As the Romney campaign faltered in the final months, many on the right refused to believe it. Signs that suggested the Obama administration was doing well, such as improving economic figures, were dismissed in disbelief. When the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national unemployment rate, which had been slowly dropping over the year, ticked down another 0.3 percent in September, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch insisted the data must have been faked. “Unbelievable jobs numbers,” he noted in an angry post on the social media site Twitter, known as a “tweet.” “These Chicago guys will do anything . . . can’t debate so change numbers.” While the “B.L.S. truthers” doubted the economic numbers, others on the right refused to believe the reports from independent polling outfits. A blogger named Dean Chambers, skeptical of the polls showing Obama had a consistent lead in the closing months of the campaign, launched a new site called UnSkewedPolls.com. There, he took the work product of professional pollsters, reweighted the results to reflect the more Republican-leaning electorate of his imagination, and then published the “unskewed” results that showed Romney well in the lead. Many on the right latched on to the altered data to confirm their own feelings that the Republicans were winning.56
Despite the belief on the right that Romney would win and win easily, Obama was reelected by a fairly comfortable margin, winning 332 electoral college votes and 51.1 percent of the popular vote. Having bought into their own narrative about the campaign, some Republicans initially refused to believe the election returns as they came in. On Fox News, GOP strategist Karl Rove pushed back against early indications of an Obama win, sifting through exit polling to find signs of hope. “Is this just math that you do as a Republican,” anchor Megyn Kelly asked him, “to make yourself feel better?” When the network called the key battleground state of Ohio for Obama, Rove pleaded with his colleagues to reverse the call, insisting the state would ultimately go to the GOP. In an improvised bit of drama, Kelly took the cameras, and viewers, back down a hallway to check in with the network’s analysts, to see if they would change their mind. They didn’t. Shortly after 11pm eastern, Fox and all the other networks called the race for the Democrats. The Romney campaign, which was so confident it hadn’t even written a concession speech for its candidate, was stunned by the results. “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming,” a senior campaign advisor noted. “He was shellshocked.” 57
In the end, Obama became the first president to win a majority of the popular vote in back-to-back elections since Reagan. But, notably, in another sign that divided government had become the new norm, voters sent roughly the same Congress back as well. Democrats kept control of the Senate, though by thin margins; the GOP held on to the House. Polarization and partisanship had proved to be sturdier than Obama had initially assumed, and in the aftermath of the election, these problems only became more pronounced. For some on the right, the lesson of the Republicans’ 2012 loss was that the party needed to change not its electoral message, but its electorate. Accordingly, a spate of new laws and executive actions at the state level sought to restrict access to the ballot, making it harder for large numbers of Americans to exercise their right to vote.
Most notably, the drive to require voter identification cards at polling places, already well under way since the 2010 midterm victories, accelerated after Romney’s loss. Ostensibly, voter ID laws were presented as a nonpartisan reform, meant to crack down on an alleged epidemic of voter fraud. But no such epidemic existed. (According to the most comprehensive study of the issue, out of over one billion votes cast in American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 potential cases of voter fraud that would be solved by voter ID.) In truth, as many Republican officials acknowledged, voter ID laws were pursued with partisan intent. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the state’s House Majority Leader Mike Turzai bragged in the summer of 2012 that he had helped institute “voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Because racial minorities were both the most likely group to lack the mandated forms of identification and an overwhelmingly Democratic constituency, Republicans believed these voter ID measures would effectively lower Democratic turnout. At the local level, where votes were actually cast and counted, some Republican officials admitted this motive, in crude but clear terms. In North Carolina, for instance, a GOP precinct chairman told a Daily Show correspondent that the state’s voter ID law would prevent “lazy blacks” from voting. “The law is going to kick Democrats in the butt.” 58
The campaign for voting rights restrictions received a surprise boost the following summer, when the Supreme Court struck down key sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Controversial at the time of its passage, the landmark civil rights legislation quickly secured broad bipartisan support. (In 2006, for example, Congress renewed the act’s provisions for another twenty-five years. In the House, the vote was 390–33; in the Senate, 98–0.) Despite that strong backing, conservative critics attacked the law as an outdated vestige of the civil rights era. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a slim 5–4 majority on the Supreme Court agreed with these critics, throwing out two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, including the requirement that states and localities with a past record of discriminatory voting laws obtain “preclearance” from the federal government before instituting any changes. Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice Roberts argued that such requirements, which “made sense” at the time of the law’s creation, were badly outdated because, “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” For liberals on the court, however, that logic was backward. Things had changed, they argued, because of the Voting Rights Act; if the law were undone, so too would those changes be undone. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg chided in her dissent, “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” And indeed, after the decision, the campaign for new voting rights restrictions took off with surprising speed. Between the 2012 and 2016 elections, seventeen different states—comprising 189 electoral votes among them—instituted new restrictions, including laws that made it more difficult to register to vote, cut back early and absentee forms of voting, and required strict forms of government-issued IDs.59
In many ways, the 2012 election and its aftermath served as an ominous warning of trends to come. As Romney’s “ 47 percent” gaffe revealed, class resentments were growing at both ends of the economic ladder. Racial divisions, which had grown in the attacks against the first African American president, intensified with the drive for voting rights restrictions. Complaints about “fake” job numbers and “skewed” polls, meanwhile, signaled that Americans increasingly could not agree even on basic facts and figures. The fault lines of division and discord had only deepened across Obama’s first term, and despite his reelection, the president would soon discover—as many of his predecessors had learned—that his political standing was far from secure.
CHAPTER 15
The Trump Effect
THE PARTISAN POLARIZATION THAT DOMINATED OBAMA’S first term only continued to spread in the years that followed.
Ominously, the divisions in DC came to be seen across the nation as a whole. The fault lines in race relations, long submerged by the fiction that America had become a “postracial nation” after the accomplishments of the civil rights era and, more recently, the election of the first black president, burst back into public view. Responding to a rash of killings of African Americans at the hands of police and private forces, the Black Lives Matter movement presented the strongest challenge to racism in decades. At the same time, white supremacist organizations increasingly made their presence felt as well, forming a new “Alt Right” culture that spoke to aggrieved whites on the fringes.
As racial divisions reached their worst point in decades, the country was rocked by a presidential campaign that severely aggravated othe
r fault lines in the United States. The 2016 contest between the insurgent candidacy of Republican Donald Trump and the predictable politics of Democrat Hillary Clinton proved to be one of the ugliest in modern American history, a hard-edged contest that sent aftershocks through the entire nation.
Acts of Terror
One of the most contentious issues in Obama’s second term stemmed from an event in the waning weeks of the 2012 election. On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Islamic militants inside Libya attacked an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, killing US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Attacks on American embassies were nothing new—during the Bush administration, for instance, thirteen had been attacked, resulting in sixty deaths—but in the heightened partisanship of the 2012 campaign, this one became particularly politicized. In the second presidential debate, Mitt Romney accused Obama of refusing to label the attack as a “terrorist act” in an effort to downplay the problem for electoral gain. But as the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, noted, Obama had in fact called it an “act of terror” in a Rose Garden address the day after the attack.1
Still, charges persisted well past the election that the Obama administration had either failed to protect the embassy or engaged in a cover-up afterward to hide its mistakes. House Republicans launched several investigations into the Benghazi incident, but ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing. Allegations that there had been a “stand-down order” sent to troops in the region who might have helped save those at Benghazi were dismissed as baseless by the House Armed Services Committee’s majority report in February 2014. Meanwhile, the House Intelligence Committee concluded in November that there was “no intelligence failure” behind the attack either. These Republican-led committees faulted the Obama White House for inadequate security plans and chided the administration for contributing to the initial confusion over the causes of the attack, but ultimately dismissed the allegations of misconduct or criminal cover-up. Despite such thorough investigations by their fellow Republicans, many in the party refused to accept their conclusions. “I think the report’s full of crap,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN, dismissing the findings of the House Intelligence Committee. Newt Gingrich likewise speculated that the body must have been “co-opted by the C.I.A.” With party elders insisting the reports were meaningless, many rank-and-file Republicans readily agreed.2
Accordingly, to placate the demands of the base, Speaker Boehner authorized yet another congressional inquiry, the Select Committee on Benghazi. This time, former secretary of state and likely 2016 Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton found herself as its focus. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor known for his confrontational style, was picked to head the special body. Elected to the House in 2010, Gowdy had defeated Republican Bob Inglis by insisting that the incumbent—a congressman with a lifetime rating of 93 percent from the American Conservative Union—had sold out his base and strayed too far toward the center. For two years, the Gowdy Committee conducted an exhaustive $7 million inquiry that ended, like the ones before it, with no damning conclusions. Its close scrutiny of Hillary Clinton, however, did yield the discovery that, while secretary of state during Obama’s first term, she had maintained a private email server through which sensitive materials had passed.3
Beyond Benghazi, new revelations about US surveillance techniques came to light. In May 2013, a contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA) named Edward Snowden leaked classified material revealing that the agency’s domestic surveillance program was far more extensive than most had previously assumed. His revelations showed that, among other things, the government had spied on cell phone calls of foreign leaders. The new information shocked Americans across the political spectrum: libertarian Republicans saw this as an intrusion of government power, while liberal Democrats were disillusioned to see Obama had followed the same line on surveillance as his predecessor. These stories, combined with the news of the extensive use of drone attacks against targeted terrorists, revealed that Obama had not only left in place many of the counterterrorism programs that he had inherited from President Bush but had even expanded them. More revelations became public as Snowden published his findings from the documents online, gaining widespread attention from the news media.4
The other area of national security that proved extremely problematic for the Obama White House was a new militant organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The administration had felt vindicated by its decimation of the al-Qaeda terrorists who waged the 9/11 attacks, a process that culminated with a daring raid in May 2011 that resulted in the assassination of Osama bin Laden. But as soon as that threat had been addressed, a new one surfaced in ISIS. In the wake of the pullout of US troops from Iraq, Sunni Arabs there and in Syria had started to amass military power and gradually take control of territory. As their group’s name indicated, their main goal was nothing less than the creation of a new Islamic state in the Middle East. ISIS captured attention by taking hostages and beheading them. Videos of the violence spread quickly via social media, YouTube, and other internet outlets, stirring up fear and anger.5
As with al-Qaeda, ISIS proved to be a complicated target—one that took territory across the Middle East while also launching terrorist strikes outside the region, most notably in the West. On November 12, 2015, in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, Obama confidently assured host George Stephanopoulos that ISIS had been “contained” in the region. “They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria they’ll come in, they’ll leave, but you don’t see this systemic march by ISIL [an alternate term for ISIS] across the terrain.” The next day, however, ISIS terrorists unleashed a massive set of coordinated attacks in Paris, where suicide bombings and shootings left 130 dead and 368 wounded. Obama’s insistence that ISIS had been “contained,” freed of context, made him sound badly out of touch. His characteristically dispassionate approach to handling crises didn’t resonate with Republicans and even some Democrats, who felt the brutal attacks deserved a more spirited response from the commander-in-chief.6
On the domestic front, the president faced a different kind of insurgency, coming from the right wing of the GOP. Emboldened by their past successes, Tea Party activists now made it clear that they would mount a primary challenge against any Republican legislator who strayed from their preferred positions. Meanwhile, conservative donors poured money into the forces opposed to any compromise. When President Obama was able to get an immigration bill through the Senate with Republican support in June 2013, for instance, the House defeated the measure, despite widespread predictions that it would pass. Issues like climate change regulation likewise languished on Capitol Hill. The budget battles flared again in 2013 with renewed threats of default. House Republicans insisted on draconian spending cuts, indicating a willingness to spark economic chaos if their demands were not met. The congressional “super committee” proved unable to reach agreement on spending cuts, triggering sequestration of funds that amounted to $1.2 trillion over ten years. In October 2013, when Congress could not reach agreement on federal spending due to a dispute over funding health care, the federal government shut down for sixteen days until a deal was reached. A Pew poll showed that Republicans and Democrats were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the past two decades.7
The confrontational style of politics continued to pay off at the polls, however, and the strength of the Republican Right solidified in the 2014 midterms. At the state level, Republicans now controlled nearly two-thirds of all governorships and state legislatures. Nationally, the GOP retook the Senate for the first time since 2006, and expanded its numbers in the House as well. Republicans now claimed the largest majority in the House since the eve of the Great Depression, with their ranks moving steadily to the right. But the new approach came with its own costs. In a stunning development, Majority Leader Eric Cantor—the second-most powerful Republican in the House and the lead
er of the all-out conservative resistance to Obama’s agenda there—was unseated in a primary challenge by David Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College who had the backing of the Tea Party. Ironically, a politician who had long championed stark partisanship as the key to his party’s survival was destroyed by it himself.8
In spite of their apparent strength, the Republican majorities in Congress again grew more visibly riven by internal fighting. Frustrated with the ineffectiveness of his institution and increasingly unable to control the Tea Party–aligned “Freedom Caucus” in the GOP ranks, Speaker Boehner announced in September 2015 that he would resign, throwing the chamber into further turmoil. His apparent successor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, then came under fire as well. Seeking to burnish his credentials with the far Right, the California Republican made controversial comments about the most recent round of House Benghazi hearings. The GOP had insisted there was no partisan motive behind the investigation, but McCarthy bragged to Fox News’s Sean Hannity that his role in creating the Gowdy Committee showed he could be counted on as a reliable party man. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” After the awkward admission that the inquiry was little more than a political hit, McCarthy was forced to withdraw from the Speaker’s race. The search for a replacement dragged on for weeks, further exposing tensions between the more moderate members of the Republican leadership and an angry, growing base of Tea Party supporters in the “Freedom Caucus” on the far right. Only in late October 2015 did the party find someone willing to serve as Speaker: Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the last “Young Gun” standing, who had served as Romney’s running mate in 2012.9
Fault Lines Page 40