by Balz, Dan
No one had any fixed expectations about the three contests on February 7. They were on the calendar but seen as an interlude in the Republican race, way stations en route to the more significant events in Michigan and Arizona three weeks later. The odds makers gave Santorum a modest chance to pull an upset in Minnesota, if only because the electorate in caucuses was likely to be small and very conservative. Romney, however, was a solid favorite in Colorado, where he had captured 60 percent of the vote in the 2008 caucuses. His team was so confident about the state that on the morning of the caucuses, Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director and a Coloradoan, guaranteed victory to the others. The campaign’s final numbers put Romney solidly in first, with Santorum and Gingrich splitting most of the rest of the vote. But Gingrich’s support was in a state of collapse in Colorado on caucus day, thanks to the fallout from the former Speaker’s rambling late-night press conference in Las Vegas.
Cable networks, accustomed to the excitement of primary and caucus nights over the first four weeks of the year, were fully prepared for another night of counting and instant analysis, no matter that these were events that in past years would have drawn little attention. For Santorum, it was a godsend. Missouri’s results came in first that evening, and the former Pennsylvania senator was quickly declared the winner. In head-to-head competition, he had defeated the front-runner by 55 to 25 percent. Next came Minnesota and another big Santorum victory. This was instantly interpreted as a sign of further dissatisfaction with Romney among conservatives and, given his performance there four years earlier, an embarrassment. Had Santorum won only those two, the damage to Romney might have been minimal. The big blow was Colorado. Romney’s team watched it slip away all day as they checked and rechecked numbers and measured the full extent of the shift from Gingrich toward Santorum. Rhoades was on the phone with Romney during the day, warning him of potential trouble. Romney was greatly irritated when he heard that news. A late surge of votes for Santorum from conservative precincts around Colorado Springs, the center of social and religious conservative activity in the state, completed the day’s sweep. At his victory party after the first of the three victories, a heady Santorum declared, “Conservatism is alive and well. I don’t stand here and claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.”
Santorum had followed a strategy of necessity as Gingrich was battling Romney in South Carolina and Florida. He had neither the money nor the infrastructure to compete effectively in either state. Beyond the debates, he was a nonplayer. Santorum left Florida to return home to prepare for a release of his tax returns. At the same time, his daughter Bella, who was born with a genetic disorder, was suddenly hospitalized, seriously ill. Santorum and his wife, Karen, broke off all campaigning to be with her as the Florida primary approached. Meanwhile, his advisers decided to concentrate their limited resources on the three states everyone else was ignoring. Santorum ran ads in all three. “It was very important for us to win a state, and we felt Missouri was our best bet,” John Brabender, Santorum’s chief strategist, said. “We thought Minnesota was our next best bet and we thought there was a very, very outside chance in Colorado. . . . I got a call as soon as we won Missouri from a number of people, e-mails from the Romney campaign. ‘Congratulations on Missouri, you guys did a great job.’ . . . Then we won Minnesota and I might have heard from one or two people from the Romney people congratulating us. When we won Colorado it went dark. My belief is they never thought in a million years they were going to lose Colorado.”
Even Gingrich was impressed at Santorum’s tactical calculation. “You have to give him credit,” he later told me. “He did something very bold and it took a lot of guts. He went to three places nobody else was going and they gambled that they’d win a PR victory. It was almost like the Tet Offensive. We’re going to win a PR victory and the PR victory will become the war. It was accurate. It was a very shrewd move, but it was made possible in part because I’d been so damaged by that point that the anti-Romney conservatives were desperately looking for somebody. And if Newt can’t beat Romney, who can?”
• • •
No one thought Rick Santorum was going to win anything in 2012. He began the campaign in obscurity—overlooked, disregarded, and dismissed as a serious candidate, though he had served sixteen years in Congress. He was first elected to the House in 1990 from western Pennsylvania, defeating a seven-term incumbent Democrat in a race in which national party leaders gave him little chance to win and little support to do so. He became a member of the Gang of Seven, a band of freshman Republicans that included future Speaker John Boehner who vigorously protested scandals at the House Bank and House Post Office. He won a Senate seat in 1994, defeating Democratic incumbent Harris Wofford. He brought many of the partisan tactics of Newt Gingrich’s Republican-controlled House to the more sedate Senate. He helped lead the effort to pass welfare reform and was elected to the number three job in leadership. He was a committed conservative who nonetheless looked after a state with a strong blue-collar constituency. He backed a hike in the minimum wage and opposed right-to-work legislation (though he later changed his mind on that), and got his share of earmarks at a time when they were commonplace among legislators in both parties.
In 1996, Santorum and his wife had lost a prematurely born son two hours after birth.* Over time, he became a more outspoken advocate on social issues. Though he voted in favor of contraception, he once said of birth control, “I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our country.” He said states have the right to ban contraception, though he would not vote for such a law. In his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, he wrote, “Radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness. As for children? Well, to paraphrase The Wizard of Oz, pay no attention to those kids behind the curtain.” Like many other politicians, he opposed same-sex marriage. But he once accused leaders of the gay community of leading a “jihad” against him over comments he had made in which he appeared to equate gay sex with bigamy, polygamy, and more. Those comments came during an interview with the Associated Press in 2003, after a Supreme Court decision that struck down antisodomy laws. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery,” he said. “You have the right to anything.” In 2005, he intervened in the case of the Florida woman Terri Schiavo, who had been in a vegetative state for years. He and other Washington politicians urged that a federal judicial panel review a state court decision authorizing the removal of her feeding tube. He also met in Florida with her parents, who opposed the removal, to pray with them.
Despite his conservative views, he was able to win reelection in blue-leaning Pennsylvania in 2000. One Pennsylvania Republican described his political deftness as being able to “run through the raindrops without getting wet.” Eventually, Santorum’s ideology caught up with him and he got soaked. In 2006, a bad year for Republicans, he was crushed in his bid for reelection. He later came to the conclusion that he never should have sought reelection that year. “We should have just said we’re not going to run for reelection but we’re going to run for president in 2008,” Brabender said. “We would have been much further along.” That would have put him alongside Romney in both 2008 and 2012. Santorum had been thinking about a presidential run for some time, and in 2009, after consulting with his family, he decided to test the waters. He had been invited to give a speech in October at the University of Dubuque, and his team leaked word of the Iowa trip to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, who wrote a small item about it. CNN picked it up and then other reporters began to call for details. After the speech, during an overnight drive in a rainstorm, Santorum and Brabender began to talk more seriously about what kind of campaign he could run. Santorum saw his base for what it was
—social and religious conservatives and to a lesser extent Tea Party activists. He decided to start traveling regularly to Iowa and see what would happen. Few took him seriously. I was among those who gave him no chance. In December 2010, we met for coffee one afternoon in Washington. Santorum laid out his agenda and the rationale behind his candidacy. I listened skeptically, and foolishly took no notes.
• • •
Two days after Santorum’s trio of victories, I sat down with Gingrich to get his assessment of the campaign. He was battered—now in a downward slide—but, typically, optimistic about the overall state of his campaign and his prospects. “As I kept telling all of you guys,” he said, “the not-Romney part of this party is huge. And it will be bigger in another few weeks because in the end Romney is in fact not somebody that this party’s going to nominate. And so he’s been sustained by being the candidate and being the establishment and being inevitable and having huge volumes of money, but in the end he’s not going to get there.” How did Santorum’s success change things? I asked him. “First of all, it really cripples Romney,” he said. “I mean, it’s really hard for Romney now to turn around and say he’s the inevitable nominee. And that’s the number one goal. I mean, if we can’t get Romney down to a size we can cope with, then there’s no second act, okay? So it turns out now there has to be a second and third act. I mean, the second act is the gradual disappearance of Santorum. Santorum is a very good candidate as long as you don’t look at him very long. There’s a reason he set the all-time Pennsylvania record for losing.”
Gingrich said he was through attacking Romney. “I’m done,” he said. “Tuesday was the signal that I’m done. Everything we do from here on out will be surrogates. Yes. I don’t need to say anything more because that part of the game is set and I’m shifting to a new game.” I asked whether he shared the view that the longer both he and Santorum stayed in the race, the better it would be for Romney. “I wouldn’t have shared it before Tuesday because he was gradually decaying,” he said of Santorum. “It may be true, although I think he may actually be the right way for me to define the difference. See, if it’s only right-left, then the two guys on the right have a whole differentiation problem. What we’re about to move towards is a timid versus bold argument. . . . I think in that sense what Santorum has done is he has set me up now to draw that sharp distinction and to be able to say, look, it’s not just right-left, it’s whether you’re prepared to fundamentally rethink where we’re going.”
• • •
Nobody in Boston was worrying about Gingrich then or after. Santorum, however, presented a potentially serious problem. He was difficult to attack as insufficiently conservative, one of the lines used against Gingrich. His vulnerabilities as a candidate were sizable, but more as a general election candidate who would be seen as out of the mainstream. In a Republican nomination battle, Romney couldn’t go after those weaknesses. That would be attacking the base.
The next contests were three weeks away. Arizona still looked favorable for Romney, but everyone knew the showdown would be in Michigan, and Santorum was on the move there. Blue-collar Michigan seemed ready-made for blue-collar and Catholic Santorum, despite the fact that Romney was born there. Money was pouring into Santorum’s campaign again. The day after his trio of victories, the campaign raised about $1.5 million, with an additional $1 million the next day, Brabender said. “So we were raising money at a clip unlike we had ever before,” he said. “But we also knew that hell was coming in a sense that we knew that, just like we had said that all these other people were going to go through scrutiny unlike they ever had before, we knew we were going to as well.” The media had a new story line and they were pumping it hard. Nerves were on edge in Boston. “They were saying [Michigan] was Waterloo,” Matt Rhoades recalled. “Mitt Romney’s Waterloo. We thought everything was on the line in Florida. But then it seemed like everything was on the line times two in Michigan.”
Days after Santorum’s victories, the annual CPAC gathering opened in Washington, D.C. Romney used his speech to reestablish his conservative bona fides. “I know conservatism because I have lived conservatism,” he said. He used the words “conservative” or “conservatism” two dozen times. But it was this line that captured the mood of concern inside the Romney campaign. “I fought against long odds in a deep blue state,” Romney said, “but I was a severely conservative Republican governor.” The word “severely” was not in Romney’s prepared text and it grated on conservative activists. Critics accused Romney of trying to impersonate a real conservative with a caricature of what true conservatism represented. Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative RedState blog, wrote, “Mitt Romney got a warm reception at CPAC, standing ovations . . . the works. He did nothing to calm fears that he is not one of us. In fact, he might have made it worse today. What the heck is a severe conservative?” He said the phrase sounded like a critique from the left. Romney’s speech was also notable for the change in tone from his CPAC speech a year earlier. In that speech, he used the word “conservative” once, not to describe himself but to say what Obama’s economic policies were not. At that point he was trying to impress conservatives that he was the most electable Republican, not necessarily the most conservative. With Santorum’s challenge, he had to demonstrate anew to the base that he could be trusted.
A Romney adviser e-mailed me two days later to take issue with the criticism of the speech. “The subject of this speech is much more about the nature of conservatism and a challenge to conservatives that this next election is a test of an ability to lead, a test that implicitly has been met with mixed results in prior elections. Romney is not tying himself in knots trying to be like many in the crowd. In fact, he is explicitly saying that [they] may come from different backgrounds. And he is offering a criticism of the professional conservative DC class.” He added, “It’s a simple fact that Romney has received more conservative votes than any candidate in the R[epublican] primary, so it’s hard to argue that conservatives have a huge problem with Romney. I believe that a great deal of this comes from the dynamic not so much that Romney isn’t a conservative but that Romney is not one of them or does not seem dependent upon their approval. . . . They want to be the vetting authority. Never mind that they never meet voters.”
Romney had good reason to be nervous. A public poll of Michigan Republicans taken at the weekend by Public Policy Polling showed Santorum leading Romney by fifteen points. The campaign’s internal poll taken a few days later put Santorum’s advantage at eight points—enormously troubling to his team for a state where he had deep family roots and had won in 2008. Katie Packer Gage, who was directing the Michigan effort, was deeply worried and during one morning staff meeting let her emotions get the better of her. “I felt like nobody thought we could win Michigan,” she later said. “And I believed that if we lost Michigan that our campaign could be over. Pretty tough to explain to our donors how he would lose a state he won the time before and a state where his dad had been governor and a state we had always sort of said we were going to win. We were very committed to that.” Rich Beeson sent her an e-mail at the end of the meeting: Hang in there, he said.
Until now, Santorum had had the luxury of picking his battles as Romney fought state by state. This was another oddity of the 2012 Republican race. Challengers came and went and came back again as the most conservative voters swung back and forth in what seemed an unfocused search for an alternative to the front-runner. Had the old rules applied, Santorum would have been dealt out of the race after South Carolina, having failed miserably to capitalize on his surprise showing in Iowa. But those rules were out the window in 2012. Now, however, Santorum could not avoid certain confrontations with Romney. He could duck Arizona, but not Michigan.
• • •
Michigan was the first state in the Republican race where the president’s bailout of the auto industry came into play. Romney was a car guy but a small government businessman a
s well. He had opposed the government bailout of the industry, a position widely shared among conservatives even though the infusion of money had begun under George W. Bush. Romney wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in November 2008, before Obama was even sworn in, opposing more government funds and calling for a managed bankruptcy. He submitted the article just after auto executives had testified in Washington asking for more help—having flown in on their private jets in a display of arrogance that turned their appearance into a public relations disaster. “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye,” Romney wrote. “It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” The headline, which Romney did not write, left a killer impression: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Whenever Romney or his surrogates went to Michigan, all reporters wanted to talk about was his position on the bailout. Santorum too had opposed what Obama did, but on bailouts he at least could argue that he was consistent. He had also opposed the bank bailout. Romney had supported bailing out the banks but not the auto companies. Santorum said Romney was for helping Wall Street while leaving to fend for itself the industry that defined his home state and that had brought power, financial security, and prominence to his father.
Santorum’s challenge to Romney, unlike all the others he had faced, seemed to offer the purest example yet in the nomination contest of the long-simmering conflict between the GOP’s business and populist wings, the party establishment and its insurgent grass roots, the country clubbers and the religious conservatives. Perry once had the potential to lead that fight against Romney but fizzled as a candidate. Santorum, through dogged determination and little more, now had the opportunity—if he could take advantage of it. One senior Romney adviser said, “It was not inconceivable that the Republican Party could nominate Rick Santorum, whereas I think we all thought that it would be a stretch for the Republican Party to nominate Newt.” Romney’s team went to work to prevent a potentially devastating defeat. In the words of one adviser, “We built a fortress around Michigan. Mitt was there. Ann was there. We were in every media market. We were in every corner of the state.” Another adviser described the strategy this way: “Campaign hard, campaign real hard. I mean, just campaign as much as we could in Michigan. Upped our media buys some. Really worked our local surrogates, our talk radio surrogates. Worked out endorsement networks. But just to try to flood the zone as much as we could.”