Gingrich's strategy has some voters willing to overlook his past. Newt: The master of disguise

The surging Newt Gingrich has mastered debates — and disguise.

The debate part is clear: The former Speaker of the House comes to play and owns the stage with an uncanny capacity to connect with the grievances of conservative voters.


The disguise part is clear, too. Gingrich has used his debate skills — and his instinct to hit the raw nerves of conservatives — to camouflage considerable weaknesses as a candidate. The three wives, and cheating on and leaving the first two while they were ill; inconsistency on the most consequential conservative causes of the past decade; episodic bouts of self-importance severe even by politicians’ standards; and countless tales of erratic leadership in crisis.

“You lead with your strengths,” a top Gingrich adviser told POLITICO, “to minimize his weaknesses.” When Gingrich does this, the adviser said, “people are willing to overlook Newt’s past.”

Mitt Romney’s top priority for the next week before the Jan. 31 Florida primary, one of the former Massachusetts governor’s advisers said, is to rip that disguise from Gingrich and expose what the Romney campaign and many Republicans outside it consider disqualifying flaws. Success or failure on this score could very well determine who wins the Republican nomination in the months ahead.

The Romney assault, likely to include upward of $10 million in spending directly by the campaign and super PACS built to protect it, will include:

Hitting Gingrich on the issue of character as “an issue, not a subtext,” a top adviser said. This will include direct references to Gingrich’s ethics troubles in the 1990s, his work for Freddie Mac in recent years and his erratic past. The dirty work of hitting Gingrich on marriages will most likely come from surrogates, not Romney. “Character is a big part of leadership,” Romney said on Fox News Sunday.

Reviving the “unreliable leader” attack that worked so well in Iowa. The super PAC attack on Gingrich worked marvelously there, so the Romney camp is eager to return to it. Look for lots of talk about Gingrich’s criticism of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan last year.

Making private pleas to Washington officials who worked with Gingrich to detail in public how wildly unpredictable he was in Congress. “Newt is a force of destructive energy,” a top GOP official emailed right after Gingrich won in South Carolina. A top Romney official, when asked to lay out the coming argument, managed to smuggle the word “erratic” into three straight sentences. Get used to hearing it.

Romney wasted no time launching this new phase of his campaign, using a rally in Ormond Beach, Fla., on Sunday to unveil his tougher line against Gingrich, calling him a failed leader who resigned the speakership “in disgrace” then went on to work as a lobbyist “selling influence around Washington.”

“He was investigated over an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that, and then his fellow Republicans, 88 percent of his Republicans, voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich,” Romney said. “He has not had a record of successful leadership.”

As for Gingrich, the smart money in Republican circles is that he cannot sustain his current level of discipline and the Romney money machine will tear him apart. Perhaps. But the smart money has made a lot of dumb bets this campaign — including missing that Gingrich would rise from the dead, not once, but twice.

Gingrich himself has told aides that the passive Newt of Iowa — the one who let Romney slap him around without slapping back — is no more. The Gingrich adviser said they were suckered last time around into “making our message about staying positive.” Not this time.

The plan, for now, is to “hit back, pivot to Obama, hit back, pivot to Obama.” While doing this, they will play to the twin impulses of conservatives, especially evangelicals, of redemption and loathing of the elite media. “People are willing to overlook Newt’s past if they sense that he has changed and that he will be a strong leader,” the official said.

The South Carolina acceptance speech showed how good Gingrich is at playing to the emotions of the right. In it, he chastised elites, elite media or just the media seven times; Saul Alinsky, four; religious bigots, three; food stamps, three; and added pokes at San Francisco, socialism and bowing to Saudi kings for good measure.

This material is rich for the voting and viewing audience: It’s resonant, emotional and much more visceral than anything Romney has to offer.

In the end, it comes down to the one question on the minds of most Republicans who know Gingrich: Can it really last? Can Gingrich really sustain a message, self-discipline, success without blowing it?

Four things point to at least the possibility of a “yes.”

He took a beaten campaign, with no staff, no money, one that was more sideshow than serious, and rocketed to the top of polls in December. He then took an allegation — that he left his second wife, after asking for permission to openly cheat — and turned it into an asset. Think about that: His greatest achievement in the final days of the South Carolina campaign was profiting from a charge that he wanted an “open marriage.”

Lost in his debate smackdown of John King was the way he slapped away perhaps the most cogent attack yet on his political career, when Rick Santorum methodically laid out the case that his ego and erratic style turned off almost every key leader he worked with in Congress — the same argument Romney is using now.

“Four years into his speakership, he was thrown out by the conservatives. It was a coup against him,” Santorum said during the CNN debate. “I served with him. I was there. I knew what the problems were going on in the House of Representatives when Newt Gingrich was leading this — leading there. It was an idea a minute, no discipline, no ability to be able to pull things together.”

Santorum hit him for ethics troubles, timidity, a penchant for taking all the credit when none was due, and alienating his friends and causes.

Gingrich, without a hint of frustration, swatted away the attacks and outlined with precision that he is a transformational figure whose successes easily outweighed any setbacks.

“Those are just historic facts, even if they’re inconvenient for Rick’s campaign,” he concluded to applause.

Finally, he’s not Romney. Does anyone really think those Santorum voters in South Carolina, Florida and elsewhere are going to flock to Romney? Especially after Romney details on Tuesday, when he has said he will release his tax returns, that he paid a 15 percent tax rate on his many millions of income and has a chunk invested in funds based in the Cayman Islands?

Political success is often about using core strengths to overshadow or overcome core weaknesses. For Romney, the strength was his discipline and business acumen that left many Republicans feeling they were in safe, if uninspired, hands. He used this strength to disguise his own significant limitations: a dull, awkward demeanor and a past full of policy contradictions.

In terms of measuring a political campaign by the material it has to work with, Romney’s was and remains quite impressive. He was self-aware enough to know he would never be loved, so he did what any good CEO would do: built a steady, high-quality, high-functioning organization to provide value over time. The plan has worked well.

But by the same measurement, Gingrich’s achievement is even more remarkable.

Everything in Romney’s career says he can sustain it. Everything in Gingrich’s leaves people skeptical.