by Tim Alberta
Priebus had reached those same conclusions. Although he denied to Steele on multiple occasions that he was interested in running for his position, Priebus had spent the summer warning the chairman against seeking reelection. The membership was deeply unhappy, he explained, and the committee was engulfed by controversy. It would benefit everyone if Steele graciously stepped aside after his two-year term.
Steele refused to listen. “If they want me gone, they’re gonna have to throw me out,” he said.
Priebus finally decided that he had no choice. Just before the midterms, he knocked on Steele’s door at the RNC. “I think the party needs to go in another direction,” he told the chairman.
“You know what, Reince?” Steele responded. “Keep the fucking suit.”
Chapter Four
January 2011
“Shakespeare has got nothing on this shit.”
HE STOOD BEFORE THEM IMPERIALLY DRESSED, SKIN FRESHLY KISSED a bright citrus by the Florida sun, his two-pack-a-day baritone rumbling with alternating notes of caution and aggression. It was the first week of Congress, and John Boehner was the Speaker of the House. Two decades spent collecting favors, dialing donors, and hustling votes had finally paid off. Now, as he addressed the enormous new class of House Republicans—eighty-seven of them—Boehner needed to set a few things straight. He was delighted that reinforcements had arrived. And he was looking forward to fighting alongside them in presenting a muscular check on the Obama administration. But he was going to need their cooperation. And their trust.
Boehner had heard the rhetoric from Republican candidates in 2010, and he wanted to make one thing clear. “Campaigning,” he told the freshmen, “is different than governing.” Republicans now controlled the House, but Democrats were still running the Senate and the White House. If the House GOP was to accomplish anything—if they were to make gains for conservatism in a divided government—compromise and incrementalism would be necessary.
Many of the new members nodded their heads. Although they had all hugged the Tea Party, plenty of the incoming lawmakers were factory produced: noncontroversial, corporate-friendly, mechanical-mannered Republicans whose twin objectives were scoring victories for the team and winning reelection for themselves (not in that order). They listened to Boehner and heard a leader worth following; he was savvy, experienced, disciplined.
The true believers had a different reaction. If half the freshmen were standard fare Republicans who expected symmetrical partisan combat with the Democrats, the other half were Tea Party guerrillas. These lawmakers felt, with some justification, that they had been sent to Washington not to trade chess moves with Obama, but to flip over the board and send the pieces scattering. They looked at Boehner, the back-slapping, cabernet-swirling, country club connoisseur, and saw that which they had come to destroy. As these rookies stewed, watching their fellow classmates pledge allegiance to Boehner, the earliest seeds of discord were sown within the House majority.
“I thought it was a revolution. I thought we were going to completely change the way that Washington worked,” Raúl Labrador, the new Idaho congressman, recalls. “Within one week—I’m not exaggerating—I saw a large majority of my class saying, essentially, ‘Whatever you need us to do, we will do.’ And I was sick inside.”
THIS INTERNAL TENSION WENT UNDETECTED AT FIRST. AFTER ALL, THE closing months of 2010 had set the stage for Armageddon between the parties. The week before Election Day, Boehner had told Sean Hannity that it was “not a time for compromise,” promising specifically that Republicans would do everything possible to keep the Obamacare law from being implemented. “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything—we can do to kill it, stop it, slow it down,” he said.
Perhaps eager to one-up his counterpart, Mitch McConnell told National Journal that same week, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”1 This quote would become legend, neatly encapsulating the GOP’s obstructionist outlook, even as it was blown slightly out of proportion. (Minority party leaders have always schemed to prevent the other party’s president from winning a second term; furthermore, McConnell had said in the next breath that Republicans would cooperate with Obama “if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues.”)
More consequential than any verbal jousting had been the collapse of the Bowles-Simpson commission. After nearly eight months of deliberation, the commission released its final report on December 1, 2010. It prescribed a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases that would slash the deficit by nearly $4 trillion by 2020. This would be achieved by slaughtering sacred cows left and right: raising the Social Security age, reducing spending on Medicare and military operations, eliminating a trillion dollars in tax loopholes, and capping government spending at 21 percent of GDP.
Congress would vote on the plan if a supermajority of the commission, fourteen of its eighteen members, approved it. But only eleven did. And while there was opposition from liberal members, the more conspicuous resistance came from the three House Republicans appointees who voted as a bloc: Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, and Dave Camp.
Ryan’s vote came across as particularly cynical. The Budget Committee’s senior Republican had spent years warning of America’s unsustainable fiscal course, yet when handed a concrete, bipartisan proposal to help correct it, Ryan balked, arguing that the plan would drive Obamacare’s price tag even higher while hindering economic growth with considerable new tax hikes.
This sparked a feud between Ryan and Obama that dashed whatever prospects once existed for a partnership. Months after the Bowles-Simpson vote, when Ryan had taken over as Budget Committee chairman and released a new version of his entitlement-cutting “Roadmap,” the White House invited him to a speech Obama was giving on fiscal solubility. With Ryan sitting in the front row at George Washington University and “shaking his head in disgust,” as the Wall Street Journal reported, the president savaged his proposal, saying it would leave poor people, disabled kids, and the elderly to “fend for themselves.”2
Without mentioning him by name—not that he needed to—Obama said Ryan’s plan “paints a picture of our future that is deeply pessimistic.” The congressman was blindsided. He rushed out of the auditorium after the speech, cursing out the president in conversations with his friends back on Capitol Hill. It was a gross breach of decorum by Obama. White House aides worried that he had gone too far; for his part, the president later told journalist Bob Woodward that he didn’t know Ryan would be attending, calling the entire episode “a mistake.”
The bigger mistake, in the eyes of Republicans, was Obama’s own rejection of Bowles-Simpson. It had been a unique opportunity to seize the high ground; Obama could claim that Republicans weren’t serious about deficit reduction, that he was willing to make the difficult choices necessary to improve America’s fiscal health. “I thought he was going to triangulate us, embrace Bowles-Simpson, make us look like we were right-wingers. But he didn’t,” Ryan recalls. “At every one of those inflection points in his first term, I thought the guy would go to the middle and kill us and scoop up the center of the country. But he just couldn’t help himself. He was a hard-core progressive.”
This partisan animosity obscured the conflict smoldering within the new GOP majority.
Boehner had been pleased to see Jim Jordan elected as the new chairman of the Republican Study Committee. Founded in 1973 as a sister organization to the Heritage Foundation, the RSC had become the biggest caucus on Capitol Hill and was home to Congress’s most conservative members. Previous chairmen, including Mike Pence, had used the organization to push Republican policy further to the right—often to the chagrin of party leadership. Boehner had reason to be wary of whoever was running the group. But he felt confident that Jordan, whose Ohio district bordered his own, would be more ally than adversary.
That proved naïve. Jordan, a two-time NCAA wrestling champion (collegiate record: 156–28–1), was re
ady to rumble from the moment he took elected office. Armed with a law degree and a master’s in education, Jordan won a seat in the Ohio assembly at age thirty. It wasn’t long before he stood out. Squat and rugged, with a rock-chiseled chin and the slightest trace of cauliflower ear, Jordan didn’t choose a career in politics for the free cocktail parties. After praying, exercising, and swigging his morning “go-go juice” (half OJ, half Mountain Dew), Jordan would spend the balance of his days seeking out conflict and charging headlong into whatever fray could be found. . In the statehouse, where he wriggled his way to the right of even the legislature’s most conservative members, Jordan quickly attained the reputation of a bulldog—or, as Boehner remembers him, “a legislative terrorist.”
Interestingly, as a young state lawmaker Jordan had looked up to Boehner, a fellow Buckeye who was then turning Congress upside down. After winning his congressional seat in 2006, Jordan found himself all the more impressed, particularly with Boehner’s stewardship of the minority during Obama’s first two years. The GOP leader, Jordan felt, had performed brilliantly in holding the conference together and drawing sharp contrasts with the Democrats.
But Republicans now had the majority, thanks to a rowdy freshman class that had arrived in Washington with its fists balled. It was a match made in right-wing heaven: When it became apparent that Boehner had no intention of executing a scorched-earth strategy against Obama, the new Tea Party lawmakers gravitated toward someone who would. “Remember the ‘Hell No’ speech?” Jordan says with a mischievous grin. “That’s the John Boehner we were hoping for.”
NINE DAYS AFTER BOEHNER WAS ELECTED SPEAKER, MEMBERS OF THE Republican National Committee gathered in a suburban Washington hotel ballroom to choose their own leader. Reince Priebus’s attempted usurping of Chairman Michael Steele lent a melodramatic mood to the proceedings; the onetime allies had not spoken since their fateful meeting at RNC headquarters in October, a fact that did not escape anyone as their loyalists worked the room, twisting arms and trading gossip.
Three other candidates were running, but the main event was Steele versus Priebus. Each had spent recent months dogging the other. Priebus alleged that Steele had been careless with the RNC’s finances, spending too liberally and racking up massive debt while doing little to improve the party’s technology and ground game. Steele countered that Priebus had been in every meeting with him, advising every decision that was made, and had never once dissented.
Steele was a sympathetic figure in certain respects. He had taken over a party decimated by Obama; he had raised a respectable amount of money; he had overseen one of the most successful election cycles in the party’s history. This was all the more impressive considering that his detractors were actively undermining him. Karl Rove, who cofounded the advocacy group American Crossroads in 2010, had urged big donors (former Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, for instance) not to give to the RNC. This was representative of a broader, post–Citizens United problem for the party: the emergence of super PACs, some run by longtime insiders and others associated with misfits such as the Koch brothers, served to cannibalize the donor base.
At the same time, Steele was his own worst enemy. He had become a distraction to the party with his frequent gaffes; he had alienated some wealthy patrons; he had racked up senseless amounts of debt—more than $20 million of it.3 (Steele says he never wanted to take out a line of credit, and secretly recorded a 2010 meeting to prove that other RNC officials were in favor of doing so.)
All the lavish spending on hotels and limousines might have been overlooked, and Steele might have survived as chairman, had it not been for the Daily Caller headline in March 2010: “Michael Steele Dropped Big Bucks on Bondage Club.” A committee staffer had taken a group of young Republicans to a sex-themed nightclub during a California visit and dropped two thousand dollars. Steele wasn’t in attendance, but the news handcuffed him for good.
Priebus knew that Steele would be angry at his decision to seek the chairmanship, though he never fully appreciated how it would be perceived. Still haunted years later by sensationalist talk of his Brutus-like betrayal, Priebus says Steele’s obstinance had left him with no choice.
“For the past six months I was basically pleading with Michael to understand how seriously bad and sour things were with the members, and why it would be a mistake to run again,” Priebus says. “And when his ultimate decision was ‘I’m running again even though I know I can’t win,’ then I felt like I had no obligation to go down with the ship—not when I could run and fix the problem. If anything, it was disloyal of him not to support someone who he knew could win, someone who had been good to him. The loyalty question goes both ways. If anything, he’s the Benedict Arnold, not me.”
Steele won 44 votes on the first ballot, second only to Priebus’s 45, but his support dropped in each of the next three rounds. Following the fourth ballot, Steele took the stage to announce his departure.4 “I hope you all appreciate the legacy we leave,” he told RNC members. “Despite the noise—and Lord knows, we’ve had a lot of noise—despite the difficulties, we won.”
Soon thereafter, Reince Priebus was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Michael Steele was exiled. He quickly became a punch line inside the party and persona non grata to its leaders. Once, assuming that he would be chairman for the GOP’s 2012 convention in Tampa, Steele had pitched the idea of “the world’s biggest block party,” an outdoor festival with ethnic food and live music to give Republicans a more relatable flavor. Instead, he would later find himself without an invitation to that very convention—no VIP pass, no floor access, no general admission. He wound up in Tampa anyway, thanks to his new job as a contributor for MSNBC. But the pain of the snub, and of his ouster as chairman, would never recede.
“I have to be honest, the only one that blindsided me was Reince. Because he and I had formed a real good friendship. That hurt more than anything else,” Steele says. “He was there for every decision that I made, so it was really painful to sit there and listen to them talk about how much financial ruin I brought on the party. And of course, a part of me couldn’t help but think it had to do with my race, because there were chairmen before me who had done a whole lot worse with a whole lot more.”
The winding irony is that Priebus, having succeeded the party’s first black chairman, would make minority outreach a top priority in the years ahead. He would proclaim that Republicans could not win the White House by targeting only white voters. And he would become chief of staff to a president of the United States who proved him wrong.
“Shakespeare,” Steele grins, “has got nothing on this shit.”
THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN PRESIDENT OBAMA AND SPEAKER BOEHNER had the potential to alter the American trajectory for generations to come. There were obvious differences between them. During an early 2011 meeting on the White House patio, Boehner sipped red wine and puffed Camel Lights while Obama drank iced tea and chewed Nicorette gum. (Boehner says Obama, a former smoker, was “scared to death” of his wife and never bummed a cigarette.) But they actually had far more in common: Both men were self-made successes, hailing from humble roots and overcoming long odds to achieve their positions in government. Both carried themselves with a cool charisma that could prove disarming for their opponents. Above all, each believed he owned a certain stature in his party that would allow him to cut a deal with the other.
For all the anti-Obama panic that animated the GOP in 2009 and 2010, Boehner had pushed a more substantive message—“Where are the jobs?”—that revealed a traditional sensibility of how to oppose a president. Boehner wanted, of course, to see Obama defeated in 2012. But he wasn’t much for stunts. His mission as the Speaker was to make practical policy gains while demonstrating to the country that Republicans could be trusted as a competent party. Meanwhile, from the White House’s perspective, there was a qualitative difference in the way Boehner interacted with Obama compared to the attitudes of McConnell, Eric Cantor, and others.
Treating Obama with respect was part of Boehner’s problem. Republicans around the country had little regard for the president. Many felt he looked down his nose at their way of life. Some thought he was a serial liar. And more than a few believed he was illegitimate—that he hadn’t been born in America and thus wasn’t qualified to be president.
Numerous state governments debated newly urgent legislation in 2009 and 2010 requiring presidential candidates to release long-form birth certificates. This paranoia echoed beyond the provinces: Twelve House Republicans cosponsored a similar bill in Congress, lending a higher degree of legitimacy to the conspiracy theorizing. When one of the cosponsors, Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, urged Cantor in a meeting to bring up the bill for a vote, he made his point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: “Kenya hear me? Kenya hear me?”
“Louie Gohmert is insane. There’s not a functional brain in there,” Boehner says, muttering a few expletives for good measure. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
But Gohmert wasn’t an outlier. “I knew people, smart people, who were into it,” says Karl Rove. “They thought it was this vast conspiracy, that people took this kid who was born in Kenya and faked newspaper clippings from the time of his birth, and documents in the Hawaii state government files, so this Kenyan-born kid could pass for an American citizen and wind up running for president. This was the Manchurian candidate on steroids—not just on steroids. This was the Manchurian candidate on LSD and peyote.”