But the biggest failure, he argued, was not attacking Obama early. “There is only one thing that could have made a clear early game-changing difference—and that would have been to take on Barack Obama early on directly and forcefully. . . . Imagine if she had branded him out of touch in Iowa when Obama said ‘has anyone seen the price of arugula lately at Whole Foods?’ We did not take the offensive until too late in the game.”
The other mistake was not competing vigorously for the support of progressive Democrats. “Hillary was a progressive seen by the right as too far to the left. And by the left as too far to the center,” he said. “She had voted for the war and she did take money from lobbyists. Obama successfully exploited this with his emphasis on his 2002 speech and his ‘no funds from lobbyists’ policies. She was not going to win progressive voters over without challenging him on these issues—Obama’s follow-through on the 2002 speech was open to question and he took millions from lobbyists right on through the start of the presidential race—facts that never got out there strongly enough to give pause to his progressive supporters. To win we needed to take him on and take the heat for taking him on. We needed to break through the Washington chatter and do what we needed to do—as the Obama campaign did when it faced tough problems. And we also had to reach out more and earlier to college campuses and young people, especially younger women.”
Because Obama had solid support among African-Americans, Clinton needed to win a bigger share of younger voters and of older progressives. Penn wrote, “That is where the extra several hundred thousand votes were to win this election, and once we did not take him on early with them, his edge in these groups produced his solid wins from Super Tuesday through Wisconsin.”
When the nomination campaign was over, we asked Obama about his competition with Hillary. “After February 5th, we win eleven contests in a row, by huge margins,” he said. “I mean, we’re winning by fifteen, eighteen, seventeen, and she’s just still going.” He started to chuckle. “And you’re thinking to yourself, my goodness! I give her enormous credit. The tenacity she showed was remarkable. We had great debates in Texas and Ohio. At that point, I knew how to debate and we were on our game. I was givin’ as good as I was gettin’. And yet she just kept hammerin’ away. After Ohio and Texas, the sense that, man, this is an endurance contest. . . . You’re just grinding it out.”
After he won the nomination, aides in his Chicago headquarters had plastered the pillars in the press area with front pages of newspapers from around the country marking his victory as the Democratic nominee. Every one of them had the word “history” in the headlines. We asked whether, on the night of June 3 as he claimed the nomination, he felt caught up in the emotion of making history. He told us, “I am very glad that there are people who have been inspired by this race. But I did not begin this race to run a symbolic contest. I ran to win. And what I thought, and this is the honest truth—I said this to Axelrod—having won against a very formidable opponent, my main thought was, I’d better win the general election. Because this should be a Democratic year and I beat somebody who would have been a good general election candidate, so we’d better get our act together now.”
BOOK FOUR
THE REPUBLICANS
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Looking for Reagan
“For more than twenty years every conservative I know has been looking for Ronald Reagan. Is he down the hall, around the corner, down the street?”
—Richard Viguerie, conservative activist
When they gathered for their first debate at the Ronald Reagan Pres idential Library on May 3, 2007, eleven Republican candidates were on the stage with a twelfth in the wings: four former governors, three members of the House, two senators, a former senator, and a former mayor. 16 The party was shrinking, thanks to President Bush’s unpopularity. Independents had shifted dramatically toward the Democrats in the 2006 midterms and were holding there. Pollsters found that fewer Americans were willing to identify themselves as Republicans. The party was reduced to a smaller, more conservative core—to which all the candidates were appealing.
Most in the field had no hope of winning the nomination and knew it. Even among those few who did—at the time that seemed to be only John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani—there was no dominant front-runner, certainly no one like Hillary Clinton, who then was the odds-on favorite in the Democratic race. Even experts in the party were stumped. A prominent Republican governor told us privately that it was easier to explain why each of the leading candidates could never win the nomination than to describe how any of them might win it.
For the first time in memory, the party of royalists, which always seemed to have a designated heir apparent, had no obvious successor to George W. Bush. Nor was there a consensus candidate for conservatives. Vice President Cheney had chosen not to run, the first time in decades that a sitting vice president had shown no interest in succeeding the outgoing president, though had he tried his own unpopularity would have made his candidacy problematic. One sitting governor might have filled the void: Jeb Bush of Florida had carved out a record of distinction as a state executive and his conservative pedigree was without question. But his brother’s low national esteem disqualified him. McCain came closer than anyone to being the heir apparent, and that fact alone underscored why Republicans were in such a funk, given his many battles with others in his party over the years.
The candidates were on a high stage close to the fuselage of the former Air Force One that had flown Reagan around the world and was now part of the library’s permanent display. Nancy Reagan was in the front row of the audience. Moderator Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked the candidates, “How do we get back to Ronald Reagan’s ‘morning in America’?” Through the rest of the debate, each candidate vied to identify his candidacy with the former president. “We need leadership that’s strong,” Mitt Romney said. “Ronald Reagan was a president of strength. His philosophy was the philosophy of strength—the strong military, the strong economy, and strong families.” Rudy Giuliani cited Reagan’s sunny confidence. “What we can borrow from Ronald Reagan, since we are in his library, is that great sense of optimism that he had.” Mike Huckabee said, “It’s important to remember that what Ronald Reagan did was to give us a vision for this country, a morning in America, a city on a hill.” McCain attached himself to Reagan’s desire—ultimately frustrated—to shrink government, saying if he had been president the previous six years, he would have vetoed one pork-laden spending bill after another “in the tradition of President Reagan.”
The debate symbolized the plight of a Republican Party that had fallen on hard times and was now looking back to one of its greatest heroes for inspiration. But none of the candidates could seem to find the keys to Reagan’s kingdom. As the campaign opened, Republicans, especially ardent Reagan disciples, were deeply discouraged. “I was with hundreds of conservatives last night at two different functions,” Richard Viguerie told us. “Nobody is excited about this election. They’re just down about it. Partly that’s because of the field [of candidates] out there, but it’s also because in the last ten, twelve years we’ve seen the Washington politicians abandon the conservative cause—the Reagan revolution, the Gingrich revolution of ’94. Putting everything together, conservatives are very, very discouraged.”
They had every reason to feel down. The conservative movement had been in ascendance in America for nearly thirty years. Now, after transforming American politics from liberal to conservative, the movement struggled. Just as FDR’s liberal New Deal had shaped the modern U.S. political state until the collapse of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, so the conservative movement that had affected everything now labored to reclaim its leadership position.
Viguerie spoke for an older generation of Republicans. They had thrilled to the conservative intellectual leadership of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr., whose National Review, founded in 1955, declared its mission to be one that “stands athwart of history, yelling S
top.” Viguerie remembered the excitement as conservatives rallied behind Barry Goldwater, and shared the anticommunist views of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society warning of “un-American” dangers of liberalism, socialism, “the left-wing press,” and the Warren Court. Finally, after Goldwater’s crushing defeat in 1964, he and other conservatives found their leader in Ronald Reagan. “When Reagan was elected in 1980,” Viguerie recalled, “we were off the wall, off the wall.”
Fourteen years later, Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America” campaign led the party to one of its greatest triumphs in modern political history—and sparked another, younger generation of conservatives to action. In Bill Clinton’s first midterm election, Republicans rode their antigovernment rhetoric to victory. They captured both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years, sweeping Democratic barons on Capitol Hill from power. Six years later, George W. Bush added the presidency, and for a time Republicans controlled all the levers of power in Washington and held a majority of the governorships, stirring dreams of a durable conservative majority long into the future.
Bush’s descent brought an end to those aspirations. Republicans were adrift and pessimistic about the future of their party. “Now,” as Viguerie said, “Republicans are very unhappy with the Republican president. They’re not going to get involved; they’re just going to sit on the sideline and grumble.” That was why, as Viguerie said, “for more than twenty years every conservative I know has been looking for Ronald Reagan. Is he down the hall, around the corner, down the street?”
There was no shortage of aspirants to the Reagan mantle. So eager were Republicans to begin their search for a nominee that the first cattle call and straw poll for the candidates was held in March 2006 in Memphis. The winner of that straw poll, then Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, never made it to the starting line, however. Another Republican who attracted considerable attention at the Memphis gathering, Virginia Senator George Allen, also fell by the wayside by year’s end, a casualty of the Democratic takeover of the Senate and self-inflicted wounds.
Still, the field of candidates filled out quickly. However much they differed in personality, experience, and background, from the southern governor (Huckabee) to the northern governor (Romney), from the big-city mayor (Giuliani) to the border state senator turned actor (Fred Thompson) to the independent-minded senator (McCain), each Republican candidate sought to wrap himself in Reagan. They became conservatism’s best defenders. They all had pieces of Reagan but none was the complete package. The problem was how best to position themselves at a time when the old Reagan coalition was no longer large enough or vibrant enough to elect a president. What, exactly, did it mean to be a conservative in 2008?
The confusion and disappointment among Republican voters looking for a nominee illustrated the depth of the party’s difficulties. As the campaign began, William Galston, a Brookings Institution scholar and political scientist who had been White House domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said American politics was either nearing or at the end of the decades-long conservative cycle. “You can just see the wind going out of the sails of one ship and filling the sails of the other,” Galston said. “Everything I know about American politics tells me that once these large impressions are formed they’re not easily squashed.” For candidates hoping to win the White House, the calculus was exceedingly difficult. Was America still a conservative country? Was it still center-right or was it becoming center-left? Or was the balance of power in the electorate lodged somewhere in the middle, motivated more by practicality than by ideology? What message would stir conservatives and attract Independents?
Attack on government was at the heart of Reagan’s message. Government, he would say, was not the solution. It was the problem. He lashed out at the bureaucracy (“puzzle palaces on the Potomac”), invoked memories of the Founding Fathers, and, mixing historical fact and fiction, declared, “They knew that governments don’t control things. . . . They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.” At the time of his political emergence, Reagan’s views represented a minority of American opinion. Sixteen years later, in 1980, they became the majority. His conservative themes shaped every winning Republican presidential campaign from 1980 through 2004: lower taxes, smaller government, faith in free markets, less regulation, promotion of cultural conservatism, and a strong national defense.
Over those decades, the Republicans successfully enlarged their coalition, attracting disaffected Democrats—Reagan Democrats—who were loosed from their traditional moorings. They were drawn to the conservative message of family values, law and order, and lower taxes. Race and civil rights helped shatter the Democrats’ hold on the South, beginning at the presidential level in the 1960s, and over the next thirty years the shift in the party balance trickled down to other offices.
Republicans also mobilized Christian conservatives, who after many years on the sidelines of politics became the most loyal constituency in the party. This began with the emergence of televangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, preaching a conservative message and forming the Moral Majority and then the Christian Coalition. Eventually, social and religious conservatives became a grassroots army that aided in the consolidation of Republican power in the South, which was the key to taking control of Congress in the Gingrich-led victories of 1994. Their coalition of economic, national security, and social conservatives, while difficult to manage at times, proved large enough to keep the party in power.
By the time of Bush’s election in 2000, religious conservatives were fully integrated into the party structure. They became precinct chairmen and county chairmen and dominated the apparatus of the party in states across the country. Their influence within the party reached a high point during Bush’s presidency, symbolized by Bush’s assiduous courtship of them and by the confirmation of two Supreme Court justices in 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, whom they strongly supported. Another moment that spring illustrated the power of the religious right, but in a way that would cost the Republicans. Congress passed legislation ordering federal courts to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman, after state courts had authorized doctors to remove her feeding tube. If the Roberts and Alito nominations showed the long-lasting influence of the religious right on the country’s politics, the Schiavo episode showed the dangers of overreaching. The Schiavo measure subverted conservative principles, putting federal authority ahead of state authority. Public reaction to Washington’s intervention in a family dispute was extremely negative. Inside the Republican coalition, other conservatives complained that the religious right had become too powerful for the party’s good.
Democrats were quick to say that Republicans had prospered over the years through a relentless attack on government and by mastering the art of negative politics. Both were true. Republicans successfully attacked Michael Dukakis in 1988 for the furlough program that let Willie Horton out of jail to kill again and for a veto of legislation that would have punished teachers who did not lead their students in the Pledge of Allegiance. Republicans accused Democratic candidates of being soft on crime and soft on communism. The Gingrich coalition of the 1990s consistently attacked the Democrats as corrupt and railed against the federal government and its defenders. In 2002, Republicans attacked Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from Vietnam wounds, as soft on terrorism for opposing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security because of a dispute over the organizing rights of federal workers. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth successfully attacked John Kerry in 2004, despite his decorations for valor in Vietnam. But the conservative ascendance was built on more than attack ads and hardball politics. Republicans prospered in the battle of ideas, capitalizing on public antipathy over the excesses of the New Deal and the Great Society and the sense that Democrats had become the party of cultural elites out of t
ouch with the values of Main Street America. Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign was shaped in reaction to those trends as he sought to move the Democrats back toward the center, but his presidency failed to bring about the lasting turn for which many Democrats had hoped. When historian Sean Wilentz published his history of the period from 1974 to 2004, he entitled his book The Age of Reagan.
Where Republicans had faltered, where they had crippled themselves, was in their inability to translate their antigovernment message into a governing philosophy. Gingrich’s revolution cratered over a budget fight that led to a government shutdown and over the GOP’s push to impeach Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bush’s presidency was arguably one of the most conservative in modern times, and yet when the party controlled Congress and the White House, government spending rose more rapidly than at any time since the Great Society. Republicans could not reconcile their message with the requirements of power. Bush’s policies proved too conservative and controversial for many moderates and Independents, but not sufficiently effective in exercising stronger control of the federal government to satisfy many in the Republican base.
By the beginning of the 2008 campaign, the Reagan coalition was splintering. Republicans appeared exhausted, out of ideas, lacking clear leaders, and in disagreement over their future. The Republican Party that had celebrated Bush’s second inauguration as the beginning of a long era in power was a party in disarray. In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans lost both houses of Congress. They reeled from self-inflicted wounds. GOP legislators and lobbyists went to prison on corruption charges. A House Republican was forced to resign over a sex scandal. A Republican senator attracted wide press coverage after an embarrassing incident in a men’s airport bathroom. The country’s changing demographics left the largely white Republican Party in a weakened position. Young voters were defecting to the Democrats. Hispanics, America’s fastest-growing demographic group, were shifting back to the Democrats after inroads by Bush.
The Battle for America 2008 Page 28
