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

Author:Balz, Dan [Balz, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

The Empire Strikes Back

The night after his defeat in South Carolina, Mitt Romney launched an aggressive new attack—the toughest of the campaign—on Newt Gingrich. He landed in Jacksonville and his entourage rolled south to Ormond Beach for an outdoor rally. His rhetoric was harsh and personal. Politico’s Reid Epstein said it was as if Romney were reading Gingrich’s résumé from a Wikipedia entry and “undercutting each item as he got to it.” Romney said the country was electing a leader, not a talk show host. “Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader,” he said. “He was a leader for four years as Speaker of the House. And at the end of four years, it was proven that he was a failed leader and he had to resign in disgrace.” He said that after leaving Congress, Gingrich had spent fifteen years working as a lobbyist “selling influence” in Washington. In a state whose economy had been hard hit by housing foreclosures, he reprised an attack from earlier in the campaign by noting that Gingrich had worked as a consultant to Freddie Mac, and demanded that Gingrich reveal more of what he had done for the housing agency.

The attacks marked a new phase in the Republican campaign, the result of a week of intense planning by Romney’s Boston-based campaign team. Romney’s advisers had seen the drubbing in South Carolina coming and began to shift their strategy accordingly. “By the first debate [in Myrtle Beach], it’s game over,” Matt Rhoades later told me. “I’m not even thinking about South Carolina anymore except for any cleanup duty. We’re working on tax returns. I’m working on making sure we have the best kickass events and message strategy and we have all the resources we need to go on TV going into Florida, while we’re in South Carolina.” When Gingrich blasted John King in the second debate, the Boston team was barely paying attention to South Carolina. Neil Newhouse said, “By the time we got to that point, we knew South Carolina was gone and we had already changed internally. By the time Saturday came, our mourning was over and we were focused on Florida. We didn’t even watch the numbers come in on Saturday.”

Romney’s super PAC had handled the bulk of the advertising attacks on Gingrich in Iowa and South Carolina. But the Boston team was never fully happy with what the super PAC was doing. Stuart Stevens told the others it was time to shift tactics. His message, according to another member of the team, was: Screw the super PAC. We need to run our own negatives against Newt. We need to start taking the bark off him. Stevens saw Gingrich as an easy target, someone who could not sustain himself in a serious campaign with Romney. “The problem Gingrich has is he’s always going to bump up against the idea of what he’s saying with who he is,” Stevens later told me. “You can’t run as an insurgent when you have ‘Speaker’ in front of your name.

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