Double Down: Game Change 2012 (38 page)

“I’ve been Romney-boated,” Gingrich said emphatically, then slipped into
the past tense. “If I could have done anything different, I would have pulled the plug on Romney’s PAC. I probably should have responded faster and more aggressively . . . If you have somebody spend $3.5 million lying about you, you have some obligation to come back and set the record straight.”

Gingrich had been complaining about Restore like this for days, but his tone was different now—less theatrical, less hyperbolic, more genuinely seething. While Newt spoke, Callista was in an adjacent room, taking in the spectacle on a live TV feed, her chair pulled up right next to the monitor, her face a few inches from the screen. Bringing his rant to a conclusion, Newt offered a stinging coda aimed directly at Romney: “Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they
are
president.”

Sitting next door, Callista nodded solemnly, silently mouthing the word “yes.”

•   •   •

R
ICK SANTORUM’S SUNDAY
was a happier affair, kicking off with an appearance on
Meet the Press
that marked his sudden arrival in the top tier. The media had sensed a swell coming up under Santorum for several days. The
Register
poll made it official—and there was even better news for him buried in the fine print. Looking at the data from all four days that the paper surveyed voters, Santo was in third place. But counting only the sampling from the last two days put him in second, with 21 percent, three points ahead of Paul and three behind Romney. Out of nowhere, Santo had snagged the Big Mo.

From the moment he entered the race, Santorum was seen less as a long shot than a no shot, and duly ignored. A former two-term senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum had been turfed out of office in 2006, losing his reelection bid by a chasmal eighteen-point margin. To the extent that he was known nationally, it was for the extremity of his socially conservative convictions: opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest, condemnation of contraception, and such a fierce revulsion toward homosexuality that he once compared it to “man-on-child, man-on-dog” relations. Among many of his former colleagues, he was seen as arrogant, headstrong, preachy, and puerile. Nebraska Democrat Bob Kerrey summed up the prevailing upper-chamber opinion in five words: “Santorum—that’s Latin for ‘asshole
.’”

But Santorum proved to be synonymous with something else in Iowa: persistence. He worked the state tirelessly, appearing at 381 events over the course of two years. As a retail pol, Santorum still left much to be desired. He was windy, dour, and digressive—senatorial in all respects. But his crushing defeat in 2006 seemed to have imbued him with a degree of humility, and he exhibited none of the slickness, phoniness, or cartoonishness of some of his rivals.

Santorum and his wife, Karen, both devout Catholics, had seven children, all of them homeschooled. Their youngest daughter, Bella, suffered from a rare genetic condition known as trisomy 18 that meant she was frequently in and out of the hospital. Wearing lapel buttons with Bella’s picture, the other Santorum kids often appeared on the campaign trail with their mom and dad. The family picture they presented was cozy and appealing, especially to religious conservatives.

And yet Santorum remained little better than an asterisk in the Iowa polling—until mid-December, when he appeared at a pro-life forum sponsored by Huckabee at the Hoyt Sherman Place theater, in Des Moines. Casting aside his suit, Santorum donned a sweater-vest and delivered a tub-thumping speech that blew the room away. To that point, evangelical voters had been split among Bachmann, Perry, Cain, and Gingrich. But as each of those candidates collapsed in sequence, the religious-right bloc remained up for grabs, with Santorum the last man still standing erect and capable of seizing it.

All along, Rick had clung to a thin reed of hope. If he could break into double digits in just one poll before Christmas, Santorum believed he could parlay that into a strong Iowa close. When he flew home to Virginia for the holiday weekend, it hadn’t happened yet—even after he had picked up the support that week of two of Iowa’s leading social conservatives. Santorum thought he was through.

Then came a bolt from the blue: a new Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey on December 23 that put him at 10 percent. Santorum boisterously relayed the news to his family. To his daughter Elizabeth, he predicted, “This is going to change the race—we’re going to win.”

Santorum’s confidence was based on two suppositions: that the lateness of his rise would make it impossible for any of his rivals to obliterate him
with a barrage of negative ads; and that he would be bathed in the glow of national media attention when the media bigfeet arrived in Iowa for the homestretch, compensating for the fact that he had barely two nickels to rub together for TV advertising.

The
Register
poll left Santorum looking like Nostradamus. On January 2, at his penultimate stop on the day before the caucuses, he arrived at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Boone, twenty minutes west of Ames, to find a hundred voters and almost as many media personages crammed into the small dining room.

After giving a brief speech, Santorum took questions from the crowd for the better part of an hour. Toward the end, a woman asked for his reaction to liberal Fox commentator Alan Colmes, who earlier that day had criticized the way Santorum and his wife handled the death of their infant son Gabriel in 1996. “Get a load of some of the crazy things [Santorum has] said and done,” Colmes said. “Like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after childbirth home.”

The essence of what Colmes said was true. After Karen miscarried, the couple refused to let the morgue claim Gabriel’s corpse, slept with the body between them that night in the hospital, and then took him back to their house the next day. Santorum recounted this story at the Pizza Ranch, choking up as he did, explaining that “we brought [the body] home so our children could see him”; that it was important for them to “know they had a brother.”

Standing a few feet from her husband, Karen began to weep. “This is just so inappropriate,” she blurted out. Santorum held back his own tears, building to a ringing chastisement of Colmes. “To some who don’t recognize the dignity of all human life,” he said, “recognizing the humanity of your son is somehow weird, somehow odd, and should be subject to ridicule.”


Even observers with no sympathy for the Santorums’ ardent pro-life views or how they chose to process their grief were struck by his sincerity and depth of feeling—a humanity that was central to Santorum’s appeal on the eve of the caucuses.

That night, the story of Santorum’s Pizza Ranch moment received wide coverage on local news. The possibility that he might steal the caucuses was
growing with each passing hour. Ten days earlier, Santorum had been reckoning with the prospect that his candidacy might soon be kaput. Now he thought,
In twenty-four hours, I may be giving the most important speech of my life.

•   •   •

R
OMNEY GREETED THE MORNING
of the caucuses at peace with that potential outcome—and everything else about Iowa. In the final days before the voting, Mitt had reverted to his preferred form: floating above the fray and training his fire on Obama. The speech in which he presented his closing argument sounded more like a general election address. He had stopped attacking Gingrich entirely. No need to kick a man already lying crumpled on the ground.

In a holding room at a Des Moines hotel as he waited to do a TV interview, Romney leaned back in his chair and reflected on how different the caucuses were for him this time than the last.
All that money, time, and effort in 2008—and for what?
he thought.
Heartbreak
. A loss that left him referring to Iowa as “the La Brea Tar Pits of politics.”

But now he had changed his tune.
The people know me better, I know them better, and we played the thing so much smarter,
he mused.
No matter what happens tonight, there’s one thing I know: that it won’t lead to my extinction.

Of course Romney wanted the victory. Of course he wanted to slay the dragon. But in a way, he had already won. His late headlong leap into Iowa had been designed to thwart Gingrich and put down Perry, and both were accomplished. A victory by Santorum, on the other hand, would be nearly meaningless. Santorum had no money, no organization outside the Hawkeye State, no national profile. As for Ron Paul, his radical libertarianism, out-front isolationism, and just plain kookiness—from his abhorrence of paper money to his ties to the John Birch Society—made him more likely to end up on a park bench feeding stale bread to the squirrels than become the Republican nominee.

Gingrich was a few blocks away doing an interview of his own on CBS News’s
The Early Show.
His last comment in Marshalltown the day before
had been intended to provoke a follow-up. He was aching to be asked point-blank if he considered Romney—not his surrogates, not his allies, not the people behind Restore, but Romney himself—a falsifier, a prevaricator, a dissimulator. Now, anchor Norah O’Donnell obliged him.

“You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this super PAC,” O’Donnell said. “I have to ask you: Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

“Yes,” Gingrich replied without hesitation or emotion.

“You’re calling Mitt Romney a liar?”

“You seem shocked by it,” Gingrich said, and then repeated calmly, “Yes.”

What followed was an extraordinary anti-Romney screed, focused on Mitt’s unsuitability for the Republican Party of 2012. “He’s not telling the American people the truth,” Gingrich said. “Here’s a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in Romneycare, puts Planned Parenthood in Romneycare, raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he’s magically a conservative.”

There was no suspense for Gingrich that night when the caucus results began rolling in around seven o’clock. His fourth-place finish was quickly set in stone. He wondered if he should simply skip New Hampshire and fly directly to South Carolina. His advisers told him he couldn’t do it—he had to get to the Granite State. That’s where the media will be, his pollster Conway said, and you need them for oxygen.

Bachmann’s fate was sealed early, too: she came in last. Five months after her straw poll coup, she had picked up only an additional thousand votes. Sitting in her campaign bus, in the same seat where she cried with joy in August, she now sobbed over her drubbing. “God, I’m a loser,” Bachmann said. “God, I turn people off.” With two debates ahead in New Hampshire, some of her advisers thought she should consider staying in the race. Bachmann wanted no part of it. Let’s draft a withdrawal speech for tomorrow, she said.

Perry was leaning the same way. In his suite in the Sheraton West Des Moines, around eight o’clock, he learned that he would likely finish fifth. He still had $4 million in the bank, but that seemed immaterial. I think this is
Romney’s race to lose now, Perry said to Allbaugh, Sullivan, and his son, Griffin. Perry’s advisers exited the room thinking it was over, though in his concession speech he left a little wiggle room: “I’ve decided to return to Texas to assess the results of tonight’s caucuses and determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race,” Perry said.

Romney, Santorum, and their teams were living in an orthogonal reality—smack in the heat of the tightest nip-and-tuck tussle for first place in Iowa caucus history. In the jam-packed Romney boiler room in the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Mitt paced back and forth as the results came in by phone from the caucus sites. He and Santorum each had approximately 25 percent, but the lead kept seesawing. 10:38 p.m.: Santorum up by thirteen votes (out of some sixty thousand cast). 10:45: Romney up by eighty-five. 11:12: Santorum up by twenty-eight.

“This is ridiculous!” Romney said, and burst out laughing.

Santorum and his shoestring operation were at the Stoney Creek Inn, in Johnston, just outside Des Moines. They had no field team, no real war room; they were getting their information from CNN and Fox. Like Romney, Santorum was cackling as he watched the advantage bounce back and forth, partly out of pure elation: he had taken on the party’s most likely nominee and come away with a virtual tie at worst.

The question was when to take the stage. Around 11:00 p.m., Santorum overheard one of the Fox talking heads say, If I were Rick Santorum, I’d get out there and declare victory—now.

And so Santorum did. Ditching the sweater-vest that had fast become his trademark, he took the podium and spoke with neither a teleprompter nor a full text—just a set of bullet points. As an introduction to a national audience, the address could scarcely have been more poised or savvy, with its emphasis on biography, family, and principle, its invocation of Santorum’s blue-collar immigrant roots and his ancestors’ coal-mining past. And it contained one indelible stanza: “I’ll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin, and all I could do at eye level was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was:
Those hands dug freedom for me.
”

Stevens had stayed up most of the previous night writing a speech
for Romney. But after he and Mitt saw Santorum speaking without a prompter, they ditched the text in favor of Romney’s standard stump speech—including a recitation of bits of “America the Beautiful” and accompanying textual commentary. (“‘O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life,’” Romney said. “Do we have any veterans in the room tonight?”) Even his staunchest allies considered the effort stilted, and somewhat embarrassing.

When Romney returned to his suite, the race was still too close to call. But just before 1:00 a.m., his political director, Rich Beeson, concluded that Mitt was going to lose—by six votes. Romney’s top advance man, Will Ritter, called the candidate’s cell phone and told him he had lost. Beeson headed to his hotel room; he had an early flight to catch. When he got there, just after 2:00 a.m., his phone rang. Rhoades was on the line.