The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Republican presidential candidates were struggling to replicate Bush’s success in consolidating the party’s conservative base while facing a broader electorate that had lost faith in the party’s leadership. And while the nation faced immense challenges and hungered for a new direction, the Republican Party was failing to offer clear political choices. Even from within its own ranks, critics complained that their party and the conservative cause were out of ideas.

  “I think the Republican Party has no particular focus at the present time,” Robert S. Walker, who had been a key Gingrich lieutenant and Pennsylvania congressman, told us. As he watched the campaign unfold, Walker was bluntly critical of his party. “During the Reagan era, we knew we were for economic growth through reducing the amount of government impact on the economy. So taxes were lowered and we cut back on regulations. We were for strong national security, defined as winning the Cold War. Then something else began during the Reagan era. That was the advent of social conservatives of the Christian right that became an essential part of the coalition that drove the social agenda of the party.” He too viewed the legacy of George W. Bush as a negative for Republicans in 2008. Polls showed Bush was defined by major mistakes: mismanagement of the war in Iraq and mismanagement of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Walker focused in particular on the effects of Katrina. “What I think Katrina proved more than anything else is that government, at all levels, has become dysfunctional,” Walker said. “People lost faith in Bush’s ability to manage: ‘Oh, he can’t even handle a storm in New Orleans.’”

  Republican candidates had to make the case that the unpopular record of their party, and their president, would not keep them from winning in 2008. That required attracting more than movement conservatives “looking for Reagan.” It meant demonstrating the Reagan magic could still create a new majority coalition. If they could do that, despite their long odds, they just might win one more for the Gipper.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Prisoner of War

  “I would much rather lose a campaign than lose a war.”

  —McCain, on the threat his support for the Iraq war posed to his candidacy

  In a party struggling for its identity, John McCain was always an uncomfortable front-runner. He was fit neither by constitution, temperament, nor instinct to run at the head of the pack. McCain had always seemed more suited to the maverick role of 2000, a politician who relished bumping up against the power of President Bush and the Republican establishment. “In 2000 it was a necessity,” he told us in the spring of 2008. “We were the outsider. We didn’t have the financial base. We didn’t have the political base. Everybody thinks I chose to be a maverick. I didn’t have a choice. By the time we got into [the campaign in] 1999, Governor Bush had done a masterful job, along with [Karl] Rove and his team, of basically sewing up the Republican establishment. Of course [mine] was an outsider kind of campaign. And I think I was suited to it. But it wasn’t ‘Hey I think I’ll run as an outsider.’ I competed for those establishment folks. Most of them had signed on to President Bush.”

  In 2008 he needed a wholly different approach. As his friend Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, often said, McCain had to learn to make the transition from being the leader of a movement to the leader of his party. Though he had quarreled frequently with the president, cooperated regularly with the Democrats, and often irritated his conservative colleagues in the Senate and House, John McCain would now try to become the candidate of the Republican establishment. “We started [going after] the establishment and planning on raising a lot of money and running that kind of campaign which is generally successful,” McCain told us.

  John Weaver, his chief strategist at the time, described the game plan as one that every successful candidate had used since Richard Nixon launched his comeback in 1966: “Move him around the country, raise money, do everything you can for the party first. Meet as many of the key donors and bundlers that the president had that we had little relationship with. Meet and develop as allies as many of the top operatives and volunteer leadership around the country that the president had and governors and whatnot. That was our goal . . . and I think we were very successful.”

  Resistance to a McCain candidacy among establishment Republicans began to soften with every tick down in Bush’s approval ratings. McCain began his courtship of the party establishment at a time when Bush was riding high. But rising unhappiness over the war in Iraq, signs of economic distress, and a backlash over the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina encouraged a reassessment of McCain among those who had viewed him with great skepticism. He seemed to be the only Republican who might be able to defeat Hillary Clinton. A prominent conservative Republican governor said privately, “If my party believes we’re going to lose this presidential election because of the dynamics, because of incumbency, because of Iraq, because of the economy, we have a hole card and that’s John McCain. We may not like McCain-Feingold, we may not like his view on this or this, but if we want to win the election for the good of the country, John McCain’s the guy. He can beat her.”

  As McCain courted Bush fund-raisers and key supporters around the country, his advisers began to lock down experienced Republican operatives who had guided Bush’s campaigns. Almost every week, Weaver lunched with somebody from Bush’s 2004 team, gathering intelligence on how they had operated or trying to recruit them to join McCain’s campaign. Through those months, the McCain team gained a greater appreciation of the machinery and particularly the discipline that had made Bush successful in his campaigns. “It firmed up our view of how disciplined a campaign they had run—which is so totally alien to our world,” Weaver said. “Our goal was to try to bring some of that discipline to John’s world.”

  Though McCain was considered the nominal front-runner, he actually trailed Rudy Giuliani in national polls of Republicans. Giuliani was a rare superstar within the party, “America’s Mayor,” as he liked to be called, a hero to many for his response to the 9/11 attacks. Time magazine had named him “Person of the Year” over President Bush, and that celebrity status helped push him to the top of the Republican field. But if McCain was an unlikely front-runner, given his strained relations with the Republican base, Giuliani was an even more implausible nominee—a socially liberal New Yorker seeking to take over a party dominated by southerners and evangelical Christians. Giuliani was a true conservative in many respects. His economic philosophy tilted sharply toward supply-side theories. His years as a mob-busting prosecutor and his crackdown on crime as mayor earned him a reputation as a law-and-order politician. On national security, no one in the field, save possibly McCain, was so outspoken about the need to stay on offense—or talked more about the damage to the country’s security that could occur if a Democrat were elected in 2008. Democrats in power, he said, would “wave the white flag” in Iraq, strip back the Patriot Act, reduce electronic surveillance, and soften the administration’s interrogation policy. “We’re going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we’ll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense,” he told a New Hampshire audience. A Democratic president would mean a prolonged war on terror that likely would cost the country the lives of many more of its own citizens. But even with that message there were doubts that he could overcome resistance to his support for abortion rights, gay rights, and gun control. The polls notwithstanding, Republican insiders were doubtful.

  For months Giuliani seemed ambivalent about running for president. As other candidates recruited their teams and reached out in the early states, Giuliani spent much of 2006 running in place. He campaigned for other Republican candidates but took few of the necessary steps to build on his attributes. McCain advisers worried less about Giuliani than other potential foes. “Frankly I didn’t care if Rudy ran or not,” John Weaver told us. “We thought he might but we didn’t know for sure.” McCain and Giuliani admired one another and considered each other friends. Weaver said, “At one point in ’06 McCain and I had din
ner with Rudy and Judy [Giuliani’s wife] and Tony Carbonetti [one of Giuliani’s closest confidants] here in Washington at Mr. K’s just to make sure of the line of communication. Both sides were playing a little bit of chicken with the other.”

  Behind the scenes, Giuliani was moving steadily toward a candidacy, evidenced by a detailed strategy memo prepared in the fall of 2006 that fell into the possession of the New York Daily News. The document outlined plans to try to raise $100 million in 2007. Giuliani recruited as his campaign manager Mike DuHaime, who had served as political director at the Republican National Committee. He signed up the Tarrance Group, one of the party’s leading polling firms. The firm’s lead partner, Ed Goeas, described a path to the nomination predicated on an analysis that in all the early states there were enough Republicans who did not see Giuliani’s abortion position as disqualifying. On February 5, 2007, to quell the doubters, Giuliani filed his declaration of candidacy and appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. “I’m in this to win,” he said, in words almost identical to the other prominent New Yorker in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton.

  The only other prospective candidate who had done anything comparable to McCain in trying to build a campaign was Mitt Romney, and he approached the task with the same single-mindedness that had marked his business career. He was highly regarded because of his success in the business world and for salvaging the scandal-tainted 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. His assets included good looks, a large and handsome family, a tremendous work ethic, the energy to outhustle his opponents, and a résumé that could be employed to sell him as a fresh face at a time the country wanted change.

  Romney’s father, George, also had been a successful businessman turned politician. He served ably as governor of Michigan and in 1968 sought the Republican presidential nomination. His campaign faltered when he said he had been brainwashed by the generals in Vietnam, but his reputation as a devoted public servant survived. So the younger Romney had politics in his blood. He challenged Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994 and ran a spirited race, until Kennedy demolished him in one of their debates. He came back eight years later to run for governor, this time successfully.

  By the middle of his first term, he concluded that a reelection campaign and the burdens of executive office could diminish rather than enhance his prospects for winning the Republican nomination. He decided to forgo a second term in Massachusetts in favor of a full-time run for the White House. While still in office, he used the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association as a platform to travel around the country, meet prominent Republican officials and donors, and begin to build a national political network. Through much of 2006, he and McCain competed fiercely for talent as they constructed political teams in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida.

  Though Romney attracted considerable attention from the press and from a small circle of Republicans, he was little-known nationally. As Giuliani and McCain topped the polls, he languished in single digits. To demonstrate his potential—to show he belonged in the top tier with the other two—he decided to show his strength financially. In early January 2007 he staged a day of national fund-raising in Boston, calling in wealthy friends like eBay’s Meg Whitman to contact their wealthy friends. By the end of the day, he had $6.5 million in donations and pledges.

  Romney began the race with a balance sheet that included liabilities almost as great as his assets. He was a one-term governor from one of the most liberal states in the nation. He was a devout Mormon in a party whose evangelical wing viewed the Mormon religion with something between skepticism and hostility. He had taken positions in Massachusetts that were anathema to the conservative base, particularly on abortion and gay rights. Running against Kennedy in 1994, Romney had declared himself a supporter of a woman’s right to choose on abortion and claimed he would do more for gay rights than Kennedy. Then he changed positions on abortion. A year before he launched his presidential candidacy, he tried to explain his evolving views to several Washington Post reporters. Columnist Ruth Marcus, who had grilled him that day, later described his explanations as “baroque circumlocutions.”

  The McCain campaign, sensing an opportunity to stop Romney even before he could get launched, stoked the story line that Romney was an opportunist and a flip-flopper. A video of Romney from 1994 surfaced that showed him defending abortion rights. The nascent Romney campaign was overwhelmed by the barrage of criticism and bungled its efforts to counter it. Campaign manager Beth Myers told us later, “At the beginning of the campaign, people didn’t know much about Mitt Romney. But if they did know him, that’s what they knew about him. Our challenge was to make sure they got to know more.” It was not a good place from which to launch a candidacy.

  Romney formally announced in February at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, rather than in Massachusetts. He cast himself as a doer, not just a dreamer, who had managed large enterprises, and as an outsider who would shake up the capital. “I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by a lifelong politician,” he said. “There have been too many deals, too many favors, too many entanglements, and too little real-world experience managing, guiding, leading.” If Republicans wanted competence, he would be that candidate.

  One issue above all symbolized the difficulty McCain would face as he tried to hold his old supporters among the Independents and moderates while attempting to mollify, if not consolidate, the establishment conservatives. That was Iraq. McCain had managed to find the most politically uncomfortable position imaginable, and his discomfort was plain whenever he talked about the war.

  McCain had charted his own course. He was one of the strongest advocates for going after Saddam Hussein when Bush launched the invasion in March 2003. But only months after U.S. forces toppled the Iraqi dictator and his regime, McCain became a critic of what he believed was gross mishandling of the aftermath—and the lack of troops necessary to finish the job. Before the Council on Foreign Relations in November 2003, he said, “President Bush speaks frequently of the need to take the offensive—in the war on terror—but in Iraq we too often appear to be playing defense. The simple truth is that we do not have sufficient forces in Iraq to meet our military objectives.”

  In the spring of 2004, when the scandal over the Abu Ghraib prison broke, McCain excoriated Donald Rumsfeld in public hearings before the Armed Services Committee, demanding explanations. After campaigning coast-to-coast for the president’s reelection, he renewed his attacks on the defense secretary. In an interview with the Associated Press, he was asked whether he had confidence in Rumsfeld’s leadership. “My answer is still no. No confidence,” he said. He stopped short of calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation, saying that decision was a presidential prerogative. But he never flagged in his advocacy of a policy of stay the course. “We cannot afford to lose,” he said.

  By late 2006, McCain faced a wholly different political reality, as the country turned against Bush and the war and support for withdrawing troops increased. One scene vividly captured his predicament. Ten days before the midterm elections, he came to Connecticut to campaign for two Republican House members in difficult races. One was Christopher Shays, who had supported the Iraq war and still did. But in the face of a serious challenge, he spent the autumn voicing public reservations to a constituency that had soured on the president’s policies. McCain had just spoken at a fund-raiser for Shays and now they were on their way to a public rally. McCain sat motionless in the front passenger seat, sunglasses covering his eyes. Shays sat directly behind him, hunched forward and talking rapidly into McCain’s ear, trying futilely to explain his now tortured stance on the war. “I just want you to know my position,” Shays said plaintively. McCain was unresponsive as Shays chattered on, until finally, with a tone of exasperation, he ended the conversation: “Like I said, there are no good options.”17 Flying back to Washington that evening, he acknowledged that the war put his political aspirations at risk. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he to
ld us.

  The day after the midterm elections, Bush dismissed Rumsfeld. In his place he nominated Robert Gates, a veteran of his father’s administration. On December 5, Gates appeared on Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearings. Asked whether the United States was winning the war, he replied, “No, sir.” The United States was neither losing nor winning, he said; the next year or two would be critical in determining the outcome.

  A day later, the ten-member Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, issued its long-awaited report. The bipartisan panel proposed a new policy that was seen as a repudiation of the president. The report was interpreted as a triumph of the foreign policy realists over the neocons and ideologues around Bush. The group said a short-term infusion of troops might be needed, but what captured the headlines was a call for a timetable for withdrawal. “The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.”

  Praise for the report seemed to offer Bush cover for a retreat from a war policy widely judged a failure. McCain, a lone voice in opposition, sharply criticized the panel’s findings. Once again he called for more troops to be sent into battle. “There’s only one thing worse than an overstressed Army and Marine Corps, and that’s a defeated Army and Marine Corps,” he said. “We saw that in 1973 [in Vietnam]. And I believe that this is a recipe that will lead to, sooner or later, our defeat in Iraq.”