The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Rove explained that the undecided voters that Republicans needed were not hostile to Obama, so a soft sell was required. “If you say he’s a socialist, they’ll go to defend him. If you call him a ‘far out left-winger,’ they’ll say, ‘no, no, he’s not.’ ” The key, Rove said, was simply to contrast the president’s promises with his record: “If you keep it focused on the facts and adopt a respectful tone, then they’re gonna agree with you.” No one bothered to ask why, if the soft sell worked, the tens of millions in low-key super PAC ads that had already run were failing to leave an impression.

  Haley Barbour provided comic relief with a parody of the Democrats’ the killing of Osama bin Laden41Pa more effective message: “You know, ‘Romney is a vulture capitalist who doesn’t care about the likes of you. He doesn’t even know people like you—he’ll lay you off, cancel your insurance, shit jobs. He’s a plutocrat. Married to a known equestrian!’ ” The room erupted in laughter, though few knew the origins of the joke, an apocryphal story in which a gay-baiting Senator George Smathers was quoted as saying during a 1950 Florida Senate primary that his opponent’s sister in Greenwich Village was a “known thespian.”

  Turning serious, Barbour compared the pro-Romney super PACs to “the charity hospital” or a “big not-for-profit cancer research program that you give to.” He concluded by saying, “I know everybody in here wants their children and grandchildren to inherit the same country we did. I honestly believe those are the stakes.” The millionaires and billionaires on hand no doubt believed that, but their “charitable” (read “political”) impulses conveniently dovetailed with their commercial interests. Unlike most wealthy Democratic donors (who are generally in the game for ego or ambassadorships), most of these donors sought explicit business favors from the government in a Romney administration. For instance, Harold Simmons, who would give nearly $27 million to Republicans in the 2012 cycle, owned a company called Waste Control Specialists that could not return to profitability unless the Nuclear Regulatory Commission changed a rule and allowed the firm to bury depleted uranium left over from the cold war at a private dump in West Texas instead of a federal waste disposal site. Even though the federal government had never allowed the privatization of such dangerous work, Romney said early in the campaign that he would favor such a rule change.

  Besides being forums for extracting cash, conventions in recent decades have been judged by the television takeaway. The original plan had called for using precious prime time on the last night of the convention to further humanize Romney. Ted and Pat Oparowski told the moving story of their fourteen-year-old son who was dying from lymphoma in the 1970s. Romney visited the boy often and helped him make a will dividing up his possessions. Boston produced a beautiful ten-minute film that tough critics in both parties called one of the best convention movies ever made. It depicted a man of character, depth, and unusual leadership abilities. But neither the Oparowskis nor the film were seen by a wide TV audience. Both ran early, before network coverage. Romney advisers said the networks would have cut away from the campaign film, as they had in the past. Instead Boston opted for stunt casting that caused it to lose control of the convention just when the big audience was tuning in.

  ROMNEY HAD FIRST met Clint Eastwood at a fundraiser in California, where he asked him if he would speak at his convention. Eastwood was originally scheduled for the second night, but after the hurricane, he was moved to the third. The trouble began after the film icon arrived in Tampa and awestruck Romney staffers failed to vet his remarks and insert them in the teleprompter like every other speaker’s.

  “Are you going to talk like you did at the fundraisers?” Russ Schriefer, who was managing the convention, asked him. “Yup,” Eastwood replied. “He’s Clint Eastwood—you argue with him,” Schriefer explained later. When, shortly partner, Russ Schriefer, ra,Pa before taking the stage, Eastwood asked for a chair, puzzled Romney staffers complied without asking why he needed one.

  Within moments the indelible image of the Tampa Convention was not of a warm and fuzzy Mitt Romney but of an eighty-two-year-old ad-libbing actor holding a peculiar conversation with an empty chair that he said contained an invisible “Mr. Obama.” “What do you want me to tell Romney?” Eastwood asked the chair, as if he were Jimmy Stewart’s Elwood and the chair held a foulmouthed version of Harvey, the invisible rabbit. “I can’t tell him to do that to himself.”

  Ignoring a flashing red light, Eastwood rambled on for twelve minutes about everything from Guantánamo to the problem with lawyers. Film critic Roger Ebert summed up the verdict on Twitter: “Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic.” Teddy Goff ran into Jim Messina’s office to tell him the story was exploding online. It didn’t take long for @BarackObama to tweet a picture of Obama and a chair in the Cabinet Room with a caption that read, “This seat’s taken.”

  Afterward Beth Myers and others close to Romney were furious with Stevens and Schriefer for not keeping Eastwood to a script. Conventions, unlike interviews, debates, and candidate town halls, are entirely controllable events, which made this a major unforced error. An annoyed Ann Romney didn’t even pretend to defend Eastwood’s performance when she appeared on the Today show the next morning.

  Romney’s acceptance speech was widely described as “solid,” which wasn’t enough to keep it from being overshadowed by Eastwood’s act. He told charming stories about his parents and early married life before explaining his business career (though uttering hardly a word about his governorship) and pivoting to a critique of Obama and a recitation of his own five-point jobs plan (energy independence, tax cuts, less regulation, deficit reduction, favors for small business) that contained nothing new. “You need to actually convince voters by making a positive case for the Romney-Ryan ticket,” said Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. He and many other conservative analysts didn’t hear that case. Romney pilloried Obama on foreign policy (he “threw Israel under the bus”) but forgot to give a shout-out to American troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.IV The sarcastic jab at the president for promising to “heal the planet” won applause in the hall but hardly helped him win the pro-environment independents he needed.

  While Romney lumbered through his convention, Obama was on reddit, a crowdsourced social news site known by few of the Tampa delegates, though popular with many of their children. The president answered questions about Internet freedom and other issues for forty-five minutes, typing his answers himself. He mentioned, as he did in most speeches, gottaregister.org, the OFA site yielding impressive new registration numbers, and ended, at Goff’s suggestion, with an inside joke for the three million reddit users: “NOT BAD.” This was a natural locution for a president whose favorite superlative around the White House was “pretty good.” The reddit appearance was another sign that Obama’s dominance of the digital campaign was not only not bad, it was a pretty good indicator that he was on a winning track.

  THE DEMOCRATS ASSEMBLED at their convention in Charlotte ready to rip Romney’s face off. “Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off now than he was four years ago!” John Kerry thundered. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm twisted the knife with glee: “In Mitt Romney’s view, the cars get the elevator and the workers get the shaft.” Congressman John Lewis of Georgia cast resistance to voter suppression as the latest chapter in the civil rights movement: “I’ve seen this before. I lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote. We must stand up, speak up, and speak out. We must march to the polls like never, ever before.” But with 23 million Americans still out of work, Democrats needed to offer a more compelling explanation of why they hadn’t done better on the issue that mattered most to voters.

  For more than two years, Bill Clinton had religiously devoted at least an hour a day to studying the economy and how to fix it. The effort produced great clarity in his thinking and an underrated book. Now he had spent weeks outlining his nom
inating speech, intent on making it logical rather than rhetorical. To align Clinton’s speech with the campaign and avoid surprises, Axelrod asked that he work with Gene Sperling, Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and Bruce Reed, Biden’s chief of staff. Both were veterans of the Clinton White House, with their loyalties now divided. As Sperling and Reed spent seven straight hours whittling down their old boss’s remarks, they felt a sense of elation. Not once did the former president make a snide comment at Obama’s expense, as he had so often in the past. Sperling took the draft to Plouffe, Axelrod, and Obama, who had only a few minor clarifications. Because Clinton took a nap before incorporating Obama’s changes, the final draft didn’t go out publicly until it was in the teleprompter and being delivered—a habit of Clinton’s that left younger, less plugged-in White House aides fretting.

  They needn’t have worried. Clinton gave one of the best speeches in recent convention history. It worked in part by being less an oration (for which there is little patience anymore) than a talk—a sophisticated and fact-rich argument delivered in an accessible conversational tone that explained the reasoning behind giving Obama a second term. Even the Fox commentators who had brayed for his removal from office in 1998 now conceded that Clinton had scored heavily. Where he seemed to be ad-libbing, the former president was actually inserting from memory sections from his original draft that had been cut for time, then using his huge expressive hands and twinkly half-smile to drive home the point.

  Beyond reminding delegates that Obama was inclusive on the big things (“Heck, he even appointed Hillary!”), selling his accomplishments and savaging the “arithmetic” of Republicans, Clinton lambasted GOP obstructionists, something that Obama had been loath to do for fear of looking weak and ineffectual. “They think government is always the enemy, they’re always right, and compromise is always weakness,” he said. By blaming economic woes on Congress in a way that sounded perfectly rational, Clinton offered more than the imprimatur of a former president; he shredded the Republicans’ claim that the Obama presidency was a left-wing departure from his own and lampooned the heart of their argument: “We left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast partner, Russ Schriefer, ra,Pa enough, so fire him and put us back in.” When Clinton said, “No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, could have fixed in four years the economy that Obama inherited,” it was hard to imagine a fair-minded American voter disagreeing. The alternative to Romney, he implied, was to embrace the investment in the middle class that gave the country the prosperity of the Clinton years. Even if this ignored the tech boom and other factors, his buoyant logic suggested the promise of a return to better times.

  When the two presidents embraced onstage, Sperling felt as if he were a child of divorce thrilled to learn that his parents were not only talking again but actually getting along. A friend emailed Obama that he should appoint Clinton “Secretary of Explaining Shit,” which Obama changed to “stuff” on the stump. It raised the question of whether health care reform might have been more popular had the two men reconciled earlier and Clinton been designated to explain it. Even before the convention, Clinton had agreed to a vigorous schedule of speaking on behalf of Obama. He was a smash with Democratic audiences in battleground states. After the third debate, he had breakfast with Messina in Chicago and agreed to campaign full-time for the last three weeks, which was like having another vice presidential candidate, only better. Clinton relished his new stature in a party that had once been ashamed of him, and he knew that he was helping his wife to be nominated practically by acclamation in 2016, if she chose to run. Obama was just happy to have all the help he could get.

  OBAMA’S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH was written a week ahead of time, an eternity in Obama World. The most important line in it may have been the simple “I am the president.” This was a rebuke to everyone from Joe Wilson (the congressman who shouted “You lie!” during a joint session of Congress in 2009) to Rush Limbaugh and Clint Eastwood. It was directed at all those who had disrespected him or questioned his legitimacy in office. Afterward it resonated especially well with ardent supporters who were waiting for him to stand up for himself.

  The speech deftly laid out that the election wasn’t merely a choice between candidates and parties but “between two fundamentally different visions for the future.” This was the essence of the 2012 contest. Obama’s “basic bargain,” was a fresh way of framing the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society. “My grandparents were given the chance to go to college and buy their home and fulfill the basic bargain at the heart of America’s story, the promise that hard work will pay off, that responsibility will be rewarded, that everyone gets a fair shot and everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same rules.”

  The “dial groups” of swing voters responded especially well to the parts of the speech where the president sounded positive and hopeful, a note that the high command took for debate prep. Chicago didn’t think voters needed to be reminded that the economic problems Romney blamed on Obama had in fact started under Bush. “Do you think they don’t know what Bush did to them?” Benenson asked in his charmingly acidic style.

  The speech was not well-reviewed. “Where Clinton entertains and explains, Obama tends to sermonize and exhort,” wrote Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times. But Obama covered the points necessary to advance his campaign, which_hi early would not have been well-served by high-flown rhetoric. He laid out a pallid, poll-tested second-term agenda that included such crowd-pleasers as a million manufacturing jobs, 100,000 new teachers, and getting rid of subsidies for oil companies. Other items on the agenda—comprehensive immigration reform, action on climate change, raising the minimum wage—would have to wait until after the election. With the Democratic base nailed down, the goal was to lure independents, not please liberals.

  To address disappointed voters, the president tried to shift the onus for hope and change from himself onto “you.” “The election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you,” he said. “My fellow citizens, you were the change.” If depersonalizing the movement diminished Obama, the White House could live with that. With his subdued tone and plain language, Obama sought to convey that he was a humble, farsighted leader on the side of the middle class. While Jon Favreau, as usual, penned the first draft after conversations with the president, Obama wrote the pivotal humility section himself, with an assist from his favorite president. “While I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together,” Obama said, “I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’ ”

  If this wasn’t quite the frank confession of failure that Stuart Stevens hoped to goad him into, the passage nimbly addressed his reputation for cockiness, as did a self-effacing line about how sick everyone was of hearing “I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.” The absence of other compelling metaphors remained a problem. The stirring paean to citizenship, for instance, was missing an allusion that might linger in the mind. But the ending struck the same notes of destiny and commonality that had carried him so far: “America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.”

  Afterward the president was in good spirits. His convention was a success. It showed a unified and relatively centrist party whose members actually looked like America. Michelle Obama’s speech had reminded everyone of why they liked her husband personally, and he did nothing to mar the impression.

  Public polls showed an Obama bump of 5 points nationally after the convention, but national polls were irrelevant in Chicago, where internal numbers showed only a 1-point gain in battleground states. That was fine. Charlotte had motivated the troops, which was the important thing.

  The weak jobs numbers released the day after the conventi
on, 96,000, did nothing to dampen the mood, though they worried Obama economists. With 150,000 new jobs required each month just to keep up with population increases, the Obama job growth record continued to be anemic. Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and still close to the campaign, liked to throw a scare into Obama supporters by telling them that the Bureau of Labor Statistics margin of error was plus or minus 100,000 jobs (until the official revisions, which could be months away). So the whole thing was appallingly random. The presidency might depend on a statistic of dubious validity except as the roughest indication of direction. Plouffe believed that beyond a few data heads, the larger public would care only if the number dipped into negative territory, snapping a streak of more than thirty months of job creation. But with the margin of error, that could seem to be happening partner, Russ Schriefer, e. early even if it wasn’t.

  Such a report would constitute the “new information” that Plouffe dreaded. He told a dozen top fundraisers in Charlotte that he expected Obama to win unless voters were exposed to news from home or abroad that changed their calculation. Otherwise the game seemed under control.

  As the fall campaign began, the president, joined for the first time at a fundraiser by his hero, Michael Jordan, said he couldn’t resist a basketball analogy: “We are in the fourth quarter. We’re up by a few points, but the other side is coming strong and they play a little dirty. If you’ve got a little bit of a lead and there’s about seven minutes [to go], that’s when you put them away.”