Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (23 page)

Dole narrowly won the Iowa caucuses, with Pat Buchanan coming in a very close second. Buchanan had never stopped running after 1992. His Republican convention speech four years earlier declaring the country in the midst of a “culture war” and a “religious war” did George H. W. Bush much harm among swing voters. But it solidified Buchanan’s standing with the social conservatives who loomed large in Iowa Republican politics. Combining this with Perot-style economic nationalism made Buchanan a powerful force but ultimately doomed him in a party whose pro-business wing strongly favored free trade.

Buchanan’s strength helped Dole in the long run because it dispatched two other conservatives who might have posed a more significant challenge later. Millionaire publisher Steve Forbes ran in favor of flat taxes, while Phil Gramm was the closest thing to a Gingrich revolutionary on the ballot.

By edging out Dole in the New Hampshire primary, Buchanan caused the front-runner a temporary embarrassment, but he also fatally wounded the one candidate who might have beaten Dole and run a Clinton-style campaign against Clinton himself. Lamar Alexander, the former education secretary, had also served as Tennessee’s governor and his profile was similar to Clinton’s, a young
New South figure who had focused on improving education in his state. Yet the mood in the party created an odd set of incentives for Alexander that showed how difficult it was to offer a governing agenda: a campaign video simultaneously touted Alexander’s achievements as secretary of education—and called for the abolition of the very department he had led. A strong Alexander challenge to Dole (and, if he had won the party’s nomination, to Clinton) can be seen in retrospect as a path-not-taken for contemporary conservatism. Alexander had the potential of being a conservative modernizer, marrying Clinton’s pragmatic style to a center-right ideology. But when the votes were counted in New Hampshire, the result at the top was a three-way split: 27 percent for Buchanan, 26 percent for Dole, and 22 percent for Alexander. Having also finished third in Iowa, Alexander was finished in the campaign. There was room for one Establishment candidate. There was room for the ideological enthusiasms of Buchanan and Forbes. There was not room for an innovator.

The topsy-turvy nature of politics on the right was captured by a poignant moment in February 1996 when Dole visited the eighty-seven-year old Barry Goldwater at his home in Arizona’s McDowell Mountains. Dole was there to get Mr. Conservative’s blessing, and the scripted part of the visit went just fine. Goldwater vouched for Dole as the heir to “the Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan legacy of conservatism,” while condemning Buchanan for offering a “fearful and divisive” message.

But then, with reporters present, the two old warhorses could not resist ruminating on how much their party had changed. Dole, always irrepressible, went completely off the talking points. “Barry and I—we’ve sort of become the liberals,” Dole cracked.

Goldwater agreed.
“We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” he said with a laugh. “Can you imagine that?”

It is difficult to find a more revelatory statement about what had happened to conservatism. The shift rightward was, indeed, breathtaking.

Dole eventually secured the nomination and chose Jack Kemp as his running mate. In doing so, Dole was reaching back to one of the most powerful strands of Reaganism, but also forward to what would later become compassionate conservatism.

Kemp’s story is revealing about what conservatism had become, but also about the turn it had yet to take. No politician was so identified with supply-side economics and its vigorous tax cutting, which reinforced Dole’s call for a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut. No one was as evangelical as Kemp was about the power of rewarding “work, savings, and investment.” (I saw this in my own mail; Kemp regularly sent me good-natured admonishments when I wrote in favor of tax increases.) The Reagan tax cuts were honored in shorthand as “Kemp-Roth,” after Kemp and Delaware Senator Bill Roth.

Yet as a former NFL quarterback who had worked in the racially integrated environment of professional sports, Kemp was passionate about the need for Republicans and conservatives to reach out to African-Americans and to others in need. He had been an activist secretary of housing and urban development under Bush, giving life to a department Republicans so often treated as a backwater. He was always in search of ways to benefit inner-city residents through policies rooted in his low-tax, entrepreneurial philosophy. He pushed, for example, for the sale of public housing units to tenants, and extolled enterprise zones, where taxes would be waived to encourage investment. For Kemp there was no conundrum about tax cuts and deficits: he was plainly not worried a bit about the latter. He assumed that the high growth rates he was certain his tax cuts would promote could finance all the social spending he did not want to cut. There were epithets in Kemp’s world for Republicans who cared about deficits too much.
He’d say they were proposing unnecessary painful “root canal” economics because they were obsessive “green eyeshade” people who looked only at budget numbers. Kemp devoutly believed in the obligation to create a world without pain—and sometimes, in his rejection of trade-offs, he seemed to imagine that such a world already existed.

Kemp, who died in 2009, had only one speed: enthusiasm. He was as sunny and ebullient as any politician who ever walked the halls of Congress. He was as loved by liberals for his ferocious opposition to racism as he was by conservatives for his in-season-and-out devotion to tax reduction and entrepreneurship. Paul Ryan has honored the Kemp tradition by repeatedly speaking of him as a role model and a hero.

But Kemp’s highly vocal dedication to the interests of African-Americans
and Latinos, including immigrants, has never caught on with a large share of the conservative movement. Kemp realized this and was openly and regularly impatient with his party and his ideological comrades. This tripped him up in the sole vice presidential debate that fall with Al Gore. When asked at one point about affirmative action, Gore set a trap for Kemp by complimenting him. “I want to congratulate Mr. Kemp for being a lonely voice in the Republican Party over the years on this question,” Gore said, seemingly graciously. “It is with some sadness that I refer to the fact that the day after he joined Senator Dole’s ticket, he announced that he was changing his position and was . . . thereafter going to adopt Senator Dole’s position to end all affirmative action.”

Kemp bristled. “My position on affirmative action has been clear ever since I left the professional football career for Congress in 1970,” he insisted, and then repeated his mantra about the urgency of “extending access to credit and capital, job opportunities, educational choice in our inner cities.” He also gave one of his classic sermons on inclusiveness.
“It is so very important for Americans, white and black, Jew and Christian, immigrant and native born,” Kemp said, “to sit down and talk and listen and begin to understand what it’s like to come from that different perspective.”

What Kemp did not do—conservatives noticed this and they were angry—was challenge Gore for singling him out as “a lonely voice in the Republican Party” on issues related to race. Nor did he defend Dole, presumably his main job as his running mate. Gore’s description of his debate opponent ran too close to the way Kemp saw himself. Kemp remains a touchstone for conservatives eager to see their movement take the path toward inclusion. But his reaction that night suggested he realized how long the journey would be.

As 1996 went on, Clinton and Republican leaders in Congress—perhaps especially Gingrich—realized they might share common interests, after all, as Morris thought they would. Republicans were desperate to hold their majority, which they sensed was imperiled by the Clinton sweep that seemed in the offing. Their largest joint achievement, to the fury of many liberals, was welfare reform. The true cost of the Democrats’ failure to enact a more generous version of welfare reform when they controlled Congress became clear when Republicans passed their own, far more punitive versions. Clinton
vetoed Republican welfare bills twice, but in the summer decided to sign the third version they sent him, after a fierce internal debate that divided his administration.

The ambivalence in the Clinton camp was summarized by two cabinet officers who offered their views at a White House meeting. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, according to the journalist John Harris’s fine account of the Clinton years, said, “signing would be safer.” Then he added, “I wouldn’t sign it.” Housing secretary Henry Cisneros declared:
“My head says yes, my heart says no.” No sentence better summarized the divided conscience of American liberal pragmatism in the 1990s.

Clinton defended his decision to go along with the Republicans by noting that the bill included some $14 billion for child care. Yet he was sensitive to criticisms from his left. He cast the new law as the beginning rather than the end of a process. And he suggested that liberals should be pleased that it would become far harder to demagogue the issue. As it turned out, the politics of “makers” and “takers” that would emerge in the Obama years showed that no single bill, however tough, would ever prevent welfare, by whatever name, from being demonized.

“When I sign it, we all have to start again,” Clinton said. “And this becomes everybody’s responsibility. After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue. The two parties cannot attack each other over it. Politicians cannot attack poor people over it. There are no encrusted habits, systems, and failures that can be laid at the foot of someone else.”

Liberals were not persuaded, and their somewhat unlikely champion was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, the man who had served Richard Nixon and was the architect of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan. One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan made the classic conservative case for a liberal position. He highlighted the law of unintended consequences, a favorite neocon theme, and argued that the new system of public assistance was the very sort of social engineering the right typically warned against. “We are putting those children at risk,” Moynihan thundered, “with absolutely no evidence that this radical idea has even the slightest chance of success.”

Clinton’s centrist and New Democrat advisors were not persuaded. They defended the merits of the bill and also argued that he could not keep vetoing
Republican welfare reform bills when he had made welfare reform his political calling card four years earlier. Besides, it was an election year.

Dole never had a chance, and as the election got nearer, House Republicans geared their strategy around a Clinton victory. Gone was a bold quest for political realignment. They hoped to hang on by casting themselves as a check on Clinton.

Clinton was looking forward to winning a clear majority so he could finally rid himself of the minority president tag. It was not to be.
In the final Pew poll, Clinton had 52 percent to 38 percent for Dole and 9 percent for Ross Perot, who ran again. But Clinton’s vote was held down by a fund-raising scandal that broke in the fall involving Asian money illegally flowing into Democratic coffers. A particularly odd episode involved a fund-raising visit by Gore to a Buddhist temple in California. The Pew survey had found that among Clinton’s supporters, 7 percent said the scandal raised doubts about him. Some of them clearly defected or chose not to vote in what was an unusually low-turnout contest. In the end, Clinton won 49.2 percent to 40.7 percent for Dole and 8.4 percent for Perot, who got in the race late and said, among other things, that Clinton would be “totally occupied for the next two years in staying out of jail.”

The failure to go over 50 percent mattered not in the least to the outcome, but it did matter to Clinton. “It was a blowout victory, but the number rankled even so, and would for years to come,” wrote Harris.
“It is a reminder of the precarious state of Clinton’s fortunes for most of his term that the man regarded as the most skilled Democratic politician of his generation never commanded more than a plurality in a national election.”

The Republican vote was up only slightly from Bush’s disastrous 1992 showing. And by becoming the first Democratic president since Roosevelt to be reelected, Clinton put an exclamation point on the idea that the Reagan Coalition was dead. Clinton won 379 electoral votes, nine more than in 1992. He lost three states he had carried in 1992, Montana, Colorado, and Georgia, but picked up Arizona and Florida. Just eight years before, the vogue in punditry was to describe a long-term Republican “Electoral College lock.” Clinton picked it. Only 16 states voted Republican in both 1992 and 1996, while 29 voted Democratic in both contests. In the Electoral College, Democrats
were beginning to build what political writer Ron Brownstein would later call their “blue wall.” Clinton’s own analysis pointed in that direction. He noted that between 1992 and 1996, his margin rose, often sharply, “in less culturally conservative or more economically sensitive states.” Most of the Northeast and the West Coast fell into the first category, the Midwest into the second.

But the fund-raising scandal—along with the GOP’s closing put-a-check-on-Clinton pitch and his failure to campaign heavily for House candidates—helped the Republicans keep their House majority. They also kept control of the Senate.

The House was a closely run thing. In the popular vote, Democrats actually edged the Republicans by 60,000 votes out of 87 million cast, and they picked up a net of nine seats. There was a 3.7 percent swing away from the Republicans from 1994, and 18 Republican incumbents were defeated. But these losses were offset by 3 Democrats who lost their seats, and by Republican gains in open seats: 29 Democrats and 21 Republicans retired, and these districts produced a net 6-seat gain for the GOP.

What the elections did underscore was a continuing shift of power in the Republican Party toward the South. John F. Cogan and David W. Brady of the Hoover Institution nicely summarized what went on:

In the Northeast and Midwest the vote swing against Republican congressional candidates from 1994 to 1996 was on average about 5 percent. In terms of lost seats the swing translated into a six-seat loss in the Northeast and a four-seat loss in the Midwest. In the southern and border states the swing against Republicans was only 1 percent, and in this region Republicans picked up four seats. In the West the swing was 3 percentage points against the Republicans, and they lost three seats.
Overall, the Democrats picked up thirteen seats in nonsouthern regions, while in the southern and border states, Republicans gained four seats
for a net loss of nine seats. (Emphasis added)