Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (22 page)

Their philosophical blinders led the staunchest conservatives in Gingrich’s ranks to miscalculate how the public would respond to the shutdown itself. Government was so unpopular, they assumed, that Americans wouldn’t much notice its absence. “Have you missed the government?” Senator Phil Gramm, asked on ABC’s
This Week with David Brinkley,
certain that he knew the answer. The reply of many Americans was, “Yes, we do.”

Representative David Funderburk from South Carolina shared Gramm’s certainty and believed the shutdown proved the point conservatives wanted to make about government. “We have had 800,000 Federal workers on furlough. Can the liberals continue to argue that these Federal workers and the thousands of idle programs they administer are critical to the health and safety of our country?” he declared. “Americans don’t miss these programs on Federal holidays and they certainly don’t miss them today.” But miss them they did.

The 1995–96 shutdown battle also brought home the contradiction between the Republicans’ stated desire for a balanced budget and the higher priority they placed on tax cuts. The GOP revolutionaries made a large mistake: their proposed $245 billion in Medicare cuts almost exactly matched the size of their tax cuts. This made it easy for Clinton and the Democrats to argue that conservatives were not paring back Medicare in the name of fiscal responsibility. They were cutting a popular program to finance their ideological obsession. Polls consistently showed that given a choice, voters preferred protecting Medicare to cutting taxes—Free and Cantril, again. And at crucial moments, both Gingrich and Bob Dole managed to remind voters that most Republicans (including, it should be said, Ronald Reagan, with considerable passion) had opposed Medicare in the first place.

In an unusually candid editorial published as the negotiations wound toward their troubling end for Republicans, the conservatives at
National Review
grappled with the tension that would vex conservatives again and again.
“The balanced budget is more important as symbolism than as accounting,” the magazine admitted editorially. “What matters now is that the government be clearly put on a path of reduced improvidence.” Suddenly the goal
that closed the government for nearly a month and created political chaos was no more than a symbol.

“Republicans have stopped talking about the positive aspects of their program,”
National Review
complained, “because they are so preoccupied with the essentially defensive message of ‘reducing the rate of growth’ of government programs. Balancing the budget is consuming every issue that comes near it.”

National Review
’s recipe was for the Republicans to give in to President Clinton on many of the numbers as long as conservatives got major policy changes in return. There was nothing wrong with throwing another $70 billion at Medicare, the magazine’s editors said, as long as Republicans preserved their medical savings accounts, which would severely undercut Medicare and represented “a radical departure from the Great Society model of government.” Throw more money at Medicaid, they said, but don’t let the White House preserve its “entitlement status” as the medical program of last resort for the poor. Unsurprisingly, there was only one issue on which the magazine counseled “intransigence.” The Republicans, the editors advised, should insist on their entire $245 billion tax cut.

Here was the clincher from the bellwether of conservative opinion. “Their most important accomplishment this year,” the magazine said of congressional Republicans, “is not potentially balancing the budget—an elusive goal still nearly a decade away—but scrapping huge chunks of the federal entitlement state.” (To nearly everyone’s surprise, balance would be reached far sooner, for reasons having very little to do with the Battle of the Shutdown.)

In one essay, the magazine neatly explained why the Republicans had such difficulty in fashioning a coherent and unified negotiating strategy, and why they were in disarray. The balanced budget was for some Republicans a vital goal and for others merely a front for the underlying conservative agenda. And so it would be two decades later.

In the midst of the budget wrangling, a devastating tragedy would cause the nation to pause and consider the implications of the abrasive antigovernment rhetoric
that had taken hold on the far right. At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The attack killed 168 people and injured nearly 700. Within a sixteen-block radius, 324 buildings were damaged or destroyed.

Initial speculation saw the attacks as the work of Arab or Muslim terrorists, which only increased the nation’s shock when it learned that the bombing was the work of two Americans, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. McVeigh had been inspired by the racist and antigovernment writings of William Luther Pierce, a white supremacist who wrote under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. His 1978 novel,
The Turner Diaries,
described the overthrow of the American government and a resulting nuclear war and race war that culminated in the extermination of Jews, gays, and nonwhites. Two pages from the book describing plans for the bombing of the FBI building in Washington were found in McVeigh’s getaway car. McVeigh made clear that he was responding to the FBI’s fifty-one-day siege of a compound in Waco, Texas, occupied by a cult known as the Branch Davidians. The siege ended on April 19, 1993—two years to the day before the Oklahoma City attack—with the burning of the compound and the death of seventy-six people, including the group’s leader, David Koresh. For many on the far right, Waco became the symbol of an oppressive federal government. In a letter to Fox News’ Rita Crosby a week after the Oklahoma City attack, McVeigh spoke the language of a soldier doing battle against an enemy.

“I chose to bomb a federal building because such an action served more purposes than other options,” he wrote. “Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike; a counter attack, for the cumulative raids.” The federal government had grown “militaristic and violent,” he said, and the bombing was “a pre-emptive (or pro-active) strike” against its “command and control centers within the federal building.”

“When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operation, it is sound military strategy to take the fight to the enemy.”

The “enemy” was the government of the United States.

For Clinton, whom Republicans had cast as a big-government advocate despite his New Democrat exertion, the bombing was an occasion for a direct and forceful challenge to right-wing rhetoric. “People should examine the
consequences of what they say,” he said, “and the kinds of emotions they’re trying in inflame.”
He urged Americans to resist “the purveyors of hatred and division” and “the promoters of paranoia.” Sensing the danger, Newt Gingrich shot back at liberals who saw links between McVeigh’s extremism and the standard rhetoric of the right. “It is grotesque,” said Gingrich, “to suggest that anybody in this country who raises legitimate questions about the size and scope of the federal government has any implication in this.” The contrast between the two statements suggests who was on offense after the attack, and who was on defense.

In a moving speech in Oklahoma City on April 23, Clinton stayed away from politics and spoke comforting words steeped in religious faith.
“It was the nation’s first exposure to Clinton as mourner in chief,” Michael Waldman, his chief speechwriter, wrote later. “In fact, it was the first time Clinton had been a reassuring figure rather than an unsettling one.” But if Clinton was subtle, he did not miss the chance to make a case against extremism. “Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear,” he declared. “When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life.”

And in honoring the dead, he offered an image of government workers far removed from conservative attacks on distant bureaucrats or McVeigh’s denunciations of federal officials as “militaristic and violent.” The public employees killed in the bombing were fellow citizens, Clinton said, “who served the rest of us—who worked to help the elderly and the disabled, who worked to support our farmers and our veterans, who worked to enforce our laws and to protect us. Let us say clearly, they served us well, and we are grateful.”

In the ensuing years, historians and journalists have debated whether Clinton’s response to Oklahoma City was even more important to rescuing his presidency than the budget battles with Gingrich and the Republicans. The
New York
magazine writer Peter Keating made one of the best cases for this view fifteen years after the bombing. He argued that Clinton
“found his voice” after Oklahoma City and that his response “gave Clinton the chance to pull his presidency together.” Both are true.

Keating cites a memo from Dick Morris eight days after the attack
suggesting that Clinton could use “extremism as issue against Republicans,” not by “direct accusations,” but via a “ricochet theory,” since some Republicans would be pushed by some of their supporters to defend right-wing militias that had been organized to oppose a federal government they looked upon much as McVeigh did. Clinton, as Keating notes, never went as far as Morris suggested, but he did write in his memoir: “The haters and extremists didn’t go away, but they were on the defensive, and, for the rest of my term, would never quite regain the position they had enjoyed after Timothy McVeigh took the demonization of government beyond the limits of humanity.”

Clinton brought the links between various parts of his message home at his 1996 State of the Union speech when he invited Richard Dean, a Vietnam veteran who had worked in the Murrah Federal Building and, as Keating noted, “re-entered the building four times to rescue people after it blew up.” But Clinton was not simply praising a hero. He was also making a point about the government shutdown. “This last November,” Clinton said of Dean, “he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down, he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay. . . . I challenge all of you in this chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again.”

Keating concluded: “That’s how much Clinton got it: He explicitly linked the terror of Oklahoma City to the federal shutdown, and both to the Republican Congress. After that, Clinton barely needed to look over his shoulder to get reelected.”

However one judges the Oklahoma City effect, it’s clear that Clinton’s budget victory was a setup for a triumphant election year that finally saw a complete economic revival. Jobs were up by 2.6 million. Both the index of consumer confidence and the sale of new homes were up by 11.5 percent. The economy’s momentum was such that in 1997 growth would hit an astonishing 8.2 percent. By the end of Clinton’s term, incomes were growing even for those who found themselves at the bottom of the class structure and who had long suffered from stagnating incomes. (It would not be long before they were stagnating and falling again.) The Roaring Nineties had hit their stride.

In his 1996 State of the Union message, Clinton arrived at the apotheosis of triangulation in two sentences.
“The era of big government is over,” he declared. “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” He made a giant (and both unnecessary and inaccurate) ideological concession in the first sentence, and then pulled it back.

For conservatives, there was an odd disconnect between the Gingrich Revolution and the battle for the Republican presidential nomination. Senator Bob Dole was the front-runner but he was also caught up in the congressional mayhem, and his involvement with the shutdown would hurt him in the fall contest with Clinton.
“If Dole wins and Gingrich runs Congress,” ran the tagline on one Clinton ad, “there’ll be nobody there to stop them.” It was simple, and devastating, given the collapse of Gingrich’s popularity.

Yet in the primaries, Dole was in no way a representative of the new conservative rebels. On the contrary, he was the voice of an older style of congressional politics. A staunch conservative, the man who had knocked Nelson Rockefeller off the Republican ticket sixteen years earlier was now cast as a Rockefeller Republican.