But Gingrich ignored the flashing yellow lights, playing down the fact that Gaylord and many other aides from his speakership days declined to join the campaign. He hired consultants, including Dave Carney and Rob Johnson, to join another longtime adviser, Sam Dawson, in running his operation. He wheedled Callista into acquiescence, promising that he would accommodate her priorities.
Gingrich wasn’t blind to his vulnerabilities, including the disintegration of his first marriage in circumstances strikingly similar to the dissolution of his second. I’ve made mistakes, I’m fallible, I’m a Christian who has asked forgiveness, he thought. It’s all out there. There will be no surprises. This will be exhilarating.
The lark-like tenor of Gingrich’s approach to his campaign became apparent before his run officially began. In a March 2011 appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he was asked obliquely about his serial infidelities. Gingrich answered as if he had never given the question an ounce of thought, with a lengthy disquisition that included the suggestion that his indiscretions had been driven by a combination of exhaustion and excessive patriotism. “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” he said.
Two months later, on May 9, Gingrich announced his candidacy via Twitter. When the tweet went out, he was on a plane with Callista and some staff, on the tarmac in Atlanta, dozing in his seat. Hey, Newt, we just did it! his staffers cried, trying to rouse him. Gingrich remained slumped in his chair, snoozing like a hibernating bear.
The passage from slumber to life support took just four weeks. On May 15, Gingrich went on Meet the Press and described Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system as “right-wing social engineering,” infuriating Rush Limbaugh, Ryan himself, and conservatives around the country. Two days later, Politico broke the story about the half-million-dollar charge account at Tiffany. (When Dawson investigated, he found that the bill the couple had run up over the years made half a million dollars seem small beer.) At the end of May, with his campaign reeling, Gingrich set off with Callista on a luxury cruise in the Greek isles. His team had begged him not to go, but Callista put her foot down. When the couple returned in early June, virtually all of Gingrich’s top people quit, with Carney and Johnson making their return to Austin to launch Perry.
“This is suicide,” Dawson told Newt. “And I’m not going to be a part of an assisted suicide.”
Gingrich would later call the next two months “the hardest in my career.” Bereft of backing, unable to raise money, he was deemed effectively defunct by the political class. But with Gingrich’s national name recognition, red-meat policy theories, and savvy about scaring up free media, he was able to live off the land in a way that a candidate such as Pawlenty never could. Gingrich saw the packed schedule of debates in the late summer and fall as an opportunity to resurrect himself. And he was further buoyed by what he perceived as Romney’s multifarious and mortal weaknesses.
For all the denigration of the Bay Stater by his fellow Republicans, Gingrich’s critique stood out as the purest distillation of the form. Newt had been observing Mitt since 1994. He had met with Romney in Boston and Washington and talked to Huckabee and others about his conduct in 2008. Gingrich thought Romney was intelligent and a fund-raising machine. But he also thought Mitt was burdened with nonexistent people skills, a religious faith he refused to talk about, and a record in Massachusetts he was unable to explain—especially a health care plan that put him at daggers drawn with the core of his party. (That Gingrich glossed over his own past backing of an individual mandate only proved the Old Newt was alive and kicking.) Gingrich’s cumulative judgment wasn’t that Romney faced long odds of winning; it was that there was zero chance of him becoming the nominee.
Gingrich was right about the rejuvenating effect of the debate stage on his candidacy. In Ames, at the Reagan Library, and in the two Florida forensic scrums, he turned in a series of bracing performances. Gingrich intuitively understood that there were two surefire techniques for stimulating the erogenous zones of the Republican base: taking the wood ferociously to Obama and whaling on the media. His genius was in divining ways to do both at once, and on occasion even including a third tickle—a pious, Reaganesque call for Republican unity—in the bargain.
A classic instance occurred in Simi Valley when one of the debate moderators, John Harris of Politico, attempted to draw Gingrich into a squabble between Perry and Romney over the individual mandate. “Well, I’m frankly not interested in your effort to get Republicans fighting each other,” Gingrich began. (Loud applause.) “You would like to puff this up into some giant thing,” Gingrich went on. “The fact is, every person up here understands Obamacare is a disaster. It is a disaster procedurally. It was rammed through after they lost Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. It was written badly, it was never reconciled. It can’t be implemented. It is killing this economy. And if this president had any concern for working Americans, he’d walk in Thursday night and ask us to repeal it because it’s a monstrosity. Every person up here agrees with that.” (Wild applause.) And let me just say, since I still have a little time left . . . I, for one, and I hope all of my friends up here, am going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama, who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team—whoever the nominee is—we are all for defeating Barack Obama.” (Deafening applause.)
By the early autumn, Gingrich’s premonition about gaining a second life was starting to seem prescient, at least to him. With Perry in free fall, Newt’s poll numbers were edging upward. After paying a visit to Governor Haley in South Carolina on October 4, Gingrich walked out on the statehouse grounds and phoned his old friend Vin Weber. A former Minnesota congressman who was one of Newt’s leading lieutenants in the nineties, Weber had championed Romney in 2008 and Pawlenty early in this cycle; now he was back with Mitt.
“Perry’s not going to come back, and Cain is going to collapse,” Gingrich prophesied. “And I’m going to be the main competitor to Romney by the middle of November.”
“Well, you might be,” Weber replied. He had long thought that Newt could be a credible candidate, and was surprised by his summer implosion (although, knowing Gingrich as he did, not totally surprised). He also thought Newt was one of the most farsighted politicians he had ever met.
“I know what the Romney campaign is capable of—I’ve watched them,” Gingrich continued. “I respect Mitt Romney. But I want you to tell them that if they try to do anything to me and Callista, I will destroy him.”
• • •
GINGRICH’S COMEBACK PREDICTION CAME FULLY TO fruition on precisely the schedule he had forecast. Heading into Thanksgiving, on the heels of Perry’s “oops” and in the midst of the cascading Cain accusations, four national polls in a row put Newt in first place, narrowly ahead of Romney, and he had surged to double-digit leads in Iowa and South Carolina.
Despite his speakership, Gingrich never considered himself a member of the Republican establishment. The feeling was mutual. The party’s grandees greeted his climb to the top of the polls with manifest incredulity, dismissing him as an impetuous flake. On a speaking jaunt to Chicago, Rove ran into a local business majordomo who asserted categorically that Gingrich could never win the nomination. When Rove asked why, the muckety-muck cited a recent visit by Newt to the Windy City during which, instead of fund-raising or politicking, he frittered away much of a Saturday touring the Field Museum’s dinosaur collection.
Rove found the tale astonishing, and repeated it on Greta Van Susteren’s program on Fox. Soon after, he received a chippy e-mail from Gingrich: “How many days did George W. spend at the ranch? Reagan spent one year out of eight at the ranch. I don’t have a ranch. Half day at the Field Museum cleared my mind. Just a thought. Newt.”
Now even more incredulous, Rove fired off
a sharp reply: “With all due respect, I don’t remember Bush taking a Saturday off in September of 1999 to visit a museum in a state that holds a late primary, nor a Greek cruise that summer. Field Museum board member had been inclined to support you until he heard about your excursion and concluded you weren’t serious . . . When you get to be president, you can have the schedule of Nixon, Reagan, 41, or 43, and you’ll find the job doesn’t leave you at the ranch, or Kennebunkport, or Camp David. It just follows you.”
Rove was all but certain that Gingrich’s temper and unruliness would inevitably cause him to self-destruct—the only question was when. But some of Rove’s establishment chums were less sanguine. Fabled lobbyist and McCain adviser Charlie Black was warning anyone who would listen that Gingrich’s hold on conservative activists was deep and durable. At receptions and in network green rooms, senior Republicans fretted that Boehner would lose the speakership if Newt was their standard-bearer.
Up in Boston, Romney shook his head. He regarded Newt as a font of provocative policies, a galvanizing orator, and an agile debater. But Gingrich’s campaign was a one-man band, his world topsy-turvy, and his personal life more sordid than Romney cared to contemplate. The Republican speed-dating tournament was starting to weigh on Mitt. First it’s Perry, then it’s Cain, now it’s Newt, Romney thought. What’s wrong with me? Why not me?
Stevens stoked Romney’s sense of disbelief at Newt’s front-runner status. To a farcical degree, Stevens was the most Panglossian of the Romneyites; no matter how horrific the development, he would declare it a boon for Boston. Newt’s rising? Great for us! said Stevens, who professed, even after “oops,” to be more concerned about Perry. Of Gingrich he said, Are you kidding me? The party’s going to nominate him? Be real.
The lenses Rhoades peered through, by contrast, were less rose-tinted. He saw Gingrich’s rise as a real threat, as did the rest of Team Romney. The reason was Iowa. Assuming Romney carried New Hampshire, where he held a commanding lead, he was well financed and well organized enough to withstand losses in the other three early states—unless one person swept those other three. And a thumping victory for Gingrich in the Hawkeye State would set him up to do just that, propelling him powerfully into South Carolina and Florida. Stevens’s partner, Schriefer, even worried that a Newt win in Iowa would imperil New Hampshire for Romney. On November 2, the New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed the former speaker, lending ballast to that nightmare scenario.
In the days before and after Thanksgiving, the Romneyites held a series of meetings at the Boston HQ to figure out their play in the Iowa caucuses, which were scheduled for January 3. All year long, the campaign had been keeping its powder dry, maintaining just a skeleton crew in the Hawkeye State, delaying a decision about how aggressively to compete. Not one TV ad had been aired, and the candidate had stumped there on only three occasions.
Newhouse’s polling suggested that Romney would be hard-pressed to garner more than 25 percent of the Iowa vote, the same as his 2008 total and probably not enough for a first-place finish. Yet to Boston’s way of thinking now, claiming the number-one spot was not the point. The point was to keep Gingrich from prevailing by a stonking margin, and to inflict serious damage on him in the process. We probably can’t catch him in Iowa, Rhoades said, but we can make sure that he comes out battered. Stevens disagreed. Not only can we catch Newt, the strategist said, but he’s gonna finish third.
In the end, the decision came down to Romney. He and Ann remained wary of Iowa and The Mormon Thing. Yet his people in the state reported that there was little anti-LDS chicanery taking place that they could detect. At the same time, Romney was itching to move past the anarchy of the past months. The Union Leader endorsement of Newt unnerved him. After 2008, he had vowed to resist the allure of the quick-knockout strategy in 2012. But he was thinking anew about the virtues of trying to shut this deal down early.
On December 1, the Romney campaign announced that it was going on the air in Iowa with TV ads. The news came amid a torrent of bad headlines for Mitt. Two days earlier, in an interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Romney had turned testy and sarcastic when asked about having changed his stances over the years on climate change, abortion, gay rights, and immigration. (“Well, Bret, your list is just not accurate. So, one, we’re going to have to be better informed about my views on issues.”) Romney’s face was plastered on the cover of Time; the headline read WHY DON’T THEY LIKE ME? A new Rasmussen poll put him behind Gingrich by twenty-one points nationally; a fresh Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey had him trailing by thirty in Florida.
Gingrich was out in Des Moines, absorbing the same streams of data, floating on cloud nine. “I am going to be the nominee,” he proclaimed in an interview with ABC News’s Jake Tapper. “And, by the way, I don’t object if people want to attack me. That’s their right. All I’m suggesting is that it’s not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast.”
Gingrich’s declaration was bald and bold, and his mind unshadowed by doubt. Before the caucuses, there would be two debates in Iowa—two more chances for him to shine. His pollster, Kellyanne Conway, told him that he was “in Romney’s head.” Boston’s decision to start advertising seemed to confirm the analysis: Mitt was running scared.
Gingrich would come to regret having put prudence aside and run his mouth so hubristically with Tapper. Newt freely admitted he had said plenty of asinine things in his career, yet this was one of the dumbest. Looking back on it months later, he thought, When the other guy has a ton of money and you have none, it’s not smart to paint a bull’s-eye on your back.
11
MAN ON FIRE
THEY WERE ARMING THE missiles for launch in Boston even as Gingrich was declaring his nomination a fait accompli. As they had done for Pawlenty and Perry before him, the Romneyites convened a series of “Kill Newt” meetings on Commercial Street. On a whiteboard, they drew up a list of potentially fruitful lines of attack on Gingrich’s record, résumé, and character. Before long, the whiteboard looked like John Nash’s equation-crammed window in A Beautiful Mind.
Even setting aside his personal peccadilloes, Gingrich made for a target-rich environment. In a recent debate, he had argued for a “humane” approach to immigration that would forswear the hard-right solution of mass deportation of illegals; Romney, picking up where he left off with Perry, was already denouncing Newt for offering a “new doorway to amnesty.”
Gingrich’s “right-wing social engineering” crack about the Ryan Medicare plan was another vulnerability. So was his global warming ad with Pelosi, which not only costarred the dreaded San Francisco lefty but was part of a campaign led by the demonic Al Gore. Gingrich had been the first speaker ever to receive a formal ethics reprimand and had been compelled to reimburse the House $300,000 for its investigation of him. After leaving Congress, he earned millions for what could be portrayed as nefarious logrolling. Among his clients was the housing-bubble villain Freddie Mac, from which Newt had collected $1.6 million—for providing services as “a historian,” he now maintained.
One Sunday morning, Romney sat in on a Kill Newt meeting and added his two cents. Mitt was perfectly happy to strafe the speaker until he was a human colander. But in 2008 Romney had learned all about the distaste of Iowa voters for candidate-on-candidate violence. He preferred to leave his staff and surrogates to man the rocket launchers, though he had no compunction about taking potshots at Newt’s soft spots.
Gingrich had a storied record of tantrums under pressure. Everyone in politics remembered his admission that he had propelled the federal government shutdown in 1995 in part because of his seating assignment in the rear of Air Force One on a trip to Israel with Bill Clinton—a conniption memorialized in a front-page illustration in the New York Daily News of the speaker in diapers, under the massive-point headline CRY BABY. In Boston, the hope was that, with a bit of provocative psyops, the campaign could light the fuse that would lead to one of Newt’s patented acts of
self-immolation.
The morning after Gingrich’s exercise in braggadocio on ABC, Romney kicked things off with an appearance on Fox and Friends, where he dinged Newt for making “self-aggrandizing statements” and being a Washington lifer. A week later, on December 8, Boston cranked the acrimony up a notch. On a Romney campaign conference call with reporters, former Missouri senator Jim Talent, who had served with Newt in the House, slapped him around as “not a reliable or trustworthy leader,” while former New Hampshire governor John Sununu called his dis of the Ryan plan “self-serving” and “anti-conservative.”
Team Romney went up with a new TV ad called “Leader” that same day. As sepia-hued footage from home movies unspooled, showing Mitt and Ann doting on their young children, the soundtrack featured Romney speaking proudly of having been “married to the same woman for . . . forty-two years” and “in the same church my entire life.” The commercial never mentioned Gingrich. It didn’t have to. The implicit contrasts were about as subtle as a mallet to the forehead.
The next day’s offensive had all the delicacy of an atomic blast: a sixty-second spot spitting out many of the issues from the Boston whiteboard in rat-a-tat succession. It was just the first in a fusillade of similarly themed commercials that would dominate the airwaves for the next three and a half weeks.
The ads were the work of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which meant that, technically speaking, Boston had nothing to do with them, since by law the campaign was barred from coordinating with Restore. The reality was more complicated. Although Restore was operationally independent from Team Romney, in every historical, genetic, and practical sense it was a subsidiary of the campaign.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 26