Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (55 page)

This meant that the side prepared to blink was the White House. The madman theory was doing its work.

As for Boehner, opinion was divided in the White House as to whether he was ever serious about making a deal with Obama. The president was convinced that he was, his aides much less so. But a larger truth harmonized
these competing assessments: Boehner did not control his own fate. As long as holding on to his job was his main priority, he would have to bend to the right wing of his conference. Estimates of its strength varied, but the Tea Party could count on between 50 and 80 votes, depending on the circumstances. Roll calls suggested that Boehner had 85 to 100 true loyalists. The rest of his 242 members were generally inclined to support Boehner but also deeply fearful of primaries from candidates running to their right. He could not rely on members of this Petrified Caucus, which meant that he could never regard his position as secure.

All of this meant that the country came perilously close to default. A deal was finally struck around a principle unknown to Washington until that point. The “compromise” was based on a simple proposition: politicians would point a fiscal gun to their own heads by assembling a collection of future budget cuts so foolish and nonsensical that neither side would ever allow them to become law. The deal authorized $1.2 trillion in spending caps and then set up a commission to come up with another $1.2 trillion in cuts. If the commission failed, automatic, across-the-board cuts would take hold, half in domestic spending, half in defense. Obama had originally hoped for a difference split, half-and-half between cuts and tax increases. But the GOP’s taxophobia made that a nonstarter. The sweeping sequester was hatched precisely because it was such an irrational approach to fiscal discipline. The Obama White House was convinced the defense hawks in the Republican Party would prove more influential than the spending hawks and that “sequestration,” as it was known, would never happen. But this assumed a rationality that politics in Washington no longer possessed. Over the long run, the calculation proved flatly wrong. Congress and the White House were still grappling with the results of this deal in Obama’s final years in office.

It was a low point for Obama, but also for the Republicans—and above all for the country. The battle over the debt ceiling was a singularly irrational, wasteful, and shameful moment in the political and economic history of the United States. It reflected much of what was wrong with the priorities of the country’s political elites and the obsessions of a Republican right that had won itself a kind of veto power over the American government.

The crisis of confidence began with the world hanging on to every
development as it fretted over whether Washington’s dysfunction would lead to American default and global calamity. Even robustly pro-American commentators and politicians around the world wondered aloud if the United States could still govern itself.

Yet even when default was averted that August, global markets imploded as American political dysfunction joined with the dysfunction inside the European Union to remind everyone of how dangerously fragile the world’s economy remained. The portrait of fecklessness was completed when Standard & Poor’s, which once happily and profitably stamped triple-A ratings on dubious securities, ended the week by downgrading the federal government’s creditworthiness. S&P had once caved in to pressure from Goldman Sachs in its rating of private financial paper, yet it refused even to pause in its dissing of American creditworthiness even though the Obama administration had identified flaws in its numbers and calculations.

The fixation on a deeply ideological debate over government spending seemed strange to a world that was looking to the United States to help power a recovery and provide leadership. What it saw instead was a nation that was suffocatingly inward-looking. Yet ideologues boasted about what they had done.
“We weren’t kidding around, either,” Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah proudly declared. “We
would
have taken it down.” He said this with pride, even though the “it” involved the American economy and America’s standing around the globe.

I was visiting London when the debt ceiling endgame came, and it was depressing to hear what even America’s staunchest overseas friends were saying about us. They knew the debt crisis was instigated by Obama’s opponents, yet they worried about how strong Obama was, and whether he could draw firm lines and seize back the initiative. The shrewdest judgment I encountered came from a leading British Conservative and a member of Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet. His take on the politics of the debt fight perfectly captured the ambivalence of those who genuinely wished Obama well.

“As a political strategist, he is often underestimated,” this politician said of Obama. “He’s playing a longer game.” While “the Republicans have allowed the Tea Party tail to wag the dog . . . Obama will be able to say, ‘I believe in spending cuts, but I also believe that the richest in the country should pay a
little more.’ ” Republicans would counter by arguing for steep cuts in Medicare and other popular programs, but the politician noted that where public opinion was concerned, Obama would hold the higher ground. This proved prophetic.

But the downside of his analysis perfectly described the fix Obama was in. The American president, the British politician said, “seems to be a passive figure at a time when the world needs a leader.”

Solving that problem would be essential both to Obama’s standing in the world and to his re-election. It was a problem that would crop up again. But with the crisis behind him, Obama set about to seize back the initiative. His self-rescue project would receive a great deal of help from his opponents.

Two speeches, one in the early summer, and one toward the end of the year, sharply defined the choice the voters would face a year later. The first, by Mitt Romney, demonstrated how a former Republican governor whom many had once seen as a moderate was determined not to let the GOP’s new Tea Party disposition get in the way of his presidential aspirations. The second, by Obama, marked his abandonment of triangulation and appeasement. He came to realize he could only win by way of a full-throated challenge to the new conservative radicalism.

In light of what eventually came to pass, it is easy to forget how promising Romney’s campaign looked on a beautiful Thursday afternoon, June 2, 2011, when he formally announced his presidential candidacy in Stratham, New Hampshire, at a farm owned by one of his supporters. The bales of hay were stacked strategically in the hope that they’d make it into the television screen. The sturdy white barn nearby provided an image worthy of a Christmas card, the symbol of a solid, calm, industrious, and confident country.

The slogan behind the candidate,
BELIEVE IN AMERICA,
did not invite debate. It was all very reassuring, a sign that despite economic catastrophes and Tea Party rebellions, not everything in politics had been turned on his head. In an age of media flying circuses where it was never clear whether someone was actually running for president and or simply boosting book sales and
speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He offered pretty pictures as part of the venerable liturgy of the country’s civil religion.

And in a genuinely beautiful speech, Ann Romney captivated the audience by speaking of how her husband had stood by her when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and fought back. She spoke plainly and unsentimentally, which made her testimony all the more powerful. It would astonish me for the rest of the campaign that the Romney apparatus never fully fleshed out the personal side of their candidate, the family man and Mormon leader who had performed many quiet acts of charity and mercy.

But on that lovely announcement day, there were storm clouds, of a political, not meteorological sort. Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani showed up in New Hampshire as if to underscore why the punditocracy always seemed to insert the word “putative” before “front-runner” where Romney was concerned.

Romney’s travails spoke to the condition of a party that wouldn’t let him embrace his actual record and constantly required him—and all other Republicans—to say outlandish things.

Romney’s greatest political achievement, the Massachusetts health care law, was a genuinely masterful piece of politics and policy.
The
New Yorker
’s Ryan Lizza had written a superb article about how Romney got the plan passed. The article reflected well on both Romney’s political skills and his understanding of health care policy. In normal times, Romney’s campaign would have reproduced Lizza’s piece in bulk. Instead, Romney’s lieutenants were no doubt hoping that Republican primary voters never heard about it. Working with those horrid Democrats to pass any sort of forward-looking government program, particularly one that had been a model for the dreaded “Obamacare,” was now forbidden.

And so when Romney spoke at Doug and Stella Scamman’s Bittersweet Farm,
he was guarded in talking about his health plan, saying he “hammered out a solution that took a bad situation and made it better. Not perfect, but it was a state solution to our state’s problem.” The crowd gave him modest cheers when he got to the part about health care being a
state
problem. Far louder and much more enthusiastic was the response when he pledged “a complete repeal of Obamacare.” That’s where the GOP’s heart was, and Palin and Giuliani both got into most of the stories about Romney’s
announcement by bashing him on health care. Was it any surprise that a candidate who was constantly forced to tiptoe around his central accomplishments was regularly accused of shifting his shape?

Yet it was Romney himself who exposed contemporary conservatism’s core flaw. “Did you know,” he asked, “that government—federal, state, and local—under President Obama, has grown to consume almost forty percent of our economy? We’re
only inches away from ceasing to be a free economy.”

Actually, the federal government of which Obama was in charge was “consuming” about a quarter of the economy—and this after a severe recession, when government’s share naturally goes up. But even granting Romney his addition of spending by all levels of government, the notion that the United States was “inches away from ceasing to be a free economy” was worse than absurd. It suggested that the only way of measuring freedom was to tote up how much government spent.

This was where the new conservatism led. It implied that we were less “free” than we could be because of the money we spent on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection. The suggestion was that we would be far freer if government spent zero percent of the economy and just stopped doing such things.

It was hard to imagine that Romney, based on his own record, really believed this, but his comment pointed to an underlying argument in American politics about what freedom meant. If freedom came down primarily to counting up how much government spent, then a country such as Sweden would be less “free” than a right-wing dictatorship that had no welfare state and no public schools—but also didn’t allow its people to speak, pray, write, or organize as they wished. Many who did “believe in America” also believed that its history had shown that liberty was compatible with an energetic government that had invested in efforts to expand the freedoms from want, fear, and unfair treatment, and the right to self-improvement. Many Republicans—including the Romney who had battled for universal health insurance—had believed in those things, too. But in the Republican Party of 2011 and 2012, liberty could be measured only through a quantitative analysis of government’s size.

It was this argument that Obama took on toward the end of the year in what would prove to be one of the most important speeches of his presidency. The venue he chose for his December 6, 2011, address said as much about his purpose as the words he spoke. He traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt’s legendary “New Nationalism” speech 101 years earlier. TR’s speech presaged his 1912 presidential candidacy as a Progressive, after he lost the Republican nomination. But even more, it was the wellspring of twentieth-century American liberalism. It was, in many ways, a radical speech, even if its purpose was to defend capitalism by reforming it and limiting the power of the trusts and the very rich.

TR declared that the
“conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress.” He spoke of “the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” Roosevelt’s conclusion: “At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.”

And Obama, who, like TR, found himself under attack from both his left and the right, might particularly have appreciated this Roosevelt observation:
“Here in Kansas,” he said, “there is one paper which habitually denounces me as the tool of Wall Street, and at the same time frantically repudiates the statement that I am a Socialist on the ground that that is an unwarranted slander of the Socialists.”