Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (51 page)

In that Tea Party Summer, the lives of Mike Castle and Mick Mulvaney were set on very different trajectories as members of Congress confronted angry conservative crowds all over the nation determined to “take our country back.” The Castle and Mulvaney stories are parables of the two tracks taken by the right-wing rebellion—a revolt against Republicans deemed
insufficiently ferocious in their opposition to liberalism and all its works, and a push to replace Democrats with uncompromising champions of the right’s true creed.

A distinguished Republican moderate and former governor of Delaware, Castle turned seventy that summer and was in his sixteenth year of service in the House. Tall with an erect bearing, Castle offers just a hint of the aristocratic but keeps it well hidden behind an engaging democratic directness. Genial in the manner of the elder President Bush—the forty-first president would later hold a fund-raiser for him at his Kennebunkport, Maine, summer house—Castle had won every election he contested since 1966. The words “widely respected” were regularly attached to his name.

At the time, he seemed to be on an easy path to the United States Senate, the favorite to take the seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden. Castle had wide appeal to Democrats who, time after time, had split their tickets on his behalf. There was no reason to think they would act differently in 2010.

Castle was not accustomed to the treatment he got from voters on the evening of June 30, 2009, during a town hall meeting in Georgetown, at the southern end of Delaware. The main town in Sussex County, the most conservative in the state, it still has about it the feel of the Old South. At first Castle didn’t realize the encounter would prove to be more than a single bad night. “That was the first sign to me that something was amiss,” Castle told me. “We didn’t give much thought to it.”

For decades, town halls were occasions for members of Congress to take the pulse of their constituents and for constituents to have the sense that their voices were being heard. As their name suggests, the exchanges harked back to tidy white buildings in New England town squares where citizens engaged in the art of self-rule. Rowdy Congressional town halls were not unknown. At one particularly acrimonious session in his own district, Barney Frank of Massachusetts had famously shot back at an angry questioner:
“Look, we politicians are no great shakes. But you voters are no day at the beach either.” But such exchanges were not the rule, and they certainly were not for Castle.

The drama started when a woman rose and waved a plastic bag that turned out to contain her birth certificate. Her package, she said, was a commentary
on the identity of the president of the United States, whom she could not bring herself to name.

“I have a birth certificate here from the United States of America saying I am an American citizen with a seal on it, signed by a doctor with the hospital administrator’s name, my parents, my date of birth, the time, the date,” she said, every syllable barked out with anger. “I want to go back to January twentieth, and I want to know: why are you people ignoring his birth certificate? He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya. I am here with my father who fought and won World War II with the Greatest Generation in the Pacific Theater. My country—and I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!”

Castle was clearly flustered but tried to stay in control. “I answered sort-of matter-of-factly,” he said later, giving the gist of his response: “I haven’t seen his birth certificate, but I will tell you that I am sure that Hillary Clinton, Senator McCain’s group, the Republican Party in general all have looked at this pretty carefully. They seem to all come to the conclusion that he was born as an American citizen and I have no reason to doubt that.

“I went on for about three minutes, and they started booing,” he said. “It got pretty out of hand . . . it was pretty hellacious.”

There was a seemingly spontaneous call for the crowd to pause and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It was one set of words on which the rationalist congressman and his birther interlocutor could agree. Castle, hand on his heart, joined in.

It was, he said, “the first inkling that there was anything afoot.”

A little over a year later, on September, 14, 2010, the state’s Republicans delivered shocking news. Castle lost the GOP primary to Christine O’Donnell, a perennial candidate with no obvious qualifications for the office who grabbed hold of the Tea Party banner.
It was a sign of the impact the relatively small but committed Tea Party cadre could have that O’Donnell shook national politics by winning with just 30,563 votes—3,542 more than Castle.

The night before the primary, I visited Castle’s headquarters at Riverfront Wilmington, the classic sort of bipartisan economic development project that had been Castle’s bread and butter. The storefront was welcoming, but
only a half-dozen people were working the phones, a brave but paltry band standing against the Tea Party tide.

Later that night, I sat down with Castle at Kelly’s Logan House, a watering hole where he has gathered his closest supporters the night before every election since his first victory, for the neighborhood’s state legislative seat, forty-four years earlier. He seemed calm and confident, yet almost valedictory as he offered a prescient analysis that would explain what happened the next day.

“There are issues on which, as Republicans and Democrats, we should sit down and work out our differences,” Castle said. But Republicans who might be inclined toward the middle of the road are petrified of “quick attacks by columnists and the Sean Hannitys of the world.

“People are very afraid of crossing the line and being called Republicans in Name Only—or worse,” he said. “Not too many members are willing to stand up.

“Part of it,” he added, “is worry about primaries, and this election has shown the power of very conservative groups.”

After the results were in, I spoke with Senator Ted Kaufman, the Democrat appointed to hold Biden’s Senate seat pending the outcome of the 2010 election. His analysis was straightforward: Most Mike Castle–style Republicans in northern Delaware weren’t Republican anymore. “There was a move of moderate Republicans becoming independents, and independents becoming Democrats,” he said. The same pattern could be traced in the nearby Philadelphia suburbs of Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware counties in Pennsylvania. The forces that had driven Senator Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania the year before defeated Castle on the other side of the state line.

In November, O’Donnell went down in a landslide. In the course of the campaign, she did become nationally known, though not in helpful ways.
Her best-known public pronouncement, “I am not a witch,” came in a general election ad aimed at playing down her past comment that she had “dabbled into witchcraft.” New Castle County Executive Chris Coons, the Democrat who everyone had expected would lose a stately sort of contest to Castle, headed off to the Senate in what was one of only a handful of bright spots for his party that evening.

If Castle’s town hall experience in Delaware was an intimation of his coming political downfall, Mick Mulvaney’s visit to a similar encounter in South Carolina marked the beginning of his successful march to Congress.

You realize quickly when you meet him that Mulvaney, who turned forty-two that summer, feels comfortable engaging with those whose views are radically different from his own; he tosses in good-natured references to himself as a “right-winger” and notes that he often tunes the television in his congressional office to MSNBC. He already knows what the people on Fox will say, he explains.

A staunch conservative with libertarian sympathies, Mulvaney was Tea Party before the fact, although the businessman who graduated from Georgetown and the University of North Carolina Law School doesn’t fit Tea Party stereotypes, or at least the ones popular among liberals. A man in a hurry, he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2006, served a single term, and then won a state senate seat in 2008.

He traces his decision to run for Congress in 2010 to how he was treated when he tried to attend a town hall held a couple of months after Castle’s. It was organized by his district’s long-serving member of Congress, John Spratt.

Spratt is the Delaware Republican’s Democratic alter ego. Each represents the different form moderation took in his respective party. Both Spratt and Castle won admiration from partisans on the other side, both cared about the details of policy, both saw the search for middle ground not as a poll-tested, split-the-difference electoral ploy but as a necessary governing strategy.

First elected to Congress in 1982, Spratt rose to become chair of the House Budget Committee. This gave him many opportunities to help his district and state, but it also allowed his opponents to hold him responsible for whatever was happening in Washington on fiscal issues. In South Carolina during that Tea Party Summer, having to answer for the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act was a mighty burden.

The then-sixty-six-year-old Spratt carried an additional load. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he seemed older than his years. His deliberate South Carolina drawl, an emblem of authenticity and thoughtfulness over so many years, was ill-suited to fending off the rapid-fire attacks he would endure from an angry and energized right.

And the onslaught was furious at the September 3, 2009, town hall in
Rock Hill, South Carolina, focused on the health care proposal. Technically, critics of the law asked Spratt questions, but many of the inquiries were barely disguised denunciations.

“There are too many unanswered questions with what you’ve just described and what I’ve been reading,” one constituent fumed. “Why the rush? Why are we hurrying to get this thing pushed right away through this fall?” And the crowd exploded into applause.

“If this bill passes, will you join us in this health care?” asked a middle-aged woman. More raucous applause and cheering.

A man in a hospital shirt rose to bear witness to his view of government’s involvement with health care. “I come here today directly from work. I think my uniform speaks for itself. I have over twenty-plus years of experience inside the health care industry. At fifty-two years of age, I also have had many years of experience seeing the result of government intervention in the private sector. The result of that government intervention has been mostly the result of what I call the reverse Midas Touch. That is, whatever government touches through its control, it mostly turns to crap.”

And then a young man with long bushy hair offered the Tea Party’s message, undistilled. “Where does it end?” he asked angrily. “Universal health care? Universal housing? Universal food? Universal everything? Where does the government stop and the individual begin? We have a God-given right. . . .” The audience interrupted to cheer. “We in America are individuals. The liberties that the Founding Fathers outlined in those documents are not handouts from the government. They are things that come from within. The pursuit of happiness, life, liberty—these are things that come from the individual, not from the government.”

What was a rough night for Spratt was a decisive moment for Mulvaney. His later account of how the event pushed him into challenging Spratt is revealing of how a smart, ambitious young conservative came to see that 2010 would be a year of opportunity.

Mulvaney said he decided to go to Rock Hill because he wanted to check up on reports that such meetings were being disrupted by outsiders—“to see if they really were busing in people from Ohio or Florida, or if the people who were showing up were actually from here.”

Then came lesson one: never hassle an elected official who might run
against your boss. “I got there and there was a line to check in, so I check in,” Mulvaney said. “And the young lady asked me for my identification. And I absentmindedly reached into my bill folder and instead of giving her my driver’s license gave her my South Carolina Senate ID.”

That wasn’t good enough. “I need to know that you live in the district to let you in,” he recalled her saying. “I need to see your driver’s license.”

Although the event was being held just outside his state senate district, Mulvaney eventually got in. But he was furious over his treatment at the door, and says he was immediately struck by how the questioning was organized. Those who had an inquiry were told to put their cards into boxes labeled “for health care reform,” “against,” and “undecided.” He remembers that “98 percent” of the cards were in the “against” box but that the three boxes were treated equally.

One of Mulvaney’s sharpest memories was of a woman who asked Spratt: “How can I be sure that this isn’t going to be like everything else when government gets involved? It’s going to be lower quality, more expensive.” Mulvaney recalls Spratt’s reply this way: “Madam, I guarantee you, that when the government runs your health care, it will be cheaper than what you have now and better than what you have now.”

Mulvaney’s account of Spratt’s position on Obamacare seems somewhat tendentious. Looking at the tape available of the meeting, the closest Spratt seems to have gotten to such a response was a reply in which he asked rhetorically: “How many people in this room would want to see Medicare disbanded because they can’t trust the government?”

Nonetheless, Mulvaney’s story captures how defensive Democrats became as Tea Partiers descended on congressional town halls and put Obamacare under siege. In trying to limit attendance to Spratt’s constituents, his aides were simply responding to disruptions at comparable events all over the country.

And by then, the Tea Party had broken out of the conservative media into the mainstream. Indeed, the television networks were eager that summer to broadcast the drama of members of Congress who found themselves under siege.
“It was relatively easy for citizens to follow the town halls as media coverage was ubiquitous,” wrote Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj in their
2014 book,
The Outrage Industry: Public Opinion Media and the New Incivility.
Berry and Sobieraj cited an August Gallup poll that found 32 percent of Americans following the town halls “very closely” and another 37 percent following them “somewhat closely.” They also cited Skocpol and Williamson’s study that traced patterns in coverage by tracking Fox News and CNN. Fox News gave the Tea Party extensive attention in the spring and early summer while CNN “generally ignored the movement.” But the disruptions of August brought a torrent of CNN air time. The movement had mainstreamed itself—or, perhaps, the mainstream media did the job for it.