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

by Balz, Dan

  Romney, meanwhile, had begun calling others who had made it to the next-to-final cut to let them know he had selected someone else. He had started with Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, soon after meeting with Ryan. Pawlenty was in Colorado at an Aspen Institute conference. He had long assumed Romney would pick Rob Portman on the theory that Portman was both highly qualified and might be able to help deliver Ohio, the most important of the battleground states. Romney told him he had decided to go with Ryan and explained the likely timetable for the public announcement. “I applauded the pick and told him it didn’t change my view of him or my willingness to help the campaign, and it really didn’t,” Pawlenty later said. “People always say, ‘Weren’t you disappointed?’ You can’t be disappointed about not getting something you didn’t expect.”

  On Friday, the day before the scheduled unveiling of Ryan, Romney called others who had been in the final cut. Marco Rubio was fishing when Romney called that afternoon. He finally connected around 7 p.m. to learn that he would not be on the ticket. Rob Portman was giving a speech in Columbus to several thousand bicyclists who were preparing for an annual cancer charity ride. He spoke to Romney when he finished and then joined the cyclists for dinner, trying to act as if nothing had just happened. Christie was in the air, flying back to New Jersey from Montana, when Romney tried to reach him that night. The plane had Wi-Fi but no phone service. Russ Schriefer sent an e-mail to Palatucci, who was on the flight, asking that the governor contact Romney as soon as possible. Palatucci e-mailed in reply: Is this about the vice presidency? Just ask him to call Governor Romney, Schriefer said. Christie’s plane landed just before 10 p.m. and he immediately called Romney. “He said to me, ‘I have some news that I think you’ll find both disappointing and a relief at the same time,’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ and he said, ‘I’ve decided to go another direction with the vice presidency,’” Christie recalled. “And I said, ‘Okay, I completely understand, I wish you the best of luck.’ He said, ‘I can’t tell you who.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to know who, because then if it leaks I could be on the suspect list, and I don’t want to be on the suspect list.’” Romney then asked Christie to deliver the keynote address to the Republican convention.

  Ryan reemerged in public the next morning on the deck of the USS Wisconsin, coming down a steep set of steps to join Romney as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Romney was so excited, he introduced Ryan as “the next president of the United States,” and had to interrupt Ryan to correct himself. “Every now and then I am known to make a mistake,” he joked. “I did not make a mistake with this guy. But I can tell you this: He’s going to be the next vice president of the United States.” Ryan told the audience, “The commitment Mitt Romney and I make to you is this: We won’t duck the tough issues; we will lead. We won’t blame others; we will take responsibility. And we won’t replace our founding principles; we will apply them.” The choice gave a needed jolt of energy to Romney’s campaign. The crowds became larger and more enthusiastic as the two men traveled together. The chemistry, so evident back in April, was just as obvious now. One campaign official used the word “bromance” to describe what they all saw. Democrats were as elated by the choice as were Republicans, seeing Romney’s decision as a political gamble that would thrust Ryan’s controversial budget plan and its Medicare cuts into the center of the campaign debate.

  • • •

  No one expected Campaign 2012 to be positive or uplifting. But what was most striking at that point in the race was not just the negativity or the sheer volume of attack ads raining down on voters in the swing states. It was the sense that all restraints were gone, the guardrails had disappeared, and there was no incentive for anyone to hold back. Almost immediately after Ryan’s announcement, the two campaigns were using some of the harshest language of the year. Vice President Biden started it during a rally in Virginia before a largely African American audience. He said that Romney would “unchain” the big banks if he were elected president and then added, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Biden later tried to temper his language, but within hours Romney unloaded. Campaigning in Ohio, he said Obama’s “angry and desperate” campaign had brought disrespect to the office of the presidency. “Mr. President,” he added, “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.” That brought an incendiary response from the Obama campaign. Spokesman Ben LaBolt said Romney’s comments “seemed unhinged.”

  Faux outrage has long been a part of every campaign’s toolkit, but now the outrage seemed genuine. Neither side had to look far to find an excuse to launch an attack or cry foul. The most egregious example of a campaign out of bounds was an ad prepared by Priorities USA, the super PAC supporting Obama. The ad tied Romney to the cancer death of the wife of Joe Soptic, the GST Steel employee who had been featured in the Obama campaign’s first two-minute ad. Mostly an online and cable talk show phenomenon, it ran only once or twice as a paid commercial, by accident, but it sparked a bitter exchange between the campaigns. Obama campaign advisers at first tried to distance themselves from the ad by claiming they didn’t know the details of Soptic’s situation. In fact, the campaign had put Soptic on a conference call months earlier. Obama privately told his advisers he thought the ad had crossed a line and he was unhappy that his campaign had been drawn into it. The Obama campaign also refused to denounce a stream of comments coming from Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who charged, with absolutely no evidence, that Romney paid no taxes for a period of ten years.

  If anyone mentioned the Priorities USA ad to Obama’s advisers, they pointed to the ad Romney was airing that accused Obama of gutting the work requirement in the welfare reform act that was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by then president Bill Clinton in 1996. They argued that the ad was patently false, though some conservative policy analysts argued that it wasn’t. Fact-checking outlets declared the ad erroneous. Romney’s campaign stood firm rather than walking away. Neil Newhouse would later say, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” The comment spoke volumes about Campaign 2012.

  Partisanship was bred into the electorate and influenced voters’ views. When I wrote about the toxic nature of the campaign, I received two e-mails in response. One blamed Obama and his campaign for the tone. “The onus is far and away on the side of the Democrats and you know it,” the writer said. “They have called Romney everything under the sun (almost), namely, a murderer, a felon, and a tax cheat. Then, they cruelly made fun of Mrs. Romney’s affliction [she suffered from multiple sclerosis] by cruelly castigating the cost of upkeep for her horse, which she uses as therapy. It is the vicious Democratic campaign machine which has denigrated Romney and now his vice president.” The writer of the second e-mail took the opposite view. “Have you been completely unaware of all the ridiculous abuse Obama’s received over the last 3+ years?” the writer said. “He spent the first 2.5 years trying to get along and asking for Republicans involvement . . . and what he got instead were accusations of death panels in his health care plan, that he’s unqualified to be a president, and that he’s a secret Muslim trying to steer the U.S. in Al Qaeda’s favor. And, Romney has not distanced himself from any of these claims.”

  Romney’s welfare ad was part of a broader August initiative designed to put Obama on the defensive. The campaign also attacked the president over Medicare, an issue perennially trouble for Republicans, by saying his health care law would slash Medicare spending by $716 million over ten years. Romney’s team also went after the president for seeming to belittle the hard work of entrepreneurs and small business owners when, making a broader point about the role of government and society generally in creating the infrastructure and climate for entrepreneurs to succeed, he said at a rally, “You didn’t build that.” This was part of the Romney campaign’s strategy, to attack rather than defend. His advisers wanted
to force Obama to spend money defending himself. Stevens said, “So we hit them on outsourcing, and they spent money on defense. We hit them on welfare, and they spent on defense. We hit them on China, and they spent money on defense. And we hit them on ‘You didn’t build [that],’ and they spent money on defense. You had this Death Star spending vast amounts of money. We had to get them to spend some of that on defense [for us] to try to stay alive.” It was the one time during the summer when the Romney campaign’s strategy began to move poll numbers, however slightly, in their direction.

  But this pointed to another difference between the campaigns. When Romney attacked Obama for his “You didn’t build that” comment, the Obama campaign responded immediately by cutting an ad with the president talking on camera. It was an effective response, probably more effective than the attack itself. Romney’s campaign, in contrast, had the opposite attitude, that responding was a sign of weakness. There was a mentality that said you should never explain, never play defense, just always try to stay on offense. That mind-set came to frustrate some of those inside the Romney campaign, who argued that Romney needed to answer some of Obama’s attacks more directly and more effectively.

  The selection of Paul Ryan had presaged a shift to a bigger message and a broader debate between the two campaigns, one in which how to handle debt and deficits and how to restore the economy would be paramount. As August ended, it seemed as if the candidates hadn’t gotten that message.

  CHAPTER 22

  Bill Clinton and the Empty Chair

  The next test for the two campaigns took place at the most outdated of all the events on the presidential campaign calendar: the national conventions. Decades ago, these conventions were grand and gaudy spectacles filled with drama, backroom dealmaking, spirited floor debates, occasional fistfights, and at times riots in the streets. They still retained some of the spectacle. The campaigns converted sports arenas into glitzy television studios with high-tech bells and whistles to entertain the delegates and those watching at home. Delegates still wore goofy hats and costumes. There were parties galore stocked with booze and fat-cat contributors. But security concerns had turned the host cities into armed camps and, for the delegates, limited mobility and logistical snarls. Conventions offered no suspense and little drama. The nightly programs were scripted down to the minute. Much of the speechwriting, save for a few big speeches, was pedestrian, repetitive, and uninspired. Conventions were too long and too boring for the major networks to bother devoting hours of their precious airtime to the nightly program. They were nothing more than nightly infomercials for the candidates. And yet they still had an important political purpose with potentially high stakes. A few effective speakers and perhaps a visual moment could resonate long after the convention had ended. After all, it had happened to Barack Obama at the 2004 convention.

  Mitt Romney needed a good convention. The summer battles had left the campaign largely where it had been at the start of the general election. For all the money spent on television, the overall race had moved little since the beginning of May. Obama still held a narrow lead, but Romney’s team was relieved to have weathered the summer storm as well as it did, though his advisers knew he had sustained damage. The challenger’s campaign was still strapped for cash. His advisers had gotten approval for a $20 million loan in August to tide themselves over until they could begin to use the general election funds they had been stockpiling for months. Even so, they would run no ads for two weeks, which astonished the Obama team. Republican super PAC leaders were patting themselves on the back for helping to keep Romney afloat in the face of the Obama air assault. Obama advisers looked at the tens of millions they had spent over the summer on ads as an investment that had prevented Romney from doing anything to improve his image as the underdog.

  For only the second time, the two parties had decided to stage their conventions on consecutive weeks—Republicans the last week of August in Tampa, and Democrats the first week of September in Charlotte. The parties had done the same thing four years earlier, breaking with a long tradition that had seen a gap of several weeks between the two conventions and with both events generally wrapped up by the middle of August. As with so much in politics, money had influenced to the decisions to shift to later conventions. In 2004, George W. Bush decided to stage his convention as close to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks as possible (and in New York City). John Kerry had held his convention in mid-July. At the time, both candidates were accepting federal funds for the general election, which came with strict spending limits. Kerry realized too late that he would have to spread his funds over a much longer period of time than would Bush: less bang for the buck. Four years later, in part to avoid that problem, the Democrats decided to move their convention to the last week of August, butting up against the Republicans, who again had picked the first week of September. But in 2012, a different reality dawned on the campaigns—particularly Romney’s. Neither candidate was taking federal money for the general election—or for that matter for the nomination battle. But campaign finance law still regulated fund-raising and made a critical distinction between money that had been raised for the nomination versus for the general election. Romney was hamstrung over the summer because he couldn’t dip into his general election account until he had formally accepted the nomination. Had his convention come in early August or even late July, he would not have been at such a financial disadvantage.

  Florida, with its twenty-nine electoral votes, was the biggest of the battleground states and a must-win for Romney. But Republicans made a major miscalculation when they scheduled their 2012 convention in Florida for the end of August rather than earlier in the summer. A convention is one event in which the candidate has control over everything—except the weather. And late August was the height of hurricane season. As party officials and the campaign’s advance team began arriving a week before opening night, the threat had become real. Hurricane Isaac was bearing down on the Tampa Bay area. Four years earlier, the GOP had been forced to scrub the first night of its convention program in Minneapolis–St. Paul because of the threat of a hurricane in Florida. With memories of Bush’s failure to respond quickly to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Republicans didn’t want any embarrassing reminder of that seeming indifference and incompetence. That was mostly a question of optics and imagery. In Tampa, as the first day of the convention neared, the issue was public safety. Would Republicans go ahead with opening night on a day when Tampa Bay could be underwater? On Saturday evening, August 25, party officials announced that they would delay opening by one day, forcing Romney’s convention team, led by Russ Schriefer, to compress four nights into three, tossing aside a summer’s worth of careful planning.

  • • •

  The Republican convention opened on Tuesday, August 28. Inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, there was a distinct lack of energy. The convention floor, normally a bustling obstacle course, was abnormally quiet, with aisles wide open. It was exactly what Romney didn’t need as he sought to charge up his party for the final months of the election. The challenger came to his convention with a lengthy to-do list. Most urgently, he still needed to fill in his biography. He needed to make himself a more appealing person, to counter the image projected by the Obama campaign. His campaign advisers had deferred action on this, believing that the convention offered the biggest audience and the best venue to do so. Romney also was under pressure to show that he had a plan to fix the economy. With so much deferred maintenance packed into three nights, he had little margin for error.

  Two speakers carried the heaviest load on opening night: Ann Romney and Chris Christie. Originally Ann Romney was slotted for Monday night, subject to network coverage, with Christie the focal point of the second night. In the hastily revised schedule, they were back-to-back, an incongruous pairing that nonetheless promised star power for the GOP. Ann Romney was one of her husband’s greatest assets, more natural than he on the campaign trail, blunt and funny, and a be
hind-the-scenes force. “Tonight,” she said, “I want to talk to you about love. I want to talk to you about the deep and abiding love I have for a man I met at a dance many years ago. And the profound love I have and I know we share for this country.” She appealed to the women watching, the campaign’s effort to do something about the persistent gender gap. “It’s the moms who have always had to work a little harder to make everything right. It’s the moms of this nation—single, married, widowed—who really hold this country together.” Over the applause, she shouted, “I love you women! And I hear your voices.” When she talked about her husband, she described him as warm and loving and patient, with values centered on faith and love of family and country. “From the time we were first married, I have seen him spend countless hours helping others,” she said. “I’ve see him drop everything to help a friend in trouble, and been there when late-night calls of panic come from a member of our church whose child has been taken to the hospital.” Finally someone was humanizing the Republican nominee. She talked about her husband’s success in business and defended him from critics who had tried to undermine that record. As she closed, she said, “I can’t tell you what will happen over the next four years. But I can only stand here tonight as a wife and a mother and a grandmother, an American, and make you this solemn commitment: This man will not fail.” Ann Romney had done her part, and the applause rained down on her as Mitt came onstage to give her a hug and kiss and wave to the delegates. Backstage, the next mini-drama was beginning to unfold.