Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (50 page)

The Tea Party allowed Palin to come into her own. If the mainstream media had called attention to her shortcomings (often simply by interviewing her) in 2008, she would turn the experience into a form of martyrdom in 2009. Attacks on the “lamestream” media were her stock in trade. It was the media that made her in her second career, as a right-wing spokesperson. For a period, the mere inclusion of the word “Palin” in a news story or commentary was enough to make it soar to the top in page views, the newest measure of media success. On July 4, 2009, she announced her resignation as governor of Alaska, choosing not to finish out her single term. At the time, she faced a variety of investigations, but it was also clear that her financial future lay in large lecture fees and book sales as the figure most sought after by the most ardent of Obama’s foes. She received a $1.25 million advance for her book
Going Rogue
. According to
Publishers Weekly,
it went on to sell more than 2,670,000 copies that year.

It said something about the nature of the divisions within the conservative movement and the Republican Party that a significant part of
Going Rogue
was devoted to attacks on John McCain’s campaign. While trying to be respectful of the senator himself, Palin was unrelenting about what she described as an overscripted and chaotic campaign that was slow to respond to the economic catastrophe unfolding that fall and too soft on Obama. She complained about being muzzled and mishandled. She was especially
tough on Steve Schmidt, even though he was one of the strongest advocates of putting her on the ticket.
Schmidt hit back, charging her book was “all fiction.”

Melanie Kirkpatrick, the former deputy editor of the
Wall Street Journal
’s reliably conservative op-ed page, tried to be sympathetic in her review of the book, but
she found it “disappointing” that Palin devoted “so little of
Going Rogue
to the issues that she and Mr. McCain ran on.” But Palin understood her audience. She was against Obama, she was a family woman, she could shoot straight (literally), and the liberal media had gone after her. That was enough.

For the mainstream of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, the rise of this vociferous right would prove both a godsend and a nightmare. In the short run, the appearance of a relentless opposition outside Washington would demonstrate that Obama’s election had not meant the death of Republicanism or conservatism, ratify the GOP’s insistence that the United States remained a “center-right” country, and show how many Americans believed that Obama was going too far on—well, everything. But in riding the back of the tiger, Republicans ignored the risk that they might end up inside. For the Tea Party did not just view Obama as a “Muslim” and a “socialist.” They saw many Republican leaders as big-government sellouts. Their sponsors among Frum’s “radical rich” felt much the same way. The new radical right proved quite capable of turning its guns from Obama toward Republicans who had once welcomed their angry insurgency.

From February 2009 through the rest of Obama’s first term, the Tea Party and its allies discovered they could say whatever they wished about Obama, no matter how extreme, and count on their charges to win wide coverage—and to escape full-throated repudiation from established Republican leaders. Although their claims that Obama had not been born in the United States were wholly invented, the “birthers” continued to get attention even in the mainstream media, especially when their charges were championed by celebrities such as Donald Trump, who for a while could command the cameras
almost as successfully as Palin—and would find himself commandeering them at will six years later.

Planting the doubts about Obama worked. In an
April 2010
New York Times
/CBS News Poll, only 58 percent of Americans replied with certainty that Obama had been born in the United States. Among the rest, 23 percent said they didn’t know and 20 percent said he had been born abroad. Among Tea Party supporters, only 41 percent said he had been born in the United States, while 30 percent said he had been born abroad. Other surveys showed that as many as 45 percent of those in the Tea Party thought the president had been born outside the United States.

Whole volumes have been written about the wild charges that were leveled against Obama from the extreme right, both before and during his presidency, so I will not dwell on them at length. Yet it is important to see the powerful role they played on the right in the Obama years, particularly during his first term. The reaction to Obama’s election revived a conspiracy-minded right that had been largely dormant—or, at least, largely out of public view—since the 1950s and early 1960s. It drew on many of the themes of the earlier far right and recycled many of its ideas. But it also added new ones specific to Obama and to new worries about radical Islam after 9/11.

An argument that seems like an endless loop has raged over whether opposition to Obama was primarily about his race or his ideology. What is beyond debate is that race played a central role in the various charges about Obama’s birth, his father’s Kenyan origins, and the insistence of so many that a man whose middle name was Hussein must be a Muslim. Many politicians have been smeared by their opponents, but these charges were unique to Obama. They would not have been made if his background had been different. Many on the left have been accused of “Marxism,” but it’s hard to find others who were charged with being Muslim Marxists not even constitutionally entitled to be president. All these attacks marked out Obama’s “otherness.”

The case of Dinesh D’Souza, once a serious conservative intellectual who transformed himself into a wealthy merchant of anti-Obama spleen, is especially revealing. In his 2010 book,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage,
D’Souza charged that Obama’s politics could be explained by his Kenyan father’s allegedly Marxist, anticolonial views.
Obama was driven by a “hatred derived
from the debris of the anti-colonial wars” and D’Souza wrote of “cases of men who are so preoccupied with their dark dreams that they have difficulty adjusting to contemporary reality.” That Obama had almost no relationship with his father and wrote himself about how complicated his feelings about him were was of no consequence. Here was a grand theory that tied Obama back to Africa and cast him as harboring a hidden Marxist agenda. It was a book made to be a far-right bestseller.

In Obama’s early years in office, major Republican figures and conservative institutions were quite happy to dabble in this right-wing nonsense themselves.
Forbes
magazine published an excerpt from D’Souza’s book while
Newt Gingrich pronounced it “brilliant.” With Obama, it was possible to propose any theory, as long as it was hostile, and crowds were waiting to proclaim its genius.

Many Republican leaders tried to have it both ways, distancing themselves from the lunatic fringe without actually saying the fringe was wrong. Representative was
a February 2011 appearance by John Boehner after he had become House Speaker on
Meet the Press
. NBC’s David Gregory played footage of an Iowa focus group run by Republican pollster Frank Luntz that had been broadcast on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.

An unidentified woman says: “I believe that Barack Obama’s religious beliefs do govern his foreign policy.”

Luntz asks her: “And what are his religious beliefs?”

She replies: “I believe that he is a Muslim.”

Luntz then goes around the room and discovers many others who believe Obama is a Muslim. Gregory asked Boehner: “As the speaker of the House, as a leader, do you not think it’s your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?”

“David,” Boehner replied, “it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people. Having said that, the state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That’s good enough for me. The president says he’s a Christian. I accept him at his word.”

Gregory pressed Boehner as to whether he felt some obligation to say, “These are facts. If you don’t believe that, it’s nonsense.” Boehner wouldn’t go
there: “Listen, the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t—it’s not my job to tell them.”

It falls to Ted Nugent, the heavy metal rocker whose hits included (perhaps appropriately) “Cat Scratch Fever,” to offer what might be rated the most compact summary of the far right’s charges against Obama. He did so in an interview before attending a gathering on the Washington Mall hosted by the Fox News talker Glenn Beck.
Nugent condemned Obama’s “Islamic, Muslim, Marxist, communist and socialist agenda.” Asked if he really believed Obama was a Muslim, Nugent replied: “You’re damn right I do! He says he’s a Christian so he can continue with his jihad of America-destroying policies.”

Among those “America-destroying” policies, in the eyes of the right, was a health care reform proposal far more cautious than Clinton’s. The model for what became the Affordable Care Act was the bill to expand health care coverage championed by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The proposals Obama put forward were also similar to the alternative to the Clinton plan introduced in the 1990s by Republican senator John Chafee. It had been cosponsored by a who’s who of the GOP, including Bob Dole, the Republican leader; Utah’s Orrin Hatch; and Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican whose support Obama desperately sought for the Affordable Care Act. The individual mandate to buy insurance had been promoted by conservatives at the Heritage Foundation and many Republican politicians (including Gingrich). They argued, plausibly from a conservative point of view, that Americans who received emergency help when they were sick or injured were “free riders” on those who paid for insurance and on the health care system itself.

But this would not matter to Republicans in Congress whose positions on health care were now well to the right those they held in the 1980s, the 1990s—or, in Romney’s case, as recently as 2006. Writing in
Forbes,
Avik Roy, a conservative policy analyst, defended the right’s new view but acknowledged that “it’s accurate to say that Obamacare was modeled after Romneycare.” He also admitted, using nicely diplomatic language, that there had been “an evolution of conservative thinking on the individual mandate.” The shift on health care was of a piece with the larger ideological shift in the GOP.

It’s ironic that the Affordable Care Act came to be called “Obamacare,”
since Obama gave Congress such wide leeway in writing the law. The process to produce a bill dragged on precisely because Obama and Senator Max Baucus, the Democratic chair of the Finance Committee, believed that they could win Republican support for the bill. A close friend of Grassley’s, Baucus was firmly convinced he could persuade his Iowa colleague to come along and held out hope even longer than Obama did. In the end, Grassley became a fierce critic even of provisions Baucus thought he had agreed to during negotiations.

As the sluggish and meandering legislative process increasingly discredited the health care effort itself, Democrats were desperate to get House and Senate bills out of committee before the summer congressional recess. The House produced its bill, but Baucus’s insistence that he could win Republican votes delayed action in the Senate. (He would not move a bill to the floor until October 13.) It was a disastrous failure for the Democrats politically, and nearly fatal to the health care reform effort itself. Opponents of health care reform were ready to pounce on both the ideas being floated and the Democrats’ incompetence. The Tea Party Summer would be long and hot, dominated by howls about “socialized medicine” and charges popularized by Palin that the measure included “death panels.”

At the end of 2009,
the fact-checkers at PolitiFact would declare the death panels charge the “Lie of the Year.” (The charge was fabricated out of a provision, which had enjoyed Republican support in the past, providing reimbusements for physicians who provided voluntary counseling to Medicare patients on end-of-life care options, living wills, and advance directives.) But by then death panels had already done their work in damaging the bill’s reputation and the Democrats’ standing.