ANALYSIS:Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucus but he will still have to fight for the Republican nomination
AS THE caucus night vote count wore on into the early hours of yesterday morning, Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, watched the results from bed in the Hotel Fort Des Moines, with four of their five sons in the room. Some 20km away, in the suburb of Johnston, Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, waited in the Stoney Creek Inn with six of their seven children.
The choice of lodgings said a lot about the candidates and their organisation. The old Hotel Fort Des Moines is as close as Iowa’s largest city comes to grandeur. The Romneys’ mirror-window limousines and SUVs were parked in front of the ornate entrance, and the campaign organised a press room equipped with giant television screens and high-speed wifi connections, password: Victory2012.
The Santorums stayed at a boxy theme lodge beside the motorway, where journalists sprawled on the floor with their laptops, and the wifi system was quickly saturated; a party for a campaign unexpectedly overtaken by its own success.
Santorum boasted of having criss-crossed Iowa in the “Chuck truck”, a pick-up belonging to one of his volunteers. But a shiny new campaign bus stood outside the Stoney Creek Inn. The lack of funds remains a handicap for Santorum, though donations have surged with his poll numbers. The bus was lent by the Duggar family of Arkansas, anti-abortion activists with 19 children.
Tradition dictates that the winning candidate speak last on caucus night, but because the poll was so close – in the end, Romney won by only eight votes out of close to 120,000 – the two camps negotiated over the telephone who would speak first.
Romney addressed reporters while Santorum was still five votes ahead. “On to New Hampshire! Let’s get the job done!” Romney said, prefiguring the January 10th primary, which he is almost certain to win.
Santorum supporters burst into choruses of God Bless America, Amazing Graceand My Country Tis of Theebefore the former senator emerged to announce, "Game on" and "We're off to New Hampshire".
The four top vote-getters in Iowa – Romney and Santorum, each with 24.6 per cent, followed by Texas congressman Ron Paul with 21 per cent, and the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, with 13 per cent – yesterday picked up stakes and moved the Republican travelling road show to New Hampshire, though Romney was careful to make a detour via South Carolina, where he faces a tough battle on January 21st. “I’ve got a big target on me now,” Romney told MSNBC. “The Democratic National Committee, the White House . . . I’ve got broad shoulders. I can handle it. People want someone who spent their life outside Washington and knows how the economy works.”
But before he takes on President Barack Obama, Romney must obtain the Republican nomination, a task complicated by the 11th-hour emergence of Santorum. Two Republican debates are scheduled to take place in New Hampshire this weekend, and Romney is the man to beat.
Jon Huntsman, who, like the last Republican presidential nominee John McCain four years ago, skipped Iowa altogether, pre-positioned himself in New Hampshire. “Nobody here cares about what happened in Iowa,” he said yesterday. Huntsman resembles Romney. Both are Mormons, former governors, multimillionaires and establishment Republicans with attractive blond wives. Huntsman is last in opinion polls, but could – like Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich before him – finally enjoy his proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
Gingrich is also spoiling for a fight with Romney. He blames pro-Romney “Super Pacs” for destroying his candidacy with attack advertisements, and has repeatedly called Romney a liar. Debates are Gingrich’s strong suit, and he could make something of a comeback. Gingrich won the endorsement of the Manchester Union Leader, the New Hampshire newspaper, in which Gingrich yesterday purchased a full-page advert. It defined “The Choice” as being between Gingrich, a self-described “bold Reagan conservative” and Romney, a “timid Massachusetts moderate”.
The animosity between Romney and Gingrich is genuine. But the closeness of Tuesday night’s caucuses threw into sharp relief the ideological differences between Romney, Santorum and Paul, and the division of the Republican party into three camps: centrists led by Romney; religious and social conservatives led by Santorum; and a small-government, non-interventionist libertarian faction led by Paul.
The rift between moderate and conservative Republicans goes back at least to Barry Goldwater’s victory over Nelson Rockefeller in 1964. But in the past, mainstream Republicans eschewed fringe groups such as the John Birch society. With the advent of the Tea Party in 2009, they embraced the conservative fringes. “They want that energy,” says political science professor Dennis Goldford of Drake University.
“The problem is: if you ride on the tiger’s back, can you get off safely?” He attributes Congressman Ron Paul’s success, especially with young voters, to Americans’ “sense that government is broken and no one knows hows to fix it”. Conservative Republicans such as Santorum – who served two terms in the US Senate – “want to remodel and renovate” government, Goldford says. The Tea Party and their ideological cousins the libertarians “want to blow it up and burn it down”.
Despite his strong showing in Iowa, no one believes for a moment that Ron Paul could win the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum may fade like Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and southern Baptist pastor who won the Iowa caucus in 2008. Or he may represent a serious challenge to Romney, especially if the religious right rally round him and campaign donations flood in.
“I think Congresswoman Bachmann will gracefully bow out, and her supporters will find Santorum very attractive,” predicted John Desaulniers, the owner of a Christian bookshop in Des Moines and a volunteer with the Santorum campaign, at Santorum’s victory party. “The same holds true for Governor Perry.” Santorum’s near victory demonstrated again how reluctant the right-wing of the Republican party is to accept Romney as presidential nominee.
There is talk of a coalition of social conservatives to back an alternative candidate, which would now logically be Santorum.
The fact that Santorum is Catholic could complicate matters in the southern Bible belt, where some still refer to the pope as the “anti-Christ” and the church as the “whore of Babylon”. And, cautions Goldford, “Rick Santorum has a very self-righteous, I’m-on-a-mission-from-God attitude much of the time. It’s hard to see him as a consensus candidate.”
Gingrich told CBS News: “One of the things that became obvious in the last few weeks in Iowa is that there will be a great debate in the Republican Party before we are ready to have a great debate with Barack Obama.”
But if Republicans want to beat Obama next November, they must paper over their differences. In an entrance poll at Tuesday night’s caucuses, three in 10 respondants said the most important quality in a candidate was the ability to beat Obama. A smaller number – one in four – said their chief criterion was that he be a “true conservative”.
Santorum will have an uphill battle convincing secular Republicans that he can defeat Obama. In an attempt to broaden his appeal to the working class, he repeatedly tells the story of his coalminer father and grandfather, both immigrants from Mussolini’s Italy.
Tuesday night’s caucuses were the first test in the electability versus ideological purity debate, and electability won, by a whisker.