Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (14 page)

THE REPUBLICANS

Mapping the Race

D
uring the Christmas holidays in 2006, Mitt Romney and his family—five sons, five daughters-in-law, and many grandchildren—gathered at their home in Utah. They were there to make a final decision about a campaign for president, which Romney had been pointing toward for more than a year. A video of their activities showed Romney energetically shoveling snow off the deck of their home, Romney sledding with his grandchildren, children sliding down stairs on mattresses, the general chaos of a house filled with people and constant activity.
One clip showed Romney saying grace
before dinner. Ann Romney narrated most of the video, talking about her relationship with her husband and their experiences traveling the country as they were exploring a candidacy. The video concluded with the family seated in the living room talking about the pros and cons of Romney running for president, with the prospective candidate taking notes on a pad of paper. “If people really get to know who you are, it could be a success,” Craig Romney said to the others in the family. Tagg Romney, the oldest son, said in the video, “I don’t think you have a choice. I think you have to run.” He added, “I look at the way your life has unfolded. You’re gifted. You’re smart. You’re intelligent. But you’ve also been extraordinarily lucky. So many things have broken your way that you couldn’t have predicted or controlled that it would be a shame not to at least try, and if you don’t win, we’ll still love you.” “Maybe,” Romney interjected, to chuckles from his family. “Maybe.” Tagg picked up again: “The country may think of you as a laughingstock, and we’ll know the truth and that’s okay. But I think you have a duty to your country and to God to see what comes of it.” At that Christmas gathering, the family took a vote on whether Romney should run. The five sons voted yes, their wives voted yes. Mitt and Ann Romney voted yes.

Four years later, when the Romney family gathered for their Christmas holiday, they faced a similar decision. This time they were in Hawaii and they sat together on a balcony one evening to share their thoughts about a second campaign. This time there was no video record of the meeting, and the vote would have shocked a political community closely monitoring the preliminary
maneuvering for the 2012 race. Even some of Romney’s closest political advisers might have been surprised. When they polled the group in Hawaii, ten of the twelve family members voted no. Mitt Romney was one of those ten voting against another campaign. The only yes votes were from Ann Romney and Tagg Romney. Some of the reservations were personal. All of them knew how disruptive and invasive a presidential campaign would be in their lives. “None of us were looking forward to the process,” Tagg Romney said. “We’re a pretty private family, to be honest with you. Having that privacy yanked away was not going to be fun. That was an underlying reason—but not the driving reason. You tasted the bitter pill once, you didn’t want to go bite into it a second time.” The more fundamental reason so many were opposed was that they feared the campaign ahead would be as brutal as it would be uncertain. “The basic reason was I think a lot of them thought, looking at it, saying, ‘This is going to be a really tough primary campaign to win,’” Tagg Romney said. And if his father were to win he would face an incumbent with a billion dollars, much of it used to attack and attack and attack.

Mitt Romney had other reasons to think that not running might be the wiser choice. Winning as a moderate from Massachusetts who happened to be Mormon was always going to be difficult. “A lot of the thinking on the part of my brothers and my dad was, ‘I’m not sure I can win a primary given those dynamics,’” Tagg Romney said. The prospective candidate also knew the sheer physical and family toll another campaign would take. “He’s a private person and, push comes to shove, he wants to spend time with his family and enjoy his time with them,” his son said. “Even up until the day before he made the announcement, he was looking for excuses to get out of it. If there had been someone who he thought would have made a better president than he, he would gladly have stepped aside.”

•   •   •

Confidence about Romney’s commitment to running never wavered in Boston, where his team had been mapping the race for months. On Thursday, December 9, 2010, just weeks before the family vote in Hawaii, Romney gathered his senior campaign team at the family’s oceanside home in La Jolla, California, for a full-scale discussion of a 2012 campaign. The team was full speed ahead, and Romney had done nothing to slow the machinery. In fact, he had done everything a likely candidate needed to do. He had spent the previous year helping to elect Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy; meeting with prospective donors; promoting his book,
No Apology;
campaigning around the country for and giving money to Republican candidates. Romney used his national and state political action committees to ingratiate himself with state and local candidates in the early states
and elsewhere, giving nearly $400,000 to three hundred candidates, according to Nicholas Confessore and Ashley Parker in the
New York Times
. “
State auditors, county commissioners
, sheriffs: no Republican candidate, it seems, has been insignificant enough to escape the glow of Mitt Romney’s affections,” they wrote. To those who followed him on some of those trips to see donors, he was far more focused than during his first campaign. Whatever reservations he may have had about a second campaign, he kept them out of view of the political advisers around him.

In La Jolla, the group was large. The attendees included Matt Rhoades, who ran Romney’s political action committee and was slotted to manage the campaign; Beth Myers, who had managed the 2008 campaign and remained one of Romney’s longest-serving and most loyal advisers; and Eric Fehrnstrom, a former journalist and longtime Romney spokesman and adviser. Bob White was there. He was Romney’s partner when Bain Capital was founded and was the candidate’s closest confidant. Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, partners in one of the Republican Party’s best-known media firms, were there in their capacity as strategists and message gurus. Stevens would become the campaign’s chief strategist. Ron Kaufman, who retained close ties to former president George H. W. Bush and was the Republican national committeeman from Massachusetts, was there as a veteran of many presidential campaigns, an experienced counselor now devoted to making Romney president. Others included Spencer Zwick, the well-regarded finance director whose task would be more difficult the second time around because of a decision that Romney would not, if at all possible, dip into his personal fortune to fund the campaign as he had done in 2008. Zac Moffatt, who would oversee the campaign’s digital operation, was part of the group, as was Kelli Harrison, Romney’s personal assistant. Family members included the candidate’s wife and two of the couple’s five sons, Tagg and Matt. The only one missing from this inner circle was Peter Flaherty, who with Myers and Fehrnstrom had served Romney as governor and after the 2008 campaign together had formed their own political consulting firm. A family problem prevented him from being there.

The conversation was broad-based: What’s the rationale for the campaign, what would it feel like, when would it have to start? Romney had been expressing his concerns about Obama and the administration’s economic policies, but at this first big meeting the focus was less on the president and more on what kind of race Romney would need to run. The group surveyed the field of prospective rivals for the nomination. They discussed whether John Thune, the senator from South Dakota, would jump in. They talked about the possibility that Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, or Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, would join the race. (Stevens always insisted that Barbour, a
former client, would not, and had told Barbour he did not think he should run.) But there was no talk about how the entry of one or another of the potential candidates would influence Romney’s decision or strategy. Romney had learned that lesson from his first campaign: Above all he had to run his own race.

At that time four years earlier, other candidates, including John McCain, were already running hard, and there was great pressure on Romney, who had no national profile, to move quickly. In December 2010, there was no such imperative. Romney could set his own pace as the nominal front-runner and was content not to force a decision to ramp up early in the new year. “I don’t recall leaving California feeling that the throttle had been switched to full steam ahead,” Beth Myers said. Mitt and Ann Romney were still weighing the costs and benefits of a second campaign. “It’s like a second marriage,” one Romney adviser said. “You go into it with your eyes open. It’s not as romantic. You realize the toll that the campaign takes on your family, your friends, and you really need to feel that it is an important thing for you to do. I think that’s what Mitt and Ann were thinking about: Is this the right thing for us to do for the country? And would we be able to run a race that we’d be able to focus on the things that are important to move the country in the right direction? Or would it be all about issues that were tangential to that? And I think they were wrestling with their ability as a family to make that commitment again.”

•   •   •

The experience of the first campaign shaped the second, starting with the most important question of all, which was what the message would be. Romney had struggled as a first-time candidate, veering into social issues in a frustrating effort to demonstrate that he could be trusted on the matters that religious and social conservatives most cared about. At the start of that first campaign, he had been urged by some Republicans with whom he consulted to present himself as what he was, a Mr. Fix-It, an economic turnaround artist, not a conservative ideologue. The issue of authenticity—who was Mitt Romney?—dogged him throughout the first campaign. Romney’s advisers concluded that he had not hit his stride as a candidate until he was practically out of the race. That can be common with candidates; only the certainty of losing liberates them to act in ways that are more natural and authentic. Romney’s best days as a candidate, his advisers believed, came after losses in Iowa and New Hampshire that had crippled his hopes of winning the nomination. Only when he began campaigning in Michigan and put a focus on economic issues did he seem comfortable. Only then did he find a true voice, they believed. “I think there was a realization then that whatever campaign he was going to run was going to be done playing to his strengths and going back to what makes
Romney uniquely qualified to be president,” Schriefer said. That meant Romney 2012 would be focused on the economy. He would keep his eyes fixed on the president and the president’s record while stressing his own background in private equity. He would avoid as much as possible getting sidetracked on other issues.

Romney had the luxury to start the campaign on his own timing, not at the frenetic early pace of his first. In his first campaign, he had staged a fund-raising call day in early January 2007 to make a statement that he could compete financially with his rivals, even though he would spend much of his own money. He had begun running television ads that winter in the early states, earlier than any of his rivals, because he wanted to boost his poll numbers and be seen as a top-tier candidate. “That’s one thing we learned from last time,” Matt Rhoades told me as the campaign was getting under way. “You don’t need to be on TV in February, a year out from the primary.” Romney planned to house his campaign in the same office building that he had used in 2008, but with far fewer staff for the primaries. Rhoades told anyone who asked that the second Romney campaign would be “leaner and meaner.”

Nor did Romney and his team feel any pressure to involve themselves in every controversy, every new development, every trivial matter that caught the attention of the political class and cable television. “I think there was a feeling [in 2008] that you had to be in the news on any given day on whatever the issue of the day was,” said one Romney adviser. “The way to be relevant was to comment on whatever happened that day, and by doing that you become [unable] to drive any one particular message.” Beth Myers said, “We were constantly trying to not be an asterisk, like anyone who gets into a presidential race for the first time realizes how hard that is, and you have to have a strategy, and our strategy was to be big and play aggressively everywhere. This time we didn’t need to do that. We had a very different race.” Romney had been following this approach throughout 2010. He avoided injecting himself into the story of the day unless there was a strategic reason to do so. He avoided internal Republican Party fights whenever possible. He wrote an occasional op-ed, mostly on economic issues, but only occasionally made himself available for an interview, even on friendly Fox News. He tried to keep his focus on the president rather than on prospective rivals.

•   •   •

The first quarter of 2011 passed and Romney still had not taken a formal step toward running. By that time, Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain had formed their exploratory committees; Newt Gingrich had taken a halting step toward doing so; John Thune and Mike Pence had announced that they would not run; Ron Paul had won the straw poll at the annual Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC); Rick Santorum was spending more and more time in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina; Michele Bachmann was suddenly exploring in Iowa; and speculation was building about whether Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels would run. Romney was the unexciting front-runner and operating contentedly out of the limelight. He was seen as the candidate to beat, but he stirred few passions in the party.

On April 8, 2011, Romney’s senior team met again, this time in Boston at Ron Kaufman’s apartment near Beacon Hill. The meeting took place three days before Romney would announce the formation of his exploratory committee. Myers had put together a PowerPoint presentation that outlined the campaign’s thinking. Two pages were headlined “The Path.” One page was mostly a calendar of contests through Super Tuesday, as best as it was known at the time. The other had three subheads: “Assumptions,” “Questions,” and “Unknowns.” Under “Assumptions,” the first line read, “No straw polls.” This was another lesson learned from 2008—the debilitating cost in time and money of competing in straw polls. Romney had invested heavily to win the Iowa Straw Poll, only to see Huckabee’s second-place finish turn out to be the meaningful event of the day. This time he would ignore them.