The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  The main thing the candidates had in common was their eagerness to outdo each other in trashing Obama. Other than Jon Huntsman, Obama’s former ambassador to China, each used a tired insult around the theme of Obama’s not being fully American. Mitt Romney said he was “slightly European,” Michelle Bachmann claimed that he had “anti-American views,” Herman Cain figured he may have been born in Kenya, and Newt Gingrich echoed the far-fetched theme offered by the author Dinesh D’Souza that the president was a “neocolonialist.” In truth, Obama’s improbable life saga—hard to imagine in any other nation—was a tribute to the sense of “American exceptionalism” the GOP candidates kept claiming he lacked.

  It wasn’t long before Obama Derangement Syndrome infected the primaries. After Governor Rick Perry of Texas said he had just consulted with Donald Trump and still wasn’t sure about Obama’s birth certificate (six months after the president released it), Joe Scarborough, a conservative GOP partner, Russ Schriefer, back OK congressman turned MSNBC host, predicted, “People will look back at these Republican candidates some day and say, ‘What idiots. What total absolute idiots.’ ” Even “low-information voters” who paid little or no attention to stories about Obama’s early life could tell there was something kooky about the claim that he wasn’t born in the United States. They sensed that it was odd and nonsensical for Romney to call Obama an “appeaser” when he had all but pulled the trigger and blown Osama bin Laden’s brains out.

  Romney was a serious man—intelligent, analytical, qualified for high office—but he was running for president in a political party that was no longer serious. Its remedies for the budget, a broken immigration system, war with Iran, and a dozen other issues were badly out of step with American voters. The debates were mostly held before Tea Party crowds that hooted down questions from moderators and cheered only the most right-wing pronouncements. None of the candidates tried to moderate his or her views with an eye to the general election or even the broader goal of seeming presidential. The news media, thrilled to have reality TV characters liven up the primaries, went along with the fiction that most of the candidates onstage had a genuine chance of being nominated.

  By late 2011 reasonable Republicans were worried. It was one thing to support candidates who were more antiabortion than the American public; Republicans had won five presidential elections under such circumstances. But now issues like contraception were on the table. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum said the birth control used by tens of millions of single women was “not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Even if the White House sacrificed some conservative Catholics by battling with the U.S. Conference of Bishops on including free contraceptives as part of Obamacare, the issue was a loser for the GOP. The same went for pandering to the base’s disdain for the theory of evolution and other matters of science. Just because climate change had lost its saliency as an issue for Democrats didn’t mean it was helpful to the party to have several Republican candidates say it was a hoax. Bachmann’s rejection of science risked real harm to women; with no evidence behind her claims, she told millions of Today show viewers that the HPV vaccine, now routinely administered to young women to prevent cervical cancer, should be avoided because it caused mental retardation.

  Under normal circumstances, politicians benefit from sustained public attention. Not this time. Comedians and bloggers enjoyed a daily feast of material with which to make Republicans look ridiculous: Gingrich’s $500,000 revolving line of credit at Tiffany’s and plea to his second wife for an “open marriage”;I Bachmann not knowing that Libya is in Africa and that Lexington and Concord are in Massachusetts (not New Hampshire); Santorum saying that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on church-state relations “made [him] want to throw up” and accusing Obama of being “a snob” for saying everyone should have a chance to go to college; Herman Cain confessing, “I don’t know the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan.” Each gaffe faded in a day or two, but they left a cumulative impression. Federal Judge Richard Posner, a barometer of principled conservative thought, complained that the GOP had become “goofy.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer referred to the field as “bumbling clowns.” Even Pat Robertson, godfather of the religious right, worried about the impact on the general election: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff.”

  ABOUT THE ONLY thing that pleased hardheaded Republicans was that Sarah Palin wasn’t jumping in. According to a GOP operative who knew her well, Palin’s thinking was that if she ran and lost the nomination, it would hurt her lecture fees, as it did Rudy Giuliani’s when he went from front-runner to also-ran in 2008. Better to flirt with running as long as she could to keep the money flowing in, then play kingmaker. (She eventually endorsed Rick Perry.) Chicago ardently hoped she would make the race. “If I could pay her filing fee, I would,” Jim Messina said in mid-2011.

  Few Republicans were happy with the announced candidates. Roger Ailes didn’t think Romney was a real conservative, but he didn’t trust Gingrich not to blow up and wreck the GOP’s chances. “He’s like a guy who’s sitting calmly on the podium and suddenly he puts scrambled eggs in his hair,” Ailes told friends. In the spring of 2011 Romney held his second meeting of the year with Rupert Murdoch, who was no more impressed than when they met in 2008 and 2010. “I didn’t care for him at all. He sounded like he was running for president of Bain and Company,” Murdoch said afterward. The News Corp. founder was eager for Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana to get into the race.

  Daniels and Huntsman were the ones who scared Chicago most. They passed the reasonableness test (even though Axelrod was furious with Huntsman for telling him to his face that he wasn’t intending to run at a time when he was busy building a campaign). Boston was confident that his family’s reluctance would keep Daniels from the race, and it didn’t worry about Huntsman, whom Romney knew through elite Mormon circles and dismissed. Sure enough, when he got in, Huntsman made little impression; instead of filling the television screen, he seemed to shrink within it. Bill Clinton, anxious for a moderate to make headway in the GOP for the good of the two-party system and the country (and hardly likely to lose sleep if Huntsman beat Obama), called Huntsman to offer his advice, but to no avail. It wasn’t just the Obama connection that hurt; Huntsman was simply too moderate for the party. “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy,” he tweeted when it was clear he no longer had a chance. The candidate who at first worried both Boston and Chicago was Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota who described himself as a “Sam’s Club Republican.” If he played well in New Hampshire, Romney was in trouble. But Pawlenty hadn’t read enough political history to know that if he just hung in for a while, he would have his moment to shine. Instead, strapped for cash and chagrined that he had lost his nerve and failed to confront Romney for sponsoring “Obamaney Care” in Massachusetts, he shocked his own aides by dropping out on August 14 and driving home to Minnesota.

  Surprisingly, neither Boston nor Chicago was much worried about Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. Stuart Stevens, who had advised him on his 2009 campaign before he became Romney’s chief strategist, didn’t think he would get in; David Axelrod thought his temper would eventually get the better of him. Roger Ailes, whose temperamentNational Youth AdministrationR early made Christie look calm, disagreed. In the fall of 2011 Ailes hosted a small luncheon at his New York estate for Christie, who was now his choice. Limbaugh flew in on his private jet for the occasion. Christie gave the group three reasons for not running: It was too early in his tenure as governor; he had four kids and needed to make some money, which might not materialize if he ran and lost; and he admitted, “I still like to go to Burger King and I’m not going to lose it [the weight].” The Burger King line was intended to be funny but wasn’t received as such, according to a person at the lunch. Later, when everyone from Nancy Reagan on down in the GOP wanted him to run
, Christie was tempted but still felt the timing wasn’t right, as it hadn’t been in 2005, when the New Jersey Republican Party asked him to run for governor four years before he was ready.

  If the Tea Party had a candidate, it might have been easier for more moderate Republicans to rally around an alternative. But all season long Tea Party members found fault with their choices. Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum had all supported bailouts or earmarks, a cardinal sin in the mind of Tea Partiers. Huntsman was seen as too liberal (even though he had a strong conservative record), and Cain flamed out. Many gravitated to Ron Paul but found they couldn’t stomach his isolationist views on foreign policy, By the end the Tea Party hadn’t helped any candidate and had badly hurt itself.

  The prevailing mood in the Republican Party was summed up by Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant nudged out of the Romney campaign in 2008. “We’re waiting for Superman,” Castellanos said. “We’re waiting for a ‘New Republican’ the way Democrats in 1992 were waiting for a ‘New Democrat’ and got one with Clinton.”

  FOR A TIME it seemed that Governor Rick Perry of Texas was the answer to the prayers of conservatives who didn’t trust Romney. He entered the race suddenly on August 13 and shot into a double-digit lead in the polls. His hard-right views and Reaganesque bearing were popular, though some prominent Republicans had doubts early on. Norquist kept asking Rove why he didn’t like Perry, and Rove finally answered, “The guy’s an empty suit. Everyone in Texas knows it.”

  Perry said some things that confirmed the impression and drove home the point that the new GOP front-runner was on the fringe of American politics. Where Romney in June hedged on the source of climate change but said there was evidence it was taking place (leading Limbaugh to claim, “He can say bye-bye to the nomination”), Perry said climate scientists embraced the theory “just to make money.” He called homosexuality “a deeply objectionable” lifestyle and charged darkly that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would be treated “pretty ugly down in Texas” because of the Fed’s “treasonous” policies. His associations raised eyebrows. A large Perry prayer rally was organized in part by a Christian sect called the New Apostolic Reformation, whose founder, C. Peter Wagner, claimed that Japan was controlled by demons. The press learned that the Perry family leased a hunting camp that, until recently, had been called “Niggerhead.”

  By October it was clear that Perry wasn’t Superman, and neither were any of the others. “It’s hard for a lot of Republicans to get a woodie this year,” Castellanos concluded.

  One explanation partner, Russ Schriefer, ,s small for the GOP ennui was that Republicans were out of new ideas and rapidly rejecting their old ones. Obama was the first president in modern memory to face an opposition party that repudiated many of its own positions to make a political point. The cynicism was startling by any historical standard. Most of the Obama initiatives savaged by the GOP presidential candidates in 2012 had originally been embraced, even originated by Republicans. The most famous example, the individual mandate for health insurance, was hatched in 1994 in the Heritage Foundation and championed by Mitt Romney in 2003 in Massachusetts. A cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the efforts of C. Boyden Gray, a senior adviser to Reagan and both Bushes. (Gingrich strongly endorsed it in 2007.) The START arms control proposal was first offered by Reagan in 1982 and negotiated by the first Bush administration. Almost all of the specific provisions of the American Jobs Act that Obama launched in September 2011 were supported before his presidency by large numbers of pro-infrastructure Republicans, none of whom had the courage now to restate their support.

  FOR MONTHS THE true winner of most of the GOP debates was Barack Obama. The press, obsessed over which Republican candidate won or lost each contest, kept missing the bigger story: the growing damage to the GOP brand. Primary debates were carried only on cable, which meant that the ratings were never higher than a few million. But with so many debates, each hyped by the sponsoring news organization, tens of millions of Americans saw at least snatches the next day on TV and online. The picture wasn’t pretty for the GOP. It showed a party of colorful fringe candidates expressing ideas of limited or no appeal to general election voters. The far-right audiences that viewers glimpsed (or heard) were loud and disrespectful, further marginalizing a party already plummeting in the polls.

  The Romney campaign despised all the primary debates and the networks’ preference for entertainment values. On the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, ABC News had a debate on Saturday night and NBC News the next morning, which required that the candidates do debate prep at 6 a.m. Romney especially loathed the goofy showbiz introductions of CNN and other sponsors that forced the candidates to enter to excitable voice-overs and thumping music as if they were contestants on American Idol. His biggest problem was with Fox. When his campaign complained to Fox about having six thousand people in a raucous live audience, the reply was, “Fine, don’t show up.” Romney’s team felt the implicit and sometimes explicit message from the networks was that not showing up or even complaining would affect coverage of their campaign.

  THE FAULT FOR allowing so many debates lay with Reince Priebus, a Wisconsin lawyer who became chairman of the Republican National Committee in January 2011. He knew the party had lost control of the process, but he didn’t have the muscle to get the candidates to reject the invitations of the TV networks. Priebus was a competent chairman, and his informal trade with Rove—the RNC’s lists of donors and supporters in exchange for super PAC money—stabilized the party’s finances. But the fact that he even had the job reflected the GOP’s cluelessness about the changing demographics of the country.

  InNational Youth AdministrationR early late 2008, after the election of the first black president, the GOP elected its first black party chairman, Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland. Moments after he won on the sixth ballot, Steele heard members of the RNC muttering “This won’t work” and “What’s the point?” as they left the room. Steele chalked it up more to poor sportsmanship than racism, but he was struck by how many complaints flowed in from members when he took his outreach program to Harlem. Several RNC board members recommended cutting the budget of his new “Coalitions” initiative, which was aimed at broadening the party’s base.

  Steele faced a daunting task rebuilding the GOP, which was demoralized after the 2008 wipeout and lacked the control of Congress or the White House that is usually necessary to raise money. In the wake of Obama’s win, many big donors gave up on the RNC and moved to super PACs. A more persuasive party chairman might have been able to keep more of that big money in party coffers, but the charge that Steele failed in his job—accepted as a given within the GOP—was unsupported by the record. He erased the party’s debt that he inherited, raised a record $198 million, revived moribund state parties by coordinating with Tea Party offshoots, tripled the number of small donors to more than a million, and, not incidentally, helped engineer a smashing victory in 2010, with the biggest gains in the House since 1938. Any other chairman would likely have been reelected based on performance. His reward was to be booted from the job.

  Steele’s problems began shortly after he took office in early 2009 when Democrats accused Rush Limbaugh of being the “de facto leader of the GOP.” This was also an attack on Steele, and he defended himself by telling the truth: “Limbaugh’s whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it is incendiary. Yes, it is ugly.” As night follows day, any criticism of Limbaugh within the Republican Party must be followed by an apology, and Steele quickly offered one. Within weeks he was branded a gaffe-prone maverick. There was truth to it: He adopted a goofy hip-hop pose for a photograph, wrongly told Sean Hannity that the GOP wouldn’t take the House in 2010, and agreed with CNN’s Roland Martin that white Republicans were “scared” of him.

  But in retrospect, most of what were seen at the time as Steele’s embarrassing gaffes—distancing the GOP from the Arizona immigration law, expressing d
oubts about the war in Afghanistan (which led neoconservatives to call for his resignation), and rejecting the party’s forty-year Southern Strategy, which he said “alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South”—were prescient attempts to modernize the party. Too prescient. Just after the big GOP victory in the midterms, the RNC’s political director Gentry Collins, ambitious to be party chairman himself, released a fiery letter of resignation accusing Steele of putting the RNC into debt by borrowing at the end of the 2010 campaign and terminating a get-out-the-vote effort called the “72 Hour Program.” (This was an effort designed by Rove, in which party operatives from Washington flooded congressional districts on the last weekend before the election; it had worked in 2004 but failed badly in 2006 and 2008.) According to Steele, Collins had earlier sent Steele a memo recommending both such courses of action. In any event, Collins was out of line: The borrowing in the fall of 2010, the main weapon used against Steele, was standard practice at the end of a campaign and fully justified by the spectacular 2010 results.

  Steele realized later that he could have survived the gaffes (which were fewer than Romney’s) and the borrowing, but nNational Youth AdministrationR earlyot the wrath of the GOP establishment, which was angry at him for giving RNC money to the states for party building instead of to the usual collection of Washington-based consultants and vendors. His critics, whom he identified as Rove, Norquist, and Boehner’s and McConnell’s political handlers, leaked to the Washington Times and the Daily Caller that the African American party chairman was incompetent. “They needed control back,” Steele said later. “I just wasn’t their boy.” His sacking was emblematic of an inflexible, hard-edged party with little use for diversity or outreach.