by Tim Alberta
“In theory, it was all about spending,” Cantor says. “In theory. But I began to question that.”
“The Kochs didn’t like the social issues, so they tried to make it a small-government thing and put ‘values’ on the back burner,” says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “But if you actually looked at the survey data, the Tea Party were our people—and the cultural issues were the top priority for them. Moms raising their kids aren’t thinking about tax rates; they’re thinking about what kind of culture their kids are growing up in.”
“It was a populist movement, rooted in conservative limited-government principles,” recalls Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who would become Boehner’s archnemesis. “But part of it was a reaction to what many Americans viewed as Obama apologizing for America. . . . It was about more than spending, as evidenced by what happened with President Trump.”
“It was fiscal,” says Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator. “But it was also about lots of intrusion into our lives, control of your health care, and redefining marriage.” (Iowa on April 3 became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage, after Massachusetts and Connecticut, causing disorientation for those who had once taken solace in believing that such developments would be limited to coastal blue states.)
More than anyone in Congress, DeMint heralded the Tea Party’s arrival as the GOP’s salvation. He had, after all, launched the Senate Conservatives Fund out of a belief that the right would soon rise up against the Republican Party. Now it was actually happening. The only problem: The establishment was resisting it.
This became clear to DeMint in September, when tens of thousands of Tea Party protesters (perhaps more, depending on warring crowd-size estimates) marched in Washington for the “9/12” rally.16 It was a powerful rebuke to Washington and its two tribes; only a handful of Republicans, including DeMint and Pence, were invited to address the event. But when the Senate GOP gathered for its weekly lunch a few days later, there was zero discussion of the march. It was as though nothing had happened.
DeMint was beside himself. “This is what we’ve been waiting for!” he told his colleagues. Years later, reflecting on that meeting, he is still upset. “They looked down on those people,” DeMint says of his Senate colleagues at the time. “The Republican Party stiff-armed the Tea Party.”
Actually, many Republicans, even the crusty establishment types, embraced the Tea Party in public even as they harbored reservations in private. There was reason for them to keep their distance. For one thing, much of the grassroots enmity was directed toward career politicians who had cheated conservative principles, campaigning in one way and then governing in another; in that regard, many GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill would be found guilty as charged. The Bush years, stained with Medicare Part D, the unfunded overseas adventurism, and a host of other apostasies, had cemented that. Even onetime revolutionaries such as Boehner had fallen in line.
Beyond their own professional self-preservation, Republicans could be excused for viewing the Tea Party with a certain bewilderment. Conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke had been temperamental more than ideological, emphasizing prudence and deliberation. Plenty of individuals who identified with the Tea Party possessed those qualities, no doubt. Yet the collective offered little trace of either. This, combined with a not-infrequent renewal of the racially tinged atmospheres witnessed during the final month of the McCain campaign, gave Republicans justifiable pause about the Tea Party and whether to associate themselves with it.
It wasn’t the last time an explosive movement would divide the GOP and vex its establishment.
Through the kaleidoscope of history, the Tea Party can be viewed most honestly as an early indication of the disquiet felt by many Americans regarding the changes sweeping the country—demographically, culturally, politically, and otherwise. This societal restlessness would manifest itself in many different ways, over many different issues, in the years that followed. But in 2009, its energy was drawn from one primary source: Obamacare.
THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION TO SEEK AN OVERHAUL OF THE AMERICAN health care system sparked a visceral resistance on the right that made opposition to the stimulus look like child’s play.
Although the fight over Hillary Clinton’s reform proposal was fifteen years old, combatants on both sides still nursed grisly wounds. Knowing this, and learning from his missteps with the stimulus, Obama moved methodically. He took a long view, allowing for months of committee hearings and casting a wide conceptual net that brought Republicans to the table during the drafting process. Much to the chagrin of progressives, Obama himself staked out centrist positions, refusing to give advocates of a single-payer system (later dubbed “Medicare for All”) a seat at the negotiating table.
It made no difference. The stimulus showdown and the Tea Party’s eruption, not to mention the fiercely partisan House vote to pass cap-and-trade legislation in June 2009, had crushed the president’s approval rating in Republican congressional districts. If Obama’s mistake in January with the stimulus was moving too quickly, too self-assuredly when Republican moderates were ripe for the picking, his mistake with health care for the remainder of 2009 was moving too slowly after those same moderates had already reached the conclusion that they could not afford to do business with him.
It wasn’t just the anti-Obama intensity that drove GOP opposition to the health care overhaul. On the statistical whole, Democrats were aiming to protect certain populations (poor people, the unemployed, minorities) that did not heavily reside in Republican congressional districts. Years later, America would witness a surge of support in conservative parts of the country for Democrat-sponsored ideas; in 2018, voters in three red states, Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska, passed ballot referenda approving Medicaid expansion. But in 2009, no obvious political incentive existed for GOP lawmakers to mess with a system that worked reasonably well for many of their constituents.
Few issues in America can be demagogued as effectively as health care. Even though the “individual mandate” was championed by the right’s favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation, in the late 1980s (and enacted by the right’s favorite presidential candidate, Romney, when he was governor), it suddenly became the paver of a pathway to socialism. The hysteria didn’t stop there. Unfounded talk of the government subsidizing coverage for illegal immigrants was rampant by the summer of 2009, as was the wildly irresponsible speculation, spearheaded by Sarah Palin and her cronies in conservative talk radio, that the Democratic legislation would set up “death panels” to decide which patients would be deserving of lifesaving treatment.17
The right’s frenzy climaxed over the August recess, with raucous town hall meetings from coast to coast scaring sense into any Republicans who might have considered working with Obama. Lawmakers who had never drawn a hometown crowd of more than one hundred people found themselves facing angry audiences of a thousand or more. The atmosphere was not just angry but fearful: Three and a half million jobs were lost in the last six months of Bush’s presidency, and another 3.5 million would disappear18 in the first six months of the Obama presidency. Unemployment, which registered at 7.6 percent the month Obama took office,19 had spiked to 9.7 percent by August20 and would clear 10 percent by year’s end.21 Meanwhile, the stock market—for those fortunate enough to still have stocks—was barely inching upward despite the taxpayer aid given to Wall Street.
The rapidly deteriorating economy, plus the party-line stimulus vote, followed by the rise of the Tea Party and the national panic over a government takeover of health care, had rendered Obama toxic to half the country less than a year after his taking office.
The president’s only recourse for passing health care legislation was to execute another brutal, party-line vote with his Democratic supermajorities. But that option disappeared on August 25 when Ted Kennedy lost his battle with brain cancer. Kennedy’s death, commemorated as the end of a dynasty that had entranced the country since the middle of the last century,
cost Obama a pivotal vote and cast the fate of his health care bill into serious doubt. Whatever mandate the president had ridden into office seven months earlier was now departed; his approval rating had dropped from 68 percent in late January22 to 50 percent in late August.23
With his health care plan languishing, the president convened a joint session of Congress on September 9 to reset the national conversation and dispel some of the more sinister myths about his proposal. It was an attempt to bring down the temperature. Instead, the fever spiked. When Obama reiterated that his bill did not provide coverage to illegal immigrants, Joe Wilson, a South Carolina congressman seated near the front of the House chamber, hollered, “You lie!” It was an atrocious breach of decorum. It was also erroneous: Obama was right on these facts, as health care experts and fact-checkers certified, and Wilson was wrong.
Not that it mattered. Wilson’s online fund-raising exploded the next day. Talk radio hailed him as a hero. Conservative movement groups made him an honored guest at upcoming banquets. He was reamed out by Boehner behind closed doors and forced to apologize, but the lesson of the incident was clear. By disrespecting the president of the United States with a blatant, provable falsehood, Wilson had become right-wing royalty.
It was a promising blueprint.
Chapter Three
April 2010
“We’ve come to take our government back!”
THE NEWS WAS SHOCKING IF UNSURPRISING: CHARLIE CRIST HAD left the Republican Party.
Once upon a time, the Florida governor had seemed invincible. He was charming and handsome, a media darling with pragmatic instincts and a nose for mass appeal: When Obama visited Florida to promote the stimulus, Crist embraced him onstage. He could do no wrong, and with an approval rating hovering near 70 percent,1 his future was brighter than a Palm Beach sunrise. After cruising to reelection in 2010, Crist would be ideally positioned, as the esteemed governor of America’s biggest swing state, to seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.
All this changed when Republican senator Mel Martinez announced his retirement in 2009. Jeb Bush, the revered former governor who had built the Florida GOP into a powerhouse, was the odds-on favorite to replace him. If Bush wanted the seat, nobody in the party would stand in the way—certainly not Marco Rubio, a dynamic young Cuban American who had risen to become Speaker of the state House of Representatives thanks in part to Bush’s mentorship.
But when Bush declined to run, and encouraged his pupil to enter the race, Rubio pounced. The thirty-seven-year-old was barely known beyond Miami; he had few statewide connections and even less money. But what he did have, as the son of an immigrant hotel bartender and a maid, was a rousing biography and the oratory to sell it. Launching his campaign with irrational optimism, he toured the state and tied his candidacy to the American dream: how he was living it, how government threatened it, how conservatives could preserve it.
Everything was on schedule until Crist jumped into the race in May 2009. It was like David versus Goliath—if Goliath had air support. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which serves as the Senate GOP’s campaign machine in Washington, had traditionally observed a policy of not meddling in primaries where no incumbent was involved. Yet the NRSC under chairman John Cornyn, the Texas senator who took charge after the 2008 cycle, was far more interventionist. Within hours of launching his campaign, Crist won the NRSC’s support. Making this especially excruciating for Rubio was that he was in Washington that very day. He had come to meet with Cornyn and other top party officials, hoping to find some support inside the Beltway. Instead, Rubio found Cornyn urging him to quit the campaign.
It was a no-brainer from the national party’s perspective: Six incumbent Republican senators had announced their retirements early in 2009, and Crist, a well-liked governor and big-time fund-raiser, would deprive Democrats of a pickup. But Cornyn’s heavy-handed approach infuriated the right. “The NRSC is actively trying to undermine the conservative Republican base with milquetoast establishment Republicans the nation rejected in 2006 and 2008,” the influential activist Erick Erickson wrote on his blog, RedState. “We must not let them win.”2
Sitting in his rental car after the Cornyn meeting, Rubio saw the emails and text messages arriving in rapid-fire fashion: Dozens and dozens of prominent Republicans, both in Florida and in Washington, were endorsing Crist. It was a shock-and-awe tactic meant to scare him from the race, and it very nearly worked.
“I thought for sure that was the end, because everything I knew about traditional politics had told me it was the end,” Rubio recalls. “As it turned out, it was the greatest thing that could have happened. There was a possibility that had they not played it that way, I may have never been able to take off and nationalize my race and raise enough money to be competitive. But embedded in that was this resentment at being told from the top down, ‘This is who you’re going to elect.’ And I think that wound up extending all the way into 2016.”
The most essential ingredient to a political victory is timing. The story of Barack Obama’s presidential conquest, and of Donald Trump’s eight years later, cannot be told without the context of the mood and the moment they were uniquely suited to meet. Crist would have crushed Rubio in any primary prior to 2010. Yet the conditions of that year on the right—militant opposition to Obama, lingering disillusionment with George W. Bush, antipathy toward Washington and its sovereign class—inverted the playing field. Rubio turned Crist’s strengths into weaknesses: his centrist skill set, his big-donor connections, his support from the party establishment, his aura of inevitability. Despite carrying some baggage from his days in the statehouse and owning a less than ideologically pristine legislative record, Rubio crafted a contrast that proved irresistible, that of a conservative outsider versus a moderate insider.
He won the support of Jim DeMint as well as other Tea Party leaders and their grassroots groups. He utilized the internet and social media to raise millions in small-dollar donations from every state in the union. He earned glowing coverage as the star of a nascent movement, including a cover of National Review that played on Obama’s 2009 slogan: “Yes He Can.” Republican power brokers in Washington were impressed—and a little bit terrified. Rubio wasn’t just beating their anointed candidate; he was threatening to expose them as obsolete.
“When I worked my first political campaign, for Bob Dole in ’96, you needed some formal apparatus to conduct politics,” Rubio says. “You don’t need anything anymore. With social media and the internet, I can reach millions of people instantly without paying virtually anything. People started realizing that in 2010. You didn’t need the party.”
(It was, with the addition of social media, a next-generation realization of the “party in a laptop” strategy that Howard Dean had used in 2004 to test the Democratic establishment with few of the infrastructural assets brought to the race by a John Kerry or a Richard Gephardt.)
Once trailing Crist in the polls by 30 points, by April of 2010, Rubio was ahead by 30 points.3 Crist’s decision to abandon the GOP and run as an independent did nothing to alter the outcome; Rubio won the Senate seat easily. But the symbolism was striking. Crist had been one of the most popular Republicans in America, and Rubio, by tapping into the fury of the right (and by branding Crist as an Obama-hugging squish), had driven him from the party altogether.
Rubio’s conquest of Crist was but the most visible ripple in a wave that grew throughout 2009 and 2010. No Republican was safe: All across the country, card-carrying members of the establishment were thrown overboard, victims of the party’s complacency and of the base’s exasperation with politics as usual.
Interestingly, the biggest contributor to this renaissance inside the GOP was the signature achievement of the Democratic president.
LOOKING BACK, THE ODDS OF A HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL WERE NEVER fully in Obama’s favor. His administration’s efforts to woo Republicans, particularly in the Senate, began wilting in the heat of conservative opposition in th
e summer of 2009. Meanwhile, the institutional troubles on the Democratic side—a Minnesota recount preventing Senator Al Franken from being seated until July, Ted Kennedy’s death from cancer a month later—rendered their vaunted “filibuster-proof majority” somewhat meaningless. It wasn’t until after the appointment of Kennedy’s temporary replacement, Paul Kirk, that Democrats could pass a health care bill through the Senate. It happened on Christmas Eve 2009, in a party-line vote of 60 to 39, with one GOP senator absent.
But the Democrats’ newfound momentum was crushed less than a month later.
The January special election to fill Kennedy’s seat was expected to be a snoozer: Dark blue Massachusetts hadn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since the Jimmy Carter administration. With health care reform hanging in the balance, and the liberal lion’s dying wish awaiting fulfillment, Democrats couldn’t possibly lose. This assumption was profoundly arrogant, given that Republicans had several months earlier won the governors’ elections in Virginia and New Jersey—a purple and blue state, respectively, both of which Obama had carried comfortably.
The certainty Democrats felt about holding Kennedy’s seat also ignored the one intangible that can transform any race: candidate quality. Scott Brown, the truck-driving, barn jacket–wearing, up-by-the-bootstraps Republican, was a superb candidate; Martha Coakley, the Democrat who mocked the idea of shaking voters’ hands outside Fenway Park, was not. Brown won the race by 5 points, eliminating the Democrats’ 60-vote majority and, it seemed very possibly, the prospects for enacting health care reform.
The problem for Obama was that the House and Senate had passed two different bills, and there was no longer a sufficient number of Democratic votes in the Senate to pass a merged version. Some top party officials, including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, argued for a scaled-back product. Others, most notably Pelosi, rejected this approach. (“Kiddie care,” she scoffed.) Harry Reid pressed for the House to pass his chamber’s version, but Pelosi’s members were cold to the idea: Moderate Democrats objected to the scope of abortion coverage, while liberals protested the lack of a government-sponsored insurance entity.