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

by Balz, Dan

  In January 2009, he filed papers to challenge incumbent Democratic governor Jon Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs executive who had poured tens of millions of his own fortune into winning a U.S. Senate seat and later into his 2005 race for governor. Corzine was vulnerable, but it had been more than a decade since Republicans had won a statewide election in New Jersey. Christie ran as the antithesis of the wealthy Corzine. He was the Springsteen-loving Jersey boy who promised to take on entrenched political interests to bring the state’s finances into balance without raising taxes. His upset victory in November 2009, along with that of Robert McDonnell in Virginia, marked the beginning of a Republican comeback that would hit with fuller force the following year in the 2010 elections.

  He faced a budget deficit estimated at $11 billion, and to close it he enacted deep spending cuts, layoffs of state workers, and cuts in education. He vetoed a millionaire’s tax approved by the Democratic-controlled legislature. He rejected $3 billion in federal assistance when he canceled plans for a rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan, saying his state could not afford its portion of the costs. He belittled critics at town hall meetings around the state, and his staff made sure the videos reached a wide audience. He took on state employee unions with a vigor that caught them and others by surprise. He demanded concessions on benefits and took his fight public. In October 2010, NBC’s Jamie Gangel profiled him on The Today Show. She asked Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, whether she thought her husband would make a good president. “Oh absolutely,” came the reply. “But Christie says he’s not ready,” Gangel reported. To Christie, she said, “Everyone in the Republican Party but you is talking about that you should be on the ticket in 2012 to run for the White House. You say?” Christie responded, “No way.”

  Chris Christie’s position would never change, but it would take a full year finally to bring an end to the speculation that he might run for president in 2012. The story of that courtship by the Republican rank and file, by fellow elected officials, and especially by wealthy contributors and others is best told by the colorful governor, who savored every moment of the experience. I sat down with him in the fall of 2012 to talk about it. When I asked him about his initial reaction to the talk that he should run for president, he said, “Headshaking. I didn’t expect it. I’ve been in the job six, eight, nine months and I just was shocked and I didn’t think that’s the way it worked. . . . I just remember thinking, ‘This is just completely surreal and not what I expected,’ and little did I know . . . that it would get a lot crazier.” As talk of a candidacy continued, Christie gave a series of responses to say he wasn’t going to run. He said he didn’t think he was ready. He told reporters in Trenton, “Short of suicide, I don’t really know what I’d have to do to convince you people that I’m not running.” His wife hated that comment. “It made a lot of people laugh, so I kept using it even if she hated it and making her, as she’s done for the last twenty-seven years, just kind of throw up her hands and go, ‘I’m doing the best I can.’” He said his comment that he wasn’t ready was misinterpreted. “It wasn’t me saying I wouldn’t be ready to do the job, although I don’t know that anybody is ever absolutely ready to do that job,” he said. “But what I meant by it was I know what it’s going to take to run and you have to absolutely believe in your mind that it’s the right time for you to do it and that you’re absolutely ready for the challenge and I knew me. If I did it and I didn’t feel completely ready, the first time something went wrong, which invariably it would, I would be sitting there in some bad hotel room in Cedar Rapids saying to myself, ‘I knew it, I knew it.’”

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the real candidates were courting Christie’s favor. He hosted small dinners with some of his New Jersey political allies and brought candidates in individually—Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney. Christie had some rules of the road for the other candidates. He said he would make a decision about endorsing someone on his own timetable. In the meantime, he didn’t want candidates trolling for support or raising money in his state. If and when he endorsed, he would bring everyone with him. “Governor Romney didn’t like that too much, and when he came [for dinner], we had a discussion about it,” Christie said. “He pressed me really hard that he wanted to start raising money in New Jersey, and I said, ‘If you raise money in New Jersey in any kind of aggressive organized way, it’s going to make it very unlikely that I’ll be able to support you.’ So it was a rather tense conversation between the two of us in February of ’11 and I heard later from others that he left not very happy with the approach I took. But I took the same approach with everybody.”

  Christie said Romney was direct in asking for support: “His pitch was, ‘I’m the one best prepared for this from having run last time. I know the mistakes I made the last time. I’m not going to make the same mistakes this time.’ He told me that he was the one whose experience was best for the problems facing the country economically, that he’d be able to make the best pitch to be the guy who replaces the president, and he told me that he was going to have the best and most successful fund-raising effort that any Republican presidential candidate ever had and that he was not going to be outspent by the president. He said, ‘You put those three factors together, Governor, and I think that makes me the likely nominee and a very good chance to be president, and you’re going to want to be on board with me before anybody else.’” Christie said he told Romney he was not ready to endorse.

  Of all the dinner guests he hosted, Christie said, Barbour was the most entertaining. Compared to the others he was “much more humorous, much more affable, kind of just exactly what you’d expect.” He said Barbour broke up the room when someone asked him that night what kind of election campaign he thought it would be if he were the nominee against the president. He said that Barbour replied, “Well, it would remind me of what my high school football coach used to say to us in the locker room before we played a game against our crosstown rival. He would say, ‘Boys, turn Mama’s picture to the wall, she ain’t gonna want to see this.’” Christie added that Barbour was very relaxed and at ease: “He was very conversant in the issues, he answered everybody’s questions, but he did it with great humor and kind of what you’ve come and we’ve all come to expect from Haley Barbour.”

  Pawlenty made a different impression. “In the bigger group,” Christie said, “he was kind of reserved and actually more reserved than Tim is one-on-one and more reserved than even he was one-on-one with me that night. . . . In fact, the person who really sold Tim that night was Mary [Pawlenty]. She really sold Tim’s story much more aggressively than Tim did at that dinner, and everybody walked away impressed with Tim but really impressed with Mary.”

  • • •

  Once Daniels and Barbour made their decisions not to run, the pressure on Christie started to ramp up once again. “Craziness,” he recalled. “Unsolicited phone calls from people all over the country. One of those, he said, was from Henry Kissinger, who asked Christie to meet him in his New York office. Christie had first met Kissinger in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium in 2010: “I walked in and I saw Henry Kissinger in a satin Yankees warm-up jacket, which I just never thought I’d see Henry Kissinger in a satin Yankees warm-up jacket, but there he was in a satin warm-up jacket. . . . When he called me in to his office, he just said, ‘The country needs a change and you connect with people in a way that I haven’t seen a politician connect with someone in a long time and you need to think about doing this.’ I said, ‘That’s very flattering, but I don’t think I’m going to do it. I just think I need to be governor and I love the job I have and I don’t see it.’ He told me I was wrong and that he had known ten or eleven presidents, I forget the exact number he said, but he said, ‘You can do this.’ I said, ‘I haven’t given any deep thought to foreign policy.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about that, we can work with you on that.’ He said, ‘Foreign policy is instinct, it’s character, that’s what f
oreign policy is. It’s instinct and it’s character that determines who are the great foreign policy presidents and who aren’t.’ I just said, ‘It’s been great talking to you, thanks.’” He said Kissinger called again and invited him and Mary Pat to dinner. When they arrived, the guests included the CEOs of several major corporations, some of whom urged him to run.

  Christie said he continued to get calls of encouragement during the summer, from elected officials in Washington, from politically connected people around the country, from some other governors. He compared notes with Paul Ryan, who was also getting encouragement to run from some of the same people. What was notable about the interest in Christie was that it was taking place as the Republican race was already under way. Romney was an announced candidate, and yet many of the people urging Christie to consider running were donors who could or should have been with Romney but were still on the sidelines. It was a measure of their lack of confidence in the supposed front-runner that they continued to openly push the New Jersey governor, despite his professed lack of interest.* Ken Langone, a wealthy New Yorker who helped found Home Depot, began to apply more serious pressure in private meetings with Christie. In July, he invited Christie to breakfast at the Rocker Club in Manhattan. “The way he sold it to me was that this was going to be a small group of his friends who were going to sit and talk with me about why I needed to do this for our country, and that was Ken’s big sales pitch,” Christie said.

  Christie arrived that morning accompanied by his wife; his son Andrew; Mike DuHaime, his top political strategist; and Maria Comella, his communications director. What they saw and heard stunned them all. “It was jaw-dropping,” DuHaime said. Instead of a few people, there were dozens. Christie estimated the group at sixty. Instead of an intimate setting, the room was arranged formally, with the guests’ chairs lined up facing a pair of chairs flanking a small table. A telephone sat on the table. “So we sit down and Langone stands up and says, ‘Governor, all these people are here today for one reason. If you’re willing to announce for president of the United States, we’re with you, and everyone in this room has committed that to me and everyone in this room will raise every dollar you need to have raised to have a successful campaign. You won’t have to worry about raising the money.’” He said Langone then announced that several people could not attend because they were out of the country. Christie then described what happened. “All of a sudden you hear John Mack [former CEO of Morgan Stanley] on the phone. [Langone] said, ‘David Koch is out of the country. David, are you there?’ Yes. David starts talking.” After several others had made the case for him to run, Christie said, Langone asked Kissinger to speak for everyone. “So Kissinger’s got the cane and helps himself up, walks to the front of the room,” Christie said, “and he says, ‘I’ve known X number of presidents. Being a successful president is about two things, courage and character. You have both and your country needs you.’ Then he turned around and sat back down. They all applauded.”*

  Christie said he was as close to speechless at that moment as he could ever remember being: “I basically said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to mislead you, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that I won’t do this, but I cannot walk out of a room like this after people like you have asked me to consider it and tell you I won’t consider it. So I’m going to take some time and Mary Pat and I are for the first time going to deliberate about this and we’ll get back to you. I won’t hold you for a long time, I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.’”

  • • •

  Christie began to solicit advice about what a campaign would entail. The process lasted many weeks. He said he talked to Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, and Ken Mehlman, the former Republican National Committee chairman who had managed Bush’s 2004 campaign. He spoke with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who had run unsuccessfully in 2008 for the Republican nomination. Then one day he got a call from George W. Bush. “He said, ‘I’m sitting on the front porch at Kennebunkport, got some time, wanna talk?’ ‘Yes sir, Mr. President, sure,’” Christie said he replied. “We spoke for probably about forty-five minutes and he just gave me his observations and his advice, didn’t say anything like you should or you shouldn’t, didn’t say he’d be with me or not, just kind of gave me his observations about what he felt the state of the race was, what he thought it would take for somebody like me to get into the race at that point, and then kind of practical things to consider. And he kind of asked me then what was I thinking, what were the impediments in my mind, what were the concerns, so that he could try to play a sounding board for me on that. It was an amazing conversation.”

  Christie called Palatucci. “I was down on the Jersey shore,” Palatucci said. “He called me late that evening and told me he had just gotten off the phone with President Bush. That made him stand up and take notice. Obviously you were talking about someone who had been through the fire of making that decision and then running, and getting the perspective of someone who had been there and done that was very helpful. The president I think helped him to provide a structure for making the decision in his own head. Again, because the president was taking him so seriously, Chris in his own mind said, ‘If people are taking me seriously, I’ve got to take it seriously.’”

  Mary Pat Christie was at work on the trading desk at Cantor Fitzgerald one day when the phone rang. It was Barbara Bush, who had spoken to her son about his conversation with Christie and decided to call Mary Pat. She took no position about whether the governor should run but sought to reassure Christie’s wife that living in the White House with children was, on balance, a plus, that she had seen the benefits in her two granddaughters, and that from all she knew about the Christies, they could keep their children well grounded in that environment. “Mary Pat had about a ten-minute conversation with her and called me up and it was probably the most exciting moment of the process for Mary Pat,” Christie said. “She called me here [at the governor’s office] and I’m sitting at the desk and she said, ‘You won’t believe who just called me!’ I’m like, ‘Who now?’ I’m thinking it’s another incredibly rich person who’s trying to convince her that she should get in my ear and get me to run. She’s like, ‘Barbara Bush called me.’”

  The previous April, Christie had received a handwritten note from Nancy Reagan inviting him to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. The event had been on the governor’s schedule for months, set for September 27, 2011. With presidential discussions swirling, everyone around Christie knew the speech would dramatically feed public speculation that he might enter the race after all. Christie also knew that the speech he intended to deliver, in which he would sharply criticize the president, would only add to the frenzy. “I didn’t want to come to the Reagan Library and not talk about issues that are bigger than just ‘here’s what’s happened in New Jersey the last year and a half.’ We consciously made the decision—this is before the Langone meeting—that we wanted to have a speech that was kind of giving my perspective on foreign policy but from a different perspective, that we’re failing at foreign policy because we’re failing at home, and that until we get our act together at home we cannot be a dominant force for good in the world because people won’t want to emulate us.” Christie said he considered whether to scrap that speech and just talk about New Jersey, but decided to proceed with his original speech. “But I knew that the cost of that was you had like a week after the Reagan speech to make a decision and then you were going to start to annoy people,” he said.

  Christie recalled the trip to California as one of the most exhilarating experiences of his life. The director of the library met him and Mary Pat, and as they came around the first corner they could hear the strains of “Hail to the Chief” and Reagan taking the oath of office. Palatucci noticed that the Christies were holding hands throughout the entire tour. Nancy Reagan then came to see them. “She came and sat down next t
o me and she said, ‘You know, this is the fastest sellout we’ve had in the history of these talks at the museum?’ I said, ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that, Mrs. Reagan.’ She says, ‘Hmmm, that says something, doesn’t it, Governor?’ ‘Yes ma’am, I guess.’ Then she turned to me and said, ‘Do you know this is the second most press credentials ever asked for for a museum speech, except for when President Bush 43 came here to speak?’ I said, ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that either.’ She goes, ‘Hmmm, a lot of excitement tonight, do you have a good speech?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ She says, ‘It better be.’”

  That night he slowly escorted the former First Lady into the room where he was to speak. “Reagan is the first guy I voted for when I was a freshman in college, so there was a lot of emotion running through me,” he said. “And then the last thing she said to me was, we sat down and the director of the museum was giving my introduction and she turned to me and she said, ‘Do you see that podium?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She goes, ‘That was one of Ronnie’s podiums from the White House.’ I said, ‘Really?’ She goes, ‘Uh-huh.’ I sat there for a second and I just turned to her and I said, ‘You’re bad, you know that?’ She had this big smile on her face. She knew exactly what she was doing.”