Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (84 page)

“Ailes built Fox”
: Gabriel Sherman,
The Loudest Voice in the Room
(New York: Random House, 2014), p. xix.

“I’ve never seen anyone”
: Ibid., p. 342.

A PRRI/ Brookings Institution survey
: Daniel Cox, E. J. Dionne, William A. Galston, Robert P. Jones & Juhem Navarro-Rivera, “What Americans Want from Immigration Reform in 2014,” PRRI/Brookings Institution, p. 34.

“is going to win by more than five points”
: “Dick Morris: ‘Romney Will Win in a Landslide,’ ”
RealClearPolitics
, October 31, 2012.

“I was fired”
: CNN Political Unit, “Dick Morris: ‘I Was Wrong at the Top of My Lungs,’ ” CNN, February 7, 2013.

“Republicans have been fleeced”
: Dylan Byers, “Republicans Lied to by ‘Conservative Entertainment Complex,’ ”
Politico
, November 9, 2012.

“If leaders of the Republican Party are not setting”
: Jackie Calmes, “ ‘They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” paper published by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (July, 2015), p. 4.

“They really didn’t know what to do”
: Gabriel Sherman in interview with Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV (August 28, 2015),
http://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/672378
.

“epistemic closure”
: Julian Sanchez, “From, Cocktail Parties and the Treat of Doubt” (March 26, 2010),
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/03/26/frum-cocktail-parties-and-the-threat-of-doubt/
. Quoted in Calmes, pp. 35–36.

Skocpol and Williamson
: Skocpol and Williamson,
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,
p. 13.

When he founded the John Birch Society
: Justin Dart was a drugstore magnate who later in life became active on behalf of the disabled. Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1987. Holmes Tuttle was seen as the informal head of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” having encouraged him to run for governor of California in 1966. He made his fortune with a chain of auto dealerships. Alfred Bloomingdale made his money in the credit card industry. Reagan appointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Joseph P. Coors built his grandfather’s beer company into a major enterprise and was a leading funder of many conservative causes, including the Heritage Foundation at its founding.

The quintessential business organization
: John Judis,
The Paradox of American Democracy
(New York: Routledge, 2001).

In the 1970s
: Ibid., p. 110.

A Virginia lawyer named Lewis Powell
: Lewis F. Powell, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” confidential memorandum to Eugene Sydnor, August 23, 1971.

As Judis noted
: Judis,
The Paradox of American Democracy,
p. 131.

And businesses opposed
: For an excellent report and analysis on business’s role in the health care reform battle, see John Judis, “Abandoned Surgery: Business and the Future of Health Care Reform,”
American Prospect,
Spring 1995, pp. 65–73.

“We want to be seen as the tax cut”
: Conor Friedersdorf, “How Republicans Get Declared RINOs,”
Atlantic
, May 16, 2012.

Specter barely survived
: Janet Hook, “Specter Barely Survives Primary,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 28, 2004.

The Koch brothers’
: Brian Doherty,
Radicals for Capitalism
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), p. 410.

When libertarian dissidents
: Ibid., p. 418.

A 2007
Washington Post
: Michael Abramowitz and Steven Mufson, “Papers Detail Industry’s Role in Cheney’s Energy Report,”
Washington Post
, July 18, 2007.

New Yorker
writer Jane Mayer: Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations,”
New Yorker
, August 31, 2010.

Writing in
Foreign Affairs
magazine: David Frum, “Crashing the Party,”
Foreign Affairs
, September/October 2014.

“from the epicenter of progressive thought”
: Tom Perkins, “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 24, 2014.

Perkins was not the only
: Frum, “Crashing the Party.”

“Conservatism is something more”
: Russell Kirk, quoted in George H. Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 81.

“The religious person is entitled”
: Terry Eastland, “In Defense of Religious America,”
Commentary
, June 1, 1981.

“may be on the offensive”
: Nathan Glazer, “Fundamentalism: A Defensive Offensive,” in Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie, eds.,
Piety and Politics
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), p. 255.

“The New Right”
: James Reichley,
Faith in Politics
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), p. 296.

More generally, religious conservatives
: Richard John Neuhaus,
The Naked Public Square
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984).

“Whites in Mississippi”
: The next several paragraphs are based on Joseph Crespino’s excellent account of the controversy, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” in Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds.,
Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 90–105. See also Joseph Crespino,
In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 253–56.

The
New York Times
published
: “Electoral Shifts,”
New York Times
, April 14, 2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/05/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_RECAP.html?_r=0
.

The cultural feel
: “Portrait of the Electorate: Table of Detailed Results,”
New York Times,
November 6, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/07/weekinreview/20101107-detailed-exitpolls.html
.

“There’s no other explanation”
: Adam Nossiter, “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,”
New York Times
, November 10, 2008.

only 19 percent said
: “Polling the Tea Party,”
New York Times
/CBS News, April 10, 2010.

opposition to illegal immigration
: On the Tea Party and immigration, the
New York Times
/CBS News poll and many other surveys have shown Tea Party supporters to be strongly motivated by opposition to immigration reform. See Daniel Cox, “Why Loyalty to Their Tea Party Constituents Is Holding Back House Republicans on Immigration Reform,” Public Religion Research Institute, August 8, 2014,
http://publicreligion.org/2014/08/why-loyalty-to-their-tea-party-constituents-is-holding-back-house-republicans-on-immigration-reform/
. See also Christopher Parker, “The (Real) Reason Why the House Won’t Pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” Brookings Institution FixGov blog, August 4, 2014,
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2014/08/04-immigration-tea-party-constituencies-parker?utm_campaign=Brookings+Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=13705896&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9O34zJ_UZgzKolEFfunsJ70vK0Cf28Pn7RceUYvTmhq2-Dh6ZkYaUDDKsn2i28aDHA321R55Vxtqo1wvT9OoxhIOnGjw&_hsmi=13705896
.

A PRRI/Brookings Institution survey
: E. J. Dionne and William A. Galston, “The Old and New Politics of Faith: Religion and the 2010 Election,” PRRI/Brookings Institution, November 17, 2010.

“People who could not even spell”
: Jonathan Raban, “At the Tea Party,”
New York Review of Books
, March 25, 2010.

10. DREAMS OF CELESTIAL CHOIRS

It found its voice four days later
: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Address to First Montgomery Improvement Association Mass Meeting,” 1955.

“Where his predecessors had roused the people”
: Arthur Schlesinger,
The Politics of Hope and the Bitter Heritage
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 110.

Obama, like Reagan, used stories
: Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention keynote address, July 27, 2004.

Reagan had intentionally drawn
: Ronald Reagan, “A Time for Choosing,” address delivered October 27, 1964.

“some liberals who dismiss”
: Senator Barack Obama, Speech on Faith and Politics, June 28, 2006.

“To think clearly about race”
: Senator Barack Obama,
The Audacity of Hope
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), p. 233.

He criticized Wright
: Senator Barack Obama, Speech on Race, March 18, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html?pagewanted=all
.

He declined to disown Wright
: Peter Slevin and Darryl Fears, “Obama Calls Minister’s Statements ‘Outrageous,’ ”
Washington Post
, April 30, 2008.

“God didn’t call America”
: E. J. Dionne, “Another Angry Black Preacher,”
Washington Post
, March 21, 2008.

“You go into some of these small towns”
: David Axelrod,
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics
(New York: Penguin Press, 2015), p. 267.

“conservatives were eager”
: Bradford Berenson, “Harvard Law Days,”
Frontline,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/choice2008/obama/harvard.html
.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed”
: Senator Barack Obama, “In Their Own Words: Obama on Reagan,”
New York Times
, January 16, 2008.

“I could stand up here”
: Julie Bosman, “Clinton Turns from Anger to Sarcasm,”
New York Times
, February 24, 2008.

“I’m unapologetic”
: E. J. Dionne, “A Dark Horse’s War Edge,”
Washington Post
, January 16, 2007.

“will take the Israelis”
: Mike Huckabee quoted in “Huckabee: Obama Marching Israelis to ‘Door of Oven,’ ”
Breitbart
(July 25, 2015).

“There’s only three things”
: Sean Sullivan, “Joe Biden’s Greatest (and Not-So-Greatest) Debate Hits,”
Washington Post
, October 10, 2012.

McCain had condemned
: Mike Glover, Associated Press, “McCain Condemns Pat Robertson,”
Washington Post
, February 28, 2000.

McCain might instead
: “Sen. John McCain Attacks Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Republican Establishment as Harming GOP Ideals,” CNN, February 28, 2000,
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0002/28/se.01.html
.

And on July 10
: Dan Balz and Anne E. Kornblut, “Top Aides Leave McCain Campaign,”
Washington Post
, July 11, 2007.

“dissatisfaction to his high command”
: Ibid.

Romney declared that he
: Marc Santora, “Candidates Spar Over Who Is a Real Republican,”
New York Times
, October 14, 2007.

“You look back at the Chinese Exclusionary Act”
: New York City mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s address to a conference on immigration at the University of Minnesota, September 30, 1996. See full transcript provided by the
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/01/nyregion/excerpt-from-address-on-immigration.html
.

“I’m standing here tonight”
: Michael Cooper, “G. O. P. Rivals Trade Jabs in Debate,”
New York Times
, November 28, 2007.

“This whole debate saddens me”
: Clyde Haberman, “Sanctuary Was a Lovely Word. Then The G.O.P. Got a Hold of It,”
New York Times
, November 30, 2007.

“rapists” “bringing drugs”; Donald Trump quoted in Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Donald Trump’s False Comments Connecting Mexican Immigrants and Crime,”
Washington Post
online (July 8, 2015).

McCain had confronted a questioner
: Holly Ramer, “Voter Confronts McCain on Immigration,”
Washington Post,
October 14, 2007.

Giuliani suffered in November
: Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson,
The Battle for America 2008
(New York: Viking, 2009), p. 267.

Giuliani had ‘billed obscure city agencies”
: Ben Smith, “Giuliana Billed Obscure Agencies for Trips,”
Politico,
November 28, 2007.

Some 60 percent of Republican caucusgoers
: “Election 2008: Iowa Caucus Results,”
New York Times
,
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/states/IA.html
.

“Religious tolerance”
: Mitt Romney, “Faith in America,” address delivered December 6, 2007.

McCain’s New Hampshire victory
: “Election 2008: New Hampshire Primary Results,”
New York Times
,
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/states/NH.html
.

McCain won with just 33 percent
: “Election 2008: South Carolina Primary Results,”
New York Times
,
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/states/SC.html
.

Giuliani’s campaign was flailing
: Michael Cooper and Michael Luo, “At Debate on the Economy, Republicans Become the Kindest of Candidates,”
New York Times
, January 25, 2008.

he won with a relatively modest
: “Election 2008: Florida Primary Results,”
New York Times,
http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/states/FL.html
.

“He is not the choice”
: E. J. Dionne, “The McCain Divide?,”
Washington Post
, February 1, 2008.

McCain took a five-point lead
: “Gallup Daily: McCain 48%, Obama 43%,” Gallup, September 10, 2008,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/110212/Gallup-Daily-McCain-48-Obama-43.aspx?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=tiles
.