A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America
Page 24
I wish I could say I was amazed by this. But so many political consultants are in these races for themselves, not for the people. It is another problem endemic in Washington, D.C.—whose political leaders are captive to consultants very much like the ones Dewhurst retained.
As serendipity would have it, the day of the Republican runoff was also the late Milton Friedman’s one hundredth birthday. Having begun studying Friedman at the Free Enterprise Institute nearly thirty years earlier, I could only begin my acceptance speech that evening by noting that it was fitting and perhaps even providential that we could celebrate this victory on what would have been “Uncle Miltie’s” hundredth birthday.
Three months later, it was incredibly gratifying to win the general election by 16 points. Not only that, but we had earned broad-based support across the state, including winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Texas is the only majority-minority state in the country that is solidly Republican, and the Hispanic support we received far outpaced the shellacking Republicans were getting nationally.
Indeed, it was hard to celebrate too much that night because Republicans were getting pummeled nationwide. Mitt Romney was losing the presidential race to Barack Obama, and Republican Senate candidates all over the country were losing, too. The only three Republicans newly elected to the Senate in 2012—myself, Jeff Flake, and Deb Fisher—all won with substantial support from the tea party, a fact often missed by the D.C. pundit class.
In the coming years, the Beltway consultants would continue to insist that the way to win Senate campaigns is to nominate more and more moderate, establishment candidates, even though 100 percent of them lost in November 2012. These were of course the very same arguments used to nominate Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008, and Romney in 2012. All are good, honorable, decent men, but all three lost. Somehow the fact that you win elections by drawing distinctions, by giving the people a clear reason to show up and vote, has still not penetrated the political consciousness of Washington, D.C.
The cognitive dissonance I had found among the establishment class in Texas was nothing compared to what I would discover in the nation’s capital.
* In his office Fielding had two of the coolest pictures I had ever seen. One was of himself on Air Force One standing next to President Reagan, who held a bumper sticker reading, “My lawyer can beat your lawyer.” The second was of himself with George W. Bush, on Air Force One, holding up the very same bumper sticker.
CHAPTER 8
Into the Beast
The accusation was telling. Only to Washington insiders could building a successful multimillion-dollar business from scratch, raising a seemingly well-adjusted and devoted family, and spearheading a military-style rescue of employees being held in an Iranian prison be considered “inexperience” for national office.*
H. Ross Perot was a man with his own failings, to be sure—he was the first to admit that—but he had built a tremendous business empire from nothing. He found himself on the cover of Fortune magazine and was one of the wealthiest men in America.
With pugnaciousness and grit—his major issue was the federal debt—the five-foot-five, silver-haired Perot had managed a Herculean feat: He was running neck-and-neck and in some instances leading national polls for the presidency of the United States against two seasoned political veterans. His third-party run challenged the two-party system in a way it hadn’t been since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. As you might imagine, the two-party system didn’t like that very much.
In the Athletic Complex on the campus of St. Louis’s Washington University, Perot stood beside the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush, and his Democratic challenger, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, for the first of three presidential debates. The two men onstage quickly attacked Perot on the audacity of deciding to run for president when he hadn’t in effect paid his dues in politics. “I think one thing that distinguishes [us] is experience,” said the sitting president.
Asked to respond, Perot offered a typically forceful, truthful answer that turned the question on its head.
Gesturing to the president and Governor Clinton, Perot shrugged. “Well, they’ve got a point,” he said in his high-pitched Texas twang. “I don’t have any experience in running up a four-trillion-dollar debt. I don’t have any experience in gridlocked government where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everybody blames everybody else. I don’t have any experience in creating the worst public school system in the industrialized world, the most violent, crime-ridden society in the industrialized world.
“But I do have a lot of experience in getting things done. So if we’re at a point in history where we want to stop talking about it and do it, I’ve got a lot of experience in figuring out how to solve problems, making the solutions work, and then moving on to the next one. I’ve got a lot of experience in not taking ten years to solve a ten-minute problem. So if it’s time for action, I think I have experience that counts. If it’s more time for gridlock and talk and finger-pointing, I’m the wrong man.”
It was a rare feat indeed for a businessman to outshine politicians who talk for a living, but Perot managed it. At one point, the diminutive Texan who was mocked in cartoons for his outsize facial features joked that if someone had a better idea for reducing the deficit, “I’m all ears.”
With bracing, often self-deprecating humor and a mastery of statistics and pie charts, he brought to the country’s attention a usually arcane topic that most politicians liked to avoid: a huge federal debt created through excessive spending and overpromises by both political parties. By the time the debate was over—Ross Perot was considered its winner by a Texas mile. Perot might well have been the first third-party candidate elected to the White House had he not dropped out of the race, and then in a confusing move dropped back in again.
Perot had also created a true grassroots movements of former Reagan Democrats and Independents fed up with Democrats who believed spending was the answer to most problems and Republicans who seemed to say one thing to get elected and then did another. The roots of what became the tea party movement had its first shoots back in 1992.
On January 3, 2013, at 12:10 p.m., I was sworn in to the U.S. Senate. As I stood in the well of the Senate and took my oath of office, I couldn’t help but think back to my dad, fifty-six years earlier, washing dishes in Austin. If someone had told that teenage immigrant that five decades hence, his son would be sworn in as a U.S. senator, he would have found it impossible to imagine. And yet, as I stood with my hand on our family Bible, there was my dad in the gallery looking down. Tears were running down his face. It was a powerful moment in our family, and yet one more illustration of the incredible promise of America.
But it didn’t take long for it to become clear how different Washington was from Texas. I had been in the Senate for a couple of weeks when I had one of my first instructive encounters with the mainstream media. I was at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington and the encounter was with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, a doyenne of the Washington press corps and wife of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. As I understood it, Mitchell was a fixture at the countless Washington dinner parties where politicians and media bigwigs dress up in tuxedos and gowns, pal around, gossip, and basically act like governance is just an entertaining game played among the insiders. President Obama is said to hate such events for that reason—it’s one of the few things on which he and I agree.
A few days before the dinner I had appeared in a debate of sorts on Meet the Press with New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, one of the most partisan, quotable, and effective politicians on the Democratic side, discussing the administration’s effort to raise the debt ceiling. Schumer took issue with Republicans like me who were urging that the Congress take action on spending restraints before voting again to increase our ever-growing federal debt. He argued that it would be terrible to risk the full faith and credit of the U.S. economy by, as he put it, holding the debt limit increase “hostage.”
“I support the concept,” Schumer replied haltingly, somewhat flummoxed. To date, he has not signed on to the bill. Nor is he likely to. What he hid from viewers was the fact that Democrats weren’t really interested in protecting America’s obligation to its creditors as much as they wanted to keep spending on programs to please their constituencies without any limits or reductions.
Indeed, every time a debt ceiling vote arises, Democrats can be counted on to raise the specter of a default on our debt. Of course, no responsible president would ever allow a default. And, regardless of what happens with the debt ceiling, there are ample revenues to service the debt; each month, federal revenues are roughly $200 billion, and interest on the debt is typically $30–40 billion. But the way the Democrats try to avoid spending reforms, and keep racking up trillions in debt, is by threatening a default that, they ominously suggest, could trigger a financial apocalypse. That’s why we should pass what I call the Default Prevention Act, which is what I urged Schumer to support. Take default off the table so the debt ceiling can be used to force meaningful spending reforms and actually fix the problem.
After my appearance, Mitchell had gone on the MSNBC program Morning Joe to say she was “shocked”—shocked—that I dared confront Schumer. Indeed, she was offended. As she herself later explained, she was not offended that Democrats like Schumer were proposing raising more taxes—“raising revenues” was Schumer’s preferred D.C. lingo—on struggling Americans. Nor was she offended that we were doing nothing serious to tackle the debt we were handing to our kids and grandkids. Or that I had made a point against Schumer that he struggled to counter. No, she was offended because she believed I’d violated the Washington rules of decorum. My offer to join together on legislation preventing a default was, she declared, “rude” to poor Chuck Schumer—a man who doesn’t strike anyone as easy to bruise verbally.
So at the Alfalfa Club dinner, as she stood next to her husband, Greenspan, I approached the legendary Andrea Mitchell with a smile. “I have to say, you shock quite easily,” I said to her.
She looked baffled. It was clear she had no clue what I was talking about. I suppose hers were just words to fit a time slot—an easy slight against a Republican on a liberal news network—and so didn’t merit her recollection. But in fact she did remember. Many months later, to buttress her claim that the “Meet the Press” exchange had been “shocking” and “rude,” she noted that Schumer had engaged in the usual banal niceties during the segment, calling me “the gentleman from Texas” and “my friend, Ted” even though he didn’t know me at all. Most freshman senators, she pointed out correctly, are preoccupied with “making friends” and “going along” with the crowd. I didn’t do that, which is supposedly what made me “rude.” This fit nicely into the Democratic Party’s effort to portray tea partiers like me and my colleagues as brash hotheads who cannot govern a country.
She did have a point in one regard. Words matter. Typically, I like to call people a friend when they’ve been, actually, a friend. But in Washington everyone is labeled a “friend,” especially when you’re about to put a shiv in his or her back. Frankly, I doubt whether Senator Schumer really thought I was much of a gentleman, either. His view of constitutional conservatives and probably Texans in general seems substantially less charitable.
I soon learned another lesson in D.C.—this too involved the idea of “friendship” with leading Democrats.
Days after being elected to the Senate, I came to Washington, D.C., for a weeklong orientation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asked each of the freshmen to visit in his office. By the time I was elected, the Democrat from Nevada had been a creature of the Senate for twenty-four years. A former boxer with a wiry frame, he was not what anyone might describe as overly chatty.
When we met together in his resplendent office in the U.S. Capitol, we engaged in some pleasantries. And then I made a go at being direct. I said, “Harry, you and I are going to disagree on a great many issues, but you have my commitment right now that number one, I will never lie to you. And number two, I will never disparage you personally or impugn your integrity.”
Now, in the real world, most people might have responded with something in kind. At the minimum, an acknowledgment. Maybe even a grunt. Not Harry Reid. He just sat there, staring at me with blank eyes behind his wire-framed glasses, the beginnings of a wry smile forming at the corners of his mouth. I couldn’t help but wonder if the wily and partisan Democrat was thinking, “What a poor sap! We’re going to eat his lunch!”
I had a more pleasant encounter with another prominent Democrat. After my swearing-in in the Senate chamber, we had an unofficial reenactment in the historic Old Senate Chamber. As president of the Senate, Vice President Joe Biden was there, scrappy as always and surprisingly charming. He flirted with my mother, then in her late seventies. When I mentioned to him that Mom had been born in Delaware and had hundreds of cousins there, Biden grinned and said, “Oh, they probably all voted for me.” I’ll confess my mother laughed back and said, “You’re probably right.”
The vice president also leaned over to pick up my youngest daughter, Catherine, who was then two years old. She wailed at the top of her lungs, and he replied, “Now, now, Catherine, it’s okay. . . . It’s a Democrat, but it’s okay.” We all laughed.
Later that week, that quote from the vice president appeared in the notable and quotables section in Time magazine, and Senator Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, kindly sent a copy to Heidi and me. When Catherine is married (hopefully many, many years hence) I intend to pull out that article at her wedding and point out that even at age two, she had the good sense to know to scream loudly if a Democrat reaches over and tries to pick you up.
In my early months in the Senate, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made a concerted effort to befriend me. Although wary, I was glad to reciprocate. In January, Mitch invited me and the other freshman Republicans to join him on a trip to Israel and Afghanistan. It was a productive trip, and particularly meaningful to sit and visit with our soldiers serving in combat. And he invited me to be his personal guest at the Alfalfa Club dinner—where I met with the aforementioned Ms. Mitchell.
When President Obama came to have lunch with the Republican senators that spring, Mitch’s staff called my office and asked me to ask the second question of the president, on Obamacare. It was unusual for a freshman to have that opportunity, and I appreciated it.
McConnell gave me all the committee assignments I wanted—Judiciary, Commerce, Armed Services—and a committee assignment I hadn’t even asked for—a spot on the Senate Rules Committee, which predominantly consists of more senior senators. He reasoned, correctly, that I would be an ally on the committee against unconstitutional campaign finance reform. Democrats were expected to make yet another run at it, and Mitch and I share a passionate distaste for restricting the First Amendment rights of American citizens. We believe in free speech and know that most congressional efforts to regulate campaign finance spending are far more about protecting incumbents than avoiding corruption.
Shortly after I was elected, Mitch also offered me something that seemed rather unusual for a freshman senator who hadn’t even taken office. He asked if I would join the Republican leadership as vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).
I was surprised, because I had been critical
of the Committee’s past practice of opposing conservatives in Republican primaries. It had a miserable record—siding with Bob Bennett against Mike Lee; Trey Grayson over Rand Paul; Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey; and Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio. Today, Senators Lee, Paul, Toomey, and Rubio are among the brightest stars in the Republican Party, while two of their vanquished opponents—Specter and Crist—left the Republican Party altogether.
When I mentioned to Mitch that if the NRSC had had its way, every one of those four conservatives would have lost, he promised that the committee would stay out of primaries from here on out. He said he wanted to bring the tea party and the grassroots together with the GOP. I agreed with that goal and based on that commitment—to stay out of primaries—I signed up.
For the first couple of months as vice chairman of the committee, I worked to help the Republican leadership raise money and support. But it soon became clear that the NRSC had every intention of supporting incumbents—in primaries—against conservative challengers across the country. And even in open races, it actively urged donors to give money to candidates opposing tea party conservatives. That didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t formally resign from my position, but I stopped asking donors to support the NRSC; I didn’t agree with what they were doing in primaries, and so I wasn’t willing to ask others to fund those efforts. It was yet another lesson: Assurances in Washington come with expiration dates.
Like all freshmen, I spent my first six months in the Senate temporarily assigned to cramped, windowless basement offices. That was fine—I was thrilled to have any office at all—but it revealed something about the glacial pace at which the Senate works. To most folks, it would seem pretty simple math: You have 100 senators and 100 Senate offices. In the private sector, you’d sit down in a conference room and in a couple of hours, assign every office.