Who Stole the American Dream? (46 page)

“Even before being sworn in as a member,
Newt had this vision of how Republicans could take the majority,” recalled Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who befriended Gingrich in 1978. “Newt saw that the country hates Congress in general, but people love their own congressman. He said, We can’t win the way we’re going. We have to nationalize the elections, mobilize the hatred for Congress nationally, and intensify it, and make Congress look so bad to people that they will think, ‘Anyone is better than what we’ve got now.’ That strategy encouraged polarizing the parties.”

Over the years, too,
Gingrich built a formidable political machine, using GOPAC, which he ran, to recruit, train, fund, and elect a whole new army of radical Republicans to do battle with liberal Democrats. In Gingrich’s mind, the conflict was literally to be a civil war. “
This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,” Gingrich caustically declared in 1988.

When Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, Gingrich was battle ready. He had ousted the old Republican bosses and gotten elected as House Republican leader. He had a disciplined minority of
175 Republicans, and he was out to block every Clinton initiative, to make Clinton and the Democratic majority look bad by tying them in knots, and then to capitalize on voter frustration to win a House majority in the 1994 elections. He was out to destroy the Congress as a working institution, in order to capture control of it.

The first big test in 1993 came on Clinton’s budget. It was a bold initiative, because it included a tax increase to help close the budget deficit left behind by Reagan and George H. W. Bush. It was smart economics because it eventually yielded the first budget surplus in years as well as helping to generate the solid economic growth of the 1990s. But Gingrich and his Republicans were dead set against any tax increase on ideological grounds. So all 175 House Republicans voted against Clinton’s five-year economic plan.

It took a titanic effort by Clinton to hold together enough Democrats to pass the budget in the House, 218–216.
The Senate deadlocked, 50–50, and Vice President Al Gore had to cast the deciding vote. Those budget votes marked a political watershed. It was the first time since World War II that a major piece of legislation had passed without a single yes vote from the opposition party.

Close as it was, that fragile victory was a high point for Clinton in that session of Congress. Clinton’s health care plan never got out of committee. A whole list of other legislation was defeated or bottled up: aid to housing, aid to education, funding for the EPA’s Superfund, and much more.
More than half the bills (56 percent) died in gridlock.

In fact, the 1993–1994 Congress was one of the two
least productive sessions in half a century
, according to a study by political scientist Sarah Binder of George Washington University.
The Washington Post
commented that it would “go into the record books as
perhaps the worst congress—least effective, most destructive, nastiest—in 50 years.”

That was the verdict Gingrich had wanted. His strategy was
to generate public disgust with Congress so that voters would reject the incumbent Democratic majority. The strategy worked brilliantly. In the 1994 congressional elections, Gingrich and the New Right hit
the jackpot—seventy-three new Republicans to give the GOP the House majority for the first time in forty years.

Gingrich could not have done it without talk radio, especially
right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh. Sharply partisan talk radio had shot up since the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 repealed “the Fairness Doctrine,” which previously required broadcasters to balance opposing political views. According to Republican
pollster Frank Luntz, people who listened to ten or more hours of talk radio a week voted 3 to 1 for Republicans in 1994. Gingrich’s freshmen understood
Limbaugh’s importance. They lionized him when he spoke at their freshmen orientation.

As the first Republican Speaker of the House in half a century, Gingrich set out in January 1995 to reverse the tide of history. His blueprint was “the
Contract with America,” the GOP’s 1994 campaign platform that had promised a constitutionally balanced budget, a slew of tax reductions, cuts in safety net spending, and reforms to curb Washington’s power. Backed by a passionate army of Class of ’94 freshmen, Gingrich launched a legislative blitzkrieg.

By mid-November, Gingrich and Bob Dole, the Senate Republican leader, had set up
a confrontation with President Clinton over the budget. Federal funds were about to run out, raising the specter of a government shutdown. Gingrich thought he had Clinton cornered. But Clinton outfoxed Gingrich by immediately furloughing eight hundred thousand federal workers, including those who processed Social Security checks. He put the political onus for the shutdown on the Republicans, accusing them of “unacceptable” cuts in education, public health, and the environment and creating a “winner-take-all society” that left out average Americans.

Gingrich fought back, pushing through a mammoth seven-year balanced budget package with even heavier program cuts. It contained a stinger, a proposal to privatize Medicare. The Gingrich plan
would push seniors into private health care plans by putting future Medicare dollars into “medical savings accounts” and forcing seniors to shop for their own health insurance. The plan passed the House easily and barely squeaked through the Senate, but its impact got lost in press coverage on the government shutdown.

For several weeks, from mid-November 1995 to early January 1996, the partisan war between the Republican-led Congress and the Clinton White House raged on. Voters were appalled. In a CBS poll,
a 51 percent majority blamed the Republicans for the government shutdown; only 28 percent blamed Clinton.

What Gingrich failed to reckon on was the ideological gulf between House and Senate Republicans. Gingrich had a New Right army in the House, but Dole led a more traditional Republican majority in the Senate. Dole himself was a mainstream conservative whom Gingrich had once mocked as “
the tax collector for the welfare state.”

By early January, Dole and the
Senate Republicans had tired of the shutdown and of Gingrich and his abrasiveness. The GOP had been taking a political beating. With Dole ready for a deal,
Gingrich had to back down and swallow Clinton’s budget. His political revolution never regained momentum.

But New Right legions kept tightening their grip on the Republican Party and intensifying their drive to purify the party and rid it of what they derisively called RINOs—“Republicans in name only.”
Target No. 1 was Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, the lone Republican moderate elected to the Senate in the GOP sweep of 1980 that elected a surge of new right-wingers and gave Republicans control of the upper chamber for the first time since 1954.

Specter had entered politics as a Kennedy Democrat in Philadelphia, but, feeling more in tune with moderate Pennsylvania Republicans like Senators Hugh Scott and John Heinz, he switched parties.
Once elected to the Senate, Specter was a straddler. He voted mostly with the Reagan White House in the early 1980s but crossed party lines on 40 percent of his votes—enough for Democrats to hail him as a sometime ally and Republican purists to mock him as “
Specter the defector.” Specter opposed Reagan’s spending cuts on Social Security, unemployment benefits, child health care, food stamps, and programs for the poor, and he fought against a ban on abortions and a constitutional amendment legalizing school prayer.
National Review
put Specter on its cover in 1983 as the “Worst GOP Senator.”

But what most infuriated the hard-core Right was his vote in 1987 in the Senate Judiciary Committee against Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Specter’s no vote helped defeat Bork. The New Right smoldered.

In 2004, the hard-core Right decided to purge Specter by challenging him in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary and intimidating other Senate RINO moderates. “
If we beat Specter, we won’t have any trouble with wayward Republicans …,” asserted Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a militantly anti-tax, anti-government right-wing group. “It serves notice to Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich and others who have been problem children that they will be next,” meaning moderate Republican senators Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and George Voinovich of Ohio.

Moore’s group spent $1 million, and its wealthy members individually added another $800,000, to fund Specter’s challenger, right-wing Republican congressman Pat Toomey. Toomey tore into Specter as a “Ted Kennedy” liberal. Specter shot back that the Club for Growth was a gang of “Wall Street tycoons” and Toomey was “
not far right, he’s far out.” In 2004, Specter beat the challenge.

But the hard-core Right was undaunted. They prepared Toomey for another run against Specter in 2010. Long beforehand, Specter could see that the political landscape had shifted against him. Pennsylvania’s once moderate GOP electorate was now dominated by its extreme wing. “
Since my election in 1980 … the Republican Party has moved far to the right,” Specter commented. “Last year, more
than 20,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats.” In April 2009, Specter announced that he, too, was switching parties.

But his switch came too late. Democratic voters saw it as too opportunistic, with the result that Specter lost in the Democratic primary. Then, in the general election,
Toomey won Specter’s old Senate seat and aligned himself with the Tea Party caucus.

The purge of Specter, wrote
Washington Post
columnist Dana Milbank, exemplified right-wing Republican “
ideological cleansing.” To Specter, it was political
cannibalism—“eating or defeating your own.”

Riding the populist enthusiasm of his 2008 election victory, Barack Obama came into the presidency believing he could transform the fierce partisan divide in Washington. He talked hopefully about moving America into a new era of “postpartisan politics.”

Obama never got a chance. He did not even get a traditional presidential honeymoon. A partisan red line split the 111th Congress from day one. The first two years of the Obama presidency echoed the instant war that former House Republican leader Newt Gingrich had declared on Bill Clinton in the 1993–1994 Congress. Confronting Obama in January 2009 was John Boehner, the new House Republican leader, who had been a top lieutenant to Gingrich in the 1990s. Boehner reused Gingrich’s obstructionist game plan. He sought to defeat or discredit every Obama initiative and to make the president and the Democratic majority look bad in the eyes of voters.

The first test was Obama’s emergency bill to rescue the U.S. economy from a free fall. In the winter of 2008–2009, private employers were firing six hundred thousand people a month and the economy had a gaping $2 trillion hole. To turn things around and to create jobs, economists of all stripes were calling for a shot in the arm from the government—a major stimulus package of tax cuts for average
Americans; funds for state governments to stave off mass layoffs of teachers, firemen, and others; and money for construction projects. Christina Romer, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, recommended
a $1.2 trillion stimulus. Keynesian economists such as Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz urged
a supersized stimulus of $1.5 trillion to $2.4 trillion. But Obama’s economic policy chief, Harvard economist Larry Summers, cautiously warned that anything larger than $600 billion to $800 billion
could “spook markets … and be counterproductive.” Summers feared Wall Street banks would raise interest rates, triggering inflation, and
he told Obama that if more money was needed, Obama could get it later. Summers was wrong on both counts—there would be no inflation danger and no second chance with Congress.

Obama was in a hurry. He immediately sent a Summers-sized $787 billion stimulus plan to Congress. It had the backing of Republican governors from Connecticut’s M. Jodi Rell to California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger. But just nine days into Obama’s presidency, all 177 House Republicans voted no on his plan to boost the economy. In the end, Democratic majorities pushed through the stimulus. Just three Republican senators voted yes. Obama’s “postpartisan” politics had died on arrival.

On health care reform, the next big issue, the Republican Right was not only rock solid in opposition, but scathing in its rhetoric. Despite numerous concessions as the bill worked its torturous way through both houses, it got not a single Republican vote.

On financial regulation, the battle lines were sharp. Despite widespread public anger against Wall Street for the financial collapse, Republicans stalled, fought, and voted against legislation to impose new regulations on Wall Street to head off another catastrophe and to protect consumers. In the end, only six Republicans—three in the Senate and three in the House—saw merit in policing Wall Street and voted for the bill.

Just as in 1994, Republican obstructionism paid off politically in the 2010 congressional elections. With high unemployment, massive home foreclosures, and wide economic discontent, voters vented
their anger at incumbent Democrats and handed sweeping victories and control of the House of Representatives to Republicans and their new Tea Party faction.

The Tea Party was born in anger in February 2009, when Chicago hedge fund trader Rick Santelli went into a nationally televised tirade against taxpayer-funded bailouts to foreclosed homeowners. In an angry rant on CNBC’s
Squawk Box
, Santelli shouted that taxpayers had no desire to “subsidize the losers.” His message was: Stop the government from helping other Americans. “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July,” Santelli boomed. “
All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”