Moments after the Supreme Court ruled on President Obama’s health care law, Lanhee Chen, the policy director for Mitt Romney, sent an e-mail to about three dozen senior Republicans on Capitol Hill and in state attorneys general’s offices.
“Please stand by. Reviewing. Will circulate answer,” the e-mail, sent at 10:17 a.m. said in part.
Minutes later, at 10:27 a.m., Mr. Chen sent another e-mail: “Go with upheld.”
Those three words unleashed a public relations plan that was nine weeks in the making and designed to make sure that the Republican response to whatever the court decided served Mr. Romney’s presidential ambitions.
“Everyone at the table understood the importance of this decision,” said Sean Spicer, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, which coordinated the planning. “The only way we were ever going to get rid of Obamacare is if we are committed to electing Governor Romney.”
For more than two months, a group of top aides to Mr. Romney met weekly with staff members to Republican lawmakers, legislative campaign committees and representatives of the state attorneys general. The meetings, led by Jeff Larson, the chief of staff at the Republican National Committee, were usually held at 3 p.m. in a conference room on the fourth floor of the committee’s headquarters.
The group developed three scenarios. Scenario One assumed the court had upheld the health care law. Scenario Two assumed the court had overturned it. Scenario Three contemplated a variety of partial rulings.
In each case, the group developed separate statements, Twitter hashtags, videos and Web sites. Mr. Spicer said there were spirited discussions (many hashtag suggestions were discarded, for example) as the group debated how to respond.
But in all cases, it was agreed that Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, was in charge of the message.
“Everybody was going to take their cue from Governor Romney,” Mr. Spicer said.
On Thursday morning, communications and policy aides from Capitol Hill and from Mr. Romney’s Boston headquarters convened in a first-floor conference room at the Republican National Committee that had been turned into a war-room. A large monitor was running TweetDeck. The group watched the initial, confusing reports about the court’s decision.
Then, they waited for Mr. Chen’s e-mail.
“Once Lanhee gave the green light, we were hitting our state parties, our surrogates,” Mr. Spicer said. The minute the e-mail arrived, Scenario One went into operation.
The surrogate list, developed over weeks, included dozens of state and national Republican officials, booked onto television and radio programs from morning to night. The switch was thrown on a Web site: peoplevobamacare.com. Republican officials everywhere started posting on Twitter with the agreed-upon hashtag: #fullrepeal.
The plan was originally designed for a Monday implementation, Mr. Spicer said (the court’s last scheduled day of the term). He said it will be compressed a bit because of the Thursday decision.
And what about Scenarios One and Two? “We had mapped out every conceivable scenario,” Mr. Spicer said.
But he’s not saying anything much about those.
Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.
