Gingrich's failed run shows super PACs' power CAMPAIGN 2012

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich announces he is suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination May 2, 2012 in Arlington, Virginia. Gingrich said he decided to leave the race after his rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, surged ahead in recent primary elections. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT) less Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich announces he is suspending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination May 2, 2012 in Arlington, Virginia. Gingrich said he decided to leave the race after ... more Photo: Olivier Douliery, McClatchy-Tribune News Service Photo: Olivier Douliery, McClatchy-Tribune News Service Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Gingrich's failed run shows super PACs' power 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Newt Gingrich officially suspended his presidential campaign Wednesday, but his legacy goes beyond his much-mocked promise of a colony on the moon.

Gingrich's mercurial Republican primary ride showed how the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision permits one wealthy donor to prop up a presidential campaign almost single-handedly. The ruling allowed unlimited contributions from individuals, labor unions and corporations to super political action committees, or super PACs.

If it weren't for the family of billionaire casino developer Sheldon Adelson contributing $21 million to Winning Our Future, the pro-Gingrich super PAC, the outside organization wouldn't have been able to launch attacks that hobbled the better-funded and organized campaign of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.

Firing $3.7 million worth of negative ads at Romney in January helped Gingrich win the South Carolina primary, giving the former House speaker hope for the rest of the race.

Gingrich's own campaign raised $23 million through March - roughly a quarter of what Romney's camp has pulled in, according to the latest federal campaign finance reports. Gingrich campaigned mostly through TV interviews, doing little of the grunt work of grassroots campaigning that was the hallmark of fellow Republican Rick Santorum's more successful presidential campaign.

'Campaign faded'

"The super PAC money kept Gingrich afloat for longer than he would have without it - and when it dried up, his campaign faded," said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, which analyzes the effect of money on politics.

Gingrich's campaign was left for dead in June after his campaign staff quit en masse - shortly after the candidate and his wife took a two-week Mediterranean cruise.

Through September of last year, Gingrich raised less money than all but one of his rivals. But after a series of strong GOP debate performances, he began to be seen as a conservative alternative to Romney.

Romney fires a shot

He was leading in the polls in the weeks running up to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, before Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting Romney, unloaded a $4.1 million onslaught of TV ads. The former House speaker finished a distant fourth in Iowa, with half as many votes as Romney.

From Iowa through the April 5 Wisconsin primary, the pro-Romney super PAC spent $8.8 million in "deceptive" ads attacking Gingrich - spots that contained factual errors, according to a study released last week by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center.

The super PAC supporting Romney outspent the super PACs supporting Gingrich and Santorum by 20 to 1 over that period, and much of the pro-Romney super PAC trafficked in "deceptive" statements, the nonpartisan group found.

"There is a real irony that super PAC ads destroyed Gingrich's campaign and revived it," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which oversees FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan project that ferrets out untruths in campaign advertising.

Lingering effects

But the real victim of Gingrich's super PAC money could be Romney. Many of the attacks directed at Romney will probably haunt him during his expected general election battle against President Obama.

For months, the pro-Gingrich super PAC slammed Romney in ways perhaps only a Democratic rival could. It ripped Romney as a flip-flopper on abortion rights and mocked the renovation of his Southern California home. It lampooned him for being "much like John Kerry," the U.S. senator from Massachusetts, because they both speak French.

One ad asked: "What kind of man would mislead, distort and deceive just to win an election? This man would: Mitt Romney."

In the days before the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary, the pro-Gingrich super PAC spent $5 million to air a 27-minute film, "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," in that state.

The film, produced by former Republican National Committee aide Jason Killian Meath, examines what happened to four companies that were acquired by Romney's private-equity firm, Bain Capital. It focuses on the workers who lost their jobs in the aftermath of the restructurings.

Romney had based his campaign, in part, on his career as an astute businessman. But the film undercut that narrative with lines such as "His mission: to reap massive rewards for himself and his investors." The film and a shortened version of it that was turned into a campaign ad "allowed the other candidates to attack Romney about Bain," said Jamieson, damaging Romney's "central claim."

On Wednesday, the Obama campaign released a 90-second video montage of Gingrich's attacks on Romney that it titled, "Newt Gingrich: Frankly, not Mitt Romney's biggest supporter."

Dusting Newt off

But other analysts say Gingrich's attacks on Romney will be forgotten as typical primary skirmishes. Gingrich, who had been out of electoral politics since resigning from the House in 1999, regained some of his former national luster with his debate performances.

"Those attacks on Romney and Bain actually sharpened his game," said Tod Lindberg, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank who has studied and written about Gingrich for decades. "It allowed Romney to come up with a stronger answer for something that was going to come up in the general election."