The champagne had been flowing freely for hours in the presidential suite atop Chicago’s Fairmont hotel when the networks got around to calling the race for Barack Obama at around 11:15 P.M. eastern standard time.
Obama’s advisers, a block away in the seventh-floor boiler room at campaign headquarters, had known the thing was over since early evening. Their internal predictions for each state had been off by little more than 1 percent in any state; Ohio was tighter than they thought, but everything else was going according to plan.
“It’s not going to be all that fucking close,” Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel told a reporter earlier that night, “way more than three hundred in the Electoral College.”
At 11:38, the AP declared it done. Midnight tolled back east, then 12:15, 12:20. Many of the forty or so would-be revelers in the suite were starting to wonder, loudly, where was the concession call from Romney?
Giddy staffers began streaming in to congratulate Obama, joining family members and friends who had been there all night. They saw Valerie Jarrett talking, half jokingly, at the televised image of Romney’s empty podium in Boston, a thousand miles to the east.
“Come on, call!” she said.
“I was pissed,” David Axelrod, Obama’s closest message adviser for a decade, later told this book’s authors. “It was just sort of childish to wait as long as he did.”
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, the man who had spent two years building the billion-dollar Obama operation from the ground up, called his Romney counterpart, Matt Rhoades. He didn’t get him. “Look, we got to do something; this race has been called,” he said gently, leaving a message, according to a person nearby. Then he texted Rhoades to underscore the point.
If Romney didn’t move quickly, there was talk of driving the president over to the McCormick Place convention center, where thousands of supporters and the national media were awaiting his victory speech, according to several top advisers.
In the suite’s bedroom, the thin man in a white shirt and blue silk tie perched on the bed making a few last-second changes to his second victory speech, with his alter-ego speechwriter, Jon Favreau, and Axelrod.
Obama, people around him would later recall, seemed unperturbed by the delay, in the mood to savor rather than to rush. It was over. His enemies had failed—all the birthers, the Tea Party obstructionists who had written his obituary after the 2010 midterms, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who vowed to make him a one-term president like Carter.
Those closest to Obama knew he always had an itch, a nagging sense that underneath the momentary adulation in 2008 people weren’t really voting for him, but against George W. Bush. It had just been swept away.
“There’s no doubt that he found this one to be sweeter than the last one,” said one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers. “It was weighing on him how much was at stake, how much of his entire legacy was on the line. His legacy had not been determined by the previous four years; that wouldn’t matter to history. It was all about the outcome on Election Day.”
After the tense, uncertain thirty-four days from Obama’s big flop at the first debate in Denver to Election Day, Romney’s dawdling was nothing short of excruciating. The jitters were getting to everybody, but especially to Jarrett, who navigated the incongruous role of Obama adviser and Obama family friend.
“Why isn’t he calling?” she asked the group. “We gotta go! We gotta go!”
Obama tried to calm everybody down. “Don’t push … This is hard. He’ll call, don’t worry,” he said, according to one of his top aides. “Look, he needs to do this in his own time.”
Soon after, Messina peered down at his iPhone. It was a text from Rhoades: “The governor will be calling in a few minutes.”
Then, at 12:35 Boston time —eighty minutes after the race had first been called—Marvin Nicholson, Obama’s towering body man and genial golf partner, took the call from his opposite number in the Romney camp, Garrett Jackson.
Obama retreated to a small dinette area. The party around him had reached such a crescendo that he had to plug a finger in his right ear to hear the familiar voice on the other end.
“Hello, Mr. President, it’s Mitt Romney …”
At 11:15 P.M. back east, in the Westin overlooking Boston Harbor, Romney’s family and staff stood around white leather couches in a state of shock. Romney had been told he’d likely lost, and his advance staff was setting in motion plans to concede.
It was an intensely painful scenario for a campaign that had been confident in victory hours before.
The television wasn’t even turned on in Romney’s room on the sixteenth floor. Instead, he preferred to follow the returns through updates from his senior aides. Jackson would relay the latest states that had fallen from his iPhone’s Twitter feed. Rhoades shuttled in from the war room down the hall with fresh data. Some of it came from news organizations, some of it from Romney aides scrolling through websites with the election returns. The campaign’s Election Day monitoring system, Orca—which no one had apparently bothered to field-test—was basically useless.
Here was a fitting way to end a campaign marked by resilience and flashes of inspiration—but ultimately sunk by strategic ineptitude and a level of self-delusion breathtaking on a team that featured some of the brightest brains and hardest heads in the Republican Party.
Obama had drafted what his team jokingly called his “loser” speech with Favreau days earlier. Romney had written nothing, pretty sure he wouldn’t need one.
“What Mitt paid attention to was the enthusiasm of the crowds, the size of the crowd, because there was real momentum out there,” said Spencer Zwick, his finance chief and family friend. “I totally believed we were going to win, and I think everyone around him believed we were going to win. If anyone tells you that they knew we weren’t going to win, I think they’re lying to you.”
His wife, Ann, was completely sold on her husband’s impending victory. “We’re going to win this,” she told an aide who had suggested the possibility of an alternative outcome the night before en route to a final rally in New Hampshire.
Now the end was coming, and far faster than anyone anticipated. When Rhoades revealed that Romney had lost Wisconsin and that their pathway was basically gone, the candidate responded in his typical matter-of-fact fashion. Time to get working on that concession speech, he said.
Romney, a boyish sixty-five, was realizing that the dream which had eluded his father, the Michigan governor and 1968 GOP hopeful, George Romney, was also beyond his reach. Still, he slipped easily into his accustomed role as family patriarch and church elder, betraying little emotion as he began hashing out his remarks.
“He’s sitting there playing with his grandkids, as calm as he could be,” recalled a source in the room.
Then, confusion: Ten minutes later, at 11:25, his aides were watching Karl Rove on Fox News, saying that the network’s call of Ohio was premature. “Well, maybe [Rove] knows something we don’t,” a person who was in the suite at the time said, explaining their thinking.
Romney aides were getting the same information from the same operative in the Columbus Renaissance hotel. Romeny’s Ohio state director, Scott Jennings, was scanning the state and county election websites and telling Rove and Boston that the race could hinge on neck‑and‑neck Hamilton County and provisional ballots.
Rhoades was also hearing from political director Rich Beeson, who was monitoring the returns across town at the TD Garden. In a phone call, Beeson told Rhoades that it was premature to concede because there were so many votes still being counted in the big four states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado.
Rhoades turned to his stoic candidate. “It doesn’t look good, but there’s still a chance,” he said.
Okay, hold off, Romney said.
He wasn’t being optimistic, just prudent. There was a strong feeling among senior Romney officials that they should decide when to concede—that they wouldn’t let the TV networks force their hand.
But as Will Ritter, Romney’s top advance man, abruptly canceled preparations to move the candidate to the convention center, tensions were mounting.
Romney’s deputy campaign manager, Katie Packer Gage, was out in the hallway arguing with the communications team. She favored a delay, not wanting Romney to “pull an Al Gore” by having to retract a concession. Eric Fehrnstrom and Kevin Madden, two senior press advisers, were talking about the perception of Romney in history.
To Gage, and earlier to Rhoades, the communications operatives conveyed the same message: time to face reality. “We didn’t want Mitt to seem like a sore loser,” Fehrnstrom would explain later.
The same debate was raging at the highest level of the campaign. Stuart Stevens—perhaps the most influential and certainly the most controversial of Romney’s aides—stepped away from Romney’s suite to call the Ohio senator Rob Portman, who was in Columbus with Jennings.
Stevens, along with other top aides, moved next door to a room occupied by senior adviser Beth Myers and put his iPhone on speaker so Portman could communicate with the high command. The Ohioan was told the campaign was thinking of sending Paul Ryan down to the podium to tell the crowd the election was still in doubt and Romney would have something more to say in the morning. A draft of the no-concession speech was read to the senator.
Portman, a veteran of Ohio presidential campaigns since 1988, thought that would be a mistake. He told Romney’s Boston staff flatly: they weren’t going to win the provisionals, so why subject Ryan to the embarrassment when the outcome would soon be clear?
Copyright © 2012 by POLITICO's Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
