The Long Alliance, page 23
The whole ball game at that point was keeping the focus on their opponent. Messina had entered 2011 promising Obama he would win if it was a straight choice between the two candidates, but that it would be less of a sure thing if the contest was instead a more straightforward Democrat-versus-Republican fight over the economy, so his team had spent most of that year testing messages on Romney, starting with “Which Mitt?,” an attempt to paint him as a spineless flip-flopper. The answer became clear, however, when they tested the argument that the private equity model Romney had helped pioneer was bad for employees, and that his tycoon’s vision of the economy would be harmful for the country. They were worried at first that it would look like they were attacking Romney’s personal success, but battleground-state focus groups quickly showed them that an old image of Romney and his colleagues holding wads of cash was a killer that would feed into their contention that he was more interested in enriching his friends than supporting workers.
The mechanics of making the case were of less concern to the campaign team than ever before, too, because of Obama’s eventual willingness to embrace a super PAC for the first time. The vehicle, run by a pair of his ex-aides, got off the ground after its founders met in LA with Hollywood titans Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who immediately committed $4 million to the anti-Romney ad effort, opening a new cash spigot that rarely stopped gushing. And when, in September, Chicago caught wind of a secretly recorded video that appeared to expose Romney as a heartless capitalist looking out for his buddies, their messaging task appeared to be completed for them.
The tape, published by Mother Jones, showed Romney telling donors at a high-dollar fundraiser that “there are forty-seven percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, alright? There are forty-seven percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It couldn’t have fed more perfectly into the central Obama-Biden argument about Republicans, and after a few days the Democrats spun it into an ad of their own, amplifying the damning clip for the middle-class audiences Romney talked about in it. Republicans tried downplaying it, but there was little denying Obama’s momentum heading into debate season. Not even another all-time classic Biden gaffe the night before the first Obama-Romney debate—“the middle class,” he said, had “been buried the last four years”—could dull the apparent high.
* * *
Biden was all set up in his upstairs living room at the Naval Observatory for a straightforward evening. The plan was to sit through Obama’s first debate against Romney and then, once it was over, to go live on TV and praise his boss for an inspiring job well done against an out-of-touch vulture capitalist. Mike Donilon was there, as usual, and a speechwriter joined so he could tweak Biden’s remarks in case anything interesting happened during the debate that warranted mentioning. The three chatted casually as the networks built up to the showdown, then fell silent when Obama and Romney walked onstage. No one could think of much to say as the next hour and a half unfolded.
It was clear inside the campaign’s “boiler room” at the University of Denver that something was wrong almost immediately. Maybe the public couldn’t see it, but this group of his top aides could tell Obama was thrown by the way Romney had ably joked about the date—it was the Obamas’ anniversary—the first time he opened his mouth, showing much more comfort onstage than the president had expected.
Things didn’t get much better from there. Obama rambled defensively, getting into the weeds of his economic record, while Romney, on an even footing with the incumbent for the first time, naturally looked more commanding than he had at any point in the campaign. The commentary on Twitter was turning against Obama, and his team was unsure what to do about such an unfamiliar dynamic. Some turned away from their computers within the first ten minutes. Some held out hope a bit longer but despaired as they watched real-time focus groups reveal that people were finding Obama to be flat and Romney to be pleasingly aggressive. Most of the rest threw up their hands when, about a third of the way into the debate, BuzzFeed News declared Romney the winner.
With five minutes left, Axelrod convened a conference call with the campaign’s deflated brain trust and suggested some policy arguments they could try making to distract from the president’s grim performance. A voice on the line tried cutting him off.
“Axe—”
Axelrod kept going on.
“Axe, Axe, Axe—”
He kept trying to talk, and Dan Pfeiffer butted in to say that wouldn’t cut it. The line fell silent with the rare interruption. Advisors were devouring the coverage, and lingered especially on the live blog posted by commentator Andrew Sullivan, often an ardent Obama backer. “How is Obama’s closing statement so fucking sad, confused and lame?” Sullivan wrote. “He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight.”
Plouffe and Messina took over. Their live focus groups had shown Obama had won just one exchange—when Romney had belittled public funding for PBS by scoffing, “I love Big Bird”—and Plouffe ordered the staff to get someone in a Big Bird suit to every Romney event starting the next day. It would, he figured, distract a bit from the debate. At least it was something.
* * *
Truth be told, none of Obama’s closest aides were really all that surprised. Prep had gone poorly from the start. Back in May, Axelrod and Klain, who was in charge of the debate program, had met with the president in the White House’s Roosevelt Room and handed him a briefing document explaining that incumbent presidents always lost the first debate because they were often judged based on optics and it was always the first time the challenger got to stand next to them, on their level. But, they’d insisted in writing to an unimpressed Obama, they wouldn’t let it happen to him, even though they were pretty sure Romney would be a better debater than John McCain was.
Obama proceeded to tear through the briefing books on Romney, his disdain for the businessman blooming for weeks as he came to consider him a retrograde faux-technocrat hardly worthy of his attention. This was fine as a general attitude, but it didn’t help when it came time to practice actual debating. Obama would have no problem explaining his own record at length but then would get defensive and uncomfortable making a partisan argument. He was also far too aggressive when it came time to talk about Romney, especially his pregovernment time in the business world. Obama was punchy and distracted enough in his first practice sessions that the aides decided he’d better stick to explaining rather than attacking, and to do it quickly. (They shared a study that showed his average press conference answer was a full eight minutes long, which would never fly on the debate stage.)
Obama didn’t take the feedback well, figuring he had more important things to do—like being president—and that he knew what he was doing, a mirror of how he’d treated the prep for other traditional, and somewhat rote, tentpole occasions like his annual State of the Union addresses. “I got this part,” he often said during practice run-throughs, insisting that they skip ahead when they got to a section of a speech or, now, a topic for debate, that he didn’t feel like revisiting. When he then flew west for a series of full mock debates outside Las Vegas with John Kerry standing in as his fellow Massachusetts patrician Romney, Obama was obviously annoyed by the setting—signs of the housing crisis were inescapable around the resort—and bored by the prep. He was even unable to land a convincing blow in practice on the topic of the 47 percent tape, leading his team to advise him to avoid it altogether, since everyone already knew about it and he wasn’t helping. The final advice, then, was to “just stay above the fray” and, though he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t boast about his record, not to try to unpack every last piece of his first term. It would come off as defensive and pedantic.
* * *
Obama didn’t think it had gone that badly when he first walked off the stage. Sure, maybe Romney had bested him here and there, but not in any way that deserved the kind of shock he detected on Plouffe’s face. Plouffe, however, disagreed, and Obama then checked with Klain, who told him over the phone that it really was a whiff, and that the coverage was making it worse. Only when Obama got back to his hotel and absorbed some of the online commentary did he concede that he’d fallen short, but even then he latched on to an analysis that he just wasn’t as desperate as other politicians for approval, which hindered his debating.
The rest of the coverage, however, riled him up—How could he have let Mitt Romney of all people do that to him?—and he brushed aside Klain’s offer to resign from the debate team the next morning. He soon flew west for a series of major fundraisers and, on the motorcade ride to his hotel, told one of his largest donation bundlers, an executive he’d rewarded with a plush ambassadorship in the first term, “I promise you I’m not going to fuck up the second and third ones like I did the first. I promise you. I understand that this was not my best hour.”
His people were happy to hear this attitude, but they needed more reassurance than that. Messina flew back to Chicago after the debate and landed at 3:00 a.m. to voicemails from Pete Rouse, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, all separately summoning him to Washington to calm everyone down. He stayed at the airport and got on the next flight east in time to meet with both the House and Senate Democrats, who were almost uniformly in a panic, insisting to the campaign manager that the president was arrogant and unfocused, and that he was going to cost them their jobs, too. Messina wasn’t exactly calm himself, but he came armed with new polling numbers he had gotten overnight from Benenson.
It was true that Obama had lost ground, he revealed, but the race had just tightened because previously skeptical Republicans and some independents had returned to Romney. Obama was still leading, even if there was no arguing that the race was now too close for comfort.
* * *
Biden and Donilon sat there in silence when the debate ended. The vice president broke in after a beat. “Jesus,” he said. “That was terrible.”
He stood to get ready for his smiley video about how great Obama had done, which was suddenly a daunting task. He had to start thinking, too, about what he’d say in the morning, when he was booked for all sorts of morning shows to keep the narrative going.
He wasn’t feeling much better when, a while later, Messina called to talk about the vice presidential debate, which was set for eight days later, in Kentucky.
“Hey, you know this, but we really need you to fight,” the campaign manager said.
Biden did already know it.
* * *
Team Biden, led by chief of staff Bruce Reed and policy director Sarah Bianchi, had started getting Joe ready six months ahead of time. The prep was slow at first, mostly focused on getting him brushed up on policy. They knew he’d had a lot of pressure on his shoulders when he’d had to debate Palin in 2008 and that he’d done well. This time they figured he’d probably have to give the campaign a shot in the arm after the first presidential debate—which everyone knew was always a bit rough for the incumbent—but that he might not have a ton of time to get ready for his turn in the spotlight once the campaign season was in full swing.
Biden assented to the brushing-up sessions, but he only fully engaged when Romney chose Paul Ryan, a young Wisconsin congressman who styled himself as a policy wonk but who was at heart a spartan conservative crusader, as his running mate in August. The VP was polite about Ryan in public at first, but behind the scenes he was brutal, pegging him as the kind of Catholic who uses his religion for the wrong kind of politics, whose heralded budget proposal was dangerous and who only got a pass because he presented himself as such a golden boy of the GOP. Biden doubled down on his policy homework and instructed his preppers to hold off on bringing him Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic congressman from Maryland they’d lined up to play Ryan in mock debate sessions, until he felt 100 percent confident about every nook and cranny of the administration’s record and Romney and Ryan’s plans.
In the meantime, he debated Bianchi for hours on end and devoted himself to studying Ryan, recognizing that he might be a formidable opponent because they had complementary strengths—Ryan knew nothing of foreign policy, Biden hated talking about budgets—but that he was also predictable, always reeling off the same anecdotes about his hometown of Janesville. For weeks Biden and Bianchi sparred, and whenever Biden tore off a good line, a speechwriter would type up what he’d just said, print it out, and hand it to him to memorize. Recitation was how he’d gotten over his debilitating stutter as a child, and it was how he got comfortable in preparation for big moments six decades later.
He was confident by the time he summoned Van Hollen, who had used the time to fully embody Ryan, and he wasted no time in ripping into the congressman. The idea was less to engage Van Hollen-as-Ryan in an intellectual or ideological battle than to steamroll him with almost cartoonish charm, interjections, and warnings about the GOP ticket’s extremism.
This was visceral, but it was also strategy. Biden had been hearing from dejected aides for weeks that Obama was blowing off his own prep. He had a feeling he’d need to step up for his boss.
* * *
The Biden debate team started the first day after Obama bombed in Denver with a white lie. They knew the Chicago brain trust was descending on Wilmington to monitor, and maybe take over, Biden’s preparation after the president’s disaster, and they wanted to make sure everyone knew that the VP understood the massive pressure now on his shoulders to stop the bleeding rather than compound it. He had this under control, thank you very much.
Reed and the staff had no doubt Biden was sure of himself, but they wanted him as comfortable as possible for the first mock session in front of Obama’s team, lest the Chicago group feel the need to step in too aggressively and get in his head. So they said Van Hollen had a scheduling conflict, and that Bianchi would play Ryan that day. The congressman was free, but no one needed to know that. Playing the role of moderator was Shailagh Murray, Biden’s trusted advisor who knew exactly what questions he had been knocking out of the park. Biden was, as they hoped, on his relentless A-game in such a familiar environment, completely rolling over Bianchi to such an aggressive and comical degree that, at one point, Plouffe turned to Klain on the sideline and asked, approvingly, “Is he really going to do that in the debate?!”
The next session, with Van Hollen, was even better, and Plouffe, Klain, and a handful of other Obamans urged him to keep going with the bulldozer act—the fewer full lines Ryan could get in edgewise and the more scathing critiques of Romney’s austere conservatism Biden could pack in, the better. The risk of looking like a buffoonish cartoon character wasn’t even worth thinking about, they thought. His goal had to be to excite Democrats who’d been freaked out by Obama’s performance, and not to worry about Republicans. As soon as Obama’s debate had ended the team had tried keeping supporters engaged by playing up the importance of Biden’s showdown, and now they went into overdrive, encouraging extra attention on the matchup between the sixty-nine-year-old veep and the forty-two-year-old upstart. Biden was encouraged by their tone but wanted to be sure they were all on the same page. He’d followed instructions to be lukewarm against Palin, he told the combined prep squad, and he could approach Ryan either hot, lukewarm, or cold. They were telling him to go in hot, right? That’s right, they said. Keep doing what you’re doing.
Biden had seen enough of these debates to know that he wasn’t going to be the story for more than a few days, and that his job was just to get the narrative back on Obama’s side—to stop the slide that had started in Colorado. Still, he figured, he might as well try to get the pendulum swinging all the way back.
* * *
Obama called Biden on the day of the debate to give him an extra dose of encouragement, but Biden hardly needed it by then. He wasn’t like his boss—no one would have to ask him the question Messina had posed to Obama regarding the first debate: “Why would your supporters fight for you if you won’t fight for them?”
Their instructions couldn’t have been any more different, either. The debate team’s final advice for Obama had been to avoid any contentious back-and-forth. Biden had sat for one final review of his mock debate tape with Klain and debate coach Michael Sheehan in Wilmington before flying to Kentucky. At the end of the session, as he was preparing to leave, Biden asked: “Any last comments?”
