Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (26 page)

Nonetheless, the Republicans decided to double down. If the Starr Report didn’t persuade the public, then surely the public release of Clinton’s grand jury testimony would do the trick. It went public on September 21. An
estimated 22 million Americans watched the president on television as he parried questions about his private behavior, carefully maintaining his composure and presenting himself as contrite and ashamed.

I was covering an event with Clinton on the day the video was streaming across the nation’s television screens. It was, all at once, a poignant, telling, and absurd moment. Clinton had traveled to the New York University School of Law for what, under other circumstances, might have been a triumphant celebration of his approach to politics. The occasion was a conference titled “Strengthening Democracy in the Global Economy,” but Washington policy types had simply dubbed it “The Third Way Meeting.” Its purpose was to champion the approach to politics that Clinton had made his own and sought to spread around the democratic world. The supporting cast could not have been more impressive, including as it did Clinton’s main Third Way partner, British prime minister Tony Blair, along with Italian prime minister Romano Prodi and other world leaders.

As Clinton’s testimony was being broadcast on television screens elsewhere at the school, Clinton and Blair gamely talked about their achievements and the Big Idea they hoped would sweep the world.
Blair, who loved synthesizing concepts and sometimes opposites as much as Clinton did, pronounced their approach as an “alliance between progress and justice.” It was an effort to “take the basic value structure” of old progressive faith “minus the dogma.”

For his part, Clinton spoke with the breezy informality he had used during living-room get-togethers in countless New Hampshire towns when he was first battling reports about his personal life during the primaries in 1992. Third Wayers, he said, wanted to be “modern and progressive,” to avoid “false choices designed to divide people to win elections,” to have an America that would stand up for “collective responsibilities beyond our borders” and would “moderate boom-bust cycles.”

As the highly advanced information systems that Third Wayers extolled were feeding the president’s testimony to millions, it fell to Hillary Rodham Clinton to preside over a morning discussion among the Third Way intellectuals. Her words were those of a stoic, and they had more than one meaning that day.
“We have to take the world as we find it,” she said, “and do what we can to improve upon it.”

Although the collision of the conference and the broadcast was happenstance, it provided a revealing juxtaposition. The very success Clinton had enjoyed politically in advancing an alternative to Reaganism is what marked him out as a dangerous enemy to those who had looked forward to an ascendant conservatism. Clintonian Third Way, New Democrat politics had undercut conservative politicians accustomed to running and winning campaigns against traditional liberals. This is not to say that the horror grassroots conservatives expressed over Clinton’s behavior was contrived or insincere. Nor does it diminish Clinton’s responsibility for what he did. But the very successes Clinton and Blair celebrated that day at NYU meant that the stakes involved in Clinton’s career and his presidency were very high.

And while it seemed strange that Clinton would be talking about education, health care, economics, and job training while television screens showed him discussing his sex life, a rather large majority of Americans made their choice about impeachment on the basis of that very contrast. They had elected Clinton because of what they hoped he would do about these practical concerns that had a bearing on their own lives, not because they regarded him as a moral paragon.

This became clear when they cast their ballots in the midterm elections. Shockingly for Gingrich and the Republicans, the Clinton scandal helped rather than hurt Democrats in November. Instead of losing seats, the Democrats picked up five. It was a much bigger defeat for the Republicans than the small number might suggest. Not since 1934 had the party out of the White House failed to gain seats at midterm. And not since 1822 had the out-party failed to gain seats in midterms held during a president’s second term in office.

An election that might have cost Clinton the presidency instead cost Gingrich the Speakership. On November 6, three days after the election, Gingrich announced he was stepping down. Even his own longtime supporters told him it was time to go. Given Gingrich’s association, particularly in the minds of liberals, with a rather rabid brand of conservatism, what is striking in retrospect—and important for understanding today’s right—is that many conservatives had soured on Gingrich precisely because he seemed so ready to work with Clinton after the failure of the shutdown strategy. He had survived earlier efforts to push him out led by his colleagues Tom DeLay
and Dick Armey. At the time of the earlier coup, many on the right expressed unhappiness not with Gingrich’s ideological zeal but with his moderation.
A young Florida congressman named Joe Scarborough, who would later host MSNBC’s morning news program, summarized how they felt. “Quite a few members are obviously concerned over the direction that the leadership has taken,” Scarborough said. “We have a concern that our leadership remains shell-shocked from the government shutdown a year and a half ago. Most of us are ready for them to start leading again rather than sitting back and reading from Clinton’s song sheet.”

When Gingrich finally fell, ideology was not the only factor, perhaps not even the central cause. Republicans were simply exhausted with a very complicated man. “Too much drama, too many headaches,” as Bill Kristol put it sixteen years later. If conservatives were glad to see him go, it turned out that Clinton would miss him, especially in the coming weeks.

Clinton hoped the 1998 election would be the end of impeachment. It wasn’t. With Gingrich out, power shifted toward Henry Hyde, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, and House Whip Tom DeLay. Both were determined to push through to impeachment, even though the voters had just said no—and even though any effort to remove Clinton was destined to fail in the Senate, where 45 Democrats would block the required two-thirds majority. For the same reasons conservatives had come to mistrust Gingrich, Clinton’s lieutenants felt he would have found a practical way out. But the passion in the GOP was to mark Clinton permanently as a president who had been impeached. And the majority view in the country had little impact on the Republican majority that would make the decision—for a reason that would continue to foster polarization for years to come.
As Gillon observed, since “most GOP members represented districts with high concentrations of Republican voters . . . most representatives felt they could pursue the case for impeachment without fear.”

Before it was over, the saga produced another political casualty. Representative Bob Livingston of Louisiana had been elected unopposed by his Republican colleagues to replace Gingrich as Speaker. But in the culture war that accompanied impeachment,
Hustler,
the pornographic magazine founded by Larry Flynt, was eager to demonstrate Republican hypocrisy on sexual matters.
Learning that Flynt was about to publish a story on his extramarital affairs, Livingston publicly apologized and announced his resignation.
He urged Clinton to follow his example to “heal the wounds you have created.”

On December 19, the House voted two articles of impeachment, the first charging him with committing perjury in his grand jury testimony, the second accusing him of obstructing justice. It voted down two others, linked to perjury in the Paula Jones lawsuit and alleged abuses of power in covering up the Lewinsky affair. The House action forced a reluctant Senate to take up the matter.
When it finally acted on February 12, 1999, it rejected the obstruction of justice article on a 50–50 vote, while the perjury article received only 45 votes. Five Republicans voted to reject both articles and an additional five voted for the first but against the second. It was a small dose of bipartisanship at the end of a wild partisan ride.

The Clinton impeachment battle was one of the most bizarre and distasteful episodes in American political history. It formally involved charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. For some conservatives, those will always be the issues. Yet the episode was also the staging ground for a series of overlapping cultural and political trials involving issues and sensibilities that went beyond these legal questions. For many, the values of the 1960s were on trial. Bill Clinton stood in for everything they saw wrong about this formative era, and his sins were the sins of a permissive value-neutrality that was bringing the nation low. For many liberals, the conservative Congress—and, yes, the “vast right-wing conspiracy”—were on trial. Organized conservatism and organized conservative money instigated and financed a series of investigations, lawsuits, and press reports designed to bring Clinton down, by any means necessary. For many Americans, politicians as a group were on trial, and few of them, left or right, came out of the struggle with much credit. The whole thing seemed a terrible waste of time, energy, and money.

It’s also possible to see the imbroglio as the first clear sign of a crisis in the political system with which we are still living. Since the collapse of the liberal consensus in the 1960s—it came under attack first from the Goldwater
right and then from a New Left appalled by the Vietnam War and a spirit of conformity—American politics has involved a fierce and relatively evenly matched struggle for power. For conservatives, who thought first in 1980 and then in 1994 that they had finally gained the upper hand, it was a long era of dashed hopes. The ferocity of the response to Clinton reflected the view of many in their ranks that his victories were based on trickery, manipulation, and slickness. And when they thought they had him cornered, he escaped—with the help of voters who, when given a choice between a flawed but reasonably successful president and his enemies, chose against his enemies.

For contemporary conservatism, the 1990s were a formative decade. They began with George H. W. Bush’s failure to reshape conservatism into a more middle-of-the-road philosophy. Bush had come to accept that the Republican Party of his age was no longer the party of his father’s era, and the very locus of his political career had forced him to acknowledge that Eisenhower could no longer be the model of a popular Republicanism. If Prescott Bush had been elected to the Senate from Connecticut, where Eisenhower-style Modern Republicanism sold well, his son built his electoral career in Texas, which demanded a much fiercer loyalty to conservatism. Out of political necessity, Bush thus acknowledged the GOP’s new imperatives long before Reagan’s rise.

Yet Bush was the least doctrinaire of politicians and he never thought he was establishing a creed. This led to some missed opportunities. By failing to engage seriously with Jack Kemp’s ideas on poverty rooted in “empowerment,” he lost a chance to renovate conservatism in a way that might have broadened its appeal. While Bush was resisting new ideas, Bill Clinton was turning his party into a laboratory for innovation—to the point, as Kristol pointed out, that some dissident conservatives inside Bush’s own administration quietly opened a dialogue with Clintonian New Democrats.

For all that, George Herbert Walker Bush was an instinctive moderate who seemed to share his father’s instincts. Bush 41 was about turning Reaganism into a fiscally sustainable and practical proposition. That Bush did not seem to understand the rebellion he was courting when he agreed to tax increases in the 1990 budget deal said a lot about him.

For conservatives, it said that he wasn’t one of them. As Kristol put it
many years later, conservatives were struck by the “cavalier” way in which Bush broke his no-new-taxes promise. They sensed, he said, that when Reagan raised taxes, he did so unhappily and “under pressure.” Because Bush drew such a sharp distinction between what might be said during a campaign to get elected and what it took to govern, he didn’t seem bothered at all by his apostasy.

Seen from another perspective, Bush was simply a realist who accepted what Clinton would call “the laws of mathematics” on budgeting and believed that conservatives were more likely to consolidate their gains if they used power in prudent ways—paradoxically, as we have seen, much as Reagan had done most of the time.

Had Bush succeeded, a consolidated and moderated form of conservatism may well have taken hold. Instead, Gingrich’s 1990 rebellion, Bush’s defeat, and Gingrich’s triumph four years later put a more aggressive, ideological conservatism back at center stage.

The Gingrich sweep was built on a shift toward much more party-line voting in congressional elections, and it tightened the grip of southern conservatism on the party as a whole. The influence gained by a highly ideological conservative media in those years, particularly during the Clinton scandal, would further empower the right wing while creating an increasingly inward-looking conservative echo chamber. This led to the party’s miscalculation of the public’s response to impeachment, and it would have a comparably distorting impact on conservative perceptions and strategies in the coming years.