The inspiration for Restore arose out of the ashes of 2008. In Iowa, Romney had been assailed over abortion and other issues by automated telephone push polls and television ads funded by a third-party outfit supporting Mike Huckabee. With no outside gang of his own, Romney was caught flat-footed and defenseless. His people were convinced that it had cost him dearly—Beth Myers, who managed the campaign, most of all.
Myers was a planner. She swore to herself that if her boss ran again, Boston would have an affiliated outside spending organization riding shotgun. In the summer of 2009, she began doing legal diligence on how to set up such a group. After the Citizens United decision a few months later, Myers realized that what she had in mind was, in effect, the first-ever presidential super PAC—and aptly code-named her embryonic project Avatar.
Rhoades concurred wholeheartedly regarding the need for Avatar. He and Myers shared a theory about how to build it. Avatar would be run by people who knew Mitt and his world intimately, who were attuned to Romneyland’s strategic and tactical proclivities, so that when the two sides were legally forced to curtail communications, they would be as much in sync as possible.
By the fall of 2010, Myers and Rhoades had recruited a threesome that perfectly fit that bill: Carl Forti, Romney’s 2008 political director; Charlie Spies, his 2008 general counsel; and Larry McCarthy, a key member of the 2008 media team. This isn’t a throwaway—it’s integral, Rhoades told them. We’re asking you because we’ve gotta have the A-Team on the super PAC. We’re asking because “you’re part of the Romney family.”
From then until the following summer, the triumvirate was in regular contact with the Boston high command. Campaign law dictated that they would need to cease all discussions 120 days before the super PAC, now operating under its official Restore banner, put up its first ads. While it was far from certain that Romney would be playing in Iowa, they agreed that they should start the clock ticking in early August so that Restore could go on the air in early December if need be. They also agreed that, although it would be fine for Mitt to bemoan outside spending in broad strokes publicly, he should never repudiate the group or its ads, lest any supporters get skittish about contributing—and that, before the Chinese wall between the sides was imposed, Romney had to send a neon signal to donors that Restore bore his imprimatur.
The Washington Post first reported the existence of Restore in June 2011. That month and the next, Romney attended three of the group’s fund-raising events: at the Four Seasons in Boston, in the penthouse apartment of real estate magnate Stephen Ross in New York, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Romney was the warm-up act at each, delivering a brief stump speech, bestowing his blessing on Restore and its troika, and making his exit. Charlie Spies then performed a ritual that would become standard at countless donor dog-and-pony shows over the next year: after starting his PowerPoint presentation with a slide that explained what a super PAC was, he put up another highlighting the trio’s roles and titles in the 2008 campaign—a blunt way of telegraphing that, yes, indeed, they were part of the Romney family.
In the first five months of 2011, before the press or most Republicans even knew it existed, Restore had raised $8 million. After Romney’s laying on of hands, it doubled that total in June and July, in chunks ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000—and there was more help on the way. In early August, right before the Chinese wall went up, Team Romney dispatched its lead fund-raiser, Steve Roche, to join Restore, armed with the campaign’s invaluable donor lists of mega-rich loyalists. At a final meeting at the Washington offices of Romney’s campaign lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, the Restore boys and the Boston brain trust held a closing discussion of the road ahead. When it was over and they got up to leave, Myers went to hug McCarthy—then pulled up short.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “I just realized I’m not going to see you guys for a year and a half!”
McCarthy chuckled. After more than twenty years of honing his craft in the shadowy world of independent expenditure committees, the adman was all too familiar with the weirdness of mandated non-communication.
With a sparse gray beard, glasses, and a Washington Nationals cap ever present on his head, the fifty-nine-year-old McCarthy looked uncannily like Steven Spielberg. In political circles, he was most famous (or infamous) for a piece of work less uplifting than E.T. but as scary and effective as Jaws: the 1988 Willie Horton commercial that helped destroy Mike Dukakis. Equally potent was another McCarthy spot, “Ashley’s Story” from 2004, which showed President Bush comforting a teenage girl whose mother had been killed on 9/11. (“He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe,” Ashley said.) “The ad was pretty close to decisive in Ohio,” John Kerry’s chief strategist, Bob Shrum, contended later. “And Ohio was the whole thing.”
McCarthy had commissioned no research on Gingrich until November; before that, like pretty much everyone else, he assumed Newt was toast. Scrambling to do last-minute ad testing and focus groups, McCarthy discovered that Republican voters were fairly clueless about Newt’s past. They liked him, thought he was smart, that he would give Obama what-for in the debates. When confronted with discrete pieces of negative information about Gingrich, they tended to give him the benefit of the doubt. His reputation as a conservative leader outweighed almost all else.
But not everything. McCarthy also found that voters had a loose, undefined sense that Gingrich was saddled with “baggage” related to his personal life. They used that word, “baggage,” and used it a lot, which surprised McCarthy. (Normal people talk that way? Huh.) To McCarthy’s eye, the term had the makings of an umbrella under which he could assemble an assortment of Gingrich’s substantive liabilities, alluding to his serial infidelities without invoking them directly. Presented that way, in aggregate, Gingrich’s flaws gave voters pause.
The sixty-second ad that hit the air in Iowa on December 9 opened with a picture of a grinning Obama. “Why is this man smiling?” the female narrator asked. Because he was tickled pink about facing Gingrich as the Republican nominee. “Newt has a ton of baggage,” the ad went on, and then marched through the dizzying panoply of charges against him: ethics, Freddie Mac, Pelosi-Gore, amnesty for illegals, his support for an individual mandate in health care, etc. “Maybe that’s why George Will called Gingrich ‘the least conservative candidate,’” the ad concluded.
Gingrich’s initial reaction to the start of the air war and Team Romney’s efforts to get under his skin was a cheery dismissal. On the afternoon of December 10, a few hours before the next debate, he paid a visit to his newly opened (and still largely empty) Iowa headquarters, just outside Des Moines. “My campaign will be relentlessly positive,” Gingrich said as Callista beamed in the front row. “We’re not going to be tearing people down.” He regaled the assembled staff and reporters with an account of the advice being rendered by his two “debate coaches”: his pre-teenage grandchildren.
The debate that night at Drake University was the first to not include Cain, who had departed the race days earlier. Its most memorable moment came from Romney: his tone-deaf offer to bet Perry $10,000 as they wrangled over the accusation that the paperback of No Apology had been edited to remove the suggestion that Romneycare was a national model. (“I’m not in the bettin’ business, but I’ll show you the book,” replied Perry slyly.)
The rest of the night was devoted almost entirely to broadsides directed at Gingrich. Romney jeered at his “idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon,” and again took after him for being in favor of “a form of amnesty” that would be “another magnet that draws people into our country illegally.” Paul poked Gingrich on Freddie Mac. Bachmann ridiculed him for making his living on K Street, the “Rodeo Drive of Washington, D.C.” And Perry went there on the question of monogamy: “If you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner, so I think that issue of fidelity is important.”
The Drake debate was but a gentle preview of the pile-on tha
t lay ahead for Gingrich. At the next debate, five days later in Sioux City, Bachmann inveighed against him for “influence-peddling” and being insufficiently pro-life. On TV, Paul’s campaign and the pro-Perry super PAC Make Us Great Again pulped him with negative ads.
Boston, meanwhile, continued to pummel Gingrich from every conceivable direction, but especially on the Ryan plan, including with a one-minute campaign video resurrecting his May Meet the Press interview. Romney moved into full mockery mode: demanding that Newt return the money he’d earned from Freddie Mac, blowing raspberries at his claim that he wasn’t a lobbyist (“That would make him the highest-paid historian in history”), and deeming him “zany” in The New York Times. “Zany,” Romney said, “is not what we need in a president.”
Yet all of these were Circus Iowus sideshows compared with what was going on under the big top: the continued bombardment of Gingrich by Restore. A few days after putting up its initial sixty-second “baggage” spot, the group released a thirty-second version—and soon followed that with another sixty, this one enlivening the motif with visuals of suitcases on an airport luggage carousel (with a green valise labeled FREDDIE MAC popping open and expelling a flurry of hundred-dollar bills).
The money behind Restore’s assault was enormous: roughly $3 million, triple the amount that Gingrich was spending in Iowa, more than double Team Romney’s outlay. In focus groups that Boston and Restore were each conducting, the effects were immediately apparent. The pre-ad blitz mentions of Newt’s “baggage” had turned into a thundering chorus. McCarthy was flabbergasted by how fast the ads were working; he’d seen nothing like it in years. Myers was relieved and delighted; her handiwork was paying off. This is a very good thing, she thought.
It was becoming apparent to one and all that Gingrich’s incineration was the story in Iowa. The network newscasts played it prominently, night after night. His poll numbers were plunging. Two weeks earlier, Gingrich had been scoring in the low thirties; now he was in the teens and trailing both Romney and Paul. On December 17, The Des Moines Register gave Newt the back of its hand and conferred its endorsement on Mitt.
The Register’s blessing was a coveted commodity, and Romney was thrilled to have it. The question was what Gingrich was thinking, and that was difficult to discern. With the caucuses approaching in two weeks, his rivals humping the hustings, and his front-runner status being shredded, Newt was literally a thousand miles away—with his mind on other matters.
• • •
GINGRICH TOOK HIS SEAT in the fourth row at a high school auditorium in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, awaiting a holiday concert by the City of Fairfax Band. Perched onstage behind a thicket of red poinsettias, Callista, who played French horn, smiled brightly and waved to her husband as the lights went down. At that moment, the news of the Register endorsement was lighting up Twitter, but Gingrich’s BlackBerry was shut off and tucked away. By the time the band eased into “Silent Night,” he had drifted into a peaceful doze.
It had been a full day for Newt. In the morning, he’d conducted a long-distance conference call with Iowa voters in which he addressed some of the charges against him and made a plea for support on caucus night. (“I’d be very, very grateful if you’d be willing to be a precinct captain by pressing 2,” he said.) In the afternoon, he spent two hours in Mount Vernon, sitting next to Callista as she signed copies of her new children’s book, Sweet Land of Liberty, and mugging for the cameras with a man dressed up as Ellis the Elephant, the cartoon hero of his wife’s tome.
In print, on cable, and on the Web, Gingrich’s decision to occupy himself this way on the last non-holiday weekend before the caucuses brought forth waves of derision. The reaction galled him, especially coming from Fox; he had expected better from his former employer than being subjected to an absurd double standard. Romney can go off to one of his fancy houses and it’s a non-event, Newt thought. But the media kills me for going home for a Christmas concert for my wife. In a different world, you can imagine people saying, “Gee, what an awfully nice thing to do.”
Gingrich had spent the first half of December behaving as if that fantasy realm was real. He had entered the race expecting that Romney and his allies would say anything to nuke him, but he did nothing to prepare a robust defense. He thought it would be a sufficient rebuttal to denounce the attacks as “lies,” “distortions,” or “grotesqueries,” because that plainly was what they were. When he insisted he would run a “relentlessly positive” campaign, he assumed he would be taken seriously. One thing the Old Newt had rarely been accused of was naïveté. The New Newt was firmly in its grip.
Gingrich had also imposed a paralytic degree of caution on himself. He knew as well as anyone his propensity for self-inflicted damage. Whenever he was asked about his latest successor as speaker, Newt compared Boehner to Woody Hayes: three yards and a cloud of dust. Gingrich, by contrast, saw himself as a gunslinging quarterback, rolling out of the pocket and heaving the ball upfield. His style had produced its share of touchdowns over the years but also plenty of interceptions. (Watching the 2002 NFL playoff game when Brett Favre was picked off six times, Gingrich thought, That’s me.) With Romney and his abettors trying to get into his head, Newt had been trying to run out the clock rather than drive for the end zone—and instead had managed to fumble the ball on his own ten-yard line.
After his weekend in Virginia, Gingrich returned to Iowa and attempted to get back on offense. On December 20, after appearing at a factory in Ottumwa, Gingrich once again decried his rivals for their negativity. When a voter asked about a radio ad that called him a “globalist,” Newt snapped, “I think these guys hire consultants who just sit around, get drunk, and write really stupid ads. I am just so fed up with this stuff.”
But it was Romney who seemed to have pushed Gingrich over the edge. Earlier that day, on Morning Joe, Mitt had been questioned about Restore. Following to the letter the script that his and the group’s advisers had drafted over the summer, Romney grumbled, “Campaign finance law has made a mockery of our political campaign season. We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs.” Asked if he would tell Restore to stop its anti-Newt onslaught, Mitt replied, “I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape, or form . . . If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.”
Gingrich knew enough about Restore to spot the hypocrisy on display. And he knew that the laws against coordination contained no prohibition against a candidate disavowing, or calling for a super PAC to take down, any ad. Marching into a press conference after his Ottumwa event, Gingrich brandished a transcript of Romney’s remarks. “His comments today are palpably misleading, clearly false, and are politics in its worst form,” Gingrich thundered. “Understand, these are his people, running his ads, doing his dirty work while he pretends to be above it.”
Gingrich had always despised what he called the “consultant class,” and the mass resignation of his own hired guns in June had only deepened the animus. Newt also had little affection for the Bush family, so he wasn’t surprised the next day when 41 declared his support for Romney. The endorsement came on the heels of that of Bob Dole, who confided to Boston that he believed if Gingrich were the nominee, it would guarantee a blowout for Obama on the scale of Reagan’s in 1984.
Newt never expected to be the candidate of the Beltway, but to see the establishment rushing to the ramparts took him aback. More and more of his former House colleagues were on TV slamming him gratuitously, questioning his character, not his policies, alluding to his personal life. It left him bewildered, hurt his feelings. The same was true of his treatment by Fox, which Gingrich saw as having turned on him viciously and inexplicably. The on-air talent was pumping the pom-poms so feverishly for Romney that Newt wondered if their arms were getting tired. He assumed that Rupert Murdoch must have taken a shine to Mitt. (In Boston they thought, If only.)
Gingrich’s woes deepened on Christmas Eve, wh
en the Virginia Republican Party notified the campaign that it had failed to submit the required signatures to qualify for the March 6 GOP primary. For Gingrich, a loud devotee of management fads such as Lean Six Sigma, the rudimentary screwup was a huge embarrassment. On Facebook, his campaign director called it an “unexpected setback” similar to “December 1941”—thus providing Romney with another opportunity for burlesque. “He compared that to Pearl Harbor,” Mitt quipped. “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.”
Gingrich returned to Iowa after Christmas for the caucus homestretch, setting off on a nine-day bus tour of the state. The schedule originally called for forty-four stops, but that number had already been cut in half. As he traipsed from town to town, Newt seemed determined to avoid anything resembling a consistent message, rambling from one arcane disquisition—on the history of the transcontinental railroad, the threats posed by pandemics and electromagnetic pulses, his status as an “amateur paleontologist”—to the next. In a nod to Romney (and Lucy), he visited a sweet shop in Algona.
“Now that I have the courage to come to the chocolate factory,” Newt said, “I hope Governor Romney has the courage to debate me one-on-one and defend his negative ads.”
By December 30, Gingrich was entirely out of sorts. At a morning event billed as a “mom town hall,” he took to the stage looking exhausted, his face pale and puffy. The moderator was pollster Frank Luntz, who had helped Gingrich devise the Contract with America in 1994. Luntz asked Gingrich about the candidate’s own late mother: “What special moments come to mind?” Almost instantly, Gingrich’s eyes welled up, and soon tears were streaming down his cheeks.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 27