How Newt blew it: An Iowa road map

How Newt blew it: An Iowa road map
Politico, 2-Jan-12
By: Jonathan Martin
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The high water mark of Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign may have been Nov. 27, the day the New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed his candidacy for president.

The famously conservative paper’s endorsement was a priceless gift. The former House Speaker proceeded to squander it.

In doing so, Gingrich revealed that he learned all the wrong lessons from his campaign’s collapse this summer and none of the right ones from his remarkable comeback.

Instead of seizing the moment and making an aggressive case for why the contest was now a two-man race between a movement conservative and flip-flopping moderate — a unique opportunity afforded by the endorsement’s implicit-but-unmistakable critique of Mitt Romney in his firewall state — Gingrich fell back to his familiar habits, a routine marked by too much self-assurance and not enough discipline.

Between that and some other key factors — among them, Romney’s super PAC blitzkrieg and his own weak fundraising — a campaign that seemed on the cusp of stealing the nomination barely a month ago now faces an ignominious fourth place finish or worse. And the dramatic arc of the final chapter in his political career suddenly seems a lot less triumphant.

“This has been a great example of best of Newt and worst of Newt,” said Dan Meyer, his Chief of Staff as speaker, of Gingrich’s December. “He has the vision thing and he knows how to inspire people. But he was going to be smarter than the consultants and he didn’t pay enough attention to fundraising and organization and so when he got pounded he couldn’t respond.”

Gingrich’s problems weren’t just on the airwaves here, though.

Until an Indiana-based GOP direct mail consultant, Chris Faulkner, arrived in Iowa a week ago at the behest of a political director Gingrich only hired a week before that, the candidate had nobody here running his day-to-day caucus effort.

Beyond the TV barrage and tactical missteps, though, he lost his lead for a more fundamental reason: just as Gingrich demonstrated during his speakership, the most basic ability to stay disciplined and drive a consistent message escaped him.

He offered no discernible response to an onslaught of negative ads other than to complain about the negativity and insist that he would stay positive. Then he repeatedly undermined his own attempt to stay on the high road by criticizing his GOP rivals.


When he and his campaign decided they had to offer policy contrasts with Romney in week after Christmas, Gingrich veered off every day into all manner of rabbit holes instead of closing here by outlining the differences between his supply-side tax plan and Romney’s less-bold proposal. He revisited his Greek cruise (an intentional ploy to anger his old staff, he explained), went to a chocolate shop and engaged Romney over his rival’s Lucille Ball crack, accused an unscrupulous paid contractor of being the reason he didn’t make the Virginia ballot, and gladly riffed on electromagnetic pulse attacks. In response to a question about climate change, the would-be president said: “I’m an amateur paleontologist.”

Even more damaging, Gingrich let himself get into a back-and-forth about Ron Paul and gladly delivered a multitude of soundbites on campaign process, returning again and again to his greatest obsession: the ad campaign against him.

By Sunday, two days before the caucuses, any hint of a policy-oriented message was gone. He was in full grievance mode.

“If I could have done anything differently I would’ve pulled the plug on Romney’s PAC,” he told reporters in this central Iowa town, revealing that he felt “Romney-boated” by the third-party attacks.


In spite of it all, Gingrich does not seem entirely convinced that his campaign is in dire straits. He has spoken in the last few days about taking the fight to Romney more aggressively in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and Gingrich strategist Kellyanne Conway said on Fox Monday that viewers should expect a fiery speech from the GOP candidate on caucus night.

Gingrich’s defiance is understandable, for a candidate who has been prematurely left for dead before.

But it’s unclear how much political wisdom Gingrich gained from his resurrection experience. Even before the SuperPAC ads went on the air here, Gingrich betrayed a remarkably naive view of what was needed to win the caucuses.

Appearing at a POLITICO forum in Des Moines on November 16th, he was asked if he had the cash for TV ads.

“We’ll be able to afford them; I don’t know that we’ll do them,” said Gingrich. “We may do all of our stuff in social media. It will depend on what we think works best, particularly here where you’re targeting a very definable universe.”

It was Newt-the-futurist, musing about an unconventional approach to politicking that would break all the rules.

It was also revealing about Newt-the-candidate: after seeing his campaign team walk off en masse in June, he was going to remain his own chief strategist.

Gingrich didn’t go up on TV in Iowa until December 5th, when he unveiled a morning-in-America style spot. It was a modest buy, though, and it was barely even playing on the airwaves here by the time Gingrich returned to the state on December 14th.

By that time, Romney’s super PAC and Paul’s campaign were saturating the airwaves with a series of brutal ads attacking Gingrich for his policy shifts and past controversies.

While promising to do more ads, he was largely dismissive of the need to fight back.

“I’m going to run my campaign the way I want to and my campaign’s going to focus on positive ideas and positive solutions and I’m, frankly, taking the gamble that the American people care about actually solving our country’s problems, not just watching politicians beat each other up,” Gingrich told reporters in Iowa City.

The venue was telling. The former speaker had just finished a lecture on brain science in a University of Iowa classroom that was interrupted by protesters and featured a question about Gingrich’s three marriages.

While his Republican rivals were spending as much time as possible in conservative-heavy precincts, Gingrich was indulging his long-standing passion for brain science by discussing the topic in Iowa’s version of Berkeley.

Just as it was in the first iteration of Gingrich’s campaign when his advisers insisted he run a more traditional retail campaign and dispense with book-signings and documentaries, scheduling was another nagging problem over the last month.

After receiving the Union Leader’s endorsement on Nov. 27, he didn’t return to New Hampshire for another 15 days. Nor, between those weeks, did he air a single radio or TV ad in the state touting his seal of approval from a conservative institution.


As for Iowa, he flew back to Washington the weekend before Christmas, immediately following the Sioux City debate. The reason? To appear at a book-signing at Mt. Vernon and his wife’s band concert in Fairfax. His opponents were all making their cases in early states that weekend.

Gingrich returned to Iowa in the days before Christmas, but had no discernible message besides carping about the negative ads and citing how many “Pinocchios” a Washington Post fact-check had given one of the spots cut by Romney’s super PAC.

Still, Gingrich officials said not to worry – the candidate would return to the state after the holiday with a 44-city bus tour and new, sharp distinctions between his economic plan and that of Romney.

When he arrived in Iowa on Dec. 27, his campaign made headlines by announcing the bus tour had been cut in half and Gingrich was forced to address a similarity — not a difference — with Romney: namely a page-one Wall Street Journal article revealing that he had praised “Romneycare” in 2006.

Whether or not the story was planted by Romney’s campaign is unknown, but it nonetheless illustrated how, at nearly every turn over the last month, Gingrich was haunted by his top rival.

The degree to which Gingrich has been outgunned by Romney was most vividly depicted in the days immediately before and after Christmas.

The reason Gingrich cut short his final pre-holiday Iowa trip wasn’t just to toe-touch in New Hampshire, as he did for a few hours. It was because he had to hustle back to hold two events in Virginia that were aimed entirely at getting him the 10,000 signatures needed to be on the commonwealth’s ballot.

That was something Romney’s campaign had taken care of by having volunteers appear at polling places for Virginia’s August primary and on Election Day in November.

But Gingrich was, to use his word, “scrambling” then to meet the deadline. Appearing in Richmond the morning of Dec. 23, the deadline to file petitions, the candidate proclaimed they had gotten the requisite signatures.

Except he hadn’t.

The next day, Gingrich was humiliated. Enough of his signatures didn’t match voter rolls that he was found to have less than 10,000. He wouldn’t appear on the ballot in the state he’s called home for over a decade.

Romney officials pounced, mocking Gingrich for his organizational failure.

As bad as the ballot issue was from a perception standpoint, Gingrich’s campaign made it worse. On Christmas Eve, Gingrich campaign manager Michael Krull posted a message on Facebook comparing their failure to get on a primary ballot to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Coming in a slow-news period, word of the bizarre comparison quickly spread and was still being discussed two days after Christmas. Then Romney ensured it would keep getting attention by saying the more apt metaphor was “I Love Lucy” grappling with chocolates on the conveyor belt.


Yet for all the very public ways in which Gingrich fell short, there were other, less obvious examples.

Take Dec. 26. Romney returned to the campaign fray by releasing a new ad and holding conference calls with early-state voters. Both got significant media attention.

Gingrich, meanwhile, was spotted that day padding around the McLean Giant and the only video that came out of his campaign was a three-minute video about George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776.

Even after he began raising the money needed to pay a professional staff, Gingrich didn’t immediately hire experienced operatives.

In that context, it’s not difficult to understand how Gingrich failed rudimentary campaign tests like getting on ballots.

His political director, Martin Baker, didn’t begin work until Dec. 19.

At that point, Gingrich was being advised by a few more veterans behind the scenes.

But by then, some of the most severe challenges were already coming to fruition. And not just the Virginia ballot.

The day Gingrich appeared in Des Moines, Nov. 16, happened to be the day he was confronted with a Bloomberg story reporting that he made over a million dollars consulting for Freddie Mac.

He had been roundly mocked after saying in a debate the week before that he was paid for his “advice as a historian,” and when faced with question about his compensation level he wouldn’t say if it was accurate.

But more telling was what he said when asked if he had documentation ready about his time consulting for the mortgage giant — he admitted he didn’t.

The Freddie issue has now dogged Gingrich for well over a month and he’s yet to offer a cogent answer or air an ad pushing back on the charge, as he suggested at one point he would.

“I probably should’ve responded faster and more aggressively on that,” the former speaker conceded to reporters in Marshalltown Sunday, lamenting that he didn’t run a spot “that explicitly repudiated the Freddie Mac distortions.”

For Gingrich, a figure pocked with scars from decades of political combat, December has been among the most humbling months of his long career.

He began it with the bravado-bordering-on-arrogance that has marked his public identity.

“I mean, 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,” he told ABC’s Jake Tapper on Dec. 1.

A month later, on Monday Jan. 2, he was conceding Iowa.

“I don’t think I’m going to win,” he said the day before the caucuses.