by Balz, Dan
Huntsman proved to be an indifferent candidate. Fred Davis later said, “I thought he got more and more uncomfortable as things went on.” His announcement day was, in Huntsman’s own words, “an utter disaster,” a logistical nightmare that included credentials with the candidate’s first name misspelled. Huntsman and his father, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Utah, were livid over the foul-ups. His operation underwent some staff upheaval, including a change in campaign managers. He had a one-state strategy focused on New Hampshire. His first debate, in Ames the week of the Iowa Straw Poll, was so unmemorable that David Axelrod summed it up with a devastating review: “Smaller than life,” he said. At that debate, Huntsman had joined others on the stage in raising his hand to reject a hypothetical deficit reduction deal that would include one dollar in new taxes for every ten dollars in spending cuts. “It was a knee-jerk response to the environment I found myself in,” he said. Huntsman said he had two choices: turn his back on a record of not raising taxes as governor by saying yes to such a deal, or respond with what he thought was an absurd answer to an absurd hypothetical question by saying no, along with everyone else onstage. “And it’s something I regretted after, because the Republican Party I grew up in was always after solutions. It wasn’t after dogmatic approaches where you’re ultimately willing to walk the plank if you don’t get your way.”
Huntsman said he had a revelation onstage that night in Ames as he watched Michele Bachmann tangle with Tim Pawlenty, which was how underwhelming the field of candidates was. “What went through my head—and I hope this doesn’t sound egotistical—what went through my head was in this country of 315 million people, Nobel Prize winners, university presidents, CEOs, creative class leaders, innovators, great people, this is what we get to run for president? This is it? How come we’ve got this? They’re all good people, but they’re not the best that this country has to offer. I thought, during a time of great need, you know, unlike any other time since maybe 1860, this is what we get?” At that August debate, Huntsman still had hopes of making a mark in the race. By the time the campaign reached New Hampshire, he was running on fumes.
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When Romney landed in New Hampshire the day after Iowa, he had a celebrity in tow: his old rival John McCain. They were the oddest of odd couples. Romney was buttoned up and buttoned down, a by-the-numbers manager who was driven by data, logic, and hardheadedness. John McCain was a freewheeling and unpredictable warrior, a visceral politician who relied on his gut and his instincts to make his way. At this very moment four years earlier, the two had been sworn enemies, dueling in a nasty New Hampshire primary campaign. On this Wednesday in January 2012, they found political communion on a stage in the Granite State. It is what happens to politicians. After his victory over Romney in Iowa in 2008, Mike Huckabee handed off to McCain the responsibility of blocking Romney’s path to the Republican nomination with an exhortation that has been etched into the political history books. “Now it’s your turn to kick his butt,” Huckabee said to McCain that night. McCain obliged. Now McCain was there to give Romney a pat on the back rather than a kick in the rear.
McCain’s embrace of Romney also was a slap at Huntsman, who had been a McCain supporter in 2008. Huntsman complained to his onetime ally: “I took a huge hit by supporting him. Support Romney, that’s fine. That’s okay. But two or three days before the primary when you knew he was going to win anyway? You’ve got another guy who bled for you and just cut him a little slack. Give him three days for heaven’s sake and then support Romney. And I basically just said, ‘You know, I gave a lot to you. We sacrificed a great deal in support of your cause, and I would have expected that maybe you would have been willing to show us a little bit of decency in the final stretch.’” McCain did not respond until some weeks later.
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New Hampshire has been the scene of great political battles over the years. In the 1980 Republican primary, Ronald Reagan took over the Nashua debate as he fought back after a loss in Iowa. In 1984, Democrat Gary Hart came from out of nowhere in the final days of the primary to upset the heavily favored Walter Mondale. In 1992, Bill Clinton was almost knocked out of the presidential race because of controversies over his relationship with Gennifer Flowers and the military draft and pronounced himself the “Comeback Kid” after finishing second. In 2000, John McCain demolished the GOP front-runner, George W. Bush, by nineteen points in one of the biggest upsets in New Hampshire history. The Republican campaign in New Hampshire in 2012 had none of the suspense, none of the drama, and ultimately none of the significance of some of those memorable earlier contests. New Hampshire was Mitt Romney’s state from start to finish, and his rivals never measured up.
The two non-Romney candidates who had dominated the final weeks in Iowa—Santorum and Gingrich—were virtual nonplayers in New Hampshire. Santorum fell into the same trap that snared Huckabee four years earlier. The victory in Iowa made him want to compete in New Hampshire, but he had no money and little infrastructure. He drew big crowds but had nothing behind them. Gingrich, after his fourth-place finish in Iowa, was considered dead politically—for the second time in the campaign. He had only one asset in New Hampshire, the endorsement of the Union Leader newspaper, but little else. That left as Romney’s principal competitors Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Neither looked formidable. Paul had finished third in Iowa and had a solid base in New Hampshire, where his libertarian philosophy was attractive to the small-government, socially moderate, live-free-or-die segment of the New Hampshire electorate. As in Iowa, Paul’s support was a shield for Romney. Huntsman was counting on strong support from independents; Paul was taking some of those from him.
On the weekend before the primary, the candidates faced an overnight debate doubleheader. The first was on the night of Saturday, January 7, at Saint Anselm College, sponsored by ABC News and WMUR-TV. Romney easily survived the test. The second was the next morning in Concord, hosted by NBC’s Meet the Press. David Gregory opened by saying, “Candidates, good morning. I just want to say, on behalf of all Americans, that I thank you for being willing to debate each other every ten hours, whether you feel you need it or not.” Romney was not at his best that morning, forced to defend his record both at Bain and as governor of Massachusetts. Santorum asked why, if his record in Massachusetts had been so good, he did not seek reelection. “I went to Massachusetts to make a difference,” Romney said. “I didn’t go there to begin a political career, running time and time again. I made a difference. I put in place the things I wanted to do. I listed out the accomplishments we wanted to pursue in our administration. There were a hundred things we wanted to do. Those things I pursued aggressively. Some we won; some we didn’t. Run again? That would be about me. I was trying to help get the state into the best shape as I possibly could, left the world of politics, went back into business. Now I have the opportunity, I believe, to use the experience I have . . .” He paused and looked at Santorum.
“You’ve got a surprised look on your face,” he said. Santorum asked pointedly, “Are you going to tell people you’re not going to run for reelection for president if you win?” Romney continued to try to play the nonpolitician. “What I’m going to tell you is, this—this for me, politics is not a career.” Gingrich had little respect for Romney by now and was incredulous as he listened. “Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” he said to Romney. “The fact is, you ran in ’94 and lost. That’s why you weren’t serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad reelection rating. You dropped out of office. You had been out of state for something like two hundred days preparing to run for president. You didn’t have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor. You were going all over the country. You were out of state consistently. You then promptly reentered politics. You happened to lose to McCain as you had lost to Kennedy. Now you’re back running. You have been
running consistently for years and years and years. So this idea that suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind—just level with the American people.” Gingrich’s withering put-down struck directly at one of Romney’s biggest vulnerabilities, his political authenticity.
There were other bad moments for Romney in the hours before the primary, including when he said at a rally, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” In full context, the quotation was hardly as damaging as it was in the often-tweeted slam that became the talk of the day. The abbreviated version seemed to play into all of the questionable aspects of Romney’s political persona—the wealthy and insensitive business executive who was out of touch with the lives of real people. But with the lead Romney had built up through months and months of political work in the state, nothing like that was going to prevent him from winning.
When the returns came in on the night of January 10, Romney posted an easy victory, winning 39 percent of the vote. Paul finished second with 23 percent, and Huntsman was a weak third with 17 percent, though he called it “a ticket to ride” to South Carolina. Santorum and Gingrich got just 9 percent each. Romney had lapped the two of them and turned south without an obvious rival for the nomination.
CHAPTER 15
The Gingrich Resurrection
South Carolina had produced classic campaigns over the years, most notably the brutally negative face-off between George W. Bush and John McCain in 2000 that left the Arizona senator bitter for years. But South Carolina had never seen anything quite like the events that were beginning to take shape in the days after New Hampshire. The eleven-day clash highlighted all the new forces that were altering the dynamics of the nomination contest, from the power of super PACs to the centrality of the debates to the sharp swings in conventional wisdom to the volatility of the conservative electorate. If people thought Romney was on a glide path to the nomination, South Carolina would remind them that the Republican Party was far from a consensus about its nominee.
Buried in Iowa by Mitt Romney’s super PAC and relegated to also-ran status in New Hampshire, Newt Gingrich should have been in no shape to mount another comeback in South Carolina. By any standard assessment, he was now out of the race. But nothing about the Republican nomination battle was either predictable or, apparently, normal. Still, if there was an early state where Romney’s profile created a barrier to success even more than in Iowa, it was South Carolina. The electorate was everything that Romney was not: southern, very conservative, and evangelical. But after Iowa and New Hampshire, these vulnerabilities were too easily overlooked, including by some members of the team in Boston. They too were caught up in the moment. Neil Newhouse explained the atmosphere inside the campaign. “Everybody’s confidence is up,” he said. “Everybody is thinking, ‘You know what, we could do this, we could sweep this and we could come through and win South Carolina.’ If you win South Carolina, we know we’ve got an organization in Florida, we know we can do that, that’s what we’ve been ready for. South Carolina is like this added bonus in here, and so we got a little heady.”
The first significant boost for Gingrich came as the New Hampshire campaign was nearing its conclusion. Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino operator, announced that he would contribute $5 million to Winning Our Future, the super PAC supporting the former Speaker. In Iowa, Romney’s super PAC, Restore Our Future, had demonstrated how a well-funded committee could virtually eliminate an opponent by deploying overwhelming resources. In South Carolina, Republicans would learn how one billionaire contributor to a super PAC could help keep an otherwise sinking candidate afloat.
Adelson had given generously to conservative causes over the years but rarely had he taken such a high-profile role. In the 1990s he had sought Gingrich’s help in battling labor unions in Nevada. Through that association the two had become friends, and Adelson and his wife subsequently had contributed millions to Gingrich’s American Solutions enterprise. Adelson and Gingrich also shared a deep commitment to Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. When the $5 million contribution became public, Gingrich clearly welcomed it. “If he wants to counterbalance Romney’s millionaires, I have no objection to him counterbalancing Romney’s millionaires,” he said. Adelson’s contribution to Gingrich’s super PAC began to narrow the advertising gap that had marked the campaign in Iowa, where Romney’s super PAC had spent about $3 million on ads, compared to a little over $250,000 by Gingrich’s PAC. Thanks to Adelson, spending by the two super PACs in South Carolina was far less lopsided. Romney’s spent about $2.5 million, with almost all of it used for negative ads; Gingrich’s spent about $1.5 million.
In the final hours before the New Hampshire primary, Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman all had attacked Romney over the work of Bain Capital. Perry had described Bain’s style as “vulture capitalism.” Gingrich, on NBC’s Today Show, said, “I’ve run four small businesses in the last decade. It gets tough out there. It doesn’t always work. I get that. But if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company, and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.” With Adelson’s cash infusion, Winning Our Future took a calculated risk, pouring its money into ads airing portions of a documentary called “King of Bain,” an all-out attack on Romney’s private equity firm. Gingrich’s super PAC also bought the twenty-seven-minute film and put it up on its Web site. “King of Bain” told the darker side of the private equity experience, describing the buying, downsizing, and subsequent selling off of companies or their subsidiaries, often resulting in workers being laid off and pensions and health benefits reduced or eliminated while the partners at Bain walked away with huge profits. The film made Romney look like a rapacious corporate raider, the opposite of the job-creating success story he wanted to tell about his business record. The documentary focused on four case studies and had all the familiar techniques of negative advertising—the ominous voice of the narrator, tales of suffering by real and sometimes tearful people, photos of Romney and his partners looking as greedy as they could be. News organizations gave it negative reviews for truthfulness. Romney called it “probably the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.” The New Yorker’s Steve Coll wrote that while it was likely not the worst piece of political demagoguery that would air during the election, it was, “like most political speech and argument in the Super PAC era . . . a narrative of noise and emotional manipulation, intercut with jagged shards of truth.”
Everyone assumed that Winning Our Future was doing the work that Gingrich wanted done by attacking Romney and Bain Capital. Other Republicans jumped to Romney’s defense, accusing Gingrich and his super PAC of doing the Democrats’ dirty work. Romney’s campaign accused Gingrich and his ally of attacking capitalism and the free enterprise system. But Bain was now seeping into the political bloodstream in a way it had not been—just as the Obama team was hoping.
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The Republican candidates were scheduled to debate in Myrtle Beach on Monday, January 16. That morning Huntsman surrendered to the obvious. In some polls he trailed all other candidates, including comedian Stephen Colbert, a South Carolina native who had created a super PAC to draw attention to and parody the influence of super PACs. With his wife and four of his daughters joining him at the lectern and his father and other relatives standing at the side of the room, Huntsman announced that he was withdrawing from the campaign. Disillusioned by his experience, he denounced what he called a “toxic” political process. “This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in American history,” he said. He called on all the candidates to cease their attacks on one another. He told me later, “I saw the writing on the wall that [Romney] was going to be the nominee and I thought, ‘Will I let the pain continue?’” Huntsman announced his endorsement of Romney and then disappeared.
That night, the once unwieldy field of cand
idates was now reduced to five: Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, and Paul. Thousands of revved-up Republicans, primed for a confrontation, packed the Myrtle Beach Convention Center. Bain provided the first fireworks. Fox News anchor Bret Baier cited a Wall Street Journal editorial that had called Gingrich’s attacks crude and embarrassing and invited the former Speaker to defend them. Gingrich said that many of the questions he was raising had come straight out of articles in the Journal. “The governor has every opportunity to answer those questions, to give us facts and data,” he said. It was better for Republicans to know the answers now, he said, rather than have Bain become a debilitating problem in a general election. Romney tried to put the best light on Bain’s work. “Every time we invested, we tried to grow an enterprise, add jobs to make it more successful,” he said. “And I know that people are going to come after me. I know President Obama is going to come after me. But the record is pretty darn good.”
Everyone assumed Gingrich was following a well-planned strategy on Bain. He told me weeks later that it wasn’t, that he got drawn into it because of his super PAC’s attacks. “You couldn’t back off of it when you had twenty-seven minutes of advertising running,” he said. “You either had to be with your team or you had to indicate weakness.” Inside his campaign, advisers were trying to persuade him to stop talking about Bain. “It was one of those issues that Newt responded to,” said Patrick Millsaps, a Georgia lawyer who later became campaign chief of staff. “But if it had been up to us it was not an issue we would have chosen to lead with.” Robert Walker, a former Pennsylvania congressman who was one of Gingrich’s chief lieutenants in the House and who had been brought into the campaign just before Iowa as national chairman, said, “There was no doubt that the Romney stuff had gotten in his head. He was really viscerally angry with what Romney was doing to him and he thought this was payback. . . . There were a number of us who kept saying to him, ‘But Newt, that isn’t the message that any of the voters in these polls are saying is important to them.’” David Winston conducted a poll in South Carolina that showed Bain hurting Gingrich with Republican voters. “It showed we had a problem and it showed that this dynamic was clearly not working and the other things he was saying could work,” Winston said.
