Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (34 page)

Krauthammer came back to this idea again and again, writing in 2003:
“We now pay the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. . . . The chief aim of the Clinton Administration was to make sure nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road.”

The eagerness of conservatives to blame Clinton for 9/11 was matched by their resistance to any effort to hold Bush to account for what happened—or even to explain why American intelligence had not raised more alarms about the threat. As the journalist Brian Montopoli reported, Vice President Dick Cheney called Majority Leader Tom Daschle in January 2002, while the Senate was
preparing closed-door hearings on intelligence failures before 9/11.
Cheney warned Daschle that if Democrats called for wider and more open hearings, they “would be met by accusations that they were hampering the war on terror.”

The call for a bipartisan commission to investigate the attacks was championed by three of the least partisan members of Congress, Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman and Representative Tim Roemer, a moderate Indiana Democrat. Their effort gained ground when the families of those who met their deaths on 9/11 joined the call for an independent inquiry.
But even the families could not, initially at least, move the administration off its opposition, with Cheney telling Fox News that an investigative commission was “the wrong way to go.” The administration’s stonewalling eventually enraged McCain. “No one has lost their job, no one has been even reprimanded, nothing has happened as a result of Sept. 11,” McCain said.
“Unless responsibility is assigned, then we can’t cure the problem.”

Eventually the commission was set up—but only after the 2002 midterm elections.

As 2002 went on, Bush and the Republicans were more and more willing to use national security issues as a political cudgel. They supplemented the old attacks around social issues, race, rights, and taxes with the charge that Democrats were soft on terror. It was a made-to-order issue in Rove’s post-2000 effort to mobilize the conservative base and another way in which Bush’s move toward moderation in the 1998 to 2000 period fell by the wayside. When Democrats challenged Bush on any aspect of the war on terror, they were beaten back with accusations that they were undermining patriotism at a moment that required unity.
Cheney denounced “incendiary” commentary by the opposition as “thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war.”

A window into Rove’s thinking about how the war on terror might transform American politics was a congratulatory letter he wrote to Melinda Lawson, an academic historian, about her book
Patriot Fires,
which described the new sense of nationhood forged during the Civil War. Lawson wrote of “
the partisan construction of national identity” and of how Republicans in Lincoln’s day stoked the “the tendency to conflate Republicanism with
loyalty and Democracy [as the Democrats were often called then] with treason.” Lawson quotes George Julian, the influential Indiana Republican congressman, who said in 1863: “Loyalty and Republicanism go hand-in-hand throughout the Union, as perfectly as treason and slavery.” It’s possible, of course, that Rove, a lover of American history, simply admired Lawson’s fine work on how the Civil War changed the way in which Americans understood their country. But it seems likely that in the post-9/11 atmosphere, Rove also saw how a new national trauma and Bush’s leadership could have political effects comparable to those left behind by the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.

The gradual escalation of partisan warfare continued through 2002, but reached an entirely different level when the administration began to make the case for the war in Iraq that summer. There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected with the 9/11 attacks, and he was a known foe of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Many leading Republicans with close ties to the elder President Bush were dubious of the Iraq venture. They included, privately, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, publicly, Brent Scowcroft, the first president Bush’s top foreign policy adviser and one of his closest friends.
Scowcroft took to the pages of the
Wall Street Journal
on August 15, 2002, to issue a prophetic warning under the unambiguous headline: “Don’t Attack Saddam.”

Arguing that “there is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations” and that “Saddam’s goals have little in common with the terrorists who threaten us,” Scowcroft undercut the administration’s central rationale for war. A war against Saddam, he said, “would not be a cakewalk,” “undoubtedly would be very expensive,” and would have “serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy.” Any campaign against Iraq, he added, “is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.”

The public was ambivalent.
While 56 percent of Americans told ABC News pollsters they supported military action to depose Saddam, a quarter of those supporters fell away when asked if they would still take this view in the face of opposition from America’s allies.

That September, I spoke with a number of Republican members of Congress who had quiet but profound doubts about the impending war. “My sense from talking to people here is that the case hasn’t been made,” said Representative Dave
Camp, who represented a solidly Republican district in central Michigan. His constituents, he said, were
“concerned about a go-it-alone strategy, and that included going it alone without the American people.”

Representative Thomas Petri, whose Wisconsin district was also loyal to the GOP, said his voters had expressed “concern about whether we know what we’re doing or how we’re going to do it.” That both Camp and Petri used the word “concerned” nicely captured the mood: most of the country was not ready to take on the president, but they were not persuaded that he was on the right path. The observations of these Republicans were consistent with the message of the Gallup poll on Afghanistan a year earlier: Americans wanted a tough response to terrorism, but they were reluctant warriors.

The rise of the war issue made the midterm elections more bitter—and sowed confusion and division among Democrats. When Bush went to Congress that fall for approval of a resolution to put the country on a path to war, he made Iraq and the terror issue central to the campaign. It was a marked departure from his father’s approach. The first President Bush delayed asking Congress for authorization to go to war with Iraq over Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 until after that year’s midterm elections. He thus gave away political advantage, but in the process allowed for a nonpartisan debate that fostered national concord. The second Bush would gain the political upper hand, but at significant cost to national unity later.

George W. Bush moved on two fronts that fall. He sought a strong United Nations resolution that called for new weapons inspections but also threatened force if Iraq refused to comply. At the same time, he asked Congress to authorize military action. The first move pushed aside criticism that Bush was trying to go it alone without allies or international sanction—something his administration had earlier claimed it could do. The second put Democrats on the spot.

And they quickly split. The war resolution won strong support from Representative Richard Gephardt and Senators Joe Lieberman and John Edwards. All three would eventually seek the 2004 Democratic nomination,
as would Senator John Kerry. Kerry also supported the resolution but criticized the administration’s “hasty war talk” and stressed the need for support “from the region and our allies . . . for the far tougher mission of ensuring a future
democratic government after the war.” Its other backers included Senator Hillary Clinton, whose decision would haunt her politically. Strong opposition came from outside the ranks of potential presidential candidates, including Senators Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone. Although few paid much attention at the time, another opponent was a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama.
“What I am opposed to is a dumb war,” he said in a speech at a Chicago antiwar rally on October 2, 2002. “What I am opposed to is a rash war.” He upbraided “armchair, weekend warriors in this administration” who would “shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Democratic senators Carl Levin and Dick Durbin sought a middle-ground solution that would give Bush support in his effort to rally the world against Saddam without having Congress authorize war. Levin and Durbin resisted conflating the question of whether the United Nations should require coercive inspections to determine if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction with a direct congressional endorsement of armed conflict. Democrats, they said, were perfectly ready to strengthen Bush’s hand at the UN. But they insisted the decision to go to war should be debated separately, and later.

Levin and Durbin showed courage and ingenuity, but they failed to slow the rush to war. For his part, Bush himself mocked those whom he characterized as saying, “I think I’m going to wait for the United Nations to make a decision.” He went on: “It seems like to me that if you’re representing the United States, you ought to be making a decision about what’s best for the United States.
If I were running for office, I’m not sure how I’d explain to the American people—say, ‘Vote for me, and oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I’m going to wait for somebody else to act.’ ”

Such comments turned Iraq into a 2002 campaign issue, embittered his opponents, and left Bush with no safety net when his Iraq policy went off the rails later. But in the short term, Bush was successful, both in getting the war endorsement and in winning the midterms.

The war resolution passed the House on October 10, 297 to 133.
The Senate passed it a day later, 77 to 23. Only seven Republicans, six House members, and Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island opposed it. (Chafee later left his party to become first an Independent and then a Democrat.) The
Democrats were sharply split. In the House, 82 Democrats voted in favor of the resolution while 126 voted against it. Senate Democrats divided 29 to 21 in support of the resolution. The newly independent Jeffords also voted no.

In the face of the most important decision of Bush’s presidency, the political opposition found itself speaking with many voices. Some Democrats supported Bush on principle, but many later regretted not speaking out more forcefully against the war. They would harden their stances later. These feelings of guilt and regret—combined with anger among grassroots Democrats at the party’s failure to stand up against Bush—would be immensely helpful to Barack Obama in 2008.

The impact on the campaign trail was plain. Most Democrats were very cautious that fall, inclined to follow the advice of political consultants who said their party’s strategic task was to get the war debate out of the way so the campaign could “move back to the economy.” Republicans held the opposite view, but for the same underlying reason: they hoped the war and terror issues could move the discussion
away
from a sagging economy—and corner their Democratic opponents.

There were a few Democrats who were willing to campaign against the war, the most notable being Paul Wellstone. Up for reelection, he took his case against intervention to Minnesota’s voters with his characteristic verve and energy. I visited with Wellstone on October 23 at a campaign rally on the University of Minnesota campus in Crookston, near the North Dakota border. He was buoyant (he was almost always buoyant) because his principled vote against the war brought him far more admiration than opposition.
“I thought maybe that vote would be it, and I don’t think it is,” Wellstone told me that day. “I’ve never had so many people come up to me and be so respectful even if they didn’t agree.” This was partly a point about Iraq policy but also a tribute to the benefits of being a conviction politician.

Two days later, Wellstone was dead. He and his wife, Sheila, were killed in a plane crash while on another campaign swing. His tragic passing gave an already larger-than-life figure special standing in his party. His campaign song, “Stand Up, Keep Fighting,” became a rallying cry for progressives unhappy with their party’s caution in the face of Bush’s policies. Wellstone’s death would also cost the Democrats a Senate seat. When a Wellstone
memorial service came to look like a campaign rally—it had not been planned that way—Republicans who had only recently been attacking Wellstone attacked the supposed politicization of his death. In the election for Senate on November 5, Republican Norm Coleman narrowly defeated former vice president Walter Mondale, who had been drafted to stand in for Wellstone.

More typical was the contest in Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District, one of the election’s premier battlegrounds, where the Republican strategy played out exactly as the GOP hoped it would. I visited the district that fall and it was where I first met Chocola, the Republican candidate against Jill Long Thompson, a Democrat who had served in Congress from a nearby district before she was swept out in the 1994 Republican landslide.

In light of how unpopular the war in Iraq became, what Chocola told me then is striking: he was counting on the war issue to win him the election, he said, and would focus his criticism on Long Thompson’s votes in Congress against the first Iraq war and defense spending, as well as her endorsement by a peace group.
Bush campaigned on Chocola’s behalf, which, the candidate said, “sent the message loud and clear that there is only one candidate who would stand with the president consistently.”

During that trip, I met up with Long Thompson at an afternoon tea for voters at the stately Queen Anne Inn in South Bend. She was very clear about the issues on which she’d contest Chocola—and about where she wouldn’t go. “It’s on domestic issues,” she said; “it wouldn’t be international.” Judging by the tenor of the questions from the generally sympathetic group of voters who turned out to meet her, they were looking for criticism of Bush’s war plans. She didn’t oblige. When asked about Iraq, she began by noting her husband’s twenty-three-year career in the military and the reserves, called for UN participation in war, but stressed her support for Bush. She explained her answer to me later.
“I think people are very uneasy about a potential strike on our part,” she said, “but we are very patriotic in the Second District, and we will support our president, and we will support our troops.”