Romney assured voters that he would “serve no one religion” and would “serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.” He emphasized repeatedly that his candidacy should be seen as evidence of the nation’s belief in religious liberty. “There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.”
As he closed his speech, he concluded with the story of how Boston’s Samuel Adams had been at a meeting of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774 when there was disagreement among members of different faiths about whether to say a prayer. As Romney told the story, Adams rose to say that “he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot. And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation.”
At that, the audience at the presidential library rose to its feet, applauding loudly, even though the speech was not finished. Romney looked pleased, and his aides afterward said they had never heard him speak with such passion. The reviews were good. Glenn Beck, who was then a host at CNN (and is himself a Mormon) told the nationwide audience that Romney had hit a “home run.” But the glow did not last long, at least not in Iowa, where a candidate’s views on religion are so important. A few days after Romney’s speech, The New York Times published an article that described an upcoming magazine story on Huckabee. At one point in an interview with the Times writer, Huckabee seemed to go out of his way to stoke questions about Romney’s religion. “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” he asked. The newspaper, in reporting Huckabee’s rhetorical question, said that the authoritative Encyclopedia of Mormonism referred to Jesus as the son of God and Satan as a fallen angel, not “as brothers.”
Romney was outraged by Huckabee’s comment and sought to turn it to his advantage. “I think attacking someone’s religion is really going too far. It’s just not the American way, and I think people will reject that,” Romney said. But Huckabee was the man of the moment. Though Romney’s speech was generally well received, it had been delivered when Huckabee was rising in the polls. A withering dispute continued within Romney’s campaign about how to respond to the Huckabee threat. Castellanos, the leader of Romney’s original media team, urged a strong attack on Huckabee. A raft of opposition research—“oppo” in campaign lingo—had been prepared. One file detailed Huckabee’s support for raising taxes. Another bulged with documents about Huckabee’s support as Arkansas governor for paroling a convicted rapist. After a parole board had released the rapist, he had raped and murdered a woman and been convicted in 2003.
As Castellanos made his case to go on the attack, a member of Romney’s second media team, Stuart Stevens, played down Huckabee’s importance. “Why the sudden focus on Huckabee?” Stevens wrote to Castellanos and other campaign officials in an October 23, 2007, e-mail. “Is there any reason to believe everything has changed from a week ago or two weeks ago, when we got our data. We are reacting as if there was some new development in the race. . . . Let’s don’t suddenly get in the mindset that our Iowa mission is to kill Huckabee.”
But that was the mind-set of Castellanos, who had been through many campaigns that had risen or fallen on such decisions. He ordered the production of an ad that attacked Huckabee’s parole record. It was envisioned as one of the most powerful spots of the campaign, a more empathetic version of the infamous “Willie Horton” ad that had helped sink the 1988 presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Instead of using a heavy-handed narrator, Castellanos and his team tracked down and filmed the mother of a woman murdered by a convicted rapist who had been released during the Huckabee administration. The ad showed the mother holding her daughter’s locket and accusing Huckabee of having supported the rapist’s release. The emotional words of the mother were accompanied by a frame that said, “Mike Huckabee granted 1,033 pardons and commutations.”
Other Romney advisers feared that running the ad would backfire. It elevated Huckabee’s importance in the race and might turn off some voters, they argued. The final decision was left to Romney. Concerned that the attack would seem desperate and create sympathy for Huckabee, he killed the ad. Instead, the Romney campaign aired what it considered a “soft” spot. Titled “Choice: The Record,” it began by comparing Romney and Huckabee favorably, praising them as “two former governors, two good family men, both prolife, both support a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage.” The difference, according to the ad, was that Romney had cracked down on illegal immigrants (a claim undercut by a report that he had hired a landscape firm that employed illegal immigrants) while Huckabee supported more lenient immigrant policies. The ad infuriated some Romney advisers, who considered it only a glancing blow at Huckabee and a questionable one at that.
By the time the Iowa campaign was over, Romney would spend nearly $10 million, much of it on ads and microtargeting. That is a stunning amount for Iowa and about ten times what Huckabee wound up spending. It greatly diminished the resources available for fights to come, especially in South Carolina and Florida. The financial advantage was so overwhelming that Huckabee was initially given little chance to win. Indeed, a Huckabee aide said the campaign was so short of cash that it couldn’t afford the $30,000 cost of buying a state Republican Party list of people who had voted in the previous caucuses, the bare minimum information needed by most campaigns. But Huckabee had an unexpected ally. A Colorado-based political consultant named Patrick Davis, who would not set foot in Iowa during the campaign, orchestrated an independent $1 million effort designed to boost Huckabee and hurt Romney. Davis, who had been a political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, believed that Romney’s flip-flop on abortion disqualified him. He set up a telephone operation to conduct what was called a “political survey.” The operation was massive, with calls to 850,000 Iowa households—twice—in the days before the caucuses. The survey was known in the political business as a “push poll,” in which questions are designed to influence opinion, not just gauge it.
One question went like this: “Does the fact that of the leading five candidates for president, only Governor Huckabee has always been pro-life and made protecting the lives of the unborn and the vulnerable in our society a top priority throughout his public life make you want to learn more about Governor Huckabee?” After the “survey” was finished, the listener was told that more information was available at “TrustHuckabee.com.” The Romney campaign was outraged but could do nothing to stop the calls. Inside the Romney campaign, meanwhile, there was frustration that no similar independent group was stepping up to promote Romney. “We were waiting for some kind of help from somebody, and it never seemed to arrive,” said Brian Kennedy, Iowa’s former Republican Party chairman, who oversaw Romney’s campaign in the eastern part of the state.
Romney’s troubles in Iowa were having potentially disastrous repercussions in New Hampshire. Romney raced back to the Granite State, where his campaign’s overconfidence was looking increasingly ill founded. Romney’s latest strategy was to blast McCain for supporting an immigration bill that Romney said would let “everybody who came here illegally . . . stay forever.” But Romney was under attack by two of the state’s most important newspapers. The Concord Monitor, which had a more liberal bent, ran an editorial calling Romney a “phony” and urging voters to back someone else. Though Romney’s campaign dismissed the Monitor’s editorial policy as liberal, it was unprepared for the endorsement of McCain by the influential and reliably conservative Union Leader, which blasted what it called Romney’s untrue attacks on the Arizonan’s record.
McCain promptly authorized a devastating ad that cited the Monitor’s characterization of Romney as a “phony”
and quoted from a Union Leader editorial that said, “Granite Staters want a candidate who will look them in the eye and tell them the truth. John McCain has done that. . . . Mitt Romney has not.” Romney seemed rattled. The former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, the owner of a New Hampshire lakefront home, was in danger of losing everything on what should have been home turf. McCain could not resist sending a zinger Romney’s way. “I know something about tailspins,” the former Navy pilot said, “and it’s pretty clear Mitt Romney is in one.”
Romney could stay in New Hampshire no longer. His campaign in Iowa seemed to be imploding, even as his staff remained publicly optimistic, convinced that the “metrics” predicted a victory. They were openly dismissive of Huckabee and his organization. A few days before the Iowa caucuses, a writer for the conservative National Review—which had given Romney its valuable endorsement—asked Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom to assess the contest.
“We’re going up against a loose confederation of fair taxers, and home schoolers, and Bible study members, and so this will be a test to see who can generate the most bodies on caucus day,” Fehrnstrom responded.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those groups?” the National Review writer asked.
“Not that there’s anything wrong, but that’s just a fact,” Fehrnstrom replied. “That’s just where he has found his support. I have a theory about why Mike Huckabee holds public events in Iowa like getting a haircut or going jogging, or actually leaving Iowa and going to California to appear on the Jay Leno show. It’s because he doesn’t have the infrastructure to plan events for him. And when he does do events in Iowa, he goes to the Pizza Ranch, where you have a built-in crowd, so you don’t have to make calls to turn people out. We’re very proud of the organization we have built in Iowa.” Huckabee’s national campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, was as bemused as he was angered. “Eric’s quote just shows the disrespect they had for us,” Saltsman said. But Saltsman was happy to have his candidate underestimated.
On January 3, 2008, the day of the Iowa caucuses, Romney’s campaign aides had a target that they believed would bring them victory: 25,000 votes. They were initially overjoyed as it became clear that they would exceed the goal, eventually garnering 30,021. But as the evening wore on, the Romney team’s confidence—some would call it hubris—proved to be misplaced. The overall turnout far exceeded their estimates, and Huckabee wound up with 40,954 votes, vastly outdistancing Romney.
Richard Schwarm, the former Iowa Republican Party chairman and senior adviser to the Romney campaign, was convinced that anti-Mormonism had played a major role in Romney’s defeat. “There are a lot of Iowans who view themselves as not bigoted but just don’t believe that Mormon is a Christian religion,” Schwarm said. “Or worse, I heard lots of times, ‘I’m not a bigot, but my aunt and sister are.’ ” Myers said anti-Mormonism in Iowa “was a major issue” and that—despite warnings from the campaign’s Iowa team—she hadn’t initially realized what a big role evangelicals would play. Had she understood the extent of their influence, she said, Romney would have deemphasized the state. “If we had known that there would have been 110,000 caucus goers, with a majority of those being evangelical Christians, I would have thought that would have been a tough situation for Mitt to win.” (The actual Republican turnout was 119,188.)
It was a remarkable statement. Evangelical power had long been the story of the Iowa caucuses. How could Romney, the man with a passion for data and details, have so underestimated it? More amazing, how could his Boston political team? In short, Romney’s Iowa strategy had been a disaster. Instead of coming into New Hampshire with unstoppable momentum, he was struggling to keep his candidacy alive. Still, some of the fundamentals seemed good: he was well known throughout the state, had a home there, and faced few questions about his religion. But the campaign had failed to heed the advice of some of its staff in New Hampshire, and now the state seemed to be slipping from Romney’s grasp.
Weeks before the New Hampshire primary, U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, Romney’s national cochairman, had traveled to Boston for a briefing at campaign headquarters. Settling into a seat in a conference room, Gregg listened to Romney’s advisers describe how easily the candidate was going to win the New Hampshire primary and the nomination. Gregg was shocked. From his years of experience, he knew all too well how a candidate could gain or lose twenty polling points in New Hampshire in a matter of days, earthquake-type shifts that depended on momentum and emotion. Yet here were Romney’s aides, with their quantitative analysis and polling charts—the “quant,” as Gregg called it—insisting that the nomination was all but sealed. “The pollsters were absolutely sure Romney would be the next president of the United States. I thought it was an absurdly ‘quantish’ view of the campaign,” Gregg said. “I can just remember walking out of the room shaking my head.” He felt out of sync with the campaign of which he was national cochairman. He appeared at some events and sometimes introduced Romney, but he was otherwise mostly shut out of the decision making. The Romney campaign “didn’t want me or my organization to do anything,” and, he said, he didn’t try to push his way into the inner circle. Asked why a campaign wouldn’t take advantage of one of the most experienced political operations in New Hampshire, Gregg responded with a single word: “Ego.” He explained, “In these campaigns, people tend to be very resistant to outsiders. So my decision was not to get involved in how to run their campaign because they didn’t appear to want to know.”
Bruce Keough, the chairman of Romney’s New Hampshire campaign who had been wooed so strongly by the candidate at a North End restaurant, decided on a far more aggressive approach. For months, he had been frustrated that the Boston team wasn’t listening to concerns raised by him and others who knew best what was happening on the ground. The campaign held conference calls with staff in the key states, but they were mostly one-sided, he said, with Romney aides providing a briefing on their latest plans. Moreover, after having been courted strongly by Romney, Keough had had little chance for interaction with the candidate. Throughout the entire New Hampshire campaign, he said, he’d had only two brief opportunities to ride with Romney in his car as he traveled across New Hampshire. He said Romney preferred to travel with only an aide, press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom. “His preference in traveling between events in New Hampshire was to be alone with Eric in the car and not use those gaps in his schedule as opportunity” to learn what was happening in the state, “and I thought it was curious,” Keough said. He was frustrated that Romney didn’t apply “the old adage about management by walking around. If you want to know how things are going on the factory floor, go talk to the factory workers.” Keough fired off a memo to Myers and Bob White, Romney’s close friend and associate from Bain Capital. He recapped the problems with the campaign and argued that Romney had to hammer away at a message of fiscal discipline. He never learned if Romney had seen the memo.
Romney was careening in the wrong direction and time was running short. A campaign memo had warned the candidate that the early primaries would be a “rocket sled process, 2 1/2 weeks, little time for adjustments.” Usually, there had been at least a week between voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. This time there were only five days.
Huckabee now posed a real challenge on Romney’s right. Not only had the Romney campaign failed to anticipate Huckabee’s strength in Iowa, but it also hadn’t thought he would go all-out in New Hampshire. Myers later said she had thought Huckabee would skip New Hampshire—where social conservatives are not nearly as important as in many other states—and go directly to South Carolina, which held the South’s first primary. “I was surprised [Huckabee] went to New Hampshire.” But Huckabee’s ascent prompted his campaign chairman, Ed Rollins, to fly into New Hampshire, three weeks before Huckabee won Iowa, making it clear that his candidate would campaign across the Granite State. “We are going to be full bore here,” he said in Concord, the state capital.
Worse, Romney faced new trouble o
n the left. The Romney campaign plan had counted on McCain and Giuliani splitting the moderate vote. But Giuliani was waging a surprisingly poor campaign. Never popular with the party’s conservative wing, which disapproved of his stance in favor of abortion rights, Giuliani was having trouble gaining support when a series of reports hurt his image among voters. Stories surfaced that the former New York City mayor had billed the city for a security detail at times when he was visiting a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Around the same time, his former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani had recommended as the secretary of homeland security, was indicted on tax-related federal charges.
Wayne Semprini, the chairman of Giuliani’s New Hampshire campaign, had believed the state was tailor-made for his candidate. Voters weren’t fazed by Giuliani’s support of abortion rights and liked his position as a fiscal conservative and strong leader. At the beginning of the campaign, Semprini, the former chairman of the state’s Republican Party, had mapped out an ambitious advertising budget for Giuliani, convinced that the former New York City mayor could win the state and use it as a launching pad to victory. Now Semprini wanted to make his move. As he drove in a campaign car with Giuliani, he told the candidate that the time had come to make a major television advertising push in New Hampshire. Giuliani picked up his cell phone and, as Semprini recalled it, ordered an aide at New York headquarters to start running the ads. Semprini was thrilled. But the expected ad blitz never came. Semprini was later told by a Giuliani aide that the campaign didn’t have the money; that was why Giuliani was spending so little time in New Hampshire and so much time running around the country raising funds.
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