The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Stevens had what he termed his “unified theory” of the Romney campaign. He called 2004 the first “post-9/11 election” and said the only way President Bush had won reelection was to make it a referendum on the war on terror. Similarly 2012 was the first “post-crash” election. Romney, as the only candidate other than Herman Cain who had been a CEO, would need to talk constantly about the economy. That was the strategy all season long, even after Romney, at his friend Bob White’s suggestion, hired veteran GOP operatives Ed Gillespie and Ron Kaufman for additional political heft and sought outside advice from media consultant Mike Murphy and other Stevens haters.

  Stevens was sure that all the abuse Romney was taking in the press would prove to be meaningless. He compared 2012 to 1992, when the George H. W. Bush White House underestimated Bill Clinton: “I can’t tell you how many meetings I sat in where they’d say, ‘Who is this fat fuck from Arkansas? He’s going to beat George Bush? Are you kidding me?’ ”

  Stevens believed that when the White House changed parties it went to the person most unlike the incumbent: vigorous Kennedy after dowdy Ike; Reagan’s sunshine after Carter’s malaise; Bush’s “honor and dignity” after Clinton’s scandals. Romney represented the sharpest break from Obama because he knew about business and how to create jobs. He was the only candidate who could talk credibly about the private sector launching companies. “If the question is about health care, we lose,” he said.

  In mid-2011 Stevens’s theory of the case was simple: Beating Obama would be “either easy or impossible” depending on the state of the economy. If unemployment fell significantly, Obama would win; if it stayed above 8 percent, he would lose. Voters consistently put the economy and jobs at the top of their list of concerns. Their take was, “It’s the economy and we’re not stupid,” Stevens liked to say. “More Americans lost their jobs under Obama than under any president in American history. End of story.” But was it? That the bulk of those job losses were in early 2009—the result of Bush policies—seemed to Stevens to be a quibble. He didn’t think voters were likely to spare the president any blame. If Chicago was betting on the maturity of voters to place Obama in historical context with Bush, Boston was betting on their ADD.

  Stevens thought Obama had only one way to survive in such a climate: Check into the Betty Ford Clinic of public opinion and issue a mea culpa. By acknowledging failure and asking for a chance to start over, the president might be able to appeal to the voters’ spirit of forgiveness. It had famously worked for Clinton after he was defeated for reelection as governor of Arkansas. McCain had played the remorse card so often that he sometimes seemed to be looking for some issue to prey upon the mercy of the public. The gratuitous advice to Chicago to apologize was ironic coming from Stevens, whose candidate wrote a book called No Apology. But he was adamant. Chicago “will do it. I can’t tell you when, but they will,” he said in mid-2012.

  Of course, for Chicago, Apollo 13 rules applied: Confession of failure was not an option. The president could acknowledge mistakes, especially in communications, and repeat “long way to go” platitudes, but to prostrate himself before the public would hasten exactly the Jimmy Carterization of his presidency that Boston sought. Stevens knew this, of course, but he kept trying to get a drumbeat for apology going in the press.

  Stevens argued that when the president went on the road and touted economic success stories at this battery plant or that biotech lab, he was doing victory laps. “It’s Mission Accomplished!” he shouted, conjuring Bush’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq on board an aircraft carrier. He charged that Obama was “uniquely blocked” in acknowledging disaster: “It’s like a hospital kills a lot of patients and they say, ‘Not everyone died.’ Or the 1988 Dukakis campaign after Willie Horton saying, ‘Most prisoners on parole don’t kill.’ ”

  Stevens believed that Obama was presumed guilty and had to prove to the voters that he was innocent. Chicago’s belief that the president’s likability would prove decisive was a fantasy. “They think this is an eHarmony.com election,” Stevens said. “We think it’s a monster.com election.” Everything would turn on who could find you a job.

  The message discipline was impressive_00 d. Every press release on the economy had not just “Believe in America” but “Obama Isn’t Working,” a slogan borrowed from a Tory campaign in Great Britain that included a Photoshopped picture of a long line in front of what was described as an “unemployment office.” If Boston was responding to something Obama had said, the Romney home page would feature a picture of Hillary Clinton with her line from 2008: “Shame on you, Barack Obama!”

  Stevens’s goal was to impose a Depression-era context on the race. When Obama called the anemic May 2011 jobs numbers “bumps in the road,” Stevens, the off-season writer, retorted, “If John Steinbeck were alive, he’d be writing about those ‘bumps’ as human beings.” He compared the “bumps in the road” comment to McCain’s “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” gaffe of September 2008. But he was overreaching. His first ad for Romney, in November 2011, showed a clip of Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’ll lose,” the point supposedly being that Obama didn’t want to dwell on the economy. But the clip, wrenched out of context, was Obama quoting McCain in 2008. The press called Romney on it, and a ticked-off candidate demanded to review every future statement from his campaign, which slowed down the volume of video releases and ads. It was an early sign that playing loose with the truth would get you busted by fact-checkers in 2012.

  The problem for Romney and Stevens was that they had no Plan B. The great corporate planner and his wily strategist had no strategy for winning if the economy got marginally better or Obama attacked, which they knew he would eventually. Worse, Boston felt no need to paint a positive, humanizing picture of their candidate.

  IF THE CHICAGO subculture was the Cave, with its twentysomething analytics experts, the equivalent in Boston was the editing suite that Stevens built in-house for the fiftysomething (or sixtysomething) team he called “Mad Men.” Axelrod leaped on the moniker, accusing Romney of being in a “time warp.” But Stevens said he was out to find the best ad men in the country, to “get the speed onto the field.” Rather than hogging most of the work for himself and Schriefer, he assembled a group modeled on Reagan’s famous 1984 “Tuesday Team,” which produced a memorable convention film and legendary spots (“There’s a Bear in the Woods”) that were brilliantly narrated—often while drunk—by the late Hal Riney.

  Nearly three decades later, Tom Messner, a Tuesday Team member who originated the idea for Reagan’s iconic “Morning in America” ad, was one of Stevens’s Mad Men. So was James Dalthorp, who coined “The Ultimate Driving Machine” for BMW, and Jim Ferguson, the campaign’s creative director, who thought up “Beef—it’s what’s for dinner.” With his long white hair, ever-present Parliaments, and 1970s tattoos, “Fergy” looked like an aging member of Hell’s Angels. When he signed on to Bush’s 2004 reelect campaign he traveled to Kennebunkport, where he told Bush, “Look, if I do this, will I have to worry about pictures of a corkscrew up my ass appearing in some magazine?” Bush laughed and said, “If you got ’em, I’d like to see ’em.” In 2011 Fergy had noticed a news story about an Iowan laid off from his job at a grain elevator w partner, Russ Schriefer, 81N earlyho could find only part-time work as a grave digger. The story made him cry, and Boston thought it would do the same for voters when turned into an ad.

  It didn’t. The Mad Men weren’t breaking through the clutter with their spots. Neither were Chicago’s TV ads, but Boston’s real contempt was reserved for the spots made by the pro-Romney super PACs. The Mad Men liked to point out that Rove was a direct-mail guy in a world where direct mail was nearly dead and that he had no business making decisions about which TV ads should run. One pro-Romney super PAC ad, in heavy rotation in May, offended their sense of craft, especially the decision to have the woman in the spot describing her problems in the Obama economy played by an actress.
“With all the unemployed women, they use an actress!” one complained. “It’s like a Vietnam ad in 1966 using an actor instead of a real soldier.”

  The Mad Men laughed at the billionaires who paid second-raters top dollar to produce subpar ads. “Those who can, do [congressional, gubernatorial, or presidential] races. Those who can’t, do IE,” one said, referring to the independent expenditure ads produced by super PACs. “They’re not doing races because they can’t win races. Fucking great idea: Get people who can’t win races and give them $200 million to spend. Wonderful.”

  Even as the pro-Romney super PACs helped destroy Gingrich’s campaign, Boston felt handicapped by them. Dan Senor, a senior aide and foreign policy adviser who had served as the Bush team’s spokesman in Iraq, compared super PACs to uncontrollable drunks in a saloon. Stevens’s analogy was to a newspaper being told what story it had to put on the front page. He rejected the notion that super PACs could do the campaign’s dirty work without blowback to the candidate for going negative. The campaign, he said, had survey data showing that viewers assumed that all super PAC ads were Romney ads, even though Romney didn’t appear in the spot to say, “I approve this message.”

  The Romney campaign and the pro-Romney super PACs weren’t allowed by law to coordinate, and they didn’t; no one wanted to have to hire lawyers after the election. In fact a schism developed between them. Boston was furious to learn that the Koch brothers scheduled their billionaires conclave in San Diego on the same June weekend the Romney campaign was bringing campaign officials, policy experts, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, and even a few journalists (Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard) to rub shoulders with rich donors and the candidate in Park City, Utah. When the Kochs refused to change the date, it was a sign that they weren’t going to take their lead from Romney, whom they didn’t much like in the first place.

  BOSTON’S DIGITAL DIRECTOR, Zac Moffatt, believed that it wasn’t necessary to match Chicago point for point, just to pick five or six things in digital and do them well. The main goal was “to separate motion from movement.” Motion was about fads—say, live-tweeting every event. Was this really necessary? He noted that when Obama’s kickoff rally in Columbus, Ohio, didn’t fill the arena, Twitter ate the president’s team alive with no need for Boston to weigh in. “You can build a lot of stuff and get marginal return,” he said.

  This was rationalizing a severe competitive disadvantage. Chicago had been building digital capacity for six years, while Boston decided it partner, Russ Schriefer, o,Pa couldn’t afford it. In April 2011 Alex Gage, the founder of TargetPoint Consulting, a Republican opinion research firm that pioneered the use of consumer data in politics, approached the Romney campaign. Gage’s firm had begun using the term microtargeting in 2000. (He later learned it was originated by the medical profession for laser surgery.) He had compiled opinion research for Republican candidates from Gerald Ford in 1976 to Romney in 2008, and after noticing Obama job postings for data scientists, he saw what he called a “data arms race” coming. So he went to Boston and pitched “Romney Abacus,” which he described as a centralized voter contact database not unlike what Chicago was building. The project would need to be located in Salt Lake City, he said, because the data scientists in Boston and Silicon Valley were almost all Democrats, an indication of the “geek gap” (Democrats had many more of them) that harmed GOP recruitment of brilliant techies.

  But that wasn’t the immediate problem. Gage, whose wife, Katie Packer Gage, was Romney’s deputy campaign manager, knew the fate of Romney Abacus when he saw the distracted Boston high command diddling their smart phones during the meeting. They were like most people, suspicious that the Big Data talk was mumbo jumbo. Stevens, who monitored Twitter obsessively but didn’t tweet himself, liked to remind people that the quants on Wall Street never saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming. He and his colleagues were in no mood to spend a couple of million dollars experimenting with analytics. Romney himself never even heard the presentation.

  The campaign had reason to be skeptical of the GOP consultants. It was already paying an eye-popping $33 million to what was known as the “FLS Mafia,” a reference to a company called FLS Connect (whose partner, Rich Beeson, was Romney’s political director), and a sister firm called TargetedVictory, cofounded by Zac Moffatt. The latter was among nine Republican organizations on a single floor in a single office building located at 66 Canal Center Plaza in Alexandria, Virginia, which the conservative blogger Erick Erickson called the “locus of evil” in the Republican Party. Erickson thought they were rip-off artists whose only competence lay in fleecing candidates. Rove’s Cr and Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney super PAC run by former Romney aide Carl Forti, were on the floor, as well as outfits with names like Digital Franking and Americans for Job Security. It wasn’t clear what any of these consultants and super PACs did to actually help Romney get elected. They spent a lot of time consulting lawyers to make sure they violated no campaign finance laws when they ate lunch together. Only much later did they realize that not only were they allowed to coordinate, they should coordinate. But by then it was late in the game and their clashing messages had already squandered millions. None of these firms delivered anything resembling the media work in Chicago of Jim Margolis and Larry Grisolano or the analytical work of the geeks in the Cave.

  The closest to the latter was Alex Lundry, a data scientist on leave from Alex Gage’s firm to help out in Boston. But the Romney campaign was never data-driven. Lundry was like the lonely commander of the Alamo watching Santa Anna’s vast army coming over the horizon. Where Chicago had fifty-four geeks building and analyzing models, Boston had only ten data scientists. The campaign did some good Twitter analysis, and Lundry borrowed TargetPoint’s National Dialogue Monitor, which built fever charts that incorporated every mention of a candidate by hundreds of media outlets. But that tool just confirmed what Stevens and the others didn’t want to hear: that Romney’s reputation was tak partner, Russ Schriefer, ors small ing a beating in mid-2012.

  Boston produced no original data products and was always playing defense against Chicago’s Optimizer, which it tried and failed to reverse-engineer. Without its own Cave-like modeling, Boston was flying blind, unable to make full use of the RNC’s voter file and vulnerable to the faulty definition of “likely” voters that afflicted Gallup and other pollsters. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, fell into a similar trap. His projections relied on 2004 and 2010 turnout models but lightly weighted 2008, when Republicans lost. That meant that Boston would have a skewed view of the race all the way to Election Day.

  Moffatt argued that the other side could have the best database in the world but it wouldn’t make any difference if it had the wrong message. He conceded in June that the Dashboard database reportedly being worked up by the Obama team would be cool. But the advantage of, say, having canvassers with special handheld devices (later largely abandoned by Chicago) seemed overblown to him. A canvasser could only hit around forty-five doors a day and talk to about twelve people, handhelds or not. What Moffatt didn’t realize was that the efficient Obama field team was talking to the twelve they needed and ignoring the rest.

  JUNE 1 WAS a bad day for the economy but a good day for Boston. The May jobs report showed only sixty-nine thousand new jobs, and the March and April figures were revised downward. Axelrod traveled that day to Boston to give a fiery speech at the state capitol castigating Romney’s record as governor. The idea was to juice the line of attack focused on how Massachusetts was forty-seventh out of fifty states in job creation under Romney. But the event was a fiasco. He was met by festive pro-Romney hecklers sent from Romney’s Commercial Street headquarters who drowned out his awkwardly delivered message. One GOP protester blew bubbles; another, a former Rhodes scholar, dressed in a space suit left over from when the Romney campaign was ridiculing Gingrich for his space colony reveries, denounced Obama’s “astronomical” deficits.

  Stevens respected Axelrod’s work in 2008, but now he went
out of his way to trash him. He emailed that Axelrod had “an obsession with Romney that is verging on the DeNiro character in Taxi Driver.” He chose to believe a bogus story about Axelrod being present in national security briefings and pointed to focus groups showing that he was less popular than Donald Trump, who Stevens said had standing not just with the conservative base but with blue-collar voters and fans of his TV show. That night, Stevens emailed the author:I

  When is Obama going to acknowledge the incredible human tragedy that has unfolded under his administration? More poverty, more unemployed, more homes lost. . . .

  This race won’t be close . . . but forget that, what about his legacy? Axe has become a cross between Haldeman and Baghdad Bob.II

  Stevens said that Chicago staffers, blinded by their hatred of Romney, failed to see that people didn’t care about his dog Seamus being strapped to the roof of his car (reprised by always said the same thing: 00 dNew York Times columnist Gail Collins in every column that referred to Romney and noted in almost every Chicago focus group). “They think it’s a Travels with Charley election,” he said, referring to the John Steinbeck travelogue about his crosscountry trip with his dog. “We think it’s a Grapes of Wrath election.”

  The one-liners in the middle of the night just kept on coming: “For the president of the United States to ask ‘What’s my narrative?’ is right up there with Dustin Hoffman asking, ‘What’s my motivation?’ when he’s a tomato at the top of Tootsie,” Stevens said later that night by phone. He argued that for Obama to ignore the unemployed while he sought his place in history by pushing health care reform was “arguably criminal. It’s like condemning all those people to misery.”