The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  THE BALLOONING DEFICIT under Obama should have been a potent campaign issue for the GOP, which had once stood squarely for fiscal responsibility. But that party was dead.

  The Republicans’ lack of seriousness about reducing the deficit was demonstrated at an August 11 debate in Ames, Iowa. Following up on a question from the conservative columnist Byron York about what ratio, if any, between spending cuts and tax increases the candidates might find acceptable, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked, “Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes, you’d walk away on the 10-to-1 deal?” Romney and his rivals all raised their hands, and only Huntsman later regretted it. The moment was a TV gimmick—would-be presidents need not raise their hands like schoolchildren—but it came to symbolize how far Republicans had drifted from reality. The tourniquet the GOP fashioned for itself on taxes was beginning to cut off its circulation. Jack Kemp, the late congressman, HUD secretary, and 1996 vice presidential candidate, had tried to teach Republicans to wrap tax cuts in a gauzy bandage of compassion. The advice hadn’t stuck.

  The bloodlust of party activists began to seep through. At the Reagan Library on September 9, Brian Williams asked Perry about the 234 executions carried out in Texas during his time in office, “more than any other governor in modern times.” After the audience cheered this dubious distinction, Williams wondered what Perry made of the applause. Neither Perry nor any of the other candidates took issue with the cheering or thought to explain, as Reagan often did, the care that should attend each wrenching decision.

  Republicans had long been the party of military strength, but the candidates (only one of whom, Perry, was a veteran) proved themselves insensitive to those serving in the armed forces. At the Fox News–Google debate in Orlando on September 23, Stephen Hill, a gay soldier risking his life in Iraq, asked a question via a YouTube video about the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy repealed by Obama. The audience booed Hill, then cheered Santorum when he said coldly that he would reimpose the ban on gays in the military. No one onstage disagreed or thanked Hill for his service. After the debate, Santorum and Gary Johnson, a libertarian candidate allowed to take part that night, were critical of the booing. Romney said nothing.

  Perry learned the hard way in Orlando about the consequences of showing compassion in a GOP primary. Already slipping in the polls, he came under attack from Romney for a Texas policy providing tuition for the children of undocumented workers. “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they have been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. He quickly learned that heart doesn’t sell within the the twentieth century, 41PaGOP. Boston and a couple of pro-Romney super PACS went hard at Perry on immigration and his numbers tumbled.

  This was a critical juncture of the campaign. Romney could have easily brought Perry to earth with ads targeting his 2010 book, which called Social Security, a hugely popular program even within the GOP, “a Ponzi scheme.” Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, later admitted, “We could have beaten Perry with just Social Security.” But at the time Romney was “flipped out” by Perry, as one senior Romney official said. Stuart Stevens figured they should go to Perry’s left on Social Security and to his right on immigration: a pincer effect to finish him off. The harsh tone on immigration was shortsighted. With the DREAM Act suddenly on the table, even Gingrich took a more compassionate view than Romney of how such children (soon to be dubbed “Dreamers” by the Democrats) should be treated.

  At a CNN debate on October 22, Perry counterattacked by mentioning that Romney employed illegal aliens to do yard work at one of his homes. Stevens and his partner, Russ Schriefer, looked at each other in surprise. They hadn’t prepared the candidate for an attack dredged up from the 2008 campaign. When an agitated and transparently political Romney said, “So we went to the company and we said, ‘Look, you can’t have any illegals working on our property, I’m running for office for Pete’s sake, we can’t have illegals,’ ” Obama operatives watching in Chicago erupted in joy.

  The net effect of these early exchanges was to place Romney to Perry’s and Gingrich’s right on immigration—so far right that it was much harder for him to scamper back to the center. For years almost every serious candidate for the nomination in either party weighed each comment he made for how it would play after the conventions; Obama’s refusal to propose cutting the Pentagon’s budget and Hillary Clinton’s opposition to negotiating with Iran were 2008 examples of that calculation. But Romney was apparently under such pressure from xenophobes inside the GOP that he thought he didn’t have that luxury. His senior staff knew the campaign had overreacted to dark forces within the party. But at the time it was as if Romney could handle only the obstacle in front of him, with no thought of what lay down the road. He was so intent on clobbering Perry that he knifed himself for November.

  ONLY A MONTH before entering the race, Perry underwent spinal fusion surgery. It didn’t go well. He wore conspicuous soft orthopedic shoes instead of his customary cowboy boots and couldn’t sleep. Before the November 9 debate at Oakland University in Auburn Hill, Michigan, the university hosted a reception for the candidates. Two guests in attendance said that Perry, “obviously high” on something, was babbling and staring straight into space. His chief strategist, Dave Carney, later insisted Perry was taking no medication but had not slept at all the night before because of the pain. In any event, the debate was a fiasco for him. Perry said he would eliminate three federal agencies, but couldn’t remember the third. “Commerce, Education and the—what’s the third one there? Let’s see,” he stumbled, before Romney suggested the Environmental Protection Agency. “EPA, there you go,” Perry said, though it was clear from his puzzled expression that he had another agency in mind. “Seriously?” moderator John Harwood asked. “You can’t name the third partner, Russ Schriefer, 9Mh2one?”

  “The third agency of government I would do away with—the Education, the Commerce. And let’s see. I can’t. The third one, I can’t,” Perry said. “Oops.”

  Later in the debate, Perry said he meant to call for the elimination of the Energy Department, and in the spin room afterward he told reporters, “Yeah I stepped in it, man.” The focus on his gaffe, one of the most embarrassing personal lapses in the history of presidential debates, overshadowed the underlying point sinking in with viewers. Perry, only recently the front-runner for the nomination, wasn’t merely too addled to be president. He had a radical view of downsizing the federal government that enjoyed little support with general election voters. But none of his rivals defended any of the departments. In fact all were on record trashing the EPA, an agency whose mission was backed by wide margins in polls.

  “Yeah it was embarrassing,” Perry said later. “But here’s what’s more important. People understand that our principles, our conservative principles, are what matter.” Those far-right views did indeed matter, though not in the way Perry and his rivals imagined.

  WITH PERRY SELF-DESTRUCTING and Cain forced out by multiple charges of sexual harassment, it was time for another front-runner to emerge. In late 2011 Newt Gingrich, whose senior staff had quit en masse in June in protest against Callista Gingrich’s running the campaign (and running up her husband’s $500,000 tab at Tiffany’s), surged into the lead in the polls. He was a serial adulterer and “inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy, and unprincipled,” as former New Hampshire governor John Sununu described him, but also a nimble thinker and gifted at using language to pack a punch.

  While smash-mouth politics had been around since the dawn of the republic, it had faded in the late twentieth century, before Gingrich’s ascent. In the four decades in which the House was in Democratic hands, moderate Republican minority leaders like Gerald Ford and Robert Michel fought hard for their ideas but maintained a civil tone. Gingrich believed their decency had prevented the GOP from winning. In 1990 he wrote a memo to Republicans called “Language: A
Key Mechanism of Control.” His list of “Optimistic, Positive Governing Words” included common sense, courage, liberty, strength, and vision. His list of “Contrasting Words,” to be used relentlessly against Democrats, included bosses, greed, lie, pathetic, and, of course, taxes. The GOP internalized Gingrich’s message, took control of the House in 1994, and proceeded to run linguistic circles around Democrats, turning inheritance taxes into “death taxes” and efforts to advise seniors on living wills into “death panels.”

  Now Gingrich turned his vitriol to a new target: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Romney. He took his ammunition from a heavy-handed twenty-eight-minute film called King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, which described Bain and Romney as “corporate raiders” who “played the system for a quick buck.” The film was produced by Barry Bennett, a Republican consultant who had recently worked for a pro-Perry PAC, and diNational Youth AdministrationR earlyrected by Jason Killian Meath, who created ads for Romney’s 2008 campaign but later left Stuart Stevens’s firm. By late 2011 Perry too had begun referring to Bain and Romney as “vultures” who “pick the carcass clean and then fly away.” This was yet more blowback on Stevens. Working in 2010 on behalf of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, Stevens had produced an ad in the GOP primary attacking Meg Whitman for her ties to Wall Street that included pictures of circling vultures.

  Chicago was already planning to slam Romney for his role at Bain; the Obama team knew that the Democratic media consultant Bob Shrum had used Bain to great effect when making anti-Romney ads in 1994 for Ted Kennedy, who pulled away from Romney in a close race that year and won reelection to the Senate. For months researchers in Chicago had dug up everything from old Securities and Exchange Commission filings on Bain to the blueprints for Romney’s car elevator in his new $12 million home. Some of the embarrassing stories were leaked; others were held in reserve. Axelrod was delighted to see Republicans laying the groundwork for his coming attacks, though in the amnesiac world of presidential politics, he didn’t expect anyone to remember.

  As the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary approached, Gingrich began losing altitude. Backed by a super PAC financed by billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson, he doubled down on attacking Bain. “You have to ask the question, ‘Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?’ ” he said. Suddenly a counterattack began. “What the hell are you doing, Newt?” former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani cried, echoing the Wall Street Journal. “I expect this from Saul Alinsky!” Giuliani said that Gingrich was acting “ignorant” and “dumb.” Under a withering assault from pro-Romney super PACs, Gingrich lost both contests.

  To repair his message for South Carolina, Gingrich began emphasizing older incendiary themes he had explored over the years, including changing child labor laws so that black kids could learn the work ethic and get paid for janitorial and other work at schools. At the same time, he stepped up the frequency of his demeaning description of Obama as “the food stamp president,” without mentioning that the sharp increase in the food stamp program resulted from the recession that preceded Obama’s taking office and that most food stamp recipients are white.

  Juan Williams, an experienced African American journalist and Fox News analyst (recently fired from NPR for making a politically incorrect comment on “Muslim garb”), decided Gingrich must be called out on it. “The code was, ‘We’ve got a bunch of lazy black kids who need to work,’ ” Williams said later. “Republicans had created a bubble—another galaxy—on the race issue and no one outside it had asked why they wanted to incite racial passions.” Santorum had also made a racially insensitive remark on welfare, telling Iowans, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to earn the money.” (Santorum later denied he said the word black, arguing that what he actually said was blah, though the tape clearly indicated otherwise.) Gingrich had been scoring points off debate moderators all ses. He implied

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  Playground of the Superrich

  The idea of billionaire-backed super PACs attacking Mitt Romney for being a capitalist was . . . rich. It was also destructive. The same super PACs that had done so much to help Republicans in 2010 hurt them in early 2012.

  Romney began tanking even before Chicago barraged him with negative ads. In a CNN poll, his unfavorable ratings rose an astonishing 19 points between November 2011 and March 2012. He went from leading Obama 51 to 47 percent in head-to-head matchups to trailing 54 to 43. The president won an end-of-the-year agreement to extend the payroll tax holiday, but he did little else of note in this period. So the best explanation for Romney’s tumble was the terrible publicity of the clown car debates, combined with the attack ads launched against him by Newt Gingrich via Sheldon Adelson.

  Had Adelson not pumped $16.5 million into Gingrich’s campaign, Gingrich would likely have run out of money after Romney crushed him in the Florida primary on January 31. The race would have effectively ended then, giving Romney two and a half more months to unify the party. Without super PAC backing from Foster Friess, a Wyoming-based evangelical Christian who made his fortune running mutual funds, Santorum wouldn’t have been able to afford any television ads at all. After surprising the political world in the Iowa caucuses, he might have won a couple of primaries on fumes in February, but he would not have had the funds necessary to win eleven primaries and nip at Romney’s heels all the way into April. As it was, if Santorum, with Friess’s backing, had won Michigan, he likely would have won Ohio and quite possibly the nomination.

  Overall, super PACs in the primaries hurt the GOP. While they helped Romney derail Gingrich, they proved to be a net negative for the front-runner. Without them, Romney would not have faced six months of withering criticism from fellow Republicans that softened him up for Obama’s attacks. Instead of spending more than $85 million in the primaries, he would have had that money to defend himself against Obama’s early ad buys over the summer.I

  Gingrich had no regrets. He told a friend in May, after Romney clinched the nomination, that none of the negative ads Adelson ran against Romney would matter because Adelson was now prepared to spend unfathomable amounts on behalf of the nominee. Gingrich added that he heard that sixteen other billionaires secretly pledged $10 million or more apiece to help Romney and Republicans win in the fall. The amount of money spent in 2012 by super PACs and other independent groups would end up increasing tenfold compared to 2008. “It’s not going to even be close,” Gingrich said with his usual self-assurance. Given the history of money in politics, this seemed like a reasonable bet at the time.

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF the twentieth century, wealthy individuals had often thrown their weight around in state and local elections, but they have had a harder time buying the presidency. Reforms first launched by President Theodore Roosevelt banned unlimited corporate donations. National party committees paid for the travel of presidential nominees but not often for advertisements or get-out-the-vote efforts. Individual contributions from the rich rarely matched the efforts of unions and state and local party organizations (urban machines for the Democrats; county courthouse politics for Republicans) that handled most of the electioneering, even for president. The cash doled out by “bag men” more often came from these local sources than from multimillionaires.

  Occasional heavy hitters—General Motors executive John J. Raskob for Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1932, insurance magnate W. Clement Stone for Richard Nixon in 1972, and currency trader George Soros for John Kerry and the Democrats in 2004—made news with their largesse, but none could fairly be called a kingmaker. Between the post-Watergate reforms of 1974 and the election of 2008, campaigns operated under a new wave of regulation, including public financing of general election presidential campaigns. Loopholes allowed for unlimited donations to the DNC and RNC, but this mostly empowered don
ors contributing or bundling tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of millions. Until Citizens United in 2010, billionaires didn’t have a big appetite for politics.

  So finding the best analogy to the renewed class-based politics of 2012 requires going all the way back to the election of 1896, when Republican William McKinley outspent populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan by more than 10 to 1. McKinley’s legendary campaign manager, the Ohio industrialist Mark Hanna, liked to say, “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

  Hanna went to New York in early 1896 to highlight “the reality of the danger” of Bryan, whom the pro-Republican New York Times depicted as a “mongoloid.” Several large banks kicked in 0.25 percent of their capital holdings to Hanna and the McKinley campaign. Cyrus McCormick sent 7,500 field agents for his reaper to spread the word that if Bryan won, he “would run the company at only half capacity,” a widespread effort among the wealthy to scare voters about what would happen to “job creators” if the Democrat prevailed.

  The heirs to Hanna and McCormick and other industrialists of the Gilded Age were Karl Rove (who described Hanna always said the same thing: 2PPaas his role model) and Charles and David Koch.

  The Koch brothers sat just behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett on the list of wealthiest Americans. Their father, Fred Koch, built oil refineries for Stalin in the Soviet Union before he turned sharp right in the early 1960s and became a major backer of the John Birch Society. After the founder’s death, his four sons fought bitterly over his estate, with Bill and Fred, echoing the government’s position, filing lawsuits that charged Charles and David with multiple violations of environmental laws. Charles and David eventually took full control of Koch Industries, which owns pipelines, refineries, paper mills, synthetic fiber manufacturers, and chemical plants, among other businesses. With sixty thousand employees and $115 billion in annual revenues, it is the second largest (after Cargill) privately held company in the country. The extreme secrecy surrounding the conglomerate extends to the dozens of bland-sounding libertarian organizations backed by the family.