Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [12]
The Romney campaign is housed in the same former furniture store and law firm in Boston’s North End that headquartered the 2008 campaign. This time there are far fewer people; the money is being husbanded for future TV ads. Romney asked Washington consultants Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer to give up their other clients and move to Boston. In a ground-floor suite equipped with editing bays, Stevens can create ads and videos on the fly.
A senior Romney adviser claims that the candidate no longer sweats “the little things.” After getting roughed up in the press in 2008, “he understands that some days the front page of POLITICO isn’t always going to be positive Mitt Romney stuff. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to win the primary and win the election.”
But, of course, there are moments when the media pummeling hurts. Looking back, Romney campaign aides still wince over the beating handed out by the Wall Street Journal editorial page in early May, after Romney gave a speech laying out his “2012 principles for health reform.” The editorial began: “As everyone knows, the health reform Mr. Romney passed in 2006 as Massachusetts Governor was the prototype for President Obama’s version and gave national health care a huge political boost.… His failure to explain his own role or admit any errors suggests serious flaws both in his candidacy and as a potential president.” The WSJ editorial was a “low” in the campaign, conceded an aide. The health care issue had nagged at Romney’s advisers, more than they later cared to admit. Romney could hardly run away from Romneycare. His official governor’s portrait hanging in the statehouse shows a copy of the health care bill lying on his desk.
The campaign decided to make a virtue of not flip-flopping on health care. As a Romney aide later put it, with a touch of bravado and his own expletive, “He went out there and said, Hey, I’m not walking away. He told [reporter Brian] Mooney in the [Boston] Globe, I am proud of what I did. Go fuck yourself.” (What Romney actually said was: “Overall, it was a positive approach.… I’m proud of the fact we took on a real tough problem and moved the ball forward.”) Romney was always quick to add, however, that his first step as president would be to repeal Obamacare.
Romney’s health care speech in May, delivered with the sort of PowerPoint bullet points favored by business consultants, was a stylistic as well as a substantive flop. All the GOP candidates were mocking President Obama for using a TelePrompTer. Romney’s handlers decided it was time to dump the PowerPoint approach and to try to make the candidate appear spontaneous and unrehearsed. “Speeches are so yesterday, man,” said one adviser. On September 6, Romney gave a much more effective address on job creation, speaking, it seemed, almost off the cuff (his key points were emblazoned on the backdrop). Romney knew that he needed to be sensitive to the charge that he was a phony and a stiff, Bob Forehead–type caricature of a pol who reads woodenly from a handler’s script. In time, Romney learned to give speeches extemporaneously, using only a few notes to get him going.
Romney’s religion was another potential vulnerability. Romney is very active in the LDS church—he has been a Mormon leader, a lay bishop, in Massachusetts, and wrote a big check to build a new Mormon temple in his hometown of Belmont, Massachusetts, dedicated in 2000. The Romney camp anticipated smears and stood ready. “Someone takes a shot at the governor’s faith, we put a scarlet letter on them, RB, religious bigot,” said a senior adviser. But through the spring and summer of 2011, the attacks never came. (When a Dallas preacher who introduced Rick Perry at an October event proceeded to walk outside the hall and call Mormonism a “cult,” the reaction was mainly