But the spiritually reborn governor still fumbled when he tried to explain how his religious views on LGBT issues fit in a modern society where the fast-gathering consensus held that gays deserved all the same rights that straight people enjoyed. During a speech in San Francisco, Perry leaned on a common analogy that had once been considered progressive in conservative Christian circles. He said he didn’t believe homosexuality was something an individual chose—but that certain sinful proclivities, such as alcoholism, had always been inborn and that God still expected his children to resist such temptations.
The comments drew condemnation and denouncement from all quarters, including from moderates in his own party, and he was forced to begin backpedaling immediately. “I readily admit it,” he said. “I stepped right in it.”
By the time Bobby Jindal convened his prayer rally in early 2015, his public persona had transformed considerably from that of the uber-bright, wonkish wunderkind who had first appeared on the national stage seven years earlier. Desperate to break out from the GOP’s growing pack of presidential contenders—and resigned to the belief that his post-2012 “stupid party” critique was a political dud—Jindal had spent the past two years appealing to the conservative grass roots, as a Christian culture warrior and small-government absolutist. He had taken to saying increasingly inflammatory things that seemed aimed at getting himself booked on TV. He railed against the “radical Left” every time a microphone was within spitting or sputtering distance, and made assertions that sometimes seemed rooted more firmly in right-wing rumor than reality. He repeatedly warned, for example, that Western countries like Great Britain were carving out so-called “no-go zones,” where Muslim immigrants enforced orthodox religious laws on all who entered their neighborhoods—a claim strongly refuted by foreign officials and experts.
To those Washington pundits and reporters who had first been introduced to Jindal as the “hall-monitoring, library-inhabiting, science fair–winning class president” described in the Washington Post in 2009, Jindal’s new act seemed like the worst, most shameless kind of pandering: a Rhodes Scholar reduced to a “dumbed-down” self-parody dying to get conservatives to like him. But among the intellectual compromises Jindal had made on the road to 2016, his full-throated defense of religious freedom wasn’t one of them. Though his Duck Dynasty foray was often cited by critics accusing him of demagoguery—and, indeed, Jindal had been fully aware of the potential political upsides at the time—he was, at his core, a man of deep faith, whose weird and extraordinary spiritual journey filled him with fervor for the importance of religion’s role in America. This would become a central theme of the long-shot presidential campaign Jindal launched later that year. And he took comfort in knowing that even if he never did manage to catch fire in 2016, at least in this one instance—on this one issue—he could say that he truly and fully believed every word he was saying.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Donnybrook in Des Moines
The same weekend Bobby Jindal was rallying believers in Baton Rouge, a crush of conservative activists, political reporters, and presidential wannabes was descending on an antique theater in Des Moines for the Iowa Freedom Summit, a Republican cattle call that had been widely hyped as “the unofficial kickoff of 2016.”
Despite Jeb Bush’s best efforts to clear the primary field, the summit’s sprawling list of scheduled speakers included nearly a dozen likely candidates who were there to audition for the presidency—a sign that the coming primaries were destined to devolve into an out-and-out free-for-all unlike anything the GOP had seen in decades. The party’s cast of presidential contenders was shaping up to be the largest in a hundred years, and no single establishment juggernaut—no matter how big, well funded, or ruthless—would be able to preempt the chaos. (Jeb, though not yet willing to admit defeat in his shock-and-awe mission, had decided to skip the event.)
With the Republican Party tumbling wildly toward an election year donnybrook of epic proportions, the contenders had converged in Des Moines for twenty-four hours, ready to start the brawl. All they were waiting for now was the first punch to get thrown.
The night before the summit’s Saturday morning kickoff, Carly Fiorina arrived at the mezzanine of the downtown Des Moines Marriott for her last in a long series of interviews that day. In the lobby below, off duty reporters were plying off-the-record politicos with liquor and pumping them for campaign gossip. In the suites above, soon-to-be candidates were rehearsing and revising their speeches. And here in a quiet enclave near the elevator bank, Fiorina was perched in a stiff upholstered chair doing everything in her power to dodge my questions about Sarah Palin.
Fiorina had spent the day building ground-level buzz in Iowa as she toured the state giving speeches and interviews that highlighted her status as the sole woman in the GOP’s prospective presidential field. It seemed to be resonating: turnout at the events had been better than she expected, and her aides were fielding a steady trickle of phone calls from curious reporters.
And yet it was obvious almost as soon as we sat down that Fiorina had no interest in talking about the most famous mama grizzly in the conservative movement, whom she had gone to bat for in 2008. Every time I mentioned Palin’s name, Fiorina shuffled into a little rhetorical tap dance as she tried to remain polite and vaguely upbeat about Sarah from Alaska without inviting comparisons to her.
Asked whether Palin’s rise had been a net positive or negative for conservative women, Fiorina said, “It’s always good when women play,” and then, “Every game is better when everybody gets to play.”
Asked whether she still believed that the early criticism of Palin had been motivated by sexism, she said she did, but then quickly changed the subject. “Let me give you a more recent example of this.”
The example she gave had to do with Joni Ernst (or, as candidate Fiorina identified her, “the junior senator from the great state of Iowa”). Ernst had recently given the Republican response to the 2015 State of the Union, after which the pro-choice women’s group EMILY’s List put out a statement referring to her as “window dressing” for the GOP.
“This is a soldier, a mother, a sitting U.S. senator, and they’re calling her window dressing?” said Fiorina indignantly. “Of course they’re sexist!”
I mentioned that after Ernst’s address, I had seen a number of liberals compare the new senator almost reflexively with Palin, the implicit suggestion being that all Republican women were the same.
“Well, it’s more than that,” Fiorina responded. “It’s, all conservative women must be stupid.”
She seemed to realize right away that she had made a mistake because she immediately flashed a taut smile and—in a distinctly non-Palinian show of restraint—stopped talking.
Just after 11 p.m. that same night, a few hours after Fiorina had retired to her room, Sarah Palin herself burst into the Marriott lobby, radiating enough high-wattage celebrity charisma to make her also-notable companions for the evening—Newt and Callista Gingrich, Congressman Steve King, and Citizens United president David Bossie—seem like a bag-carrying entourage. Palin was slated for a prime speaking slot at the summit the next day, and she was toting a binder with her that contained a draft of her planned remarks.
A scrum of buzzed and drunk political reporters crowded around to snap Instagram photos while Palin—all big hair, big glasses, and big personality—soaked up the attention with the practiced nonchalance of an experienced paparazzi fuss object.
Eventually, one of the reporters got around to asking Palin the same question reporters had been asking her for the past seven years: Are you thinking of running for president?
And Palin, with no reason to discontinue the charade, gave the same answer she had been giving for the past seven years: “You can absolutely say I am seriously interested.”
At that, she disappeared into an elevator while journalists scrambled to tweet the breaking news and fire off emails to their East Coast editors. By midnight, the “se
riously interested” headline was on the Washington Post’s home page, and before long it was splashed across the top of the Drudge Report.
Asked the next morning what she thought of the big Palin news, Fiorina shrugged and then offered a bit coldly, “I mean, if she wants to run she should run.”
Fiorina’s lack of enthusiasm for Palin-mentum wasn’t difficult to grok. She was preparing to embark on a presidential campaign premised on the same shrewd brand of “conservative feminism” that Palin had pioneered. Fiorina knew she had little chance of breaking through as long as Palin was seen as a serious threat to enter the race.
That afternoon, Fiorina strode onstage in the elegantly ornate theater at Des Moines’s historic Hoyt Sherman Place to deliver her speech. It was largely made up of the same rhetoric she had been road testing over the past year: she bashed Hillary Clinton, accused Democrats of sexism, and defended pro-life women. As usual, it went over well with the conservative audience—but the full extent of Fiorina’s Freedom Summit triumph didn’t become clear until shortly after she left the stage and Palin sashayed on to take her place.
The past twelve hours of media tongue wagging over Palin’s stated presidential ambitions had heightened the anticipation surrounding her appearance, and she was greeted with wild applause by the 1,200 grassroots Iowans in attendance. Once she started talking, however, the excitement quickly gave way to confusion. Palin rambled and ranted through an extended stream of consciousness tour of personal feuds, petty grievances, and puzzling polemics. If there was something more compelling (or comprehensible) in her notes, she had apparently decided to ignore them. Instead, she exhaustively chronicled minor injustices inflicted upon her by the media, punctuating the stories with jarring outbursts—like “Screw the Left in Hollywood!”—that startled some of the mild-mannered churchgoers who were watching. Even for a political provocateur with a long blooper reel of cringe-inducing shark-jump moments, the performance was bad enough to cause many of Palin’s last remaining defenders in the Republican Party to give up and change the channel for good.
By the time Palin exited stage right at around the thirty-five-minute mark, the withering reviews from Republicans were already pouring in. “Bizarro,” ruled one conservative columnist. “Barely coherent,” said another. Joe Scarborough expressed bafflement at how far she had fallen since her electrifying speech at the 2008 GOP convention, and declared the onstage meltdown a “tragedy.” The pile-on was most vividly encapsulated in the conservative magazine of record, National Review, where Charles Cooke wrote that Palin’s “one-woman variety show” in Des Moines was “the foreordained culmination of a slow and unseemly descent into farce,” and that it should “disqualify her from any role in the GOP going forward.” The root problem, he argued, was that Palin “isn’t really trying to change politics; she’s trying to be politics.”
But to some extent, that had always been true of Palin. What originally made her a Republican superstar was her skill at brandishing her own gender and identity as weapons of culture war; now those same instincts were being cited as cause for excommunication from her party.
While Palin’s implosion gave Fiorina the opening she needed in 2016, it also provided her with a cautionary tale. In the coming months, Fiorina would bring conservative audiences to their feet with galvanizing speeches about the Democrats’ real “war on women.” She would righteously call foul on interviewers—from Katie Couric to local radio hosts—who asked if she was really running for vice president. (“Would you ask a male candidate that question?”) She would stoke outrage on the right by reciting the indignities she suffered as a Republican woman (like being asked on live TV about her menopause). And she would perform with great relish her assigned role as the party’s anti-Clinton attack dog, unleashing a regular barrage of barbed one-liners and fiery criticism that male candidates could never get away with. (In one especially pointed instance, she would joke that Bill Clinton’s judgment had been “clouded by hormones in the Oval Office.”) To the men of the Republican establishment who had coaxed her into the race, all this would be cause for adulation. But, as Palin’s downfall had illustrated, that praise could evaporate just as quickly if party elites decided she was “playing the gender card” in a way that they didn’t approve of.
By the time Palin and Fiorina were shepherded away from the venue in separate vehicles on Saturday afternoon, the two women had effectively swapped places in the 2016 topography. It wouldn’t be the only political tremor to rock Hoyt Sherman Place that weekend.
As Scott Walker stood backstage waiting for his cue, the even-keeled, aw-shucks governor of Wisconsin found himself experiencing an urge he typically felt only during Packers games: an impulse to shed his Midwestern manners and start shouting. During four years in the trenches of nonstop political combat in his state, he had beaten back the enemy three separate times—and now that he was here to tell his war stories, he was feeling uncommonly amped up.
Of course, the conservative activists in the audience were familiar with Walker’s heroics in a general way. They had read in the papers about his pitched battle with the public sector unions. They had occasionally seen his smiling mug on Fox. They had heard his voice on talk radio. A few had crossed state lines to serve weekend tours of duty in his defense—knocking on doors, handing out flyers—when he had faced a recall election. But like most conservatives across the country, Iowa Republicans didn’t have strong impressions of Walker. When pollsters asked them what they thought of the governor next door as a presidential prospect, more than 40 percent responded with a “don’t know enough to answer” shrug.
Walker was determined to change that. The key to making an impression, he believed, was to fill in the broad-strokes picture his audience already had of his war in Wisconsin with the sort of bracing, gritty details that would be difficult to forget. So, when his cue came, the trim forty-seven-year-old governor walked buoyantly out onto the stage, waved at the balcony, and immediately began to recount the “darkest days” of his battle with the savage armies of the Left.
He told of menacing protesters following his elderly mother through a grocery store and hectoring her in the aisles. He quoted from death threats, including one letter addressed to him promising to “gut” his wife “like a deer,” and another addressed to his wife vowing that if she didn’t stop her husband, he “would be the first Wisconsin governor ever assassinated,” and then providing details about where their children went to school. He recounted thousands of demonstrators camping outside his family’s suburban home, and people targeting his teenage sons on Facebook.
By the time he finished the brief, searing account, the audience was captivated, and Walker was charged with adrenaline.
“Time and time again, the protesters were trying to intimidate us,” he said, his voice rising. “But you know what? All they did was remind me how important it was to stand up for the people of my state. They reminded me to focus on why I ran for governor in the first place.”
It wasn’t the most sparkling oratory, but it did the trick: the audience erupted in unbridled applause. For the next twenty minutes, Walker energetically touted the “go big and go bold” agenda he had enacted, from passing controversial voter ID laws to defunding Planned Parenthood. What made his story compelling was not the positions themselves, which were generally shared by every speaker at the summit that day, but that he had successfully championed them in a solidly Democratic state and still managed to win three statewide races in a row.
“MSNBC didn’t much like our election victory back in June of 2012, and they didn’t like it again this last fall,” he boasted. “Because you know what? It wasn’t just about a victory. It was about showing [that] commonsense could serve in reforms [and] can actually work, and they work in a blue state like Wisconsin.”
What the conservatives in Des Moines that day saw in Walker was the possibility that they wouldn’t have to choose between electability and ideology in the coming presidential contest. And that promi
se was enough to propel Walker to the front of the 2016 pack almost immediately after he finished speaking. Within days after the summit, the Des Moines Register would release a poll that showed him rocketing from single-digit obscurity to first place, and national polls quickly followed suit. Walker wouldn’t officially announce his campaign for another five months, but for all intents and purposes, his bid was launched that day in Des Moines.
As the Saturday summit stretched on, the atmosphere inside Hoyt Sherman Place took on a frenzied, circus-gone-wrong quality, as if a thousand people were trapped inside a Barnum and Bailey tent where the elephants had been set loose.
Inside the theater, the high-octane sound bites being hurled from the stage all seemed to melt together as the interminable marathon of speakers marched past five hours, then six, then seven, and beyond. The lackluster ventilation system made the 150-year-old venue feel stuffy and hot, and the activists in the audience grew increasingly disheveled, punchy, and agitated as they shed sweaters and fidgeted in their seats. In the middle of a lively speech by Rick Perry—whose red-blooded macho-cowboy routine stopped just short of including a lasso and shouts of “Yee-haw!”—a dozen Latino immigration activists stood in unison and began shouting in protest from the balcony. A few overwound audience members charged the demonstrators and got within inches of their faces before guards finally intervened to stop a physical altercation. The whole episode repeated itself again when Chris Christie was speaking. At one point, a bat got into the theater, swooping back and forth from the rafters and adding to the sense that the whole summit was some sort of fever dream.
Those who wanted to escape the delirium taking hold inside the theater wandered out to the cramped halls along the building’s perimeter, where Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and a slew of other candidates-in-waiting hocked their books, signed their autographs, and elbowed (in some cases literally) their way through the crowd. The mad hot chaos of the coming Republican primaries was already palpable in Hoyt Sherman Place.
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