Playbook 2012

by Mike Allen

  At one point, Palin, who is privately shy and introverted despite her public brassiness, complained to aides that Mitt Romney had somehow “rigged” the primary schedule to favor his candidacy, although she was never quite clear how. Determined to be an idol of the masses, Palin wanted to protect her turf from all intruders, including Donald Trump, the first and least serious of the early front-runners. Looking for a good catfight, the press played up her rivalry with Michele Bachmann and Palin’s apparent intent to upstage Bachmann by appearing in Iowa just as the congresswoman was announcing her candidacy. But Palin insiders say that she wasn’t particularly insecure about Bachmann, that the Palin v. Bachmann smackdown was mostly a media creation.

  Still, she was upset when a reporter caught her by surprise with the news that Bachmann had won the Ames straw poll. “We were in Dixon, Illinois,” a longtime aide recalled. “I told [her husband] Todd but I had not told her. An NBC reporter jumped out of a bush somewhere, popped a question at her—it just literally had just happened. So they were clearly tracking us, waiting to get the response. And I hadn’t told her yet. I should have said something.” A scolding followed. She was frustrated “that [she] was caught off guard, didn’t know the information. [The] schedule should have been such that we were watching the straw poll results, as opposed to doing some other activity.” For each debate, Palin insisted on having a place to watch if she was on the road, and afterward wanted to deconstruct the debate with advisers.

  Some Palin advisers wanted her to run, even if briefly and quixotically, to renew her fans’ loyalty. People around the Palins felt they had been signaled to be ready to go, but aides were disappointed when Palin’s road trips in August didn’t seem to generate much excitement. They were planning on running a few small tests in September to measure her fundraising ability, but it was too late. Palin announced she would not run on October 5.

  * * *

  New Jersey governor Chris Christie knew he wasn’t ready, and repeatedly resisted what was one of the most intensive lobbying efforts anyone in Republican politics could recall. Encountering Christie in the skybox of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, George W. Bush told the governor: “You got what it takes to do this if you want to do it.” Witnesses said the encounter was a little awkward because Johnson is one of Mitt Romney’s national chairmen.

  In July, fifty of the most prized donors in national politics, including several hedge fund billionaires who are among the richest people in the world, schlepped to a Manhattan office or hovered around speakerphones as their host, venture capitalist Ken Langone, a co-founder of the Home Depot, implored Christie to reconsider. The governor declined eloquently and firmly, as paraphrased by a close source for POLITICO Playbook readers at the time: “I’m not running, but I came because Langone is so aggressive, he basically just physically shook me into doing it. I’ve weighed this carefully; I didn’t dismiss it out of hand. There were four considerations. 1) One question was: Where’s my wife? She’s not enthused. 2) The second is: I looked ahead at the potential for two years of running, and not seeing my kids. If I won, six years of not seeing them. If I won a second term, ten years of not seeing them. Missing my kids growing up is a big deal to me, and it was a big reason. The wife was the biggest. The children were the second. 3) I’m staying in New Jersey. I am not just going to quit halfway through my term. The people trusted me, and I feel like I owe that trust and faith some fidelity. 4) And fourth: Could I win? Could I really do it? I think I would win—not saying I would win, but I could win. I brought my oldest son today because, first of all, I wanted him to wake up early. [Laughter] And, second of all, to have to put on his one suit and tie. [More laughter] But I wanted him to listen because if I did run, which I’m not going to—but if I did in the future—it’s going to affect him. There’s six people in the family—I’m just one. I recognize that not all of you would immediately commit, but it certainly makes me realize that if I were to run, and had this group behind me, I certainly wouldn’t have any problem raising money.”

  * * *

  Until the fall of 2011, many of the big moneymen in the Republican establishment stood on the sidelines, reluctant to throw in with Romney. They hoped, vainly, for an alternative. But some of the significant financial types who gather checks and bundle them together into sizable campaign donations saw a different, more effective Romney emerging as a candidate. One of the fundraisers, an important Washington lobbyist—call him “the Bundler”—spoke with us (anonymously) about Romney 2.0.

  The Bundler had not been a Romney insider. He had raised money for John McCain, the GOP nominee in 2008. But “early in the midterm cycle”—by late 2009—it was obvious to the Bundler that “Romney was going to run again because he was frenetically active and the [Romney] PAC was so aggressive at raising money.” The Bundler, in effect, decided to make an early bet on Romney. He saw weaknesses but, over time, real strengths as well that were not readily apparent to outsiders.

  “Romney has greater self-awareness than any presidential candidate I’ve worked with since Reagan,” said the Bundler (who has worked with several). “Reagan, although people thought he wasn’t self-aware, was very self-aware. He was aware of the importance of how he dressed, how he looked, how he sounded, what he was conveying to people without opening his mouth as well as with what he said. And he was very aware of what people thought of him, an actor and a lightweight, and then thought after he was governor that he was too conservative. Mitt is a very self-aware person, and he takes criticism and suggestions of his style, of his campaign tactics and techniques, much more readily than most other candidates, who have a natural defensive reaction to that.”

  The “biggest change,” observed the Bundler, was that Romney learned to be more disciplined and to have a clear message based on “things he truly believed in so he didn’t have to think about how he felt.” The Bundler pointed to the fact that Romney actually wrote his own campaign book. “You can tell if you read it because it has that tortured syntax that is characteristic of Romney,” said the Bundler (“characteristic of a lot of finance guys, by the way,” he added).

  Romney learned to stay on message and avoid the tempting but pointless tit-for-tat squabbles that are the prime ingredient of cable TV news. “The Romney campaign of ’08, I can tell you from the McCain side, we would send them chasing off after all kinds of rabbits, and they chased every one of them. After a while it was a game,” said the Bundler, who was particularly impressed that Romney did not succumb to the temptation to swipe at Jon Huntsman’s campaign. The Huntsman and Romney families are rival power centers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Romney knew well enough to leave Huntsman alone—at under 2 percent in most polls, Huntsman was only a real threat if Romney made him one. “As much as Huntsman was a bee buzzing in his ear, he was told not to swat at it and he didn’t.”

  The Bundler also noticed a new toughness in Romney. Not uncommonly, big donors want something for their checks—not in the way of a quid pro quo, but at least the chance to tell the candidate what he is doing wrong and how to run his campaign. The Bundler, who often set up these big donor meetings, recalled, “We’d be going to recruit an important fundraiser and the person would be pushing in on stuff, and they’d have a real discussion, but if the guy or woman was being ridiculous, unfair, the old Mitt would have been, Gee, you’re making great points here, I’ve really got to take that to heart. The new Mitt is, Well, we’ve made those changes and I’ve explained to you what they are. Now, if you’re not comfortable with that, maybe I’m not the guy for you to support.” The Bundler was with Romney, seeking donations, when some Wall Street moneymen, seeking a return on investment, were pushing him to support a particular investment tax break. Romney said no; it was a mistake to try to engineer prosperity through new tax breaks when what was needed was more certainty in the business climate.

  In 2008, said the Bundler, Romney had “only his inner circle of advisers and he had too many of them. He drew no b
oundaries and he had no toughness, which is why he pandered to everybody because he didn’t say no to anybody. This time around, he’s a much better candidate because he’s got the boundaries and the toughness but still the openness. Very hard thing to pull off.”

  * * *

  As other candidates flailed about in the spring and summer of 2011, Romney ran a low-key, almost stealthy campaign. He quietly but methodically visited small towns in northern and western New Hampshire where John McCain had staged a comeback in 2008 by working the barbershops and VFW halls. Romney “looks like the guy who fired you,” said Mike Huckabee in 2008, so now Romney was trying to be more approachable. He took off his tie and wore blue jeans with his starched shirts. Romney rarely said anything of note, offering bland utterances and ducking controversial subjects when reporters tried to corner him.

  Romney could laugh at the absurdity of campaigning. “He finds it, on some level, funny,” said an adviser. “He sort of grasps the deep and sometimes dark humor of it.” Romney’s sense of humor sometimes shows in an odd, teenage boy sort of way. He likes practical jokes. On a trip to Florida, while he was governor, a state trooper in his protective detail, acting like a prankster in a college dorm, short-sheeted the governor’s hotel bed. “Mitt decided to get back at him,” recalled an aide. He swiped some hotel stationery and wrote a letter from the hotel manager to the governor, apologizing for the badly made bed and saying that a chambermaid had been fired. Mitt showed the letter to the trooper, “who turned white,” according to the aide. In June, at a visit to Mary Ann’s Diner in Derry, New Hampshire, Romney lined up the waitresses for a photo with his arms around them. “Get closer,” he said, smiling, then suddenly jumped forward as if he had been goosed. “Just teasing,” he explained to reporters. He noted that, at a similar stop in his 2008 campaign, someone really had grabbed him in the rear end. He gave a hearty “Ha-ha-hah!” laugh.

  Romney paced himself. A dutiful jogger, Romney runs three miles every morning, on jogging trails, on a treadmill in the gym, even around and around the hotel (often a Marriott), if there’s no place else to go. If he has a slice of pizza, he pulls the cheese off the top. Usually, Romney dines on turkey breast, rice, and broccoli, chased by water or maybe a Diet Coke. In South Carolina, for a big treat, he might visit a Bojangles’ for the fried chicken. Romney relished KFC, but pulled off the skin.

  Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, is a non-schmoozing, no-joking-around type who arrives in the office before seven every morning. (“He probably dreams Mitt Romney,” said one colleague. “His mood spans the range from A to B,” said another.) Remembering the waste of 2008, the campaign manager hired far fewer bodies this time around. The candidate himself is a notorious cheapskate. He puts duct tape around the fingers of torn ski gloves and likes to fly JetBlue. When it’s necessary to reroute Romney, he sometimes balks; he doesn’t like the fees imposed by airlines for changed reservations.

  The Romney campaign is housed in the same former furniture store and law firm in Boston’s North End that headquartered the 2008 campaign. This time there are far fewer people; the money is being husbanded for future TV ads. Romney asked Washington consultants Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer to give up their other clients and move to Boston. In a ground-floor suite equipped with editing bays, Stevens can create ads and videos on the fly.

  A senior Romney adviser claims that the candidate no longer sweats “the little things.” After getting roughed up in the press in 2008, “he understands that some days the front page of POLITICO isn’t always going to be positive Mitt Romney stuff. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to win the primary and win the election.”

  But, of course, there are moments when the media pummeling hurts. Looking back, Romney campaign aides still wince over the beating handed out by the Wall Street Journal editorial page in early May, after Romney gave a speech laying out his “2012 principles for health reform.” The editorial began: “As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts Governor was the prototype for President Obama’s version and gave national health care a huge political boost.… His failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential president.” The WSJ editorial was a “low” in the campaign, conceded an aide. The health care issue had nagged at Romney’s advisers, more than they later cared to admit. Romney could hardly run away from Romneycare. His official governor’s portrait hanging in the statehouse shows a copy of the health care bill lying on his desk.

  The campaign decided to make a virtue of not flip-flopping on health care. As a Romney aide later put it, with a touch of bravado and his own expletive, “He went out there and said, Hey, I’m not walking away. He told [reporter Brian] Mooney in the [Boston] Globe, I am proud of what I did. Go fuck yourself.” (What Romney actually said was: “Overall, it was a positive approach.… I’m proud of the fact we took on a real tough problem and moved the ball forward.”) Romney was always quick to add, however, that his first step as president would be to repeal Obamacare.

  Romney’s health care speech in May, delivered with the sort of PowerPoint bullet points favored by business consultants, was a stylistic as well as a substantive flop. All the GOP candidates were mocking President Obama for using a TelePrompTer. Romney’s handlers decided it was time to dump the PowerPoint approach and to try to make the candidate appear spontaneous and unrehearsed. “Speeches are so yesterday, man,” said one adviser. On September 6, Romney gave a much more effective address on job creation, speaking, it seemed, almost off the cuff (his key points were emblazoned on the backdrop). Romney knew that he needed to be sensitive to the charge that he was a phony and a stiff, Bob Forehead–type caricature of a pol who reads woodenly from a handler’s script. In time, Romney learned to give speeches extemporaneously, using only a few notes to get him going.

  Romney’s religion was another potential vulnerability. Romney is very active in the LDS church—he has been a Mormon leader, a lay bishop, in Massachusetts, and wrote a big check to build a new Mormon temple in his hometown of Belmont, Massachusetts, dedicated in 2000. The Romney camp anticipated smears and stood ready. “Someone takes a shot at the governor’s faith, we put a scarlet letter on them, RB, religious bigot,” said a senior adviser. But through the spring and summer of 2011, the attacks never came. (When a Dallas preacher who introduced Rick Perry at an October event proceeded to walk outside the hall and call Mormonism a “cult,” the reaction was mainly pro-Romney, or at least neutral, which was effectively pro-Romney.)

  By September, the Romneyites were relieved that their man had survived what they feared to be the most threatening challenges. “I’ll tell you who really worried us was Governor Pawlenty,” said a senior adviser. “If he was able to run the tortoise campaign that he was running and win [the] Iowa [caucuses], surprise people and just win it, or even surprise people and come in a strong second, he was the candidate who could do Iowa and New Hampshire. We really felt like he was just perfect—he was the personality, he was the background, he was the candidate that could have done that. And so we had no desire to run against him in New Hampshire, especially if he was strong in Iowa. Governor Pawlenty can roll into a pool hall in New Hampshire and just grab a beer and connect with people, he just could.” But, the adviser said, with an almost rueful sympathy, “He got caught out in Iowa, man. I’ve been there. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that movie.” In Iowa in 2008, after great effort and expense (about $10 million), Romney had been badly beaten in the caucuses by Mike Huckabee, which is one reason why Romney avoided the Iowa straw poll this time around.

  Bachmann had missed her chance. Said the adviser: “After the straw poll, she should have shifted her focus on Perry, not done a victory lap on every Sunday show where she got, where the target was her.”

  Governor Rick Perry of Texas was the real threat—or at least that’s what the pundits were saying as the pre-primary campaign turned into the backstretch after Labor Day. If he g
ot in the race, the conventional thinking went, then the Tea Partyers would flock to the Texan, who was so anti–federal government and pro–states’ rights that he had once suggested that the Lone Star State consider seceding from the union. One Romney adviser ticked off all the reasons to worry about Perry, including the governor’s Texas financial base, but he observed: “One other thing to watch with Perry, though, is that we’re going to do really well with women, Republican women, and he won’t. He doesn’t poll well with women. He does with evangelical women. It’s the same old stuff, he’s a bit of a swaggering cowboy, and women have a real aversion to that. They want to date that guy in high school. They don’t want to marry him.”

  The reverse implication was that women might not want to date Romney—and guys might not want to watch a game with him. But they were likely to see the stolid Romney as a more reliable long-term relationship than a former fighter jock good ol’ boy who still wore cowboy boots. The Romneyites were reasonably confident that Perry would beat himself. Still, they began quietly preparing a negative campaign to tear down Perry, just in case.

  * * *

  Perry finally decided to run in part because he could not abide Romney. “He basically told me, Hell, I’m not going to concede this thing to Mitt,” said one top political operative who often spoke, as he put it, “in depth” with Perry.

  Asked if Perry disliked Romney, Perry’s chief strategist, Dave Carney, offered a roundabout answer, but one with a clear meaning. “Perry looks at things, particularly in politics, that when you say something … your word is important,” he began. The wide-waisted Carney, fifty-two, had rolled up to a Peterborough, New Hampshire, diner in a beat-up, cherry-red Ford Explorer with stickers on the back for the Perry campaign and the ConVal (New Hampshire) Regional High School Cougars, for whom his son plays football. Wearing shorts and a ball cap on a crisp fall morning, he ordered a three-egg omelet with sausage. Lounging on a bench, Carney was uncharacteristically inarticulate as he fumbled for a way to describe Perry’s attitude toward Romney. He finally settled on describing Romney as “just not his cup of tea, is the best way to say it.” So Romney and Perry were not going to be pals? “They are just different personalities and they really don’t have much in common,” responded Carney.