by Tim Alberta
Of this group, Gingrich was in the worst shape. He had finished a distant fourth in Iowa, taking 13 percent of the vote, while Romney, Paul, and Santorum had all finished north of 20 percent. (Santorum technically won, though Romney was announced the winner on caucus night, robbing the underdog of a major momentum boost.) Gingrich had also been blown out in New Hampshire, taking just 9 percent of the vote compared to Romney’s 39 percent.
In the modern primary system, a candidate typically needed a strong showing in one of the first two contests to raise the requisite money for his or her campaign to continue into South Carolina. But Citizens United had transformed the landscape. One donor could now single-handedly sustain a candidate with millions of dollars in super PAC spending, and Gingrich had the sweetest sugar daddy of them all: Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, whose total pro-Gingrich expenditures for the cycle would reach $20 million.2
All that money wasn’t doing Gingrich any good. His candidacy was on life support, and polls showed Romney up double digits in South Carolina. Gingrich was stumped. He had exhausted every tactic imaginable: staying positive and playing nice with his rivals; eviscerating Obama, even going so far as to call him the “food-stamp president”; and eventually, going nuclear on Romney in response to sustained attacks from the front-runner’s camp, alleging that his company, Bain Capital, consisted of “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” None of it had vaulted Gingrich into contention. And time was running out.
The two debates in South Carolina offered final gasps of oxygen before the state’s January 21 primary. The first forum, hosted by Fox News in Myrtle Beach, got off to a lousy start, as Gingrich stumbled in response to questions about abandoning his positive-campaigning pledge. And then it happened: Juan Williams, the African American moderator, started grilling Gingrich about his recent racially tinged comments, including the “food stamp president” quip. As the crowd hissed at Williams, Gingrich scolded him with a lecture on political correctness that elicited a standing ovation.
It was an uncomfortable snapshot for some in the party: an overwhelmingly white audience booing a black moderator on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a state where the Confederate flag still flew on the Capitol grounds. But for Gingrich it was a moment of clarity. Where all his calculated strategies had failed, his off-the-cuff reprimand of Williams had succeeded. Perhaps attacking Romney—or even the president, for that matter—was a waste of time. Maybe there was a greater upside in doing what came naturally to him: tormenting the fourth estate.
“The thing that struck me,” Gingrich recalls, “was what conservative audiences reacted to, even more than attacks on Obama, was attacks on the media. You could get a stronger response by taking the media head-on than you could with any other single topic.”
Sure enough, three nights later, in North Charleston, Gingrich stole the show with a similar routine. It was all too easy: CNN reporter John King opened the debate with a question about Gingrich’s ex-wife’s recent claim that he had sought an open marriage. It was like putting a beachball on a tee in front of Babe Ruth. Summoning every fiber of moral outrage, Gingrich tore into King, CNN, and the entire press corps. In a rant heard ’round South Carolina, Gingrich bellowed, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans!”
“It was an electric moment,” recalls Kevin Madden, Romney’s longtime senior adviser and communications specialist. “Literally overnight, Newt’s favorables and unfavorables flipped in our tracking. We went into those debates ten points up and came out fifteen points down.”
Republicans have a rich history of shunning the press. Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving office, ripped the “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” at Barry Goldwater’s 1964 convention, saying they “couldn’t care less about the good of our party.” Vice President Spiro Agnew ratcheted up the rhetoric on behalf of Richard Nixon, giving his famed 1969 speech in Des Moines decrying the “small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.” And, in a less conspicuous fashion, Reagan warred with the White House press corps for most his time in Washington.
Much of this amounted to “working the refs,” as a basketball coach does after a tough foul call, in the hope of avoiding the next whistle. There was an age in which the refs were perceived to be impartial: As of 1986, Gallup found that 65 percent of Americans still felt a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in the press.3 But over the ensuing three decades, as voters came to view the refs as players looking to dunk on their team, that number plummeted: By the time Trump was elected president, it was 32 percent, and just 14 percent among Republicans.4
“Taking on the media, instigating that clash of political civilizations, became Newt’s message,” Madden says. “I always believed that media bias is a fact, not a message. I don’t believe that anymore.”
Gingrich won South Carolina in a rout, taking 40 percent of the vote to Romney’s 28 percent, a result that would have been unimaginable a week earlier. By using the media as a foil, Gingrich had rallied the conservative base, shattered the establishment’s infallibility, and reset the narrative of the campaign. He had also created a blueprint.
That spring, Andrew Breitbart, the combative blogger whose website was gaining cult popularity among the anti-establishment right, died suddenly at age forty-three. This news shook the conservative movement: Breitbart had been pioneering with his vision of an alternative to what he viewed as a biased mainstream media. Upon his death, the leadership of Breitbart’s burgeoning empire was assumed by a little-known investment banker with nationalist views and a disdain for the GOP elite. His name was Steve Bannon.
SOUTH CAROLINA WAS SIGNIFICANT LESS BECAUSE IT WAS GINGRICH’S last stand and more because it represented Romney’s chance to effectively put away the nomination—and he whiffed.
On paper, there was no reason for a protracted primary. Romney had the biggest bank account, the best campaign infrastructure, the most support from party elders. Sure, he struggled with his aloof image, worsened by his boast that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs” and by his telling a crowd in New Hampshire, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”5 Then again, his rivals had the sum emotional connection of a late-night infomercial. Gingrich’s ego was surpassed only by his insincerity—he railed against “elites” while being chauffeured between mansions and green rooms. Santorum was so lacking in warmth that his sweater vest became the campaign’s spiritual avatar. And Paul, on his best day, was charming in the mold of an aging, disheveled uncle who mutters to himself at holiday gatherings.
For all Romney’s flaws, no Republican was equipped to exploit them; they all lacked some combination of money, organization, broad appeal, and political chops. The question was never whether Romney would win the nomination, but how long it would take, and what it would cost him.
Romney recouped his momentum after South Carolina by winning easily in both Florida and Nevada, appearing once more to be the inevitable nominee. But then Santorum, having established himself as the last man standing against the front-runner, swept all three states voting on February 7, Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri. The result was to stunt Romney’s coronation while highlighting his emerging weakness with blue-collar voters in middle America.
Ultimately, Romney’s money and manpower were still the difference. As the campaign became a slog, his rivals were exposed as organizationally incompetent. Santorum failed to file complete delegate slates in numerous contests, rendering the vote totals somewhat irrelevant; more embarrassingly, neither he nor Gingrich qualified for the Virginia ballot on Super Tuesday. With competition like this—in the contest to lead the free world, no less—Romney couldn’t help but finally pull away. On April 25, after a bruising, four-month-long primary, the RNC declared him the party’s presumptive nominee.
Hindsight suggests that however unimpressive on the surface, Ro
mney deserves real credit for his victory. At a time when conservative authenticity had become the currency of a party dominated by evangelical Christians and increasingly populated by working-class whites, Republicans nominated a moderate Mormon with three political reincarnations—one for each vacation home. In the truest sense, Romney was a statesman picked to lead a populist crusade.
For this triumph, he owed a debt of thanks to one man in particular: Donald Trump.
Cable news shows spent much of 2011 speculating, often salivating, over the notion of Trump running for president, and he regularly took advantage of their platforms to critique potential rivals. His favorite target was Romney, whom he derisively labeled “a small businessman,” and his favorite venue was Fox News, specifically the Fox and Friends morning show, on which he made a weekly Monday appearance. As Trump grew more hostile, Romney’s team was split over a possible response. Some wanted him to strike back to prove his toughness, while others thought he should ignore Trump, fearing a pissing match that could not possibly be won.
Trump could sink Romney three different ways: by endorsing someone else, by entering the primary himself, or by running as an independent. None was far-fetched: Trump had, in the summer of 2011, staged a publicity stunt by taking Sarah Palin out for pizza in New York, and was intrigued at the opportunity of tapping into the populist streak she had exposed in 2008. “She’s a very good woman, and what they did to her was terrible,” Trump recalls. “Working people were angry at McCain, at the McCain campaign, because of what they did to her. She gave that really weak campaign a tremendous, positive jolt of energy, but [they] stripped her of her tremendous assets, her tremendous personality. She had this great vibrancy and they wanted to take it all away.”
Romney’s brain trust determined that Trump needed to be engaged—but not provoked.
Just as the primary voting was getting under way, Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, traveled to Manhattan for a meeting with Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and “fixer.” Inside a conference room at Trump Tower, Cohen probed with concerns about Romney’s viability. Rhoades, in turn, made the case for his boss as the surest bet to beat Obama, and pressed for a meeting between Trump and Romney. This dance went on until Cohen was suddenly interrupted by a voice crackling over a speakerphone on the table. It was Trump. He had been listening in the entire time, and was now agreeing to meet with Romney.
The two men soon found themselves standing together on a small stage in Las Vegas—Romney with a nervous smile next to his red-in-the-cheeks wife, Trump at the podium endorsing him. “Mitt is tough, he’s smart, he’s sharp, he’s not going to allow bad things to continue to happen to this country that we all love,” Trump said. After a firm handshake, Romney stepped to the podium and announced, “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life. This is one of them.”
It was February 2, Groundhog Day, but nobody had seen anything like this from Romney. He was “Massachusetts Mitt,” a social liberal, when he ran for Senate in 1994; he was “the conservative’s conservative” when he ran for president in 2008; now, having rebranded himself again for 2012, the somber, centrist, establishment-backed Romney was kissing the ring of a carnival barker whose claim to political fame was lying about the president’s birthplace.
All these tortuous developments in the Republican primary—Romney’s determination to neutralize Trump, his failure to finish off Gingrich in South Carolina, his struggle to put away Santorum thereafter—were indicative of a basic vulnerability: Conservatives did not like or trust the party’s nominee.
IN THE FALL OF 2011, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL tournament tipped off, David McIntosh had taken on a new client with a most unusual request.
McIntosh, the former Indiana congressman and cofounder of the Federalist Society, the powerful club of Republican attorneys, had long been a kingpin inside the conservative movement. But nothing had prepared him for this. His client, a major conservative donor, represented a larger group of major conservative donors, and they were prepared to pool their resources to attract a viable challenge to Romney for the GOP nomination. What they needed from McIntosh was a comprehensive analysis of the potential candidates and their records: fund-raising abilities, electoral wins and losses, political strengths and weaknesses, and ideological convictions. Once the dossier was completed, the donors would evaluate the prospects and determine whether any of them was worth recruiting into the race.
“The theory was, even at that late stage, if we could find someone and fund their Iowa and New Hampshire operations on the ground, that would propel them to the nomination,” McIntosh says.
The appraisal yielded three distinct conclusions. The first was that the most attractive prospect, Marco Rubio, was too inexperienced—and indeed, he had already ruled out running in 2012. The second was that the most accomplished prospect, Chris Christie, was too moderate for many of the donors. The third was that one man, and one man only, met all the group’s criteria: Mike Pence.
They weren’t so much drawn to Pence’s pious traditionalism. Many of the donors, in fact, were libertarian-minded affiliates of the Koch brothers’ network; Romney’s vacillations on social issues were the least of their worries. The two major concerns were taxes and entitlements: Romney had hiked tax revenues in Massachusetts (by levying fees and closing loopholes) while implementing a health care system that added significantly to the state’s mandatory spending. These were philosophical red flags for the donors, who worried that such heresies reflected a worldview that could lead Romney to decisions even more catastrophic—such as appointing another moderate, à la David Souter, to the Supreme Court.
There were no such doubts about Pence. A fixture of the conservative movement—his soft smile and helmet of prematurely white hair recognizable all about town—the congressman was a consistent voice on every issue, one of the few lonely Republicans who had pushed back against the Bush administration’s excesses. With the possible exception of his best friend in the chamber, Arizona congressman Jeff Flake, Pence was the most reliable conservative in the House of Representatives.
McIntosh was struck by the serendipity of the donors’ choice. Pence had succeeded him in Congress a decade earlier; the pair went all the way back to Pence’s days as a NASCAR-loving, Bill Clinton-bashing radio host in Indianapolis.
There was just one problem: He was already running for governor of Indiana.
Pence had long harbored visions of sitting behind the Resolute desk. After failing in his first two bids for Congress, in 1988 and 1990—the latter loss was defined by his TV advertisement featuring an Arab-dressed actor, speaking in a thick Middle Eastern accent, thanking Pence’s opponent for America’s dependence on foreign oil—he had stepped back to reassess. He took over as president of a small free-market think tank in Indiana. He penned an essay, “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” apologizing for his tactics and vowing never to use them again. When Pence finally succeeded, winning the race to replace McIntosh a decade later, he felt it was the fulfilment of God’s plan for his life. He had humbled himself, repented, and was being rewarded. Emerging as a star conservative in the House of Representatives, Pence looked for the next phase of the plan. He suspected it might just include serving as president. But as he surveyed his confidants in early 2011, they all advised against a run. House members don’t get elected president, they told him. Go home and be a governor.
Having heeded that advice, Pence was in the driver’s seat to be elected Indiana’s chief executive. But he was nonetheless captivated by McIntosh’s pitch, listening intently to the recruitment effort and chewing it over with his wife, Karen. Ultimately, the timing just wasn’t right. He would focus on the governor’s race, he told McIntosh, and keep an eye toward 2016 if the Republican nominee failed to defeat Obama in 2012.
With Pence out and the primary season drawing closer, McIntosh’s client scrapped the project. It was too much money to risk throwing behind just anyone on such short
notice. The ensuing split among donors would reflect the divides across the Republican financial universe: Many went to Romney, eager to curry favor with the likely nominee; others picked a rival horse, determined to deny Romney the nomination; and a few stayed on the sidelines altogether, waiting to see not whether Romney could win the primary, but whether he would choose a running mate who compensated for some of his limitations.
Naturally, those limitations weren’t limited to taxes and entitlements.
EVEN WHEN ROMNEY WAS LAURA INGRAHAM’S PET CONSERVATIVE IN 2008, his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was the subject of a nasty dog-whistling movement on the right. Socially conservative Americans, particularly those belonging to evangelical churches, had for generations been steeped in the belief that Mormonism is a wicked perversion of traditional Christian doctrine. Even for nonbelievers, the LDS church has been synonymous with an alien community; in 2011 it would become something of a cultural punch line thanks to the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon, a foulmouthed tale of two missionaries attempting to proselytize an African village.
In 2008, Romney felt compelled to give a speech on his faith to defuse the antagonism his campaign was eliciting, particularly from voters in southern and midwestern states. But it didn’t stop the whisper campaign. And some critics didn’t bother whispering.
Robert Jeffress, the prominent pastor of a Dallas megachurch, denounced Romney’s religion as a “cult”6 and implored evangelicals to oppose him. During an organized debate with Christian attorney (and Romney supporter) Jay Sekulow, Jeffress addressed “the hypocrisy” of church leaders who “for the last eight years of the Bush administration have been telling us how important it is to have an evangelical Christian in office who reads his Bible every day. And now suddenly these same leaders are telling us that a candidate’s faith really isn’t that important.” Jeffress added: “My fear is such a sudden U-turn is going to give people a case of voter whiplash. I think people have to decide, and Christian leaders have to decide once and for all, whether a candidate’s faith is really important.”7