by Mike Allen
Already, the Obama warriors were moving into position. “When David Axelrod [Obama’s chief strategist] says ‘weird’ [referring to Romney], that equals Mormon, and he says it all the time, and he’s tried to get under his skin,” said an adviser. “If Romney shows he can’t take a hit, can’t take punches, they’re going to hit him where he doesn’t like to be hit, which is the Mormon stuff.”
* * *
The Obama camp was preparing to cast Romney as a “cheater.” At the end of October, a White House insider, a well-connected consultant, offered some insights. The consultant sounded almost gleeful about running against Romney. “You could not have from our perspective a more perfectly positioned rich guy than Mitt Romney,” said the insider. “He didn’t make a product or start a chain of restaurants or do whatever. He made it on Wall Street. And if you look at anything in the polling, in the focus groups, or the zeitgeist of the country, that was the cheater way to go. The guy is going to be a cheater,” the consultant said. “There’s no question that that’s going to be the message frame that the Obama team puts around him, whether Bain & Company made their money by buying up companies, firing people, putting their money offshore, having questionable financial products. It’s all going to land in Mitt Romney’s lap. And that’s going to appeal to independents. It’s not just going to be a lefty argument. It’s going to be like this guy didn’t play by the rules and now he wants to be president.”
Obama himself doesn’t have much instinct for the jugular, the insider said, with some evident regret. Earlier in the fall, his staff had sent the president out to key states to bash Republicans for not passing his jobs bill. “That lasted about a week on the campaign trail,” said the insider. “Did you notice? He went out there and started beating them up and then he’s like, Eww, I don’t really like doing this.” (Obama may be aloof from the political hurly-burly, but he follows it closely. Unlike most presidents, who get their information from news summaries prepared by staff, Obama reads The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, sometimes on paper, sometimes on his iPad.)
Some of Obama’s key staffers were demoralized, according to the insider. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s friend and confidante, was already thinking more about Obama the man and his place in history than she was about what he might accomplish in the last year of his term. “She cares about Barack Obama as opposed to President Obama,” said the insider. If Obama was going to be a one-term president, it was already time to look to his legacy. Jarrett was not happy with her own situation at the White House, said the insider. Jarrett had tried to reach out to the business leaders, only to be thwarted by the other senior staffers. “She just stopped getting out there as much because, if you’re her, like what the fuck am I going to keep talking to them for and put myself on a limb when I come back and get my head shot off?” said the insider. “It feels like the boys will never leave her alone. Why do they hate her so much? Is it because it bugs them that she could walk in [to the Oval Office] anytime and see him after hours? I don’t know, it just feels like, no matter what, somebody is after her. Like Rahm [Emanuel] walked out the door and said to [Bill] Daley, Make sure you keep the pressure on Valerie.”
White House chief of staff Bill Daley had been brought in to impose some order on “Camp Obama,” the gaggle of young staffers who rarely began or ended a meeting on time. But a year after taking over from Emanuel, who had left to run for mayor of Chicago, Daley had already announced he would not be back in a second term. The insider suggested that Daley had announced he was leaving before he could be pushed. “People inside are unhappy with him,” the consultant said, “and so the best way to preserve your reputation is to announce your own departure.”
One person in the White House who was actually looking forward to the campaign was the first lady. “Michelle is definitely committed to gearing up. I mean, she’s getting out a lot more,” said the insider. “I think she expects to be much more active and back more to like the old days. I think she was hypersensitive to not screwing up and really felt like she was going to be judged on whether or not she was a good parent since she had sort of talked about it.”
The old days. Could Obama get the magic back? The insider wanted to believe so. “I think right now they’re still the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan, right? So they may [drop] the ball a lot and they still have Michael Jordan. As long as they keep it focused on [the fact that] they’ve got Michael Jordan and nobody else does, they power through the reelection.”
* * *
In Chicago, the Obama campaign was “data mining” for voters. Using social networking and computer search engines, the Obama staff was gearing up to find Obama voters and get them out to vote. The Democrats had been learning from the Republicans—from Karl Rove’s “micro-targeting” at the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, which used tools like sampling viewers from the Golf Channel to find potential voters. “I think the Bushies in ’04 did a very good job on this,” said a top campaign official. “We took it to another level in ’08 and were going to make what we did in ’08 look like Jurassic Park.”
The manager of the Obama campaign, Jim Messina, wanted to see hard data on his computer screen every day—numbers of doors knocked on, phone calls made, and more esoteric data he was not willing to describe, lest he tip off the Republicans. “I get paid to worry,” Messina told us. “That’s my job. Like, I spend all my time worrying. If you ask one of my staff, I don’t go into their office and say, Great job. I’m like, Here’s my worry. What about this?”
With up to a billion dollars to spend on the president’s reelection, the Obama team was not likely to be short of resources. But the prevailing ethos at Obama headquarters, a fifty-thousand-square-foot space in one of Chicago’s tallest buildings, was to be cheap. “We don’t give people business cards. We make them buy them on their own. We don’t give people the Obama T-shirts. They have to buy their own T-shirts. We make people recycle their nametags. You only get one nametag for events, and if you lose it, you have to make yourself another, because nametags are expensive, they’re like a buck fifty, and I’m not spending a buck fifty because you lost your nametag,” the senior campaign official told us. He had been consulting with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, on how to create the right office culture. “You’ve got to make fun every day for your people,” the Google exec told him. “Last time,” said the senior official, “we had cubes and it wasn’t fun. This time we have an open setting, and people chipped in money to hire an artist to make a mural on one wall because people wanted a mural.” The campaign headquarters has a foosball table and a Ping-Pong table (Messina plays, to show he’s a regular guy) and parties once a month. But the staffers have to buy their own beer.
What the Obama campaign did not have was a message. In 2008, Obama had won on a promise to change Washington. When that quickly proved impossible, he tried to work with the powers-that-be in Washington to get things done. With the exception of the first stimulus bill and the highly controversial health care legislation, that didn’t really work, either.
The lack of a message was a source of considerable anxiety inside the Obama camp. “There’s a bit of casting about, throwing ideas at the wall,” said an Obama adviser. “Win the Future followed by We Can’t Wait followed by—who knows what comes next?” The adviser said that Mike Donilon, a White House adviser (and brother of Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser), has been strenuously urging that the president don a populist mantle. “Mike’s been arguing forcefully in the West Wing that this is not 1948—this is not Truman versus the Do-Nothing Congress, which really is what the We Can’t Wait message is.” The more effective historical analogy, goes the Donilon argument, is to 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt ran against “inequitable Big Business.” The adviser says that Daley’s diminishment as chief of staff (in early November he announced that he was already reducing his day-to-day role) reflects a significant leftward shift by Obama. Daley was a centrist who was supposed
to bring compromise with Congress and business. The “new message,” says the adviser, is “to align more closely to the 99 percent” against the “the 1 percent”—the mantra of Occupy Wall Street.
The Obama team has been fretting about the ultimate impact of Occupy Wall Street. “If anything the Occupy folks are being generous,” said the adviser. “It’s not the 99 percent. It’s the 99.9 percent. Their anger is legitimate and has been legitimized. I don’t know where that energy goes. My guess is that it’s not going to the guy who founded Bain Capital. But it also may not be to the guy who hired Tim Geithner and Larry Summers,” Obama’s treasury secretary and former chief economic adviser, who have both been Wall Street boosters.
It may be that Obama will have to win the hard way—by superior political mechanics, by finding new voters and turning out old ones. For now, Obama has no slogan; the bumper sticker just says “Obama 2012.” The only other route is to go hard negative against the Republican nominee. Obama may personally recoil at this approach. But his operatives won’t.
* * *
Karl Rove kept on meeting with the big money boys—independent PACs, which can raise unlimited funds—every month. The get-togethers were still called “the Weaver Terrace meetings,” even though Rove had sold his house in Washington and moved back to Austin, Texas. The participants—one of two representatives from nineteen groups—compete at cooking, eating, and raising money to elect Republicans. (Rove claims his barbecue “cannot be beat.” He makes venison sausages from deer he has shot.)
In early November, Rove was confident about his money machine, American Crossroads. “I know we’re going to get to $240 million and beyond,” he said. “No ifs, ands, or buts.” Rove says the money will be used to “take the Senate, keep the House. In the Senate, we could put as many as seven or eight seats in play.”
As for the presidential race, he recalled that in 2008, between June and November, Obama and the Democratic National Committee had outspent McCain and the RNC by $850 million to $550 million. “My gut tells me that the Democrats will have an advantage this time around, but it will not be as big as it was last time.” Rove was doubtful that the Obama campaign would raise the billion dollars it was said to be after. Overall, he said, “We’re in better shape than we were, but not in as good shape as some seem to think we are.” The conversation ended, for now. “I’m going to go fishing,” said Rove.
* * *
“How did we come back?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as he reviewed the Republicans recovery from its low state in 2008. “They let us come back,” Graham said. “Obama made a mistake early on. He turned the agenda over to [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the more liberal people in the House.” The “good news for Republicans,” said Graham, speaking to us in early November, is that “conservatism sells.” The country is right of center. “In terms of policy, we’re in good shape.” But he warned, “demographics, not so much.”
Younger voters are liberal on social issues and the environment, Graham notes, and Hispanics—the nation’s fastest growing population—don’t like the GOP’s harsh stands on immigration. Hard right stands may win voters in GOP primaries in the short term, but they risk hurting Republican ambitions in the long run. “We’ve got a problem with young people,” said Graham. “We lost two to one in the last election. As they get older, they’ll get more conservative, but you don’t want to have that generation, eighteen to thirty-five, imprinted in the sense that they are used to voting for Democrats. We’re going backward with Hispanics, not forward. Immigration does loom large out there, the way we talk about it.”
Politics, says Graham, “is a business. Where will the market be ten years from now? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what’s going on in America, and twenty years from now we’re going to be less like we are today, and we’re going to have a younger generation coming into power, in the economy and throughout society, that has a different view than my generation about some issues like the environment. And the good news again is that conservatism is not our problem. Our problem is being able to communicate it and to not turn people off. The Democratic problem is to make sure they haven’t let the far left take them into a ditch. The person who can figure that out—the party that can figure this out the best is going to own the twenty-first century.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to Jonathan Martin of POLITICO for his contributions of reporting, insight, and joie de vivre. We are also appreciative of Byron Tau and all the other hardworking POLITICOs for their kind help on this project. At Random House, Benjamin Steinberg has been invaluable.
APPENDIX
Rick Perry’s Schedule
A presidential campaign plans the contours of the candidate’s schedule months ahead. A former staffer provided these preliminary “block calendars” for the first three full months of Rick Perry’s campaign, covering everything haircuts to Hanukkah:
October 2011
Saturday 1st FL [First Lady] in CA
11:00 AM TAMU [Texas A&M University] vs. Arkansas—Arlington
8:00 AM Economic Forum—Hampton, NH
9:00 AM Political Meetings—Hampton, NH
10:05 AM Meeting and Green and Political Meeting—Atkinson, NH
12:15 PM WMUR Interview—Manchester
12:35 PM Chilifest—Manchester
1:30 PM House Party and Political Meeting—Manchester
9:00 PM Dr. Appointment
Sunday 2nd FL in CA
Hold
Monday 3rd FL in CA
8:35 AM Flu Shot
9:00 AM Haircut
10:45 AM Policy Briefing
1:45 PM Policy Briefing
Tuesday 4th FL in CA
10:30 AM Finance Meeting—Los Angeles
11:30 AM Finance Event—Los Angeles
1:25 PM Meet and Greet—Santa Monica
3:30 PM Juliette Huddy Interview—Healdsburg
3:45 PM Finance Meeting—Healdsburg
4:00 PM Finance Event—Healdsburg
6:30 PM Finance Event—Fairfield
Ron Los Angeles
Wednesday 5th FL in CA
11:15 AM Finance Meeting—Los Angeles
12:00 PM Finance Lunch—Beverly Hills
2:00 PM Wiesenthal Tour—Los Angeles
4:25 PM Newsweek Interview—Los Angeles
5:15 PM Finance Diner—Thousand Oaks
Thursday 6th 12:00 PM Finance Lunch—Ovilla
2:00 PM Finance Meetings—Midlothian
5:15 PM Finance Meeting
5:30 PM Finance Reception
Friday 7th FL on travel
Yom Kippur
12:45 PM VV Ldrs Meeting—DC
1:05 PM Catholic Ldrs Meeting—DC
2:20 PM Values Voters—DC
2:45 PM Sekulow Meeting—DC
6:15 PM GOP BBQ—Tiffin
Ron Iowa City, IA
Saturday 8th Yom Kippur
6:00 PM TAMU vs. Tech—Lubbock
9:00 AM Jobs Roundtable—Sioux City
9:30 AM Woodbury Legislators—Sioux City
10:30 AM Meet and Greet—Sioux City
12:15 Meet and Greet—Orange City
2:15 PM Sen Johnson Meeting—Spencer
Sunday 9th Weisie Steen’s Birthday
Hold
Monday 10th Columbus Day
2:30 PM Policy Briefing
7:00 PM FL TeleTownhall
Ron Hanover, NH
Tuesday 11th FL
ALL EVENTS IN HANOVER, NH
TBD PM Radio Call-Ins
TBD PM Tech Walkthrough
8:00 PM WaPo [Washington Post]/Bloomberg Debate
TBD PM Debate Watch Party
Ron Hanover, NH
Wednesday 12th FL on travel
10:55 AM Finance Meeting—Indianapolis
11:30 AM Finance Lunch—Indianapolis
1:00 PM Chancellor Meeting—Indianapolis
2:00 PM INGOP Presidential Forum—Indianapolis
5:00 PM Finance Meeting—Chicago
