politico.com
OPINION
By BILL SCHNEIDER
Updated: 1/3/12 8:08 PM EST



Restore Our Future double what Romney did in Iowa — almost all on anti-Gingrich ads.

Welcome to the War of 2012.

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian military theorist, had it backward when he wrote, “War is politics by other means.” He should have said: “Politics is war by other means.”

This year’s presidential campaign will be a war of total annihilation. Look at what just happened to Newt Gingrich. He got totally annihilated by the most fearsome weapon of war in the history of American politics: the super PAC.

In any war, when an army gets a new and powerful weapon, it won’t hesitate to use it. Like the atomic bomb. This year’s new weapon is the super PAC. Super PACs can collect contributions in unlimited amounts and spend them any way they want — as long as their activities are uncoordinated with any campaign.

Is that legal? It is now. Because the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the government cannot limit independent spending to influence elections.

Enter Restore Our Future, a super PAC run by former Mitt Romney operatives. Restore Our Future spent twice as much money in Iowa as the Romney campaign did — almost all of it on anti-Gingrich ads. Romney could and did disassociate himself from the attacks. The ads were not run by his campaign.

That’s why super PACS are so powerful. There’s no blowback. They damage the target without doing collateral damage to the candidate they favor. While Gingrich’s support collapsed in Iowa, Romney’s support remained steady.

Nearly half of all the ads in Iowa were anti-Gingrich. They attacked the former speaker for, among other things, his position on illegal immigration, his ethics violations, and his past views on climate change and health care.

Gingrich left these many charges unanswered, for two reasons. One, they were mostly true. Two, he had no money to defend himself.

Gingrich tried to make a virtue of necessity — by promising not to run any ads criticizing his Republican opponents. He couldn’t have paid for them if he wanted to. Instead, Gingrich asked Iowans to vote for him to make a statement that negative ads don’t work.

But they do work. Gingrich would have won the caucuses if they had been held in early December. By early January, however, after weeks of relentless attacks over the airwaves, Gingrich’s support in Iowa was cut by more than half.

Gingrich’s Iowa campaign will live forever as a case study in what happens if you are faced with a negative campaign and don’t fight back. Alongside Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004.

The Republican Party establishment poured money into the Romney Super PAC to stop Gingrich. They know Gingrich can’t beat Obama. It’s the same tactic they used to obliterate Dukakis back in 1988. The racially incendiary Willie Horton ads were run by an independent spending committee that year, not by the George H.W. Bush campaign.

It’s the same tactic they used to demolish Sen. John Kerry’s war hero credentials in 2004, when he was attacked by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — also an independent spending committee.

Romney will likely win the Republican nomination simply because no one else is a plausible nominee. But there was something odd about the Iowa contest. Romney’s numbers could never rise above 30 percent. Conservatives, who never trusted Romney, auditioned candidate after candidate to be the anti-Romney alternative. One by one, the contenders were struck down. By caucus day, conservatives were scraping the bottom of the barrel. That’s where they found Rick Santorum, who had been there for months.

The only remaining question is whether conservatives will mount a die-hard resistance campaign against Romney. Once they rally behind an alternative, the conservative candidate and his super PAC can start raising money to wage a guerrilla campaign against the front-runner. The guerrillas won’t win, but they may do a lot of damage to the nominee.

The outlook for the general election campaign is no less belligerent. Republicans can win only by hammering home the point that the Obama administration has been a failure. Romney has been saying that for months.

Republicans now have a weapon they call “the book” — 500 pages of every public utterance made by President Barack Obama since the day he took office in 2009, complete with sources. All online.

Republicans intend to use Obama’s own words as weapons against him. Like the time in 2009 when he said on NBC’s “Today” show that if he could not fix the economy in three years, “then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is gearing up for total war. The only way Obama can get reelected is by discrediting his Republican opponent.

Obama may not be comfortable running a harsh negative campaign. But he may not have to. He has his own super PAC — Priorities USA Action — and it’s already going after Romney with ads like this one, released before a single primary vote was cast in the GOP contest: “Wall Street unregulated … the middle class decimated … American jobs relocated … Social Security privatized … Medicare dismantled … college aid slashed … health insurance reform repealed … Mitt Romney’s America is not our America.”

In 1988, the Willie Horton ads against Dukakis were seen as an aberration. The explosive reaction made that kind of attack seem risky. But here we are in 2012, and total war is now the norm.

The country’s only hope? That this war, like every war in U.S. history, will ignite an anti-war movement.

Bill Schneider is the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst professor of public policy at George Mason University and a resident scholar at Third Way.

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