Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (49 page)

Obama was inheriting an economy in collapse and he promised rapid action to get the economy moving right after the election. In America’s peculiar constitutional system, the new and heavily Democratic Congress took office seventeen days before Obama did. At Obama’s direction (though not under his control), it set to work passing a stimulus program aimed at pumping purchasing power into an economy where it was rapidly drying up. While Republicans insisted that they, too, understood the need to stimulate the economy, they were determined to follow Kevin McCarthy’s injunction to challenge Obama “on every single bill.” In the end, not one House Republican voted for it.

The stimulus saga, including its afterlife, helps to explain much that would happen over the rest of Obama’s term. Conservatives would always cite it as Obama’s original sin, arguing that it was too big, that Obama had refused to negotiate with them, that he had simply followed the lead of the Democrats in Congress—or some combination of all of these. The stimulus was regularly invoked to account for the rise of the Tea Party. Horror over unprecedented spending was always the go-to explanation for what rallied millions into passionate and frightened opposition to a president who, they insisted, seemed to accept no limits.

The irony is that the stimulus plan proved to be far smaller, and of shorter duration, than the depth of the crisis demanded. The administration itself
eventually understood that at least $1.2 trillion would be required to give the economy the boost it needed. Stimulating the economy through a combination of public spending and tax cuts had been a bipartisan habit that Ronald Reagan himself (he combined tax cuts with much stepped-up military spending) had pursued, if not admitted to. George W. Bush had tried to stimulate the economy, too.

Obama and the Democrats decided to keep the stimulus under a trillion dollars for fear of provoking sticker shock, although this did little to protect them from accusations that they were undisciplined deficit spenders. Obama and congressional Democrats also developed what became a dysfunctional relationship, with Obama at times distancing himself from the handiwork of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues and quickly backing down over certain specific Republican criticisms of the stimulus. In some cases, his moves were pragmatic as he tried to rid the package of any provisions that might slow its passage. At other times, though, he seemed eager to preserve his standing as a neither-red-nor-blue, above-the-fray leader. This posture tried the patience of Pelosi, Obama’s most loyal ally, and she was eventually direct in expressing her displeasure. “Mr. President, I don’t mind your throwing us under the bus,” she told Obama toward the end of the stimulus battle. “But I do object to your
backing the bus up and running us over again.”

In his efforts to keep some distance between himself and the Democrats, Obama played into Republican efforts to split him off from his allies. Their argument, as Alter noted, became:
“The president wants to work with us; it’s the speaker who’s standing in the way.” But Obama’s efforts to work with the GOP bore no fruit, and by unintentionally feeding the Republican narrative that Pelosi was calling the shots, he weakened his friends in Congress and undercut his own image. Would a strong president let himself be led around by the House Speaker and a bunch of Democratic committee chairs?

Pelosi stayed frustrated with Obama’s refusal to recognize publicly that it was Republicans blocking his way and not some nonpartisan entity he regularly referred to simply as “Washington.” In his memoir, published in 2015, David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, reported on a meeting with Pelosi later that spring in which she took the president to task for his above-the-battle rhetoric.
“We can’t run against Washington,” she told Axelrod. “We
are
Washington.”
According to Axelrod, Obama sympathized with Pelosi. “Democrats are not the reason things are all gummed up here,” the president said. But he would keep trying to cast himself as someone keeping his distance from Washington’s partisan mess.

Failing to recognize that the Republicans had decided to let Democrats pass the stimulus on their own had other costs. Obama organized his bargaining strategy around the assumption of at least some goodwill, which began a pattern of what might be called preemptive concession. The president and the Democrats included some $300 billion in tax cuts in the plan, on the theory that they represented at least one form of stimulus the Republicans would be open to. Wouldn’t this choice inevitably be seen as a sign of goodwill?
When the stimulus finally passed, more than a third of it consisted in tax cuts. But the Democrats’ tax cuts took the form of a $400 per individual and $800 per couple refundable tax credit; a temporary increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for the disadvantaged; and an extension of a program that allowed businesses to recover their capital costs more quickly. Because the Republicans preferred tax rate cuts on incomes and capital gains—and because they had not proposed them—the GOP never accepted the stimulus tax cuts as “real” tax cuts. Proposing no tax cuts at all and letting the Republicans win them as part of a negotiation might have changed the political dynamic. But doing so would have required Obama to admit that he was negotiating with a tough adversary.

The bill eventually cleared the House, but because of McConnell’s determination to block anything but tax rate cuts, it needed sixty votes to clear the Senate. The Democrats were one short because future senator Al Franken was still involved in a recount in Minnesota. (He would not take the oath of office until July 7.) And so Obama went into negotiations with the only three Republican senators willing to deal with him: Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Maine’s two moderates, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. (The opposition within the Republican Party that Specter’s apostasy unleashed would force him to become a Democrat, and Snowe would retire in frustration.) By the time the bill came out of the House, it had already been cut to $820 billion, and Specter insisted that it be pulled to under $800 billion. It was finally passed at $787 billion, with some potentially popular and visible measures (such as $16 billion in
school construction) knocked out at the Republicans’ demand. In retrospect, Democrats would have done better to include substantially more infrastructure spending, yet neither Obama nor his party realized how hard it would become to come back for more stimulus—or how difficult it would be to pass even a construction bill, normally the most popular legislation among politicians of all stripes.

Obama signed the stimulus into law on February 17. The speed with which it passed is, in light of usual congressional behavior, astonishing. Yet a bill that materially contributed to saving the American economy turned into both a political albatross and a symptom of Washington dysfunction. It was not the first time that Obama failed to understand the urgency of selling his own program. He often seemed to treat the stimulus, Alter wrote,
“as if it was a dog’s breakfast concocted by someone else.”
Because the stimulus was never properly touted or defended—it took journalist Michael Grunwald to write
The New New Deal,
a thoroughgoing brief on its behalf—it was easy to parody or dismiss. Its effects, though broad, were also diffuse, and because the economy was so battered, a full recovery was a long time in coming. Obama faced a problem that FDR did not. Not only did the economy collapse on Herbert Hoover’s watch, but the country endured three long years of suffering after 1929 under a Republican president. Voters knew where they wanted to direct their ire. In the Great Recession, the collapse occurred under Bush, but most of its effects were felt after Obama took office.

One of Obama’s singular successes, the rescue—or “bailout”—of the auto industry also ran into a wave of opposition, not only from Republicans but also from large parts of a public that blamed the American car companies for failing to produce products they wanted to buy.
A CNN poll taken in December 2008, before Obama took office, found that 61 percent of Americans opposed public help for the auto companies; only 36 percent supported it. Yet over time, the auto rescue proved easier to defend because the comeback of the auto industry was quicker and more obvious than the sluggish recovery of the economy as a whole. The benefits of the bailout were concentrated in midwestern states that would be central to the 2012 election and thus were the locus of large-scale advertising touting the policy. The stimulus could never be sold nationwide in the same way.

Any dreams Obama had for a new day in Washington should have
vanished during the stimulus battle. The costs of the dysfunctional relationship between the White House and its allies in Congress were ongoing, but their full toll did not become apparent until the 2010 elections wiped out the Democrats’ House majority.

The lessons for conservatives and Republicans were obvious: opposition pays. Not only did Republican members of Congress who battled Obama stay within the good graces of the party’s conservatives. Their successful branding of the stimulus as a government monstrosity would be highly useful both with the electorate and for right-wing activists itching to organize against Obama.

The Tea Party took off less than a month after the inauguration. Its origin is typically ascribed to a televised rant against mortgage relief programs on February 19, 2009, from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade—not the usual venue for launching a populist rebellion—by CNBC’s Rick Santelli.
He charged that the administration was asking his viewers “to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills.” Obama, he said, wanted to “subsidize the losers’ mortgages.” He compared the American economy to the wreckage of Cuba’s economy and then spoke the magic words: “We’re having a Chicago Tea Party in July!” He was not calling on the toiling masses to revolt. Presumably they were the “losers” he was condemning. “All you capitalists who want to show up at Lake Michigan,” he shouted, “I’m going to start organizing!” Inciting oppressed capitalists to the barricades was not the normal way of starting a revolution. But 2009 was not a normal year.

Santelli clearly struck a nerve on the right, particularly among the stock market mavens who made up much of his audience. CNBC asked visitors to its website: “Would you join Santelli’s ‘Chicago Tea Party?’ ”
About 170,000 people responded within one day, and 93 percent said yes, Jane Hamsher reported on her liberal website Firedoglake. A CNBC spokesperson told the journalist Arun Gupta that the number of respondents was “much higher” than normal for a CNBC poll. Within eleven days, Gupta reported,
“the rant video was the most-watched clip ever on the CNBC website, with nearly 2 million views and another 855,000 hits on YouTube.” All those capitalists were ready to march—or, at the least, to click their anger online.

Yet Kate Zernike, the
New York Times
expert on the Tea Party, found that the first
Tea Party rally was held three days before Santelli’s rant, in the liberal city of Seattle. It was not a political outsider’s affair, but the work of twenty-nine-year old Keli Carender, a conservative since high school, a member of Young Republicans, and a regular
National Review
reader. Like many conservatives, Carender had become unhappy at the end of the Bush years and had not much liked any of her party’s 2008 presidential candidates. “None of them seemed to understand what conservatives didn’t like about Bush,” Carender told Zernike, “that it was the spending.” She called her rally “The Anti-Porkulus Protest,” using Rush Limbaugh’s name for the stimulus package. She drew a small crowd, “mostly older people,” Zernike reported, “along with a few in their twenties who had supported Ron Paul.” Other Tea Party protests followed. At first, Fox News was slow to the party—the movement was given its initial boost by radio talkers. But eventually the network became the Tea party’s leading booster. As Zernike noted, Fox searched high and low for all signs of anti-Obama protest, at one point giving coverage to a Florida “rally” organized by a woman named Mary Rakovich that consisted of herself, her husband, and a friend.

These early rumblings are revealing of what the Tea Party was about. It was not a spontaneous uprising of previously apolitical or indifferent voters, although some of them certainly joined in. It was primarily a movement of committed conservatives. A
New York Times
survey later found that 73 percent of Tea Party supporters called themselves conservatives, including 39 percent who said they were “very conservative.” (Only 12 percent of all Americans called themselves “very conservative.”)
Tea Party supporters were twice as likely as the country as a whole to be Republican—54 percent versus 28 percent. This was, for the most part, an activist movement of angry conservative Republicans.

This might go without saying but for the prevalence early on of a romantic portrait of the Tea Party as a spontaneous form of populist protest by hundreds of thousands of Americans who were new to politics. This view was nurtured by the right and picked up at times in the mainstream media.

The conservative media coverage of the anti-Obama movement, including the Tea Party, created a feedback loop: the conservative talkers called for protests, then covered what protest there was, which in turn called out other
conservatives to launch protests of their own, which then created more opportunities for coverage. It was quite brilliant in its way, and very effective. And as this process rolled forward, mainstream media outlets were pummeled for not giving the protests enough attention.
“This anger has been ignored by the mainstream media,” wrote Scott Johnson on the influential conservative Power Line blog, echoing criticism that ricocheted across the conservative media and blogosphere. “It doesn’t fit with any narrative that is congenial to them.” Over time, the mainstream media followed the lead of their critics on the right and gave expansive coverage to the anti-Obama movement.

In certain respects, the Tea Party was simply the old far right with the added advantages of having on its side a television network of its own, an army of talk radio hosts, and an activist conservative Web. It also had Sarah Palin.