Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (16 page)

A few weeks after the Ann Arbor speech, I asked one of Romney’s top advisers whether the health care issue had been solved. “Listen, every candidate who ever runs for president goes and runs and they have things that they have to overcome,” he said. “Either you overcome them or you don’t. And as
long as—and I do believe this—as long as we keep our head right about that, that attitude, he’ll overcome it.”

•   •   •

Before Romney’s formal announcement, his campaign tested styles of presentation with voters in focus groups and with other research. Which Mitt would voters like best? People did not find Romney particularly appealing speaking directly to the camera. “I think they thought he was overselling,” Stevens said. “They discounted what he was saying because he was a salesman, a guy coming to your door. [They were saying], ‘I don’t care what it is, I don’t want to buy it.’” The campaign showed him to people while wearing suits or jeans or other outfits. Voters responded better to him when he was in jeans, and so for the next year and a half Romney mostly wore jeans as he campaigned.

Romney formally launched his candidacy on June 2, 2011, on a farm in Stratham, New Hampshire, owned by Doug and Stella Scamman, both of them former legislators and he a former speaker of the New Hampshire House. The day was sunny and breezy, with big puffy clouds moving across the New England sky. The wind whipped the landscape, blowing down a small tent and putting a snap in a flag planted on the grounds. The guests were served Ann Romney’s chili, and she and Mitt dished it up from half a dozen slow cookers that were spread out on a table in a field. A big American flag was hanging from the old barn, with the Romney campaign logo and slogan, “Believe in America,” on another barn. Another flag was hanging on the back of the Scammans’ 250-year-old house. Romney spoke from the bed of a hay wagon. He wore dark slacks and an open-collared shirt that billowed in the wind, which was so strong that it shook the teleprompters as he delivered the speech.

His focus was on the president, true to the campaign’s assessment that Romney would rise or fall as a candidate based on how voters saw him as a potential steward of the economy. He ignored the brewing fight for his party’s nomination and the intraparty differences that lay ahead. “A few years ago,” he said, “Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do: We gave someone new a chance to lead; someone we hadn’t known for very long, who didn’t have much of a record but promised to lead us to a better place. At the time, we didn’t know what sort of a president he would make. It was a moment of crisis for our economy, and when Barack Obama came to office, we wished him well and hoped for the best. Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America.” Obama had inherited a bad economy and made it worse, he said. He and the president had different visions for the country, more government versus less, more spending versus less, more regulation versus less. He offered a litany of economic hardship across the country—
falling home prices, foreclosures, rising unemployment, higher gasoline prices, burdensome federal debt. “These failing hopes make up President Obama’s own misery index,” he said. “It’s never been higher. And what’s his answer? He says this: ‘I’m just getting started.’ No, Mr. President, you’ve had your chance. We, the people on this farm, and citizens across the country are the ones who are just getting started.”

As with all front-runners, no matter how strong or fragile, Romney’s struggle would be a familiar one. He was starting off in an enviable position: better funded than his rivals, his message honed and sharper than in his first campaign, the confidence and serenity that come with having run before. He understood the pace of a campaign better than his rivals. But could he truly rally this new and more conservative Republican Party behind him? Or would he find himself in constant conflict over Massachusetts health care, his conservative convictions, and his authenticity? Could he stay on the course he had set? Could he run his race and not the race that his rivals would try to make him run? Romney’s family put his chances of winning the nomination at no better than fifty-fifty.

The Apocalypse Party

A
s the campaign for the Republican nomination first began to take shape in early 2011, the political focus was not on the field of prospective presidential candidates. Instead it was on Congress and the eighty-seven freshman House Republicans who had arrived in Washington as a result of the 2010 elections. The Republican Party was now the Tea Party party, for all intents and purposes, and the newest recruits were cut from a different cloth than those in preceding classes. They were conservative to be sure, but they were also uncompromising, anti-Washington, and antiestablishment in ways previous newcomers had not been—even the class of 1994 under Speaker Newt Gingrich. The Republican congressional leadership was in the grip of this new class, and the presidential candidates were paying close attention.

The mood swings among Republicans—and assessments of the party’s future—had come with breathtaking speed over the half-dozen preceding years. When George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, there was talk that Republicans were on the brink of having a durable governing majority in Washington and the states. Then in 2006, with the country souring on Bush’s leadership and the Iraq War, with GOP infighting over spending and immigration, and with a series of scandals affecting their elected officials, Republicans were suddenly out of power in Congress. Two years after that, with Obama’s historic victory, they were out of power completely in Washington. As Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, the pendulum appeared to be swinging back to the left. Republicans feared they could be facing a lengthy time in the wilderness.
In the first year of Obama’s presidency
, the author Sam Tanenhaus published a work entitled
The Death of Conservatism
. “We stand on the threshold of a new era that has decisively declared the end of an old one,” he wrote. “In the shorthand of the moment, this abandoned era is often called the Reagan Revolution. . . . The crisis on the right is the endgame of a long-running debate—not only between conservatism and liberalism but also within conservatism, and sometimes within the minds of individual conservatives—about the nature of government and society, and about the role of politics in binding
the two. . . . Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.” Tanenhaus wrote with more dramatic flair than some others, but his conclusions were widely shared. Obama’s victory in 2008 did seem to mark the endpoint of the conservative ascendance. Republicans seemed divided between their conservative and very conservative wings.

If others were ready to declare the conservative era dead, however, Obama was not—not quite, at least. In a post-election interview in December 2008, I asked him to reflect on the meaning of his victory and whether it marked an end to the Reagan era. He said Reagan had ushered in “skepticism towards government solutions to every problem, a suspicion of command-and-control top-down social engineering.” He saw that as a lasting legacy of the Reagan era and the conservative movement, starting with Goldwater. But he saw the 2008 election as an end to knee-jerk reactions toward the New Deal and big government. “What we don’t know yet,” he added, “is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government, they’re more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government.” Obama got a partial answer to that question twenty-three months after we spoke when resurgent Republicans swept back into power in the House and gained seats in the Senate in November 2010. His failure to persuade the country that he believed in smart government rather than big government had brought the Republicans back to life. But what had the Republican Party become?

•   •   •

The Tea Party movement was born early in 2009, with a rant and a string of rallies. The rant took place on the morning of February 19, 2009, on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. CNBC’s Rick Santelli started it. “
President Obama, are you listening
?” His call to arms—“We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July”—quickly went viral. Bloggers took up the rallying cry and began to organize protests. Hundreds of thousands of Americans rallied around the country on Tax Day. By summer, Tea Party groups had sprung up across the country, protesting Obama’s stimulus package, the auto bailout, what they saw as reckless spending by Washington that was ballooning the deficit and the national debt, and especially Obama’s health care reform proposal. The Tea Party became an object of fear and fascination, scorn and admiration—and misunderstanding. Journalists tried to put human faces on the movement and found a mix of emotions and intentions among those newly drawn to political activism.
Some scholars saw it
as a manifestation of the growing ideological polarization.
Others described it
as putting a label on a
preexisting, ultraconservative wing of the party.
Still others noted
that it was a reaction against both Obama and the failures of Republican governance during Bush’s presidency.

Even without a clear leader, Tea Party activists provided much of the anti-Obama energy fueling the Republican Party’s efforts to win back the House and Senate in 2010. They also acted as disciplinarians within the Republican Party. Citing constitutional principles, they demanded political orthodoxy on issues related to government spending, taxation, regulation, and the role of government and invoked litmus tests on elected officials and candidates for office. The demand for purity arose first in the fall of 2009, when Obama nominated John McHugh, a moderate Republican congressman from upstate New York, to be Army secretary. In the ensuing special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, local GOP leaders put forward as their nominee Dede Scozzafava, whose moderate philosophy matched the district’s and McHugh’s politics. A skirmish erupted within the party over whether to support her or Doug Hoffman, who was running on the Conservative Party line. Party leaders in Washington, including House Republican leader John Boehner, backed Scozzafava. So did Newt Gingrich. Sarah Palin then endorsed Hoffman, and some other Republicans looking to run for president in 2012 quickly followed her lead, among them Tim Pawlenty, then the governor of Minnesota. Scozzafava dropped out just before the election and endorsed the Democratic nominee, Bill Owens. With the GOP badly splintered, the seat, which had been in Republican hands for a century, fell to Owens and the Democrats in the special election.

The fight in New York proved to be a precursor for other internecine battles that followed in 2010 in Utah, Florida, Kentucky, and elsewhere. Three Senate seats were lost in 2010—in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware—in large part because Tea Party–favored candidates had won the Republican nomination and proved unacceptable to the overall electorate. But those losses were considered small disappointments in comparison with the overall results in November 2010. The big victory persuaded many Republicans that 2006 and 2008 were aberrations and that the country remained firmly tilted to the center-right. There was only one obstacle, and that was Obama, who they believed was determined to take the country in a radically different direction and had to be stopped.

•   •   •

The Tea Party symbolized the rightward shift in the party, and that movement would shape the nomination battle. The 2010 elections showed that the Republican Party was more conservative than it had been during Reagan’s presidency and also more conservative than it had been at the time of Bush’s
election in 2000. The grassroots movement appeared to be in control, and some elected officials joined them to take on the establishment. South Carolina senator Jim DeMint took an active role in supporting antiestablishment candidates in party primaries, and his support was eagerly sought, to the dismay of the party’s established leadership.
*
Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, exercised considerable power by asking candidates to sign pledges to voters in their states not to raise taxes. The Club for Growth, whose slogan was “Prosperity and Opportunity through Economic Freedom,” took an active role in Republican primary contests, funding television ads against mainstream candidates they regarded as insufficiently conservative on taxes and spending. Americans for Prosperity, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, worked closely with Tea Party groups from the inception of the movement to prevent ideological backsliding. Talk show hosts, from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck, berated Republicans who were straying, as they kept up a steady line of attack against Obama.

But it was more than just a shift to the right. The 2010 midterms produced a party that, at its grass roots, was more militant in its beliefs and less willing to accept compromise in its leaders.
In the summer of 2012
, the
Washington Post
and the Kaiser Family Foundation did a deep survey examining the political parties. The survey identified five different factions within the Republican Party. Three made up the heart of the GOP coalition and reflected the fissures that the presidential candidates would have to negotiate in the primaries and caucuses. The largest then was labeled “Tea Party Movement” Republicans, accounting for almost 30 percent of the party and clearly the most conservative of the five groups. Ninety-eight percent of them said they wanted smaller government, and just 6 percent said they agreed with the proposition that “the world is always changing and we should adjust our morals and our values to those changes.” Another fifth of the party was labeled “Religious Values Voters,” though ironically they were not quite as religious as the Tea Party Republicans in our survey. Another fifth was called “Old School Republicans.” They were more male than the other groups and somewhat more moderate on social issues. In that sense they were what used to be known as country club Republicans, socially moderate but fiscally conservative. On fiscal and governmental issues, their views were almost as conservative as those of the Tea Party movement group. Moderates barely claimed a toehold in the party and enjoyed no credibility with grassroots activists.

A majority of Republicans in the survey said it was more important for their
elected officials to stick to their principles than to compromise on important issues with the Democrats. The Republican freshman class that was brought to Washington with the 2010 elections reflected these sentiments, and the members were determined not to succumb to the get-along-go-along attitude they believed had affected previous freshman classes. Tom Cole, a Republican House member from Oklahoma, was elected in 2002 and went on to chair the party’s congressional campaign committee. During the 2012 campaign, he talked about the difference between his class and those who joined the 112th Congress in January 2011. He arrived in Congress at a time when “our congressional leaders were the leaders that had balanced the budget, had gotten welfare reform passed, and now we were turning to deal with this enormous challenge overseas that hadn’t been anticipated. We were doing the right things. That class was very inclined to be supportive of its leadership and its president. Fast-forward to this class. They get here and they’re like, ‘You guys are part of the problem. On your watch, we lost the majority, we lost control of spending.’”

Some party leaders could see the dangers of a coalition that was overwhelmingly white and had its strongest support among older voters. Tom Davis, a moderate Republican and former Virginia congressman who had run the National Republican Congressional Committee for several cycles, said, “We’re going to have to change what we’re doing if we want to win. If you want to be a politically competitive majority party, you just take a look at the coalition and the fastest-growing groups and voting. We got the old people; they’re dying off. They got the young people; they’re going to be voting a long time. They got Hispanics; that’s the largest immigrant group. Where are we picking up? You don’t pick it up among rural white southerners.”

But that was hardly accepted doctrine within the party. Instead, as the campaign was gearing up, the most striking characteristic about the party and its conservative grassroots was the intensity of hostility toward the president. Disgust with Obama had become a dominant strain in the party’s personality. Many Republicans, from the leaders of conservative constituencies to newly energized grassroots activists, saw the prospect of another four years of Obama in the White House as disastrous. They feared what he might do if reelected and expressed those fears in apocalyptic terms. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, put it this way when he spoke to the annual CPAC gathering in Washington in early 2012: “Our soul is at stake in this election. This campaign is a fight for our country, our values, and the freedom we believe in. All of our Second Amendment liberty, all of the rights we’ve worked so hard to defend, all of what we know is good and right about America—all of it could be lost if Barack Obama is reelected. It’s all or nothing.”

Along the campaign trail, ordinary Americans expressed the same fears
about a second Obama term, that the country as they knew it would be lost forever. I asked a Michigan Republican what he thought would happen to the country if Obama was reelected. “Additional decay and [loss of] personal freedoms and more growth of dependency on the government, which is sad for America,” he said. An Ohio voter, when I asked how he would describe what was at stake in the election, said, “My freedom. I am scared to death of Obama. He has nothing to lose if he gets reelected and I’m just terribly afraid the country will plummet and we won’t return. I don’t like his health care plan. I don’t like the debt that he’s put us in. I don’t like the control he’s trying to take over the American people. I have worked hard all my life and we made it on our own and we didn’t come from rich families and he’s too much for the entitlements, making people lazy in the United States, which can only lead to others governing us.”