Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (58 page)

Santorum’s awareness of the outsize role of religious voices in the low-turnout caucuses led him to bet his entire candidacy on Iowa. When I heard him speak that December at the Royal Amsterdam Hotel in Pella—a lovely town that honors its Dutch background with windmills—he told an appreciative crowd that he had spent so much time in the state, he could challenge lifelong residents to Iowa trivia contests. Speaking before a banner touting his “Faith, Family, and Freedom” tour, Santorum combined detailed proposals—including tax policies aimed at reviving American manufacturing—with
harsh attacks on President Obama. But he sought to close the deal with frankly theological reflections.
“I approach every problem in my life through faith and reason,” he said. “If your reason is right and your faith is true, you’ll end up in the same place.” And toward the end of the campaign, he won endorsements from prominent religious conservatives in the state, including Robert Vander Plaats, the CEO of a group called the Family Leader, and Chuck Hurley, another Christian activist. The effect was to create the sense that Santorum was on the move, a valuable signal to anti-Romney conservatives still trying to figure out the most effective vote to cast.

And on caucus night, it was Santorum who rose above the rest of the non-Romneys. His victory was robbed of its immediate significance when party officials declared Mitt Romney the victor by eight votes, giving him needed momentum. Yet a final count more than two weeks later showed that Santorum had actually won Iowa by 34 votes. By forcing a premature announcement, GOP chieftains did Romney a great favor—one time, at least, when the right’s complaints against a party establishment had real force. Still, Iowa made Rick Santorum, at least for a while.

If Santorum’s victory was a reminder of the continuing power of religious concerns in the Tea Party Republican era, it also underscored another aspect of the GOP coalition that would prove troubling for Romney: the sharp class split between the working-class whites who provided Republican candidates with critical support, and the upscale conservatives most interested in low taxes and pro-business regulatory policies—and who financed the party. The deal within conservatism involved the business end of the party getting its way on economics and the working and lower middle class getting a dose of social conservatism.

But in an economic downturn, social conservatives could not live on values alone. There was
economic discontent in the ranks, and Santorum highlighted the class rift with a moving Iowa valedictory speech in which he spoke of his grandfather, who “worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons . . . lived in a shack.

“He ended up continuing to work in those mines until he was seventy-two years old, digging coal,” Santorum went on. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw someone who had died. It was my grandfather. And I knelt next to his coffin. And
all I could do . . . was look at his hands. They were enormous hands. And all I could think was those hands dug freedom for me.”

Santorum turned his personal tale into a challenge to his party. He was all for low taxes, he said, but insisted that “we as Republicans have to look at those who are not doing well in our society by just cutting taxes and balancing budgets.” Among his proposals was a plan to eliminate corporate taxes altogether on manufacturing, and he used it to take a jab at free-market ideologues: “When Republican purists say to me, well, why are you treating manufacturing different than retail? I say because Wal-Mart’s not moving to China and taking their jobs with them.” Santorum’s message was that blue-collar work and blue-collar values were intimately linked.

Santorum’s attempt to graft a distinctive economic appeal onto traditional social conservatism represented something new in the Republican Party. It served as a warning that despite Obama’s unpopularity among many lower-income whites, Republicans and conservatives could not count on their unquestioned loyalty. Santorum was filling a void in the Republican Party left by the withdrawal of Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, after he was overwhelmed in the Iowa straw poll by Bachmann. Recognizing
the importance of blue-collar voters to the Republican coalition, Pawlenty sought to make it “the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.” He hoped to speak for the movement’s less privileged voters who shopped at the famous discount outlet. Without adopting Pawlenty’s label, Santorum was picking up his role and his strategy.

In one sense, Santorum was reflecting a widespread nostalgia for the America of the 1950s, a longing that affected both the left and the right. Santorum yearned for the family stability and the high levels of religious observance that characterized the immediate post–World War II era. Progressives wanted to bring back strong unions and a time of American economic dominance that kept blue-collar wages high. The two dreams reinforced each other: the family values Santorum promoted had been underwritten by the high wages the left hoped to restore. Santorum failed to pull off the synthesis, partly because he was constrained by conservatism’s continued hostility to unions and the limits of its antigovernment, low-tax ideology. (The same had been true of Pawlenty.) Santorum’s economic program was inadequate
to the task he was taking on, since a tax break for manufacturers would not be enough to restore the old social bargain. But the success he did enjoy was a warning to conservatives: they could not take the support their movement had won among blue-collar voters for granted.

If Santorum represented an intriguing form of dissent on the blue-collar end of the movement, the candidacy of Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor whom Obama had appointed as his ambassador to China, was the dissent of the moderately conservative upper middle class. The fact that Huntsman had accepted a job from Obama almost certainly doomed his candidacy from the beginning. For most conservatives, working for Obama was a form of partisan and philosophical treason. And the fact that Huntsman first joined the administration and then left abruptly to become an Obama critic smacked of opportunism.

Nonetheless, when Huntsman announced his candidacy in June 2011, he was opening the way for a different kind of conservatism, a correction of the movement’s direction. The closest model for Huntsman’s approach was British prime minister David Cameron’s remake of the British Conservative Party’s image. The Tories chose Cameron as their leader in 2005 because they were sick of losing elections and realized they could no longer present themselves as an old, cranky, right-wing party. Cameron was Mr. Nice, Mr. Modern, Mr. Moderate, and Mr. New. And he won.

Huntsman was betting that enough Republicans had concluded that the country needed a less doctrinaire, less extreme, and less angry GOP. Most striking about his announcement in front of the Statue of Liberty (other than a slew of snafus, including the misspelling of his first name on a batch of press passes) was the extent to which his speech was all about hope and promise. It offered a lot about who Huntsman wanted you to think he was and little about what he’d do. With not all that many changes, it could have been a speech delivered by someone announcing a Democratic primary challenge to Obama—and, in some ways, by Obama himself.

“We have the power, we have the means, we have the character to astonish the world again by making from adversity a new and better country; this inexhaustible land of promise and opportunity,” he declared. “We’re choosing whether we are to be yesterday’s story or tomorrow’s.”

His slogan might have been: Platitudes with a purpose. Or perhaps: Change we can believe in. Still, the upbeat rhetoric contrasted sharply with a party characterized by a sense of doom about the nation’s cultural direction, ideological rigidity, and a reflexive less-government, lower-taxes response to every problem.

It was a sign of how rancid politics had become that the biggest “news” in the speech came in these sentences: “And I respect the president of the United States. He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president; not who’s the better American.” It was actually brave for a Republican candidate to declare that the president was a good American who loved his country.

Huntsman’s hopes rested largely on New Hampshire, where independents could cast ballots in the Republican primary, and in other states where Democrats as well as independents could cross over. Huntsman hoped for a repeat of the 2000 and 2008 victories of another relatively moderate maverick, John McCain.

In December 2011, I stopped by a Huntsman talk to a Rotary Club meeting at the Monadnock Country Club in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a town that had once served as a stately home to old-fashioned moderate-to-progressive New England Republicanism. It was revealing that when Dennis Allen, the club’s president-elect, introduced Huntsman, he mentioned that his earlier diplomatic posts came from George H. W. and George W. Bush, but omitted the name of the president who gave Huntsman the China job.

Huntsman’s moderate rhetoric made him quite popular among Democrats and moderate independents, but his Rotary speech underscored what they tended to overlook—and what Huntsman hoped Republicans would notice: that on core economic issues, the genial candidate was solidly right of center. He noted that he had “embraced” Representative Paul Ryan’s budget as “a very aggressive approach” to the deficit. He endorsed term limits for members of Congress, promised “no more bailouts,” condemned “Obamacare” and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, and criticized the “regulatory barriers” to business. He boasted of praise he has won from the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial page, the arbiter of conservative economic orthodoxy.

Yet there was just enough heterodoxy for the moderates. Huntsman said he wanted to break up the biggest banks and put an end to the idea of “too big to fail.” He said he would pull American troops out of Afghanistan. And he spoke longingly of national unity, mourning that the country was “more divided than at any point in history.”

The orientation of the Republican primary electorate made it hard for Huntsman to run straight out as a middle-of-the-roader, which sent a mixed message to the state’s voters, as Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committee member from New Hampshire, told me at the time:
“He started running as a moderate, and now he’s saying he’s a conservative. That’s confusing.”

At an earlier moment in Republican history, Huntsman might have connected with parts of the right with a more consistently center-right argument. But any link to Obama was toxic in a Republican primary in 2012, and just as it took the British Conservative Party three election defeats before it was willing to turn to Cameron, so it would take more time for the Republicans to be open to the likes of Huntsman. As it was, the 2012 mood in large parts of the party may have been best captured in a question Santorum was asked during an appearance in Windham, New Hampshire: Did he think the Tenth Amendment allowed states to nullify federal laws. To his credit, Santorum did not pander to the nullifier. “We had a Civil War about nullification,” Santorum said with a smile. “I’m not sure I want to go there.”

When the returns came in on January 10, Huntsman’s bet on New Hampshire did not look foolish, but he did fall short. Romney, who had built a powerful organizational firewall in the state, won overwhelmingly with 39 percent, to 23 percent for Ron Paul. Huntsman came in third with 17 percent. Paul’s showing reflected the powerful libertarian strain that runs through the state with “Live Free or Die” on its license plates. Pure libertarianism was a minority view, but it was a big enough minority to keep Huntsman out of second place. Gingrich and Santorum ran virtually even, at just over 9 percent each, fourth and fifth respectively, well behind Huntsman.

In political terms, it was a nearly perfect result for Romney: Gingrich and Santorum, the two main competitors to his right, were weakened, but neither had managed to knock the other out. Paul was never going to threaten
Romney for the nomination. And the wild-card challenge from Huntsman was definitively derailed.

Yet there have been many moments when presidential candidates lost their immediate battles but foreshadowed the future. Goldwater has entered history as such a figure. While the 2012 Huntsman and Santorum campaigns will never enjoy the cache of Goldwater’s glorious defeat, the two stood in for the debate Republicanism and conservatism will need to have in the coming decades.

Huntsman was a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He was a defender of science and a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejected neoconservative moralism and interventionism. He spoke the language of the moderately conservative wing of the upper middle class that preferred politics to focus on economic growth, deficits, and our future competition with China rather than on the social issues of abortion and gay rights. Huntsman’s core vote, such as it was, came from less intensely religious economic rationalists who do not perceive culture wars as breaking out all over.

Santorum championed the Republican working class. He was a Catholic on one side of a long-standing debate in the church about how to build a decent society. In contrast to the more liberal social justice Catholics who found a voice again in Pope Francis, Santorum was what Republican strategist Steve Wagner labeled a “social renewal” Catholic. Such Catholics saw opposition to abortion as a foundational matter and opposition to gay marriage as essential to protecting the family. They viewed the federal government
less as a guarantor of social fairness than as “inflicting harm on the nation’s moral character,” as Wagner put it. It was a brand of Catholicism that sought an alliance with evangelical Christians who viewed the social issues as paramount.

Yet Santorum, like Pawlenty, also struggled to find an economic program that would speak to the interests as well as the values of those on the right who were not invited to join country clubs. Their specific proposals were inadequate to the task, but they were right in their insight that conservatives could no longer take the white working-class vote for granted. It would fall to other conservatives to try to answer the need they identified but did not meet.