I had a chance to interview Newt Gingrich late this afternoon as he walked from the podium backstage after speaking to the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce at the Columbia Marriott and then for five minutes in his bus before he left for his next stop. “When it was purely earned media”—i.e., press coverage and debate appearances—“I was ahead by 27 points,” he said, looking back to the days from mid-November to mid-December when he was leading in national, Iowa and South Carolina polls. “The $3.5 million in negatives against me hurt. But we’re closing in.” On the Monday debate, “We’re getting very close to our natural voice. Romney was less coherent than he has been.”
Before the Chamber of Commerce Gingrich showed an easy familiarity with South Carolina issues, calling for offshore natural gas exploration in the Atlantic Ocean, backing the dredging of the Port of Charleston (so it can accommodate the bigger container ships which will come through the widened Panama Canal starting in 2014), calling for building the I-73 to Myrtle Beach making it a “corridor of hope” rather than (as he said Barack Obama called it, in a reference I am unfamiliar with) a “corridor of shame.” He denounced the National Labor Relations Board for bringing its case against Boeing for building its Dreamliner plant outside Charleston airport and in response to a question said he would see if he could as president sign an executive order to close it down (presumably as a response to what he considers the unconstitutionality of Barack Obama’s recent recent appointments). He told me he was the first candidate to walk on the Dreamliner assembly line and said that someone had told him that part of the agreement with the Machinists Union which resulted in settlement of the case was that union workers in Washington state but not non-union workers in South Carolina would get $5,000 Christmas bonuses—a story that at the least shows the bitterness of the opposition to the NLRB’s decision in South Carolina.
What are you going to say in the debate Thursday night? I asked. “I have no idea,” he said. “I talk to my two grandchildren. Maggie tells me to be smiling and [I didn’t catch the name of the other] tells me to make it shorter and clearer. Then I drink a Diet Coke and see what the questions are. It’s a little like being a jazz musician. It’s all improvisation. I don’t worry about it.”
Rick Santorum has been doing even more talking on the campaign trail than Gingrich and has told me he doesn’t go in for much debate prep either. In his talk to the Chamber of Commerce Santorum showed less easy familiarity with South Carolina issues. Asked about dredging the Port of Charleston, he replied that the port of Philadelphia wasn’t as deep and that New Jersey, Delaware, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers opposed his efforts to deepen it—and then went on to defend his practice of seeking earmarks for such projects. I’m not sure the South Carolinians cared much. Asked about reducing the national debt, he called for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and defended that proposal against the argument that amendments should be sparingly resorted to by arguing that the Seventeenth Amendment, which took the election of senators away from state legislatures and entrusted it to voters, had made the federal government more liable to engage in deficit spending and to enact entitlement programs. An intellectually coherent argument, and Santorum made it clear that he opposes repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.
Santorum’s campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley was unhappy with the (for him, puzzling) barrage of negative ads run by Ron Paul’s campaign against Santorum, and Santorum himself was ready to take on Gingrich. “Newt’s comments are out of left field,” he said, and then got more specific and referred to Gingrich’s argument that anti-“Massachusetts moderate” voters should coalesce around his candidacy. He pointed out, as he often has publicly, that he ran ahead of Gingrich in Iowa and New Hampshire, not the other way around (as was reported on primary night, reflecting the returns that were then in). “I would never ask another candidate to get out of the race,” Santorum said. “I’ve won two statewide races in one of the most important states in the general election. He was elected in one of the most Republican districts in the nation”—something that was true starting in 1992 but not before, to which Santorum might have added that Gingrich’s margins were sometimes very narrow both before and after. “He has a disconnection with reality which is very troubling for someone who wants to be the leader of our nation.” Tough language, I told Gidley, who said he has usually been using words like “hubris” and “arrogance” today; and the usually cheerful and ebullient Santorum seemed a bit irritated.
Nevertheless, Gingrich continues to see himself as a world historical figure. To the Chamber audience he made his recent standard argument that he is the only candidate who has shown the capacity to make major changes in government, in the Reagan 1980s and (a stronger case) as Speaker in the 1990s. “If I win South Carolina, I will be the nominee,” he told the Chamber audience, and repeated that to me in the bus. He told the audience that he would beat Obama so badly in debates that he would carry a surprising number of states. “Your support in the next four days,” he concluded, “can change history.”
Conclusion: Santorum sounds like a candidate who is worried that he will come in third in South Carolina, while Gingrich has come to believe he has a real chance to come in first. We’ll know more Saturday night.
