The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  In truth, while the Joe Soptic ad was the most inflammatory spot of the campaign to date, an ad Romney aired on welfare reform was the most inaccurate. It accused Obama of gutting the work requirements of Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill and “sending a check” directly to welfare recipients without requiring them to work. While the waivers offered to states by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (and signed off on by the White House) were at first too loose, the White House quickly backpedaled and HHS included explicit requirements that states expand the number of welfare recipients at work. A few liberals at HHS may have wanted to gut the 1996 bill, but they failed. No checks were ever sent without discernible signs of work, and no one in a powerful position ever intended to do so. The ad didn’t feature blacks and thus couldn’t be scored as racial, but the subtext—Obama is giving your hard-earned money to his people—was hard to miss.II

  Romney was going for the anti-moocher vote—the whites whom Ronald Reagan had won with his denunciations of “welfare queens.” When Romney in midsummer put nearly 50 percent of his money behind this one spot capitalizing on a bureaucratic snafu, the White House went into a paralyzed crouch. It had thought Obama had political cover because the requests for flexibility came from the Republican governors of Nevada and Utah. (Romney had made his own such requests when governor of Massachusetts.) Now everyone recognized the whole idea of “cover” was dead. Anything was fair game.

  While the Romney ad didn’t hurt Obama much in the polls, it did effectively shut down the federal government until Election Day. In the first half of 2012, the White House pushed its “We Can’t Wait” agenda of small policy initiatives that required no congressional approval and let the agencies continue rule-making and other policy formulation. But after the July welfare imbroglio, David Plouffe and Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann DeParle blocked almost everything for fear of a damaging story on the Daily Caller, Drudge, or Fox that could be turned into a thirty-second ad. Many regulations and nominations were put on hold, strictly for defensive political reasons. For instance, the FDA had a proposed rule barring food handlers from chewing gum or wearing jewelry at work because these items were accidentally falling into the food supply. It was delayed until 2013.

  The White House wasn’t taking any chances. Obama would have likely opposed military intervention in Syria even if it were not an election year; when the issue came to a head in a July meeting, only the CIA (with the lukewarm backing of Hillary Clinton) wanted a more aggressive policy there. But the prospect of being drawn into another unpopular war was especially unappealing now. With the Democratic base nailed down, the goal was to lure independents, not launch new initiatives or brag about the Obama record. In sou always said the same thing: hi earlytheastern Ohio, for instance, Obama was running to Romney’s right on coal, airing ads that showed Romney as governor saying, “This plant kills,” about a coal plant in Massachusetts he wanted to shut down. When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who had won tough races in battleground Colorado, offered new conservation plans that might have helped there, he was ignored. Instead a policy of No Distractions descended over the administration. The idea, said one White House official, was “We’ve got a strategy. Now don’t go fuck it up.”

  The all-politics focus came straight from the top. “If I lose, my presidency is a footnote,” Obama told his senior counselor, Pete Rouse, in the middle of 2012. “All of the progress we made in the first four years would be reversed.” By winning, he said, his first-term achievements would be cemented for a generation and he could move forward on promises sidetracked by the Great Recession.

  IN JUNE AND JULY Romney undertook his vice presidential selection process with the same analytical rigor he applied to his business career but that had been missing from his approach to data management. From the start, he never believed in geographical picks, and the campaign had no polling that showed selecting Senator Rob Portman of Ohio would help carry that state for Romney. Portman made the final list nonetheless, as did Marco Rubio, Tim Pawlenty, Chris Christie, and Paul Ryan.

  Romney’s first requirement was what he described as “no surprises.” He hadn’t been running for five years just to see his VP choice blow up his chances over something he and his team hadn’t anticipated. He wanted someone young, someone who could energize the base, and a “governing partner” who could help his administration and be president immediately if it came to that. The person who best met those four requirements would get picked.

  While young and engaging, Rubio had some question marks in his past, especially a flap over his using a credit card from the Florida Republican Party for $160,000 in personal expenses. But the bigger concern was that Romney didn’t think that after just a year and a half in the Senate he was ready to be president. Pawlenty (Axelrod’s prediction) had proved during his brief presidential campaign that he wasn’t exciting to the base, while Portman (Stuart Stevens’s choice) met only the requirement of being fully ready to assume the top job if necessary, and even that qualification was marred by his time as budget director in the Bush administration.

  Chris Christie came much closer than reporters recognized at the time. He was young (fifty), capable of governing, and appealing to moderates. The base of the party might not agree with every position he took, but he was strongly pro-life and thrilling to party activists. Christie’s problem, Romney concluded, was lack of “discipline.” Romney never said that this meant his inability to control his weight, but he didn’t have to. He had other examples. At a fundraiser one night at the Grand Hyatt in New York, Christie, who was scheduled to introduce Romney, was so late that Romney started speaking without him. When Christie entered the room during Romney’s speech, Romney had to stop and introduce him. If this happened only once, no one would have cared, but Christie was consistently late and it annoyed Romney.

  Ryan was young, exciting for the base, and his selection would reflect partner, Russ Schriefer, elected early Romney’s belief that 2012 wasn’t just a referendum on the Obama economy but a big-time “contrast election.” The question about him was whether, as a forty-three-year-old congressman, he was ready to be president. But his deep knowledge of the budget and fluency on other issues dazzled Romney, who thought Ryan could help him hit the ground running in the White House. Unlike Christie, he was highly organized—“tight,” as Romney said. After listening to Ryan talk, Bob White leaned over to Dan Senor and said, “At Bain, we would have called him ‘client-ready,’ ” meaning that he could be sent out to represent the firm on multimillion-dollar deals. Matt Rhoades, the campaign manager, said Romney was smitten: “It was like talking to your buddy who has just met a girl and he’s giddy.”

  By choosing Ryan, Romney was doubling down on the idea of slashing programs for the middle class in order to pay for more tax cuts. Surprisingly Boston seemed unprepared to answer the question of whether Romney backed the Ryan Plan, which he had called “marvelous” in 2011 but was now less enthusiastic about. Axelrod figured he wanted to be the “ideas candidate” without actually embracing the idea he had just imported.

  Teddy Goff reported that Twitter exploded after the Ryan pick and that money was pouring in online. Jeremy Bird said that the troops in Wisconsin were galvanized and newly confident of victory in Ryan’s home state. At the White House, Obama told his team that selecting Ryan cemented the analogy in his mind between 2012 and 1964, when GOP nominee Goldwater promised to reverse Johnson’s Great Society agenda of Medicare, education, and civil rights. It was, the president said, a clarifying choice.

  ON JULY 13 Obama joined Senator Mark Warner of Virginia in front of a fire station in Roanoke. What happened next wasn’t noticed by the Romney campaign’s oppo staff for five days, but it symbolized the conflict over founding principles and became one of Boston’s lifelines after a rocky month of being battered over Bain. About three-quarters into his stump speech, Obama arrived at the place where he ordinarily included himself among the well-off. It was a rhetorical trick first used by Bill Clinton: Get point
s for saying people like me don’t deserve a tax cut. First he calmly said, “A lot of wealthy, successful Americans agree with me—because they want to give something back.”

  Just as he had borrowed from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick for part of a 2010 stump speech, he now took a leaf from Elizabeth Warren, running for the Senate from Massachusetts. A video of her delivering off-the-cuff remarks at a house party had gone viral among liberals. “There’s nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You moved your goods to markets on roads the rest of us paid for,” she said, then explained how the workforce was educated by public school teachers, how factories were protected from harm by public police and firefighters, and how society had moved away from appreciation of the New Deal, the GI Bill, and other great achievements of activist government. Warren also championed individual initiative and getting rich (“God bless!”), but said successful citizens should “pay it forward.”

  Unlike Warren, the president, speaking in a folksy way, crossed the line from preaching commonality to taking a shot at successful people: “I’m always National Youth Administration" aid=",Pastruck by people who think, well, it [success] must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”

  At this point, the crowd applauded. The firefighters and their families and other middle-class people in attendance liked being told they were just as smart and hardworking as the people who make ten times or a hundred times (or, in the case of some of those who drove the economy into the ditch, a thousand times) as much money.

  Then came a section that reflected innocuous intentions on the president’s part but went out to the world with a grammatical ambiguity that hurt his campaign, at least temporarily: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

  The president was trying to make his familiar Abraham Lincoln point about the importance of infrastructure and collective action. Factcheck.org, the Washington Post, and other media referees agreed that Obama’s awkward “that” in “you didn’t build that” referred to “roads and bridges,” not businesses. No matter. The president was off his game that day, not just grammatically but in tone. He had spoken often in the past about the importance of championing success. In his inaugural address in 2009, he saluted “the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things,” and many of his trips around the country in the years since had been to visit factories and private labs and small restaurants, where he praised all of the qualities of small business owners he was accused of ignoring. But he didn’t do that in Roanoke, which gave conservatives an opening. Crossroads GPS cut a spot of small business owners watching the “you didn’t built that” clip and saying this confirmed what they always suspected about the president. If the speech hadn’t become controversial, Obama’s straw men would have remained billionaires. But once the video went viral, many Republican small business owners thought the president was talking about them—telling them that intelligence and hard work had nothing to do with their success.

  The episode also played into the “other” theme. “It’s as if a Dutch politician—an intelligent, well-meaning Dutch politician—were somehow running for the presidency,” the conservative social critic Charles Murray wrote on his blog. “We would listen to him and say to ourselves, ‘He doesn’t get this country.’ ” Then Murray went on to repeat the tired talking point that Obama was acting “un-American.” The slur seemed contagious. “I wish the president would learn how to be an American,” said John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and White House chief of staff. These were not Internet trolls attacking the president’s patriotism but prominent conservatives.

  Obama and Chicago knew the latest barbs couldn’t be as easily dismissed as similar attacks in the past. Axelrod ordered up two ads of a soft-spoken president speaking directly into the camera and explaining how much he respected entrepreneurs. After that, Chicago_hi early was unperturbed. Polls showed little slippage, and Romney’s ads on the charge never went into heavy rotation, suggesting they didn’t get much traction. Ben LaBolt, the Chicago campaign press secretary, had an explanation: “They’re not going to win the election based on a lie.”

  AS THEY GATHERED for their convention in steaming Tampa, Republicans weren’t enthusiastic about Mitt Romney; their passion came from despising Barack Obama. No fewer than seven politicians who had expressed doubt over whether Obama was born in the United States, including Florida governor Rick Scott and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, were given speaking roles, though not in prime time.III Boston knew that Obama-bashing would only hurt them with the 2008 Obama supporters they needed to win over. So the convention was designed to humanize the nominee.

  Just as in Minneapolis in 2008, a hurricane caused the cancellation of the first night of the convention—the first of two hurricanes in 2012 that marred Romney’s plans. Limbaugh alleged that the Obama “regime” intentionally forecast hurricane warnings for Florida with the intention of causing the cancellation. “What could be better for the Democrats than the Republicans to cancel a day of this?” he asked. Donald Trump was especially disappointed. Romney had publicly embraced him in Las Vegas in May and signed off on a video of him behind his desk giving a dismal performance review to an Obama impersonator, who is predictably dispatched with Trump’s signature line from his NBC show: “President Obama, you’re fired.” The video, scheduled for the first night, never aired, and Trump plotted his next publicity stunt.

  The humanizing of Romney, which should have been launched months earlier in paid media, began with Ann Romney’s warm and well-delivered speech. But her meditation on love (including the awkward “I love women!”) was free of any stories about her husband that might be remembered even a day later. She was followed by the keynoter, Chris Christie, who rejected the drafts offered by speechwriters, penned his own at the Jersey Shore, then bristled when told by aides during rehearsal that it wasn’t good enough. Romney staffers weren’t happy when they vetted Christie’s speech, but they didn’t stand up to him or even notice that he contradicted Ann Romney by saying that his mother taught him that love is less important than respect, a quality he failed to show by not mentioning the nominee until the sixteenth minute of his speech. This soon became a theme of the GOP convention: self-promotion over promotion of the presidential candidate.

  Worse, the convention looked like a country club or, as conservative media baron Chris Ruddy put it, an Afrikaner Party convention in the old South Africa. Black delegates numbered twenty-eight out of 2,286, down from 167 in 2004, which was partly attributable to the difficulty of recruiting blacks in the age of Obama. Latino delegates were more in evidence, but Latino viewers didn’t seem to care; the latter overwhelmingly watched telenovelas on Univision instead of the convention. Because the hall was filled with well-heeled Romney delegates, not boisterous Tea Party enthusiasts, the convention seemed to lack the energy of previous GOP conclaves. Some of this was also by design. The Tea Party, unpopular with independents, wasn’t mentioned once from the podium during prime time.National Youth Administration" aid=",Pa

  In fact three years after they noisily took over town meetings on health care, Tea Party activists were surprisingly absent in Tampa. The movement had been weakened by feuds. In 2011 Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express found herself embroiled in a lawsuit with Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin for pushing her out of Tea Party Patriots in 2009 and stealing the name, which Meckler and Martin denied. Then Martin slowly froze Meckler out of decision makin
g at Tea Party Patriots until, in 2012, Meckler quit. Kate Zernike, who chronicled the Tea Party for the New York Times, felt the movement benefited early on from people not knowing what it really was. Now, even as ated GOP House members embraced radical Tea Party ideas, the name itself was in bad odor and threatening the whole Republican brand.

  THE LAST TWO nights of the convention featured several fine addresses by former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, Senator Marco Rubio, and Governor Susan Martinez, among others, but the acceptance speeches were underwhelming. Paul Ryan came into the convention with a reputation as a truth teller and left with one, at least among the news media, as a prevaricator. His Boy-Scout-with-a-knife evisceration of Obama thrilled the conservative base but contained a half-dozen misstatements of fact, from implying that a General Motors plant in his congressional district closed when Obama was president (it was shuttered under Bush), to falsely charging that Medicare was raided for Obamacare and attacking the president for not embracing Simpson-Bowles when it was Ryan himself who helped torpedo the commission’s recommendations. He also incorrectly charged that the president had begun his administration by focusing on health care, not jobs. (The stimulus came first.)

  While these policy distortions might not have resonated beyond the world of fact-checkers and Democratic partisans, a fib Ryan told earlier in the year about running a marathon continued to circulate. Ryan twice claimed he ran a twenty-six-mile marathon in under three hours when in fact his fastest time, according to Runner’s World magazine, was just over four hours—a nontrivial difference that did not help his reputation for truthfulness.

  In Tampa, Republicans were putting all of their money on money. The real convention, the one where someone might be persuaded to act, wasn’t in the arena but at the tony Tampa Club, where Karl Rove hosted an Americans Crossroads event for seventy superrich donors. A reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, Sheelah Kolhatkar, accompanied a guest and recorded the session, where Rove said Crossroads would raise $300 million, or an average of more than $4 million from each person in the room.