The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  The high priest of process was losing his faith.

  But Ryan wasn’t entirely without hope. Two years after setting out, there was no denying that his post-2012 effort to wedge poverty into the Republican Party’s national agenda had made serious progress. Potential 2016 standard-bearers from every ideological corner of the GOP were now regularly talking about the plight and problems of the poor, and many were pledging to make those issues cornerstones of their presidential campaigns if they decided to run.

  Bobby Jindal was now framing his fight with the Justice Department over Louisiana’s school voucher program as a war against “cruel policies that will only perpetuate the cycle of poverty.” Rand Paul was traveling to impoverished areas of the country like Detroit to sermonize about the “two separate worlds” where big-government policies allow “the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.” Marco Rubio had introduced his own set of antipoverty proposals in the Senate, arguing earnestly that “the millions currently trapped in poverty and despair are a tremendous untapped resource,” while Chris Christie called for greater national attention to be placed on the working poor, who made up “the backbone of every American community.”

  Remarkably, complaints about “income inequality”—once widely dismissed by conservatives as a socialist concept—were now being uttered seriously by GOP figures ranging from Ted Cruz to Jeb Bush. Cruz had co-opted a onetime Occupy Wall Street rallying cry and made it Tea Party–friendly by lamenting that in the Obama economy, “the top one percent earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928.” And Bush would launch his political action committee in January, doing so with a bold declaration that “the income gap is real.” In the PAC’s mission statement, Bush would write, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America. The playing field is no longer fair or level.”

  Some of these Republicans had been drawn to the issue independently, but throughout the party there was wide acknowledgment that Ryan’s crusade had been a driving force behind this new GOP emphasis. After the congressman gave one of his speeches about poverty at the Manhattan Institute, Bush glowingly praised his family-centered approach to lifting the poor without overbearing government programs: “When it comes to the American family, Paul Ryan has it right.”

  But Ryan was also better acquainted than most with the realities of presidential politics, and knew there could be nothing worse for his agenda than to charge into the crowded, competitive 2016 presidential primaries. Some rivals would no doubt de-emphasize their own poverty talk, figuring Ryan had the market cornered on the issue, while others might even begin blasting away at his proposals in an effort to outflank him on the right. If the goal was to place the issue front and center in the primaries, Ryan decided it would be better to stay on the sidelines, advising everyone in the field and declining to endorse any one contender.

  “I didn’t want to jeopardize this project and these causes by betting it on a presidential campaign,” he would later explain to a reporter. “You know, who knows who’s going to win?… I wanted to make sure that this got some distance from being seen as some personal ambitious project for a politician.”

  In his new position, Ryan knew that his critics would be watching him closely, expecting him to promptly dispose of his poverty agenda now that he wielded such a coveted gavel. And he was committed to proving their doubts wrong. But as Ryan considered the next chapter of his career, he found himself looking back to a meeting a couple of months earlier, held in the towering glass-sheathed building of the National Association of Realtors on Washington’s New Jersey Avenue.

  In the boardroom that September evening, Woodson later told me, the longtime activist had assembled almost every one of the advocates Ryan had met over the course of his poverty tour, calling it a “family reunion.” Looking around the table, Ryan saw pioneering pastors who were coming up with new solutions for homelessness, tireless counselors who spent all their time attending to heroin addicts, and an inspiring band of extra-mile advocates who were pouring their lives into helping actual people each day, instead of dreaming up doomed policy ideas. If his excursions into their churches and halfway houses had convinced him of anything, it was that their day-to-day work was infinitely more meaningful than anything he could accomplish in Washington.

  But before the three-hour meeting ended, Woodson and his colleagues sought to remind him that he played a key role in their mission as well. After all, the “Pharaoh-Joseph relationship” that Woodson liked to talk about couldn’t produce miracles without kings in well-appointed boardrooms who were willing to audaciously defy the conventions of power and follow the lead of the righteous visionaries in lower castes.

  With great ceremony, Woodson called Ryan to the front of the room and presented him with a mock cover of Time magazine that featured a photo of him. As the room dissolved into laughter, Ryan read the cover line: “Paul Ryan Named Ambassador to the Hood.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Shock and Awe

  One morning late in 2014, Jeb Bush awoke from his long season of political slumber and decided he was ready to become president now.

  For the past year and a half, he had deliberately avoided the frenzied to-and-fro of his party’s various intramural skirmishes, enjoying a leisurely respite from the sweaty, wearisome business of politicking. He’d spent the time, instead, reading, and golfing, and tinkering with his special homemade guacamole recipe, and attending various functions in ballrooms where well-dressed Floridians bathed him in affection. Of course, he made certain not to vanish completely from the national political stage, stumping for Republican candidates during the midterms and giving the occasional speech to well-heeled donor types. But by and large, he had lain low ever since the unpleasantness of his 2013 book tour, opting to give the young guns in his party a shot at rebuilding the GOP. Just as he’d feared, though, this untested crop of up-and-comers had gone and made an even bigger mess of things—from Marquito’s immigration implosion, to Ted Cruz’s government shutdown, to Rand Paul’s adolescent musings about gutting national security. It was clear to Jeb that none of these neophytes were ready to lead Republicans back to the White House. It was time for a grown-up to step in.

  It didn’t take much for Jeb to get his operation off the ground once his mind was made up: a quick call to his top lieutenant Sally Bradshaw with the “go” order, a couple of well-placed emails activating his family’s expansive political network, and a simple media rollout, designed and executed by the small circle of aides he had kept on his personal payroll just in case.

  On December 16, Jeb posted a brief note to his Facebook page, announcing to his followers, “I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for president of the United States.”

  The announcement arrived with the force of a monsoon in the middle of a holiday-induced news drought, and the nation’s rejoicing political press responded with wall-to-wall coverage. With Jeb now dominating headlines, the rest of the Republican presidential prospects—most of whom were enjoying Christmas vacations when the news broke—were suddenly reduced to flat-footed also-rans, forced to shove aside their eggnog and wrapping paper and scramble to move up their own campaign timelines. Before the year was out, Jeb was topping 2016 polls and attracting a bevy of endorsements from establishment bigwigs. With the flip of a switch, he had transformed himself from a retired elder statesman sipping soda by the pool to the formidable front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

  Jeb’s team was pleased: their sneak attack had gone exactly according to plan. Now it was time to initiate the next stage of the Bush blitzkrieg.

  Mitt Romney was taken aback when he read Jeb’s December 16 Facebook post. Gosh, he thought as he swiped at his iPad screen. He really is serious about this, after all. For weeks, Romney had heard rumblings among his former donors that Jeb seemed to be signaling he was serious about the 2016 race—but Romney wasn’t sure
how much to make of the speculation. The two men weren’t pals, per se, but Romney considered Jeb a gentleman, and liked to think they had a mutual respect for each other. They were both sons of the establishment, instilled with a sense of decency and decorum. Surely no well-bred Bush would begin making moves before first seeking out the party’s most recent standard-bearer. It was only proper!

  Yet here Romney found himself—blindsided by a flippin’ Facebook post without so much as a phone call beforehand. If he had just come and asked me for my blessing, I might have given it to him! The more he stewed, the more indignant he became, his shock giving way to frustration, and then resentment, and finally defiance. If Jeb thought he was going to sideline him with this little stunt, he was badly mistaken.

  Romney’s political fortunes had improved dramatically since that fateful November night in 2012. Back then, the defeated candidate had been made to shuffle off the national stage in a kind of disgrace, hauling behind him decades’ worth of political baggage that his party was eager to unload. The scapegoating had begun right away, as presidential prospects and party elders alike gave interviews and wrote op-eds trying to saddle Romney with a generation of GOP failures—from the party’s historically fraught relationship with people of color, to its off-putting ties with big business and billionaires, to its increasingly self-defeating social agenda. The pile-on had been swift and fierce, a political excommunication meant to restore holiness to the Republican Party.

  However unfair the public flogging may have been, Romney did nothing to stop it. He considered it his lot to bear, and he did so with the dutiful, clench-jawed resolve of his pioneer forebears. He reasoned that he had been blessed with a loving family, fantastic wealth, and an altogether wonderful private life. If offering up his public reputation for slaughter would somehow serve his party and country, that was a sacrifice he was willing to make.

  But something strange had happened on the way to martyrdom: Americans started to like him again—even miss him. The reasons for the Romney renaissance were varied. Part of it was due to the fact that some of his campaign foreign policy rhetoric—including a widely mocked contention that Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe”—now seemed prescient in the era of Edward Snowden and Russian military incursions. What’s more, President Obama’s domestic agenda had faltered on almost every front, most notably with the disastrous launch of the government’s health-care website, which made Romney’s 2012 Obamacare bashing seem prophetic. But something else was changing as well: the legendarily cautious and closed-off Romney felt, for the first time, as though the public was finally getting to know him at a human level.

  In January 2014, he had attended the Sundance Film Festival for the splashy premiere of a new documentary titled Mitt, which offered a sympathetic portrait of the former candidate and his family. The ad campaign for the movie, which was distributed by Netflix, extended an ambitious challenge to viewers: “Whatever side you’re on, see another side.” And sure enough, the documentary’s portrayal managed to win over pundits and film critics of all partisan persuasions. In the forgiving light of political obsolescence, Romney’s gee-golly diction looked sweetly endearing, rather than insufferably anachronistic; his devotion to faith and family seemed authentic and admirable, rather than weird or contrived. It had been just over a year since his defeat, and Romney’s public image was, improbably, on its way to full rehabilitation.

  He spent 2014 as an in-demand surrogate and fund-raiser, stumping for Republican candidates across the country. He also began to take note of the growing chorus of loyalists who wanted him to run for president a third time. His 2012 finance director, Spencer Zwick—a longtime aide often referred to by family friends as his “sixth son”—was especially insistent, forwarding him encouraging notes from donors and national polls showing that a majority of Americans wished Romney had been elected. Zwick routinely dropped everything to hype Romney’s 2016 prospects in the press, once taking time to respond to a reporter’s email query on the subject while waiting at the hospital for his wife to give birth. At first, Romney dismissed the lobbying from Zwick and others as a mixture of flattery and delusion. He told interviewers repeatedly that he would not run again, and he waved off news reports to the contrary as nothing but speculation.

  But the interviewers kept asking, and the reporters kept speculating, and the chorus kept singing, and—Goodness gracious!—if all these folks were really this interested, he couldn’t just ignore them, could he? His midterm stumping before fired-up Republican audiences made him miss the heat of the campaign and reengaged him in the big policy debates of the day. He continued to believe that his successful business background made him uniquely qualified to address the major challenges facing the United States, and he regretted more than ever that he wasn’t in the Oval Office to do it.

  Before long, he found himself seriously entertaining the notion of a 2016 run. Quietly, he began huddling with confidants and advisers, weighing his options and talking through how a third campaign might work. He was compelled by an idea floated by Hugh Hewitt—a popular conservative talk radio host and outspoken Romney champion—who argued that Mitt’s preeminence in the party might allow him to skip the daily grind of the campaign trail, and lock up the nomination with just a handful of commanding debate performances, high-profile speeches, and well-crafted ads. Romney wasn’t convinced it would be that easy, but he did believe his status as the party’s last nominee should at least buy him the time he needed to deliberate.

  But not anymore. Jeb was forcing his hand now, and Romney was not comfortable with being pushed around—especially by someone who hadn’t run for office in a decade, and whose pitiful private sector career consisted mainly of handouts from Bush cronies and financial dealings so politically toxic they made his own private equity record look like an afternoon at the soup kitchen. I mean, good grief: the guy sat on the board of one of the big banks that took a bailout! “You saw what they did to me with Bain,” he told friends. “What do you think they’ll do to him over Barclays?”

  The more he thought about it, the more decidedly unimpressed he was by Jeb. If this was the best the party had to offer, then Romney felt duty-bound to explore entering the race. After getting approval from his wife, Ann, over Christmas, he fired off his first warning shot on January 9, 2015. At a closed-door meeting in midtown Manhattan, Romney told a group of about thirty former donors not to count him out.

  “Everybody in here can go tell your friends that I’m considering a run,” he said, adding, “I want to be president.”

  Jeb knew there was a chance Romney might react to his announcement this way, which was why he and his team had developed a plan to deal with a potential Mitt-ruption. In private, his lieutenants referred to the strategy as “shock and awe”—a military doctrine, employed by Jeb’s brother George at the outset of the Iraq War, that aimed to exhaust and discourage the enemy with an early show of overwhelming force. Applied here, the idea was to quickly amass a vast arsenal of high-dollar donors, topflight operatives, and establishment endorsements so intimidating that Romney would conclude he couldn’t compete. And along the way, they’d make the process so painful for him that he wouldn’t even want to. The goal was to crush Romney’s spirit and scare off any other potential challengers who were on the fence.

  To carry out this shock-and-awe strategy, Jeb relied on a small team of operatives marshaled by Bradshaw, a tough, Mississippi-born political infighter who had served as Bush’s enforcer for two decades. His inner circle also included veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy and loyal longtime aides Brandi Brown, Josh Venable, and Kristy Campbell.

  By the time Romney finally declared his 2016 interest in January, the Bush team’s assault was already under way, and he quickly found himself struggling to play catch-up. Romney spent hours every day dialing up former donors and supporters, often to discover that Jeb had gotten there first and extracted ironclad commitments from them.

  Whereas Romney’s instinct was t
o approach these early conversations with a friendly, testing-the-waters tone, Jeb’s style was blunt and unflinching, directly putting the question to donors—Are you with me, or Mitt?—and then waiting in silence as they squirmed.

  Also working the phones on Jeb’s behalf was a sprawling network of family friends, fund-raisers, party hacks, senior statesmen, and more than a few former ambassadors whose cushy appointments had come courtesy of either Bush ’41 or Bush ’43. In their zeal to deliver for the new dynastic heir, these foot soldiers routinely trashed Romney during calls with donors, dubbing him a “loser” and claiming that—contrary to Mitt’s own claims—he was planning to build his new campaign around Stuart Stevens and Beth Myers, two of the strategists widely faulted for the failure of his 2012 bid.

  Team Jeb’s hyperaggressive approach put off some donors, who maintained a personal affection for Romney regardless of whether they supported his 2016 gambit. But many more were impressed by the sharp-elbowed tactics, and signed on with Jeb in hopes that he would take the same fight to Hillary Clinton in the general election.

  Meanwhile, Romney was struggling to figure out why his coverage in the press—which, not long ago, had been rife with soft-focus profiles and breathless speculation about his political future—was turning sharply negative all of a sudden. In the Washington Post, Dan Balz wrote about “the haste and seemingly haphazard nature” of Romney’s trial balloon. In a Wall Street Journal column headlined “Don’t Do It, Mr. Romney,” Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for the first President Bush, declared, “This is a moment in history that demands superior political gifts from one who would govern. Mitt Romney does not have them. He never did.” And most remarkably, Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post blogger whose shameless Romney shilling throughout 2012 often made her seem like an agent of the campaign, had now inexplicably turned on him. In one bizarrely harsh takedown, Rubin wrote, “The ‘rivalry’ between Romney and Jeb Bush is like that between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The former is so confident of its own stature that it does not know there is a rivalry. Romney is Los Angeles.”