Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (48 page)

Thus had the false claims that were the bread-and-butter of the Tea Party and their media allies already emerged in 2008: that Obama was a Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government, and that he was educated in Wahhabi schools. McCain’s campaign did not pick up the most extreme charges, and McCain could not be blamed for the extremists who immediately saw in Obama a chance to earn fame and fortune by concocting lies or half-truths about him. But McCain and his campaign, facing a frustrating, uphill challenge, did occasionally take advantage of such suspicions by suggesting that voters didn’t really know who Obama was, thus hinting at a sinister backstory without filling in the details. This was left to the voters’ imaginations.

One of the singular defections to Obama’s side came when Christopher Buckley, the novelist and former speechwriter for George H. W. Bush, announced he would vote for Obama (his first ballot ever for a Democrat). He referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. “You know,” William F. Buckley Jr. had said,
“I’ve spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks.”

In the end,
nothing worked for McCain, and Obama won handily with 365 electoral votes, 53 percent of the popular vote, and a 9.5 million vote majority. In addition to winning the Kerry states and all of the key swing states (including Ohio, Florida, and Virginia), he carried Indiana, which had not voted for a Democrat since LBJ won it in 1964, and North Carolina, which last went Democratic in 1976 for Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s coalition was, in one sense, the traditional Democratic alignment—most of the places and most of the social groups that had voted for Gore and Kerry also supported Obama. But it was also something very new. Obama won by attracting new voters into the electorate, particularly African-Americans and the young. Not only did African-Americans vote
in larger numbers, they gave Obama 95 percent of their ballots. Obama also drew a sharp generational line across the country. He carried 66 percent of the voters under the age of 30, up from 54 percent for John Kerry four years earlier and 48 percent for Al Gore in 2000. By contrast, voters 65 and older supported McCain, 53 percent to 45 percent.
Young voters enjoyed another breakthrough: they outnumbered older voters, which rarely happens in American elections. Voters under 30 made up 18 percent of the electorate, while voters over 65 accounted for only 16 percent. And the share of ballots cast by white Americans was at its lowest point in history. Obama was clearly the candidate of a new, younger, more diverse America that was on the rise.

What Obama did not and could not change was the ongoing polarization of the country as conservatives and liberals continued to sort themselves according to party. McCain may not have been the first choice of conservatives, but 64 percent of the people who voted for him called themselves conservative.
In 1988, by contrast, only 49 percent of George H. W. Bush’s voters had called themselves conservative. The Republican Party, in victory or defeat, was now more than ever dependent on the ballots of conservatives, and this would affect the behavior of its leaders. Moreover, as we saw in the previous chapter, Obama’s gains over John Kerry were concentrated in the more moderate or progressive parts of the country. The most conservative regions and counties resisted his candidacy, and this fact, too, would affect the choices of Republican politicians. The very nature of the Republican Party would make its leaders highly resistant to explanations of Bush’s failures rooted in criticisms of conservative policies (or the Iraq War). Holding the party together required a critique of Bush as too “liberal,” too enamored of “big government,” and too “Establishment.”

It would be equally vital to block Obama’s efforts to create a consensual approach to governing, to disrupt his efforts to reduce the power of the social issues, which had brought so many working-class white voters to the Republicans—and, more broadly, to prevent him from keeping his promise to tear down the barriers between red and blue America. If Obama managed to end the bitter political polarization that took root in the Clinton years, the right would be isolated. As gifted as Obama was, he would not succeed in getting a party and a movement to act against its own political interests.
Obama would come to see this eventually, but not before he expended a great deal of energy trying to realize his original vision. The celestial choirs, alas, were not about to sing.

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, before some 1.6 million people stretched across the National Mall before him, Obama was clearly still hoping he could call those choirs forth, and he struck a strikingly nonpartisan tone. In doing so, he deprived the elated crowd of the applause lines they had become accustomed to during his campaign.
“On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” Obama declared. “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” There were no celebrations here of partisan victories or ideological triumphs—and no commentary on the shortcomings of the previous eight years that had brought Obama to power and the country to a parlous state.

That evening, an influential group of Republicans came together over dinner to offer each other solace and to plan ahead. The fifteen or so party influentials had been invited to the Caucus Room, a steakhouse and lobbyist hangout nine blocks from the Capitol and seven from the White House, by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Fast-talking and unapologetically open in expressing emotion, Luntz was then forty-six years old and had gotten his start as an outsider, advising Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. He became famous for providing Republicans with focus-grouped phrases that could make even unpopular conservative policies sound mainstream and serious. The gathering, whose story was well told by the journalist Robert Draper, included Newt Gingrich, who had brought the Republicans back from defeat fourteen years earlier, and three House members who would soon become GOP stars: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy.

While it might be unfair to see the dinner as a celebration of the very “recriminations” and “worn-out dogmas” that Obama had denounced earlier in the day, those whom Luntz brought together had no interest in joining
the new president in putting an end to “conflict and discord” or in rethinking conservative ideology. These savvy politicians were determined to get back into power, beginning with victory in the 2010 midterm election. They knew that foiling Obama was essential to that end. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign,” McCarthy declared.
Among the strategic imperatives agreed upon at the end of four hours of talk, Draper noted, was the need to “show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies.” The determined partisans didn’t waste any time. As Draper wrote, eight days later, Cantor, the House minority whip, “would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was not at the Caucus Room caucus, but he had reached exactly the same conclusion; it was imperative for Republicans to turn Obama into a failure. He would cause a stir with a sound bite that was repeated endlessly by liberals and Democrats.
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell would say in an interview with
National Journal
published on October 23, 2010. But he had decided on this strategy long before—around the same time that Luntz’s colleagues reached their own combative conclusions.

Senator Bob Bennett, the Utah Republican who in 2010 was one of the first in his party to be denied renomination in the Tea Party purge, spoke to journalist Alec MacGillis about the Senate Republican retreat held in West Virginia in midwinter 2009, just after Obama took office. Bennett’s recollection was clear:

“Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the seventy percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time when the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.’ ” MacGillis summarized the strategy: “In other words, wait out Americans’ hopefulness in a dire moment for the country until it curdles to disillusionment.”

Obama had insisted that “there is a not a liberal America and a
conservative America—there is the United States of America.” But there
was
a conservative America. Its more assertive and extreme wing had made its feelings known on the campaign trail in October 2008. Its leaders in the House and Senate were in a minority, but they were determined not to remain in that status long, and they were in a fighting mood. Together, the grassroots right and its political leadership would make the new president’s life miserable.

“I want to know: why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?”

The popular assumption about our democracy is that when a new president is elected, he gets a “honeymoon” during which the country, including the political opposition, gives him (and, someday, her) a chance to make proposals and even enact them. In this rationalist view of self-government, a new chief executive’s program is given a chance to work. The opposition’s job is, after a decent interval, to point out where the president’s program has failed and propose alternatives. Voters then get a chance to judge an incumbent’s performance, the opposition’s response, and cast ballots accordingly.

This highly idealized view has never been fully accurate, since a party that has lost an election turns immediately—which is to say, twenty-four hours after the ballots are cast—to figuring out why it was defeated and how to win the next time. Many of the warm words opposition leaders pronounce on their newly elected adversary are typically, and mostly rightly, written off by voters as hollow niceties. Politics in a democracy never really stops.

Nonetheless, Barack Hussein Obama may be the first president in American history who never got a single day of honeymoon time.

It’s true that there was cheering (and self-congratulation) across party lines over the election of the first African-American president in the country’s history. The campaign’s rough moments when Obama’s race did seem to be a problem for many voters were forgotten. Obama himself encouraged the country to give itself a pat on the back.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” he declared in his election night victory speech before a throng of 250,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” When they spoke with pollsters, Americans seemed inclined to share in the celebration.
Obama’s 68 percent approval rating coming into office was much higher than that of nearly all other recent presidents. Only John F. Kennedy at 72 percent approval in 1961, topped him, only Eisenhower tied him, and only Jimmy Carter, at 66 percent in 1977, came close. By contrast, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush took office with the barest majority of public approval at 51 percent. Even Republicans seemed ready to give Obama the benefit of the doubt: 43 percent of them said they approved of Obama, 30 percent disapproved, and 27 percent expressed no opinion.

Yet from the very beginning of his presidency, Obama would be vexed by the peculiar political circumstances of a deeply divided country. To give the invocation at his inauguration, Obama chose Rick Warren, the popular evangelical pastor whose conservative politics had not gotten in the way of his inviting Obama to his mega-congregation at the Saddleback Church in California. Warren had endured much denunciation from the religious right because of Obama’s views on abortion, so Obama’s invitation was an expression of appreciation. It was also a sign of Obama’s determination to demonstrate his openness to theologically conservative white Christians. In the end, Obama took grief for the move from his left because of Warren’s views on homosexuality, and got little credit from his right.

When Chief Justice John Roberts botched the words of the oath of office while administering it to Obama, the president’s aides decided they simply could not let the error stand. With “birthers” already questioning the right
of Obama to be president, because they did not believe he had been born in the United States, it was obvious that some “constitutional conservatives” would question his legitimacy because he had not recited the precise words prescribed in the Constitution. Roberts was invited to the White House to administer the oath again—this time, as Obama put it, “very slowly.”

The 57 percent of Republicans who opposed him or had doubts even in that first poll would loom large for other reasons, especially since Obama’s benefit of the doubt extended neither to Republican politicians nor to the party’s activists. And Obama himself could never take a honeymoon because he had to start governing and make momentous choices involving enormous sums of money even before he took office. He was the
“Instant President,” as Jonathan Alter called him in
The Promise,
an excellent account of Obama’s first year in office.