The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  A man shouted out from one of the pews, “Cat!”

  “Aw, no,” Webster responded, grinning. “I never knew that. Does that mean you was a cat daddy?”

  The men laughed knowingly, and Ryan laughed carefully.

  At one point, Ryan was invited to speak. He kept his remarks brief. “Look,” he said. “I have a lot of humility right now. I just want to—I’m here to learn. I’m here to listen.”

  Near the end of the service, Webster invited the audience to stand for a song, and Ryan rose with them. A two-man band on the stage began to play as lyrics scrolled across projector screens hanging on the walls. Most of the men were familiar with the routine; Ryan clearly wasn’t. Still, he bent his arms in the position of “receiving” like everyone else, and began gently swaying back and forth, as though he was slow dancing in middle school. He opened his mouth ever so slightly—just wide enough to let the words seep out—and started to sing.

  Here’s my hands, oh Lord.

  Here’s my hands, oh Lord.

  I offer them to you.

  As a living sacrifice.

  The song had several verses, and with each stanza the chapel full of amateur baritones swelled with fervor. Ryan remained stone-faced, his eyes dutifully locked on the projector screens. And when the band eventually stopped and the pastor closed the meeting with a prayer—that God would bless Ryan with “understanding as he crisscrosses the country”—the congressman’s voice seemed to grow louder than it had been all morning as he said “Amen.”

  Hours after the service, Ryan was still self-conscious about how he had performed during the devotional. “I’m so goofy with that stuff,” he said. “It’s just not my thing. I’m Catholic!”

  The uproar over Ryan’s “inner-city” comments threw into sharp relief the sheer audacity of his mission to transform the GOP into champions of the poor. He felt as though he had charged headfirst without a helmet into a bitterly entrenched battle on unfamiliar terrain, zealously and clumsily fighting for a segment of the American public that Republicans hadn’t reached in generations. And he was concerned that all the demagoguery he was now experiencing would prevent his fellow Republicans from joining the cause.

  “He knows this kind of crap is the price of admission when you challenge the Left’s perceived political monopoly,” one Ryan adviser told me amid the hailstorm of criticism. “But the 2012 experience was very helpful in thickening the body armor. I think the bigger worry is what sort of signal it sends to would-be reformers… It can be really dispiriting.”

  What made it more daunting was Ryan’s realization that this probably wouldn’t be the last time he said something dumb or insensitive as he tried to build inroads to the urban poor. It was just the nature of the project: if he had any chance of advancing a conservative antipoverty agenda, he would have to fight and fumble his way through a thousand little gaffes, missteps, and screwups. “What I learned is that there’s a whole language and history that people are very sensitive to, understandably so,” Ryan told me. “We just have to better understand. You know, we’ll be a little clumsy, but it’s with the right intentions behind it.” It would be frequently awkward and occasionally humiliating, but it was also better than staying on the sidelines.

  This was Ryan’s attitude when he walked into a closed-door meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus on April 30, 2014. The caucus had invited him to its meeting shortly after his radio interview, and his initial instinct had been to make peace with his colleagues by profusely apologizing and lathering on his trademark flattery.

  But when Woodson heard about the invitation, he urged Ryan not to waste time with mea culpas. This was a rare opportunity to talk to his partisan opponents about poverty, outside the reach of TV cameras and buzzthirsty pundits. He should embrace the inherent ideological friction and speak his mind bluntly—not reach for a “Kumbaya” hugfest.

  “He was expecting to get his ass kicked, and I told him, ‘Don’t go in there with your hat in your hand,’” Woodson later told me. “I coached him on that. I said, ‘You know, first of all, you need to recognize that you have visited more poor black communities than any of them have.’ I told Paul, ‘Never play defense.’ I don’t have any defensive plays in my playbook. I’m all attack, all the time.”

  Ryan took his advice, and began girding himself for a knock-down, drag-out fight with a bunch of lawmakers who had spent the past several weeks calling him racist on MSNBC. He wouldn’t defend the phrasing of his now-infamous comments, but he decided he wouldn’t apologize for them either. Instead, he was prepared to offer a vigorous defense of his conservative vision for fighting poverty—and that included addressing the toxic culture created by society’s isolation of the poor.

  To Ryan’s surprise, though, the tone of the meeting was decidedly subdued. After offering some mild criticism of what he had said on the radio, the lawmakers dropped the subject—and the made-for-cable bluster—and earnestly questioned him about his trips into poor urban neighborhoods. Ryan was able to plead his case for decentralized, homegrown poverty cures, and tell some powerful stories about the people on the ground making a difference in the communities he’d visited.

  Still, he and his black Democratic colleagues couldn’t find much common ground on policy. The lawmakers remained dismayed at the deep cuts to federal social programs Ryan called for in his budget, and they believed his austere fiscal proposals represented an irreconcilable tension with his stated concern for the poor.

  Describing the meeting afterward to reporters, caucus chairwoman Representative Marcia Fudge said that while Ryan claimed his observation about inner-city culture was merely inarticulate, “his policies belie that and basically say that he believes what he said.”

  The question of what Ryan truly believed was at the heart of the controversy surrounding his outreach and his “inner-city” gaffe, and it was one that had trailed him through his entire career. But now, after years of having his personal motives dissected and held up for public inspection by all of Washington, he was growing tired of it. What Ryan believed was that the best way to help the poor was to scale back the massive federal programs and empower a diverse constellation of Emmanuel Missionary–like programs, each one of them tailored to its specific community.

  Was that really so sinister?

  Later that year, when the House committee that Ryan chaired released the Republicans’ 2014 budget without any of his antipoverty proposals factored in, his critics pounced. The liberal New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, one of Ryan’s most prolific antagonists in the commentariat, wrote that the omission “reveals something very deep” about him: “His policy vision is fundamentally impossible.”

  Ryan defended himself at the time, telling me, “I’ve got two roles. I’m chairman of the House Budget Committee, representing my conference… and I’m a House member representing Wisconsin, doing my own thing. I can’t speak for everybody and put my stuff in their budget. My work on poverty is a separate thing.”

  But many found this argument unconvincing—including his own poverty Sherpa. The truth, Woodson believed, was that Ryan was growing tired of the limitations imposed by the budget process—and the politics of Capitol Hill—as he spent more time visiting with the poor outside the Beltway. “He wants to spend less time with budgets, less time arguing in Congress, and he’s desperate to spend more time with us,” Woodson said. “I think he’s tired of it; I think he finds it a little tedious. It’s just not how Paul defines who Paul Ryan is anymore.”

  As 2016 neared, Ryan would continue to answer questions about whether he planned to run with vague, I’m-thinking-about-it language that left the door open. Polls showed him in the top tier of Republican presidential prospects, and many assumed that if he entered the race the nomination would be his for the taking. And yet, for the first time in his life, Ryan was starting to think about getting out of politics altogether.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Double Bind in the Greenroom

>   While Paul Ryan was planning his exit from the political carnival once and for all, Carly Fiorina was ardently searching for a way in. Which was why she spent the week of the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2014 bobbing in and out of a testosterone-soaked greenroom. The small, curtained-off enclave in the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor, Maryland, was where the Right’s big wheels, big deals, and bigheaded alpha males converged to sniff one another and assert dominance before stomping onto the stage and triumphantly beating their chests in front of a roaring crowd of conservative activists. Nowhere was Fiorina more acutely aware of her middling place in the Republican food chain than here.

  In other rooms, and in another era, Fiorina would have easily commanded the attention of the cheap suits milling around her. As a trailblazing executive whose meteoric rise had once made her the most powerful businesswoman in U.S. history, she had spent her fair share of time busting up boardroom boys’ clubs. Once, she had gone so far as to stuff wadded-up athletic socks down her pants and then flaunt her bulging crotch at a high-stakes sales meeting as she declared, “Our balls are as big as anyone’s in this room!” “It was an outrageous thing to do,” she would later concede, but “effective communication means speaking in a language people understand.” And to the cocky, irreverent, foulmouthed sales bros in that 1999 meeting, the message of her brash stunt had come through loud and clear.

  But the VIP sausage fest on display backstage at the conservative movement’s marquee annual gathering was not so easily won over. Here at CPAC—where thousands of activists had descended on a riverside convention complex in Maryland for four days to cheer on a star-studded lineup of Republican speakers—Fiorina was not a star. She was not in charge, nor was she one of the guys. Her pioneering private sector career might have earned her an eight-figure net worth and a case study carve-out in management textbooks, but in the insular world of conservative bigwigs, she was just a failed Senate candidate whose most valuable proven skill was soliciting political donations from her fellow millionaires. She was well regarded and well liked, sure, but certainly not feared. Brimming with competence, but lacking in clout. And while her perch on the board of the American Conservative Union, which put on this conference each year, guaranteed her a speaking slot this week, no one was expecting much of a performance. Among the few political reporters who had spotted her name in the program, it was widely assumed that she was there to fill some kind of double X chromosome quota.

  Fiorina knew all this. She was clear-eyed about her D-list standing in the conservative statusphere, and she had mostly made peace with it. But then, at a meeting on the eve of the conference’s kickoff, a fellow board member of the ACU blindsided her with a strange suggestion.

  “Carly,” he said, “I want to talk to you about running for president.”

  She was taken aback by the suggestion. “It was sort of out of the blue,” she would later tell me. Fiorina knew that the Washington wise guys who were already busy handicapping the 2016 primaries would deem the notion laughable—and, frankly, she couldn’t entirely blame them. She had never held elective office, and her foray into electoral politics had ended in 2010 with a double-digit defeat to her Democratic Senate opponent in California. But when a prominent member of the ACU board, no small figure in the party, says you’d make a good commander in chief, you don’t just shrug him off.

  Fiorina had responded tentatively: “Okay, let’s talk about that.” And then they agreed to table the topic until after the conference was over.

  And so she had spent the week cheering on the CPAC parade of superstars while this crazy “What if?” ping-ponged around in her head. Fiorina had no doubt that she was every bit as smart, gutsy, and qualified for the presidency as political peacocks like Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. The notion that presidents had to be picked from such a small pool of politicos was preposterous to her, and she believed it flew in the face of the citizen government the Founding Fathers had set up. She had also been itching to get back in the arena ever since 2012, when Democrats had spent the entire election using wedge issues like abortion and birth control to weave an audaciously dishonest narrative about conservatives waging a “war on women.” She wanted to pull out her hair as she watched her party’s feeble, bumbling response. On Election Day, Mitt Romney had lost women by a whopping eleven-point margin, and single women had voted against him two to one. The fiasco had convinced her that the men of the GOP were either too sissy to fight back or too stupid to do it right—and it had left her with lots to say on the subject. But would anyone listen?

  On the final day of the conference, a plugged-in Republican strategist named Mercedes Viana Schlapp took the stage ahead of Fiorina and delivered an unexpectedly lofty introduction for someone who was a virtual unknown to most in the audience.

  “It is my honor to introduce a true leader,” Schlapp said. “She has led in the private sector. She leads in the charitable world. She is leading in the debate of ideas. She bravely took on liberal Barbara Boxer in California. That’s right—she ran against a liberal woman in the most liberal state in the country.” Schlapp paused for some lukewarm applause and then delivered the kicker: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if she took on another liberal woman in 2016?”

  This was the first time anyone had publicly mentioned Fiorina as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, and the idea was not exactly greeted as a stroke of brilliance even by the ebullient crowd of happy partisan warriors. Schlapp’s line was met with scattered laughter that morphed into tepid applause as the attendees seemed to realize she was being serious.

  But Fiorina wouldn’t be a joke for long. When the introduction concluded, she strode across the stage in a royal-purple skirt suit and launched into her feisty speech with an opening line that was sure to grab the crowd’s attention.

  “You know what makes me mad?”

  The rhetorical question was followed by a litany of Republican-approved answers: environmental regulations that were hurting California farmers; mayoral crusades against charter schools in New York City; climate change alarmists hyperventilating about the weather; economic ignoramuses calling for hikes to the minimum wage. These were standard clap lines at CPAC, and the audience politely applauded through the first half of her speech.

  But then she arrived at the grievance that would ultimately serve as her presidential launching pad.

  “And one last example,” Fiorina said. “I am a proud, pro-life woman… I am prepared to accept and respect that not all women agree with me. I know how lonely a woman can feel when she faces a terrible decision. What we are not prepared to accept is that we are waging a war on women simply because we know that an abortion at five months is inhumane to mother and child.”

  The audience erupted, as Fiorina expertly adjusted the volume of her voice to speak just above the din, building on the room’s energy.

  “We are not waging a war on women simply because we believe there is no reason for birth control to be free!”

  There were more cheers, and Fiorina charged forward.

  “We respect all women and we do not insult them by thinking that all they care about is reproductive rights!”

  The crowd was growing noisier now, the enthusiasm was frenetic. This was a ballroom full of conservatives who had spent much of their lives angrily, indignantly, and desperately fending off the Left’s accusations of misogyny. And now here was Fiorina, a prominent, successful, career-driven woman—the kind of glass-ceiling shatterer that liberals and feminists loved to celebrate—telling them they had nothing to be ashamed of. Not only was she absolving them of their supposed war crimes, but she was calling out the other side’s intolerance and condescension. And while she wasn’t saying anything her audience didn’t already believe, there was a psychic satisfaction in seeing an impeccably credentialed woman like Fiorina say it.

  “All issues are women’s issues!” Fiorina proclaimed as the crowd roared. “We are half of this great nation!”

  The speech generat
ed few headlines in the mainstream press—many reporters didn’t even bother to watch it—and the ground-level buzz around Fiorina would soon be drowned out by the populist ramblings of CPAC’s grand finale speaker, Sarah Palin.

  But that brief jolt of enthusiasm was all Fiorina needed to begin seriously entertaining a long shot presidential bid.

  “What I remember most was young men—and young women, especially—coming up to me and saying, ‘I loved that speech! You have to stay out there!’” she would later tell me. “So that really made me pause and think. Because it was obvious that what I had said and the way I had said it was different, and broke through for a lot of people.”

  For most of her climb up the corporate ladder, Fiorina had tried not to play the lady card. In conference rooms and on corporate retreats, she affected with her male colleagues the manner of a good-natured towel snapper rather than an HR tattletale. She encountered the same routine slights and petty prejudices endured by every woman in the workplace—and they often drove her nuts. But she adhered strictly to a Lent-like abstention from victimhood, grinning gamely through cracks about her wardrobe and menstrual cycle, and refusing to react emotionally when competitors and coworkers called her a “bitch.”

  Once, early in her career, a group of male coworkers—apparently threatened by her success—conspired to move an important meeting with one of her clients in DC to a strip club called the Board Room.

  “The thing is,” a colleague said while informing her of the change, “they have a favorite restaurant here in DC, and they’ve requested that we meet there. You know, I always do what the customer wants, and so I don’t think you’ll be able to join us.”

  Fiorina spent a couple of hours agonizing over the power play before finally deciding, Screw it. She donned a power suit and bow tie and charged into the strip club on time for the meeting. To get to where her coworkers were seated, she had to walk the length of a stage where a live striptease was taking place. “I looked like a complete idiot,” she later recalled. But when she arrived at the table, she found her coworkers and clients shocked—but at least a little impressed. Fiorina attended to her client while strippers in see-through baby doll negligees danced on tables all around them, and by the time the meeting was over, she had won over the group.