Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [7]
“The consultants say, If you get a question from the screen, you’ve got to answer the person on the screen because otherwise it’s disrespectful of the citizen. So whatever her name is gets up on the screen and says, I have a health care question. So my first swing thought is, I’ve got to answer the screen. So I say to the woman, Betty or Nancy or whatever your name is, that’s a great question about health care, and I’m doing that [answering by talking about Obamacare], and John King doesn’t want to hear any of that. He wants to hear me whack Romney. So he interrupts me the first time and says, Well, what about this thing you said about Romney and what you called ‘Obamneycare?’ And then I start to whale on Obama because my second swing thought is, After you do the screen, no matter what question you get, you’ve got to whale on Obama because the base loves that, and they like nothing better than when you criticize Obama and then pivot to whatever point you’re going to make. So I’m thinking, Screen, whale Obama, nick Mitt. So this is my three-point swing thought, so I’m through swing thought one on the screen, and King’s interrupted me. When I’m into swing thought two about Obama, he doesn’t want to hear that, either. He wants me to nick Mitt, and I’m fully prepared to do it, and we get into this awkward, I’m trying to say something, he’s trying to get me to get to the point. At that point I’m focused on Obama, and I thought it was a legitimate point to whale on Obama, but I decided to stay with that and not finish it with Mitt.”
Phew. Pawlenty later conceded that his wife had urged him not to go after Romney with the “Obamneycare” line, which was swing thought number four, and, possibly, the one that really bollixed him.
One of Pawlenty’s top advisers questioned whether the candidate’s heart was really in the race. Pawlenty always seemed to want to get back to the hotel to see if there was a good hockey game he could watch in the sports bar with his body man, this adviser said. On the day before the Ames, Iowa, straw poll on August 13, 2011, which the Pawlenty team had targeted as make-or-break, with thousands of hands still to shake, Pawlenty wanted to quit early, said this adviser. His spokesman, Alex Conant, did not dispute this, though he offered a more benign explanation. “Unlike every candidate I’ve ever worked for, he wanted to make sure that there was ample downtime and that the days were not so long that by the end of them he was not making sense anymore,” said Conant.
In his interview with us, Pawlenty said, “The idea we sloughed off is complete BS.” Pawlenty was eager, however, to drop out of the race if he badly lost the Ames straw poll. He did not want to have a big campaign debt. On the eve of the straw poll, Pawlenty’s wife, Mary, confronted campaign manager Ayers in their hotel suite. “What happens if we get out on Sunday morning?” she asked. “Is there going to be debt?” Ayers answered, “No.” Pawlenty finished a distant third and dropped out of the race.
As he drove home from Iowa, he received a stream of consoling phone calls from well-wishers, like George H. W. Bush (a fan) and Mitt Romney, who was angling for T-Paw’s endorsement. Then one of the people riding in the car heard Pawlenty exclaim, “I don’t even know what to say about that. That’s jaw-dropping.” Riding in the backseat, his wife, Mary, was suddenly alert. She began asking her husband, “What? What? What? What are you saying?” Pawlenty looked crestfallen. He explained that he had just learned that the campaign was more than a half million dollars in the red.
Mary Pawlenty believed that Ayers had flat-out lied about the campaign debt. (Ayers denied this.) The campaign office