Authors: Michael Kranish,Scott Helman
For many reporters covering the campaign, the moment crystallized their frustration with Romney’s inaccessibility, as well as with the off-putting and combative style of his inner circle. Later, Romney himself seemed to acknowledge as much when, after the Staples encounter, everyone settled into the campaign plane. Playing the role of flight attendant, Romney strolled into the press section with a tray of hot hors d’oeuvres, offering some to Johnson while an aide made a remark about making peace. Speaking shortly afterward on
The Tonight Show
, Romney went public with his damage control, telling Jay Leno that reporters “have a tough job to do. I respect the fact they’ve got to ask me tough questions and get in my face, but if I don’t agree, I’m going to come back hard as well.”
Some saw the episode as evidence of Romney’s thin skin. But others saw something unintentionally authentic, and it doubtless made for great television. The bottom line, however, was that Romney was off message and, when it came to competing in South Carolina, lacked the commitment.
Looking ahead in the calendar, Romney’s campaign wanted to save money for upcoming contests in Florida and a slew of “Super Tuesday” states. At Boston headquarters, South Carolina began to look like a financial drain with little prospect of success. So, shortly after the New Hampshire loss, Romney’s South Carolina advisers made a difficult call to Boston headquarters. Unless Romney spent a lot of time in South Carolina leading up to the primary, they said, he had no chance of winning. Romney decided to pull out most of his resources. Beth Myers would later insist that the “the truth of the matter is we hadn’t been in South Carolina that much. We did not have that much of an investment going in . . . we never really pulled the trigger on South Carolina.”
N
early everything was bet on Florida. But if the fight between the states and Boston headquarters had been bad in earlier states, it was even worse in Florida. The state bore the burden of trying to turn around a dying campaign with ever-diminishing resources. It hadn’t started that way. When Romney first met with his Florida team, he had won them over with assurances that he would defer decisions to them and that he would tap his personal fortune to make sure they had the needed resources. Then, on October 19, 2007, a crucial meeting took place at a hotel in Orlando. Romney and his Boston team, including Myers and the competing teams of strategists, met with the Florida campaign staff to discuss how they would win the state and then the nomination.
The state staff prepared a PowerPoint presentation, Romney’s favorite form of communication, titled “All Roads Lead to Florida.” The presentation laid out the challenge of winning in a state with about a dozen major media markets and an expected Republican turnout of 1.5 million voters—about thirteen times the number who would turn out for the Iowa caucuses. Yet although the campaign would spend $10 million on its gamble to win Iowa, it had far less to reach many more voters in Florida. Though an exact number is not available, about $5.5 million would be spent in Florida on television ads, the bulk of the campaign’s spending in the state.
A key to winning Florida, according to the PowerPoint presentation, was to send millions of pieces of mail, utilizing the costly “microtargeting” data that Romney valued so highly. The mailings would be tailored to win over three groups: 450,000 social conservatives, 450,000 progun voters, and 250,000 households where someone was expected to vote by absentee ballot. In a state dominated by older people, who are likely to be most receptive to mailings, the strategy was considered particularly crucial.
The Florida team wanted to hear reassurances from Romney that he would follow through on his commitment to deliver the needed money to the state. If Romney lost Iowa and New Hampshire, the Florida team said, everything would rely on winning the Sunshine State. But Romney’s national strategists shot down even the discussion about the possibility of losing both Iowa and New Hampshire. “This was a major debate that took place in that room of ‘Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket, let’s not be shortsighted,’ ” said Mandy Fletcher, Romney’s Florida director. “But the top decision makers in the campaign were very confident that the strategy in either Iowa or New Hampshire would bring us a win and that would carry us. From the Florida standpoint, the concern was ‘What’s Plan B?’ and there was none.”
As the money dried up, Boston changed its mind so often about strategy that the Florida team was required to write at least seven different plans, the last version coming just a couple of weeks before the primary. The Florida staff would recommend where to spend money on television, and Boston sometimes overruled them. Florida argued against spending money on television in heavily Democratic areas, but Boston disagreed. Florida urged that money be invested in the Panhandle region, where McCain was strong, and Boston resisted.
Sally Bradshaw, Romney’s senior adviser in Florida, exemplified the frustration. “I really cared about Governor Romney,” she said. “I really believed he was the right guy. I was willing to fight for these things. I was a squeaky wheel, I pushed so hard. That probably left me feeling more disappointed than most. We laid it out on the line.”
Most remarkably, after spending so heavily to produce extensive data about voters, Boston rejected pleas from the Florida team to follow through on the plan to harvest that information into millions of pieces of carefully targeted mail. In fact, the Florida strategists said, not a single piece of that mail was sent, a decision that was kept secret by the campaign and upset a number of Romney’s Florida strategists. “If you had to boil [Romney’s failure in the state] down to one thing, not sending mail in Florida was a really big thing and I truly believe it could have made a difference,” said Fletcher, the Florida director. “If he had come out of Florida as a winner, he could have been the nominee.”
The McCain team now saw it as a race against Romney, with Florida the place to finish off the former Massachusetts governor. The McCain plan was to draw Romney into a debate about whether there should be a “timetable” to withdraw troops from Iraq, and it worked. “Governor Romney wanted to set a date for withdrawal, similar to what the Democrats are seeking, which would have led to the victory by Al Qaeda in my view,” McCain said. Romney, who had never suggested such a date, took the bait. “I don’t know why he’s being dishonest,” Romney responded. “But that’s dishonest.”
The exchanges went on for several days, dominating news coverage. A top McCain adviser later said, “We played Romney like a fiddle,” keeping him away from his strength of an economic message and on McCain’s turf of national security. McCain beat Romney by a 36-to-31-percent margin in the January 29 Florida primary.
Romney’s last hope was for a comeback in a debate to be held in advance of the February 5 slate of Super Tuesday primaries. The exhausted candidates flew from Florida to California for what would be Romney’s last chance, a debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Romney pushed back against McCain’s accusation that he backed a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. In one of the bitterest exchanges of the campaign, he accused McCain of pulling “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.” McCain fired back, accusing Romney of lacking “the experience and the judgment” to be president in a time of terrorism.
As time passed, McCain regretted his performance. He said he’d been worn out from flying cross-country and offered an apology to Romney. “I was really tired,” McCain said. “I was testy in that debate and clearly lost it. I just overreacted. I kind of took after Mitt. That just was a bad performance on my part, the moral being to not be exhausted when you are doing these debates.”
But the attack had been effective. On February 5, McCain won a number of key states, including Illinois and New York, all but assuring him the Republican nomination. Romney, whose wins included Massachusetts and Colorado, vowed to fight on, saying, “We’re going to keep on battling, we’re going to go all the way to the convention, we’re going to win this thing and go to the White House.” At the time, it seemed that the animosity between the two men was insurmountable. But Romney’s vow to continue proved to be bluster. Two days afterward, Romney pulled out, and a week later he endorsed McCain. It was time to make peace and look to the future. The vice presidency could be on the line.
Back into the Fire
My power alley is the economy.
—MITT ROMNEY
T
hey stream into the Elks Club in sweatshirts, ties, windbreakers, Boston Red Sox T-shirts, cowboy hats, baseball caps, plaid Oxfords, and homely sweaters. And still they come, every name dutifully logged by a campaign aide with a laptop, a growing catalog of New Hampshire voters eager for fresh leadership in the White House. Each one is asked: Are you backing Mitt Romney? Many say yes and take a sticker. Some are still shopping. The seats are soon full. Latecomers have to pile in behind the TV cameras, back in the cheap seats with the press. The low-ceilinged room, festooned with Romney placards and red, white, and blue bunting, is starting to feel claustrophobic. The cigarette smoke wafting up from the basement doesn’t help.
This partisan crowd of a few hundred people in Salem, New Hampshire, on a brisk fall evening in 2011, doesn’t mind, though. They’re fed up—with President Obama, with the lack of jobs, with the fact that everywhere they go they see signs and instructions in tongues other than English. “There’s like eight to ten different languages on the ATM machine!” a woman complains. Mitt Romney, his watch glistening under the stage lights, is talking hard truths, tough choices, and economic realities. But he’s offering an appealing antidote—himself—promising to dive headlong into the job and ask the nation to follow him. “I will demand more of the American people,” he says, “in terms of work, energy, and passion, and commitment to the country, attention to the challenges we face, harder work from our kids in school, demanding higher standards of our teachers and our young people, and parents working with their kids. We’re going to have to do better.”
He is now sixty-four, with more gray at his temples and more lines on his face, but Romney’s energy shows no signs of abating, his skills of earnest persuasion as sharp as ever. You can still imagine him, if you try hard enough, at the home of a Frenchman years ago, asserting the merits of his faith until the door slammed. You can imagine him putting the hard sell on Ann, imploring her to wait for him, not to fall for the hunk at Brigham Young University who was just filling her loneliness. You can imagine him, armed with reams of data, showing a company how to operate more profitably and then taking over a company of his own. You can imagine him giving the charge to a demoralized Olympic community, igniting its spark anew. And you can imagine him peering into the Byzantine world of state government, rubbing his hands together—eager to take it apart and rebuild.
His confidence, on this day, veers close to arrogance at times: “It’s so hard for some people who haven’t spent their life—or haven’t spent a day!—in the private sector to know how it works,” he says. But he leavens those words with humility, a sign of a more experienced candidate. Not that he’s figured everything out. In a riff on retail politicking, he briefly laments the ubiquity of camera lenses. “It’s the nemesis of a campaign, by the way,” he says. “Everybody you meet has a camera and wants your picture—with them! It just takes a lot of time.” Then the gears turn in his head. He realizes he’s talking to a bunch of people who will probably want a photo of him afterward—with them. And he pivots quickly. “It’s kind of fun, my face is all over Facebook,” he says cheerfully. “This is like free advertising. Keep it up, guys. Keep it up.”
It had all started with him marveling at American innovation, still in many ways a Detroit boy who hasn’t lost his sense of wonder at the latest invention, gadget, and late-model car, still drawn to the creative alchemy that is technological advancement. “I can take a blooming picture with my phone!” he says, sounding just like the young Mitt might have years before, at his father’s side, surveying the latest automotive prototype with wide eyes.
Today, he’s a long way from Detroit, more than six decades on the road and still traveling. And he is still finding his way. He got close to his ultimate goal four years ago, before he was forced to fall in line behind John McCain, putting a bitter rivalry aside. Indeed, their makeup press conference at Romney’s campaign headquarters in Boston was as awkward as they come. But to Romney failure became just another hurdle to mount. It didn’t take him long to start trying again.
M
itt Romney hadn’t been anyone’s number two since the earliest days of his business career—and then not for long. But after bowing out of the 2008 race, that was the job he was gunning for. It was also the only one open. His hope was to salvage his first national campaign by becoming McCain’s chosen running mate and, if that didn’t work out, put himself in position to make another run. In his trademark analytical way, he embarked on the courtship as if it were one more primary, this time with the goal of gaining not voters’ approval but McCain’s. He shook off the pain of defeat, or at least put it out of mind, and set off to campaign hard for the man who had vanquished him.
Romney barnstormed from state to state as a McCain surrogate and headlined fund-raisers for the chronically cash-poor candidate. He earned praise as the ultimate good scout, a man who put helping his party above nursing his wounded pride. And McCain took notice. “I had every confidence of his loyalty,” McCain said. “Anytime anybody asked him to do something anywhere for our campaign, Mitt did it.”
As McCain pondered his running-mate options, Romney was in the mix and at times leading the short list. He was, to many McCain aides, clearly the most accomplished and qualified of the names in contention, but “accomplished” and “qualified” were not necessarily what the Arizona senator was looking for. McCain, who was running way behind in the polls, felt pressed to consider an unorthodox choice, a surprise, someone who could shake things up and wrest the mantle of change from Barack Obama. McCain was also determined to run with someone with whom he felt personally comfortable. The fact was that he and Romney, though they had been campaign rivals for months, barely knew each other. The question of whether to go with a bold choice instead would require further pondering on McCain’s part. But closing the personal gap between the two men could be dealt with straightaway.
And so, in May 2008, a few months after Romney pulled out of the presidential race, he and Ann climbed into a white Ford Mustang and drove toward the canyons around Sedona, Arizona. He was still frustrated at having squandered his chance with a flawed campaign strategy, a fractured staff, and his own uneven performance as a candidate. But now was not the time for self-criticism; it was time to sell himself anew. Along with other prospective candidates, Romney had been invited to spend a weekend at McCain’s ranch. There McCain could take his measure of Romney on friendly territory, at his own pace, as they barbecued, walked to the creek, and hiked around the area’s breathtaking Red Rocks.
To break whatever tension still lingered, McCain invited the Romneys to join his family at one of his favorite hangouts, a restaurant in Jerome, an old, spooky mining town thirty miles away in the high desert. It was a historic Spanish Mission–style venue, once a hospital and psychiatric ward for miners. Now it was an upscale eatery called The Asylum. The McCains and the Romneys settled into their seats, taking in the sweeping views of the Verde Valley. McCain soon found himself seeing the man across the table in a way he never had. “I’d always gotten the impression during the campaign that he was a little stiff,” McCain said. “As I got to know him and his family,” he said, he found “that’s just not the case. In informal settings, he’s a very talkative, entertaining guy with lots of experiences.”
They were opposites in many ways: the disciplined, straitlaced Romney, who didn’t swear or drink, and the fiery, tempestuous McCain, a former navy man who’d seen a bit more of life. But there in Arizona, they found something in common. There was history, for one. Both had family ties to the state. And they shared something else: both had struggled to step out of, and beyond, a paternal shadow. McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, and Romney, the son of a governor, had both grown up with the highest of expectations. Gradually, to the surprise of aides in both camps, “Mitt and I became friends,” McCain said. “I think Mitt is one of those guys, certainly was in my case, the better I got to know him, the better I liked him.”
After the trip to Arizona, Romney remained a top prospect to be McCain’s running mate, acknowledging that he would be “honored” if McCain picked him. McCain aides were asked to list pluses and minuses of various candidates, and Romney inevitably came up with a passel of pluses: competency, conservatism, the ability to raise money. But some McCain aides emphasized the minuses. Romney had been a success in business, yes, but sometimes at the expense of workers. Many of his deals had left “blood on the floor,” as the aides put it, and that might be hard to explain to voters. And then there was his image as something of a weather vane on social issues. One of the McCain aides, who had never gotten over Romney’s gibes at McCain during the primaries, made an argument that a fellow adviser summed up this way: “This is a Massachusetts flip-flopper potentially being coupled with the unflinching man of honor, and the two brands don’t add up.”
Romney’s supporters in McCain’s inner circle continued to push for their man, and Romney was thoroughly vetted by the team of lawyers McCain hired to evaluate potential picks. But McCain began to focus harder on making an unconventional pick. His pollster Bill McInturff told him that more than two-thirds of the public thought the country was on the “wrong track” and that the majority of such people would vote for the Democratic nominee. Given those numbers, McInturff told McCain, “There is no precedent in American political history, post–World War II, for the Republican nominee to win.” McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was equally grim, telling McCain, “If we don’t do anything that significantly mixes it up, you’re going to lose.”
McCain took the advice, looking past Romney’s attributes to abruptly choose a little-known but promising Alaska governor named Sarah Palin. McCain wanted a game changer who could rally the Republican base, siphon support from women voters who had backed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and draw attention away from Obama, whose appealing backstory as a black man of Kenyan-Kansan heritage bathed his campaign in historical significance. The moment McCain settled on the rambunctious, youthful Palin, Mitt Romney’s campaign year was over. It was time to go home.
I
t was early February 2011, and Romney had just arrived at an upscale Washington restaurant for a private meeting with one of the nation’s most influential evangelicals. Across the table sat Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. It felt, in many ways, like a reprise of four years earlier, when Land had flown to Boston and met Romney at his home to discuss campaign strategy. Land was among many who had counseled Romney to court social conservatives, and now he prepared to make the pitch again, but this time in a different economic and political climate.
Romney and Land, along with a few others, settled into a booth at the Acadiana restaurant and ordered plates of Louisiana cuisine. Land offered his take on the political landscape. He saw advantages for Romney in a U.S. economy still staggering out of a deep recession, and he saw risk for him in the controversial health plan he had pushed into law in Massachusetts. But Land’s key message was that Romney should not be swayed by those who were now advising him to downplay his positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and other social issues. That would be a fatal mistake, he said, because the Tea Party movement, still ascendant within the GOP, had zeroed in on downscaling government but included many who cared deeply about social issues.
But this wasn’t 2008, and Romney’s response to Land’s counsel showed how much the candidate had changed. He thanked Land for his advice without saying how much of it he would take. Some months later, the answer seemed clear: Romney kicked off his campaign by focusing heavily on fixing the economy. He did not mention abortion in his announcement speech. Even when speaking to a faith-based group the day after his kickoff, he mentioned abortion in a sentence and quickly moved to more comfortable terrain: kick-starting the U.S. economy. It was a striking change and intended as one.
In the aftermath of 2008, Romney closely analyzed his campaign, talking through the failure with his closest advisers. True to form, he wallowed in the data, crunched the numbers, and evaluated the results thoroughly. Several things had gone wrong. His message had been muddled. He had spent far too much time and money in Iowa. He had miscalculated his popularity in New Hampshire. He’d relied too heavily on expectations about how his competitors would fare. Romney, admitting the limits of his own political instincts, also seemed particularly rueful, two advisers said, at not having had a campaign architect such as Mike Murphy, who had stayed out of the 2008 race because of his ties to McCain. “I never had a strategist,” Romney told his friends. “I had all the pieces of the puzzle but didn’t fit them together.” He had needed a team he could trust implicitly, a key ingredient in his success at many points in his life and career. In 2008, his team had been divided. Some advisers insisted that Romney thrived in that environment, refereeing the collision of ideas and making the end call as the CEO. But the lesson of 2008 seemed to be that running a presidential campaign, with its compressed time frame and unpredictable currents, is nothing like leading a state, helming the Olympics, or buying and selling companies.