Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [20]
Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana had conjured a full-fledged campaign organization before he bailed out in May 2011. “Mitch actually had this thing ready to go,” said the operative. “It was totally baked.” (“We could have been up and running the next day,” said Indiana GOP chair Eric Holcomb, a top Daniels adviser.) But Daniels did not want to run against the wishes of his wife and daughters, who feared that the media would wallow in Daniels’s divorce from his wife in the late 1990s. “Everybody talked about family values in the Republican Party, how important they are, and they checked their families at the door while they go to another level of power,” said the operative. Daniels at least had put family values first, he said. (A close associate of the governor said he also feared the loss of his own privacy. “It’s no secret that Mitch likes to lose his tiny state detail when he’s out riding his motorcycle in Indiana,” the friend said.)
The operative’s real candidate had been Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida. Bush resisted; he said it was too soon for another Bush to run for president. “You’re missing it,” the operative told him. “You think there is some negative out there; there’s not. We can manage whatever there is.” Al Hoffman and Jack Oliver, the financial wizard behind George W. Bush, both urged Jeb to run. But a friend said Bush felt strongly that it “was not time to run,” suggesting he hoped to go in 2016. Could he win? “Absolutely!” insisted a close friend. But Jeb Bush did his calculating in the reverse order that Mitch Daniels had. Daniels let supporters convince him that he could win, then got a firm no from his family. Bush, convinced this was the wrong time for his family, never indulged in victory scenarios, even with close friends. Asked about his thinking, Jeb Bush emailed: “[T]he conventional belief [was] that because my last name is Bush, 2012 was not the year for me to run. I don’t believe that is true, and my decision not to run was based on personal private reasons, and not based on political assessments.” And many of those who bowed out had the same thought: Mitt Romney wanted it more than they did.
The operative said, “Jeb could have won [the nomination], I think Mitch could have won, I think Christie could have won.” Christie, he said, made a mistake by waiting, thinking he could get the nomination in 2016. “I would have helped Christie in a heartbeat,” said the operative. “But you know what? If it’s him versus Jeb, we’re going to beat the shit out of him. We’ll smoke him. We will smoke him.”
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“I can’t stand politics,” said Dave Carney, Perry’s chief strategist, as he sat outside the diner in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in mid-October. We asked him why he would say that.
“Have you ever met anybody in politics?” asked Carney, obviously enjoying himself (“He likes to be the Mad Genius,” said the Perry fundraiser.) “The political people, political operatives?” We pointed out that working in politics had “made a nice living for your family.” Carney responded, “Oh, yeah, I enjoy it, but there are some people who obsess politics, who are—like I’m sure there’s football junkies and baseball junkies—but there’s more to life than how many electoral votes Herbert Hoover got.”
We noted that we were sitting with him in a diner in New Hampshire.
“I’m just as guilty as the rest of them. I wouldn’t want to hang around with me if I was a normal person,” Carney said, laughing.
Carney may dislike politics, or some aspect of politics, but he definitely likes political intrigue. During the conversation, while discussing Romney, he let slip, “The number one vulnerability in their own research is the flip-flops.”
How would Carney know what was in Romney’s research?
“People worked on the campaign,” he said. Did that mean he had a mole from Romney’s 2008 campaign? Who? “These are just friends of mine,”