Double Down: Game Change 2012 (36 page)

On December 1, the Romney campaign announced that it was going on
the air in Iowa with TV ads. The news came amid a torrent of bad headlines for Mitt. Two days earlier, in an interview with Bret Baier on Fox, Romney had turned testy and sarcastic when asked about having changed his stances over the years on climate change, abortion, gay rights, and immigration. (“Well, Bret, your list is just not accurate. So, one, we’re going to have to be better informed about my views on issues.”) Romney’s face was plastered on the cover of
Time;
the headline read
WHY DON’T THEY LIKE ME
? A new Rasmussen poll put him behind Gingrich by twenty-one points nationally; a fresh Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey had him trailing by thirty in Florida.

Gingrich was out in Des Moines, absorbing the same streams of data, floating on cloud nine. “I am going to be the nominee,” he proclaimed in an interview with ABC News’s Jake Tapper. “And, by the way, I don’t object if people want to attack me. That’s their right. All I’m suggesting is that it’s not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast.”

Gingrich’s declaration was bald and bold, and his mind unshadowed by doubt. Before the caucuses, there would be two debates in Iowa—two more chances for him to shine. His pollster, Kellyanne Conway, told him that he was “in Romney’s head.” Boston’s decision to start advertising seemed to confirm the analysis: Mitt was running scared.

Gingrich would come to regret having put prudence aside and run his mouth so hubristically with Tapper. Newt freely admitted he had said plenty of asinine things in his career, yet this was one of the dumbest. Looking back on it months later, he thought,
When the other guy has a ton of money and you have none, it’s not smart to paint a bull’s-eye on your back.

11

MAN ON FIRE

T
HEY WERE ARMING
THE
missiles for launch in Boston even as Gingrich was declaring his nomination a fait accompli. As they had done for Pawlenty and Perry before him, the Romneyites convened a series of “Kill Newt” meetings on Commercial Street. On a whiteboard, they drew up a list of potentially fruitful lines of attack on Gingrich’s record, résumé, and character. Before long, the whiteboard looked like John Nash’s equation-crammed window in
A Beautiful Mind.

Even setting aside his personal peccadilloes, Gingrich made for a target-rich environment. In a recent debate, he had argued for a “humane” approach to immigration that would forswear the hard-right solution of mass deportation of illegals; Romney, picking up where he left off with Perry, was already denouncing Newt for offering a “new doorway to amnesty.”

Gingrich’s “right-wing social engineering” crack about the Ryan Medicare plan was another vulnerability. So was his global warming ad with Pelosi, which not only costarred the dreaded San Francisco lefty but was part of a campaign led by the demonic Al Gore. Gingrich had been the first speaker ever to receive a formal ethics reprimand and had been compelled to reimburse the House $300,000 for its investigation of him. After leaving Congress, he earned millions for what could be portrayed as nefarious
logrolling. Among his clients was the housing-bubble villain Freddie Mac, from which Newt had collected $1.6 million—for providing services as “a historian,” he now maintained.

One Sunday morning, Romney sat in on a Kill Newt meeting and added his two cents. Mitt was perfectly happy to strafe the speaker until he was a human colander. But in 2008 Romney had learned all about the distaste of Iowa voters for candidate-on-candidate violence. He preferred to leave his staff and surrogates to man the rocket launchers, though he had no compunction about taking potshots at Newt’s soft spots.

Gingrich had a storied record of tantrums under pressure. Everyone in politics remembered his admission that he had propelled the federal government shutdown in 1995 in part because of his seating assignment in the rear of Air Force One on a trip to Israel with Bill Clinton—a conniption memorialized in a front-page illustration in the New York
Daily News
of the speaker in diapers, under the massive-point headline
CRY BABY
. In Boston, the hope was that, with a bit of provocative psyops, the campaign could light the fuse that would lead to one of Newt’s patented acts of self-immolation.

The morning after Gingrich’s exercise in braggadocio on ABC, Romney kicked things off with an appearance on
Fox and Friends,
where he dinged Newt for making “self-aggrandizing statements” and being a Washington lifer. A week later, on December 8, Boston cranked the acrimony up a notch. On a Romney campaign conference call with reporters, former Missouri senator Jim Talent, who had served with Newt in the House, slapped him around as “not a reliable or trustworthy leader,” while former New Hampshire governor John Sununu called his dis of the Ryan plan “self-serving” and “anti-conservative.”

Team Romney went up with a new TV ad called “Leader” that same day. As sepia-hued footage from home movies unspooled, showing Mitt and Ann doting on their young children, the soundtrack featured Romney speaking proudly of having been “married to the same woman for . . . forty-two years” and “in the same church my entire life.” The commercial never mentioned Gingrich. It didn’t have to. The implicit contrasts were about as subtle as a mallet to the forehead.

The next day’s offensive had all the delicacy of an atomic blast: a sixty-second spot spitting out many of the issues from the Boston whiteboard in
rat-a-tat succession. It was just the first in a fusillade of similarly themed commercials that would dominate the airwaves for the next three and a half weeks.

The ads were the work of the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, which meant that, technically speaking, Boston had nothing to do with them, since by law the campaign was barred from coordinating with Restore. The reality was more complicated. Although Restore was operationally independent from Team Romney, in every historical, genetic, and practical sense it was a subsidiary of the campaign.

The inspiration for Restore arose out of the ashes of 2008. In Iowa, Romney had been assailed over abortion and other issues by automated telephone push polls and television ads funded by a third-party outfit supporting Mike Huckabee. With no outside gang of his own, Romney was caught flat-footed and defenseless. His people were convinced that it had cost him dearly—Beth Myers, who managed the campaign, most of all.

Myers was a planner. She swore to herself that if her boss ran again, Boston would have an affiliated outside spending organization riding shotgun. In the summer of 2009, she began doing legal diligence on how to set up such a group. After the
Citizens United
decision a few months later, Myers realized that what she had in mind was, in effect, the first-ever presidential super PAC—and aptly code-named her embryonic project Avatar.

Rhoades concurred wholeheartedly regarding the need for Avatar. He and Myers shared a theory about how to build it. Avatar would be run by people who knew Mitt and his world intimately, who were attuned to Romneyland’s strategic and tactical proclivities, so that when the two sides were legally forced to curtail communications, they would be as much in sync as possible.

By the fall of 2010, Myers and Rhoades had recruited a threesome that perfectly fit that bill: Carl Forti, Romney’s 2008 political director; Charlie Spies, his 2008 general counsel; and Larry McCarthy, a key member of the 2008 media team. This isn’t a throwaway—it’s integral, Rhoades told them. We’re asking you because we’ve gotta have the A-Team on the super PAC. We’re asking because “you’re part of the Romney family.”

From then until the following summer, the triumvirate was in regular contact with the Boston high command. Campaign law dictated that they
would need to cease all discussions 120 days before the super PAC, now operating under its official Restore banner, put up its first ads. While it was far from certain that Romney would be playing in Iowa, they agreed that they should start the clock ticking in early August so that Restore could go on the air in early December if need be. They also agreed that, although it would be fine for Mitt to bemoan outside spending in broad strokes publicly, he should never repudiate the group or its ads, lest any supporters get skittish about contributing—and that, before the Chinese wall between the sides was imposed, Romney had to send a neon signal to donors that Restore bore his imprimatur.

The
Washington Post
first reported the existence of Restore in June 2011. That month and the next, Romney attended three of the group’s fund-raising events: at the Four Seasons in Boston, in the penthouse apartment of real estate magnate Stephen Ross in New York, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Romney was the warm-up act at each, delivering a brief stump speech, bestowing his blessing on Restore and its troika, and making his exit. Charlie Spies then performed a ritual that would become standard at countless donor dog-and-pony shows over the next year: after starting his PowerPoint presentation with a slide that explained what a super PAC was, he put up another highlighting the trio’s roles and titles in the 2008 campaign—a blunt way of telegraphing that, yes, indeed, they were part of the Romney family.

In the first five months of 2011, before the press or most Republicans even knew it existed, Restore had raised $8 million. After Romney’s laying on of hands, it doubled that total in June and July, in chunks ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000—and there was more help on the way. In early August, right before the Chinese wall went up, Team Romney dispatched its lead fund-raiser, Steve Roche, to join Restore, armed with the campaign’s invaluable donor lists of mega-rich loyalists. At a final meeting at the Washington offices of Romney’s campaign lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, the Restore boys and the Boston brain trust held a closing discussion of the road ahead. When it was over and they got up to leave, Myers went to hug McCarthy—then pulled up short.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “I just realized I’m not going to see you guys for a year and a half!”

McCarthy chuckled. After more than twenty years of honing his craft in
the shadowy world of independent expenditure committees, the adman was all too familiar with the weirdness of mandated non-communication.

With a sparse gray beard, glasses, and a Washington Nationals cap ever present on his head, the fifty-nine-year-old McCarthy looked uncannily like Steven Spielberg. In political circles, he was most famous (or infamous) for a piece of work less uplifting than
E.T.
but as scary and effective as
Jaws
: the 1988 Willie Horton commercial that helped destroy Mike Dukakis. Equally potent was another McCarthy spot, “Ashley’s Story” from 2004, which showed President Bush comforting a teenage girl whose mother had been killed on 9/11. (“He’s the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I’m safe,” Ashley said.) “The ad was pretty close to decisive in Ohio,” John Kerry’s chief strategist, Bob Shrum, contended later. “And Ohio was the whole thing.”

McCarthy had commissioned no research on Gingrich until November; before that, like pretty much everyone else, he assumed Newt was toast. Scrambling to do last-minute ad testing and focus groups, McCarthy discovered that Republican voters were fairly clueless about Newt’s past. They liked him, thought he was smart, that he would give Obama what-for in the debates. When confronted with discrete pieces of negative information about Gingrich, they tended to give him the benefit of the doubt. His reputation as a conservative leader outweighed almost all else.

But not everything. McCarthy also found that voters had a loose, undefined sense that Gingrich was saddled with “baggage” related to his personal life. They used that word, “baggage,” and used it a lot, which surprised McCarthy.
(Normal people talk that way? Huh.)
To McCarthy’s eye, the term had the makings of an umbrella under which he could assemble an assortment of Gingrich’s substantive liabilities, alluding to his serial infidelities without invoking them directly. Presented that way, in aggregate, Gingrich’s flaws gave voters pause.