Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  In mid-November, I wrote about Gingrich’s unexpected opportunity and said he still could be his own worst enemy: “He delights in over-the-top rhetoric, stridency, extravagant criticism and condescension toward his enemies. He becomes a scold. Gingrich has various attributes, which have kept him as a prominent voice in the Republican Party for more than two decades in spite of setbacks and self-inflicted wounds. For reasons mostly beyond his doing, he may have been handed a new opportunity for redemption and leadership. Whether he can restrain the impulses that have brought him down in the past will now be his biggest challenge.”

  The next morning an e-mail arrived from Gingrich. There was no content other than the subject line. It read: “Good analysis newt.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Mitt’s Moment

  Mitt Romney was the one constant in the Republican race. Through the summer and fall, as his rivals came and went, he remained at or near the top of nearly every poll. He won or tied virtually every one of the fall debates. He did not excite the party’s base, but in his steady, unspectacular style he was able to keep his focus on the ultimate prize that had eluded him four years earlier. He had learned well the lessons of 2008. He and his team were digging in for a long battle.

  There were now two distinguishing features of the Republican race. One was the absence of a truly strong challenger to Romney. One by one, other candidates had come calling for support. One by one, they had stumbled or been found wanting. Those ebbs and flows contrasted with the other reality of the race, which was Romney’s inability to gain additional support when one of his rivals had stumbled. His relative flat line in the polls, with somewhere between 25 and 30 percent support, was considered a sure sign of weakness. The Obama team mocked him as “the 25 percent man.” But there was every bit as much weakness, if not more, among those who were seeking to challenge him, which now made his route to the nomination potentially easier. Nothing was guaranteed, but the weakness of the opposition—in particular the failure of anyone to consolidate conservative support in Iowa—gave Romney the opportunity to do something that was not in the original game plan in Boston. It was now possible that Romney could win both Iowa and New Hampshire and set himself on a fast track to victory.

  Throughout the year, Romney and his team had played Iowa with considerable deftness. He was neither fully in the race to win the state nor definitely passing on the caucuses, as John McCain had done in both his 2000 and 2008 campaigns. Iowa was not a Romney-friendly environment. Christian conservatives played too big a role in the precinct caucuses, as Romney had learned in 2008. In his second race, he had decided to approach the state cautiously, keeping his options open as long as possible. The strategic conversations had begun in 2010 between Dave Kochel, Romney’s lead strategist in Iowa, and the team in Boston. They wanted Romney to campaign in the state just enough to keep himself visible but not enough to suggest that he was going all out there. They wanted to reconnect with Romney’s 2008 supporters but needed to stay below the radar so as not to suggest they were making a play to win the caucuses. As other candidates were traveling to Iowa regularly in 2010, Romney stayed away. He made a quick trip in the final month of the midterm elections to campaign for Terry Branstad, who had served four terms as governor in the 1980s and 1990s, retired, and was now trying to win another term. Through the first two-thirds of 2011, as other candidates were swarming the state, Romney was an infrequent visitor. He was there in the spring and came back for the August debate just before the Ames Straw Poll. On that visit he made the obligatory stop at the Iowa State Fair, where he got into a verbal tussle with a heckler and, in trying to defend the free market system, uttered the now-famous words, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

  Romney maintained a skeletal staff in Iowa, led by Kochel and state director Sara Craig. In the late spring they began to reach out more systematically to their county coordinators from 2008. Over the summer they quietly recruited precinct captains, and in the fall began a more serious effort to canvass potential supporters—all without making any public acknowledgment. Managing expectations became one of the single biggest challenges for the campaign. Campaign manager Matt Rhoades spent considerable time weighing the risks, rewards, costs, and opportunities of Iowa. In November 2011, he vetoed the idea of having Romney attend a sixty-fifth birthday party for Branstad. Ron Kaufman, a Romney senior adviser and former business partner of Branstad, strongly recommended that Romney go to the celebration. To do otherwise would seem to be a snub of the popular governor. Rhoades said no. He knew that if Romney went to the birthday party he also would be obliged to attend a candidate forum sponsored by Family Leader, one of the leading social conservative organizations in the state. Rhoades and others knew it was not a setting that would help Romney. Branstad had already put Romney on notice a few days before the birthday party weekend. “I think he’s making a big mistake . . . by not coming here and spending more time,” Branstad said at an energy conference in Des Moines. “I mean Romney is dropping in the polls, and I think he wants to keep down expectations—well, his expectations may get really bad if he doesn’t get a little more serious.” Branstad’s public upbraiding, along with Gingrich’s emergence, put a noticeable dent in Romney’s Iowa support. Rhoades stuck with the plan. “It just seemed like an exercise in jumping through every hoop that people put out in front of you,” he said of the Family Leader forum. “That’s one of the things that we’ve not done as a campaign. We didn’t do it in Iowa. We didn’t go to every forum just because they were in Iowa. We didn’t do the straw poll. We learned our lessons [from 2008] and we didn’t go.”

  There was little doubt, however, that Romney would ultimately make a vigorous push in Iowa. On December 1, campaign officials announced the first television buy in the state. In the ad, Romney said, “I spent my life in the private sector. I’ve competed with companies around the world. I’ve learned something about how it is that economies grow. We’re not going to balance the budget just by pretending that all they have to do is take out the waste. We’re going to have to cut spending.” The campaign had played the expectations game expertly to that point. The question was whether Romney now risked raising them too high.

  On December 10, the candidates met in Des Moines for another debate. Newt Gingrich was now the center of attention and the target of the attacks. A Washington Post/ABC News poll of potential Iowa caucus participants showed the former Speaker leading the field, with a ten-point margin over second-place Romney. The Romney campaign’s internal polling showed Gingrich ahead by seven points at the time of the Des Moines debate. Interviews with Iowa voters showed how much the debates had helped him. A woman in rural Carroll County who participated in an informal focus group that I convened said, “I think he has shaped these debates. He is making everyone talk about ideas and he is so respectful of the other candidates on the stage and doesn’t tear down. . . . He just wants to talk about ideas, and that’s so exciting and refreshing.” What Iowa Republicans found most appealing about Gingrich was the belief that he would demolish Obama in the general election debates. A woman who lived in the Des Moines suburbs and who participated in another group I met with said, “I think he’d kick [Obama’s] butt in a debate, and that’s what we need.”

  With characteristic bravado, Gingrich had called the race all but over. “I’m going to be the nominee,” he told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee. 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. . . . They should do what they and their consultants want to do. I will focus on being substantive and I will focus on Barack Obama.” Gingrich’s hubris angered Romney’s Boston team. Rhoades was personally insulted, for his candidate and for the entire campaign.

  At the debate in Des Moines, Gingrich was ac
cused of being a career politician who profited by his insider status, a hypocrite, and an intemperate, unreliable leader. Romney led the attacks. “We don’t need folks who are lifetime Washington people to get this country out of the mess it’s in,” he said. “We need people from outside Washington, outside K Street.” Gingrich responded to Romney by saying, “Let’s be candid. The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is because you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”

  The debate also escalated the controversy over immigration that Gingrich had touched off during a forum in Washington two weeks earlier. The former Speaker had said he favored an immigration policy that would allow someone who had been in the country illegally for a quarter century or more and had put down roots in a community to stay to be given a path to legal status—though not citizenship. Romney had been sharply critical of the proposal, as he had been with Perry’s in-state tuition program. Asked about his proposal at the Des Moines debate, Gingrich held his ground. “I will just say flatly, I do not believe the people of the United States are going to send the police in to rip that kind of person out and ship them out of this country,” he said. Romney continued to take a hard line. “We will then create another magnet that draws people into our country illegally,” he said. That was also the night Romney dared Perry to bet him $10,000 to settle a dispute over something in Romney’s book.

  Five days later, the candidates put on a repeat performance in Sioux City. Gingrich’s rivals said he was not a true conservative and would put the entire party at risk if he were the nominee. Michele Bachmann was especially aggressive, attacking him for having been a lobbyist for Freddie Mac, which paid him $1.6 million in consulting fees. Given conservative antipathy toward both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for their roles in the foreclosure crisis, this was fertile ground. “The Speaker had his hand out and was taking $1.6 million to influence senior Republicans to keep the scam going in Washington, D.C.,” she said. Gingrich replied, “I never lobbied under any circumstance. The truth is, I was a national figure who was doing just fine, doing a whole variety of things, including writing best-selling books, making speeches. And the fact is, I only chose to work with people whose values I shared, and having people have a chance to buy a house is a value I believe still is important in America.”

  • • •

  Gingrich’s surge in Iowa brought out the newest force in presidential politics, the super PAC, with Romney the first beneficiary. Restore Our Future was explicitly created to help Romney—independent by its incorporation but nonetheless a powerful ally that could spend freely to attack anyone who appeared to be a serious obstacle in the former governor’s path to the nomination. ROF began a massive advertising campaign against Gingrich, spending nearly $3 million in December. Romney used his television money to offer positive ads while leaving it to the super PAC to attack Gingrich relentlessly. It was the first clear evidence of the outsized role these groups could play in the nomination battle.

  Super PACs grew out of the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and also of a later decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission. The Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they wanted directly on elections. The second decision made it possible for political action committees that engaged only in independent expenditures, and not advocating directly for a candidate, to accept unlimited contributions. Super PACs mushroomed during the 2010 election cycle, with about eighty different ones registered with the Federal Election Commission. Ten of those committees accounted for three-quarters of the roughly $90 million spent on campaigns that cycle. The best known of these committees was American Crossroads, formed by a group that included Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s two campaigns and White House deputy chief of staff in Bush’s administration. Like traditional PACs, these super PACs were regulated by the FEC and had similar reporting and disclosure requirements.* The big difference was in the amount of money they could collect from a single individual.

  The 2012 presidential election brought another refinement to these super PACs—committees formed for the express purpose of promoting a specific candidacy. Even though they were not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaign of the candidate they were supporting, these PACs were generally created by and staffed with people having close ties to the candidate and his campaign. Romney’s super PAC was founded by the general counsel for his 2008 campaign, Charles Spies, and by Carl Forti, who was political director for that campaign. Gingrich’s was formed by Becky Burkett, who had run his political action committee at American Solutions, and one of the first to come aboard as its senior adviser and chief spokesman was Rick Tyler, who had long been one of Gingrich’s closest advisers and was a member of his campaign team until the mass walkout by senior staff in June 2011. Another twist tied these super PACs even more closely to the campaigns they were aiding: The candidate and his staff were allowed to help raise money for these supposedly independent organizations. Though entirely legal, it seemed a perversion of the system of presidential campaign financing that had been breaking apart since the 2000 campaign.

  • • •

  Iowans were famous for seeing things before voters elsewhere, because they had an early opportunity to examine the candidates repeatedly and up close. But that wasn’t the case this time. Until early December 2011, the campaign in Iowa had been far quieter than in previous years. Candidates had spent less time and money in the state. They had held far fewer events, and those events (with a few exceptions) drew smaller audiences and generated less excitement than in the past. Campaign organizing was months behind the pace of the past several cycles. Iowans were moving along with the rest of the country. As Republican voters shifted nationally, Iowa voters changed with them, from Bachmann to Perry to Cain and now to Gingrich. Debates and cable television were supplanting some of the old-fashioned retail campaigning so elemental to Iowa’s politics.

  The absence of organizational infrastructure was particularly evident. I went to Bachmann’s headquarters outside Des Moines in early December and found only a few people making telephone calls. Gingrich’s headquarters was even emptier. Scores of cell phones were plugged into outlets in an otherwise barren room. Only two people were making calls to voters, and both were from outside the state. The mismatch between the image of Gingrich as the hot candidate, leading the polls in Iowa, and the support structure he had to turn out voters on caucus night was as great as any I had seen. The Republican race in Iowa was quickly becoming a free-for-all. The attacks on Gingrich drove down his support. Romney’s advisers grew increasingly optimistic that he could actually win the caucuses. Meanwhile, two other candidates were beginning to attract attention.

  Ron Paul was his own universe as a candidate, but he was becoming a force in Iowa. His brand of libertarianism attracted an intense following, small in numbers but passionate in their support. Paul was the oldest and quirkiest of the candidates. He was out of step with his party on national security issues. His support for legalization of marijuana also put him at odds with most Republicans, though it helped attract young voters. But on the question of government’s role, he offered Tea Party activists the purest and most radical platform. He wanted to shrink the government dramatically and balance the budget immediately. He also wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve. In debates, he seemed to enjoy attacking his rivals. He showed no mercy toward Gingrich, who he believed was a hypocrite and a phony conservative. He didn’t much like fellow Texan Rick Perry either. The only candidate generally spared from his attacks was Romney. In fact, they acted as allies against the other candidates. In Iowa, Paul was building an organization that was the envy of many of the other low-budget candidates. His supporters had been at work for years. “This isn’t a year-and-a-half campaign,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, told the New York Times�
�� Richard A. Oppel Jr. “This is a five-year campaign.” The better Ron Paul did in Iowa, the more Romney liked it. Paul had no chance to win the nomination, but in Iowa he had the potential to suppress support for some of the others who were trying to become Romney’s principal challenger.

  The other candidate on the rise was Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator. He was as conservative as anyone in the field. He had done his politics in Iowa the old-fashioned way, and for most of the year he had been camped out in the state, drawing little attention. He would go anywhere to meet with one or two or a dozen voters. Reporters rarely followed him around. Romney’s campaign advisers thought so little of his chances that they did not even bother to prepare an opposition research book on him. His candidacy seemed improbable from the start. A partisan fighter, he had served Pennsylvania in the House and later the Senate, as one of the most outspoken social conservatives in the chamber. He was the father of seven children, one a special needs child. He and his wife, Karen, lost an eighth child shortly after birth, a wrenching experience that turned him into a more aggressive advocate on some of the social issues he had merely paid lip service to before. When he ran for reelection in 2006, a bad year for Republicans, he lost by eighteen points. He was built like a football player, and his trademark became the sweater-vests that he wore on the campaign trail. Buttons sold at his events said, “Chicks Dig the Vest.” By December, he was burrowed deep into Iowa. He had visited all ninety-nine counties in the state, often riding in a Dodge Ram pickup owned by friend and aide Chuck Laudner that became known as the Chuck Truck. He knew Iowa activists by name. When Perry and Bachmann squared off in August in Waterloo the day after the straw poll, Santorum was there too. No one remembered that, but Nick Ryan, a conservative operative in Iowa who was with him that night did. “As he went from table to table, he knew so many people who were in that room. He recognized them, by name,” Ryan said. “He shook their hands. He was . . . overlooked by the media but continuing to build relationships.”