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

by Balz, Dan

  Onstage, the challenger protested Obama’s claim that he wanted to cut taxes by $5 trillion, though several independent studies said that was the size of the cuts Romney was proposing. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” he said. “I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people. High-income people are doing just fine in this economy. They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.” Romney’s tax plan had been a potential liability from the day he announced it back in February. He had deliberately avoided filling in the missing details—the deductions he would have to eliminate or cap in order to pay for his tax cuts. Obama’s team was dumbfounded by what he was saying. “Mitt Romney just walked away from his $5 trillion tax cut,” Cutter tweeted. Those keeping score on Twitter were more captivated by the contrasting performances on the stage than by the substance of what either was saying. At 9:18 p.m., Bill Maher, the caustic comedian and Obama super PAC contributor, began to sound nervous: “Obama’s not looking like he came for a job interview, Romney so far does.” Two minutes later, Andrew Sullivan, an enthusiastic Obama supporter with one of the largest blog followings in the country, weighed in. “Man, Obama is boring and abstract,” he tweeted. “He’s putting us to sleep. I get his points but he is entirely wonky tonight. And he is on the defensive.”

  Obama bore in on Romney’s tax package. There was no way for Romney to pay for all those cuts, he said. Romney was sputtering as he tried to break into the conversation. “Virtually everything he just said about my tax plan is inaccurate,” he said. Even he would oppose the plan Obama was describing. Obama was incredulous. He said Romney was saying “Never mind” to eighteen months of campaigning. Basic arithmetic, he said, proved Romney was misleading the public. The president’s words may have been on point, but he was listless in the face of Romney’s aggressiveness. The challenger was on the offensive against the president and even tried to overrule Lehrer. At one point he demanded the last word during one segment. As Lehrer began to protest, Obama said, “You can have it.”

  “Well, well, well,” tweeted Dana Perino, who was White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and was now a Fox News commentator, “who do we have here? Romney is prePARED.” Jeff Greenfield, the veteran political reporter and television correspondent, tweeted, “Romney is instructing Obama on how the economy works, and Obama seems unable to wrench the narrative away from him.” Actor Albert Brooks observed, “Romney looks like he got more sleep.” Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, protested Romney’s attempt to rewrite his tax plan. “I’m sorry, are we gonna let Romney get away with a brand new tax plan?” she tweeted. “That all of a sudden he gets to say that he won’t cut more?” But a pattern was emerging on the left and right. As the first half hour of the debate was ending, Hugh Hewitt, the conservative talk show host, tweeted, “Romney pounding POTUS. Let the debate go long. What is POTUS thinking right now? ‘Help me @davidaxelrod.’” David Corn, the journalist who had broken the story about the 47 percent video, offered this summation: “Romney does seem more passionate about dealing with the economic mess than Obama. He’s doing well.” And Mike Murphy, the former Romney adviser and GOP strategist and commentator, said what other Republicans were now thinking: “If we had this Mitt Romney for last 60 days, he’d be 5 points ahead.”

  At this point, some levity crept into the debate—and the Twitter conversation. Romney was ticking through areas he would cut to try to reduce the deficit. “Obamacare is on my list,” he said, using the pejorative that conservatives had attached to the president’s Affordable Care Act. “I apologize, Mr. President, I use that term with all respect.” Inexplicably, the president replied, “I like it.” Romney continued, “Good. Okay, good.” The audience laughed. “So I’ll get rid of that. I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.” “Mitt Romney’s love of Big Bird just exploded Twitter,” said the Web site BuzzFeed. Instantly someone created a Big Bird identity on Twitter (several parody accounts were launched, in fact) and began offering snarky responses to Romney. “Mitt Romney will end Bert and Ernie’s right to a civil union,” the Twitter Big Bird tweeted.

  The debate continued apace. Romney was loaded for whatever Obama offered. He attacked Obama’s green energy initiatives. He said a friend had commented that Obama didn’t pick winners and losers, just losers. “You put $90 billion into green jobs,” he said. “And look, I’m all in favor of green energy. Ninety billion, that would have hired two million teachers.” At times Obama offered detailed rebuttals, filled with facts and figures. It wasn’t always his answers that were a problem—reading the transcript, the debate appeared substantive, serious, mostly civil, and more evenly balanced. It was the way he responded, as if didn’t want to be there. Obama managed to score some points in the final half hour, once again calling out Romney for lack of specificity. “At some point, I think the American people have to ask themselves, is the reason that Governor Romney is keeping all these plans to replace secret because they’re too good? Is it because that somehow middle-class families are going to benefit too much from them? No.” But he showed peevishness when Lehrer tried to cut him off. “Two minutes is up, sir,” Lehrer said. “No,” Obama replied. “I think I had five seconds before you interrupted me.” Later the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore lamented in a tweet, “PBO, lemme get this straight. You can send in drones that kill civilians, but you can’t stop Romney or Lehrer from interrupting you?” Obama’s closing statement drew this from a Vanity Fair tweet: “Good LORD Obama wouldn’t win a student council election against a chubby nerd with that closing statement.”

  In the filing center, where hundreds of journalists from the United States and around the world were watching on flat-screen televisions, there was an area at the front of the room for emissaries of the two candidates to spin reporters after the debate. But spin alley was now obsolete, effectively put out of business by the advances in social media. The tweets had rolled out faster than anyone could really absorb them all, as reporters, strategists, celebrities, and ordinary citizens set the narrative in bursts of 140 characters that magnified the consensus: Romney was not just winning the debate. He was crushing the president. The longer the debate went on, the more everyone was expressing the same view. Two-thirds of the way through, David Gregory, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, tweeted, “One hour in Romney is far more energetic and aggressive than the president.” As the debate entered its final twenty minutes, journalists and others began to point out Obama’s missed opportunities. Ashley Parker of the New York Times summed it up this way: “Things Obama has not yet mentioned, w 15 min left: Bain, 47 percent, flip-flopping.” “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Bill Maher said shortly before the debate ended, “but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.” The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol blogged that Romney was turning in “the best debate performance by a GOP candidate in more than two decades.” Weekly Standard writer Mark Hemingway joked, “That wasn’t a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car.” That, of course, was a reference to the Romneys’ decades-old family car trip in which the family dog, Seamus, had been put on the roof. Roger Simon, Politico’s chief political columnist, headlined his sharply written analysis “President Obama Snoozes and Loses.” He said the president “looked like someone had slipped him an Ambien.”

  Seven minutes after the debate ended, as the front of the filing center was being overrun by a platoon of Romney staffers and surrogates, Olivier Knox, chief Washington correspondent for Yahoo! News, tweeted, “Not one Obama surrogate in the ‘spin room’ right now. Emergency talking points meeting?” Even the hosts on MSNBC were attackin
g the president’s performance. Eleven minutes later, now almost 11 p.m. on the East Coast, Andrew Sullivan offered one more stinging observation: “Look: you know how much I love the guy, and how much of a high info viewer I am, but this was a disaster for Obama.”

  • • •

  The president had met with his debate team for the first time in May in the Roosevelt Room, a few steps from the Oval Office. His advisers gave a presentation to set the context of the debates: History showed that incumbent presidents do poorly in the first debate, they told him. The presentation included a slide reviewing the history of first debates: Of six incumbent presidents, five had lost their first debate. The debate team offered reasons. Presidents lose because they’re out of practice and the challenger isn’t. Incumbent presidents live in a world where people don’t stand a few feet from them and berate them or twist their record. Challengers gained stature just by being on the same stage with the president. Finally, incumbent presidents have two jobs—running the country and running for reelection. Challengers have but one job, which is to win the election. They come to the first debate more ready than the president. Presidents think they know the issues; they’re dealing with them every day. They often don’t prepare or practice diligently enough. Obama absorbed the briefing and then showed his competitive streak. “Let’s see if we can break the string,” one member of the team recalled him saying that day.

  Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and Vice President Gore, led the debate team. He had been co-leader in 2008. Anita Dunn, White House communications director during Obama’s first years in the White House and also part of the 2008 debate team, was back again. The two Davids—Plouffe and Axelrod—were key members, as was Joel Benenson, the campaign’s lead pollster. Karen Dunn was recruited to assemble the research that the president would be asked to consume and played an invaluable role. Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel and Anita Dunn’s husband, was tasked to handle negotiations with the Romney campaign. Jack Lew, a newcomer to presidential debates, became an active participant as well. Chief speechwriter Jon Favreau participated as the time for the debates approached. Plouffe recommended they recruit Massachusetts senator John Kerry to play Romney in their mock debates. As a fellow Bay State politician, Kerry had studied Romney closely over the years, bore some similar physical characteristics, and was a skilled debater who had overwhelmed George W. Bush in the first debate in 2004.

  Obama’s advisers took Romney very seriously as an opponent. “We were all really worried about it to begin with,” said one member of the team. “McCain was not a good debater in 2008 and he didn’t prepare. Romney went into the debates that mattered with a strategy, he knew exactly what he needed to do, he worked his tail off preparing.” Everyone on the team knew Obama did not like debates. He disliked having to chop answers into short bites. His speaking style was that of an orator who built to a crescendo and delivered his best lines at the end. In debates, the punch line had to come first. Obama saw debates as performances—all show. “Obama would be the first to say he hadn’t performed well in 2008 in the multicandidate ones during the primary because he didn’t like them,” the adviser said. “He didn’t like them for the general election but he performed well. But he didn’t have to perform against a really good opponent. This was just a totally different situation, so we were quite worried.”

  During the summer, the team began to game out the first debate and lay a strategy for the president. An early strategy memo called for the president to be aggressive in the opening debate, to take the fight to Romney and to stay on the offensive as much as possible. His advisers told the president to challenge Romney in areas where the challenger had expertise, where he didn’t, and where he seemed to have no moorings at all. Obama was given a series of briefing books to help him become more familiar with what Romney had been saying. Obama was diligent in doing the homework. “He came back with voluminous questions,” Axelrod said. “He’d read these debate books and he’d send back a memo with forty questions that reflected the fact that he had read every line. So he worked hard enough. He was taking it seriously, but everything was out of alignment and you could tell in the debate prep.”

  In mid-August, the president and Kerry held their first mock debate at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee just south of the Capitol. Obama’s performance was underwhelming. Kerry-as-Romney came well prepared. The president tried to overpower him with facts and statistics. His advisers could see his testiness as he listened to Kerry/Romney attack his record. Obama’s irritability was a major concern, a hangover from his 2008 debates when his most memorable moment was an unintended putdown of Hillary Rodham Clinton during a debate three days before the New Hampshire primary. Obama’s line, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” became a lasting image and one his advisers did not want replicated in any form against Romney. Obama understood that he couldn’t be snarky against Romney, but he asked his advisers, with evident frustration, how he should deal with someone he believed was outright lying about his record. It was clear to all that Obama didn’t much like Romney. This too was different from the 2008 debates. Obama and McCain were far from chummy, but they had worked together on some things in the Senate and Obama had real respect for McCain’s courage and sacrifice in behalf of his country as a POW during the Vietnam War. He believed there were lines McCain would not cross in his pursuit of the presidency. He did not believe the same of Romney.

  Everyone knew the first mock debate was just the opener in a series, but it was an unsettling start. “Everyone was looking at each other afterwards like, ‘Let’s just go kill ourselves,’” said one of the president’s advisers. When his advisers critiqued the performance the following week, Obama was receptive to their suggestions—in contrast to his sometimes prickly reactions of four years earlier. He said they were right, that he agreed with their criticisms. He said, according to one advisers, “I get it, I hear you.” He promised he would fix it—and then he kept doing the same bad things over and over and over again. The second mock debate was a virtual repeat of the first. The third took place on Friday, September 14, after Obama had just returned from an emotionally wrenching ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, where he and Secretary of State Clinton had received the bodies of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three other Americans killed in Benghazi. He delivered his worst performance yet. His advisers wrote it off to a president preoccupied with bigger concerns.

  • • •

  “Let’s make the debate project the Manhattan Project of our campaign,” Beth Myers remembered Romney saying to her early in the year. “Let’s commit the resources. Let’s commit the time. Let’s have all the smartest people.” Romney wanted to be sure that when he walked into the debates, he would be as prepared as he could possibly be. Romney enjoyed debates and looked forward to them. “He’d probably get mad at me for saying that, but when you run for president there aren’t that many things that are intellectually challenging and exciting as one-on-one debates with your opponent,” she said. “He wanted to be ready, and being ready for Mitt means lots of preparation.”

  Myers assembled a core team: Chief strategist Stuart Stevens and policy director Lanhee Chen developed overall strategy. Jim Perry handled preparation of the voluminous briefing materials for the candidate. Austin Barbour, who was part of the media team, oversaw all the logistics. Ohio senator Rob Portman was chosen to play Obama in the mock debates. Other senior members of the campaign staff—Matt Rhoades, Bob White, Eric Fehrnstrom, Ed Gillespie, Peter Flaherty, Ron Kaufman—were brought in once the process began in earnest to help with the mock debates and strategy sessions. The core team first met with Romney on June 23 in Utah, more than three months before the first debate. “We had policy preparation, strategy preparation, and mock debates,” Myers said. “And we did enough of all of them.” Myers would give Romney briefing books before long flights, and he would spend his time on the plane digesting the material
. He didn’t memorize so much as he absorbed and recast the material. “He’s the kind of guy who really prepared for his exams at Harvard Law School [and] Business School, but also crammed at the end,” Portman said in an e-mail message to me. “So he did both. He took notes in our sessions and then he would synthesize comments people had made and consolidate his notes into a few points in his own writing.”

  Romney did sixteen mock debates overall, ten before Denver. The first ones took place the week after the Republican convention, as the Democrats were meeting in Charlotte. The Romney team decamped to Vermont, to the home of Kerry Healey, who was Romney’s lieutenant governor in Massachusetts. Over a three-day period, the Romney campaign staged five mock debates. Each night at dinner they had general discussions. On the first night, they discussed Obama’s strengths and weaknesses. The next night they put Romney under the microscope. Throughout the month of September, they were focused on developing a strategy for Denver. Particularly after the 47 percent video, Romney’s team saw the Denver debate as a new opportunity to present Romney whole to the voters. He could be the real Mitt, more thoughtful and compassionate, and more moderate than the Obama ads were saying. But they knew the most important goal was to go after the president’s record. “We needed to be ready for the first debate to be on attack on all issues and to have a counterattack,” Myers said. In the mock debates, Portman played a president on the attack, but as the debate neared, he cautioned Romney to be ready for a different Obama. “I thought it was important to prepare for a more aggressive Obama just in case,” Portman said in a message. “But I expressed my opinion that he would be playing rope-a-dope because he was being told by his people that he was ahead in the polls, which he was. He was probably plus eight in Ohio at that point,” Portman said. At this point, not many days before the Denver debate, the numbers everywhere were grim, thanks to the 47 percent comment. Matt Rhoades and company developed a turnaround plan. The first point of the plan was: Have a great debate.