Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (27 page)

On the evening before the caucuses, Santorum appeared before an overflow audience packed in a steamy side room at the Pizza Ranch. It was a dramatic change from just two weeks earlier when he had trouble holding a lunchtime crowd during a speech at an insurance company in Des Moines. He told the crowd this was his 380th Iowa event. “We haven’t speed-dated through Iowa,” he said. “We’ve taken our time. It’s been a courtship.” With the caucuses twenty-four hours away, he pleaded with Iowans to set aside everything but their own instincts and their own judgments. “You’re first,” he said. “That is a huge responsibility. I know a lot of people make light of the Iowa caucuses, but as you will see tomorrow night, it will have a huge impact on this race. And so the decision you make, and I know this, cannot and should not be taken lightly. . . . This is the most important election in your lifetime. . . . Do not defer your judgment to people who know less about who these candidates are than you do. Lead. . . . I’m asking you to lead. I’m asking you to be bold.”

Caucus night was a blur of precinct results, shifting numbers, and
uncertain outcomes. For most of the night, Romney and Santorum were neck and neck, with Paul running third. Santorum hesitated to go out to speak until he knew the final results, but his aides urged him at least to claim a moral victory even if he wasn’t in first place. No matter what, he had far exceeded expectations. Brabender reminded him that no matter what he said, the first lines would be the ones television would capture. When he finally addressed supporters, he had a broad smile on his face. “Game on!” he said. It was a remarkable showing for Santorum, but by early the next morning, the near-final count showed Romney with a lead of 8 votes out of more than 120,000 cast.

A few days later, Rhoades told me, “Everything we did in Iowa was to win the nomination, not to win Iowa, to win the nomination. That was our plan from the beginning, keeping our options open was the plan to win the nomination. Popping out there, doing debates, never going the McCain route of writing off the state at some point. We kept our options open from day one because it was all about winning the nomination. And we ended up winning Iowa.” As Romney boarded his chartered airplane for the flight to New Hampshire the morning after the caucuses, he was in position to do what no Republican had done in the modern era of presidential politics—win both of the opening contests. The only worrisome thing was that while he had “won” the caucuses, he actually received fewer votes than he had four years earlier. He had momentum, but he did not yet have his party.

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Jon Huntsman Jr. awaited the other candidates in New Hampshire. He was the misfit in the Republican race, the lone apparent moderate (other than perhaps Romney) in a party where such species were nearly extinct. Huntsman was a popular former governor of Utah who had been tapped by Obama in 2009 to become U.S. ambassador to China. The appointment was seen as a clever way to fill a critical diplomatic post and sideline a potential 2012 rival at the same time. Then rumors of a possible Huntsman candidacy surfaced in January 2011. Huntsman came to Washington that month for the state visit by Chinese president Hu Jintao. Obama couldn’t resist having fun with his envoy to Beijing. “I’m sure that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary,” he said to laughter at a press conference. That night, Axelrod spoke to Huntsman. “I went up to him and said, ‘Jon, I want you to know you can have my endorsement too if that helps,’” he said. “And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know where all this is coming from, it’s way overblown.’”

Meanwhile, a fledgling Huntsman for President operation sprang up under the direction of John Weaver, a veteran Republican consultant who had been a senior strategist for John McCain. The team also included Fred Davis, a Republican ad maker from Hollywood known for his theatrical flair, who had
done the “I am not a witch” ad for Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell. The Weaver operation technically was not connected directly to Huntsman. In interviews both said there was no direct contact between the two while Huntsman was in Beijing. But Huntsman could easily monitor the press coverage as the team built a Web site, a theme, and the skeletal infrastructure for a candidate who met all of Huntsman’s criteria. Huntsman resigned his diplomatic post and returned to Washington at the end of April. The day he landed, he got off the plane, put on a tuxedo, and attended the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Late that night he called Weaver and said he wanted to meet the next morning with the team Weaver had put together. Weaver suggested late morning, knowing the likely condition of the others after a night of hard partying. Huntsman insisted on an early start. The group arrived at Huntsman’s home in the Kalorama neighborhood in Northwest Washington with various degrees of hangovers. “From 7:30 a.m. onward, it was back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings, all at his request,” Weaver said.

Huntsman was ill-suited to seek the nomination of the Republican Party as it was constituted after the 2010 elections. In Utah he was a fiscal conservative but a moderate in other areas. He had looked favorably on the need to combat global climate change. He supported civil unions for gay couples. Once out of the Obama Foreign Service corps, he took issue with the war in Afghanistan, saying he would bring U.S. forces home as quickly as possible. Stylistically, he lacked the hard edge that some activists on the right expected of their presidential candidates. Long after he had dropped out of the race, he talked with me about the political culture shock he experienced when he returned from China and joined the Republican race. “You come back to the anger and the vitriol,” he said. “How you could talk of a president, of any party, as they were President Obama? I just couldn’t get my head around that.” I asked whether he found the country changed during his time away. “Very much so,” he said. “The party structurally was different. It was siloed in different ideological areas. The Tea Party of course had blossomed, and that was a driving sort of vanguard force. The vitriol toward the president, the venom, was something that I had never experienced before, and I had worked for Ronald Reagan as a young guy as an advance man. He was a gentleman, he believed that politics ought to have certain standards for decorum and respect. And what I was hearing just was not out of my world politically. The anger, the town hall meetings with people throwing punches and shouting down politicians.”

Huntsman believed this was destructive to the Republican Party. “I came from the Republican Party of ideas,” he said. “You think about solutions, you put ’em forward, you fight for them based upon our Republican ideals—that
don’t include, by the way, hating the other guy, but teeing up something that’s bold, courageous, and optimistic. So that’s the party I came out of. And when you hit head-on with the reality that you don’t just put ideas forward, you rip the guts out of the other guy, you rip him down, you cut him to shreds, you eviscerate him—that wasn’t my style. People could say you’ve got to be that angry, you’ve got to rip the president. I just worked for him, for heaven’s sake. I was his envoy to China. He’s a decent man. I can’t do that. And even if I did, it would come across as disingenuous. I’m not going to play that game.”

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.