Takeover (26 page)

Those who backed John McCain as the “lesser of two evils” did no favors for themselves, their movement, or for Senator McCain. To unite the conservative grassroots of the party, Senator McCain needed to know what conservatives really thought, and he needed to know what had to be done to get conservatives enthusiastically on board his campaign.

What he had to do was pick Sarah Palin—or some other limited-government constitutional conservative—as his vice presidential nominee.

The conservative base of the party had been listless. But with the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee, nearly all would work enthusiastically for the McCain–Palin ticket.

In fact, when I spoke to conservatives at the grass roots of the party, it seemed they were the most enthusiastic they had been since the era of Ronald Reagan.
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To me the choice of Sarah Palin was a grand-slam home run. During the days leading up to the convention and Palin’s national debut, it seemed as if conservatives’ feet didn’t touch the ground.

Some pundits saw the choice of Palin as another in a list of establishment presidential candidates, such as Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush, choosing a vice presidential candidate who could be isolated and would bring little experience or horsepower to the table to challenge the candidate or his inside circle.

I figured that there was much more to Sarah Palin and was pleased that McCain had chosen to balance his ticket with a principled conservative like her. Governor Palin’s life story was one of sticking to principle. She was living proof that a person can take on the corrupt political establishment—including corrupt leaders in her own party—and achieve great things.

There’s an old expression in politics:
Go along to get along
. Not this time. The selection of Sarah Palin was one big kick in the pants to the corrupt establishment in both parties.

The problem for Republicans was that John McCain had gone from being a “maverick” at war with the Republican establishment, particularly those associated with the Bush family, to actually surrounding himself with Bush’s staff and consultants.

Although he’d made a brilliant move in choosing Sarah Palin as his VP, in most other respects he’d pretty much done the opposite of what Jim Dobson, other influential conservatives, and I had urged—he made peace and unified the Republican establishment. But he then went on to freeze conservatives out of the campaign.

And that was where the McCain campaign would founder; it failed to use Sarah Palin to her full potential to connect with America’s conservative grass roots and in the process missed the opportunity to defeat Barack Obama and avoid the disaster for America that the Obama presidency has produced.

In the haze of history and the establishment media’s deification of Barack Obama, it is difficult for most Americans to remember that in Gallup’s August 13, 2008, daily tracking poll, Barack Obama
led John McCain 48 percent to 42 percent. Yet at the close of the Republican National Convention, McCain actually led Barack Obama 49 percent to 44 percent in the September 8 tracking poll—a swing of eleven points. The week that McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate—and she gave her electrifying speech at the Republican National Convention—was the only time after Labor Day when McCain led Obama in Gallup’s daily poll.
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When Sarah Palin left the Convention and hit the road on her own, she was drawing larger crowds than either McCain or Obama, and that immediately began to make McCain’s Washington-based staff unhappy.

The sniping from inside the McCain campaign began almost immediately, and Governor Palin, her family, staff, and supporters from Alaska were treated like a bunch of rubes by the snobby alumni of the Bush White House that McCain had hired to run his campaign.

The shabby treatment of Governor Palin was shameful, but what really destroyed McCain’s chances of defeating Obama was the campaign’s refusal to use Governor Palin to connect with the conservatives who were her natural constituency and whose votes and enthusiastic support McCain needed to have any hope of becoming president.

The McCain campaign had put the conservative “pit bull with lipstick” on a leash. The campaign had surrounded her with people from the Bush administration. And as we could see from the wreckage of the Bush presidencies, these folks didn’t have the slightest clue how to make a case to the American people.

By early October it was clear the election was slipping away from McCain, and I began to say what a lot of conservatives were thinking privately: McCain needed to free Sarah Palin to go after Barack Obama and the liberal Democrats, or he would almost certainly lose.

I also said point-blank that McCain needed to get rid of the Bush people around Palin, along with the lobbyists and the folks from the Washington consulting firms, and replace them with
principled conservatives who know how to relate to and speak to grassroots America.

As I’ve said many times throughout this book, Republicans never win big elections unless they nationalize the election and draw a clear distinction between the liberal vision for America and the conservative vision for America. America is a center-right country. So, for four decades, when national elections break along the liberal-conservative fault line, the more conservative candidate wins. Nationalizing the election along liberal-conservative lines was McCain’s only path to victory.

Of course, elections don’t happen in a vacuum, and Obama and his liberal allies were ahead because they were making the 2008 election about the record of the Bush administration and the GOP leadership in Congress—ironically, a record of cronyism and Big Government that McCain could credibly argue he had opposed.

Personnel is policy!

And having surrounded himself with lobbyists and Bush White House alumni who were part of the problem, McCain suddenly found it impossible to campaign against the cronyism, corruption, and follies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Wall Street that he had railed against during the entire eight years of the Bush presidency.

Contrast that with Reagan. Almost all of his top advisors were from outside the Beltway; Ed Meese, Mike Deaver, Judge William Clark, Lyn Nofziger, Dick Allen, and his California kitchen cabinet were all from outside of Washington, and were not beholden to the entrenched special interests of the DC establishment.

John McCain had forfeited his outsider status and was not willing and able to cast the 2008 election as a choice between one side that is center-right and the other that is extremely liberal. Only Governor Palin could do that.

Palin brought together all the types of conservatives—economic conservatives and religious conservatives, libertarians and “values voters,” and people who are simply fed up with Washington’s culture of corruption—and she appealed to millions of Americans in the center.

This is why the Left hates Sarah Palin to this day. And this is why she represented McCain’s last, best chance. To have any hope of winning, McCain needed to remember why he picked Governor Palin, and unleash her to do what she did best: rally grassroots conservative and independent voters to support the McCain–Palin ticket.

Predictably, the response from the McCain inner circle was to do pretty much the opposite of what conservatives suggested.

I won’t go into a state-by-state analysis of why McCain lost. One example will suffice: New Hampshire, where McCain twice won the Republican primary, but lost in the 2008 general election.

The McCain campaign’s New Hampshire staff had prohibited any communication between Palin’s advance team and the local right-to-life leadership due to the fact that the state GOP leadership was feuding with the right-to-life community.

A small group of right-to-lifers gathered outside Palin’s hotel in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the governor, and when told that, yes, the entire family was along, including Bristol and Trig, they burst into spontaneous applause. Startled advance people later concluded it was their way of affirming their support for the Palin family’s commitment to the right to life, despite the fact that they had been given the back of the hand by the McCain campaign.
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Rather than bring conservatives, such as the New Hampshire right-to-life community, into the campaign, McCain ceded his New Hampshire operation to the state’s Republican establishment and operatives working for establishment Republican senator John Sununu and Rep. Jeb Bradley, who of course found it impossible to run against the cronyism and Big Government of the Bush years because they were part of the problem.

The result was predictable. Tied to the discredited Big Government Republican policies of the Bush presidency and bereft of conservative support, Bradley was defeated in his bid for re-election, Sununu was defeated in his bid for reelection, and McCain lost a state that had twice resuscitated his presidential ambitions.

Instead of running as outsiders and turning Governor Palin
loose to appeal to America’s center-right voters, the McCain campaign represented many things Americans do not like about politics. Senator McCain spent more than a quarter century in Washington as a “moderate” and “insider,” and his campaign was run by longtime Washington insiders and lobbyists for Big Government.

In the 2008 elections, voters did not reject conservatism; they rejected Big Government Republicanism in all its forms, including the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress, who undoubtedly sealed their fate when they passed TARP and protected Wall Street and K Street and forgot about Main Street.

The disastrous defeat of 2008 must be laid at the feet of the Big Government corporate Republicans, because they abandoned the Reagan Coalition, massively expanded government, and ignored the needs and values of America’s center-right grassroots voters.

As the conservative vice presidential candidate yoked to the blundering establishment campaign of GOP presidential candidate John McCain, Sarah Palin often drew larger and more energetic crowds than her running mate. In large measure this was because she gave voice to the frustrations of middle-class Americans in what Washington’s inside elite derisively call “flyover country.”

It is not a stretch to say that the outpouring of populist support for Sarah Palin’s vice presidential run was a precursor to the Tea Party movement, and that the thousands of conservative voters whom she energized with the message that the establishment could be beaten were going to be heard from again, and soon.

In postelection comments I remarked that Republicans would make a comeback only after they returned to their conservative roots. The battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party had stepped up in intensity and although Republicans had lost the presidency in 2008, the good news for conservatives was that new troops were coming onto the battlefield on our side.

P
eople looking for the roots of the Tea Party movement should start with the grassroots response to the Sarah Palin candidacy for vice president—both at the grassroots and in the inner circle of the Republican establishment. The people who showed up at Sarah Palin’s events were different. They were not the usual back-slapping corporate types and ladies with rhinestone elephant pins that made up the crowd at many Republican events for the past two decades.

Instead there were people in well-worn work clothes, the clean Carhart jackets and jeans or logo-embroidered shirts that guys wear when they come to give you an estimate for a new furnace or wait on you at the local computer shop. And they brought their children, especially their daughters and their children with disabilities, to see “their” candidate—Sarah Palin.
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The trashing of Sarah Palin by the Republican Party’s inside elite, particularly those associated with the George W. Bush White House, demonstrated the level of contempt in which grassroots conservative Republicans were held by the professional political class in Washington.

Palin was, and is, a genuine populist phenomenon, and her
appeal showed a way forward to rebuilding the Republican majority, one more attuned to the views and values of the limited-government constitutional conservatives of the Party’s grassroots. It was also a clarion call for new leadership in the GOP, and the Republican establishment wasn’t about to hand over power without a fight.

One can’t understand the Tea Party movement unless one understands that it is as much a rebellion against the Big Government Republican establishment and the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party as it is driven by opposition to specific liberal policies of President Obama, such as Obamacare or the growth of spending, the deficit, and the federal debt.

Why? Because the Republican establishment, while often talking a good game, has been complicit in the spending, deficit, and debt and in the creation of all of those Big Government programs that drive it.

The Republican Party’s Capitol Hill leaders never seem to learn that going along with Big Government policies is exactly what gets Republicans thrown out of office and relegated to the status of the powerless minority they were for the better part of the fifty years from the beginning of the New Deal until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

When Big Government establishment Republicans are the face of the Party, Republicans lose, most recently in 2006, 2008, and 2012.

What’s more, in addition to being seen as “Democrats-lite,” establishment Republicans just plain aren’t very well liked by the grass roots of the GOP. They are viewed as out of touch, elitist, and arrogant—and that’s by the grass roots of their own party. Imagine what the conservative independents, Reagan Democrats, and liberty-minded voters that Republicans need to attract to win national elections think?

Enter CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli and his February 19, 2009, “Rant Heard ’Round the World.”

Santelli went on air from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and called for a “Chicago Tea Party” and urged a revolt against the Obama administration’s mortgage bailout plan.