World

On the campaign trail with Obama and Romney—2012 and beyond

November 11, 2013
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The American political journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann had a huge success in 2010 with "Game Change", their gripping account of the 2008 US presidential election (it was published in this country as Race of a Lifetime). "Double Down", their story of the 2012 election, in which Barack Obama ran for a second term against Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachussets, has just been published. It has all the distinctive qualities that made the first volume so riveting—exhaustive reporting, extensive interviews (many of them done on condition of anonymity in order to elicit maximum candour) and the kind of narrative propulsion one normally expects from a high-grade thriller.

The book begins with a prologue set in the final month of the race, when the Obama campaign was in despair at the President's disastrous performance in the first televised debate with Romney and the equally calamitous progress of his preparation for the second. When I spoke to Halperin and Heilemann on the phone from the US, I began by asking them why they decided to start the book there.

JH: We started with that in the prologue because in the fall campaign it was a hugely dramatic moment that no one knew about—the fact that the president had an epic performance collapse in his preparation for what they, the Obama campaign, now saw as a must-win debate. His advisors had to sit the president down and say, “Mr President, what’s going wrong with you?”

JD: Was that level of frankness on the part of his advisors unprecedented?

JH: It was certainly unprecedented for Barack Obama to be on the verge of having two successive massive performance failures. David Axelrod said after the [first] Denver debate that the President had had some political defeats before, but he’d never suffered performance failure like he did in Denver. And to now have the possibility that he was about to do it again in the second debate at Hofstra University was unprecedented. And certainly for his advisors to make the kind of intervention with him they did … it was a pretty searching encounter. He was having a kind of existential crisis. They all thought they’d never seen anything like that previously with him. It was a hugely dramatic moment and had it gone wrong, it could have threatened the President’s re-election. And it was a moment that cut to the core of the President and what his strengths as a performer were, and what were his flaws in terms of his unwillingness to embrace what most politicians consider to be a standard part of doing business as a high-level political candidate. So it was a revealing moment. It was a traumatic moment. And a moment that had never been reported before. So it gave us a way in, given the kind of thing we do, which is to write narrative non-fiction with novelistic styling. It gave us a way in to the story that was emotionally accessible.

That same slightly high-minded distaste for some of the grubbier aspects of the business of politics shows up in Obama’s attitude towards raising campaign funds doesn’t it? On the subject of fundraising, you seem to suggest in the book that the “Citizens United” verdict in 2010, which removed the limits on campaign donations to political action committees, or “Super PACs”, changed the rules of the game of campaign financing decisively. What specific effects did Super PACs and the Citizens United decision have on the 2012 campaign?

MH: In one sense it helped Romney in that it magnified the huge advantage he had in being the guy who knows a lot of millionaires and billionaires. At the same time, it clearly extended the [Republican] nomination fight. In the case of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, it only took one or two patrons for them to contest different states with Romney. And it weakened Romney. On the Democratic side, the decision and the way the President and his team reacted to it really tested the commitment of Barack Obama and his advisors to campaign finance reform and the determination to get big money out of politics. It leaves the system in a place where, if you’re not willing to unilaterally disarm, then it’s difficult to see that the Super PAC culture won’t become an even bigger factor in 2016 than it was in 2012. Neither party feels now that it can or that it even wants to change the system. Individual politicians might feel, “If I can master this and benefit from it, why would I want to change it?”

JH: The ability to raise money has always been a key metric of viability for presidential aspirants. The fact is that one of the big effects of 2012 is that there’s no one who’s going to be taken seriously in 2016, in either party, who doesn’t hold the potential to be able to raise a billion dollars plus. It’s one of the reasons, among many, why Hillary Clinton will be so formidable if she decides to run—she can play at the level required in a post-Citizens United world. And it’s part of the reason why [the Republican governor of New Jersey] Chris Christie is considered so seriously—everyone knows he has great connections in the donor world and people think, “Well, Chris Christie could go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton and raise more than a billion dollars.” That will shape how people think about 2016.

The race for the 2012 Republican nomination was, as you show in the book, a mixture of high theatre and low farce. Do you think the GOP has learned any lessons from that race and if so, what are they?

JH: Questions like that presuppose that there’s an entity called the “GOP”. The notion of personifying parties is, I think, a misunderstanding. The GOP, more than the Democratic Party, has competing factions within it. And I think those factions have learned different lessons from 2012. The donor class, the establishment, realises that the Tea Party, the populist wing of the party, is here to stay and provides a lot of energy. But it can also impose significant costs as nominees feel compelled to try to cater to some positions which that wing of the party feels strongly about, and these put the nominee, as was the case with Mitt Romney, pretty far outside of the mainstream of American politics. So the establishment, the donor wing, thinks “We must find someone who is acceptable to us, who captures the energy of the Tea Party wing, but who is also much more in the mainstream." Chris Christie is someone who could get votes in the centre but also generate enthusiasm on the far right. The far right looks at Mitt Romney and says, “This is another moderate we nominated. We nominated John McCain, we nominated Mitt Romney. And we’re losing by not nominating a true conservative.” The Tea Party’s lesson is that Mitt Romney couldn’t prosecute the healthcare case against Barack Obama. (As we show in the book, he was tied up in knots because of “Romneycare”.) They think, “We must now nominate a true believer.” And that’s why there are many on the far right who think someone Ted Cruz or Rand Paul would be a better standard bearer. So the problem for Republicans is that there is no one Republican Party right now. The two big factions see very different lessons coming out of what we chronicle in the book for 2016.

I’d like to ask you about the dynamics of the Obama-Biden relationship which you treat in a very interesting way in the book. You emphasise Joe Biden’s enduring insecurities, but it does seem to me that he was a strength for the campaign, rather than a weakness. As you show, he offered a connection to blue-collar Democrats in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania that arguably Obama struggled to male.

MH: He offered that as well as, at times, a real benefit to the President by virtue of his relationships on Capitol Hill and in dealing with national security. As we highlight when writing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Obama had a team involving Secretary Gates, Secretary Clinton and Vice-President Biden that worked really well together. And the Vice-President gets a lot of credit for that. The President delegated to him responsibility for dealing with Iraq and a range of other issues that were critical for governance. The political implications were clear: you had a young Democratic president with limited national security experience, yet national security was not perceived as a particularly big threat to his re-election. And the President gives some of the credit for that to Joe Biden. And Joe Biden deserves some of that credit.

Nevertheless, as you show, the Obama team did consider swapping Biden for Hillary Clinton, for the first time in the autumn of 2011.

MH: They did because it was such a politically perilous time for the President. Coming out of the debt ceiling fight and the budget fight, he was at his weakest. And the notion of being weak, which was a criticism from both sides, led them [Obama’s advisors], as much as they thought the Republican Party was weak and would likely produce a weak nominee, to feel they needed to look at every possible option that might strengthen the President’s hand. As we write in the book, it showed that they are more hard-headed than soft-hearted.

Another recurrent theme in the book concerns the dysfunctions and misfires of Obama’s team which you show was a source of great frustration to the President. Why did things keep going wrong? Was that just a function of the attrition of incumbency?

JH: I think that slightly overstates it. There’s a chapter in the book that deals with the period when the general election was gearing up where the President’s team had some stumbles coming out of the gate. But the overarching picture, in terms of the campaign, was that you had a campaign that operated pretty close to playing error-free ball throughout 2012, with the exception of this period in May, when there were some stumbles coming out of the gate, which we identify. I wouldn’t want to diminish their importance, but I think you can attribute them to the fact that the Republican nomination process had gone on a lot longer than they expected. They were to some extent rusty. They weren’t perfectly calibrated. A very good example is the attacks on Romney over his role at Bain Capital, which generated a lot of controversy at the beginning [of the campaign] among the donor class on the Democratic side. The President’s team’s attacks were somewhat heavy-handed, were not well-orchestrated or particularly well-timed. They did a bunch of things that allowed the Republicans to gain the high ground momentarily and create the perception that things were out of sorts on the part of the President’s re-election team. And they were a little bit out of sorts. But they didn’t back off from those attacks. As they moved forward they honed them and sharpened them and made them more effective, more pointed. It was a period when the President was very frustrated, as we report in the book, with some of the tactical blunders. But those went away pretty quickly. And you had a team that functioned pretty close to flawlessly, until the President himself started to screw things up with the Denver debate.

There’s another significant personal dynamic that interests me: that between President Obama and Bill Clinton. Would you say that there was a genuine reconciliation between the two men by the time of the election, or at least a significant thawing of the relationship after what happened in 2008?

MH: There was at least a significant thawing. President Obama is not someone who willingly spends time with people he doesn’t want to spend time with. But he looked for opportunities, in this period after the thaw, to spend time with President Clinton. And clearly enjoyed it. It was a confluence of the personal and the political that took a lot time and, as we show in the book, involved getting over a certain amount of pride but also a real oil-and-water factor about their personalities. They are different types in how they like to spend time and interact with other politicians. It was clearly initially out of necessity that President Obama did something that he rarely does, which is to admit to his advisors and to himself that he needed help from someone else. We show how, at a fundraiser in 2012, President Obama saw President Clinton make the case for Obama for the first time and how impressed he was. And in the fall of 2012, when President Obama had to come back to Washington to deal with Hurricane Sandy, Clinton said to Obama, “You go and be President and I’ll do the campaigning.” That was something President Obama appreciated, but also something President Clinton appreciated, because it was really the first time since 1996 that he got to play a large and active role in a presidential campaign. There’s nobody in America who likes doing that more than him. Not only did they give him a plane and other logistics, which allowed him to do a lot of campaigning, they clearly had no ambivalence about it.

Let’s turn to the Romney campaign. Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, wasn’t a disaster on the Sarah Palin scale, but the impression one gets from the book is that Romney’s people never quite worked out what to do with him.

JH: That’s fair. We report in a reasonable amount of detail about the selection. Governor Romney had been suffering a small but persistent deficit against the President. So within the Romney team, the choice of a running mate took on a greater significance. They knew they had to change the dynamic. And so they ended up with Congressman Ryan on the ticket. He was the ideological and intellectual leader of conservative Congressional Republicans. He was seen, because of the Ryan budget, as someone who was both associated with a very strong ideological and policy agenda, and also someone who had a lot of controversy attached to that agenda. So there was a certain amount of perceived policy risk involved in Governor Romney embracing him. Then they put him on the ticket. As we report in the book, Congressman Ryan assumed that his being put on the ticket meant that Governor Romney was embracing his policy and ideological positions. But then he found out pretty quickly that they didn’t know what to do him and were handling him with either kid gloves or HazMat gloves, one or the other. There was no personal tension between the two of them, but Governor Romney was still torn between the question whether their basic theory of the race was that it was a referendum election—in which they were running on Barack Obama’s record and discrediting his economic achievements—or that it was a “choice” election, which was more Ryan’s position, in which they’d put forward a big, bold agenda for the future and contrast it with the President’s agenda. Governor Romney’s team was split on that question and because that split never really got resolved, they never really figured out how to use Congressman Ryan to full effect. To use him to full effect, they’d have had to come down more strongly on the notion of a choice election, and they never quite got there. So Paul Ryan ended up being an under-utilised resource. Whatever it was that he brought to the ticket, they didn’t use most of it because they weren’t sure of the direction they wanted to go.

You show in the book that right up until the election, Romney’s internal polling was suggesting that he could win. What went wrong there, because the internal numbers that the Obama campaign were getting gave a very different picture?

MH: The Republicans didn’t realise that the Democracts were going to try so substantially to remake the electorate, so that they could lose independents in some critical states but still win by virtue of turning out their voters in higher numbers. They also didn’t really understand the full extent of the discrepancy between the quality of the President’s “ground game” and their own. They had a very eye-opening experience on election day because they weren’t even close to having as sophisticated an operation as the Democrats did, and which they’d had four years to hone since their success with it in 2008.

Are you going to do this again in 2016?

MH: Stay tuned!

If you do, do you think you’ll be reporting on Hillary Clinton versus Chris Christie?

JH: It’s a long way off, even though people are already speculating like crazy about what will happen. There’s no question that if you were to ask members of the political class who they thought, today, were the frontrunners, people would say those two. On the Democratic side, it’s much more clear-cut. If Hillary Clinton decides to run, and all the indications are that she’s headed in that direction, I think she’d win the Democratic nomination, barring a health issue or some scandal we don’t know about, by something close to acclamation. She’s a towering figure in the party, she has a resource advantage over anyone else who would run against her. Most of the plausible challengers—people like Governor Cuomo, Vice-President Biden and others—look at her and see on oncoming train. I think many of them won’t run at all if she runs. She has the tacit support of President Obama that she has, a hold on key elements of the Democratic coalition (from African-Americans to Latinos to women) and financial advantages. And the sense in the party that having finally nominated and then elected the first African-American, that it’s now time for the first female nominee of the Democratic Party is pretty overwhelming. She will be the nominee if she runs. It’s a little different on the Republican side. Chris Christie is a really good politician, he has star power, he has shown, with his re-election the other day [as governor of New Jersey], that he has the ability to win in a blue state, he has considerable support on the populist wing of the party and a huge amount of support on the establishment wing. But he does have a series of views on certain issues that will pose challenges for him with the Republican electorate—on things like gun control, Medicaid expansion, on Obamacare in New Jersey, on immigration. He has issues of temperament. It’s totally unclear how well the brash, competitive style that’s worked so well for him in New Jersey and with the national press will work as well in places like Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina. And, for all the attention he’s gotten, he’s still a relatively unknown figure among average voters in places that aren’t in the Beltway or in the “Acela Corridor” between New York and Washington. Whereas Senator Clinton is a genuinely national and international figure. So Christie is the frontrunner, but not at all the prohibitive frontrunner and there are a lot of formidable Republicans— Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin—who could give Christie a run for his money. So it’s a much more open and volatile field on the Republican side than the Democratic side.

"Double Down: The Explosive Inside Account of the 2012 Presidential Election" is published by WH Allen (£20).