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.
Within a month, the vetters had assembled preliminary research books
on the 11, which Romney perused and then rendered his short list:
Christie (Pufferfish), Pawlenty (Lakefish), Portman (Filet o Fish),
Rubio (Pescado) and Ryan (Fishconsin).
In the nine months since Christie’s endorsement of Romney in October
2011, Boston had formed a mixed view of the governor who George W. Bush
had once nicknamed Big Boy. Christopher James Christie, 51, was less
than two years into his first term as governor of New Jersey, suave as
sandpaper and morbidly obese. He was also one of the most intriguing
figures in American politics. His voice was like an air horn, cutting
through the clutter. There was no one better at making the referendum
case against Obama, at nailing the President to the wall with ferocity
and caustic humor. Christie’s temperament was ideally suited to the
unfolding tenor of the race. “We’re in a street fight, and he’s a street
fighter,” Romney’s chief strategist Stuart Stevens told Romney. “He’s
the best street fighter—and he’s comfortable saying things that you’re
not comfortable saying.”
He was also a fundraising dynamo, but he and his staff were
overbearing and hard to work with, demanding in ways that would have
been unthinkable from any other surrogate. Months earlier, Christie had
banned Romney from raising money in New Jersey until Christie had given
the O.K. to do so—a move Romney found galling, like something out of The Sopranos.
Are you kidding me, Mitt thought. He’s going to do that? There were
plenty of New Jersey donors who’d given money to Mitt in 2008; now
Christie was trying to impose a gag order on talking to them? “He
sounds like the biggest asshole in the world,” Stevens griped to his
partner, Russ Shriefer. More recently, Trenton insisted on private jets,
lavish spreads of food, space for a massive entourage. Romney ally
Wayne Berman looked at the bubble around Christie and thought, He’s not
the President of the United States, you know.
Chronically behind schedule, Christie made a habit of showing up late
to Romney fundraising events. In May he was so tardy to a donor
reception at the Grand Hyatt New York that Mitt wound up taking the
stage to speak before Christie arrived. When the Jersey governor finally
made his grand entrance, it was as if Mitt had been his warm-up act.
Punctuality mattered to Romney. Christie’s lateness bugged him. Mitt
also cared about fitness and was prone to poke fun at those who didn’t.
(“Oh, there’s your date for tonight,” he would say to male members of
his traveling crew when they spied a chunky lady on the street.) Romney
marveled at Christie’s girth, his difficulties in making his way down
the narrow aisle of the campaign bus. Watching a video of Christie
without his suit jacket on, Romney cackled to his aides, “Guys! Look at
that!”
But Mitt was grateful for Christie’s endorsement and everything else
he’d done. He appreciated Chris’ persona, his shtick, his forcefulness,
his intuitive connection with voters. That night at the Grand Hyatt, at a
high-dollar dinner after the main event, Christie’s argument for Mitt
was more compelling than anything the nominee could manage.
The list of questions Myers and her team had for Christie was
extensive and troubling. More than once, Myers reported back that
Trenton’s response was, in effect, Why do we need to give you that piece
of information? Myers told her team, We have to assume if they’re not
answering, it’s because the answer is bad.
The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the
shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector
general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior
to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney
who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without
adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or
no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There
was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the
Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a
senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer
Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government
contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General
John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a
defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his
successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race.
Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed
to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange
Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which
customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a
family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the
vetters.) And all that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that
sparked concern on Myers’ team: Christie’s other lobbying clients, his
investments overseas, the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but
might call into doubt his presidential temperament, and the status of
his health.
Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under Myers, had come into the
vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying
the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his
colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we
would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again.
When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty.
Early Sunday morning, July 15, Romney got on a conference call with the Boston brain trust to talk about the veepstakes.
The overwhelming consensus was for Ryan. He was young, telegenic,
Irish Catholic, with blue collar appeal, and he might put his state in
play. He would rouse the base and sharpen the policy contrast with
Obama. While the Ryan budget and Medicare plan were political cons,
Romney was half pregnant with them anyway—so why not marry their most
articulate defender? Two of Mitt’s closest confidants, former Utah
Governor Mike Leavitt and his former business partner Bob White argued
that Mitt should pick the best governing partner; privately, both
expressed support for Ryan. Look, Mitt, you’ve never worked in
Washington, Leavitt said. Having someone who can swing a bat for you on
the Hill and knows the budget inside out makes a lot of sense.
But Stevens remained unconvinced about Ryan and adamantly in favor of
Christie. Shielded from the crash vet and what it was turning up,
Romney’s chief strategist was making a purely political argument—one
that contradicted the considered judgment of virtually everyone else on
whom Mitt relied for advice. Such was the potency of the Romney-Stevens
bond that Mitt kept Christie in the pack.
Romney was somewhat shielded from the Pufferfish vet too, but he knew
it wasn’t going smoothly. Myers informed him that a significant problem
had not been solved: the severe limits on political donations from the
financial community that would have applied to a Romney-Christie ticket
under New Jersey’s strict pay-to-play regulations which limited the
amounts potential donors employed by financial services firms who did
business with the state could contribute.
Romney’s lawyers were still looking into the matter. Facing Obama’s
formidable fundraising machine, it appeared that picking Christie could
cost Romney a serious chunk of change. One possibility was that if
Christie were picked as VP, Romney would no longer be able to raise
money from many financial institutions for the rest of the campaign. Not
great, but manageable, maybe. Another possibility was that Boston would
have to return the cash it had already raised on the
Street—unacceptable. The attorneys had been exploring workarounds; none
were watertight.
The easiest solution would be for Christie to resign as governor if
he got the nod. A few hours after the conference call, Romney phoned him
to float that notion. “Are there any circumstances in which you’d
consider resigning to become the nominee?” Mitt asked.
Christie asked for time to think it over.
