Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (31 page)

The following day Romney released his 2010 tax returns and an estimate of his 2011 tax liabilities. He said he would release his full 2011 returns when they were completed later in the year, but restated that he would not release returns from prior years, despite the pounding he was taking from the Obama campaign. Still, there was plenty of ammunition for his rivals from the documents he made public. The returns showed that he had income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million in 2011, almost all from dividends, interest, and capital gains. He paid an effective rate of 13.9 percent for 2010 and estimated he would pay about 15.4 percent for 2011. The returns highlighted the generosity of the Romneys, who gave away more than $7 million during the two years, most of it to the Mormon Church. The 550 pages of documentation contained more damaging revelations. The Romneys had had a Swiss bank account,
which had been closed in 2010. They had had investments in the Cayman Islands, a noted tax haven. The Democratic National Committee produced a Web video asking, “What is Mitt Romney hiding and where is he hiding it?”

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The Romney campaign’s pummeling of Gingrich carried on nonstop throughout the week. Romney’s campaign and his super PAC clogged the airwaves with attacks on Gingrich. The gap between his and Gingrich’s spending on advertising ballooned again in Romney’s favor. Florida was simply too expensive for Gingrich and his super PAC to keep pace. Romney’s campaign had significantly boosted its advertising budget. According to a Republican ad-buying firm, in the final ten days before the primary, the campaign spent almost $4 million on ads in Florida. Gingrich’s campaign spent about $1.1 million. Restore Our Future, Romney’s super PAC, spent about $6 million in that period to about $5.5 million for Gingrich’s PAC. In many markets, Romney was running two, three, or four times as many ads as Gingrich. But the amounts spent in the period after South Carolina hardly measured the totality of Romney’s advantage. Romney had been advertising in Florida for weeks. His campaign and super PAC together spent around $15 million in the state over the course of the entire campaign—almost $12 million of it on negative ads. Restore Our Future ran almost twelve thousand ads in the state, and Romney’s campaign ran more than nine thousand.

One Romney ad in particular stood out. Neil Newhouse had seen a snippet of a video of the
NBC Nightly News
from the day Gingrich had resigned as Speaker. Tom Brokaw was in the anchor chair at the time. Newhouse asked to see the entire clip. By luck, it ran twenty-seven seconds, perfect for a thirty-second commercial. In his report that night, Brokaw noted that Gingrich, who had once brought down another Speaker on ethics charges, had been “found . . . guilty of ethics violations” by an overwhelming vote of his House colleagues. Newhouse took the segment with him to Florida and showed it to a focus group of voters. Most of the other ads he showed that day did not test well, but the clip of Brokaw drew a strong response. Newhouse came back to Boston and insisted that it be included in the rotation in Florida. NBC and Brokaw protested and asked the campaign to take it down, but Romney’s team ignored the request. It worked too well.

On the ground, Gingrich was drawing big crowds, but the Romney surrogates harassed him at every stop. Utah representative Jason Chaffetz, Florida representative Connie Mack, and California representative Mary Bono Mack traveled together much of the week, teaming up for press conferences attacking Gingrich before or after his events. When a frustrated R. C. Hammond, Gingrich’s aggressive spokesman, confronted Chaffetz on consecutive days, he
managed only to highlight the growing frustrations of his candidate, particularly after an exchange was posted on YouTube. Gingrich’s message lost focus. Along Florida’s Space Coast, he came up with an exotic idea that seemed to have little to do with the problems voters were confronting. Gingrich pledged that he would establish a permanent moon colony if he were elected president. The grandiose proposal became fodder for a
Saturday Night Live
sketch that portrayed Gingrich as “Moon President.”
National Review
featured Gingrich on its cover as Marvin the Martian.

Three nights after the Tampa debate, the candidates squared off in Jacksonville. It turned into a repeat performance of the first debate, though Romney was even more aggressive and Gingrich even more off balance. The former Speaker appeared handcuffed by the harshness of Romney’s attacks. After Gingrich defended his proposal for a moon colony, Romney skewered him. “I spent twenty-five years in business,” he said. “If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’” Romney hit Gingrich on Freddie Mac, saying the former Speaker should have protested the policies that he said led to the housing crisis. Gingrich tried to tie Romney to the crisis by noting that Romney had owned stock in both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and had profited handsomely by selling some of it. Romney said he had never owned stock in either, that his investments were through mutual funds, and then dropped a surprise on Gingrich that his team had dug out only that afternoon. “And, Mr. Speaker, I know that sounds like an enormous revelation, but have you checked your own investments? You also have investments through mutual funds that also invest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Gingrich was caught flat-footed. The investment was a minor matter, but one that fed the emerging consensus that Romney had rebounded and Gingrich was reeling.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tried to get Gingrich to repeat a statement from a campaign rally where he had criticized Romney for his Cayman Islands investments and Swiss bank account. Gingrich said such attacks were fine in interviews but inappropriate at a debate, where, he said, bigger issues should be the topics of discussion. Romney jumped in. “Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t make accusations somewhere else that they weren’t willing to defend here?” he said. “Okay. All right,” Gingrich said. “Given that standard, Mitt, I did say I thought it was unusual. And I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account. I’d be glad for you to explain that sort of thing.” Romney explained the workings of his blind trust and chided Gingrich to stop attacking his wealth and record of success in business. “It would be nice,” Gingrich responded, “if you had the same standard for other people that you would like applied to you and didn’t enter into personal attacks about personal
activities about which you are factually wrong. So I would be glad to have a truce with you, but it’s a two-way truce.”

At another point Blitzer asked Gingrich about a Spanish-language radio ad, which the campaign had already pulled down, in which he accused Romney of being “the most anti-immigrant” of the candidates. When Gingrich reaffirmed the characterization, Romney, feigning outrage, responded, “That’s inexcusable. And, actually, Senator Marco Rubio [who was neutral at the time] came to my defense and said that ad was inexcusable and inflammatory and inappropriate. Mr. Speaker, I’m not anti-immigrant. My father was born in Mexico. My wife’s father was born in Wales. They came to this country. The idea that I’m anti-immigrant is repulsive.”

Gingrich knew he was stumbling through the two debates. “I am really good if I’m centered,” he told me two weeks later. “I mean, I’m probably as good a debater as there is in the country. If I’m not centered, I’m not any better than anybody else. It was obvious by Monday night [in Tampa] that Romney would attempt to destroy me and would do so—we’ve now gone from, ‘Oh, my super PAC is doing bad things I can’t control,’ to Romney personally lying, knowing he’s lying. I mean making campaign speeches that are lies. In the first debate, I didn’t respond to him because I would have gotten so angry that it would have been uncontrollable. And I thought it was better to be passive than to blow up. And it was a conscious decision. In the second one, I was so surprised by his dishonesty, and then suddenly I’m working on the next time we debate, I mean to think through how do you deal with it. Let me give an example. He turns and says, ‘I’ve always voted for a Republican when that opportunity was available.’ Well, Larry Sabato tweets within seconds it’s not true. Now, in a setting like that where the audience had a fairly large number of Romney supporters, how do you turn to the supposed front-runner for the Republican nomination, former governor and successful businessman, and say, ‘You know, you’re just a lying sack of shit.’ It’s just plain not true. And he had two or three other things where he came at me and at the time they all seemed wrong. But I didn’t have ‘there you go again,’ and I couldn’t figure out how to cope with it.”

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Romney wasn’t fighting this battle alone. Virtually the entire Republican establishment had joined in the effort to take Gingrich down. Some of the attacks were orchestrated by the Romney campaign. Others occurred spontaneously, spawned by past battles dating back almost two decades between Gingrich and fellow Republicans. From one corner to another, those who had tangled with Gingrich, who felt aggrieved toward Gingrich, or who feared him as their nominee joined to stop him, knowing how much harder it would be to do so if he were to win in Florida. Bob Dole said Gingrich would
threaten the election of Republican candidates up and down the ballot. “Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him,” Dole said in a statement issued through the Romney campaign, “and that speaks for itself. He was a one-man band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.”

The establishment message that Gingrich represented a threat to the party was not new, but the intensity with which it was now being delivered certainly was. That he might become the nominee had touched off near panic in the ranks ahead of Tuesday’s vote. Party establishments, to the degree they exist, have only limited power to direct the course of events. But to the extent they have power, they were exercising it with a vengeance, ganging upon the Speaker with evident enthusiasm. Former House majority leader Tom DeLay, who had served as House whip under Gingrich, called him erratic.
National Review
attacked him, as did the
American Spectator
. Ann Coulter issued a warning: “Reelect Obama. Vote Newt.” In a matter of weeks, what had been talk of whether a stop-Romney movement would materialize on the right became the reality of a stop-Gingrich movement coming from the party establishment.

Some former House colleagues went after Gingrich; others stood by him. The fight for Ronald Reagan’s legacy divided old Reaganites. Some derided Gingrich’s claim that he was a key lieutenant in the Reagan revolution or his rightful heir, atleast among the GOP candidates. Others still regarded him as the political leader who helped translate Reagan’s success into a congressional majority after forty years of Democratic rule in the House. Sarah Palin accused the establishment of trying to crucify Gingrich and said it was far too soon to call a halt to the debate and the vetting of the candidates. “If for no other reason, rage against the machine, vote for Newt,” Palin said. She never quite endorsed him, but her husband, Todd, did.

Privately Gingrich was seething at both Romney and his allies. “This may strike you as naïve and this is my bias,” he later explained. “I have never dealt at this level with somebody as dishonest as Mitt Romney. And I wasn’t prepared. I mean, I don’t mind being really tough and I don’t mind a brass-knuckles fight, but it is very difficult.” He said what people were overlooking was that he had been at odds with the party’s establishment for decades. “I’ve been in this fight now for thirty years,” he told me. He added, “Nobody pointed out, for example, when Bob Dole issued his statement, this is a guy who in 1984 I called the ‘tax collector of the welfare state.’” He said Dole had never forgiven him for passing the welfare reform bill in the middle of the 1996 campaign, when Dole was the nominee and knew that Clinton’s signing would only make his long odds of winning that much longer. “When we made the decision, [Dole’s campaign] called in the middle of our conference and said,
‘We can’t beat Clinton if you pass this,’” Gingrich recalled. “And I said, ‘We can’t get [the House] reelected unless we pass this.’”

When the votes in Florida were counted on the night of January 31, Romney’s strategy produced a decisive victory. Romney captured 46 percent of the vote to Gingrich’s 32 percent, a 240,000-vote margin that left Gingrich tottering. Florida was better territory for Romney than South Carolina. And Romney was the superior candidate. But Romney’s superior resources also overwhelmed his opponent. Gingrich said he later compared notes with Joe Gaylord, who had been his most important adviser through his career. “We knew of no theoretical model that could have won the Florida campaign,” he said, “because . . . [as] Lord Nelson once said, numbers annihilate.” Rhoades and Stevens dismissed analysts who credited the bombardment on television for Romney’s victory. It was the candidate, they said, who had stepped up when his candidacy was on the line.

As he left Florida, Romney committed another verbal gaffe during an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” he 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, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling, and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.” With what seemed like a dismissive comment about the plight of the poor, Romney continued to provide the Obama campaign evidence to show he was out of touch with people.

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Romney rounded off the week with a big victory in the Nevada caucuses. The result was never really in question. He had won the state by a huge margin four years earlier, and none of his rivals had the infrastructure to seriously contest the event. At midweek, in one of the more awkward events of the campaign, Romney received the endorsement of Donald Trump. It was another blow to Gingrich, who had thought he might win Trump’s support. Romney looked uncomfortable standing beside the flashy businessman at Trump’s casino hotel and appeared eager to get off the stage as quickly as possible. He took no questions from reporters. Trump held forth for the press before and after the formal endorsement. Romney was far more at ease on caucus night, February 4, as he claimed victory before a crowd of cheering supporters. Gingrich passed up the normal election-night rally with supporters in favor of a sometimes bizarre half-hour press conference, where he struck a defiant pose and trashed the winner. He predicted he would once again be at parity with Romney by the time of the Texas primary later in the spring—though Texas officials had not set an exact date for its contest. He vowed to carry his fight
all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa. “I’m not going to withdraw,” he said. “I’m actually pretty happy with where we are.” Gingrich’s performance was as strange as it was unconvincing, a stark contrast to the Gingrich who just two weeks earlier had stood before supporters in South Carolina as the candidate with new momentum and confidence. No one could explain Gingrich’s performance that night—a rambling and confused defense of his candidacy based on a series of implausible scenarios.