The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  SANDY DEVELOPED LATE for a hurricane. Until recent years, when the end of the hurricane season was pushed back a month (likely by climate change), it was rare to see hurricanes at the end of October and even rarer to see them hitting as far north as the New York area. On October 24 a tropical cyclone was upgraded to a hurricane shortly before making landfall in Jamaica, then gained strength as it headed out to sea again. By the time the storm hit Cape May, New Jersey, at 5:46 p.m. on Monday, October 29, Hurricane Sandy was the largest hurricane (in diameter) on record.

  The president lef the killing of Osama bin Ladense24t Andrews Air Force Base for Orlando on Sunday evening, hoping to squeeze in a rally before the storm hit. But by midnight Air Force One pilots indicated that Monday afternoon might be too late to get back to Washington in time. This conjured memories of President Bush being out of town and off the case during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the kind of mistake that could blow the election. So at 6:30 a.m. the White House scrapped Obama’s 10 a.m. campus rally and flew back to Washington Monday morning under threatening skies, leaving the less airworthy press plane behind. At 2:15 p.m. the president called New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies had already positioned resources to respond quickly to the storm, and the president and governor had a good discussion about the preparations. They spoke again at midnight, after much of the New Jersey that Christie knew as a kid, the Jersey Shore, lay in ruins.

  From the Situation Room, Obama declared a predisaster state of emergency in several states and signed edicts that speeded aid for New Jersey and New York by forgoing the usual paperwork. Just as he had during the BP oil spill, he gave the governors and big-city mayors his cell phone number and insisted they call him directly anytime red tape held something up. He instructed his agency heads not to tell him why something couldn’t be done but to figure out how it could.

  The grim totals for the United States and the Caribbean—138 dead, $75 billion in property damage, 81 million people without power—were worse than expected. But like so much else in his presidency, Obama had undertaken careful preparation. As a senator, he won notice for his close analysis of Katrina and FEMA’s poor response. After becoming president, he promptly asked Craig Fugate, who managed Florida’s emergency preparedness under Republican Governor Jeb Bush, to run FEMA, and Fugate accepted. When congressional Republicans tried to starve FEMA’s budget, the Obama White House fought back hard and won.

  Christie was impressed by the president’s attentiveness. On Wednesday, October 31, after postponing Halloween in New Jersey, he hosted Obama on a tour of hurricane damage in his state. Later he told the press about the goose bumps he felt riding on Air Force One. The image of a Democratic president and a Republican governor working well together sent a powerful bipartisan message.

  For three days in a row, Christie went out of his way to heap accolades on Obama. “The president has been outstanding in this,” he told the Today show. “I have to give the president great credit,” he gushed to Fox. Rush Limbaugh was so upset about the remarks that he suggested a gay subtext to the Christie-Obama relationship by describing their “man loving man” tour of hurricane damage.

  Fox’s Steve Doocy asked Christie whether Romney would visit New Jersey with him. Christie was dismissive: “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested.” Republicans were sure that Christie was just sore over not being selected for the ticket, or perhaps figured that he would have a better chance to win the presidency in 2016, at the end of Obama’s second term, than in 2020, at the end of Romney’s. In truth, Romney had nothing to add to managing the crisis, and it would have looked like a campaign stunt for him to jump into the story.

  Tuesday, October 30, a week before the election, was the day Romney appeared to lose his footing. At a campaign event billed as “storm relief” in Kettering, Ohio, Romney ask partner, Russ Schriefer, I3Q earlyed for donations of supplies and possessions—just what professional relief workers don’t want from the public. (They have trouble sorting them, and many of the intended recipients don’t need what donors provide from their closets.) McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed revealed that Romney staffers spent $5,000 at a local Walmart on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to make the photo-op look good. It had the opposite effect.

  Worse, Romney was on record in the GOP primaries pandering to Republicans who viewed FEMA as just more big government. During a June 2011 CNN debate, moderator John King asked him whether disaster relief money should be on the chopping block. Romney said, “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” At a press conference on the day after the storm, reporters tried seven times to get Romney to talk about FEMA and he refused. It had been more than three weeks since he had subjected himself to any questions at all, even from Fox or ESPN, an unprecedented degree of inaccessibility at the end of a presidential campaign. With his embrace of antigovernment ideology catching up to him, he looked like a man with something to hide.

  Chris Christie was sleeping about two hours a night. He was stressed by the crisis and still shaken by the destruction of the Jersey Shore. Finally, he realized he had to attend to political business, especially after Rupert Murdoch tweeted that Christie “must re-declare for Romney or take blame for the next dire four years.” On November 4 the Christie team planted a question about Romney with Fox News reporter Rick Leventhal. Christie began his answer with fake pique (“This is the kind of silliness that really drives me crazy”) before explaining that he was the first governor to endorse Romney, had raised millions for him, and of course would be voting for him. He then finished with a typical Christie-esque riff on how the media was stupid for even asking the question he had just planted.

  For months Bill Clinton’s gut had told him that Romney would win. It wasn’t until the Obama-Christie moment during Hurricane Sandy that he changed his mind. After that, he was confident. Obama was acting like a president, while Romney lost a precious ten days just before the election. In Boston Stuart Stevens thought for the first time that maybe his man might lose. In the end, the election wasn’t close enough for Sandy to be decisive, but it clearly helped Obama.

  ON NOVEMBER 1 Romney held a conference call with big donors. After an upbeat presentation by pollster Neil Newhouse, Romney said, “Neil’s giving you the straight scoop. I feel very positive. The energy flow is tremendous. You should see the crowds!” He explained that the campaign was expanding the battlefield to Minnesota and Pennsylvania. “Dick Morris is predicting a landslide,” he added. “I don’t think that. It’s very close, but I’m in good shape to win.”

  The logic was that Romney had closed the gap in states where he had trailed a month earlier. Obama had won independents by 8 points in 2008 but trailed with them now by an average of 11 points in the Newhouse polls. Obama had outspent McCain by 4 to 1 in 2008, but now there was rough parity. The money was flow partner, Russ Schriefer, I3Q earlying in, with several hundred Romney donors giving more than $50,000 apiece.

  Newhouse’s polls showed Romney ahead in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina and tied in Virginia, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. He had Romney within the margin of error in Colorado, Nevada, and, incredibly, Minnesota. Newhouse, until then a well-regarded pollster, was certain that the white vote would make up at least 74 percent of the electorate, as it had in 2008. But that percentage had been falling by 2 or 3 points every four years in every election cycle since 1988, as whites aged and had fewer children and minority populations grew. Joe Trippi, who had run Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 and was now an analyst for Fox News, kept telling viewers that white turnout would be 72 percent of the electorate. You could set your watch to it.

  Newhouse argued his numbers vigorously and benefited from the group-think that had taken
over the Romney campaign and much of the Republican Party. Their working assumption was that this was 1980, when voters had broken sharply at the end for Reagan against the incumbent Carter.

  VOTER SUPPRESSION TURNED out to be one big boomerang. On the day before the election, Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia called Jim Messina. All the talk of a “white wave” washing Romney into office amused him. There was a wave in Philadelphia, all right—a huge wave of angry black voters headed to the polls not out of joy but because, as many African Americans told the mayor, “they’re fucking with our president.” The Obama camp had never worried much about Pennsylvania, but this was a good sign nonetheless, and the same news was coming out of Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.

  The black ministers who had been so upset about Obama’s support for same-sex marriage discovered that they were more upset by the threatened cancellation of voting on the Sunday before the election. “Souls to the Polls” was their chance to show their communities how much clout they had compared to other congregations. The number of buses lined up in the church parking lot became a way of keeping score. They had the president’s back, of course, but their own as well.

  As the backlash gathered strength, Republicans were about to get the worst of both worlds: no suppression efforts upheld by the courts but the full force of the reaction against them. OFA had two hundred paid staffers on the ground in Pennsylvania, and no one there doubted the outcome. The Cave thought the white Republican legislators in Pennsylvania who admitted trying to suppress the vote in order to elect Romney had been too stupid to do proper research. If they had, they would have found that large numbers of those with expired driver’s licenses were rural white seniors—the core of Romney’s support.

  The Romney high command blithely assumed that a combination of devastating black unemployment and disappointment with Obama would inevitably dampen turnout in urban areas. It was wishful thinking.

  WHILE FOX NEWS had a financial incentive to see Obama reelected (the network generally enjoyed higher ratings under Democrats), it was still trying to help Romney until the end. Roger Ailes covered the Benghazi story as if it were Watergate just before Nixon’s _evresignation, with almost wall-to-wall coverage. Only one Fox anchor was allowed to offer a dissenting view, and even that had its limits. On November 2 Geraldo Rivera appeared on Fox & Friends and said that “it broke [his] heart” that Charles Woods, the father of one of the contractors killed in Benghazi, “has been led to believe that the president of the United States went gambling in Las Vegas instead of saving our kids in Benghazi, and that’s a lie.” When another Fox host, Eric Bolling, began attacking Obama’s negligence, Rivera shouted, “That’s a lie! You are a politician trying to make a political point.”

  After the argument continued for several minutes, Ailes called the control room and told the producers to cut Rivera’s mic. Just after Rivera said, “It makes it seem as if bureaucrats were sitting there scratching their bellies and that’s not what happened,” his next words—“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, it’s very frustrating”—were picked up, though faintly, on the microphone of Steve Doocy, who had placed his hand on Rivera’s shoulder. As host Gretchen Carlson previewed an upcoming story, Rivera could be heard on her mic saying, almost inaudibly, “Oh, great, great, now I’m gonna get lynched.” The video was available from YouTube for several weeks before being mysteriously taken down. Ailes was happy to employ Rivera on his network; he was a flamboyant reporter who attracted viewers. But when Rivera used facts to destroy Fox’s bogus narrative on Benghazi, it was time to pull the plug.

  OBAMA FIGURED RACE was playing less of a role than in 2008, when voters didn’t know him. This time the election was more about class. “The folks at the very top—they’ll always have a champion,” Obama said in his new combative stump speech. “The people who need a champion never have lobbyists in Washington working for them. They need a president fighting for them.” These were Democratic Party themes going back to Andrew Jackson, and he seemed exhilarated to express them. “This is coming from his loins,” Axelrod said after a rally in Linn, Ohio, as the traveling press corps snickered.

  With unemployment below 8 percent in the final jobs report before the election, the president could afford to brag a bit about his foresight on the economy (“The auto rescue wasn’t even popular in Ohio and Michigan, but I knew it was the right thing to do”) and even his own integrity (“You may be frustrated with the pace of change, but you know where I stand. You know I tell the truth”). When he warned about the opposition trying “to buy an election” and the booing began, he always said the same thing: “Don’t boo. Vote.”

  As Obama found his groove, all the talk about his not communicating seemed in the past. By the end of the campaign, he was conveying his message so well that voters on the street were regurgitating “make-or-break moment for the middle class” and other arguments back to reporters and pollsters. And Obama communicated the one quality that matters most in politics: trust. For all of the disappointments in their own lives, the people still felt that the president of the United States was honest and even a little cool.

  On the road Obama enjoyed spending time with the campaign’s state directors. They all had the same playoff beards and the same approach—humble, hardworking, smart, and almost always willing to give credit the killing of Osama bin Ladense24 first to their troops. The president would say, “Take a picture,” and usually the state director would reply, “No, take one with my team.” Finally, Marty Nesbitt said to Obama, “Everywhere we go, that’s the same dude.” The president agreed and he loved it. He had created a self-reinforcing subculture of young leaders much less self-absorbed than the activists of an earlier era. “They’re better than we were—much better,” he liked to say.

  Obama was not just self-aware; he was a bit detached from his own experiences, as if he were focused on collecting novelistic string for his memoirs. Some of his comments along the way were merely nostalgic (“This is my last debate prep” or “This is my last walk-through”), but others seemed ripped from a Walker Percy novel. “I’m sort of a prop in the campaign,” he said onstage two days before the election. But in Des Moines at the end, he felt the full force of what everyone had done for him. Out in the crowd he saw so many people who had been with him from the beginning, still working their hearts out for him five years later. The standoffishness of those dutiful occasions in the East Room evaporated. “He was feeling the love,m the start, O

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  Shell-shocked

  After the election, it was hard to believe that Romney and his campaign hadn’t seen it coming. The signs were there all along, from the forbidding math of the Electoral College, which required Romney to run the table, to polling in media markets showing that $100 million in late ad buys by super PACs had not moved the needle even slightly. Early voting—more than a third of the total ballots cast across the country—appeared to be overwhelmingly for Obama in every battleground state except Colorado. But the whole Romney team—and much of conservative America—seemed to be swimming in a sea of denial.

  Ever since the first debate, Fox News had covered Romney’s supposed “momentum” as if it would inevitably carry him into the White House. Conservatives avidly followed a website called “Unskewed Polls” that purported to show why any polls showing Obama ahead were faulty. In truth, it was the Romney polls that used the wrong turnout models. The normally sober Neil Newhouse was projecting a win. “IN EVERY SINGLE STATE WE HAVE A SIGNIFICANT partner, Russ Schriefer, inor with 12 MOMENTUM LEAD,” Newhouse wrote in one of his last emails to supporters. The all-caps message was clear: Only clueless skeptics who weren’t in touch with the numbers—up by 20 points with white women! up by 28 with white men!—could not see the victory ahead.

  Romney, determined to leave everything on the (reality distortion) field, campaigned in Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire on the day before the election, ending with a relaxed halftime appearance on Monday Night Football. The crowds at the end
were large and often ecstatic, chanting “One more day! One more day!” On Tuesday, Romney got up and voted at home in Belmont, Massachusetts, before heading out on a final trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania, where 96 percent of voters cast their ballots on Election Day. Obama had harvested most of his votes early, Boston reasoned, and Romney would rule when it counted.

  Blessed by good health and great business success, Romney had suffered few setbacks in his life. In politics, his loss to Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Senate race was hardly devastating; he had beaten expectations and given Kennedy his toughest race ever. Now the man groomed and conditioned for great success landed at Boston’s Logan Airport more than merely confident of what the evening’s returns held in store for him. He fully expected to be elected president of the United States.

  STARTING AT 6 A.M. on Election Day, Dan Wagner came up from the Cave every half-hour to brief the high command, gathered on the seventh floor in what was known (in homage to an earlier political era) as “the Boiler Room.” Axelrod said to Wagner, only half-joking, “If we lose, there are two people who can never go outside again: you and Nate Silver.” Wagner said he had a hara-kiri knife ready downstairs for ritual suicide.

  By 11 a.m. the joke didn’t seem so funny in the Cave. Most areas looked good, but some Ohio numbers were throwing the models out of whack. When Wagner stepped out of the Cave for a moment, two analysts approached Elan Kriegel, who ran battleground state analytics, with troubling numbers. Gordon, the Election Day voter tracking system named for the man who killed Houdini, was producing data with disturbing anomalies. All of the subgroups most supportive of the president were down roughly 5 percent. Kriegel said the numbers must be wrong and asked the statisticians to run them again. When they did, they came back the same. He asked David Shor, the twenty-year-old onetime prodigy who helped him prepare the Golden Reports, what it meant. Shor said it meant that Obama was losing Ohio.