The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  The insults spewed forth for three hours a day. Limbaugh repeatedly called the president “an angry black guy.” Even if most listeners viewed the twentieth century, JU Limbaugh as entertainment, the relentless message couldn’t help but sink in: “Barackblican with en

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  The Voter-Suppression Project

  It was the biggest open secret in politics: To win and keep power, Republicans felt they had to hold down turnout among young people and minorities, who tended to vote Democratic. With demographic trends moving against them, the task took on a new urgency.

  But the GOP had a problem in 2012. Many Americans saw voting as both a right and a rite, a core value and an almost sacred tradition. So Republicans needed a cover story. They embraced the convenient fiction that massive vote fraud threatened the integrity of the ballot box. This became writ within the party. Any Republicans admitting the truth—that fixing voter fraud was a solution in search of a problem—risked being ostracized. Their insecurity about attracting voters trumped their faith in democracy. Few stopped to think of the backlash should their obvious motive—voter suppression—become widely recognized among those whose rights they sought to violate.

  Suppressing the vote was hardly a new feature of American political life. In the late nineteenth century state senator seemed and early twentieth, Southern Democrats imposed literacy tests, “grandfather clauses” (citizens could only vote if their grandfathers had, which was impossible for blacks), and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise African Americans. Many of these Jim Crow–era abuses survived past midcentury, well within the living memory of black voters.

  Republicans, who thought of themselves as the party of Lincoln, didn’t take up suppression tactics until after the 1960 election, when they charged that Mayor Daley had stolen votes for John F. Kennedy in the “river wards” of Chicago. (In fact Kennedy would have won even without Illinois’s electoral votes.) In 1964 the Republican National Committee launched “Operation Eagle-Eye,” ostensibly to guard against vote fraud. Volunteers were dispatched to inner-city precincts as poll watchers. Among them was William Rehnquist, a future Supreme Court justice, who was alleged to have taken part in efforts to discourage African American voters in Phoenix in the early 1960s, though he later denied it.

  Over the next two decades, a combination of the Voting Rights Act and the decline of big-city political machines led to much cleaner American elections. As reformers in both parties stamped out most genuine vote fraud, all that remained were scattered anecdotes that, even if true, amounted to less than 0.001 percent of ballots cast.

  But the GOP was determined to use “ballot security” to suppress the black vote. Since 1982 the Republican National Committee has been operating under a federal consent decree (stemming from racist ballot suppression in New Jersey) that prevented the party from backing efforts by its activists to police the polls. When the RNC tried to get the consent decree lifted on the peculiar grounds that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder were black, a U.S. District Court judge called the argument “offensive” and the Supreme Court agreed.

  By this time a new and more pervasive form of voter suppression was making headway. The twenty-first-century efforts to restrict the franchise came not from racists or grubby aldermen but from extremely wealthy men who saw a chance to bend the political system to their will.

  THE MODERN ERA of corporate power in the political realm began in August 1971 with a thirty-four-page “confidential memorandum” to the Chamber of Commerce entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The author was Lewis F. Powell Jr., a prominent Richmond, Virginia, lawyer who two months later would be appointed by President Nixon to the Supreme Court. Powell began by arguing, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” The attack from college campuses, the pulpit, the media, liberal politicians, and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader was “quite new in the history of America.” Business, Powell wrote, had responded, if at all, by “appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem.”

  Powell, who today would be characterized as a moderate Republican, was right that American liberal discourse in the early 1970s routinely denigrated business and ignored the importance of entrepreneurship. But it wasn’t accurate even then that “few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman [and] the corporation.” Nowadays, thanks in part to the movement that Powell kicked off, the opposite is closer to the truth.

  The Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart s small memorandum’s recommendation of a “more aggressive attitude” toward generating conservative books, articles, institutes, and television programs bore fruit beyond anything Powell could have imagined. It led, directly and indirectly, to the creation of more than a dozen conservative legal foundations and think tanks. William Simon, treasury secretary under Nixon, convinced the Coors, Scaife, and Olin families to establish the Heritage Foundation in 1973. This kicked off an effort to subsidize the spread of conservative ideas that dwarfed anything on the left. Within a decade of its founding in 1982 as a student organization at prestigious law schools, the Federalist Society and its impressive alumni had already moved the American legal system in a conservative direction. Two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, alone funded 150 programs at colleges and universities to promote their libertarian ideas.

  Over the years Heritage helped fuel conservative domination of the intellectual debate, with some significant ironies. It was at Heritage in the early 1990s that a health policy expert named Stuart Butler first popularized the idea of a “mandate” on employees, requiring them to buy health insurance. This was seen as a conservative alternative to a government-run health care system and a way of dealing with the “free riders” who received treatment at hospitals without paying for it. Politicians ranging from Hillary Clinton to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would eventually adopt Heritage’s proposal.

  The transition of these institutions from right-leaning think tanks to political outfits was best exemplified by the case of the Cato Institute, founded in 1974 by Charles Koch and Edward Crane to spread libertarian ideas. After the death of Chairman Emeritus William Niskanen in 2011, a court fight erupted over control of the foundation, with Crane charging that Koch was trying to turn Cato into “some sort of auxiliary of the GOP.”

  It was a cofounder of Heritage, Paul Weyrich, who in 1980 first argued to Republicans that the long-term demographic trends of the country were moving against them. Weyrich addressed a conference in Dallas headlined by Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. “I don’t want everyone to vote,” Weyrich told the crowd. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

  In the 1970s Weyrich was also a cofounder, with Representative Henry Hyde, of one of the most influential, and least known, of all conservative organizations: the American Legislative Exchange Council, a bland-sounding outfit originally called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. ALEC sponsored forums that brought together corporate lobbyists and state representatives to write model bills that could be used to advance conservative causes in state capitals. Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms, John Kasich, and many other prominent conservative politicians have been associated with ALEC, which worked closely with donors to state campaigns. The bylaws of ALEC’s closed-door meetings gave corporate lobbyists an equal vote with legislators on which model bills to introduce, with the practical effect that Republican-controlled state legislatures were often rubber stamps for corporate interests. Thousands of cookie-cutter state laws on everything from tax cuts and deregulation to the “Stand Your Ground” legislation that figured in the 2012 case of Trayvon Martin (an unarmed teenager shot and killed in Florida) began as ALEC model bills. In 2002 ALEC began to explore ways of changing state election laws to help Republicans and their corporate backers.

  AS REPUBLICANS SOUGHT to curtail turnout, Democrats were busy making the country’s cha
nging demographics work for them. In 1993, after Clinton was elected president with the help of first-time voters, Democrats passed the “Motor Voter” bill, which required states to offer voter registration at departments of motor vehicles. While the Democrats’ partisan motive for expanding turnout was as plain as the Republicans’ partisan motive for restricting it, the effect of Motor Voter and other such bills was to expand democracy without any discernible rise in corruption.

  After Bush v. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that shut down the Florida recount of the 2000 election and assured Bush’s victory, Democrats became convinced that Republicans had stolen the election. It took years of recounts and investigations, but proof finally arrived in 2004, when it turned out that a list of fifty thousand ex-convicts purged from voter rolls included about twenty thousand voters who weren’t felons, half of them black in a state that was just 15 percent African American. The improperly purged names added up to more than enough votes to give Gore the presidency. The experience was seared into the psyche of Democrats—especially minority voters—in ways that would prove relevant in 2012.

  The Florida recount put pressure on Washington to upgrade election procedures, but the 2002 Help America Vote Act did little more than banish punch-card ballots and the infamous chads that hung from them. Karl Rove, by then President Bush’s chief political adviser, saw an opening. With attention focused on fixing the system, he gave speeches and interviews claiming that the real problem was vote fraud. Bush’s new attorney general, John Ashcroft, placed the issue near the top of his agenda and hired a savvy conservative activist from the Florida recount, Hans A. von Spakovsky, to head the voting rights section of the Justice Department—an insult to civil rights activists who trusted Justice to guarantee voting rights, not restrict them. Several career staffers quit in protest after von Spakovsky, a member of the Federalist Society, overruled them in backing a photo ID law in Georgia (later invalidated by a judge as “akin to a Jim Crow–era poll tax”) that became a national model for conservatives.

  From the White House, Rove pushed career prosecutors to win convictions for vote fraud. When U.S. attorneys in New Mexico and Seattle appointed by Bush couldn’t make cases, they were fired for disloyalty, a politicization of law enforcement so blatant that it led Rove to be subpoenaed by Congress.I After five years of investigations and prosecutions, the Bush Justice Department acknowledged in 2007 that no evidence existed of a widespread problem with vote fraud. In a nation of more than 200 million citizens of voting age, fewer than fifty people were convicted of voting illegally, almost all of whom offered convincing explanations that they had done so unintentionally. In the climate of prosecution created in Washington, however, several were rewarded for their confusion with prison or deportation.

  This did nothing to dampen enthusiasm on the right. Von Spakovsky, whose nomination by President Bush to be a member of the Federal Election Commission was derailed in 2007 by Senator Barack Obama, cowrote a book with the conservative Obamacare and v journalist John Fund that claimed vote fraud by convicted felons delivered Minnesota’s Senate seat to Al Franken in 2008. Because Franken’s race against Norm Coleman was so close, it was exhaustively investigated by authorities in Minnesota, who found “zero evidence of fraud.” Nonetheless von Spakovsky helped spread the word among Republican state legislators in 2011 that they should introduce “election reform” bills that could take effect before the 2012 election.

  Fox News helped. After the 2008 campaign, the network blew up small, isolated voting irregularities in Milwaukee and South Bend, Indiana, into national “scandals.” When two members of the New Black Panther Party showed up at a polling place in Philadelphia, not a single actual voter there complained of intimidation. But the name of the group and the fears it conjured in viewers fueled weeks of the stories in the conservative media. Fox News reporter Eric Shawn launched a weekly “Voter Fraud” segment that publicized any random accusation, even if minor and unconfirmed. Stories of forged ballot access petitions, on which volunteers would list celebrities or phony obscene names as a goof, were covered on Fox as major crimes, even though no referenda made the ballot or ineligible persons voted as a result. The shenanigans of a media provocateur, James O’Keefe, brought down the left-wing ACORN organization for alleged offenses unrelated to vote fraud. But in 2008 ACORN had self-reported a few bogus registration forms it collected (with names of cartoon characters and NFL players put on the forms by petition passers), which added to the GOP’s momentum.II So did Norquist’s baseless claim that Obama campaign workers had promised Democrats they could get jobs in the post office if they voted for Obama in 2008.

  Norquist, von Spakovsky, and Fund then began arguing with only minor anecdotal evidence that vote-by-mail systems adopted by thousands of counties across the country led to widespread vote fraud. Their examples of absentee vote fraud, which Fund called “the easiest and most pervasive kind,” made their arguments seem to be backed by facts. But because absentee ballots in many states favor Republicans (who are more likely to travel out of town on Election Day on business), most of the hundreds of “election reform” bills introduced by Republicans in state legislatures in early 2011 did little to change the rules on them.

  Without good evidence of vote fraud convictions to bolster their case, ALEC and the Republicans pushed hard on von Spakovsky’s idea of requiring photo IDs. On the surface, showing ID before voting seemed reasonable; the idea enjoyed strong public support from voters required to provide proof of identity to cash checks or get on an airplane. But the only reason to move hastily to change the law would be if there were widespread evidence of voter fraud, which there wasn’t. Lawyers for Republicans could come up with only nine anecdotal cases of in-person voter impersonation (the only crime that photo IDs guard against) in the entire country in the past quarter-century, none of which led to prosecution.

  Nonetheless, in 2008 the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board upheld Indiana’s state photo ID requirements. The Court’s reasoning was that because the IDs were free, they didn’t constitute an unconstitutional poll tax. Although the state of Indiana failed in its brief to produce a single case in the history of Indiana of in-person voter impersonation, ALEC and other backers of photo ID laws invoked the d had long since earlyecision to advance their argument in state capitals. After Crawford the Democrats miscalculated. Instead of using their majorities in several battleground states to compromise on commonsense photo ID bills, Democrats dug in against any changes in those laws, a decision that almost sank them when so many states went Republican in 2010.

  IN 1998 A quiet movement began that would change the way much of the country voted. That year Oregon, under a visionary secretary of state named Phil Keisling, became the first vote-by-mail state in the country, a move that boosted participation in presidential elections to more than 80 percent of registered voters. Whether citizens voted by mail or in person, the convenience of voting early spread quickly to hundreds of counties in dozens of states. After 2004, when John Kerry lost Ohio and thus the election at least in part because of extremely long lines at polling places, voting by mail and voting early became a priority for the Democratic Party, and many Republican election officials agreed that it was the right thing to do for harried voters who often couldn’t get time off from work on Election Day. By 2008 nearly a third of the American electorate voted early. Because Democrats more often took advantage of the convenience of early voting, the change helped Obama in Ohio, Florida, and other states.

  Then came the midterms. With so many statehouses and state legislatures suddenly in Republican hands, it wasn’t hard to roll back the small d democratic victories of Democrats. Starting in early 2011, the GOP, often using ALEC model bills, launched quiet voter-suppression campaigns in forty-one states. It was the most systematic and pervasive effort to discourage voting in almost a century. GOP state legislators introduced 140 bills to restrict voting, and by mid-2012 sixteen states had approved legislation, including
the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Through the beginning of 2012 there was little publicity about these suspiciously timed efforts, but Democrats were under no illusions about what was happening. The White House believed the GOP was trying to rig or at least tilt the election. Bob Bauer, the president’s longtime attorney, called it “a remarkable piece of concerted execution.”

  Not every state enacted every provision in the ALEC model bills, but the similarities in many of the measures were striking. It was an open secret within the GOP that Republican governors were racing to see who could be the first to sign far-reaching election “reform.” Republican secretaries of state, egging each other on at conservative conferences, recognized that their ticket to higher office was proving to donors and party officials that they would use their power to hold down Democratic turnout.

  The GOP’s goal was to require state-issued photo ID; to curtail voter-registration drives (which register minorities at twice the rate of nonminorities); to cut back on early in-person voting; to repeal “same-day” (Election Day) registration, used by many college students; and to intensify citizenship challenges against those suspected of being ineligible to vote. All of these changes were aimed at suppressing turnout by the minorities and young voters who make up the base of the Democratic Party. Almost all of the bills were effective in the 2012 cycle, which, as former RNC chairman Michael Steele later acknowledged, further confirmed that the goal was less to improve the system over time than to defeatPension Benefit Guaranty Corporationv the president and other Democrats.