IT ALL BEGAN with the disposal of aborted fetuses.
That was what led to one of Mitt Romney’s worst moments in the 2012 election and possibly his downfall as a presidential candidate: the revelation of a secretly recorded video at a private fundraiser that captured Romney denigrating 47 percent of the electorate as “victims” and moochers who rely upon government handouts, who do not pay income taxes, and, perhaps most insulting of all, who do not “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
This story, which generated headlines around the world, hit as Romney was slogging through the final stretch of a presidential contest that was not proceeding as Romney had once hoped it would. Instead of a referendum on President Barack Obama’s handling of the sluggish economy, the election had become a choice between the two candidates and their respective visions—or perhaps a referendum on Romney’s character.
IN LATE JUNE, three months before I revealed the 47 percent video on the Mother Jones website, I received an email from an investigator I’ve known for years: “Got a sec for a quick chat?” My answer: “Sure.”
As a reporter, I receive tips and leads from a number of sources. Some have an obvious motive. (Say, a political campaign will point out something odd in the campaign disclosure filing of an opponent.) In most cases, the tipster is presenting me with material already in the public domain—not undercover video or a diary pilfered from someone’s home. The stuff simply has not been noticed. Usually the most important task at hand is determining whether the proffered material is factually correct and actually newsworthy.
This source—whom I’ll call Luke—and I spoke that night, and he told me about a Bain Capital investment that could be bad news for Romney. Luke wasn’t with the Obama reelection campaign or the White House, but he didn’t say who his client was.
The deal was this: in late 1999, Bain Capital—the private equity firm Romney had founded and managed—and another private equity company had invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical waste disposal firm that in more recent years has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing of aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics.
The Huffington Post earlier in the year had run an article reporting on this Bain investment. But when the HuffPo piece came out, Bain tamped down the potential controversy. The company’s official line was that Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. That seemed to mean he had not been directly involved in the deal. Romney’s connection to a firm that disposed of aborted fetuses—indirect or not—never became a campaign issue.
Luke encouraged me to take another look, noting that my colleagues at the Washington bureau of Mother Jones and I had a reputation for digging and producing articles that went beyond the daily (and sometimes silly) give-and-take of political campaigns. He emailed me an electronic pile of documents, including news stories that chronicled Stericycle’s spotty safety record in its early years.
Included in the material were documents Bain had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After I quickly confirmed that these SEC records were real, I read them and saw that Romney was listed as an active participant in the Stericycle investment, which occurred in November 1999. This fact was significant; it undercut the claim that Romney had departed Bain in early 1999 and had had nothing to do with the firm’s actions after that point.
The February cut-off date was important for Romney. The Washington Post, on June 21, 2012, had published a story reporting that Romney’s Bain Capital had “invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.” With the presidential campaign focused on jobs creation—here in the United States, not abroad—this was a major slam on Romney: he had profited by outsourcing jobs.
His campaign pushed back hard, insisting that Romney had left from Bain before several of the key episodes cited in the Post article (though there was no denying Romney had retained a deep ownership stake in the private equity firm).
FOR WEEKS PRIOR to the Post piece, the Obama camp had been pounding on Romney’s days at Bain—focusing on the firm’s acquisition of businesses that later underwent bankruptcies or job losses, even as Romney and his colleagues still reaped a profit. This was part of the Obama campaign’s effort to portray the GOP presidential candidate as a 1 percenter who was out of touch with average Americans and, thus, not a politician who could be expected to advance policies that would boost the economic prospects of middle-class voters.
The goal for Obama and his reelection team based in Chicago was to define Romney for the general election—especially for undecided voters who had not paid much attention during the Republican primaries—before the multimillionaire former Massachusetts governor could do so himself. In April, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, had told me that the campaign would move fiercely in the coming weeks—during the lull between the end of the GOP primary contest and the summer (when fewer voters would be following the campaign and, instead, be watching the Olympics)—to influence how voters perceived Romney. With Romney touting his private sector experience as the top reason he should be hired as America’s CEO, bashing Romney’s Bain record was critical for Obama’s squad.
This was but one facet of the president’s grand strategy. Ever since the Democrats took a drubbing in the 2010 congressional elections, the president had been attempting to cast the 2012 election not as an up-or-down vote on his management of the economy, but as a fundamental clash between his vision of progressive government (which invests in education, innovation, and infrastructure to enhance the economy; which protects and strengthens the social safety net; and which pursues a deficit reduction strategy that includes a bit more taxes from the well-to-do) and the stark vision of the Tea Party-ized Republicans (who contend that government is the problem, not the answer, and who call for slashing government spending on social programs and freeing businesses and wealthy Americans from such government interventions as higher taxes, environmental and safety regulations, and health care reform). My book Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP To Set Up the 2012 Election, published earlier this year, told much of that story.
While waging this ideological war, Obama had used the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP chairman of the House budget committee, as his foil—a stand-in for whomever the Republican presidential nominee would be. Ryan’s plan would eviscerate spending on such programs as Head Start, Pell Grants for college students, federal law enforcement, food safety monitoring, environmental protection, medical research, and school lunch programs. It would reduce taxes for the rich even beyond the tax cuts implemented by President George W. Bush and end the Medicare guarantee. Such radical change, Obama insisted, was out of step with American values—and it would produce a darker and more Darwinian society. And as Romney, who had embraced the Ryan budget (long before tapping Ryan to be his running mate), emerged as the likely GOP nominee, Obama and his aides began redirecting this values-based assault against him.
The Bain attack, which Romney and his allies bitterly decried as an affront to the free enterprise system, served the Obama campaign on two levels: it undermined Romney’s number-one argument—that he was a turnaround king who could do the same for the US economy—and it highlighted Obama’s values-related message: I’m for the public interest; he’s for profits over people. The Obama campaign sought to depict Romney as a corporate raider who cared more about maximizing wealth for his investors than about the workers who toiled at the businesses Bain acquired and flipped.
Some Democrats publicly voiced skepticism about this approach, moaning that it could cause voters to view Obama as a foe of business. But the Obama camp was committed to it (and to knocking Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor). And the president joined in. As his campaigned targeted Romney’s Bain connection, he defended this tactic: “If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about.” Romney fired back: “President Obama confirmed today that he will continue his attacks on the free enterprise system.”
With the polls always close and Democratic operatives getting nervous about Obama’s chances, the two presidential campaigns continued to joust over Romney’s business career. The Romney crew kept trying to change the subject to the lousy jobs picture and to take advantage of such slip-ups as Obama’s comment that the “private sector is doing fine.” Yet Romney could not escape the Bain attacks, and any and all details about his private equity days could be important. This was especially true given a late June NBC/Wall Street Journal poll indicating that Romney remained largely undefined for many voters—meaning Obama and his aides still had the opportunity to fill in the lines.
ON JULY 2, I posted a story on Romney’s connection to Stericyle, reporting that Bain had filed SEC documents designating Romney as an active participant in this deal when the transaction happened in late 1999. This undermined Romney’s assertion that he had nothing to do with Bain’s activities after February of that year.
Bain’s filing with the SEC, dated November 19, 1999, listed assorted Bain affiliates that were acquiring a large stake in Stericycle, and it noted that Romney was the “sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President” of these entities. The document also stated that Romney “may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to” 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle “in his capacity as sole shareholder” of these Bain affiliates. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. The filing was signed by Romney.
The Stericycle article became part of the ongoing political media debate over when Romney had said goodbye to Bain—and what Bain actions he could be held responsible for. There was even the question of whether Romney had violated the law. Romney had declared on the federal financial disclosure form he filed as a presidential candidate that he “has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” since February 1999. But his involvement in the Stericycle deal—he had signed papers related to this transaction—contradicted his flat-out assertion. (Making a false statement on a federal financial disclosure form is a felony punishable by up to one year of imprisonment and a $50,000 fine.)
After the Stericycle article appeared, it was evident that reporters and researchers could pore over SEC documents for information on Romney and Bain. And within days, I received an email from James Carter, a freelance researcher (looking for a job) who had read that piece and who had information to share. He didn’t mention he was the grandson of President Jimmy Carter and possessed a deep personal motive for unearthing material on Romney, who routinely disparaged his grandfather. (I wouldn’t learn of his relationship to the former president until early September, when Carter and I would meet in person at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.) But Carter’s information stood on its own; he had located an SEC document for another Bain deal in early 2000 that named Romney as a principle and was also signed by Romney.
I thanked Carter for the lead. He next sent me a link to SEC documents regarding a Bain affiliate’s investment in a Chinese firm named Global-Tech Appliances, Inc., a company that outsourced the manufacturing of appliances for US corporations, including Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon. The Global-Tech deal had occurred before Romney left Bain for the Winter Olympics. This was a clear example of Romney and Bain (and a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. that Romney solely controlled) seeking to benefit by investing in a Chinese firm profiting from outsourcing.
I broke this story on July 11. Headline: “Romney Invested Millions in Chinese Firm that Profited on US Outsourcing.” I gave a research assistance credit to Carter. (He had sent similar information to a few other journalists who had not paid attention to it.) A spokeswoman for Bain told me that the company would not comment on the Global-Tech investment or provide any additional details about this deal. A Romney campaign official would not address the issue of Global-Tech gaining from US outsourcing, but this Romney aide insisted that the deal was nothing other than a routine investment in a foreign company.
On the campaign trail in February, Romney had proclaimed, “We will not let China continue to steal jobs from the United States of America.” Years earlier, though, he had bet on outsourcing.
THROUGHOUT JULY, THE Obama campaign continued its effort to delegitimize Romney with ads in the crucial swing states and assaults from the president and his surrogates that hit him on several fronts: Romney was hiding something by not releasing his tax returns prior to 2010; he had maintained offshore accounts without explaining why; Bain had invested in companies that outsourced and laid off workers. Meanwhile Romney vilified Obama as an enemy of free enterprise and pounced on Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment, which was taken wildly out of context.
“If the election’s about Romney and Bain, then the president’s going to win,” political handicapper Stuart Rothenberg observed. And the Obama camp was endeavoring mighty hard to mold the race in that manner. On July 18, ABC News reported that Obama had succeeded in changing the topic from disappointing economic news to “Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.”
AND THE BAIN story had not been fully mined. There were thousands of pages of SEC documents to review. Looking through these filings, I discovered that a Bain affiliate wholly owned by Romney had invested tens of millions of dollars in a pair of companies that were in the late 1990s pioneering the outsourcing of high-tech manufacturing and developing large offshore production facilities in Mexico, China, and elsewhere to build electronics for US firms. These investments had originated before Romney left Bain for Utah.
On July 20, I posted an article revealing these deals. The Romney campaign, in an email to me, had dismissed the investments as nothing other than ordinary business decisions and, once again, did not address the potentially dicey issue of Romney’s investing in ventures that made money off outsourcing and offshoring. Yet my article received sparse attention. It was published the morning Americans learned that a gunman had gone on a killing spree at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.
AT SUMMER’S MIDPOINT, Romney remained on the defensive on several related topics: his taxes, his offshore accounts, his Bain stint—all of these issues reinforcing the image the Obama campaign was trying to convey of Romney. And if voters saw Romney as a tax-dodging corporate vulture, they sure wouldn’t believe him when he said his policies were better for them than Obama’s.
Then came Romney’s overseas trip. He made repeated flubs in London, insulting the host city regarding its preparations for the Olympics. In Israel, he offended Palestinians by suggesting Jewish culture was superior to theirs. When a senior adviser openly said Romney would support a unilateral strike by Israel against Iran, Romney himself had to walk back the remark.
AUGUST IS TYPICALLY the month when a successful presidential challenger starts to pick up steam. Yet that didn’t happen for Romney. He got snared in a Bain-related scuffle with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said that an anonymous Bain investor had told him Romney didn’t pay any taxes for ten years. (Reid never disclosed his source.) And the Obama campaign blasted Romney’s tax plan after the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center released a report that said Romney’s proposal would lead to an average tax cut of $87,000 for millionaires and higher taxes for those who pocketed $200,000 or less. “It’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” Obama declared. “It’s Romney Hood.”
The Obama campaign was presenting a coherent, integrated assault on Romney, while Romney’s camp seemed to bounce from one tactic to another. It returned fire with an ad claiming Obama was gutting welfare reform. The charge was false—and it prompted speculation that Romney was trying to exploit a racially charged issue to boost his standing among white male voters.
The campaign was moving in the right direction for Obama—albeit slightly. He even got the Republican vice presidential candidate he wanted.
When Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate, he took full possession of the Wisconsin congressman’s budget proposal and hardcore conservative vision: draconian spending cuts; subjecting Medicare recipients to the whims of the market; gutting such government programs as food safety inspections, law enforcement, and environmental protection, and more post-tax dollars for 1 percenters.
The pick may have granted Romney a moment of boldness. Ryan was a white guy, but not a boring white guy with no message. But the move provided Obama another line of attack on Romney and more opportunity to establish the election as a clash of values and visions. Instead of talking about the economy, did Romney want to discuss the details of Ryan’s plan, especially its Medicare provision? It seemed so.
Romney’s veep decision signaled that the onetime moderate GOP governor of a blue state was marching in lockstep with the Tea Party parade and had not only accepted but embraced his party’s lurch to the far end of the ideological spectrum. After Romney’s own lunge to the right to nab the GOP nomination, there would not be the much-anticipated pivot to the center in pursuit of independent and undecided voters. At least not for the time being.
And time was getting tight for Romney. He had been his party’s presumptive nominee for months, yet he had not used this period effectively to develop a bond with voters. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found an enormous empathy gap: 52 percent of the voters believed Obama cared about average Americans; only 30 percent said that about Romney.
The Romney camp, though, appeared unfazed by such polls and the missteps of the summer. On the opening day of the Republican convention in Tampa—which had been delayed a day due to Hurricane Isaac—I ran into a top Republican who had not been so keen on Romney and his campaign tactics over the past year. He believed the Romney campaign had failed to engage voters in a fundamental fashion—regarding either Romney’s biography or his proposed policies.
“Did you expect any major change on the Romney side?” I asked.
“No,” he said, a tone of sadness in his voice. “I talk to people in the campaign and they tell me they’re comfortable where they are now.”
“Really? Given the lousy economy, shouldn’t Romney be 10 points ahead of the guy in the White House?”
“Yes, but they think they’re in a good spot. And when you feel comfortable, you don’t change things.” He rolled his eyes and added, “At least the weather is getting better.”
In an interview posted by Politico that day, Romney conceded that Obama had succeeded in making him a less likable person. But, he said, “I am who I am.” He added, “I was voted the president of my fraternity [at Brigham Young University]. . . . [Y]ou don’t get voted to be head of your group if you don’t get along with people, if you don’t connect with people.”
A Washington Post/ABC News poll that week showed Romney had a 40 percent/51 percent favorable/unfavorable rating. (Obama’s was 50/47.) This was the lowest personal popularity for a major-party nominee in three decades.
THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION didn’t do much to help the man it nominated. Ryan’s acceptance speech was archly ideological. He declared that the only way to juice the economy was to place “hard limits on the size of government,” and he described Obamaland in the darkest (and Ayn Randiest) terms: “The best this administration offers [is] a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”
With such language, Ryan was not pressing the obvious case that Romney was a pragmatic businessman who could be a competent steward of the still-struggling American economy. He was announcing that he and Romney aimed to remake American society. He was essentially issuing a declaration of ideological warfare: government is the enemy of freedom and the cause of the nation’s economic woes; it must be crushed.
This was not an appeal to the middle. When I asked a top Republican who advised the Romney campaign—but who was not a member of its inner circle—why Romney had not yet gyrated toward the center, he replied that the Romney campaign had become “preconditioned” to placating conservatives. “They were in that mode for a year during the primaries and can’t get out of it.”
Romney’s acceptance speech was more measured. He presented a conservatism that could be palatable to in-the-middle undecided voters: The way out of the current hole, he maintained, is to cut taxes and trim government. Citing his days at Bain Capital, he asserted that he knew how to repair the economy.
His speech, short on specifics, was hardly a winner. And Clint Eastwood’s rambling and crude stand-up routine prior to Romney’s address dominated coverage of Romney’s big night. Romney’s inexplicable failure to mention during his speech the Afghanistan war or the US troops serving there received more attention than anything the candidate actually said. There was no convention bounce. Romney did not leave Tampa seeming any more likable or empathetic. His obvious vulnerabilities remained.
The Democratic convention was a success. It revved up its delegates. Bill Clinton presented a rip-roaring case for Obama’s presidency. And in his speech, Obama stuck to the strategic message he had been pushing for nearly two years. Without saying much about himself or his accomplishments—or about Romney—he noted that the election was “a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.”
The post-conventions consensus among the politerati seemed correct: Obama had achieved a small but discernible boost. But the race stayed tight. The money chase was neck and neck. An external event—a financial or foreign crisis—could reshape the contest. Each candidate still had a shot; each could catch a lucky break—or an unlucky one.
ON AUGUST 24, James Carter sent me an email. It contained only a link to a two-minute video posted on YouTube that showed Mitt Romney in a room talking to several people about a trip he had taken to China to buy a factory. Romney noted that the facility employed thousands of young women working long hours each day for “a pittance” and living “twelve girls per room.” The factory had fences and guard towers around it—not to keep the workers in, he was told, but to prevent job seekers from sneaking in and joining the workforce uninvited. For Romney, the point was not the harsh conditions faced by the Chinese workers but the wonder of the United States. He went on: “The Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, ‘You know 95 percent of life is settled if you are born in America. This is an amazing land.’ ” A title at the end of the clip claimed the footage had been recorded at a private mansion during a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser. There was no information about the person (or persons) who had shot and posted the video.
Carter and I had the same reaction: Romney appeared to be speaking about Global-Tech, the Bain-backed outsourcing company based in Hong Kong that I had written about in early July. We both wanted to find out more about this video. Perhaps the source had additional footage of Romney discussing his China trip—or something else.
The China clip had been knocking around on the Internet for several months. Someone using the handle RomneyExposed had posted it on an anti-Romney YouTube site with a few other snippets that seemed to come from the same event. The video images were purposefully blurred; these clips were essentially audio files. They had drawn little attention.
Earlier in August, a YouTube account had been set up under the name of Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, and it, too, posted the video of the China remarks, with a transcript covering and obscuring much of the footage. Maddow asked YouTube to shut down this channel, but she referred to the video on her show and linked to it on her website. After that, every so often a blogger would rediscover this clip. But its origins remained a mystery, as did the person or persons behind it.
THAT SAME DAY—AUGUST 24—Carter and I continued exchanging emails about the China clip. “I found it in a YouTube search for Romney,” he wrote. “It’s not a real Maddow account. I don’t know anything else about it.”
“I want to know who got this and how,” I replied.
Carter started digging. He researched Romney fundraisers in an effort to locate where these remarks might have been recorded. About this time, someone was putting up related clips elsewhere on the Internet—in the HuffingtonPost.com comments section, on the liberal DailyKos site—without identifying information or context. On August 27—the day before the Republican convention was to begin—a YouTube account set up by “Anne Onymous” uploaded some of the clips.
Four days after that, Carter sent me an email reporting that he had discovered a key clue: “The person who uploaded the strange Chinese slave labor video is on twitter.” And he had found Anne Onymous’s Twitter handle.
Carter started sending private tweets to this Anne Onymous, and within hours emailed me: “They would like to get in touch with you.”
I received that email just as I was returning from the Republican convention. I quickly sent a private tweet to Anne Onymous. The source replied that Carter was the first and only person to have located him.
AFTER A SERIES of tweets back and forth, A.O. agreed to send me the entire video recording of this Romney fundraiser. He noted that the video was about an hour long, but he would not say where or when it had been shot. He asked that the video not be released in any manner that would show the faces of others in the room.
I told A.O. that I would not use any of the footage without consulting him, for it was clear that he preferred to preserve his anonymity. He—or someone else—had obviously tried for months to slip the China clip (and, I later learned, the other snippets) into the political media bloodstream, but the out-of-context and fuzzy videos had not been widely noticed. My read was that A.O. wanted the material to reach the public but was hoping to keep his fingerprints off it.
I emailed Carter: “I’ve made contact and am working something out. Will keep you posted.”
A.O. UNDERSTANDABLY WAS nervous and needed some coaxing, and through that day and the next, we worked out the details. I promised “complete confidentiality,” and I pledged that I would handle this story responsibly and do what was necessary to protect him. A.O. asked, Please don’t release an unedited version that would show the faces of others in the room?
The file was too large to email. A.O. offered to ship it via overnight mail on Monday, September 3. I was heading to Charlotte for the Democratic convention and eager to get the file, I asked if he would send it through a file transfer website. Yes, he said. But a few hours later, just as he was about to send the file, he became apprehensive, worrying about repercussions should he be linked to the video. He seemed to be having second thoughts. I began to wonder if he was changing his mind about sharing the video—and if he might at any moment shut down his anonymous Twitter feed and email account and disappear.
I emphasized that I would not reveal A.O. as the source. He proposed obscuring all people on the video other than Romney before sharing the file with me. His aim was to keep the focus on Romney’s words, not the location of the event or any of the guests.
I suggested A.O. let me view the video and then we would discuss what to do. Nothing, I said, would be done with the video without his approval. Nothing.
That was finally good enough for him: A.O. told me the video would be sent in the mail—the regular mail—from a city other than where he lived. It should arrive, he said, in several days. He promised I would be the only person sent the entire video file.
In Charlotte, as I covered the Democratic convention, I waited anxiously, checking with my Washington office each day to see if it had arrived. And I maintained contact with A.O, who told me what to look for on the video: Romney impersonating Henry Kissinger, Romney saying that Palestinians didn’t want peace in the Middle East, and Romney declaring that 47 percent of Americans believe they are entitled to food, health care, and housing. He said that I was being entrusted with the fundraiser video because of my previous stories probing Romney’s years at Bain.
THE PACKAGE—A DISK tucked inside a blank thank-you card—arrived toward the end of the day on September 10. I was back from Charlotte and watched it immediately. There was Romney standing and speaking to a small group of people eating dinner. Not much in the room could be seen. The other people had their backs to the camera. The point of view suggested that a recording device had been placed on a table to the side of the room. (A.O. had not told me what equipment had been used or how the recording had been made.)
In the opening minutes of the video, Romney was serving up the usual chitchat about his family and his deep concern for the nation’s future. When he discussed his family background, he cracked a joke about his father: “And had he been born of Mexican parents I’d have a better shot at winning this.” The audience laughed at this reference to his low standing among Latino voters.
Romney defiantly took issue with the charge that he had succeeded because he had come from wealth, declaring, “I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work.” The audience of well-to-do donors applauded. He described his trip to China to emphasize a related point: “Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America.”
This was interesting stuff: an unguarded Romney talking in the comfort of a private and intimate setting with folks who shared the privileges of wealth. But it did not seem explosive.
There was much conversation about the country’s fiscal difficulties. Romney uttered a few hawkish comments about Iran and blasted Obama for being weak and naïve regarding foreign policy. No big news there.
When he was asked how “the Palestinian problem could be solved,” he provided a long answer indicating that he did not believe the two-state solution in the Middle East was feasible. Lumping all Palestinians together, he asserted they “have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.” He remarked that peace was “almost unthinkable,” and he said that, were he elected, he would merely aim to “kick the ball down the field” (rather than actively pursue the peace process). He told his financial backers that he had expressed no interest when a former secretary of state had said to him that there were prospects for peace in the Middle East.
With these comments, Romney was breaking with official US policy (and mainstream foreign policy consensus), which endorses the two-state solution. He had publicly proclaimed his support for the two-state solution in July 2012. But, it appeared, that did not reflect his true beliefs. This exchange would be news—but mostly for the foreign policy crowd.
I kept watching, wondering if I had merely a good story, not a great one. The questions from the funders were predictable, as were most of Romney’s answers. Then one of the donors asked, “For the last three years, all everybody’s been told is, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?”
Romney answered without hesitation:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it—that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.
I was stunned. A.O. had mentioned this section without conveying its full impact. Romney had expressed disdain for half of the nation, casting all Obama voters as spongers and self-perceived victims. With conviction and passion as he spoke to fellow 1 percenters, he described the election as a face-off between the strivers (people like himself and the others in the room) and the parasitic hordes who sought to live off the hard work of the accomplished. He acknowledged that for the rest of the campaign he was writing off this 47 percent.
I couldn’t recall any major presidential candidate getting caught speaking in such contemptuous terms of his fellow citizens. Also, Romney’s comments didn’t really make sense: he was conflating three different groups—those who supported Obama, those Americans with earnings too low to pay income taxes, and those citizens who received some form of government payment or assistance. But this moment seemed to reveal the real Romney.
There was more on the video—Romney discussing his political strategy, saying the campaign was using his wife Ann “sparingly right now, so that people don’t get tired of her,” and making cracks about the hosts of The View—but I knew the 47 percent remarks would be the story: in his world, nearly half of Americans, including retirees on Medicare and Social Security, the working poor in need of food stamps or Medicaid, and veterans receiving assistance, were shiftless freeloaders who refused to accept responsibility for their own lives. His comment was 100 percent 1 percent. There was no doubt this footage of Romney would reinforce the case that the Obama camp had been making: he did not empathize with or understand Americans confronting economic challenges.
The next morning, September 11, I sent A.O. an email: “What jumped out at me immediately was the 47 percent comments and the remarks about the Middle East. Important stuff that reveals his true mindset.”
I studied the video closely to identify where and when the fundraiser had occurred. There were multiple tells, with Romney referring to other things he and his wife Anne had done that day. An Internet search led to local articles reporting that Romney on May 17 had attended a $50,000-a-plate dinner at the Boca Raton, Florida, home of Marc Leder, a controversial private equity manager who had been inspired to enter the field after a visit to Bain Capital. (The previous year Leder had been in the news for holding a wild sex party at his Bridgehampton estate.)
Throughout the rest of the day, A.O. and I discussed how to proceed. I again agreed that everyone other than Romney would be blurred. A.O. was insistent that this particular fundraiser not be identified in the hope that he would not be fingered as the source. I would be allowed only to report that the event had occurred earlier in the year. I realized these restrictions could diminish the power of the story but accepted them. At one point, I asked A.O. if he was connected to any campaign or partisan outfit and whether the video was the work of a political hit squad. He insisted that was not the case.
All that settled, I went to work, I selected several excerpts to turn into clips Mother Jones would post on its daily website, and video editors at Mother Jones began preparing them. My colleagues and I also reviewed the video to see if we could discern any indications of editing. (I fretted there was a slight chance this was an elaborate and sophisticated hoax.) We spotted no signs of doctoring.
The file had come in two parts, with missing moments in between them. A.O. explained that the recording device had timed out—or been jostled and turned off—and that he had restarted it after noticing it had stopped recording. He estimated that one to two minutes, possibly less, had been lost.
AS I WORKED on the story, Romney galloped into another mess. Following assaults on the US embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya—which occurred after a crudely produced, made-in-the-USA anti-Islam movie sparked protests in the Muslim world—Romney rushed out a statement on the evening of September 11 saying it was “disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Romney was accusing the administration of nearly treasonous conduct, trying to bolster his longstanding criticism that Obama was an appeaser and apologizer. Yet the administration had done no such thing. Worse, after Romney’s statement, the news broke that US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and others had died in one of the attacks. Romney was caught recklessly exploiting a crisis and a tragedy. He and his advisers were seen as desperately seeking any opportunity to score points against Obama. This mistake was but one in a chain of blunders that included his recent overseas trip and the error-ridden GOP convention. More important, polls were showing Obama establishing significant but not overwhelming leads in critical swing states, including Florida, Ohio, and Virginia.
AS I CONTINUED to vet the video and prepare the clips and articles based on them, A.O. shared a worrisome piece of information: The Huffington Post had contacted him in search of the full video. But he reiterated that he would not share it with anyone other than me. In the meantime, with his permission, I contacted Michael Isikoff at NBC News—we had co-written Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War—and told him about the video to determine if The Today Show might want to broadcast a segment on it the morning we would break the story. Isikoff was interested and began discussing this with NBC News colleagues.
My colleagues at Mother Jones and I started to think about the best time to unveil this video. We were obviously hoping for a large splash. It was late in the week, and I tend to opt against releasing major pieces on Friday, a lousy day for website traffic (ditto for weekends)—unless there is no choice. Our lawyers had to be consulted; that would take time. Moreover, NBC News needed a few days to sort out any legal or editorial concerns of its own. Monday was the Jewish New Year. We aimed for the coming Tuesday, September 18, as the release date. But I told my staff: let’s get this story ready as fast as we responsibly can, just in case.
A.O. had repeatedly told me that no one else had the video. I thought we could wait. Still, I was nervous. After all, this could be a game-changing scoop.
I began writing two articles: one focused on the 47 percent remarks and other comments Romney had made about the campaign, another featuring his statements on the Middle East and other foreign policy topics.
On the evening of September 15, I was at a party, and A.O. called. That day, a political website had reposted the China clip, and the political media world was buzzing about this video. Ben LaBolt, the press secretary of the Obama campaign, had tweeted about it. And, A.O. said, The Huffington Post was still pressing him for the full video. He assured me there was nothing to worry about.
Okay, I thought, this is all a matter of trust. A.O. trusts me; I trust A.O. Hold on tight.
On the afternoon of September 17, I was driving back from rural Virginia, where my family had gone for the weekend to mark the death of a close friend, when I saw an email from Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post: “you got the full video from the guy at the Romney fundraiser?”
Shit, I thought.
I didn’t respond, and within an hour, The Huffington Post published an article linking to several of the short clips from the fundraiser A.O. had previously posted on YouTube and elsewhere. HuffPo did not have the full and unaltered video. Its reporters had not authenticated the clips. They had only discovered these few brief and blurry excerpts. Romney could not be clearly seen; these snippets were equivalent to audio clips. But The Huffington Post reported that the source had given the full video to me.
I quickly contacted A.O. I knew that he had made these clips, but we had miscommunicated, and I had thought (wrongly) that only the China clip was still available online. No, he said, these clips had remained on YouTube. Had I realized that earlier, I would have moved faster. But, after talking to A.O., I determined that Mother Jones was still the only media outlet that had the actual video—all of it—and that had authenticated the footage.
I conferred with my colleagues and within minutes we launched our story. The video excerpts were blurred to hide the other people in the room, but they plainly showed Romney. There was no mention of the location, the precise date, or the host of the fundraiser.
The article led with the 47 percent remark but also reported that Romney had said he couldn’t slam Obama too hard for fear of alienating independent voters who had supported the president in 2008. The piece noted that Romney had boasted about his consultants (some, he said, had worked for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), that he had complained he couldn’t talk about policy and big ideas during a presidential campaign, and that he had proclaimed the economy would get a boost if he won the election.
OUR STORY—AND THE video—was an immediate sensation. Reporters and television news bookers besieged me with phone calls and emails. News outlets wanted more information about the video. Tweets were flying. The story zipped through the world of Facebook.
Within an hour or so, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, sent an email to the president’s supporters: “It’s shocking that a candidate for President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives. It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.” Obama’s Twitter feed sent a link to the story to his 19 million followers.
About the same time, Josh Barro, a conservative writing for Bloomberg View, maintained (perhaps prematurely), “You can mark my prediction now: A secret recording from a closed-door Mitt Romney fundraiser, released today by David Corn at Mother Jones, has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.”
Millions of people were watching the video—at the Mother Jones website, on YouTube, and elsewhere. NBC News and ABC News scrambled to show it on their nightly news programs. Both “David Corn” and the hashtag “#47Percent” were top trends on Twitter.
A high-level Obama adviser sent me a one-word email: “Wow.”
THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN replied quickly, releasing a statement:
Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy. As the governor has made clear all year, he is concerned about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work. Mitt Romney’s plan creates 12 million new jobs in four years, grows the economy and moves Americans off of government dependency and into jobs.
This was no denial—and no claim that his remarks had been taken out of context. It was a tacit admission: he had said what he had said.
WITH THE STORY burning red hot, A.O. granted me permission to remove the blurring from the video clips, to report the time, place, and host of the fundraiser, and to release the whole video file. On Rachel Maddow’s show, I revealed that Romney had uttered his 47 percent remark at Leder’s opulent home in Boca Raton in May.
Inside Romney HQ, he and his aides decided the campaign’s bland statement wouldn’t cut it. They hastily called a press conference in Costa Mesa, California, for Romney.
Looking flustered, Romney first tried to dismiss the video as “a snippet.” (It wasn’t.) He claimed he had merely been talking about the different approaches of the two presidential campaigns: “those who are reliant on government are not as attracted to my message of slimming down the size of government, and so I then focus on those individuals who I believe are most likely to be able to be pulled into my camp.” He was attempting to spin the growing controversy into a philosophical debate: “the president believes in what I’ve described as a government-centered society where government plays a larger and larger roll . . . and I happen to believe instead in a free-enterprise, free-individual society.”
Asked if he was “stepping away” from remarks that offended the “47 percent you mentioned,” Romney replied, “Well, um, it’s not elegantly stated, let me put it that way. I’m speaking off the cuff in response to a question, and I’m sure I can state it more clearly in a more effective way than I did. . . . But it’s a message which I’m going to carry and continue to carry.”
He added, “I hope the person who has the video would put out the full material.”
Romney was not handling this well. He had been busted, captured on video acting perfectly in sync with the Obama campaign’s characterization of him as an uncaring profiteer who had no attachment to or understanding of average voters. And all he was offering was a quasi-defense and a quasi-doubling-down.
THERE WAS NO easy way out for Romney. He couldn’t deny what he said. He couldn’t spin it away. As I noted in various media interviews, the video spoke for itself. It did not require interpretation or analysis. The story was clean: this was Romney in his natural environment, in his own words.
Right away, conservative pundits, perhaps sensing that their side’s chance to return to power was shriveling, savaged Romney. In The New York Times, David Brooks blasted him: “he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the VA? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?” Brooks observed that Romney had “lost any sense of the social compact” and that Romney and the GOP had “shifted over toward a much more hyper-individualistic and atomistic social view.” (In other words, Romney was giving Obama the fight over values the president desired.) Brooks noted, “Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.” The headline was damning: “Thurston Howell Romney.”
Numerous commentators pointed out that a significant portion of the 47 percent, such as elderly Medicare and Social Security recipients, were Republicans who presumably supported Romney. (Romney was faring well in the polls among older voters.) Neocon analyst Bill Kristol slammed Romney’s comments as “arrogant and stupid,” and he added, “So Romney seems to have contempt not just for the Democrats who oppose him, but for tens of millions who intend to vote for him.”
The day after the story exploded—with 47 percent now a full-fledged media and Internet meme—Mother Jones posted my second article on the fundraiser video. This piece highlighted Romney’s remarks about the Middle East conflict, showing him telling his funders something quite different than what he said in public. This article also featured an excerpt in which Romney claimed Iran had to be prevented from developing a nuclear weapon; otherwise, Tehran would be able to hand a dirty bomb to Hezbollah, which could detonate such a device in Chicago. (A nuclear weapons program, though, is not necessary for the production of a dirty bomb; radioactive medical waste can be used.)
By now, some right-wing websites and radio talk show hosts were trying to beat back the story. They pointed to the two-minute (or so) gap and huffed that I had selectively edited the video. That was not true. Some in the Romney camp complained to reporters that the long excerpt of his Middle East remarks had been cut short—prior to a point when Romney had said he did believe peace was possible—and cried foul. The Romney campaign itself would use this argument to claim the video was debunked (when it had not been). But the sentences not in the clip were vague comments indicating Romney could envision peace only if the Palestinians totally caved and abandoned their key demands.
I received a flood of hate tweets and emails that accused me of all sorts of evils, including pedophilia. Some contained hints of violence. One stood out by referring to the “Nigger-in-Chief.”
On the afternoon of September 18, Mother Jones posted the entire video file—unblurred—on its website. Citizens and journalists were free to examine the whole video and determine for themselves whether the excerpts had accurately reflected Romney’s full remarks. Immediately, reporters began posting articles that zeroed in on Romney comments I had not highlighted in my original pieces.
REPUBLICANS QUICKLY DISTANCED themselves from Romney’s 47 percent rant, as the story continued to dominate the news. Republican Senator Scott Brown, who was in a tough battle against Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren and whose chief strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, also worked for Romney, declared, “That’s not the way I view the world. As someone who grew up in tough circumstances, I know that being on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.” (Harry Reid cracked, “We have a long line of people who are running from Romney as if the Olympics are still on.”) Republican consultant Mark McKinnon bemoaned, “The tape makes it harder to defend Romney and harder to support him.” Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan huffed, “It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. . . . An intervention is in order.”
Obama played it cool. Appearing on David Letterman’s show, he said, “One of the things I’ve learned as president is you represent the entire country . . . My expectation is if you want to be president, you’ve got to work for everybody, not just some.”
Democrats embraced the moment. On the morning of September 19, Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC, released a television ad blasting Romney’s 47 percent statements and announced the spot would air in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Democratic candidates in House and Senate races were zapping out fundraising emails pegged to Romney’s 47 percent comments. Former President Jimmy Carter emailed his grandson: “James: This is extraordinary. Congratulations! Papa.”
Front-page articles about the 47 percent video appeared in 41 newspapers in swing states alone; the story was picked up by papers and news outlets around the world. The video became instant fodder for Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Saturday Night Live and other satirists. (The Onion headline: “The GOP is secretly relieved they can get started on 2016.”) MSNBC experienced a serious ratings boost due to the 47 percent story.
That one-minute-and-seven-seconds-long clip crystalized the values fight the Obama team had been designing for nearly two years, and it reconfigured the election. Within a week of the video’s release, the 47 percent clip had been viewed on YouTube 3.4 million times—racking up more than three times the number of views of Mitt Romney’s campaign speech. His unscripted moment had become far more important than his script.
THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN initially tried to regain its footing by pushing a 1998 video clip of Obama saying he supported “redistribution”—leaving out his next sentence about increasing competition in the marketplace. But this redistribution remark was hardly controversial; anyone who supports Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, and school lunch programs backs some degree of redistribution.
This Romney effort to distract from the 47 percent controversy fizzled. And Romney and his strategists were forced to mount a quick and haphazard overhaul of their campaign and message. Days after the 47 percent video was revealed, Romney, speaking at a Univision forum in Miami, changed his overall tune. He declared, “This is a campaign about 100 percent.” He said he would accept being called the “grandfather of Obamacare.” Though he had struck a harsh stance on immigration during the GOP primary contest and called for self-deportation, he now insisted he was not in favor of “a mass deportation effort.” He reiterated his opposition to gay marriage, but he spoke positively of gay domestic partnerships.
Yet again, there was a new Romney. He was softening his tone to reach in-the-middle voters. His pivot to the center had finally arrived, but not on his own terms or schedule. He was being bum-rushed into it, reacting to having been branded a sneering plutocrat.
This hurried move underlined one of the key elements of the 2012 campaign. Obama had long ago developed his own strategic vision for the race that integrated his policy inclinations, his ideological proclivities, his past, and his sense of politics. His campaign team was united and committed to implementing that strategy.
Romney, though, had no clear and constant strategic message consistent with his policy beliefs and past actions. During the GOP primaries, when he was running against a former speaker of the House, a current House member, and an ex-senator, he proudly said he was an outsider. When Obama happened to mention in the days following the video’s release that “you can’t change Washington from the inside,” Romney reflexively claimed that he could be the insider who would force the capital city to function.
Such jerky reactions suggested Romney had no rudder, and a boat without a rudder has a harder time traveling on a steady course. It was as if Romney’s campaign was being steered by a blogger fixated on the “gotcha” story of the moment.
By the end of the week, new polls showed Romney slipping further. At an AARP convention, Ryan was booed when he defended his and Romney’s proposal to weaken (or end) the Medicare guarantee. And on a Friday afternoon, Romney finally released his 2011 tax returns—while still refusing to do the same for years prior to 2010. Yet this move prompted more questions than answers about his complex personal finances and his years at Bain.
POLITICAL PROS WERE now assessing the damage done by the 47 percent video. Had it guaranteed Romney’s demise? Or, in the age of hyper-media, might Romney recover once this story burned out? Using focus groups, Obama strategists found that the remark had caused independent voters to turn against Romney and that the 47 percent tirade had even alienated some Republican voters. A senior Obama adviser noted, “This is bigger than a flash. It confirms succinctly a view people had of him, or suspected of him. And there is very big penetration of the remark, meaning most people have heard about it, which doesn’t happen very often.”
One thing was certain: Romney had lost almost two weeks to the fallout. One of the most valuable commodities for a presidential campaign is time, and the Republican nominee had seen at least one fifth of the post-conventions stretch consumed by this controversy. And Romney still couldn’t address the matter convincingly. When asked about the 47 percent remarks during a 60 Minutes interview, he said, “That’s not the campaign. That was me, right? . . . But not everything I say is elegant.” (He also again refused to be specific about his tax plan and claimed the uninsured could find health care when they need it in an emergency room—a practice he had previously denounced.)
The Obama campaign concluded that the 47 percent video could be a deathblow. It began airing an ad in Ohio—where Romney and Ryan were campaigning—with the clip of Romney saying, “My job is not to worry” about the 47 percent, and an announcer asking, “Doesn’t the president have to worry about everyone? Mitt Romney paid just 14.1 percent in taxes last year. He keeps millions in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. He won’t release his tax returns before 2010. Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes, Romney should come clean on his.”
Another Obama ad—again aired in Ohio—declared, “When Mitt Romney dismissed 47 percent of Americans for not pulling their weight, he attacked millions of hardworking people. . . . Instead of attacking folks who work for a living, shouldn’t we stand up for them?”
Polls taken after the 47 percent video had fully penetrated the political media world showed Romney sinking in Florida (trailing Obama by 9 points among likely voters), Ohio (10 points), and Pennsylvania (12 points). A Washington Post/ABC News survey found that 54 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of his 47 percent comments (with 32 percent approving) and that a whopping 61 percent expressed negative views about how Romney was running his campaign. Other polls showed Democratic prospects in Senate races on the rise.
More telling was a new Romney ad in which the candidate peered straight into the camera and said, “President Obama and I both care about poor and middle-class families. The difference is my policies will make things better for them.” Political insiders regarded this spot as a sign of desperation—that the Romney campaign’s internal data indicated he had been seriously harmed by the 47 percent revelation. NBC News’ First Read newsletter was blunt: “Folks this is an admission that the ‘47%’ remarks—and the Obama campaign’s new TV ads on them—have done real damage. Realize: Candidate-to-camera ads are typically [used] when all else is failing and the bonds of trust with the voters are fraying.” Well-respected political analyst Charlie Cook observed, “A change of trajectory is exactly what would have to happen for Romney to win. . . . Romney’s negatives remain quite high and are not diminishing.”
THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN did not let up. On September 28, it released a two-minute ad in which Obama somberly laid out his economic plan: “read my plan. Compare it to Governor Romney’s and decide for yourself.” It was his campaign speech downsized: there’s a choice about the future path of the nation, pick wisely. But on the same day the campaign put out yet another 47 percent ad. The spot played Romney’s remarks while displaying images of average Americans—workers, parents, veterans. There was no other message: simply Romney’s words.
Thanks to Romney, Obama was closer to that goal of delegitimizing Romney as a potential president. All along, the campaign’s aim had been not merely to demonize Romney and transform him into a caricature of an uncaring 1 percenter; the point was to make it tougher for voters to accept that Romney’s ideas and policies—tax cuts for the wealthy, slashes in government programs—would help middle- and working-class voters. And Romney had done more than anyone to place this question center stage: could Americans entrust the future of their nation to a tycoon who disparaged half the country?
On the campaign trail, Obama exploited Romney’s 47 percent diatribe to starkly define the choice he had been selling for nearly two years—and that he was now hoping to place before those few undecided voters left in the handful of swing states. Speaking at a rally in Ohio, he declared:
Look, I don’t believe we can get very far with leaders who write off half the nation as a bunch of victims who never take responsibility for their own lives. And I’ve got to tell you, as I travel around Ohio and as I look out on this crowd, I don’t see a lot of victims. I see hardworking Ohioans . . . So this is the choice that you face; it’s what this election comes down to . . . Their basic argument is since government can’t do everything, it should do almost nothing. Their basic theory is you’re on your own. If you can’t afford health insurance, hope you don’t get sick. If a company is releasing toxic pollution that your kids are breathing, well, that’s the price of progress. If you can’t afford to start a business or go to college, just borrow more money from your parents.
He went on:
It’s interesting: in 2008, 47 percent of the country did not vote for me. They voted for John McCain. But on election night, in Grant Park in Chicago, I said to all those Americans who didn’t vote for me, I said, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, and I need your help. And I will be your president, too. . . . The values of hard work and personal responsibility . . . don’t just belong to workers or businesses, or the rich or the poor, the 53 percent or the 47 percent, the 1 percent or the 99 percent. Those are American values. They belong to all of us.
He didn’t have to explain what he was talking about. Everybody knew.
TOWARD THE END of the second week of the 47 percent firestorm, Nate Silver, the guru of political statistics, pointed to a possible 1.6-point bounce in the polls for Obama due to Romney’s comments. Days later, a Pew Research Center poll found that 67 percent of the public could identify Romney as the candidate who had made the 47 percent comment. Among independents aware of the remarks, 55 percent reported a negative reaction; only 18 percent had a positive response. According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, almost 60 percent of voters said Romney, if elected, would do more to help the rich than the middle class. And The Washington Post stated the obvious: the 47 percent “moment has become a defining element of Romney’s candidacy.” Republican consultant Alex Castellanos, who worked for the Romney campaign in 2008 but did not join the 2012 effort, told the newspaper, “The only thing in politics that is worse than voters deciding that they don’t like you is when voters decide you don’t like them.”
At the first presidential debate in Denver on October 3, moderator Jim Lehrer did not question Romney about the 47 percent video—even though there were long segments on entitlements and taxes—and, inexplicably, Obama, in an underwhelming performance, did not refer to it once (or to Romney’s Bain Capital days). With a vigorous Romney on the offensive—bobbing, weaving, and prevaricating when Obama challenged him on key policy positions—Obama appeared to have difficulty defending his progress regarding the still-sluggish economy, and Romney had an easy time decrying the status quo and promising to do better (without offering specifics). The debate was a reminder that the fundamental dynamics of this race (a slowly recovering economy, voter unease) have always been—and remain—tough for Obama.
The morning after the debate, several Democratic strategists told me they were disappointed and worried by Obama’s showing—and puzzled by his reluctance to mention the 47 percent video or take a swing at Romney’s Bain record. An Obama campaign official offered this explanation: “Not that we won’t talk about [the 47 percent video] again. We will. But [what’s] most compelling [is] hearing it from Romney himself. We’ve got that on the air [with ads] at a heavy dollar amount in key states. And it’s sunk in. Ultimately the president’s goal last night was to speak past the pundits and directly to the undecided voter tuning in for the first time about the economic choice and his plans to restore economic security.”
On a conference call with reporters, a defensive Axelrod noted that Obama’s supporters would have liked to see the president slam Romney on Bain, tax returns, and the 47 percent video. But, he added, “a lot of these issues are well known to the public” and Obama’s “choice was to talk about the main things people are worried about in their lives.” Obama, Axelrod said, had wanted to avoid an insult-fest and instead use the debate to talk about the future. He did note that following the debate the campaign would “make some adjustments.”
A Democrat-conducted focus group held during the debate in Aurora, Colorado, of “weak Democrats and independents who voted for Obama in 2008 but who remain open to switching in the upcoming election” found that these voters ended the night believing Romney was not such a bad guy (though they favored Obama’s ideas for the economy and faulted Romney for not offering policy specifics). This suggested Romney had the potential to undo some of the damage he suffered from the Bain blasts and the 47 percent video. Which made the video perhaps more consequential. Though unmentioned in Denver, Romney’s 67-second-long 47 percent outburst could continue to undercut Romney’s fundamental argument: I’m the white knight whom you can trust to rescue the economy for everyone. And after his lackluster debate performance, Obama might need it even more.
Romney all but acknowledged this importance when he appeared on Fox News and was asked what he would have said had Obama referred to the 47 percent video during the debate. Romney replied, “Well, clearly in a campaign with hundreds if not thousands of question-and-answer sessions, now and then you’re going to say something that doesn’t come out right. In this case, I said something that’s just completely wrong.” This was a non-apology apology, for Romney did not explain what was wrong with his remarks. But Romney’s admission that he had erred—a big switch from his initial response—was a sign that he and his strategists believed his 47 percent minute remained an important factor in the race and a profound problem for him.
IN THE DAYS following the release of the 47 percent video—arguably the most consequential story of the 2012 election to date and one of the most dramatic revelations in presidential campaign history—political pundits issued grand statements about what would be the ultimate impact of Romney’s behind-closed-doors moment. I eschewed any predictions. Politics is a land of odd bounces: news comes and goes fast in the Twitter-driven media environment of today, and the final day of the campaign was still over a month away. But when I was asked in interviews what part of the video I found the most damning for Romney, I pointed to a particular line he had said: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney was bluntly expressing his belief that Americans who don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes and those who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, or other government programs are lesser people than he and the millionaires who had gathered at Leder’s mansion that spring night. These people, Romney was saying, are not adults; they do not, and will not, fend for themselves or do what they must to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and care for themselves and their family members. It was an elitist slur spoken with full detachment.
My view was reinforced when one morning I purchased some cleaning products at a hardware store. Once I had paid, the 40-something woman working behind the counter said in a low voice, “I really don’t want to bother you, but . . .”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“But I know who you are, and I just want to say that Mitt Romney doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Not at all. I am college educated, but look where I’m working now. I can’t find a better job now. And, and . . .”
She paused and lowered her voice more: “I’m on food stamps. I didn’t have a choice. I’m making about $12,000 a year now. And I need them. I work hard. And I’m looking for other work. But just because I’m on food stamps doesn’t mean I’m not taking care of myself. Doesn’t he know that? Doesn’t he get it?”
It seemed he did not. Many people on food stamps, Medicaid, and other assistance programs do strive to provide for themselves and their families. And Romney’s 47 percent included Americans not on government assistance who have jobs but pay no federal income taxes because they do not earn enough. The working poor . . . work. They may even park cars at fancy fundraisers for minimum wage. Romney all too glibly characterized anyone receiving any public help as a parasitic loafer, and he revealed an us-versus-them attitude that was ungracious, mean spirited, and predicated on ignorance of the real world. And, as he has learned, it was lousy politics to denigrate and denounce half of America. Romney could end up paying the ultimate price for having shared these thoughts with fellow millionaires.
“Thank you, thank you,” the woman at the store said. “You showed us what he really thinks of us, what he thinks of me.”
Mitt Romney built that.