Double Down: Game Change 2012 (37 page)

The sixty-second ad that hit the air in Iowa on December 9 opened with a picture of a grinning Obama. “Why is this man smiling?” the female narrator asked. Because he was tickled pink about facing Gingrich as the Republican nominee. “Newt has a ton of baggage,” the ad went on, and then marched through the dizzying panoply of charges against him: ethics, Freddie Mac, Pelosi-Gore, amnesty for illegals, his support for an individual
mandate in health care, etc. “Maybe that’s why George Will called Gingrich ‘the least conservative candidate,’” the ad concluded.

Gingrich’s initial reaction to the start of the air war and Team Romney’s efforts to get under his skin was a cheery dismissal. On the afternoon of December 10, a few hours before the next debate, he paid a visit to his newly opened (and still largely empty) Iowa headquarters, just outside Des Moines. “My campaign will be relentlessly positive,” Gingrich said as Callista beamed in the front row. “We’re not going to be tearing people down.” He regaled the assembled staff and reporters with an account of the advice being rendered by his two “debate coaches”: his pre-teenage grandchildren.

The debate that night at Drake University was the first to not include Cain, who had departed the race days earlier. Its most memorable moment came from Romney: his tone-deaf offer to bet Perry $10,000 as they wrangled over the accusation that the paperback of
No Apology
had been edited to remove the suggestion that Romneycare was a national model. (“I’m not in the bettin’ business, but I’ll show you the book,” replied Perry slyly.)

The rest of the night was devoted almost entirely to broadsides directed at Gingrich. Romney jeered at his “idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon,” and again took after him for being in favor of “a form of amnesty” that would be “another magnet that draws people into our country illegally.” Paul poked Gingrich on Freddie Mac. Bachmann ridiculed him for making his living on K Street, the “Rodeo Drive of Washington, D.C.” And Perry went there on the question of monogamy: “If you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner, so I think that issue of fidelity is important.”

The Drake debate was but a gentle preview of the pile-on that lay ahead for Gingrich. At the next debate, five days later in Sioux City, Bachmann inveighed against him for “influence-peddling” and being insufficiently pro-life. On TV, Paul’s campaign and the pro-Perry super PAC Make Us Great Again pulped him with negative ads.

Boston, meanwhile, continued to pummel Gingrich from every conceivable direction, but especially on the Ryan plan, including with a one-minute campaign video resurrecting his May
Meet the Press
interview. Romney moved into full mockery mode: demanding that Newt return the money he’d earned from Freddie Mac, blowing raspberries at his claim that he
wasn’t a lobbyist (“That would make him the highest-paid historian in history”), and deeming him “zany” in
The New York Times.
“Zany,” Romney said, “is not what we need in a president.”

Yet all of these were Circus Iowus sideshows compared with what was going on under the big top: the continued bombardment of Gingrich by Restore. A few days after putting up its initial sixty-second “baggage” spot, the group released a thirty-second version—and soon followed that with another sixty, this one enlivening the motif with visuals of suitcases on an airport luggage carousel (with a green valise labeled
FREDDIE MAC
popping open and expelling a flurry of hundred-dollar bills).

The money behind Restore’s assault was enormous: roughly $3 million, triple the amount that Gingrich was spending in Iowa, more than double Team Romney’s outlay. In focus groups that Boston and Restore were each conducting, the effects were immediately apparent. The pre-ad blitz mentions of Newt’s “baggage” had turned into a thundering chorus. McCarthy was flabbergasted by how fast the ads were working; he’d seen nothing like it in years. Myers was relieved and delighted; her handiwork was paying off.
This is a very good thing,
she thought.

It was becoming apparent to one and all that Gingrich’s incineration was the story in Iowa. The network newscasts played it prominently, night after night. His poll numbers were plunging. Two weeks earlier, Gingrich had been scoring in the low thirties; now he was in the teens and trailing both Romney and Paul. On December 17,
The
Des Moines Register
gave Newt the back of its hand and conferred its endorsement on Mitt.

The
Register
’s blessing was a coveted commodity, and Romney was thrilled to have it. The question was what Gingrich was thinking, and that was difficult to discern. With the caucuses approaching in two weeks, his rivals humping the hustings, and his front-runner status being shredded, Newt was literally a thousand miles away—with his mind on other matters.

•   •   •

G
INGRICH TOOK HIS SEAT
in the fourth row at a high school auditorium in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, awaiting a holiday concert by the City of Fairfax Band. Perched onstage behind a thicket of red poinsettias, Callista, who played French horn, smiled brightly and waved to her husband
as the lights went down. At that moment, the news of the
Register
endorsement was lighting up Twitter, but Gingrich’s BlackBerry was shut off and tucked away. By the time the band eased into “Silent Night,” he had drifted into a peaceful doze.

It had been a full day for Newt. In the morning, he’d conducted a long-distance conference call with Iowa voters in which he addressed some of the charges against him and made a plea for support on caucus night. (“I’d be very, very grateful if you’d be willing to be a precinct captain by pressing 2,” he said.) In the afternoon, he spent two hours in Mount Vernon, sitting next to Callista as she signed copies of her new children’s book,
Sweet Land of Liberty,
and mugging for the cameras with a man dressed up as Ellis the Elephant, the cartoon hero of his wife’s tome.

In print, on cable, and on the Web, Gingrich’s decision to occupy himself this way on the last non-holiday weekend before the caucuses brought forth waves of derision. The reaction galled him, especially coming from Fox; he had expected better from his former employer than being subjected to an absurd double standard.
Romney can go off to one of his fancy houses and it’s a non-event,
Newt thought.
But the media kills me for going home for a Christmas concert for my wife. In a different world, you can imagine people saying, “Gee, what an awfully nice thing to do.”

Gingrich had spent the first half of December behaving as if that fantasy realm was real. He had entered the race expecting that Romney and his allies would say anything to nuke him, but he did nothing to prepare a robust defense. He thought it would be a sufficient rebuttal to denounce the attacks as “lies,” “distortions,” or “grotesqueries,” because that plainly was what they were. When he insisted he would run a “relentlessly positive” campaign, he assumed he would be taken seriously. One thing the Old Newt had rarely been accused of was naïveté. The New Newt was firmly in its grip.

Gingrich had also imposed a paralytic degree of caution on himself. He knew as well as anyone his propensity for self-inflicted damage. Whenever he was asked about his latest successor as speaker, Newt compared Boehner to Woody Hayes: three yards and a cloud of dust. Gingrich, by contrast, saw himself as a gunslinging quarterback, rolling out of the pocket and heaving the ball upfield. His style had produced its share of touchdowns over the years but also plenty of interceptions. (Watching the 2002 NFL playoff game
when Brett Favre was picked off six times, Gingrich thought,
That’s me.
) With Romney and his abettors trying to get into his head, Newt had been trying to run out the clock rather than drive for the end zone—and instead had managed to fumble the ball on his own ten-yard line.

After his weekend in Virginia, Gingrich returned to Iowa and attempted to get back on offense. On December 20, after appearing at a factory in Ottumwa, Gingrich once again decried his rivals for their negativity. When a voter asked about a radio ad that called him a “globalist,” Newt snapped, “I think these guys hire consultants who just sit around, get drunk, and write really stupid ads. I am just so fed up with this stuff.”

But it was Romney who seemed to have pushed Gingrich over the edge. Earlier that day, on
Morning Joe,
Mitt had been questioned about Restore. Following to the letter the script that his and the group’s advisers had drafted over the summer, Romney grumbled, “Campaign finance law has made a mockery of our political campaign season. We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs.” Asked if he would tell Restore to stop its anti-Newt onslaught, Mitt replied, “I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape, or form . . . If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.”

Gingrich knew enough about Restore to spot the hypocrisy on display. And he knew that the laws against coordination contained no prohibition against a candidate disavowing, or calling for a super PAC to take down, any ad. Marching into a press conference after his Ottumwa event, Gingrich brandished a transcript of Romney’s remarks. “His comments today are palpably misleading, clearly false, and are politics in its worst form,” Gingrich thundered. “Understand, these are his people, running his ads, doing his dirty work while he pretends to be above it.”

Gingrich had always despised what he called the “consultant class,” and the mass resignation of his own hired guns in June had only deepened the animus. Newt also had little affection for the Bush family, so he wasn’t surprised the next day when 41 declared his support for Romney. The endorsement came on the heels of that of Bob Dole, who confided to Boston that he believed if Gingrich were the nominee, it would guarantee a blowout for Obama on the scale of Reagan’s in 1984.

Newt never expected to be the candidate of the Beltway, but to see the
establishment rushing to the ramparts took him aback. More and more of his former House colleagues were on TV slamming him gratuitously, questioning his character, not his policies, alluding to his personal life. It left him bewildered, hurt his feelings. The same was true of his treatment by Fox, which Gingrich saw as having turned on him viciously and inexplicably. The on-air talent was pumping the pom-poms so feverishly for Romney that Newt wondered if their arms were getting tired. He assumed that Rupert Murdoch must have taken a shine to Mitt. (In Boston they thought,
If only.
)

Gingrich’s woes deepened on Christmas Eve, when the Virginia Republican Party notified the campaign that it had failed to submit the required signatures to qualify for the March 6 GOP primary. For Gingrich, a loud devotee of management fads such as Lean Six Sigma, the rudimentary screwup was a huge embarrassment. On Facebook, his campaign director called it an “unexpected setback” similar to “December 1941”—thus providing Romney with another opportunity for burlesque. “He compared that to Pearl Harbor,” Mitt quipped. “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.”

Gingrich returned to Iowa after Christmas for the caucus homestretch, setting off on a nine-day bus tour of the state. The schedule originally called for forty-four stops, but that number had already been cut in half. As he traipsed from town to town, Newt seemed determined to avoid anything resembling a consistent message, rambling from one arcane disquisition—on the history of the transcontinental railroad, the threats posed by pandemics and electromagnetic pulses, his status as an “amateur paleontologist”—to the next. In a nod to Romney (and Lucy), he visited a sweet shop in Algona.

“Now that I have the courage to come to the chocolate factory,” Newt said, “I hope Governor Romney has the courage to debate me one-on-one and defend his negative ads.”

By December 30, Gingrich was entirely out of sorts. At a morning event billed as a “mom town hall,” he took to the stage looking exhausted, his face pale and puffy. The moderator was pollster Frank Luntz, who had helped Gingrich devise the Contract with America in 1994. Luntz asked Gingrich about the candidate’s own late mother: “What special moments come to
mind?” Almost instantly, Gingrich’s eyes welled up, and soon tears were streaming down his cheeks.

Gingrich often became emotional at the memory of his mother, who was physically abused by his biological father and suffered under the household tyranny of her second husband, Newt’s adoptive father. But another factor was in play here: Gingrich was sick as a dog that day—vomiting, diarrhea, severe dehydration. When Newt’s staff learned how ill he was, they knew he needed some attention. But taking him to a hospital would be impossible without the press corps blowing the whistle. R. C. Hammond, Gingrich’s press secretary, had an idea. He smuggled Newt into a local fire station, where he was administered fluids through an IV.

Gingrich spent the next two days in wretched shape. His New Year’s Eve was a bowl of broth and a quiet family vigil anticipating the news of the night.

By tradition in Iowa, every four years the political world waited on tenterhooks for the results of the final
Des Moines
Register
pre-caucus poll. The stats gurus at the paper were highly esteemed, with a long-held reputation for producing surveys of startling accuracy. Four years earlier, the
Register
had shocked everyone by not merely calling Obama’s victory but correctly forecasting an unprecedented turnout on caucus night. And while this year’s numbers were less eye-popping, they confirmed just how disastrously far Gingrich had fallen: all the way to fourth place—behind Romney, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum—with a meager 12 percent.

New Year’s morning was a Sunday, and Newt and Callista started the day by attending mass at St. Ambrose Cathedral, in Des Moines. From there they drove thirty-five miles north to Ames, to a media-swarmed event at the West Towne Pub, and from there another forty miles due east to the Junction Sports Bar and Grill, in Marshalltown. Gingrich still wasn’t feeling well, but his discomfort did little to blunt his outrage over what had befallen him. After chatting and taking pictures with voters for an hour, he commandeered a back room and staged an impromptu media availability. Among those present was Chris Matthews, who more or less took control of the proceedings, goading Newt by suggesting that he had allowed Romney to “kick the shit” out of him.