Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (36 page)

Mulvaney’s position on the issue—he supported traditional marriage but believed the matter should be settled by the states—was a minority view on the right at the time, but his analytical point about Rove’s strategy is instructive about the early rumblings of conservative discontent.

Such doubts about Rove’s approach were not widely shared in 2004 because whatever its shortcomings, his strategy worked. If the 2000 election carried a taint from Bush’s loss of the popular vote and the Supreme Court’s intervention, the 2004 result was a clear, if still narrow, triumph.

The contours of the results were not radically different from those of 2000. Only three states switched sides:
New Mexico and Iowa from Gore to Bush, and New Hampshire from Bush to Kerry, netting Bush a 286-to-251 victory in the Electoral College. But in the popular vote, Bush went from a 500,000-vote deficit to Gore to a 3-million-vote lead over Kerry. Especially striking were the successes of Bush’s campaign operation in turning out voters in far suburban, exurban, and rural counties. In Ohio, the state both sides rightly identified as the key to the election, a well-organized Kerry operation hit the campaign’s targets in the major cities. But these Democratic turnout gains were more than offset by Bush’s successes in the less heavily settled, whiter, and more socially conservative parts of the state.

The election also strengthened the Republicans’ hold on Congress with three additional seats in the House and four in the Senate. Significantly, five of the Senate Republican pickups came in the South, a further step toward the party’s southernization, even as they lost contests in Illinois (the seat was won by Barack Obama) and Colorado. But the Republicans’ biggest and most symbolically important prize was South Dakota, where Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle was narrowly defeated. It was the first time that a sitting party leader had lost since 1952, when a forty-three-year-old Phoenix city council member named Barry Goldwater ousted Democratic majority leader Ernest McFarland in Arizona.

Rove’s efforts with evangelicals (and with conservative Catholics) had exactly the impact he had hoped for.
A single exit poll finding launched thousands of essays: 22 percent of voters said the issue that mattered most to their choice was “moral values,” and they backed Bush, 80 percent to 18 percent. The survey also found that 8 percent of voters said a candidate’s “strong religious faith” was the personal quality that mattered most to them, and they backed Bush 91 percent to 8 percent.

But while turnout among social conservatives certainly mattered, Bush won the election in the middle of the electorate because of the lingering power of the terror issue.
Bush increased his share of the vote among women from 43 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2004. As in 2002, the results suggested the existence of a “security mom” constituency. The exit polls found that one-tenth of Al Gore’s 2000 voters switched to Bush, and among these switchers, more than 8 in 10 thought the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism, a key indicator of support for Bush’s global view.

It’s easy to forget in light of subsequent events that Bush’s 2004 victory was widely hailed on the right as the decisive realignment that conservatives had been waiting for since Bill Rusher had laid out its contours for
National Review
’s readers in 1963 and Richard Nixon proclaimed his “new majority” in 1972.

Writing in the
Weekly Standard
under the headline “Realignment, Now More than Ever,” a pun on Nixon’s 1972 slogan, the conservative journalist Fred Barnes gave Rove credit for achieving his dream. The facts, Barnes argued, were clear: “Republicans now have both an operational majority in Washington (control of the
White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives) and an ideological majority in the country (51 percent popular vote for a center-right president).
They also control a majority of governorships, a plurality of state legislatures, and are at rough parity with Democrats in the number of state legislators.”

Barnes’s conclusion: “Rove says that under Bush a ‘rolling realignment’ favoring Republicans continues, and he’s right. So Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades.”

The new conservative majority endured less than two years.

Bush was nothing if not bold in response to his reelection.
“I earned capital in the political campaign,” he famously declared the day after his victory, “and I intend to spend it.” He betrayed no sense that there might be something fragile about his 50.7 percent majority or that it was built with votes borrowed from the other side—the security moms and the Gore defectors who had no particular sympathy with the ideological right. Such voters had decided, for the time being, that Bush was the stronger leader more likely to keep the country safe.

Bush and Rove were determined to use their victory to reshape the political economy in ways that would keep their realignment rolling. Their main vehicle would be a redesign of Social Security, the great achievement of the New Deal era. A program that had taught millions of Americans that government could protect them from some of life’s uncertainties would, in their vision, become a vehicle for enlarging the “investing class” and reducing voters’ dependence on government. If Huey Long had described an America in which every man was a king, Bush and Rove wanted to make every man and woman a capitalist.

Bush was certain that his reelection had given him a mandate for his partial privatization plan. He had mentioned it regularly in the campaign, even if it was hardly his central argument to voters. He wanted to allow workers to take part of their Social Security tax payment and invest it instead in a private retirement account. Since Bush promised those at or near retirement
that they could keep their existing pensions, the transition costs of the plan—because of the lost revenue from the redirected tax money—were estimated to run to about $1 trillion. This did not deter Bush, because he argued that over the long run, Social Security payments would be reduced. The wonders of the marketplace would create a whole new class of small investors who would, over time, become conservatives and Republicans. No longer worried about getting benefits from Washington, they would watch the stock ticker. So, at least, went the theory.

This was a serious, if utopian, hope of many conservatives.
The Bush program, wrote Stephen Moore, then of the Club for Growth, “would empower millions of working class Americans to become owners of stocks and bonds for the first time in their lives. They would, in short, move out of the dependency class and into the shareholder class.”

Where privatization was concerned, Bush’s big investment of his political capital went bust. Bush never actually put forward a plan of his own in the face of opposition not only from Democrats but also from many inside his own party. The more it was discussed, the less popular the plan became. Most Americans, it turned out, valued the “security” in the program’s title and were understandably wary of giving up the one part of their retirement that was not dependent on the ups and downs of the market or their own ability to save. The steady move in the private sector away from defined-benefit pension plans made the old-fashioned guarantees of traditional Social Security all the more attractive.

Many Republicans in Congress understood this. Having to face the voters every two or six years, they were not willing to gamble their seats on a theory of long-term political realignment. Here again was a bold promise to the political right that was bound to be unkept—not because of liberal scheming but because the vast majority of voters were deeply skeptical of where the conservative dreamers wanted to go.

Responding to the privatization idea in 2006, Tom Davis, the Republican congressman, offered one of the most backhanded compliments ever bestowed upon a president.
“I guess you could argue that if it gets Iraq off the front page, it was probably a good thing at this point,” he said of Bush’s plan. He then rendered the political judgment that so many of his GOP colleagues
also reached. A White House push on the issue, Davis said, “is not going anywhere. This president never likes to back down. I think he’s putting it on the table, but I don’t think anybody’s going to pick it up.” The privatization idea died without ever getting a vote.

To his credit, Bush continued to follow through on his promise for immigration reform, and his efforts were thoroughly bipartisan—partly because they had to be. Large parts of Bush’s own party and the conservative movement stoutly opposed anything that was, or even looked like, “amnesty for illegal immigrants.” Opposing the bipartisan immigration bill became a central cause of right-wing talk radio, particularly Rush Limbaugh and many of Fox News’ personalities.

When the Senate voted in June 2007, supporters of reform could not even muster a majority on a procedural motion to proceed with a bill. In the end, only 46 senators voted to move forward; 53 voted against.
Bush lobbied hard, but only 12 of the Senate’s 49 Republicans stuck with him. Most of the support came from Democrats, more than two-thirds of whom—including the young first-termer Barack Obama—voted yes.

Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, was a leading opponent of the bill, as he would be a vociferous critic seven years later of Obama’s executive action to give relief to millions of undocumented families. Sessions pinpointed the organizing force behind the opposition in the Bush years.
The bill’s supporters, he explained, had wanted to pass a bill quickly, “before Rush Limbaugh could tell the American people what was in it.” Talk radio, he told the
New York Times,
was “a big factor” in derailing immigration reform.

The death of the immigration bill, even more than the failure of Social Security privatization, signaled the implosion of the Bush-Rove drive for a new conservative majority that depended heavily on winning a significant share of Latinos for the GOP, as Bush did in both of his campaigns. The party’s obvious role in killing immigration reform would lead to the collapse of the Republican Latino vote. And Bush’s failure to move his party on the issue was a sign that his talk of a newly compassionate conservatism did little to change the underlying rightward tilt of a party whose base was still almost uniformly white and conservative.

The historian Gary Gerstle offered an exceptionally shrewd analysis of
both Bush’s hopes and his failures.
The very religious president had tried to initiate what Gerstle called a “multiculturalism of the godly,” welcoming the hardworking, family-oriented, and God-fearing of all races and creeds. On the questions of “immigration and diversity,” Gerstle wrote, “Bush was worlds apart from Patrick Buchanan and the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party that wanted to restore America to its imagined Anglo-Saxon and Celtic glory.” Bush offered “groups of minority voters reason to rethink their traditional hostility to the GOP” by showing he “was comfortable with diversity, bilingualism, and cultural pluralism as long as America’s ethnic and racial subcultures shared his patriotism, religious faith, and political conservatism.”

For the significant sections of the right fiercely opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, strongly in favor of English-only laws, and alarmed by the proliferation of new Spanish-speaking neighborhoods all over the country, this amounted to betrayal.
The rejection of the 2007 immigration law that Bush championed, said the conservative columnist Christopher Caldwell, “was the clearest sign he was losing the ear of his party.”

And these feelings persisted long after Bush left office. In explaining Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor’s June 2014 defeat by a Tea Party candidate, Sean Trende, the perceptive, conservative-leaning writer for
RealClearPolitics,
pointed to the enduring hostility to Bush on substantial parts of the right.

“The Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years,” Trende wrote. “From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s. And what do Republicans have to show for it?” It would be an enduring theme.

Even the old social issues stopped working for Republicans. In a reversal whose speed had little precedent in the history of public opinion, gay marriage became steadily more popular, particularly among Millennial voters, who were a growing part of the electorate. The Supreme Court’s ratification of same-sex marriage in 2015 was an instance of judges following the public rather than leading it.

Conservatives also miscalculated badly on end-of life issues. In March 2005,
Bush strongly supported and signed a bill to overturn a Florida state court decision allowing the husband of Terri Schiavo to remove her feeding tube. In a tragic episode that won wide attention around the country,
Schiavo had suffered severe brain damage after a potassium imbalance caused a heart attack in 1990, and she went on life support. Since 1998, her husband, Michael, and her parents had battled in court over whether the feeding tube should be withdrawn. The law Bush signed effectively sided with the parents, even though the measure flatly contradicted conservative claims to be the champions of states’ rights. To the surprise of many on both sides of the debate, the move also enraged a majority of the public. Most Americans saw end-of-life decisions as tragic, difficult, and not the business of politicians to decide. The federal courts affirmed the state judicial ruling and Schiavo died on March 31, 2005, ten days after Congress acted. An autopsy contradicted the claims of those who had denied the severity of Schiavo’s impairment, concluding, as the
Washington Post
reported, that she had “suffered severe, irreversible brain damage.”