The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Latinos were the big demographic story. They went 71 percent for Obama nationwide, up 4 points from 2008, and made the difference in Nevada, Colorado, and Florida, where the president won an astonishing 83 percent of the Puerto Rican vote, up 20 points over 2008. (The Sotomayor ad was crucial.) Obama was especially pleased to carry nearly half of Florida’s Cuban Americans, who had been overwhelmingly Republican for half a century. The Latino vote in Florida helped compensate for a 10-point drop in white support there and gave Obama a state that even some of his top aides doubted he would win. Asian Americans, favoring a larger role for government, went 73 percent for Obama nationwide, an increase of 11 points over 2008. The president also won 73 percent of the LGBT vote, up 6 points, in part because of his support for gay marriage.I

  Throughout the campaign, Romney and his team had always taken comfort in the otherwise disturbing right track/wrong track figures. As long as most voters thought the country was headed in the wrong direction, they figured, Romney had a good chance. No president had ever been reelected with negative numbers on this question. When the exit polls came out, Obama was the first. More than half the country, 52 percent, thought the United States was still on the wrong track.

  But on the critical question of which candidate “cares more about people like me,” Obama won overwhelmingly. He also prevailed among those who felt he better represented the middle class. And Obama won on the issues: Only 25 percent wanted Obamacare repealed and 60 percent favored an increase in taxes for the wealthy. A majority of self-described moderates backed the president.

  The president had coattails in 2012, though not long enough to change control of the House of Representatives. Democratic candidates for the House won 1.1 million more votes than Republican candidates, but Republicans ended up with 55 percent of the House seats, which gave them a comfortable margin of thirty-three seats. The explanation was gerrymandering in state capitals after the 2010 midterms. For instance, Obama prevailed in Ohio by 2 points, but Republicans carried twelve of the state’s sixteen seats. In Pennsylvania, which Obama won by 5 points, Republicans took thirteen of eighteen seats. The Senate was a different story. Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana were defeated over rape gaffes, but Republicans also lost contested races in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Ohio, North Dakota, and Montana. Six months after most experts predicted that they would lose control of the upper chamber, Democrats expanded their majority from fifty-three to fifty-five seats.

  At least the prognosticators who miscalled the Senate months earlier could plead that conditions had changed and that their predictions were mostly accurate at the end. Many pollsters did partner, Russ Schriefer, " aid="1MPan’t have that excuse. As Joel Benenson and Dan Wagner had been saying all year, the polling profession in the United States was in deep trouble. It wasn’t just the discrediting of Neil Newhouse, the Romney pollster whose descent from math into spin was captured in his infamous comment, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Unreliable polls with shoddy methodology (including the granddaddy of pollsters, Gallup) had infected the entire process. Their “likely voter” models, based partly on such outdated questions as whether voters knew where their polling places were (younger voters just looked up the location on their iPhones that morning) and whether they had voted in 2010, were often worthless. Even on the day before the election, when polls are usually spot-on, Gallup had Obama up by only 1 point, and the much-read RCP Average of polls had Obama winning nationally by only 0.7 percent—more than 3 points less than the actual result.

  THE BACKLASH AGAINST voter suppression had helped to power the president’s victory. In Ohio more than 100,000 Obama voters cast their ballots early in the last three days in a state the president won by only 166,000 votes. In Virginia thousands of blacks waited patiently in line for more than five hours to vote. In Florida 150 pastors organized “Operation Lemonade”—named for the “lemon” that Governor Rick Scott handed them—and nearly matched their “Souls to the Polls” turnout in 2008 despite six fewer early voting days. Florida would have been out of reach for Obama without the pushback against suppression. The president carried the state by only seventy-four thousand votes, far fewer than the numbers who voted early in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, all three of which were initially barred from opening their polling places longer to relieve long lines. In Pennsylvania several all-black precincts in Philadelphia reported no votes for Romney. Not less than 1 percent, not 0.1 percent: not a single vote.

  It sounded suspicious to conservatives, but they had no indication of fraud. True the Vote, the right-wing organization that promised one million poll watchers, fizzled on Election Day. The group’s Internet training was focused on harassing lightly documented voters in African American communities by photographing and videotaping them and threatening to report them to authorities. But the training instructions were slipshod, and many would-be poll watchers were turned away by county election officials after they failed to complete the requirements for certification.

  Overall the Tea Party wasn’t much of a presence on the ground. Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks spent $40 million on Senate races and lost them all; two House stalwarts, Allen West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois, went down.II Local Tea Party organizations helped bring evangelicals to the polls who might not have otherwise voted for a Mormon, and they turned out their hard-core voters, many of them older. But 46 million more people voted in 2012 than in 2010, their year of glory. That meant that more than one-third of the electorate was voting only once every four years. While Tea Party members wanted the world to believe they were the “true” Americans, the 2012 returns exposed this as a nostalgic fantasy. They were what European and other multiparty states called a “remnant party,” still powerful in midterm and other low-turnout elections but hardly the wave partner, Russ Schriefer, S,Pa of the future.

  WITHIN MINUTES OF the outcome, the conservative rationalizations began: Romney was too moderate; the liberal media was to blame; Obama stole the election. Late on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly set the pace for the “moocher” analysis. He pointed to exit polls saying the president’s response to Hurricane Sandy was important and noted, “There are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”

  This was the makers-versus-takers argument all over again, but it was at odds with the facts of what are known in budget circles as “transfer payments.” In truth, the age group receiving the most “stuff” from Washington is the elderly, who voted overwhelmingly for Romney. And most of the biggest “takers” among the states—the places that receive far more money from Washington than they send in taxes—are red states in the South and West. And then there are the hedge fund managers who, as Warren Buffett said, pay at a lower tax rate than their secretaries, not to mention $500 billion in additional tax breaks that the wealthy expected from a Romney administration, all of which might fairly be called “gifts.”

  Two days after the election, Romney held a closed-door postmortem. He was once again the clinical Bain analyst of the 1980s, assessing a deal gone sour: Beating an incumbent who has no primary opponent is tough. Beating an incumbent when you have a prolonged primary is even tougher. Beating an incumbent who has not lost his popularity with the American people—who is not hated—is toughest of all.

  In later conference calls with donors, he moved toward O’Reilly’s “stuff” analysis. After praising his “no drama” campaign team and criticizing the GOP primary system (“We had twenty Republican primary debates—that was absolutely nuts”), Romney zeroed in on the “gifts” that Obama handed out. He mentioned forgiveness of college loan debt, free contraceptives, and especially Obamacare. “For any lower-income Hispanic family, Obamacare was massive,” Romney said. “For a home earning let’s say thirty thousand a year, free health care, which is worth about ten thousand dollars a year, I mean is massive, it’s huge.”

  News of
the conference call offended Democrats. “It all came full circle, back to the 47 percent,” Senator Al Franken told a friend. “It’s like he was saying, ‘See, I told you that you didn’t want to vote for me.’ ”

  Many conservatives thought “gifts” were only part of the explanation for minority turnout they claimed was suspiciously high. Right-wing blogs cried fraud based on comparing voter turnout to census figures. They failed to factor in student voting and seniors who still voted in the North but were often counted for the census in the South, or vice versa. A September story in the Columbus Dispatch saying that a few Ohio counties had more registered voters than eligible voters got a lot of attention after the election. But as the story pointed out, there was nothing unusual about voter rolls that hadn’t been updated after people died or moved. Despite the best efforts of Obama haters, no credible evidence of vote fraud surfaced in 2012, and even the sketchy accounts amounted to a minuscule number of National Youth Administration:off:0000000s small irregularities—not enough to affect the outcome in a single precinct, much less to justify harsh new restrictions on voting. That didn’t stop many Republicans from challenging the validity of the election. Public Policy Polling, a mischievous liberal pollster, later asked Republicans if they believed ACORN, a community action group, stole the 2012 election for Obama, and 49 percent said yes, even though ACORN went out of business in 2010, which suggested that close to half of the GOP was still prepared to believe the worst about the president regardless of the facts.III

  The reactionary spasm after the election took different forms. Hundreds of students rioted at the University of Mississippi, burning Obama posters and, in some cases, hurling racial epithets. Reuters reported financial advisers around the country having to talk “inconsolable” small business owners “off the ledge.” Robert Murray of Murray Energy, a coal company, read a prayer and laid off fifty employees. Writing in WorldNetDaily, Larry Klayman, who had hounded Bill Clinton during impeachment, argued that the United States was headed toward Egyptian-like bondage “thanks to our ‘Mullah in Chief’ and his growing voter hoards of socialists, communists, anti-Semites, anti-Christians, atheists, radical gays and lesbians, feminists, illegal immigrants, Muslims, anti-Anglo whites and others who last Tuesday cemented his destructive hold on the White House and our country.”

  THE BIG DONORS were shocked at first but quickly concluded that Romney had run a poor campaign and the super PAC ads had failed to resonate. Several regretted that in September, when Romney was tanking in the polls, they had considered shifting their money into Senate races but stuck with Romney when he won the first debate. Now they were hardly impressed by the logic of Carl Forti, head of Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney super PAC, who claimed, “We accompbed:000D?mime=

  Afterword

  After the shock of the 2012 election wore off, many prominent Republicans acknowledged that they had become “the stupid party,” as Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, put it. Senators took positions in support of comprehensive immigration reform that would have led them to be ostracized from the GOP a year earlier. Governors who had supported repeal of Obamacare changed their minds and accepted it for their states. A long list of prominent conservatives signed a letter supporting same-sex marriage. But on taxes and spending, the only issues that united the party, conservatives dug in.

  At the end of the year, the president and Congress began negotiating to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, an expression coined in early 2012 by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a man not otherwise known for memorable phrases. The result was a return to what the White House felt had become a Washington version of Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie in which every frustrating day is like the day before.

  But Obama’s end-of-the-year talks with John Boehner went badly. In their six one-on-one meetings in the president’s first term (a small fraction of the times President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill got together in the 1980s), the two men talked past each other. Boehner, who feared not being reelected speaker in January, claimed that 2012 was a “status quo election,” resulting in a Democratic presidency and Senate and a Republican House, just like before. Obama replied at a meeting on December 4, “Let me get this straight. I won the election and you want Mitt Romney’s tax cuts? Let’s get serious.” After their next one-on-one meeting, on December 13, Boehner complained to reporters that Obama talked “nearly the entire time,” lecturing him for more than thirty minutes on his mandate and what the Republican caucus might swallow. Boehner much preferred negotiating with Nancy Pelosi. “I’m not trying to make her a Republican,” Boehner said, “and she’s not trying to make me a Democrat.”

  The Republicans acted as if accepting the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy constituted a major concession. When the president repeated his long-standing proposal for a “balanced approach” that would include $1.6 trillion in new tax revenues over ten years as well as spending cuts and entitlement reform, Mitch McConnell dismissed it as “laughable.” In late December, Boehner once again walked away from the negotiations. The speaker’s “Plan B”—letting taxes rise for those earning more than $1 million but offering no other suggestions for increasing revenue—failed with his own caucus.

  Obama and Boehner were annoyed with each other; their staffs even quarreled over the speaker’s disrespecting the president by not accepting his invitation for a screening of the movie Lincoln, which depicts Abraham Lincoln and a resistant House of Representatives coming together to enact the Thirteenth Amendment. (Boehner claimed the invitation came too late.) Obama decided to let Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell hammer out the deal, as they had at the time of the debt-ceiling partner, Russ Schriefer, ll seemed crisis in 2011. Just before January 1, they settled on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone except individuals making more than $400,000 a year, resolving the estate tax and other high-end tax breaks, ending the payroll tax holiday, and kicking the $1.2 trillion in “sequestration” budget cuts down the road. Boehner’s caucus balked; he needed Pelosi’s Democrats to get the compromise through the House and avoid the cliff.

  In retrospect, it was a mistake for Obama to give up the leverage offered by the January 1 expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Doing so left him with no bargaining power to prevent what he called “the idiotic” sequestration cuts that began in March, when everything from critical scientific research to White House tours faced indiscriminate cuts. Republicans trying to eliminate the $600 billion in crude cuts scheduled over ten years for the Pentagon made the peculiar economic argument that building aircraft carriers helped create jobs and a strong economy, but building roads and bridges did not. Democrats were unhappy about the $600 billion in domestic cuts being phased in more quickly under the sequester. Many felt the Republicans were acting as if there had never been an election.

  That was certainly Paul Ryan’s approach. As a vice presidential candidate he had spoken constantly about how the 2012 election would “determine the path forward” for the country. But in March 2013 Ryan introduced a draconian budget that was almost identical to those he proposed in 2011 and 2012. (The only major difference was that the 2013 version balanced the budget in ten years instead of twenty-five, based on implausibly high growth figures that existed only in the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.) Ryan’s budget, which once again easily passed the House and fell seven votes short in the Democratic-controlled Senate, would have cut trillions from social programs (three times as much as the sequester in the short-term alone) and rewritten the social contract.

  Had Romney been elected, some version of Ryan’s budget likely would have become law.I Now, contrary to the disingenuous pleas of fundraising emails from Democrats, that radical vision had no chance. Nor did any of the rest of the conservative agenda. Obama still held the veto pen. The center would hold.

  BY EARLY 2013 the reactionary forces that would have been emboldened by a Romney victory were divided and in retreat. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus commissioned a report that concluded the R
epublican Party’s message was “weak” and the party was behind in digital innovation and field organizing. Priebus reported that focus groups “said that the party is ‘scary,’ ‘narrow-minded,’ and ‘out of touch’ and that we were a party of ‘stuffy old men.’ ” But it would take more than rebranding the GOP the “Growth and Opportunity Party” and Roger Ailes starting a Spanish-language cable news network to bring Republicans back to power. “You can’t just put a sombrero on the elephant,” said Michael Steele, the former RNC chairman.

  A split on foreign policy seemed inevitable. At the CPAC in March 2013, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky won the straw poll for president after a neo-isolationist speech that pleased some liberal Democrats but led John McCain to call Rand and freshman senator Ted Cruz of Texas (who charged that Obama administration nominees partner, Russ Schriefer, OV early were in cahoots with terrorists) “wacko birds.” Cruz decided to wear McCain’s moniker as a badge of honor.

  Obama Derangement Syndrome remained at epidemic proportions, though now it was often just another way of monetizing political ideology. Sarah Palin, still raking in big money on the lecture circuit, delighted right-wing audiences with her riff about applying “background checks” to Obama, not gun owners. Palin routinely attacked Obama’s use of a teleprompter in a speech she read from a teleprompter. Tens of thousands of southerners, who apparently hated the president more than they loved the United States, signed petitions calling for secession. In the popular History Channel series The Bible, the actor playing Satan was made up to look almost exactly like Obama, a decision that the publicity-savvy executive producer, Mark Burnett, claimed was unintentional.