Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (31 page)

One thing Rove’s 1999 strategy did not anticipate was the early strength of John McCain’s insurgency in the Republican primaries. McCain’s campaign was exciting and caught the imagination of the media. McCain sometimes referred to journalists, not inaccurately, as part of his “base.” Bush may never have been in as much jeopardy from McCain as he seemed to be the night he was defeated by the Vietnam War hero
in the New Hampshire primary in an astonishing 49 percent to 30 percent landslide. For if McCain’s Straight Talk Express was fueled by the fascination his breezy but edgy candor created in the media and among political independents and some Democrats, Bush’s campaign was a large and sturdy all-terrain vehicle not easily thrown off its center-right course. Despite all of his careful repositioning, the Bush campaign’s ballast was on the right: against McCain, at least, Bush became the favorite of the GOP’s conservative wing.

Even in the face of Bush’s defeat in New Hampshire, the numbers were telling. The state allowed independents to vote in either party’s primary, and they flooded into the Republican contest to support McCain, who won them 61 percent to 19 percent over Bush. Independents built the McCain landslide. McCain was so strong in New Hampshire that he carried Republicans as well, but by a narrower, 44-to-36 percent, margin, and conservatives split their ballots almost evenly, 37-to-36 percent for McCain over Bush.

McCain’s relative weakness among conservatives even in his New Hampshire stronghold explained why Bush would go on to overwhelm him in the next, decisive and also vicious contest in South Carolina. Wooing a very conservative primary electorate in one of the most conservative states in the union, Bush ran unapologetically to McCain’s right. Bush’s first stop after his New Hampshire defeat was a boisterous rally at Bob Jones University.
He was later attacked by McCain and the Democrats for visiting a college that banned interracial dating and labeled Catholicism as a “Satanic counterfeit” of Christianity. But the visit and other appeals to evangelicals (along with a variety of below-the-radar attacks on McCain) had their effect. In his memoir,
Rove explicitly asked: “Was it a mistake to go to Bob Jones?” He seemed to have few regrets, given how things turned out. “It was a big venue, a major stop for GOP candidates, and a large and enthusiastic crowd the day after a bad defeat,” Rove wrote. Fully embracing the moderate and compassionate remake of conservatism would have to wait until the base and the nomination were secure.

Thus did Bush’s campaign suggest “directly and indirectly,” as the
New York Times
’ R. W. Apple Jr. put it,
“that McCain was a closet liberal, or at least unreliably conservative.” The payoff was large. Conservatives in South Carolina backed Bush over McCain, 65 percent to 29 percent.
Not only did conservatives make up a much bigger part of the Republican electorate in South Carolina than they did in New Hampshire; they were also conservatives of a different kind. Religious conservatives made up only 16 percent of New Hampshire GOP voters, but accounted for 34 percent of the Republicans who cast ballots in South Carolina—and they went overwhelmingly to Bush.

The political to-and-fro—from center to right and then back to the middle again—is a mark of Rove’s tactical flexibility, but also a sign of what an intricate contraption his game plan was. Bush and Rove knew the damage the party’s conservative congressional wing had done to Bob Dole in 1996 and to the party’s standing with moderate and suburban voters, particularly outside the South. But they also knew that the party was more conservative than it had been when Republicans had nominated Bush’s father. This dictated corrections here and there while staying true to the right on the key questions, as Balz had noticed. It also meant that the man who would write a laudatory book about his dad in 2014 showed surprising caution when discussing his father’s legacy when I interviewed him in 1998. Asked about his family’s tradition of public service, Bush was surprisingly circumspect. “Obviously it’s a proud tradition,” he said—and then immediately put distance between his father’s achievements and what he and his brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, were doing. “I believe we have that sense of service,” W. said, “but I believe that we’re both driven as well by ideas and philosophy. That we have come to realize, particularly in our respective roles as governors, how powerful an idea can be. And that it’s important to serve but it’s also important to achieve results: To set goals, clear and measurable goals, and to lead.”

Being “driven as well by ideas and philosophy” was Bush’s polite way of saying that he and his brother understood the importance to the Republican base of
conservative
ideas and philosophy in a way their dad had not.

Bush knew from having worked with religious conservatives during his father’s campaign that they were a key force in GOP nominating politics. Led by Pat Robertson, the Christian Right had almost upended his father’s campaign in the 1988 caucuses in Michigan and pushed him into third place in Iowa. This would not happen to the son.

At the same time, the younger Bush was a corporate and business Republican by temperament and experience. He had paid $600,000 for his share of the Texas Rangers baseball team and sold his stake a decade later for nearly $15 million.
It was no surprise that he loved capitalism and his business friends, or that talk of creating “an environment in which people are willing to risk capital” would routinely cross his lips.

This Bush was acutely aware of the problems supply-side tax cutters had with his father. The son would avoid the father’s mistakes in this area, too, and made a $1.3 trillion tax cut a centerpiece of his campaign program.

Looking back in 2014, David Frum, the Bush speechwriter and future conservative apostate, explained why Bush’s strategery had its moments of real success but ultimately failed to produce the enduring conservative majority that was Rove’s goal. Frum argues that it’s important to see that Rove and Bush were primarily interested in solving a “political problem,” and “not in devising a broad new policy approach.” As short-term politics, Frum saw their approach as “very brilliant” because it did manage to “rebrand and repackage conservatism, to make it more acceptable to educated women.”

But he added pointedly: “They do not solve the policy problem.” The Bush-Rove correction was primarily “stylistic,” he said, designed to make Republicans look “less argumentative and contentious.”

Moving education to the center of his agenda may have been a substantive change, but there was no such change on taxes, where Bush offered supply-side cuts while “jettison[ing] the supply side argument” for them. As Frum observed, the Clinton surpluses allowed Bush to argue that he could simultaneously pay for his priorities, pay down the debt, and then and only then cut taxes. He could cast this as “prudent management of extra money after we do the basics.”

“They don’t win a landslide,” Frum concluded, “but it was good enough for government work.”

The problems Frum described emerged over time. But an immediate hitch with the Rove strategy emerged on election night: Bush not only failed to win a majority; he actually lost the popular vote to Gore. And Bush’s Electoral College victory was secured only through the intervention of five conservative justices on the Supreme Court who stopped the recounting of ballots in Florida. The Republicans’ harsh, personal attacks on Gore for seeking recounts—any candidate for any office would have asked for a recount in a similarly close contest—and justices who used arguments they had rejected in the past to make Bush president created a bitterness among Democrats that would never go away. Gore was repeatedly told that in trying to get an honest count, he was putting his own interest before the country’s, as if the national interest depended on allowing Bush to become president as quickly as possible. The conservative
Weekly Standard
was representative in referring to Gore’s recount efforts as
“The Gore Coup.” Bush (through surrogates, of course) was perfectly willing to be a “divider” if that’s what it took to win the recount fight. The chasm between the two parties that marked Bush’s presidency through all but the months immediately following the 9/11 attacks was opened first in Florida’s recount halls and in courtrooms, not on Iraq’s battlefields.

While publicly battling Gore during the Florida episode, Rove was privately upset that his strategy had fallen far short of his expectations of a clear and uncontested victory. He commissioned Matt Dowd, the campaign’s pollster, to undertake a study to explain Bush’s disappointing showing. Dowd’s conclusion was explosive: the true swing, independent part of the electorate—the voters who had so preoccupied Rove—had shrunk from roughly a quarter of the electorate in the Reagan years to a mere 6 percent in 2000.
The upshot, as the historian Gary Gerstle put it, was that “Bush’s pursuit of the ‘phantom middle’ of the electorate had cost him votes among hard-core Republicans, especially those who described themselves as evangelicals.”

After Dowd’s statistical revelations, polarization and mobilization became the watchwords. What Rove had called the “old paradigm” was new again. As Edsall put it,
Dowd’s memo “allowed Republican leaders and strategists to return to the kind of wedge issues and polarizing tactics that had worked so effectively in the decades following the 1960s.”

Rove did not give up on the political center entirely. But as Gerstle noted,
the strategy that emerged from Rove’s dual quest—to convert moderates and to mobilize the base at the same time—“was inherently difficult to execute, for it required balancing contradictory ambitions, broadening the party’s appeal while persuading the conservative base that the party was a vehicle for their views alone.” Even with the best strategery, it was not a feat he could pull off.

With the unpleasantness of Florida out of the way, Bush immediately set about to keeping his core campaign promises. With a Republican Congress backing him up, Bush would not allow the disputed character of his election to get in the way of his program.

His short and elegant inaugural address was pure and explicit compassionate conservatism. “America at its best is compassionate,” he declared. “In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our Nation’s promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault.”

Bush defended government’s role, but he also defined it parsimoniously, referring to its “responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools.” He then offered a nicely hedged view of the state that both pro- and anti-government compassionate conservatives could cheer. “Yet, compassion is the work of a nation, not just of government,” he said. The limiting word “just” suggested some role for government, even as the emphasis of the rest of the passage was on actors far removed the bureaucracies. “And some needs and hurts are so deep,” Bush went on, “they will only respond to a mentor’s touch or a pastor’s prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.” If liberals put government at the center of their struggle for a more just society, Bush put religious Americans at the center of his plan to create a more caring country.

A president whose administration would, in just eight months, come to be defined by an act of terrorism and two wars devoted exactly two paragraphs
in a thirty-paragraph address to foreign policy. And both were vague, including a promise “to build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge.”

His first major order of business was cutting taxes. It was not just that Bush wanted to draw a clear line between himself and his father; he was also a sufficiently conventional pro-business conservative to believe that tax cuts would boost an economy beginning to sag. Moreover, Clinton’s surpluses allowed Bush to tell citizens that he was simply giving them some of their money back.

In truth, the rationale for the tax cuts kept shifting. Initially, they were affordable because the economy was booming. Later, they were necessary because the economy was stalling. No matter what was happening with the economy, it was always time for a tax cut.

First came the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, a classic across-the-board, supply-side measure. The top income tax bracket for the best-off was cut from 39.6 percent to 35 percent; the 36 percent bracket went down to 33 percent, and so on down the line. The estate tax cut was cut incrementally over a decade and set to be repealed entirely in 2010. The revenue cost of the bill was estimated at the time at $1.35 trillion. Because budget rules limited the amount that could be added to the deficit after the first decade of a law’s life, the bill contained a “sunset” provision that automatically repealed the entire measure on January 1, 2011. It was a gimmick designed to permit a much larger tax cut than would otherwise have been possible.

Particularly as it related to the estate tax, this gamesmanship created perversities—or, as the
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman mischievously wrote,
“some interesting incentives.” As the law was written, the estate tax would be zero on December 31, 2010, but jump back up to 55 percent on January 1, 2011, a startling difference for those looking forward to large inheritances. Krugman came to refer to the law as the “Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001.”