Former aide reflects on Gingrich's fall and rise
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- On May 18, Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign appeared to be teetering on the edge of a cliff, with just one more nudge required before it would plummet into the abyss of irrelevance.
Three days earlier, Gingrich had appeared to make a fatal mistake during an appearance on "Meet the Press" when he denigrated Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare voucher plan as "right-wing social engineering."
The conservative backlash was as relentless as it was instantaneous, and much of the national media began asking aloud whether the comment would snuff the final flickers of life in Gingrich's nascent campaign, which had already seen one public relations disaster after another.
Rick Tyler, Gingrich's spokesman of a dozen years, woke up early that morning in a foul mood and proceeded to drink too many cups of coffee, as he recalls.
"We were in Iowa all that week, and we were going to event after event after event, and hundreds of people were showing up," Tyler said in an interview here on Tuesday night. "And what they were telling us back in Washington was not believable because we were having all these people show up."
Tyler glanced at his email inbox and saw a request from The Huffington Post's Michael Calderone for reaction to the latest misfortune that had befallen the campaign.
Nine times out of 10, a campaign aide in Tyler's position would have either ignored the question entirely or responded with some innocuous, easily forgettable response about how everything was perfectly fine.
But Tyler decided to take a different route.
"The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding," he responded in a seven-sentence, 138-word statement-de-force, which veered from a nebulous takedown of the "cowardly," who had "sensed weakness," to an indictment of a media machine that had, in his words, been "left exposed by their bylines and handles."
"But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces," Tyler concluded.
Tyler's confidence in Gingrich's redemption did not last long.
Less than a month later, he joined the rest of the candidate's senior staff and high-paid consultants in a mass resignation that added insult to injury for a campaign that was regressing by the day.
Now Gingrich is the front-runner for the Republican nomination, while Tyler is the spokesman for The Response -- a group whose call for a "revolution of righteousness in this country" brought it to Iowa for a prayer event Tuesday designed in part to refocus evangelical Republicans ahead of next month's caucuses.
In the months since Tyler left the campaign, Gingrich has surged to the top of the polls -- in no small part due to his anti-media diatribes that have helped win over conservative audiences on national TV.
Tyler makes no attempt to downplay his satisfaction that his own over-the-top prediction about Gingrich's political prospects has come to fruition, at least for the time being.
"I just started writing it, and it just flowed out," he recalled. "Honestly, I just thought it was a really elegant way of just saying, 'F--- you.' "
Tyler recalled with genuine fondness the subsequent media mockery that his comment to the Huffington Post generated, including a cartoon rendition of the statement that appeared in The Atlantic, a quiz in Vanity Fair that challenged readers to distinguish between Tyler's prose and lines from the 1929 war classic "All Quiet on the Western Front," and a dramatic reading of the statement by actor John Lithgow on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
"I thought he almost got it right," Tyler said of Lithgow's performance. "I would've changed a couple of the inflections, but not bad."
The Response's first prayer event last summer, which was headlined by Texas Gov. Rick Perry in Houston, drew tens of thousands and a swarm of media. But on Tuesday night, the River of Life Ministries in Cedar Rapids was more than half empty, as about 500 people stretched out their arms in prayer as they swayed to spiritual melodies and called out free-flowing responses to a preacher who shared the stage with a worship band.
None of the presidential candidates had an official presence at the event, and prominent Iowa evangelical leaders like Bob Vander Plaats also were no-shows.
The unexceptional turnout did not dampen Tyler's spirits, as he spoke enthusiastically about the group's mission.
But as much as he seemed to be enjoying his current work, Tyler sounded as if he was very much interested in rejoining the now high-riding Gingrich campaign.
"When I left, I lost my perspective," he said. "You can't serve when you lose your perspective. I've got it all back now -- I see things very clearly."
Asked directly if he wanted to be back on board the Gingrich Express, Tyler responded in a progressively assenting manner.
"I leave it open," he said. "I wouldn't rule it out. Yeah."
Tyler said that he still exchanges emails with Gingrich and some of his current campaign staffers. A spokesman for the campaign did not respond to an inquiry about whether Tyler would be welcomed back into the fold.
Echoing his former boss's famously unbridled self-confidence, Tyler said that he believes Gingrich already has Iowa "wrapped up" and will eventually secure the Republican nomination.
"I thought it was a brilliant strategy actually," Tyler joked. "Have the whole campaign implode, the press writes him off, no one pays attention, and right at the right time, he peaks, and the press can't knock him down on time."
Though Tyler's immediate future remains uncertain, his grandiose diatribe from last spring will at the very least secure him a place in the annals of presidential campaign lore. But does he have any regrets about his subsequent decision to quit along with several of his peers, who abandoned the Gingrich ship for the now foundering Perry campaign?
"I have a hard time using the word 'regret' because regret would imply that I made a mistake," Tyler said. "And I don't think I made a mistake -- I couldn't serve Newt where I was. An avalanche fell on us. I thought we were dead! Everybody else did, too. Newt dug himself out, which I should have known about Newt because he's always had the long-term view."
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