Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [5]
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What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer’s book about the 1988 presidential election, documented the physical, mental, and emotional toll of running for president. The book has taken on a cult status among political aficionados, in part because it shows the human cost of running for president and the extreme dedication required to win.
In the 2012 campaign for the GOP nomination, one candidate steadily plowed ahead. Mitt Romney was boring at times, almost invisible much of the time, but his campaign was essentially error-free and unflappable. The others self-destructed in memorable, sometimes colorful ways.
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Haley Barbour’s campaign-in-waiting for the Republican nomination was so far advanced in the winter of 2011 that his staffers had looked at houses in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi and putative Barbour campaign headquarters. They had planned each stop of the announcement tour, starting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, hitting New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina, and winding back home to Jackson for a hero’s welcome and mega-fundraiser. A Washington operative who was likely to join the team had even planned an all-Google technology infrastructure, to save money using free tools, but also to create the unlikely profile of Haley Barbour, tech-savvy. The Mississippi governor and head of the Republican National Committee was a prodigious fundraiser. He had even begun to eat and drink less, shedding twenty pounds. (Though even Barbour himself joked that his idea of cutting back was less bourbon and more Cabernet.)
But there was a catch. Following the practice of many campaigns, Barbour’s advisers had collected “oppo,” opposition research on their own candidate. “It was a big file,” recalled one adviser. Flashing red lights included foreign clients of Barbour’s lobbying business. “The assumption was: if we can find it within ten or twelve weeks, then we have to assume that already The Washington Post, The New York Times, POLITICO, or The Wall Street Journal already have this or will have this.” Some of the material was so embarrassing that Barbour was briefed in private. “There was a decision made that we would not be together as a group to present it to him. We thought that was disrespectful and unbecoming of what a professional team should do. So Scott [Reed, Barbour’s chief adviser] was the only one to take the file and go present it to Haley privately, just the two of them,” said the adviser. “He took it like a man,” Reed told the others. Not long after, in late April, Barbour decided not to run.
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Callista Gingrich, a former staffer on the House Agriculture Committee and Newt Gingrich’s third wife, was deeply involved in her husband’s professional life. Gingrich had given control of his communications company to Callista, easing out his daughter, who had been in charge for the prior decade. Gingrich’s aides say that Callista is cheerful and smiling. “She’s not the Wicked Witch of the West. She’s a nice person. She was fun to be around,” said one. But she is a perfectionist and demanding. She insisted that aides follow her revisions of routine memos to the letter. (“When I send you changes, I expect them to be made.”) She wanted to fly on private planes, but not just any plane—only ones she deemed safe (a Hawker 800 or a Citation 10). At the same time, she threw Newt’s down-to-the-minute schedule off track. “Well, you know, women want to go back to the hotel and freshen up and things like that, and that’s understandable, but freshening up to me is, you know, fifteen minutes, and there were times when it was forty-five