The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  His path to the nomination was obvious, though difficult. He was the southern candidate the field had lacked after Tennessee’s Bill Frist and Virginia’s George Allen forfeited their chances of running. (Like others, he underestimated Huckabee.) He needed to win South Carolina; to get that far, he would have to finish a strong second in Iowa. Instead, he ran a no-state strategy, a campaign marked by lack of energy or clear commitment on his part.

  Bob Haus, a veteran Iowa Republican operative who was part of the Thompson team, recalled his frustration when Thompson abruptly canceled a long-scheduled hunting trip in Iowa with members of the National Rifle Association board that had been set up as an ideal photo-op. He said Jeri Thompson and others did not want Thompson worn out before a big speech that night. Later that weekend, Jeri told Haus that she objected to some of the questions she and Thompson had gotten at a meeting with activists. She said her husband intended to run a different kind of campaign. Haus said he told her, “This is what all candidates have to do. I summarized by saying, ‘Mrs. Thompson, you and the senator have to submit yourself to this process or this process will humble you.’ It was the last time she ever spoke to me directly.”

  E-mails from inside the campaign, provided by Thompson staffers after the campaign ended, show the degree of frustration many of them felt trying to get Thompson to do even the most basic campaign activities. In the late fall, a staffer at headquarters e-mailed a staffer in Iowa, noting that Huckabee was doing six events the next day and Ron Paul three. The reply read, “We? Are doing 0. Zeeeroooh. Nada. Zilch. Nuttin.” On New Year’s Day, CNN was eager to book an interview with Thompson, but he wouldn’t budge. With the caucuses two days away, all the other candidates were running at full speed. Thompson had set aside the day to watch college football, then took a nap, according to two of his aides. His lone event was a half-hour stop at a home for veterans. There was an internal squabble over how far he would have to go to get to the CNN satellite truck for the appearance. The frustrated press staffer told his colleagues that CNN “thinks I’m an idiot.”

  Thompson resisted making phone calls to donors or even responding to developments on the campaign trail. For a campaign built on the concept of exploiting the new media, he was slow to grasp the demands of a 24/7 news cycle. When campaign advisers wanted to respond to breaking developments, one adviser said, “Fred’s response often would be, ‘Now hold on, they’re not going to dictate to us when we respond to things.’” Decisions that should have taken hours took days. The staff sometimes had to send proposed responses to the road and then wait for the candidate’s approval. One frustrated adviser said, “Literally something would happen on a Monday and we’d send the statement out to the road and like on Wednesday get an e-mail. The best is we’d get back a hard copy of it, ‘Approved.’”

  Toward the end of the Iowa campaign, Thompson was persuaded by a few old hands that the way to turn his candidacy around was to take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign playbook and deliver a twenty-minute talk (actual time was seventeen minutes) straight to camera. Lacy protested and thought he had stopped it. But a film crew was flown to Iowa to produce the video and a staffer delivered it to a television station. Other staffers frantically e-mailed one another trying to figure out whether the video had been killed. Lacy later told us, “Reagan was Reagan. Fred is incredible but there’s no other Reagan. It’s a different era. I just thought it was a total waste of time and it was.”

  When Thompson announced his candidacy, he surged to near the front of the pack. From there to the end, he experienced a slow but steady decline in his support, due in large measure to his own performance. His closest advisers argued later that he eventually became an effective candidate, but by then he had been written off. The coverage of his early trips left an indelible impression that his heart was not in the game. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times described Thompson speaking for twenty-four minutes in a small restaurant in Nevada, Iowa. When he finished, no one stirred. “Can I have a round of applause?” he asked plaintively.

  In late summer, Newsweek ran a cover story about Thompson with the headline “Lazy Like a Fox?” The message: Watch out for the wily Thompson. Months later, Politico’s Roger Simon wrote a column under the headline “Thompson, Lazy as Charged.”

  Lacy later concluded the campaign was doomed almost from the beginning, that few of the late mistakes mattered much. “He hadn’t been out on the trail for ten years and it took him a while to get back in the game,” one adviser said. “He needed time to get back in the groove again.” Thompson had promised a campaign of bold ideas, but they were smothered by the fact that he was not prepared to fight for the nomination. “We did not meet expectations from the beginning and we steadily declined,” Lacy said. “I think that’s because over time the voters didn’t think we measured up either as a candidate or a campaign.”

  Had Thompson been ready to enter the race when McCain stumbled, he might have found an audience and become a force. Instead, his lackluster campaign removed one more potential obstacle in the path of McCain’s resurrection.

  McCain was blessed by his opposition. In one way or another, all his opponents had made strategic or tactical decisions that helped McCain put himself back into the thick of the Republican race. McCain no longer pretended to be running a national campaign. Now every decision was made with one objective: Does it help or hurt his chances of winning New Hampshire? When Lindsey Graham begged for money for South Carolina, Salter told him, “The only thing that will cure McCain’s problems there is winning New Hampshire.”

  McCain doggedly continued to conduct town hall meetings and visited every newspaper editorial board possible—dailies and weeklies—in hope of winning their endorsements. With the help of Mike Dennehy, a New Hampshire-based staffer, he courted Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. The paper no longer possessed the power of earlier decades—a power often recklessly used to reward allies and punish opponents—but it remained the most important voice of conservatism in the state and a force in Republican presidential primaries. The newspaper had not endorsed McCain in 2000; his maverick conservative politics were at odds with its philosophy. But now, on December 2, in a front-page editorial signed by McQuaid, the Union Leader wrote, “We don’t agree with him on every issue. . . . What is most compelling about McCain, however, is that his record, his character, and his courage show him to be the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination.” The editorial also said, “Simply put, McCain can be trusted to make informed decisions based on the best interests of his country, come hell or high water.”

  By that time, McCain was beginning to move up in New Hampshire polls. In early December, Romney’s internal polling showed him at 34 percent in New Hampshire, with Giuliani second at 17 percent, and McCain third at 14 percent. Although Giuliani was beginning to fade, Romney’s advisers were not worried. His vote appeared solid; they doubted Giuliani would truly collapse. But by mid-December, the daily tracks showed a clear pattern. “All of a sudden, McCain comes back,” Alex Gage remembered. “The Phoenix rises.” Romney advisers decided to attack McCain. McCain stormed back, airing a television ad quoting the Concord Monitor, which had written a devastating editorial saying Romney should never be president and calling him a “phony.”

  The Romney campaign was now suffering from internal strife. His message was fuzzy. He did not seem authentic as a candidate and was still struggling to find a message. Was he running as a true conservative, an outsider, a Mr. Fixit ready to reform Washington? It was never clear. One conservative strategist volunteered to us late in the year that the more he saw of Romney, the less he liked him.

  Romney’s advertising team was split into dueling camps. He had started out with Alex Castellanos as his main media adviser. When McCain’s campaign collapsed in the summer, Romney successfully wooed McCain’s media duo, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, who also had produced ads for Bush’s two campaigns. The effo
rt at creative tension backfired, as the ad makers squabbled repeatedly about message and commercials. “It created a very difficult environment to manage the strategy and tactics. . . . They spent hours arguing,” Alex Gage later complained.

  The day after Christmas, Romney’s polls showed McCain had taken the lead. Giuliani had collapsed, and was heading toward single digits. “The environment got very good for McCain,” Gage said. “People in New Hampshire that had written him off, all of a sudden [saw it was coming] back together for him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Phoenix Rising

  “I’m past the age when I can claim the noun ‘kid,’ no matter what adjective precedes it. But tonight, we sure showed them what a comeback looks like.”

  —John McCain after winning New Hampshire

  The New Year opened with the nomination battle almost as confused as it had been at the start of 2007, although the landscape was more favorable than McCain could have dreamed when his campaign blew up six months earlier. All his rivals were struggling. Romney was in trouble in New Hampshire and pinned down in Iowa in a nasty fight with Huckabee. Huckabee had no clear path after Iowa. Giuliani had abandoned New Hampshire and the other early states and was staking everything on Florida; he was an increasingly irrelevant factor. Thompson had never gotten off the ground and could get no attention.

  Most of the media attention was focused on the Democratic race in Iowa, with Clinton, Obama, and Edwards rallying their supporters in the first days of January. But even as a sideshow, the Republican race provided fireworks and unexpected twists.

  Huckabee, now leading in Iowa, was weathering some of the toughest weeks of his campaign. He drew a rebuke from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after describing the Bush administration’s foreign policy as having an “arrogant bunker mentality.” He made a churlish comment about Romney’s Mormon religion, for which he apologized. There were new questions about gifts he had taken as governor of Arkansas and other ethical issues. But his supporters remained enthusiastic about a candidate whose message emphasized conservative values, economic populism, and a call to change the Republican Party. “You have an opportunity to do something completely different that would utterly confound the political ruling class in this country,” he told one audience a week before the caucuses.

  Romney, desperate to avoid defeat, lashed out at Huckabee. Ed Rollins, who had run Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and was Huckabee’s new national chairman, urged his candidate to fight back. Rollins, a former boxer, enjoyed a good political brawl. On December 30, Huckabee flew back to Little Rock aboard a chartered airplane, accompanied by Rollins, Chip Saltsman, and ad maker Bob Wicker. They filmed a commercial and prepared for a rollout the next day. The plan included a radio ad and new direct-mail brochure hitting Romney.

  The campaign had scheduled a press conference for noon at the Mar riott Hotel in downtown Des Moines, where it would draw a big media crowd. That morning, unbeknownst to his advisers, Huckabee had a change of mind. Barely an hour before the press conference, he announced he did not want to put the ad on television. Saltsman and Rollins were shocked. Huckabee told them, Saltsman recalled, “We started positive and I want to stay positive.” But he would go ahead with his press conference and, in a bizarre decision, show the ad to reporters. Huckabee stood against a backdrop that said, “Enough is Enough,” and announced his decision. “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said solemnly. Then, to derisive laughter, he proceeded to show the ad to the reporters. He left Des Moines to spend New Year’s Eve on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

  The national press hammered Huckabee that day, but in Iowa, particularly among Huckabee’s supporters, the decision not to succumb to negative campaigning proved popular. The next night he appeared at the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines for an exuberant rally that featured the actor Chuck Norris, Huckabee’s leading surrogate, and a rock and roll band that Huckabee and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough joined for several songs. It was clear that he was the Republican candidate with the energy in Iowa.

  McCain continued to make cameo appearances in Iowa. He flew in two days after Christmas, having won the endorsement of the Des Moines Register. Speaking with reporters, he played down expectations for the caucuses but said he felt good about his campaign. “The Comeback Kid is always uppermost in my mind,” he said. “I look forward to that name.” He left immediately for New Hampshire, but returned on the eve of the caucuses, traveling with three senators: Sam Brownback of Kansas, John Thune of South Dakota, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Though not a factor in the race in Iowa, McCain hoped his last-minute appearance might enable him to steal third place against the slumping Thompson.19 It was bitterly cold, but his headquarters office was overflowing and overheated as supporters waited for him to arrive. Graham offered testimonials, telling the audience, “Send him out of here with as much momentum as you can, and John, when you get to South Carolina this time, we’re going to close the deal.”

  McCain’s hopes depended on Huckabee’s ability to pull off an upset in Iowa. Romney had a talented Iowa team and was extremely well organized. But Huckabee once again proved that even in a caucus state, momentum trumps organization. On caucus night 120,000 people turned out for the Republican caucuses, exceeding everyone’s expectations. Sixty percent of those who turned out said they were evangelical Christians—far above anything Romney’s team had estimated. Huckabee won almost half of those voters while Romney managed barely a fifth, and Huckabee won the caucuses with 34 percent to Romney’s 25. McCain’s hopes for third fell short; he was edged out by Thompson. It didn’t matter. Huckabee’s stunning victory was overshadowed that night by Obama’s shocking Democratic triumph, but it damaged the only candidate, Romney, with a chance to defeat McCain in New Hampshire. Huckabee was jubilant. So was McCain. When McCain called to offer his congratulations, Huckabee thanked him and said, “Now it’s your turn to kick his butt.”

  After Iowa, Romney retooled his message. Piggybacking on Obama’s Iowa victory, he now presented himself as the change candidate, a Republican outsider who could shake up Washington. But he ran into a wall of opposition in New Hampshire.

  Over months of campaigning Romney had managed to offend most of his rivals. Now, at a debate at Saint Anselm College three days before the primary, they gleefully ganged up on him. Thompson took a shot, as did Huckabee, who accused Romney of supporting a timetable for withdrawal in Iraq. “Governor, don’t try to characterize my position,” Romney replied testily. “Which one?” Huckabee asked. Stung, Romney said, “You know, we’re wise to talk about policies and not to make personal attacks.”

  McCain delivered a sarcastic slap: “We disagree on a lot of issues,” he told Romney. “But I agree. You are the candidate of change.” The audience howled at the obvious reference to Romney as a flip-flopper. The next day, McCain offered no regrets for his rough handling of Romney. “We’ve had a flood of e-mails and calls saying, ‘Way to go,’ because there has been an inaccurate portrayal of my positions on issues in mass mailings and others, and, I mean, you’ve got to respond and I responded,” he said in an interview.

  By now, McCain was cautiously optimistic about his prospects. “Tempered confidence,” he told reporters. His aides were, as Mark Salter later put it, “cocky confident” about victory. “McCain was totally on his game, [the voters] were totally into him,” Salter said. McCain was in his element, touring the state on what was called the “Mac Is Back” tour. He drew overflow crowds. In some places fire marshals had to shut the doors. John McCain was loose and freewheeling, bantering with reporters as if it were 2000 again.

  Romney’s team openly rooted for Obama to attract a heavy Independent vote—still the core of McCain’s appeal in New Hampshire—to diminish their influence in the Republican primary and preserve his hopes of winning. But to no avail. On primary night, Hillary Clinton’s upset victory of Obama was the story that captured most of the attention, but no less remarkable, given all he had been thr
ough the previous six months, was McCain’s triumph in the Republican primary. McCain and Romney split the Republican vote, but McCain won Independents running away. With that showing, he achieved something that had seemed almost impossible when he held his post-implosion press conference in Concord the previous July. Aides could see the sense of satisfaction, the spirit of the survivor, in their candidate that night. “I’m past the age when I can claim the noun ‘kid,’ no matter what adjective precedes it,” an ebullient McCain said at his victory rally. “But tonight, we sure showed them what a comeback looks like.”

  The next contest was in Michigan. McCain had won there in 2000, but Michigan was Romney’s home state, and after two disappointing second-place finishes, he began to show his mettle as a campaigner. He and his wife were glum the night of New Hampshire, deeply disappointed by his failure to win either of the first two states. But they were not ready to give up; the Republican race was, in their estimation, still too unpredictable. Michigan’s battered economy dominated the campaign there and fit Romney’s profile. McCain, never comfortable talking about the economy, stumbled when he told voters that many of the jobs that had been lost would never come back, a realistic assessment that nonetheless sounded too pessimistic. Romney’s victory taught the McCain campaign a lesson. They regretted making such a strong stand in Michigan, because they enhanced Romney’s victory. They vowed to be more disciplined in their decisions.