Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a GOP presidential hopeful, campaigns May 9 in Ames. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The following is an excerpt from DOUBLE DOWN: Game Change 2012 to be published Tuesday, Nov. 5.
In conventional political terms, Mitt Romney’s challenge in picking a VP presented a complex puzzle. With the GOP convention in Tampa less than a month away, he was running four to six points behind Barack Obama
in the national polls. Mitt was hurting with women, hurting with
Hispanics, hurting with blue collar whites. His standing in the
industrial Midwest and the West was shaky. The Republican base remained
unenthused by him and the middle of the electorate unimpressed. The
quandary was which of these maladies he should try to heal with his
running mate. For many members of the Republican smarty-pants set, one
thing was increasingly clear: Romney needed a game changer.
Romney didn’t see it that way, at least not at the start. When he
tapped longtime adviser and confidante Beth Myers to lead the search for
his VP, Mitt put forth two criteria and a precept. The criteria applied
to the candidates: that they be qualified and immediately perceived as
qualified to be Commander in Chief, and that there be nothing in their
background that could become a distraction for the campaign. The precept
applied to Myers and her assignment. When decision time came, Romney
said, he wanted to have a choice—not be informed, with the clock
ticking, that there was really only one viable option.
Myers set up her operation in a third-floor office on Boston’s
Commercial Street that became known as “the clean room.” Because the
Romney campaign’s servers were under continual assault by Chinese
hackers, the computers in the clean room were not connected to the
Internet. Myers insisted that the team be extremely cautious about what
they put in e-mail when using their regular computers. Ted Newton and
Chris Oman, two veep background checkers, concluded it was best to
communicate in code. Based on their junk-food-saturated vetting diet,
they called their undertaking Project Goldfish (after the
crackers)—ultimately giving each of the VP finalists an aquatic code
name. Myers’ plan was to have Project Goldfish completed by Memorial
Day. In April she presented Romney with a list of two dozen names, which
he whittled down to 11: Kelly Ayotte, John Cornyn, Chris Christie,
Mitch Daniels, Bill Frist, Mike Huckabee, Bob McDonnell, Tim Pawlenty,
Rob Portman, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.