Playbook 2012_ The Right Fights Back (Politico Inside Election 2012) - Mike Allen [9]
Palin herself was obsessed with running, said the adviser. “She wanted to be updated moment to moment” on the race, said the adviser, just in case she suddenly decided to take the plunge. He marveled at “the intensity and detail that she knew about all the candidates, all the process, all the debates, everything that went on. I read Playbook every morning and [the] Drudge [Report] and POLITICO, refresh every hour and keep up on the blogs and try to keep track of everything that’s going on, but many times I was caught off guard by her having more information than I do.”
At one point, Palin, who is privately shy and introverted despite her public brassiness, complained to aides that Mitt Romney had somehow “rigged” the primary schedule to favor his candidacy, although she was never quite clear how. Determined to be an idol of the masses, Palin wanted to protect her turf from all intruders, including Donald Trump, the first and least serious of the early front-runners. Looking for a good catfight, the press played up her rivalry with Michele Bachmann and Palin’s apparent intent to upstage Bachmann by appearing in Iowa just as the congresswoman was announcing her candidacy. But Palin insiders say that she wasn’t particularly insecure about Bachmann, that the Palin v. Bachmann smackdown was mostly a media creation.
Still, she was upset when a reporter caught her by surprise with the news that Bachmann had won the Ames straw poll. “We were in Dixon, Illinois,” a longtime aide recalled. “I told [her husband] Todd but I had not told her. An NBC reporter jumped out of a bush somewhere, popped a question at her—it just literally had just happened. So they were clearly tracking us, waiting to get the response. And I hadn’t told her yet. I should have said something.” A scolding followed. She was frustrated “that [she] was caught off guard, didn’t know the information. [The] schedule should have been such that we were watching the straw poll results, as opposed to doing some other activity.” For each debate, Palin insisted on having a place to watch if she was on the road, and afterward wanted to deconstruct the debate with advisers.
Some Palin advisers wanted her to run, even if briefly and quixotically, to renew her fans’ loyalty. People around the Palins felt they had been signaled to be ready to go, but aides were disappointed when Palin’s road trips in August didn’t seem to generate much excitement. They were planning on running a few small tests in September to measure her fundraising ability, but it was too late. Palin announced she would not run on October 5.
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New Jersey governor Chris Christie knew he wasn’t ready, and repeatedly resisted what was one of the most intensive lobbying efforts anyone in Republican politics could recall. Encountering Christie in the skybox of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, George W. Bush told the governor: “You got what it takes to do this if you want to do it.” Witnesses said the encounter was a little awkward because Johnson is one of Mitt Romney’s national chairmen.
In July, fifty of the most prized donors in national politics, including several hedge fund billionaires who are among the richest people in the world, schlepped to a Manhattan office or hovered around speakerphones as their host, venture capitalist Ken Langone, a co-founder of the Home Depot, implored Christie to reconsider. The governor declined eloquently and firmly, as paraphrased by a close source for POLITICO Playbook readers at the time: “I’m not running, but I came because Langone is so aggressive, he basically just physically shook me into doing it. I’ve weighed this carefully; I didn’t dismiss it out of hand. There were four considerations. 1) One question was: Where’s my wife? She’s not enthused. 2) The second is: I looked ahead at the potential