finished a distant fourth in Iowa, taking 13 percent of the vote, while Romney, Paul, and Santorum had all finished north of 20 percent. (Santorum technically won, though Romney was announced the winner on caucus night, robbing the underdog of a major momentum boost.) Gingrich had also been blown out in New Hampshire, taking just 9 percent of the vote compared to Romney’s 39 percent.
In the modern primary system, a candidate typically needed a strong showing in one of the first two contests to raise the requisite money for his or her campaign to continue into South Carolina. But Citizens United had transformed the landscape. One donor could now single-handedly sustain a candidate with millions of dollars in super PAC spending, and Gingrich had the sweetest sugar daddy of them all: Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate, whose total pro-Gingrich expenditures for the cycle would reach $20 million.2
All that money wasn’t doing Gingrich any good. His candidacy was on life support, and polls showed Romney up double digits in South Carolina. Gingrich was stumped. He had exhausted every tactic imaginable: staying positive and playing nice with his rivals; eviscerating Obama, even going so far as to call him the “food-stamp president”; and eventually, going nuclear on Romney in response to sustained attacks from the front-runner’s camp, alleging that his company, Bain Capital, consisted of “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” None of it had vaulted Gingrich into contention. And time was running out.
The two debates in South Carolina offered final gasps of oxygen before the state’s January 21 primary. The first forum, hosted by Fox News in Myrtle Beach, got off to a lousy start, as Gingrich stumbled in response to questions about abandoning his positive-campaigning pledge. And then it happened: Juan Williams, the African American moderator, started grilling Gingrich about his recent racially tinged comments, including the “food stamp president” quip. As the crowd hissed at Williams, Gingrich scolded him with a lecture on political correctness that elicited a standing ovation.
It was an uncomfortable snapshot for some in the party: an overwhelmingly white audience booing a black moderator on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a state where the Confederate flag still flew on the Capitol grounds. But for Gingrich it was a moment of clarity. Where all his calculated strategies had failed, his off-the-cuff reprimand of Williams had succeeded. Perhaps attacking Romney—or even the president, for that matter—was a waste of time. Maybe there was a greater upside in doing what came naturally to him: tormenting the fourth estate.
“The thing that struck me,” Gingrich recalls, “was what conservative audiences reacted to, even more than attacks on Obama, was attacks on the media. You could get a stronger response by taking the media head-on than you could with any other single topic.”
Sure enough, three nights later, in North Charleston, Gingrich stole the show with a similar routine. It was all too easy: CNN reporter John King opened the debate with a question about Gingrich’s ex-wife’s recent claim that he had sought an open marriage. It was like putting a beachball on a tee in front of Babe Ruth. Summoning every fiber of moral outrage, Gingrich tore into King, CNN, and the entire press corps. In a rant heard ’round South Carolina, Gingrich bellowed, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans!”
“It was an electric moment,” recalls Kevin Madden, Romney’s longtime senior adviser and communications specialist. “Literally overnight, Newt’s favorables and unfavorables flipped in our tracking. We went into those debates ten points up and came out fifteen points down.”
Republicans have a rich history of shunning the press. Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving office, ripped the “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” at Barry Goldwater’s 1964 convention, saying they “couldn’t care less about the good of our party.” Vice President Spiro Agnew ratcheted up the rhetoric on behalf of Richard Nixon, giving his famed 1969 speech in Des Moines decrying the “small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.” And, in a less conspicuous fashion, Reagan warred with the White House press corps for most his time in Washington.
Much of this amounted to “working the refs,” as a basketball coach does after a tough foul call, in the hope of avoiding the next whistle. There was an age in which the refs were perceived to be impartial: As of 1986, Gallup found that 65 percent of Americans still felt a