The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  In 2012 the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency of Congress, looked back over decades of economic studies and concluded, “The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth.” Shortly before the 2012 election, Senate Republicans pressured CRS to squelch the report.

  The verdict of history had no effect on Republican thinking. Admitting they had erred on the magic of tax cuts would mean repudiating the core of the party’s identity. Instead smarter Republicans conceded that cutting taxes wouldn’t miraculously lower deficits, but they claimed that this was fine with them. Large deficits would offer the excuse they needed to shrink government. Starting in the late 1980s they used the limitations of supply-side economics to fashion a fresh argument. The new glue holding together the GOP was no longer fiscal discipline, as it had been from William McKinley through George H. W. Bush, but tax cuts.

  “Deficits don’t matter,” Dick Cheney told a newly inaugurated George W. Bush in 2001 as Bush weighed whether to follow through on a 2000 campaign promise of sweeping tax cuts. Bush had made that promise in order to siphon off supporters of Steve Forbes, a self-financed candidate who was threatening him in the New Hampshire primary. While Bush was a true believer in ending what conservatives had cleverly rebranded “the death tax,” he winced at the idea of cutting the top income tax bracket so sharply, wondering aloud whether the cuts were too tilted toward the top end. But he went ahead under the theory that it was time, as old Reaganites put it, to “starve the beast”: reduce the federal Leviathan through tax cuts that would deprive Washington of the revenues necessary to run a large government.

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  NORQUIST PERSONIFIED THE rise of the American right inside Washington. Raised in a well-to-do household in Weston, Massachusetts, the son of a Polaroid executive, he arrived at Harvard in 1974 already an arresting combination of implacable libertarian and fierce anticommunist. At the Harvard Crimson, still a far-left newspaper in the mid-1970s, Norquist was a geeky yet unself-conscious dissenter whose calm and friendly arguments even then were delivered with an eerie confidence that he had figured out exactly how the world works.I “When I became twenty-one, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of twenty-one,” he said later. Consuming political tracts from all perspectives, he quietly adapted Lenin’s idea of a “vanguard of the proletariat,” by which a small group of zealous intellectuals would master power politics and execute choke holds on the old order. Norquist simply substituted “freedom” for “the proletariat” and moved to Washington to build his conservative vanguard during the “Reagan Revolution.” He later denied this was his goal but suggested that Straussians (disciples of Leo Strauss, a conservative political philosopher who celebrated elitism), neocons, and others on the right may have borrowed tactics from the left.

  In the mid-1980s Norquist traveled several times to Angola, where, donning the uniform of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA Army, he instructed the anticommunist guerrilla leader in free market principles. He ghostwrote articles under Savimbi’s byline in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that suggest the Leninist influence on his own thinking about political struggle. “We are using Communist military and propaganda principles in order to defeat the Soviets and their political ideology,” Savimbi/Norquist wrote in Policy Review. Savimbi, whose movement had originally been backed by Mao, was described by Don Steinberg, President Clinton’s ambassador to Angola, as “the most articulate, charismatic homicidal maniac I ever met.”II

  By this time Norquist had emerged as a right-wing antihero, holding raucous parties on Capitol Hill for other young conservative thinkers and activists. When Gingrich became speaker of the House in 1995, Norquist all but moved into his friend’s office as a close adviser, though he preferred the movement cred that came from staying on the outside. The conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke described him as “Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge.”

  While building his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist always had time to play the provocateur in politics. At the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans, he printed cards with pictures of Michael Dukakis and Willie Horton on one side and the Monopoly le apologized earlygend “Get Out of Jail Free!” on the other. When Norquist convinced two network anchors to show the faux Monopoly card on air, it was the first time the story went national. (Floyd Brown’s infamous ad on Horton didn’t debut until the following month.)

  Eager to stop President Clinton’s health care plan, Norquist began hosting meetings in Washington every Wednesday for elected officials, the heads of all major conservative organizations, lobbyists, and other elements of the GOP coalition. After the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, the Wednesday Meeting became an important Washington institution; when George W. Bush was president, Karl Rove made sure to show up several times a year; later someone senior from Boehner’s office was almost always in attendance. The Wednesday Meeting was not a debating society; Norquist’s rules required that attendees make only positive nuts-and-bolts comments about how to advance conservative ideas and candidates, with no doctrinal arguments allowed. In the late 1990s he began to replicate the meetings in all fifty states. The idea wasn’t complicated. “We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals—and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship,” Norquist said in 2003, only half-kidding.

  Norquist, also an important member of the board of the NRA, worked closely with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the godfather of modern hyperpartisanship. Tea Party obstruction and Boehner’s fear of the word compromise grew directly out of DeLay’s long intransigence, which led to the impeachment of Clinton, among other victories. When DeLay resigned the House under fire in 2006, he went out with a blast: “It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades the public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.”

  Norquist added historical sweep to the rigid ideology. He thought the country had been off on a statist, un-American track ever since American progressives imported centralization and regimentation from Bismarck’s Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. He saw his movement as dismantling the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and all the other “encroachments” on freedom over the years. He figured that government spending should be about 8 percent of GDP, as it was during much of the nineteenth century, instead of more than 20 percent.

  As the beast shrank, of course, Norquist, like DeLay, would extract his own pound of flesh. His lobbying firm, Janus-Merritt Strategies, prospered but also became enmeshed in scandal. Congressional investigators accused the firm of lobbying on behalf of a Saudi national and Hamas supporter later convicted of plotting the assassination of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Norquist denied that association but admitted to representing a Saudi businessman whose “charity” was connected to financing terrorism. For years Norquist, who is married to a Palestinian Muslim, had sought to bring American Muslims into the GOP, a project that, especially after 9/11, met with less success than his antitax efforts.

  Norquist had been friends with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff since they were young conservative activists together. He knew all about “Casino Jack” bilking his American Indian clients of millions to pay for lavish overseas trips and to finance the efforts of Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition to stop a rival casino. In 2000 Abramoff used his old friend Norquist as what a congressional committee later called “a conduit to the outside world.s h2” for some of the money (“Call Ralph re Grover doing pass through,” Abramoff wrote in an email reminder to himself in 1999), and Americans for Tax Reform got a cut of Abramoff’s take from clients. Abramoff went to jail and Reed’s reputation was tarnished, but Norquist emerged largely unscathed.

  Although Reagan
had occasionally raised taxes, Norquist worked tirelessly to memorialize him. He spearheaded efforts to name Washington National Airport and nearly two hundred bridges, highways, and schools after the former president. With a Republican president and Congress in 2013, he was confident he would have the votes to push Alexander Hamilton off the ten-dollar bill and Franklin Roosevelt off the dime in favor of Reagan—a symbolic nail in the coffin of both Hamiltonian centralized power and the New Deal.

  Norquist launched his “Taxpayers Protection Pledge” in 1986; it was quickly signed by one hundred House members and twenty senators, with hundreds more legislators at the federal and state levels on the way. Vice President George H. W. Bush signed the pledge in 1988, which helped him win the nomination and, by Norquist’s account, the election. Thanks in part to Norquist, the story of the pledge and the 1988 election would wear heavily on every Republican politician who came of age in that era.

  That year Bob Dole won the GOP Iowa caucuses handily and was the strong favorite in the New Hampshire primary less than a week later. Bush, the sitting vice president, finished third in Iowa behind the televangelist Pat Robertson and faced political oblivion. To turn it around, Bush’s team created an ad called “Straddle” that attacked Dole for not being clear in his opposition to new taxes. Dole was the only GOP presidential candidate that year—or any year afterward—who didn’t sign the pledge. Normally WMUR, the premier station in New Hampshire, would be closed for the weekend, which would have meant no time for Bush’s ad to air. But because the vice president—at the prodding of New Hampshire’s governor John Sununu—had done the station a favor the year before by coming down from his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to take part in a local forum, the station manager agreed to make an exception and broadcast the Bush spot. The ad began to turn the tide. Then, in a televised debate two days before the primary, another candidate, former Delaware governor Pierre “Pete” du Pont, thrust Norquist’s pledge in Dole’s face. When Dole said blandly that he would have to read it first, his fate was sealed. Bush won the primary by 10 points and cruised to the nomination.

  At the Republican convention in New Orleans that summer, Bush, reading an especially effective Peggy Noonan speech, famously said, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Earlier a senior Bush aide, Richard Darman, had crossed out the line; he thought it “stupid and dangerous” to tie the next president’s hands when the country faced a huge deficit. But another adviser, Roger Ailes, argued strongly to keep it in. When Bush went back on the pledge and agreed to tax hikes in 1990, conservatives—led by Norquist—were furious. Norquist argued long and hard that this cost Bush the 1992 election against Clinton. Ignore that history at your peril, he threatened other candidates. (Most analysts argue that Bush’s anemic 37 percent that year was more the result of Ross Perot being in the race and the economic downturn.) A myth was born. By 1996 Dole, belittled by Gingrich as “the tax collector for the welfare state,” found himself back in New Hampshire, under attack again on the pledge, this time from Pat Buchanan. Dole lost the presidential primary there once more, though to the outside world.s h2 he went on to win the nomination.

  Norquist never tired of pointing out that the pledge meant no net tax increases, so that any deduction that was eliminated had to be compensated by a tax cut somewhere else. In other words, only spending cuts, not the tax code, could be used to reduce the deficit. This had been Norquist’s position for years, and it would continue to be, even when the deficit passed a trillion dollars. As the Obama years began, Norquist was confident that Republican members of Congress would keep their pledges. After all, he said with sweet reason, those pledges weren’t made to Grover Norquist or Americans for Tax Reform, but to the people in their states and districts who sent them to Washington in the first place.

  ON THE NIGHT of the Obama Inauguration, January 20, 2009, the GOP public opinion impresario Frank Luntz hosted a four-hour dinner for conservative lawmakers at the Caucus Room, a Washington steak house. Minority Leaders McConnell and Boehner, neither of whom had much use for Luntz, were no-shows, but almost every other important Republican on Capitol Hill was present. Those in attendance agreed that it was necessary to oppose the new president at every turn, and when the author Robert Draper reported on the evening three years later, no one denied this goal. Obstructionism was their only way back to power, and they pursued this strategy relentlessly.

  The core of the party—represented at the dinner—felt that working with a Democratic president would be folly. The takeaway point was made by Paul Ryan, a sad-eyed thirty-eight-year-old congressman from Wisconsin who knew the budget numbers better than the others. “The only way we’ll succeed is if we’re united,” Ryan said. “If we tear ourselves apart, we’re finished.”

  “United” meant one thing: implacable opposition to whatever Obama proposed. Joining with the immensely popular president might be patriotic and make them look good to their constituents in the short term, but it wouldn’t do anything for the party in the long term. They felt they had already compromised too much on their conservative principles under President Bush.

  So beginning in the first week of Obama’s presidency, Republicans agreed on the broad outlines of a strategy to win back power. They would immediately start hammering vulnerable Democrats (paid attack ads would begin within six weeks) and stand united against Obama’s economic plan. Boehner instructed his caucus that Republicans were opposing the Recovery Act no matter what was in it. He said explicitly that any effort by the president to amend the stimulus to meet their concerns should be rebuffed. And there would be no equivalent of the Boll Weevils (Southern Democrats who peeled off from the party and backed President Reagan’s economic recovery in 1981). Unity demanded total party discipline.

  On the Senate side, McConnell said much the same, telling his caucus that GOP senators must stand together to survive. He decided from the start to make everything a chore for the Democrats, using the threat of a filibuster to prevent dozens of routine bills from coming to the floor. Majority Leader Harry Reid first realized what was up when a national parks bill that had enjoyed strong bipartisan support in the past came to the floor. Normally it would have passed in a day or two, but now it took three weeks, as Republicans introduced amendment after amendment to allow more guns in national parks. Later a transportation bill to the outside world.s h2 took weeks because of amendments allowing passengers to carry weapons when they got on Amtrak.

  Obama, trying to dig the nation out of a deep hole, harbored hopes that he could make good on his campaign promise to bring the country together. Part of him knew, as he admitted a few weeks later, that the GOP didn’t see it as their duty to pitch in during the crisis. But he still felt it would have been wrong for him to strike a partisan tone right out of the gate. So during his first week, the new president did something unprecedented: He traveled to Capitol Hill not to talk to fellow Democrats but to meet just with House Republicans. He had already put $300 billion in tax cuts into his stimulus plan, a preemptive effort to win bipartisan support, even if all the economists were telling him that tax cuts were the slowest way to pump money into the economy. (He later admitted this was “bad poker” and one of his biggest mistakes.)

  No one expected a true compromise. Elections have consequences, and the big Democratic victory the previous November meant that Republicans would not get their core agenda: lower marginal tax rates and less regulation. “We won,” Obama said flatly to Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor when Cantor held out for this. But short of letting the losers dominate the rescue plan, maybe they could agree on targeted tax relief or other bipartisan elements of a stimulus. Or so he had hoped. When he was in the limo en route to Capitol Hill, the president learned that the Republican caucus had been instructed by its leadership, Boehner and Cantor, not to be seduced. They were to listen politely but not take part in trying to save the economy.

  In the first three weeks of his presidency, amid a flurry of cable news attacks, only one House Republican and
three Senate Republicans voted for the Recovery Act. Later none voted for Obamacare and only a tiny handful for any of the president’s other legislation.

  ANYTIME REPUBLICANS THOUGHT of trying to be even a smidgen more moderate, they worried about being primaried, the new verb on the lips of the incumbents. Senators were reminded of the fate of Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, who served in the GOP Senate leadership and, according to scorecards published by conservative groups, amassed a nearly perfect conservative record. A former top lieutenant to billionaire Howard Hughes, Bennett was Mormon royalty, the son of a senator and grandson of a president of the LDS Church. He was the only senator in either party to vote against domestic partner benefits for federal employees. He was well-liked personally in both Utah and Washington and considered a shoo-in for a fourth term.

  Then Bennett made a horrible political mistake: He was caught working with a Democrat. Bennett joined with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon on a more market-based health care reform idea that got no traction in the capital (except with experts and editorial writers). The Utah Tea Party erupted, and at the May 2010 state party convention, Bennett, still leading comfortably in polls of Republicans, finished a shocking third in the balloting. Upon returning to Washington to serve out the remaining seven months of his term, Bennett became a walking advertisement for the power of the Tea Party.

  Bennett’s leader, Mitch McConnell, also learned a hard lesson in 2010, when his candidate for Kentucky’s other Senate seat, Trey Grayson, lost badly in the primary to libertarian Rand Paul. McConnell believed his best route to becoming majority">284Over on the House side, John Boehner didn’t have anywhere close to that degree of control. Consider the House Republican caucus meeting of July 11, 2011: The members had positive feelings about the GOP’s plan to cut $5 trillion from the deficit, but several freshmen wanted to know why it had to be over ten years. Why not cut $5 trillion over two years? No one dared mention the most basic of facts: that with a federal budget of $3.6 trillion a year, such a move would mean cutting nearly three-quarters of the entire federal budget.