The Romney campaign was aghast that Giuliani was pulling back in New Hampshire. It had believed all along that it needed Giuliani to do reasonably well in order to draw support away from McCain. Now the McCain campaign seized on Giuliani’s collapse, telling voters that a vote for the former mayor was effectively a vote for Romney. “When Rudy stopped advertising in New Hampshire, that was one of the worst days in our campaign,” Myers said later. McCain, deemed all but dead a few months earlier, was gaining momentum in New Hampshire. He was once again at his most comfortable, spending most of his time at town meetings and talking to voters.
Romney struggled as he tried to match McCain’s success in connecting with voters, and his every utterance came under scrutiny. Asked about his lack of foreign policy experience in the wake of the assassination of former Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, Romney responded, “The President is not an expert. The president is a leader who guides America in making the important decisions which must be made to keep us safe.” After he said he had seen his father march with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the assertion was questioned and he backed away from it.
Romney knew he had to change his message. Five days before the New Hampshire primary, he sat in his Portsmouth hotel room, took out a yellow legal pad, and sketched out a theme: “Washington is broken.” The subtext was that only an outsider could bring real change. It would be Romney’s mantra for the rest of the campaign and would be revived for the 2012 effort. But Romney’s opponents, sensing that his carefully constructed campaign was coming unglued, pounded him the following night at a January 5 debate at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. McCain mocked Romney’s effort to describe himself as the candidate of change. “I agree, you are the candidate of change,” McCain said, alluding to Romney’s change of positions on various issues. When Romney charged that McCain had supported a plan that granted amnesty to illegal immigrants, McCain said there were penalties involved and quoted Romney as having previously said the plan was “reasonable and was not amnesty.” McCain then used the exchange as a vehicle to portray Romney as a rich liar: “You can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it . . . won’t be true.”
On the morning of the January 8 New Hampshire primary, Romney’s top campaign staff gathered at headquarters in Manchester. Even as the vote came in, the consultants and pollsters talked at length about Romney’s message and his “brand.” Keough, the New Hampshire campaign chairman, could not believe what he was hearing. A year earlier, he had attended a similar meeting in Boston at which all of Romney’s staff had discussed the need to settle on a message. Now, as the same debate rattled through the headquarters on Elm Street, the frustrated Keough could take no more.
“What have you people been doing for the last year?” he demanded, bristling.
As he looked around, the problem seemed obvious. It was, as one aide put it, the “Noah’s Ark campaign.” There were two of everything, it seemed, including the competing media teams. The Romney campaign spin had been that the candidate loved the creative tension, but Keough had noticed a change in the candidate’s attitude since the Iowa loss. “Mitt was a little less certain that he had the best campaign that money could buy,” he said. That night, election returns showed that McCain had beaten Romney in New Hampshire by a margin of 37 to 32 percent.
Romney had one last chance, his advisers believed, to return to the original idea of campaigning as Mr. Fix-it. Echoing the Obama campaign, he would promise to bring change to Washington. The emphasis on social issues would be lowered, if not dropped. As the New Hampshire results came in, Romney sent an e-mail to Castellanos, saying he had at last latched onto the message the adviser had long been pressing on him. “Alex. Well, change was it—just like you said from the beginning,” Romney wrote. “Never found a better word for it. Change it is. And change we will have—soon. Hope for the better . . . Mitt.” But now money was an unexpected concern. After giving millions of dollars of his own money, Romney was nearing the limit of how much he was willing to contribute out of his fortune. The financial need, however, was great. There were upcoming primaries in Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina. Romney’s campaign believed it could win with an economic message in Romney’s birth state of Michigan and easily win in Nevada, which has a large Mormon population. He did go on to win both of those states.
The question was whether it was worth following through on his initial vow to go all-out in South Carolina. As Romney struggled over such questions of strategy, his frustrations with the direction of his campaign surfaced in one of his rare public displays of anger. With his plane grounded by a snowstorm, he held an impromptu news conference at a Staples store in South Carolina. As he took his position in front of a rack of ballpoint pens, reporters scrambled for position. Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson (who subsequently joined The Boston Globe) nabbed a seat on the floor in order to plug his laptop into a nearby outlet. Johnson listened as Romney sought to contrast himself to his opponents, saying, “I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign, I don’t have lobbyists that are tied to my—”
“That is not true, Governor, that is not true,” Johnson interjected from his ground-level position. He had been traveling on the Romney campaign plane and knew that one of the best-known lobbyists in Washington, Ron Kaufman, was a valued Romney strategist. “Ron Kaufman’s a lobbyist.”
Romney angrily denied that Kaufman was running his campaign. “Did you hear what I said, Glen, did you hear what I said? I said I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign, and he’s not running my campaign.” He did acknowledge, however, that Kaufman was “an adviser.” Fuming, he kept up the argument, denying that Kaufman had participated in “senior strategy sessions,” but under further questioning from Johnson, he seemed to contradict himself by acknowledging that Kaufman had helped him in debate preparation sessions. Still, the incident might have passed without further notice had Romney, piqued at his loss of message control, not sought out Johnson after the press conference. A videographer caught the confrontation as the candidate got close to Johnson’s face. “Listen to my words,” Romney said. Then it was the turn of Fehrnstrom, Romney’s ever-protective press secretary, who chastised Johnson for “being argumentative with the candidate. It’s out of line. You’re out of line.”
For many reporters covering the campaign, the moment crystallized their frustration with Romney’s inaccessibility, as well as with the off-putting and combative style of his inner circle. Later, Romney himself seemed to acknowledge as much when, after the Staples encounter, everyone settled into the campaign plane. Playing the role of flight attendant, Romney strolled into the press section with a tray of hot hors d’oeuvres, offering some to Johnson while an aide made a remark about making peace. Speaking shortly afterward on The Tonight Show, Romney went public with his damage control, telling Jay Leno that reporters “have a tough job to do. I respect the fact they’ve got to ask me tough questions and get in my face, but if I don’t agree, I’m going to come back hard as well.”
Some saw the episode as evidence of Romney’s thin skin. But others saw something unintentionally authentic, and it doubtless made for great television. The bottom line, however, was that Romney was off message and, when it came to competing in South Carolina, lacked the commitment.
Looking ahead in the calendar, Romney’s campaign wanted to save money for upcoming contests in Florida and a slew of “Super Tuesday” states. At Boston headquarters, South Carolina began to look like a financial drain with little prospect of success. So, shortly after the New Hampshire loss, Romney’s South Carolina advisers made a difficult call to Boston headquarters. Unless Romney spent a lot of time in South Carolina leading up to the primary, they said, he had no chance of winning. Romney decided to pull out most of his resources. Beth Myers would later insist that the “the truth of the matter is we hadn’t been in South Carolina that much. We did not have that much of an investment going in . . . we never really pulled the trigger on South Carolina.”
Nearly everything was bet on Florida. But if the fight between the states and Boston headquarters had been bad in earlier states, it was even worse in Florida. The state bore the burden of trying to turn around a dying campaign with ever-diminishing resources. It hadn’t started that way. When Romney first met with his Florida team, he had won them over with assurances that he would defer decisions to them and that he would tap his personal fortune to make sure they had the needed resources. Then, on October 19, 2007, a crucial meeting took place at a hotel in Orlando. Romney and his Boston team, including Myers and the competing teams of strategists, met with the Florida campaign staff to discuss how they would win the state and then the nomination.
The state staff prepared a PowerPoint presentation, Romney’s favorite form of communication, titled “All Roads Lead to Florida.” The presentation laid out the challenge of winning in a state with about a dozen major media markets and an expected Republican turnout of 1.5 million voters—about thirteen times the number who would turn out for the Iowa caucuses. Yet although the campaign would spend $10 million on its gamble to win Iowa, it had far less to reach many more voters in Florida. Though an exact number is not available, about $5.5 million would be spent in Florida on television ads, the bulk of the campaign’s spending in the state.
A key to winning Florida, according to the PowerPoint presentation, was to send millions of pieces of mail, utilizing the costly “microtargeting” data that Romney valued so highly. The mailings would be tailored to win over three groups: 450,000 social conservatives, 450,000 progun voters, and 250,000 households where someone was expected to vote by absentee ballot. In a state dominated by older people, who are likely to be most receptive to mailings, the strategy was considered particularly crucial.
The Florida team wanted to hear reassurances from Romney that he would follow through on his commitment to deliver the needed money to the state. If Romney lost Iowa and New Hampshire, the Florida team said, everything would rely on winning the Sunshine State. But Romney’s national strategists shot down even the discussion about the possibility of losing both Iowa and New Hampshire. “This was a major debate that took place in that room of ‘Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket, let’s not be shortsighted,’ ” said Mandy Fletcher, Romney’s Florida director. “But the top decision makers in the campaign were very confident that the strategy in either Iowa or New Hampshire would bring us a win and that would carry us. From the Florida standpoint, the concern was ‘What’s Plan B?’ and there was none.”
As the money dried up, Boston changed its mind so often about strategy that the Florida team was required to write at least seven different plans, the last version coming just a couple of weeks before the primary. The Florida staff would recommend where to spend money on television, and Boston sometimes overruled them. Florida argued against spending money on television in heavily Democratic areas, but Boston disagreed. Florida urged that money be invested in the Panhandle region, where McCain was strong, and Boston resisted.
Sally Bradshaw, Romney’s senior adviser in Florida, exemplified the frustration. “I really cared about Governor Romney,” she said. “I really believed he was the right guy. I was willing to fight for these things. I was a squeaky wheel, I pushed so hard. That probably left me feeling more disappointed than most. We laid it out on the line.”
Most remarkably, after spending so heavily to produce extensive data about voters, Boston rejected pleas from the Florida team to follow through on the plan to harvest that information into millions of pieces of carefully targeted mail. In fact, the Florida strategists said, not a single piece of that mail was sent, a decision that was kept secret by the campaign and upset a number of Romney’s Florida strategists. “If you had to boil [Romney’s failure in the state] down to one thing, not sending mail in Florida was a really big thing and I truly believe it could have made a difference,” said Fletcher, the Florida director. “If he had come out of Florida as a winner, he could have been the nominee.”
The McCain team now saw it as a race against Romney, with Florida the place to finish off the former Massachusetts governor. The McCain plan was to draw Romney into a debate about whether there should be a “timetable” to withdraw troops from Iraq, and it worked. “Governor Romney wanted to set a date for withdrawal, similar to what the Democrats are seeking, which would have led to the victory by Al Qaeda in my view,” McCain said. Romney, who had never suggested such a date, took the bait. “I don’t know why he’s being dishonest,” Romney responded. “But that’s dishonest.”
The exchanges went on for several days, dominating news coverage. A top McCain adviser later said, “We played Romney like a fiddle,” keeping him away from his strength of an economic message and on McCain’s turf of national security. McCain beat Romney by a 36-to-31-percent margin in the January 29 Florida primary.
Romney’s last hope was for a comeback in a debate to be held in advance of the February 5 slate of Super Tuesday primaries. The exhausted candidates flew from Florida to California for what would be Romney’s last chance, a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Romney pushed back against McCain’s accusation that he backed a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. In one of the bitterest exchanges of the campaign, he accused McCain of pulling “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.” McCain fired back, accusing Romney of lacking “the experience and the judgment” to be president in a time of terrorism.
As time passed, McCain regretted his performance. He said he’d been worn out from flying cross-country and offered an apology to Romney. “I was really tired,” McCain said. “I was testy in that debate and clearly lost it. I just overreacted. I kind of took after Mitt. That just was a bad performance on my part, the moral being to not be exhausted when you are doing these debates.”
But the attack had been effective. On February 5, McCain won a number of key states, including Illinois and New York, all but assuring him the Republican nomination. Romney, whose wins included Massachusetts and Colorado, vowed to fight on, saying, “We’re going to keep on battling, we’re going to go all the way to the convention, we’re going to win this thing and go to the White House.” At the time, it seemed that the animosity between the two men was insurmountable. But Romney’s vow to continue proved to be bluster. Two days afterward, Romney pulled out, and a week later he endorsed McCain. It was time to make peace and look to the future. The vice presidency could be on the line.
[ Twelve ]
Back into the Fire
My power alley is the economy.
—MITT ROMNEY
They stream into the Elks Club in sweatshirts, ties, windbreakers, Boston Red Sox T-shirts, cowboy hats, baseball caps, plaid Oxfords, and homely sweaters. And still they come, every name dutifully logged by a campaign aide with a laptop, a growing catalog of New Hampshire voters eager for fresh leadership in the White House. Each one is asked: Are you backing Mitt Romney? Many say yes and take a sticker. Some are still shopping. The seats are soon full. Latecomers have to pile in behind the TV cameras, back in the cheap seats with the press. The low-ceilinged room, festooned with Romney placards and red, white, and blue bunting, is starting to feel claustrophobic. The cigarette smoke wafting up from the basement doesn’t help.
This partisan crowd of a few hundred people in Salem, New Hampshire, on a brisk fall evening in 2011, doesn’t mind, though. They’re fed up—with President Obama, with the lack of jobs, with the fact that everywhere they go they see signs and instructions in tongues other than English. “There’s like eight to ten different languages on the ATM machine!” a woman complains. Mitt Romney, his watch glistening under the stage lights, is talking hard truths, tough choices, and economic realities. But he’s offering an appealing antidote—himself—promising to dive headlong into the job and ask the nation to follow him. “I will demand more of the American people,” he says, “in terms of work, energy, and passion, and commitment to the co
untry, attention to the challenges we face, harder work from our kids in school, demanding higher standards of our teachers and our young people, and parents working with their kids. We’re going to have to do better.”
He is now sixty-four, with more gray at his temples and more lines on his face, but Romney’s energy shows no signs of abating, his skills of earnest persuasion as sharp as ever. You can still imagine him, if you try hard enough, at the home of a Frenchman years ago, asserting the merits of his faith until the door slammed. You can imagine him putting the hard sell on Ann, imploring her to wait for him, not to fall for the hunk at Brigham Young University who was just filling her loneliness. You can imagine him, armed with reams of data, showing a company how to operate more profitably and then taking over a company of his own. You can imagine him giving the charge to a demoralized Olympic community, igniting its spark anew. And you can imagine him peering into the Byzantine world of state government, rubbing his hands together—eager to take it apart and rebuild.
His confidence, on this day, veers close to arrogance at times: “It’s so hard for some people who haven’t spent their life—or haven’t spent a day!—in the private sector to know how it works,” he says. But he leavens those words with humility, a sign of a more experienced candidate. Not that he’s figured everything out. In a riff on retail politicking, he briefly laments the ubiquity of camera lenses. “It’s the nemesis of a campaign, by the way,” he says. “Everybody you meet has a camera and wants your picture—with them! It just takes a lot of time.” Then the gears turn in his head. He realizes he’s talking to a bunch of people who will probably want a photo of him afterward—with them. And he pivots quickly. “It’s kind of fun, my face is all over Facebook,” he says cheerfully. “This is like free advertising. Keep it up, guys. Keep it up.”
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