Early on, you could see the fall of the Perry and Cain candidacies even as they rose. Both were new, both were fresh, both were saying and doing interesting things in — respectively — their states and the debates, and (maybe most important) both seemed to represent a viable alternative to Mitt Romney.
But at the same time, both were untested, and this is ultimately why they receded and why Romney is still strong. The national press hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Cain’s world that can reveal baggage which can normally stay secret; it hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Perry’s record and ability as a campaigner that would ultimately show him to be a relative lightweight. When the press and the pressure showed up, they crumbled. Romney has already been through it all; there’s no shoe about to drop, no damaging story threatening to derail his credibility or viability. He is — unlike Cain and Perry — who we think he is. There are downsides to this — there’s no sense of drama or discovery as we get to know more and more about him as a person as the campaign unfolds. But there’s something to be said for stability as well, particularly when the party is as desperate to win the White House as it is.
So normally, even though the base distrusts him, Romney would be a shoo-in for the nomination, the steady tortoise to everyone else’s mercurial hares. The only reason he’s not is that his most visible rival is perhaps the most distinct and special Republican politician since Ronald Reagan. And understanding why he’s so special (not necessarily good, but special) is key to understanding why he’s such a potent candidate.
Let’s take as a given his deep and broad imagination. Yes, he’s got a lot of ideas. Some of them are good, some are batty. Assume as well his tremendous gifts as a debater — maybe the best five-minute debater in the history of the House of Representatives — and deep connection with the Republican base, built over decades of campaigning for local candidates.
What makes Newt so special is that these particular attributes — which would be enough for most politicians operating at a national level — are just the tip of the iceberg. He is a brilliant political strategist and tactician, who not only identified what Republicans would have to do to win back the House in the mid-1990s, but devised the Contract with America as a way to convert what could have been a freak anti-incumbent election into a long-term governing majority. He also understood before nearly anyone the degree to which consultant-driven negative campaigning had turned off voters (“the only thing we learned from the 2004 election,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute, “is that slightly more people hated John Kerry than George Bush.”), and much of his current strength comes from the sense he’s broken past this and into new, positive ideas. He’s also a fantastic planner. In 1995, I was one of hundreds of young House Republican staffers whom Gingrich personally briefed on a thoughtful, shrewd strategic plan for Medicare reform, which he knew as the one single issue which could lose the majority in the 1996 elections (he was right – it almost did). He understands organizational leadership, he understands how to communicate an issue as well as anyone in national politics (most politicians do well communicating their own identities but lousy on ideas), and he understands how to build and manage a staff, which seems easy and not terribly important until you actually have to do it, when you find out it’s very hard and vital. And nobody — nobody — understands the Republican base better. He’s so good, so self-sufficient as a political unit that when a number of campaign staff quit on him this summer because they doubted his commitment (he was taking a cruise of the Aegean Sea with his wife instead of fundraising), you got a sense all it did was lower his overhead.
But as good as Good Newt is, there’s a Bad Newt — largely drawn from his four years as Speaker and his own marital (and extramarital) history. Basically, as well as Good Newt understood what and how to do things, Bad Newt couldn’t execute them. As orchestrator of the 1994 elections and the Contract with America, Gingrich had no peer, but as Speaker he managed to alienate… well, nearly everybody: his leadership team, the freshman class he’d helped elect, and rank-and-file who stuck with him through a failed coup because Republicans Don’t Like Coups. Bad Newt changed his mind frequently, threw temper tantrums in public, wouldn’t listen to bad news, made huge decisions without consulting others, and rushed into major change initiatives without a backup plan or strategy. (He also had an extramarital affair with a staffer at the same time he was pushing the House to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern, maybe not the best judgment). Bad Newt can be very, very bad, which might explain why few of his former top House staffers (among the very best on Capitol Hill) are working for his presidential campaign; the painful memories linger.
So the big question right now is whether Bad Newt is still lurking in the shadows, and whether Good Newt can overcome Bad Newt’s potentially fatal flaws; eleven years is a long time.
The more precise questions are, in no specific order:
Short-term judgment. Again, will he put his foot in it? His confrontational, no-holds-barred style serves him well in that his overstatements tend to be most offensive to the constituencies that the Republican base loathes — the mainstream media, the Washington elites, anybody who has ever watched MSNBC on purpose; to the base, they’re mother’s milk. But he has shown a tendency to do things totally at odds with the values he talks about with the greatest conviction, and not wanting to hear bad news is a common politician’s disease. Most worrying here is his lack of a strong, discreet advisor who can be brutally candid with him about mistakes he needs to correct or avoid — that’s a sign that although he might understand the problem, he hasn’t actually done anything concrete about it.
Clarifying the Vision. Newt’s strategy thus far has been to use the relatively narrow bandwidth available in the debates to articulate better than anyone else Republican skepticism and hostility towards commonly accepted foes, whether in office (Obama, Pelosi, Barney Frank) or not (the mainstream press, the bureaucracy, “Warshington,” cultural elites). Then, secondarily, he’ll discuss his own ideas. His actual policy instincts are probably overrated; he’s given credit for the party-defining Contract with America, but in fact all of those ideas had been Reagan Administration initiatives which polled extremely well but had been pushed aside by the Democratic Congress. As the primaries turn into a two-person race against Romney, he will have to better articulate his positive vision and prioritize his policy agenda, and this will require a level of discipline and rigor he has yet to show.
Building and Maintaining an Organization. He’s put together a number of enterprises since leaving the Capitol, but none have required the kind of agility and resilience that a Presidential campaign requires. So far, the campaign has been all about the debates, and he’s been able to be both candidate and campaign manager. Soon that will change; he will have to focus almost entirely on his public performance, and delegate the rest to others. (Consider how important James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos were for Bill Clinton, arguably the most skilled and knowledgeable Democratic politician and strategist since FDR). The concerns, based on his history as Speaker, are huge — epically so — and unresolved. In 1984, Gary Hart — also relatively organization-free — was able to ride a wave of short-term buzz and lack of excitement about frontrunner Walter Mondale to the brink of knocking him off in the early primaries because so many of them came so quickly after his dramatic win in New Hampshire. Today, it’s possible to think that social media could also make such a surge possible, but more likely that he’s peaked too early to ride that kind of spontaneous crest.
Other Candidates. The sweet spot of the Republican primary ballot is to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, and now that Gingrich has it, others like Rick Perry and Ron Paul will start focusing their rhetoric on him. Can he survive this? In 2004, Howard Dean looked as though he’d wrap up the Democratic nomination even before getting to the southern primaries, but Dick Gephardt — worried that a Dean nomination would be death for House Democrats and reconciled with his own likely loss — took it upon himself to wound Dean’s candidacy in Iowa, and Dean’s third-place finish crippled his chances. Could Gingrich face a similar barrage of not-entirely-accidental-friendly fire, either from a rival candidate (like Ron Paul) or conservative group (like the Club for Growth). Could he survive it?
The point about Gingrich is that by any conventional measure, his campaign should be on a death watch by now. That it’s not means he has a chance, and if can survive through the southern primaries, it will show he’s been able to answer the biggest concerns about his candidacy. In which case — watch out.
