American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  Jeffress continued his crusade during the 2012 campaign. A supporter of Perry for president, the pastor used an appearance at the Values Voter Summit in October 2011 to drive a wedge between Romney and evangelicals. “I just do not believe that we as conservative Christians can expect him to stand strong for the issues that are important to us,” Jeffress told reporters.8 “I really am not nearly as concerned about a candidate’s fiscal policy or immigration policy as I am about where they stand on biblical issues.”

  (Four years later, Jeffress would become Candidate Trump’s most visible Christian disciple, appearing with the thrice-married, casino-owning candidate onstage in Texas during the heat of the GOP primary race. “I can tell you from experience, if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, we who are evangelical Christians are going to have a true friend in the White House,” he said, according to the Dallas Morning News.)

  The issue was far from resolved when Romney clinched the GOP nomination in April. A survey released by CBS News and the New York Times found that just 27 percent of white evangelical Republicans said they would “enthusiastically” support him against Obama in the fall.

  Even as the professional Christian right grudgingly rallied around him—with endorsements from the major evangelical groups and leaders, including, eventually, Jeffress himself—the grass roots remained hesitant. When Romney agreed to give the May commencement address at Liberty University, the Jerry Falwell–founded Christian college in Virginia, the school wound up removing the news from its Facebook page because of the backlash among students and alumni.

  “I get it. I’m from a weird religion, too, according to Republicans,” says Eric Cantor, who hails from a deeply religious tract of Virginia and heard frequent complaints about Romney’s Mormon faith. “My district was sandwiched between the Falwells to the West and Pat Robertson to the East. I’m Jewish, and the district is not even two percent Jewish. We would do polling and one of the most important issues for people was whether the candidate believed in Jesus as their savior. That wasn’t good for me.”

  In retrospect, the distrust of Romney is better understood through a prism of cultural warfare than one of theological creed. At the outset of the primary campaign, the Obama administration mandated that religious institutions must cover contraceptives in employees’ insurance plans. In May, on the same day as Romney’s commencement address at Liberty, the president announced his support for same-sex marriage. A month later, in the span of two weeks, Obama issued an executive order protecting young immigrants from deportation while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

  All the while, America’s folk landscape looked like the culmination of conservative jeremiads about decline: Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel of true love realized through bondage and sadomasochism, spent more than seven months atop the New York Times bestseller list.

  “It was a revolution,” John Boehner says. “The country was changing right underneath our feet.”

  The conservative base was on fire. His religion aside, Republicans had reason to worry that Romney—whose adviser had publicly compared the candidate’s November strategy to an “Etch A Sketch,” shaking off the right-wing positions of the primary and starting over afresh—didn’t have the core convictions, much less the stomach, for a fight with Obama.

  The president and his allies, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to start throwing haymakers.

  ROMNEY WAS AN EASY TARGET. THE WAY HE TALKED AND THE WAY HE walked, the haircut and the mannerisms—it was like a black-and-white sitcom character reborn in the age of Technicolor. Once, after a donor meeting in which Romney heard the phrase “No shit, Sherlock” for the first time, he gleefully repeated the quip to his staff—but cleaned it up to say, “No bleep, Sherlock.”

  Even Republicans couldn’t help themselves. As he campaigned for House candidates across the country in 2012, Boehner worked humorous digs at Romney into his stump speech, mocking the Republican nominee behind closed doors as someone who had never mowed his own lawn or owned a pair of blue jeans.

  This detachment carried significant political risk. In a vacuum, the fact that Romney didn’t curse, or didn’t drink, or had lots of money, might not have been damaging. But taken with his policy positions, and given how the president aimed to portray him, these characteristics were glaring vulnerabilities. Because strategically, Obama and his allies wanted everything voters learned about Romney to fit into a simple overarching theme: He was not one of them.

  The president had little choice but to run a bruising reelection campaign. It was true that Osama bin Laden was dead and the Detroit automakers were alive. But the conditions were categorically ripe for his defeat: There was little tangible progress to show for the stimulus package; the Affordable Care Act was still widely unpopular; unemployment was still north of 8 percent; average gas prices were approaching a record high; and stock markets were barely inching upward.

  The bright spot for Obama, politically, was that polling showed him still in decent standing with low- and middle-income voters, most of whom did not blame their hardships on him but, rather, on the previous administration, the broken institutions of government, and what they viewed as a broken economic model that exploited the many for the gain of the few. Against this backdrop, Romney, the billionaire businessman and venture capitalist, represented a perfect foil, someone whose obvious strength could be turned into an insurmountable weakness.

  Team Obama spent the late spring and early summer battering Romney with an advertising blitz that defined the Republican nominee in terms he would never recover from: as a cold, bloodthirsty corporate raider who cared more about profits than people. “President Obama was politically wise in characterizing me as some rich Republican that doesn’t care about the little guy. There are a lot of reasons why he was able to define me in that way,” Romney recalls. “I needed to do a much better job in communicating that the whole reason I was running is for the average American.”

  The two most memorable spots were so haunting, so brutally effective, that political scientists will dissect them for decades to come. The first, from Obama’s campaign, was set to a soundtrack of Romney singing “America the Beautiful,” during which headlines flashed across the screen telling of his corporate outsourcing, his Swiss bank account, his tropical tax havens. (The fade to black came as Romney belted out, “And crown thy good with brotherhood . . .”) The second, from Priorities USA Action, featured a testimonial from Mike Earnest, an Indiana factory worker who told of building a thirty-foot stage that Bain Capital officials used to announce that they were closing the plant and firing all its employees. “Mitt Romney made over a hundred million dollars by shutting down our plant and devastated our lives,” Earnest said. “Turns out that when we built that stage, it was like building my own coffin. And it just made me sick.”

  The precise impact of the ads themselves would later become the subject of debate, considering how Romney had remained relatively stable at 2 to 4 points behind Obama in the horse race polling. But it was impossible to quantify how this onslaught of negativity—on top of questions about Romney’s tax returns and Harry Reid’s claim that the GOP nominee hadn’t paid any income taxes for a decade—drove media coverage in a way that implanted an asterisk of doubt in the minds of voters whenever they heard Romney tout his economic expertise.

  There were critics of Team Obama’s strategy. Several of the Priorities USA ads were skewered by fact-checkers; one in particular, which suggested Romney’s shuttering of a plant was responsible for an employee’s wife dying of cancer, was slammed as egregious and untrue.9 Meanwhile, several prominent Democrats, including auto bailout czar Steve Rattner and then-Newark mayor Cory Booker, condemned the Bain Capital ads and defended Romney as a practitioner of capitalism. And Reid, for his part, forfeited much of his credibility when it was learned that he’d flat out lied about Romney’s tax returns.

  But the feathering of Romney was effective largely becau
se Republicans had supplied the tar. Gingrich cronies had flooded South Carolina with ads depicting the predatory ways of Romney and Bain Capital. Perry had called Romney’s colleagues “vultures” that were “waiting for a company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, and they leave the skeleton.”10 Even Palin had gotten in on the act, going on Sean Hannity’s television show to question Romney’s claim of creating one hundred thousand jobs at Bain and needling him for his failure to release more tax returns.

  Meanwhile, Romney had made himself singularly vulnerable when, in 2008, he wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The substance was defensible; Romney argued that the automakers, burdened by legacy costs related to lavish union contracts, could be viable long term only by restructuring under rules of bankruptcy. And yet the headline—coupled with Obama’s rescue of General Motors and Chrysler—reinforced Romney’s negatives in the midwestern states where Obama was most exposed.

  The attacks on Romney shouldn’t have been surprising. For all the flowery rhetoric, Obama, a student of Chicago-style campaigning, had run a pitilessly negative operation against McCain four years earlier. (And, as Romney observed during the bludgeoning of Gingrich months earlier, “politics ain’t bean bag.”) What was surprising was Romney’s failure to defend himself, and to defend capitalism conceptually, from Team Obama’s tireless assault.

  “We spent the campaign defining his business record. These were legitimate stories and legitimate critiques. What was absent was the other side of the story—they never told it,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, says. “At a time when a lot of people were really jaundiced about Wall Street and financiers, they nominated a guy who spent most of his life in that world. Romney was always going to get the benefit of the doubt as someone who could manage the economy; what was suspect was whether he would manage the economy in a way that was beneficial to the middle class. And he never made that case.”

  ROMNEY HAD THREE OBVIOUS OPTIONS IN CHOOSING A RUNNING MATE. The first was someone who could help make that economic case, someone with executive or managerial experience who would reinforce his greatest strength. The second was someone who could compensate for a glaring weakness—namely, the lack of enthusiasm in the conservative base, as John McCain had done with Sarah Palin four years prior. The third was someone who could help politically, ideally someone so popular in a swing state that his presence on the ticket could carry it come November.

  There was no shortage of choices. Romney could select a successful governor, such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal or New Jersey’s Chris Christie or Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty. He could pick a Tea Party star, such as Marco Rubio. He could choose a geographic complement, such as Ohio’s Rob Portman or Virginia’s Bob McDonnell.

  One name that nobody outside Romney’s inner circle took seriously: Paul Ryan.

  The congressional GOP was dysfunctional, and Ryan had emerged as perhaps its most polarizing figure. His safety net–slashing budgets were widely viewed as politically toxic: Democrats ran ads depicting Ryan pushing a wheelchair-bound grandmother off a cliff, and Newt Gingrich described the Wisconsin congressman’s proposal as “right-wing social engineering.”11

  Furthermore, Ryan had found religion on deficits only once George W. Bush left office, having voted for two wars, enormous tax cuts, and the massive Medicare prescription drug program. Romney had enough problems of his own; why adopt someone else’s baggage?

  This was the position taken by Stu Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist and closest adviser. Determined to make the election a “referendum” on Obama—that is, forcing voters to view their decision through the narrowest possible context of the president’s job performance—Stevens was not welcoming of distractions. Anything the GOP did to divert attention away from a limping economy, Stevens told Romney, was a boon to Obama’s reelection.

  The president wanted a “choice” election, one in which voters judged the incumbent not in isolation, but against the alternative. In this case, that meant framing Obama, the pragmatic protector of the American worker he identified with, against Romney, the ruthless fix-it man who worked off formulas instead of feelings. The problem for Stevens, and for the GOP writ large, was that Romney wanted both a referendum and a choice—hence his pick of Ryan.

  In truth, Romney never valued a running mate who offered political expediency; he made it known to friends and senior aides that he wanted his selection to signal an emphasis on governing. This was hard to believe given Romney’s cautious reputation, but in fact, the Republican nominee had told confidants that he was prepared to be unpopular for the first two years of his presidency because of the cuts he hoped to make—cuts that Ryan, as his junior partner, could help design and pass into law. Obama could barely believe his luck. Ryan, the poster child for policies made synonymous with social Darwinism, was joining the GOP ticket.

  When Romney introduced his running mate, on August 11 aboard the retired USS Wisconsin in Southern Virginia, he hailed Ryan as “an intellectual leader of the Republican Party” who had been prescient in warning of “the fiscal catastrophe that awaits us if we don’t change course.” Ryan, who could pass for one of Romney’s five sons, came bounding down from the ship wearing a sport coat with no tie.

  “President Obama, and too many like him in Washington, have refused to make difficult decisions because they are more worried about their next election than they are about the next generation,” Ryan said. “Politicians from both parties have made empty promises which will soon become broken promises—with painful consequences—if we fail to act now.”

  Although Romney had been pouring time and money into diversifying states such as Virginia and Colorado, the investment was showing little return. In fact, as the campaign progressed, it was becoming apparent that Romney’s best chance to beat Obama would be in the Rust Belt, where the president’s approval among working-class whites had plateaued over the last several years. Wisconsin was part of the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had carried in every presidential election since 1992. Romney hoped that Ryan, with his Irish-Catholic roots and midwestern twang, could help put not just his home state into play but Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.

  It was an exercise in obliviousness: Romney was confident that certain voters, in a certain part of the country, would respond to a running mate whose governing vision—entitlement cuts, immigration reform, and unfettered free trade—was exactly what they did not want.

  ROMNEY ALWAYS STRUGGLED TO SELL HIS STRENGTHS. HE WAS A COMPETENT, technocrat-minded governor, but he appeared reticent in hyping his record. Reforming the Massachusetts health care system had been a crowning achievement, but he avoided the issue because of the fury over Obamacare. His activity in the LDS church included countless stories of his service to the poor and destitute, but he was hesitant to discuss religion.

  This was precisely what Stevens envisioned. The election should be a referendum on Obama. Romney wasn’t going to win a likeability contest against the president; his advisers wanted a Monster.com election, not a Match.com election. Whenever he saw ads run by the outside super PAC supporting Romney that attempted to humanize him (with stories of how he’d once shut down his business to conduct a search for a missing teenage girl, for instance), Stevens would scream at the television, “Why are you wasting money on this shit?!”

  Romney grew more assertive speaking to these themes as the race went on: how he governed pragmatically in a blue state, how he understood the complexities of the health care marketplace, how he served the underprivileged as an elder in his church.

  Tellingly, these testimonials had something of an inverse effect on diverging portions of the electorate: It attracted some persuadable voters in the middle, but it did nothing to energize conservatives. Meanwhile, the one trait universally assumed to help Romney connect with the base, his business chops, might have alienated him from it. Pie charts and economic models do little to assuage voter angst. As people watched their jobs
disappearing, their communities hollowing out, and their national character changing, they wanted a brawler—not a bookkeeper.

  “It became a Wall Street Journal campaign,” Cantor recalls. “There were rallies in these big airport hangers in rural areas, and he’s talking about unfunded liabilities and the entitlement programs and GDP percentage. I mean, it was like a graduate economics class. And it struck me that something was just not clicking. There’s no way all these thousands of people that showed up really want to hear this.”

  What they wanted to hear, many of them, was an echo of their own contempt for Obama.

  Four years had provided plenty of ammunition. The president’s about-face on gay marriage. His administration’s feud with religious groups over contraception and the ensuing talk of a Republican “war on women.” His so-called apology tour, in which he traveled the world confessing of America’s past arrogance. All of it felt patronizing, disdainful.

  But more than anything, it was Obama’s perceived exploitation of racially driven identity politics that drove Republicans crazy. Whether it was his election-year legalization of undocumented minors, or his scolding of a Massachusetts police officer for his arrest of a black Harvard professor, or his emotional observation that a murdered black teenager, Trayvon Martin, could pass for his own son, the nation’s first black president goaded conservatives in ways that no white Democrat possibly could.

  “He took race back to the sixties, as far as I’m concerned. He made everything a race issue, or at least saw it through a racial lens,” says Jim DeMint, the South Carolinian who entered the Senate with Obama in 2004. “The country had moved toward bending over backward to create equality. But then suddenly, with Obama, he just lit the fires. I thought when he was elected that was the big victory, that we had put racism behind us.”