Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (54 page)

Liberals felt under siege, not only from the Republicans but from Obama himself. At a news conference a little over a month after the election catastrophe,
Obama infuriated liberals—especially those in Congress who had lost their seats, partly because of their loyal support for his program—by calling them “sanctimonious” and arguing that they longed for the “satisfaction of having a purist position and no victories for the American people.”

For those who accused him of negotiating with “hostage-takers” in the Republican Party, Obama was unrepentant. “In this case,” he said, “the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.” Writing in the
Washington Post,
Perry Bacon and Scott Wilson captured the
fears such words inspired in many quarters of the Democratic Party.
“Acceding to the demands of hostage-takers is generally viewed as unwise because it risks encouraging future hostage-taking,” they wrote. “Democratic critics fear that is precisely the cue Republican leaders will take from this standoff—threaten this president and win.”

Liberals wondered who Obama thought he could count on when conservatives tried to repeal the health care law, forced cuts in programs he supported, and investigated his administration down to the last pencil, even as the right’s hard core continued to denounce him as an un-American Muslim socialist. Many Democrats were deeply suspicious of signals coming from White House aides casting the president as a centrist problem solver. It looked like a new iteration of Bill Clinton’s old “triangulation” strategy.

But Obama seemed just as frustrated. He complained that many liberals were so upset that the health care law failed to include a “public option”—a Medicare-like alternative to private health insurance plans—that they overlooked the fact that
“we got health insurance for 30 million people.” In one sense, Obama’s frustration was understandable. At the time, Congress was meeting in a lame duck session that would prove to be one of the most productive in history. Obama and progressives won some major victories that December, including repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, a major step forward for the rights of gays and lesbians. The START Treaty with Russia was ratified, a food safety bill was passed, and so was a bill to provide free medical treatment and compensation to the first responders to 9/11.

The budget deal disappointed many Democrats because Obama acceded to Republican demands to continue the Bush tax cuts for another two years. But some liberals supported the compromise since it included many provisions they saw as essential to keeping the recovery going. For roughly $100 billion to the rich, Obama got $197 billion in benefits he sought for the nonrich, including a thirteen-month extension of unemployment benefits. He also won $146 billion in business tax cuts to push job creation, plus an extension of a $280 billion middle-class tax cut. Many Democrats insisted that the Republicans would have eventually given in on relief for the middle class; the administration was not so sure.

At the time, I spoke with a House Democrat who was an Obama
supporter. He backed the budget deal Obama had made, but his reasoning was hardly a vote of confidence in him or his administration, one reason he asked that his name not be used.

“If I thought they were ready to go twelve rounds on this next year, I’d kill it in a heartbeat,” he said. “But if they’re going to keep leaving the ring after the first punch, this is the best alternative we’ve got to keep this recovery going and helping those who are hurting the most.” There was no sanctimony or purism here, just a sober and melancholy realism.

Obama was unrepentant on the need to give ground in order to win ground, and at that December news conference, he invoked his race. It was something he rarely did in public, a sign, perhaps, of how agitated he was beneath his customary calm.
“This country was founded on compromise,” he insisted. “I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding. And, you know, if we were thinking of ideal positions, we wouldn’t have a union.”

But what would be the price of compromise, especially with opponents whose most energetic partisans saw compromise as a form of selling out? Then and for years to come, majorities of Democrats and Independents would tell pollsters that they favored compromise even at the cost of giving some principle. Substantial majorities of Republicans, on the other hand, would express a preference for sticking to principle. All negotiations were thus destined to be asymmetric.

The new House Speaker, John Boehner, proved early on (though not later) to be a master of a negotiating style Richard Nixon had characterized as “the madman theory.” The approach induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down in the hope of avoiding the wreckage your rage might let loose.

In Boehner’s variation, the Speaker cast himself as the reasonable man fully prepared to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown. But, he would explain calmly, he also had
to satisfy a band of “wild-eyed bomb-throwing freshmen,” as he characterized his new House members in a
Wall Street Journal
interview, comparing them fondly to his younger self.

Thus were negotiators for President Obama and Senate Democrats forced to deal not only with Republican leaders across the table but also with a menacing specter outside the room. As “responsible” public officials,
Democrats were being asked to make additional concessions just to keep the bomb-throwers at bay. The bomb-throwers obliged by treating the idea of a government shutdown not only as a normal part of politics but also as an outcome devoutly to be wished for.
At a gathering of several hundred Tea Party supporters in April, Representative Mike Pence, then a Republican fire-eater from Indiana (he would become somewhat more soft-spoken as the state’s governor), declared that if Senate Democrats refused to accept “a modest down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, ‘Shut it down!’ ” What counted as “modest,” of course, was in the eye of the beholder, but Pence had the crowd with him. It erupted, lustily and joyfully: “Shut it down! Shut it down!” There was contempt in the way the crowd shouted the word “it,” a reference to the government of the United States.

With the Senate still under the control of Democrats, the early Republican game plan seemed normal, if very conservative. Republicans sought $61 billion in budget cuts and got $38 billion in a deal passed in early April. The Democrats were having to play on Republican turf, but they had been able to moderate Republican demands and structured the package so most of the cuts were in later years, minimizing the immediate drag on the economy. The concessions bothered 59 of Boehner’s “wild-eyed” bomb-throwers who voted against the deal—and kept up the pressure on him.

The right wing got something more to its liking the next week when the House passed budget chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal plan that proposed to cut $5.8 trillion over the next decade.
“Yesterday we cut billions,” a triumphant Representative Kevin McCarthy declared. “Today we cut trillions.” The most eye-catching part of the plan (and the part Democrats highlighted) was its proposal abolishing the existing Medicare system over time and replacing it with government support for private insurance premiums. But at least as consequential were the plan’s deep cuts in Medicaid, which covers the poor and the disabled, and in other safety net programs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that nearly two-thirds of Ryan’s cuts came in programs for low-income Americans.

Ryan’s goal, moreover, was not simply to balance the budget but to slash taxes, especially on the wealthy. His design included $2 trillion in tax cuts, including a reduction in the top income tax rate to 25 percent. That would have
been the lowest rate since the Hoover administration. Those earning over $1 million a year, according to the Tax Policy Center, would have received an average $265,000 tax break, on top of the $129,00 reduction they were already enjoying courtesy of Bush’s tax cuts.

The Ryan budget, even more than Tea Party rants, was a sign of how far to the right the Republican mainstream had moved. Ryan was in no way a political outsider and his temperament was not that of an angry extremist. On the contrary, he was an affable midwesterner with a sunny disposition whose entire career was built inside the conservative end of the Washington establishment. He had started out as a twenty-two-year-old staffer for Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten and, after Kasten’s 1992 defeat, became a speechwriter at the blue-chip conservative think tank Empower America, working for movement luminaries Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett. He wrote speeches for Kemp’s 1996 vice presidential campaign, and also served as legislative director for Kansas senator Sam Brownback, who would later push through the Tea Party program as his state’s governor. Ryan returned home to Wisconsin in 1997 and spent a year at the family construction company preparing to run for Congress. He was elected in 1998 at the age of twenty-eight. Except for that brief sojourn at the family business, Ryan was entirely a creature of Washington.

But this also underscored the problem facing Republican leaders, especially Boehner. The older-style Republicans were now in broad agreement with the farther reaches of the right on policy. If government spending was as monumental a problem as even mainstream Republicans said it was, shouldn’t the tactics used by the leadership reflect the urgency of the cause? And if the leadership was simply content with passing a budget through one house and then going back to politics as usual, why shouldn’t the ardent Tea Partiers view them as engaging in a thinly disguised sellout? There was also this: if Barack Obama was as corrupt and dangerous as so many in the party’s base devoutly believed, how could the Republicans engage him in a normal give-and-take?

There was thus an inevitability to how John Boehner ended up creating a crisis over the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, a crisis he had said shouldn’t happen.
“At some point it’s clear to me that we have to increase the
debt ceiling,” Boehner said in late May on CBS’s
Face the Nation
. Raising the debt ceiling had never been an issue before. It had been raised repeatedly under Reagan and both Presidents Bush. In the past it had been, at worst, an opportunity for much political posturing. The party out of power would let the party in power do the dirty work, but without obstructing the distasteful but necessary task. The notion that the country would assume debt and then somehow walk away from it had never occurred to anyone as a usable political lever.

It did in the summer of 2011, with serious Republican politicians claiming that there were worse things than defaulting, and that drastically reducing the debt was well worth the risk of doing so.

Boehner and Obama seemed at various points determined to negotiate their way to a solution. In early July, a Boehner-Obama effort to reach a deal was killed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. There was a second try, involving Cantor this time, in which Obama, as was his wont, moved more than halfway to accommodate Boehner. Obama initially seemed to bless a deal that included $1.7 trillion in spending cuts in exchange for $800 billion in revenues. Even that modest amount of revenue was to come not from tax rate increases but through “tax reform.” And much of the revenue granted by Boehner as a “concession” would have come automatically at the end of 2012 with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts if Obama simply sat tight. It was an astonishingly good deal for the Republicans and would, in fact, have deprived Obama of many of the talking points about taxes and economic justice he would later use in his 2012 campaign.

The deal fell apart for a variety of reasons, though it was never clear that Boehner could have sold it to his conference in any form. Two days after the Boehner and Obama sides seemed close to a deal, a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Six, with three members from each party, came up with an outline worth $3.7 trillion in deficit reduction, including $2 trillion in revenue. Knowing that Democrats would wonder why he had been unable to come up with more revenue than a bipartisan Senate group, Obama asked Boehner if he could find some new revenue in the Senate plan and add it to their deal.

When Jack Lew, Obama’s budget director, finally briefed Senate Democrats
on what Obama had been cooking up with Boehner, their anger was explosive. They were furious at being left out of the discussions and what they saw as paltry revenue concessions being exchanged for much larger spending cuts. Obama, knowing any deal would need some Democratic support, eventually asked Boehner for $400 billion more in revenue, bringing the total to $1.2 billion. Boehner said the number was impossible, and the talks collapsed.

It was a revealing episode. To begin with, it’s astonishing that with unemployment still over 9 percent, the government was obsessed not with restoring job growth but with cutting government—and with very long-term plans that had nothing to do with the immediate crisis. The impact of a radicalized Republican Party was to pull the center of the nation’s political conversation far from anything that might once have been recognized as moderation or problem solving. An abstract goal related to the size of government took precedence over the issues that preoccupied Americans at their kitchen tables—employment, wages, mortgages, and defaults. And Washington’s centrist elites, themselves focused on long-term deficit reduction, became effective allies of the Republicans by reinforcing their message that deficits mattered most.

Obama was complicit in allowing the Republicans to set the agenda, but he was also responding to a genuine fear. At the time, I regularly asked White House officials why they were so forthcoming in their negotiations with the Republicans. Why were they willing to play on the Republicans’ turf and thus reinforce their arguments about the primacy of deficits when Obama and his party knew that economic growth was the more pressing issue? Again and again, I got the same answer: Obama was absolutely convinced that House Republicans were willing to take the country over the cliff. Obama felt he had to do whatever was necessary to prevent default and the resulting economic catastrophe.