Free Playbook 2012 by Mike Allen Page B

an unusual meeting with unaligned lobbyists, hosted by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors. Perry started strong, saying of his rocky launch: “The first three weeks was a lovefest. And the last three weeks was an ass-kicking.” It was all downhill from there, according to several participants. His worst moment was when a financial lobbyist asked him his view of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform. “Repeal it!” said Perry, apparently not realizing there were parts of the new law that the financial industry embraced, and that his audience did not favor wholesale repeal. “He couldn’t talk about it in any detail at all,” one attendee said. Another later took Perry aside to warn that the governor’s shallow understanding of such a key issue would be hazardous in debates. By mid-November, the Texas governor was fighting for his political life. At the November 9 GOP debate in Michigan staged by CNBC, Perry grandly announced that he would eliminate three federal agencies. He named two (Commerce and Education) and then—for an agonizing minute that seemed like an hour—couldnot remember the third (Energy, he later recalled). “Oops,” Perry said. In the spin room after the debate, Perry’s aides looked shell-shocked; there was no stopping a mud slide of bad press. Cleaning up after Perry had become an increasingly onerous task. In that rocky late October, Perry had seemed so incoherent that his host, Kevin Smith, director of the conservative group Cornerstone Action, had felt compelled to publicly deny that Perry had been drunk at the time.
    The Romney camp was keeping an eye on Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker’s campaign had nearly collapsed over the summer amidst the stories about Callista and the Tiffany charge account as well as the mass exodus of his staff. Gingrich still had no ground operation to speak of, no armies of volunteers to knock on doors, and he had not raised much money for ad buys. He was regarded by the political pros as a hapless manager. (“From a policy perspective, I would probably agree with Newt on more things than any other person in the field,” said a former Haley Barbour adviser. “But, look, Newt would fuck up a two-car funeral procession.”) At his Iowa appearances, he sometimes seemed to be chattering in a different language than his workaday supporters. One of his staple proposals is applying the management fad “Lean Six Sigma” to the federal government, which can be a bit of a head-scratcher for rural audiences.
    Still, Gingrich had impressed in the September-October debates, particularly the last two, in New Hampshire and in Nevada, by standing back and offering a Wise Man’s view of the political shenanigans onstage and in Washington generally. “Gingrich is the only person—if you watch the dial groups [voters recruited by pollsters to turn up a dial to express enthusiasm while watching a debate] and you look at the polling and you look at the focus groups and you look at the audience analysis that’s out there after the debates, Gingrich is the only guy up there wholooks like a president other than Mitt,” said a Romney adviser. “The rest of them look like comedians.”
    Gingrich was feeling pleased with his comeback when he spoke to us in mid-November. He acknowledged that his campaign had nearly sunk over the summer. Borrowing a comment he’d heard on CNN, he described himself as the Bruce Willis character in the movie
The Sixth Sense
: “I was the only guy in the room who didn’t know I was dead.” June and July, he said, had been “the two hardest months in my life. It was just excruciating.” After his staff quit en masse and the pundits mocked his trip to the Greek islands and his Tiffany expense account, “traditional money raising was almost impossible,” he said. “We went through two sets of finance people who just burned out because they couldn’t take the negatives.”
    But he survived and created what he called “a