And for whatever his faults, Romney was strong when it came to McCain’s greatest weakness: immigration.
McCain had long been viewed warily by the right wing of the Republican Party. While celebrated for his Vietnam heroism—he spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, refusing the early release offered due to his father’s rank as a four-star admiral1—the Arizona senator reveled in deviating from party orthodoxy. He opposed his onetime rival George W. Bush’s tax cuts after losing to him in the GOP primary of 2000. He decried the administration’s use of torture and advocated for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. He teamed with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold to rewrite the nation’s campaign finance laws, undermining the GOP’s structural cash advantages. On a personal level, McCain could be gruff and churlish, prone to angry outbursts that left colleagues questioning his steadiness. “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, a Republican, told the Boston Globe in 2008. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me.”2
But McCain’s unforgivable sin came in 2007. Along with the “Liberal Lion,” Ted Kennedy, he led the charge in Congress to pass Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform plan—including a path to citizenship for millions of illegal residents. The fallout was devastating. McCain took a beating from the right, which, combined with the early mismanagement of his 2008 campaign, nearly ended his second bid for the White House before it began.
Even as his pirate ship of a campaign steadied, and McCain climbed back into contention, his vulnerability was all the more exposed. Republican candidates had expected the 2008 primary fight to revolve around two issues: the domestic economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no shortage of discussion and debate on these topics. Yet more visceral for GOP voters, especially those in the lily-white early-nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire, was immigration. The fear was that by offering “amnesty” to millions of foreign-born intruders, Republicans threatened to destabilize the economy while staining the American social fabric.
During a town hall meeting in New Hampshire in the late summer of 2007, McCain grew exasperated upon hearing yet another voter raise concerns about Mexican immigrants endangering her community. “Ma’am, you live in New Hampshire. We’re two thousand miles from the southern border,” the senator said. “What are you worried about, a bunch of angry French Canadians?”
McCain’s traveling staff, which due to financial troubles had been pared back to campaign manager Rick Davis and a few local organizers, howled at the remark. But as they spoke afterward, McCain warned Davis that the issue could derail his candidacy. “If we’re going to get this in New Hampshire,” McCain said, “we’re going to get this everywhere.”
The rival campaigns reached a similar conclusion and began to recalibrate, seeking tougher tones to channel the ire of their electorate. Fortunately for McCain, many of his opponents were ill equipped to attack him on the issue: Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, was a longtime friend and an immigration dove himself; former Arkansas governor and onetime Baptist minister Mike Huckabee had a similarly soft record; Texas congressman Ron Paul’s libertarian worldview called for a free flow of goods and people; and former senator Fred Thompson, like the rest of the field, lacked the viability to inflict damage on McCain.
The exception was Romney. He methodically chiseled away at McCain’s immigration record, painting him as a career politician oblivious to the plight of working Americans. The irony, in retrospect, is that Romney now realizes that the churning resentment among voters had far less to do with people coming in than it did with jobs going out—something he and other Republicans spent little time discussing, having accepted as canon the political infallibility of free markets.
“It was evident that certain industries would be substantially affected and harmed on a disproportionate basis—the auto industry, mining, metals—[and] the argument was, well, in the long run this is all good for the country, and as a nation we’ll do better,” Romney says. “I think the evidence is that as a nation we did do better. But if you’re working in an auto factory in Detroit you’re not doing better, and if you’re working in Ohio or Indiana for a car factory or a steel factory, you’re not doing better. Your life has been devastated. You had a home, a community. Suddenly the community becomes almost a ghost town. You can’t sell your home because who wants to buy a home in Lordstown, Ohio, when GM pulls out and there’s just no one else moving in? These people are very angry, and the elites, Republicans and Democrats in power, didn’t do anything about it, and didn’t really think about what the implications would be for those disproportionately affected. So, people were very angry—and continue to be angry.”
Convinced that immigration was the galvanic issue of the race, Romney didn’t limit his attacks to McCain. He savaged Huckabee as well, hoping to undermine the preacher’s down-home populism. The former Arkansas governor had fought for illegal minors in the state to qualify for college scholarships, inspired by the story of a local high school valedictorian who was brought to the United States when he was four years old. “If a cop pulls over a car for speeding, he gives the ticket to the dad, not to the kid in the backseat,” Huckabee says. “I wanted this kid to go to college and become a doctor and pay taxes, rather than just have him pick tomatoes while the government subsidizes him for the rest of his life.”
Things got especially testy in Iowa. With McCain skipping the evangelical-laden caucuses to train his efforts on New Hampshire, where he had legendarily revived his 2000 primary bid, Romney and Huckabee escalated their attacks on one another down the home stretch, each man sensing that a victory in the Hawkeye State was their only springboard to capture the party’s nomination. Romney’s operation was cutthroat: Several former staffers recall handing out flyers in Iowa with a picture of the Mexican consulate in Little Rock, Arkansas, asking why Governor Huckabee had permitted so many Mexicans to work illegally in poultry factories.
“There were a lot of things Romney’s people should have apologized for. We were constantly putting out fires that his people were starting,” Huckabee says. “I had never seen a more disingenuous campaign in trying to portray somebody who was anything but conservative as more conservative than everyone else on the stage. It was truly laughable.”
While losing ground thanks to Romney’s sustained assault, Huckabee reached into his own bag of tricks. Speaking with a reporter from the New York Times Magazine in December, Huckabee asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”3
This was the last election in which social media would not play a dominant role—and yet even still, Huckabee’s quote went viral, dumping kerosene on the fire already burning in Iowa. He quickly apologized to Romney; ten years later, Huckabee still insists the comment was born out of ignorance rather than animus. Either way, it played into a whisper campaign that sought to cast his rival’s Mormon faith in a suspicious light. And in the closing days of the Iowa race, Huckabee ran a now-famous television ad in which he spoke directly to the camera in front of a Christmas tree, framed by the corner of a white bookshelf that gave the unambiguous appearance of a cross.4 This, paired with his remark to the Times, struck no one as coincidental, given the outsize influence Christian voters held over the outcome of the Iowa caucuses.