SharpEdgeNews.com Editor’s Note: The results of Tuesday caucuses in Iowa remain inconclusive, with with 96% reporting at press time, and Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in a near-tie with only 113 votes between them both, as of 11pm Central Time.
Former Senator Rick Santorum’s campaign in Iowa conducted no polls or focus groups, employed no speechwriter and had no security presence until a few days ago. “We don’t have a bunch of guys with earpieces running around doing nothing,” he would boast.
He had a skeletal advertising budget — “You can’t buy Iowa,” he would say, deriding his better-financed rivals — and his campaign disclosure forms included itemized receipts from the likes of Target (“food & beverage” expense, $16.48), Walmart (“event supplies/container,” $4.47) and Priceline.com (“Airfare,” $670.84”).
But Mr. Santorum made a muscular showing in returns from the Iowa caucuses Tuesday night, where he was in a virtual two-way tie for the lead with former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, and with Representative Ron Paul of Texas trailing by just a few percentage points. To reach that top tier, Mr. Santorum drew on his own persistence, a faltering field of former front-runners and a savvy strategy devised by a team of seasoned political operatives.
He turned to longtime aides from his past Senate runs in Pennsylvania, deployed veterans from the Iowa campaigns of the 2008 winner, Mike Huckabee, and runner-up, Mr. Romney, and zigzagged the state with one of its top political strategists in a 2006 Dodge Ram pickup. (There were 138,000 miles on it as of late Tuesday.)
“Santorum had a very small, dedicated and super-smart team that did not overmanage his assets,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party. “He put in the time and allowed his network to take shape organically.”
Mr. Santorum also relied on his own instincts, honed during his years in Congress during the 1990s and 2000s, when he worked closely with the White House political adviser Karl Rove on issues relating to electoral and legislative successes of the Bush presidency. His team included his longtime aide John Brabender; J. Hogan Gidley, who advised Mr. Huckabee in 2008; and Jill Latham, the daughter of the former Iowa congressman Tom Latham and a veteran of Mr. Romney’s 2008 campaign, who ran the state field operation for Mr. Santorum.
Now, as the campaign moves beyond the long-shot-friendly borders of Iowa, Mr. Santorum’s campaign can no longer count on the candidate’s pluck and retail political prowess to make up for its lingering handicaps. He is seriously outgunned by the national fund-raising and organizational operations of his chief rivals, Mr. Romney and Mr. Paul, and he will face much heavier scrutiny from the news media and attacks from opponents. And while he has visited New Hampshire repeatedly (more than 30 times) as well as South Carolina (25 visits), his campaign still has a relatively tiny staff and is only now developing its advertising strategy.
By spending a lot of time in Iowa, aides said, Mr. Santorum gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the state’s political flavor. In lieu of scripted presentations and market-tested messages, Mr. Santorum’s preparation on the stump rarely amounted to more than having Chuck Laudner, a top aide to Representative Steve King of Iowa described by Republican insiders as a “secret weapon,” literally in the driver’s seat briefing the candidate on the issues he would confront at his next appearance.
“In a sense, his focus group was what he saw in front of him at all of his events,” said Mr. Brabender. About eight months ago, the campaign decided to switch from a stump speech to a town-meeting format at Mr. Santorum’s events.
“He saw that when people asked questions, he was able to connect better,” Mr. Brabender said.
That also allowed the campaign to gauge what was effective with Iowa voters and what their concerns were. Mr. Santorum learned, for instance, that many parents who home-schooled their children were eager to share their experiences with the former senator, who with his wife, Karen, home-schooled some of their seven children. It showed him that his fierce opposition to late-term abortions in the Senate remained a resonant issue today with Iowans.
He also emphasized his leading role in the welfare overhaul of the 1990s and his current hard line against the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran after hearing the audience response.
“One of the things we could tell about the crowds was that no one really thought he had a chance, so that kept the numbers down for a while,” Mr. Laudner said. Mr. Santorum would become openly frustrated when it seemed that every other Republican candidate would enjoy a surge except him. “When’s my bump coming?” he asked Mr. Laudner early last month.
Mr. Laudner replied that when he started to move a little bit, the effect would snowball; if he got to about 10 percent in the polls, “the 1 would be replaced by a 2 very quickly,” Mr. Laudner said.
About a month ago, Mr. Brabender asked Mr. Santorum if he was starting to be recognized more when he walked alone through airports. Not really, Mr. Santorum said. But he persevered, and, aides said, believed that if the forces of luck and momentum aligned in his favor, he would get his surge at the best possible time — just before the votes were cast in Iowa.
As a boy in the working-class town of Butler, Pa., Mr. Santorum would lie awake in the bedroom he shared with his brother Dan and listen as his father, a psychologist, read night after night the same bedtime story: “The Little Engine That Could.”
“I know it might sound corny in this case, but positive thinking was a big lesson we were taught growing up,” said Dan Santorum, who runs an association of tennis professionals in Hilton Head, S.C.
In the many solitary months of his campaign here, Mr. Santorum became deft at turning his lack of time in the spotlight into an asset. It was a way to show Iowans that he cared what they thought, not what the national media thought.
“The pundits don’t come to these events, you do,” he said last week at a sports bar in Marshalltown, Iowa, filled with college football fans, Santorum supporters and reporters. “Let’s let Iowans decide who is electable.”
At a jammed Pizza Ranch restaurant in Boone on Monday, Mr. Santorum stood with his hands on his hips, under a “Livery Stable” sign, and shook his head over the sudden crush of more than 100 members of the national media watching him now.
“I know there are more media here than there are folks,” he said, suggesting that members of the media are not “folks.”
He then opened the packed room to questions. “I’d like to hear from Iowans first,” he said.
Report Courtesy of the New York Times