Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (46 page)

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The president had met with his debate team for the first time in May in the Roosevelt Room, a few steps from the Oval Office. His advisers gave a presentation to set the context of the debates: History showed that incumbent presidents do poorly in the first debate, they told him. The presentation included a slide reviewing the history of first debates: Of six incumbent presidents, five had lost their first debate. The debate team offered reasons. Presidents lose because they’re out of practice and the challenger isn’t. Incumbent presidents live in a world where people don’t stand a few feet from them and berate them or twist their record. Challengers gained stature just by being on the same stage with the president. Finally, incumbent presidents have two jobs—running the country and running for reelection. Challengers have but one job, which is to win the election. They come to the first debate more ready than the president. Presidents think they know the issues; they’re dealing with them every day. They often don’t prepare or practice diligently enough. Obama absorbed the briefing and then showed his competitive streak. “Let’s see if we can break the string,” one member of the team recalled him saying that day.

Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and Vice President Gore, led the debate team. He had been co-leader in 2008. Anita Dunn, White House communications director during Obama’s first years in the White House and also part of the 2008 debate team, was back again. The two Davids—Plouffe and Axelrod—were key members, as was Joel Benenson, the campaign’s lead pollster. Karen Dunn was recruited to assemble the research that the president would be asked to consume and played an invaluable role. Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel and Anita Dunn’s husband, was tasked to handle negotiations with the Romney campaign. Jack Lew, a newcomer to presidential debates, became an active participant as well. Chief speechwriter Jon Favreau participated as the time for the debates approached. Plouffe recommended they recruit Massachusetts senator John Kerry to play Romney in their mock debates. As a fellow Bay State politician, Kerry had
studied Romney closely over the years, bore some similar physical characteristics, and was a skilled debater who had overwhelmed George W. Bush in the first debate in 2004.

Obama’s advisers took Romney very seriously as an opponent. “We were all really worried about it to begin with,” said one member of the team. “McCain was not a good debater in 2008 and he didn’t prepare. Romney went into the debates that mattered with a strategy, he knew exactly what he needed to do, he worked his tail off preparing.” Everyone on the team knew Obama did not like debates. He disliked having to chop answers into short bites. His speaking style was that of an orator who built to a crescendo and delivered his best lines at the end. In debates, the punch line had to come first. Obama saw debates as performances—all show. “Obama would be the first to say he hadn’t performed well in 2008 in the multicandidate ones during the primary because he didn’t like them,” the adviser said. “He didn’t like them for the general election but he performed well. But he didn’t have to perform against a really good opponent. This was just a totally different situation, so we were quite worried.”

During the summer, the team began to game out the first debate and lay a strategy for the president. An early strategy memo called for the president to be aggressive in the opening debate, to take the fight to Romney and to stay on the offensive as much as possible. His advisers told the president to challenge Romney in areas where the challenger had expertise, where he didn’t, and where he seemed to have no moorings at all. Obama was given a series of briefing books to help him become more familiar with what Romney had been saying. Obama was diligent in doing the homework. “He came back with voluminous questions,” Axelrod said. “He’d read these debate books and he’d send back a memo with forty questions that reflected the fact that he had read every line. So he worked hard enough. He was taking it seriously, but everything was out of alignment and you could tell in the debate prep.”

In mid-August, the president and Kerry held their first mock debate at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee just south of the Capitol. Obama’s performance was underwhelming. Kerry-as-Romney came well prepared. The president tried to overpower him with facts and statistics. His advisers could see his testiness as he listened to Kerry/Romney attack his record. Obama’s irritability was a major concern, a hangover from his 2008 debates when his most memorable moment was an unintended putdown of Hillary Rodham Clinton during a debate three days before the New Hampshire primary. Obama’s line, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” became a lasting image and one his advisers did not want replicated in any form against Romney. Obama understood that he couldn’t be snarky against Romney, but he asked his advisers, with evident frustration, how he should deal with someone he
believed was outright lying about his record. It was clear to all that Obama didn’t much like Romney. This too was different from the 2008 debates. Obama and McCain were far from chummy, but they had worked together on some things in the Senate and Obama had real respect for McCain’s courage and sacrifice in behalf of his country as a POW during the Vietnam War. He believed there were lines McCain would not cross in his pursuit of the presidency. He did not believe the same of Romney.

Everyone knew the first mock debate was just the opener in a series, but it was an unsettling start. “Everyone was looking at each other afterwards like, ‘Let’s just go kill ourselves,’” said one of the president’s advisers. When his advisers critiqued the performance the following week, Obama was receptive to their suggestions—in contrast to his sometimes prickly reactions of four years earlier. He said they were right, that he agreed with their criticisms. He said, according to one advisers, “I get it, I hear you.” He promised he would fix it—and then he kept doing the same bad things over and over and over again. The second mock debate was a virtual repeat of the first. The third took place on Friday, September 14, after Obama had just returned from an emotionally wrenching ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, where he and Secretary of State Clinton had received the bodies of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three other Americans killed in Benghazi. He delivered his worst performance yet. His advisers wrote it off to a president preoccupied with bigger concerns.

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“Let’s make the debate project the Manhattan Project of our campaign,” Beth Myers remembered Romney saying to her early in the year. “Let’s commit the resources. Let’s commit the time. Let’s have all the smartest people.” Romney wanted to be sure that when he walked into the debates, he would be as prepared as he could possibly be. Romney enjoyed debates and looked forward to them. “He’d probably get mad at me for saying that, but when you run for president there aren’t that many things that are intellectually challenging and exciting as one-on-one debates with your opponent,” she said. “He wanted to be ready, and being ready for Mitt means lots of preparation.”

Myers assembled a core team: Chief strategist Stuart Stevens and policy director Lanhee Chen developed overall strategy. Jim Perry handled preparation of the voluminous briefing materials for the candidate. Austin Barbour, who was part of the media team, oversaw all the logistics. Ohio senator Rob Portman was chosen to play Obama in the mock debates. Other senior members of the campaign staff—Matt Rhoades, Bob White, Eric Fehrnstrom, Ed Gillespie, Peter Flaherty, Ron Kaufman—were brought in once the process began in earnest to help with the mock debates and strategy sessions. The core team first met with Romney on June 23 in Utah, more than three months
before the first debate. “We had policy preparation, strategy preparation, and mock debates,” Myers said. “And we did enough of all of them.” Myers would give Romney briefing books before long flights, and he would spend his time on the plane digesting the material. He didn’t memorize so much as he absorbed and recast the material. “He’s the kind of guy who really prepared for his exams at Harvard Law School [and] Business School, but also crammed at the end,” Portman said in an e-mail message to me. “So he did both. He took notes in our sessions and then he would synthesize comments people had made and consolidate his notes into a few points in his own writing.”

Romney did sixteen mock debates overall, ten before Denver. The first ones took place the week after the Republican convention, as the Democrats were meeting in Charlotte. The Romney team decamped to Vermont, to the home of Kerry Healey, who was Romney’s lieutenant governor in Massachusetts. Over a three-day period, the Romney campaign staged five mock debates. Each night at dinner they had general discussions. On the first night, they discussed Obama’s strengths and weaknesses. The next night they put Romney under the microscope. Throughout the month of September, they were focused on developing a strategy for Denver. Particularly after the 47 percent video, Romney’s team saw the Denver debate as a new opportunity to present Romney whole to the voters. He could be the real Mitt, more thoughtful and compassionate, and more moderate than the Obama ads were saying. But they knew the most important goal was to go after the president’s record. “We needed to be ready for the first debate to be on attack on all issues and to have a counterattack,” Myers said. In the mock debates, Portman played a president on the attack, but as the debate neared, he cautioned Romney to be ready for a different Obama. “I thought it was important to prepare for a more aggressive Obama just in case,” Portman said in a message. “But I expressed my opinion that he would be playing rope-a-dope because he was being told by his people that he was ahead in the polls, which he was. He was probably plus eight in Ohio at that point,” Portman said. At this point, not many days before the Denver debate, the numbers everywhere were grim, thanks to the 47 percent comment. Matt Rhoades and company developed a turnaround plan. The first point of the plan was: Have a great debate.

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The president left Washington on the morning of Sunday, September 30, and arrived a few hours later in Nevada for debate boot camp. Obama’s advisers presented him with a new strategy. The changing landscape—Romney’s erosion in the polls after the conventions and the 47 percent comment—had prompted a reevaluation of the plan they had settled on during the summer. Though they claimed otherwise, Obama’s advisers were, in Axelrod’s word,
“seduced” by the new polls and by the new narrative of a race that had Obama firmly in command and Romney teetering on the edge of defeat. The debate team had concluded that the goals for Denver should be adjusted to fit the new state of the race. They no longer wanted Obama to be so aggressive. They recommended that he try to stay above the fray, to capitalize on the fact that voters liked him better than Romney. “The goal in this debate,” one adviser said, “is to not change that and not leave the people thinking their guy is a nice guy and our guy is an asshole, because if we can just keep this likability thing where it is, we’re going to win. So that colors your thinking about how aggressive you want to be in the debate, that colors your thinking about exchanges in the debate, that colors your thinking about how much conflict you want in the debate.” This adviser said there was another reason to urge Obama not to be on the attack. “You’re watching these practice sessions and when you turn Obama loose or when he goes after Romney, it’s horrible,” he said. Another adviser said, “Our assessment on the risk-reward, given where the race was, given what we thought we needed to get done in the debates, given how our candidate was performing, our assessment was to really just play it safe and to go into Denver and to try to deliver some message and talk about our plan, do some positive stuff, engage Romney on some issues but not blow it.” “What I didn’t want was peevishness,” Axelrod said. “I didn’t want caustic exchanges, and so we kind of warned him off of those, and in a sense he was left in no-man’s-land when he got out there.”

When his advisers presented Obama with the new plan, he disagreed with their recommendation. “We had a discussion with him about this aggressiveness thing and to his credit his instinct was that the strategy was wrong,” one adviser recalled. “His instinct was he needed to be more aggressive. He was right about that. . . . We explained to him that we thought, given where we were in the race, given our lead, given that likability was his strongest asset, that our strategy was not to be too aggressive in the debate, and he was like, ‘I don’t see how I’m going to win if that’s my strategy.’” Sunday’s mock debate was passable. Monday’s, however, was lousy. Obama seemed to be regressing. On Tuesday, after an outing to see the Hoover Dam, Obama returned for his final mock debate before Denver. This one went better than the previous night, more in line with Sunday’s. All three, an adviser later said, were better than his performance in the actual debate.

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Romney arrived in Denver on Monday night, after one final mock debate. In Denver he held a rally at which he received the endorsement of John Elway, the celebrated former quarterback of the Denver Broncos. His campaign was having trouble calibrating expectations. En route to Colorado, Kevin Madden had
tried to downplay expectations, but a day earlier Chris Christie had set them sky high. “This whole race,” he said on CBS’s
Face the Nation,
“is going to turn upside down come Thursday morning.” The day before the Denver debate, Romney got another confidence booster when he took a call from George W. Bush. Don’t worry, Bush told him. You’ll do just fine. The former president told Romney that he knew from his own experience how difficult first debates were for incumbents. He doubted that the president would be as prepared as he should be. He predicted Romney would emerge as the winner.

The morning of the debate, Obama and his advisers met for a final critique session before flying off to Denver. His advisers knew they were sending him into the first and most important of the debates unfocused and with an uncertain strategy. “We went into Denver not really with a strategy but with a hope,” one adviser said. “A hope that it would all kind of work out.”