The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  As the summer began, Stevens was feeling especially good. He said publicly that now Romney could run the campaign he had been planning to run all along, focused on Obama’s failures to fix the economy. Privately he all but pitied the Obama campaign. He was sure it had wasted $25 million in May on spots that didn’t move the needle up in a single media market. After the election, Chicago’s decision to front-load its ads over the summer became a shorthand explanation of why he won. In fact Stevens was right that all of the early Obama ads barely affected the polls in an exceptionally stable race. But there was something ominous for Romney going on beneath the surface of the electorate in battleground states that wouldn’t be clear until after the election.

  Stevens placed his faith in right track/wrong track numbers. Only 26 percent of the public thought the country was on the right track, he said, which was why Romney would eventually win easily. The strangest thing of all, Stevens said, was that a president who had begun his career working with the unemployed on the South Side of Chicago wouldn’t even meet with them now. “Those people have become ‘the disappeared,’ ” Stevens claimed, as if they were Central or South American dissidents who simply vanished. He didn’t mention that Romney wasn’t venturing into the inner city either.

  Obama could talk about subjects other than the economy, but it wouldn’t matter, a confident Stevens said. The ammunition Chicago was saving was for naught. An ad reminding voters that Romney had money in the Cayman Islands? “It’s like showing up at the Tet offensive and saying, ‘Your shirttail is out.’ No one cares,” Stevens said. On this point, he would prove to be mistaken.

  Stevens’s theory was that this was not “a Seinfeld election,” a reference to Jerry Seinfeld pitching his pilot as “a show about nothing.” The 2012 contest was most definitely about something, and because it was so obviously about one issue, Romney had the luxury to lay off the ad hominems against Obama in favor of an advertising campaign featuring the patronizing “he’s a nice guy who isn’t up to the job” line of attack. This didn’t sit well with conservatives, who booed Romney at the Orlando Tea Party debate in 2011 for denying that Obama was a socialist. And it surprised Axelrod, who expected a vicious frontal attack.

  “When you buy a new car you don’t have to hate the car you’re trading in, you don’t have to admit that you made a terrible mistake buying that car four years ago,” Stevens said. “We don’t want to make you think you were a dumb motherfucker four years ago for supportingNational Youth Administrationcv Obama.” In this spirit, the RNC made an ad with the tagline “He tried, you tried—it’s OK to make a change.”

  AFTER THE ELECTION, Boston was criticized for not humanizing Romney more. But that may have been a futile exercise. In 2008 Romney ran an ad featuring Robert Gay, a former Bain partner who credited Romney with mobilizing the entire firm in a successful search for his missing fourteen-year-old daughter. In 2012 Restore Our Future, in a move that raised eyebrows among campaign finance watchers, bought time for the same heartwarming ad in Arizona and a couple other primary states. But it didn’t move any numbers. “It didn’t work because he didn’t need to be humanized,” Stevens said. He compared it to trying to make a wide receiver in football play center instead. Voters didn’t want to see Romney in another position, especially one that didn’t play to his strengths on the economy.

  The same logic led Stevens to explain away all the gaffes Romney made during the primary season: “News flash!—people already knew he was rich and didn’t care because they wanted to be rich, too.” It had ever been thus. Jackie Kennedy’s equestrian habits hadn’t hurt JFK—had in fact made the couple more glamorous—and Ann’s dressage horse being in the Olympics would be just fine. Romney’s awkward attempts to relate to the unemployed—“There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip”—were cringe-worthy but easy enough to avoid repeating. And these stories, even with YouTube, evaporated in a day or two for everyone but the Democratic base.

  Or so Stevens—and, by extension, Romney—believed. They aired no ads on the Olympics or good deeds in the Mormon Church or testimonials from Staples employees who had good jobs because of Romney. All of this would eventually come at the Republican Convention, but by then impressions had been allowed to harden. The Mad Men failed to understand that whatever the state of the economy, the character and humanity of the person who might assume high office is always of great significance.

  ERIC FEHRNSTROM, a senior Romney adviser, told CNN that after the primaries “everything changes” and it’s no longer necessary to worry about conservatives so much. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can try to shake it up and start all over again.” A media frenzy ensued, but once again Stevens dismissed the importance of the mistake. This election was all about Obama, who had said in 2009, “If three years from now, the economy is no better I’ll be a one-term president.” Boston was confident that any price Romney paid for Etch-A-Sketching would be small compared to Obama’s broken promise on the biggest issue of the day.

  Much of the GOP establishment thought little of Stevens’s strategy and began speaking out in early July. Rupert Murdoch, new to Twitter but loving it, weighed in first, tweeting that Obama’s Chicago team “will be hard to beat unless he [Romney] drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized that a “coasting” Romney campaign was “slowly squandering an_00 d historic opportunity.” The laser-like focus on economic conditions wasn’t cutting it, the newspaper said. “We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that ‘Obama isn’t working.’ Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that.” Bill Kristol wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard that “the campaign’s monomaniacal belief that it’s about the economy and only the economy and that they need to keep telling us stupid voters that it’s only about the economy, has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.” But the Journal and Kristol were delusional too. They and other conservative critics wanted Romney to lay out a clear agenda on taxes, spending, health care, and other issues—a suicide mission considering the strong support Democrats received on all those issues.

  Even as Romney got hammered all summer on Swiss bank accounts, his tax returns, and Bain, Stevens remained confident. Some campaign finance rules—like the one stipulating that, until the nominating conventions, campaigns could only spend money on TV ads that had been raised explicitly for the primaries—were hurting them over the summer but would soon be in the past. While Romney lacked the power of incumbency to rake in contributions (a huge asset for Obama), he made up for it with prodigious fundraising, spearheaded by the indefatigable Spencer Zwick, whose firms made more than $20 million off the campaign. Stevens got a chuckle over reporters complaining about Romney’s light schedule. He was spending most of his day raising money, nearly three-quarters of which would go for ads on CBS, NBC, Yahoo, and the other parent media companies of the campaign press corps.

  Boston liked the way the race was shaping up. By mid-July Obama had spent $100 million in advertising in swing states, and, while some polls showed marginal upticks, he had not gone over 50 percent in any state or built the lead Chicago had hoped for. But Stevens was unaware at the time of how much money Obama was putting into its field operation—and how effectively that money was being spent. Chicago had bet on the summer and Boston on the fall, when it expected to dominate the airwaves.

  Stevens knew that between the 8:1 spending advantage that Romney enjoyed among super PACs and the greater amounts of campaign cash that he raised in the spring and summer, Boston would have a financial advantage. Both sides agreed in July that the president would be outspent after Labor Day. The only question was how badly.

  FRIDAY, JULY 13 was an unlucky day for Romney. A story in the Boston Globe that made him look dodgy on the timing of his departure from Bain was taking him off message. His claim that he left Bain for the Salt Lake City Olympics in 1999 was critical to his avoidance o
f responsibility for the bankruptcies, layoffs, and outsourcing that Obama was emphasizing. Obama went on TV to reinforce the message t

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  A Message Built to Last?

  It sometimes seemed as if the president saw everything about political campaigns through basketball and poker. When faced with a setback, he liked to recall the 1991 NBA season, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls lost the first game of the finals to the Los Angeles Lakers on a three-pointer by Sam Perkins. Even the Chicago press wrote off the Bulls, who went on to win four in a row and launch a storied sports dynasty. Obama’s confidence could also take the form of a hoops metaphor. In February Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana asked him if he had what it took to beat Romney. At first the president seemed annoyed by the question, then he said his campaign would “block” Romney at every turn: “We’re the Miami Heat and he’s Jeremy Lin.”

  For most of 2011, “blocking” Republicans meant playing defense on taxes and budget deficits. Polls showed that independents wanted the president to focus on the deficit, which many of them viewed almost as a character issue. Plouffe and the president had tried to adjust accordingly. The result was even more delay in returning to a jobs agenda. But after the debt ceiling fiasco, Obama decided to move left and double down on the Democratic base. The phrase, which originally meant to double a bet in blackjack, was overworked now, applied to everything from doubling Haitian relief efforts to a Kentucky Fried Chicken sandwich with meat for buns. Obama used it twice in his 2012 State of the Union speech, proposing that the United States “double down on a clean energy industry” and praising other countries for “doubling down on education” as many states at home fired teachers. The president, a poker player, lik the twentieth century, nOKed the idea of prudent bets that could pay off big in the future.

  In his reelection campaign, this meant betting on the rapidly growing coalition of women, minorities, young people, and gays that was sticking with him, and worrying less about being a transformational leader who floated above politics. Given that composition of his base, it was natural that he would highlight issues like women’s health, immigration, student loans, and eventually gay marriage instead of chasing after a Grand Bargain and trying to woo independents with claims of fiscal rectitude. His economic message would stress fairness, not austerity.

  Romney too doubled down on his base, but he was forced to do so by the realities of the GOP. He had to bet on conservative cards to have any chance of being the Republican nominee. Politicians with fewer options win fewer hands. And the cards he played were consistently worse than the president’s, the bets riskier and less connected to the center of the action. Polls showed that the policy ideas that Romney advocated were much further outside the American mainstream.

  Of course, Obama was taking chances too. This was the first presidential campaign since Walter Mondale’s disastrous effort in 1984 in which a candidate boldly endorsed tax increases. It helped that Warren Buffett agreed. The billionaire’s New York Times op-ed piece, entitled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” made it harder to depict the president as an antibusiness populist, and it gave the president a line he would use throughout the campaign: “Warren Buffett’s secretary should not be paying a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett.” But Obama still had to convince low-information voters—people with better things to do than pay attention to politics—of his careful distinction between taxing the wealthy and taxing them. His victory depended on poor and middle-class Americans suspending their natural aspirations to be rich for long enough to notice that the game was rigged against them. The main conclusion of the series of Saturday political meetings the president began hosting in the Roosevelt Room was to “raise the stakes” in 2012. His legislative program, speeches, and messaging would all be directed at reminding voters that they faced a historic choice.

  The message about the stakes had begun not with Obama or his consultants but with the voters themselves. It was in the endless focus groups that Binder, Grisolano, and David Simas, an emerging talent who ran opinion research, began to hear the musings that eventually became the line “This crisis wasn’t created overnight, and it won’t be solved overnight.” This view reflected a maturity on the part of voters whose expectations had been lowered. But their anxiety also created a sense of urgency. The line “make-or-break moment for the middle class” that Obama used on the stump came straight from a white middle-aged woman in a focus group.

  It helped that he genuinely believed it. The president told friends that he might not be reelected, but he was going to go down fighting for what had brought him into politics in the first place. Harry Reid liked hearing Obama talk that way. He thought the president would lose his remaining credibility with Senate Democrats if he didn’t pivot to jobs, and thus was relieved when Obama called him the day after Labor Day 2011 to say he would be addressing a joint session of Congress on the need for a major jobs package. Everything in the $447 billion American Jobs Act that he championed around the country that fall—extending unemployment benefits, the payroll tax holiday, tax credits for hiring, road and bridge construction, modernizing partner, Russ Schriefer, Tea Party early schools—had been supported in the past by the Republican leadership.

  When Republicans predictably rejected the jobs bill, they looked like Lucy pulling away the football every time Charlie Brown tried to kick it. But the president didn’t care about seeming ineffectual. Throughout late 2011 and 2012 the point was to make the GOP look mean, out of touch, and not to be trusted with the power of the presidency. “Every election is the most important election in our history,” Obama liked to say at fundraisers. “But let me tell you, this one matters. This one matters. This one matters.”

  IT WOULD TAKE time to bring back the base. Many liberals were still sore that Obama had let Wall Street–friendly officials dominate economic policymaking and failed to prosecute bankers for fraud. They wanted Guantánamo closed (though there was no place to put the prisoners) and Bush-era torturers brought to justice. Despite the achievement of universal health care coverage after a century of trying, many progressives remained disappointed that Obamacare didn’t include a public option. Most of all, they insisted that he stop being passive and move on the offensive.

  With major legislation dead until the next election, Obama decided to double down and raise the stakes on classic progressive ideas. He traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, where on December 6, 2011, he delivered what his staff considered one of the most important speeches of his presidency. Osawatomie was the site of a famous Theodore Roosevelt address in 1912 outlining a progressive political philosophy Roosevelt called “the New Nationalism.” Obama had long admired Roosevelt’s pragmatic progressivism. A quote from TR, chosen by the president, was woven into his Oval Office rug: “The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.” Kansas was bright red, but it was also the home state of Obama’s white grandparents and it had helped connect him to the heartland in 2008.

  The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talked to Axelrod about Roosevelt, the subject of her next book. They agreed the analogy fit. Roosevelt was sensitive to the gap between Gilded Age fortunes and the rest of society. While his attacks on moneyed interests were sharper than anything Obama could get away with a century later, TR’s message resonated. “This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules,” Obama said in Osawatomie, echoing not just Roosevelt but Bill Clinton in 1992 and many of his own themes in 2008. Then he leaned into a line that came close to the kind of sound bite he normally disliked: “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

  In December, Obama got a chance to show he was fighting. House Republicans overreached by insisting they would agree to extend the payroll tax holiday for a year only if the rest of their right-wing agenda (repealing Obamacare, voucherizing Medicare, slashing programs for the poor) were enacted
. For a week before Christmas, everyone from Republican senators up for reelection to the Wall Street Journal editorial page said the House GOP caucus was shooting itself in the foot. Obama surrounded himself with average Americans who explained what $40 less a week or $1,000 less a year in their paycheck, if the holiday wasn’t extended, would mean for them. The optics, in the Washington vernacular, were outstanding for the White House, and Senator partner, Russ Schriefer, Tea Party earlyChuck Schumer advised Obama to “make them sue for peace.” Finally, on December 23, Boehner caved and admitted he hadn’t handled the issue right. His staff conceded that it was the worst week of his speakership.

  IT WOULD TAKE years, even decades to know whether the Obama presidency was truly make-or-break for the middle class. Campaigns, by contrast, are made or broken on a shorter time horizon. To fend off the forces arrayed against Obama, his team would have to drive a consistent message.

  Here the mathematical tools of the Cave were less useful. The quants pushed “experiment-informed programs,” a methodology popularized by liberal statisticians that analyzed how messages were received by different audiences (comparing delivery by ads, phone, mail, door knocks). But Analytics wasn’t yet able to design the messages in the first place. That took the political experience and judgment of people like Axelrod, Grisolano, Benenson, and Simas. “If you don’t have the right message and the right strategy, you can have the greatest analytics in the world and you’re still the Titanic,” Benenson said. Just as the medical profession couldn’t use “comparative effectiveness” statistics to address all patient needs and the educational establishment had to avoid standardized testing as a panacea, the Obama campaign knew it needed to keep a little humility about the numbers.