Mitt's single-digit landslide, and Newt's singularly focused revenge
Romney can no longer avoid the fury of his desperate rivals. This weekend in New Hampshire, they'll pile on the frontrunner like never before
How about that Romney landslide? It turned out that in Iowa, the Mitt did fit — by two hands worth of votes, minus the thumbs. On paid media alone, Romney spent approximately $113 per vote and Rick Santorum spent just $1.65. The Romney campaign dared, and lost while winning. If Mitt had racked up a convincing margin, he would have been on a glide path to the GOP nomination. Instead, he won by a mere eight votes.
Now, in two weekend debates just hours apart in New Hampshire, he's headed into a demolition derby — and for the first time, the other drivers on the track will all be targeting Romney. His opponents probably can't deprive Mitt of a semi-home state victory, but they could let the air out of his overinflated standing in the polls in the Granite State, strengthen the conservative resistance to his contrived candidacy, weaken him for South Carolina and Florida, and manage to drag out the entire GOP race. Even if Mitt finishes first, he may sputter across the finish line.
Newt Gingrich, incandescent in his anger about the televised assault from a Romney-friendly super-PAC, survived Iowa to fight another day — if not entirely on his own behalf. After the former House speaker, now the brief-and-former frontrunner, delivered himself of a caucus night speech that was more jeremiad than concession, Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager in 2008, shrewdly observed that Gingrich was now positioning himself as Santorum's "blocking tackle."
As Bette Davis famously rasped in All About Eve: "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night."
In playing that position, Newt's first complaint doesn't matter much in this season of economic turbulence and the overheated brews of the Tea Party. Previously a supreme practitioner of the negative arts, he's shocked, appalled, outraged — you name it, because he has — at the negative bombardment that's shredding his political resurrection. He almost sounds like a convert to Common Cause, a tribune of campaign reform. It is self-serving, of course, but Gingrich has seldom conveyed a sense of perspective or self-knowledge. Not since the Clinton White House consigned him to steerage on Air Force One's journey to the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has he been so self-righteously aggrieved.
That time, he shut down the government. This time, he aims to shut down Mitt Romney. And he has another line of attack that could be far more effective than whining about unfair ads that for the most part are anything but inaccurate. Romney, Newt's relentless mantra goes, is a "Massachusetts moderate."
Watch Gingrich expand on this in the debates. I can hear it now: "Mitt, you ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate. Along the way to losing, you said you were better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy. You said that, like Ted Kennedy, you were fervently pro-choice. Like Ted Kennedy, you said you were never for Ronald Reagan — and added that in the Reagan years you weren't a Republican, but an independent. After you got elected governor while announcing you were a progressive, you worked with Ted Kennedy to pass RomneyCare — which then became the model for ObamaCare. And like Ted Kennedy, your health plan funded abortions."
Perhaps a pause, and then the punch line: "Mitt, if you're a Republican, you're a Ted Kennedy Republican." (Sounds okay to me, but not to GOP primary voters.)
Unlike Rick Perry, Gingrich has the skill to pull off a set piece like that — and make it sound natural, convincing, and devastating. And after the blocking tackle opens the way, he and Romney's other rivals can and will keep piling on — not just about the heresies of Mitt's past, but about the timid faux conservatism of his current incarnation. On health care, he still defends the individual mandate — and it doesn't matter whether it is imposed at the state or federal level. He's for tinkering with the tax code, not a flat tax — which he favors only in theory. He wouldn't repeal the right of gays and lesbians to serve in the military.
The last of these could prove to be especially congenial to the gay-baiting Perry, who, post-Iowa, conducted the shortest "reassessment" in history, after which he in effect said "oops" again, tweeting: "Here we come South Carolina" — with a convenient touchdown in New Hampshire for the next two debates.
Jon Huntsman, you can be sure, will arraign not just Romney's unreliable conservatism, but at least implicitly the hollowness of his character.
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