Double Down: Game Change 2012 (35 page)

Or at least the old Newt Gingrich did. Heading into 2012, the people closest to him swore that there was a new incarnation in the house—not displacing but coexisting with the original. The Old Newt might still occasionally snarl at Obama over his Kenyan, anticolonial leanings, or label him the “food stamp president,” but the New Newt was less gruff, less
grandiloquent, more contemplative and self-aware. Nearly seven decades of brashness, bomb throwing, and priapism had tuckered him out. The New Newt was a churchgoing grandfather of two who required naps to stay sharp.

The catalytic element in the creation of the New Newt was his third wife, Callista, whom he married in 2000 after they carried on a six-year affair. Callista was forty-five, with a helmet of platinum blond hair and unblinking ice-blue eyes, and Newt was gaga for her. He draped her in opulent jewelry from Tiffany, where the couple maintained a $500,000 interest-free line of credit. He lavished her with expensive travel. She was a Catholic; he converted. (“One of the happiest moments of my life,” she said.) She loved opera; he joined the Kennedy Center. She played golf; he took up the game.

Callista, while a devoted spouse, wanted no part of a presidential campaign. She worried about the financial impact of Newt abandoning his lucrative ventures. She fretted over the intrusions of the press. Most of all, she quivered—with both fear and rage—at their marital history being picked over. (She detested being referred to as Newt’s former mistress and third wife; “I’ve only been married once,” she protested again and again.) Gingrich’s close friend and longest-serving political adviser, Joe Gaylord, cautioned him against a run. Gingrich’s personal and political baggage was so heavy, Gaylord argued, that lugging it down the road would be mighty painful and likely lead nowhere good.

But Gingrich ignored the flashing yellow lights, playing down the fact that Gaylord and many other aides from his speakership days declined to join the campaign. He hired consultants, including Dave Carney and Rob Johnson, to join another longtime adviser, Sam Dawson, in running his operation. He wheedled Callista into acquiescence, promising that he would accommodate her priorities.

Gingrich wasn’t blind to his vulnerabilities, including the disintegration of his first marriage in circumstances strikingly similar to the dissolution of his second.
I’ve made mistakes, I’m fallible, I’m a Christian who has asked forgiveness,
he thought.
It’s all out there. There will be no surprises. This will be exhilarating.

The lark-like tenor of Gingrich’s approach to his campaign became apparent before his run officially began. In a March 2011 appearance on the
Christian Broadcasting Network, he was asked obliquely about his serial infidelities. Gingrich answered as if he had never given the question an ounce of thought, with a lengthy disquisition that included the suggestion that his indiscretions had been driven by a combination of exhaustion and excessive patriotism. “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” he said.

Two months later, on May 9, Gingrich announced his candidacy via Twitter. When the tweet went out, he was on a plane with Callista and some staff, on the tarmac in Atlanta, dozing in his seat. Hey, Newt, we just did it! his staffers cried, trying to rouse him. Gingrich remained slumped in his chair, snoozing like a hibernating bear.

The passage from slumber to life support took just four weeks. On May 15, Gingrich went on
Meet the Press
and described Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system as “right-wing social engineering,” infuriating Rush Limbaugh, Ryan himself, and conservatives around the country. Two days later, Politico broke the story about the half-million-dollar charge account at Tiffany. (When Dawson investigated, he found that the bill the couple had run up over the years made half a million dollars seem small beer.) At the end of May, with his campaign reeling, Gingrich set off with Callista on a luxury cruise in the Greek isles. His team had begged him not to go, but Callista put her foot down. When the couple returned in early June, virtually all of Gingrich’s top people quit, with Carney and Johnson making their return to Austin to launch Perry.

“This is suicide,” Dawson told Newt. “And I’m not going to be a part of an assisted suicide.”

Gingrich would later call the next two months “the hardest in my career.” Bereft of backing, unable to raise money, he was deemed effectively defunct by the political class. But with Gingrich’s national name recognition, red-meat policy theories, and savvy about scaring up free media, he was able to live off the land in a way that a candidate such as Pawlenty never could. Gingrich saw the packed schedule of debates in the late summer and fall as an opportunity to resurrect himself. And he was further buoyed by what he perceived as Romney’s multifarious and mortal weaknesses.

For all the denigration of the Bay Stater by his fellow Republicans,
Gingrich’s critique stood out as the purest distillation of the form. Newt had been observing Mitt since 1994. He had met with Romney in Boston and Washington and talked to Huckabee and others about his conduct in 2008. Gingrich thought Romney was intelligent and a fund-raising machine. But he also thought Mitt was burdened with nonexistent people skills, a religious faith he refused to talk about, and a record in Massachusetts he was unable to explain—especially a health care plan that put him at daggers drawn with the core of his party. (That Gingrich glossed over his own past backing of an individual mandate only proved the Old Newt was alive and kicking.) Gingrich’s cumulative judgment wasn’t that Romney faced long odds of winning; it was that there was zero chance of him becoming the nominee.

Gingrich was right about the rejuvenating effect of the debate stage on his candidacy. In Ames, at the Reagan Library, and in the two Florida forensic scrums, he turned in a series of bracing performances. Gingrich intuitively understood that there were two surefire techniques for stimulating the erogenous zones of the Republican base: taking the wood ferociously to Obama and whaling on the media. His genius was in divining ways to do both at once, and on occasion even including a third tickle—a pious, Reaganesque call for Republican unity—in the bargain.

A classic instance occurred in Simi Valley when one of the debate moderators, John Harris of Politico, attempted to draw Gingrich into a squabble between Perry and Romney over the individual mandate. “Well, I’m frankly not interested in your effort to get Republicans fighting each other,” Gingrich began. (Loud applause.) “You would like to puff this up into some giant thing,” Gingrich went on. “The fact is, every person up here understands Obamacare is a disaster. It is a disaster procedurally. It was rammed through after they lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. It was written badly, it was never reconciled. It can’t be implemented. It is killing this economy. And if this president had any concern for working Americans, he’d walk in Thursday night and ask us to repeal it because it’s a monstrosity. Every person up here agrees with that.” (Wild applause.) And let me just say, since I still have a little time left . . . I, for one, and I hope all of my friends up here, am going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get
Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama, who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team—whoever the nominee is—we are all for defeating Barack Obama.” (Deafening applause.)

By the early autumn, Gingrich’s premonition about gaining a second life was starting to seem prescient, at least to him. With Perry in free fall, Newt’s poll numbers were edging upward. After paying a visit to Governor Haley in South Carolina on October 4, Gingrich walked out on the statehouse grounds and phoned his old friend Vin Weber. A former Minnesota congressman who was one of Newt’s leading lieutenants in the nineties, Weber had championed Romney in 2008 and Pawlenty early in this cycle; now he was back with Mitt.

“Perry’s not going to come back, and Cain is going to collapse,” Gingrich prophesied. “And I’m going to be the main competitor to Romney by the middle of November.”

“Well, you might be,” Weber replied. He had long thought that Newt could be a credible candidate, and was surprised by his summer implosion (although, knowing Gingrich as he did, not totally surprised). He also thought Newt was one of the most farsighted politicians he had ever met.

“I know what the Romney campaign is capable of—I’ve watched them,” Gingrich continued. “I respect Mitt Romney. But I want you to tell them that if they try to do anything to me and Callista, I will destroy him.”

•   •   •

G
INGRICH’S COMEBACK PREDICTION CAME FULLY TO
fruition on precisely the schedule he had forecast. Heading into Thanksgiving, on the heels of Perry’s “oops” and in the midst of the cascading Cain accusations, four national polls in a row put Newt in first place, narrowly ahead of Romney, and he had surged to double-digit leads in Iowa and South Carolina.

Despite his speakership, Gingrich never considered himself a member of the Republican establishment. The feeling was mutual. The party’s grandees greeted his climb to the top of the polls with manifest incredulity, dismissing him as an impetuous flake. On a speaking jaunt to Chicago, Rove ran into a local business majordomo who asserted categorically that Gingrich could never win the nomination. When Rove asked why, the muckety-muck
cited a recent visit by Newt to the Windy City during which, instead of fund-raising or politicking, he frittered away much of a Saturday touring the Field Museum’s dinosaur collection.

Rove found the tale astonishing, and repeated it on Greta Van Susteren’s program on Fox. Soon after, he received a chippy e-mail from Gingrich: “How many days did George W. spend at the ranch? Reagan spent one year out of eight at the ranch. I don’t have a ranch. Half day at the Field Museum cleared my mind. Just a thought. Newt.”

Now even more incredulous, Rove fired off a sharp reply: “With all due respect, I don’t remember Bush taking a Saturday off in September of 1999 to visit a museum in a state that holds a late primary, nor a Greek cruise that summer. Field Museum board member had been inclined to support you until he heard about your excursion and concluded you weren’t serious . . . When you get to be president, you can have the schedule of Nixon, Reagan, 41, or 43, and you’ll find the job doesn’t leave you at the ranch, or Kennebunkport, or Camp David. It just follows you.”

Rove was all but certain that Gingrich’s temper and unruliness would inevitably cause him to self-destruct—the only question was when. But some of Rove’s establishment chums were less sanguine. Fabled lobbyist and McCain adviser Charlie Black was warning anyone who would listen that Gingrich’s hold on conservative activists was deep and durable. At receptions and in network green rooms, senior Republicans fretted that Boehner would lose the speakership if Newt was their standard-bearer.

Up in Boston, Romney shook his head. He regarded Newt as a font of provocative policies, a galvanizing orator, and an agile debater. But Gingrich’s campaign was a one-man band, his world topsy-turvy, and his personal life more sordid than Romney cared to contemplate. The Republican speed-dating tournament was starting to weigh on Mitt.
First it’s Perry, then it’s Cain, now it’s Newt,
Romney thought.
What’s wrong with me? Why not me?

Stevens stoked Romney’s sense of disbelief at Newt’s front-runner status. To a farcical degree, Stevens was the most Panglossian of the Romneyites; no matter how horrific the development, he would declare it a boon for Boston. Newt’s rising? Great for us! said Stevens, who professed, even after “oops,” to be more concerned about Perry. Of Gingrich he said, Are you kidding me? The party’s going to nominate
him?
Be real.

The lenses Rhoades peered through, by contrast, were less rose-tinted. He saw Gingrich’s rise as a real threat, as did the rest of Team Romney. The reason was Iowa. Assuming Romney carried New Hampshire, where he held a commanding lead, he was well financed and well organized enough to withstand losses in the other three early states—unless one person swept those other three. And a thumping victory for Gingrich in the Hawkeye State would set him up to do just that, propelling him powerfully into South Carolina and Florida. Stevens’s partner, Schriefer, even worried that a Newt win in Iowa would imperil New Hampshire for Romney. On November 2, the
New Hampshire
Union Leader
endorsed the former speaker, lending ballast to that nightmare scenario.

In the days before and after Thanksgiving, the Romneyites held a series of meetings at the Boston HQ to figure out their play in the Iowa caucuses, which were scheduled for January 3. All year long, the campaign had been keeping its powder dry, maintaining just a skeleton crew in the Hawkeye State, delaying a decision about how aggressively to compete. Not one TV ad had been aired, and the candidate had stumped there on only three occasions.

Newhouse’s polling suggested that Romney would be hard-pressed to garner more than 25 percent of the Iowa vote, the same as his 2008 total and probably not enough for a first-place finish. Yet to Boston’s way of thinking now, claiming the number-one spot was not the point. The point was to keep Gingrich from prevailing by a stonking margin, and to inflict serious damage on him in the process. We probably can’t catch him in Iowa, Rhoades said, but we can make sure that he comes out battered. Stevens disagreed. Not only can we catch Newt, the strategist said, but he’s gonna finish third.

In the end, the decision came down to Romney. He and Ann remained wary of Iowa and The Mormon Thing. Yet his people in the state reported that there was little anti-LDS chicanery taking place that they could detect. At the same time, Romney was itching to move past the anarchy of the past months. The
Union Leader
endorsement of Newt unnerved him. After 2008, he had vowed to resist the allure of the quick-knockout strategy in 2012. But he was thinking anew about the virtues of trying to shut this deal down early.