Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (46 page)

From the beginning, McCain’s second campaign for the presidency had a tragic quality. If his first run had been an unruly and joyous romp, the second was carefully planned and meticulously calculated. He very nearly organized and calculated himself out of the nomination.

McCain seemed constantly torn between his desire to resist the Republican powers that be and his need to appease dominant forces in the party. His efforts to pacify the right end of the party muddied his image as a heroic dissident but, in the early going at least, brought him little gain. And if McCain had suffered mightily during the 2000 primaries at the hands of George W. Bush’s political operation, he was burdened eight years later by his loyalty to Bush on Iraq. If Bush destroyed McCain’s candidacy by design the first time, he threatened to smother him by association the second.

Moreover, no matter how far McCain went to court, soothe, and pamper the right, many in its ranks simply couldn’t abide him. He had spoken forcefully in 2000 for campaign finance reform and against “the demands of big-money special interests.” The McCain-Feingold law was the largest step in decades toward reform of the campaign money system (before it was eviscerated in 2010 by the Supreme Court).
McCain had condemned the “self-appointed” leaders of conservative groups and singled out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance.” At one point he had called Bush a “Pat Robertson Republican.”

In deciding to make up with the president, McCain’s chosen vehicle was Iraq, on which he genuinely viewed success in the same terms as the administration. He won over a share of Bush fund-raisers and some Bush operatives, but significant parts of the Bush political family went over to Romney, joining at least a few of McCain’s 2000 enthusiasts.

McCain might instead have promised to “build a bigger Republican Party . . . by attracting new people to our cause with an appeal to the patriotism that unites us and the promise of a government that we can be proud of again.” Thus spoke the maverick in 2000 in words almost perfectly suited for his party’s plight in 2007 and 2008. But McCain made different choices—on principle about Iraq and by calculation for almost everything else. Like Bush, he decided not to challenge the party’s drift right.

On July 10, 2007, McCain’s campaign cracked up. Longtime adviser and confidant John Weaver and campaign manager Terry Nelson announced their departure, with McCain, as the
Washington Post
reported, expressing
“dissatisfaction to his high command over what he regarded as mismanagement of operations and excessive spending in the face of weaker-than-projected fundraising.” The impact of the bloodbath went deep. “A staff that once numbered about 120 is now down to about 50,” the
Washington Post
’s Dan Balz and Anne Kornblut wrote.

The two main beneficiaries of McCain’s decline were Romney and Giuliani. Romney hoped that he could win the Iowa caucuses, where he invested heavily, and supplant McCain as the favorite in New Hampshire, where he owned a summer home and was well-known because much of the state relied on Boston media. To establish his ideological purity, Romney borrowed and reworked a line that Democrat Howard Dean had, in turn, taken from the late Paul Wellstone.
Romney declared that he represented “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” (At an October debate, McCain snapped back: “As we all know, when he ran for office in Massachusetts, being a Republican wasn’t much of a priority.”)

Giuliani stood to gain if McCain floundered because he would be seen as the logical next choice of the moderate and moderately conservative Republican voters, and Independents, too. And Thompson, who did not enter the race until September, thought he could win the hearts of Republicans by reincarnating the good cheer of Ronald Reagan and capitalizing on his standing as a breakthrough candidate in the Republican revolution of 1994. It turned out that Thompson’s main function in the race would be to divide the conservative vote and diminish its influence.

The pressure to remain orthodox and very conservative was obvious throughout the debates that fall. In the October encounter where Romney had paraphrased Dean and Wellstone, he and Giuliani sparred over which of them had been the biggest tax cutter—hoping, presumably, that those watching would forget that they had run two of the most liberal, high-tax jurisdictions in the country. And the continuing power of anti-immigrant feeling among Republicans was obvious in a CNN/YouTube debate in November during which Romney and Giuliani each sought to cast the other as a closet liberal.

Romney assailed Giuliani for turning New York into a “sanctuary city” for immigrants. It was, in fact, quite true that in his earlier incarnation as a candidate in New York City, Giuliani had spoken out strongly against nativism. “The anti-immigration issue that’s now sweeping the country in my view is no different than the movements that swept the country in the past,” Giuliani had said in 1996.
“You look back at the Chinese Exclusionary Act, or the Know Nothing movement—these are movements that encouraged Americans to fear foreigners, to fear something that is different, and to stop immigration.”

It would have been a mark of courage for Giuliani to repeat those words on that November night. Instead, he accused Romney of having employed illegal immigrants to work on his Massachusetts home, turning it into what Giuliani called a “sanctuary mansion.” Romney, in turn, asked Giuliani if he was saying that a person who hired a company for home improvement should be expected to ask someone in the work crew who had “a funny accent” to prove his citizenship. The exchange ennobled neither man, but it showed how they thought Republican primary voters were thinking.

On that evening, it was Huckabee, the Christian conservative, and McCain, the longtime champion of immigration reform, who stood out from the crowd. When Romney attacked Huckabee for an Arkansas program that allowed the children of illegal immigrants to apply for college scholarships, Huckabee was unapologetic and hit back hard:
“I’m standing here tonight on this stage because I got an education. If I hadn’t had the education, I wouldn’t be standing on this stage. I might be picking lettuce. . . . In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.” At a lunch with reporters the next day, Huckabee stood his ground. “You can’t just pander to anger and hostility,” he said. “If that costs me the election, then the country can pick a different guy.”

McCain joined in expressing disgust for the discussion’s nativist turn.
“This whole debate saddens me a little bit,” he said. “These are God’s children as well, and they need some protections under the law, and they need some of our love and compassion.”

Over the long run, the view championed by Huckabee and McCain would get steadily weaker in the Republican Party. By the summer 2015,
Donald Trump could denounce Mexican immigrants as, among other things,
“rapists” who were “bringing drugs . . . bringing crime,” call for the deportation of all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, and happily watch his campaign take off. It was Giuliani and Romney who correctly sensed where the party was moving.

But McCain’s old authenticity gradually began to work in his favor that fall, after his campaign organization was transformed by financial necessity from a front-runner’s behemoth into a scrappy insurgency focused almost entirely on winning the New Hampshire primary.

On a visit to the Granite State that November, I discovered that a campaign that was supposed to be dead was very much alive. This was a real nuisance to McCain’s opponents, who had been circling what they thought was his expiring campaign. A
Washington Post
/ABC News survey around that time put him in second place, behind Giuliani, who benefited from his vast name recognition.

The mood of McCain’s loyalists in New Hampshire combined relief with the restrained glee that comes from walking away from a car wreck in one piece. Jim Barnett, McCain’s state director there, traced McCain’s local comeback to his renewed looseness in freewheeling town meeting formats that were his specialty. Barnett pointed to a moment during a mid-October gathering in Hopkinton where
McCain had confronted a questioner who spoke—in language that was to become more common on the right during the Obama years—of the “anger the average European Christian, native-born American feels when they see their country turning into a multicultural chaos Tower of Babel.”

McCain had been trying to appease his conservative critics on immigration by stressing the need to secure the nation’s borders first. But at the Hopkinton meeting, as in the debate, the old, combative, and principled McCain reappeared. He condemned his interlocutor’s language and declared that he was “grateful to live in a nation that has been enriched by people coming to our nation from around the world.” The applause, Barnett recalled with pride, “went on for a long time.”

But the issue on which McCain truly found his voice was the one he cared most passionately about. With Bush having changed strategy in Iraq with
the “surge” of more U.S. troops into Iraq, McCain, who had supported the increase, could campaign all out on the idea that abandoning the new approach to the war—and the war itself—amounted to “surrender.” Thus began his “No Surrender” tour, a nice double message declaring his opposition to “surrender” in Iraq and his refusal to surrender the nomination to adversaries he considered lightweights.

And just when McCain was ready to surge himself,
Giuliani suffered a series of blows that ultimately freed up a new pool of voters. As Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported in their excellent account of 2008, Giuliani was embarrassed in November 2007 when Bernard Kerik, his former driver and police commissioner, was indicted on corruption charges. Earlier, Giuliani had pushed Kerik to be secretary of homeland security in the Bush administration, even though it emerged that Giuliani had been briefed on Kerik’s potential problems as early as 2004.
Politico
’s Ben Smith then reported that as mayor, Giuliani had “
billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands in security expenses amassed during the time he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons.” Finally, an endorsement he had been expecting from Florida governor Charlie Crist, then a Republican, never materialized, despite Crist’s promises. Crist eventually endorsed McCain. (Giuliani would exact his revenge in 2014 by campaigning energetically for Republican governor Rick Scott, who defeated a challenge from Crist, by then politically reborn as a Democrat.)

With Giuliani fatally weakened, McCain was able to occupy all of the party’s more moderate ground while the old maverick’s more conservative adversaries systematically defeated each other. Romney had invested heavily in winning the January 3 Iowa caucuses, which McCain barely contested. It was money poorly spent.
Some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers were evangelical Christians, and they flocked to one of their own. Huckabee won with 35 percent to 25 percent for Romney. Huckabee demonstrated the continuing power of social conservatism (particularly in low-turnout Republican contests) by building a strong organization that relied on groups not traditionally seen as political powerhouses, including organizations of parents who homeschooled their children. But it’s also a certainty that Romney suffered from unease among evangelicals with his Mormonism.

Romney had tried to deal with the religious issue in a speech in December that remains an important document. Its contradictions point to a core tension in contemporary conservatism that continues to bedevil the movement. If Republicans need a strong dose of religious tolerance to regain the ground they have lost with Asians, Muslims, and more secular Millennials, they still find themselves needing to appease Christian conservatives. In his address at the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, Romney tried hard to square this circle—and failed.

Romney put forward two propositions: first, that his religious faith should not be a factor in how voters judged him; but, second, that he happened to have a powerful faith in Jesus Christ. The clashing messages led him to make an argument that was, by turns, brilliant and frustrating, inspiring yet also transparently political.

He began with a bracing challenge, calling upon Americans to live up to the demands of pluralism rooted in liberty.
“Religious tolerance,” he asserted, “would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.” He spoke with perfect pitch about the dangers of subjecting candidates to doctrinal investigations. “There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church’s distinctive doctrines,” Romney said. “To do so would enable the very religious test the Founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes president, he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths.” He reached for a bit of poetry in declaring “we do not insist on a single strain of religion—rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.”

So it was a neck-snapping moment when Romney went on to declare: “What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” Romney had every right to declare his faith in Jesus, of course. But with those words, he legitimized the very test that he had just asked voters to reject. And he was insisting that it was an examination on which Christian conservatives should give him an A.

In declaring that “liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government,” he was echoing many earlier politicians, including John F. Kennedy. And in saying that “every single human being is a child of God,” he was citing a view long
invoked by progressive Christians on behalf of social, political, and economic equality. But then he went further. “Freedom,” he said, “requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.” And to those who see religion as “merely a private affair with no place in public life,” he offered this rebuke: “It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”