The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Representative Michael Burgess of Texas was a good example of what Boehner was up against. Burgess, an amiable ob-gyn first elected in 2002, was more conservative than most of the Tea Party freshmen. He thought Boehner should have been thrown out of the leadership after losing a combined total of fifty-four seats in 2006 and 2008, and he regretted voting with him on issues such as extending unemployment insurance, which Burgess said people in his low-unemployment district in East Texas called “FUNemployment insurance” because it subsidized good times while recipients made money off the books. He recalled more than two thousand people at a town meeting in Denton, Texas, hollering at him over Obamacare for no other reason than that he wasn’t angry enough in his opposition to it. “It’s impossible to exaggerate how conservative my district is,” Burgess said. “They’re even against a payroll tax holiday,” in part because Fox and talk radio had convinced his constituents that it was an Obama gimmick worth opposing even if it meant more money in their pocket. Boehner had to deal with more than a hundred or so Michael Burgesses every day.

  The natural leader of these and other Republicans wasn’t Boehner or even Eric Cantor, who never enjoyed the popularity in the caucus that the press assumed. It was Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee. His startling rise to power—eighteen months from backbencher to GOP vice presidential candidate—began in 2010, when the president traveled to Baltimore to take part in the House Republican Conference retreat. Obama’s televised back-and-forth with members of the House minority left the White House ecstatic. He had shown such mastery over the event that the Republicans never invited him to engage in televised dialogue again. But one member of the minority party was also delighted. Obama not only called Ryan by his first name but showed evidence that he had actually read his preliminary budget plan. When had a president ever paid the slightest attention to a powerless backbencher’s budget? Ryan’s stature rose.

  The key to Ryan’s influence was the support he built among the House freshmen. Late in 2011 pollster Frank Luntz surveyed freshmen on which colleague they would seek guidance from if they arrived on the floor without knowing what was being voted on—a common enough occurrence. Most said they would look up on the electronic board for two names: Paul Ryan and Allen West.

  Nearly every week Ryan held what were called “listening sessions” for members in the Capitol conference room of House Whip Kevin McCarthy. These PowerPoint presentations combined mastery of the de felt the full force of MPatails with a winning explanatory style. His influence within the caucus was arrived at honestly, through persuasion, not horse trading or earmarks or any of the other traditional tools of the inside game that often cost taxpayers billions. It helped that he was drawing the public spotlight, which reinforced his clout, but by renouncing any claims on a leadership post he never posed a direct threat to Boehner or Cantor. Within a few months no self-respecting member of the Republican caucus, freshman or otherwise, would be caught admitting he or she had never heard the Ryan PowerPoint. His budget blueprint became the GOP agenda, and when he revised it, the new revisions became the new agenda.

  Not surprisingly Ryan was an enthusiastic backer of the Norquist pledge. In the 112th Congress, sworn in on January 5, 2011, a total of 236 out of 242 Republicans serving in the House and forty out of forty-seven in the Senate had signed the pledge at some point in their careers. (Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Representatives Rob Andrews of New Jersey and Ben Chandler of Kentucky were the only three Democrats to do so.) When a Republican was tempted to stray, Norquist, comparing himself to a shepherd and his flock, would get on the phone and gently nudge him back in line.

  Sometimes the man David Plouffe called “the modern puppeteer of the Republican Party” wasn’t so gentle. Norquist warned Mitt Romney not to renege on the pledge and then took off after his old enemies in the Bush family. When Jeb Bush in 2012 described the pledge as “outsourcing your principles,” Norquist, an admirer of George W., said on CNN that Jeb had “stepped in it.” He threatened Jeb Bush by invoking the infamous (to him) 1990 budget deal: “There’s a guy who watched his father throw away his presidency on a 2:1 [ratio of spending cuts to tax increases] promise. . . . And he thinks he’s sophisticated by saying that he’d take a 10:1 promise. He doesn’t understand—he’s just agreed to walk down the same alley his dad did with the same gang. And he thinks he’s smart. You walk down that alley, you don’t come out.”

  From Kennebunkport a peeved George H. W. Bush asked, “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?” The contempt of a former president carried no weight. Retired politicians and two or three senators with safe seats might scoff at the importance of the pledge, but it was the only glue that held together the GOP. Everything else (except abortion) was the subject of fierce debate within the party. The simplicity of rejecting any tax increases under any circumstances gave Norquist as much power on fiscal matters as anyone in Washington.

  IN THE BUSINESS community, the solution to the nation’s budget woes seemed obvious: Simpson-Bowles, an elixir that, like a fine wine, seemed to get better with age. It referred to the advisory report of a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission that the president created in 2010. While Simpson-Bowles wasn’t an issue for the electorate at large, many American elites cited the president’s failure to endorse his own commission’s recommendations as their main reason for opposing him for reelection. This analysis—widespread among the business class—is accurate as far as it goes, but it fails to account for how radical Republicans sabotaged the balanced approach at the heart of Simpson-Bowles both before and after the cochairs announced their recommendations on December 1, 2010.

  The idea for a deficit-reduction commission to put everythingAmerican Israel Public Affairs Committeev on the table began in 2009, when Senators Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg—one Democrat, one Republican—proposed an eighteen-person panel modeled on the successful base-closing commission of the 1990s. The point was to fast-track a bill to the Senate floor for a straight up-or-down vote, no amendments. As with shuttering popular military installations, lawmakers knew this was the best way—maybe the only way—to accomplish something big and politically ugly. In this case, the ugly thing was simultaneously raising taxes and cutting entitlements in order to restore fiscal sanity.

  The Conrad-Gregg commission drew more support from Republicans than Democrats, so when Obama surprised official Washington and endorsed it at the beginning of 2010, deficit hawks celebrated. But then McConnell decided that if Obama was for it, he was against it. Seven original GOP cosponsors of the Conrad-Gregg bill, including John McCain, bowed to their leader and now opposed what they had created, fearing they would lose their seats or at least their standing with McConnell if they supported their own commission. This was astonishing and perhaps unprecedented—an effort, Alan Simpson later said, “to stick it to the president.” For nonpartisan political scientists like Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, the move symbolized the utter failure of the Republican Party to put the interests of the country above its own.

  Some Republicans said the president bore some blame too. Obama let his understandable anger prevent him from calling the minority leader for a little chat. In fact they had no contact beyond big meetings. “If the president had passed that bill, this commission report with $4 trillion in savings would have had an automatic vote in the Senate,” Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said later. “That’s what the lack of relations with the Republican leader cost Obama and the country.”

  After the Senate rejected the idea of a deficit-reduction commission with teeth, Obama established an advisory National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to make nonbinding recommendations. He named Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator, and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under Clinton, to head it. The bipartisan commission met often during 2010 and made surprising progress, with Democratic members like Senator Dick Durbin agreeing to entitlement cuts and Republican members like Senator Tom Coburn agreeing to tax hikes.
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br />   To make formal a recommendation, fourteen of the eighteen Simpson-Bowles members had to agree on it. After the midterms, this became impossible. The three GOP congressmen on the panel—Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, and Dave Camp—had been reasonable and productive members of the commission all year long but now decided to play to the new Republican House. They went from “maybe you can get our votes” to “no way,” as a Republican member of Simpson-Bowles remembered.

  Simpson, who described his commission as “the stink bomb at the garden party,” paid a visit to the Republican House members of the panel. “I want to tell you if you voted against this because you’re afraid of Grover Norquist, I have no respect for you—none,” Simpson told them. (Simpson had earlier called Norquist “the most powerful man in America—including the president of the United States.”) Ryan assured Simpson that the real reason was Obamacare, which the commission had not voted to repeal. This excuse for not embracing several trillion dollars in deficit reduction seemed to mollify Simpson. When four Democrats on the panel saw that the House Republicans wouldn’t even vote for revenue increases that came from closing loopholes and ending deductions, they too voted no. The final tally, eleven to seven, felt the full force of MPafell three votes short.

  Lacking formal backing from their panel, Simpson and Bowles nonetheless unveiled the defeated plan on December 1, 2010. It slashed discretionary spending by $1.6 trillion; saved about $800 billion from Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs; and raised close to $1 trillion in new revenue—a 3:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases. With the savings from lower interest payments, the total deficit reduction over ten years was an impressive $4 trillion. That aggregate figure and many of the commission’s specifics, from “chaining” cost-of-living adjustments to a different Consumer Price Index and capping government outlays at 21 percent of GDP, would become important debating points in the budget battles to come. But the plan itself went nowhere.

  Obama’s failure to embrace Simpson-Bowles in 2011 didn’t doom its recommendations, which had little chance of being adopted by Congress anyway. But if he had supported Simpson-Bowles, or at least used it as a basis to put forward his own plan, he might have positioned himself better for 2012. At a minimum, he would have seemed less tactical and reactive through much of 2011. If Obama and the Democrats had been braver in reforming unsustainable entitlement programs in some fashion, they might have won credit for confronting budget problems squarely instead of kicking the can down the road yet again.

  With 20/20 hindsight, it was obvious to Pete Rouse that the president should have embraced Simpson-Bowles as a starting point for his own plan, which would have laid down a marker of how to protect the needy while achieving long-term deficit reduction. But it hadn’t been obvious at the time. Obama knew that the moment he supported the commission’s recommendations, the chances of passage would drop to zero, just as they had on Conrad-Gregg and several other measures that had received bipartisan support in the past but were now DOA in the Republican House.

  Even without the president’s backing, more politicians touted Simpson-Bowles than actually supported it. When a bipartisan version of it reached the House floor in March 2012, it lost 382 to 38, with just sixteen Republicans in support. Only a few more Democrats, twenty-two, backed it, but Democrats had never been the party of deficit reduction. The conservative rejection was more instructive. It proved once and for all that tax cuts were more important to the GOP than fiscal responsibility.

  Nobody understood this better than Senator Tom Coburn, a true deficit hawk who was friendly with Obama but soon feuding with Norquist.III After Coburn revealed that he voted in favor of Simpson-Bowles, Norquist’s staff leaked word that Coburn had been two-faced during the commission’s deliberations. Coburn called Norquist and confronted him. Norquist denied responsibility for the slurs. So when Ryan Ellis, the policy director of Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, later posted a column entitled “The Two Faces of Tom Coburn” on the ATR website, Coburn was enraged. He photocopied the column, scrawled “You lied” on it, and mailed it to Norquist.

  The fight between the two men continued throughout the year. “Don’t tell me getting rid of useless $5 billion ethanol subsidies is raising taxes,” Coburn said in response to Norquist’s interpretation of the pledge. Calling tax favors “tax expenditures,” Norquist replied, is like saying that “when a mugger walks down the street and doesn’t steal your wallet, he’s giving you your wallet. It’s your wallet, not the mugger on the groundal d’s.” Norquist had no problem comparing the U.S. government to a mugger.

  If Norquist’s bathtub would never be big enough to drown the beast, at least he could look forward confidently to a Republican president and a Republican Congress to keep thts.” Bit

  5

  Fox Nation

  Around 125 million Americans would end up voting in 2012, but only 10 to 20 million of them paid much attention to politics until shortly before the election. That was the aggregate number of all cable news viewers, readers of political coverage in major newspapers and magazines, talk radio listeners, visitors to political websites, and fans of fake news programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Everyone else was visiting popular sites for other kinds of information (mostly about entertainment) and getting on with their lives just fine without Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Maddow.

  Fox News, the cable news leader in ratings, drew about a million viewers during the day and two million in prime time, which, combined, was less than 3 percent of the electorate. But ideas and stories that started on cable often leached into the rest of the culture, where positions hardened. Before the rise of Newt Gingrich, Fox News, and the new smash-mouth politics, analysts worried about the death of political parties. (David Broder wrote a book titled The Party’s Over, arguing for more partisanship.) Now all the tut-tutting from the graybeards was about the decline of civility and the demise of moderates—especially moderate felt the full force of or with fe Republicans—who could work across the aisle.

  Engaged voters increasingly inhabited parallel universes—separate political realms hermetically sealed off from one another and, too often, from the outside world. Viewers became ideological extensions of their favorite commentators, tuning in less to learn something that challenged their assumptions than to cackle at the comeuppance of their enemies and luxuriate in the warm validation of the worldview they already held. Those on the left gravitated to MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and NPR. The right watched Fox News, read the Drudge Report, and listened to talk radio. Each side included too many people who talked too much to themselves inside their respective echo chambers. By egging each other on, they made compromise seem like capitulation.

  There was some equivalence here, but the right was much farther to the right than the left was to the left, and was further cut off from the social and demographic changes reshaping the country. The same was true in media, where the right moved further away from reason and disinterested reporting. This flight from facts was intensified by institutional arrogance. After so many years feeling marginalized by what Sarah Palin called “the lamestream media,” conservatives established their own hyperpartisan media colossus, suffused with righteousness and unburdened by conventional ideas of rationality.

  But it did have conventional ideas of ratings. For Fox News, it was all business. Critics often misunderstood how its management operated. They assumed that Roger Ailes or some other senior-level conservative gave marching orders on what the line of the day would be. It didn’t work that way. Instead Fox became the repository of nearly every story conjured by different outlets of the conservative media. An article might first appear on Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, Red State, or a hundred other blogs and end up on Drudge, the most reliable indicator of the stories that viewers would see Fox anchors and their guests hyperventilating about that evening or the next day. If Ailes noticed that an issue played well, he would push for more coverage, though p
roducers, consulting the ratings, usually didn’t have to wait for him to do so. Fox thus became the validator of the conservative media entertainment complex. Its New York–based producers, most of whom were political centrists or even liberals, knew which way the wind was blowing at their workplace.

  For instance, in 2009, when Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a Fox producer (whose colleagues believed him to be nonpolitical) sent out an email saying that of the two still photos the network had of Sotomayor, the unsmiling, less attractive picture should be used on the air. Every day, producers highlighted some piece of “news” about the Obama Justice Department or sketchy terrorist threats or an obscure dopey liberal, not because it was important or necessarily true but because it advanced the conservative argument or played to the insecurities of the Fox audience. Anything emotional involving race, class, gender politics (especially strident, young, sexually active women), lazy “takers,” mindless professors, and the biased liberal media elite was likely to be a crowd-pleaser. The best stories of all involved anything that reflected badly on the president of the United States.

  Ironically Fox and Obama had one motivation in common: an eagerness to mobilize their respective bases. In Fox’s case, the base consisted of viewers, not voters. Convincing viewers to cast their ballots for Republicans was not part of the network’s core mission; the aim instead was to get viewers into the tent the4">

  “I hired Sarah Palin because she was hot and got ratings,” Ailes said on the occasion of Fox’s fifteenth anniversary.

  The Fox base rejected juicy tabloid stories if the subtext was wrong. One Fox producer had assumed that sex always sold on TV, until the story about Republican Senator Larry Craig, who was arrested in 2007 for solicitation in the men’s room of the Minneapolis airport. The story turned out to be of little interest to Fox viewers, who had no taste for watching Republicans exposed as hypocrites. Once management noticed that viewers were changing channels during news segments on the Craig story, they stopped covering it. Fox’s unscientific viewer polls were also important in determining coverage. When 2011 polls showed, for instance, that many viewers thought Wisconsin state workers received pensions they didn’t deserve, subsequent coverage came through that lens.