Former Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney is trailing after failing to break Newt Gingrich’s momentum and a bet that backfired
FIVE REPUBLICAN presidential candidates ganged up on Newt Gingrich at the party’s 12th presidential debate in Des Moines on Saturday night, but the frontrunner slugged it out and strengthened the probability that he will win the Iowa caucus on January 3rd, newspaper and television commentators said yesterday.
The former frontrunner Mitt Romney failed to break Gingrich’s momentum. Instead, Gingrich delivered a blistering rebuttal of Romney’s boast that he, as a businessman from the private sector, is best qualified to lead the nation.
“The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is that you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994,” Gingrich said. “You’d have been a 17-year career politician if you’d won.”
In a self-inflicted wound, Romney tried to bet Texas governor Rick Perry $10,000 that he had never suggested his healthcare plan when he was governor of Massachusetts should be a model for the country. Romney is a millionaire many times over, and the proposed bet went down like a lead balloon in Iowa, where the median annual income is less than $50,000 a year.
Gingrich now has a double digit lead over Romney in opinion polls in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, three of the four states where Republicans will vote next month. Romney is ahead only in New Hampshire, which is less evangelical and less socially conservative.
Romney mocked Gingrich for having wanted to build an American colony on the moon to mine minerals. Ron Paul accused him of hypocrisy and in taking taxpayers’ money from the government-backed mortgage company Freddie Mac.
Asked whether fidelity in marriage matters, the Texas governor Rick Perry targeted the thrice married Gingrich, saying, “If you will cheat on your wife . . . then why wouldn’t you cheat on your business partner, or why wouldn’t you cheat on anyone for that matter?”
But Gingrich deflected the blow, saying: “I’m also a 68 year-old grandfather, and I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I am a person they can trust.” Nor was Gingrich hurt by his incendiary statement, made in an interview with the Jewish Channel on Friday, that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. In the debate, Paul accused him of “stirring up trouble”.
On the Palestinian issue, Romney said a US president must demonstrate “sobriety, care and stability”, adding: “I am not a bomb-thrower, rhetorically or literally.” Gingrich is often described as a “bomb-thrower”.
Gingrich stuck to his guns. “Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth [about the Palestinians],” he said. “These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools.”
Gingrich's surge has enlivened the Republican race, which was until recently characterised by ennui. Dennis Goldford, professor of politics at Drake University in Des Moines, said the first 11 debates resembled the 1993 film Groundhog Day,in which a television weatherman finds himself doomed to live the same day over and over again.
In Iowa, as elsewhere, Gingrich is a divisive figure. The former speaker of the House of Representatives is in danger of falling off the frontrunner’s perch “every time he opens his mouth”, says Prof Goldford. “Whatever Newt says, he says with absolute, apocalyptic certainty. The average voter doesn’t know whether it’s true or not, but he sounds like someone who could debate Obama.”
Sue Dvorsky, who chairs the Iowa Democratic Party, is more blunt. “The world is fragile,” she says. “Newt Gingrich is a bull in a china shop. He breaks things.”
“What has got in Newt’s way in the past?” asks Linda Upmeyer, the Republican majority leader in the Iowa state assembly and Gingrich’s state chairwoman. “Usually Newt.” Gingrich’s previous most inflammatory statements were about the need to abolish child labour laws so that children could replace “unionised” workers as janitors. “Really poor children in really poor neighbourhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” Gingrich said at a dinner in Iowa this month.
“They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of, ‘I do this, and you give me cash’, unless it’s illegal.” The statement caused an uproar among US liberals, who labelled Gingrich’s idea Dickensian. Upmeyer says her hero often chooses his words poorly when expressing a “philosophical position”. In his reference to poor children “he was trying to say that children need role models”, she explains. At least Gingrich has passion, she adds, something she finds lacking in Romney.
Upmeyer endorsed Gingrich last February, months before he declared his candidacy. A former nurse practitioner who chaired the state assembly’s healthcare committee, she came in contact with Gingrich through his – very profitable – think tanks, American Solutions and Center for Health Transformation, in the early 2000s.
“The first time I heard him speak, my reaction was, ‘Wow. This is really a smart guy with interesting ideas’,” she says. Asked what revolutionary ideas Gingrich brings to the US healthcare mess, Upmeyer says he “believes in letting each state do its own system”. Gingrich (68) is only four years older than Romney. But Gingrich has white hair and a substantial girth, while the tall, patrician Romney looks presidential. “There have been a lot of leaders in the world that didn’t look like Mitt Romney, and they were great leaders,” Upmeyer says defensively. “People want someone passionate, bold and smart. I have heard people say that Newt may be our Winston Churchill for our time. I think that’s fair.” The fact that the “establishment” – Republican as well as Democratic – is so critical of Gingrich could actually help him with restive voters.
A majority of Republicans still say they could change their minds. “Voters may be a little gun shy,” says Kathie Obradovich, political columnist for the Des Moines Register. “They’ve seen so many candidates go to the top [of the opinion polls] and fall down.”
Few are overjoyed at the thought of a Gingrich candidacy, but most seem resigned to it. Obradovich quotes the 1970 folk rock song by Stephen Stills: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” President Obama’s staff are reportedly gleeful at the prospect of fighting the erratic Gngrich instead of Romney, the bloodless technocrat, in next year’s election.
Prof Goldford urges caution. “In November 1979, the Carter White House was salivating at the possibility that Ronald Reagan would be the Republican candidate,” he recalls. “Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The rescue mission for the hostages in Tehran failed.
“By 1980, the slogan was ABC – Anybody But Carter. All Reagan had to do was show he wasn’t crazy. If enough people believe that Obama hasn’t provided leadership, it will be ABO – Anybody But Obama.” Like the US, Iowa has drifted rightward over the past 12 years, with the exception of 2008, when it chose Obama.
Republicans took the lower house in the state assembly in the 2010 midterms, as they did in Washington, leaving the state senate with a narrow Democratic majority, also mirroring the balance of power in Washington.
Dvorsky, the Democratic leader, feels confident that Obama will win Iowa again next year. “While the Republicans are fighting each other, we’ve been organising,” she explains. The Obama campaign has opened eight offices across the state, more than any Republican candidate. “On January 4th, they’ll be exhausted and in a shambles; we’ll be going forward,” says Dvorsky.