Dan Balz pens searing indictment of 2012

[AdamSmith]

This looks good.

Dan Balz pens searing indictment of 2012

By ROGER SIMON | 8/6/13 5:01 AM EDT

politico.com

Here is Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, explaining to Dan Balz how he intends to run the 2012 campaign:

“My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” Messina says. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore. [The Republicans] may have a plan to beat my guy. My job is to punch them in the face.”

Here is Tagg Romney, Mitt Romney’s son, telling Balz that his father was not quite fired up and ready to go less than three weeks before he announced his candidacy. “He was hoping for an exit,” Tagg says. “I think he wanted to have an excuse not to run.” During the Christmas holiday of 2010, the Romney family had gathered in Hawaii and voted on whether Romney should run. Ten of the 12 family members voted no. Mitt Romney was among the no votes.

Here is Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, still undecided about his own candidacy. He orders those Republicans who had decided to run not to troll for support or money in his state. It was like something out of “The Sopranos.” Jersey was his territory. “Governor Romney didn’t like that too much,” Christie tells Balz.

Nancy Reagan sends a handwritten note inviting Christie to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Christie shows up, he is seated on the stage and Nancy Reagan leans over to him and points out the podium from which he will speak. “That was one of Ronnie’s podiums from the White House,” she says. Christie tells Balz: “I sat there for a second, and I just turned to her and I said, ‘You’re bad, you know that?’ She had this big smile on her face.”

Here is Ron Kaufman, one of Romney’s top advisers, on election night after Romney’s defeat, sitting in a nearly empty staff room after Romney has made a gracious concession call to Obama and a concession speech. Romney walks into the staff room. “This is scary,” Romney says. “This is a bad thing for the country.”

I could go on and on. Balz’s new book, “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” is so full of anecdotes and revelations that it is hard to stop. But I will. Because even though I think this is one of the best political books I have ever read, harkening back to the “Making of the President” books in terms of its richness of detail and analysis, it is not a collection of anecdotes.

Instead, it is a searing, unsparing indictment of America’s presidential election system and the way candidates run for office. And though Balz is the chief correspondent of The Washington Post, the press does not escape unscathed either.

He gives fair warning on the very first page. “It was not an uplifting campaign by any stretch of the imagination,” he writes. And 352 pages later, he concludes that the campaign was rarely about ideas or issues. Obama and Romney had a different agenda. Balz writes: “Each pursued a strategy designed for one thing: winning.”

Balz sat down for two hours at my kitchen table recently. He was no stranger to it, nor I to his. We have been friends for more than 40 years. Today and tomorrow, I will present the highlights of our conversation.

Q: You are pretty tough on Obama in your book.

DB: Neither side rose to the moment of trying to overcome where we were with our paralysis and negativity. Obama decided the best way to overcome that was to win convincingly. Everything we’ve seen since is that that didn’t work.

Q: You write: “No one expected Campaign 2012 to be positive or uplifting … [but] all restraints were gone, the guardrails had disappeared and there was no incentive for anyone to hold back.” One reason the campaign became so negative is because neither side believed the independent vote was large enough to matter. So both sides did everything they could to throw red meat to their base voters.

DB: The base wants to feel enthusiastic about the nominee and in this environment that means the candidate often has to be harsh on his opponent. One of the things the Obama people took away from [his poor performance in] the first debate was that much of the importance of a debate is to make your voters feel good and not to persuade undecided voters.

In the second debate, which was the vice presidential debate, Joe Biden was as aggressive as he could be to say to his base: “We’re fighting for you.”

Q: You have this wonderful anecdote about Biden landing in Kentucky for his debate, and he immediately takes a call from Obama. After it, Biden is smiling and tells an adviser: “I know we’re in trouble.” The adviser asks why and Biden says: “I know we’re in trouble because the president just told me to be myself, and that’s the first time in four years he’s ever told me that.”

DB: (laughs) Obama could not have done [the all-out attacking] he did in the second and third debates without the first debate. He had to overcompensate.

Q: In trying to explain to you his infamous 47 percent remarks, Romney reaches for his iPad and starts quoting from it but he still gets the 47 percent quote wrong. What’s up with that?

DB: He can’t accept the words he uttered were the words he uttered. In his own mind, that’s not what he thinks he said. We talk about candidates having the ability to connect with voters, but with Romney I turn it around: The voters could not connect with Romney. As one person in one focus group said: “He’s been too rich for too long.”

Part Two: The press, Christie and 2016 [tomorrow]

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist. His new e-book, “RECKONING: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America,” can be found on Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com and iTunes.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/balz-pens-searing-indictment-of-2012-95191.html#ixzz2bDhsymBH

[TampaYankee]

Good read. I look forward to installment two. Balz is right about some of it, a little starry eyed and wishing for fairytale politics too.

He gives fair warning on the very first page. “It was not an uplifting campaign by any stretch of the imagination,” he writes. And 352 pages later, he concludes that the campaign was rarely about ideas or issues. Obama and Romney had a different agenda. Balz writes: “Each pursued a strategy designed for one thing: winning.”

The fact is that most Presidential Elections are about winning, at least in modern times. They have been all the way back to the Thomas Jefferson - Aaron Burr face-off.

Campaigns about lofty ideals and agendas usually follow, sometimes precede, tumultuous events in our history -- slavery and the Civil War, the Great Depression, the transition from WWII/Korea to the Cold War. These events come sparingly, thankfully.

In other times it is about the winning, riding the seat of government to the lesser or greater benefit of the winning party constituents. That is why so many people have always felt it did not matter to them who won, it made no impact on their lives. This does not include the one percent or the people institutionally excluded from the benefits of society but those in the lower middle who saw little difference in their lives from one administration to the next.

Consider how abysmally low our voter participation is in this country. ( http://www.statisticbrain.com/presidential-election-voter-statistics/ )

Year Voting-Age Population Voter Registration Voter Turnout Turnout of Voting-Age Population

2012* 239,405,657 197,828,022 126,000,000 57.5 % *Estimate

[AdamSmith]

Agree with your observations. Pity in many respects, but the way it is.

While awaiting Part 2 of that story, found this previous piece on the same book:

Dan Balz book: Christie a wanted man in 2012

By LOIS ROMANO | 7/2/13 1:55 PM EDT

politico.com

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie thought far more seriously about jumping into the 2012 presidential race — and was under intense pressure to do so — than previously known, according to a new book about the campaign, “Collision 2012.”

In colorful detail, Christie recalls for the author, Dan Balz, chief correspondent of The Washington Post, the full court press he received throughout the summer of 2011. It came at a a time when many in the establishment had already committed to Mitt Romney, clearly signaling a level of dissatisfaction with the field.

“Craziness,” Christie recalled, “Unsolicited phone calls from all over the country. … I was in this job six, eight nine months and I just was shocked. … I remember thinking, ‘This is a just completely surreal and not what I expected,’ and little did I know … that it would get a lot crazier.”

The book, which will be on sale Aug. 6 and is catnip for political junkies, also sheds new light on a complex “pay-to-play” regulatory rule that caused Romney to pass over the New Jersey governor as his running mate. Under the SEC regulation, candidates cannot accept campaign money from financial institutions doing business in their states.

In effect, Romney would have had to forgo Wall Street money unless Christie resigned as governor, which Christie says he never considered. This raises questions about future potential fundraising issues for Christie, a top GOP prospect for president in 2016.

But long before those VP discussions, Romney had a larger issue he may not have known about: Money men, operatives, and party leaders who should have been for him in 2011 were sufficiently unenthusiastic to court a one-term governor.

According to Christie, among those who prevailed upon him or simply called him, were former President George W. Bush, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Nancy Reagan and David Koch, the businessman and activist who spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat Barack Obama.

Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, was stunned to pick up her phone at work one day to find Barbara Bush on the other end. The plucky former first lady only wanted to reassure Mary Pat that raising children in the White House was doable and a positive.

Through it all, Christie held firm publicly that he was not interested, but tells Balz of one pivotal event that forced him to rethink his position.

Home Depot founder Ken Langone — a wealthy GOP contributor and player — invited Christie to come meet with “a small group” of friends who would talk to the governor about what he should do for the country.

Christie arrived with his wife and a top aide, all of whom were flabbergasted to find 60 heavy hitters in the room, not to mention those who were conferenced in by phone.

Christie recalled: “All of a sudden you hear John Mack [ former CEO of Morgan Stanley] on the phone. [Langone] says ‘David Koch is out of the county. David, are you there?’”

In the end, Kissinger was asked to speak for the group. He told Christie he had known many presidents. “Being a successful president is about two things, courage and character,” Kissinger is quoted as saying. “You have both and your country needs you.”

Christie told the group he was unlikely to run but promised them he would seriously explore the possibility. And that he did.

Over the course of many weeks, Christie consulted with Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, who had run George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, Rudy Giuliani and others. One day, Bush called him for a 45-minute chat.

“He kind of asked me then what I was thinking, what were the impediments in my mind, what were the concerns,” Christie told Balz. “It was an amazing conversation.”

Christie said he decided against running after talking with his father, who asked, “Do you love your job?”

“I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said to me, ‘You’re 48 years old. Why are you leaving it if you love it?’”

A year later, Christie found himself in another whirlwind, this time as he was being vetted as a possible running mate to Romney.

Romney personally called Christie to discuss the issues associated with the SEC “pay-to-play” rule should he be selected. In previous cycles, the rule did not have a big impact because candidates accepted federal funds for the campaign, which automatically limited how much they could raise.

But with candidates forgoing federal matching funds, they need to raises every penny and can’t afford to write off investment banks that also invested in states. Balz reports that the campaign could never come up with a solution and determined that it would have the same issue with any sitting governor being considered.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/dan-balz-book-chris-christie-2012-93663.html#ixzz2bHousgau

[TampaYankee]

Thanks for the follow up and link.

[AdamSmith]

Here's Part 2:

Dan Balz: Polling alters press coverage

President Obama and Mitt Romney spoke to voters differently, Balz said. | AP Photo

By ROGER SIMON | 8/7/13 5:04 AM EDT

A few days ago, I sat down with Dan Balz and interviewed him about his new book, “Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America,” a searing look at presidential politics. On Tuesday, I presented the first part of our conversation and this is the second:

Q: The Obama campaign had so much going for it, including deep data, targeted ads, tons of opposition research, groundbreaking field work, a huge staff and a billion dollars. Did it need all that to defeat Mitt Romney?

DB: They believed that they were going to be in a real struggle. They came to the conclusion that Romney was a bad fit for the moment, but they didn’t know that for sure at the beginning. But they had so much money they were going to run this kind of campaign even if their opponent was Herman Cain.

Q: You reveal that the Obama campaign collected data on what individuals were watching on cable TV based on their channel clicking gathered from set-top boxes. Isn’t that pretty invasive?

DB: When I learned about it, I was, “Wait, you know what I’m clicking on?” And they said, “We don’t know what Dan Balz is doing; there is a firewall that keeps individual identities private.” But it gave [the Obama campaign] an advantage. They had a better sense of the kinds of people who watched this or that, and this allowed them to advertise on many more cable shows.

Q: Both Obama and Romney opted out of public financing in the general election, a system that was supposed to stop the raising and spending of obscene amounts of money. You blame this on Obama, who opted out in 2008, writing that he was “choosing political advantage over principle.”

DB: Obama didn’t create the problem. Whoever has an advantage [in fundraising] has taken that advantage to destroy the public finance system.

Q: Isn’t that a bad thing?

DB: Bad? I don’t know the answer. On one hand, if you get millions of ordinary people to give relatively small amounts to campaigns, that is healthy. It is not [business tycoon] Sheldon Adelson giving $5 million to a super PAC. But could you run an effective and efficient campaign for half the money? Yes. You would have fewer ads and employ fewer people. David Axelrod says no campaign wins with ads that are run after Labor Day, yet the Obama campaign ran thousands of ads after Labor Day. You don’t want to take the chance.

Q: To slightly alter Michelle Obama’s memorable line: “Running for president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” True or false?

DB: It’s basically right. It is such a long and public process that the public does get to know the candidates and the essence of who they are. The mystery to me was Mitt Romney, why his campaign was never able to present the Romney that people who know Romney revealed: smart, successful, a man of faith, with a lot of positive attributes. For whatever reason they weren’t able to highlight that.

The biggest difference was the way the two candidates spoke to voters: Romney spoke to job creators, businesses large and small. Obama spoke to people who worked for businesses. As [Romney spokesman] Kevin Madden said: “We were doing economics and he was doing love songs.”

Q: You write that even after it was clear Romney was not going to win “…the media’s hunger for a compelling story down to the last day of the campaign, affected the broad sweep of the reporting and analysis.” And reporters began doing “Romney comeback” stories that had little or no basis in fact. That’s a pretty damning indictment of the press, isn’t it?

DB: (laughs) I thought it was an understatement. One of the elements of current campaign coverage is that it is much more shaped by polling than ever before.

Obama’s polling was very accurate. There were no peaks or valleys during the entire campaign. There was a dip for Romney after his 47 percent remarks, and after the first debate his numbers came back up. But Obama’s numbers didn’t change.

Q: Will Chris Christie run for president in 2016?

DB: I assume he will run in 2016.

Q: There are some signs that people on both sides would like to get past the gridlock in this country.

DB: Maybe that will happen over time. This is a very divided country and not a particularly happy country, and it is a country that has lost confidence in Washington.

Q: Can anybody change how presidential campaigns are run?

DB: It’s hard. I don’t think voters can or will be able to change how campaigns are run. The voters will have to endure them.

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/dan-balz-polling-alters-press-coverage-95240.html#ixzz2bfzMeXqs