The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  Before Rubio went to bed, he typed up a short note on his Facebook page in which he promised to roll out an ambitious agenda in the coming session of Congress that would aim to reach the same voters who had overwhelmingly rejected his party tonight.

  “The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it,” he wrote, “and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them.”

  Rubio hit publish.

  It was just a small step, but it was enough to satisfy his anxious, jittery, restless need for forward motion, at least for tonight. Starting tomorrow, he would set off on a full sprint—and he wouldn’t let anything or anyone slow him down.

  Coral Gables, Florida

  A couple of miles away, Jeb Bush leisurely took in the election coverage at his stylish, million-dollar townhome, afflicted with no such eagerness for motion. He was good and comfortable right where he was: rich, rested, and reaping the rewards of a genetic lottery ticket that would pay out its installments of wealth and privilege until he was in the dirt. He genuinely felt he had done some good with the advantages he’d inherited. And now, six years after retiring as one of Florida’s most beloved and successful governors in decades, he was settling in nicely to the role of elder statesman. He felt no particular urge to disturb it.

  Of course, the same could not be said of his wide orbit of allies, advisers, and admirers. As soon as it seemed safe to acknowledge that Romney was finished, the Bush dynasty’s national network—and especially those in Jeb’s own Florida fiefdom—began buzzing with the prospect of a “Bush 45” presidency. Emails, texts, and phone calls zipped up and down the Sunshine State and across time zones, as donors, operators, and hangers-on trawled for inside info and clamored to know how they could help.

  What is he thinking? How can we convince him? What does he need from us?

  A few of these messages landed in Jeb’s own inbox, but he had little interest in entertaining the notion at the moment. This same crowd of “family friends” had pleaded with him to run in 2012, and he had denied them. When interviewers had then spent the year asking Jeb whether he would consider a future presidential run, he’d made no effort to keep his supporters’ hopes alive. In one particularly conclusive-sounding interview earlier that year, Jeb solemnly suggested to Charlie Rose that he had missed his last chance for the White House when he decided to forgo the 2012 race.

  “This was probably my time,” Jeb said. And his time had passed.

  In fact, watching this election unfold had convinced Jeb of just how miserable the whole campaign process had gotten even since the last time his brother ran. He didn’t say this part in interviews, of course, but he had been struck in 2012 by just how much coarser and crasser and crazier the political circus now seemed. The point was driven home for him when pizza magnate Herman Cain had spent a not-inconsiderable period of time at the top of the Republican primary polls. Herman Cain! Part of him found the whole thing amusing—but then he pictured actually running for president and somehow trailing a comic-relief candidate like that, and the thought just depressed him.

  He frequently complained to friends about how immature and unstatesmanlike it was that these aspiring leaders of the free world were duking it out on Twitter with sarcastic hashtags and so-called memes. He had always prided himself on being on the cutting edge of technology and media. His early adoption of email and his penchant for responding to electronic missives from constituents at all hours had become part of the popular mythology surrounding Jeb—so much so that his BlackBerry was included in his official gubernatorial portrait. But if running for president now meant doing… this… he had no interest in it. He was happy to let Rubio, clearly ambitious and eager to enter the fray, take on all that nonsense.

  That said, Jeb’s vast following of party insiders and establishment elites was obviously undeterred by the signals he’d been sending that he was done with national politics. He felt no rush to start rallying the troops tonight—but if he eventually decided he needed them, he had little doubt they would quickly fall in line.

  Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  As Bobby Jindal paced the floors of the palatial plantation-style governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge, he searched his memory for missed warning signs.

  The forty-one-year-old governor of Louisiana had spent the final, frenzied days of the election inside the Romney campaign bubble, stumping for his party’s nominee in front of crowds so big and so hysterically passionate that he had been hypnotized by their conviction. He wasn’t privy to any of the campaign’s internal numbers or the secret strategy memos coming out of Boston headquarters. But everywhere he went, he found the candidate’s operatives coolly predicting victory, armed with some promising new scrap of polling data out of Pennsylvania or some vague notion about how things in Ohio were looking very, very good, or just generally acting as though they knew something he didn’t.

  Jindal considered himself a rational guy—a smart guy—and so he had never quite bought into the theory, fervently clung to by many on the right, that the polls showing President Obama with a persistent lead throughout 2012 were systemically biased because they were undersampling Republicans. This idea had gripped conservative political junkies across the country, and one obscure blogger had even gained national notoriety with a website, unskewedpolls.com, that reengineered the raw polling data to predict a Romney landslide. Jindal knew that such efforts exhibited a dubious grasp of reality, let alone mathematics, and he had winced as prominent Republicans, including his friend Texas Governor Rick Perry, enthusiastically touted the website. Yet in that final stretch of the race, as Romney’s staffers radiated confidence, Jindal, too, became convinced that Republicans were on the cusp of triumph, Gallup be damned.

  Now, as the election returns filtered in from swing states and he could see the bubble bursting, it was clear that there was never any evidence to support such certainty except for the certainty of other Republicans; it was gut feelings and tainted instincts and unskewed polls all the way down—and Jindal, however fleetingly, had been taken in by the con.

  But while he faulted himself for this temporary lapse into gullibility, he wasted little time on self-censure. Another realization was beginning to take hold as he watched the electoral votes pile up in the president’s corner on Fox News—one that he knew he could use to his advantage.

  Mitt Romney, he thought, ran a fantastically stupid campaign.

  Jindal did not know Romney well, and from a distance the man seemed sharp enough, but he was shocked by the frequency with which Romney had undermined his campaign’s message by saying some moronic thing or another. And the few times Jindal had actually interacted with the candidate, he was left baffled by the political ineptitude on display.

  This impression was cemented the day after the Republican National Convention, when Romney flew to Louisiana to tour a flood-ravaged fishing village on the bayou with Jindal. The trip was a political no-brainer—an easy photo op that would make any third-rate politician look presidential. But soon after the two men climbed into the SUV that was to shepherd them to the flood zone, Romney began complaining to Jindal that the Hurricane Isaac victims they were on their way to meet really shouldn’t be living in areas outside the reach of the state’s flood protection levee system. After all, Romney reasoned, wasn’t it reckless of them to make their homes in places they knew could be flooded every hurricane season?

  Jindal politely responded that he saw Romney’s point, but that it was probably best to keep such observations to himself when he was talking to the victims. Yet, unbelievably, Romney went on to spend the bulk of their forty-five-minute drive pressing the point so adamantly that Jindal began to worry that the newly minted Republican nominee was actually about to turn a feel-your-pain photo op into a lecture on personal responsibility. As they neared the site of the flood damage, he urged Romney to drop the subject before they got out of the car.

  “I
get it,” Jindal said. “But, Mitt, you can’t say that to them. These people have just lost their homes.”

  Romney appeared to mull over the advice before exiting the vehicle and greeting some first responders and victims who had gathered to meet him. The visit went off without incident, and Jindal was so relieved that his exhortation had gotten through that he minded only a little when the candidate spent the forty-five-minute drive back to the campaign plane reciting his arguments all over again. The episode had left Jindal with the distinct sense that the GOP’s standard-bearer, while certainly “smart,” was not exactly brimming with social intelligence.

  More troubling to Jindal, though, was the Romney campaign’s defensiveness and lack of substantive ideas. The Republican strategy in 2012 reminded him of basketball players before the shot clock was introduced, idly dribbling at half-court for minutes at a time, nursing a narrow lead in hopes that they could just run out the clock without making any mistakes. The Romney campaign’s message, Jindal thought, hadn’t been anti-intellectual so much as intellectually petrified—devoid of ambitious thinking, stripped of substance, chained to meaningless maxims, and scared of using big words.

  He knew that by morning, the political world would be consumed with a blizzard of post-campaign analysis that blamed the Republican Party’s losses on everything from tactical failures to a fundamental disconnect with the American electorate. But Jindal, the Rhodes scholar and lifelong smartest-kid-in-class, couldn’t help but view the party’s meltdown tonight in terms of intelligence. The GOP had suffered a national embarrassment because a clueless candidate had run a vacuous campaign filled with dumbed down bumper sticker slogans aimed at what the operatives running the show must have believed was a nation of imbeciles.

  Yes… Jindal liked the sound of that. Not only was it true, but it would also perfectly set the stage for the political comeback he was plotting. What the party needed now was an intellectually ambitious messenger with a detailed, forward-thinking agenda. Someone who would stop reducing every complicated issue to mindless taglines and trust the intelligence of the American people. Someone who was smart—and not afraid to show it.

  Someone, he thought, like Bobby Jindal.

  Houston, Texas

  It took a little less than forty-five minutes for Ted Cruz to tell his first noble lie to the Tea Party as senator-elect. Standing triumphant on a stage at the head of the Hilton Houston Post Oak ballroom, Cruz was flanked by his wife, Heidi, and his two young daughters—all three dressed for the occasion in Red State red dresses—and set against the backdrop of an indoor billboard emblazoned with his all-caps campaign tagline, “TED CRUZ: PROVEN CONSERVATIVE.”

  Cruz, a rare winner in a night of Republican losses, had already cheerfully run through most of the standard box-checking platitudes for a victory speech of this kind—the recap of the “gracious” concession call from his opponent, the gentle told-you-so to the nameless naysayers who claimed it “couldn’t be done”—and now he wanted to get serious. Lowering his voice and angling his head downward a few degrees to signal gravity, Cruz laid out the big picture.

  “Every few decades we have a particularly consequential election. Nineteen thirty-two was a consequential election. Nineteen eighty was a consequential election.” He paused. “And 2012 is a consequential election.”

  Cruz looked down at the podium and bit his lower lip before raising his eyes and proclaiming sternly, “At issue is, what sort of nation will we be?”

  By now it was a little after 9 p.m. Houston time—10 in the east, where the data jockeys in the TV network boiler rooms were meticulously sorting through swing state precinct returns and tallying electoral votes. Officially, they wouldn’t call the election for Obama for about another hour, but the writing was on the wall: Mitt was cooked. Cruz knew it; the networks knew it; the operatives and the donors and the Twitter political junkies and every sentient human being who worked on either campaign knew it. Everybody in the know knew it.

  But the grassroots patriots who had filled this ballroom were not all “in the know” types. Most of them were stalwart believers who would cling to their faith until the bitter end—and there was no sense in Cruz squandering his agenda-setting victory speech to kill the mood and shatter their illusions. It was important that they stay excited. He needed them to pay attention. So he fibbed.

  “At this point, we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen nationally,” he said. “I continue to hope and believe that Mitt Romney’s gonna be elected our next president.

  “However,” he continued, “if President Obama is reelected…”

  At this, the ballroom erupted in a loud chorus of “Booo”s and shouts of “No!,” and Cruz had to raise a reassuring hand to steady the crowd.

  Firmly, he reiterated, “And I don’t believe he will be…”

  There was some scattered applause, and the room quieted. In the pantheon of great political liars, this minor deception would barely earn Cruz a small engraved placard. Plenty of Republican politicians had spent the past year telling far greater whoppers in the service of pretending to like the presidential nominee Cruz would later refer to as “screamingly awful.” It was just good partisan manners.

  Besides, tonight this small, noble lie had a greater purpose, as it set up Cruz to unambiguously lay out the mission of the conservative movement for the remainder of the Obama years—and the audacious role he planned to play in it.

  “Let me say this,” Cruz told the patriots. “If President Obama means what he says on the campaign trail—if he is interested in working to bring people together and reduce the deficit and get people working—then I will work with him.”

  A solitary “Whoo!” echoed across the otherwise cemetery-silent ballroom.

  “But,” Cruz continued, jabbing an index finger into the air, “if he is reelected and intends to continue down this same path, then I will spend every waking moment working to lead the fight to stop it.”

  The ballroom patriots rewarded this declaration of war with an ebullient round of applause, and Cruz allowed himself a satisfied grin. There was plenty more to cover from the notes on the podium in front of him, and he would get through all of it. He would promise to go after spending cuts and tax reform in the Senate. He would thank the cast of right-wing icons—Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and more—who had helped him defeat the entrenched establishmentarian in his primary race. And he would give a warm shout-out to his campaign team, the “ragtag bag of warriors who stood against all assails.”

  But even as he celebrated tonight, he was already positioning himself for the next victory—the one he was destined for. When Cruz had said 2012 would go down in the history books as a “consequential election,” he was telling God’s honest truth. But it certainly wouldn’t be because of footnote-bound Mitt, or even the hapless left-wing lame duck he planned to spend the next four years thwarting. No, 2012 would be remembered as the year the conservative movement finally found its champion—the man who had the gifts and guts to burn down Washington, and rebuild it in their image.

  Yes, he was quite sure that 2012 would mark the beginning of the consequential rise of Ted Cruz.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Paul Ryan was slumped like a banged-up crash test dummy—silent, motionless, damaged—on one of the cream-colored sofas in the Westin hotel’s presidential suite. The curtains were pulled shut, blocking the room’s expensive waterfront views of Boston Harbor, and a dour circle of campaign advisers and Romney family members sat silently staring at their laps or feebly studying their smartphones—anything to distract from the bitter scene around them. Fox News was calling Ohio for President Obama. Mitt was about to get on the phone with the president to concede the election. The race was over, and they had lost—badly.

  Now here was Ryan, forced to endure the first true flameout of his career in front of the nominee he had let down, the campaign he had failed, and the country—sixty million TV viewers and counting!—he had fail
ed to convince. And as if all that weren’t miserable enough, he had to do it while putting on a brave face for the family he had dragged along on this whole misadventure.

  Ten weeks ago, when he and his wife, Janna, had informed their three young kids that Daddy was going to run for vice president, the prospect of having to leave their friends in Janesville, Wisconsin, set off a mini-tantrum. But since then, the kids had grown to appreciate the perks of the campaign trail: the decimated bedtimes, the traffic-stopping motorcade rides, the special plane that shepherded them all over the country, their favorite snacks always stocked. By election night, the kids wanted to soak up every last minute of this big, fun family adventure they were on, and after the Ryans tucked their seven-year-old son, Sam, into bed and prepared to depart for the Romneys’ suite, Liza and Charlie begged their parents to let them tag along. Ryan looked at his two oldest children now, in this sad, crowded hotel room full of grown-ups with the sternest of don’t-bother-me scowls on their faces—Mom crying softly to herself, and Dad a useless, quasi-catatonic hunk of charcoal-gray wool and disappointment. Liza had tears streaming down her face, and quiet, shy Charlie was visibly retreating inward. Ryan wished he had left them in bed.

  Soon the gears of the campaign machine began churning around him—preparing to crank out one last public performance—and it became glaringly obvious once again that Ryan was the only cog in the apparatus without a meaningful function. Stuart Stevens was in charge of hammering out a hastily prepared concession speech. Mitt, of course, would have the task of delivering it. And sometime tomorrow morning, the operatives in this room would begin the laborious process of collapsing the whole Believe-in-America operation into a pile of cardboard boxes and shredded files. Even Mitt’s twenty-four-year-old body man, Garrett Jackson, had a job to do: setting up the concession call with Obama.