American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Immediately following his victory, Steele was whisked two hundred miles southwest to Hot Springs, Virginia, where House Republicans were holding their annual retreat. The atmosphere there was ebullient. Fresh off their defiance of Obama, and for the first time in months, the GOP lawmakers felt a sense of optimism. Pence, the newly elected number three House Republican, planned a weekend-long pep rally. Boehner told his troops that the stimulus vote would be remembered as the party’s return to fiscal responsibility. Cantor asked his lieutenants to autograph a bottle of wine that they would uncork after winning the majority in 2010. And Pence played a clip from Patton in which George C. Scott, portraying the famed World War II general, says, “We are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything—except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose, and we’re gonna kick him in the ass. We’re gonna kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose!”

  None of this seemed terribly realistic. Their rejection of the stimulus did not change the fact that House Republicans, by and large, were big spenders. Or that House Republicans, deep in the minority, stood little chance of retaking the majority in two years. Or that House Republicans, intimidated by Obama’s approval rating, still believed they would be obligated to cooperate with him.

  In fact, exhilarating as their stand against the stimulus was, many of Boehner’s members had hoped to vote for it. Those representing districts in the industrial heartland were especially desperate to help their constituents. Paul Ryan, whose hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, was being devastated by the closing of a General Motors plant, had expected the stimulus package to offer something closer to a fifty-fifty split between tax cuts and infrastructure spending, and was slack-jawed by the Democrats’ final product.

  Ryan still believed, however, that there was plenty of work to do with the new president. Having crafted a controversial bill in 2008 calling for a restructuring of entitlement programs—a proposal that the House GOP’s campaign arm urged its incumbents to disown—Ryan was pleasantly surprised when Obama, after taking office, reached out privately to offer positive feedback. There seemed to be real potential for an alliance: A year later, in early 2010, Obama would praise Ryan as a “sincere guy” with a “serious proposal” for cutting the deficit.7

  Ryan, an annoyingly earnest midwesterner who came to Washington straight out of college—he worked as a waiter, a think tank researcher, and a Capitol Hill staffer before winning his congressional seat at age twenty-eight—was under no illusions about Obama’s liberalism. But unlike most of his comrades, Ryan believed the president was uniquely suited to pursue major bipartisan reforms to government in a way Bush had never been. While other Republicans spent the retreat talking tough about Obama, the congressman from Wisconsin’s First District was more circumspect.

  “The president did a good job laying the groundwork for the future,” Ryan told Politico, referencing their recent conversations. “Speaking for myself, I think the president is showing us that he wants to collaborate.”8

  Steele, meanwhile, received a standing ovation when he stood to address the gathering. “My mom was a sharecropper’s daughter with a fifth-grade education,” the new party chairman said. “If my mother knew how to balance the budget without taking money out of my pocket, I’m sure that the rest of the folks out here on the other side should know how to do that as well.”

  Republicans were ecstatic at the new voice, and the new look, of their party. It wouldn’t last.

  Over the next few months, Steele put his foot in his mouth so many times it warranted a surgical relocation. He promised to bring conservatism to “hip-hop settings.”9 He said Democrats voting for the stimulus were trying to “get a little bling, bling.”10 He jokingly linked Bobby Jindal, the Indian American governor of Louisiana, to the film Slumdog Millionaire, a film set in the ghettos of Mumbai.11 He called abortion “an individual choice” that should be left to the states.12

  None of this should have been surprising. Steele was a known quantity in the party, an opinionated rabble-rouser with a penchant for provocation. Interestingly, while the RNC tried to tame its leader in some respects—members suggested, for instance, that his colorful suits and ties were a bit much—they were eager to use his uniqueness in other ways. When Steele went to give a major speech early in his tenure, he was handed prepared remarks that included several jokes about Obama’s birthplace. He refused to read them.

  “I said, ‘Do you understand what it’s like for a black man to stand up and say another black man is not born here?’” Steele recalls. “People in the party wanted me to go out there and start hitting Obama on his birth certificate to score points with the base and get them all fired up. I’d rather get people fired up about being right about policy and challenging the status quo that way, as opposed to playing the race card against the president.”

  Others weren’t so reluctant. As Rush Limbaugh led conservative talk radio down a dim path of racial dog whistling, declaring himself in the summer of 2009 to be a full-fledged “birther”—one who doubted that Obama was born in the United States—Steele felt compelled to push back. Most memorably, he went on CNN with comedian D. L. Hughley and denounced Limbaugh when Hughley suggested the radio jock was the leader of the Republican Party. “Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment,” Steele said. “Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.”

  Predictably, El Rushbo devoted much of his next show to lampooning Steele.13 The coverage of the incident, and the fury in the base, indicating mass allegiance to the talk radio host instead of the party chairman, suggested that the tail was wagging the dog.

  Meanwhile, Steele was trying to back-channel with the White House to set up a meeting with the president. He wanted to get acquainted; to let Obama know that he would be civil and attempt to keep the party’s nativist voices at bay. But the president never responded.

  “Despite the public image of Barack Obama, he’s very, very partisan. He does not like Republicans. He didn’t like any of us,” Steele says. “I don’t think he really appreciated the roles that we were both in, at the same time, as black men. And in my estimation, there should have been some space for the two of us to get in a room together, just so we could say, ‘Hey, can you believe these white people?’”

  As Steele grappled with concerns over identity and image, the GOP’s fund-raising sputtered and its state-by-state organization fossilized. The buyer’s remorse was sudden. Steele had barely moved into his new office when the mutiny began. In early March, The Hill reported that North Carolina committeewoman Ada Fisher, one of the RNC’s three black members, had emailed her colleagues calling for Steele’s resignation.14

  “I don’t want to hear anymore language trying to be cool about the bling in the stimulus package or appealing to D. L. Hughley and blacks in a way that isn’t going to win us any votes and makes us frankly appear to many blacks as quite foolish,” Fisher wrote.

  Steele survived the uprising, thanks in part to the rigorous defense of a baby-faced Wisconsin lawyer. He was the RNC’s general counsel and the chairman’s right-hand man, Reinhold Richard Priebus—“Reince” for short.

  FROM THE FLOOR OF THE CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE, A MAN flapped his arms and bellowed into the camera. It was February 19 and CNBC reporter Rick Santelli was irate—not just about the recently enacted stimulus, but about the Obama administration’s plans to rescue homeowners from bad mortgages.

  “How about this president and new administration,” Santelli shouted. “Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? Or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure, and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?”

  Back in the studio, the hosts of Squawk Box chuckled at their correspondent’s indignation. But Sa
ntelli grew only more animated.

  “This is America!” he shouted, motioning to the traders surrounding him. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand!” The traders cheered in solidarity. Santelli turned back to the camera. “President Obama,” he cried, “are you listening?”

  Santelli’s rant blew up overnight. He had bottled the anger fermenting over Bush’s bailout and Obama’s stimulus, not to mention the inevitability of further government intervention into the automotive companies, the energy sector, and the health care industry. Worried that Democrats were exploiting the economic upheaval to make wholesale changes to the country—a suspicion fed by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s comment “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”15—Republicans were already on the edge. By warning that he might organize a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest, Santelli provided the push.

  Soon, they were everywhere: people in the streets, some wearing revolutionary-era costumes and toting Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, demonstrating against the president and his party and the skulking odor of socialism. These weren’t the first protests since Obama was elected, and Santelli wasn’t the first person to use the phrase “Tea Party” in opposition to Obama’s policies, but the CNBC host had galvanized a movement.

  The day after Santelli’s outburst, roughly two dozen conservative activists joined a conference call to harness the sudden vigor in the grass roots. Many of them had never met in person; they were associated through the internet, particularly social media, having huddled under the hashtag #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter). The organizer of this online community, a business consultant named Michael Patrick Leahy, put together the conference call. “We need to strike while the iron’s hot, while people are talking about Santelli,” Leahy announced.

  One of the participants on the call was Jenny Beth Martin, an Atlanta-based computer programmer who had become active in conservative forums online. Having lost her home to foreclosure and moved into a downsized rental just two weeks earlier, Martin and her husband were doing odd jobs to make ends meet. She says that they didn’t need the government’s help and were livid at its intervention on behalf of the powerful.

  “People sensed that Washington was rigging the system against the average American and expecting the average American to pay for that rigged system,” she says. “Big business and big labor and big technology teaming up with big government against the average American.”

  The voices on the call agreed to coordinate their first events one week later, on Friday, the twenty-seventh of February. They hoped to hold ten events and draw a few thousand demonstrators; instead, nearly fifty rallies popped up across the country, and attendance was five times what anyone had anticipated.

  This had been achieved on short notice and with almost no money behind it. Watching with interest, the right’s wealthiest benefactors saw an investment too good to pass up. Hoping to capitalize on this burst of momentum, some of the biggest donors in conservative politics, including the libertarian-minded industrialists Charles and David Koch, jumped into the action, spending heavily to build out expansive lists of activists and volunteers. Rare was a movement that came about so quickly; even rarer was an opportunity to shape it. By pumping untold millions of dollars into a network of right-wing organizations, deep-pocketed ideologues such as the Kochs aimed to build a machine capable of displacing a hollowed-out Republican Party.

  Meanwhile, smaller, more organic groups were springing up across the country under the Tea Party banner, planning meetings and coordinating with sister outfits. One of them, cofounded by Martin, was the Tea Party Patriots, which in a matter of weeks had amassed thousands of members in its Atlanta chapter alone.

  The potency of this combination, AstroTurf money and grassroots mobilizing, was realized on April 15, 2009. It was Tax Day, and the bill for eight years of big-government policies had finally come due. As if the bank bailouts, stimulus vote, and mortgage rescues weren’t unpopular enough, Obama was now throwing some $55 billion at the Detroit automakers (on top of the $25 billion in TARP funding Bush had provided) in exchange for government-mandated restructurings inside General Motors and Chrysler. Hundreds of Tea Party rallies were held nationwide in protest of Washington’s fiscal recklessness and its intrusion into the private marketplace.

  It wasn’t just rage against Uncle Sam animating the masses. The news in March 2009 of New York financier Bernie Madoff having defrauded thousands of people out of tens of billions of dollars stoked the same feelings of exploitation and unfairness that were increasingly being directed at the government over its policies on spending, immigration, and trade. Decades of a widening chasm in incomes, a diminishment of factory work, a shredded national identity, a dissipating sense of societal cohesiveness, a vanished sense of postwar unity—it was all blurring together in an abstract expression of outrage.

  America was in open revolt, and Obama’s honeymoon period was suddenly over.

  The cover of Time magazine for May 18, 2009, showed a Republican elephant logo with the headline “Endangered Species.” It didn’t come across as hyperbole—not when party honchos had spent the past six months thinking the same thing, and certainly not when Arlen Specter, the senator from Pennsylvania, felt compelled to defect to the Democratic Party that spring, giving Obama a 60th vote in the Senate once Al Franken was seated after a protracted legal fight in Minnesota.

  But all the while, something was happening—an authentic rebellion the likes of which the right hadn’t seen since the days of the John Birch Society. The irony was subtle but significant: Republicans had failed for the past four years to mobilize their base, yet Obama had done for the party what it could not do for itself.

  GOP LEADERS WERE KEEN TO CAPITALIZE. BOEHNER WAS SCHEDULED to be in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, headlining a fund-raiser in the district of Cantor’s chief deputy whip, Kevin McCarthy. Boehner and McCarthy agreed to attend the Bakersfield Tea Party event on the condition that they not give any remarks. Boehner suspected with some justification that these crowds would be just as hostile to Republican politicians, especially leadership officials, as they were to Democrats.

  “We’re at this event, and there’s some people who are really happy that we showed up,” Boehner recalls. “But there were others that just looked at us with more disdain than you could ever imagine. They thought we were the enemy.”

  If anything, strange as it would seem given the events of the next several years, Boehner embodied the Tea Party before it existed. A self-made businessman who worked as a janitor to put himself through school, Boehner had earned a small fortune selling corrugated boxes and injection-molded plastics before turning his attention to politics. After winning a state legislative race, he defied the Ohio GOP establishment to win a congressional seat in 1990, overcoming a last name that was mispronounced by everyone, from talk radio hosts to a young volunteer for his campaign, a local college Republican named Paul Ryan. “I didn’t know him,” Ryan laughs. “I thought his name was Boner.”

  Boehner (“BAY-ner”) quickly cut a reputation as a crusader against waste and corruption. Leading a group of young lawmakers known as the “Gang of Seven,” he gained fame for investigations into the House Bank and the House Post Office that rattled Congress to its core. These triumphs earned him a spot at Gingrich’s leadership table following the GOP Revolution of 1994, but he was later exiled to the rank and file. Clawing his way back to congressional relevance over the ensuing decade, Boehner sharpened his legislative skills, won a committee chairmanship, authored the No Child Left Behind Act, and forged alliances with members across the aisle—and across his party’s ideological divide. By the time Denny Hastert had vacated his spot atop the House GOP, Boehner was positioned as the undisputed heir apparent.

  He was a breathing paradox: the creature of K Street who rented his Capitol Hill apartment from a lobbyist, but who never requested an earma
rk in his career; the chain-smoking bullshitter who wept at the mere mention of schoolchildren; the midwestern Everyman who never left home without a clean shave and an ironed shirt; the bartender’s son who grew up in a two-room ranch with his parents and eleven siblings only to become the Speaker of the House.

  If Cantor served as the House GOP’s head—calculating the angles, crunching the votes—Boehner was its heart. Having evolved from insurgent to institutionalist, he specialized in reading people, in building relationships, in giving tough love and getting respect in return. He trafficked in candor and humor, often at the same time, never hesitant to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear or dispense pearls of wisecracking wisdom. Once, when Patrick McHenry was brand new to Congress, Boehner spotted him eating an ice-cream sandwich in the Republican cloakroom. “Don’t do that,” Boehner told the freshman, pointing to the frozen snack.

  “Why?” McHenry asked.

  “You’re gonna be a fat-ass,” Boehner replied. (Sure enough, McHenry says, his weight ballooned during his first term in Washington.)

  Another time, after he had finished railing against Alaska-based earmarks on the floor, Boehner was confronted by the state’s congressman, Don Young, who after a verbal skirmish shoved Boehner against a wall and held a ten-inch blade to his throat. “Fuck you,” Boehner said, staring the Alaskan in the eye. Young would later ask Boehner to serve as best man at his wedding.

  This political sixth sense, however, did nothing for Boehner when it came to the Tea Party. He understood the recoil against a growing federal government, but he wasn’t sure what to make of grown men wearing tricornered hats. He agreed that Washington spent taxpayer money carelessly, but he wasn’t convinced this movement was really about fiscal responsibility.

  Boehner wasn’t alone in this regard. The tea in Tea Party was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already,” yet the more time Republicans spent observing the nascent movement, the less certain they felt about its organizing philosophy.