Saturday evening’s Family Leader forum in Des Moines was widely viewed as a key test for Republican presidential candidates trying to win the support of still-undecided Iowa social conservatives. And after an extraordinary and sometimes soul-baring discussion between six candidates gathered at First Federated Church, there are signs Newt Gingrich has come out ahead in the race to become the candidate behind whom social conservatives unite behind in their drive to stop Mitt Romney.
Discussions with some social conservative leaders after the forum brought praise for all of the participants, particularly Gingrich and Rick Santorum. But it turns out that pollster/strategist Frank Luntz, who conducted the forum, also ran a focus group after the session, and it appears Gingrich scored very well with the group. “I think the focus group that Luntz did afterward would bear out that Newt Gingrich came a long way Saturday night,” says Family Leader president Bob vander Plaats. “I think it would bear out that Gingrich won the forum.”
“When you watch it, you’ll say, ‘Wow,'” vander Plaats continued. “It also looked very good for Santorum, but primarily for Gingrich.” The focus group was taped for later showing on Fox News.
In the forum itself, Luntz asked the candidates to forgo criticizing each other and reveal their innermost thoughts on the failures and difficulties they have encountered in life. Several complied. Santorum told the story of his daughter Bella, born with a potentially fatal birth defect. Amid tears and long pauses to collect himself, Santorum told the crowd of his realization that he had “decided that the best thing I could do was to treat her differently, to not love her, like I did, because it wouldn’t hurt as much if I lost her. I remember holding that finger, looking at her and realizing what I’d done. I had been exactly what I had said that I’d fought against at the partial birth abortion. I had seen her as less of a person because of her disability.”
Herman Cain told of the moment he learned that he had stage four cancer. With tears in his eyes, he haltingly recalled his decision to fight the disease with everything he had. “It’s as bad as it gets, I will never forget before my wife and I were about to get in the car I said, ‘I can do this,'” Cain said. At that moment, Cain told the crowd, his wife Gloria said, “We can do this.”
Michele Bachmann told the heart-wrenching story of her parents’ divorce, which happened when she was 12, after her family moved to Minnesota. “My dad left and I didn’t see him again for six years,” Bachmann said. “And when that happened we lost virtually everything overnight. We lost our home and I remember my mom took all the things out of — the pretty dishes out of the dining room and the wedding gifts and everything and she put it on card tables out in the garage and we just watched everything sold and, and sent away. And my mom said to us, she said, it’s, it’s hard now but she said we’re going to hold on, we’re going to get through this, we’re going to be OK and it really was hard.”
Gingrich had no such wrenching story to tell. But he told the crowd of becoming so wrapped up in his work and career in his early days in Congress that he felt an intense emptiness in his life. “Although I was remarkably successful in many ways — I was a PhD, I was a congressman, I had a lot of very exciting things going on — there was a part of me that was truly hollow,” Gingrich said. “And it was almost like the harder I worked and the more things I did the hollower I got inside. And finally a friend of mine who was a banker in Griffin, Georgia actually loaned — gave me the two books that are the base of Alcoholic’s Anonymous. I wasn’t drinking, but I had precisely the symptoms of somebody who was collapsing under this weight.” With those two books — the Bible and the AA volume — Gingrich says he recovered.
What value do such emotional confessions have for voters? “What it shows is people who have been through trials,” says vander Plaats. “We believe that people are tested, and if they’re able to persevere and move on, they come out the other side stronger.”
Of course, if emotional revelation were the only standard, Santorum would probably have won the evening. But even though Santorum has impressed social conservatives with his campaigning in Iowa — he alone has visited all 99 of the state’s counties — social conservatives are still worried about his low standing in state polls. They realize they could raise Santorum’s numbers somewhat with a high-profile endorsement but worry that Santorum is too far behind to make his way to the front of the pack.
Gingrich, on the other hand, is shooting upward in the polls, mostly on the strength of his performances in debates and the problems of Cain, Perry, and Bachmann. What is happening now is that social conservatives are working their way through his liabilities, particularly his three marriages, and trying to decide if they can support the Gingrich of today — not the Gingrich of 15 or 20 years ago — without compromising social conservative principles. In the Family Leader forum Saturday, it appears that all involved made a big step toward doing that.
