Gingrich’s invocation of Santorum would likely have surprised the former senator—had he been around to hear it. But not only was Santorum not in Lutz, he was on his way out of Florida that day, heading home to suburban Virginia.
Since Iowa, almost nothing had gone right for Rick. His assumption that a virtual tie would provide a boost had proved badly mistaken. After his fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, he entered South Carolina broke and disorganized. He secured the endorsement of a group of prominent evangelicals but was able to do nothing with it. By the time the news arrived that he had beaten Romney in the Hawkeye State, the media had moved on. In the Palmetto State, he finished third, with just 17 percent of the vote. The one bright spot was that his performances in the Florida debates were strong, propelled by a searing critique of Romneycare—that it would render Mitt unable to prosecute the president on Obamacare. “Your mandate is no different than Barack Obama’s mandate,” he said in Jacksonville. “Folks, we can’t give this issue away in this election.”
But the depletion of Santorum’s kitty made it impossible for him to be a factor in such a vast and vastly expensive state. Sagging again in the polls, absent from his own bed for a month, Santorum had another reason for going home: having challenged Mitt to release his tax returns, he felt obligated to do the same. Unlike Romney, however, Santorum had no task force in the wings to put his finances in order. All he had was his home computer and TurboTax.
• • •
ON JANUARY 30, ROMNEY held his last event on the eve of the Florida primary: a massive rally at the Villages. Everything about the Villages was massive, truth be told. A sprawling retirement community fifty miles northwest of Orlando, it had nearly 100,000 residents, 63 recreation centers, 540 holes of golf, and a conservative political bent. Owned by Gary Morse, a co-chair of Romney’s Sunshine State campaign, the Villages had given a corporate donation of $250,000 to Restore Our Future; Morse’s wife, Renee, had written the super PAC a matching personal check. If any place in Florida was Romney Country, this was it.
As the campaign bus rolled toward the event in the early evening, White and Romney were gabbing in the back. Mitt’s recitation of “America the Beautiful” had become a standard trope of his stump speech—roundly derided by the press, cringed at by some of his own donors, but beloved by the candidate and his pal Bob. Hey, White said. Why don’t you sing it tonight?
Really? Romney’s young trip director, Charlie Pearce, thought—as visions of Mike Dukakis in the tank, looking like Rocky the Flying Squirrel, raced through his mind.
Um, I’m not sure about that, Bob, Pearce said. Can the governor actually sing?
At Pearce’s urging, Romney rendered a muted, a capella audition right there on the bus.
Not bad, Pearce said.
Not bad at all, White agreed.
The serenade Romney offered from the stage was slightly off-key. The five-thousand-strong crowd didn’t seem bothered; plenty of them sang along. The video hit YouTube instantly and went viral just as quickly. Any mockery slid off Romney’s back. He had a ball doing it; he considered himself quite the crooner.
The victory Romney racked up the next day was every bit as impressive as Gingrich’s had been ten days earlier. The top-line totals—46 for Mitt, 32 percent for Newt, 13 for Santorum—told only some of the story. In addition to whipping his main rival within the constituencies that were part of Romney’s bedrock electoral coalition (the affluent, the educated, the moderate, the non-evangelical), Mitt carried conservatives and Tea Party supporters, and tied Newt among Christian conservatives.
That Romney had won big in the Sunshine State was beyond dispute. But there was no denying that he also had won ugly. The degree of the unprettiness was causing qualms among GOP leaders, who feared that the damage Mitt and Newt were inflicting on each other might prove hard to heal in time for the general election.
In his victory speech in Tampa, Romney sought to allay those concerns. “Primary contests are not easy,” he declared. “As this primary unfolds, our opponents in the other party have been watching, and they like to comfort themselves with the thought that a competitive campaign will leave us divided and weak. But I’ve got news for them. A competitive primary does not divide us—it prepares us, and we will win. And when we gather back here in Tampa seven months from now for our convention, ours will be a united party with a winning ticket for America.”
Yet the Republican establishment’s jitters about Romney were rooted in more than the harsh tone of the Florida contest. In the last three primaries, Mitt’s core claim—electability in the fall—had taken a beating. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that his unfavorability rating among independent voters had risen twenty points, from 22 to 42 percent, since December. Two months earlier, Romney had been beating Obama 47–34 among those voters. Now the numbers were reversed: Obama was besting Mitt 44–36.
Some of that damage was attributable to the Gingrich and Perry broadsides on Mitt’s Bain tenure and his income taxes. But much of it had been self-inflicted, most notably by the string of flubs—from his fear of pink slips to his enjoyment of firing people to his “not very much” in speaker’s fees—which gave the impression he suffered from a hybrid of affluenza and Tourette’s. At the debate in Tampa, Romney had piled one more brick on his back: his statement that, when it came to immigration, “the answer is self-deportation.” And the morning after the primary, he added yet another.
Making his victory lap on the morning shows, Romney was asked by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien if he understood the “needs of average Americans.”
“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney said. “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich; they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
With his ostensible dismissal of “the very poor,” Romney hadn’t quite snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The triumph in Florida was still real enough: the nomination was within his grasp now—everyone knew that. Later that day, he would become the first Republican candidate to receive Secret Service protection; his code name would be Javelin; Ann’s would be Jockey.
But in Boston, no one doubted that “very poor” would leave a mark. There was nothing to be done. The candidate’s stumbles and fumbles were a part of the environment, like oxygen. Faced with a choice between wringing their hands or keeping their eyes on the prize, his people picked the latter. Rhoades had even developed a catchphrase to ward off frustration with his guy’s gaffes. Whenever the candidate stuck his foot in his mouth, the campaign manager would shrug and say, “Mitt happens.”
13
FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE MOTOR CITY
AGAINST A BACKDROP OF royal blue drapes, flanked by American flags, the Romneys stood before a swarm of reporters just off the lobby of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. It was February 2, two days after Florida and two days before the Nevada caucuses, and Mitt was there to receive a prize he had sought with ardor but also ambivalence: the endorsement of the Donald.
Since his decision to forgo a pursuit of the presidency in favor of his TV paycheck, Trump had played a noisy—and, in the view of many establishmentarians, noisome—role in the race. He had tried in December to moderate his own Republican debate, which fell apart for lack of interest. He had switched his political affiliation to independent and was fulminating about waging a third-party bid. But none of this had kept most of the GOP candidates, actual and potential, from queuing up outside Trump Tower to kiss his ring. Palin, Huckabee, Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain: all had called or met with the Donald in search of his favor.
And so had Romney, first paying a visit to Trump in New York in September and then staying in touch by phone. The Donald took a shine to Mitt, who struck him as looser and funnier than he came across on TV. And Romney liked Trump, too. For a man of such ex
treme squareness, Romney took curious pleasure in the company of oddballs and showboats. After encounters with Trump, he would say to his aides, “Isn’t he fun?”
Jollity wasn’t the only motivating factor in Romney’s romancing of Trump. The Donald was a Tea Party favorite and a potential fund-raising dynamo. (Some in Boston wondered whether Trump could be to Romney what George Clooney was to Obama.) He had also been endowed by the freak show with a puissant bully pulpit—and Romney preferred to see Trump bullying Mitt’s rivals rather than him.
But Romney was aware that hitching his wagon to Trump entailed political risks. The birther issue was nothing but trouble, Mitt thought: ludicrous on the merits, repellent to swing voters, and a needless distraction from Obama’s real vulnerabilities. (If we stay focused on the economy, we can beat this guy; shut up about Kenya, please.) And Romney knew that many New York donors and members of the mainstream media considered Trump a punch line. For the Mitt-Donald meeting in Gotham, Rhoades had Will Ritter fly down from Boston to execute one firm directive: “No fucking pictures.” So Ritter played decoy, holding court with the press outside Trump Tower—standing by the wrong entrance so that Romney could enter and exit through a different door, undetected and unmolested.
Boston tried to approach the endorsement itself with similar delicacy. When Romney learned he had won the Trump Primary, it was a few days before the vote in Florida. The Donald suggested he bestow the honor there, but Newhouse polled the matter and found that it made more sense to wait until Nevada; that Trump wasn’t popular in either place, but he was less unpopular in the Silver State. Trump pushed for a splashy event at his hotel just off the Strip—Tallest building in Las Vegas!—but Boston seized control of the logistics. Fearing an iconic rich-guy photo in front of a gaudy waterfall or gold-encrusted columns, Ritter spent a bundle to install a setup that was as drab as possible. (Trump later deemed it “gorgeous.”)
Yet even as the stagehands were at work, Romney and Rhoades were wondering if they were being played. The night before, a number of top-shelf media outlets—from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to CNN—reported that the Trump endorsement was going to Gingrich. Rhoades couldn’t believe Trump would have the gall to set them up that way. On the other hand, the campaign manager thought, This is a circus, and Trump’s an entertainer.
Romney’s doubts didn’t fully abate until he and Ann saw Trump in the flesh in his hotel suite that morning. Trump had been waxing exuberant to Romney’s staff about the media horde on hand. (“Biggest crowd of press you’ve ever gotten!”) He was eager to take questions from the reporters after the endorsement. Envisioning a birtherfest, Boston wanted no part of it. Three times already, Trump had tried to cajole Mitt’s press secretary, Andrea Saul, into having a Q&A. Three times, she waved him off. Now, in the elevator on the way downstairs, Trump implored Romney, We’re going to take questions, right?
“I’m not taking questions,” Mitt replied, digging in his heels. “You can take questions.”
Trump could live with that.
Team Romney had no idea what Trump was going to say as he took the podium. Mitt and Ann gazed on, arms stiff at their sides, frozen half smiles on their faces. Watching the spectacle on TV in Boston, Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s communications director, shook her head and thought, This looks like a hostage situation.
Liberation came quickly, at least. Trump’s comments consumed less than two minutes. Mitt’s remarks took three minutes—and included a pair of the most candid sentences of 2012. “There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life,” he said. “This is one of them.”
• • •
JUST AROUND THE CORNER on the Strip, Gingrich was bunkered in a hotel owned by a different billionaire—his billionaire, Sheldon Adelson—wondering why anyone ever thought he was about to receive the Donald’s blessing. Newt and Callista were members of Trump National Golf Club, in Virginia. They considered its proprietor a friend. But that was irrelevant. “Trump plays the odds,” Newt told his aides, and the odds were obviously in Romney’s favor.
After Florida, Gingrich felt he needed to regroup. So he had pitched up at the Palazzo and convened an extended retreat with his consultants, major donors, and the ragtag crew that made up his campaign staff. For the better part of four full days, while Romney was beating the bushes for votes in Nevada, Gingrich and his allies were tucked away in windowless warrens and private dining rooms, eating and drinking, scheming and dreaming, and yak-yak-yakking.
Gingrich himself spent most of the first two days grousing and griping. The anger that started bubbling in Iowa and simmered through Florida had now reached a boil. Over and over, Newt berated Romney and his henchmen as a pack of lying liars whose level of mendacity he could scarcely comprehend. He also lashed out at his own people, yelling at them, insulting them (“That’s a stupid thing to say”), ridiculing their suggestions (“You think that we’re going to find the votes we need in Maine?”). Newt’s staff averted their eyes. Never had they seen him quite so seethingly out of sorts.
At a dinner with donors on Friday, the night before the caucuses, Gingrich’s mood began to brighten. Adelson rose and offered him a heartfelt tribute, talking about what a great friend to Israel he had been, how he would make “a fantastic president.”
By the next morning, Gingrich was convinced he saw a route to his third resurrection: a long march through the South and the industrial Midwest to the Texas primary that spring. There he would emerge again as the front-runner as Romney buckled under the weight of his Massachusetts record. Newt was sure that Santo would be gone by then. The guy had more children than campaign staff; he wasn’t built for the long haul. Facing off one-on-one against Mitt, Newt would deny him a majority of delegates. Then the two of them would duke it out at the Republican convention.
The scenario now sustaining Gingrich was implausible, but it struck those who knew him best as all too typical. In trying to explain his old friend’s behavior to Boston, Vin Weber often observed that Newt saw himself as the hero of an epic historical film unspooling in his mind. Gingrich was too smart not to grasp the damage that Romney and Restore had done to him in Iowa and Florida. But there would be nothing doughty about dropping out and throwing his support to Mitt. What Newt’s psyche required was a fittingly dramatic end to his story arc. A convention-floor brawl for the heart and soul of the party would surely qualify.
Gingrich provided a public preview of the blockbuster brewing in his head late that Saturday night. The results of the caucuses were still rolling in, but it was clear he had been crushed by Romney. Rather than deliver a concession speech, Newt conducted a press conference—a twenty-two-minute montage of sarcasm, contumely, and free disassociation. He emphatically denied rumors that he was withdrawing from the race. He predicted his resurgence and its timing with demented certitude. He pledged to march all the way to Tampa. And then he applied his rhetorical mace to Mitt.
After listening to Newt mash his rival in florid terms yet again, The New York Times’s Jeff Zeleny asked him, “Can you be successful going forward if Mitt Romney is still in your head?” Scowling, sneering, Gingrich answered, “I’m not sure Mitt Romney is in my head . . . I’m sure that with a psychiatric degree, that will get you a tremendous opportunity to have new clients.” Then he returned to lambasting Romney, calling him “substantially dishonest,” “blatantly dishonest,” and “fundamentally dishonest.”
Even among a political class inured to over-the-top rhetoric from Gingrich, his unhingedness in Vegas caused mandibles to drop to sternums—and nowhere more so than in Boston. Thinking Gingrich was still a threat, Romney had devoted the better part of three straight days to defending his position in the Silver State. But his final victory margin was a whopping twenty-nine points.
After New Hampshire, Boston had believed the race might be over. After Nevada, certainty took hold. While Gingrich might stick around, encouraged by Adelson’s largesse and the prospect of another debate schedu
led for later in the month, the Romneyites were convinced that Newt was plainly cooked and possibly crackers. (Gingrich would win just one more primary—in his home state, Georgia.) As for Santorum, he wasn’t even in Nevada. How could someone who had ceded the field ever be any sort of threat?
• • •
IT WAS A MIRACLE, in a way, that Santorum was still in the race at all. His special-needs daughter, Bella, had caught a cold while he was in South Carolina, and by the time he left the trail in Florida, her condition was spiraling downward. Rick and Karen had been dealing with Bella’s fragile health since the day she was born; they had a makeshift ICU in their home. But after a long night in which her heart rate kept rising and her breathing became more labored, they rushed her to the hospital, where the doctors diagnosed her with pneumonia. The last time Bella had been this bad off, she was on a ventilator for five weeks and almost died. If that situation repeated itself now, Santorum’s campaign would be over.
Bella usually didn’t react quickly to treatment. This time, she did. Twenty-four hours later, her lungs were nearly clear and her doctors at a loss to explain the rapidity of her recovery. The Santorums put it down to prayer. In any case, the scare had passed—and Rick bounded back into the fray. But rather than making a beeline for Nevada, he headed to Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, where the next set of contests would take place on February 7.
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