Playbook 2012

by Mike Allen

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  Rick Santorum was visiting Adams, the smallest of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties, looking for voters anywhere he could find them. Late on a raw early November night, he stopped in at Kay’s Kafé in the town of Corning and found six patrons watching the last game of the World Series on TV. Into the bar walked Joe Klein, the Time magazine columnist. “I had no idea he was going to be there,” said Santorum. “I just thought, How weird is this?” A couple of patrons said to Santorum, “You got my vote. If anybody comes to Corning, you’ve got my vote.” Despite eight town meetings that day, Santorum did not have a drink—he does not even touch caffeine.

  His relaxation is Fantasy League Baseball. At a candidates’ forum in Iowa, in the middle of a Newt Gingrich speech, the camera caught him surreptitiously checking his tablet to see how his team was doing. We asked Santorum if the process is humiliating. “It’s humiliating if you’re not humble,” he answered.

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  Herman Cain seemed to be having a good time. The former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza had jumped into national prominence by running for president. Improbably, by late October “the Hermanator” led the race for the Republican nomination in some national polls, and trailed Romney by only a point or two in others. To be sure, Cain seemed more like a protest vote than a real choice. At a focus group conducted by pollster Peter Hart for the Pew Charitable Trusts, voters were asked to think back to their fifth grade experience to describe the candidates. Asked to choose from a list of adjectives, the voters described Romney as “pompous” and Perry as “the bully.” Cain was called “the kid everyone respects.” A little taken aback, Hart asked, “Do you think this person could be president of the United States? Is anybody willing to raise your hand and say, I would be comfortable if he became the next president of the United States?” Not a hand went up.

  Still, people seemed to like Cain’s cheeky bluntness. When other candidates attacked his 9-9-9 flat tax plan (9 percent flat income tax, 9 percent corporate tax, 9 percent national sales tax) as politically impossible, a revenue loser, and a burden on the poor, Cain just shrugged and kept on smiling and joking. He may have been a little weak on the facts—he apparently was unaware that China possessed a nuclear arsenal—but he had a simple, clear slogan (“9-9-9!”) and a sly sense of humor. Half in-your-face, half tongue-in-cheek, a Cain for President ad showed his campaign manager, Mark Block, offering an earnest testimonial to Cain, then impassively dragging on a cigarette. The ad became a sensation on the Internet, instantly going viral.

  The fun ended for Cain on Sunday morning, October 30, or, possibly, a few days earlier. Outside the Washington bureau of CBS downtown, Cain was leaving the set of Face the Nation when he was approached by POLITICO reporter Jonathan Martin. For more than a week, Martin and several other POLITICO staffers had been working on a story that Cain had been accused of sexual harassment during his time as head of the National Restaurant Association. POLITICO’s digging showed that in the late 1990s, as a fun-loving boss residing on weekdays in Washington apart from his wife and family (who continued to live in Omaha, Nebraska), Cain had sometimes indulged in humor and physical jests with the sort of suggestive innuendo that, at least in the opinion of two younger female employees, crossed the line into sexual harassment. Two of the women had filed complaints with the restaurant association and left the organization with financial packages and nondisclosure agreements typical in these matters. The most explosive reporting was that one woman claimed he invited her to his hotel room and made “an unwanted sexual advance.” POLITICO eventually found six people who knew details of the tense encounter. Off the record, reporters were given much more vivid accounts. Within a week, at least a half dozen women were making allegations to reporters across Washington. For ten days, beginning on Thursday, October 20, Martin and other POLITICO reporters sought a response from the Cain campaign. POLITICO emailed campaign manager Block and spokesman J. D. Gordon with the name of one of the women who had allegedly taken a cash payment from the restaurant association and signed a nondisclosure agreement. On Saturday night, October 29, Martin emailed the Cain campaign to say that POLITICO was in “the final stages” of a story reporting on the sexual harassment charges—and pleaded with the campaign to put Cain on the phone. When he got no response, Martin decided to drive down to the CBS Washington bureau on Sunday morning.

  Martin did not want to confront Cain while there were other reporters standing around outside the bureau, so he waited until Cain had walked down the block to sign some autographs from passing tourists. “Mr. Cain,” the reporter said, “I’m Jonathan Martin of POLITICO. I’m working on a story about two allegations of sexual harassment during your time at the National Restaurant Association. Do you have a comment on that, sir?”

  Cain began by saying that he had been in business for years and “it’s real easy for someone to make these accusations.” Martin said he had the names of two women. Cain cut in, “But you won’t tell us who these people are.” Martin said that POLITICO had given his campaign the name of one of the women, and then repeated the name. Cain said nothing. A security man intervened, saying, “Step back.”

  Martin tried again. “Have you ever been accused, sir, of sexual harassment?”

  Cain responded, “Have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

  “Have a nice day,” said Martin, and headed back to his car.

  The inevitable feeding frenzy was on. Cain meant to spend the next day talking about his economic plan to the National Press Club, the American Enterprise Institute, and various news outlets. But he was surrounded by reporters who wanted to know about his alleged misdeeds. He struggled with damage control. He denied any impropriety, but offered shifting explanations. At first he said he knew nothing about any financial settlements, but then amended his answer to admit an “agreement” to pay one of the women. He tried to suggest his behavior had been essentially harmless—teasing a woman about her height—but acknowledged that the woman might have felt uncomfortable.

  Right-wing bloggers and talkers rallied to Cain as the victim of a liberal media “witch hunt.” “A high-tech lynching,” said conservative commentator Ann Coulter, alluding to the sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings in 1991. But then, on Wednesday—Day Four, with the scandal running its predictable course—Cain accused the Perry campaign of leaking the allegations. The Perry campaign promptly suggested that the Romney campaign was to blame. “Not true,” said a Romney spokesman. A lawyer for one of the women asked the National Restaurant Association to free his client from her confidentiality agreement. Although she later issued a statement, at the time she did not want to get into the details—she did not want to become “another Anita Hill,” the lawyer said, referring to Clarence Thomas’s accuser. But she wanted to make a public statement to the effect that Cain had, in fact, sexually harassed her.

  On November 7, a former restaurant association employee, Sharon Bialek, held a press conference to say that Cain had groped her while the two sat in a car in Washington. Cain denied the charge as “baseless, bogus, and false,” and offered to take a lie detector test (“if I think it’s necessary,” he hedged). The Cain campaign worked to discredit his accusers, and many conservatives remained loyal, suspicious of a Democratic plot. But Cain began to slip in the polls.

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  Cain may have been Romney’s chief challenger throughout much of the fall, but the Romney camp did not welcome Cain’s demise. A Romney adviser said he was sorry to see Cain tangled up in a scandal. “We didn’t want oppo on him coming out,” the adviser explained. “We wanted him to stay where he is. He keeps Perry down.” With two months remaining before the Iowa caucuses on January 3, Romney was stuck at no more than 25 percent or so in the polls in Iowa. His Mormonism was a real, if largely unspoken, issue among many of Iowa’s Christian GOP activists, the sort of voters who are willing to come out on a winter’s night to stand around a caucus meet
ing for two hours.

  The Romney camp wanted to keep Cain in the race to divide up the true-believer conservative vote in Iowa. If Cain fell away, that left an opening for a charge by a conservative, possibly Rick Perry, who was launching a big TV buy in Iowa. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s campaign strategist, was worried about Perry stealing a march in Iowa. Stevens was weighing whether to make a real push in Iowa—and risk an early disaster if Romney was surprised, as he had been by Huckabee in 2008. Stevens was fretting that if Perry really camped out in Iowa and talked incessantly about his own Christian faith, he could make a late run. Most Iowa voters remained undecided. Should Romney try to lower expectations in Iowa? Or accept his front-runner status and go for the early kill in Iowa and New Hampshire?

  Perry, meanwhile, was self-immolating. Throughout the fall, Perry repeatedly disappointed influential audiences who wanted to see his policy chops. In early November, he flew into Washington for an unusual meeting with unaligned lobbyists, hosted by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. Perry started strong, saying of his rocky launch: “The first three weeks was a lovefest. And the last three weeks was an ass-kicking.” It was all downhill from there, according to several participants. His worst moment was when a financial lobbyist asked him his view of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform. “Repeal it!” said Perry, apparently not realizing there were parts of the new law that the financial industry embraced, and that his audience did not favor wholesale repeal. “He couldn’t talk about it in any detail at all,” one attendee said. Another later took Perry aside to warn that the governor’s shallow understanding of such a key issue would be hazardous in debates. By mid-November, the Texas governor was fighting for his political life. At the November 9 GOP debate in Michigan staged by CNBC, Perry grandly announced that he would eliminate three federal agencies. He named two (Commerce and Education) and then—for an agonizing minute that seemed like an hour—could not remember the third (Energy, he later recalled). “Oops,” Perry said. In the spin room after the debate, Perry’s aides looked shell-shocked; there was no stopping a mud slide of bad press. Cleaning up after Perry had become an increasingly onerous task. In that rocky late October, Perry had seemed so incoherent that his host, Kevin Smith, director of the conservative group Cornerstone Action, had felt compelled to publicly deny that Perry had been drunk at the time.

  The Romney camp was keeping an eye on Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker’s campaign had nearly collapsed over the summer amidst the stories about Callista and the Tiffany charge account as well as the mass exodus of his staff. Gingrich still had no ground operation to speak of, no armies of volunteers to knock on doors, and he had not raised much money for ad buys. He was regarded by the political pros as a hapless manager. (“From a policy perspective, I would probably agree with Newt on more things than any other person in the field,” said a former Haley Barbour adviser. “But, look, Newt would fuck up a two-car funeral procession.”) At his Iowa appearances, he sometimes seemed to be chattering in a different language than his workaday supporters. One of his staple proposals is applying the management fad “Lean Six Sigma” to the federal government, which can be a bit of a head-scratcher for rural audiences.

  Still, Gingrich had impressed in the September-October debates, particularly the last two, in New Hampshire and in Nevada, by standing back and offering a Wise Man’s view of the political shenanigans onstage and in Washington generally. “Gingrich is the only person—if you watch the dial groups [voters recruited by pollsters to turn up a dial to express enthusiasm while watching a debate] and you look at the polling and you look at the focus groups and you look at the audience analysis that’s out there after the debates, Gingrich is the only guy up there who looks like a president other than Mitt,” said a Romney adviser. “The rest of them look like comedians.”

  Gingrich was feeling pleased with his comeback when he spoke to us in mid-November. He acknowledged that his campaign had nearly sunk over the summer. Borrowing a comment he’d heard on CNN, he described himself as the Bruce Willis character in the movie The Sixth Sense: “I was the only guy in the room who didn’t know I was dead.” June and July, he said, had been “the two hardest months in my life. It was just excruciating.” After his staff quit en masse and the pundits mocked his trip to the Greek islands and his Tiffany expense account, “traditional money raising was almost impossible,” he said. “We went through two sets of finance people who just burned out because they couldn’t take the negatives.”

  But he survived and created what he called “a substance-based, volunteer-centered, Internet-based system.” He boasted that he was inventing a revolutionary new model of campaigning. “I told somebody at one point, ‘This is like watching Walton or Kroc develop Walmart and McDonald’s.’ ” Gingrich turned over operations to his wife and her close friend from college Michael Krull. He credits Callista in part for his resurgence. “We privately discuss everything. She sees all the [email] traffic that matters,” he said. “She is very, very good at certain kinds of editing and she is very, very good at visuals. She is a very good surrogate. She is increasingly comfortable going out and talking and giving speeches and visiting with people.” The “closest analog” to his wife “is Nancy Reagan,” he said, in that “Nancy was extraordinarily close to Ronnie and that they discussed virtually everything.”

  He scoffed at his former staffers who had put down his wife. “They were worried about Callista’s impact in South Carolina. I mean, to a degree that was absurd.” We asked what he meant. “Well, just being the younger wife that would turn people off, et cetera, et cetera, that people would do dirty tricks. And every time she goes out she is wildly received. Our volunteers are begging her to go out and do more meetings and have more coffees and see more people. And what I concluded was that we were surrounded by a bunch of guys who had learned politics twenty-five years ago and they had no idea how much the world had changed.” He added, “By the way, all of them except [Rick] Tyler went to Perry, and I’ll let you decide how successful they’ve been.” He insisted that Perry had been talked into running by his former advisers, including David Carney, who had been Gingrich’s strategist before he signed on with Perry. “I think it’s 100 percent why Perry ran,” said Gingrich. “I think had I been as strong in June as I am today, Perry wouldn’t have run. He had no intention of running and didn’t want to run.”

  Romney, said Gingrich, “has the Giuliani problem, which is he can’t find any place to win. Remember, Giuliani didn’t go to Iowa because he couldn’t win. He didn’t go to New Hampshire because he couldn’t win. He didn’t even go to South Carolina because he couldn’t win—which somehow magically is going to turn around in Florida? “I just spent two days in New Hampshire. I didn’t find any place where there’s enthusiasm for Mitt Romney. The only place that’s enthusiastic for Mitt Romney is the elite media, who keep saying he is inevitable.”

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  The Romney team expected that eventually Republican voters would come around, after parking their votes here and there, and get behind Romney. Most Romneyites credited campaign manager Matt Rhoades for relentless “message discipline,” a quality the political pros worship the way nuns venerate chastity.

  To be sure, the likability issue was nagging. Even Romney’s fellow investment bankers didn’t love him. In an interview with POLITICO, one of them described having dinner with Romney a couple of years ago, when Romney was looking for supporters. “I think he comes across as, first of all, very intelligent, very comfortable with himself, but when he asks you a question, it feels like he processes the answer—he takes the answer, finds the file folder in his brain about where he’s supposed to store it in case he needs it later, files it, and then moves on to the next thing. It’s like he’s in data collection mode, but not at a gut but an intellectual, almost robotic level,” said the banker. The banker marveled that Romney—a flip-flopper from the moderate Northeast—could have apparently snatched the nomination from true believers like Governor Perry,
who was much more in step with the GOP zeitgeist.

  Romney had by and large avoided slipups on the campaign trail, but in Ohio in late October, an old Romney bugaboo—flip-flopping—had resurfaced. Ohio voters were set to vote on a referendum on whether collective bargaining by public employees should be banned—a cause dear to conservatives, but controversial in an old pro-labor state. In remarks to reporters, Romney waffled back and forth on the measure. The press corps jumped on this reemergence of the Old Romney, as did the conservative blogs. “Two, three more of those between now and the end of the year and we’re done. We will lose,” said a Romney adviser. Some Romney aides worried that withering attacks from Obama and the various Democratic groups would eventually get under Romney’s skin. Yes, Romney was a much tougher, more disciplined candidate than he had been in 2008. But he was not a superman, and, at least where his family’s honor was concerned, he was susceptible to what friends called “Mittfrontations.” At the Las Vegas debate, he had allowed Perry to bait him a bit, to make him turn red-faced, over the home lawn care flap.