Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (28 page)

“You’ve got a surprised look on your face,” he said. Santorum asked pointedly, “Are you going to tell people you’re not going to run for reelection for president if you win?” Romney continued to try to play the nonpolitician. “What I’m going to tell you is, this—this for me, politics is not a career.” Gingrich had little respect for Romney by now and was incredulous as he listened. “Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” he said to Romney. “The fact is, you ran
in ’94 and lost. That’s why you weren’t serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad reelection rating. You dropped out of office. You had been out of state for something like two hundred days preparing to run for president. You didn’t have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor. You were going all over the country. You were out of state consistently. You then promptly reentered politics. You happened to lose to McCain as you had lost to Kennedy. Now you’re back running. You have been running consistently for years and years and years. So this idea that suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind—just level with the American people.” Gingrich’s withering put-down struck directly at one of Romney’s biggest vulnerabilities, his political authenticity.

There were other bad moments for Romney in the hours before the primary, including when he said at a rally, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” In full context, the quotation was hardly as damaging as it was in the often-tweeted slam that became the talk of the day. The abbreviated version seemed to play into all of the questionable aspects of Romney’s political persona—the wealthy and insensitive business executive who was out of touch with the lives of real people. But with the lead Romney had built up through months and months of political work in the state, nothing like that was going to prevent him from winning.

When the returns came in on the night of January 10, Romney posted an easy victory, winning 39 percent of the vote. Paul finished second with 23 percent, and Huntsman was a weak third with 17 percent, though he called it “a ticket to ride” to South Carolina. Santorum and Gingrich got just 9 percent each. Romney had lapped the two of them and turned south without an obvious rival for the nomination.

The Gingrich Resurrection

S
outh Carolina had produced classic campaigns over the years, most notably the brutally negative face-off between George W. Bush and John McCain in 2000 that left the Arizona senator bitter for years. But South Carolina had never seen anything quite like the events that were beginning to take shape in the days after New Hampshire. The eleven-day clash highlighted all the new forces that were altering the dynamics of the nomination contest, from the power of super PACs to the centrality of the debates to the sharp swings in conventional wisdom to the volatility of the conservative electorate. If people thought Romney was on a glide path to the nomination, South Carolina would remind them that the Republican Party was far from a consensus about its nominee.

Buried in Iowa by Mitt Romney’s super PAC and relegated to also-ran status in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich should have been in no shape to mount another comeback in South Carolina. By any standard assessment, he was now out of the race. But nothing about the Republican nomination battle was either predictable or, apparently, normal. Still, if there was an early state where Romney’s profile created a barrier to success even more than in Iowa, it was South Carolina. The electorate was everything that Romney was not: southern, very conservative, and evangelical. But after Iowa and New Hampshire, these vulnerabilities were too easily overlooked, including by some members of the team in Boston. They too were caught up in the moment. Neil Newhouse explained the atmosphere inside the campaign. “Everybody’s confidence is up,” he said. “Everybody is thinking, ‘You know what, we could do this, we could sweep this and we could come through and win South Carolina.’ If you win South Carolina, we know we’ve got an organization in Florida, we know we can do that, that’s what we’ve been ready for. South Carolina is like this added bonus in here, and so we got a little heady.”

The first significant boost for Gingrich came as the New Hampshire campaign was nearing its conclusion. Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino operator, announced that he would contribute $5 million to Winning Our Future,
the super PAC supporting the former Speaker. In Iowa, Romney’s super PAC, Restore Our Future, had demonstrated how a well-funded committee could virtually eliminate an opponent by deploying overwhelming resources. In South Carolina, Republicans would learn how one billionaire contributor to a super PAC could help keep an otherwise sinking candidate afloat.

Adelson had given generously to conservative causes over the years but rarely had he taken such a high-profile role. In the 1990s he had sought Gingrich’s help in battling labor unions in Nevada. Through that association the two had become friends, and Adelson and his wife subsequently had contributed millions to Gingrich’s American Solutions enterprise. Adelson and Gingrich also shared a deep commitment to Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. When the $5 million contribution became public, Gingrich clearly welcomed it. “
If he wants to counterbalance
Romney’s millionaires, I have no objection to him counterbalancing Romney’s millionaires,” he said. Adelson’s contribution to Gingrich’s super PAC began to narrow the advertising gap that had marked the campaign in Iowa, where Romney’s super PAC had spent about $3 million on ads, compared to a little over $250,000 by Gingrich’s PAC. Thanks to Adelson, spending by the two super PACs in South Carolina was far less lopsided. Romney’s spent about $2.5 million, with almost all of it used for negative ads; Gingrich’s spent about $1.5 million.

In the final hours before the New Hampshire primary, Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman all had attacked Romney over the work of Bain Capital. Perry had described Bain’s style as “vulture capitalism.” Gingrich, on NBC’s
Today Show,
said, “I’ve run four small businesses in the last decade. It gets tough out there. It doesn’t always work. I get that. But if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company, and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.” With Adelson’s cash infusion, Winning Our Future took a calculated risk, pouring its money into ads airing portions of a documentary called “King of Bain,” an all-out attack on Romney’s private equity firm. Gingrich’s super PAC also bought the twenty-seven-minute film and put it up on its Web site. “King of Bain” told the darker side of the private equity experience, describing the buying, downsizing, and subsequent selling off of companies or their subsidiaries, often resulting in workers being laid off and pensions and health benefits reduced or eliminated while the partners at Bain walked away with huge profits. The film made Romney look like a rapacious corporate raider, the opposite of the job-creating success story he wanted to tell about his business record. The documentary focused on four case studies and had all the familiar techniques of negative advertising—the ominous voice of the narrator, tales of suffering by real and sometimes tearful people, photos of Romney and his partners looking as greedy as they could be. News
organizations gave it negative reviews for truthfulness. Romney called it “probably the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.”
The
New Yorker
’s Steve Coll
wrote that while it was likely not the worst piece of political demagoguery that would air during the election, it was, “like most political speech and argument in the Super PAC era . . . a narrative of noise and emotional manipulation, intercut with jagged shards of truth.”

Everyone assumed that Winning Our Future was doing the work that Gingrich wanted done by attacking Romney and Bain Capital. Other Republicans jumped to Romney’s defense, accusing Gingrich and his super PAC of doing the Democrats’ dirty work. Romney’s campaign accused Gingrich and his ally of attacking capitalism and the free enterprise system. But Bain was now seeping into the political bloodstream in a way it had not been—just as the Obama team was hoping.

•   •   •

The Republican candidates were scheduled to debate in Myrtle Beach on Monday, January 16. That morning Huntsman surrendered to the obvious. In some polls he trailed all other candidates, including comedian Stephen Colbert, a South Carolina native who had created a super PAC to draw attention to and parody the influence of super PACs. With his wife and four of his daughters joining him at the lectern and his father and other relatives standing at the side of the room, Huntsman announced that he was withdrawing from the campaign. Disillusioned by his experience, he denounced what he called a “toxic” political process. “This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in American history,” he said. He called on all the candidates to cease their attacks on one another. He told me later, “I saw the writing on the wall that [Romney] was going to be the nominee and I thought, ‘Will I let the pain continue?’” Huntsman announced his endorsement of Romney and then disappeared.

That night, the once unwieldy field of candidates was now reduced to five: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, and Paul. Thousands of revved-up Republicans, primed for a confrontation, packed the Myrtle Beach Convention Center. Bain provided the first fireworks. Fox News anchor Bret Baier cited a
Wall Street Journal
editorial that had called Gingrich’s attacks crude and embarrassing and invited the former Speaker to defend them. Gingrich said that many of the questions he was raising had come straight out of articles in the
Journal
. “The governor has every opportunity to answer those questions, to give us facts and data,” he said. It was better for Republicans to know the answers now, he said, rather than have Bain become a debilitating problem in a general election. Romney tried to put the best light on Bain’s work. “Every time we invested, we
tried to grow an enterprise, add jobs to make it more successful,” he said. “And I know that people are going to come after me. I know President Obama is going to come after me. But the record is pretty darn good.”

Everyone assumed Gingrich was following a well-planned strategy on Bain. He told me weeks later that it wasn’t, that he got drawn into it because of his super PAC’s attacks. “You couldn’t back off of it when you had twenty-seven minutes of advertising running,” he said. “You either had to be with your team or you had to indicate weakness.” Inside his campaign, advisers were trying to persuade him to stop talking about Bain. “It was one of those issues that Newt responded to,” said Patrick Millsaps, a Georgia lawyer who later became campaign chief of staff. “But if it had been up to us it was not an issue we would have chosen to lead with.” Robert Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman who was one of Gingrich’s chief lieutenants in the House and who had been brought into the campaign just before Iowa as national chairman, said, “There was no doubt that the Romney stuff had gotten in his head. He was really viscerally angry with what Romney was doing to him and he thought this was payback. . . . There were a number of us who kept saying to him, ‘But Newt, that isn’t the message that any of the voters in these polls are saying is important to them.’” David Winston conducted a poll in South Carolina that showed Bain hurting Gingrich with Republican voters. “It showed we had a problem and it showed that this dynamic was clearly not working and the other things he was saying could work,” Winston said.

But it wasn’t Bain that made the Myrtle Beach debate memorable. The debate ultimately turned on one exchange, and with it the whole South Carolina campaign suddenly shifted dramatically. On the campaign trail, Gingrich had been routinely calling Obama a “food stamp president” and saying that African Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps, from Washington. He also had sparked controversy by contending that poor children lacked a work ethic. He said schoolchildren should work helping to clean their schools—acting in essence as janitors—to learn work habits and earn some money. Fox’s Juan Williams confronted him with those comments. “Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” he asked. “No,” Gingrich replied, “I don’t see that.” He said the schoolchildren would benefit by earning the money and doing the work, “which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.” The audience began to applaud as Williams persisted. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people,” he said. Now the audience was booing Williams. Gingrich, who had mastered the putdown of debate moderators, seized the opportunity. “First of all, Juan,” he said, “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any
president in American history.” The audience applauded again. “Now, I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.” This brought more laughter and applause. “Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. The area that ought to be I-73 [in South Carolina] was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built the road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything.” Gingrich was out of time, but Baier let him continue. “I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness,” he said. “And if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.” As the television screens dissolved for a commercial break, the audience was giving Gingrich a standing ovation, applauding and cheering wildly. Gingrich said he could feel the applause roll toward him “like the wave of an ocean.”

The audience’s reaction to the exchange captured the pent-up anger of the party’s base. Conservatives wanted a nominee who would go after the president and the liberal elites, and in Gingrich they saw someone doing it. In Boston, Romney’s advisers saw an overnight shift in the race. Romney had entered the Myrtle Beach debate with a ten-point lead over Gingrich. A day later, when Newhouse got back the results of his latest survey, the two were in a statistical tie. The race had turned from one with Romney up 32 to 17 percent to a contest that had Gingrich at 23 percent and Romney at 21 percent. “I’ve never seen numbers like that,” Newhouse said. “You just don’t see that kind of volatility. You just don’t. What it demonstrated is people just weren’t anchored and they’re paying attention to this stuff.”

•   •   •

The morning after the debate, Romney, Gingrich, and Perry all campaigned in Florence. Romney’s rally at the convention center drew a sparse crowd that filled only a fraction of the large room—a clear sign of flagging enthusiasm. The front-runner’s campaign appeared to be floundering. He had been under fire for weeks for not releasing his tax returns, and his opponents had stepped up criticism. What was this rich man hiding? The issue was a growing topic of debate inside the campaign, but Romney continued to resist. He was hoping to keep the issue at bay until tax time in April, when he assumed he would be safely through the early primaries and on his way to locking down the nomination. Romney’s income came mainly from capital gains on the investments in his personal fortune. After the rally he took question from reporters.
Time
’s Mark Halperin asked Romney to estimate his effective tax rate. Romney said it was “probably closer to 15 percent than anything.” The figure was far below that of the average taxpayer. Romney told reporters that he also had received
speaker’s fees but said the amount was “not very much.” In truth, he had earned $374,000 from speeches in the previous year—small change to a man who was earning millions on a fortune estimated at more than $200 million, but another example of a candidate totally out of touch with the perceptions of ordinary Americans.

After Gingrich left Florence, Rick Perry arrived. His campaign had lost all its purpose by now, and as a result Perry seemed liberated—more comfortable than at any time since the opening days in August. He ambled into the Drive In restaurant wearing a blue fleece with a Perry campaign logo. He moved from table to table, shaking hands and posing for pictures. He ordered a beef gyro and onion rings for lunch and paid with a $20 bill he pulled from his wallet. Then he plopped down at a corner table with a local couple and two children. He fiddled with his BlackBerry as he chatted. Reporters elbowed one another to catch snippets of the conversation, and photographers pressed up against the windows from outside to shoot photos. When he finished eating, he took questions. Asked about Romney’s taxes, Perry said, “Release it all. Not the front page—release all of your income tax, and then the people of America can do the calculations I think rather speedily and figure out what it is and make appropriate conclusions.” Told that Gingrich had said that morning that a vote for Perry or Santorum was a vote for Romney, he replied, “That’s the reason we have contests. That’s the reason we have Super Bowls. That’s the reason we have competitions. We’ll let the people of South Carolina make that decision.”