by Balz, Dan
But it wasn’t Bain that made the Myrtle Beach debate memorable. The debate ultimately turned on one exchange, and with it the whole South Carolina campaign suddenly shifted dramatically. On the campaign trail, Gingrich had been routinely calling Obama a “food stamp president” and saying that African Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps, from Washington. He also had sparked controversy by contending that poor children lacked a work ethic. He said schoolchildren should work helping to clean their schools—acting in essence as janitors—to learn work habits and earn some money. Fox’s Juan Williams confronted him with those comments. “Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” he asked. “No,” Gingrich replied, “I don’t see that.” He said the schoolchildren would benefit by earning the money and doing the work, “which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.” The audience began to applaud as Williams persisted. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people,” he said. Now the audience was booing Williams. Gingrich, who had mastered the putdown of debate moderators, seized the opportunity. “First of all, Juan,” he said, “the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” The audience applauded again. “Now, I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.” This brought more laughter and applause. “Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. The area that ought to be I-73 [in South Carolina] was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built the road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything.” Gingrich was out of time, but Baier let him continue. “I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness,” he said. “And if that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.” As the television screens dissolved for a commercial break, the audience was giving Gingrich a standing ovation, applauding and cheering wildly. Gingrich said he could feel the applause roll toward him “like the wave of an ocean.”
The audience’s reaction to the exchange captured the pent-up anger of the party’s base. Conservatives wanted a nominee who would go after the president and the liberal elites, and in Gingrich they saw someone doing it. In Boston, Romney’s advisers saw an overnight shift in the race. Romney had entered the Myrtle Beach debate with a ten-point lead over Gingrich. A day later, when Newhouse got back the results of his latest survey, the two were in a statistical tie. The race had turned from one with Romney up 32 to 17 percent to a contest that had Gingrich at 23 percent and Romney at 21 percent. “I’ve never seen numbers like that,” Newhouse said. “You just don’t see that kind of volatility. You just don’t. What it demonstrated is people just weren’t anchored and they’re paying attention to this stuff.”
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The morning after the debate, Romney, Gingrich, and Perry all campaigned in Florence. Romney’s rally at the convention center drew a sparse crowd that filled only a fraction of the large room—a clear sign of flagging enthusiasm. The front-runner’s campaign appeared to be floundering. He had been under fire for weeks for not releasing his tax returns, and his opponents had stepped up criticism. What was this rich man hiding? The issue was a growing topic of debate inside the campaign, but Romney continued to resist. He was hoping to keep the issue at bay until tax time in April, when he assumed he would be safely through the early primaries and on his way to locking down the nomination. Romney’s income came mainly from capital gains on the investments in his personal fortune. After the rally he took question from reporters. Time’s Mark Halperin asked Romney to estimate his effective tax rate. Romney said it was “probably closer to 15 percent than anything.” The figure was far below that of the average taxpayer. Romney told reporters that he also had received speaker’s fees but said the amount was “not very much.” In truth, he had earned $374,000 from speeches in the previous year—small change to a man who was earning millions on a fortune estimated at more than $200 million, but another example of a candidate totally out of touch with the perceptions of ordinary Americans.
After Gingrich left Florence, Rick Perry arrived. His campaign had lost all its purpose by now, and as a result Perry seemed liberated—more comfortable than at any time since the opening days in August. He ambled into the Drive In restaurant wearing a blue fleece with a Perry campaign logo. He moved from table to table, shaking hands and posing for pictures. He ordered a beef gyro and onion rings for lunch and paid with a $20 bill he pulled from his wallet. Then he plopped down at a corner table with a local couple and two children. He fiddled with his BlackBerry as he chatted. Reporters elbowed one another to catch snippets of the conversation, and photographers pressed up against the windows from outside to shoot photos. When he finished eating, he took questions. Asked about Romney’s taxes, Perry said, “Release it all. Not the front page—release all of your income tax, and then the people of America can do the calculations I think rather speedily and figure out what it is and make appropriate conclusions.” Told that Gingrich had said that morning that a vote for Perry or Santorum was a vote for Romney, he replied, “That’s the reason we have contests. That’s the reason we have Super Bowls. That’s the reason we have competitions. We’ll let the people of South Carolina make that decision.”
The next day, Gingrich campaigned at Bobby’s Bar-B-Q in Warrenville. When he arrived the parking lot was filled to overflowing. Supporters and spectators packed the banquet room where he spoke, spilling onto the veranda and the parking lot. A new public poll showed Romney still leading Gingrich in the state, but the margin had been cut in half. Gingrich suspected the race was even closer. “I think they have internal polls that show them losing,” he said. When a woman in the audience said, “I want to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for putting Mr. Juan Williams in his place,” the room erupted with applause.
• • •
All of this became the backdrop for the most kaleidoscopic day of the primary—and almost everything that happened that day seemed to further erode Romney’s standing. Thursday, January 19, was a day of split-screen viewing and almost hourly recalibration of conventional wisdom. At the beginning of the week, the Republican nomination battle appeared almost as if it were on autopilot, with Romney cruising toward eventual victory. Suddenly the candidates were hurtling toward a Saturday primary now just two days away and Romney was fighting to avoid a potentially costly and unexpected defeat at the hands of the twice-dead Gingrich. South Carolina’s reputation for memorable and intensely fought primary campaigns remained intact.
The first news broke while most people were still asleep. Overnight, the Des Moines Register posted a report that the Iowa Republican Party had completed a recount of the caucuses and Santorum was now thirty-four votes ahead of Romney. Iowa GOP officials had been struggling since caucus night to determine the actual vote count, and rumors had been circulating for days that Romney’s victory was in jeopardy. Just after 9 a.m., the party released its official results, though its statement was ambiguous enough that chairman Matt Strawn had to come forward a few hours later to say definitely that Santorum was the undisputed winner. Santorum had won, but victory seemed to have come too late to make any difference for the former senator, who was gasping for attention at a moment when the nomination contest was seen as a two-person race between Gingrich and Romney.
Meanwhile, another potential blockbuster was unfolding. The Drudge Report had posted an item the day before noting that ABC News had secured an interview with Marianne Gingrich, the candidate’s second of three wives. Gingrich’s personal life was part of the baggage he carried as a candidate. On Thursday morning, Ann Curry of The Today Show interviewed Gingrich. “Back in 1995, your ex-wife Marianne told Vanity Fair she
could derail your campaign with one TV interview,” she said. “Tonight she is giving that interview. Is there anything she could say, Newt Gingrich, that could end your campaign?” Gingrich responded, “I’m not going to say anything negative about Marianne. My two daughters, Kathy and Jackie, have sent a letter to the president of ABC News, saying from a family perspective, they think this is totally wrong. . . . People will have to judge me. I’m a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather. See how close I am to my wife, Callista, and how close I am to my daughters and son-in-laws, my two grandchildren. They’ll have to make their mind up. But sixteen- and twenty-year-old stories—we have real stories this week on the failure of the Obama administration.” Three and a half hours later, ABC’s Brian Ross tweeted a link to the most explosive portion of the interview, in which Marianne claimed Gingrich had sought an open marriage. “He said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do,’” Marianne said in the interview. “He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”
With fevered speculation about what the ABC interview would do to Gingrich’s candidacy, the third big development of the day broke: Perry had decided to end his campaign and endorse Gingrich. Though Perry had little support by then, the symbolic significance of his decision was huge. Reporters quickly descended on the Hyatt Place Hotel in Charleston for Perry’s 11 a.m. announcement. “As I have contemplated the future of this campaign, I have come to the conclusion that there is no viable path to victory for my candidacy in 2012,” he said. “Therefore today I am suspending my campaign and endorsing Newt Gingrich for president of the United States. I believe Newt is a conservative visionary who can transform this country. We have had our differences, which campaigns inevitably bring out.” Alluding to Gingrich’s multiple marriages and the breaking news about Marianne’s interview, he added, “And Newt is not perfect, but who among us is? The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God, and I believe in the power of redemption, for it is a central tenet of my own Christian faith.”
Perry had come to South Carolina thinking there was still a chance of catching fire. He had seen others rebound after setbacks, notably Gingrich in November. He told spokesman Ray Sullivan the day after the Iowa caucuses that his campaign still had money and he had enough fire left to keep going. “I don’t want to wake up five years from now and wonder what if I’d have stayed in,” Sullivan said Perry told him. By Wednesday of primary week in South Carolina, Perry saw the futility of continuing. He was out of money and faced another humiliating defeat that could further damage his political reputation. His wife, Anita, agreed. When he told his staff he was pulling out, no one tried to dissuade him. The only thing in question was whether he would endorse Gingrich or remain neutral. An argument was made to stay neutral and see how the race unfolded. Perry came to another conclusion. “I can read polls,” he later told me, “and to maintain the race any farther wasn’t in my best interest, wasn’t in Newt’s best interest. And I wanted Newt to be the nominee.”
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That night in Charleston, the remaining candidates met for the second debate in four days. It took only the opening minutes for a winner to be declared. CNN’s John King began with a question for Gingrich about his ex-wife’s charges. “Would you like to take time to respond to that?” King asked calmly. “No,” Gingrich said. He hesitated for a split second, as if he were going to avoid the whole controversy, but then said, “But I will.” With even more righteous anger than he had summoned to put down Juan Williams three nights earlier, Gingrich erupted. “I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” he said. “I’m appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” The audience was applauding now as King interjected, “Is that all you want to say, sir?” Gingrich wasn’t even close to done. “Every person in here knows personal pain,” he said. “Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” As the audience cheered, he added, “My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. . . . Now, let me be quite clear: The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested because they would like to attack any Republican.”*
I asked Gingrich later whether he had prepared the response with his advisers before the debate. He said, “Several of my highly shrewd advisers said to me, ‘He will lull you to relax and then about two-thirds of the way through the debate he’ll ask you.’ And I said back, ‘No. This involves sex and scandal. He [King] will open with it because he won’t be able to help himself.’ I hadn’t totally thought through how I was going to do it, but I wasn’t surprised by it. And I mean, one of the virtues again of being a jazz musician is you eventually get pretty good timing with the audience. And so I came back and said, ‘No’—and the audience began to applaud—‘but I will.’ And if you watch, there’s a pause. I didn’t expect the intensity of the response, and then, of course, he decided to stick with it, which gave me a second bite at the apple. But the way he came back and said, ‘Oh, well, you know they raised it so it’s not my fault’—[that] was just too big an opening.”
The debate was notable in two other respects. First, Santorum ripped into Gingrich. “I served with him,” Santorum said. “I was there. I knew what the problems were going on in the House of Representatives when Newt Gingrich was leading there. It was an idea a minute, no discipline, no ability to be able to pull things together.” Santorum then accused Gingrich of not standing up to the Democrats over the check kiting scandal in the early 1990s and said his own work in exposing it had “more or as much to do with the 1994 win as any plan that you put together.” Gingrich, who had been the nemesis of the Democrats in the 1980s and helped bring down Jim Wright as Speaker of the House, was outraged by Santorum’s putdown. “Each of us writes a selective history that fits our interest,” he said as he recounted his many battles with the Democrats. “Those are just historic facts, even if they’re inconvenient for Rick’s campaign.” Santorum was asked to respond to Gingrich’s criticism that he lacked the imagination or know-how for something as significant as a presidential campaign. “Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” he said. Gingrich took that as a compliment. “You’re right. I think grandiose thoughts. This is a grandiose country of big people doing big things. And we need leadership prepared to take on big projects.”
Romney meanwhile continued to flounder on the issue of releasing his tax returns. “I’ll release my returns in April and probably for other years as well. I know that’s what’s going to come.” He said Democrats were trying to demonize success. “I have been successful. But let me tell you, the challenge in America is not people who’ve been successful. The challenge in America, and President Obama doesn’t want to talk about this, is you’ve got a president who’s played ninety rounds of golf while there are twenty-five million Americans out of work, and while the price of gasoline has doubled, he said no to the Keystone pipeline. . . . That’s the problem in America, not the attacks they make on people who’ve been successful.” Gingrich, who had posted his returns on his campaign Web site during the debate, put the onus back on Romney: “He’s got to decide and the people of South Carolina have to decide. But if there’s anything in there that is going to help us lose the election, we should know it before the nomination. And if there’s nothing in there, why not release it?”
• • •
The next morning, I called an unaligned South Carolina Republican strategist and a Romney adviser for perspective on the week’s developments. The strategist said h
e saw no way Gingrich would lose the primary the following day. He was scathing in his assessment of Romney and the campaign’s performance in the state. “I don’t know how in the world they can continually flub [the tax issue],” he said. “Both candidate and campaign have done a terrible job.” If Gingrich won on Saturday, he said, “Florida is what people thought it would be, an all-out brawl.” The glum Romney adviser was critical about the campaign’s reluctance to deal with the tax issue. “I would feel a lot better if we’d turned loose some tax returns a couple days ago,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t understand why the obvious isn’t obvious to everybody.”
Gingrich campaigned with growing confidence. At a boisterous rally in Orangeburg, he again exhorted conservatives to rally behind him. “The only effective conservative vote to stop the Massachusetts moderate is to vote for me,” he said. As he walked away from the microphone, he was asked about Romney’s failure to commit to any of the debates scheduled in Florida the next week. “Romney can’t claim that he’s prepared to debate Obama if he’s not prepared to debate Newt Gingrich,” he said. Romney, bleeding in South Carolina and nationally, sought to lower expectations. “I said from the very beginning South Carolina is an uphill battle for a guy from Massachusetts,” he said after a rain-soaked event in Gilbert. That night in Greenville, in a preview of what was coming, he turned fiery on the stump. It was the first time all week he had shown any life or fight.