Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (59 page)

The future of conservatism depends on the willingness of conservatives to recognize that Huntsman’s modernist critique and Santorum’s
traditionalist critique each point to long-term problems facing their coalition and their creed. If conservatives want to focus primarily on economic issues, they will have to engineer the movement toward social moderation that Huntsman began. And if they want to maintain the support of middle-income and working-class voters who have been so vital to their victories, conservatives will have to pay heed to the discontent among working-class conservatives with whom Santorum identified.

In 2012, the issue of class would not go away, and class warfare against Romney was initially injected into the campaign not by Obama and the Democrats, but by Republicans themselves. Occupy Wall Street was hardly a conservative movement, but Mitt Romney’s opponents saw a chance for victory in the language of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

With Romney emerging after New Hampshire as the clear front-runner, it was nothing short of astonishing that GOP rivals
running to his right
sought to place the nature of modern capitalism at the center of the Republican debate. Their interest was not theoretical. They decided, in line with one of Karl Rove’s famous dictums, that the best way to undercut an opponent was to attack him in his area of perceived strength. Romney’s central claim was that his experience in business, including venture capital, prepared him to be the nation’s premier job creator. This message would run into difficulty if he came to be seen as a job destroyer. And that’s exactly the case his opponents made.

What if a certain class of capitalist made scads of money not by building up companies but by tearing them down? What if there was a distinction between the capitalist who created a good product and hired people to make and market it, and another kind of capitalist who took over a company, pulled out all the cash he could, and then abandoned it to die? These questions were raised not by a Marxist intellectual writing in an obscure journal. They underlay the way Rick Perry chose to describe Romney’s line of work at a town hall meeting in Fort, Mill, South Carolina, on January 10, 2012. He did it more colorfully than the average academic.

“They’re just vultures” Perry declared. “They’re vultures that are sitting
out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton.” The late Molly Ivins, the Lone Star State’s legendary populist scribe, must have been smiling in a People’s Heaven.

The day before, Newt Gingrich had made a similar case while visiting the right’s media citadel. On Fox News, he told Sean Hannity: “I think
there’s a real difference between people who believed in the free market and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment.”

Rarely had class warfare been so explicit in the conservative world. And the strategy of the non-Romneys right made tactical sense. Romney was clearly the candidate of the best-heeled Republicans. In New Hampshire, the exit polls found he had done best among voters earning more than $200,000 a year, next best with those whose incomes were between $100,000 and $200,000. He was weakest among those taking home less than $50,000 annually. A privileged candidate was sitting atop a relatively privileged base. The available votes were elsewhere.

Romney hit back, and would eventually force his rivals to relent, by insisting that they were putting
“free enterprise on trial,” and he would be proud to defend it. His language fit more comfortably within the conservative worldview. But damage was being done, and non-Republican blue-collar voters started noticing.

Indeed, one of the very toughest ads against Romney’s business past during the 2012 campaign was produced by the Super PAC supporting Gingrich and funded by Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire. It was not subtle. Titled
“King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” it included interviews in which those who had lost jobs at companies that Romney’s Bain Capital had taken over. The ad, drawn from a documentary, intermingled their accounts of pain and suffering, which they attributed to Bain, and images of Romney’s “$12 million California beach house.”

“Who am I?” a man in a Vietnam veteran’s hat says. “I’m Bob Stafford. Mitt Romney and those guys, they don’t care who I am.”

The film’s producer, Barry Bennett, said he wanted Republicans to be aware of the political risks they would run with Romney. “David Axelrod is
going to have a heyday with this,” Bennett told the
New York Times,
referring to Obama’s top strategist, “and
Republicans need to know this story before we nominate this guy.” Bennett was entirely right, although he also made Axelrod’s job easier. In his 2015 memoir,
Axelrod called the video “vicious” and said it played into the campaign’s plans to make Romney’s activities at Bain “ground zero for an economic values argument.” The Obama forces would pick up the Bain critique in May and start running their own ads on Romney and his company in June.

The attacks on Romney helped Gingrich to overwhelm him in the January 21 South Carolina primary. Gingrich won more than 40 percent of the vote, to just under 28 percent for Romney and 17 percent for Santorum. Gingrich beat Romney by 20 points among Tea Party supporters and by 5 points among voters who said they were neutral about the Tea Party. Romney carried Tea Party opponents, 32 percent to 19 percent for Gingrich. But this group amounted to all of
8 percent
of South Carolina primary voters, 64 percent of whom said they supported the Tea Party. Gingrich also drew a class line across South Carolina, once again confirming Romney’s weakness among working-class and middle-class voters, even in Republican primaries. The exit polls found Romney carrying only one income group: voters earning more than $200,000 a year. Voters earning less than $100,000 a year went strongly for Gingrich.

But Romney was blessed with weak opponents. With his challengers whittled down to Gingrich and Santorum (even as Ron Paul continued to gather up votes from faithful libertarians), Romney appealed to enough Republicans, even those who didn’t much like him, as the only plausible president on the ballot. After launching fierce attacks on Gingrich, Romney recovered his footing in the January 31 Florida primary,
taking 46 percent to 32 percent for the former Speaker. Santorum trailed both.
Romney’s victory was in large part a negative verdict on Gingrich, who was viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of those who cast ballots. After months of campaigning, nearly 40 percent of Florida’s voters still said they wished that someone else would seek the nomination. Even Romney’s supporters had doubts about him: he won 46 percent of the Florida vote, but only 34 percent of the same electorate saw him as the Republican candidate who
“best understands the problems of
average Americans.” Roughly a quarter of Romney’s own voters, Republican primary voters, denied him this distinction. It was a problem that Obama’s team would notice.
In the fall election, voters who said the most important characteristic they sought in a president was that he “cares about people like me” would vote for Obama over Romney, 81 percent to 18 percent.

Florida put Romney on the road to the nomination, but not before he was tested for another two months. He profited from the refusal of either Gingrich or Santorum to give way to the other. In many states, their combined vote, from the right end of the party, was larger than Romney’s share. In very conservative states, one or the other would defeat Romney. (In the end, Santorum carried eleven states and Gingrich two.) In more moderate states, where they could not afford to split conservative ballots, Romney won.

As the primaries rolled on, the candidates regularly underscored contradictions in the conservative argument. Both Romney and Santorum opposed President Obama’s rescue of the auto industry, a form of direct government intervention whose success Republicans (though not, it turned out, voters in Michigan and Ohio) had a hard time acknowledging. But Santorum raised a good question during a debate at the Detroit Economic Club.
“Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit,” Santorum said. “My feeling was that . . . the government should not be involved in bailouts, period. I think that’s a much more consistent position.”

Indeed it was. Romney could offer all sorts of rationales for the distinction he made between the two bailouts, but once he backed the Wall Street rescue, he could no longer claim free-market purity. And the financial bailout, however necessary, might be seen as creating the very “dependency” and “sense of entitlement” within the privileged classes that Romney condemned when it came to the less well-off.

For his part, Romney (through his Super PAC) attacked Santorum for regularly voting to increase the debt ceiling when he was a senator from Pennsylvania. This was the same Santorum who heaped praise on congressional conservatives when they had tried to block a debt ceiling increase in pursuit of more budget cuts.
“We cannot continue to write blank checks that our nation cannot cash,” Santorum said—referring to the very blank checks he freely authorized when he was in the Senate.

Romney defeated a spirited Santorum challenge in Michigan, and promptly touted his tax cut program, structured pretty much like every other conservative tax cut plan put forward over the previous three decades.
Romney promised to enact an “across-the-board, 20 percent rate cut for every American,” pledged to “repeal the alternative minimum tax,” and said he’d abolish the “death tax,” conservative-speak for the estate tax paid by only the most affluent Americans. He also proposed to cut the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. Absent steep spending cuts, his plan would have increased the deficit—remember the deficit?—by some $3 trillion.

The “across-the-board” part was meant to sound fair and balanced, but its impact certainly was not. A Tax Policy Center study the previous November, when Romney began floating his ideas, found that a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut would cut the taxes of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans by $264,000. Those in the middle of the income distribution would see a reduction of $791, and the poorest 20 percent would get $78. It was not exactly “Ask not what your country can do for you,” but these ideas clearly appealed to Romney’s most faithful constituency in the primaries. Republicans earning more than $200,000 a year repeated the pattern of the earlier primaries and backed Romney over Santorum by 2-to-1 in Michigan, Romney had temporarily beaten back the attacks on Bain, but the class self-portrait he helped his opponents paint was clear enough to most voters.

Romney’s Mormonism was never an open issue in the 2012 primaries. Indeed, Romney was so wary that his devotion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might damage his standing with evangelicals—as it had in Iowa in 2008—that he did little to call attention to his faith or to the acts of service and charity it had inspired. This flattened Romney’s image and gave him little to call on when he was painted as a heartless financier first by his Republican opponents and then by Obama. He had reason to worry about theological issues, since he never did well in the primaries with evangelical Republicans. But his church membership may have been less important with these voters than the sense that he had flip-flopped on social issues, including abortion. Many religious conservatives may also have suspected that like many Republicans at the high end of the class structure, he was a closet moderate, a view that Gingrich tried hard to reinforce. This suspicion helped Romney throughout the primaries among Republicans who were
bona fide moderates—they regularly voted for him over his more conservative adversaries—but left the religious conservatives cold.

The exit polls made this clear. In ten states that had voted before the Illinois primary on March 20, pollsters asked Republican voters how important it was for a candidate to share their religious beliefs.
On average, Romney received only 23 percent from voters who said a candidate’s religious views mattered a “great deal” to them. When Virginia (where Romney faced only Ron Paul) and Arizona (with its substantial Mormon population) were excluded, Romney’s average among these voters dropped to 17 percent. By contrast, Santorum averaged 46 percent among voters who said a candidate’s religious views mattered a great deal.

And in sixteen of the states that voted before Illinois, exit pollsters asked whether voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians. In the states that went for Santorum, evangelicals averaged 71 percent of the electorate. In the states Romney won, they averaged only 33 percent of the electorate (and only 31 percent if Virginia is excluded). In the two states Gingrich carried, South Carolina and Georgia, evangelicals made up 64 percent of the vote.

The primaries for other offices underscored how a focus purely on the Tea Party’s small-government, antispending commitments obscured how important social issues such as abortion and gay marriage still were to the movement’s core constituency of older, white, and religious voters. In 2012, this would saddle the Republicans with two Senate candidates who would astonish even staunch conservatives with their insensitivity.