Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [4]
The book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, seemed to give Romney a sense of purpose and even comfort. He wrote it at his kitchen table in Belmont, Massachusetts, and sitting on the beach at his waterfront home in La Jolla (born in Michigan, educated at Stanford, Brigham Young University, and Harvard business and law schools, Romney has had homes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah, and California). Aides had hired a writer for him, but Romney was so possessive about the project that the guy was eventually sidelined. (“The thought was Mitt would sit down with a writer, give him ideas, and then the writer would put some words on paper and then Mitt would edit,” said the aide. “It didn’t work that way, even slightly. The writer wrote a chapter and Mitt completely rewrote it, and then the writer wrote another chapter and Mitt completely rewrote it, and then we were like, You know, why don’t we do it in reverse? Why doesn’t Mitt write a chapter and you kind of buff it up? It was sort of painful, awkward, but the guy was great. He was like, Sure.” He became a glorified fact checker.)
At the La Jolla confab that December, Mitt and Ann Romney never said so explicitly, but the others could tell it was a “go.” Romney instantly became the GOP front-runner. “If he wins,” marveled a top southern operative who supports Romney, “he will have completely stolen the nomination. He is a northeastern Republican governor with a reputation for moderate-to-liberal tendencies on things that matter a lot to what is essentially a southern-western party right now.”
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Democrats and even a few Republicans hoped that the end of the George W. Bush years meant an end to Karl Rove, the Bush adviser who won in 2000 and 2004 but who could not devise a political strategy to avoid the 2006 midterm defeats for Republicans or raise Bush’s ratings in the final years of the presidency. And in fact Rove seemed plenty happy in his new life as a columnist, author, and Fox News Channel expert. But in April 2010, at his modest home on Weaver Terrace in Northwest D.C., Rove served his favorite chicken pot pie lunch to a score of his fellow Republican operators, figuring out how, in effect, to create a shadow political juggernaut to raise money for the Republicans. The way had been opened three months earlier by Citizens United, a Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited donations to political action committees.
By the summer of 2010, Rove was secretly flying around the country for a new organization called American Crossroads, harvesting checks from wealthy donors. An organizer ticked off the bounty: “A $4 million check, a $3.5 million check, a bunch of million-dollar checks, a $7 million check that came in the form of a $5 million check and two $1 million checks, and one $10 million contribution that came in tranches of $2.5 million. And I think $69 million of our money came in contributions of $100,000 or more.” When one Californian asked Rove what his cut was and was told it was zero, the wealthy patron doubled his gift.
The first employee of American Crossroads was a well-connected Washington operator named Steve Law. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, Law, chief counsel of the Chamber of Commerce, had been sitting in a kabob place on Route 7 in the Virginia suburbs, half watching MSNBC, when he noticed something. The cable network was running a split screen, showing President Obama on one side, exhorting Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill. On the other side was “a rolling scroll of all the junk that was in the bill,” recalled Law. “I thought, you know, if MSNBC, definitely not a Republican-oriented station, is even starting to nick this guy—I wondered: he just started all of a sudden looking like a politician.” Law quit his job and, for the half the salary, became the head of American Crossroads.
The new organization got a boost when it was publicly attacked by