Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (60 page)

In May, Senator Richard Lugar, a thirty-five-year Senate veteran and one of the body’s most respected foreign policy voices, lost the Indiana Republican primary to state treasurer Richard Mourdock by a 3-to-2 margin. Mourdock had strong support from outside conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, while the eighty-year old Lugar refused to adjust his approach to campaigning or to apologize for his history of working with Democrats, including Obama. That Lugar’s overall record was, by most standards, solidly conservative did not help him. In a CNN interview that May, Mourdock illustrated how defining compromise out of the conservative playbook was a new imperative on the right.

“What I’ve said about compromise and bipartisanship,” Mourdock said, is
that “I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, lower taxes and get America moving again.” When the interviewer noted that this didn’t sound like compromise, Mourdock replied: “Well, it is the definition of political effectiveness.” It certainly was an effective position to take for a Republican primary in the Tea Party era.

It was only much later that the costs of nominating Mourdock would become clear. Two weeks before the 2012 election, he was asked about his opposition to exceptions to an abortion ban, for example in the case of rape. He replied: “I think
even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.”

At that point in the campaign, Mourdock was favored to defeat Democratic representative Joe Donnelly. But on Election Day, even as Obama was losing Indiana to Romney by 10 points, Donnelly defeated Mourdock by 6, and a margin of nearly 150,000 votes.

Something similar happened in the August Republican Senate primary in Missouri. Representative Todd Akin, a staunch conservative Christian—he had once said that “at the heart of liberalism really is a hatred of God”—upset two opponents who had been running well ahead of him, former state treasurer Sarah Steelman, who had Sarah Palin’s endorsement, and John Brunner, a businessman who was a favorite of the Chamber of Commerce and spent more than
$7 million of his own money on his campaign. All three had been running ahead of incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in the polls, but Akin’s lead was the smallest and he was universally regarded as the weakest general election candidate.

Democrats knew this, and shrewdly intervened in the GOP primary on Akin’s behalf. McCaskill’s campaign ran an ad “attacking” Akin, but in the context of the Republican primary McCaskill was trying to influence, it was anything but an attack.
The ad noted that Akin was a “true conservative,” “the most conservative congressman in Missouri,” and a “crusader against bigger government” with “a pro-family agenda.” These were magic words of praise with Missouri’s very conservative Republican primary electorate, and the ad provided Akin with additional air cover he could not have afforded himself. In
the meantime, Majority PAC, a Super PAC dedicated to helping Democratic Senate candidates, spent nearly $1.2 million going after Brunner, the most moderate candidate and thus the most dangerous foe to McCaskill.

The Democrats got the foe they wanted: Akin won the August 7 primary. And their investments paid off quickly and handsomely. On Sunday, August 19, a St. Louis TV station asked Akin a similar question to the one Mourdock would eventually face: why his opposition to abortion extended even to women who had become pregnant because of rape. His answer astounded the nation and sent Republicans, including Romney, scurrying away in horror.

“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

The next day,
Romney declared that Akin’s comments were “insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong.” The stray “frankly” in Romney’s statement may have reflected his frank realization of how politically damaging Akin’s comment was to the party as a whole. Two Republican senators urged Akin to withdraw from the race and statements by both the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and Senator John Cornyn, who headed the Republican Senate campaign arm, were clearly aimed at the same result.

But Akin refused to drop out, and the result was predictable. While Romney carried Missouri by 9 points, McCaskill overwhelmed Akin by 15 points and received more votes than Romney.

It was astonishing enough that two different Republican candidates in the same year would entangle themselves in impossible controversies because of their peculiar statements on rape. But the lessons of the 2012 primaries extended well beyond Akin and Mourdock and pointed to how the conservative movement’s radicalized wings might not only cause problems with the larger electorate, but also devour each other.

Conservatism has always had to struggle with real and principled differences among its various tendencies.
National Review
’s fusionist consensus worked well as long as parties to the agreement did not ask too many
questions and did not press each other too hard. At a practical level, economic conservatives such as George W. Bush could side with opponents of abortion and win their votes as long as they were allowed to press their case quietly, using soothing language about “building a culture of life” and seeking indirect, longer-term victories through Supreme Court appointments. But abortion’s foes had watched the practice take deep hold in the country in the four decades after
Roe v. Wade
and wanted more than they had been given by conservative politicians whose energies mainly focused on low taxes and deregulation. It was thus not surprising that they turned to more uncompromising candidates such as Akin and Mourdock in the primaries, and demanded stronger and stronger legislation at both the state and national levels—intrusive requirements for ultrasounds for those seeking abortions became the most controversial. Loyalty and high turnouts needed to be requited.

But the radicalization of conservatism on economic issues was problematic for the very working-class and middle-class constituencies that were drawn rightward not because they were particularly pro-business but because they disliked the liberals for their views on social issues or civil rights, or because they felt government policies indulged the lazy—and illegal immigrants. It was one thing for Reagan to propose across-the-board tax cuts when the top income tax rate was (in theory if not in practice) 90 percent. It was quite another to argue for lower income tax rates when the top rate was down to 35 percent, and the rate on capital gains was only 15 percent. The benefits of these policies were not obvious to social conservatives with middle- or working-class incomes.

There was always a certain cynicism in the conservative strategy of gaining the votes of the less well-to-do for economic policies that did little for them in exchange for what was often mere lip service to their views on religious and cultural matters. In early 2015, Ralph Reed, the veteran religious right leader, illustrated this cynicism, no doubt unconsciously, when in an interview with the
New York Times
he instructed wealthy, pro-business conservatives on the importance of evangelical voters.

“You’re not going to get your tax cut if this vote doesn’t turn out,” Reed said. “If evangelicals don’t pour out of the pews and into the voting precincts, there isn’t going to
be any successful business agenda.” In other words: pay attention to God and the prayerful, or your taxes will go sky-high.

Moreover, the Great Recession was widely seen, even among many rank-and-file conservatives, as having been caused in whole or in part by Wall Street financiers who had made their money much as Mitt Romney had. The objection to the Wall Street bailout for many street-corner conservatives was less that it violated free-market norms than that it had protected the wealthy and connected while leaving Americans like themselves exposed to economic hardship. “Where’s my bailout?” was a slogan that appealed across ideological lines. And many middle Americans of all political views did not need to look at statistical tables to know that the rewards in the economy had shifted sharply away from them and toward the very well-off. Working-class voters who had supported Nixon and Reagan in the years when the term “middle Americans” was popular felt they had a great deal to lose at a time when industrial wages were high, a large share of the workforce was unionized—and the full effects of globalization had not yet been felt.

Some of these voters might still respond to arguments against spending their tax dollars on the “takers” unwilling to work as hard as they were. But these appeals were less persuasive when they came from a millionaire venture capitalist. Many toward whom they were directed began to suspect that the greatest threat to their standard of living came not from below but from above. If the core contradiction of the old Roosevelt coalition had been race, the central contradiction of the conservative coalition in the twenty-first century was class. Barack Obama may have caused offense by talking about working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion.” But he understood this contradiction perfectly. Romney would pay the price.

“The House GOP’s incredible, amazing discovery: Most Americans aren’t entrepreneurs.”

Mitt Romney had barely secured the Republican nomination when the Obama campaign picked up where his primary opponents had left off. The Obama calculus was based on a classic principle of modern political consulting: elections can be either a referendum on an incumbent or a choice between two candidates. Obama’s lieutenants were determined to make the election a choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

The Romney campaign was based on a simple and logical proposition: that economic discontent and impatience with Obama would help Republicans twice over. Swing voters who had elected Obama in 2008 because of their dissatisfaction with Bush would turn back to the Republicans because of their unhappiness with the president’s economic stewardship. And voters in Obama’s base, particularly young people and African-Americans, would not turn out in the same strength as they had in 2008 because he had disappointed
their very high expectations—and because many of them were suffering in the slow recovery. It was the classic referendum theory, embodied in the Stuart Stevens’s “Obama Isn’t Working” poster, and it had a certain historical logic on its side. Two of the most consequential presidents in American history, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, initially won office in classic referendum elections. Both were ideologically transformative, but they won largely because the country was so unhappy with first Herbert Hoover and then Jimmy Carter.

Yet in 2012, the referendum theory had core weaknesses. The biggest: most Americans didn’t blame Obama for the economic mess. In September 2012, after Obama had been in office for nearly four years, a CNN/ORC poll found that
57 percent of voters blamed George W. Bush and the Republicans for the country’s economic problems; only 35 percent blamed Obama and the Democrats. If his party had been able to run against Herbert Hoover for decades, Obama could run against Bush for at least one more election.

Moreover, most Americans thought the economy was better than it had been, even if it was not yet good enough. Republican pollster David Winston was shrewd in warning his party that Reagan’s classic question—
“Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”—would not work for Romney as it had for Reagan because the public had a genuinely nuanced view of the nation’s economic situation.

Winston asked a question of his own that gave voters three options. The results were revealing. The
largest group, 39 percent, said the economy was better but that the amount of progress it had made was unacceptable; 29 percent said it was better and that level of progress was acceptable. Only 31 percent said flatly that the economy was not getting better. Romney’s campaign was geared to the third group, which was not nearly large enough to elect him. Obama’s campaign pocketed the second group and directed its efforts toward persuading the largest share of the electorate that his policies, rather than Romney’s, were more likely to speed the improvement these voters were looking for. Romney’s advisers were a sophisticated bunch, but their view was clearly influenced by two core beliefs of the right and far right: that Obama was a dangerous and miserable failure, and that most Americans shared this view. They were entitled to the first view as a matter of opinion, but the second was a factual matter on which they turned out to be wrong.

The attacks on Romney, first from his own primary opponents and then from the Democrats, were important because if he were successfully branded as a wealthy and out-of-touch capitalist who had made money destroying rather than creating jobs, his economic program—especially if its provisions disproportionately benefited wealthy Americans like himself, which they did—would be suspect. Romney would be crippled in the campaign’s most important game-within-a-game for the hearts of the largest group of voters, those looking primarily toward the future.

Thus did the Obama campaign go on the air on May 15, 2012, with a two-minute ad called “Steel.” It ran in only a few markets but received wide attention. It told the story of GST Steel in Kansas City, Missouri, and opened with the testimony of Joe Soptic, who had worked there. “I was a steelworker for thirty years. We had a reputation for quality products. It was something that was American made. And we weren’t rich but I was able to put my daughter through college. . . . That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital.” The ad contained footage of Romney on the stump declaring: “I know how business works. I know why jobs come and why they go.” Soptic comes back: “They made as much money off it as they could and they closed it down and filed for bankruptcy without any concern for the families or the community.”
If Rick Perry had called Romney-style capitalists “vultures,” another worker in the ad, Joe Cobb, chose a different villain. “It was like a vampire. They sucked the life out of us.”