Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (45 page)

Obama eventually put the controversy behind him by resorting to what had always been his secret weapon: carefully wrought eloquence in a speech he delivered on March 18, 2008, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
He criticized Wright for having a “profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” And he went back to his patented dualism, speaking of “the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never worked through—a part of our union that we’ve yet to perfect.”

Yet Obama also sought to be true to a kind of secular ministry he had undertaken of explaining black America to white America. There was, he said, a powerful anger in the black community rooted in “memories of humiliation and doubt” that “may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends” but “does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. . . . And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”

He declined to disown Wright entirely, saying, “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” But when Wright reemerged on April 28 at the National Press Club and offered even more incendiary comments, including praise for Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, Obama did have to break with him decisively. He pronounced Wright’s new statements “outrageous” and “ridiculous.”

At the time, I interviewed Obama about the Wright matter and we discussed how Wright’s comments were not all that far from angry comments King had made toward the end of his life about the Vietnam War. At his own
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968, King had declared:
“God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.” King, not unlike Wright, predicted the Almighty’s response: “And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.”

The later King, of course, was also reflecting the disillusionment that had set in after the great hopefulness of the early civil rights years, and he also spoke after the rise of the Black Power movement. In our conversation, Obama made the key historical point that Wright began his career at the pulpit not in the early, upbeat civil rights times, but after the emergence of Black Power and Black Liberation Theology. Wright’s angrier tone reflected his formative period. Obama, by contrast, was trying to restore something closer to the old hopefulness of the early 1960s. It represented not a “postracial” politics that so many touted at the time, but an approach that reflected both the gains the African-American community had made and the troubles it still faced—a politics of racial complexity.

Just how complex was the task Obama was undertaking? At the midpoint of the Wright controversy, on April 6, a recording emerged of comments he had made at what was supposed to be an off-the-record fund-raiser in San Francisco on April 6. The full quotation matters. He said:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. Each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
So it’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion
or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Not surprisingly, the italicized words made big news. The Hillary Clinton campaign used them in its ongoing and successful effort to rally white working-class voters to her side in the later primaries. But they have been used ever since to paint Obama as elitist and out of touch. The irony is that the statement taken whole was a perfect reflection of Obama’s analysis of American politics going back to his keynote speech, his “Call to Renewal” address, and his response to Jeremiah Wright: that the white working class had been shortchanged and responded by embracing various forms of social conservatism to protest its conditions. The implication of his argument was that progressives needed to remedy the economic problems that had unleashed the backlash if they wanted the country to move beyond it. But this is not how the quotation looked or sounded—and, to Obama’s detriment, it also made him seem distant and detached from the people he was analyzing. That he was “explaining” the white working class to a group of wealthy San Francisco liberals did not help his cause, even if he had made a large part of his political living since 2004 trying to explain different groups of Americans to each other. It says something about race and politics that for many it was easier to accept his explaining African-Americans to whites than to countenance his efforts to explain the white working class to the privileged. The word “cling” didn’t help matters.

That these mishaps did not derail Obama in 2008 accounts for his confidence that he could keep his promise to bring red and blue together. He believed—and his victory, with the largest percentage of the popular vote won by a Democrat since 1964, ratified his belief—that he had found the formulas for drawing in not only the Democratic base but also many voters with rather conservative social and religious views.

His own experience taught him that he was good at reaching out to the right. After all, he was elected as the first African-American president of the
Harvard Law Review
with conservative votes. Bradford Berenson, who worked in the Bush White House and was on the law review with Obama, explained to PBS’s
Frontline
that at the time,
“conservatives were eager to have somebody who would treat them fairly, who would listen to what they had to say, who would not abuse the powers of the office to favor his ideological soul mates and punish those who had different views.”

Ultimately, Berenson said, “the conservatives on the review supported Barack as president in the final rounds of balloting because he fit that bill far better than the other people who were running.” In the intense environment
of the law review, its members got to know each other very well. “You know who the people are who are blinded by their politics,” Berenson said. “And you know who the people are who, despite their politics, can reach across and be friendly to and make friends with folks who have different views. And Barack very much fell into the latter category.”

Obama was convinced that what he had done at the
Harvard Law Review,
as well as in Illinois Senate, he could do in Washington, D.C.

He thus ran as someone who was at once unifying and transformational. He would bring the country together and still manage to push through profound social and economic changes. The tension within Obama’s approach was visible throughout the 2008 campaign and would become problematic once he took office. But it helped him in the primaries by allowing him to campaign simultaneously to Clinton’s right
and
left. He could declare himself free of the taint of the political polarization of the Clinton 1990s and insist on his ability to work happily with conservatives and Republicans. Yet he won support from the left for his opposition to the Iraq War, and he unabashedly cast himself as the progressives’ answer to Ronald Reagan.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way Bill Clinton did not,” he told the
Reno Journal-Gazette
in March 2008. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. . . . I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is: we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that has been missing.” The reference to Hillary Clinton’s husband did not go unnoticed.

But Clinton got her licks in against Obama and by the end of the primaries, she had fought him to a draw in the popular vote. A comment she made in Toledo, Ohio, on February 24, 2008, captured her skepticism about what Obama was promising. Her words dripped with sarcasm, but they proved prophetic.

“I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Clinton said. “The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect.”

She added: “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand.”

The excitement of an Obama-Clinton contest that ran right to the end of the primary season allowed Democrats to dominate the public imagination for the first six months of 2008. But it was not simply the historic nature of their confrontation that commanded popular and media attention. Widespread popular disaffection with the Republican Party at the end of the Bush years created a large enthusiasm gap between the two parties. When the primaries ended, Obama had won 17.8 million votes, Clinton 17.7 million. John McCain, the eventual Republican victor, won nearly half of the votes cast in the Republican primaries, but his total reached only 9.9 million.

The paradox of the 2008 contest for the Republican nomination was that while it ended in the nomination of the premier GOP dissident, the flow of the campaign itself would demonstrate the power of right-wing issues and constituents. John McCain won because the more conservative candidates systematically destroyed each other. Yet even in victory, McCain was ultimately forced to bow to forces on the right wing of his party. Thus did he turn Sarah Palin into a national figure.

At the outset, the GOP had an unusual opportunity not only to shake free of Bush but to chart a new philosophical course. Since Vice President Dick Cheney had ruled himself out as a presidential candidate, the party’s 2008 field was large and included candidates with records of defying various aspects of conservative orthodoxy. McCain, the original maverick who had dissented from many of Bush’s economic policies, was the early favorite. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a national hero after 9/11 who held views on social issues that put him on the left end of his party, was often cast as his principal challenger.

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, had allied with Ted Kennedy to get his state to adopt a sweeping health insurance program that would, over time, extend coverage to nearly everyone in his state. Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee had worked for the famously conciliatory
Senate majority leader Howard Baker. And even the champion of the religious right, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, was a dissenter from conservative economics who spoke of the obligations of Christians to the poor—Compassionate Conservatism Redux.

More than any candidate (other than Ron Paul, the perennial standard-bearer for libertarian Republicans), Huckabee distanced himself from Bush’s Iraq policy, and he spoke proudly of his practical achievements as governor.
“I’m unapologetic with the conservative evangelicals, and pro-life,” he told me when I interviewed him in January 2007. “But if people look at my record, what they’re going to see is that the focus of my time as governor was education reform . . . transportation [and] health initiatives.” Huckabee’s unusual mix of positions and his sunny disposition were strengths the punditocracy and Republican politicians largely underestimated. (It was a less sunny Huckabee who ran for the 2016 nomination. Reflecting perhaps a change in himself but certainly a change in the attitudes of the Republican electorate, he became much harsher—for example, declaring that Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran
“will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”)

Yet over time, the 2008 Republican field adjusted itself to the reality of an increasingly conservative party. Romney, realizing where the opportunity in the race lay, abandoned the middle-of-the-road posture that had allowed him to win in Massachusetts and ran to McCain’s right. So did Thompson, who entered the contest late. Huckabee, despite his independent-mindedness on certain questions, relied primarily on his strong base among the evangelical conservatives.

This left Giuliani and McCain as the two dissenters from orthodoxy. Yet in key respects, they were also the candidates most loyal to the central aspects of Bush’s legacy. McCain was the standard-bearer of a neoconservative foreign policy and one of the stoutest defenders of the Iraq War. Giuliani was the symbol of the nation’s resiliency after 9/11, and it was his campaign’s calling card.
“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11,” said Joe Biden, then a senator challenging Clinton and Obama for the Democratic nomination. The wicked line stung because it had the ring of truth. At times Giuliani ran as the moderate he had been, casting himself as
the strongest candidate for general election. At other times he moved right, knowing where Republican primary votes lay.