Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (32 page)

By now there was a curious predictability to the Republican race, despite all the unexpected twists and strange moments. The campaign was playing out almost precisely as Romney’s advisers had planned it in Boston the previous spring. They may not have known which of Romney’s many rivals would become his principal opponent. But they had understood their candidate’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the perils and opportunities of the early states. They had built a strategy with the goal of putting Romney in the strongest possible position by the beginning of February, with the resources to wage a potentially long fight. Which was exactly where he was. The months and months Romney devoted to raising money, the time he took going from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, the hours he spent on airplanes flying from one coast to another and back again in the space of a week were all designed to put him in shape to run the kind of campaign a winning candidate must run. There was no question about who was positioned to win a battle over delegates. But the first contests also highlighted Romney’s vulnerabilities. His favorability rating among independents was taking a beating. He had dug a deep hole with Hispanic voters with his hard-line posture on immigration. He still struggled to connect with voters. He was given to verbal mistakes. He had a biography that his advisers believed could become an asset in a general election, but they were doing little to inoculate him from the coming attacks by Obama.

Santorum’s Challenge

R
ick Santorum was an also-ran in the New Hampshire primary. Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney buried him in South Carolina. Santorum bailed out of Florida, leaving Romney and Gingrich to fight it out there. He ignored Nevada and finished in last place. It was a measure of how strange the Republican contest was that after all that, Santorum was poised for a dramatic reentry into the top ranks of the race. He did it three days after Nevada with victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, contests in which not a single delegate was actually awarded. Missouri held a beauty contest primary, a mere popularity vote. Gingrich had not even bothered to get on the ballot, and Romney didn’t waste time campaigning there. Minnesota and Colorado held caucuses, the first tentative steps in a lengthy process that eventually would award delegates to the national convention. Santorum saw the three states as an opportunity to get back in the competition. His rebound became one more improbable plot twist in a contest that continued to defy every expert’s predictions. With those three victories, he became Romney’s principal and last significant challenger.

No one had any fixed expectations about the three contests on February 7. They were on the calendar but seen as an interlude in the Republican race, way stations en route to the more significant events in Michigan and Arizona three weeks later. The odds makers gave Santorum a modest chance to pull an upset in Minnesota, if only because the electorate in caucuses was likely to be small and very conservative. Romney, however, was a solid favorite in Colorado, where he had captured 60 percent of the vote in the 2008 caucuses. His team was so confident about the state that on the morning of the caucuses, Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director and a Coloradoan, guaranteed victory to the others. The campaign’s final numbers put Romney solidly in first, with Santorum and Gingrich splitting most of the rest of the vote. But Gingrich’s support was in a state of collapse in Colorado on caucus day, thanks to the fallout from the former Speaker’s rambling late-night press conference in Las Vegas.

Cable networks, accustomed to the excitement of primary and caucus nights over the first four weeks of the year, were fully prepared for another night of counting and instant analysis, no matter that these were events that in past years would have drawn little attention. For Santorum, it was a godsend. Missouri’s results came in first that evening, and the former Pennsylvania senator was quickly declared the winner. In head-to-head competition, he had defeated the front-runner by 55 to 25 percent. Next came Minnesota and another big Santorum victory. This was instantly interpreted as a sign of further dissatisfaction with Romney among conservatives and, given his performance there four years earlier, an embarrassment. Had Santorum won only those two, the damage to Romney might have been minimal. The big blow was Colorado. Romney’s team watched it slip away all day as they checked and rechecked numbers and measured the full extent of the shift from Gingrich toward Santorum. Rhoades was on the phone with Romney during the day, warning him of potential trouble. Romney was greatly irritated when he heard that news. A late surge of votes for Santorum from conservative precincts around Colorado Springs, the center of social and religious conservative activity in the state, completed the day’s sweep. At his victory party after the first of the three victories, a heady Santorum declared, “Conservatism is alive and well. I don’t stand here and claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama.”

Santorum had followed a strategy of necessity as Gingrich was battling Romney in South Carolina and Florida. He had neither the money nor the infrastructure to compete effectively in either state. Beyond the debates, he was a nonplayer. Santorum left Florida to return home to prepare for a release of his tax returns. At the same time, his daughter Bella, who was born with a genetic disorder, was suddenly hospitalized, seriously ill. Santorum and his wife, Karen, broke off all campaigning to be with her as the Florida primary approached. Meanwhile, his advisers decided to concentrate their limited resources on the three states everyone else was ignoring. Santorum ran ads in all three. “It was very important for us to win a state, and we felt Missouri was our best bet,” John Brabender, Santorum’s chief strategist, said. “We thought Minnesota was our next best bet and we thought there was a very, very outside chance in Colorado. . . . I got a call as soon as we won Missouri from a number of people, e-mails from the Romney campaign. ‘Congratulations on Missouri, you guys did a great job.’ . . . Then we won Minnesota and I might have heard from one or two people from the Romney people congratulating us. When we won Colorado it went dark. My belief is they never thought in a million years they were going to lose Colorado.”

Even Gingrich was impressed at Santorum’s tactical calculation. “You have
to give him credit,” he later told me. “He did something very bold and it took a lot of guts. He went to three places nobody else was going and they gambled that they’d win a PR victory. It was almost like the Tet Offensive. We’re going to win a PR victory and the PR victory will become the war. It was accurate. It was a very shrewd move, but it was made possible in part because I’d been so damaged by that point that the anti-Romney conservatives were desperately looking for somebody. And if Newt can’t beat Romney, who can?”

•   •   •

No one thought Rick Santorum was going to win anything in 2012. He began the campaign in obscurity—overlooked, disregarded, and dismissed as a serious candidate, though he had served sixteen years in Congress. He was first elected to the House in 1990 from western Pennsylvania, defeating a seven-term incumbent Democrat in a race in which national party leaders gave him little chance to win and little support to do so. He became a member of the Gang of Seven, a band of freshman Republicans that included future Speaker John Boehner who vigorously protested scandals at the House Bank and House Post Office. He won a Senate seat in 1994, defeating Democratic incumbent Harris Wofford. He brought many of the partisan tactics of Newt Gingrich’s Republican-controlled House to the more sedate Senate. He helped lead the effort to pass welfare reform and was elected to the number three job in leadership. He was a committed conservative who nonetheless looked after a state with a strong blue-collar constituency. He backed a hike in the minimum wage and opposed right-to-work legislation (though he later changed his mind on that), and got his share of earmarks at a time when they were commonplace among legislators in both parties.

In 1996, Santorum and his wife had lost a prematurely born son two hours after birth.
*
Over time, he became a more outspoken advocate on social issues. Though he voted in favor of contraception, he once said of birth control, “I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our country.” He said states have the right to ban contraception, though he would not vote for such a law. In his 2005 book,
It Takes a Family,
he wrote, “Radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness. As for children? Well, to paraphrase
The Wizard of Oz,
pay no attention to those kids behind the curtain.” Like many other politicians, he opposed same-sex marriage. But he once accused leaders of the gay community of leading a “jihad” against him over comments he had made in which he appeared to equate gay sex with bigamy, polygamy, and more.
Those comments came
during an interview with the Associated Press in 2003, after a
Supreme Court decision that struck down antisodomy laws. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery,” he said. “You have the right to anything.” In 2005, he intervened in the case of the Florida woman Terri Schiavo, who had been in a vegetative state for years. He and other Washington politicians urged that a federal judicial panel review a state court decision authorizing the removal of her feeding tube. He also met in Florida with her parents, who opposed the removal, to pray with them.

Despite his conservative views, he was able to win reelection in blue-leaning Pennsylvania in 2000. One Pennsylvania Republican described his political deftness as being able to “run through the raindrops without getting wet.” Eventually, Santorum’s ideology caught up with him and he got soaked. In 2006, a bad year for Republicans, he was crushed in his bid for reelection. He later came to the conclusion that he never should have sought reelection that year. “We should have just said we’re not going to run for reelection but we’re going to run for president in 2008,” Brabender said. “We would have been much further along.” That would have put him alongside Romney in both 2008 and 2012. Santorum had been thinking about a presidential run for some time, and in 2009, after consulting with his family, he decided to test the waters. He had been invited to give a speech in October at the University of Dubuque, and his team leaked word of the Iowa trip to
Politico
’s Jonathan Martin, who wrote a small item about it. CNN picked it up and then other reporters began to call for details. After the speech, during an overnight drive in a rainstorm, Santorum and Brabender began to talk more seriously about what kind of campaign he could run. Santorum saw his base for what it was—social and religious conservatives and to a lesser extent Tea Party activists. He decided to start traveling regularly to Iowa and see what would happen. Few took him seriously. I was among those who gave him no chance. In December 2010, we met for coffee one afternoon in Washington. Santorum laid out his agenda and the rationale behind his candidacy. I listened skeptically, and foolishly took no notes.

•   •   •

Two days after Santorum’s trio of victories, I sat down with Gingrich to get his assessment of the campaign. He was battered—now in a downward slide—but, typically, optimistic about the overall state of his campaign and his prospects. “As I kept telling all of you guys,” he said, “the not-Romney part of this party is huge. And it will be bigger in another few weeks because in the end Romney is in fact not somebody that this party’s going to nominate. And so he’s been sustained by being the candidate and being the establishment and
being inevitable and having huge volumes of money, but in the end he’s not going to get there.” How did Santorum’s success change things? I asked him. “First of all, it really cripples Romney,” he said. “I mean, it’s really hard for Romney now to turn around and say he’s the inevitable nominee. And that’s the number one goal. I mean, if we can’t get Romney down to a size we can cope with, then there’s no second act, okay? So it turns out now there has to be a second and third act. I mean, the second act is the gradual disappearance of Santorum. Santorum is a very good candidate as long as you don’t look at him very long. There’s a reason he set the all-time Pennsylvania record for losing.”

Gingrich said he was through attacking Romney. “I’m done,” he said. “Tuesday was the signal that I’m done. Everything we do from here on out will be surrogates. Yes. I don’t need to say anything more because that part of the game is set and I’m shifting to a new game.” I asked whether he shared the view that the longer both he and Santorum stayed in the race, the better it would be for Romney. “I wouldn’t have shared it before Tuesday because he was gradually decaying,” he said of Santorum. “It may be true, although I think he may actually be the right way for me to define the difference. See, if it’s only right-left, then the two guys on the right have a whole differentiation problem. What we’re about to move towards is a timid versus bold argument. . . . I think in that sense what Santorum has done is he has set me up now to draw that sharp distinction and to be able to say, look, it’s not just right-left, it’s whether you’re prepared to fundamentally rethink where we’re going.”

•   •   •

Nobody in Boston was worrying about Gingrich then or after. Santorum, however, presented a potentially serious problem. He was difficult to attack as insufficiently conservative, one of the lines used against Gingrich. His vulnerabilities as a candidate were sizable, but more as a general election candidate who would be seen as out of the mainstream. In a Republican nomination battle, Romney couldn’t go after those weaknesses. That would be attacking the base.

The next contests were three weeks away. Arizona still looked favorable for Romney, but everyone knew the showdown would be in Michigan, and Santorum was on the move there. Blue-collar Michigan seemed ready-made for blue-collar and Catholic Santorum, despite the fact that Romney was born there. Money was pouring into Santorum’s campaign again. The day after his trio of victories, the campaign raised about $1.5 million, with an additional $1 million the next day, Brabender said. “So we were raising money at a clip unlike we had ever before,” he said. “But we also knew that hell was coming in a sense that we knew that, just like we had said that all these other people were going to go through scrutiny unlike they ever had before, we knew we were going to as
well.” The media had a new story line and they were pumping it hard. Nerves were on edge in Boston. “They were saying [Michigan] was Waterloo,” Matt Rhoades recalled. “Mitt Romney’s Waterloo. We thought everything was on the line in Florida. But then it seemed like everything was on the line times two in Michigan.”

Days after Santorum’s victories, the annual CPAC gathering opened in Washington, D.C. Romney used his speech to reestablish his conservative bona fides. “I know conservatism because I have lived conservatism,” he said. He used the words “conservative” or “conservatism” two dozen times. But it was this line that captured the mood of concern inside the Romney campaign. “I fought against long odds in a deep blue state,” Romney said, “but I was a severely conservative Republican governor.” The word “severely” was not in Romney’s prepared text and it grated on conservative activists. Critics accused Romney of trying to impersonate a real conservative with a caricature of what true conservatism represented. Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative
RedState
blog, wrote, “Mitt Romney got a warm reception at CPAC, standing ovations . . . the works. He did nothing to calm fears that he is not one of us. In fact, he might have made it worse today. What the heck is a severe conservative?” He said the phrase sounded like a critique from the left. Romney’s speech was also notable for the change in tone from his CPAC speech a year earlier. In that speech, he used the word “conservative” once, not to describe himself but to say what Obama’s economic policies were not. At that point he was trying to impress conservatives that he was the most electable Republican, not necessarily the most conservative. With Santorum’s challenge, he had to demonstrate anew to the base that he could be trusted.