Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (62 page)

Although Ryan tried to distance himself from Rand in subsequent years, his speech in October 2011 at the Heritage Foundation reflected how profound her influence had been. Like Rand, Ryan divided the world sharply between the productive and the unproductive—between the “makers” and the “takers.” The formulation would haunt the Romney campaign, and still haunts the American right.

“We’re coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition,” Ryan declared. “Because what we will end up doing is we will convert our safety net system—which is necessary I believe to help people who can’t themselves, to help people who
are down on their luck get back onto their feet—into a hammock that ends up lulling people into lives of dependency and complacency which drains them of their incentive and the will to make the most of their lives.”

The “hammock” metaphor drove home what Ryan was saying. The poor receiving government benefits (especially the working poor on food stamps who labored long hours for low pay) would have been surprised to learn that they were living pleasant lives on the dole, comfortably swinging between trees. But the passage explained all of Ryan’s budgets with their tax cuts for the “makers” and their sharp program cuts for the “takers.” The theory seemed to be that the rich responded to incentives that offered them more money and the poor responded to incentives that offered them less. Ryan’s greatest fear was not that American society was becoming unequal but that government was coddling the less productive and thus weakening the economy and the social fabric. Ryan insisted that as a Catholic, he believed in Christian charity. Late in the campaign, in an effort to align himself with a compassionate conservatism that had largely disappeared from the public dialogue, Ryan gave a moving speech warmly embracing the work of faith-based and community groups in alleviating poverty. But it was hard to miss Ayn Rand’s worldview beneath it all, a philosophy tinged with the Gilded Age Social Darwinism of William Graham Sumner, who had scorned charity as destructive because it interfered with a “natural” process through which the fittest survived and prospered.

Ryan’s “makers” and “takers” riff would prove to be a disastrous backdrop to the tale of the greatest error of Romney’s campaign. It was not an error he was even aware of, since it came during a speech on May 17, 2012, to a group of donors in Boca Raton that Romney thought was private and would never be heard by the larger electorate. But thanks to Scott Prouty, who worked as a caterer at the event and put a small camera on the bar near where Romney spoke, the whole world would eventually learn what Romney said that night. Prouty eventually got the recording to David Corn of
Mother Jones
magazine, and it went online on September 17, 2012. Here are Romney’s words that upended his candidacy:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent
upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

After the campaign, Romney told the
Washington Post
’s Dan Balz that he thought he was just engaging in rather uncontroversial electoral analysis.
Romney translated the passage this way: “Look, the Democrats have 47 percent, we’ve got 45 percent, my job is to get the people in the middle, and I’ve got to get the people in the middle.” But Romney had said much more than this and his words reflected Ryan’s stark division of the world between “makers” and “takers.” The contempt for the needy—those who “believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it”—was astonishing. Worse still was the arrogance in the line: “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” A declaration that the less affluent 47 percent of the country did not “take responsibility” for their own lives reflected a view so out of touch with the day-to-day struggles of a large part of the country as to disqualify Romney from the presidency, which is exactly what many voters did when they heard about his comments. Romney’s very definition of the 47 percent was revealing for how blind the right could be on the matter of who actually paid the most in taxes. To define taxpayers as only those who paid income tax ignored the extent to which middle-class and poor Americans often paid a
larger
share of their income in taxes than did the best-off because of regressive payroll, sales, and property levies. The very rich typically paid low capital gains rates, which is why Warren Buffett could say that his secretary paid proportionately more in taxes than he did.

Politically, Romney may have taken the biggest hit for his statement, “my job is not to worry about those people.” The idea that a president would not “worry” about nearly half the country was shocking, too, although this, at least, fits with Romney’s claim that he was only engaging in electoral analysis.

Romney is certainly a more caring man than his 47 percent moment suggested, given his record of extensive acts of personal charity. But this is also why his statement was so important, and so damning of what conservative ideology had become. Conservatives were aware of the damage Romney’s statement had done, which is why many of them disowned it, some during the campaign and many more afterward. This was not about how Romney
felt
. It was about how he
thought
. Romney did not invent any of the ideas contained in his statement. As David Frum argued, it really did reflect the view of the new “radical rich,” who had come to see decades of social provision as promoting only dependency and who saw themselves as the primary productive class in the United States. Those who failed to join their ranks had missed out not because of bad luck, discrimination, economic change, or social injustice. They were failures and moochers who were unprepared “to take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

After the 47 percent moment, only once did Romney genuinely threaten Obama’s lead. The president’s performance in their first debate on October 3 in Denver—the scene of his nomination four years earlier—was disastrous. It was obvious from the debate’s first moments that Romney was not only well prepared, with a clear strategy to execute, but also warm, at ease, and ready to fight. As for Obama, Axelrod, his loyal friend and partisan, captured the president’s failure that night as candidly as anyone.
“While he defended his record to a fault, indulging in esoterica, Obama was remarkably passive, seldom challenging Romney or, especially, Romney’s cynical reinvention of himself,” Axelrod wrote in his memoir. “Worse, the president looked disengaged, in stark contrast with a challenger who was in command of the moment.” Romney’s victory was so overwhelming that Obama’s partisans stopped even trying to defend the president’s performance on Twitter, the
new spin room of American politics. A consensus formed early, and it was bleak for the Democrats. The Republicans were joyously triumphant, and not a little surprised.

But Axelrod pointed to an important aspect of the evening that was largely lost in the pummeling Obama legitimately took. At that very late hour in the campaign, Romney was trying to pivot away from the right and recapture his image as a moderate, after so many years of running away from it.
Having campaigned hard on a tax proposal that called for $5 trillion in tax cuts, he said flatly: “I don’t have a tax cut of the scale that you’re talking about.” Romney, it seemed, was for his tax plan before he was against it, though no one was talking about this much that night.

Romney’s whole approach was moderate, practical, and terribly concerned about the middle class. The candidate who had repeatedly attacked regulations was quick to insist: “Regulation is essential. . . . You have to have regulations so that you can have an economy work.” He reiterated his criticism of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform legislation, but the scourge of big government during the primaries took care to make clear that whatever his running mate’s reading habits might be, he was not about to turn the United States into Ayn Rand’s utopia.

Having hidden his Massachusetts health care plan behind “Repeal Obamacare” rhetoric in the primaries, Romney finally embraced (or reembraced) it, without explaining why repealing a national health care system modeled after the one of which he was now so proud would be consistent with his view. He repeatedly used the word “crushed” to describe the impact of the president’s policies on Americans’ well-being and returned to Stuart Stevens’s favorite theme. “We know that the path we’re taking is not working,” Romney said late in the debate. “It’s time for a new path.”

In the early going that night, Obama seemed reluctant to go on offense and backed away from several opportunities to engage Romney. The president appeared far more interested in explaining than attacking, more concerned with scoring policy points than with raising larger questions about his opponent’s approach. The words “47 percent” did not come up.

Obama did return repeatedly to a central point: the vagueness of Romney’s proposals on taxes and health care. He charged that Romney was hiding the
details of those plans because they would prove unpopular with and harmful to the middle class. Several times, using different language, Obama effectively asked: if Romney’s ideas were genuinely helpful to average voters, wouldn’t he be shouting their particulars from the rooftops? And at several moments, Obama spoke of the baleful impact that Paul Ryan’s budget cuts would have on Medicare, student loans, and community colleges. Only in the last minutes did Obama find a stronger voice in describing his achievements. He contrasted his willingness “to say no to things” with Romney’s refusal to say no to “the more extreme parts of his party.” But Obama never managed to put Romney on the defensive, and in truth, never really tried. He contented himself with telling voters what he himself had done and why. Pollsters and pundits had long pondered whether Obama might suffer on Election Day from an “enthusiasm gap” on the part of his supporters. That night, said political writer Matt Bai, there certainly was an enthusiasm gap. It was Obama’s own.

The schedule provided for a thirteen-day gap between the first and second presidential debates. These were very long days for Obama’s supporters, who got something of a reprieve when Vice President Joe Biden cheerfully pummeled Paul Ryan and his budgets in the single vice presidential debate on October 11. As has always been his way, Obama performed best when he was on the ropes. In debate two, it was Obama on the offensive and Romney forced to be defensive. And the heart of Obama’s attack was a moment that distilled the essence of the critique of Romney, pioneered by Perry, Santorum, and Gingrich and driven home by the Democrats. After Romney had described his five-point economic plan, Obama pounced:

Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that the folks at the top play by a different set of rules. That’s been his philosophy in the private sector, that’s been his philosophy as governor, that’s been his philosophy as a presidential candidate. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less. You can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money. That’s exactly the philosophy that we’ve seen in place for the last decade. That’s what’s been squeezing middle-class families.

Neatly, Obama wrapped together criticisms of Romney’s views and his business habits, threw a punch at the Bush legacy (without a mention of Bush’s name), and drove home a progressive critique of conservative economics, including the sorts of tax cuts that Romney and Ryan favored. A campaign that had been headed Obama’s way before the first debate resumed its earlier trajectory.

Fox News commentators, reflecting the opinion bubble in which so many on the right lived, were absolutely certain of a Romney victory—certain because Americans could not possibly be happy with Obama, and certain that Obama’s own supporters could not help but be disillusioned. Romney himself shared this certainty. It was a belief driven in part by data—but the data came from the 2010 election. Surely, many conservatives reasoned, turnout in 2012 would be more demographically similar to 2010, the most recent election, than to 2008, wouldn’t it?