Double Down: Game Change 2012 (39 page)

“Do you believe in miracles?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Beeson asked.

“We won!” Rhoades exulted.

Beeson called Romney with the good news. “Great—on to New Hampshire!” Romney said.

The Iowa Republican Party had no comprehensible explanation for the discovery of late ballots that turned a narrow loss for Romney into an eight-vote victory. If the members of Santorum’s team hadn’t been so tired, giddy, and ill-equipped, they would have challenged the result on the spot. But Santorum himself believed that, in the end, it wouldn’t matter. Whether he prevailed by six votes or lost by eight was immaterial. He was the night’s big winner, and he was sure the press would cover it that way.
By God!
thought Santorum.
We spent no money! We had no money! But we dueled Romney, with millions behind him, to a draw. Talk about a miracle story!

As Romney set off for New Hampshire the next morning, his ostensible triumph seemed equally total to him. Bachmann was gone. Perry would soon be gone. Gingrich had been crippled. The other caucus prizewinners, Santorum and Paul, were profoundly flawed. Restore had played precisely the role that Romney and his people had designed it to. And Mitt had put to rest the Iowan ghosts of 2008. The state he once thought of as a tar pit had been transformed into a springboard.

But in the Iowa cornfields Romney had also planted seeds that would sprout in unfortunate ways. He had taken positions—on immigration, on the Ryan plan—that had the Obamans gleeful. In allowing Santorum to rise and dismissing his future viability, Boston had underestimated his potential appeal as the conservative alternative to Mitt. And then there was Gingrich.

From the start, Newt had believed that South Carolina was the place where he would make his stand. His cremation by Restore had roused a powerful financial force that was about to come to his aid. Most fatefully, Romney and his allies had dangerously altered Gingrich’s mental state. The New Newt might have been a teddy bear, as his friends kept saying, but now the teddy bear was angry. On arriving in New Hampshire, he informed his aides of a shift in strategy that was at once unequivocal and unrepentant: “We have to make Romney radioactive.”

12

MITT HAPPENS

R
OMNEY FLEW OUT OF DES MOINES
that Wednesday morning, January 4, arrived in Manchester before noon, and headed to a rally at a nearby high school gym. As his blue-and-white campaign bus deposited him at the entrance, Romney was bedraggled from lack of sleep but upbeat about being back on home turf. In the Granite State as in no other, he had led in the polls from the start, and by a country mile. No non-incumbent Republican had ever carried the caucuses and the first-in-the-nation primary in the same year. Now, after months of seeing his front-runner status serially usurped by Pierrots and pretenders, Mitt was poised to make history when the votes were counted six days later.

The event at Central High was designed to cement his position in the catbird seat. With Romney onstage was John McCain, there to confer his endorsement. Four years earlier, the idea of McCain standing behind Romney—unless he was preparing to slit his throat—would have seemed as likely as a terrier reciting Tennyson. And some awkwardness was still apparent. After offering his approbation of Romney, McCain couldn’t resist disgorging a morsel of sarcasm: “By the way, we forgot to congratulate [Mitt] on his landslide victory last night!”

Like most of McCain’s political judgments, his endorsement was based on a mixture of caprice, calculation, and comparative chagrin. Huntsman he disdained for his service to the president (“Why the fuck would he do that?” he asked Weaver) and going soft on Afghanistan. Newt he detested for being “a moron.” Santorum he despised not only for backing Romney in 2008 but also for recording robocalls that ripped McCain for lacking presidential “temperament.” All of which left Mitt, among the extant options, on the bottom rung of McCain’s pecking order of pique. And Romney alone had a prayer of beating Obama—who was, of course, at the top.

Still, the strangeness of the situation wasn’t lost on either man. Afterwards, on Romney’s bus, McCain cracked wise about it. “The choice in the Republican Party has come down to the dog-on-roof guy or the man-on-dog guy?” he said. “I’m with the dog-on-roof guy.”

Romney spent the next twenty-four hours with McCain, traipsing with him from Manchester to Peterborough to Salem, agog at his inability to complete three sentences without dropping an f-bomb. (Romney employed prim substitutes for profanities: “blooming” for “fucking,” “grunt” for “shit.”)

The oddity of their coupling notwithstanding, Romney took comfort in having the 2000 and 2008 New Hampshire winner at his side. Since his final push in Iowa, Romney had been working his worry beads over how a victory there might come back to bite him in the next contest. He recalled a theory his Granite State guru, Tom Rath, had propounded: that Live Free or Die voters were congenitally incapable of rubber-stamping the results of the caucuses. Romney would never forget the way Obama had come flying out of Iowa four years earlier, only to be greeted by an extended middle finger in New Hampshire, as the state simultaneously flipped the bird to Mitt.

To the extent that his nervousness had a tangible focus, it was Huntsman. After months of camping out in the Granite State, the Utahan’s poll numbers had ticked up into double digits, though he remained twenty points off the lead. Stevens kept telling his candidate to ignore Huntsman. But Romney, having restrained himself for months, was itching to pop his Mormon rival in the puss.

The opportunity presented itself that Saturday night, in a debate at Saint Anselm College, outside Manchester, when Huntsman scolded Romney for being jejune about China.

“I’m sorry, Governor,” Romney shot back. “You were, the last two years, implementing the policies of this administration in China. The rest of us on this stage were doing our best to get Republicans elected across the country and stop the policies of this president from being put forward.”

Huntsman’s retort was literally incomprehensible: he gibbered something in Mandarin.

After the debate, Huntsman’s aides were beside themselves, and this time the candidate was, too. Stung by McCain’s endorsement of Romney—which, given Huntsman’s abandonment of Mitt for Mac in 2006, struck Jon as a piquant betrayal—he retreated to his hotel and engaged in a fit of full-bodied self-flagellation. By a quirk of the schedule, the candidates would meet again for a debate the next morning in Concord. Huntsman’s wife and daughters, along with his advisers, all agreed: for the sake of his dignity, if nothing else, Huntsman needed to come out swinging.

The next morning, Stevens warned Romney, “He’s gonna come after you,” and Huntsman did. “I was criticized last night by Governor Romney,” Jon said. “While he was out raising money, [I was] serving my country—yes, under a Democrat, like my two sons are doing in the United States Navy. They’re not asking what political affiliation the president is. I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and this country: I will always put my country first.”

For Huntsman and his team, the moment represented the high point of his campaign: a flash of principle and a flogging of Mitt, with McCain’s 2008 campaign slogan thrown in for added oomph. When the debate was over, Stevens reminded Romney, “I
told you
he was gonna come after you.”

“It was worth it,” Mitt merrily replied.

Less easily laughed off was a line of attack pushed by Gingrich in the debates that weekend, assaulting Romney’s record in private equity. The former speaker had taken a glancing swipe at Mitt’s Bain background a few weeks earlier, then let the matter lie. But now came news that the billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson had written a $5 million check to the pro-Newt super PAC Winning Our Future, which had just bought the rights to
a twenty-eight-minute video,
King of Bain:
When Mitt Romney Came to Town,
and reserved half-hour blocks of airtime to run it in South Carolina.

Gingrich didn’t distance himself from the charges in the video, which depicted Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider. Instead, over the next forty-eight hours, he amplified them as if through a bullhorn, describing Bain’s endeavors as “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” Down in South Carolina, Perry, who had surprised everyone the morning after Iowa and decided to stay in the race, chimed in on Bain—comparing firms such as Romney’s to “vultures.”

Romney had always expected to be assailed on Bain, just not so soon, and not by Republicans. Stevens was surprised, too, but not terribly concerned. History told the strategist that when incendiary issues were aired out during a nomination fight, they tended to fade away before the general election.
Think of Reverend Wright,
Stevens mused.
Think of Gennifer Flowers. Better that we go through this now against Gingrich than later against Obama.

There were other reasons for the Bain broadsides not to bother Boston. They distracted Mitt’s opponents from harping on Romneycare and presented Mitt with a chance to seize the conservative high ground. With Gingrich and Perry sounding more like Daily Kos commenters than Republicans, Romney could champion the glories of market capitalism, rallying the right (for once) to his cause.

Executing this jujitsu move required a dexterity that Romney had rarely evinced. Starting that summer, when he’d cheerfully referred to himself as “unemployed” at a Florida coffee shop and blurted out in Iowa that “corporations are people,” and continuing through his proposed $10,000 bet with Perry, the candidate had shown a propensity for faux pas when talking about money. Now, in the waning hours before the New Hampshire vote, he coughed up two more gems: his claim that, in his vaunted private sector career, “there were a couple of times I wondered whether I was gonna get a pink slip”; and his comment, in discussing the virtues of shopping around for health care purveyors, that “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”

Boston collectively blanched. Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman pounced. And yet, when the results tumbled in that Tuesday night, January 10, none
of it seemed to matter. All week long, the flashbacks from four years earlier had been vivid in Mitt’s mind: the stricken look on Ann’s face as the exit polls arrived, the sense of being kicked in the teeth by Iowa and then punched in the gut by . . . his neighbors. But not tonight. In the campaign’s war room at Southern New Hampshire University, the Romneys were as much relieved as ebullient when they learned the final tally: with 39 percent of the vote, Mitt had whipped Ron Paul by sixteen points and Huntsman by twenty-two.

For his victory speech, Romney’s advance team wanted an image of him solo in the arena, surrounded by a teeming crowd—a shot announcing,
This is over.
But Romney insisted his family join him on the podium. Flanked by Ann and his five sons, he offered his indictment of Gingrich and Perry with a clarity that eluded him in less carefully scripted settings. “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial,” Romney said. “In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

Half an hour later, Huntsman delivered his concession speech at the Black Brimmer bar, in Manchester. Since the Concord debate, Jon had been bolstered by a sense of momentum that convinced him he could finish a close second. Mary Kaye saw a promo ad on MSNBC that echoed her husband’s new “country first” message and was sure that Jon had inspired the spot. Huntsman Sr. was talking to Weaver and Davis about putting $10 million into the super PAC, though Jonny continued to resist. (In the end, the father contributed just over $2 million to Our Destiny.)

The distant third crushed the Huntsman family’s spirits; Mary Kaye and the girls were in tears. Onstage, Jon proclaimed, “I’d say third place is a ticket to ride—hello, South Carolina!” But no one believed it. When Abby Huntsman brought the New Hampshire exit polls to her father, she could tell from the look on his face that it was over. Six days later, he dropped out and anemically endorsed Mitt.