Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (30 page)

Romney had arrived in South Carolina the winner of the first two contests on the primary-caucus calendar, the leader in the polls and positioned to take command of the nomination battle. He was preparing to leave having lost two of the first three contests, now facing a still flawed but rejuvenated opponent in Gingrich and with renewed doubts about his capacity to rally his party behind him.

The Empire Strikes Back

T
he night after his defeat in South Carolina, Mitt Romney launched an aggressive new attack—the toughest of the campaign—on Newt Gingrich. He landed in Jacksonville and his entourage rolled south to Ormond Beach for an outdoor rally. His rhetoric was harsh and personal.
Politico
’s Reid Epstein
said it was as if Romney were reading Gingrich’s résumé from a Wikipedia entry and “undercutting each item as he got to it.” Romney said the country was electing a leader, not a talk show host. “Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader,” he said. “He was a leader for four years as Speaker of the House. And at the end of four years, it was proven that he was a failed leader and he had to resign in disgrace.” He said that after leaving Congress, Gingrich had spent fifteen years working as a lobbyist “selling influence” in Washington. In a state whose economy had been hard hit by housing foreclosures, he reprised an attack from earlier in the campaign by noting that Gingrich had worked as a consultant to Freddie Mac, and demanded that Gingrich reveal more of what he had done for the housing agency.

The attacks marked a new phase in the Republican campaign, the result of a week of intense planning by Romney’s Boston-based campaign team. Romney’s advisers had seen the drubbing in South Carolina coming and began to shift their strategy accordingly. “By the first debate [in Myrtle Beach], it’s game over,” Matt Rhoades later told me. “I’m not even thinking about South Carolina anymore except for any cleanup duty. We’re working on tax returns. I’m working on making sure we have the best kickass events and message strategy and we have all the resources we need to go on TV going into Florida, while we’re in South Carolina.” When Gingrich blasted John King in the second debate, the Boston team was barely paying attention to South Carolina. Neil Newhouse said, “By the time we got to that point, we knew South Carolina was gone and we had already changed internally. By the time Saturday came, our mourning was over and we were focused on Florida. We didn’t even watch the numbers come in on Saturday.”

Romney’s super PAC had handled the bulk of the advertising attacks on
Gingrich in Iowa and South Carolina. But the Boston team was never fully happy with what the super PAC was doing. Stuart Stevens told the others it was time to shift tactics. His message, according to another member of the team, was: Screw the super PAC. We need to run our own negatives against Newt. We need to start taking the bark off him. Stevens saw Gingrich as an easy target, someone who could not sustain himself in a serious campaign with Romney. “The problem Gingrich has is he’s always going to bump up against the idea of what he’s saying with who he is,” Stevens later told me. “You can’t run as an insurgent when you have ‘Speaker’ in front of your name. You can’t run as an anti-Washington guy when you’ve been there for three and a half decades. You can’t run as a closet lobbyist. You can’t rage against the machine when you’re the machine—against a guy who’s never been in Washington.”

The team set to work to develop a strategy to take Gingrich down. Advisers began a series of what they called “Kill Newt” meetings. There was a big whiteboard on the wall of the conference room where the attack strategy began to come together. At the top of the whiteboard was a series of unflattering descriptions: “lobbyist,” “undisciplined,” “erratic,” “opportunist,” “arrogant,” “unsteady,” “what’s in it for Newt,” “K Street insider,” “untrustworthy,” “prima donna.” Below that were five categories outlining specific lines of attack: “Immig.” (for immigration), “Social,” “Ethics,” “DC Insider,” “Conservative.” Under “Conservative,” the possible attacks included Gingrich’s criticisms of on Paul Ryan’s Medicare blueprint as right-wing social engineering and his history of supporting more spending. Under “DC Insider” there were three attacks: Freddie Mac, lobbying, and Newt Inc.

Romney’s team set out to rattle Gingrich, put him on the defensive, surround him with Romney surrogates as he campaigned in Florida, bombard him on television with attack ads, smother him in the debates and force him, if possible, into mistakes. The Sunday night rally was designed to frame the entire week. “We wanted Mitt to talk about and take it to Obama and focus on jobs and the economy, spending, the issues,” Rhoades said. “That just didn’t work in South Carolina, not when you’ve got super PACs dropping on you, not when you’ve got the press still looking for a fight, not when you have debate moderators serving themselves up on a platter to Newt Gingrich and Newt just cranking it out of the park, to his credit.” The Romney team had learned a valuable lesson during South Carolina. “I get lectured all the time during this primary process about Mitt’s not being ‘big,’” Rhoades said. “We tried it in South Carolina. We got shellacked by Newt Gingrich. So we weren’t going to allow that to happen again. And so we went in there, we decided to kick it up a notch on our contrast. The gov, he was just on fire going into Florida.”

On the morning after the South Carolina primary, Romney advisers laid
out the plan to the candidate in a conference call. It was known as “the path forward” plan, but in reality it was the “Kill Newt” plan. His advisers went through the details department by department. Rhoades offered an overview and turned it over to Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s combative communications director. She described what one adviser later called “an entirely negative earned media campaign against Newt.” The campaign had lined up a surrogate strike force across the state, with David Kochel flown in from Iowa to manage it on the ground. The plan was to follow Gingrich everywhere he went. “And it was going to be a mind game because we knew that he couldn’t handle it,” one adviser said. “Our strategy was to go after him with all the earned media
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tactics we could employ. We were going to do it nonstop. It was the hardest that we had ever worked, on the entire campaign. We were blowing Newt out over everything. That’s what we told Mitt we were going to do.”

Romney mostly listened. Okay, he said, let’s do it. As the Florida campaign began, Romney was in a tailspin. The campaign’s internal polling had shown him leading Gingrich in Florida by 42 to 15 percent before South Carolina. By the night he appeared in Ormond Beach, he was leading by a precarious 37 to 33 percent. Newhouse said he sent an e-mail to others in the campaign that night. It began, “Buckle your chinstraps.”

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The startling outcome of the South Carolina primary did more than turn the race for the Republican presidential nomination upside down. It also highlighted what by now was the party’s yearlong identity crisis in its search for a standard-bearer. If Republican voters seemed confused, it was no wonder. The field of candidates included no one yet who seemed to possess the attributes that could provide a center of gravity to a party still searching for someone to define its post-2010 character. In some respects the contest between Romney and Gingrich had familiar contours: establishment versus insurgents. But neither candidate was the ideal choice to play his assigned role or, more important, to bridge the kinds of internal divisions that had played out in Senate primary contests in 2010. Romney had the breeding and countenance of the establishment, and yet when he first ran for office in 1994 he ran away from Ronald Reagan and the prevailing philosophy and tactics of the Gingrich-led campaign. Gingrich could rightly claim a longer connection to the party’s conservative causes, and he embodied the resentment of the grass roots toward the establishments of both parties. He consistently channeled the anger at Obama that had given rise to the Tea Party. But though he had the rhetoric
of an outsider, he had operated in the corridors of power in Washington for almost three decades, was complicit in some of the actions the Tea Party opposed, and had developed many detractors in his own party.

The two men spoke to contradictory desires within the party. The grass roots yearned for a fighter who could take on Obama in the most strident and confrontational way possible. But other Republicans also knew they needed the steady competence of a leader capable of restraining the worst excesses of the hard-right activists and who could translate conservative rhetoric and ideas into a governing strategy that would appeal beyond the base. At this moment, some of those on the sidelines still seemed better suited to pull the party together. Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels would have been establishment candidates, yet both had the kind of conservative credentials and credibility that Romney lacked. Chris Christie could be as pugnacious as Gingrich—as rhetorically harsh in attacks on Obama’s leadership as anyone. But he would not have been burdened by Gingrich’s liabilities. Mike Huckabee could have played the role of populist conservative better than either Romney or Gingrich. No one could at the time say that a Barbour or Daniels or Huckabee or Christie would have done better than any of the existing candidates. But there was no mistaking the feeling that there was still a mismatch between the character and personality of the Republican Party and the people who were seeking to lead it into one of the most important campaigns in years.

Gingrich and Romney had attributes that made them worthy of the coming showdown in Florida. With some exceptions, Romney had been disciplined and patient. He had stumbled in South Carolina over the release of his tax returns, but in other ways he had shown steadiness and intelligence. He was a better candidate than he had been in 2008. Gingrich had shown remarkable resilience throughout the campaign and the spirit that many conservatives were looking for. But it was the other side of the balance sheet that made Republicans nervous about what they might be getting, no matter who they got. Romney lacked real passion in attacking Obama. He was more gentlemanly than many conservatives wanted. He had moved right in the nomination campaign, but many conservatives still didn’t trust him. Gingrich had more than enough over-the-top rhetoric to satisfy the base. But he was far from an ideal Tea Party politician. He was not a pure small-government politician. His rivals said his economic and entitlement proposals would blow a big hole in the deficit. And he carried more baggage than the rest of the field combined.

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Debates had reshaped the primary in South Carolina. In Florida they did the same—this time to Romney’s advantage. On Monday, January 23, the
Republican candidates met in Tampa for their eighteenth debate. There were now four people on the stage—Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul. But the focus was now only on the two leaders. To prepare for the Florida debates, the Romney campaign had reached out to Brett O’Donnell, previously one of Bachmann’s top advisers and the former debate coach at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. O’Donnell prepared a memo outlining a strategy for attacking Gingrich. Romney was open to the idea but hesitant at first about adopting such an aggressive posture. “He was nervous about executing the strategy, worried that it wasn’t the right thing to do,” said one person involved in the preparations. “He thought it was very high-risk, that if it backfired people would say, ‘Oh, you’re the mean guy going after our guy Newt,’ or whatever.” Russ Schriefer said, “The idea was to prosecute Gingrich on being a Washington insider, having worked for Fannie and Freddie . . . and making sure that when those opportunities presented themselves to take them.”

Romney’s attacks in Tampa came straight off the whiteboard in Boston. He pursued Gingrich relentlessly. “The Speaker was given an opportunity to be the leader of our party in 1994. And at the end of four years, he had to resign in disgrace,” he said. He cited Gingrich’s long record in Washington in and out of government and contrasted that with his own record at Bain (which no longer was under attack), the 2002 Winter Olympics, and as governor of Massachusetts. Gingrich accused Romney of spouting falsehoods. Romney seized on the release of Gingrich’s contract with Freddie Mac, which showed that he had reported to the agency’s chief lobbyist. Gingrich insisted he had not lobbied for the agency, that he was a consultant, but his prior, and laughable, claim that he had been hired because he was a “historian” who could offer strategic guidance on that basis was crumbling. Romney accused Gingrich of being an influence peddler who had lobbied members of Congress in behalf of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit that was favored by some of the health care companies that had helped bankroll his American Solutions. “Whoa. Whoa,” Gingrich said. “You just jumped a long way over here, friend.” Gingrich said he had never lobbied for those companies but acknowledged that he was proud of his support for the new and costly drug benefit.

The atmosphere in the hall that night was totally different from that of the debates in South Carolina. NBC anchor Brian Williams had admonished the audience to be quiet. He said he would not tolerate the kind of cheering and applauding that had occurred in Myrtle Beach and Charleston. Williams’s instructions drained from the room the partisan energy that had fueled Gingrich’s performances the previous week. The candidates underwent a role reversal. Gingrich was subdued and defensive as Romney went on offense. At one point, faced with a series of attacks, Gingrich said, “I’m not going to spend
the evening trying to chase Governor Romney’s misinformation.” At another point, he said, “Let me be very clear, because I understand your technique, which you used on McCain, you used on Huckabee, you’ve used consistently, okay? It’s unfortunate, and it’s not going to work very well, because the American people see through it.” Instant analysis gave Romney the victory, though not by a huge margin. But it was clear that there was another momentum shift under way.

•   •   •

There was one other notable moment in the Tampa debate, one that would have lasting consequences for Romney. When the subject of immigration was raised, Adam Smith of the
Tampa Bay Times
asked, “Governor Romney, there is one thing I’m confused about. You say you don’t want to go and round up people and deport them, but you also say that they would have to go back to their home countries and then apply for citizenship. So, if you don’t deport them, how do you send them home?” Romney replied with a phrase that haunted him to the very end of the general election. “Well, the answer is self-deportation,” he said. His response was spontaneous, not something that had been prepared in advance. It came out of Romney’s mouth as much to the surprise of his advisers as to everyone else who heard it. Romney went on to say that he would not round up illegal immigrants but that with a stricter system of employer verifications their opportunities for work would dry up. “They’re going to find they can’t get work here,” he said. “And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.” Romney had given an inelegant description of a process that was already taking place, with many illegal immigrants having returned to their native countries because of the recession that began in 2008. But all anyone would remember was the startling phrase and what people outside his campaign saw as Romney’s stubborn resistance to a more humane approach to dealing with the millions of illegal immigrants who were now in the country.