Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (47 page)

This was a philosophical mouthful. Religion certainly can be and has been conducive to freedom. But does freedom require religion? Is religion always conducive to freedom? Does freedom not also thrive in far more secular societies than our own? Why not seek solidarity among the lovers of liberty, secular as well as religious? And Romney’s knock on the “religion of secularism” was the purest form of pandering to the religious right. Thus did Romney water down his eloquence about “our grand tradition of religious tolerance and liberty.” With Romney’s defeat in Iowa at the hands of the Christian right, the speech could be rated as a failure, even as a political ploy.

If Huckabee kept Romney from fulfilling the first half of his breakout strategy in Iowa, McCain blocked him from the second, five days later in New Hampshire—and set himself on the path to the nomination. The mathematics of McCain’s eventual triumph are important because they show that McCain won the Republican nomination despite his relative moderation rather than because of it. His more conservative foes checked each other’s ambitions by dividing the conservative Republican vote. This created the narrow path for McCain.

McCain’s New Hampshire victory was not overwhelming, well short of his rout of Bush eight years earlier. He received 37 percent of the vote to Romney’s 32 percent. Giuliani’s collapse was key; he won less than 8 percent.

Romney finally scored a victory a week later in Michigan, the state of his birth, and won a few days after that in Nevada, with its substantial Mormon population. But the key tests came in South Carolina on January 19 and Florida on January 29.

South Carolina had been McCain’s undoing against Bush. This time it provided him with his decisive, if narrow, victory—and here, the splintering of the conservative vote was key.
McCain won with just 33 percent, well below the 42 percent he had secured against Bush. His main competitor
in a state where religious conservatives are strong was Huckabee, who won 30 percent. Preventing Huckabee from consolidating the right end of the party the way Bush had was Fred Thompson, who drew 16 percent and promptly withdrew from the race. Romney won a little over 15 percent. The more conservative candidates taken together outpolled McCain by nearly 2-to-1.

In Florida, a stronger Giuliani might have hampered McCain the way Huckabee, Romney, and Thompson had blocked each other’s way in South Carolina. But by then,
Giuliani’s campaign was flailing, a fact so obvious that in a January 24 debate in Boca Raton, NBC anchor Brian Williams asked directly: “What has happened to your candidacy?” Gamely, Giuliani replied: “We have them all lulled into a very false sense of security now.”

In truth, Florida was a contest between Romney and McCain, and Romney flooded the state with resources and focused the campaign on the economy, an issue that has never been within McCain’s comfort zone. With less than a week to go, as Balz and Johnson reported, Romney had fought his way back to a tie in the tracking polls. In the end, McCain pushed the campaign back to Iraq, suggesting (falsely) that Romney favored withdrawal. McCain also drew key last-minute endorsements from Crist and Senator Mel Martinez. Again,
he won with a relatively modest share of the vote, beating Romney 36 percent to 31 percent. Giuliani came in at just 15 percent of the vote and Huckabee at 13 percent.

Republican professionals realized quickly that after Florida, there would be no stopping McCain. But for many conservatives, this was a source of alarm. McCain would be the first Republican nominee since Gerald Ford in 1976 to win despite opposition from organized conservatism, and the first whose base in Republican primaries rested on the party’s center and its dwindling left. Those who built the American right, from Barry Goldwater in 1964 through the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions, were intensely aware of the dangers a McCain victory portended.

“He is not the choice of conservatives, as opposed to the choice of the Republican establishment—and that distinction is key,” declared Rush Limbaugh, the arbiter of orthodoxy, using language that would become popular in the Tea Party years. “The Republican establishment, which has long sought to
rid the party of conservative influence since Reagan, is feeling a victory today as well as our friends in the media.”

For those outside the conservative movement, such anxiety seems strange. McCain’s voting record in the House and Senate has typically won high ratings from conservative groups. His positions on key issues—support for the Iraq War, opposition to abortion, his long-standing criticism of government spending—were those of a conservative loyalist.

But staunch conservatives saw things differently. They knew that in primary after primary, McCain’s base had been formed by moderates, liberals, independents, supporters of abortion rights, and critics of President Bush. Conservatives were not his coalition’s driving force. Republicans who described themselves as “very conservative” consistently rejected McCain. In the Florida primary, those voters chose Romney over McCain by more than 2-to-1.

Many of the leading Republicans who championed McCain had never been heroes to the right. Giuliani quickly endorsed McCain after Florida. Crist, whose last-minute endorsement in Florida proved important to McCain, appealed at least as much to independents and Democrats as to Republicans. It was no surprise when Crist left the GOP to run for the Senate as an Independent before making his 2014 gubernatorial run as a Democrat. McCain also won the endorsement of Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor of California, who had veered far from conservatism in working closely with Democrats in the state legislature.

When McCain wrapped up the nomination on February 5, Super Tuesday, the states he lost and those he won told the same story. Huckabee became the champion of the Old South, winning in Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, although McCain narrowly won in Missouri and Oklahoma. Romney carried a swath of states in the Midwest and mountain West. McCain lost most of the core Republican states, instead piling up delegates in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, and California—all states Obama would carry handily in November. Once again, McCain prevailed because Huckabee and Romney continued to divide the right.

Having never won the ideological heart of his party, McCain made a series of adjustments and overtures to the right, culminating in the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Steve Schmidt, one of McCain’s closest campaign aides, insists that her selection was primarily about shaking up a race that clearly seemed to be moving Obama’s way. Choosing a forty-four-year-old woman, herself a maverick as Alaska’s governor, seemed a perfect complement to McCain, who turned seventy-two that August. The Democrats’ rejection of Hillary Clinton’s own breakthrough candidacy still bothered—in many cases angered—millions of her supporters. These feelings were aggravated when Obama picked Joe Biden as his running mate rather than Clinton. And in defense of the Palin choice, Schmidt and others who supported it still point out that in the first Gallup poll taken after the Republican convention ended on September 4,
McCain took a five-point lead on Obama. He had trailed by three before the convention.

But there were other ways to have shaken up the contest. The one McCain preferred was to put his dear friend Joe Lieberman on the ticket. This would have been a true maverick move, since Lieberman was a Democrat, had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and was pro-choice on abortion. This is precisely what sank the idea. It would take a majority in just four state delegations to force a roll call vote, and McCain’s aides were certain that conservative pro-lifers would revolt. Senator Lindsey Graham, who favored Lieberman, talked up the possibility, which had the unintended effect of building opposition. As Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson reported,
McCain’s pollster Bill McInturff further hurt Lieberman’s chances—and the prospects of another McCain favorite, Tom Ridge, the pro-labor Republican governor of Pennsylvania—by reporting the results of a survey he did shortly before the convention. It showed that 40 percent of McCain’s core supporters would be less likely to vote for him if he chose a pro-choice running mate.

A McCain-Lieberman or McCain-Ridge ticket would have signaled philosophical change in the Republican Party. It was a risk McCain decided he couldn’t take. The risk he did take with Palin may have been safe inside his party, but it came to hurt him badly among moderate swing voters who came to see the Obama-Biden ticket as safer. That fall, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a South Florida Democrat, told me that she had once feared
substantial defections of moderate Jewish and traditionally Democratic voters toward McCain. But the Palin choice, she said, unleashed a flood of the people in “my condos”—the vast housing developments where many Jewish voters live—back to the Democrats and Obama. Exit polls ratified Wasserman Schultz’s intuition.

Whatever short-term surge McCain enjoyed was, in any event, wiped out over the weekend of September 13, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the Bush administration decided it could not rescue the firm. The Great Recession had begun, even if its full effects were not yet obvious. The episode led eventually to the bank bailout, but in immediate political terms, a strong case can be made that Obama won the election on Wednesday, September 24, when McCain called for a suspension of campaigning and said he would not participate in the first presidential debate two days hence. Shortly after McCain’s announcement, Obama calmly told reporters he thought the debate should go forward and that he’d be there. When McCain backed down and agreed to debate after all, Obama, the newcomer, emerged as the victor in a test of strength. McCain appeared impulsive and capricious in the midst of a crisis. In the debate itself, Obama achieved his central objective of showing the country that he was at ease and knowledgeable. A
USA Today
/Gallup Poll found that
voters saw Obama as offering “the best proposals to solve the country’s problems” by a remarkably wide 52-to-35 percent margin. By 46 percent to 34 percent, they said Obama had turned in the better debate performance, and Obama’s overall lead in the presidential race itself was back up to 8 points. There would be no looking back.

The perception that an Obama victory was nearly inevitable did not go down the same way with all Americans. In the afterglow of Obama’s historic victory, the bitterness that engulfed substantial parts of the right in the fall of 2008 was largely forgotten. This amnesia distorted subsequent explanations for the rise of the Tea Party and other forms of opposition to Obama once he took office. The Tea Party did not emerge spontaneously and suddenly just because Obama supported a stimulus plan or subsequently proposed health care reforms. The anti-Obama sentiments, rooted in anger, fear, and, in some cases, prejudice, were highly visible on the campaign trail that fall, to the point where McCain himself felt a need at times to push back against them.

“Rage Rising on the McCain Campaign Trail” was the headline on a CNN story published on October 11, 2008. The story, by correspondents Ed Henry and Ed Hornick, recounted a variety of incidents that presaged almost exactly comparable episodes that would become common after Obama was in the White House.

“I don’t trust Obama,” said a woman at a McCain rally in Minnesota. “I have read about him and he’s an Arab.” McCain, they reported, shook his head and replied, “No ma’am, no ma’am. He’s a decent family man . . . that I just happen to have disagreements with.”

One man at the Minnesota rally said he was “scared of an Obama presidency,” while at a rally in Waukesha, the heart of the Republican base in Wisconsin, a participant voiced alarm about the mystery of Obama’s rise, reflecting a notion that would become popular on the right, that only nefarious forces could have allowed him the success he enjoyed. “We’re all wondering why that Obama is where he’s at, how he got here,” he said. “I mean, everybody in this room is stunned that we’re in this position.”

“I’m mad. I’m really mad,” said another. “And what’s going to surprise you, it’s not the economy. It’s the socialists taking over our country.”

McCain seemed “torn” in his response to the attacks on Obama, as CNN put it. On the one hand, he regularly and honorably rebuked audience members for going too far, particularly when one of his supporters labeled Obama a “Muslim.” Yet McCain’s own campaign ran ads about Obama’s neighborhood friendship with Bill Ayers, who had been part of the Weather Underground in the 1960—around the time Obama was eight or nine years old. Later, Ayers became an academic and Obama worked with him in local Chicago charities. The circumstances
didn’t stop the McCain ad from declaring: “Barack Obama and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Friends. They’ve worked together for years. But Obama tries to hide it.” Palin had a convenient shorthand on the Ayers question: She accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Palin audiences sometimes responded by shouting “terrorist” and even “Kill him!”

It was to be one of the many paradoxes of Obama’s efforts to pull the country out of divisions that had plagued it since the 1990s, and in many cases the 1960s. Precisely because Obama was only nine years old when the sixties ended,
he carried none of the generational scars that Clinton did. Most Americans (including most boomers) shared Obama’s weariness of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years. Yet this posed a real challenge to a certain style of conservative politics, and in their frustration, the right’s militants—and, at times, the McCain campaign—reached back even farther, to far-right tropes of the 1950s or even the 1930s.