Playbook 2012 (6 page)

“Carney said to the governor, Are you good on Race to the Top? And he said, Yeah, I think so, and then he launched into what would be his answer, and Carney suggested a tweak or [would] point this out. The governor tried it again and gave an answer, and they carried on about their day. That was the five minutes of debate prep that day.”

The Perry campaign had come into Orlando confident that the candidate would win the state GOP straw poll scheduled two days after the debate. At the debate, sponsored by Google and Fox at a giant arena near Walt Disney World, the fundraiser sat behind a group of Florida politicians and moneymen invited to join Anita Perry, the governor’s wife, near the front. After a few of Perry’s rambling answers, the fundraiser noted that Dean Cannon, the Speaker of the Florida House, was hanging his head. The fundraiser tried to cheer louder for Perry, “trying to make up for this, like his answers were actually good.”

Perry, who has long suffered from a bad back, underwent serious back surgery six weeks before he announced his campaign—spinal fusion and nerve decompression, including an
injection of his own adult stem cells. As the campaign launched, he was suffering excruciating back pain. Medication could have contributed to some of his goofy on-camera lapses, and may have been part of the reason for a giggly speech in New Hampshire that went viral when an opponent posted an edited video making him look drunk. (When asked about pain medication and its possible effect on his performance, Perry told a
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter, “No. I have had spine surgery on the first of July, but you know, I ran this morning. I would’ve taken you out. It’s a beautiful run down this river.” One Perry official said, “What do you mean, ‘What about meds?’ He jogs three miles, four days a week. People who have back problems don’t take medication and jog three miles every four days.”)

A former campaign aide recalled: “Look, the guy is in extreme back pain all the time, and everybody could see that [at the disastrous debate in Orlando]. It’s a real physical problem for him.” For photo opportunities at fundraisers, aides were allowed to schedule just fifty “clicks” (individual photos with donors), rather than the seventy-five to a hundred that they would have preferred, “so that he doesn’t have to stand for more than thirty minutes,” the former aide recalled. “Because it’s standing still that hurts. If you watch him make a speech, he moves around a lot—he’s like an evangelical preacher, and part of that is because of his back. It’s more comfortable to be moving, but if you have to stand still and upright, it hurts like hell after about thirty minutes.” Most debates ran ninety minutes, posing a constant challenge of endurance as well as of oratory.

“I could even see that at the end of the photo ops. [He was saying,] Get these people in and out of here quickly, like I’ve got to move. I just think he was in excruciating pain having to stand for more than thirty minutes,” recalled the aide.

Perry was also suffering from insomnia. The fundraiser thought he should be taking sleeping pills, but was told he was not. (Perry later publicly admitted he had been tired, but Carney denied to us that the governor was having back trouble.)

The night after the debate, the fundraiser was sitting at the bar in the Peabody Hotel, nursing her wounds, when Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, approached. “Rough night last night?” asked Scott. The fundraiser tried to rally by saying that “Perry knocked it out of the park at CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] today, so hopefully that helped a little bit.” Governor Scott just shook his head and said, “He lost a lot of votes last night. He lost a lot of support here last night.” The next day, Perry was surprised in the straw poll, losing badly to Herman Cain. It was the beginning of Cain’s unexpected surge in the national poll.

A presidential candidate has to make hundreds, if not thousands, of calls to potential donors. Less than two months into his campaign, Perry had made a total of twenty calls. “I think the governor was talked into running,” the fundraiser told us. “And I think he was also promised he wouldn’t have to work all that hard to get it.” In early October, she left the campaign “by mutual agreement.” Her biggest regret—and vexation—was, as she put it, “just spending lots of time with him and traveling with him and not seeing a real burning desire that I’ve seen with every other candidate I ever worked with.”

Perry’s frequent gaffes led to gallows humor around his campaign. One night, when we asked one adviser how his day had been, he replied slyly, “We didn’t have anything to correct by 3
P.M
.” The Perry campaign now operates out of a former steam laundry at Eighth and Congress
Streets, near the capitol in downtown Austin. Carney and the campaign manager, Rob Johnson, share space in what used to be a bank vault, within the same building. The door, combination lock and all, is still there, but it stays open because no one knows the combination. Mark Miner, the national press secretary, penned a sign over the door that says, “PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BEARS.” The office is decorated by a sword and golf clubs, and all eight of the chairs around the low conference table are mismatches. Poking fun at themselves, the operatives have left the big dry-erase board empty except for the words “Secret Plan,” then an arrow to “JOBS.”

Within weeks of Perry’s announcement, his small headquarters staff was distressed to learn that Jason Cherkis, a Huffington Post reporter, was in Austin prowling around on a story that had been gossiped about for years in the Texas capital: is Perry gay? The episode illustrates the kind of off-the-wall queries that campaigns field. A Perry official described the rumors as “bullshit”: the governor has been married for twenty-nine years to Anita Thigpen—the two met at an elementary school piano recital. But that hasn’t stopped the gossip around the Texas capital, where a detailed story about a supposed assignation with a former state official continues to make the rounds. Perry aides feared the distraction and tawdriness of the story line Cherkis seemed to be pursuing. They took comfort in the Huffington Post’s roots on the left, which gave the Perry staff hope that mainstream outlets would ignore the story. The Perry official said that Cherkis at one point approached the campaign about the story: “[T]he problem we had was he had unnamed sources. We felt it was shoddy reporting. He used an example of someone who wouldn’t answer his question, so that means he’s confirming.… He would interpret that as ‘Ah-ha!’ ” Cherkis left Austin and wound up posting a harmless rehash, “Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’ Includes Crowded Homeless Shelters, Low-Wage Jobs, Worker Deaths.”

In late September, the campaign was caught by surprise when a
Washington Post
reporter called to ask about a Perry family hunting camp that was known as “Niggerhead,” with the name at one point painted on a rock at the entrance. The reporter, Stephanie McCrummen, later told a blogger that the name was “pretty much common knowledge among people who knew Perry and his father, Ray.”

Watching Perry flub his attacks on Romney at the Orlando debate, the mood in the room was “ecstatic. I was coming out of my shoes,” a Romney confidante recalled. “I’m like, This is awesome. We’ve won.” Watching Romney with an admiration verging on awe was Tim Pawlenty. In early October, Pawlenty sat down with us and contrasted Romney’s performance with that of every other GOP candidate, including himself. “I think he’s put on a clinic, the varsity versus the junior varsity. The others aren’t even in the same league,” said Pawlenty.

After Pawlenty dropped out of the race, Romney asked him and his wife, Mary, to come up to Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, to spend the weekend with him and Ann. There were boat rides, just the four of them, and a quiet dinner on Saturday night. Pawlenty came back impressed with his host. “There’s this theory that somehow he’s different in person than he is in public,” Pawlenty said of Romney. “That’s just not true. He is a perpetually optimistic, upbeat, gracious person. Mary and I went up to his place in New Hampshire and spent some time with him and Ann. They’re just gracious, fun, upbeat people. And this idea that he’s somehow always stiff and there’s a dissonance between his public life and how he behaves in other settings, I just don’t buy that.” Romney later asked Pawlenty for his endorsement. Pawlenty said yes.

The 2012 GOP campaign would be remembered for the candidates who didn’t get in the race, predicted a veteran GOP operative. Wooed by GOP heavies from Henry Kissinger to Nancy Reagan, New Jersey’s Chris Christie stirred one last will-he-won’t-he drama by playing coy in late September.

But Christie’s “heart wasn’t in it,” said the operative, who spoke to Christie several times (“though he did have second thoughts after talking to Nancy Reagan”). The operative wrote a 120-day fundraising plan while other operatives worked on getting Christie on state primary ballots. A person who knew Christie’s mind phoned us to say why he wouldn’t take the bait: “One, he genuinely believes that he’s not prepared on an issue and substance basis to address all of the things you have to address as a candidate, and he’s leery of learning on the fly. Two, the performance of Perry [in the debates] shows the dangers of late entry. And while others use that as a reason for him to get in, for him, it’s the opposite—it’s the reason that validates his decision not to get in this late. And the third is that you sit and look at the map, and the path for Chris Christie [to get more delegates than Romney] is difficult to chart.”

Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana had conjured a full-fledged campaign organization before he bailed out in May 2011. “Mitch actually had this thing ready to go,” said the operative. “It was totally baked.” (“We could have been up and running the next day,” said Indiana GOP chair Eric Holcomb, a top Daniels adviser.) But Daniels did not want to run against the wishes of his wife and daughters, who feared that the media would wallow in Daniels’s divorce from his wife in the late 1990s. “Everybody talked about family values in the Republican Party, how
important they are, and they checked their families at the door while they go to another level of power,” said the operative. Daniels at least had put family values first, he said. (A close associate of the governor said he also feared the loss of his own privacy. “It’s no secret that Mitch likes to lose his tiny state detail when he’s out riding his motorcycle in Indiana,” the friend said.)

The operative’s real candidate had been Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. Bush resisted; he said it was too soon for another Bush to run for president. “You’re missing it,” the operative told him. “You think there is some negative out there; there’s not. We can manage whatever there is.” Al Hoffman and Jack Oliver, the financial wizard behind George W. Bush, both urged Jeb to run. But a friend said Bush felt strongly that it “was not time to run,” suggesting he hoped to go in 2016. Could he win? “Absolutely!” insisted a close friend. But Jeb Bush did his calculating in the reverse order that Mitch Daniels had. Daniels let supporters convince him that he could win, then got a firm no from his family. Bush, convinced this was the wrong time for his family, never indulged in victory scenarios, even with close friends. Asked about his thinking, Jeb Bush emailed: “[T]he conventional belief [was] that because my last name is Bush, 2012 was not the year for me to run. I don’t believe that is true, and my decision not to run was based on personal private reasons, and not based on political assessments.” And many of those who bowed out had the same thought: Mitt Romney wanted it more than they did.

The operative said, “Jeb could have won [the nomination], I think Mitch could have won, I think Christie could have won.” Christie, he said, made a mistake by waiting, thinking he could get the nomination in 2016. “I would have helped Christie in a heartbeat,” said the operative. “But you know what? If it’s him versus Jeb, we’re going to beat the shit out of him. We’ll smoke him. We will smoke him.”

“I can’t stand politics,” said Dave Carney, Perry’s chief strategist, as he sat outside the diner in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in mid-October. We asked him why he would say that.

“Have you ever met anybody in politics?” asked Carney, obviously enjoying himself (“He likes to be the Mad Genius,” said the Perry fundraiser.) “The political people, political operatives?” We pointed out that working in politics had “made a nice living for your family.” Carney responded, “Oh, yeah, I enjoy it, but there are some people who obsess politics, who are—like I’m sure there’s football junkies and baseball junkies—but there’s more to life than how many electoral votes Herbert Hoover got.”

We noted that we were sitting with him in a diner in New Hampshire.

“I’m just as guilty as the rest of them. I wouldn’t want to hang around with me if I was a normal person,” Carney said, laughing.

Carney may dislike politics, or some aspect of politics, but he definitely likes political intrigue. During the conversation, while discussing Romney, he let slip, “The number one vulnerability in their own research is the flip-flops.”

How would Carney know what was in Romney’s research?

“People worked on the campaign,” he said. Did that mean he had a mole from Romney’s 2008 campaign? Who? “These are just friends of mine,” he went on. Speaking elliptically, using a sardonic double negative, Carney remarked that Romney “hired every mercenary in the country four years ago and didn’t hire them this time. One thing about mercenaries is that they don’t like not to be on the payroll of somebody.”

Carney was in a mischievous mood. His candidate had basically lost the “Washington primary”—the race for money and endorsements and the backing of the establishment. Perry might, with his great skill at retail politics, win voters one by one on the stump, working the small towns of Iowa. But what he really needed was for Romney to stumble. Perry needed to find a way to trip up his rival.

“Everybody knows the book on Romney is that it has to be his way or no way,” said Carney. “He’s very stubborn. He’s very thin-skinned … storms out of meetings when it doesn’t go his way. And people who are involved in debate prep in the last cycle”—here, Carney was apparently alluding to his mole from the 2008 Romney campaign—“basically told us that he would react badly to someone challenging his narrative. He just is incapable of acknowledging that there may be a different interpretation of something.”