by Balz, Dan
His surprise success brought predictable scrutiny, which he did not handle well. At a debate in Las Vegas in early October, his rivals pummeled him over his tax plan. Rick Santorum said it would mean higher taxes for 84 percent of Americans. Perry said it wouldn’t fly in the states because it created a new tax. Cain said his opponents were mixing apples and oranges—state and federal tax systems. Romney said apples and oranges would be in the same bucket—all taxable. CNN host Anderson Cooper turned to Newt Gingrich. “Speaker Gingrich,” he said, “you have said in recent days that Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would be a harder sell than he lets on. How so?” Gingrich replied, “Well, you just watched it.”
Weeks later Cain was interviewed on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly and ended up in a verbal joust with the host over his views on Iraq and Iran. O’Reilly challenged Cain over his proposal to put more Aegis warships in the Persian Gulf, which the host suggested would provoke a response by the Iranians. “That would be perfectly all right,” Cain said, “because I believe we have a superior capability.” Do you really want a shooting war? O’Reilly asked, incredulous. “Well, I don’t want that,” Cain said. “But if they fire first, we are going to defend ourselves and . . . they are no match for our warships.” He had a similar dustup with Charles Krauthammer on Fox News’ Special Report that same night. He seemed to have contradictory positions on abortion, saying the decision should be left to a woman, her family, and her doctor while also saying he somehow favored outlawing all abortions, too. He hardly looked ready for the presidency.
On the night of October 30, Politico posted a story on its Web site that said two women had accused Cain of sexually inappropriate behavior when he was head of the National Restaurant Association and that paid settlements had been negotiated with the women. Cain spokesman J. D. Gordon, who had been alerted by Politico ten days earlier, had a response ready. When the story broke, he e-mailed it to about fifty outlets. Exhausted, he fell asleep. As he later recalled the succession of events, he was awakened by a phone call from Geraldo Rivera’s brother Craig, who wanted him on Geraldo’s program. Gordon, who was friendly with Craig, said he had nothing more to say. Craig said to hold on. “He says, ‘Talk to Geraldo at the break.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’ He says, ‘Hold on.’” What he heard next was Geraldo’s voice, as he sat up in bed and watched the host holding a BlackBerry up to his lapel microphone on live television. “Geraldo’s like, ‘You’re live, J.D., you’re live.’” Geraldo pressed Gordon about whether there had been a settlement. Gordon, who knew none of the details, froze. “It was horrific,” he later said.
Cain was in Washington the next day with a full schedule of public appearances and interviews, and the media were in hot pursuit. He found himself confronted by cameras and shouting reporters in a parking garage. Later at a luncheon at the National Press Club, he got more questions. He kept digging the hole deeper with an ever-changing series of explanations. He first said that he was “vaguely familiar” with the incidents. Then he said he knew nothing about a settlement. Later in the afternoon, he told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that he recalled there was “some sort of settlement or termination.” Details of the incidents remained hazy, but the candidate was now caught in a familiar scandal routine. Other news organizations joined in pursuit of the story. Within a week two more women were accusing Cain of inappropriate behavior. The fourth accuser, Sharon Bialek, was the first to allow her name to be used. She appeared with celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred at a press conference at the Friars Club in New York. “I want you, Mr. Cain, to come clean,” she said. Cain called all the charges “baseless, bogus, and false” and remained defiant. “We are not going to allow Washington or politics to deny me the opportunity to represent this great nation,” he said.
In the midst of the uproar over the allegations, Cain committed another major gaffe during a videotaped interview with editors and reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was asked a straightforward question about whether he had supported President Obama on Libya. He paused and stammered, “Okay, Libya.” He paused again. “President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, ‘Yes, I agreed,’ or ‘No, I didn’t agree.’ I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason—nope, that’s a different one.” Another pause. “I gotta go back and see. I got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me that I agree or not disagree with Obama?” His advisers blamed it on lack of sleep.
On November 28, a fifth woman came forward. Ginger White, an Atlanta woman, said she had engaged in a thirteen-year affair with Cain. She had cell phone records showing calls and text messages from a number that belonged to Cain. The candidate again denied the allegations. He said they were friends, that he had tried to help her, but that there was no sexual relationship. Cain’s lawyer appeared to contradict the candidate by saying a consensual affair between adults was not a legitimate news story. Four days after White made her statement, Cain told the Union Leader newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire, that he had frequently given her money to help out with expenses. He said he had never told his wife, Gloria, about the payments or about his relationship with White. Cain also said he was reassessing his candidacy.
His campaign was in free fall. Contributions, which had spiked after the first allegations, had dropped off by almost 90 percent within a day or two of White’s allegation. On Saturday, December 3, 2011, Cain announced that he was suspending his campaign. He was defiant to the end, saying that he would establish a new organization to promote the ideas he had championed during the campaign. “I am not going to be silenced and I am not going away,” he said. As quickly as he had risen to the top of the Republican field, he was gone and forgotten. His candidacy ended as a bizarre sideshow. Once it was over, it was even more unimaginable that he had virtually led the race for the nomination at least for a few weeks. Such was the state of the Republican Party as the year 2011 neared its conclusion.
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What followed Cain’s destruction was almost as surprising: the reemergence of Newt Gingrich as Romney’s next apparent challenger. No one had started the campaign with more fumbles and missteps than the man who had led Republicans to power in Congress in 1994. His personal balance sheet included as many liabilities as assets. The liabilities included two messy divorces, an admission of adultery, extravagantly harsh and divisive rhetoric toward his opponents, a tumultuous record as Speaker, a capacity to be childish, and, often, turmoil in his wake. The other reality was that by sheer force of intellect, energy, and ambition he had managed to stay in the forefront of the public debate longer than almost any other contemporary member of his party.
For three decades, Gingrich had been a leader of Republicans. He started as a House backbencher roiling the old guard of his party in the 1980s. Once elected to the leadership, he led his party to its first House majority in forty years. After a government shutdown that cost his party politically, he worked with Bill Clinton to produce a major reform of the welfare system and a balanced budget. For a time, he was the face of the GOP, for better and worse. He survived a coup attempt by some of his lieutenants in 1997, then stepped down as Speaker after his party suffered embarrassing losses in the 1998 midterms as he and other Republicans were pushing to impeach Clinton for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Soon after, he left Congress entirely. That could have ended his public career. But he resurrected himself and became the CEO of an idea-generating mini-conglomerate that was uniquely his. He was a brilliant provocateur. The question was whether Gingrich could show the steadiness, the calm, and the maturity that voters seek in a president. Did he have the discipline required of all successful presidential candidates—the discipline to keep his focus, to avoid meaningless fights, to ignore barbs from his critics, to show statesmanship?
In the spring of 2011, the answers
all came back negative. He stumbled toward the starting gate, delaying again and again the formation of a presidential campaign committee as he extracted himself from his tangled business empire. In May, more than a month after Paul Ryan put forward his Republican budget plan, Gingrich belittled it on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.” Conservatives trashed him, from Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal to his friend Bill Bennett, who gave him a public tongue-lashing on his radio show the next day. “To salvage your candidacy, say you blew it,” Bennett said. Gingrich did. He spent the next few days doing mea culpa after mea culpa with conservative media while apologizing to Ryan. “He called and he was very, very apologetic,” Ryan said. “I said, ‘Look, that’s fine, just take it back, because it doesn’t hurt me personally, it hurts our cause, our efforts.’” Gingrich did take it back. He said he was wrong to say what he’d said. He said he liked the Ryan plan and would have voted for it. He said he shouldn’t have answered a “hypothetical baloney question,” though what David Gregory had asked him was quite straightforward and not in the least a hypothetical. True to form, he found a way to turn his mistake into a warning to the Democrats not to try to exploit it. “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate,” he told Greta Van Susteren. Meanwhile, spokesman Rick Tyler issued a purple-prose statement attacking Gingrich’s critics. “The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness,” the statement said. “They fired timidly at first. Then the sheep, not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list, unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.” He said Gingrich emerged from “the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia” ready to lead “those who won’t be intimidated by the political elite.” While Gingrich was engaging in damage control over his interview about Ryan’s budget, Politico reported that he and his wife, Callista, had a revolving line of credit of up to $500,000 at Tiffany’s earlier in the decade. Gingrich said his purchasing habits were no one’s business and that, anyway, any debts had been paid off.
A week after all this, I sat down with Gingrich to talk about the campaign. He acknowledged again that he had used a poor choice of words when commenting on Ryan’s plan. He said what the right had to understand was that imposing dramatic change required them to bring the voters along. “My point is, it’s fine to be radical,” he said. “Welfare reform was radical, but if you’re going to be radical you actually have to spend more time with the American people getting them to understand it.” He knew that all his opponents would be waiting to seize on any misstep. “Not just the media but every competitor, White House, the Romney team, the Pawlenty team, et cetera. They’re all going to be watching, and any single slip they’re going to exploit.” He said he learned something else from the firestorm that erupted over his remarks. “There were an amazing number of people waiting to write the ‘Newt Is Dead’ story,” he said. “Whether they wrote it this week, whether they wrote it next week, whether they wrote it a month from now, they wanted to write it. And so I’m now kind of cheerful because in fact it didn’t work.” As I was leaving, he said to me with a big smile, “All I can promise you is you won’t be bored.” He said one other thing of note during the hour we spent together: “No normal consultant can work with me, because they have prefixed models of who’s allowed to be a Republican.”
Those primed to write “Newt Is Dead” stories did not have long to wait. On June 9, his campaign imploded. His entire senior staff quit in a disagreement with the candidate. Those departing included campaign manager Rob Johnson, media adviser Sam Dawson, senior strategists Katon Dawson and David Carney, longtime spokesman Rick Tyler, and leaders of the campaign operations in Iowa and South Carolina. The split was weeks in the making. The campaign was hemorrhaging money. Fund-raising projections were woefully off the mark. “The assumptions about fund-raising were not just off but they were completely wrong,” said one of his advisers. The campaign had planned to try to make a splash at the Iowa Straw Poll in August but was so strapped for money it could not afford the entry fee or the list of past caucus attendees. Carney called it “a Cadillac campaign on a Bud Light budget.”
The campaign team was in despair when Gingrich insisted on going ahead with a two-week vacation that included a cruise to the Greek isles. They begged him not to go, told him that if he was going to go on vacation at all he should do it in the United States. While he was on the trip, his advisers drafted a long memo that suggested he consider a graceful exit from the race. The only other options were to develop a live-off-the-land strategy or to continue on the current course, which none of the advisers believed was feasible. Gingrich later described the e-mail, which reached him in Istanbul, as, “Money is terrible. Either quit or come back and turn life over to us.” When he and Callista returned, they met with Johnson and Sam Dawson at offices that housed the Gingrich business enterprises. The meeting was not acrimonious. There was no animosity. But it resulted in one of the most dramatic walkouts by a campaign team in presidential politics. “I basically told them, ‘You would like me to be the candidate for your campaign. I would like you to be the managers of my campaign,’” Gingrich later told me. “I can’t be the candidate for your campaign. I have no interest in being the candidate for a traditional Republican campaign.” Dawson and Johnson told Gingrich he deserved advisers who shared the same passion and believed in the way he should run the campaign, which they did not. When it was over, everyone shook hands and the departing consultants hugged Callista.
Gingrich had his own, strange ideas about how he wanted to run the campaign. He believed he could find new coalitions of supporters. One was people who owned pets. Another was Chinese Americans in Iowa. He said he would attract new supporters by focusing on the problem of Alzheimer’s disease. He believed he could organize and attract support through the Internet, though he had no real strategy for that. He planned to continue to give speeches around the country with his wife to promote the films and books they had produced. He would take advantage of the debates. Everyone thought he was—well, just the same old Newt. Nothing about the opening stages of his campaign reflected well on the candidate. Gingrich had a year or more to get ready for the presidential campaign. Yet when he got to the point of running, he appeared utterly unprepared for the task at hand. He prided himself on being a student of history, but the mass exodus of his campaign team showed that he had not bothered to study what it takes to become a successful presidential candidate. Gingrich had always wanted to do things his way. Now he would have to.
Gingrich called me a week later. He wanted to share how he saw the campaign going forward. “If I fade away, you won’t want the chapter,” he said, laughing. “If I don’t fade away, then you’ll want the chapter, right?” He said he had done a comparison of what he called the Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich model and the standard Republican consulting model. “I was surprised at the virtual impossibility of crossing those two cultures,” he said. “The people I brought in were very smart. I have tremendous admiration for them. But it was like bringing in a hockey team and explaining that we’re now playing football. But where’s the ice?” The past few days had been extremely unhappy ones. “We were being beaten up on every front,” he said. “We were getting beaten up by the media, we had consultants who were leaving us in debt while attacking us, which I thought was astonishingly unprofessional.” He was determined to follow his own instincts, odd and unproven as they were to veterans of successful presidential campaigns. He said, “We are not trying to hire anyone who is a normal politician, because they’re trying to do normal things. We’re trying to figure out if we can have a citizen movement that in the age of the Internet can be moved by ideas and concepts.�
�� He wanted to focus on big ideas, on a scale of change bigger and bolder than his opponents would ever dare. He ended the call by saying, “At minimum, this will shape the idea environment. If it breaks loose and goes viral, I could be the nominee.”
Gingrich soldiered on, participating in debates but otherwise ignored. “We went through the two worst months in my career,” he told the Post’s Karen Tumulty. “I would say June and July were the hardest months, worse than the two defeats [for Congress] in ’74 and ’76.” He later said to me, “People I had worked with and knew were enthusiastically trashing me. They weren’t just trashing me. They were enthusiastically trashing me. And I don’t think I’d understood how much hostility the Washington establishment had for me and how much disdain they had for me. . . . It was hard because you’d call friends who’d been told all day by Fox and others that I was dead and how do you raise money for a campaign? So you had to, as an act of will, get up every day knowing that most of the people you were about to call, even if they’d been with you for twenty years, now thought it was sad that you hadn’t dropped out and accepted reality.”
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Debates saved—or resurrected—Gingrich’s candidacy. His strategy consisted of the following: Avoid attacking the other candidates. Find ways to attack the media and the moderators. Talk about big ideas. Focus on Obama. From June until early November, he was a bystander on the stage as one after another of the perceived leading candidates drew the attention and the toughest questions. But he was quietly rebuilding his image. No one in the field went after Obama with the intensity of Gingrich, which was exactly what much of the Republican base was looking for. When Cain began his descent into irrelevance, Gingrich was the beneficiary. He became the newest not-Romney in the field, setting up a clash that no one in the party had foreseen.