Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (44 page)

The improvement in their relationship had taken time, and there were still difficult moments. When Clinton had described Romney’s business record as “sterling” in June, he was shocked by the negative reaction among Democrats. A White House official said Gene Sperling, who was director of the National Economic Council in Clinton’s White House and now held the same job in Obama’s, spoke to his former boss to explain why people were upset. A friend described Clinton as “shell-shocked” by the commentary that he had undermined Obama. “He was a little baffled and surprised by the reaction,” the friend added. Clinton’s DNA was not to attack people. He wasn’t looking to go after Romney personally. What he was saying was that Romney might be qualified to be president but, given the choice, there was no question that Obama had the better policies. Days after that episode, Obama and Clinton were scheduled to appear together at a New York fund-raiser. Any worries about
Clinton’s reliability faded quickly. With Obama at his side, Clinton told the audience that Romney “would in my opinion be calamitous for our country and the world.” In Charlotte, the Obama team wanted Clinton to do even more. Clinton took the assignment seriously. Terry McAuliffe and his wife, Dorothy, close friends of the Clintons, visited the former president in the Hamptons before the convention. McAuliffe is an early riser, and when he came into the kitchen one morning he found Clinton working on the speech. “He was at the kitchen table writing it out, by himself,” McAuliffe said. “He knew what he wanted to say. He knew what arguments he wanted to make. He was obsessed. He knew how important this was. He took it on his shoulders.” McAuliffe was struck by Clinton’s focus. “After a couple of days I’d say, ‘Mr. President, happy hour, can I get a beer?’”

The day of the speech, the bloggers played a guessing game: When would the Obama team finally get a look at the speech, and what would they do if it wasn’t what they wanted? Clinton was notorious for stretching his speech deadlines. He would make last-minute edits on his State of the Union addresses on his way to Capitol Hill to deliver them. A few hours before the evening session of the convention was to begin, there was another report that Clinton hadn’t delivered his text. But if there was nervousness, it had nothing to do with content. The Obama team had already filmed Clinton for TV commercials. They knew what he thought and how he wanted to say it. Besides, Sperling and Bruce Reed, Vice President Biden’s chief of staff and domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House, were working on it with him. What the Obama team worried about was length. Clinton was as notoriously lengthy as he was sometimes late. Obama himself kept asking about it. Have we seen the draft? Axelrod said, “I said, ‘Mr. President, trust me, we’re not going to see the draft until very, very late.’” It was after 7 p.m. when the speech arrived.

Clinton took the stage about 10:40 p.m. The networks were scheduled to end their coverage at eleven, but Obama’s advisers were confident they would not cut off the former president. Clinton could barely speak a sentence without being interrupted by applause. “I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for president to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before his election saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression; a man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs that he saved or created, there’d still be millions more waiting, worried about feeding their own kids, trying to keep their hopes alive. I want to nominate a man who’s cool on the outside”—more cheers—“but who burns for America on the inside.” The applause continued. “I want a man who believes with no doubt that we can build a new
American dream economy, driven by innovation and creativity, by education, and—yes—by cooperation. And by the way, after last night, I want a man who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.” The arena erupted again.

Then he turned his fire on the Republicans with an affecting combination of sarcasm and humor. “This Republican narrative—this alternative universe—says that every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, we’re all completely self-made.” The audience was laughing now. “One of the greatest chairmen the Democratic Party ever had, Bob Strauss, used to say that every politician wants every voter to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself. But as Strauss then admitted, it ain’t so. We Democrats, we think the country works better with a strong middle class. . . . You see, we believe that ‘we’re all in this together’ is a far better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.’” He compared the job creation records of Democratic and Republican presidents. He decried the hard-liners in the Republican Party, whom he said seemed to hate the president, and talked about days when Democrats like himself worked with Republicans to get things done. He debunked the Republican argument that Obama had made a bad situation worse. “No president,” he said, “not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.”

Clinton’s speech was a rhetorical tour de force. He covered every possible argument and every possible subject, validating Obama’s policies and his commitment to the middle class, challenging the Republicans as a back-to-the-future party that wanted to implement the same policies that had brought about the collapse. He made the argument for more spending on education and technology and training and said Republican spending cuts would hurt the economy and harm the middle class. The Republican plan didn’t pass the arithmetic test either, he said. And as he delivered his next line—“We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle-down”—the audience cheered loudly—again.

Obama’s team, having cut the speech back, estimated that it would run a little over thirty-five minutes. It ran for nearly fifty. Clinton moved back and forth from the prepared text to his famous riffs so often that Obama’s team began to have sympathy for the teleprompter operator. Axelrod laughed. “We had given [Clinton] twenty-five minutes and he had written a fifty-minute speech, and so they cut it down to twenty-five minutes. And then of course he got over there, he had memorized everything he had cut out and he gave the fifty-minute speech—every minute of which was worthwhile.” No network cut away.

Clinton’s speech finally eliminated the enthusiasm gap that existed between Democrats and Republicans. After Charlotte, it was never again a serious worry for Obama. After his speech, Clinton was calm but not ebullient. “It was off his
shoulders,” said McAuliffe, who saw him that night. “He did what he had to do. He didn’t want to talk about it too much.” Everyone else did.

•   •   •

Torrential rains on Wednesday washed away the campaign’s hopes for another outdoor program on Thursday night like that of 2008. Obama delivered his acceptance speech from inside the arena. It was an anticlimax—serviceable but not soaring, effective but not as much as either Clinton or the First Lady. The speech was short on specifics, though his team had told reporters it included new details of his second-term agenda. That was for another time. He spoke to the disappointment that many voters, even his own, felt. “If you turn away now,” he said, “if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible, well, change will not happen. . . . Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.” Earlier in the speech, Obama had spoken also to the feeling that the campaign had not risen to the moment. “I know campaigns can seem small, even silly sometimes. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I.” At this, the audience began to laugh and applaud. “But when all is said and done—when you pick up that ballot to vote—you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation. Over the next few years, big decisions will be made in Washington on jobs, the economy, taxes and deficits, energy, education, war and peace—decisions that will have a huge impact on our lives and on our children’s lives for decades to come. And on every issue, the choice you face won’t just be between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.”

The 47 Percent Solution

M
itt Romney was in California when the news broke on the afternoon of September 17. David Corn of
Mother Jones
magazine posted the report, along with excerpts of a video recorded during a $50,000-per-person Romney fund-raiser on May 17 in Boca Raton, Florida. The video had been shot surreptitiously, from a low angle at the side of the room. Romney was visible in an at-times grainy image, but most of his words could be heard clearly.

Someone in the audience said to Romney, “For the last three years, all everybody’s been told is, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?” Romney replied, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those people . . . we do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or—” At that point the recording broke off for a minute or two.

Corn had been working on the story for some months. After publishing a
story about Romney and one of Bain’s companies, he had received an e-mail from someone named James Carter, a freelance researcher, who offered information that led to another story. Carter turned out to be the grandson of former president Jimmy Carter. Carter later tipped Corn to the existence of video clips of Romney and in late August put him in touch with someone who had set up a YouTube account under the name “Anne Onymous” and had posted video clips from a Romney fund-raiser. The anonymous source, whom Corn came to call “A.O.,” offered Corn the full video of the May fund-raiser. Corn received the video on September 10 after returning from the Democratic convention, according to an account he published in December 2012. When he viewed the entire video, he realized instantly that Romney’s 47 percent comments were explosive and damaging. He planned to post something on September 18, but he accelerated the schedule when the
Huffington Post
published an article that referred to some of A.O.’s previous video postings.
Within minutes of his posting
, it had blown up into a major controversy.

This was more than a gaffe, more than a slip of the tongue, more than Romney’s “I like to fire people” comment in New Hampshire or “I’m not concerned about the very poor” after the Florida primary. This seemed to speak to fundamental values of the candidate, a devastating moment when the candidate was speaking before a friendly audience, off the record, with no expectation that his words would become public. The campaign’s first response was a statement. “Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy,” it said. Inside the campaign an argument had erupted. Should Romney directly address the video remarks or not? Romney watched a clip of the video on an iPad during a ride between fund-raisers. He tried to explain it to his advisers. “He was very insistent that this was not in the proper context and that what he was saying was being unfairly portrayed as overly negative,” said Kevin Madden, who was traveling with Romney that day. “And he was quite animated.” Romney said he had been asked how he could win the middle of the electorate (which was not the question, according to the text of the video). He said his words might have been inelegant but hardly as damning as the video made them seem. Campaign officials told Romney that he needed to respond quickly and vigorously. “It was as dispiriting a day as I’ve ever encountered in working on campaigns for a long time,” Madden said. “We were totally under siege.”

In Boston, people were caught by surprise by the comments from the fund-raiser, though not by the existence of a video. They had seen something earlier from the event—an innocuous clip that had been posted on YouTube, about a factory in China that Bain had been interested in. That video clip had gotten no pickup. As the new, 47 percent video hurtled around the Internet and took
over cable coverage of the race, Romney’s advisers set up a conference call with the candidate. “There was broad consensus that Mitt needed to address it,” Eric Fehrnstrom said. “The question I remember trying to hash out was should we do it that night or should we wait until the morning, and the news cycle being the way it is we decided that it should be done immediately and if we have to do it again in the morning we’ll do it again in the morning.”

Stuart Stevens wanted video of Romney responding so that the video posted by
Mother Jones
wasn’t the only thing available for television. The campaign hastily arranged for Romney to speak to his traveling press corps as soon as possible. He explained that what he had said was “not elegantly stated” because he had been speaking off the cuff. He had made the mistake, he said, of trying to become a political analyst. He said he was often asked how he could win and this was his effort to explain how he would try to win the small percentage of voters who were not tied strongly to either party. “Of course individuals are going to take responsibility for their lives,” Romney said. “My campaign is about helping people take more responsibility and becoming employed again, particularly those who don’t have work,” he added. “This whole campaign is based on getting people jobs again, putting people back to work. This is ultimately a question about direction for the country. Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?”

•   •   •

The 47 percent controversy erupted during the rockiest month of the general election for the Republican challenger. After the convention in Tampa, Romney’s campaign seemed to slide steadily downhill. His convention bounce, modest as it was, disappeared once the Democrats started their convention in Charlotte. Ed Gillespie said the Republican convention was “a little bit like cotton candy. It didn’t end up giving us any sustenance or protein.” The Democratic convention produced a much bigger bounce for the president. The Romney team in Boston concluded that Obama had managed to do what they feared, which was to rekindle the flame from 2008, certainly enough to rally supporters who may have been disappointed in his performance. Democrats were now enthusiastically focused on preventing the Republicans from taking back the White House. More worrisome by far, given the underpinnings of Romney’s campaign strategy, the polls were beginning to record growing confidence in the direction of the country and more optimism about the state of the economy. Although the mood was still more negative than positive, polls showed a jump of ten points in the number of people who said that things were heading in the right direction. Romney eyed those numbers with considerable concern. If that accelerated, or even held, it would threaten the whole
conceptual framework of the campaign strategy. Just as during the summer, the margin between Obama and Romney remained close and competitive, but underneath those numbers there were signs that the contest was slipping away from the challenger.

The 47 percent video hit less than a week after Romney had created controversy over the Obama administration’s handling of protests in Egypt over an American-made video attacking the Prophet Muhammad and later that day the killing of four Americans in Libya, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens. On September 11, protests erupted in Cairo as demonstrators angry over the American video stormed the U.S. embassy climbed over the wall, took down the American flag, and replaced it with a black flag bearing an Islamic inscription. Before the demonstrations turned violent, the embassy had issued a statement that appeared to be an effort to mollify the protestors. “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others,” the statement said. Meanwhile, a separate confrontation was unfolding in Benghazi, though it would take hours before either the White House or the State Department realized how deadly it had become.

As reports continued to update developments, the Romney campaign decided to weigh in. This was an opportunity, advisers believed, to attack the president for siding with Islamic militants rather than defending American values of free speech, however repugnant the video that sparked the demonstrations was. Romney had long accused the president of apologizing for America, and this seemed a perfect example. Romney was on an airplane as the campaign worked out the language. When he was able to read it, he gave his approval. The statement was issued at about 10 p.m. that night, though it initially carried a midnight embargo. Within minutes, the embargo had been broken. “It’s disgraceful,” the statement said, “that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” At that point, the full extent of the tragedy in Benghazi was not yet known. Romney’s advisers did not know that the ambassador and the other Americans had been killed. By morning, however, everyone knew. Nonetheless, rather than step back, Romney went before the cameras to repeat his criticism. “Apologizing for America’s values is never the right course,” he said. His criticism of the embassy’s statement was certainly justified—even members of the administration were outraged that it had been issued and told reporters it had not been cleared in Washington—but his timing was poorly chosen. At a moment when the nation was absorbing the shocking deaths of four Americans, Romney appeared more interested in scoring political points. His comments drew a sharp rebuke from the president.
“Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later,” he said. But criticism of Romney also came from prominent Republicans.

•   •   •

Romney was suffering from other problems in September. On September 17, Peter Hart convened another of his focus groups. He went to Fairfax, Virginia, for a second time, assembling a group of undecided voters. As the two-hour discussion unfolded, two things became clear. Even voters who said they were undecided had more or less made up their minds. Of the twelve members of the group, only four seemed truly undecided. The other revelation was the degree to which Obama’s attacks on Romney over abortion, contraception, and family planning had reached the targeted audience of women voters and threatened Romney’s hopes of narrowing the gender gap.

The Obama White House had begun the year on the defensive over whether religiously affiliated facilities—mainly hospitals and universities—would be required to provide free contraception even if doing so violated their religious beliefs. But the Republicans in Congress mangled the public relations of their response, turning what had been a problem for the White House into a weapon in the contest to win the women’s vote. The Republican-controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee scheduled hearings on the contraceptive issue but declined to hear testimony from any women. Sandra Fluke, a thirty-year-old Georgetown University law student, had asked to be included on the list of witnesses. When she later told her story and argued for free contraception, Rush Limbaugh attacked her as a “slut” and a “prostitute” who wanted to be “paid to have sex.” (Under pressure, Limbaugh later apologized for the remarks.) Democrats declared that Republicans were waging a “war on women.” Romney had stepped carefully through that winter controversy, but he was on record calling for an end to federal funding for Planned Parenthood. The Obama campaign ran a series of ads over the summer attacking Romney and the GOP as extremists. As with other attacks, the Romney campaign decided not to respond, though that was not a unanimous view among the senior staff. Some Romney advisers thought he was taking an unnecessary risk not putting ads on television rebutting the attacks.

Inside the focus group facility in Fairfax, Hart had asked all of the participants to outline the issue of greatest concern to them. Nine people cited the economy, while two said it was health care. But as Hart probed the reasons why the truly undecided still were not certain about their vote, another reality revealed itself. “One thing that hasn’t come up is women’s rights and women’s health,” one of the women said. Hart asked which candidate she thought would be better on those issues. “Obama,” she said. He asked another woman,
a McCain voter from 2008, why she was not yet firmly in Romney’s column. “You know, it should be locked down,” she replied. “And I think part of it has to do with the Republican platform and the women’s health issues, which should not be an issue.” An Obama voter from 2008 said there were aspects of Romney’s career and ideas that she liked. “One of the things he has going for him is he has a history of working well with the other party, and that’s what we need right now. But part of me can’t get past some of the other little things.” Like what? Hart asked. “Women’s health, gay issues, the right for everybody to marry, those types of things kind of hold me back.”

•   •   •

Romney’s explanation about the 47 percent comment did nothing to quell the controversy. His advisers could see that it seemed to confirm everything his critics had been saying about him, that he was out of touch with ordinary Americans, or that he saw the world through a prism that made it impossible for him to identify with the lives and aspirations of the middle class or the working class. Prominent conservatives in the media joined others to attack him. On MSNBC’s
Morning Joe,
host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said, “This is dangerous—not because he’s going to lose that 47 percent of the vote—but because you’re going to start seeing suburban voters, swing voters, storm away from the campaign as quickly as possible unless he fixes it.”
New York Times
columnist
David Brooks likened Romney to Thurston Howell III, the wealthy, aristocratic New Englander from the old television series
Gilligan’s Island
. “Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not—some sort of cartoonish government-hater,” he wrote. “But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign.”
Wall Street Journal
columnist
and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote a blistering critique headlined “Time for an Intervention.” “What should Mitt Romney do now?” she wrote. “He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly. And then he needs to snap out of it and
move
.” Leaders of some of the Republican super PACs began to discuss whether they should shift their substantial funds out of the presidential race into competitive House and Senate contests.