by Tim Alberta
Still, there was no other way—and Obama knew it. As the president launched a public relations campaign, touring the country and citing news of insurance rate hikes to argue for the bill as a cost-containment measure, Reid and Pelosi agreed on a two-step legislative strategy. The House would pass the Senate bill; then the Senate, using a parliamentary tactic known as reconciliation, would pass a package of changes demanded by House Democrats in exchange for their votes.
As it became clear that their plan would work, it became equally clear that Pelosi was asking some of her centrist members to walk the plank. Dozens of House Democrats were already facing stiff reelection fights; voting for the president’s polarizing bill was akin to nailing shut their own coffins. “She is a strong Speaker—there isn’t any question about that,” Boehner told reporters at the time. “So, you pass a very unpopular bill. You shove it down the throats of the American people, and you lose your majority. How good is that? How smart is that?”
Pelosi did nothing to tamp down Republican criticisms of the product, and the process, when she remarked in early March, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” The Speaker knew what was in the Affordable Care Act; it had been debated for many months, and her comment, in full context, was clearly meant to assure the public that they would like the bill once its benefits were realized. But Pelosi’s verbal blunder was a political gift that would keep on giving in the years ahead.
“Look at how this bill was written,” Boehner barked from the House floor. It was March 21, minutes before the House would pass the Senate bill in a landmark victory for the Democratic Party. “Can you say it was done openly?” Lawmakers in the chamber shouted in response. “With transparency and accountability?” The shouts grew louder. “Without backroom deals struck behind closed doors, hidden from the people?” Boehner mustered every ounce of righteous indignation. “Hell no, you can’t!”
When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law a few days later, it was, in the immortal words whispered into his ear by Vice President Joe Biden, “a big fucking deal.” Democrats had succeeded, where generations of their forebears had failed, in approving a sweeping reorganization of the American health care industry. That meant, among other things, the implementation of a requirement to own insurance; expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income individuals; the opening of a federal insurance marketplace with government subsidies for those who qualified; and revamped regulations governing how insurance companies provided or denied coverage, such as to people with preexisting medical conditions.
It was also a big deal for the GOP. Not a single Republican in either chamber had voted for the bill dubbed “Obamacare,” even though a number of Senate Republicans had spent months negotiating the details and said privately that they found the legislation to be fair-minded. “Mitch did everything he could to keep a Republican from crossing over. We had meetings every Wednesday just to keep discipline,” recalls Tennessee senator Bob Corker. “Mitch is really good at loosening lug nuts, and over time the wheels just fall off. That’s what he did with Obamacare.”
“It was the unifying effort for us, the definitive effort going into the 2010 elections,” McConnell says. “It gave us a chance at a comeback. It set up a referendum in the country on whether or not [voters] were suffering from some buyer’s remorse over the decision two years earlier. I think that would have been less likely had we signed on and a bunch of people had gone over to the other side. They would have claimed it was bipartisan.”
Boehner was correct in saying the law did not have majority support. One day before the president signed it, CNN released a poll showing 59 percent of Americans opposed and just 39 percent in favor.4 This was one of many surveys to suggest that the partisan exercise had aggravated the middle of the electorate. The Republican base was already on fire in opposition to Obama, and now there were signs of an independent exodus away from the Democratic Party as well.
Perhaps most significant, in the political short term, was the Democrats’ decision to cut $500 billion from Medicare to help pay for the legislation. The cuts were not immediate; in fact, they were designed to slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade, a longtime goal of reform-minded Republicans. This introduced no small amount of irony to the 2010 campaign season. Two years earlier, Paul Ryan had been ostracized within the GOP for his entitlement-tweaking “Roadmap”; his cosponsors of the legislation numbered fewer than ten. Now, with the Tea Party rewriting the rules of the GOP, dozens of candidates nationwide ran for Congress endorsing Ryan’s proposal.
It suggested a potential inflection point: Perhaps Republicans would become the party of hard truths and tough choices, after all.
Instead, party strategists, eyeing big gains among elderly voters and middle-income whites nearing retirement, made “Obama’s Medicare cuts” the go-to attack of 2010. The maneuver reflected equal parts tactical brilliance and intellectual nihilism.
ONE DAY AFTER OBAMA’S SIGNING CEREMONY, THE INK STILL WET ON Democrats’ historic legislation, Republicans filed bills in both chambers of Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
This was a promise made by effectively every single Republican running for Congress in 2010: They would repeal Obamacare. Boehner and the House GOP leadership stated as much in their “Pledge to America,” a document that itemized the reforms Republicans would make once back in power. Among the party’s other vows: to slash $100 billion from the budget in year one; to reduce overall government spending to pre-2008 levels; to prohibit federal funding for abortions; and to post all bills online for three days before a vote could occur.
If repealing Obamacare was one pillar of the GOP’s midterm platform, the other was arresting the president’s fiscal profligacy. Obama could be excused for shaking his head in disbelief. For the previous eight years, Republicans had spent like teenagers with their first credit card, blowing a hole in the deficit and incurring unprecedented amounts of debt. Now their “Pledge” promised to get America’s fiscal house back in order—with fuzzy math and unspecified budget cuts.
Seeking to claim the high ground and avoid being typecast as a big-spending progressive, Obama had in February 2010 created a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Co-chaired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, the eighteen-member group was tasked with producing a comprehensive plan for debt and deficit reduction.
The final passage of Obamacare a month later pushed Simpson-Bowles to the national back burner and ended whatever fleeting moment of ideological cease-fire it had created. With the midterm elections fast approaching and each party now bunkered down in their positions, any notion of transcending partisanship faded away. The Republicans who had bet against Obama’s messianic promises were proved right: He couldn’t break the impasse in Washington.
What they couldn’t anticipate, however, was the deepening schism within their own tribe.
There was mounting buzz of a mutiny inside the Republican National Committee, with members complaining of Steele’s odd management style and lavish spending habits. The juiciest rumor, percolating in the spring of 2010, was that Reince Priebus, the RNC’s general counsel and Steele’s consigliere, was plotting a coup. Priebus laughed it off when the chairman confronted him, claiming the rumor was totally fabricated. Steele believed him. He couldn’t trust many people inside the RNC anymore, but Priebus had been in his corner through thick and thin.
Around that same time, in Arizona, a firestorm erupted when conservatives in the statehouse muscled through a bill, SB 1070, that required all residents to carry immigration paperwork on their person and required law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected might be illegal, even if they were not stopped or detained for committing a crime. Republicans in the state overwhelmingly supported the effort, including John McCain, who faced a primary challenge that year from an immigration hard-liner. But the bill’s sanctioning of racial profiling made national Republicans nervous, especially
given the increasingly hostile tone struck on the immigration issue ever since the collapse of Bush’s reform effort in 2007.
Meanwhile, in April, the Heritage Foundation, the GOP’s academic bedrock for a generation, announced the creation of a spinoff lobbying organization. It would be called Heritage Action. Unlike its scholarly cousin, this new group favored baseball bats over bow ties. Republican politicians had been making big promises since Obama took office, Heritage officials reasoned. It was time to hold them accountable.
LESS THAN TWO YEARS REMOVED FROM BUSH LEAVING THE WHITE House with record-low approval ratings and Obama taking office with Washington at his feet, Republicans were beginning to entertain a scenario that had once seemed unfathomable: They could regain control of Congress in 2010.
It was a heavy lift. The Senate appeared out of reach; a net gain of 10 seats was needed to flip the chamber. And even the more realistic target, the House of Representatives, required a net gain of 39 seats for Republicans to retake the majority. Still, there was cause for bullishness. A first-term president’s party traditionally takes a thumping in the midterms, and Obama, wounded by the stimulus and health care fights, suddenly seemed mortal. With the president’s job approval sagging, the economy barely yawning to life, and the energy of the electorate squarely behind them, Republicans schemed to put Democrats on the defensive. They would expand the political map, targeting not just the Blue Dog moderates in coin-flip districts, but also the progressives who rarely faced general election challenges, forcing the Democrats to spread their resources thin.
But first, the GOP had to exorcise its own demons.
Despite the long-brewing disillusionment of the conservative base, there had never been a true intraparty bloodletting in 2008. Bush was still in office, McCain had been mostly within striking distance of Obama, and the Republicans who voted for TARP did so after the conclusion of primary season. Now, with a new day dawning for the GOP, it was imperative for many first-time congressional hopefuls to run not just against Obama and the excesses of the Democratic Party, but against Bush and the excesses of the Republican Party.
In Michigan’s Third District, where the GOP incumbent was retiring, a thirty-year-old freshman state lawmaker named Justin Amash separated himself from a crowded primary field by blasting the policies of his own party. The approach was not without risk: Prominent Republicans in the state put a target on Amash’s back, and some refused to support him even after he’d advanced to the general election. But Amash, a Ron Paul acolyte, won the West Michigan race anyway, thanks to support from Tea Party groups and a surge of participation from low-propensity voters attracted to his libertarian message. “I got active in politics in part because of what George W. Bush was doing,” Amash recalls. “The Obama backlash of course started around the time of the Tea Party, but a lot of us blamed George W. Bush for Obama in the first place.”
In South Carolina’s Fourth District, a local prosecutor named Trey Gowdy shredded the Republican incumbent, Bob Inglis, for supporting Bush’s bailout of Wall Street. It wasn’t the congressman’s only vulnerability: Inglis had denounced his South Carolina colleague Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” at Obama, and had further infuriated voters by asking them, at a town hall meeting, why they were so afraid of the president. His greater offense was criticizing the Fox News host Glenn Beck for “trading on fear” and urging his constituents to stop watching the program. Gowdy capitalized on all this, identifying Inglis as a part of the old Republican guard that had sullied the party’s reputation. Propelled by considerable Tea Party support in one of America’s most conservative districts, Gowdy trounced the GOP incumbent.
On the opposite end of the state, down in the Lowcountry of South Carolina’s First District, the anti-establishment revolt proved metaphorically rich. In a sprawling primary contest, two dynastic giants towered above the field: Carroll Campbell III, son and namesake of the state’s iconic ex-governor, and Paul Thurmond, son of Strom Thurmond, the famous senator and segregationist Dixiecrat. Lesser known was Tim Scott, an African American state lawmaker and a self-made insurance salesman from the hard neighborhoods of North Charleston. Boosted by national Tea Party groups (and also by Eric Cantor, who was desperate to diversify the House Republican ranks), Scott built his candidacy around the populist crusades of eliminating earmarks and introducing term limits. After defeating Thurmond in the runoff, a contest thick with racial and historical subplots, Scott punched his ticket to Congress in November.
And in Idaho’s First District, incumbent congressman Walt Minnick, a Blue Dog and a fiscal hawk, became the country’s only Democrat to receive a national Tea Party endorsement. The only problem: Both Republicans running against him also had Tea Party backing. Raúl Labrador, a state lawmaker and former immigration attorney, had the support of numerous local activist groups, while Vaughn Ward, a Marine combat veteran, was endorsed by Sarah Palin. The weakness of Ward: He was also a prized recruit of the national party leadership, a fact that his GOP rival wielded mercilessly against him. “The Republican Party brought us the Obama administration because they couldn’t get their act together in Washington,” Labrador told the Idaho Statesman. He also vented frustration at Palin’s attempt to establish herself as the Tea Party’s figurehead. “This is a movement,” Labrador said at the time, “not a party.” He scored an upset over Ward and then defeated Minnick in the general election.
The pattern was inescapable: In congressional districts from sea to shining sea, self-styled insurgents found success by racing to the right and distancing themselves from the GOP’s ruling class. These candidates were running as a new breed; they would legislate as conservatives first and Republicans second, prizing ideological purity over partisan achievement, coming to Washington not to climb the institutional ladder but to dismantle it rung by rung.
It wasn’t limited to federal races. In Texas, popular U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison launched a primary challenge to Governor Rick Perry on the grounds that he was too much of an absolutist. Campaigning as a pragmatic centrist, Hutchison was supported by a small army of political heavyweights, including former president George H. W. Bush, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, and former vice president Dick Cheney. It didn’t have the intended effect: Perry, running against Washington and the party’s graybeards, crushed Hutchison by 21 points.
Steele, who visited more than one hundred cities that fall on the RNC’s “Fire Pelosi” bus tour, saw the anti-establishment fanaticism everywhere he traveled. He recalls wondering how, if Republicans took back the House, Boehner would handle a mob of rookie revolutionaries. When they met in Washington, shortly before Election Day, Boehner’s answer was simple: They would fall in line. Freshmen always fall in line.
But the party chairman was not convinced. “These guys are out there blowing up Republicans as much as they’re blowing up Democrats,” Steele told Boehner. “You mean to tell me you can’t see that?”
Boehner could see it, all right. But after two years of being steamrolled by Pelosi, all he cared about was flipping seats and reclaiming the House majority. And so far, despite the emergence of some Republicans he would come to describe as “assholes” and “legislative terrorists,” none of them had proved so crazy as to cost the GOP a winnable race.
McConnell was not so fortunate.
WHAT MADE THE TEA PARTY VIBRANT IS ALSO WHAT MADE IT UNSUSTAINABLE: a lack of organization. With thousands of groups springing up overnight—national, state, county—cohesion was a pipe dream. There could be no designated platform, no organizing doctrine, no shared sense of vision for what specifically they hoped to accomplish. In a sense, this seemed appropriate. Conservatism is by definition distrustful of top-down, one-size-fits-all thinking. But the movement’s administrative void created a Wild West ecosystem in which supremacy belonged to whatever organization, or candidate, could push hardest and farthest to the right.
Palin was the de facto figurehead, hence her keynote address to the inaugural Tea Party Nation
conference in February 2010. (Her six-figure speaking fee, and the exorbitant ticket prices,5 invited a lasting skepticism of the “grassroots” leaders and their commercial incentives.) It hardly mattered that she had abruptly resigned as Alaska’s governor, a move that validated the perceptions of her volatility. More than any elected official alive, Palin possessed a God-given capacity for channeling the forces of panic and populist grievance swirling throughout much of America—especially its older, whiter parcels. And now that she wasn’t running Alaska, she was free to lead a much larger constituency.
At the same time, a chorus of conservative groups—the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Party Express, among many others—fought for organizational dominance atop the movement. They jockeyed over donors, events, endorsements, and troops to populate their armies (and their lucrative email lists). It was an exciting time to be a conservative activist: After decades of being dictated to by party overlords, the commoners had wrested away their power.
Even so, the fundamental problem of parameters, or a lack thereof, remained. Having little regard for the practical considerations of winning a general election, activists and their allied groups often defaulted to backing the candidate farthest from the mainstream, empowered by DeMint’s infamous observation that he would rather have thirty conservative Republicans in the Senate than sixty moderate Republicans. (To be clear, thirty senators, even if all reborn as Barry Goldwater, lack the capacity for passing legislation or confirming judicial nominees.)