Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (61 page)

The ad concluded with Soptic reciting words the Obama campaign hoped would stick in the minds of voters—and the media: “He’s running for president, and if he’s going to run the country the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there. He would be so out of touch with the average person in this country. How could you care? How could you care for the average working person if you feel that way.”

The
Washington Post
’s Dan Balz highlighted the ad in his book on the campaign,
Collision 2012,
because it kicked off what may have been the decisive period of the contest in May and June. That is when Romney lost any chance he had for a referendum election. And because that groundwork was laid, Romney’s “47 percent” comments later were seen in the worst possible context—the context partially set by Joe Soptic.

In late May, the pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA would run one of the most devastating ads of the entire campaign. It was about another company Bain had owned, Ampad. Mike Earnest, a worker at the company’s plant in Marion, Indiana, describes how he and some fellow workers were asked to build a stage.
It was from that stage that plant managers announced they were shutting the factory down. “Turns out that when we built that stage,” Earnest said, “it was like building my own coffin—and it just made me sick.”

On June 21,
Tom Hamburger of the
Washington Post
cited Securities and Exchange Commission documents for a story in which he reported that during Romney’s nearly fifteen years at Bain, “it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components.”

The Obama campaign couldn’t move fast enough to create a new ad. “What a president believes matters,” it declared. “Mitt Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low-wage countries. He supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. President Obama believes in insourcing.
He fought to save the U.S. auto industry and favors tax cuts for companies that bring jobs home. Outsourcing versus Insourcing. It matters.”

A choice was being framed. Mitt Romney’s referendum was on permanent hold. And a class war that conservatives had long waged on social and religious issues would be waged instead around—class.

At the midpoint of 2012, it was startling how far the nation’s political conversation had moved in just a year.

In the summer of 2011, the country was focused on budget deficits, the new Republican Congress, the debt ceiling fiasco, and the threat of default. Republicans were on offense, Obama was reactive, and progressive voices in the country were still or ignored.

Republicans had reason to believe they had not only prevented the progressive realignment that Democrats had dreamed of the day Obama was elected but had also reversed the tide. The sweep in the 2010 midterms could only be a portent of that long-elusive conservative majority. And this time,
with the Tea Party giving the movement spine and electoral muscle, it would be a majority led by full-throated conservatives. Government really would be rolled back. Even the great monuments of the New Deal and the Great Society, Social Security and Medicare, would be contained and set, if not on a path to extinction, then at least toward much lower spending levels in the long run. Establishment Republicans, witnessing the fate of their more moderate colleagues, were edging steadily right.

In state governments around the country, full Republican control had ushered in some of the most conservative approaches to policy since the 1920s. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker had vastly reduced the power of public employee unions—and, in what conservatives hoped was a portent for the fall, beat back the unions’ effort to recall him from office in June 2012.

As it was in Wisconsin, so it was in states as diverse as North Carolina, Kansas, Ohio, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where state budgets were slashed and taxes cut. In many states where Republicans held both the executive and the legislature, new restrictions on abortion were passed and “voter protection” measures were enacted. Justified in the name of preventing voter fraud—of which there was scant evidence—these measures had the effect of making access to the ballot box more difficult for many voters, particularly members of minority groups and younger Americans. They were the very groups that had swelled Obama’s margins in 2008. Some of the laws involved voter ID requirements. Others shortened early voting periods and complicated voter registration efforts. At least one Republican admitted the political motivation behind the measures. In Pennsylvania, the Republican House majority leader Mike Turzai ticked off a series of his party’s legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting and proudly included the state’s new voter requirement on the list.
“Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.” Not for nothing did Democrats and civil rights leaders see these measures as the return of voter suppression. They were one of many marks of a conservative movement not only on the move, but also determined to use the power it had to lock in its advantages for the future.

Yet in the seven months from the rise of Occupy Wall Street and Obama’s Osawatomie speech through the strange Republican primary journey, the
issue landscape was transformed. If the country was skeptical of how government worked, it was also skeptical of how economic elites had managed the nation’s business. When the focus shifted from the first to the second, progressives, including Obama, regained the advantage.

Obama was again fully engaged, reflecting the peculiar rhythms of his political life. He was up and energetic during campaigns, but restrained and curiously passive in his public performances when the campaign was over—except when his back was against a wall and his competitive inclinations, learned on basketball courts and in all other games with winners and losers, drove him to seek victory.

His senior political adviser David Axelrod had prepared a video for Obama, shown at the first major planning meeting for the reelection campaign on September 17, 2011. It included parts of the 2004 convention speech, Axelrod wrote in his memoir, “in which he so eloquently gave voice to the hopes and struggles of hardworking Americans he had met while traveling in Illinois,” and highlights of inspiring moments from the 2008 campaign. “I finished with more recent footage, documenting a restrained president sharing the details of his deficit reduction policies and what they would mean for some distant fiscal year,” Axelrod wrote. “It was a clinical and bloodless performance, lacking both passion and a sense of advocacy.”

“We need you to be
that
guy again,” Axelrod said, referring to the earlier Obama who had been “passionate and purposeful.”

Obama’s old friend was right about the president’s need to get back on his game, but the point was about more than performance. Obama was always stronger when making an affirmative case that challenged conservative assumptions and policies. With the right determined not only to defeat him but also to roll back the larger progressive project, falling back on bromides about the need to end partisanship and discord would neither answer its challenge nor mobilize his own supporters. It was bound to be a loser’s strategy, and Obama did not want to lose.

Romney, of course, wanted to win, too. He had turned back his primary foes by accusing them of being enemies of free enterprise, and he tried to do the same when Obama gave him an opening. Speaking in front of a fire station in Virginia on July 13, Obama tried to channel a comment by Harvard
professor Elizabeth Warren that had become a Web sensation earlier in the year; Warren declared that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own” because everyone, perhaps especially the wealthy, depended on government for the provision of social goods.
Thriving entrepreneurs, she noted, moved their products “on the roads the rest of us pay for,” hired workers whom “the rest of us paid to educate,” have their property protected by police and firefighters that the rest of us also pay for—and that was just for starters. Obama made the same point by saying, “If you were successful, someone along the line gave you some help.”
He went on with this theme for a while, and then got to a somewhat garbled passage: “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.
If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that
.”

When the fact-checkers looked back after the italicized sentence became a Republican cause célèbre, they concluded that what Obama was saying the businessperson didn’t build were those roads and the bridges. Obama was
not
referring to the businesses themselves. This didn’t detain the Republicans. Romney hit back with a Web ad. If Obama’s ads included workers, Romney’s ads, as was only appropriate given his worldview, included the voices of management and ownership.
“Through hard work and a little bit of luck, we built this business,” Jack Gilchrist, a New Hampshire metal plant owner, said in the ad. “Why are you demonizing us for it? It’s time we had somebody who believes in us.”

Republicans were so certain they had found the key to the election—definitive proof, as many saw it, of Obama’s “socialism”—that they made attacks on the phrase a centerpiece at their national convention and a mainstay of the campaign.

In his book
The Center Holds,
Jonathan Alter recounted how Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment drove respectable
Republican politicians and scholars to distraction. Writing under the headline “Un-American” on the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, prominent conservative author Charles Murray grumbled: “That’s the thing about Obama. Time and again, he does things and says things that are un-American. Not evil. Not anti-American. Just un-American.”
John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, echoed this language. “I wish the president would learn how to be an American,” he said. As Alter observed,
“These were not Internet trolls attacking
the president’s patriotism but prominent conservatives.” There were now two streams of conservative radicalism. At the edges were those who saw Obama as a Muslim, a foreign interloper who had no right to be president. But within the Republican establishment, there were many who had so turned against public provision by the state, particularly when the state was run by Obama, that even a defense of the idea that prosperity depended on a reasonably active government had become “un-American.” Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln would all have been surprised to have been read out of the American experiment. The Tea Party view had entered the right’s mainstream.

Obama, of course, had issued more than his share of encomiums to entrepreneurs. But the episode showed how far conservatism had strayed from the emphasis that both Nixon and Reagan placed on working people. The Reagan Democrats were southerners, to be sure, but also factory workers in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Partisans of the new conservative ideology were so obsessed with the “job creators,” a term repeated thousands of times at hundreds of Republican rallies, that they forgot entirely about those who held the jobs. Far from upending Obama, the attention Romney and his party gave to the “you didn’t build that” line only reinforced the sense that they looked at the world entirely from the perspective of the boss, the investor, the boardroom, and the front office.

Only after the election did conservatives come to terms with how absurd this approach was, as a political matter no less than as a factual matter. In early 2014, the conservative
Washington Examiner’
s lead political writer, Byron York, reported on a speech by then–majority leader Eric Cantor.
The
Examiner
’s puckish headline: “The House GOP’s incredible, amazing discovery: Most Americans aren’t entrepreneurs.” Cantor had, indeed, stated an obvious truth: “Ninety percent of Americans work for someone else. . . . Their dream is to have a good job, with an income that will allow them to support their family. We shouldn’t miss the chance to talk to these people.” But in 2012, they did miss their chance. The obvious can get lost in a cloud of ideology.

Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate reinforced his image as a hard economic conservative. The turn to Ryan said a lot
about Romney, some of it good. Romney was not about to saddle the country (or himself) with a gimmicky and patently unqualified running mate. He and the party had learned from its Sarah Palin experience. Ryan knew Washington well, having worked there since his early twenties. He was bright and affable with a young man’s smile and a devotion to personal fitness. He was the face and voice of a new generation of conservatives. In a laudatory profile pushing Ryan as the logical VP pick, the
Weekly Standard
’s Stephen Hayes called the Wisconsin congressman “the intellectual leader of the Republican Party.”
Hayes quoted the legendary Democratic strategist James Carville declaring that Ryan would be “a clarifying choice” and would make the contest “about big issues.”

This proved to be absolutely true. Precisely because Ryan, then forty-two, was representative of the new generation on the right, he espoused—in a folksy and friendly way—its radicalism on taxing, spending, and the purpose of government. Like many young conservatives, he had been influenced in college by the radical individualism of Ayn Rand, whose works included a book with the brutally candid title
The Virtue of Selfishness
. In 2005, Ryan addressed the Atlas Society, named after Rand’s most influential book, at an event honoring the hundredth anniversary of her birth.
He told the assembled Randians that
Atlas Shrugged
“inspired me so much that it’s required reading for all my interns and my staff.” If Bill Buckley tried to read Rand out of the conservative movement, Ryan and a great many others on the younger right never got the message.