“FLORIDA ‘IS LIKE A FREIGHT LINER, AND
ONCE IT TURNS — AND I THINK IT’S
TURNED — IT’S HARD TO TURN BACK.’”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“We’re going to go and have a really big Moose Drool Beer,” he said.
All that faded, of course, the
day after the first debate. In the
spin room afterwards, on the campus of the University of Denver,
Romney aides had a pretty easy
night of it. They fielded questions
of course, but didn’t need to say
much. Romney had clearly won,
and worse, Obama had contributed greatly to his own loss. The
president had been so passive that
Saturday Night Live later mocked
him, suggesting that Obama had
even let Romney claim that he
killed Osama bin Laden.
The press devoured Obama’s
advisers when they finally entered the room after a more than
10-minute delay. David Axelrod
and David Plouffe, in particular,
the twin swamis of the Obama
high command, were swarmed by
packs of reporters. The only time
I had seen anyone under more
pressure in a spin room the entire
election was when Texas Gov. Rick
Perry faced reporters himself after
the GOP primary debate outside
Detroit, in November 2011, to try
to explain himself after his horrifying “oops” moment.
Back at the Renaissance hotel,
the mood was ecstatic. Madden
and fellow Romney advisers Stuart Stevens, Eric Fehrnstrom, Ron
Kaufman, Ben Ginsberg and others mingled with a group of campaign staff and reporters. They
were careful not to be too jubilant.
But there were a lot of smiles.
The next morning, I left the Renaissance and walked down the
street about three blocks — rolling
my suitcase behind me through
hotel parking lots and gravelly,
trash-strewn bus stops — to the
Holiday Inn where Obama had
spent the night. A bus was standing by to carry me and other reporters to a nearby rally, and
within an hour we were deposited
in a park on the banks of Sloan’s
Lake, about 10 feet away from performing artist Will.i.am, who was
trying to warm up a few thousand
Obama supporters.
The crowd, shivering in the
cold, was still shell-shocked from
the president’s woeful perfor-