The final weeks of the campaign saw a mountain of other lies. Billboards in Florida depicted Obama bowing to a Saudi king and charged that he intentionally raised gas prices. An email went viral claiming that the inside of the president’s wedding ring bore the inscription “There is no god but Allah.” More than 2.5 million voters in battleground states received a free DVD in the mail of a scurrilous movie alleging, with no evidence, that the president was the love child of Stanley Ann Dunham and Frank Marshall Davis, a onetime communist who befriended Obama when he was a teenager in Honolulu. The film, Dreams from My Real Father, directed by Joel Gilbert, speculated that Obama and Davis had the same freckles. In an especially disgusting touch, the film showed nude pictures from a bondage magazine and falsely claimed the woman depicted in them was the president’s mother. Jerome Corsi, who did so much to spread the “birther” story, now put his energy behind this alternative conspiracy theory, while the conservative commentator Monica Crowley gave Gilbert a platform to promote his film on Fox News. A group of well-funded conservative activists had been planning over the summer to distribute the film even more widely until Frank Luntz’s focus groups found that audiences were “revolted” by it.
MITT ROMNEY THOUGHT he had Florida in the bag. On September 20, still reeling from the release of the 47 percent video, he had answered questions at a candidate forum at the University of Miami from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. With the help of a university official on the local Romney steering committee, he packed the hall with supporters (in violation of the rules) and held his own with Ramos before a huge Latino TV audience.III The next night, Ramos grilled the president on why he hadn’t delivered on comprehensive immigration reform. The comparison played to Romney’s advantage. He didn’t have to win the Latino vote outright, always said the same thing: ev just get close to 40 percent, which seemed doable. Then his edge along the I-4 corridor in Florida would take him across the finish line.
Boston figured that with Florida safely in hand, it could concentrate on an aerial assault in Ohio, where Romney’s approach seemed to have been borrowed from Curtis LeMay, the air force general who believed in carpet bombing. The combination of Republican super PACs and Romney’s own ads meant that viewers sometimes saw as many as seven or eight ads in a row. It was overkill. After World War II the Strategic Bombing Survey found that air campaigns don’t work in combat without coordinated ground forces. The same went for politics.
Boston kept saying it was not about the numbers of offices in states. But that metric was a good indication of the reach of OFA, which had built an intricate “snowflake” of paid organizers and volunteers to take advantage of Chicago’s microtargeting. In Ohio Obama had 121 offices, three times as many as Romney. In Florida the president’s campaign had 104 offices, twice as many as four years earlier and twice as many as Romney. OFA registered an astonishing nearly half a million new voters in Florida, including 50,000 in a four-day period just before the October 9 deadline, which Jeremy Bird said may have been the most extraordinary organizing effort he had ever seen.
Among the other factors that Romney didn’t foresee was the passion of the uncontested blue states. California, nicknamed “the Death Star” for its potency in 2008, this time outdid itself, placing 16 million calls into battleground areas. Mary Jane Stevenson’s crew boasted fourteen huge phone banks (including seven hundred people assembled on a soundstage in Culver City) and tens of thousands of volunteers calling from home, where “predictive caller” software that automatically teed up calls let them work eight times faster. After Analytics found that California’s out-of-state calls were just as effective as in-state calls in generating absentee ballot returns and early voting, it freed up battleground state directors to direct more resources to “knock and drag,” knocking on doors and dragging people out to vote early, as 70 percent did in Colorado. When early voting there was going only 51–49 for Obama, closer than the models predicted, Chicago had time to reallocate money to the state to target early voters who hadn’t yet turned in their ballots.
The story was much the same on fundraising. Romney did well, but Obama did better, and he did it in a small “d” democratic way. The contrast on fundraising spoke to the class issues at the center of the campaign.
Romney raised nearly $950 million, 70 percent of which came from its “high dollar program,” run by Spencer Zwick, the campaign’s talented finance director. With few small donors (the average donation was $1,000), Boston relied on “bundlers” who competed with each other to raise enough to gain access to special briefings on policy areas that might affect their industries and, if they were successful enough, to the candidate himself. Worried about carried interest? Give to Romney. Clean air rules? Give to Romney. Raising $100,000 entitled the bundler to certain privileges, $200,000 to more perks, and so on. The innermost group consisted of a hundred hard-chargers who raised $1 million each, all, as required by law, in increments of only a few thousand dollars. The program was run like a business, with even volunteer fundraisers being fired if they missed their goals.
Obama also attended scores of major donor events, especially at the beginning, when campaigns are like start-up businesses seeking seed capital. But even as Obama so partner, Russ Schriefer, ut,Palidified his record as the president who killed public financing, he was setting a new standard in how to convince average people that they owned a piece of the campaign. All told, Obama attracted 4.5 million donors, 2.9 million of them new since 2008. OFA became the first-ever billion-dollar campaign, ending with $1.1 billion, about a third more than expected in early summer. Although wealthy donors still accounted for nearly half of the total raised, they no longer dominated Democratic politics the way they once did. Of the last $200 million in donations to Obama, only $22 million came from big donors. An amazing 97 percent of Obama contributors gave less than $250, with the average donation being $66. They couldn’t buy access with that, only a T-shirt or bumper sticker.
Chicago was thrilled with the $181 million raised in September, a one-month record that wouldn’t have been possible without Digital’s email tests. But the biggest draw was still the Obamas. Michelle attended about a fundraiser a day in October and charmed everyone. The money machine was humming so well that the president and vice president could stop attending fundraisers on October 15, while Romney and Ryan had to soldier on to Election Day.
The bed-wetting on the Democratic side continued nonetheless. In October Obama supporters outside the campaign grew worried about the movement of independents toward Romney. Chicago reasoned that many of these voters weren’t truly independents; they were Republicans who got fed up with the party in 2011 and stopped self-identifying as Republicans, which led to a precipitous drop in party membership. Now they were coming home to Romney, which brought his standing back to where it had been in midsummer.
Plouffe thought all the fevered talk about national polls was pointless. The election, he said, amounted to “governors’ races on steroids” and everything else was noise. For months he had been convinced that Romney’s best shot “was to attack our economy and Bush’s economy and offer something really new,” but he never separated himself from the Bush years and never recovered from all of the incoming fire.
Now, just weeks before the election, Plouffe and Messina had their metrics and they were sticking to them. The excitable Benenson could always be relied on to tell the morning conference call why the latest AP or Gallup or Washington Post–ABC News poll showing Romney surging was “complete shit,” with the wrong methodology for determining likely voters. He fervently believed the race had been remarkably stable for months, that Romney was simply returning to where they expected him to be all along. The Benenson analysis, confirmed in the Cave, was compelling enough to convince the high command to believe its own spin, which is always helpful in making the case to the outside world.
For all the talk of airpower (Romney) versus a ground game (Obama), it turned out the president had air superiority as well. Obama bought
a staggering 503,000 TV spots, more than twice as many as Romney, but for $135 million less, mostly because Chicago purchased them earlier, when they were cheaper. Inside the political industry, Boston took heat for overpaying for ads and for exceeding saturation levels. By the last week of the campaign, pro-Romney forces bought 7,000 gross ratings points, which meant that the targeted viewers could see the ads as many as seventy times—ten times a day. Obama bought about 4,500 points, which was also over the top. Jim Margolis, responsible for OFA’s ads, had to wonder, “So at what point do people say, ‘Fuck all of this’?” partner, Russ Schriefer, inMPaIV
All of the firepower was directed at about 0.5 percent of the electorate: the 700,000 voters in battleground states who were up for grabs. It came out to about $1,000 per undecided voter. With a month to go, Sheldon Adelson put another $33 million into pro-Romney and pro-business PACs, bringing his total over the staggering $100 million he pledged. While most of his money went to holding the House for the GOP, by the end he was funding half of the super PAC ads from the pro-Romney side. But even Adelson had his limits. He said no to the Chamber of Commerce when it appealed for even more in the closing days. The Kochs also pulled back a bit at the end. They disliked Karl Rove, were lukewarm about Romney, and decided to pour money into grassroots organizing in state and local races, where they bolstered the Republican ticket.
ROMNEY HAD THE misfortune to be running in the same cycle as two Republican senatorial candidates who self-immolated by discussing rape in ways that made them look like creepy fringe candidates. When Todd Akin, the Tea Party Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, blew up his campaign in August over a comment about “legitimate rape,” it didn’t seem at first to be close enough to the election to do Romney much harm. But Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party candidate who had unseated Senator Richard Lugar in Indiana’s GOP primary, made his comment about pregnancies resulting from rape being “something God intended to happen” only a fortnight before November 6. Worse for Boston, Mourdock was one of only two candidates for whom Romney had cut ads on which he spoke into the camera endorsing their candidacies.
Boston’s initial internal reaction was that Mourdock’s comment hadn’t been as bad as Akin’s and therefore it had no reason to pull the ad and denounce him. The story, Republicans assured themselves, would fade. This wishful thinking was based on a determination to hold the Senate seat in Indiana and not antagonize the evangelical base. Boston, knowing Romney would carry Indiana in any event, didn’t monitor events there closely enough. Stevens didn’t even notice at first that John McCain went off script and criticized Mourdock, giving the story more air. And no one in Boston bothered to check in with Governor Mitch Daniels, who was saying privately that Mourdock was “dead” and Romney should cut him loose. Once Romney publicly declined to pull his ad for Mourdock, he was trapped. Obama weighed in on the controversy (“Rape is rape”) in front of Jay Leno’s large audience, and Stephanie Cutter rushed out the message that Paul Ryan shared Mourdock’s opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest. All the talk of rape helped Obama solidify his strong edge among women.
IN OHIO RIGHT-WINGERS turned on Jon Husted, long the symbol of voter suppression in the state. Judicial Watch, True the Vote, and other conservative groups accused him of not moving fast enough to purge voter rolls of ineligible voters (Democrats, not surprisingly, thought the opposite) and for failing to get a much tougher voter ID bill enacted. On the Friday before the election, Husted made one last attempt to prove his devotion to the voter-suppression cause, issuing a directive—after the courts had closed—requiring that partner, Russ Schriefer, Te earlyprovisional ballots (those cast when voters have no driver’s license, only something like a utility bill) be disqualified if the voter improperly filled out the ID portion of the form, though Ohio law stated that this was the poll workers’ responsibility.
This new rule on provisional ballots was a great worry for the Obama Ohio team going into Election Day. It didn’t help that the conservative billionaire Steve Einhorn put up posters in inner-city Cleveland announcing “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY!” punishable by up to three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The obvious aim was to scare blacks into thinking that if they didn’t have the right identification, they might be arrested.
Last-ditch voter-suppression efforts were under way in other states too. In Iowa Romney field organizers distributed instructions to poll watchers explaining that they should make sure all voters had photo ID, though Iowa state law didn’t require it. In Pennsylvania state-sponsored ads saying voters must show their IDs were still up after the law was overturned. In Florida thousands of voters received bogus letters from an unknown source saying that their citizenship was under investigation. And in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s organization instructed volunteer Romney poll watchers in some areas to lie at polling stations by registering as “concerned citizens” rather than Republicans. They were then to tell voters they couldn’t vote without a photo ID or if they had ever been convicted of a crime, neither of which was true under Wisconsin law.
Despite the talk on the right of Chicago “thuggery,” there were no significant reports of dirty tricks on the Democratic side. When the Obama team played rough, it was on the theme of Romney as rich and out of touch. The tagline of one Obama attack ad, “He’s not one of us,” would have caused a huge outcry had it been directed toward the president, as Stuart Stevens pointed out. But that’s because it would have been seen as race-baiting. The news media took a more benign view of populist arguments. The Obama campaign sent out a mailer with a picture of Romney on his yacht and the line “Mitt Romney’s Plan Cuts Taxes for Families Like His—But Raises Taxes on Ours.” It occasioned little comment, in part because nonpartisan fact-checkers deemed it to be true.
Populist sentiment fused with outrage over racial injustice as black voters came to believe that, like their parents and grandparents, they were facing a genuine threat to their most basic civil rights. “We got so much stronger as an organization because of voter suppression,” Jeremy Bird said later. “Souls to the Polls” and other organized early voting efforts in the black community would be even bigger than in 2008.
Suddenly Al Sharpton was drawing thousands of people when he appeared in Ohio, Florida, or Virginia—the biggest crowds of his career. “Black people vote when they’re proud or angry,” Sharpton said. “They were proud in 2008 and angry in 2012.” He recalled the civil rights leader Wyatt Walker telling him that activists combed the South in the early 1960s looking for a symbol, and they finally found one in Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief who turned fire hoses and dogs on black children. “Voter suppression was our Bull Connor,” Sharpton said.
WITH EIGHT DAYS to go before the election and Romney holding a slight lead in several n_evational polls, experts agreed that the race was too close to call. With Obama’s advantage in the Electoral College and on the ground (early voting by Democrats was already exceeding that in 2008), Romney was still the slight underdog. And yet seasoned political professionals were beginning to conclude that Boston’s supreme confidence was more than just spin. Despite important endorsements from Michael Bloomberg and Colin Powell, self-described independents seemed to be moving to Romney. Even savvy political analysts didn’t understand at the time that a large proportion of them were actually Republicans disgusted by the primaries coming back into the fold. True independents were splitting more evenly, though this was hard to discern amid all the noise. With Florida close again and polls tightening in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, fears arose that the country might face another contested election like 2000.
For months Bob Bauer had organized a huge voter-protection effort that included hundreds of lawyers across nine states and hundreds more available by phone. Six days before the election, he held a conference call for senior staff to review contingency plans for a possible recount. “It was nauseating to contemplate,” Dan Pfeiffer recalled.
In Florida, scene of the 2000
fiasco, it looked as if history might be repeating itself. On the Friday before the election, voters in Miami-Dade County waited in line as long as nine hours to vote early. When officials at polling places tried to end the early voting, hundreds still in line chanted, “Let us vote!” The same day, Orange County closed an early voting site for four hours to contend with a bomb threat, leaving hundreds without the chance to vote when they planned.
At 1 a.m. on Saturday, Bauer, pulling an all-nighter in the Legal Brain Trust office in Chicago, directed that a suit be immediately filed in federal court against three Florida counties to compel them to keep their polls open over the weekend for early voting. This was a huge piece of business for OFA; at least 100,000 Obama voters were being prevented from voting on the last weekend in a state that was too close to call. After OFA’s suit, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties quickly agreed to restore early voting. Orange County, facing a state court suit, argued tough luck: Those voters thwarted by the bomb scare could come back and wait in line on Election Day if they wanted to vote so badly. First thing Saturday morning, a state court judge ordered the Orange County polls reopened immediately. The judge asked, in essence, Why should those four hours come out of the hides of voters? Broward County held out until a federal judge, angry at the resistance, beat up the county in court. This was only the latest judicial shot at those who didn’t understand that election officials were duty-bound to help voters, not restrict the franchise. “The courts had had enough. They kept asking, ‘Why are you making it harder to vote?’ ” Bauer remembered.
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies Page 37
