He can’t seriously say no to this, thought Rand.
He was wrong. After some more loquacious beating around the bush, Cruz finally answered, “Personally, no.”
Watching the exchange on TV, Rand’s advisers were nauseated by the Texas senator’s snake-oily smarm. But Rand himself was more dismayed by the implications of his colleague’s confession. Cruz couldn’t actually stop the Senate from passing a federal spending bill, but as the face of the defund-Obamacare movement, he was consulting daily with the Tea Party caucus in the GOP-controlled House—and they would force a government shutdown in a second if Cruz told them to. But to what end? As far as Rand could tell, Cruz was about to drive Washington off a cliff just so he could prove he wasn’t afraid of heights.
The Kentuckian didn’t know where his colleague was headed with all this, but he knew for sure that he wouldn’t be riding shotgun.
On the first day of October, the beloved twenty-four-hour live cam that broadcast round-the-clock footage of the resident baby panda at the National Zoo went dark, prompting a Twitter-wide outcry from the Internet’s vast and vocal constituency of cuddly-animal fans. It was one of the first visible casualties of a federal government that had run out of money—forced to shut down until Republicans and Democrats could reach a détente and turn the lights back on.
Sticking to the plan they had agreed on all those months ago in Mike Lee’s crowded conference room, the right-wing conspirators led by Cruz were refusing to entertain any legislation that included a cent for Obamacare. They reasoned that it wouldn’t be long before liberals started to revolt against the president for allowing their cherished big-government bureaucracies to go broke, and forced him to cave.
The next day, panicked Republican senators gathered for a closed-door lunch meeting in the Senate’s Mansfield Room and demanded to know Cruz’s endgame. They were now thirty-six hours into the shutdown crisis that the Texas freshman had caused, and they were hectoring him for answers: What’s your strategy for getting the Democrats to blink? What kind of concessions would you accept to put an end to this? How did you think this would end, Ted?
The truth was that Cruz had always known this gambit had no real chance of defunding Obamacare. He spoke openly about the reality of the situation only within a tight inner circle of trusted aides and allies. But as three of Cruz’s confidants would later tell me, very few of the original right-wing conspirators who gathered in Lee’s office for that first meeting believed that their shutdown strategy would have the effect they were publicly promising the patriots. “I don’t think you could find a single person in that room who really believed the plan would work,” one attendee confessed to me.
But Cruz was a gambler, and he was prepared to bank all his chips on the stunt, armed with nothing but several thousand die-hard supporters and his unyielding poker face. Knowing that the exercise likely wouldn’t spell the end for Obamacare didn’t mean that the Texas senator and his allies believed the whole exercise was without purpose. For one thing, they really did think that angling the massive klieg light of the national media toward Obamacare would reveal its flaws in greater detail than ever before, and hasten public disenchantment with the law. They also assumed their little game of chicken with the White House would at least result in a few policy concessions from the Democrats—a reasonable assumption, given recent history. And, as Cruz would go on to argue in keynote speeches and at fund-raising dinners for years to come, he thought any righteous cause that mobilized the conservative movement was ultimately a plus for the party. The Washington establishment needed a good scare every once in a while, and this had done the trick.
Of course, there were other, less noble-sounding reasons for driving the federal government to a shutdown. For example, the crusade was bound to produce a fund-raising windfall for the conservative organizations behind it, like Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund. For right-wing pressure groups, high-stakes dramas like these were only good for business.
And as for Cruz, standing center stage in the biggest political story of the year posed plenty of advantages. He was now the undisputed king of the Tea Party, having earned the sort of adoring reputation on the right after just ten months in the Senate that lesser living legends took years to build up. His shiny new political brand was sure to help position him for a presidential run in 2016, as would the thousands of activists’ phone numbers and email addresses that had been pouring in ever since he seized the mantle of defunder in chief. And even though he had no reason to believe Obamacare would get gutted the way he had been so confidently predicting, he thought his role as an ideological agitator was essential in the grand scheme of things. When debates like this arose, he saw his job as staking out the space on one far end of the spectrum—and then dragging the rest of his party toward him through force of argument and appeals to the conservative movement. If sometimes that meant telling a noble lie here or there to get them fired up, it was all for the cause of freedom. As one adviser in Cruz’s Senate office would explain to me, with startling bluntness, several days into the shutdown, “[Cruz] didn’t start with ‘Delay the individual mandate for a year,’ or some more complicated message like that, because that doesn’t make for a good hashtag.”
Of course, Cruz didn’t say any of this in the Mansfield Room, where he did his best to remain unflappable as his colleagues badgered him. In one contentious exchange, someone asked him if he would repudiate the attacks that outside conservative groups had been launching against GOP senators who didn’t support the defund strategy.
“I will not,” Cruz replied.
Later that day, as rumors of the heated closed-door Cruz grilling circulated throughout Washington, members of Congress received an odd letter from Rand Paul.
“Tension is at an all-time high here at the Capitol,” he wrote, in the diplomatic tone of a marriage counselor. “We are all anxious about the shutdown and had to send the bulk of our staff home—worried about their future… Maybe by chatting over coffee together, we can just talk and see if we can get along.”
The next morning, Rand showed up for what he had termed a “bipartisan coffee chat” at a designated spot on the steps of the Capitol—in full view of the nearby TV cameras. Sporting Ray-Ban sunglasses and draping his suit jacket casually over one shoulder, he evinced a low-key friendliness that was intended to contrast sharply with Cruz’s high-drama theatrics.
Rand had decided to put together this little gathering on a whim, but its underlying strategy had been a subject of much discussion and debate among his advisers recently. For months, political pundits had been predicting that he and Cruz were on a “collision course” for 2016, when the two presidential prospects would inevitably be battling it out for the support of the conservative grass roots. But if Rand decided to run for president, he didn’t want to build his campaign around the same elements of the conservative base that had always supported his dad. He had his eye on bigger things: a new, convention-defying coalition of voters. And Cruz’s shutdown fever had presented Rand with a perfect opportunity to begin positioning himself as a different kind of conservative.
Only a handful of Rand’s fellow lawmakers ended up attending his “bipartisan” powwow—including just one Democrat. But their cheerful thirty-minute huddle got the point across well enough when reporters overheard them joking about singing “Kumbaya.”
Over the next two weeks, chaos reigned in Washington. At the temporarily shuttered Vietnam War memorial, military veterans defied orders to stay off the property and police ended up forcibly removing them from the granite tribute that bore the names of their fallen comrades. At the nearby World War II memorial, conservative lawmakers actually joined veterans and demonstrators in storming the gates, leading officials to reinforce the surrounding barricades with wire that bound the fences together. At yet another demonstration, Cruz and Lee joined thousands of veterans as they converged on the White House and the Lincoln Memorial. Surrounded by watchful park police, Cruz rallied the
restless crowd.
“Let me ask a simple question,” he shouted. “Why is the federal government spending money to erect barricades to keep veterans out of this memorial?” A chorus of boos and shouts rang out while an American flag flew high behind him.
Across the country, meanwhile, the small indignities and injustices brought on by the shutdown continued to pile up. Hundreds of brides who had planned their weddings in national parks like Yellowstone were forced to tearfully change venues at the last minute. Philadelphia runners staged a rowdy protest in Valley Forge Park, while federal workers in Chicago marched angrily behind signs that read “Jobs Not Furloughs.”
At the same time, world markets were growing increasingly skittish about the possibility that the two parties would fail to reach a compromise before the U.S. government began defaulting on its debts. As the shutdown neared the end of its second week, financial forecasters handed in glum predictions, shaving multiple percentage points off their GDP projections. Some warned of soon-to-plummet stock prices and devastating disruptions to the housing market, while others said the political uncertainty in DC was already serving as a drag on the national economy, as investors held their breath for the apocalypse. “Even the discussion of default poses great risk to our economy and to our country,” warned Randall Stephenson, the chief executive at AT&T.
With the country careening haplessly toward fiscal calamity, the most powerful governing body in the free world had ground to a halt.
And standing amid all the pandemonium was Ted Cruz—reviled and scorned, hated and feared, but for the first time in his life at the center of the action. Washington and the world now turned on a hinge that he held in his palm, just as it was always meant to be.
In the end, even conservatives’ most modestly hopeful predictions for how the shutdown would end proved to be overly optimistic. After years of allowing Tea Party lawmakers to extract concessions from the Democrats during manufactured crises such as these, the White House had put its foot down, refusing to negotiate at all on the issue of Obamacare. After fourteen grueling days and a series of failed legislative gambits, congressional Republicans would finally cave without a single victory to point to. Making matters worse, there was evidence that the drama had wreaked havoc on the national perception of the GOP. On October 10, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll was released showing that the favorability rating for the Republican Party now stood at just 24 percent—the lowest it had been in at least two decades.
But even as the rattled Journal-reading GOP establishment publicly fretted about their party’s self-impalement at the hands of these unbridled Washington wacko birds, Cruz exhibited no hint of remorse, marching off to a large annual gathering of conservative activists in downtown DC, where the rapturous crowds greeted him like a conquering hero.
Thousands of patriots sprang to their feet as the Texas senator took the stage at the Values Voter Summit, and then a single voice called out from the audience, “If God is with you, who can be against you?” The rest of the patriots roared their approval, and Cruz bowed his head ever so slightly in a gesture of prophetic humility.
“I receive that blessing,” he told the crowd reverently.
Two days after the Journal poll set off a panic among party elites—and one day before the government would officially reopen, with Republicans having nothing to show for their fight—Cruz won the Values Voter presidential straw poll in a landslide.
He had finally found a place where he belonged. He knew his people, and he knew what they wanted. He was all in.
Chapter Eleven
Gridlock
It was the night before New Jersey’s 2013 gubernatorial election, and Chris Christie was spending it in Union City—a gritty working-class town and longtime stronghold for Garden State Democrats, with a population that was 85 percent Hispanic. This was not the kind of place Republican candidates hung out on the eve of an election. But Christie, as always, was proud to be his party’s exception. Just before his campaign rally began, supporters spilled out into the street from downtown stores, offices, and apartment buildings, filling a city block. Live salsa music blasted over the speakers, and onlookers munched on cold Cuban sandwiches and bounced up and down to keep warm in the near-freezing temperatures. Spanish-language signs were everywhere: “Yo Apoyo a Christie el Gobernador.”
Standing on a stage alongside the city’s Democratic mayor Brian Stack, Christie told the crowd, “When I asked Brian if we could do this, a couple of months ago, I thought to myself, I wonder what it’ll be like. I wonder what it’ll be like for me to go up to Union City on the night before my election. I wonder who’ll show up.”
He paused for dramatic effect, then boomed into his microphone, “Well, look at you!”
Christie could barely contain his delight, safe in the knowledge that by tomorrow he would be reelected in a landslide, with polls predicting stunning wins among Hispanic voters, huge gains with African Americans, and even a surge of support from Democrats. Best of all, he knew that the GOP’s political priesthood in Washington—more desperate than ever for a 2016 prospect who could save the party from wacko birds—would be salivating over Christie’s big win.
It had been just two weeks since the government shutdown ended, and the Republican establishment was increasingly infatuated with Christie, viewing him as a strong, tough, straight-talking standard-bearer who could help erase some of the damage that had been done during this most recent Tea Party fiasco. Not long ago, it had seemed to the moneyed megadonors and moderate politicos who populated the party’s pro-business establishment that they would have a dazzling cast of candidates to pick from in 2016. But Ted Cruz had just turned off everyone but the farthest right in the party, Marco Rubio’s poll numbers had imploded following the immigration debacle, Jeb Bush was MIA, and Scott Walker, the union-busting Wisconsin governor who had recently survived a recall attempt in his deep-blue state, was facing a tough reelection the next year, and no one knew if he would survive it. The last man standing, it seemed, was Christie.
The New Jersey governor held lots of appeal for the party’s pragmatic, pro-business wing. His minority outreach was an obvious plus, but there were also signs that he wouldn’t engage in the electorally toxic conservative culture war. He had recently dropped the fight against same-sex marriage in his state, acknowledging that the federal court legalizing the unions in New Jersey should have the last word.
And lately he had been speaking out vocally against the “wacko birds” in Washington who wanted to end the drone program, gut the NSA, and shut down the government. With weeks to go before election night, Christie had blasted the shutdown as “an awful example in governance,” the result of politicians who “played chicken with each other.”
“If I was in the Senate right now, I’d kill myself,” he joked.
Talk like this made the Republican donor class swoon. “He’s getting traction with people because people want to win,” said megadonor Ken Langone. “After 2012, it dawned on a lot of us that we need to have a better candidate, somebody who can connect, and Christie is the person who can do that.” Fred Malek, another prominent donor, said the governor’s expected reelection would establish him “as an instant Republican front-runner for 2016.”
As Christie looked out over the diverse sea of supporters convened in Union City, he offered a message of cooperation and inclusiveness—one he thought Washington could learn from. “For the last four years, we’ve worked together to confront every challenge, and now we have one more challenge left in front of us in 2013,” he said. “And that challenge left is to prove to all the folks who say we can’t come together and work together, that we can’t do things together regardless of party… Are you ready to prove them wrong tomorrow?”
The next day, Christie was reelected with 51 percent of Latino voters, 21 percent of black voters, and 32 percent of Democrats. If there was a single microcosm of what the party needed to replicate nationally, New Jersey was it.
And then…
On January 8, 2014, the Wall Street Journal posted a story on its website headlined “Bridge-Spat Emails Pose Questions for Christie.” Beneath the starchy headline was an explosive revelation: Christie’s staff had orchestrated a major, several-days-long traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey—one of the most heavily trafficked areas in the country—to retaliate against the town’s mayor for refusing to endorse the governor for reelection. For four days in September 2013, the busiest bridge in the country was reduced to just one access lane. The delays were massive, with emergency workers abandoning their ambulances by foot rather than waiting for traffic to move.
For months, Democrats had been spreading rumors of foul play. And now the damning emails and texts from the governor’s staff, which the Journal published in full, seemed to confirm the allegations. Weeks before two out of three lanes onto the George Washington Bridge were shut down, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, emailed Christie-appointed Port Authority executive David Wildstein, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
“Is it wrong that I am smiling?” Wildstein texted in one exchange with Kelly.
“No,” Kelly replied.
“I feel badly about the kids,” he admitted.
“They are the children of Buono voters,” she replied, referring to Christie’s former opponent, Barbara Buono.
The revelation set off a national feeding frenzy in the media, and “Bridgegate,” as it quickly became known, dominated every broadcast in the country.
On January 9, Christie stepped up to an ornately carved lectern beneath the chandelier of Trenton’s statehouse, wearing a discreetly pin-striped suit, a flag pin in the shape of New Jersey, and a contrite face. He was penitent and apologetic, and at times even deferential to the reporters he had made a career out of castigating in public. He seemed drained of the swagger that had long defined his political persona.
The Wilderness Page 19