Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (66 page)

The episode was deeply harmful to Obama over the long run and ended the long advantage he had enjoyed on foreign policy. Americans approved of his two most visible accomplishments: the withdrawal from Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden. But after the confusion around Syria, some foreign governments began expressing doubts about Obama’s steadfastness even as his fellow citizens began to question his overall approach. This would hurt him later when the Islamic State emerged, out of nowhere for most Americans and to the surprise of the administration itself, as a new threat.

The year 2013 ended far less merrily for Obama than it had begun.
Julie Pace of the Associated Press captured the mood when she asked him at his year-end news conference in December, “Has this been the worst year of your presidency?”

Obama declined to give a direct answer, though the distinction probably belonged to 2011, or at least its first eight months, when the president emerged from the summer looking weak after the debt ceiling fiasco in which he had operated from a position of fear. Yet the knocks Obama took in 2013 were real. They included the defeat of background checks, the bottling up of immigration reform, the website disaster, and the costs of his Syrian jumble. The gaudy progressive hopes of his Inaugural Address had gone largely unfulfilled.

But there was also this: in 2013, at least, conservatives had also absorbed heavy blows. The Tea Party began to decline in both real and perceived power, and Republicans began a slow retreat from the politics of absolutism.

At year’s end, Democratic senator Patty Murray and Paul Ryan did something that had not happened since the Republican takeover of the House in 2010: they quietly negotiated a middle-of-the-road budget deal that more or less split the differences between the parties. This was big news because compromise itself had come to be viewed as a violation of conservative ideals and was a new dividing line between the parties. Yet if compromise was now a countercultural activity for conservatives, Ryan and Boehner correctly calculated they could get away with it because their colleagues were still dealing with the political wreckage from the shutdown and had no stomach for another fight.

Boehner himself even spoke out against the party’s new alternative establishment, the well-funded outside groups such as FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, and Americans for Prosperity, for opposing the Ryan-Murray deal “before they even saw it.” He accused them of “using our members and using the American people for their own goals.” It was a recognition that a counter-establishment, bolstered by conservative radio talkers, Fox News, and right-wing money, was in direct competition with the party’s elected leaders for control not only over its message but also over its approach to governing.

Yet there was no letting up on Obama. All year long, Republicans searched in vain for a conspiracy behind the killing of four Americans,
including Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Mere mention of the word “Benghazi” was enough to incite conservative crowds and it became the new shorthand on the right for all that was wrong with both Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Republicans insisted that the administration was covering up its failures and had not done everything it could have to save American lives. The focus on Benghazi did not dissipate even when a report from the House Intelligence Committee—released, conveniently, after the 2014 elections—cleared the administration of such charges. Still the Benghazi obsession eventually had a political payoff for Republicans. The never-ending congressional inquiry into Benghazi led, at least indirectly, to the revelation in 2015 that Hillary Clinton had avoided sending email on a State Department account and used a private server in her home instead. It would be the first major controversy of her campaign for president, and it would drag her down in the polls throughout the summer of 2015. She would win a reprieve only in late September of 2015, when Kevin McCarthy bragged on Fox News of the investigation’s impact on Clinton’s poll numbers. His admission of a political motive enraged his colleagues, helped doom his candidacy for Speaker—and was a lifeline to Clinton. Her strong performance at a House investigative committee hearing in the face of Republican badgering strengthened her further. Like her husband, she was, for a while at least, the beneficiary of Republican and conservative overreach.

Conservatives also took on their favorite target, the Internal Revue Service, for allegedly targeting conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status under the “social welfare” provision of the tax code. With the loosening of campaign finance rules by the Supreme Court, the IRS took on new responsibilities to regulate these groups. It emerged that the IRS did not single out conservative organizations but also challenged progressive groups—and that most of the conservative groups received the tax status they were seeking anyway. In the end, even Representative Darrell Issa, the scourge of the Obama administration, could not find any participation by the White House in the screening and vetting process.
Issa’s report was left to claiming that “President Obama’s rhetoric against conservative-oriented groups” had “influenced how the IRS engaged with them.” Both the Benghazi and IRS
stories provided many hours of entertaining outrage for Fox News viewers and created moments of embarrassment for public officials. But they did not produce the Watergate moment Republicans longed for.

Was 2014 the year the “Republican establishment” put the Tea Party in its place? Or was it the year when the Establishment went over to the Tea Party?

The first narrative was popular in the media because the Republican Party did far better in 2014 than in the previous two election cycles at preventing the nomination of obviously extreme candidates. Incumbents were more prepared for challengers, and those challengers were, on the whole, less formidable than some of the earlier Tea Party standard-bearers. In the case of Mississippi’s Thad Cochran, as we saw in Chapter One, Republicans had to import Democratic voters into their primary to fend off Chris McDaniel in the year’s strongest Tea Party challenge. But other incumbents had it easier, and 2014 was the first year since 2008 in which conservative insurgents failed to dislodge a single Republican incumbent. Besides Cochran, the victors included the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senators Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, Pat Roberts, and John Cornyn.

Yet the scorecard did not reflect the entire game. L. Brent Bozell III, a leading voice on the right, told the
Washington Post,
“What I find to be the greatest irony of them all is everybody has one thing in common—everybody is running as a conservative.” In fact, the Tea Party’s greatest victory was not electoral. It was to change the nature of the party and the definition of conservatism. Despite Boehner’s grumbling at the end of 2013, the distinction between the Establishment and the Tea Party was now blurred.

This was obvious in the contests that did not involve incumbents. Most of these could not be characterized as fights between “the grass roots” and “the big guys.” Rather, they were clashes between competing establishment factions with vast sums to spend. They had little to do with the long-term philosophical direction of the party, since rich ideological donors, along with Tea Party groups, had already seen to the task of moving it rightward. Political correctness of an extremely conservative kind was the rule in 2014, meaning
that some Republican politicians experienced indigestion as they were forced to eat old words acknowledging a human role in climate change. Except for the year-end budget agreement, they shunned deal-making with Obama.

The May primary for an open seat in Nebraska was revealing. Ben Sasse, a university president who held a variety of jobs in George W. Bush’s administration, won it handily. His success was broadly taken as a triumph for the Tea Party, which just a week earlier had been said to have suffered a defeat in North Carolina. There, Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the state House of Representatives and the so-called establishment candidate, faced opponents perceived to be to his right. Yet Tillis would prove to be one of the most right-wing candidates on any ballot in 2014. In the legislature, he had worked happily with the most conservative forces in the state.

An instructive way to look at the Nebraska result was suggested by
Wall Street Journal
writer Reid Epstein. Sometimes news stories are like good poems that convey meaning through artful—if not always intentional—juxtaposition.

Epstein noted that Sasse was “
backed by more than $2.4 million in ad spending, either praising him or attacking his opponents, from organizations such as the small-government Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, which targets Republicans it deems insufficiently conservative.”

Yet in the very next paragraph, Epstein quoted a Facebook post from Senator Ted Cruz, the Tea Party hero who supported Sasse. The Texas Republican declared that “Ben Sasse’s decisive victory is a clear indication that the grass roots are rising up to make D. C. listen.”

So, was this really the grass roots speaking to Washington? Or was it a cadre of conservative groups, largely working out of Washington, spending vast sums of cash to persuade voters to listen to them? It was hard to see Nebraska’s primary as a mass revolt, since turnout amounted to just
316,124 out of 1,152,180 registered Nebraskans.
Sasse won with about 110,000 votes. And the grassroots claim was problematic given Sasse’s Washington experience and also because many Nebraska-based Tea Party groups backed one of his opponents, former state treasurer Shane Osborn.
Salon
’s Jim Newell noted that FreedomWorks, one of the Washington-based operations that latched on to the Tea Party early, initially endorsed Osborn but switched to Sasse. The local Tea Party faithful who preferred Osborn resented the machinations
of the big-money groups headquartered in the nation’s capital, whose competition resembled a
Game of Thrones
power struggle.
As the
Atlantic
’s Molly Ball put it, “Sasse actually represents less the Tea Party’s anti-incumbent rage than the sort of fusion candidate who can unite the party establishment and base—a well-credentialed insider who can convince the right wing he’s on their side.”

In one of the most insightful and important articles of the election cycle, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru of
National Review
introduced “Establishment Tea” into the political conversation. “The tea parties have almost since their inception been attacking the party establishment for not standing for anything, and the establishment has been complaining for nearly as long that tea party candidates are not ready for prime time.
This primary season, each side seems to be learning the others’ lesson.” Sasse fit this bill, they argued because he “campaigned on a full-throated anti-Obamacare and anti-Washington message” yet “was a former Bush official who didn’t scare anyone.”

Establishment Tea meant this: the Establishment was moving right to survive, and the Tea Partiers, at least when they were not facing incumbents, were finding themselves a better bunch of candidates.

Tea Party rebels did achieve one victory that shocked the political class—and perhaps even the Tea Party itself. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor could be forgiven for thinking that in unseating him, the Tea Party had gone after a friend. After all, in November 2010, he had declared that “[t]he Tea Party [is] . . . an
organic movement that played a tremendously positive role in this election. I mean, certainly, it produced an outcome beneficial to our party when you’re picking up at least 60-some seats.” Cantor fell to the very forces he and his colleagues unleashed and encouraged.

Immigration was a central issue used against Cantor by David Brat, the insurgent professor who defeated him by 11 percentage points. It was a reminder of how powerful the issue is for the Republican right. If there had ever been any chance that Boehner would act on his promises to Obama about immigration reform, Cantor’s defeat almost certainly closed it off. Cantor’s loss made holding a fearful and fractious GOP caucus together an even more central preoccupation.

Cantor’s loss was also a blow to conservatives who were trying to reform the movement. He recognized, as we’ve seen, that employees and not just
entrepreneurs deserved the party’s attention, and he had sponsored efforts to strengthen thinkers in the movement who were trying to come up with plausible policies. His defeat helps explain why he and his allies worried so much about being too bold in their new ideas venture.

There was an irony in the race, and it related to gerrymandering. Cantor’s district was changed to give him more Republican voters—and he lost especially badly in the primary among the new and very conservative voters who had been moved in to strengthen him in the general election.

For Democrats entering the fall of 2014, the election was set up badly, and then things would get darker still. Most of the key Senate races were in states Obama lost in 2012, and the two seats the party thought it might pick up from the GOP were in Romney states, too. Democratic incumbents were in trouble from the start in Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Alaska. Open seats held by Democrats who had left or retired in Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia also looked very vulnerable. Every one of these seats fell to the Republicans, although North Carolina and Alaska were close. And Democrats fell far short of picking up targeted seats in Kentucky—McConnell’s seat—and Georgia.