Posted by
nabilanafla on Thursday, December 15, 2011
If you’re competing in the Iowa caucuses, there’s a new obligatory stop on the campaign trail this year, and it’s not a greasy spoon or an evangelical church.
It’s the WHO-AM radio show ofSimon Conway. Mr. Conway, while cutting and often brash, does not fit the conservative talk radio mold. For one, he is British by birth, and his thick English accent can be somewhat disorienting as it booms from stereos here in the heartland. He also happens to be Jewish, a fact that seems lost on many listeners, especially those who are wishing him Merry Christmas these days.
“Rick Perry. Had him in last Friday for an hour,” Mr. Conway said in an interview this week.
Newt Gingrich? “I’ve looked him in the eye. Twice had him in.”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum, who stopped in for an hour-long interview on Wednesday, have all been on his afternoon show several times on WHO. Mitt Romney has yet to agree to come on, though Mr. Conway said his campaign was mulling a request.
“If you want to reach Iowans, pretty much you’ve got to sit in WHO,” Mr. Conway noted.
On the national stage, Fox News is the media outlet of choice for Republican candidates, who are sitting for continuous rounds of interviews and spending considerable sums on advertising, because the network is a surefire way to reach large numbers of conservatives.
But in Iowa, WHO-AM (1040) plays that role, as the most listened-to and widely broadcast news radio station in the state.
WHO’s 50,000-watt signal carries easily across Iowa’s mostly flat terrain, making it available to just about any Iowan with a radio. Unlike the state’s segmented television markets — which are split into several regions from Sioux City in the West to Des Moines in the center to Cedar Rapids in the East — WHO offers the only truly statewide broadcast.
“It’s a 50,000-watt blowtorch,” said Matthew Strawn, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. According to Arbitron, nearly 65,000 people across Iowa tune in during the 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. afternoon drive period at any given point during the average week when Mr. Conway’s show is broadcast — a small audience but still the largest in Iowa for talk radio. And given the demographics of talk radio — the audience tends to skew toward the politically attuned, conservative type that Republican candidates want to reach — WHO offers a highly targeted way for campaigns to convey their messages, through interviews or advertising.
Mr. Conway was named in April to WHO’s storied roster of hosts — the station is where Ronald Reagan made a name for himself as a sportscaster in the 1930s — replacing Steve Deace, a firebrand religious conservative whose 4 p.m. program was another must-visit destination for Republican candidates. (Mr. Deace now hosts a syndicated radio program.) The choice to hire Mr. Conway was a bold one for the Des Moines station, an institution that has always prided itself on its Hawkeye heritage. But minus the accent, he seems right at home here.
“He is very good at stirring the pot, and I have some admiration for how quickly he was able to figure Iowa out,” said Stephen Winzenburg, a professor of communications at Grand View University here who studies the intersection of media and politics. “He’s good at working the system, figuring out who the key players are and inviting them on his show.”
Mr. Strawn of the state Republican Party said that Mr. Conway set sights on him early. Shortly after Mr. Conway started at WHO, the Republican leader said he got a text message from him proposing that they meet.
Mr. Conway, who has a broad chest, blue eyes and swept-back brown hair that is graying slightly around the temples, wears an American flag pin on his lapel, a gold necklace with a Hebrew letter chai pendant and cowboy boots. He cast his first ballot in an American election in 2008. “That was for McCain,” he said, wincing and plugging his nose. His dog, a rescued chocolate Labrador retriever, is named Reagan.
His interviews, which tend to be free-wheeling and nonconfrontational, have produced some of memorable moments in the presidential campaign. He prompted Representative Ron Paul of Texas to acknowledge that his noninterventionist foreign policy would have precluded him from carrying out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And in comments that grabbed headlines, Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, told Mr. Conway that he would fire Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke.
Posted by
nabilanafla on Sunday, December 11, 2011
Newt Gingrich was the most important Republican of the 1990s. None of his current rivals for the party's 2012 presidential nomination have played an analogous role for even an hour.
After more than three decades on the national stage, Gingrich offers a public record so voluminous that it amounts to a full employment act for opposition researchers in both parties. From his early days as a self-described "Rockefeller Republican" to his emergence as the embodiment of post-Reagan conservatism, Gingrich has often spoken first and thought later, leaving behind a Bartlett's of caustic, cosmic and sometimes contradictory quotations. The result is that, using legitimate video clips, Gingrich easily can be portrayed as anyone from transformative leader to tragic loser.
Beyond its entertainment value and its promotion of exotic venues like New Year's Eve in Des Moines, a presidential campaign should reveal how a candidate might react upon moving into the Oval Office. That is why the most fruitful place to begin the search for clues to envision Newton Leroy Gingrich as the nation's 45th president is to re-examine his four years as House speaker. This period is often misunderstood by both his Republican fans and Democratic foes because Gingrich in power was rarely a one-dimensional conservative ideologue. Chris Shays, the former Connecticut representative who is one of the last Republican moderates, said admiringly in an interview with me this week, "Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich are the only people who have changed Washington in the last 50 years." Shays, who is now running for the Senate, has endorsed Mitt Romney for president.
When Gingrich took the speaker's gavel after masterminding a stunning 52-seat pickup in the House in the 1994 elections, the most important step he took was never mentioned in the Contract with America. Gingrich ended the selection of committee chairmen based on seniority and, in effect, put that power in his own hands. As New Yorker writer Connie Bruck concluded in a still insightful 1995 profile, "The old fiefdoms of autocratic committee chairmen no longer exist." Paul Weyrich, the leading right-wing activist of the 1990s, told Bruck, "Newt Gingrich is the first conservative I have ever known who knows how to use power."
After becoming the most powerful House speaker in more than 80 years, Gingrich never stifled his visionary pronouncements even when they led him down wacky byways. His 1995 book, To Renew America, which is dedicated to his soon-to-be-displaced second wife ("To Marianne, who made it all worthwhile") gleefully predicts, "Honeymoons in space will be the vogue by 2020. Imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attraction." That same year, Gingrich co-authored with William R. Forstchen an awkwardly written what-if novel, 1945, about a Nazi-dominated Europe. Sample dialogue from the first page: "I wish I could just divorce Mrs. Little Goodie Two-Shoes."
Gingrich's tenure as speaker will always be associated with his decision to force a series of governmental shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996 as part of his budget showdown with Bill Clinton. A re-energized Clinton decisively won the battle in both the public-relations and political arenas. According to Taylor Branch's book, The Clinton Tapes, an account of his private White House conversations with the president, "Clinton said he thought Gingrich and his caucus were fooled by their own propaganda about the moral force of their own crusade." In his intriguing, if little-noticed, 2008 book on the relationship between Gingrich and Clinton, The Pact, the historian Steven M. Gillon concludes, "Gingrich led the Republicans into battle with a deeply flawed plan. When the president put up more resistance that he expected, Gingrich had no alternative plan."
What lessons does the Gingrich of today derive from this 16-year-old strategic blunder? That is the kind of question that is almost never asked on the campaign trail or in the debates. Any sadder-but-wiser insights from Gingrich are more relevant to his potential presidency than another rendition of his opposition to President Barack Obama's health care law. Certainly, Clinton's theory that his adversary believed his own spin and Gillon's assessment that the speaker failed to plot out his backup chess moves suggest potential pitfalls for Gingrich as president.
What makes Gingrich, then and now, such a complex political figure is what happened after the government shutdown. The surprising thesis of The Pact is that Gingrich and Clinton were poised to negotiate a landmark compromise to reform Social Security and perhaps Medicare. While Gillon, who is on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, may place too much weight on a secret White House meeting in late 1997 between the president and the speaker, the efforts at bipartisan cooperation between the two men are undeniable. Michael Waldman, who was Clinton's chief speechwriter, told me, "The premise of The Pact is right. After the government shutdown, Clinton and Gingrich worked together to try to solve big problems." Pointing to balanced budgets and welfare reform, Shays said, "We got Bill Clinton to work with us."
Newt Gingrich's record as an apostle of let's-make-a-deal governing, does not fit into the standard campaign-trail rhetoric any more than Ronald Reagan's record of tax increases does. During the mid-1990s, Republicans were so busy lionizing Gingrich's conservative credentials and Democrats were so adroit at demonizing him that it was hard to see the real leader amid the fog. Further complicating the portrait—then and now—are Gingrich's grandiose pronouncements and outbursts of temper.
What ended this little-known era of good feeling between the speaker's office and the White House was the Monica Lewinsky scandal that broke in mid-January 1998, just before Clinton's State of the Union Address. Surprisingly, rather than reveling in the president's misfortune, Gingrich initially tried to be helpful. Waldman, in his book POTUS Speaks, recounts that Clinton told him as they worked on the State of the Union, "Did you hear about my phone call from Newt? He strongly suggested putting some bipartisan applause lines at the top."
Whether it was because of his own tangled love life, a sense of political realism or lingering affection for Clinton, Gingrich did not bellow outrage during the early months of the Lewinsky saga. As Shays put it, "Newt was never gung-ho on impeachment." Even when the issue was before the House Judiciary Committee, Gillon writes, "Gingrich avoided making headlines as much as possible, and when he did speak about the proceedings, his words were measured and balanced." But Gingrich can also be a vicious partisan—and he eventually joined the mob. His motivation was probably a mixture of internal pressure from the firebrands in his House caucus and the messianic sense that he could bring down a president just as he once destroyed House Speaker Jim Wright. Once again Gingrich miscalculated, stepping down under pressure as speaker just a few days after the Democrats unexpectedly gained House seats in the 1998 elections.
Back in 1995, Gingrich told the New Yorker in an interview, "I'm not a natural leader ... I'm too intellectual. I'm too abstract. I think too much." Now Gingrich, who has been thinking about running for president since 1996, is closer to power than he has been since he was defrocked as speaker more than 13 years ago. If elected president (and those words seemed ludicrous just a few weeks ago), would Gingrich govern as a centrist Republican or a right-wing true believer? Judging from Gingrich's complex record as House speaker, the answer may well be both.
Walter Shapiro, a special correspondent for the New Republic, is covering his ninth presidential campaign. Follow him on Twitter at @waltershapiroPD. This is part of a series of articles examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates.
Come to Yahoo! at 9 p.m. ET on Saturday to watch the Republican presidential debate in Des Moines. You will be able to provide real-time feedback, and to read and watch live coverage and analysis.
Mitt Romney has 23 days to confront any political damage from what may become the most memorable moment of Saturday night’s debate — the image of him offering to wager $10,000 to settle a bet with Rick Perry over the contents of Mr. Romney’s latest book.
Mr. Romney heads to New Hampshire Sunday evening and will campaign there, in Iowa and in South Carolina in the coming week as he battles Newt Gingrich and his other rivals before voting begins on Jan. 3. The seven remaining candidates will face each other one more time before then during a debate in western Iowa on Thursday night.
The rapidly closing window for campaigning puts new pressure on the candidates and their campaigns to respond quickly and aggressively to offer defenses against bad debate moments — or to take maximum advantage of good ones.
Mr. Gingrich faces the challenge of building on his lead in the polls and capitalizing on what early reviews suggested was another strong debate performance on Saturday night. His campaign quickly posted video of Mr. Gingrich vowing to tell the truth like Ronald Reagan did.
For the other Republican candidates, like Michele Bachmann, the trick will be to use the memorable debate moments to try and generate a new buzz around their candidacies. That may be increasingly difficult to do as the media increasingly focuses on the new rivalry between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney.
On Monday, the one candidate who didn’t participate in Saturday’s debate,Jon M. Huntsman Jr., will face off againt Mr. Gingrich in a two-person, Lincoln-Douglass style debate in New Hampshire, where Mr. Huntsman is hoping to make a last stand in his bid for the nomination.
But until the next debate, much of the political conversation in the country — and among the candidates fighting for the Republican nomination — will revolve around what was said at Drake University in Des Moines last night.
Here are five of the key moments that will fuel that conversation.
1. $10,000?
It looked like a scripted moment; one of those overly practiced lines that politicians love to have in their back pocket, ready to whip out at just the right time. As soon as Rick Perry started his attack on a passage about health care in Mr. Romney’s book, Mr. Romney lunged out his hand, offering a bet on whether he had changed his position.
“10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet?” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Perry demurred, saying that “I’m not in the bettin’ business.”
The danger for Mr. Romney is that the size of the bet was so large and so out of reach for many Americans, for whom $10,000 amounts to a huge chunk of their annual salary. The Democratic National Committee pounced, tweeting repeatedly on Saturday night with the hashtag #What10kBuys.
Republicans seized on it too. Mr. Huntsman’s campaign promised to launch the website www.10kbet.com soon. And Representative Michele Bachmann’s spokeswoman told reporters that $10,000 was “three or four months salary” for many voters in Iowa.
The moment was similar to one earlier this year, when Mr. Romney answered a heckler at the Iowa state fair by saying that “corporations are people, my friend.” Democrats seized on the clip as evidence that Mr. Romney was no friend of average Americans.
Like the corporations incident, the $10,000 bet may be most dangerous for Mr. Romney if he becomes the nominee and has to explain it to a broader electorate.
Aides to Mr. Romney conceded it wasn’t his best moment, but insisted that it does not fundamentally change the dynamic in the race. People know that Mr. Romney is rich, they said, and his opponents were always going to try and use that against him.
But the economic unease in the country could make the moment particularly dangerous for Mr. Romney if his rivals are able to successfully paint him as out of touch with middle America. It’s particularly problematic given Mr. Romney’s recent attempts at populism by tailoring some of his economic proposals directly at the middle class instead of the wealthy.
In the debate, Mr. Romney confronted the issue head-on: ” I didn’t grow up poor,” he said. “And if somebody is looking for someone who’s grown up with that background, I’m – I’m not the person. But I – but I grew up with a dad who’d been poor, and my dad wanted to make sure I understood the lessons of hard work.”
Now, the question is whether that argument will win out over the political noise from his $10,000 bet.
2. Newt’s Humility?
If there’s anything that’s whispered about in Washington, it’s how vulnerable Mr. Gingrich might be because of his personal life — three marriages, one of them broken up because of his own infidelity with his current wife.
But Mr. Gingrich — now in the lead in most polls — created one of the more memorable moments in the debate Saturday night by handling the issue deftly when it was raised by the moderators.
He didn’t object to the question or call it stupid, as he has so many times about other subjects in previous debates. He waited patiently as the other candidates took their turns talking about their successful marriages. And then he humbly accepted responsibility for the mistakes he has made.
“In my case, I said up-front openly I’ve made mistakes at times,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness. I’ve had to seek reconciliation. But I’m also a 68-year-old grandfather. And I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I’m a person they can trust.”
It was an un-Gingrich-like answer to what began as a pretty direct assault on his character from Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas. Asked about the importance of marital vows and faith, Mr. Perry took a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Gingrich’s marriages.
“I think the voters are wise enough to figure that one out,” he said. “I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that – if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner.”
3. Mr. Newt Romney.
If Mrs. Bachmann was looking for a moment that could help her regain the spotlight in the days that are left, she may have found it.
By creating a new opponent — Newt Romney — Mrs. Bachmann offered a catchy new slogan for conservatives who think that both men are not true believers in their causes.
“If you look at Newt Romney, they were for ObamaCare principles,” she said. “If you look at Newt Romney, they were for cap and trade. If you look at Newt Romney, they– for the illegal immigration problem. And if you look at New Romney, they were for the $700 billion bailout. And you just heard Newt/Romney is also with Obama on the issue of the payroll extension.”
The phrase recalls the success that Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, briefly had by combining Mr. Romney’s name with “Obamacare” and coming up with “Obamneycare.” His refusal to use the phrase during a debate made him look afraid to attack and contributed to his early departure from the race.
The question may be whether Mrs. Bachmann can sustain the criticism of both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney during the days ahead in ways that capture the imagination of voters and the attention of the media.
If Mr. Romney flubbed his prepared line, Mr. Gingrich did not. As soon as Mr. Romney contrasted his experience in the business sector with Mr. Gingrich’s years of Washington work, he was ready.
“Let’s be candid,” Mr. Gingrich said to Mr. Romney. “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”
The audience booed — but not at either man on the stage; Republicans just boo at the mention of the late Mr. Kennedy, a liberal icon. Mr. Romney ran against Mr. Kennedy in 1994, but lost the race and did not make another attempt to get back into politics until 2002.
“I’m a citizen, I’ve served the country in many ways, you’re a citizen, you served the country in many ways,” Mr. Gingrich added. “But it’s a bit much. You would have been a 17-year career politician by now, if you’d won. That’s, that’s all I’m saying on that one.”
Mr. Romney had a good comeback when it was his turn, noting that “if I would’ve been able to get in the NFL liked I hope when I was a kid, why, I would have been a football star all my life too.”
Taken together, the back-and-forth is likely to remain one of the most memorable moments, in part because it gets at the central question between the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination: what kind of experience is better?
Mr. Romney and groups working on his behalf are already pressing that question with voters in appearances and television ads. And Mr. Gingrich is not shy about saying whenever he can that his experience as the Speaker for four years is part of what he is selling to voters.
Mr. Gingrich is trying to undermine Mr. Romney’s claim to have spent most of his adult life as a businessman. There’s very little time left for Mr. Gingrich to get that message across to voters.
A debate moment like that can’t hurt his cause.
5. Palestine and Israel
Perhaps the only foreign policy moment to emerge from Saturday’s debate was the exchange over Palestine, and especially Mr. Gingrich’s heated refusal to back down on his characterization that Palestinians are an “invented” group of people.
Mr. Gingrich sought to portray himself as a truth-teller who was willing to stand up on behalf of Israel.
“Somebody oughta have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”
A few minutes later, Mr. Gingrich summoned the memory of Ronald Reagan, saying that “sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”
But his rivals are just as certain to characterize his statements as the rantings of a hothead who does not have the temperament to be the commander-in-chief. Mr. Romney began to make that argument during the debate, and it’s likely he will continue on the trail.
“I will exercise sobriety, care, stability,” Mr. Romney said, seeming to suggest that Mr. Gingrich has none of those attributes. “And make sure that in a setting like this, anything I say that can affect a place with– with rockets going in, with people dying, I don’t do anything that would harm that– that process.”
Rick Santorum echoed Mr. Romney, saying that “I think you have to speak the truth, but you have to do so with prudence. I mean, it’s, it’s a combination.”
The question going forward, however, is whether Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum and others can effectively raise serious doubts about how Mr. Gingrich might handle foreign policy — especially during a time when most voters are more concerned about their economic situation.
In his first debate Saturday as the polling Republican frontrunner, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich bore the brunt of the attacks from every contender on the stage on a host of issues. But after two hours of attacks in the forum, co-sponsored by Yahoo News, ABC News and the Des Moines Register, he appeared to escape relatively unscathed.
Prompted at times by ABC News moderators Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos, all five of the GOP contenders on stage took shots at Gingrich at some point. But a relaxed and confident Gingrich delivered responses that played out in a way to potentially strengthen his standing among Republicans in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus.
Over the course of the night, Gingrich was challenged on his consulting for government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac, his past support for a government mandate to buy health insurance, his three marriages, a comment he made calling Palestinians an "invented" people, and even a proposal he once floated to build a colony on the moon. But despite the barrage, Gingrich appeared to coast largely above the fray.
After about 15 minutes of tame policy talk, Romney took the first shot when asked if he thought Gingrich was in the best position to defeat President Barack Obama in 2012.
"Well, of course I don't agree with that," Romney said. "I think a lot of people don't agree with that." Romney went on to criticize Gingrich for spending most of his career in Washington, comparing it to his years in the private sector.
"Let's be candid," Gingrich replied. "The only reasons you didn't become a career politician is because you lost to Ted Kennedy in 1994."
"You'd have been a 17-year career politician by now if you'd won," he said.
In what could have been the most devastating portion of the debate for Gingrich, a candidate now married to his third wife, the moderators asked whether someone who had cheated on a spouse could be trusted to run the country. Each candidate was given an opportunity to attack Gingrich on the issue before he could respond.
"If you cheat on your wife, you'll cheat on your business partners," Perry said. "I think that sends a very powerful message. . . . I think that issue of fidelity is important."
"Trust is everything," added former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who said marriage infidelity should not disqualify a candidate.
When they got to Romney, however, he declined to address Gingrich directly, but he emphasized his 42 years of marriage. Gingrich responded by saying that he has asked God for forgiveness and played up his own grandchildren but said that his past was fair game.
"I think that's a very, very important issue and I think people have to render judgment," Gingrich said. "I'm delighted at the way people have been willing to look at who I am, to look at what my record has been."
Even though most of the criticism was aimed at Gingrich, Romney will likely suffer the most from the contest. During a brief argument with Rick Perry, Romney challenged the Texas governor to a $10,000 bet that he never supported a national individual mandate to purchase health insurance in his book No Apology, as Perry accused. Expect to see that clip played repeatedly over the course of the campaign.
If Saturday's Republican presidential debate was the weathervane that would signal whether the Republican primary race would go negative in the days before the first caucuses and primaries, we're in for quite the slog.
Since Republican support for businessman Herman Cain began to slide--he dropped out of the race last weekend--Gingrich has replaced him as the the latest "anti-Mitt Romney" candidate. And based on the response from Romney's campaign this week, it is clear that Boston is taking Gingrich's rise seriously. Romney this week launched his very own blitzkrieg against Gingrich, deploying the many surrogates who have endorsed him to nail him at several angles. The campaign also released a bruising anti-Gingrich web video that reminded voters of the time he criticized the entitlement reform plan put forth by Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and passed by the House GOP, calling it "right-wing social engineering."
Gingrich on Friday struck back, accusing Romney of "running to the left of Teddy Kennedy" when he ran for Senate in 1994. In those comments, Gingrich suggested that Romney is a politician who is only a conservative when it's convenient, a criticism that has been ruthlessly lobbed at the former governor for years. Later that day, Gingrich's team in Iowa blasted Romney for launching the latest attacks on Gingrich, calling the effort "a load of crap."
"What we're seeing from Mitt Romney is desperation and panic and I think that's going to be very frustrating to people who want to move forward," said Gingrich Iowa co-chairwoman Linda Upmeyer. "They don't want to see $3 million of attack ads. It's a bad way to go and he ought to reconsider that tactic. Because Iowans, we're not stupid people and we understand a load of crap when we see it. That isn't what wins you caucuses or elections here in Iowa."
Gingrich told Yahoo News in a recent interview that of all the lessons he had learned about himself while running for president of the United States, he was most surprised in his ability to resist the temptation to attack his fellow candidates. Throughout the campaign, Gingrich has made a point to deflect questions about other candidates, choosing to keep criticism narrowly focused on President Barack Obama or the media.
"I may be more capable of calm discipline than I would have guessed," Gingrich said in a Yahoo News interview in November. "Watch the way in which I am methodically not getting engaged in a fight with my friends."
Mitt Romney has 23 days to confront any political damage from what may become the most memorable moment of Saturday night’s debate — the image of him offering to wager $10,000 to settle a bet with Rick Perry over the contents of Mr. Romney’s latest book.
Mr. Romney heads to New Hampshire Sunday evening and will campaign there, in Iowa and in South Carolina in the coming week as he battles Newt Gingrich and his other rivals before voting begins on Jan. 3. The seven remaining candidates will face each other one more time before then during a debate in western Iowa on Thursday night.
The rapidly closing window for campaigning puts new pressure on the candidates and their campaigns to respond quickly and aggressively to offer defenses against bad debate moments — or to take maximum advantage of good ones.
Mr. Gingrich faces the challenge of building on his lead in the polls and capitalizing on what early reviews suggested was another strong debate performance on Saturday night. His campaign quickly posted video of Mr. Gingrich vowing to tell the truth like Ronald Reagan did.
For the other Republican candidates, like Michele Bachmann, the trick will be to use the memorable debate moments to try and generate a new buzz around their candidacies. That may be increasingly difficult to do as the media increasingly focuses on the new rivalry between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney.
On Monday, the one candidate who didn’t participate in Saturday’s debate,Jon M. Huntsman Jr., will face off againt Mr. Gingrich in a two-person, Lincoln-Douglass style debate in New Hampshire, where Mr. Huntsman is hoping to make a last stand in his bid for the nomination.
But until the next debate, much of the political conversation in the country — and among the candidates fighting for the Republican nomination — will revolve around what was said at Drake University in Des Moines last night.
Here are five of the key moments that will fuel that conversation.
1. $10,000?
It looked like a scripted moment; one of those overly practiced lines that politicians love to have in their back pocket, ready to whip out at just the right time. As soon as Rick Perry started his attack on a passage about health care in Mr. Romney’s book, Mr. Romney lunged out his hand, offering a bet on whether he had changed his position.
“10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet?” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Perry demurred, saying that “I’m not in the bettin’ business.”
The danger for Mr. Romney is that the size of the bet was so large and so out of reach for many Americans, for whom $10,000 amounts to a huge chunk of their annual salary. The Democratic National Committee pounced, tweeting repeatedly on Saturday night with the hashtag #What10kBuys.
Republicans seized on it too. Mr. Huntsman’s campaign promised to launch the website www.10kbet.com soon. And Representative Michele Bachmann’s spokeswoman told reporters that $10,000 was “three or four months salary” for many voters in Iowa.
The moment was similar to one earlier this year, when Mr. Romney answered a heckler at the Iowa state fair by saying that “corporations are people, my friend.” Democrats seized on the clip as evidence that Mr. Romney was no friend of average Americans.
Like the corporations incident, the $10,000 bet may be most dangerous for Mr. Romney if he becomes the nominee and has to explain it to a broader electorate.
Aides to Mr. Romney conceded it wasn’t his best moment, but insisted that it does not fundamentally change the dynamic in the race. People know that Mr. Romney is rich, they said, and his opponents were always going to try and use that against him.
But the economic unease in the country could make the moment particularly dangerous for Mr. Romney if his rivals are able to successfully paint him as out of touch with middle America. It’s particularly problematic given Mr. Romney’s recent attempts at populism by tailoring some of his economic proposals directly at the middle class instead of the wealthy.
In the debate, Mr. Romney confronted the issue head-on: ” I didn’t grow up poor,” he said. “And if somebody is looking for someone who’s grown up with that background, I’m – I’m not the person. But I – but I grew up with a dad who’d been poor, and my dad wanted to make sure I understood the lessons of hard work.”
Now, the question is whether that argument will win out over the political noise from his $10,000 bet.
2. Newt’s Humility?
If there’s anything that’s whispered about in Washington, it’s how vulnerable Mr. Gingrich might be because of his personal life — three marriages, one of them broken up because of his own infidelity with his current wife.
But Mr. Gingrich — now in the lead in most polls — created one of the more memorable moments in the debate Saturday night by handling the issue deftly when it was raised by the moderators.
He didn’t object to the question or call it stupid, as he has so many times about other subjects in previous debates. He waited patiently as the other candidates took their turns talking about their successful marriages. And then he humbly accepted responsibility for the mistakes he has made.
“In my case, I said up-front openly I’ve made mistakes at times,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness. I’ve had to seek reconciliation. But I’m also a 68-year-old grandfather. And I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I’m a person they can trust.”
It was an un-Gingrich-like answer to what began as a pretty direct assault on his character from Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas. Asked about the importance of marital vows and faith, Mr. Perry took a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Gingrich’s marriages.
“I think the voters are wise enough to figure that one out,” he said. “I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that – if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner.”
3. Mr. Newt Romney.
If Mrs. Bachmann was looking for a moment that could help her regain the spotlight in the days that are left, she may have found it.
By creating a new opponent — Newt Romney — Mrs. Bachmann offered a catchy new slogan for conservatives who think that both men are not true believers in their causes.
“If you look at Newt Romney, they were for ObamaCare principles,” she said. “If you look at Newt Romney, they were for cap and trade. If you look at Newt Romney, they– for the illegal immigration problem. And if you look at New Romney, they were for the $700 billion bailout. And you just heard Newt/Romney is also with Obama on the issue of the payroll extension.”
The phrase recalls the success that Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, briefly had by combining Mr. Romney’s name with “Obamacare” and coming up with “Obamneycare.” His refusal to use the phrase during a debate made him look afraid to attack and contributed to his early departure from the race.
The question may be whether Mrs. Bachmann can sustain the criticism of both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney during the days ahead in ways that capture the imagination of voters and the attention of the media.
If Mr. Romney flubbed his prepared line, Mr. Gingrich did not. As soon as Mr. Romney contrasted his experience in the business sector with Mr. Gingrich’s years of Washington work, he was ready.
“Let’s be candid,” Mr. Gingrich said to Mr. Romney. “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”
The audience booed — but not at either man on the stage; Republicans just boo at the mention of the late Mr. Kennedy, a liberal icon. Mr. Romney ran against Mr. Kennedy in 1994, but lost the race and did not make another attempt to get back into politics until 2002.
“I’m a citizen, I’ve served the country in many ways, you’re a citizen, you served the country in many ways,” Mr. Gingrich added. “But it’s a bit much. You would have been a 17-year career politician by now, if you’d won. That’s, that’s all I’m saying on that one.”
Mr. Romney had a good comeback when it was his turn, noting that “if I would’ve been able to get in the NFL liked I hope when I was a kid, why, I would have been a football star all my life too.”
Taken together, the back-and-forth is likely to remain one of the most memorable moments, in part because it gets at the central question between the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination: what kind of experience is better?
Mr. Romney and groups working on his behalf are already pressing that question with voters in appearances and television ads. And Mr. Gingrich is not shy about saying whenever he can that his experience as the Speaker for four years is part of what he is selling to voters.
Mr. Gingrich is trying to undermine Mr. Romney’s claim to have spent most of his adult life as a businessman. There’s very little time left for Mr. Gingrich to get that message across to voters.
A debate moment like that can’t hurt his cause.
5. Palestine and Israel
Perhaps the only foreign policy moment to emerge from Saturday’s debate was the exchange over Palestine, and especially Mr. Gingrich’s heated refusal to back down on his characterization that Palestinians are an “invented” group of people.
Mr. Gingrich sought to portray himself as a truth-teller who was willing to stand up on behalf of Israel.
“Somebody oughta have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”
A few minutes later, Mr. Gingrich summoned the memory of Ronald Reagan, saying that “sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”
But his rivals are just as certain to characterize his statements as the rantings of a hothead who does not have the temperament to be the commander-in-chief. Mr. Romney began to make that argument during the debate, and it’s likely he will continue on the trail.
“I will exercise sobriety, care, stability,” Mr. Romney said, seeming to suggest that Mr. Gingrich has none of those attributes. “And make sure that in a setting like this, anything I say that can affect a place with– with rockets going in, with people dying, I don’t do anything that would harm that– that process.”
Rick Santorum echoed Mr. Romney, saying that “I think you have to speak the truth, but you have to do so with prudence. I mean, it’s, it’s a combination.”
The question going forward, however, is whether Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum and others can effectively raise serious doubts about how Mr. Gingrich might handle foreign policy — especially during a time when most voters are more concerned about their economic situation.
Mitt Romney has 23 days to confront any political damage from what may become the most memorable moment of Saturday night’s debate — the image of him offering to wager $10,000 to settle a bet with Rick Perry over the contents of Mr. Romney’s latest book.
Mr. Romney heads to New Hampshire Sunday evening and will campaign there, in Iowa and in South Carolina in the coming week as he battles Newt Gingrich and his other rivals before voting begins on Jan. 3. The seven remaining candidates will face each other one more time before then during a debate in western Iowa on Thursday night.
The rapidly closing window for campaigning puts new pressure on the candidates and their campaigns to respond quickly and aggressively to offer defenses against bad debate moments — or to take maximum advantage of good ones.
Mr. Gingrich faces the challenge of building on his lead in the polls and capitalizing on what early reviews suggested was another strong debate performance on Saturday night. His campaign quickly posted video of Mr. Gingrich vowing to tell the truth like Ronald Reagan did.
For the other Republican candidates, like Michele Bachmann, the trick will be to use the memorable debate moments to try and generate a new buzz around their candidacies. That may be increasingly difficult to do as the media increasingly focuses on the new rivalry between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney.
On Monday, the one candidate who didn’t participate in Saturday’s debate,Jon M. Huntsman Jr., will face off againt Mr. Gingrich in a two-person, Lincoln-Douglass style debate in New Hampshire, where Mr. Huntsman is hoping to make a last stand in his bid for the nomination.
But until the next debate, much of the political conversation in the country — and among the candidates fighting for the Republican nomination — will revolve around what was said at Drake University in Des Moines last night.
Here are five of the key moments that will fuel that conversation.
1. $10,000?
It looked like a scripted moment; one of those overly practiced lines that politicians love to have in their back pocket, ready to whip out at just the right time. As soon as Rick Perry started his attack on a passage about health care in Mr. Romney’s book, Mr. Romney lunged out his hand, offering a bet on whether he had changed his position.
“10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet?” Mr. Romney said.
Mr. Perry demurred, saying that “I’m not in the bettin’ business.”
The danger for Mr. Romney is that the size of the bet was so large and so out of reach for many Americans, for whom $10,000 amounts to a huge chunk of their annual salary. The Democratic National Committee pounced, tweeting repeatedly on Saturday night with the hashtag #What10kBuys.
Republicans seized on it too. Mr. Huntsman’s campaign promised to launch the website www.10kbet.com soon. And Representative Michele Bachmann’s spokeswoman told reporters that $10,000 was “three or four months salary” for many voters in Iowa.
The moment was similar to one earlier this year, when Mr. Romney answered a heckler at the Iowa state fair by saying that “corporations are people, my friend.” Democrats seized on the clip as evidence that Mr. Romney was no friend of average Americans.
Like the corporations incident, the $10,000 bet may be most dangerous for Mr. Romney if he becomes the nominee and has to explain it to a broader electorate.
Aides to Mr. Romney conceded it wasn’t his best moment, but insisted that it does not fundamentally change the dynamic in the race. People know that Mr. Romney is rich, they said, and his opponents were always going to try and use that against him.
But the economic unease in the country could make the moment particularly dangerous for Mr. Romney if his rivals are able to successfully paint him as out of touch with middle America. It’s particularly problematic given Mr. Romney’s recent attempts at populism by tailoring some of his economic proposals directly at the middle class instead of the wealthy.
In the debate, Mr. Romney confronted the issue head-on: ” I didn’t grow up poor,” he said. “And if somebody is looking for someone who’s grown up with that background, I’m – I’m not the person. But I – but I grew up with a dad who’d been poor, and my dad wanted to make sure I understood the lessons of hard work.”
Now, the question is whether that argument will win out over the political noise from his $10,000 bet.
2. Newt’s Humility?
If there’s anything that’s whispered about in Washington, it’s how vulnerable Mr. Gingrich might be because of his personal life — three marriages, one of them broken up because of his own infidelity with his current wife.
But Mr. Gingrich — now in the lead in most polls — created one of the more memorable moments in the debate Saturday night by handling the issue deftly when it was raised by the moderators.
He didn’t object to the question or call it stupid, as he has so many times about other subjects in previous debates. He waited patiently as the other candidates took their turns talking about their successful marriages. And then he humbly accepted responsibility for the mistakes he has made.
“In my case, I said up-front openly I’ve made mistakes at times,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness. I’ve had to seek reconciliation. But I’m also a 68-year-old grandfather. And I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I’m a person they can trust.”
It was an un-Gingrich-like answer to what began as a pretty direct assault on his character from Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas. Asked about the importance of marital vows and faith, Mr. Perry took a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Gingrich’s marriages.
“I think the voters are wise enough to figure that one out,” he said. “I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that – if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner.”
3. Mr. Newt Romney.
If Mrs. Bachmann was looking for a moment that could help her regain the spotlight in the days that are left, she may have found it.
By creating a new opponent — Newt Romney — Mrs. Bachmann offered a catchy new slogan for conservatives who think that both men are not true believers in their causes.
“If you look at Newt Romney, they were for ObamaCare principles,” she said. “If you look at Newt Romney, they were for cap and trade. If you look at Newt Romney, they– for the illegal immigration problem. And if you look at New Romney, they were for the $700 billion bailout. And you just heard Newt/Romney is also with Obama on the issue of the payroll extension.”
The phrase recalls the success that Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, briefly had by combining Mr. Romney’s name with “Obamacare” and coming up with “Obamneycare.” His refusal to use the phrase during a debate made him look afraid to attack and contributed to his early departure from the race.
The question may be whether Mrs. Bachmann can sustain the criticism of both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney during the days ahead in ways that capture the imagination of voters and the attention of the media.
If Mr. Romney flubbed his prepared line, Mr. Gingrich did not. As soon as Mr. Romney contrasted his experience in the business sector with Mr. Gingrich’s years of Washington work, he was ready.
“Let’s be candid,” Mr. Gingrich said to Mr. Romney. “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”
The audience booed — but not at either man on the stage; Republicans just boo at the mention of the late Mr. Kennedy, a liberal icon. Mr. Romney ran against Mr. Kennedy in 1994, but lost the race and did not make another attempt to get back into politics until 2002.
“I’m a citizen, I’ve served the country in many ways, you’re a citizen, you served the country in many ways,” Mr. Gingrich added. “But it’s a bit much. You would have been a 17-year career politician by now, if you’d won. That’s, that’s all I’m saying on that one.”
Mr. Romney had a good comeback when it was his turn, noting that “if I would’ve been able to get in the NFL liked I hope when I was a kid, why, I would have been a football star all my life too.”
Taken together, the back-and-forth is likely to remain one of the most memorable moments, in part because it gets at the central question between the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination: what kind of experience is better?
Mr. Romney and groups working on his behalf are already pressing that question with voters in appearances and television ads. And Mr. Gingrich is not shy about saying whenever he can that his experience as the Speaker for four years is part of what he is selling to voters.
Mr. Gingrich is trying to undermine Mr. Romney’s claim to have spent most of his adult life as a businessman. There’s very little time left for Mr. Gingrich to get that message across to voters.
A debate moment like that can’t hurt his cause.
5. Palestine and Israel
Perhaps the only foreign policy moment to emerge from Saturday’s debate was the exchange over Palestine, and especially Mr. Gingrich’s heated refusal to back down on his characterization that Palestinians are an “invented” group of people.
Mr. Gingrich sought to portray himself as a truth-teller who was willing to stand up on behalf of Israel.
“Somebody oughta have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”
A few minutes later, Mr. Gingrich summoned the memory of Ronald Reagan, saying that “sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”
But his rivals are just as certain to characterize his statements as the rantings of a hothead who does not have the temperament to be the commander-in-chief. Mr. Romney began to make that argument during the debate, and it’s likely he will continue on the trail.
“I will exercise sobriety, care, stability,” Mr. Romney said, seeming to suggest that Mr. Gingrich has none of those attributes. “And make sure that in a setting like this, anything I say that can affect a place with– with rockets going in, with people dying, I don’t do anything that would harm that– that process.”
Rick Santorum echoed Mr. Romney, saying that “I think you have to speak the truth, but you have to do so with prudence. I mean, it’s, it’s a combination.”
The question going forward, however, is whether Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum and others can effectively raise serious doubts about how Mr. Gingrich might handle foreign policy — especially during a time when most voters are more concerned about their economic situation.
