Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  I said I thought the real question for the president was not whether people blamed him for what had happened as he was coming into office but whether they believed he had the strength of leadership now to do something about it. I said that question seemed more acute now than it had a year earlier. “I agree with that,” Axelrod said. Part of the president’s problem was that what once was seen as strength—his patience, his calmness, and his willingness to compromise—now seemed evidence of weakness. Was he capable of making a shift? I asked. “Well, I think this is a big thing,” he replied. “This is a strategic and tactical question that we have to decide, but it’s also a personal question that he has to decide. I find what these guys [Republicans] are doing deeply offensive, I think he finds it deeply offensive, and I think he needs to show some of that. I think he needs to be very passionate about it. And he needs to be passionate about it in a simple and direct way. And if he is, if he does that, I think we will win. If he doesn’t I think it’s going to be harder. This is not a time for nuance. I think that the battles we’re having on the Hill need to be channeled into a larger fight, because they really are. These fights on the Hill reflect what these Republican presidential candidates are all saying, in part because they’re all worshipping the same false god of this Tea Party crowd. So it’s important that this thing that we’re talking about, this sort of sense of passion and edge, extend to how he talks about all the governmental stuff as well. He can’t be sort of a narrator of the government four days a week and then a campaigner three days a week. I mean, it’s got to be of one piece.”

  • • •

  Obama addressed Congress and the nation on Thursday, September 8. The speech was ostensibly to present a new package of measures designed to create more than a million jobs. Its other and more important purpose was to make the pivot from negotiation to confrontation, from governing to campaigning. Before the speech, one of his advisers made clear that from that day forward, Obama would not only press for action on his jobs package but also use every tool available to pin the blame on Republicans if his proposals were not passed. He was not going to go behind closed doors with congressional leaders. “We’re not going to sit in the Cabinet Room for weeks at a time,” the adviser said.

  Obama spoke with a new sense of urgency. He offered a package of $447 billion in tax cuts and new spending initiatives. The biggest piece by far was an extension of the payroll tax cut that was initially approved in the 2010 lame-duck session. He proposed including employers as well as individuals in the extension. He told lawmakers that some of his ideas were ones Republicans had supported in the past. “You should pass this jobs plan right away,” he said. He talked about the political climate. “The next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here—the people who hired us to work for them—they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months. . . . They need help, and they need it now. He drew a contrast between his philosophy and that of the Republicans: “This larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own—that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”

  The joint session speech marked the pivot point for Obama. He saw the jobs package as something that might actually kick-start the economy, and he knew that anything that helped the economy made his path to reelection that much easier. But he also needed a new argument for the campaign. And at heart, he needed Americans to look at him anew. “Obama is a reasonable guy, and you’ve got to be true to who you are,” a senior White House official told me later. “You can’t light yourself on fire. It’s not going to work. But if you focus too much on reasonableness, you can lose strength. Being reasonable in the face of unreasonableness—sometimes you can see how someone can turn that to weakness. That’s what the fall strategy was about, that was what the tone of the joint session was. We needed a circuit breaker on our political narrative. We needed something that would allow everyone who commented on it to say Obama learned this. It was one of the toughest things for us, because we’re all somewhat stubborn and we all sometimes want to just tell the [Washington chattering class] to go to hell. We were reasonable with Boehner before, we’re talking to these guys. Now we’re not. Now we’re going out to the country and we’re going to be tough, so you need the circuit breaker moment to move on. The speech was about the circuit breaker.”

  Obama had returned from his summer vacation focused on the job ahead. Beyond the joint session speech, his advisers had blocked out the first months of the fall for regular travel outside of Washington to make the case for the jobs package. One trip in late September took Obama to an aging bridge over the Ohio River that linked Ohio to Kentucky and by happenstance the areas represented by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. “Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama said. “Help us rebuild America. Help us put this country back to work. Pass this jobs bill right away.” It wasn’t exactly Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” but as political theater it got the point across that Obama was now fully in campaign mode. On September 19, Obama defiantly reengaged with Republicans on the deficit. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, he called for $1.5 trillion in new taxes to help produce overall $3.2 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade. “I will not support—I will not support—any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans,” he said. Republicans accused him of political posturing. White House officials saw it as redefining Obama in the face of criticism that he had been weak—and weakened—in the debt ceiling battle.

  Rarely had the president been as blunt in his challenges as he was that day.Rarely had he been so willing to draw such sharp contrasts. In just a few weeks, Obama had transitioned from a president who talked openly about how he was prepared to buck his own party on entitlements to a politician determined to reconnect with his base as the two parties headed toward the election campaign. Attempting to stay above the fray and appealing for at least a temporary cessation in the partisan wars in Washington was no longer an option. Obama’s speech also helped reassure some in the Democratic family that he was still one of them, prepared to fight for their values. Daniel Mintz, the campaign director of MoveOn.org, an organization often at odds with the president, issued a statement of praise. “For months, hundreds of thousands of members of the American Dream Movement have been urging Washington to focus on creating jobs and making our tax system work for all Americans, not just the super rich,” he said. “Today, we’re glad to see this message reach the White House.”

  That afternoon, I spoke with David Plouffe, who outlined the thinking behind the speech and how it fit together with the jobs package. He said he had never seen the electorate so focused on the issue of fairness and said Obama’s positions drew a sharp contrast with the Republicans, whether candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry or members of Congress like Paul Ryan. Looking ahead, Plouffe talked about the challenges the economy presented to Obama’s reelection. “There are two certainties of our life for the next fourteen months,” he said. “One, the economy is going to be awfully challenging. Two, we’re going to have a really, really close and tough election. That’s just a fact.” He said that everyone around the president knew people did not give him high grades on the economy, but that the contrast he would draw in the campaign was one the voters would respond to. “I think at the end of the day we can construct a campaign that suggests to people that this is a president who’s in alignment with the world you think we live in and where we need to go as a country,” he said. “But it’s going to be hard. It’s going to have to be a much more contrasted message. It just has to be. Right?”

  Plouffe caught the moment accurately. The public was focused on fairness, but voters also were not seeing in Obama the leadership skills or strength to do much about it, given the
Republican opposition. It was why he and the others around the president knew that they would have to be on the attack in 2012 in ways they never had to be in 2008.

  • • •

  On September 17, 2011, about a thousand demonstrators converged on Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York. It was the first Occupy Wall Street protest, and within weeks it became a movement—the Occupy movement—that spread to more than seventy cities around the country. Occupy was both a viral and a virtual movement that exploded almost overnight, drawing attention to the growing gap between rich and poor and the topic of income inequality, which was rarely addressed by politicians. Because it started in New York, the movement drew a huge amount of media attention. The media also covered it because it appeared to be the left’s answer to the Tea Party movement. There were similarities, certainly, but as time passed it was obvious that there were major differences as well. The Tea Party movement focused on electoral action. The Occupy movement did not. Occupy protesters set up tented encampments in parks and squares around the country, but there was no organized political strategy behind them.

  What the Occupy movement did politically was to introduce new shorthand language to frame the debate about income inequality—the gap between the nation’s top 1 percent of income holders and the rest of the population. People rallied under banners and placards that read, “We are the 99 percent.” One blog, created by a pair of twenty-somethings, posted photos of people holding up handwritten stories of their struggles, which all ended with the statement, “We are the 99 percent.” Mother Jones magazine tracked down the founders of the site, who said they had started it in early September and within a month were getting a hundred postings a day, “from the 61-year-old who lost her job and moved in with her kids, to the husband of a college professor on WIC and Medicaid to support an infant daughter, to the 50-something couple living on tossed-out KFC, to a bevy of youths pummeled by student debt and too poor to visit a dentist.”

  What it all added up to was a matter of interpretation. After the Arab Spring, some Americans wondered if this would be a homegrown version of a grassroots revolt against the power establishment. Some Democrats embraced the movement. Elizabeth Warren, who had been rejected by Republicans in the Senate to head the new consumer protection bureau created by Obama’s financial regulatory reform legislation and was now running for the Senate in Massachusetts, said, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.” White House officials maintained some distance from the movement, particularly the most unsavory aspects of it—the vandalism, violence, and breaking of the law. But Obama’s advisers recognized that the movement was helping to reshape the political conversation. “I think it had a significant change in the overall climate in that it reframed the discussion nationally and it did two things,” said Anita Dunn, who served as White House communications director early in Obama’s presidency. “One, it gave people permission to openly discuss something that had not really been openly discussed, which was the growing inequalities and the unfairness. Two, it gave many members of the Democratic Party much more confidence in going to those places in the criticism of the Republican policies.”

  Though the president was looking to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans on values and would make raising taxes on the rich a centerpiece of his message, his advisers feared the Occupy movement put too much focus on pure class division. Obama was sounding more like a populist himself at times. He wanted the rich to pay more in taxes. Many Democrats wanted to hear more of that from the president, but he didn’t exactly want to alienate the rich either. His advisers worried that if they embraced the Occupy rhetoric directly or indirectly, some of the middle-class swing voters they hoped to attract would turn away. “The one fear about Occupy, would they get violent, would this take a turn that would necessarily rebound against us but generally would taint the whole argument about tax fairness? So there was great concern about that,” Plouffe said. When the movement began to fizzle, it was actually to the relief of many in the Obama campaign. But Obama advisers recognized that the movement had some lasting effect. “Occupy had its blazing moment in the sun and then began to peter out, but again, the arguments they were making were in the bloodstream of our politics all through 2012,” Plouffe said.

  • • •

  Obama completed his pivot to the campaign on December 6, 2011, in Osawatomie, Kansas, population 4,600, where he delivered a speech that was the culmination of a year of conflict with congressional Republicans, months of research by his campaign, and the president’s own frustrations with what he had experienced over the previous three years. Piggybacking on Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism theme of a century earlier, Obama drew a line from the economic excesses that had contributed to the collapse in 2008 to the coming election campaign. What had happened then, he said, resulted from “breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility across the system.” The result was widespread economic pain and, ever since, a raging debate about what to do. “Throughout the country, it has sparked protests and political movements—from the Tea Party to the people who have been occupying the streets of New York and other cities,” Obama said. “It’s left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. And it’s been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women who are running for president. But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” He invoked Roosevelt’s epic battle against the trusts at the beginning of the twentieth century. He spoke in concrete terms and pointed fingers at his opponents. Whenever there was an economic challenge, he said, Republicans responded with the same prescription: free markets, fewer regulations, tax cuts, especially for the wealthy. “It’s a simple theory—one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.”

  The goal of the Kansas speech was to anchor Obama in a mission to rebuild the economy by rebuilding a stronger middle class. “It was a chance for him to say to the country, ‘Here is where we are. Here’s where we stand and here’s where we need to go,’” Grisolano said. The speech was not overly prescriptive. Obama would wait until his 2012 State of the Union address for that. Instead he hoped to convey a sense of his values and to challenge those of the Republican Party, based on all that the campaign had learned through the year. David Nakamura of the Washington Post said the president had “laid out, in his sharpest language yet, the economic and social arguments” destined to be used against the Republicans in 2012. The headline in the New York Times read, “Obama Sounds a Populist Call on G.O.P. Turf.” “Obama Says Middle-Class Faces a ‘Make or Break’ Moment,” the Kansas City Star headline said.

  A transition that began with the shellacking in 2010 and built on the disappointment and frustration over the year’s conflict with Republicans in Congress was now done. The Osawatomie speech was the most important of the year for the president, as it laid out the themes for the reelection campaign more robustly than at any time during the fall. The Republicans were just a month away from the first votes in their nomination battle. Obama served notice that he would be ready for Mitt Romney or whoever emerged as their nominee.

  • • •

  A month before Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Nate Silver, the baseball statistician turned political prognosticator, wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine that carried the headline, “Is Obama Toast?” The headline was more provocative than Silver’s careful analysis. He noted that incumbents are almost always favored for reelection; six of the previous eight presidents who had run a second time had won a second term. But he pointed out that the debt ceiling fight had prove
d to be a perfect storm of trouble for the president. The outcome had offended Obama’s liberal base, frustrated swing voters, and potentially imperiled the already fragile economy, which of course was the worst danger of all. “Obama has gone from a modest favorite to win re-election to, probably, a slight underdog,” Silver wrote. He sketched out a series of scenarios, depending on the state of the economy and Obama’s potential opponent, Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. Against Romney, with a stagnant economy, the president was a clear underdog. Even with an improving economy, it was no better than a 60 percent probability that he would win.

  Obama’s advisers well understood the situation. They could see the president’s strong points and knew there were certain arguments Republicans might use against him that would not fly with the swing voters they were hoping to woo back to his side. Swing voters in the Obama focus groups rejected the charge being leveled by Romney and the Republicans that the president had made a bad economy worse. They thought that was nonsense. “The great vulnerability for us,” a campaign official said, “was what they said at the end of the sentence—‘I just don’t know if he can turn it around’—which was Romney’s great strength, which then became the foundation for our attacks on him to take away that strength.”