Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (52 page)

And in the usual way of the media, the more raucous the meeting, the more media attention it received. That summer I spoke with frustrated Democrats who felt this approach artificially magnified the voices of right-wing rage.

“The media coverage has done a disservice by falling for a trick that you’d think experienced media hands wouldn’t fall for: of allowing loud voices to distort the debate,” said Representative Mary Jo Kilroy, who would be defeated in 2010 in her district centered on Columbus, Ohio.

Representative David Price of North Carolina reported that a network stringer who attended a large town hall meeting Price held in Durham told him that he was one of ten journalists who had fanned out to cover the town hall circuses across the country. The reporter, Price said, warned him: “Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up.” As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to the health care law. No “news” there.

But the disruptions had their effect, helping to shape the public image of the Affordable Care Act for years afterward.

And Mulvaney was in the race. He insists he really did believe he stood no chance when he persuaded his wife to bless his campaign, but then quickly changed his mind. The turning point came in January 2010, when Republican Scott Brown unexpectedly won the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat that the late Ted Kennedy had held for nearly five decades.

And by the fall,
the tide was clearly running out on Spratt. Focusing on rising deficits, a Tea Party issue that also appealed to country-club Republicans, Mulvaney turned Spratt’s past against the incumbent’s present, claiming the incumbent had gone from being “the bipartisan John Spratt that you’ve
heard of from the late 1990s and 2000s” to “the John Spratt that voted with Nancy Pelosi 98 percent of the time.”

All Republicans ran against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2010, using the San Francisco Democrat as a symbol of Washington and liberalism. The conservative backlash against Obamacare and the stimulus—along with lingering rage over the economic collapse and the bank bailout—set the tone. In 2008,
Spratt had been reelected with nearly 62 percent of the vote. Just two years later, Mulvaney beat Spratt by 20,000 votes, 55 percent to 45 percent.

Mulvaney was right in seeing Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts on January 19, 2010, as a sign of things to come. Ted Kennedy died on August 25, 2009, and a special election was called to fill the seat he had held since 1962. Kennedy’s endorsement in 2008 had provided a powerful validation of Obama’s candidacy, and the liberal lion’s struggle with cancer had deprived supporters of universal health care, the cause of his life, of their most powerful and savvy advocate.

To say that the Massachusetts election came at an awkward time for Democrats understates the matter, even if they (and almost all prognosticators) were very slow in seeing Brown’s victory coming. Brown proved an excellent campaigner, running as a folksy rebel who traveled the state in a pickup truck. It was the right approach at a time when discontent in the country was widespread—even in the one state that stuck with George McGovern against Richard Nixon in 1972 and had reelected Kennedy eight times. Brown’s opponent, state attorney general Martha Coakley, was, by contrast, an overconfident, indifferent campaigner who committed a series of gaffes, including two involving the state’s beloved Boston Red Sox.

Obama’s approval rating nationally was still positive at the time, but barely so at 50 percent. Republicans who might once have given him a chance had made their decision: only 14 percent of them approved of his performance in office. And as the summer had shown, Republicans were mobilized while Democrats were largely passive, not unhappy with Obama exactly but disappointed that things were not working out better.

Four days before the Massachusetts vote,
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pegged the unemployment rate at 10.0 percent, with 15.3 million Americans out of work. That figure did not include those who had involuntarily left the workforce or were working part-time. Americans hoping to get by the damage of the 2008 crash quickly were disappointed.

At the time, I was reminded of a conversation I had had in June 2008, a few months before the financial implosions began, with two smart financiers about the future of the seemingly shaky American economy.

Defying the moment’s conventional predictions that we would muddle through, one offered a dire and uncannily accurate forecast. He explained why banks would blow up, investments would crash, and the federal government would have to spend “at least $300 billion” to bail out financial institutions.

The other expert, a staunch Republican, listened closely, took a sip from his drink, and smiled. “This,” he said, “would seem like an excellent time for the Democrats to take power.”

It wasn’t that he thought Democratic policies would be better in a time of turmoil. As a Republican, he was just hoping that the other side would be in charge to take the blame when things came tumbling down.

That exchange explained Brown’s victory better than all the analysis that followed. Conservatives, of course, blamed “liberalism” for Coakley’s defeat—big government, big deficits, an overly ambitious health care plan, a stimulus that spent too much, and all the other supposedly left-leaning sins of the Obama regime. The right was especially taken with, and heartened by, the movement of political independents from sympathy for Obama and the Democrats to strong support for Brown’s insurgency.

Obama sympathizers countered that the president’s approval ratings were quite healthy in light of the unemployment rate and a nearly unprecedented destruction of personal wealth. To cite ideology rather than the economy in explaining the big news for Massachusetts was like analyzing the causes of the Civil War without any reference to slavery, or the rise of the New Deal without mention of the Great Depression.

The Democratic case was strong on the merits—it almost certainly was a Carvillian “It’s the economy, stupid” moment. But the success of the conservative narrative pointed to real problems for both liberals and the Obama
administration. The president had to own the economic catastrophe much earlier than he should have. Most Americans understood the downturn had happened before Obama took office, yet they were still uneasy that the government had spent so much without an immediate result. The costs of underselling and underexplaining the stimulus and the economy’s larger difficulties had come home. Absent a clear and persistent case from Obama for why earlier policies had been mistaken and why he was correcting them, conservatives succeeded in distancing themselves from the very policies that had helped create the downturn—and the resulting big deficits they were bemoaning.

And absent a more robust stimulus, the economy was even slower in coming back than it might have been. Arguing that unemployment would have been more severe without the actions Obama had taken was a hard case to make.
As Barney Frank noted, voters rarely responded to the slogan, “It could have been worse.”

The raw numbers in the Massachusetts contest told a harrowing story for Democrats that would be prophetic for the fall’s midterms. In 2008,
Obama had defeated McCain by a wide margin—1,904,098 votes to 1,108,854 for McCain.
In 2010, Brown received 1,168,107 votes to Coakley’s 1,058,682. Brown had won an enormously significant victory with a little over 59,000 more votes than McCain. Coakley had received nearly 850,000 fewer votes than Obama. The turned-on Obama constituency of 2008 was turned off, or, at best, dormant.

And there was one way in which the rise of the Tea Party reinforced Republican establishment themes—and also the commitments of the broader, supposedly centrist political establishment. At a time when the economy actually needed even more stimulation, the nation’s leading voices became obsessed with rising deficits.

Of course the deficit had grown. The downturn itself deprived the government of revenues, and necessary emergency spending added to the red ink. All this was on top of the continuing effect of the Bush tax cuts, which further threw off the balance sheets. But instead of focusing on the urgency of getting the economy moving, established voices highlighted long-term deficit problems related to Social Security and Medicare. All the down-the-road
projections, of course, looked much worse because of the downturn. And a large share of the future deficit was explained by soaring inflation in health care costs, one of the problems Obama was trying to solve through his reform.

Nonetheless, conservatives won a major victory early on when the deficit obsession took hold. It shifted the public conversation from the causes and cures of the Great Recession to its aftereffects. If the first subject raised pointed questions about the deregulation of financial markets and the failure of tax-cutting policies to fulfill their promises, the deficit issue made it easy for the right to wage war on “big government.”

To a degree that undercut his own priorities, Obama offered a partial but important bow to the antideficit forces. The theory of his political advisers was that the public itself saw the deficits as important, and Obama did not want to be isolated, especially from elites who shared the concern over debt. But failing to challenge the deficit obsession only allowed it to grow, providing Republicans with one of their key campaign themes of 2010.

The highly politicized nature of the fight came into relief in January 2010, when a bipartisan bill to create a deficit reduction commission whose proposals would have to get an up-or-down vote in Congress failed.
It received 53 votes, short of a filibuster-proof majority. In an astonishing show of the GOP’s determination to oppose Obama even when it agreed with him, six Republicans who had cosponsored the bill actually voted against it after Obama endorsed it. Obama then appointed the commission himself and chose Erskine Bowles, who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and former Republican senator Alan Simpson as cochairs. Both could be described as moderately conservative.

In the very short term, Obama got a political edge on intransigent Republicans. But the deficit issue had been blessed as a central concern, and Obama was later criticized by deficit hawks when he refused to embrace the commission’s findings, some of which he saw, unsurprisingly given his own leanings, as too conservative.

Scott Brown’s victory deprived Democrats of their sixtieth vote in the Senate at just the moment when they hoped to pass the health care bill. There were voices in the administration advising Obama to give up on comprehensive reform. Brown’s victory in one of the most Democratic states in
the union—
for Ted Kennedy’s seat
—was the clearest indicator, they argued, of the cost of the health care fight to the administration. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff and an instinctive moderate, was quoted by columnists sympathetic to him (to Emanuel’s later chagrin) as favoring bailing out on a big bill to pass a smaller one. But Obama decided to fight for the broader plan, with much encouragement from Pelosi.

Now that Republicans had the 41 votes in the Senate that would allow them to kill a new bill that would result from House-Senate negotiations, Democrats had only one option. The Senate had already passed a version of health care reform, so
that
bill could get to the president’s desk if the House simply passed it. The Senate bill was imperfect, and less generous than the competing House version. But since the liberal House members who were most unhappy with the proposal Baucus had crafted were also the most committed supporters of universal coverage, they were willing to swallow their objections to get the job done. Then the Senate passed a series of necessary amendments related to financing under what are known as “reconciliation” rules, which bar filibusters on certain budget matters. The arcane process had been used many times before by Republicans (notably to pass Bush’s big tax cut), but here the GOP cried foul. Whether the party’s objections were sincere or not, they represented shrewd politics, giving conservatives one more opportunity to tarnish the biggest health care achievement since the passage of Medicare.

There were many other legislative victories during the two years in which Obama had a Democratic Congress. The largest besides health care and the stimulus was the reform of Wall Street and financial institutions. The law—known as Dodd-Frank after its cosponsors, Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank—also created a new agency to protect the rights of consumers of loans, mortgages, and other financial products where fine print frequently led to exploitation and gouging.

Yet, as Robert Kaiser wrote in
Act of Congress,
his definitive account of the law’s enactment, “This big, substantial and consequential new law never penetrated the public consciousness.” It was another marker of the Republicans’ success in scarring Obama’s record and the failure of both the administration and a Democratic Congress to defend their achievements.

The cost was high. That fall, Republicans ran a masterly campaign on
three levels that gave its candidates a wealth of advantages in flexibility, deniability, and determination. At the first level, Republicans could be as reasonable or as angry, as moderate or as conservative, as their circumstances required. They had such freedom because outside groups that were flooding the political system with money were pounding their Democratic opponents in commercials for which no one was accountable. And then, on the farther right, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck and their media allies continued to cast Obama as the central figure in a conspiracy against America itself, fueling participation by the most extreme 10 percent or 15 percent of the electorate, including the Tea Party’s enthusiasts who came out in force that fall. Rather than repudiate these forces, establishment Republicans were happy to ride the wave they helped create.