CHAPTER 22

IN LATE 2006, MITT Romney’s top advisers gathered for a meeting in Boston to begin laying out a strategy for the 2008 presidential campaign that the outgoing Massachusetts governor already had decided to launch. Tom Rath, who would become Romney’s top New Hampshire adviser, suggested that he run as “Mr. Fix It”—the competent manager and nonideological private-equity wizard who found a sensible way to provide nearly universal health care in his state. That tact, Rath believed, would play particularly well in the nation’s first primary state, where voters in previous elections had often awarded competence over flash. But when the room began discussing Romney’s likely Republican rivals, the consensus was that it would be difficult for him to run successfully as Mr. Fix It when Rudy Giuliani would widely be seen as the more dynamic leader. Romney, who did rescue the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, would nonetheless have a hard time standing out in the management department against the guy who helped turn around New York City and rallied the entire country in the aftermath of one of the worst days in its history. So the room settled on positioning Romney as the deeply conservative manager in the race.

In the summer of 2007, I began covering my first presidential campaign as an embedded off-air reporter for CBS News and was assigned to the Romney campaign. For as long as Romney remained in the race (five more months, as it turned out), I would trail him wherever he went. I was armed for the task with an array of video equipment and a dangerous combination of great enthusiasm and negligible expertise on how to cover a presidential campaign. In stark contrast to the popular image perpetuated by the top dogs of journalism who were the “Boys on the Bus” in the 1960s and 1970s, for more two decades prior to my own first campaign, all of the network news divisions had placed the onus of on-the-ground campaign coverage on young and wildly inexperienced reporters. This system provided the networks with cheap labor and a pool of available go-getters who were eager to work endless strings of sixteen-hour days on the road without seeing their own homes for weeks or months at a time. I’d never been more excited and less prepared to do anything in my life.

I hit the road with the candidate on Labor Day at a time when the decision to emphasize Romney’s previously subdued conservatism appeared to be a sound one. Although he was less known nationally than three of his Republican rivals—Giuliani, McCain, and actor-turned-Tennessee-senator Fred Thompson—Romney looked on paper like a candidate who was capable of going the distance. He had the appearance, poise, and pedigree of a president, and he had used his fund-raising prowess and personal fortune to make a big commitment to advertising heavily in all of the early states. Although he was already fighting perceptions that he was a political chameleon—one who ran and governed as a moderate in Massachusetts before discovering just in time for the Republican nominating fight that he was, in fact, an arch-conservative—Romney’s big push in the early states had been paying off, as he was leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

I was pretty confident that I could handle the editorial side of my new gig. But I was scared witless about the many technical aspects of acting as a one-man band. As an embed, I needed to be a camera person, sound person, producer, and satellite truck, all in the form of an overwhelmed twenty-four-year-old with a BlackBerry holster attached to his ill-fitting khakis. The campaign trail was tough sledding, for me and for Romney.

When I got to the Milford Labor Day parade that afternoon, I dutifully followed behind Romney as he lurched in mechanical, perpendicular movements to shake hands with parade-goers on both sides. “Hi, I’m Mitt Romney,” he’d say upon approaching each person with the grace and ease of Herman Munster.

Four years later, Romney would take a lot of heat in his 2012 presidential campaign for coming across as stiff and preprogrammed. Generally forgotten is that in his first presidential run, these deficiencies were massively more pronounced.

“Goodtahseeya. Goodtahseeya,” he’d repeat, like a parrot reprising something he’d once heard a human say.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Oh, wouldjahlookatthat?”

“Hi, I’m Mitt Romney.”

“How old are you, six? Oh, you’re eleven? Wow!”

“Hi, I’m Mitt Romney.”

For Romney—who happened to be an exceedingly nice and convivial man in private settings—the act of establishing even the most elemental form of connection with his fellow humans on the trail often felt like he was trying to solve an impossible riddle. It was as if I could hear the voice in his head, asking repeatedly, “Now, how might I attempt to form a bond with the earthlings in my midst?”

Although both states were critical to his overall strategy for winning the 2008 GOP nomination, Romney had deemed Iowa to be priority “1A” and New Hampshire priority “1B.” The emphasis on Iowa would later prove to be a critical error. Iowa’s socially conservative, evangelical voters—who compose a majority of the GOP caucus electorate—had not yet found their candidate and were at the time defaulting to Romney. But if ever there was a paper tiger in the Hawkeye State, it was the former Massachusetts governor. He may have been talking the talk of a traditional movement conservative, but he walked the walk unconvincingly. My fellow reporters covering Romney and I would exchange knowing glances every time we were in some tiny farm town with forty people in the crowd and he would get to one of the more absurd parts of his stump speech. It went like this: “And when I’m president, I’ll make sure our kids know that before they have babies, they should get married.”

It was an empty promise with no substantive policy proposal of any kind to back it up. And though it was a surefire applause line among the Iowa retirees who showed up for his events, if Romney’s standing in Iowa looked too good to be true, that’s because it was. When a deep-dimpled former Baptist minister turned downhome everyman politician named Mike Huckabee finished in second place in the Ames Straw Poll in August and emerged as a viable contender, the man from Massachusetts stood little chance. In retrospect, Romney should have stepped off the gas pedal in Iowa and turned his focus to New Hampshire—a state that was a much more natural fit for him. But Romney’s “Iowa first” strategy remained in place, even as his New Hampshire team misjudged who his strongest competitor in the Granite State would turn out to be. Throughout the summer and fall of 2007, Romney directed the focus of his increasingly bitter primary fight in New Hampshire against Giuliani. Meanwhile, he mostly ignored McCain, whose standing among the ranks of the politically dead was generally regarded as a given.

When McCain launched his 2008 run, his plan from the outset had been to act the part of the Republican Party’s heir apparent to his onetime rival George W. Bush. But the Arizona senator had turned out to be a front-runner in name only. His efforts to push through that year’s comprehensive immigration reform bill in the Senate, combined with his unwavering support for the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, proved a double-whammy against him.

The McCain campaign’s bank account sank as quickly as his poll numbers. After his top advisers delivered one sanguine presentation in the early summer of 2007 on how McCain intended to steamroll all of his competitors, former Texas senator Phil Gramm—a McCain backer who had run for president unsuccessfully a dozen years earlier—spoke up in a manner that presaged the campaign’s imminent downfall. “This has all been really great,” Gramm said in his Texas twang. “But I’ve got one question. How much money do we take in, and how much do we send out?” The answer to Gramm’s two-pronged question: way too little, and way too much.

“It’s always darkest before it gets totally black.” It was one of McCain’s favorite sayings, and from just about every vantage point, it looked like an appropriately pessimistic view of the state of his campaign. Hundreds of staffers were laid off, and McCain dramatically dialed back his ambitions. As bleak as things looked, however, no one who was left on McCain’s team was ready to give up just yet. One of the few survivors of the staff purge, Charlie Black—a longtime heavyweight in the Republican consulting world—warned McCain, “You’re going to have terrible press, and all you have to do is endure.” He was right about the terrible press. When McCain’s support in New Hampshire bottomed out at 10 percent in late July, the narrative for the Republican nominating fight had turned almost entirely to the battle between Romney and Giuliani. McCain had become an afterthought, but that was kind of OK with him. Being the front-runner appealed to McCain’s disposition about as much as expired milk did. He didn’t mind that trips to New Hampshire now meant commuting on Southwest Airlines flights from BWI Airport, carrying his own bag, sometimes without a single aide in tow. It was John McCain against the world now, and if anyone knew how to endure that kind of odds, it was McCain.

With his campaign on life support, his reshuffled senior staff had come up with the kind of last-ditch strategy that they knew would appeal to McCain’s “us against the world” mentality. They called it “living off the land.” Instead of the original, grandiose plans for the kind of national field operation that would give him an air of inevitability, McCain would now clear off the cobwebs from the Straight Talk Express and bet it all on New Hampshire, as he had done in 2000.

Over the ensuing four months, signs of progress were hard to come by, as the surging candidacy of Mike Huckabee in Iowa further relegated McCain into the ranks of the second-tier candidates. When McCain hosted a mid-July luncheon at the Chamber of Commerce in Concord, an event designed to demonstrate that his campaign was still functioning, he drew a massive contingent of national political reporters. They weren’t there to see how the comeback was going. No, they’d showed up because they’d expected that the wounded candidate might announce that he was withdrawing from the race. “Are there any circumstances you could imagine in which you would drop out?” McCain was asked by one reporter.

“Contracting a fatal disease,” he shot back.

Even as McCain was shaking as many hands as his seventy-one-year-old body could withstand in diners, coffee shops, and town halls up and down New Hampshire, he wasn’t seeing much movement in the polls against Giuliani and Romney. Each time the Arizona senator would arrive late at night at the Manchester airport, his New Hampshire–based senior adviser Steve Duprey would pick him up in his Suburban and take him to the Courtyard by Marriott in Concord, where he’d stay for the discounted “candidate rate.” Not even the perpetually upbeat Duprey, who called himself the Secretary of Fun, could realistically challenge perceptions that the thing was all but over.

There was no single moment when things suddenly started heading in the right direction. Instead, McCain’s fortunes began to change slowly. In the weeks leading up to one particularly dreamy, snow-swept night in northern New Hampshire, everyone around him could begin to feel the familiar rumblings of a modest shift in momentum. Even if it wasn’t registering in the polls just yet, the crowd sizes and responses that the candidate was beginning to get from audiences around the state told the story. McCain and his aides didn’t need poll numbers to tell them that New Hampshirites were excited about him again. For that, all the evidence they needed was the “Mac is back!” chants that began greeting the candidate wherever he went and the feeling in the air that something was happening.

Although the troop surge in Iraq that he supported vocally and unequivocally remained widely unpopular, McCain continued to gain ground via the force of his personality and convictions. He campaigned around the state the only way he knew how: by persuading small groups of voters and hoping they’d convey their positive impressions of him to friends, family, and neighbors. For Romney, who was fading quickly in Iowa, McCain’s rise in New Hampshire became a significant problem. It didn’t help the former Massachusetts governor’s standing that Giuliani’s once-robust support in New Hampshire was collapsing, as the former New York City mayor gave up on a traditional early state strategy and decamped to Florida, where he planned to make an unrealistic last stand after reverting to the ranks of a campaign sideshow. The problem for Romney was that the vast majority of Giuliani’s New Hampshire support had begun to move in McCain’s direction.

By late December, Romney was still holding onto a narrow lead over McCain in New Hampshire, with Huckabee building a lead in Iowa. Suddenly, for Romney, New Hampshire was no longer 1B—it was, for all intents and purposes, a must-win for the former Massachusetts governor every bit as much as it was for McCain. As part of an effort to reverse this trajectory, Romney added a line or two to his stump speech about how McCain had “failed Reagan 101” in not having previously supported President Bush’s tax-cut plans, but the struggling former governor still couldn’t find his groove beyond that. The problem, in a nutshell, was that he couldn’t stop talking about grackles and mashed potatoes.

The air temperature was seasonably face-numbing when I headed out for a pre-Christmas northern New Hampshire swing with Romney that included town-hall meetings in the Carroll County hamlets of North Conway and Tuftonboro. Romney had always begun these events with hit-or-miss jokes and little anecdotes about his family, but on this particular trip he added a drawn-out story to his set list that couldn’t have been more tonally out of step with a campaign that was two weeks away from its make-or-break moment on Primary Day. It was a saccharine tale about how he and his five sons had once accidentally come upon a nest of young grackles, whose mother was nowhere to be found. In a turn of events fit for an episode of The Brady Bunch, the Romney brood subsequently devoted themselves to nurturing and raising the baby grackles. The highpoint of the story came when Romney demonstrated how his son Matt attempted to encourage the young birds to leave the nest by flapping his own arms in the manner of an oversized grackle. Many members of the audience—and all of us in the traveling press corps—would laugh each time Romney flapped his arms like a bird. But standing in the back of the room, the powerless operatives who composed Romney’s New Hampshire brain trust weren’t as amused. Their campaign was on the ropes, and here was the candidate, telling a long-winded story about grackles. When Romney and his wife, Ann, began regularly engaging in extensive public discourse about his proficiency at making mashed potatoes, they sensed that the campaign was at risk of spinning out of control.

On his final Iowa swing before the caucuses, Romney suddenly abandoned his strategy of attacking Huckabee at every opportunity and instead started focusing his attacks entirely McCain, who wasn’t even really competing in the caucuses. It was confirmation that Iowa was all but lost, and though the Romney campaign still held out some hope, Huckabee won the caucuses the next day by a more comfortable than expected nine-point margin. At the moment when the checkmark next to Huckabee’s name flashed onto the Fox News Channel screen at the West Des Moines Sheraton early in the night, I’d never felt the air go out of a room more suddenly and completely. As they looked in vain for a quiet spot in the hotel lobby to huddle, senior Romney aides looked like kids who had just been told their dog died. They had just four days to try to turn things around in New Hampshire.

A few hours later, we loaded into the press charter plane at the Des Moines airport with Portsmouth as our destination. The plane was carrying a large contingent of national media heavy-hitters who had booked their seats many weeks earlier, under the expectation that Romney would be the likely Republican victor in Iowa. As we sat on the plane waiting to pull back from the gate, I remember watching a replay of Barack Obama’s historic “They said this day would never come” Iowa victory speech on my seatback TV and thinking for the first time that the Illinois senator might actually become president. Romney, with his grackle and mashed potatoes stories, looked small in comparison.

The sun had not yet risen when we landed in Portsmouth, but Romney’s New Hampshire team had managed to assemble a couple of hundred sign-waving supporters to try to lift the downtrodden candidate’s spirits. Tom Rath, who had found a twenty-four-hour Dunkin’ Donuts in the area to provide the stimulants required for such an occasion, led the crowd in an ad hoc version of “Sweet Caroline.” The song felt like a drill going through my head, as I was utterly exhausted and knew that I had about forty-five minutes of sleep to look forward to before I had to produce the live shot for Romney’s round of morning show interviews. Romney, I had to admit, had it worse than I did. He had a full day of events ahead of him, for which he had to be “on” at every moment. The very idea of it was too miserable for me to contemplate.

Still, there was nothing fake about Romney’s own humbled reaction to this vibrant New Hampshire welcoming reception, and he seemed to believe that he still had a shot. But with just four days to work with, he was going to have to come up with something better than grackle stories.

At a town-hall meeting in Derry the next day, Romney unveiled a new prop: an illuminated sign that hung on the wall that said, “Washington Is Broken.” The gist of the slogan had been a part of his message since Day One of his candidacy—that he was the turnaround artist who could come in and fix what ailed DC—but had largely been lost in the haphazard mix of social issues. Finally, Romney had elucidated in just three words the premise of a candidacy that his aides had first batted around more than a year earlier before deciding against it: Washington was broken and Mr. Fix It was here to put it back together again.

Over that final weekend and on the Monday before Primary Day, Romney really did seem to be hitting his stride. Every political professional knows how dangerous it is to make determinations about a campaign’s strength based solely on crowd size and perceived “energy,” but it was difficult to ignore the sense of momentum—difficult, that is, for those of us who hadn’t been attending McCain’s events and didn’t realize that the Arizona senator’s crowds were even bigger and more energized than Romney’s were.

On primary eve, Romney held his final New Hampshire town-hall meeting at McKelvie Intermediate School in Bedford. The place was packed, and it was rocking. A few minutes before he went out to deliver his final stump speech of the 2008 New Hampshire campaign, Romney stood backstage with some family and top members of his New Hampshire and national team. He allowed himself a few moments to wax nostalgic about the long journey that had led to this moment, and then he turned to the task at hand. “So what do you guys think I should start with tonight?” Romney asked. “Maybe the Olympics story? Something about the flag? Or how about the mashed potatoes?”

Romney’s New Hampshire state director Jim Merrill was the first to pipe up.

“Governor,” Merrill said. “No mashed potatoes story. You need to ask for their vote. This is it. This is not mashed potatoes.”

Romney looked at Merrill for a moment with an expression that indicated he was a bit hurt. That mashed potatoes story killed! He was good at making mashed potatoes, gosh darnit!

Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then, to Merrill’s great relief, former Missouri senator Jim Talent—a senior Romney adviser—stepped in. “You know, governor,” Talent said. “I think Jim’s right. Let’s lose the mashed potatoes.”

Romney lost the mashed potatoes. The next day, he lost New Hampshire to McCain by five points.

A little less than ten months later, his hopes of becoming president looking dimmer by the day, John McCain was losing to Barack Obama in New Hampshire by a double-digit margin. A desperation play for the state’s four electoral votes was not exactly a savvy use of the candidate’s time in the final hours of the general election, but McCain insisted on making a nostalgic trek to the Granite State on the Sunday night before Election Day. An airport rally in Manchester would have made far more sense logistically at this stage in the game, but the Republican nominee was not to be denied one final visit to his favorite spot in New Hampshire: Peterborough Town House.

The swelling crowd, swarms of Secret Service agents and dozens of TV cameras that showed up for McCain’s final New Hampshire stop of 2008 made for quite a contrast from the gloomy, underattended ice cream social that had marked the beginning of his sordid love affair with the state more than nine years earlier. Many of the faces in the front row of the jam-packed event were familiar, and McCain gave them one of his most resounding performances in months. With the clock ticking, his staff practically had to drag him off the stage. McCain ended up losing New Hampshire to Obama by almost ten points, but in a strange way, he managed to go out on his own terms.