Double Down: Game Change 2012 Read online

  ALSO BY MARK HALPERIN AND JOHN HEILEMANN

  Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

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  First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  All photos © Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

  ISBN: 978-1-101-63870-5

  Version_1

  For Karen and my family

  —MEH

  For Diana and my dad

  —JAH

  CONTENTS

  Also by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. Missions Accomplished

  2. The Weakness Meme

  3. Obama’s List

  4. The Uncle Joe Problem

  PART TWO

  5. Preserving the Option

  6. Four Little Indians

  7. The Test-Tube Candidate

  8. F’d Up

  9. Big Boy

  10. The Dating Game

  11. Man on Fire

  12. Mitt Happens

  13. Fear and Loathing in the Motor City

  PART THREE

  14. The Pugnacity of Hope

  15. Failures to Launch

  16. Bain Pain

  17. Project Goldfish

  18. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  19. Off the Leash

  20. The War Council

  21. Mile-High Meltdown

  22. Intervention

  23. Like a Hurricane

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  THE DEBATE WAS ONLY a few minutes old, and Barack Obama was already tanking. His opponent on this warm autumn night, a Massachusetts patrician with an impressive résumé, a chiseled jaw, and a staunch helmet of burnished hair, was an inferior political specimen by any conceivable measure. But with surprising fluency, verve, and even humor, Obama’s rival was putting points on the board. The president was not. Passive and passionless, he seemed barely present.

  It was Sunday, October 14, 2012, and Obama was bunkered two levels below the lobby of the Kingsmill Resort, in Williamsburg, Virginia. In a blue blazer, khaki pants, and an open-necked shirt, he was squaring off in a mock debate against Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was standing in for the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. The two men were in Williamsburg, along with the president’s team, to prepare Obama for his second televised confrontation with Romney, forty-eight hours away, at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. It was an event to which few had given much thought. Until the debacle in Denver, that is.

  The debate in the Mile High City eleven days earlier jolted a race that for many months had been hard-fought but remarkably stable. From the moment in May that Romney emerged victorious from the most volatile and unpredictable Republican nomination contest in many moons, Obama held a narrow yet consistent lead. But after Romney mauled the president in Denver, the wind and weather of the campaign shifted dramatically in something like a heartbeat. The challenger was surging. The polls were tightening. Republicans were pulsating with renewed hope. Democrats were rending their garments and collapsing on their fainting couches.

  Obama was nowhere in the vicinity of panic. “You ever known me to lose two in a row?” he said to friends to calm their nerves.

  The president’s advisers were barely more rattled. Yes, Denver had been atrocious. Yes, it had been unnerving. But Obama was still ahead of Romney, the sky hadn’t fallen, and they would fix what went wrong in time for the town hall debate at Hofstra. Their message to the nervous nellies in their party was: Keep calm and carry on.

  Williamsburg was where the repair job was supposed to take place. The Obamans had arrived at the resort, ready to work, on Saturday the 13th. The first day had gone well. The president seemed to be finding his form. He and Kerry had been doing mock debates since August, and the session on Saturday night was Obama’s best yet. Everyone exhaled.

  But now, in Sunday night’s run-through, the president seemed to be relapsing: the disengaged and pedantic Obama of Denver was back. In the staff room, his two closest advisers, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, watched on video monitors with a mounting sense of unease—when, all of a sudden, a practice round that had started out looking merely desultory turned into the Mock from Hell.

  The moment it happened could be pinpointed with precision: at the 39:35 mark on the clock. A question about home foreclosures had been put to POTUS; under the rules, he had two minutes to respond. Before the mock, Kerry had been instructed by one of the debate coaches to interrupt Obama at some juncture to see how he reacted. Striding across the bright red carpet of the set that the president’s team had constructed as a precise replica of the Hofstra town hall stage, Kerry invaded the president’s space and barged in during Obama’s answer.

  The president’s eyes flashed with annoyance.

  “Don’t interrupt me,” he snapped.

  When Kerry persisted, Obama shot a death stare at the moderator—his adviser Anita Dunn, standing in for CNN’s Candy Crowley—and pleaded for an intercession.

  The president’s coaches had persistently worried about the appearance of Nasty Obama on the debate stage: the variant who infamously, imperiously dismissed his main Democratic rival in 2008 with the withering phrase “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” His advisers saw glimpses of that side of him in their preparations for Denver—a manifestation of a personal antipathy for Romney that had grown visceral and intense. Now they were seeing it again, and worse. The admixture of Nasty Obama and Denver Obama was not a pretty picture.

  Challenged by Kerry with multipronged attacks, the president rebutted them point by point, exhaustively and exhaustingly. Instead of driving a sharp message, he was explanatory and meandering. Instead of casting an eye to the future, he litigated the past. Instead of warmly establishing connections with the town hall questioners, he pontificated airily, as if he were conducting a particularly tedious press conference. While Kerry was answering a query about immigration, Obama retaliated for the earlier interruption by abruptly cutting him off.

  In the staff room, Axelrod and Plouffe were aghast. Sitting with them, Obama’s lead pollster, Joel Benenson muttered, “This is unbelievable.”

  Watching from the set, the renowned Democratic style coach Michael Sheehan scribbled furiously on a legal pad, each notation more alarmed than the last. Reflecting on Obama’s interplay with the questioners, Sheehan summed up his demeanor with a single word: “Creepy.”

  After ninety excruciating minutes, the Mock from Hell was over. As Obama made his way for the door, he was intercepted by Axelrod, Plouffe, Benenson, and the lead debate coach, Ron Klain. Little was said. Little needed to be said. The ashen looks on the faces o
f the president’s men told the tale.

  Obama left the building and returned to his sprawling quarters on the banks of the James River with his best friend from Chicago, Marty Nesbitt, to watch football and play cards. His advisers retreated to the president’s debate-prep holding room to have a collective coronary.

  That the presidential debates were proving problematic for Obama came as no real surprise to the members of his team. Many of them—Axelrod, the mustachioed message maven and guardian of the Obama brand; Plouffe, the spindly senior White House adviser and enforcer of strategic rigor; Dunn, the media-savvy mother superior and former White House communications director; Benenson, the bearded and nudgy former Mario Cuomo hand; Jon Favreau, the dashing young speechwriter—had been with Obama from the start of his meteoric ascent. They knew that he detested televised debates. That he disdained political theater in every guise. That, on some level, he distrusted political performance itself, with its attendant emotional manipulations.

  The paradox, of course, was that Obama had risen to prominence and power to a large extent on the basis of his preternatural performance skills—and his ability to summon them whenever the game was on the line. In late 2007, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic nomination fight by thirty points. In the fall of 2008, when the global financial crisis hit during the crucial last weeks of the general election. In early 2010, when his signature health care reform proposal seemed destined for defeat. In every instance, under ungodly pressure, Obama had set his feet, pulled up, and drained a three-pointer at the buzzer.

  The faith of the president’s people that he would do the same at Hofstra was what sustained them in the wake of Denver. For a year, the Obamans had fretted over everything under the sun: gas prices, unemployment, the European financial crisis, Iran, the Koch brothers, the lack of enthusiasm from the Democratic base, Hispanic turnout in the Orlando metroplex. The one thing they had never worried about was Barack Obama.

  But given the spectacle they had just witnessed at Kingsmill, the Obamans were more than worried. After spending ten days pooh-poohing the widespread hysteria in their party about Denver, Obama’s debate team was now the most wigged-out collection of Democrats in the country, huddling in a hotel cubby that had become their secret panic room. Three hours had passed since the mock ended; it was almost 2:00 a.m. Obama’s team was still clustered in the work space, reading transcripts and waxing apocalyptic.

  “Guys, what are we going to do?” Plouffe asked quietly, over and over. “That was a disaster.”

  Among the Obamans, there was nobody more unflappable than Plouffe—and nobody less shaken by Denver. The campaign’s research showed that there was a deep well of sympathy for Obama among voters; in focus groups after the first debate, people offered excuse after excuse for his horrific presentation. In Florida, one woman said, almost protectively, “I just bet you he wasn’t feeling well.”

  But what the research also told Plouffe was that Obama was “on probation” after Denver. The public might brush off a single bad debate showing; two in a row would not be so readily ignored. With Hofstra less than forty-eight hours away, the Obamans essentially had a day to diagnose the malady afflicting their boss—the sudden sickness that had robbed their great communicator of his ability to communicate under pressure—and find a remedy. What was wrong? What would they do? No one had a clue.

  All Plouffe knew was that, if Obama turned in a performance at Hofstra like the one they had seen that night, the consequences could be dire.

  “If we don’t fix this,” Plouffe said emphatically, “we could lose the whole fucking election.”

  • • •

  THE MOST HELLISH DAYS of 2012 for Obama were heaven on earth for Mitt Romney. Before his turn on the debate stage in Denver, Romney had never achieved a moment in the campaign that was politically triumphal and, to his mind, revealing of who he was. His performance as a candidate was unartful, and in exactly the ways that both the Obamans and the GOP establishment had predicted at the start of the race. His greatest credential for the Oval Office—his enormous success in the private sector—was savagely turned against him. His public image from his first national run, in 2008, had been that of a flip-flopping Mormon; in 2012, he was rendered a hybrid of Gordon Gekko and Mr. Magoo. But at that first debate, the Romney in whom his advisers, friends, family, and supporters believed made a powerful appearance: a good and decent man with a formidable intellect, economic expertise, problem-solving know-how, and patriotic zeal. In an instant, the former Massachusetts governor looked like a plausible president. It was a conquest that propelled Romney toward the finish line with new fervor, and one he would savor long after the votes were counted.

  With the benefit of hindsight, innumerable analysts would declare that the result of the election was foreordained: that Obama always had it in the bag. But the president and his people spent all of 2011 and most of 2012 believing nothing of the sort. The economic headwinds that Obama faced were ferocious and unrelenting. His approval ratings during his first term rarely edged above 50 percent. The opposition inspired by his presidency was intense and at times rabid, from the populist ire of the Tea Party to the legislative recalcitrance of the congressional wing of the GOP to the wailing and gnashing of the anti-Obama caucus in the business world and on Wall Street especially. The country was split almost cleanly down the middle, and more polarized than ever.

  The two sides had few beliefs in common, but one of them was this: the outcome of the election mattered, and not a little. The ideological contrast between the parties had rarely been starker. In terms of specific policies, the size and role of government and the fundamental priorities of the nation, the practical implications of which man won were vast.

  With so much at stake, the 2012 election had the feel of a big casino, as the players took on the complexion of compulsive gamblers, pushing more and more chips into the center of the table. On the right, a phalanx of millionaires and billionaires doubled down on Romney even after his flaws were all too clear, pouring gargantuan sums into his campaign and conservative super PACs. The Republican nominee, in turn, not only doubled down on the orthodoxies of the right but on his own controversial statements and positions. On the left, the Obamans were engaged in their own doubling down: on the coalition that had elected their man in 2008; on their pioneering use of new technology; on their grassroots get-out-the-vote machine. But no doubt the biggest wager they placed was on Obama.

  On that mid-October night in Williamsburg, with the election three weeks away, it remained unclear who would leave the casino flush and who would exit with picked-clean pockets. In the end, the answer would lie in the hands of the president of the United States—who, at that hour, far from the cameras, was more imperiled than anyone imagined, his greatest gift having deserted him at the worst possible time. After four years of economic hardship, nagging uncertainty, and disappointment that change had come so slowly when it came at all, Obama would have to rise to a different kind of challenge—a challenge from within himself—before the country would double down on him.

  PART ONE

  1

  MISSIONS ACCOMPLISHED

  BARACK OBAMA WAS BACK in Chicago and back on the campaign trail, two realms from which he had been absent for a while but which always felt like home. It was April 14, 2011, and Obama had returned to the Windy City to launch his reelection effort with a trio of fund-raisers. Ten days earlier, his people had filed the papers making his candidacy official and opened up the campaign headquarters there. Five hundred and seventy-two days later, the voters would render their judgment. To Obama, Election Day seemed eons away—and just around the corner.

  Working his way from two small events for high-dollar donors at fancy restaurants to a crowd of two thousand at Navy Pier, the incumbent served up the old Obama fire. He invoked the memory of the last election night in Grant Park, “the excitement in the streets, the sense of hope, the sense of possibility.” He touted his achievements as “the chang
e we still believe in.” He ended the evening with a “Yes, we can!”

  But again and again, Obama cited the burdens of his station. Although he’d always known that as president his plate would be full, the fullness was staggering—from the economic crisis to the swine flu pandemic, the BP oil spill, and the hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates. (“Who thought we were going to have to deal with pirates?”) He acknowledged the frustrations of many Democrats at the fitfulness of the progress he’d brought about, the compromises with Republicans. He apologized for the fact that his head wasn’t fully in the reelection game. “Over the next three months, six months, nine months, I’m going to be a little preoccupied,” Obama said. “I’ve got this day job that I’ve got to handle.”

  The president’s preoccupations at that moment were many and varied, trivial and profound. In public, he was battling with the GOP over the budget and preparing for a face-off over the federal debt ceiling. In secret, he was deliberating over an overseas special-ops raid aimed at a shadowy target who possibly, maybe, hopefully was Osama bin Laden. But the most persistent distraction Obama was facing was personified by Donald Trump, the real estate billionaire and reality show ringmaster who was flirting with making a presidential run under the banner of birtherism—the crackpot conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya and thus was constitutionally ineligible to preside as commander in chief.

  Obama had contended with birtherism since the previous campaign, when rumors surfaced that there was no record of his birth in Hawaii. The fringe theorists had grown distractingly shrill and increasingly insistent; after he won the nomination in June 2008, his team deemed it necessary to post his short-form birth certificate on the Web. The charge was lunacy, Obama thought. Simply mental. But it wouldn’t go away. A recent New York Times poll had found that 45 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of voters overall believed he was foreign born. And with Trump serving as a human bullhorn, the faux controversy had escaped the confines of Fox News and conservative talk radio, reverberating in the mainstream media. Just that morning, before Obama departed for Chicago, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos had asked him about it in an interview, specifically citing Trump—twice.