Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (57 page)

There was a larger problem: the impression the Republican primary candidates made collectively may have created more damage than did any of their individual shortcomings. It gives one a sense of how it felt at the time that even the loyally conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer referred to the Republican contenders as
“bumbling clowns.” The “minor” candidates became major celebrities because the party scheduled twenty-two debates. These became an unexpected political sitcom hit with an entertaining cast of characters. Herman Cain seemed to tout his “9-9-9” tax plan in every other sentence. At one point, Bachmann confused John Wayne with the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Rick Santorum accused President Obama of being a “snob” for the great sin of wanting young Americans to attend college. Newt Gingrich, who specialized in political resurrections, had long ago mastered the art of making himself the center of attention under almost any circumstances. Texas governor Rick Perry pledged to abolish three cabinet
departments but couldn’t remember the third one. Perry said “oops,” which pretty well summarized his party’s attitude toward the entire exercise when all the debates were over.

The longing of the Republican right for someone other than Romney was obvious from the polls all through 2011 and into early 2012. Tea Party supporters and their allies shifted from one conservative candidate to another as the fortunes of the various alternatives rose and fell. For a significant part of the Republican primary electorate, it was anybody but Romney, and they clearly did mean
anybody
. Every few weeks, a new conservative candidate (they became known as the “non-Romneys”) would consolidate enough votes on the right to take the lead in a national poll. Typically, a candidate would rise with a particularly good debate performance or a victory in a straw poll. In Bachmann’s case, Fox News’ website headlined her triumph in Iowa’s straw poll in August 2011—she won 28 percent and nearly 17,000 ballots. The victory, Fox headlined, “cements her top-tier status in GOP race.” Imagining Bachmann in the top tier was terrifying to many Republicans and delightful to Democrats, but it was not fanciful. A couple of months earlier,
a Zogby poll found Bachmann leading nationwide with 24 percent to 15 percent each for Romney and Cain. That any poll could find Bachmann and Cain with a full third of the Republican electorate said a great deal about the nature of the GOP in 2011. It was a history that would repeat itself in a more spectacular fashion in the summer and fall of 2015 when Donald Trump and neurosurgeon Ben Carson swapped the number one and number two spots in many national and state surveys—and were then challenged themselves by a brief surge from Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO.

The clear opening at the right end of the party drew Perry into the 2012 race, and for a while, he seemed the obvious favorite. He combined the executive experience most of the candidates on the right lacked with views highly congenial to the Tea Party. He was certainly the only Republican candidate who had flirted with secession. After a Tea Party event in 2009, he had told an Associated Press reporter that Texas
“would be able to leave [the Union] if we decided to do that,” and added: “We’ve got a great union. There is absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” Such notions
went down well with many conservatives in the Age of Obama.

And shortly after Perry entered the race on August 11, 2011, he surged to the top.
The August 17–21 Gallup survey had him at 29 percent to 17 percent for Romney. Bachmann had fallen to 10 percent and Gingrich and Cain held 4 percent each. Ron Paul, holding aloft the libertarian banner, held his core voters no matter what was happening around him. He came in at 10 percent in July, 13 percent in August.
Another survey at the time by Public Policy Polling put Perry at 33 percent to 20 percent for Romney. The nomination was Perry’s to lose, and lose it he did. After Perry faded, it was Cain’s turn to rise, and he found himself briefly in first, with 27 percent to Romney’s 23 percent,
in an NBC/
Wall Street Journal
poll in October. Tea Partiers and allied religious conservatives were desperate for an alternative, and they would turn anywhere they could find one.

The causes of Perry’s collapse were revealing. The accepted wisdom, true to a certain degree, is that his campaign was over after his “oops” moment at the November 9, 2011, Republican debate. Telling Republican voters what they wanted to hear, he promised deep cuts in the federal bureaucracy. “And I will tell you,” he declared,
“it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the—what’s the third one there? Let’s see.” He struggled and struggled until he surrendered. “I can’t. The third one I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” The missing department was Energy, a curious lapse for a Texas governor.

Momentary failures of memory are common enough. But one presumes that a candidate for president making sweeping proposals ponders them carefully, discusses them with advisers, and understands their implications. Forgetting an idea at the heart of your program is not the same as forgetting a phone number, a friend’s name, a football score, or the title of a recently read book. Perry’s brain-freeze moment seemed to show he wasn’t asserting anything that he was truly serious about. And this spoke to the extent that the conservative movement seemed to have been overtaken by what was, quite literally, a mindless opposition to government. Perry thought, correctly, that he had a winning sound bite, if he had managed to blurt it out, because promises to scrap government departments (and three was a nice, round number) always led conservatives to cheer without asking too many questions.

Yet Perry had begun to fall in the polls before his gaffe. He lost ground largely because he was too
liberal
for the Republican primary electorate—on immigration. At a debate in Orlando on September 23, Romney attacked Perry for a Texas policy providing in-state tuition for the children of undocumented immigrants, a replay of the 2008 attacks on Mike Huckabee. Texas’s approach, Romney said, meant that illegal immigrants received as much as $22,000 a year in tuition breaks that citizens who lived outside the state did not get.
“That just doesn’t make sense to me,” Romney said.

Perry was passionate in embracing his state’s approach to immigrant children and defending his policy. His stout defense of compassionate conservatism redux, at least in this instance, earned him boos from the crowd. “If you say that we should not educate children that have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought here by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. Conservatives, from Goldwater forward, have never taken kindly to being called heartless. Romney and allied Super PACs went after Perry on the issue and his polling numbers sagged. Perry quickly realized that accusing staunch conservatives—his base—of being heartless was a mistake, and he apologized.
“I was probably a bit overpassionate in using that word and it was inappropriate,” he said in an interview with the right-wing website
Newsmax
. But conservatives suspected that Perry had meant what he said in the first place, and they were almost certainly right. In 2000, after all, another Texas governor had won a Republican nomination primary by embracing immigrants and Latinos. But what had worked for George W. Bush could no longer work in a Republican primary. Conservative hostility to illegal immigrants, already pronounced in 2008, was moving to the plane of litmus test politics.

Romney’s need to put down challenges from his right (and Perry’s, before his numbers fell to earth, was clearly the most dangerous) pushed him much further on immigration than he needed to go. And at another debate in Orlando, on January 23, 2012, he made his position indelible for Latino voters.

Adam Smith, the political editor of the
Tampa Bay Times,
told Romney he was “confused” about his stance on deportation because Romney had said he did not want to “round up people and deport them, but you also say that they would have to go back to their home countries and then apply for citizenship. So, if you don’t deport them, how do you send them home?”

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here,” Romney replied. “And so we’re not going to round people up.”

One can imagine that at the moment, Romney was pleased with this response. “Self-deportation” was a memorable phrase and it seemed a relatively humane alternative to “rounding people up.” Yet those words would haunt Romney for the rest of the campaign. The concept seemed bizarre—and it would be remembered by Latino voters. On that January night, Romney set himself up for what would, ten months later, be the weakest performance for a Republican candidate with Latino voters in decades.

Conservatives quickly realized that Cain was not a plausible alternative, especially after the emergence of sexual harassment charges against him. Cain and his defenders initially tried to rally conservatives with the most reliable call in the conservative playbook, assailing the “liberal media” and “the Democrat machine” for going after their man—forgetting what they had said not many years earlier about comparable charges leveled against Bill Clinton. But Cain was never a strong enough candidate to weather such a storm, and he faded.

By mid-December, the Republican right seemed ready to embrace the tried-and-true. Newt Gingrich had never gone away and a Republican campaign dominated by debates was made for a man who loved nothing more than turning phrases and matching wits with any comer. At the time, it was strangely entertaining to witness the apoplectic fear and loathing of so many GOP establishmentarians toward the man who had led them to victory in 1994. Many Republicans treated Gingrich as an alien body.

Gingrich’s rise was the revenge of a Republican base that actually took seriously the intense hostility to Obama, the incendiary accusations against liberals, and the Manichaean division of the world between an “us” and a “them” that Gingrich had long been peddling. The right-wing faithful knew that Gingrich had pioneered this style of politics, and they scoffed at efforts to cast the former House Speaker as something other than a “true conservative.” The Establishment was happy to use Gingrich’s tactics to win elections, but it never expected to lose control of the party to the voters it rallied with
such grandiose negativity. The joke was on those who had manipulated the base. The base was striking back, and Newt, for a while, was its weapon.

It’s not as if the criticisms being leveled at Gingrich were all wrong. There was always a flamboyant self-importance and an eerie sense of mission about him.
“I am a transformational figure,” he had said. He also admitted: “I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.” But Gingrich offered the first set of thoughts in 1994 and spoke of shifting the planet way back in 1985. Newt, in other words, had been Newt for a long time. Yet many of the same Republican leaders who found all this so distasteful in 2011 had cheered the very same qualities when he was in his earlier role. Liberals who criticized these traits earlier were tut-tutted for not “getting it,” for failing to understand the man’s genius. It was only when Gingrich seemed to threaten Republican chances of defeating Obama that party elders decided that what they once saw as visionary self-confidence was debilitating hubris after all.
National Review,
for example,
criticized Gingrich for “his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas.” Its editors were simply reciting from a catechism that his critics had written long ago. Meet the new Newt, same as the old Newt.

Still, even conservatives who admired him knew that Gingrich was very much yesterday’s man, and if he emerged for a while as better than any of the alternatives to Romney, he had hardly secured that role. I visited Iowa in late December 2011 to take stock of a Republican contest that was in shambles. Romney had hung on as the front-runner simply because no single candidate on the right had risen long enough to assume the role of the main challenger. Romney had also built an impregnable fortress in New Hampshire to survive a possible defeat in Iowa. But on January 3, who would Iowa’s very conservative caucusgoers anoint as the alternative to him?

At that point, the race was a bookie’s nightmare. The contest was becoming less rather than more settled, and anyone among the six major remaining candidates had a reasonable chance of coming in first or second. Libertarian Ron Paul had the energy of a loyal organization and supporters who didn’t have much use for anyone else. Romney’s opposition was so badly splintered that he had a chance to come in first—but also faced the possibility of lagging far behind. The
line between success and failure for him was very thin. Gingrich, the target of millions of dollars of negative advertising, seemed to be surrendering the Iowa lead he had briefly held. He tried to use jujitsu to turn all the negative media in his favor, and when I caught up with him at a factory in Ottumwa, he denounced Romney as “purely dishonest” for refusing to push his Super PAC—theoretically independent of the campaign but closely connected to Romney’s supporters—to stop running the ads. It wasn’t going to happen. At the time, Gingrich was visiting an enterprise called Al-jon, which, a company official explained, could take a large truck “and in two minutes, it cubes that truck into a bundle the size of a refrigerator.” Figuratively speaking, that’s what Gingrich’s opponents, Romney in particular, were threatening to do to his candidacy.

And thus was the way prepared for Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and both devoutly conservative and devoutly Catholic. Santorum’s biggest advantage was that he had never yet emerged as the top alternative on the right to Romney, meaning that he had largely avoided attacks from his opponents and the scrutiny they had received. He also understood something important about the Republican Party, and particularly about Iowa caucusgoers: while all the media attention since 2009 had gone to the shiny new object of the Tea Party, the older forces of the religious right had never gone away—and, as we have seen, many Tea Partiers were as conservative on theological and cultural issues as were the followers of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their successors. It was a fact that came home to Republicans later in the year when two social conservatives won Republican Senate nominations and make comments about abortion and rape that would cost the party two elections it should have won.