The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

WITH A DAMAGED candidate and the country’s demographics lined up against them, Republicans needed more than a limp economy to win the election. But their two biggest assets—a bottomless war chest and concerted voter-suppression efforts—were failing them. The super PAC aerial bombardment was not weakening the will of the people, who had mostly made up their minds oblivious to TV ads. Not a single pro-Romney ad cut through the clutter enough to become part of the conversation. And efforts in state capitals to supress turnout were backfiring.

  By now, voter suppression was emerging from the shadows of the campaign as a major civil rights issue. Bill Clinton recalled seeing racial discrimination at the polls in pre–Voting Rights Act Arkansas in the mid-1960s. But he said it didn’t compare to 2012: “In my lifetime, nobody’s ever done anything quite this blatant.”

  By late summer it was clear that the GOP’s efforts to discourage voting weren’t turning out as planned. First, the American Legislative Exchange Council was forced from the battlefield in the wake of the highly publicized Trayvon Martin case. After George Zimmerman killed Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American carrying nothing but a pack of Skittles, Florida authorities at first said they couldn’t arrest Zimmerman because of the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which allowed the use of lethal force on the slightest pretext. When word spread that ALEC had won passage of similar bills in more than a dozen states, several corporations, fearful of bad publicity, left the Council. To prevent a stampede of corporate backers, ALEC announced that it would, for now, drop its efforts on behalf of both Stand Your Ground bills and its “vote fraud” legislation, which had already helped lead to new laws in nineteen states.

  Meanwhile voter-suppression efforts were not faring well in the courts. In Florida, where the Brennan Center for Justice filed suit with the Obama Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act, a federal judge called the provision of the election law requiring that registration forms be turned in within forty-eight hours “harsh and impractical,” and ruled that the bill had “no purpose other than to discourage” constitutionally protected activity. The Obama campaign, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and others engaged in voter registration got back to work in time to make a difference.

  Unfortunately for OFA, the part of the statute that cut early voting time was allowed to stand—a serious blow to Obama’s chances in Florida. The intentionally confusing law let people vote early for eight days in late October, but closed the early voting sites on the last six days before Election Day. So the Obama campaign would have to always said the same thing: hi earlytry to get word out to black churches that they needed the buses on the previous Sunday, nine days before Election Day. It might not work. The “Souls to the Polls” Democratic tradition was central to the ground game in Florida, where 33 percent of those who voted on the last Sunday before the 2008 election were African American and 23 percent were Latino. With polling places expected to be jammed, Bauer’s team of lawyers, dubbed the “Legal Brain Trust,” would be filing suit to restore early voting in three Florida counties right up to Election Day.

  Wisconsin had attached a series of requirements for student IDs, including expiration dates on the cards. Requiring tens of thousands of students to get new IDs would have held down the youth vote. A state judge invalidated the law and allowed continuation of same-day registration, a ruling that Chicago felt tipped Paul Ryan’s home state to Obama. After the election, Wisconsin state senator Alberta Darling, a cochair of Romney’s campaign there, said Romney “absolutely” would have won Wisconsin had the voter ID law been allowed to take effect. Because Obama carried the st least a hundr

  24

  The First Debate

  After Romney’s “47 percent” fiasco, Obama World thought the election was over. Yes, the president could lose, but he would not. His approval ratings were over 50 percent for the first time since 2009. He led Romney by 7 points nationally and 9 in Ohio, a nearly insurmountable lead in an election just around the corner. As Romney suffered through two terrible weeks at the end of September, money and volunteers for OFA began drying up. There was no urgency anymore.

  But the fallout from the 47 percent story coincided with exactly the kind of external news that David Plouffe worried could affect the election. On the anniversary of 9/11, armed men launched attacks on a consulate building and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others were killed.

  The Benghazi story was quickly politicized. Republicans charged that the Obama White House, invested in its campaign boast that Al Qaeda was on the wane, tried to make it seem as if the attacks grew out of spontaneous demonstrations against a crude anti-Islamic video originating in the United States, not terrorism. Charges of a cover-up began almost immediately. Democrats countered that the initial erroneous reports about the nature of the incident (repeated by UN Ambassador Susan Rice on Meet the Press) came from the intelligence community, which is nonpartisan. While the CIA station chief in Tripoli said the intensity of the raid made him believe it was planned, James Clapper, director of national intelligence and hardly an Obama stooge, concluded initially (based on intelligence from around the world) that it was in response to the anti-Islamic video that had already sparked riots in Egypt and the Sudan. (The attacks were later attributed to local terrorist groups retaliating against U.S.-backed counterterrorism efforts in the area.)I Lost in the cross fire were legitimate questions about why the U.S. government didn’t do a better job protecting its personnel abroad. Hillary Clinton had made repeated attempts to beef up security at U.S. embassies, but the House of Representatives never provided the money.

  Romney was so eager to score political points that at first he barged in on the wrong Middle Eastern story. On the morning of September 12, as the world was first learning of Ambassador Stevens’s death, Romney went on television to blast U.S. policy in Egypt, where protests against the inflammatory video had taken place. He spoke before the president appeared in the Rose Garden to mourn with the nation and before the bodies from Libya had been returned to the United States. From a campaign stop in Jacksonville, he charged that the career U.S. ambassador in Cairo had “sympathized” with the Egyptian attackers by issuing a mild statement calling for religious tolerance. McConnell, Boehner, and even Fox News distanced themselves from Romney’s remarks. The smell of defeat around the Romney campaign had now grown so strong that major GOP donors seriously considered shifting their money from the presidential to congressional contests. The press had begun to write Romney off.

  Then, on October 3 in Denver, the president almost threw his presidency away. His disdain for the requirements of politics, his ill-disguised contempt for Romney, and his complacent cockiness caught up to him in a listless and bewildering debate performance in front of 67 million people. The strategy, style, execution, spin—everything went wrong. “We had this inflated lead partner, Russ Schriefer, because early and we wanted to see if we could erase it in one night,” David Simas joked after the election, still wincing.

  RON KLAIN, the veteran Democratic Party operative who headed Obama’s debate prep, had reminded the president over the summer that he would probably lose the first debate. Almost all incumbents do, from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to both Bushes.II The challenger wins just by being on equal footing with the president for the first time. He gets to seem like a plausible commander in chief without having to defend a record. If he has been through primaries, he’s in fighting trim, while the incumbent is rusty. The press, looking for an underdog story, sets the expectations bar higher for the sitting president.

  Of course, that didn’t explain the dimensions of Obama’s defeat. Maybe nothing could. Klain said he would go to his grave not knowing exactly what happened.

  From the start, Obama’s unexpected lead in the polls had made it tricky to formulate debate strategy. The debate prep team counseled the president to stick with the calm and agreeable tone that had helped give him his lead in the polls. The worst thing that could
happen, his coaches figured, was a moment like Obama’s patronizing “You’re likable enough, Hillary” line in the 2008 New Hampshire debate, which opened the door to her comeback there. It was a real danger. In prep, said one coach, “if you armed him with a scalpel, he took out a hacksaw.” When a mock question was posed about Romney’s business career, the correct setup answer was to be gracious about his opponent’s success before pivoting to the message about the economy. But the president could never deliver the setup with anything but venom. He’d describe how both he and Romney went to the same law school and he became a community organizer while Romney went to make money. It was exactly the sharp-edged and boastful approach his coaches wanted him to avoid.

  Worried about a gaffe, Obama’s advisers disregarded the risks of a cautious strategy. They sat on a lead, playing not to lose, which of course leads to losing. Obama told his friend Robert Wolf in September that it was “the beginning of the fourth quarter and we’re up a few baskets.” But it wasn’t the fourth quarter. It was the third quarter, too early to run down the clock. A prevent defense in football or a four-corner offense in basketball was premature.

  Part of the problem was that the president was uncomfortable with the advice he was getting and dubious that it would work. Early on in prep, Klain suggested they adopt NBA coach Paul Westhead’s run-and-gun offense, which emphasized fast breaks for easy points and only a light defense against Romney’s shots. “You’ll win 162 to 160,” he said. Obama wasn’t a Westhead fan; he had once coached the Chicago Bulls to a dismal 28–54 record. And he thought the advice was wrong. He accepted it intellectually and internalized it, but it went against his instincts. He never believed he could win the debate with a “wide-open but soft” strategy. He thought he needed to hit Romney, to “get physical” on the court. “He was right, and we were wrong,” Klain said later.

  The strategy called for Obama to be the explainer, like Bill Clinton at the convention, but this misread the new expectations of the viewersNational Youth Administration, ,Pa. While Obama’s slow, almost ponderous, nonconfrontational style had worked well in his first debate with John McCain in Mississippi in 2008, the context was different this time. In the past, incumbents didn’t take shots at their challengers; it was considered unpresidential. The pugilistic 2012 GOP primary debates had changed that, with the most combative candidate usually declared the winner. So now partisans on both sides were looking for their man to land blows. Later Axelrod tried to blame himself: “We were a little phobic about engagement [with Romney] and took it to an illogical extreme. We prepared him for a discussion instead of a debate.”

  Obama hated debates. He felt they were a circus sideshow. Not coincidentally, he knew he wasn’t very good at them. He had despised them since 2004, when perennial candidate Alan Keyes scored points off him in their Senate campaign debates even though Keyes was a hotheaded and erratic candidate at best. In 2008 he lost almost every primary debate to Hillary Clinton. Even besting McCain never brought him much better than passing grades. Debates represented what he couldn’t stand about politics: superficial, canned answers with thumbs up/thumbs down reviews by prattling pundits. What did they have to do with the actual work of being president? He thought the format was artificial and relied on stagecraft and debate rules that were irrelevant.

  When he was told during prep for Denver that his answer on infrastructure needed to be less than sixty seconds long, he said, “It really deserves sixty minutes.” Obama hadn’t gone into politics to be a public affairs entertainer, and his writerly detachment from the idiocies of the process had helped him keep perspective. But he failed to absorb that since the days when George Washington made sure he looked good on a horse, politicians have always been required to perform in the theater of the presidency. While the president could be a gifted performer in other venues, he never fully inhabited the role of debater. Now he was like a novelist cast as a politician in a movie. His aloofness set in, as if he were too good for the part.

  Lack of practice wasn’t the problem. After several warm-up sessions, the president had three full-dress mock debates in the basement of the Democratic National Committee and three more at the Westin near Henderson, Nevada, where the stage was an almost perfect replica of the one at the University of Denver. He went 0–6 in debate prep, according to his coaches. Prep was like eating mayonnaise or asparagus or some other food he disliked. The president, who spent his days steeped in policy, was forever in the weeds, offering long, boring answers, talking too slowly, not responding crisply to John Kerry, who was playing Romney well, though he wasn’t such a cogent speaker himself.

  When one of the eight or nine advisers present offered a critique, Obama didn’t disagree, as he had during his cranky 2008 debate prep. He would say, “You’re right, that’s in the [briefing] book”—then fix nothing in his performance. This failure to bring up his game rattled his coaches.

  The prep was going so poorly that the team recommended Obama not discuss the 47 percent video unless asked directly. In rehearsal, Obama kept blowing the topic. First, he would turn it into a defense of the social safety net that was too wonky. Then, when Kerry-as-Romney responded, saying that 47 million Americans were now on food stamps, Obama took the bait and went into a full-throated defense of food stamps, a sure loser in a message aimed at the middle class. “We assumed it would lead to a vituperative exchange that wouldn’t be helpful,” Axelrod said. One debate coach had a theory about what partner, Russ Schriefer, because early was in Obama’s head: I’m up by seven and can talk about liberal stuff that’s good for the country.

  Debate prep brought out the truant in Obama. He escaped debate camp at Lake Las Vegas once to visit Hoover Dam and again to deliver pizzas to campaign volunteers in Henderson, where he was overheard telling a supporter on the phone that debate prep “is a drag. They’re making me do my homework.”

  For twenty-five years, Democratic presidential candidates had employed Michael Sheehan, a communications expert and debate coach. After the Denver debate a couple of senior staffers bad-mouthed him for having told Obama it was okay to scribble notes and look at them. In fact Sheehan had worried all along that the president was writing too much. “We kept telling him not to write a novel,” he said later. “He wished the whole thing could be an essay exam and he could use two blue books if he needed to.”

  It wasn’t that anyone was afraid of telling him the truth. “You had no energy again today and weren’t driving message,” they told him. Obama shrugged and said, “I’ll do better.” On the eve of the debate, the president told Axelrod, “I’ll be fine. I’m a game-day player.” On the flight to Denver the staff engaged in gallows humor: “Maybe our guy will bring it when the red light goes on.”

  At the Westin Hotel, a reporter asked spokeswoman Jen Psaki what was the worst that could happen. “Well, he could fall off the stage,” Psaki said. A day later, he almost did.

  ROMNEY ENDEARED HIMSELF to his top staff with his good humor and refusal to point fingers. “You didn’t say ‘47 percent,’ ” he told his campaign manager, Matt Rhoades. “Stuart didn’t say ‘47 percent.’ I did.”

  At fundraisers in mid-2012 Romney had informed donors that he had three big chances to turn around his standing in the polls: the choice of his running mate, his convention, and the debates. Ryan didn’t give him much of a lift, and the Tampa convention brought no bounce at all, so that left the debates. He had debated thirty-two times in the primaries, but he started his fall debate prep in June, the earliest on record. Beth Myers called debate prep the campaign’s “Manhattan Project.” It was the reason Romney kept such a light schedule on the campaign trail. The elaborate preparations included policy sessions led by issues director Lanhee Chen, strategy meetings run by Stuart Stevens, and a record sixteen mock debates, with five in three days at a house in Vermont. With Senator Rob Portman playing the president, they practiced Romney’s long-awaited pivot to the middle. Stevens and company had timed it well: too late for Tea Party conservative
s, hungry for victory, to complain, but just in time for the tens of millions of moderate general election voters only now tuning in. Arriving in Denver, Romney was confident his moment was at hand.

  Onstage the tone was set from the beginning. Obama spoke first, but Romney got the jump by mentioning that it was the Obamas’ twentieth wedding anniversary. His self-effacing little joke—“I’m sure this was the most romantic place you could imagine—here with me”—was appealing, a different Romney. Obama looked at his wife and said, “I just want to wish, Sweetie, you happy anniversary and let you know that a year from now we will not be celebrating it in front of 40 million people.” The partner, Russ Schriefer, Gingrich early line was scripted but was nonetheless a tip-off that the president would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else. Romney was crisp, confident, and well-informed. He pushed around the moderator, Jim Lehrer, but most critics blamed Lehrer for not having better control. Obama was vague, halting. His team, huddled backstage, thought the president held his own in the first fifteen minutes, slipped behind in the next fifteen, and the wheels came off after that. The low point was when he brought up IPAB, the Obamacare advisory board charged with reviewing health care costs, three times in three consecutive answers.

  Chicago had been perhaps too effective in making Romney look like a rich and untrustworthy twit. Now, when he seemed presidential and decent, it undercut everything the Obama campaign had been trying to build or destroy. But Romney didn’t just beat the expectations spread. He won outright with a mixture of energy and fluency on policy. The joke afterward was that he had violated Mormon dietary strictures and downed three cups of coffee beforehand. That many of his statements (such as “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans”) were at odds with his stated program didn’t seem to matter.