The government could require every American to purchase long-term and catastrophic health-care insurance to provide for overwhelming needs, such as chronic illness and nursing home expenses. A federal regulatory board would operationalize the efficacy requirement, i.e., indicate when particular treatments must receive funding. Both premiums and extent of coverage would vary according to an individual’s income and needs; the government would subsidize premiums so that every individual could afford the necessary coverage. Young adults and the wealthy would pay more for their coverage than they would receive in benefits; the elderly and the poor would receive more in benefits than they paid in coverage. Obviously, premiums would not fluctuate with age or health and would thus be based on community, instead of experiential, rates; insurance companies would be obligated to issue and renew coverage, regardless of preexisting conditions.
While some of these ideas were kicking around right-leaning think tanks at the time, the basic contours of the policies Jindal was proposing—a personal health insurance mandate, a government regulatory board that decided which treatments should be subsidized, the preexisting conditions clause—would later become anathema to conservatives in the Obamacare era.
Jindal didn’t know it at the time, but his months at Oxford set him on a collision course of conscience. Under Dworkin, he had gone from being a smart kid who wielded his intellect like a weapon to a genuinely thoughtful student of ideas—not without convictions, but willing to submit them to interesting challenges from all quarters of the intellectual world. He came to love working alongside ideological adversaries, and he developed a deep appreciation for nuance. But he also decided he was destined for a life in politics. He found his personal ambitions shifting away from practicing medicine and towards policy making, reasoning that he would be able to help millions in government as opposed to treating sick people one by one.
Compared to the many aspiring officeholders who populated Oxford while he was there, Jindal seemed like an unlikely political prospect. Whereas his self-confidence manifested itself in more bookish pursuits, his fellow Rhodes scholar Cory Booker, for example, oozed candidate-like charisma, strutting around campus with his arm around a rotating cast of pretty coeds. (When the unmarried Booker later faced gay rumors as he ran for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, Jindal was skeptical. “If that’s true,” he would later joke, “then he had a lot of beards. He was really overcompensating.”)
But Jindal was just as ambitious as anyone, and when the time came decades later for him to overhaul his personality in pursuit of the presidency, he wouldn’t hesitate.
The new and improved—and nosier—Bobby Jindal of 2014 was the product of months of behind-the-scenes deliberation among his advisers. Shortly after the Duck Dynasty episode, with Jindal riding a wave of populist glory, his team decided it was time to punch up the governor’s rhetoric—but how?
To those who worked with him, it was no secret that beneath Jindal’s wholesome, well-mannered earnestness was a barbed wit that he was liable to swing at you in moments of frustration or boredom, or even just for his own amusement. “If you start trading insults with him, it’s not gonna go well for you,” one close adviser said. Everyone on Jindal’s team had a story about falling victim to one of his acerbic put-downs. Once, when he was visiting the Old Town Alexandria offices of Curt Anderson’s consulting firm, OnMessage, he noticed that the shelves of industry awards on display included one for the radio ads the firm had produced during his failed 2003 gubernatorial campaign. “Oh, that’s nice,” Jindal murmured. “Kind of like the juice boxes and trophies they give to every kid after they lose a soccer game.” Later, as Anderson and his colleagues pitched to him on why they should be hired to work on his next campaign, Jindal quipped, “I’d like to congratulate you guys. You had the cojones to come in here and tell me how good you are right after we just lost.” Another time, after his staff insisted that he sit for a briefing from his pollsters, he impatiently announced, “My calendar says that the next fifteen minutes are devoted to y’all presenting some junk science that is as useful to me as voodoo.”
Jindal’s aides mostly enjoyed his swaggering sarcasm, but they also recognized that it might not be received well outside the quarters of the foulmouthed, overcaffeinated political class. Anderson, in particular, worried that Jindal would come off as a condescending smart-ass if he revealed that side of himself to the public, and whenever it flared up during debate prep sessions or mock press interviews, the operative actively worked to tamp it down. “I always thought it was a little bit dangerous,” Anderson said.
But Jindal was no longer merely contending for votes in the Bayou State. He was vying for attention from a national conservative media complex that often appeared as though it valued political trolling above all other forms of persuasion. Proving your argument right was nice, and defeating your ideological enemies was great. But successfully whipping up the Left into an indignant, frothy-mouthed frenzy by saying something strategically provocative—that was the gold standard. And for a Republican who wanted to be a champion of the conservative movement, it was a craft that had to be mastered.
Over the next few months, Jindal punctuated his speeches with increasingly razor-edged partisan barbs. At the Saint Patrick’s Day Wild Irish Breakfast in Nashua, New Hampshire, he earned roaring applause and laughter with a line that would turn into a mainstay of his rhetoric. “Are we witnessing the most extremely liberal, ideological administration in our country’s modern history? Or are we witnessing the most incompetent administration in our country’s history? Well, to quote Secretary Clinton, what difference does it make?”
His writing became more fiery as well—not to mention more abundant. To overcome his distance from the DC press corps, Jindal began cranking out op-eds at a stunning pace, firing off more than twenty different articles in the first half of 2014, and sending his staff scrambling to find publications that would take them. No newspaper was too small, and no issue too obscure, to disqualify itself from Jindal weighing in: what mattered was that he was everywhere. There he was in the Ouachita Citizen, demanding to know what the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org had “against individuals with disabilities.” Here he was in the New York Post, comparing New York City’s mayor to a “petulant tyrant holding low-income students hostage.” There he was on some website called NetRightDaily, accusing the Obama administration of sending the IRS on a political witch hunt, or “jeopardizing the freedoms of billions of citizens the world over,” or any number of other transgressions. As with any weekly columnist—because that’s effectively what he had become—Jindal’s body of work varied in quality and tone. But the pieces often read as though they were written by the governor’s hyperaggressive alter ego, a right-wing Mr. Hyde.
He continued to roll out new policy proposals, but his efforts seemed pro forma, and his ideas were greeted unenthusiastically by the conservative wonk crowd. In the spring, Jindal’s policy group, America Next, introduced a proposed health-care plan that would repeal Obamacare, dramatically shrink costs, and reduce the number of Americans who were insured. The plan was missing many of the ideas he had written about at Oxford—it would eliminate the insurance mandate, provide no tax relief for catastrophic care, and lift regulations aimed at protecting people with preexisting conditions—and even many conservatives found it to be too austere. In April, when Jindal traveled to Washington and met with a small group of right-leaning policy writers and scholars to pitch the plan, he received strong pushback from conservatives who thought the kind of cuts he was calling for would be devastatingly unpopular in a post-Obamacare world. Writing about the plan after the meeting, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat summed up, in his perpetually polite manner, the real logic of Jindal’s plan: “Politically, I don’t think there’s any question that Jindal’s argument… would play well with at least part of the GOP electorate in a primary campaign.”
The overhaul to Jindal’s political persona was jarringly obvious to many in t
he press, but his team dutifully spun his new act as perfectly in sync with the old, wonky, thoughtful, “stupid party”–bashing governor. “He’s not a dog who’ll take a kicking,” an adviser told U.S. News when a reporter asked about the change in tone. “We are not hiding it anymore.”
In late April 2014, Jindal published an op-ed on CNN’s website titled “The ‘Stupid Party,’ Revisited” in which he sought to dispense with any lingering perception of himself as a smarty-pants scold trying to make his party more thoughtful and intelligent. “While it is true that we as Republicans need to do a better job articulating our principles and being the party of bold new ideas, the Democrats have a far worse problem,” he wrote. “Democrats need to stop being the party that thinks Americans themselves are stupid.” Never mind that less than two years earlier, one of his central prescriptions for his own party was to “stop insulting the intelligence of voters.” The new Jindal was a happy partisan warrior, doling out affirmation for Republicans and withering criticism for Democrats every chance he got.
This pose wasn’t entirely new for Jindal. He was a politician, after all, and black-and-white partisanship was always part of the gig. But for years, Jindal had been speaking to conservatives in two different languages, simulcasting brains and policy sophistication to the GOP elites, and a brash, rowdy zest for culture war to the right-wing base. The result was that his message had always been muddled—a sort of Spanglish that both groups could make out, but neither found particularly inspiring.
Now it was quite clear that Jindal had chosen the guttural growl of the conservative movement as his first language. His most ungenerous critics said he was a sellout, that he had dumbed himself down and become the embodiment of everything he once wanted to purge from his own party. But Jindal didn’t care. He had been blessed with the gift of tongues, and his fluency was winning converts—converts who might stick around for a presidential run. Who could possibly say that was dumb?
Four days after Jindal’s raucous performance in South Carolina, a small contingent of right-wing elites gathered for an intimate dinner party at the Great Falls, Virginia, home of conservative superactivist Brent Bozell.
The evening’s guest list comprised leaders of the country’s most influential Tea Party organizations and right-wing pressure groups—people whose shared mission was to burn down the Republican establishment and install a new regime of brash, populist hard-liners in its place. They included Heritage Action’s Mike Needham, who had masterminded the 2013 government shutdown; Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who could sic a mob of culture warriors on any Republican who signaled disloyalty to the religious Right; Tea Party Patriots founder Jenny Beth Martin; Andy Roth of the Club for Growth; David Bossie of Citizens United; and prominent conservative fund-raiser Richard Norman. These were four-star generals in the conservative movement, and together they commanded millions of pavement-pounding activists and many tens of millions of dollars.
They were just starting in on the ceviche hors d’oeuvres when Martin glanced at her phone to check the early returns in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s primary race. Like her dinner companions, she viewed the Virginia congressman as emblematic of the Republicans’ corrupt, compromising congressional leadership—but she wasn’t holding out hope for him to lose tonight’s contest. Cantor was running against an obscure conservative economics professor named David Brat, who had little money and no discernible campaign structure. Last she had heard, his entire operation consisted of two part-time aides who shared a flip phone for campaign business. Just a few days earlier, the Washington Post had reported that the Cantor campaign’s internal polling showed him cruising to a thirty-four-point victory in the primary.
At the moment, Martin saw, Brat was slightly ahead in the vote totals—but only two precincts had reported so far. She shared the news with the dinner party.
“Cantor should give his concession speech now!” Bozell joked.
Everyone laughed, but it wasn’t long before their phones started buzzing with the startling news that Cantor, the second most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives, was actually about to go down to a grassroots insurgent.
The development upended the friendly dinner party, as attendees began hurriedly placing calls to activists and scanning their phones for updates. Somebody turned on CNN, and they watched, awestruck, as the race was officially called for Brat.
“Can you think of a greater political upset in your life?” Bozell marveled. “I can’t think of one. This is stunning. This is the conservative movement on fire.”
The mood at the party quickly evolved from shock, to ebullient celebration, and finally to defiance. All through the midterm primary season over the past few months, the people in this room had seen their efforts to engineer another 2010-style Tea Party insurrection fall flat. There was a reason for this: after watching Ted Cruz and his brigade of bomb throwers shut down the government a year earlier, the GOP’s establishment forces had redoubled their efforts to beat back right-wing challengers in primary races across the country and bolster electable, reasonable-sounding Republican candidates. With the help of groups from the chamber of commerce to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, they had largely succeeded—and lately the national political press had been permeated with obituaries marking the demise of the Tea Party.
Now Bozell and his comrades couldn’t help but indulge in a little gloating.
“Is the establishment going to get questions for the next week and a half asking whether they’re dead?” Martin joked sarcastically.
“Damn right we won!” Bozell exclaimed. “Damn right the movement is still alive!”
The irony was that none of the groups represented at Bozell’s dinner table had actually supported Brat’s campaign, all having deemed it a lost cause. Cantor, determined not to get caught flat-footed by a primary challenger, had actually sunk himself by spending $2 million on a negative ad campaign that inadvertently elevated his opponent and touched off a last-minute conservative backlash.
But even if it was a fluke, no one in Great Falls that night seemed to care. They had Cantor’s head on a pike, and they planned to hoist it in the air as they paraded through the streets reenergizing the right wing and reclaiming the momentum in the Republican civil war.
Over wine and vegetable lasagna, the group looked past the midterms and began plotting for the next presidential race. The question at hand was how they could use tonight’s coup to embolden the Tea Party, and make sure a true conservative triumphed in the 2016 primaries. Ted Cruz’s name came up. Rand Paul’s did, too. Somebody mentioned that Jindal was showing promise. They weren’t ready to coalesce around a single populist contender—at least not yet—but they all fervently agreed that they could not let the party nominate another milquetoast moderate like Mitt Romney.
As the room buzzed, Bozell briefly retreated from the dinner with his public relations consultant to craft a press release that ominously warned of the war on the horizon.
“Eric Cantor’s loss tonight is an apocalyptic moment for the GOP establishment,” the statement read. “The grass roots is in revolt and marching.”
PART IV
PROMISED LAND
Chapter Eighteen
Ball and Chain
Almost as soon as he became a credible presidential prospect, Rand Paul began cheekily referring reporters’ questions about his 2016 plans to his wife, Kelley. “There’s two votes in my family. My wife has both of them,” he joked to the Detroit Economic Club in December 2013. Nine months later, he reported to inquisitive attendees at a New Hampshire fund-raiser that “my wife is not completely convinced of it.” And in November 2014, he responded to 2016 queries shouted across a campaign rope line in Kentucky by instructing reporters to “ask my wife.”
Washington’s smart set didn’t give any of this much thought. Rand seemed to be playing the shtick in the winking, sitcom-y way of a suburban husband who says he’s got to “ask the boss” before he can join his buddies
for poker night. It was a well-worn bit in politics—a little smarmy, maybe, but popular across time zones, and particularly effective with swing state soccer moms. The fact remained that no politician in recent memory had been more brazenly transparent about his presidential ambitions than the junior senator from Kentucky. He was staffing up his vast and growing shadow campaign, networking with Iowa power brokers and Manhattan moneymen, and posing for one magazine cover after another. As far as the political class was concerned, Rand Paul was running for president. As for his routine display of deference to his wife, they chalked it up to the faux coyness in which every candidate cloaks himself before eventually entering the race, hand in hand with a prim and smiling spouse.
It wasn’t that.
Behind the closed doors of their redbrick colonial in Bowling Green, family confidants told me, Rand had been engaged in a carefully orchestrated and increasingly desperate lobbying effort to get his wife on board with the idea of a presidential campaign—and the whip count of one was proving stubbornly resistant to his efforts. By the fall of 2014, rumors of Kelley’s reluctance had begun to spread within Rand’s orbit, and many became genuinely worried that she might actually pull the plug at the last minute on the operation they had been building for years.
“Think of it from her perspective,” one adviser told me in October 2014. “You’re comfortable. You’re happy. You’ve got a kid still in high school, two in college, and your husband could run for reelection in Kentucky and probably win hands down.” The adviser then added, with a sigh suggesting defeat, “Would you want to put yourself through a presidential campaign?”
Kelley took some pleasure in the mild panic she had set off among the colony of worker bees that was constantly buzzing around her husband. This was her family, after all. Her life. And no matter how confident and in control Doug Stafford and the rest of Rand’s DC operators pretended to be, this was still her decision—and she wanted them to know it.
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