Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (29 page)

The next day, Gingrich campaigned at Bobby’s Bar-B-Q in Warrenville. When he arrived the parking lot was filled to overflowing. Supporters and spectators packed the banquet room where he spoke, spilling onto the veranda and the parking lot. A new public poll showed Romney still leading Gingrich in the state, but the margin had been cut in half. Gingrich suspected the race was even closer. “I think they have internal polls that show them losing,” he said.
When a woman in the audience
said, “I want to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for putting Mr. Juan Williams in his place,” the room erupted with applause.

•   •   •

All of this became the backdrop for the most kaleidoscopic day of the primary—and almost everything that happened that day seemed to further erode Romney’s standing. Thursday, January 19, was a day of split-screen viewing and almost hourly recalibration of conventional wisdom. At the beginning of the week, the Republican nomination battle appeared almost as if it were on autopilot, with Romney cruising toward eventual victory. Suddenly the candidates were hurtling toward a Saturday primary now just two days away and Romney was fighting to avoid a potentially costly and unexpected defeat
at the hands of the twice-dead Gingrich. South Carolina’s reputation for memorable and intensely fought primary campaigns remained intact.

The first news broke while most people were still asleep. Overnight, the
Des Moines Register
posted a report that the Iowa Republican Party had completed a recount of the caucuses and Santorum was now thirty-four votes ahead of Romney. Iowa GOP officials had been struggling since caucus night to determine the actual vote count, and rumors had been circulating for days that Romney’s victory was in jeopardy. Just after 9 a.m., the party released its official results, though its statement was ambiguous enough that chairman Matt Strawn had to come forward a few hours later to say definitely that Santorum was the undisputed winner. Santorum had won, but victory seemed to have come too late to make any difference for the former senator, who was gasping for attention at a moment when the nomination contest was seen as a two-person race between Gingrich and Romney.

Meanwhile, another potential blockbuster was unfolding. The
Drudge Report
had posted an item the day before noting that ABC News had secured an interview with Marianne Gingrich, the candidate’s second of three wives. Gingrich’s personal life was part of the baggage he carried as a candidate. On Thursday morning, Ann Curry of
The Today Show
interviewed Gingrich. “Back in 1995, your ex-wife Marianne told
Vanity Fair
she could derail your campaign with one TV interview,” she said. “Tonight she is giving that interview. Is there anything she could say, Newt Gingrich, that could end your campaign?” Gingrich responded, “I’m not going to say anything negative about Marianne. My two daughters, Kathy and Jackie, have sent a letter to the president of ABC News, saying from a family perspective, they think this is totally wrong. . . . People will have to judge me. I’m a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather. See how close I am to my wife, Callista, and how close I am to my daughters and son-in-laws, my two grandchildren. They’ll have to make their mind up. But sixteen- and twenty-year-old stories—we have real stories this week on the failure of the Obama administration.” Three and a half hours later, ABC’s Brian Ross tweeted a link to the most explosive portion of the interview, in which Marianne claimed Gingrich had sought an open marriage. “He said, ‘Callista doesn’t care what I do,’” Marianne said in the interview. “He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

With fevered speculation about what the ABC interview would do to Gingrich’s candidacy, the third big development of the day broke: Perry had decided to end his campaign and endorse Gingrich. Though Perry had little support by then, the symbolic significance of his decision was huge. Reporters quickly descended on the Hyatt Place Hotel in Charleston for Perry’s 11 a.m.
announcement. “As I have contemplated the future of this campaign, I have come to the conclusion that there is no viable path to victory for my candidacy in 2012,” he said. “Therefore today I am suspending my campaign and endorsing Newt Gingrich for president of the United States. I believe Newt is a conservative visionary who can transform this country. We have had our differences, which campaigns inevitably bring out.” Alluding to Gingrich’s multiple marriages and the breaking news about Marianne’s interview, he added, “And Newt is not perfect, but who among us is? The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God, and I believe in the power of redemption, for it is a central tenet of my own Christian faith.”

Perry had come to South Carolina thinking there was still a chance of catching fire. He had seen others rebound after setbacks, notably Gingrich in November. He told spokesman Ray Sullivan the day after the Iowa caucuses that his campaign still had money and he had enough fire left to keep going. “I don’t want to wake up five years from now and wonder what if I’d have stayed in,” Sullivan said Perry told him. By Wednesday of primary week in South Carolina, Perry saw the futility of continuing. He was out of money and faced another humiliating defeat that could further damage his political reputation. His wife, Anita, agreed. When he told his staff he was pulling out, no one tried to dissuade him. The only thing in question was whether he would endorse Gingrich or remain neutral. An argument was made to stay neutral and see how the race unfolded. Perry came to another conclusion. “I can read polls,” he later told me, “and to maintain the race any farther wasn’t in my best interest, wasn’t in Newt’s best interest. And I wanted Newt to be the nominee.”

•   •   •

That night in Charleston, the remaining candidates met for the second debate in four days. It took only the opening minutes for a winner to be declared. CNN’s John King began with a question for Gingrich about his ex-wife’s charges. “Would you like to take time to respond to that?” King asked calmly. “No,” Gingrich said. He hesitated for a split second, as if he were going to avoid the whole controversy, but then said, “But I will.” With even more righteous anger than he had summoned to put down Juan Williams three nights earlier, Gingrich erupted. “I think the destructive, vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” he said. “I’m appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” The audience was applauding now as King interjected, “Is that all you want to say, sir?” Gingrich wasn’t even close to done. “Every person in here knows personal pain,” he said. “Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it, two days before the primary, a significant
question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” As the audience cheered, he added, “My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. . . . Now, let me be quite clear: The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested because they would like to attack any Republican.”
*

I asked Gingrich later whether he had prepared the response with his advisers before the debate. He said, “Several of my highly shrewd advisers said to me, ‘He will lull you to relax and then about two-thirds of the way through the debate he’ll ask you.’ And I said back, ‘No. This involves sex and scandal. He [King] will open with it because he won’t be able to help himself.’ I hadn’t totally thought through how I was going to do it, but I wasn’t surprised by it. And I mean, one of the virtues again of being a jazz musician is you eventually get pretty good timing with the audience. And so I came back and said, ‘No’—and the audience began to applaud—‘but I will.’ And if you watch, there’s a pause. I didn’t expect the intensity of the response, and then, of course, he decided to stick with it, which gave me a second bite at the apple. But the way he came back and said, ‘Oh, well, you know they raised it so it’s not my fault’—[that] was just too big an opening.”

The debate was notable in two other respects. First, Santorum ripped into Gingrich. “I served with him,” Santorum said. “I was there. I knew what the problems were going on in the House of Representatives when Newt Gingrich was leading there. It was an idea a minute, no discipline, no ability to be able to pull things together.” Santorum then accused Gingrich of not standing up to the Democrats over the check kiting scandal in the early 1990s and said his own work in exposing it had “more or as much to do with the 1994 win as any plan that you put together.” Gingrich, who had been the nemesis of the Democrats in the 1980s and helped bring down Jim Wright as Speaker of the House, was outraged by Santorum’s putdown. “Each of us writes a selective history that fits our interest,” he said as he recounted his many battles with the Democrats. “Those are just historic facts, even if they’re inconvenient for Rick’s campaign.” Santorum was asked to respond to Gingrich’s criticism that he lacked the imagination or know-how for something as significant as a presidential campaign. “Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” he said. Gingrich took that as a compliment. “You’re right. I think grandiose thoughts. This is a
grandiose country of big people doing big things. And we need leadership prepared to take on big projects.”

Romney meanwhile continued to flounder on the issue of releasing his tax returns. “I’ll release my returns in April and probably for other years as well. I know that’s what’s going to come.” He said Democrats were trying to demonize success. “I have been successful. But let me tell you, the challenge in America is not people who’ve been successful. The challenge in America, and President Obama doesn’t want to talk about this, is you’ve got a president who’s played ninety rounds of golf while there are twenty-five million Americans out of work, and while the price of gasoline has doubled, he said no to the Keystone pipeline. . . . That’s the problem in America, not the attacks they make on people who’ve been successful.” Gingrich, who had posted his returns on his campaign Web site during the debate, put the onus back on Romney: “He’s got to decide and the people of South Carolina have to decide. But if there’s anything in there that is going to help us lose the election, we should know it before the nomination. And if there’s nothing in there, why not release it?”

•   •   •

The next morning, I called an unaligned South Carolina Republican strategist and a Romney adviser for perspective on the week’s developments. The strategist said he saw no way Gingrich would lose the primary the following day. He was scathing in his assessment of Romney and the campaign’s performance in the state. “I don’t know how in the world they can continually flub [the tax issue],” he said. “Both candidate and campaign have done a terrible job.” If Gingrich won on Saturday, he said, “Florida is what people thought it would be, an all-out brawl.” The glum Romney adviser was critical about the campaign’s reluctance to deal with the tax issue. “I would feel a lot better if we’d turned loose some tax returns a couple days ago,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t understand why the obvious isn’t obvious to everybody.”

Gingrich campaigned with growing confidence. At a boisterous rally in Orangeburg, he again exhorted conservatives to rally behind him. “The only effective conservative vote to stop the Massachusetts moderate is to vote for me,” he said. As he walked away from the microphone, he was asked about Romney’s failure to commit to any of the debates scheduled in Florida the next week. “Romney can’t claim that he’s prepared to debate Obama if he’s not prepared to debate Newt Gingrich,” he said. Romney, bleeding in South Carolina and nationally, sought to lower expectations. “I said from the very beginning South Carolina is an uphill battle for a guy from Massachusetts,” he said after a rain-soaked event in Gilbert. That night in Greenville, in a preview of what was coming, he turned fiery on the stump. It was the first time all week he had shown any life or fight.

On primary day, the candidates held dueling events at Tommy’s Country Ham House and then retreated to their hotels to await results. Romney and his wife, Ann, were at the Marriott in downtown Columbia. That afternoon, the
Post
’s Phil Rucker found Romney in the hotel laundry room, feeding quarters into one of the laundry machines. Ann was keeping him company in the tiny room. Romney was fretting about a sock that had slipped between the machines while praising the quality of Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts.
Later, as he rode up the elevator
with a bag of clean clothes, he foreshadowed the evening’s outcome. “We’re on to Florida and Nevada,” he said. “And where else?”

Saturday night brought a thumping defeat for Romney and a huge victory for Gingrich. The former Speaker captured 40 percent of the vote to just 28 percent for Romney. Santorum ran third with 17 percent.
Gingrich, greeted with chants
of “Newt can win” from supporters, said his victory was the result of “something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be in the news media will take seriously: The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system.” He said, “We don’t have the kind of money that at least one of the candidates has, but we do have ideas, and we do have people, and we proved here in South Carolina that people power with the right ideas beats big money.” And to the delight of the audience, he went after Obama, the former community organizer on Chicago’s South Side. “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” Gingrich said. Romney told his supporters to prepare for a long and difficult fight for the nomination. “I don’t shrink from competition, I embrace it,” he said.

Gingrich said that night he called Vin Weber, the former Minnesota congressman and a longtime friend and ally during their days in the House. Weber had started the campaign supporting Tim Pawlenty but was now backing Romney. It was the second time he had reached out to Weber. “I called Weber when we were in South Carolina in December,” he later told me. “And I said to him, ‘These polls mean that I will beat Romney in a positive campaign, and Romney will be told by his guys that he has to destroy me. And I just want you to understand if he does that then there’ll be no holds barred.’ He said, ‘I understand and I will try to communicate.’” Weber remembered that conversation: “He wanted me to convey to the campaign that if they went over the line—and there’s no clear definition of what that meant—that he would do significant damage to Romney. I think that’s what you saw in Bain. In a calmer environment, Newt Gingrich would have had no problem with Bain Capital. But at that point he was in a mode of creating issues that would hurt Romney. It was a revenge thing on his part.” In his call on the night of his
South Carolina victory, Gingrich said he told Weber, “This means they’re going to be very tempted to be even worse in Florida. And I just want you to understand I am the best counterpuncher in the modern Republican Party.” Weber said he did not remember that call.