the day before the Ames, Iowa, straw poll on August 13, 2011, which the Pawlenty team had targeted as make-or-break, with thousands of hands still to shake, Pawlenty wanted to quit early, said this adviser. His spokesman, Alex Conant, did not dispute this, though he offered a more benign explanation. “Unlike every candidate I’ve ever worked for, he wanted to make sure that there was ample downtime and that the days were not so long that by the end of them he was not making sense anymore,” said Conant.

  In his interview with us, Pawlenty said, “The idea we sloughed off is complete BS.” Pawlenty was eager, however, to drop out of the race if he badly lost the Ames straw poll. He did not want to have a big campaign debt. On the eve of the straw poll, Pawlenty’s wife, Mary, confronted campaign manager Ayers in their hotel suite. “What happens if we get out on Sunday morning?” she asked. “Is there going to be debt?” Ayers answered, “No.” Pawlenty finished a distant third and dropped out of the race.

  As he drove home from Iowa, he received a stream of consoling phone calls from well-wishers, like George H. W. Bush (a fan) and Mitt Romney, who was angling for T-Paw’s endorsement. Then one of the people riding in the car heard Pawlenty exclaim, “I don’t even know what to say about that. That’s jaw-dropping.” Riding in the backseat, his wife, Mary, was suddenly alert. She began asking her husband, “What? What? What? What are you saying?” Pawlenty looked crestfallen. He explained that he had just learned that the campaign was more than a half million dollars in the red.

  Mary Pawlenty believed that Ayers had flat-out lied about the campaign debt. (Ayers denied this.) The campaign office had been so dysfunctional in the early going that Pawlenty probably would have fired Ayers, but Ayers had been on the campaign such a short time that it would have made the candidate look weak.

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  Ed Rollins, Michele Bachmann’s chief strategist, remained skeptical even after he was retained. She left their get-to-know-you meeting in Manhattan to do Fox News, and stuck him with the check. “Not only did I give free advice,” he later complained, “I paid thirty bucks for a cup of coffee.” (Bachmann had met Rollins at AJ Maxwell’s Steakhouse, a high-priced midtown restaurant.)

  At that first meeting in October 2010, Rollins insisted to Bachmann, as Ayers had to Pawlenty, that he would have to exercise total control over the campaign. (Veteran political strategists generally cannot abide candidates who try to micromanage their own campaigns.) Bachmann “didn’t respond,” Rollins recalled. “I would say, what it was, it was like a first date and neither of us cared whether we had a second date.” But a few days later, Bachmann called Rollins and said, “I want you to do the campaign. I will give you total control.”

  Rollins put together a small, tightly controlled operation—at times, a phantom campaign. Her red-white-and-blue bus emblazoned with “Michele Bachmann” drove around Iowa without her aboard, giving the impression that she was everywhere (she often had to be back in Washington casting votes in Congress). Rollins himself worked from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., sometimes later. Despite her hands-off pledge, Bachmann would email him at all hours. “She was kind of a high-strung candidate,” recalled Rollins. “I found myself waking up at 2 A.M., and my beeper going off, and her emailing me on stupid little things.” Bachmann would be upset by some small glitch or setback, said Rollins—“You know, this particular pastor went for Pawlenty.”

  Rollins, sixty-eight, was recovering from a stroke in November 2010 that has left him with a slight limp when he gets tired. After a few weeks of the Bachmann campaign, his wife, Shari, was blunt with him: “You’re going to die. You’re going to have a heart attack or another stroke—and she ain’t gonna be president, so why are you doing this?” Meanwhile, Rollins’s sixteen-year-old daughter was uncomfortable with Bachmann’s stance on gay rights. She was saying to him, recalled Rollins, “You know, I’ve got 450 kids on my Facebook who are writing me little notes about who your daddy is working for.”

  Bachmann, meanwhile, “always bitched about the scheduling,” recalled Rollins. “The weekend of the hurricane [Irene, August 27–28], she wanted to go on vacation. She was getting worn out from the campaign trail, she wanted a day off every week totally free of everyone, and she wasn’t making her finance calls [calls to potential campaign donors, critical to presidential campaigning].” Bachmann wanted to spend $300,000 to compete in the September 24 Florida straw poll, a waste of time and money as far as Rollins was concerned. When another Bachmann aide insisted to Rollins that the candidate should go for the straw poll, saying that former Florida governor Jeb Bush had told Bachmann she could win the state, Rollins threatened to play the sort of hardball at which political consultants delight. According to Rollins, he told the aide, “I’
ll tell you, the quickest way to stop that is I’ll go leak that story to POLITICO. I’ll go tell Maggie [Haberman, a POLITICO reporter] that Governor Bush basically said that you [meaning Bachmann] could win Florida, and you’ll see how long it takes him to drop that rumor real quick.”

  In early September, Bachmann, who continued to avoid making fundraising calls herself, wanted to fire two of her fundraisers. That was it for Rollins. “I don’t need this shit,” he told her over the phone. “Let me give you thirty days’ notice.” The next day Bachmann called him at campaign headquarters and said, “If you’re going to leave you might as well leave now.”

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  While Gingrich and Bachmann were losing staff and Pawlenty was fizzling out, Sarah Palin remained sure she could win. “In our small group, there was no question that she would win the nomination,” one of her closest advisers recalled. At a meeting at the new Palin home in Arizona in early summer, the Palin team talked about potential campaign consultants and war-gamed how to raise money for a race.

  Palin herself was obsessed with running, said the adviser. “She wanted to be updated moment to moment” on the race, said the adviser, just in case she suddenly decided to take the plunge. He marveled at “the intensity and detail that she knew about all the candidates, all the process, all the debates, everything that went on. I read Playbook every morning and [the] Drudge [Report] and POLITICO, refresh every hour and keep up on the blogs and try to keep track of everything that’s going on, but many times I was caught off guard by her having more information than I do.”