by Balz, Dan
Romney and his team made one other crucial decision as they looked at the challenge from Santorum, a choice that bought short-term advantages in exchange for long-term problems. The week before the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Romney unveiled a new tax plan that called for cutting marginal income tax rates an additional 20 percent. That would reduce the rate on the highest earners from 35 percent, the level where it had stood since George W. Bush’s presidency, down to 28 percent. Romney said he would avoid enlarging the deficit or giving a special break to wealthy taxpayers by eliminating unspecified deductions and exempting those earning less than $200,000 from capital gains taxes while maintaining them on wealthier taxpayers. There were several motivations for a more detailed tax plan, but the timing was dictated by the emergence of Santorum, whom Romney labeled “an economic lightweight,” as a credible challenger. Romney was looking for other ways to prove to conservatives that he was truly one of them. “There were certainly some economic conservatives that thought pretty strongly that we need a more forceful articulation of a tax reform proposal,” one Romney adviser said. “But there was also a sense beyond what everyone else may have been saying that if we were going to be the candidate of the economy and of improving the economy, it was going to be hard to advance that discussion much further without fleshing out the tax discussion.” Romney’s team saw it for what it was politically. As the adviser put it, “This was going to be the coup de grâce in some ways. And I think it was very helpful in the primary. There’s no question about it.”
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The only debate ahead of the two primaries was held February 22 in Mesa, Arizona. As in Florida, Romney came well prepared with an intimate knowledge of Santorum’s record in Congress. Santorum had spent much of the day campaigning. He was always indifferent to debate preparation and paid a high price for his failure to anticipate Romney’s attacks and work up responses. “This day particularly was in my mind idiotic because they flew and did events in multiple cities and [that] should never have been the case,” Brabender said. “We would do debate prep right before the debate, literally, and he had not had a chance to read the material that was put together for him.”
Santorum had never been in a debate like this in the presidential campaign. Most times he struggled to get the attention of the moderator as he begged to be heard. In Mesa, he was the target of all the attacks. Romney sought to revive his campaign by destroying his opponent’s credibility as a fiscal conservative and by painting Santorum as another deal-cutting Washington insider. He attacked Santorum for supporting earmarks, and when Santorum noted that Romney had sought federal money to help the Salt Lake City Olympics, Romney responded, “When I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the Bridge to Nowhere.” Romney tripped Santorum up over his true feelings about Title X family planning funding. When Santorum said he had supported it because it was part of a larger appropriation, Romney countered by saying he had recently watched a clip of Santorum stating positively that he had supported Title X itself, not because it was included in a larger bill. Santorum tried to put Romney on the defensive over the Massachusetts health care plan, but he was up against a superior candidate that night. Santorum’s worst moment came when the discussion turned to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reform, which most conservatives now saw as a usurpation of the rights of states, localities, and parents to run their schools. “I have to admit, I voted for that,” Santorum said. “It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.” The audience began to boo him.
Santorum finished the debate believing he had dealt with that question effectively, by suggesting that while he thought the measure could be improved, it was better than nothing at all. “When he came off the stage he thought he did beautifully with that answer,” recalled Hogan Gidley, Santorum’s spokesman. “He said it was a signature piece of legislation for a Republican president. They understand that. I said, ‘No, they don’t understand.’” Brabender said of the debate, “Rick was tired, did not prepare particularly well, and was also the centerpiece. You had Romney, who frankly was a little bit on the ropes at that time. They did the right thing. They spent, they prepared well, Romney had a good performance. We didn’t. Do I think it affected some votes? Absolutely.”
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Over the next few days, neither candidate looked like a winner. Romney scheduled a “major speech” on the economy for Friday, February 24, before the Detroit Economic Club. But he had already unveiled the guts of the speech, his new tax plan. The day’s story became a logistical foul-up that left the candidate speaking to his audience on the artificial turf of Ford Field, the Detroit Lions’ football stadium, with more than sixty thousand empty seats visible all around him. When one of the club officials enthusiastically showed the venue to Katie Packer Gage, she responded, “I don’t know. All I can see are sixty thousand empty seats. Can you send some clowns in here so the press will be distracted?” Reporters tweeted photos throughout the speech. Then came questions and answers, and more trouble. “This feels good, being back in Michigan,” Romney said, trying to play the hometown candidate. “You know, the trees are the right height. The streets are just fine.” He had used those lines before, but not what came next. “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles,” he said. “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” Once again, inexplicably, he had stumbled into the stereotype his campaign was trying to avoid.
The next morning, Santorum made his own mess. Speaking at a conference sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group funded in large part by the Koch brothers, he was trying to highlight his blue-collar heritage by talking about his grandfather, a coal miner. He launched into an attack on the country’s elites. “Elites come up with phony ideologies and phony ideas to rob you of your freedom and impose government control on your lives.” So far not so bad, but then this: “President Obama once said he wants everyone to go to college,” he said. And then, oozing contempt, he added, “What a snob!” The conservative, Obama-hating audience loved it, but it was obviously a major mistake on Santorum’s part. The next day he made another. On ABC’s This Week program, host George Stephanopoulos asked him about a comment he had made about John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to Baptist ministers in the 1960 campaign, in which Kennedy had talked about his Catholic faith and his belief in the separation of church and state. Santorum had said watching the speech made him want to vomit. Stephanopoulos asked why. “Because the first line, the first substantive line in the speech says, ‘I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,’” Santorum said. “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . . You bet that makes you throw up.” The back-to-back comments underscored the absence of message discipline by the candidate and made clear he had no strategy for or even interest in reaching beyond his narrow base.
As the primary day neared, the polls in Michigan tightened. A week out, Romney’s polling showed that his deficit was now just three points. A few days later, Romney’s numbers showed him leading Santorum by three points. Santorum’s negatives had doubled in that time, though Republicans still had a mostly positive impression of him, as they did of Romney. The more people were hearing from Santorum, the more unfavorably they viewed him. By the weekend before the primary, Romney’s advisers were increasingly confident. Then, by Monday, they were nervous again. “I’m not sure any of us understand what’s happening,” said one Romney adviser I talked to that day. “I don’t think anybody puts this away easily.” He was puzzled at how candidates who in past campaigns would have been out of the race were able to keep going. “Gingrich is still being treated as a significant figure and he only won one state and he isn’t even playing right now,” he said. “We were in a stronger position fou
r years ago and [yet] we were out of the race. . . . And yes, some of this is us. We haven’t lit up. Mitt Mania has been kept under restraint.”
On the Sunday before the primary, Romney’s team decided to send him to the Daytona 500. It would be a way to show his affinity for cars and for a constituency important to the Republican Party. But the weather was rainy enough to wash out the race, and Romney managed to commit another of his verbal gaffes. As he was having his picture taken, someone asked him about his connection to NASCAR racing. “I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners,” he replied. By the time he returned to Michigan, Romney was in a bad mood, believing he had wasted the day when he could have been campaigning in Michigan, where it counted. On primary day, he spoke with his traveling press corps. One reporter asked what he would say to Republicans who were critical that he so far had not been able to excite the party’s base. “You know, it’s very easy to excite the base with incendiary comments,” he replied. “We’ve seen throughout the campaign that if you’re willing to say really outrageous things that are accusative and attacking of President Obama that you’re going to jump up in the polls. You know, I’m not willing to light my hair on fire to try and get support. I am who I am.” Another reporter asked whether he realized that comments like those he had made about his wife’s two Cadillacs and the NASCAR team owners were hurting him. “Yes. Next question,” he replied. Then a reporter tried to follow up about Romney not being willing to light his hair on fire. That produced, finally, a touch of humor. “I’m not going to do it,” the gelled candidate said. “I don’t care how hard you ask. It would be a big fire, I assure you.”
When the votes were counted on February 28, Romney squeezed out a narrow victory—41 percent to Santorum’s 38 percent. He won Arizona easily, as expected. The Michigan victory was what Romney needed, but not enough to knock Santorum out or, for that matter, to shut off talk about Romney’s weaknesses as a front-runner. Republican gossipers speculated that his vulnerabilities could open the door to a late entry by another Republican. As the campaign turned toward a dozen contests on Super Tuesday the following week, Romney still had work to do. His strategy was the same as always, which was to try to make himself the most broadly attractive candidate. He could divide and conquer as long as Santorum, Gingrich, and Ron Paul remained in the race indefinitely and split the anti-Romney constituency in the party. Or if the race truly was a two-person contest, as Santorum was saying, he could demonstrate his strength by starting to win majorities. It all came down to the same thing. To win the nomination, he had to keep winning primaries.
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The weekend after Michigan and before Super Tuesday, I went to Boston to check in with Romney’s team. They were hunkered down—not out of concern that the nomination was suddenly in jeopardy; they were still confident of victory. But they were even more keenly aware that the rules governing this battle were conspiring to make Romney’s path to victory long and difficult. Russ Schriefer cited four factors that he thought made it impossible to end the battle quickly, despite what people had said after New Hampshire. One was the calendar and the rule change to proportional distribution of delegates. He pointed to the super PACs as the second factor. “If you go back to, like, the Democratic nomination in 2004, when Kerry wrapped it up so fast, if George Soros decided to give Howard Dean another $5 million, Dean could have gone on. Right? If some big donor decided to [give] Gephardt another $5 million, the race would have continued and Kerry wouldn’t have been able to wrap it up as quickly as he did.” Schriefer cited two other factors to explain why Romney had not been able to wrap up the race quickly. One was the role of the debates. He doubted that Gingrich would have won South Carolina without them. The other was the rise of social media and Internet fund-raising, something that had grown exponentially in just eight years, which he argued also elongated the process. Everyone had had a moment to challenge Romney. Santorum was the latest and, he hoped, the last. Donald Trump. Michele Bachmann. Herman Cain. Rick Perry. Newt Gingrich twice. Rick Santorum now. “The one thing that we saw was that over the course of the campaign these sorts of surges would last anywhere from three to five weeks,” Schriefer said. “And then things would start to settle down.” By those calculations, Santorum’s loss in Michigan marked the beginning of the end of his time in the spotlight.
Matt Rhoades had a similar analysis that day, with one additional insight. “The way the media has changed, the new media and just the constant negative information flow that exists out there, those three things have completely changed the dynamics of the primary process,” he said. “That we’re still here and we’ll be going on past Super Tuesday is not Mitt Romney’s fault. Has our campaign made mistakes? Sure. But it’s not our fault that [the contest is] going to keep going. That’s how the process is designed, that’s what they intended it to do, and that’s how it’ll be.” Rhoades wasn’t finished. “One thing [that] happened since New Hampshire is everyone started believing that Mitt was going to, like, roll through everything, and I never thought that. But the perception got out there. And it was like, why didn’t Mitt win South Carolina? Why does Mitt lose any states? It’s an unfair burden people place on him—some of our own supporters, the D.C. crowd who know nothing about presidential politics, they start chattering and it builds and the media then builds. And then you have South Carolina and you have people saying it’s over. And then you have a great night [in Florida] and then Rick has a great night, and it’s like, ‘What’s wrong?’”
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Ten states held contests on Super Tuesday, March 6. The only one that really counted and was in doubt was Ohio, where once again Santorum was pitted against Romney in a head-to-head contest that neither candidate could afford to lose. It was, presumably, tailor-made for Santorum to spring an upset. Ohio was like Michigan, an industrial state with an older population hard hit by economic decline over a decade and more. Ohio bordered Pennsylvania—and specifically the part of Pennsylvania that was Santorum’s home area. Unlike Michigan, Romney had no direct ties to the state, no family connections, no history of doing well there. He had never been on the ballot there. Romney’s campaign team did not regard Ohio as an ideal place for a showdown with an opponent who was both more conservative and more blue-collar and who also had a message—at least when he was focused and disciplined—that was aimed directly at culturally conservative, working-class voters. At times during the campaign, Santorum had spoken with passion and eloquence about what had happened to the country’s manufacturing base and to the workers who once made good livings in the auto and steel and glass factories. He spoke from the workers’ perspective, unlike Romney, whose language reflected that of the entrepreneur and business owner. As important as Michigan had been, Romney’s advisers worried more about Ohio—and knew they would have only a week to make their case. He still had one big advantage. He could far outspend Santorum and did. Between his campaign and super PAC, Romney spent almost $4 million on ads in Ohio. Santorum and his Red, White and Blue Fund spent barely $1 million.
The polls in Ohio had shown a pattern similar to those in Michigan. Santorum’s victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado turned the race around in Ohio, with his margin over Romney pegged at anywhere between seven and eighteen points in the two weeks after February 7. Then Romney began to claw his way back. After the victories in Michigan and Arizona, multiple polls showed Romney and Santorum in a virtual tie in Ohio. Romney, with guidance from Ohio senator Rob Portman, made a series of strategic appearances and stepped up appeals to working-class voters. Three days before the primary, he appeared before an enthusiastic audience at a factory outside Dayton. Nick Mangold, an All-America football player from Ohio State University who was now with the New York Jets, joined him. “If I were as big and strong as Nick,” he said, “this race would be over.” It was a near-perfect rally except when he got a question from the mother of a young woman serving in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. What
would Romney do to end the war and bring the troops home? she asked. He did not have a coherent policy for the war. “We’re going to finish the job of passing it off to them and bring our troops home as soon as humanly possible,” he said. On the final day of campaigning, Romney and Santorum continued to bid for blue-collar voters. In Zanesville, Republicans who had turned out to hear Romney openly worried about the negativity of the GOP contest. “We’re giving the Democrats all the ammunition they need to fight us,” Shirley Labaki, an antiques store owner, told the Columbus Dispatch. “We’re doing all their research for them.” Santorum attacked Romney as a weak general election candidate and highlighted his own conservative credentials. “Liberalism is an ideology,” he said. “Socialism is an ideology. Conservatism is simply what works.”
Election night produced hours of agony for Romney. Of the ten contests that night, Romney won six, Santorum three, and Gingrich one. But it was not until well after midnight that the networks gave him Ohio. For a time it appeared that Santorum might pull the upset he needed to truly transform the race. Only when Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, reported its final numbers was Romney declared the winner. He won the state by just 10,508 votes, far less than his margin in Michigan the previous week. That night he also won Virginia, Vermont, Idaho, Alaska, and Massachusetts and a majority of the delegates awarded that day (hitting the goal his advisers had set out a year earlier in their analysis of how to win the nomination). But Ohio’s result came so late and was so close that Santorum’s victories in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and North Dakota, along with Gingrich’s in Georgia, left the distinct impression that the Republican race was far from over. Rhoades described the scene inside Romney headquarters. “This is a night where [Romney’s] believing in his team,” he said. “Because if you’re watching TV, Mitt Romney’s losing Ohio. But if you’ve got our apparatus set where we’ve got all the phones coming in from all the places and all the counties and precincts, Rich [Beeson] is saying, ‘We’re going to win it.’ It’s a painful, painful night, and it’s painful to go through because Ohio was late and people love a horse race. The slog continues.”