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

by Balz, Dan

  • • •

  On the morning of August 8, Pawlenty cut into a cinnamon bun the size of a loaf of bread. Around the table at the Machine Shed restaurant in suburban Des Moines was a group of reporters invited to have breakfast with the candidate as he began the final week of campaigning before the straw poll. He struggled to calibrate expectations for the weekend. “I didn’t say it’s not that meaningful,” he said. Then he said, “Well, it’s an important event, but it’s not the ultimate event. I think we’re going to do well, move from the back of the pack to the front of the pack. So we endorse the idea that it’s an important measure, but it’s not the final measure.” His goal, he said, was to finish first, second, or bunched together as part of the top three. Did he regret getting sucked into the straw poll? he was asked. “We didn’t get sucked in. We dove in. We want to be in the straw poll,” he said.

  He was asked about the impending entry of Rick Perry. Would a victory in the straw poll prove fleeting against someone with Perry’s presumed resources and big-state experience? “I didn’t have a built-in national brand,” he said. “I don’t have a celebrity status. I don’t have personal wealth. I don’t have some comedic shtick. This is going to be done the real way. You’ve got to go meet people and earn their support and earn their trust and earn their vote.” Every month, he said, there would be something or someone new, whether Donald Trump in the spring or Perry on the horizon. “We are not ever going to be the cable TV shooting star of the month,” he said.

  Later that morning Bachmann’s campaign bus rolled into tiny Atlantic, Iowa, eighty miles west of Des Moines, the sounds of Elvis’s “Promised Land” blaring from the public address system. Her campaign had concluded that its best hope of winning the straw poll was to concentrate on a roughly hundred-mile circle around Ames, figuring that Iowans who lived much farther away were not likely to make the effort to get to the straw poll. That week she was on the cover of Newsweek with a controversial photograph that showed her bug-eyed above a headline that read, “The Queen of Rage.” Conservatives denounced the magazine. “Is that what’s behind your campaign? Rage?” a voter asked. She replied, “I think the power behind our campaign is hope and a future. . . . I haven’t read the story. I can only tell you who I am. I am a thoughtful person who is positive. . . . I was mocked. I was jeered. Who cares?”

  Inexplicably, the Republican race had become, for the moment, a contest between Pawlenty and Bachmann, with potentially devastating consequences for the loser. Bachmann could not afford a setback, given the momentum she had gained since joining the race. All the other candidates had faded into the background for the week, with the exception of Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas House member with a passionate following but with little ability to expand his appeal. No matter how well he did in Ames, that reality would not change.

  On Thursday, August 11, the candidates met for their next debate, hosted again by Fox News. On this night, there were eight candidates onstage: Pawlenty, Bachmann, Romney, Gingrich, Cain, Santorum, Paul, and, for the first time, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, who had recently stepped down as the Obama administration’s ambassador to China. Pawlenty was faced with the problem of how aggressively he could attack a female candidate, but after what had happened in New Hampshire, the answer was obvious. “If I get asked to whack somebody, I’m going to whack ’em, because on the heels of that earlier debate we just couldn’t afford to have any sense that there was hesitation to be strong and be willing to contrast with your opponents,” he said. Pawlenty had talked this through with his advisers. They agreed that they could not allow another round of stories saying he was afraid to take on his opponents.

  Within minutes of the introductions, Pawlenty and Bachmann began to spar. “She has done wonderful things in her life, absolutely wonderful things, but it is an undisputable fact that in Congress her record of accomplishment and results is nonexistent,” Pawlenty said. Bachmann accused Pawlenty of having embraced views on health care and climate change that were closer to Obama’s than to those of true conservatives. “He said the era of small government is over,” she said of her opponent. “I have a very consistent record of fighting very hard against Barack Obama and his unconstitutional measures in Congress.” Pawlenty then shot back, “She’s got a record of misstating and making false statements.” He assailed her again for failing to block Obama’s initiatives. “She said she’s got a titanium spine. It’s not her spine we’re worried about. It’s her record of results. If that’s your view of effective leadership with results, please stop, because you’re killing us.” Pawlenty was a different personality from the candidate who had debated in New Hampshire, but in Bachmann he found a rival who was prepared to hit back as hard as she was hit. “When you attacked her, she was the black widow spider,” Nahigian said.

  • • •

  The Ames Straw Poll is an event that long ago outlived its value. By 2011, it was little more than a giant fund-raiser for the Iowa Republican Party and a summer spectacle for political junkies. As a predictor of who might win the Republican nomination, or even the Iowa caucuses, it had a poor record, and it gobbled up precious resources from any candidate who participated. Campaigns bought the tickets for supporters, rented the buses to get them to Ames, and courted them with food and entertainment, all for a few thousand votes. Romney had learned his lesson in 2008, winning the straw poll but losing the caucuses and the nomination. Pawlenty was stuck in a battle that could prove meaningless if he won but deadly if he lost.

  When the results were announced late Saturday afternoon, Bachmann led the field with 4,823 votes, or 29 percent of the total, followed closely by Ron Paul with 4,671. Pawlenty was a distant and disappointing third with 2,293 votes, or 14 percent. He and his wife, Mary, were in a hotel room in Ames when the results were announced. They had already agreed that if he fell short of his goal he would quit the race. His lackluster finish made the next step obvious: “We just had it in our mind that I had to have some sort of breakout experience early or the campaign was going to be unsuccessful. We planned for, built up, and spent as if that breakout moment was going to be Ames, and it turned out not to be.” He later wished he had announced that he would skip Ames the minute Bachmann got in the race, believing he would have gotten a second look from Republican voters later in the year.

  Contributing to the decision to get out was the fact that Pawlenty’s campaign was in debt. The candidate said he first heard about it shortly before the straw poll. Some advisers blamed Ayers for letting spending get out of control. Ayers said he had no role in setting up the financial systems for the campaign. “I advised against the way we were managing our resources,” he said, “but ultimately the candidate is in charge and I respect that decision and the hierarchy, but I had voiced internal concern.” He said that as campaign manager, “Ultimately I’m in charge. The governor and I should have been aware about the numbers. Okay? But we both were given different numbers.” Whether Ayers’s claim of “different numbers” could withstand scrutiny hardly matters; the Pawlenty campaign was over.

  Pawlenty announced his decision to quit on ABC’s This Week program, hosted that week by Jake Tapper. “We had the wrong strategy,” Pawlenty later told me. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, but we were running on the wrong premise, and the premise was that this thing was going to crystallize early, that somebody—probably Mitt—would be the front-runner and break away from the pack and if you’re going to run as a relatively unknown, underresourced candidate from the Midwest, you’ve got to get some attention early and you’ve got to put a stake in early. It turned out to be, I think, an outdated model circa 2002, 2004, where you tried to show some progress early, get the buzz going that you’re the aggregated challenger to the front-runner, and then try to pivot off of that financially and politically. But things have changed.” He had no real regrets about getting out. Had he stayed longer, he still would not have had the financial resources to go up against Rom
ney.

  In Boston, Romney advisers were relieved to see Pawlenty on the sidelines. But as Pawlenty exited, another candidate who seemed even more formidable was arriving for his turn at a chance to take down the front-runner.

  CHAPTER 12

  Candidate “Oops”

  Central casting could not have produced a more ideal candidate for the Republican nomination than Texas governor Rick Perry—on paper, that is. He had led the second largest state in the country for a decade. He succeeded George W. Bush after Bush became president in 2000 and then won election on his own three times. He had rugged good looks and an easy way with people. Born in the tiny town of Paint Creek, he was first elected to the state legislature in 1984 as a Democrat. In his lifetime, he had never lost an election, including a contest for king of the Paint Creek School Carnival when he was in elementary school. The Dallas Morning News reported that he had secured that victory “by handing out pennies for votes.” To win his third term, he demolished the popular senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary and then defeated Bill White, the well-regarded former Democratic mayor of Houston, in the general election.

  Perry was the perfect foil to Mitt Romney. He was a staunch conservative whose convictions were never in question, the leader of a bright red state to Romney’s blue Massachusetts, a politician who had nearly perfect pitch with the Tea Party movement and became a national folk hero to those anti-Washington activists after he mentioned secession at a rally in 2009. Perry and Romney had served together as governors, and there was bad blood between them. Romney was chairman of the Republican Governors Association when Perry was running for reelection in 2006. On a trip to Texas, Romney had dropped in to see Perry at the Texas State Capitol. During the meeting, Perry complained to Romney that a consultant on the RGA payroll was also working for one of his opponents, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who had left the party to run as an independent. Perry asked how was it that a consultant to the RGA could be working to defeat a sitting Republican governor and, by the way, working for a candidate who wasn’t even a Republican. Perry and Romney were “two completely different people,” a friend of Perry’s said.

  That was easy to understand given their backgrounds. Perry grew up in hardscrabble circumstances. Paint Creek, which sits north of Abilene, was so small it didn’t show up on Texas maps at the time he was born. His father was a dryland cotton farmer, dependent on the Good Lord and the weather to harvest a crop. His home had no indoor plumbing during his earliest years. His mother made his clothes, including underwear. He was an Eagle Scout and an evangelical Christian. But as a boy, asked if he wanted to be a Christian, he said, “Nope, I want to be an Aggie.” He fulfilled that dream, attending Texas A&M University, where he was a yell leader (which is what the Aggies called their cheerleaders), an indifferent student, and a member of ROTC. When he graduated, he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Air Force and flew C-130 cargo planes around the world. When his time was up, he returned to Paint Creek and went into the farming business with his father. He married his childhood sweetheart, Anita Thigpen, the daughter of a local doctor, after a courtship of sixteen years. In the early 1980s, he took the test to become a pilot for Southwest Airlines and was scheduled for an interview when a huge rainstorm dropped two feet of rain on his hometown in two days. He took that as an omen that he should stay with his father and work the land.

  His father and grandfather had been in local and state politics, and when a seat in the legislature came open in 1984, he ran for it and won. He was a Democrat then. Nearly everyone in Texas was. The Lone Star State was undergoing a political transformation that would eventually make it one of the most Republican states in the nation, but in those days the county courthouses and the legislature were still firmly in Democratic hands. The Democratic Party was long split between its liberal and conservative wings. Perry was one of the conservatives. He supported Al Gore’s presidential candidacy in 1988, a line on his résumé that later raised questions about his true political leanings. In that 1988 nominating battle, however, Texans remember Gore as the southerner, running against liberals like Michael Dukakis, Richard Gephardt, and Jesse Jackson.

  In 1989, Perry joined the exodus of conservative Democrats from their historic home and became a Republican. A year later, he won his first statewide office, defeating Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, the populist Democrat who was seeking a third term. Eight years later, he ran for lieutenant governor in a race that would set him on a fast track to the governor’s chair. The office had come open because of the retirement of Bob Bullock, a Democratic legend who had become an ally and a mentor to George W. Bush during his first term as governor. Bush was seeking reelection that year, with an eye on a presidential campaign in 2000, and putting the lieutenant governor’s office in Republican hands was crucial to his game plan. Perry’s opponent was John Sharp, a classmate at A&M and a shrewd and popular Democrat. On a day that Bush won reelection with 68 percent of the vote, Perry defeated Sharp by 50 to 48 percent. The race resulted in strained relations between Perry and Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, which continued to color Texas politics for a decade and carried into Perry’s 2012 campaign.

  • • •

  Six days after his 2010 victory, Perry was in Washington as part of a tour to promote his new book, Fed Up!, a screed against Washington and the federal government. The book tour, which included a New York stop on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, prompted speculation about a possible presidential campaign. A month earlier, I had interviewed Perry in Texas and asked him about running in 2012. “I don’t know how many times you’ve got to say no,” he said. “I have no passion to go to Washington, D.C.” At the post-election breakfast, Perry was even more insistent about his lack of interest in seeking the presidency. He suggested that only his untimely passing would prevent him from serving out his term: “Lord willing, I will be governor of Texas.”

  A longtime Perry adviser said the governor’s team had a different role in mind than presidential candidate. “After the 2010 reelect was behind us, I wanted to make sure that if he wasn’t going to be the king, I wanted him to be the kingmaker,” the adviser said. “I didn’t want a repeat of 2008, where he just suddenly endorsed [Rudy] Giuliani. I wanted him to be courted and be a significant national player.” A few months later, when Perry’s chief strategist, David Carney, and his 2010 campaign manager, Rob Johnson, went off to help run Newt Gingrich’s campaign, it seemed to all that Perry was definitely out of the presidential race. Johnson had checked with Perry before taking the job with Gingrich. “Perry said, ‘I’m not running.’ He gave me his blessing,” Johnson said.

  Then Perry changed his mind. On May 27, 2011, as the legislative session was nearing its conclusion, he said to reporters that he was “going to think about” running for president. I asked Perry about his sudden change of heart during an interview in the governor’s office in Austin months after his campaign had ended. “I truly had no intention of running for the presidency of the United States until May of 2011,” he said, “and at that particular point in time it was the phone calls—‘we really wish you would consider this,’ ‘reconsider it,’ whatever the words that they used.” Perry said his wife, who had never taken such a central role in his political decisions, was among those pushing him. “I wanted to push this off into my corner,” he said. “This wasn’t something I wanted to do. I think there was a personal pushback that I don’t want to go do this because I’m really comfortable where I am and I don’t want to go through the trials and tribulations—and even I didn’t know the test that would be before me if I decided to make that.”

  Within weeks, Carney and Johnson were back in Austin and available to lead the exploration, having quit the Gingrich campaign as part of a mass exodus of senior staff. “Rob and I tried to figure out what are the questions,” Carney later said. “If you’re going to run for president, what are the questions you’d like answered, and ours were: Is there an op
ening for someone like you to get in a primary; are there the resources there to wage an effective campaign; and is there time?” Johnson went to work contacting potential bundlers who could help raise money quickly. Carney assessed the early states and the potential to build organizations. Deirdre Delisi, a longtime adviser, looked at how quickly Perry could adjust his thinking from state to national policy questions. Perry worked the phones, calling elected officials, activists, evangelical leaders.

  Later in July, Perry and his wife met at their residence with Carney, Johnson, and Ray Sullivan, who had been the gubernatorial chief of staff. “Our goal had always been it’s a political and policy goal to put him in the strongest possible position to do anything he wanted, and it just so happened that that was a high point in his political life,” Sullivan said. “He was as strong and prepared as he’d ever been, I think.” By then it was clear that Perry was ready to run. Before he did, however, he decided to have major surgery to repair a bad back, a decision he would come to regret.

  Perry’s first thought was to announce in Iowa at the Ames Straw Poll. He was told it was too late to be added to the ballot. The conservative blog site RedState had scheduled its annual conference for Charleston the same weekend. Perry decided to make his announcement there. That morning, in declaring his candidacy, he said his goal was “to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I possibly can.” The announcement overshadowed the straw poll, and Ames was buzzing with talk about how Perry’s entry would affect Romney’s candidacy. Mike Huckabee, who was in Ames as an observer, had a different perspective. “The question may be what Romney does to Perry,” he said. “One thing Romney’s got going for him is that this is not his first rodeo. It’s a bruising experience.”