The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  “Both parties tend to divide Americans into ‘our voters’ and ‘their voters,’” Ryan said that night. “Republicans must steer far clear of that trap. We must speak to the aspirations and anxieties of every American… We have a compassionate vision based on ideas that work, but sometimes we don’t do a good job of laying out that vision. We need to do better.”

  Ryan offered little doubt about his new direction, using the word “poverty” fifteen times in the space of a twenty-minute speech—once every eighty seconds, on average—and declaring, “When Lyndon Johnson launched the war on poverty in 1964, he predicted we would eliminate poverty in thirty-five to fifty years. Here we are, forty-eight years later, and poverty is winning.”

  Marco Rubio also spoke at the dinner, sounding similar themes in his remarks, and together their speeches generated a flurry of headlines about the coming fight over the GOP’s soul—and how these two most high-profile combatants were positioning themselves for 2016. Several commentators noted that Ryan’s rhetoric about inclusiveness and compassion seemed like a less-than-subtle attempt at distancing himself from Mitt “47 percent” Romney.

  The contrast, of course, was exactly what Ryan had been hoping for. But he also knew that throwing his party’s ticket topper under the bus over a stupid gaffe wasn’t going to reshape the Republican Party, reinvigorate his career, or shift the momentum in America’s war on poverty. To accomplish that, he would have to do something that virtually nobody in Washington’s gilded political class had done with any regularity in decades: start spending unchoreographed, unbuffered, unpublicized time with actual poor people.

  Chapter Four

  The Coroners

  Paul Ryan wasn’t the only Republican doing a postmortem. Shortly after the 2012 election, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, assembled five well-regarded party functionaries and charged them with diagnosing what had gone wrong for the GOP in the last election. Officially, the initiative was given the cheerful title “The Growth and Opportunity Project.” Internally—and eventually in the press—it was referred to as “the autopsy.”

  The designated party coroners were all loyal partisans, with ties to the establishment and reputations in GOP circles for seriousness and competence. There was Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House press secretary and now head of the Republican Jewish Coalition; Sally Bradshaw, a top Florida strategist and longtime adviser to Jeb Bush; Henry Barbour, nephew of Mississippi’s beloved former governor and now a committeeman in the state party; Glenn McCall, an official in the South Carolina GOP; and Zori Fonalledas, a Republican committeewoman in Puerto Rico. Their assignment was to prepare a report that identified systemic weaknesses in the party and proposed solutions.

  In another era, establishment fixtures like these would have been among the cigar-chomping cloakroom dwellers who hashed out the Grand Old Party’s presidential nominations over stiff drinks and dirty jokes. But the influence of this political priesthood had been on the wane in both parties for decades. In the GOP especially, the power of establishment leaders had been decimated by the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United ruling and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party in 2010. With political spending now virtually unlimited and unregulated, the official party committees—which once held immense sway over fund-raising—were forced to compete for attention and influence with billionaire megadonors like the Koch brothers, conservative kingmakers on talk radio and cable, and well-funded Tea Party pressure groups like FreedomWorks. Some from the old guard had figured out how to stay in the game in this new era, most notably Karl Rove—the former Dubya strategist who had gone on to build a lavishly funded political organization, American Crossroads, and a multimedia pundit platform that made sure his voice mattered. But by and large, the party insiders had become something more like outsiders, left to compile their opinions in a PDF report and post it online in hopes that someone with real influence might read it and agree with them.

  Fleischer was emblematic of the type the RNC had tapped for the autopsy. Once, he had been among the most high-profile Republicans in the country, delivering daily press briefings at the White House, where he rigorously defended the Iraq War and routinely denounced the press corps’ coverage of the president. After leaving his post in 2003, he was a hot commodity on the political speaking circuit for a while, pulling in a reported $36,000 per speech. He penned a buzzy memoir and remained an ardent Bush defender on Sunday morning political talk shows.

  Now he worked in a small office building shared with a local realty company in the quaint Westchester town of Bedford, New York. His desk overlooked a main road leading to the elementary school he had attended as a child. The walls of his office were adorned with tiny monuments to his past proximity to power: photos of Fleischer with the president on 9/11; a rendering of Fleischer in an old political cartoon; a framed cover of Fleischer’s 2005 memoir, Taking Heat. He still went on CNN occasionally to talk politics, but he dreaded the commutes to Manhattan, so he performed his appearances from a makeshift studio the network had rigged in his house. These days, he made most of his money as a behind-the-scenes PR consultant in the professional sports industry.

  Fleischer’s self-imposed exile from Washington and distance from the new Wild West of conservative politics had left him richer and more rested—allowing him to sport a year-round tan and a wardrobe full of pricey designer suits—but considerably less influential within his party. And for a while, he didn’t mind. “I was out,” he told me. “I didn’t want to do much TV. I would just look at [the political landscape] and shake my head at so much of the stuff. And then the longer I was out, the more I thought, ‘You know what? I want to play, I want to go back, I want to see what I can do.’” After the 2012 election, he called Priebus and asked how he could help.

  Fleischer undertook his assignment from the RNC with vigor. For months, he and the other coroners fanned out across the country to hold focus groups and listening sessions and pore over exit polls and survey data—and then they would reconvene every week on a conference call to discuss their findings.

  What they found was depressing. In one focus group after another, they heard their party described as “out of touch” and full of “stuffy old men.” Fleischer soon concluded that unless the GOP found a way to change this reputation, its future would be even bleaker than anyone realized. “You cannot come out of the 2008 and 2012 elections and think that Republicans have a strong future in presidential [races] unless we deal with the demographic changes,” he said.

  He became consumed with the question of how to alter the party’s demographic destiny. After talking to pro-gay Republicans like Ana Navarro and Margaret Hoover—both of whom served alongside him as CNN’s in-house conservative voices, much to the consternation of many on the right—he became convinced that the party needed to cast off its image as uniformly opposed to same-sex marriage. For millions of younger voters, Fleischer believed, marriage was a “gateway” issue that would prevent them from even thinking about voting Republican.

  During his weekly conference calls, Fleischer began adamantly arguing that their little commission should propose adopting a more inclusive stance on the marriage issue. Some of his fellow coroners were extremely resistant at first, worrying about how such a proposal would go over with conservatives, but eventually they arrived at a compromise. The final report contained no policy recommendation on the subject, but signaled that there should be room within the party for disagreement.

  “For the GOP to appeal to younger voters, we do not have to agree on every issue, but we do need to make sure young people do not see the party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view,” the final report would read. “Already, there is a generational difference within the conservative movement about issues involving the treatment and the rights of gays—and for many younger voters, these issues are a gateway into whether the party is a place they want to be.”

  As the months wore on, the coroners continued to probe
their corpse for causes of death, conducting interviews with everyone from right-leaning suburban voters in Ohio to more unlikely sources of wisdom, like Howard Dean, the left-wing former governor of Vermont. By the end, the one thing they all agreed on—and the only explicit policy prescription that would make it into the report—was that Republicans had to get behind a legislative effort to produce a compassionate overhaul of U.S. immigration policy.

  “As the five of us got into it, we realized that with so many of the things we were writing about—demographic changes in America, Republicans being more inclusive—immigration was the elephant in the room,” Fleischer later recalled. “We couldn’t talk about inclusiveness… and then ignore immigration. Otherwise, it would’ve rung hollow, I think.”

  They knew that their report wouldn’t single-handedly infuse the entire population of conservative voters with newfound empathy for undocumented immigrants, but they hoped to create a “safe zone” for the GOP’s secretly immigrant-friendly officeholders—those who had become too afraid to voice their support for reform, too intimidated by the Laura Ingrahams and Rush Limbaughs of the world. The coroners chose their words carefully, urging the party to “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform” and adding few other specifics. Altogether, they were proud of the work they had done and excited to present their findings. The autopsy was published in March 2013, to much fanfare, with Priebus hyping the findings in a series of high-profile interviews and declaring a new era for the GOP. “Instead of driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac,” the coroners wrote in the tone-setting introduction, “we need a party whose brand of conservatism invites and inspires new people to visit us.”

  Large portions of the party revolted immediately.

  Conservative activists viewed the report as an assault on the burgeoning power of the grass roots. Not only had the coroners called for surrender in the fights over immigration and gay rights, they had also proposed revamping the party’s presidential nominating system with fewer debates and a condensed primary calendar. The goal was to spare the eventual 2016 nominee from the prolonged barrage of friendly fire that Romney had suffered in 2012. But these changes would make it harder for an insurgent candidate on a shoestring budget to break out.

  The forces behind such conservative figures as Rand Paul and Rick Santorum dug in their heels. One anonymous Paul aide was quoted in the press warning that the procedural changes amounted to a “nuclear war with the grass roots.” Santorum adviser John Brabender said the report was designed to boost “the wealthiest candidates.”

  Meanwhile, the religious Right was appalled at how the report called for increased tolerance of gays while making virtually zero reference to the conservative Christian movement that had been the backbone of the Republican Party for decades. The report contained no mention of so-called values voters, and the words “Christian,” “marriage,” and “abortion” were entirely absent from its text. Social conservative leaders considered the snub deeply troubling.

  “The report didn’t mention religion much, if at all,” huffed Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association. “You cannot grow your party by distancing yourself from your base, and this report doesn’t reinforce the values that attracted me and many other people into the Republican Party in the first place. It just talks about reaching out to other groups.”

  Among hard-core conservatives, there wasn’t just disagreement with one or two points in the report—they objected to its fundamental premise. Limbaugh summed up the sentiment on the right during an on-air diatribe against the RNC’s conclusions. “They think they’ve gotta rebrand, and it’s all predictable. They gotta reach out to minorities. They gotta moderate their tone here and moderate their tone there. And that’s not at all what they’ve gotta do,” he bellowed. “The Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative. It didn’t get its base out in the 2012 election.”

  Fleischer and the other coroners were dismayed by the visceral backlash. They had anticipated some pushback but didn’t expect their recommendations to be interpreted as a knife-in-back betrayal of their party’s base or its founding principles. “We knew we’d hear from some conservatives,” said Fleischer. “What was disheartening was that some people interpreted being more opening and welcoming and inclusive as changing our ideology.”

  Meanwhile, Priebus embarked on a nationwide tour touting the GOP’s new direction. He waved around the autopsy in front of black and brown and nose-pierced young people, pledging that his penitent party had turned over a new leaf.

  During one early stop at a black megachurch in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, Priebus stood side by side with a prominent African American pastor—and in front of more journalists than black voters—as he preached outreach and inclusion, touting the RNC’s plan to spend millions on a permanent political infrastructure that would employ Republican field staffers in minority-heavy communities. Still, he stressed that the RNC didn’t have it all figured out yet.

  “Today is about listening, and today is a start,” he told reporters as he headed into the church for a private meeting with black Republican activists. As the doors closed, he could be heard asking the group, “The question we really want to hone in on is… what are the things you believe the Democrats are doing really well?”

  Much of the motivation undergirding the GOP’s hearts-and-minds campaign in America’s black and Latino communities was genuinely idealistic. But there was also simple electoral arithmetic at play. “If you can steal enough votes from the other team’s base you will win,” Fleischer explained to me. As a model, he pointed to the gains Republicans had made recently with American Jewish voters, traditionally a reliable Democratic constituency. Back in 1992, George H. W. Bush had won just 11 percent of Jewish votes. By 2012, Romney won 30 percent. The expectation wasn’t to turn these constituencies into permanent cornerstones of the new Republican coalition: it was simply to deprive the other side of the votes they needed. “If we can do this in the black community, and have similar success in the Hispanic community, we will doom the Democrats to defeat.”

  But as Fleischer observed the conservative backlash in the weeks that followed the release of the coroners’ autopsy, he became increasingly convinced that no well-intentioned RNC commission would, on its own, be able to save the Republican Party from careering toward disaster. No rigorously prepared reports, or little-known RNC officials with unpronounceable names, or small-ball pilot programs conceived of in Washington were going to reverse the demographic tide crashing down on the party. What Republicans truly needed was a high-profile, singularly gifted leader capable of uniting the conservative movement with the young voters and people of color who made up the coalition of the ascendant.

  Of course, every White House hopeful with a pulse and a plane ticket to New Hampshire would spend plenty of time in the sprint toward 2016 flapping their lips about “minority engagement” and “big-tent conservatism” and “returning to the party of Lincoln.” But only one Republican in the winter of 2013 appeared willing to bet his own presidential prospects on the idea: Marco Rubio. And he would soon find that the stakes were even higher than he realized.

  Chapter Five

  Outreach

  On the afternoon of January 28, 2013, so many reporters and photographers had crammed into the Senate TV gallery that when the C-SPAN camera zoomed out, the shot of the press conference was framed by rumpled journalists leaning enthusiastically forward, as though they were about to rush the lawmakers lined up behind the podium and hoist them into the air in celebration. After four years of covering a Congress gripped by an almost nihilistic dysfunction, the Capitol Hill press corps had before them something rather exotic: a bipartisan band of senators who wanted to actually do something. They were dubbed the Gang of Eight, and they were here to solve the nation’s immigration crisis.

  The star of the show was Marco Rubio—the Spanish-speaking Tea Party senator who was at least two decades younger than most of
the comrades he had joined today. For the majority of the press conference, Rubio stood in silence, his hands clasped neatly in front of him as the geezers droned on. When his turn finally arrived, he stepped up to the podium to a frantic click-clack chorus of cameras that would persist throughout the entirety of his comments.

  “I am clearly new to this issue in terms of the Senate,” he said. “I’m not new to it in terms of my life. I live surrounded by immigrants. My neighbors are immigrants. My family is immigrants. I married into a family of immigrants. I see immigration every single day.”

  His cadence was measured and firm, his pace quick but coherent, his rhetoric compelling and lucid. He spoke of the need to adopt tougher security measures at the Mexican border, and to reform the process of legal immigration with an eye toward bolstering free enterprise—hitting each conservative note with just enough force before then striking a compassionate chord.

  “We are dealing,” Rubio said, “with eleven million human beings who are here undocumented—the vast and enormous majority of whom have come here in pursuit of what all of us would recognize as the American dream.”

  What deftness! What agility! What poise! Ah yes, this was their star, all right—the darling of the national media, in his element. The cameras click-clacked furiously as Rubio wrapped up his remarks and then retook his spot in the line of senators, confident and unfazed.

  He was just getting started.

  When Rubio’s colleagues had persuaded him to join the Gang of Eight, they envisioned his role as ambassadorial in nature—venturing out into the wilds of the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio to pitch their immigration plan to the Tea Party. Rubio didn’t quite see it that way himself: he viewed his primary function as representing conservative interests in the legislative process. Still, he had never been one to turn down an interview request from a friendly media outlet, and he felt quite confident in his ability to charm even the most ardent dissenter on the right. After all, these people loved him.