Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [3]
The rebirth of the right is an extraordinary tale. By historical standards it was a rapid shift, on par with the 1966 conservative backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society after the 1964 landslide. And as conservatives well know, that drama ended with the election of a Republican president in 1968.
This eBook tells the story not only of the last three months or weeks but of the last three years. Setting out, we asked the most basic question of all: how did American politics get from the “there” of a new Age of Obama to the “here” of a resurgent right? Part of the answer is cultural: Americans tend to elect Republican presidents, not Democratic ones. (In the last three quarters of a century, only two Democrats, FDR and Clinton, have been reelected; four Republicans have.)
The bloodless Romney’s ruthless, disciplined campaign appeared built to last, while his more colorful opponents rose and fell, distracting fire from Romney and allowing him to build his machine quietly. The swashbuckling Perry team misjudged their man and the moment at every turn, and the also-rans didn’t have what it takes. (You will read later about candidates who wanted days off—a natural human reaction to the grind of a campaign, but presidential contests are about overcoming natural human reactions.) When Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie got out, Romney essentially had the nomination and big Republicans were left pining for what might have been. They know that a Romney-Obama general election will be almost a mechanical effort to turn out voters.
Here is the tale of how the right fought back to even (or better) with Obama—the intrigues and the plotting, the ground games and the quests for cash. It is the story of what’s happening behind the scenes, but also the story of who we are right now—and what we may be becoming.
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Obama’s positive rating, which started in the mid-60s, fell throughout 2009 and into 2010. His negative rating, which started in the low 20s, steadily rose. The lines crossed in mid-2010. Unemployment stood stubbornly over 9 percent. Pundits visiting the White House began to hear a note of self-pity in the explanations of the Obama spinners. Privately, Obama began to identity with George H. W. Bush, a one-termer who was slowly being redeemed by history. Obama often invited Bush 41 to the White House when the former president was in town and would call him from time to time, just to talk. He awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with another father figure: Warren Buffett.
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Shortly before Christmas in December 2010, the Romney clan and top advisers met in the living room of Romney’s house in La Jolla, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Ann Romney, who already suffered from MS, had been laid low by radiation treatment for early stages of breast cancer, but she was doing better. Her husband had been cagey about his plans for 2012, even inside his own family. “I might not do this, Tagg,” Romney had been telling his oldest son. “You keep assuming that I’m going to do this, but I might not.”
Stuart Stevens, who had been holding informal strategy sessions with Romney’s inner circle in Washington, gave a presentation. Frugality and discipline were the themes; there would be no replay of Romney’s high-spending, scattershot 2008 campaign. Stevens told the group that Romney 2.0 would be lean and mean. Still shaken by the 2008 debacle, some of Romney’s advisers had their doubts. “Are we completely crazy?” one recalled thinking. Romney himself had seemed more Zen-like in the aftermath of his failed first run. “He wasn’t like, Hey, I’ll never be president, and he wasn’t like [Richard] Nixon, You’ll never have Romney to kick around,” recalled one adviser, who would visit Romney from time to time. Romney was trying to write a book about what he believed. “He’d be sitting at his kitchen table, writing