Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America
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Some party leaders could see the dangers of a coalition that was overwhelmingly white and had its strongest support among older voters. Tom Davis, a moderate Republican and former Virginia congressman who had run the National Republican Congressional Committee for several cycles, said, “We’re going to have to change what we’re doing if we want to win. If you want to be a politically competitive majority party, you just take a look at the coalition and the fastest-growing groups and voting. We got the old people; they’re dying off. They got the young people; they’re going to be voting a long time. They got Hispanics; that’s the largest immigrant group. Where are we picking up? You don’t pick it up among rural white southerners.”
But that was hardly accepted doctrine within the party. Instead, as the campaign was gearing up, the most striking characteristic about the party and its conservative grassroots was the intensity of hostility toward the president. Disgust with Obama had become a dominant strain in the party’s personality. Many Republicans, from the leaders of conservative constituencies to newly energized grassroots activists, saw the prospect of another four years of Obama in the White House as disastrous. They feared what he might do if reelected and expressed those fears in apocalyptic terms. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, put it this way when he spoke to the annual CPAC gathering in Washington in early 2012: “Our soul is at stake in this election. This campaign is a fight for our country, our values, and the freedom we believe in. All of our Second Amendment liberty, all of the rights we’ve worked so hard to defend, all of what we know is good and right about America—all of it could be lost if Barack Obama is reelected. It’s all or nothing.”
Along the campaign trail, ordinary Americans expressed the same fears about a second Obama term, that the country as they knew it would be lost forever. I asked a Michigan Republican what he thought would happen to the country if Obama was reelected. “Additional decay and [loss of] personal freedoms and more growth of dependency on the government, which is sad for America,” he said. An Ohio voter, when I asked how he would describe what was at stake in the election, said, “My freedom. I am scared to death of Obama. He has nothing to lose if he gets reelected and I’m just terribly afraid the country will plummet and we won’t return. I don’t like his health care plan. I don’t like the debt that he’s put us in. I don’t like the control he’s trying to take over the American people. I have worked hard all my life and we made it on our own and we didn’t come from rich families and he’s too much for the entitlements, making people lazy in the United States, which can only lead to others governing us.”
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For Romney and the others looking to win the Republican nomination, the 2010 elections signaled that the nominating process would be dominated by this grassroots sentiment, as well as by the religious and social conservatives who had risen to power two decades earlier and who had become a force in the presidential primaries. Nomination battles often came down to a contest between an establishment candidate and a conservative insurgent—the business wing or the populist wing. Even for those who came from the business wing of the party, catering to this new party would become the first priority. That meant more than fealty to a conservative philosophy; it meant accommodating to the confrontational desires of those at the grass roots. Romney’s advisers believed his conservative views on fiscal issues would find support among Tea Party activists. The worry was how far right he would be dragged in order to defeat more conservative rivals in the field of candidates. Republicans had won the 2010 elections because Obama was seen as having abandoned the center of the political spectrum. Now Republicans were in danger of giving the center back to Obama for 2012.
CHAPTER 9
The First Primary
Politics, like history, is a game of what-ifs, and so one can only speculate about what might have happened if Romney had been pitted against a different field. The reality was that, for all the concerns Romney and his family might have had, he was always the likeliest of the Republicans to become the presidential nominee. For a time in 2011, however, it appeared that Romney could face a more formidable set of rivals. Compared to previous Republicans who had worn the front-runner’s label, Romney cast no large shadows.
Potential rivals came from all parts of the party. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was one. Bush had all the other credentials needed: two terms as governor of a big state, a record as a reformer on education, a politician attentive to the Hispanic community, a realist who understood that nostalgia for the Reagan era did not constitute a winning platform in the twenty-first century. Had his name been Jeb Smith, he might have become the Republican nominee. But his brother’s unpopular presidency was only a few years in the rearview mirror. Bush never gave serious thought to running in 2012. He had explored a race for the Senate when Republican Mel Martinez abruptly announced his resignation, but he concluded that the time was not right, for him or for his family. When the 2012 cycle arrived, according to two close advisers, he did not revisit the issue of getting back into politics. Beyond Bush, there were others seen as potential candidates. They included Haley Barbour, then the governor of Mississippi; Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana; and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose surprise victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses helped to cripple Romney’s candidacy at the very start of the process. There was Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential nominee, a celebrity-politician who was a favorite of the Tea Party movement and knew how to attract the attention of the media. New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the blunt-talking former prosecutor, though not even two years into office, also became the object of a frenzied recruitment effort.
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On the night of November 3, 2010, one day after Republicans delivered their shellacking to President Obama and the Democrats, Haley Barbour was sipping whiskey at the Willard Hotel two blocks east of the White House. The Willard is one of Washington’s most historic hotels, renovated in the opulent style that recalls the era of President Ulysses S. Grant, who frequented the hotel after hours and coined the term “lobbyists” to describe the influence peddlers who hung out there. Barbour, with a wide girth and deep southern drawl, was at home in such places. Before he was elected governor, he was one of the capital’s best-connected lobbyists. His résumé as a party leader was lengthy: Before winning the governorship in Mississippi, he had led the Republicans Governors Association during the 2010 cycle. He had chaired the Republican National Committee when Republicans captured the House in 1994, and before that he had served as political director in the Reagan White House.
Barbour epitomized the business wing of the party, a member in good standing of the Republican establishment, to the extent that there was such a thing. That alone was reason for some Republicans to think he would give Romney a serious challenge. He was a prodigious fund-raiser. He was policy wise and street smart. He knew how to run a tough campaign. Plus, he didn’t particularly admire Romney. Barbour was a big-tent Republican. He was conservative in his views but eminently pragmatic when it came to winning elections. When, after the 2008 election, some conservatives were calling for litmus tests for candidates, Barbour took the opposite view. In the summer of 2009, he told me, “Politics is about addition and multiplication; purity is about subtraction and division.”
The southerner was a master of the inside game, widely regarded as one of the shrewdest political strategists in either party. He was skilled at the courtship rituals of Washington. The night after the midterm election, he was playing host to more than a dozen reporters. Most had known Barbour for two decades; many called him by his first name. After drinks, the group assembled around a large round table. At each seat, specially printed menus described the evening’s four-course meal. The table settings included fine china and silverware. The ostensible purpose was to review the results of the election a day earlier. The real purpose was to continue Barbour’s already active exp
loration of a campaign for the White House in 2012—all on “background,” of course. Everyone in the room understood that this was a kind of trial run in the event that he decided to seek the presidency.
Barbour was far from a decision, but had told his advisers that, if he did not run, he didn’t want the reason to be that he had not done the necessary preliminary work. He wanted to keep his options open. He had met secretly with Scott Reed, who had managed Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, and with Ed Rogers, his past business partner and a senior White House official in George H. W. Bush’s administration, in Birmingham in August 2010 to consider next steps. Those around Barbour saw Romney as “fatally compromised” by the Massachusetts health care plan. Ed Goeas, Barbour’s pollster, had conducted polls and focus groups in Iowa. In September, Rogers e-mailed Reed to propose that Reed be hired in November and December to start organizing the calendar. In mid-November, Reed e-mailed Rogers to say, “I personally believe if we build it, they will come.” As they prepared, Barbour’s team hired the law firm of Williams & Connolly to prepare a vulnerability study. Rogers said, “The vulnerability study confirmed what everybody already knew [about Barbour’s potential weaknesses], and they were all problems that were to be managed, not solved, and none of it was fatal in today’s world for sure.” Most of the problems centered on Barbour’s work as a lobbyist. He had earned millions representing tobacco companies. His clients also included alcohol interests, energy companies, and foreign governments.
What wasn’t anticipated was that the normally surefooted Barbour would find himself on the defensive over the issue of race three times in a matter of months with a series of missteps. He once explained the South’s conversion to the Republican Party as the result of younger whites having grown up with integration rejecting the Democratic Party and joining the GOP. He said it was old Democrats who clung to segregation. His version overlooked the flight of segregationists from the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson, who knew he was putting his party at risk, signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In another case, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson asked him how his hometown of Yazoo City managed to integrate its schools without violence. “Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he responded. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up North they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.” In fact, Citizens’ Councils in the South had a history of racism that was well documented. Barbour’s alarmed advisers put together “an organized walk-back” of the statement. In early 2011, I asked Barbour how such an astute politician had gotten into such a predicament over race. “I have reconciled myself to the fact that some people on the left who don’t like me or don’t like conservative Christian Republicans from the Deep South are going to criticize anything I do,” Barbour said. “Will it have any effect on my deciding whether or not to run? No.” Others around him were far more concerned. They worried that Barbour could be badly hurt by running for president, and that if he were ever to become the nominee, the Obama campaign would make the campaign about him rather than the president. Rogers said, “Given his accent and given where he’s from, it was always going to be a vulnerable spot for him. . . . It was going to be a problem that was going to be managed, not solved.”
Barbour began traveling to test the waters and came back with upbeat reports about the receptions he was receiving but without a commitment to run. After his trips, Rogers would ask, “Well, have you seen a burning bush?” Barbour would reply, “No. I ain’t seen no burning bush.” Nonetheless, Scott Reed started to plan an announcement tour for early May. A week before the launch, Barbour announced that he would not be a candidate after all. He said he lacked the fire in the belly. “I cannot offer that with certainty, and total certainty is required,” he told supporters. There was more to it, according to his advisers. They knew what Obama and the Democrats would do against a portly Mississippian. One close adviser said, “We were never going to be able to make this about Obama and his policies and his bad decisions and the weakness of the economy—everything the campaign should be about.”
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If Barbour was a serious potential candidate, Donald Trump was the opposite, though his cameo role brought unwelcome attention to the party. The self-promoting businessman waded into the Republican race for seemingly one purpose, which was to flagrantly challenge Obama to prove that he was born in America. That Trump could become the country’s most prominent birther and the leader in the race for the Republican nomination, according to at least some polls, was the best evidence of just how far out of the mainstream at least some of the Republican base was.
Trump was a clown candidate and his potential candidacy was preposterous, but it clearly irritated the president, who soon vowed to take action. During an overnight visit to his home in Chicago that spring, Obama had found what he thought was the legal document certifying his birth. He brought it back to the White House, where White House counsel Robert Bauer informed him that it wasn’t the actual document. Obama said he wanted the real document made public. Many of Obama’s advisers opposed the move, believing it would draw more attention to the birther issue and make it seem like the president was being forced to answer to Trump. Obama saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate how much was wrong with politics and the way it was played. He secretly requested the certificate from authorities in Hawaii and quietly ordered a White House lawyer to fly to Honolulu to retrieve it.
On the morning of April 27, 2011, as Trump’s helicopter descended on Dover, New Hampshire, for what he hoped would be a grand visit to the Granite State, the White House unexpectedly released a copy of Obama’s never-seen long-form birth certificate. Appearing before reporters, the president said, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness.” Trump crowed, “I’ve accomplished something no one else was able to do.” But it was Obama who got the last laugh. At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on April 30, 2011, the president made Trump the butt of his jokes. As Helene Cooper of the New York Times put it, “As a hair-gelled, grimly unsmiling Mr. Trump sat at a nearby table—a guest of the Washington Post—Mr. Obama ripped one punch after another at the real estate tycoon.” Joked Obama, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” He ribbed Trump for showing decisive leadership in getting rid of actor Gary Busey on Celebrity Apprentice. “These are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night,” he said as the audience laughed at Trump’s expense. “Well handled, sir. Well handled.” He noted that Trump would no doubt bring real change to the White House, and up on the screen popped a photo of the White House that read, “Trump White House Resort and Casino.”
Trump’s phantom candidacy had peaked. A few weeks later, he announced to no one’s surprise that he would not be a candidate. That Trump could become, even for a few weeks, a potentially serious choice in the minds of Republican voters again highlighted a party whose leadership was being overrun by forces they could not control.
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Mike Huckabee presented another potential challenge to Romney—a clear contrast in an area that had plagued Romney as a candidate and would continue to do so. Huckabee was an economic populist with a life story the opposite of Romney’s. He had an instinctive feel for middle- and lower-middle-class Americans, having grown up without money or connections. Among the field of candidates, he also would have first claim on the party’s evangelical base. He resented talk that Romney was “next in line” for the nomination and had tangled frequently with Romney in 2008. “I take a little umbrage about the next in line,” he told the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty in February 2011. “I was second, not Romney. I came in second in the number of delegates. It’s just pure spin to deny me that. Give me that.”
What stood in Huckabee’s path was not the confidence that he could compete for votes, but concerns about money—the state of his personal finances and the cash it would take to run again. After his loss in the 2008 race, Huckabee, genial in personality and firm in his conservatism, had gone on to become a Fox News personality. He had his own television program and a contract that finally began to give him the financial security he had lacked his entire life. He and his wife had started to build their dream home in northern Florida. But there were other signs that he wasn’t serious about running a second time. Tumulty captured that side of Huckabee in the profile she wrote after interviewing him. “Instead of throwing red meat to the conservative faithful, Huckabee was tucking into a breakfast of eggs and butter-slathered pancakes at a trendy New York hotel overlooking Times Square. His much-discussed diet—he famously lost more than 100 pounds after a diabetes diagnosis in 2003 and wrote a book about eating right—is apparently on hiatus.”
Staffers from his 2008 campaign were in regular conversation with him about another campaign, but found little enthusiasm from Huckabee. Ed Rollins, the veteran Republican strategist, said, “Finally I said to him, ‘Mike I’ve been through this. I can’t want this more than you want it.’” On May 14, 2011, to no one’s surprise, Huckabee announced that he would not run, removing another obstacle from Romney’s path.