Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (35 page)

Her response pointed to a reality about the Bush presidency that would have a long-lasting effect: in the period from 9/11 through John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, Republicans were prepared to pummel Democrats who broke with Bush as bordering on unpatriotic and as insufficiently alive to the need to protect the nation against terrorism. Bush’s partisan invocation
of patriotism and security set a pattern that would affect Tea Party politics after he left the White House.

Chocola won the race, 50 percent to 46 percent, and his brief congressional career perfectly matched the trajectory of the politics of the Bush era. With Bush leading the ticket in 2004, Chocola was easily reelected over Democrat Joe Donnelly. But when Donnelly ran again in 2006, Chocola became a casualty of a Democratic sweep fueled by disillusionment with Bush, and with the war that had initially advanced Chocola’s career.

Bush picked another national security fight in 2002 that gave Republicans additional campaign fodder. Although he had initially resisted the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security, he changed course in early summer but still found a way to take issue with the Democrats. Criticizing them for affording the new department’s employees various union and civil service protections, he argued these would make it more difficult to dismiss employees for reasons related to national security, insubordination, or incompetence.
Republican senators filibustered all efforts to reach a compromise and Bush charged that the Senate (meaning its Democratic majority) was “not interested in the security of the American people.”

It can fairly be said that the battle over DHS definitively broke whatever had survived the post-9/11 bipartisan spirit. One particularly vicious Republican advertisement would be cited by Democrats years later as the signpost for when everything became partisan again. In Georgia, Republican Saxby Chambliss pilloried Democratic senator Max Cleland by using pictures of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to accuse Cleland of being soft on terrorism because he had supported the DHS union and civil service rules.
The ad claimed that Cleland had voted against Bush’s “vital homeland security efforts 11 times,” which simply meant that in all of the procedural maneuvering, Cleland had supported the Democrats’ approach over Bush’s. What made the visual association of Cleland with Saddam so galling to Democrats was Cleland’s standing as a Vietnam War hero who had lost an arm and both of his legs in a grenade explosion near the end of his tour.
“I served my country and don’t have to prove my patriotism to anybody,” said an angry Cleland, who noted that Chambliss had used four student deferments to escape service before being released because of “an old football knee.”

Cleland lost and months after the election, Durbin captured the mood of
so many of the defeated senator’s colleagues. “This is something that gnaws at us,” Durbin said.
“A decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran would be discredited because of his stand in the homeland security debate?”

As Georgia and Indiana’s 2nd District went, so went the country. It was a remarkable election for Bush, Rove, and the Republicans because it marked only the third time since the Civil War that a president’s party had gained seats in a midterm contest. The other two were 1934, a ratification of FDR’s New Deal, and 1998, which, as we’ve seen, reflected a backlash against Republican efforts to impeach Bill Clinton. (A partial exception: 1902, after the size of the House was expanded and both parties gained seats.) Republicans picked up eight seats in the House, and netted two in the Senate, which returned them to control after the Jeffords interlude. The exit polling pointed to a 9/11 effect. Compared with the election two years earlier, Democrats lost more ground with women than with men, particularly married women. This fed the idea that a new Republican electoral group, “security moms,” had taken the place of the old pro-Clinton group, “soccer moms.” The Democratic vote fell more sharply in the East, the region directly affected by 9/11, than elsewhere. The Republicans gained more ground among higher-income voters than among others—perhaps a response to Bush’s tax policies but also likely a 9/11 effect. And Republican House candidates had their best election in some time among party members who described themselves as moderate or liberal. Such Republicans had often given Democrats a significant minority of their ballots. It was a glimmer of the possibility for an alternative coalition rooted in the center ground—an approach that Bush and Rove ultimately rejected. By 2008, most of these swing moderate and liberal Republicans had moved away from their party again.

The notion that Democrats and liberals were weak on terror, less than patriotic, and not part of the “real America” never fell out of the conservative playbook. It would play later into attacks on Obama as less than fully American, as “a Muslim” who had been “educated at a madrassa” and as “a Kenyan anti-colonialist.” Talk of the red states as representing the “real America,” opposed to a counterfeit nation in the Northeast and on the West Coast, had a similarly long-term impact on the right, which embraced this trope, and on the left, which was enraged by it.

At the 2004 Republican convention, it fell to a Bush-supporting Democrat, former Georgia governor Zell Miller, to offer the most inflammatory speech of the conclave. “Today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator,” Miller declared. “In their warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution.
They don’t believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.”

There was also this, of Bush’s opponent: “Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.” It was an odd thing to say, since Kerry had just a few weeks before delivered an acceptance speech in which he explicitly declared: “I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security.”

Nor was Miller’s rhetoric a one-off. It would persist throughout Bush’s presidency. Speaking to the New York State Conservative Party in July 2005, Rove himself declared: “Perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security.
Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Republicans would continue to deploy such rhetoric about alleged Democratic weakness into the Obama years.

The first Gallup poll taken after the November 2002 elections put Bush’s approval rating at 68 percent, but over the next two years his popularity came back down to earth. On May 1, 2003, Bush, appearing in an aviator’s uniform, announced the end of major combat operations aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
in front of a banner that read
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
.

It was an astonighingly ill-considered bit of public relations, and as the war dragged on with the mission not at all “accomplished,” both Bush’s popularity and support for his Iraq policy collapsed.
Every prediction the administration had offered went awry—about the war’s costs, about the number of troops it would require, about the duration of the conflict, about the
likelihood of concord among the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, and, of course, Vice President Cheney’s certainty that “we will be greeted as liberators.”
The reason most Americans gave their ascent to the war was the administration’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” said Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser who later became his secretary of state, in one of the pithiest and most evocative versions of the case. But when it turned out that Saddam did not have such weapons, the reluctant hawks felt betrayed.

By 2004 the country was once again as divided about Bush as it had been in 2000.
His approval rating had fallen to 49 percent at the beginning of February, and for the rest of the year, it hovered between 46 percent and 55 percent. He hit this higher number only in late November, after his reelection.

Rank-and-file Democrats were increasingly impatient with both the party’s failure to stand against the war at the outset and the continued hedging on Iraq among its leading presidential candidates. Howard Dean, who ended his twelve years as governor of Vermont in 2003, jumped into the 2004 presidential race as an unapologetic antiwar candidate and created a sensation. He brought on-line fundraising to an entirely new level, building up a large cadre of small donors eager to talk back to the Democratic establishment, and to Bush. Barack Obama would later expand on what Dean had started. Yet Dean, briefly the pundit favorite going into the Iowa caucuses, faltered as he and Gephardt, deemed his major rival, discredited each other with a barrage of back-and-forth negative attacks. This opened the way for Kerry, who finished a strong first in Iowa.

Democratic primary voters came to see Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, as especially dangerous to Bush. If patriotism was the Republicans’ trump card, the party would finesse it by nominating a war hero. Kerry turned
the 2004 Democratic National Convention into a martial celebration of the nation and his own service record, while the young African-American Democratic Senate nominee from Illinois gave a keynote address on national unity and Republican efforts to divide the nation that instantly turned him into a Democratic star. Barack Obama’s life changed that night.

It was thus a shock to Kerry and the Democrats that the Republicans quickly moved to turn his greatest asset into a liability. The Democratic
convention ended on July 29, and a Pew survey in early August gave Kerry a narrow lead over Bush. Then, on August 5, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth went on the air with the first in a series of ads attacking Kerry’s Vietnam War record, his veracity, and his fitness to lead.
Regnery, the conservative publishing house, issued a volume called
Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry
. It became an instant bestseller. Thus did the term
swift boating
enter the political lexicon. The Kerry campaign was slow to respond, failing to anticipate how quickly the attacks would take hold and dominate the news. Theoretically, the Swift Boaters were an independent group, though it later emerged that its leading funders were prominent Republicans, among them Bob J. Perry, a longtime Bush supporter who contributed more than $4 million to the effort. T. Boone Pickens Jr. gave $2 million.

Over time, media accounts discredited the charges—among them, that Kerry had exaggerated his war record and didn’t deserve the medals he won. Most of those who served closely with Kerry backed him up. And it was clear that many of Kerry’s foes were continuing a vendetta dating back to the early 1970s against a decorated veteran who came home and actively opposed the Vietnam War. (
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry had asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971.)
A lengthy
New York Times
investigation found that the Swift Boat accounts were “riddled with inconsistencies,” and that “material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men’s own statements.” The
Los Angeles Times
editorialized flatly that “these charges against John Kerry are false.” But much damage was done.

In the meantime, Rove continued to be attentive to the lessons of Matt Dowd’s polling and the need to shore up the Republican base. Rove had estimated that some 4 million evangelical Christians had failed to vote in 2000; in 2004, he was determined to bring them out. The Bush campaign engaged in unprecedented organizing efforts in the conservative churches. And when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 legalized gay marriage in the state, he was handed the issue around which he could keep the religious right mobilized. Bush made “traditional marriage” a key campaign theme, declaring marriage between a man and a woman “the most fundamental institution of civilization.”
He endorsed a federal constitutional amendment
banning gay marriage in early 2004, and Rove encouraged referenda on state constitutional amendments enshrining traditional marriage in key battlegrounds, notably Ohio.

Bush’s move against same-sex marriage had the desired result in mobilizing social conservatives. But Representative Mick Mulvaney, elected to the House from South Carolina in the 2010 Tea Party wave, argued that it was also a sign of weakness. “I knew what Rove was doing,” Mulvaney told me in a 2014 interview. “He was trying to gin up support within the Christian conservative base for a lackluster candidate. He was trying to create enthusiasm for a Republican candidate because the Republican candidate couldn’t do it on his own.” Already, Mulvaney said, many on the right had their list of grievances against Bush, beginning with the most basic: “He had spent too much money.” Because Bush’s lieutenants “thought they were going to lose . . . they did something that violates our core conservative principles in order to drive people to the polls.”