Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [2]
Recalling this story four years later, as Romney seemed headed for the GOP nomination in 2012, a Romney adviser said, “You just have to accept the fact that no one gets elected president without being humiliated.” Not only did Romney not mind being humiliated, he didn’t mind doing virtually whatever it took to win.
In a sense, Romney never really stopped running. The Romney 2012 campaign was born in February 2008, when Senator John McCain forced Romney out of the race by taking Super Tuesday. Romney immediately started campaigning for McCain—in part, to win friends if he needed them for 2012.
Romney confidants now talk about how lucky they were that he lost in 2008: you’re not going to win a pure personality contest with Barack Obama if you’re Mitt Romney. To win in 2012, his advisers knew, he needed a crowded race for the nomination to dilute the competition, and he needed the election to be about the economy. “If it was, he would win,” an adviser recalled. “If it wasn’t, he would lose.”
Romney, who made his fortune by turning around companies that were in precarious financial shape, saw himself as fundamentally data-driven. He wanted to see if Barack Obama was beatable before deciding, for certain, whether to run in 2012. Shortly after Election Day, Romney was cruising the Caribbean with conservative activists while Washington and much of the nation swooned over the new president. True, Obama looked pretty unbeatable, but things change fast in politics. “Give him a year,” Romney told a friend.
The dawn of 2009 was supposed to inaugurate a new political age. After a decade of war and a year of epic economic collapse, a young Democratic president unscarred by the cultural conflicts of the Clinton years promised a “post-partisan” ethos for a world more familiar with Facebook than with FDR. Conservatism was said to be dead.
Except it wasn’t. Beginning in early 2009, dispirited Republicans, exhausted by the George W. Bush regime, decided that while the presidency may have seemingly come easily to Barack Obama, nothing else would. The new president was under sustained assault from the start. From the initial stimulus bill and then with the health care battle, Obama faced an implacable GOP opposition and a dissatisfied Democratic Party. The left wing thought him too timid; the centrists, watching the rise of the Tea Party and mourning the political deaths of Blue Dogs and other moderate colleagues, believed him too liberal.
At least since Theodore White began his Making of the President series in 1960, Americans have tended to see campaigns for the White House in the most ancient of narrative terms, as an odyssey in which the protagonists undergo a series of tests in search of the ultimate prize. (Politicians like to see themselves in this light, too: two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson referred to the Founders as “Argonauts of old.”) In this first installment of the Playbook 2012 eBook series, the seekers range from Obama himself, in the White House amid crisis after crisis, to Mitt Romney, shrewdly staying out of the second-by-second Web wars while slowly building support the old-fashioned way: Lincoln Day dinner by Lincoln Day dinner, congressional-race funder appearance by congressional-race funder appearance. And there were the flavors of the month (or week), manifestations of a profound American uneasiness with the pervasive sense of drift and decline that Obama has failed to change.
The experiences of men such as Haley Barbour and Tim