Playbook 2012 by Mike Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

Texas just likes him.”
    The “worst example,” she said, was with Al Hoffman, a North Palm Beach businessman who was ambassador to Portugal in the George W. Bush administration. Twice serving as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, Hoffman had the clout and connections to raise some $5 million for the Perry campaign, and his endorsement was worth even more as a signal to other big donors and fundraisers. “There could not be a bigger get,” said the fundraiser. Hoffman had “stayed on the sidelines and has not been crazy about Perry,” she said, but she persuaded him to meet with the candidate on his swing through Florida for the Orlando debate.
    Hoffman came to a meeting with Perry brandishing a four-page list of sixteen questions, expecting a respectful audience and response. “[Hoffman’s] absolutely worth all the time in the world,” said the fundraiser. “Other candidates have said, Hey, come on the plane with me for a week. Let’s really spend time together.”
    Perry chafed at even spending an hour with Hoffman. “I think he was tired and just feeling like, I have been in the race a month and I’m really ahead in the polls, and why are these people still demanding answers of me that I don’t have yet?” said the fundraiser.
    Usually candidates go to Ambassador Hoffman at his Palm Beach mansion, so the fundraiser was a little embarrassed to insist that the ambassador come meet Perry in a conference room at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach. (It wasn’t even a full conference room, she recalled, but “some little corner of it.”) She maneuvered to get more face time between Perry and Hoffman, making Perry twenty minutes late for a photo op. Perry just seemed peeved. “Sixteen questions?” Perry asked. “Can you believe the nerve? Can’t he go read about my positions on these things?” he said to Dave Carney, who seemed equally put out to have to kowtow to Hoffman.
    At the meeting, Hoffman “kind of dropped the idea that, Well, sometimes I travel with the candidate. He didn’t ask, but he kind of let him know that he usually gets more than a thirty-minute meeting at the convention center,” said the fundraiser.
    Later, on the plane flying—without Hoffman—from Palm Beach to Orlando, Perry turned to Carney and said, with a laugh, “He wants to come on the plane with us and talk. I don’t think that’s going to be happening.” Carney chuckled and said, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” By this time, the frustrated fundraiser was actually agreeing, because, as she put it, “the more time Ambassador Hoffman could have spent with Perry, the worse he would have come off.” Hoffman stayed neutral.
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    Courtship is the nature of politics. Voters, opinion makers, and donors must be wooed. Big donors like Al Hoffman like it that way. “Yeah, you’re always young and beautiful if you can raise the money,” Hoffman, seventy-seven, said. “You know, it’s sort of like a woman stillproving that she’s attractive. Sort of gives you a great flattering sense of, I’m still there, I haven’t lost my magic touch.” Hoffman was forgiving toward Perry when he spoke to us. Notwithstanding all the macho bluster between Carney and Perry on the plane, according to Hoffman, the Perry camp had tried to get him on the plane after all, but he had begged off because of a medical procedure.
    Perry, though, at times could be a winning courtier. In late September, a veteran political operative watched as Perry appealed for support from Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher who had run for president in 1996 and 2000 on a flat tax platform, When Perry entered Forbes’s conference room at the Forbes Building in downtown Manhattan, “I expected more of a Texas swagger, but it wasn’t there, not at all. There was no phoniness and no bravado at all,” said the operative, who was at the table. Perry seemed knowledgeable, in a