by Balz, Dan
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The president left Washington on the morning of Sunday, September 30, and arrived a few hours later in Nevada for debate boot camp. Obama’s advisers presented him with a new strategy. The changing landscape—Romney’s erosion in the polls after the conventions and the 47 percent comment—had prompted a reevaluation of the plan they had settled on during the summer. Though they claimed otherwise, Obama’s advisers were, in Axelrod’s word, “seduced” by the new polls and by the new narrative of a race that had Obama firmly in command and Romney teetering on the edge of defeat. The debate team had concluded that the goals for Denver should be adjusted to fit the new state of the race. They no longer wanted Obama to be so aggressive. They recommended that he try to stay above the fray, to capitalize on the fact that voters liked him better than Romney. “The goal in this debate,” one adviser said, “is to not change that and not leave the people thinking their guy is a nice guy and our guy is an asshole, because if we can just keep this likability thing where it is, we’re going to win. So that colors your thinking about how aggressive you want to be in the debate, that colors your thinking about exchanges in the debate, that colors your thinking about how much conflict you want in the debate.” This adviser said there was another reason to urge Obama not to be on the attack. “You’re watching these practice sessions and when you turn Obama loose or when he goes after Romney, it’s horrible,” he said. Another adviser said, “Our assessment on the risk-reward, given where the race was, given what we thought we needed to get done in the debates, given how our candidate was performing, our assessment was to really just play it safe and to go into Denver and to try to deliver some message and talk about our plan, do some positive stuff, engage Romney on some issues but not blow it.” “What I didn’t want was peevishness,” Axelrod said. “I didn’t want caustic exchanges, and so we kind of warned him off of those, and in a sense he was left in no-man’s-land when he got out there.”
When his advisers presented Obama with the new plan, he disagreed with their recommendation. “We had a discussion with him about this aggressiveness thing and to his credit his instinct was that the strategy was wrong,” one adviser recalled. “His instinct was he needed to be more aggressive. He was right about that. . . . We explained to him that we thought, given where we were in the race, given our lead, given that likability was his strongest asset, that our strategy was not to be too aggressive in the debate, and he was like, ‘I don’t see how I’m going to win if that’s my strategy.’” Sunday’s mock debate was passable. Monday’s, however, was lousy. Obama seemed to be regressing. On Tuesday, after an outing to see the Hoover Dam, Obama returned for his final mock debate before Denver. This one went better than the previous night, more in line with Sunday’s. All three, an adviser later said, were better than his performance in the actual debate.
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Romney arrived in Denver on Monday night, after one final mock debate. In Denver he held a rally at which he received the endorsement of John Elway, the celebrated former quarterback of the Denver Broncos. His campaign was having trouble calibrating expectations. En route to Colorado, Kevin Madden had tried to downplay expectations, but a day earlier Chris Christie had set them sky high. “This whole race,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation, “is going to turn upside down come Thursday morning.” The day before the Denver debate, Romney got another confidence booster when he took a call from George W. Bush. Don’t worry, Bush told him. You’ll do just fine. The former president told Romney that he knew from his own experience how difficult first debates were for incumbents. He doubted that the president would be as prepared as he should be. He predicted Romney would emerge as the winner.
The morning of the debate, Obama and his advisers met for a final critique session before flying off to Denver. His advisers knew they were sending him into the first and most important of the debates unfocused and with an uncertain strategy. “We went into Denver not really with a strategy but with a hope,” one adviser said. “A hope that it would all kind of work out.”
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When the debate ended, Romney’s family joined him onstage. Ann Romney effusively praised his performance. Tagg gave his father a hug. “You were awesome,” he said. Romney said he wasn’t sure it was all that great. “You crushed him,” Tagg told his father “Well, I don’t know,” Romney said. It wasn’t until he walked back toward the holding rooms that he got the full sense of what he had done. Romney staffers lined both sides of the corridor, and as the candidate and his wife approached, they broke out into cheers and applause. In the spin room, Stuart Stevens, who had been the target of much criticism over the previous weeks, kept smiling broadly. He had argued for months that Obama’s failure to take ownership of his record would prove to be his biggest obstacle to reelection. He said the debate proved that. “I don’t think [Obama] had a particularly bad debate,” he said. “He has a bad record.”
Obama left the arena quickly and returned to his hotel, unaware of the post-debate commentary that was going on nonstop. A senior White House official recalled approaching him as he was walking into a room with family and friends, who were assembled for an anniversary party. “I remember being gentle, but I said, ‘The commentary has been pretty rough,’ and I just kind of introduced it, and it didn’t sink in at that moment.” When Plouffe saw him after returning from the spin room, Obama quizzed him about the reaction. “He said, ‘I just don’t understand,’” Plouffe recalled. “I had to say, ‘It’s not just the media. This did not go well.’” Obama began to watch and read some of the post-debate commentary. By the time Axelrod saw him, the president was beginning to come to terms with the night. “He said, ‘I gather the consensus is we didn’t do very well,’” Axelrod said. “I said, ‘It appears to be a consensus.’” Plouffe and Axelrod had been through moments like this. They were reminded of the night of the New Hampshire primary, when Hillary Clinton scored a dramatic upset that reshaped the nomination battle and guaranteed a long and brutal fight. “One of the great qualities of Obama is he gathers himself quickly after a setback,” Axelrod said, “and so we were up quite late, not him but the group, thinking through the next day.”
The next morning, the president asked another adviser whether she had seen the reruns. “I said I did look at it on television and I said it was really bad on TV and he said, ‘Why?’” the adviser recalled. Obama was more curious than defensive, still trying to understand better why the judgments were so harsh. “I told him about the split screen, which he did not know that there was going to be a split screen, and he was aware that he was looking down but he wasn’t aware of how the looking down would appear in contrast to Romney.” The adviser said Obama replied, “I’ve got to figure out how to deal with this Romney, if that’s going to be who he is.” He meant the Romney who had shown up in Denver as opposed to the Romney from the campaign trail. Obama had a rally in Denver that morning. The day was cold and raw, matching the mood inside his campaign, but the president delivered a fiery speech, filled with fresh lines written overnight. He was as energized in the chill Rocky Mountain morning as he had been passive the night before. But the harsh reviews and evident discouragement among Democrats dominated the coverage.
Klain flew back to Washington that morning. When he arrived he sent an e-mail to Axelrod and Plouffe, offering to resign from the debate team. Axelrod and Plouffe independently thought the suggestion was ridiculous and dismissed it out of hand. Later that evening, the president called Klain. What happened in Denver, he said, is my fault, no one else’s. Obama had asked Plouffe to get him a video of the debate. He called Plouffe on Friday night. “I get it,” he said. When the full team met the following week, Obama told them he wasn’t just going to do better in the next debates, he was going to win them. The following Friday, Robert Gibbs had lunch with the president. Gibbs could tell that Obama knew what he had done wrong, that he had pulled back too much and that he would be in a much better place
for the second debate. “He knew how poorly he had done,” Gibbs said. “He had to engage Romney. He had to debate. He knew.” Had the first debate not turned out as badly as it did, Plouffe said, “There’s no way we would have had a good second and third debate.”
In Boston, Romney’s team saw an immediate surge of energy around their candidate. “You would not believe the way the numbers changed literally overnight,” Newhouse said. “Literally overnight.” The campaign’s surveys always asked a question that gauged how recent news was affecting their impressions. Based on what they had heard or seen, did they have a more or less favorable impression of the candidate? “We had been minus-twenty on that, thirty-five/fifty-five, whereas Obama was dead even,” Newhouse said. And just like that, overnight the numbers flipped.” In Chicago, Obama’s team was monitoring the numbers just as closely. David Simas, the director of opinion research, kept watch as the Denver debate rippled through the electorate. When the first numbers came back, Obama’s margin had narrowed by a point and a half. Simas wondered, Is this the floor? The analytics team said they couldn’t tell yet. The next day the margin tightened again. Now Simas wanted to know something else: Who’s moving? The answer wasn’t yet empirically clear. By the third day, it was: Romney’s gains were coming almost entirely from Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. They had peeled off in September and now were enthusiastically coming home. Romney’s advisers believed they were seeing something broader and more significant.
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Whatever the numbers said, Obama’s team knew it had a perception problem and that the second debate could be even more important than the first. Obama had to reverse the impression left in Denver or the race might truly turn against him. A few days after the first debate, Obama again met with his debate team, who presented him with a new strategy. He could be aggressive almost with impunity and go after Romney at every turn. The team decided to concentrate more on the president’s style and less on perfecting his answers. His body language in Denver had cost him badly, and his advisers talked about how he could confront the challenger and stay on the offensive in the face of Romney’s attacks. Obama, who found so much of the stagecraft of debates distasteful, agreed with the recommendations. His only lament was that the second debate was more than a week away.
As he waited, the two vice presidential candidates met on October 11 at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. As a House member, Paul Ryan had never been in such a high-stakes debate, and he was nervous. Joe Biden had been debating for years and loved the verbal combat. Ryan had a capacity to memorize huge quantities of information and devoured the briefing books his team had put together. Biden was not a detail person, but his agility on a stage was well known. Even in 2008, when his presidential candidacy had never gained traction, his debate performances were always solid. Knowing the stakes of his debate with Ryan, Biden immersed himself in preparations. The day of the debate, the vice president’s plane landed in Kentucky, and as the motorcade was forming, he took a call from the president. He came out smiling and turned to one of his advisers and said, “I know we’re in trouble.” The adviser asked what he meant and said Biden replied, “I know we’re in trouble because the president just told me to be myself, and that’s the first time in four years he’s ever told me that.”
For Biden, “be myself” meant to be aggressive and to speak to the Democratic base, which was exactly what Obama’s team needed. Four years earlier, when he debated Sarah Palin, the advice had been the opposite: Be careful, be deliberate, don’t be too harsh, don’t act like a bully. After Denver, Obama needed Biden to reenergize the Democrats, whatever that took. That night, Biden followed the new game plan, with exaggerated expressions and gestures and interjections meant to show his disbelief or displeasure with much of what Ryan was saying. Ryan’s advisers had prepared him for this. Ted Olson, a solicitor general in the Bush administration, had played Biden as a boorish and sometimes obnoxious character. Biden drew some criticism, but overall he was judged the winner. He accomplished two things. One was to make the argument that the Romney people saw in Denver, the more moderate Mitt, was in fact not the real Romney, that the Republican nominee was the “severely conservative” candidate of the primaries and that Ryan only added more conservatism to the ticket. Equally important, he gave reassurance to the Democratic base. “Let me tell you something,” said one adviser. “What we did that night and where we were in the race and where we were with our supporters, between being too cold and too hot, there’s no question what risk we wanted to take, and we did a really good job of it.” Ryan’s advisers were happy that the congressman had kept his cool so well and made no mistakes that would cost the Republican ticket. But Biden had done what the Democratic base wanted and what the Obama campaign needed.
Obama’s team had learned some things from the first debate and the fallout afterward. One was that playing to the Democratic base was more important than appealing to undecided voters. The country was so polarized, and the undecided voters so few, that nothing was more important than giving every potential Obama supporter a reason to get out and vote. They realized that in this atmosphere, no one would be penalized for being too aggressive in the debates. They also concluded that 2012 was unlike 2008 in another way. The first debate in 2008 took place against the backdrop of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and an erratic performance by McCain in the days after. Looking steady and somewhat ponderous was good for Obama. But this was a different campaign. People wanted someone who they believed would energetically attack the country’s economic problems. Debates were clashes between candidates, not college seminars. Obama needed to show more life and fight. When the debate team had looked at the transcript from Denver, they found that Obama had actually talked for about four more minutes than Romney but had delivered, by his campaign’s count, roughly a thousand fewer words. Speak faster, Obama’s team told him.
All of this crystallized into a fresh strategy for Obama in the second presidential debate on October 16 at Hofstra University on Long Island. Hit Romney hard; don’t try to debunk his policy proposals, just attack them; don’t try to answer Romney if he claimed he wasn’t proposing a $5 trillion tax cut, attack the philosophy. Explain the choice and be the champion of the middle class. There was one inherent risk, at least according to the conventional wisdom of debates. The second of the three debates was in the town hall format, with questions from citizens on the stage. It was often assumed that attacking the other candidate in such a setting was difficult if not politically dangerous. The weekend before the Hofstra debate, Obama was in California for some fund-raising. While there, Bill Clinton cautioned him about punching too hard in a town hall debate. He reported this when he returned and began final preparations in Williamsburg, Virginia. His advisers persuaded him to dismiss the advice. “We had learned from our mistakes in Denver,” one adviser said. “We had learned that Twitter-sphere wasn’t really that interested in candidates being nice with one another, and our voters wanted to see him hit Romney hard and hit Romney on the 47 percent and bring all these attacks.” The campaign also developed a strategy for Twitter, encouraging supporters to send positive tweets. Plouffe said, “One of our goals for the second debate was within the first ten minutes to have you guys on Twitter saying, ‘Okay, Obama is better, he’s back.’ We need the press corps to say you’re off to a good start.”
Romney’s strategy was condensed into four bullet points in the campaign’s debate briefing book: “Meet the attacks from the president head on. Don’t just answer the question; speak to the questioner. Give specific contrast points; on each issue make sure you differentiate yourself from the president. Have the same Mitt Romney show up for second debate as first debate.” He arrived for the second debate with his team feeling he was as well prepared as he had been before Denver. But Obama was confident as well. In the locker room before the debate, he huddled with Axelrod and Plouffe. “I feel good about it,” Axelrod remembers him saying. “We�
�re going to have a good night.”
Romney was, if anything, even more aggressive in the second debate, interrupting the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, and jabbing hard at the president. His one memorable phrase, however, was when he talked about how he had worked hard to hire more women while he was governor. He said he had “binders full of women” from which to choose. But Romney faced a different Obama, and that made for a far different evening. The president stayed on the attack throughout. Toward the end of the debate, the Benghazi killings came up. “Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?” the president was asked by one of the citizens on the stage. Obama explained the steps he had taken after the killings and poked at Romney’s statements on the night of the attacks and the next day. When it was Romney’s turn, he accused Obama of being feckless in the face of terrorism. “There were many days that passed before we knew whether this was a spontaneous demonstration, or actually whether it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “And there was no demonstration involved. It was a terrorist attack, and it took a long time for that to be told to the American people.” Earlier that afternoon, Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, had pointed out to the debate team the exact words Obama had used in the Rose Garden the day after the four Americans had been killed. Obama had said it was an “act of terror.” The president and his team spent time preparing a response. When Romney was finished, Obama pounced. “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror.” Romney was incredulous. “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?” Obama replied dismissively, “Please proceed, Governor.” Romney continued: “I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president fourteen days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” Obama interjected, “Get the transcript.” Crowley stepped in. “He did in fact, sir. So let me call it an act of terror.” Obama said, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” “He did call it an act of terror,” she repeated.
