Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (51 page)

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Obama delivered his victory speech at 12:38 a.m. Chicago time at a noisy rally in the sprawling McCormick Place along Lake Shore Drive. There was something different about the president that night, especially in comparison to the same night four years earlier when he addressed more than a hundred thousand people on that balmy night in Grant Park. The crowd that night was ecstatic and there were tears flowing among many who stood in the park. Obama, however, looked sobered, as if the weight of all the problems before the country were settling on his slender frame. This time, in McCormick Place, he was more animated and seemingly more ebullient. Axelrod noticed. The president, he thought, was happier on this night than he had been four years earlier. “I felt the weight of the burden on him more than I felt the elation four years ago,” he said. “I know he believes this was a more satisfying win even than that one because of all the obstacles. A year ago the sainted Nate Silver was writing a magazine piece the headline of which was, ‘Is Obama Toast?’ To be written off and degraded and all that and come back and win . . .” He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

Romney’s Take

M
itt Romney greeted me at the door with a big smile and firm handshake. It was late January 2013, almost three months after the election. He was at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after a weekend in Washington where he had been feted at a luncheon hosted by his friend Bill Marriott and attended the annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club. He was dressed in blue jeans and a checked shirt. He motioned me to one of the big easy chairs in the living room, pulled an ottoman between us to hold my digital recorders, and sat back. For the next hour and a half we talked about his campaign.

I asked him what made him want to be president and why he thought he didn’t become president. “I wanted to be president because I believe that my background and experience and my perspective and point of view would be helpful to get America back on track, to keep America the economic powerhouse it’s been and the champion of freedom here and around the world,” he said. “I happen to believe that America is on a course of decline if it continues with the policies we’ve seen over the last couple of decades, and we need to take a very different course, returning to more fundamental principles, if you will.” I asked whether part of his decision to run was an effort to fulfill an ambition that his father never did. “I love my dad. It’s fair to say that I probably would not have thought of politics had I not seen my mom and dad involved in politics,” he said. “But my decision to run for office was really in no way a response to my father’s campaign. It was instead a recognition that, by virtue of a series of fortunate events, I was in a position to run for president and potentially become president. And I felt if I didn’t do so, given that opportunity, I would have been letting down my country, my family, and the future.”

He attributed his loss to a series of factors. “There are almost any number of things which, had they been different, might have yielded a different result,” he said. “One, the president ran an effective campaign and did a number of things very well. He was able to appeal directly one on one to key members of the voter base and turn voters out. And so you give credit where credit is due. Number two, there were events outside either one of our control that helped his effort.
One was the perception that the economy had suddenly gotten a lot better. If you looked at the wrong track/right track numbers, they shifted quite dramatically in the final month. Unemployment at 8 percent dropped to 7.9 or 7.8, and that somehow was heralded as a major change in the economy and changed people’s perception. That’s clearly something you can’t control. And the hurricane [Hurricane Sandy] also put us on a bit of a stall in terms of our prosecution of our case and provided an opportunity for incumbency to have a normal advantage. . . . And then of course, there were the things that our own campaign should have done differently or could have done differently. We weren’t as effective at turning people out as was the president’s campaign. We didn’t do as well with Hispanic voters as we probably could have. And then of course the inevitable mistakes that I made. I know the president also made mistakes, but you can say, well, if I wouldn’t have made any mistakes, that might have led to a different result as well.”

We then went back to the beginning of the race, during the formative months as he was preparing to run again. I reminded him of the family gathering at Christmas in 2010 when everyone had taken a vote on whether or not he should run. There were only two yes votes: Ann Romney and Tagg Romney. He had been one of the ten to vote no. Why? “I knew how grueling the process was, and I felt that there may be others who could be more effective in actually winning and then getting America on course. And I thought, for instance, if someone like Jeb Bush were to have run, that he might well be able to do what was necessary to get the country on track. I got into this out of a sense of obligation to the things I believed in and love for the country, but not because it was something I desperately wanted so that I could feel better about myself.” Eventually, after looking over the field of candidates, he decided he was the right candidate for the time. “I didn’t think that any one of them had a good chance of defeating the president . . . and in some cases I thought that they lacked the experience and perspective necessary to do what was essential to get the country on track.”

He confirmed that at one point in the spring of 2011, he was so pessimistic about his chances that he called Tagg early one morning to say he thought he was not going to run after all. “I recognized that by virtue of the realities of my circumstances, there were some drawbacks to my candidacy for a lot of Republican voters,” he said. “One, because I had a health care plan in Massachusetts that had been copied in some respects by the president, that I would be tainted by that feature. I also realized that being a person of wealth, I would be pilloried by the president as someone who, if you use the term of the day, was in the 1 percent. Being Mormon would obviously be a challenge for some evangelical voters. I didn’t know whether that would persist or whether that would go away
during the primaries. I think it was Stuart Stevens who said, ‘You know, our party is more southern, and you’re from the North. It’s more evangelical, and you’re a Mormon. And it’s more populist and you’re a rich guy. This is going to be an uphill fight.’” Romney laughed. “And so I didn’t want to get into the race and make it more difficult for the leader of our party to beat the president. And so for me the gating issue was, am I the person best able to defeat President Obama and therefore get the country on track?”

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We talked at some length about the issue of immigration and whether he had compromised his chances of winning more Hispanic votes in the general election by what he had done to win the nomination. His answers offered his perspective on how events had unfolded and how he perceived it at the time and later. Long before he announced his candidacy, he said, he had learned there was to be a meeting in Florida of Hispanic leaders. “I went to see Jeb, I flew down to see him and said I’d like to take immigration off the issue list for the primaries. And wouldn’t it be great if Republicans could come up with an immigration plan that all of the contenders could say, ‘Yeah, I agree.’ And then we could sweep that aside. And we were unable to get there. I mean, there just wasn’t enough consensus among Republicans generally.”

Once the debates began, Romney aggressively prosecuted the immigration issue against two of his rivals, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. Why had he taken the positions he did? I asked. He said in essence that he was only being consistent with things he had said during his first campaign or done as governor of Massachusetts. He said he believed that those previous positions would be used against him in a general election regardless of what he did in the primaries. “I was convinced by one of the colleagues in the campaign who said, ‘Mitt, the things you said before about immigration, you will be, quote, hung with in the general. It’s not like people will forget what you said in 2008.’” One example was his veto of legislation providing in-state tuition for children of illegal immigrants, which was the initial focus of his attacks on Perry. “If you have those views, which I do, and you’ve said them before, the idea of not saying them now is kind of silly. . . . You’ve got video of me having this debate with Mike Huckabee on that topic [in 2008]. Why would I not have the same debate with Rick Perry on that topic?” Did he agree with Matt Rhoades, his campaign manager, that the immigration attacks against Perry were both damaging and unnecessary, that he probably could have beaten back Perry’s challenge just on the issue of Social Security? “Looking back, I think that’s right,” he said. “I think that I was ineffective in being able to bring Hispanic voters into our circle and that had I been less pointed on that in the debates, I would have been more likely to get more Hispanic voters.”

Romney drew a distinction between using immigration in the debates and using the issue generally in his effort to win the nomination. “There was a time when our ad people said, ‘Look, in South Carolina, we’re falling behind Newt. We need to run ads on immigration.’ And I said, ‘No, I will not run an immigration ad. I’m not going to make this a campaign about immigration. Will I stand for the positions I stand for? Absolutely. I will defend. But I’m not going to go out with a series of immigration ads. Will not do it.’ And I had to make the decisions as to whether we’re going to go that course or not. And so I decided not to—I mean, I did not run an immigration campaign.”

Romney is best remembered on immigration for his comment on “self-deportation” in one of the Florida primary debates. I asked him if he thought that was what had damaged him the most on the issue. He said he was still puzzled by the reaction to the comment. “I thought of it as being a term that is used in the community of those discussing immigration,” he said. “I hadn’t seen it as being a negative term. You have two options of dealing with those that have come here illegally: deportation or self-deportation. The president has deported more I think in four years than President Bush did in eight years. So the president was using a deportation method. The view of others is, no, let people make their own choice, let them self-deport if they will go to the country that has better economic opportunities than the U.S. might at the current time [or] family connections. And so let people make their own choice, as opposed to deporting them. So I was looking for a more, if you will, compassionate approach, which is let people make their own choice, as opposed to deporting people. And that was seen as being, I think by some, as being punitive. I still don’t know whether it’s seen as being punitive in the Hispanic community. I mean, I know it is in the Anglo community. . . . I didn’t recognize how negative and punitive that term would be seen by the voting community.”

There was another moment when he might have repaired some of the damage, which was when Marco Rubio began to talk about trying to find a new version of the Dream Act that could win bipartisan support. I said it seemed as if his campaign kept Rubio and his efforts at arm’s length. “Au contraire,” he said with a laugh. “We were very much encouraging [Rubio chief of staff] Cesar Conda, who was an old adviser to my campaign in 2008, and the Rubio camp to come out with what I think you call the Dream and Achieve Act. We wanted to see him come out with his own version. Very anxious for that to happen.” He said his campaign tried to work with Rubio’s staff to come up with something close to where he was on the issue. “But if they came out with something which was a little different than what I had already laid [out], I would at least be able to say directionally, ‘What Marco’s doing makes a lot of sense and I encourage that process and it seems like there’s common ground here.’ I could warm
myself to what Marco Rubio was saying, even if it wasn’t precisely the place I’d like to end up.” Obama’s executive order, which stopped deportations of students, “knocked Marco’s legs out from under him,” Romney said. “He decided not to proceed. Now we encouraged Marco’s team, ‘Please come out!’ Yeah. But they already felt that was not a wise move once the president [had acted].”

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Romney said there were several times during the early stages of the nomination contest when he thought he might lose. “Almost everybody was ahead of me at one time or the other,” he said. “And so I’d look at those and say, ‘Well, right now they’re more likely to get there, but I’m going to keep on battling.’” He said a betting person might not have put much money on him at those moments, though he always had confidence he eventually would prevail. “But I think for certainly two or three weeks there—maybe longer—I thought it was more likely that Rick Perry would be the nominee, or even Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich.” He paused. “I have to tell you that, in the discussions I had with my senior staff, people like Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer said, ‘Look, Newt is not going to be the nominee. I don’t care what the polls say, he’s not going to be the nominee.’ I was far less sanguine about that.”

He said he was most worried about losing the nomination after Gingrich won the January 21 primary in South Carolina. He said that led to what he still believes was the campaign’s biggest mistake during the nomination contest, which was to ignore the February 7 contests in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado. Romney easily defeated Gingrich in the January 31 primary in Florida, but he was still worried about avoiding a setback in Nevada (though he was heavily favored). “I’ve got to stop Newt, so we made a real effort in Nevada and said these other contests in Colorado and Minnesota, Missouri, these are nowhere near as significant,” he said. “These won’t make any difference. Well, in fact, they did make a big difference.” When Santorum won all three, Romney got nervous again and insisted he be sent to Maine to make sure he did not lose there the following weekend. He flew across the country and marshaled his forces there against Ron Paul, enough to prevail. Meanwhile, Santorum had taken the lead in Michigan, the next important contest, which caused another moment of deep concern. “I looked and said, ‘Look, if he wins Michigan, it may be over.’ I mean, this is a state where I’m supposed to win, because I was born there, my dad was governor there. If he wins, what’ll happen to Ohio? He’ll win Ohio. If he wins Michigan and Ohio, I’ve probably lost. Any one of these could send the nomination to Rick. So in terms of strategic mistake in our primary campaign, I think probably the most significant one was not devoting the attention and energy we should have to Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado events and instead focusing all of our effort in Nevada.”

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We talked about the Obama campaign’s attacks during the summer of 2012 and why he responded the way he did. He said, “The question is, all right, what do we want to do? Do we want to respond to the attack, where they’re saying that Bain is an outsourcer? The fact checkers are saying that’s inaccurate. We’ve responded in the earned media that it’s inaccurate. And the earned media stood with us on that—Obama ads are wrong.
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But he kept running them. And then, so Romney’s this bad guy, outsourcer. Do you respond to the attacks? My own view was that rather than our precious dollars being used to respond to attacks, that we should attack on our own and, number two, lay out what I would do to get the country on track.” Those were the so-called Day One ads. Wasn’t there a third option, I asked, which was to run positive biographical ads to fill in his profile for voters who were just starting to look at him more closely? “We looked at, quote, bio ads,” he said. “And it’s, you know, ‘Here I am with my family,’ and ‘Bain is a nice place that started Staples.’ And they’re hitting me as the outsourcer in chief.” Romney said he concluded that any biographical ads he might run would not be as compelling as fresh attacks on the president. “If I’m out there explaining, I’m losing,” he said.