The Other McCain

In reporting on the financial collapse of Newt Gingrich’s campaign — which I described last night — Michael Shear of the New York Times writes:

Mr. Gingrich has struggled to raise money for weeks as he failed to win states outside of Georgia.

Look, the Georgia primary was Super Tuesday, March 6, but Newt “struggled to raise money” for more than a month before then. Here’s what happened:

• During the final three months of 2011, Gingrich’s campaign raised $9.8 million. He began January with $2.1 million cash on hand, with debt of $1.2 million, for a net balance (cash on hand minus debt) of $900,000.
• In January, Newt raised $5.6 million and spent $5.9 million. He ended January with $1.79 million cash on hand, with debt of $1.76 million. So his spending exceeded his revenue by $300,000 and he also added $560,000 to his debts. His net balance entering February was therefore only $30,000.
• The wheels fell off in February, when Newt raised only $2.6 million — a 54% month-to-month decrease — while spending $2.9 million, some of which must have gone to pay off debts, which decreased to $1.5 million, but his month ending cash-on-hand was less than his debt, so that his net balance was negative as of Feb. 29, six days before the Georgia primary on Super Tuesday.

My guess is that Newt’s fundraising peaked in mid-to-late January, between the first South Carolina debate (Jan. 16 at Myrtle Beach) and the second Florida debate (Jan. 26 at Jacksonville). The Myrtle Beach debate was widely hailed as a triumph for Gingrich, while the Jacksonville debate was one of his worst performances of the entire campaign.

Live by the debate, die by the debate. Four weeks transpired between the Jan. 26 Jacksonville debate and the final debate, Feb. 22 in Arizona. After beating Mitt Romney in South Carolina by 12 points on Jan. 21, Newt lost Florida by 14 points on Jan. 31, then lost Nevada by 29 points on Feb. 4 and never recovered.

Also: Live by the poll, die by the poll. If you’ll look at the Real Clear Politics summary of national polls, you’ll see that in the week Jan. 8-15 (from the back-to-back New Hampshire debates until the first South Carolina debate), Romney led by 16 to 25 points in four consecutive polls (Gallup, CNN, Fox and ABC), but Romney’s lead was just 3 points in a Rasmussen poll taken the day after the first South Carolina debate. Between Jan. 22-26, three polls (NBC, Rasmussen, Gallup) showed Gingrich leading by 7 to 9 points.

After Newt lost Florida, however, the bottom fell out: Having led the RCP national average Jan. 27 by 4.3 points (31.3% to Romney’s 27%), Gingrich lost more than 15 points in less than two weeks, falling to third place at 16.2% by Feb. 14. That was three weeks before the Georgia primary.

While Newt’s fundraising might have bounced up a bit between Feb. 22 (the Arizona debate) and Super Tuesday on March 6, it likely never equalled the $106,000 per day Gingrich averaged in the last three months of 2011, and certainly not his January fundraising, which averaged $180,000 per day. And there’s no telling how far Newt’s daily fundraising has fallen in the two weeks since he lost Alabama and Mississippi.

But the point — correcting the New York Times — is that things started going downhill for Newt long before the Georgia primary on March 6, and his campaign’s finances were shaky even during his best month of fundraising. His “burn rate” was over 100% in January and he actually added debt while his cash-on-hand declined. On Feb. 21, the day after the FEC reports for January were published, I said Newt’s “burn rate” was unsustainable, and it took another month before the February FEC report proved this to be true.

Three weeks from now, after we see Gingrich’s March FEC report, we’ll know exactly how deep in the red his campaign is. It is already obvious, however, that Newt ceased to be financially viable sometime in February, but managed to conceal his bankruptcy for at least three weeks. Those proved to be three crucial weeks during which Gingrich effectively delayed the consolidation of the “Anybody But Mitt” vote behind Santorum, permitting Romney to score a key win in Ohio, by less than 1 point.

Even after he lost Alabama and Mississippi on March 13, however, Gingrich spent another two weeks pretending that everything was hunky-dory — “all the way to Tampa!” — before he finally quit trying to maintain the illusion and cut his campaign staff, which was still rolling in a 10-car motorcade last week in Louisiana.

Monday, after getting back from Louisiana, I warned: “Expect to see more stories in coming days about Newt’s final meltdown.”

That was a fairly safe prediction, and didn’t take long to be fulfilled. Pretty soon, we’ll have the typical “sources close to the campaign” telling tales to reporters about the wretched excesses inside Team Newt, and not long after that (by Sunday at the latest, I’d guess), you’ll see at least one of those long, in-depth retrospective What-Went-Wrong features about the Gingrich debacle:

“It began one night in October when, after a debate in Las Vegas, the blogger Allahpundit at HotAir.com said, ‘Second look at Newt?’ . . .”

“I have no talent. I have nothing to offer.”
— Kendra Wilkinson

“Look, clearly we’re gonna have to go on a fairly tight budget to get from here to Tampa.”
— Newt Gingrich

It would be terribly mean-spirited to use the phrase “big fake boobs” as a cheap excuse to make fun of Newt Gingrich again. According to the latest Wisconsin poll, however, Gingrich is on his way to yet another fourth-place finish, while refusing to admit that his campaign has lost whatever actual political rationale it had before he lost Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

So as long as Newt wants to keep pretending that he’s still a viable candidate, the ridiculousness of his make-believe campaign — as fake as a Bunny’s boobies — is legitimate news, just like the latest idiotic quotes from Hef’s ex-girlfriend Kendra are legitimate news. The Gingrich pseudo-campaign crossed a bold new frontier of hopeless desperation in Delaware yesterday:

Monday’s event, held in a state that doesn’t vote for another three weeks, also seemed to signal a new phase in the campaign. Event attendees were allowed to take pictures with the candidate for $50 per photo. Before tonight, supporters took photos with Gingrich for free.
Charging for photos, in addition to news that the campaign canceled a trip to North Carolina, contributes to the narrative that Gingrich is struggling to stay afloat financially.

Well, no duh. Team Newt burned through $5.9 million in January and $2.9 million in February, the campaign’s expenditures averaging more than $146,000 per day for the first two months of the year.

Despite its high-rolling ways, the Gingrich campaign recorded exactly one victory (South Carolina, Jan. 21) during that 60-day period, along with two second-place finishes in Florida (Jan. 31) and Nevada (Feb. 4), third place in Colorado (Feb. 7) and Arizona (Feb. 28), fourth-place finishes in Iowa (Jan. 3), Minnesota (Feb. 7), Maine (Feb. 11) and Michigan (Feb. 28), and fifth place in New Hampshire (Jan. 10).

Not exactly the kind of strong performance you might expect from a serious contender burning $146,000 a day, you see. When we learned on March 20 that Newt’s campaign was essentially bankrupt — with $1.5 million in debt, slightly more than its cash on hand as of the end of February — it was only a matter of time before the whole phony sham collapsed under the weight of its own expensive fraudulence.

“It is hard to identify a spot on the remaining primary map where Gingrich would be a stronger challenger than Santorum.”
— Walter Shapiro, The New Republic

“Gingrich’s status as a Republican primary candidate has slipped from longshot to sideshow.”
— Molly Ball, The Atlantic

“There is no path for Gingrich. . . . His strategy has come and gone and that’s the bottom line.”
— G. Terry Madonna, Franklin and Marshall College Poll

Yeah, I’m collecting quotes like that these days, because everybody can now see what I’ve been describing ever since Newt melted down at his Feb. 4 Las Vegas press conference: The Neutral Objective Fact that Gingrich’s campaign was falling apart right in front of our eyes, even while he was on TV every night telling everybody he was going “all the way to Tampa.” The Bernie Madoff approach to “viability,” as it were.

On March 19 — the day before his February FEC report exposed his bankruptcy — Gingrich published a Red State column attacking Rick Santorum and insisting that he, Newt Gingrich, was the “only . . . candidate in this race who can offer the change our country desperately needs.”

Now Newt’s hustling folks for $50 a photo.

If he can find about 2,900 people a day to pay that much, he can afford the kind of campaign he was running in January and February, when he won exactly one primary out 10 contests.

And good luck with that, huh?

UPDATE: Wow. Talk about timing. Latest news from Politico:

Newt Gingrich is cutting back his campaign schedule, will lay off about a third of his cash-strapped campaign’s full-time staff, and has replaced his manager as part of what aides are calling a “big-choice convention” strategy . . .

Which is to say, it’s over.

And as Allah says, any suggestion that Newt will get the nomination at a brokered convention is “pure fantasy.” If Republicans go looking for a candidate who can make the case for fiscal discipline, I’m sure they’ll pick the guy who spent his campaign into bankruptcy.