Monday, Carl Cameron of Fox News was the vehicle by which
“sources close to the Gingrich campaign” floated a trial balloon,
suggesting that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich might announce
Texas Gov. Rick Perry as his running mate “prior
to the Republican National Convention at the end of
August.”
While I haven’t bothered to check with my own “sources
close to the Gingrich campaign,” this suggestion had the distinct
aroma of a substance one might find on the plains of Texas in the
vicinity of a herd of longhorn cattle. Carl Cameron is too smart of
a reporter to believe such a steaming pile of nonsense, and so my
guess is that Carl was just sharing it with Fox News viewers in
order to give them a glimpse of how truly desperate “sources close
to the Gingrich campaign” have become. Republican voters go to the
polls in Alabama and Mississippi today, and if Newt loses these two
primaries, he’s got as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as
he has of making Christina Hendricks his next wife.
Frankly, Newt doesn’t have much more of a chance even if
he wins Alabama and Mississippi, but at least if he wins, his hope
of going on to claim the Republican nomination would not be quite
so comically implausible. Anyone can see that the Gingrich campaign
is now at coffin corner and their increasingly desperate plight is
the most likely reason for floating the Perry-for-VP trial balloon.
Perry was once the most popular GOP candidate in the South and his
endorsement two days before the South Carolina primary gave
Gingrich a crucial boost there. Polls in both
Mississippi and
Alabama indicate nearly a three-way dead heat between Gingrich,
Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, and even a few points might make a
crucial difference to Newt’s last stand in Dixie. A loss would be
disastrous because it would mean “Gingrich can’t even
claim to have won all of the Southern states that he feels is his
natural base,” as
Ed Morrissey of Hot Air observed.
Out of 25 state primaries and caucuses to date, Gingrich
has won exactly two — South Carolina on Jan. 21 and his home state
of Georgia last Tuesday. His prospects have declined
catastrophically since early December, when he confidently
declared to Jake Tapper of ABC News, “I’m going to be the
nominee.” That was before Gingrich was buried in a
multimillion-dollar avalanche of attack ads from the Romney
campaign (and its allied “super PAC”) in Iowa. Gingrich finished
fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, but his victory in South
Carolina appeared to revive his campaign. That appearance was
short-lived, however, as Romney unleashed an altogether
unprecedented tsunami of attack ads in Florida, crushing Newt’s
hopes of continuing his comeback in that state’s Jan. 31
primary.
Since then, Gingrich has struggled to maintain the
appearance of being a viable contender. On stage in Orlando the
night of his Florida defeat, Gingrich was surrounded by supporters
holding signs that read “46 states to go.” I was in Tampa that
night, covering the victory rally where one of Romney’s top aides
reacted to Gingrich’s slogan with a dismissive sneer, “Newt’s not
even on the ballot in 46 more states.” This was true —
Gingrich had failed to qualify for the Virginia and Missouri
primaries — and yet Newt’s supporters in Orlando cheered wildly as
he gave a speech in which he rattled off a list of acts he would
take on his first day in office after being sworn in as
president.
If the improbability of Gingrich ever getting to the Oval
Office was not readily apparent that Tuesday night in Florida, it
should have been clear the following Saturday, when Romney won the
Nevada caucuses by a margin of nearly 30 points. This was a brutal
humiliation for Gingrich, coming as it did in the home state of the
chief donor to his “super PAC,” Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson. The size of the loss was perhaps not even the worst of it.
Gingrich’s effort in Nevada was such a mismanaged disaster that at
one point, the candidate canceled an appearance with the state’s
popular Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, that his staff had
spent days working to arrange. The Nevada debacle was capped by
what the
Washington Post’s Aaron Blake called “a
bizarre press conference” in Vegas where, among other things,
Gingrich brought up Romney’s religion, dismissing Nevada as a
“heavily Mormon state.”
After Nevada, things went from bad to worse for Newt. On
Feb. 7, Rick Santorum celebrated a triple victory in the Missouri
primary and the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado. The Romney camp
dismissed Santorum’s wins as non-binding “beauty contests” that
didn’t matter to the delegate count, but arguably more significant
was the poor showing by Gingrich. Not on the ballot in Missouri, he
placed third in Colorado and finished a weak fourth in Minnesota.
Gingrich was again fourth in Maine (Feb. 11), then on Feb. 28
finished third in Arizona and fourth in Michigan. With the field
winnowed down to four active candidates, there were only so many
times a candidate could place fourth before his plausibility as a
contender expired, and Newt was already approaching his sell-by
date when Super Tuesday arrived on March 6.
By all ordinary logic of politics, Super Tuesday should
have been the end of Gingrich’s campaign, but 2012 has been a bad
year for ordinary political logic. As it happened, of the 10 states
that held primaries or caucuses March 6, Georgia had more delegates
than any other, and Gingrich concentrated his campaign in what was
clearly a do-or-die effort in his home state. He won with 47
percent of the vote in Georgia and thus survived, but at the cost
of being wiped out nearly everywhere else. Santorum battled Romney
down to the wire in Ohio, and lost by less than a single percentage
point, while Gingrich finished a weak third in the Buckeye State
with less than 15 percent. In three other states where Santorum
finished second to Romney — Alaska, Idaho, and Massachusetts —
Gingrich placed fourth behind Ron Paul, and Gingrich was also
fourth in North Dakota, which Santorum won.
By far the worst Super Tuesday results for Gingrich,
however, were Santorum’s victories in Oklahoma and Tennessee. By
winning there, Santorum exposed Gingrich as vulnerable in the
South, which had previously been regarded as “safe” for the former
Speaker. The next day, while Santorum traveled to Alabama, the
Gingrich campaign suddenly canceled
its scheduled events in Kansas to concentrate its resources in
the two Deep South states that hold primaries today. That had the
effect of ceding Kansas to Santorum, who scored what the New
York Times called a
“decisive” victory there, with Gingrich a distant third.
Santorum has now won eight states to Gingrich’s two and, according
to the Wall Street
Journal, Santorum now has more than twice as many
delegates (217) as Gingrich (107).
The delegate math now offers a daunting prospect for any
conservative hope of preventing the more moderate Romney from
winning the nomination. When the Santorum campaign published a
strategy memo arguing against Romney’s claim of inevitability,
reporters immediately pointed out that the Santorum scenario would
require a “brokered convention,” denying Romney a first-ballot
majority in Tampa. Whether even the staunchest conservatives have
the stomach for such an all-out fight remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Gingrich has repeatedly vowed his willingness to go all
the way to the convention to stop Romney. Newt may indeed be
willing, but if he doesn’t win today’s two Deep South primaries, he
may no longer be able.
