All the while, America’s folk landscape looked like the culmination of conservative jeremiads about decline: Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel of true love realized through bondage and sadomasochism, spent more than seven months atop the New York Times bestseller list.
“It was a revolution,” John Boehner says. “The country was changing right underneath our feet.”
The conservative base was on fire. His religion aside, Republicans had reason to worry that Romney—whose adviser had publicly compared the candidate’s November strategy to an “Etch A Sketch,” shaking off the right-wing positions of the primary and starting over afresh—didn’t have the core convictions, much less the stomach, for a fight with Obama.
The president and his allies, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to start throwing haymakers.
ROMNEY WAS AN EASY TARGET. THE WAY HE TALKED AND THE WAY HE walked, the haircut and the mannerisms—it was like a black-and-white sitcom character reborn in the age of Technicolor. Once, after a donor meeting in which Romney heard the phrase “No shit, Sherlock” for the first time, he gleefully repeated the quip to his staff—but cleaned it up to say, “No bleep, Sherlock.”
Even Republicans couldn’t help themselves. As he campaigned for House candidates across the country in 2012, Boehner worked humorous digs at Romney into his stump speech, mocking the Republican nominee behind closed doors as someone who had never mowed his own lawn or owned a pair of blue jeans.
This detachment carried significant political risk. In a vacuum, the fact that Romney didn’t curse, or didn’t drink, or had lots of money, might not have been damaging. But taken with his policy positions, and given how the president aimed to portray him, these characteristics were glaring vulnerabilities. Because strategically, Obama and his allies wanted everything voters learned about Romney to fit into a simple overarching theme: He was not one of them.
The president had little choice but to run a bruising reelection campaign. It was true that Osama bin Laden was dead and the Detroit automakers were alive. But the conditions were categorically ripe for his defeat: There was little tangible progress to show for the stimulus package; the Affordable Care Act was still widely unpopular; unemployment was still north of 8 percent; average gas prices were approaching a record high; and stock markets were barely inching upward.
The bright spot for Obama, politically, was that polling showed him still in decent standing with low- and middle-income voters, most of whom did not blame their hardships on him but, rather, on the previous administration, the broken institutions of government, and what they viewed as a broken economic model that exploited the many for the gain of the few. Against this backdrop, Romney, the billionaire businessman and venture capitalist, represented a perfect foil, someone whose obvious strength could be turned into an insurmountable weakness.
Team Obama spent the late spring and early summer battering Romney with an advertising blitz that defined the Republican nominee in terms he would never recover from: as a cold, bloodthirsty corporate raider who cared more about profits than people. “President Obama was politically wise in characterizing me as some rich Republican that doesn’t care about the little guy. There are a lot of reasons why he was able to define me in that way,” Romney recalls. “I needed to do a much better job in communicating that the whole reason I was running is for the average American.”
The two most memorable spots were so haunting, so brutally effective, that political scientists will dissect them for decades to come. The first, from Obama’s campaign, was set to a soundtrack of Romney singing “America the Beautiful,” during which headlines flashed across the screen telling of his corporate outsourcing, his Swiss bank account, his tropical tax havens. (The fade to black came as Romney belted out, “And crown thy good with brotherhood . . .”) The second, from Priorities USA Action, featured a testimonial from Mike Earnest, an Indiana factory worker who told of building a thirty-foot stage that Bain Capital officials used to announce that they were closing the plant and firing all its employees. “Mitt Romney made over a hundred million dollars by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives,” Earnest said. “Turns out that when we built that stage, it was like building my own coffin. And it just made me sick.”
The precise impact of the ads themselves would later become the subject of debate, considering how Romney had remained relatively stable at 2 to 4 points behind Obama in the horse race polling. But it was impossible to quantify how this onslaught of negativity—on top of questions about Romney’s tax returns and Harry Reid’s claim that the GOP nominee hadn’t paid any income taxes for a decade—drove media coverage in a way that implanted an asterisk of doubt in the minds of voters whenever they heard Romney tout his economic expertise.
There were critics of Team Obama’s strategy. Several of the Priorities USA ads were skewered by fact-checkers; one in particular, which suggested Romney’s shuttering of a plant was responsible for an employee’s wife dying of cancer, was slammed as egregious and untrue.9 Meanwhile, several prominent Democrats, including auto bailout czar Steve Rattner and then-Newark mayor Cory Booker, condemned the Bain Capital ads and defended Romney as a practitioner of capitalism. And Reid, for his part, forfeited much of his credibility when it was learned that he’d flat out lied about Romney’s tax returns.
But the feathering of Romney was effective largely because Republicans had supplied the tar. Gingrich cronies had flooded South Carolina with ads depicting the predatory ways of Romney and Bain Capital. Perry had called Romney’s colleagues “vultures” that were “waiting for a company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, and they leave the skeleton.”10 Even Palin had gotten in on the act, going on Sean Hannity’s television show to question Romney’s claim of creating one hundred thousand jobs at Bain and needling him for his failure to release more tax returns.
Meanwhile, Romney had made himself singularly vulnerable when, in 2008, he wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The substance was defensible; Romney argued that the automakers, burdened by legacy costs related to lavish union contracts, could be viable long term only by restructuring under rules of bankruptcy. And yet the headline—coupled with Obama’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler—reinforced Romney’s negatives in the midwestern states where Obama was most exposed.
The attacks on Romney shouldn’t have been surprising. For all the flowery rhetoric, Obama, a student of Chicago-style campaigning, had run a pitilessly negative operation against McCain four years earlier. (And, as Romney observed during the bludgeoning of Gingrich months earlier, “politics ain’t bean bag.”) What was surprising was Romney’s failure to defend himself, and to defend capitalism conceptually, from Team Obama’s tireless assault.
“We spent the campaign defining his business record. These were legitimate stories and legitimate critiques. What was absent was the other side of the story—they never told it,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, says. “At a time when a lot of people were really jaundiced about Wall Street and financiers, they nominated a guy who spent most of his life in that world. Romney was always going to get the benefit of the doubt as someone who could manage the economy; what was suspect was whether he would manage the economy in a way that was beneficial to the middle class. And he never made that case.”