The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Politics
SAMUEL L. POPKIN
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Popkin, Samuel L., author.
Title: Crackup : the Republican implosion and the future of presidential politics / Samuel L. Popkin.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049817 (print) | LCCN 2020049818 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190913823 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190913847 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– ) | United States—Politics and government—21st century. | Trump, Donald, 1946–
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049817
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049818
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190913823.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
To the next two generations: My children Lucy and David, their spouses Seth and Paige, and my grandchildren Sadie and Henry
Acknowledgments
The constant support and invaluable feedback of my wife, Susan Shirk, made this book possible. Throughout our marriage she has filled our lives—and those of our children and grandchildren—with love and joy. I dedicated my last book to her and now I am dedicating this book to the next two generations of the family we have made together. Even while building UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center and writing her own foundational books, she has contributed to my work with understanding and constructive criticism. I cherish her and look forward to the day when we can resume traveling together. In the meantime, though, it’s my turn to ease her way while she finishes her latest book.
Writing this book was only possible because my editor, Dave McBride, and my agent, Jill Marsal, believed so strongly in this project. For ten years Jill has read my chapters with an eagle eye for clarity and logic. Even with increased management responsibilities at Oxford University Press, Dave found the time to give smart, incisive feedback. After Donald Trump’s election, it would have been all too easy to dismiss the premise of a Republican Party crackup. I am grateful that they both gave me unwavering support, and I hope this book justifies their trust.
My work on the ways changes in campaign finance and new media options transformed parties and politics only came together in a book because Gabriel Greene, the director of artistic development at La Jolla Playhouse, cared enough about this project to once again find time to help me. As a dramaturg, he kept my structural focus squarely on the Republican Party and off the sideshows. In addition to feedback and good cheer, Molly Schneider provided extraordinary assistance by organizing more than 10,000 newspaper and magazine articles so that I could quickly search and cite them while tracking unfolding issues or connecting the pieces of the stories. I was also fortunate for Francesca Lupia’s essential help; she provided fresh, sharp eyes, and ensured that my citations backed my text, and that the references weren’t too obscure for readers whose political awareness begins with 9/11 or the Great Recession. Huchen Lu and Zoe Nemerever created my tables.
I am equally indebted to fellow academic researchers. My study of the distinctive ways national politics plays out differently in the House, the Senate, and the White House was aided by years of conversations and feedback from Matt McCubbins, Gary Cox, and Roger Noll. Professors Frances Lee, Andrew Clarke, and Sarah Binder were also helpful at critical junctures by e-mail and with timely articles for the Monkey Cage, the Washington Post’s political science blog. Gary Jacobson has perfected the art of finding clear, straightforward ways to see the changes in relations between national and local issues in congressional elections. Thad Kousser helped me understand state legislatures and the critical role governors play in trying to connect the realities of managing government with how national legislators deal with the laws and regulation of campaign finance.
When I was an undergraduate at MIT, Howard Rosenthal introduced me to the ways modern research methods could help us address pressing social issues. All of political science owes a debt of gratitude to him and his former students and coauthors Nolan McCarty, Adam Bonica, and Keith Poole for their work on political polarization and the growth of wealth inequality in America.
What we owe each other as a country depends upon who we are and how much we trust government. My colleagues Tom Wong and Marisa Abrajano have helped many of us understand the complexities of immigration and the current stalemate over those who have lived and worked in America for decades. Michael Tesler and Shanto Iyengar have made sense of the ways race and media interact in a country where people can vote for an African American presidential candidate in one election, and then vote for a person who denies his predecessor was eligible to even run in the next. Chris Baylor and James Guth helped me decipher the complex maze of religious mobilization from Jimmy Carter onward. Arthur Lupia and Marc Hetherington have drawn attention to two distinct aspects of trust and political decisionmaking; both helped me understand the value of eroding trust in government, and how that makes it harder for governments to regulate tobacco, pollution, or coal. Raymond La Raja warned us of the dangers lurking in anti-party campaign finance reforms. Nancy Rosenblum placed the low regard for political parties in perspective and helped me explain why they are a necessary virtue, not a necessary evil.
At a moment when the work of journalists has been dangerously diminished or villainized, reporters have risen to the occasion, refusing to be cowed. Calling journalism the “first draft of history” understates the depth
and value of the hundreds of books and articles I cite. In all my years in national politics there have never been so many insightful analyses from so many perspectives. I relied on so many writers that I cannot hope to list them all. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is the gift that keeps on giving; it showed me the supreme irony and peril of a world where billionaires celebrate Ayn Rand’s world of great men who do it all on their own, while quietly forming a cartel to control state and national legislation. Tom Edsall has chronicled the ways that austerity and race have been changing our politics for over thirty years and has consistently managed to incorporate a vast array of scholarly research into his work. Besides her never-ending line of stories about President Trump, Maggie Haberman gets my vote as the “Most Valuable Tweeter.” Her comments on stories or tweets invariably connect the dots or flesh out the story. Jonathan Tilove was an invaluable window on Texas politics; perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay him is that he made it possible to smile while reading about Ted Cruz. Besides his own illuminating articles, Dan Balz developed a team of younger reporters ready to carry on at his level for decades.
I am particularly grateful to friends and family members who read early drafts. Richard Thaler encouraged me to turn an early chapter into a book and nudged me to clarify my reasoning. David Popkin and Paige St.Clair Fitzgerald found time for detailed comments on my arguments and order of presentation. James Hamilton, Robert Kaiser, Jill Lepore, Arne Westad, Barney Frank, Sandy Lakoff, Pamela Ban, Henry Kim, Abby Weiss, Peter Gourevitch, and Len Chazen all read chapters and corrected errors both factual and grammatical. And perhaps the most important piece of advice came from Peter Goldman, who always reminded me of the Newsweek mantra: be sure there are enough signs pointing to the candy store.
Introduction
In 2016, a businessman so discredited that he could no longer get a casino license or borrow money from an American bank was elected president of the United States of America. How did this happen? How could Donald Trump—armed only with a barebones campaign operation, a few powerful slogans, and almost complete ignorance of any policy issues—manage to beat a field of prominent, well-funded GOP governors and senators—and then win the presidency?
It is easy to mock, ridicule, or scorn the former president as if he alone were the problem. But blaming Donald Trump for being exactly the kind of person he showed himself to be in the campaign is as comforting and easy as it is self-defeating. As Jill Lepore wrote of the press baron William Randolph Hearst, “Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience.”1
Trump’s rants about President Barack Obama, race, and immigration were an important part of his appeal. But they are insufficient to explain his extraordinary accomplishment. Conflicts over race and immigration are often cited as the primary reasons for the Republican Party’s current divisions. But while such tensions are certainly present, they are not new to the country, and they were more violent and more present in daily life in other periods of the last century.
So what brought us to this moment? As I argue in this book, what is new is the collapse in trust of Congress and the inability of the political parties to respond to voters’ concerns. Hardly a day goes by without columnists, disaffected Republicans, and Democratic politicians attacking the GOP for failing to defend the Constitution, cooperate with allies, or protect elections from foreign meddling. If the party were capable of these actions, there would not have been a president like Donald Trump.2
The Anna Karenina Principle
To paraphrase the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, successful political parties are all alike, but every unsuccessful political party is unsuccessful in its own way. The geographer and historian Jared Diamond, explaining the development of human societies, used Tolstoy’s famous observation, this “Anna Karenina Principle,” to explain why searches for single causes of success are so misleading. In so many human endeavors, he showed that “success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.”3
A successful political party is a coalition in which there is peaceful coexistence between its diverse groups, and candidates from the party can compete and win at both the state and national level. All it takes for a party to turn from comity to carnage is a breakdown of the truce among its major groups.
Trump is a symptom of a much larger and more insidious issue plaguing the Republican Party, one that began well before him and may last well after him. During his years in real estate, Donald J. Trump had proven himself an expert in profiting from distressed properties, and the Republican Party, rife with dissensus, certainly fit the bill; after years of overpromising and underperforming, Republican voters became disillusioned with the GOP establishment.4
“Outsider” candidates win support when citizens lose faith in the ability of elected representatives to fulfill their promises and solve problems. Trump campaigned as someone untainted by responsibility for Washington’s stalemates, claiming his alleged business success meant he could cut through legislative obstacles the way Alexander the Great had undone the mythical Gordian knot with a single stroke of his sword.
The single most important reason that the United States ended up with an anti-party president—one who, upon accepting the nomination of his party, proudly proclaimed “I alone can fix it”—is the collapse of Republican leadership in the House and Senate. That was the straw that broke the elephant’s back. It was unlike any break the party had experienced in over a century. This was not the doing of inept or unqualified leaders. Rather, it was an institutional failure that occurred when the chosen leaders no longer had the power necessary to form consensus within their caucuses.
Someone as ill-prepared and improbable as Trump could only win the GOP nomination because the party had already cracked up into uncompromising
groups with incompatible demands, and had alienated so many of its voters that no Republican leader or politician had the credibility to exploit Trump’s record of broken promises, betrayals, and shady deals.5
Crackups—by which I mean a breakdown of cohesion within a party that prevents its leaders from developing realistic, achievable goals they can deliver on when they control the White House and majorities in the House and Senate—are an inevitable feature of the American federal system. They can endure for many election cycles, because the parties’ diverse groups are always jockeying among themselves for power. There will always be conflicts between voting blocs, donors, and party elites that make it hard for a party to compete well enough to win the presidency and legislative majorities.
This Republican crackup is different from past crackups, however. This is the first time—for the Democrats or the GOP—that no group within the party could create a synthesis of old orthodoxies and new realities that altered the party’s direction enough to build a new consensus. This is the first time that a candidate with virtually no support from established leaders won a party’s nomination, let alone the presidency. The Republicans imploded to the point that no candidate offering a defense of their traditional stands could come close to winning the nomination for president.
I want to make it clear from the start that this crackup is not a one-time failure of the Republican Party; Democrats have no reason to gloat and feel immune to a similar fate. Democrats were so badly split over social issues and redistributive government programs that they only controlled the White House for four out of twenty-four years between Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. When the next rift occurs, they will be just as susceptible to the factors that led to the current GOP crackup.
In this book, I argue that Donald Trump is symptomatic of the problems facing both parties. Ongoing changes in social and commercial media, combined with campaign finance reforms, are at the heart of the Republican crackup—and of future potential crackups in both parties. From now on, whenever there is a serious internal rift, parties will be prone to capture by a presidential candidate with no support from its leaders. Unless major reforms occur, both parties are vulnerable to legislative factions big enough to block compromise but too small in numbers or extreme in their demands to develop realistic policies that could garner majority support within the party.
Changes in social media and an expansion of the forms of commercial media have raised the number of issues voters follow and lowered the standards of reporting from many news sources. These changes make it easier
for individual politicians to find audiences and build personal reputations at odds with their party’s brand. In the 1960s, the main way for a senator to get a national television audience was by chairing a hearing so important that people tuned in. That gave party leaders control over national exposure; a senator had to earn respect and trust before being selected.
Today, it often seems that there are as many channels and programs as there are politicians in Washington. In 2008, the political consultant Ed Rollins observed how easy it was to start a campaign without ever becoming a “serious candidate with serious solutions.” All one had to do to raise several million dollars was go on television and say something “outrageous . . . throw a hand grenade.”6 Thanks to the growth of social media and the rise of low-budget commentators at the expense of costly investigative reporting, there are also more ways to degrade the credibility of expertise and devalue inconvenient facts.7
Misguided campaign finance reforms and Supreme Court rulings over the last twenty years have limited the ability of political parties to raise money directly, while at the same time removing all limits on independent spending by corporations and wealthy individuals. These rulings paved the way for billionaires with pet issues to build their own lavishly funded political organizations outside of party control, allowing them to operate behind the scenes and spend millions on advertisements while legally hiding the source of funds for the ads.
Moving the money away from parties has changed politics in America, weakening House and Senate party leaders and making it harder to pass legislation critical to their party’s supporters. When a party’s congressional leaders lack the leverage to bring the extremes of the party together, the system breaks down.
We are living with the unintended consequences of these changes, most prominently the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (known, respectively, as McCainFeingold and Citizens United). These changes in the fundamental rules of campaign finance are the result of an inadvertent synergy between the progressive quest for a government cleansed of party bosses, big money, and interests deemed “special,” on the one hand, and the anti-government determination of social and economic conservatives to make government smaller and less progressive, on the other. The combination has stripped the major parties of most of their power to enforce any collective responsibility on their legislative colleagues, or upon a president from their own party.
How Crackup Came to Be
This book began in 2013 as an additional chapter for a second edition of my earlier book, The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—and Hold—the White House. I wanted to elaborate on an important theme: the tactics that aspiring presidential candidates deploy to alter their party’s brand and become president.
The questions I faced demanded a lengthier examination than a chapter would allow, and it soon turned into a much bigger project focusing on the changing nature of intraparty battles in general, and the current crackup of the Republican Party in particular.
Several of those questions involved Senator Ted Cruz. During President Obama’s second term, whenever I gave a lecture, someone would ask me, “Is Hillary Clinton going to win in 2016?” I always responded, “It depends on how much damage Ted Cruz does to the Republican Party.”
I considered Cruz the key to the 2016 election—partly because he was the most entrepreneurial and politically creative Republican senator, but mostly because he was using the Senate in a brazenly self-serving manner; he seemed determined to be known as the bravest and purest one of all, regardless of the damage he inflicted on his party. Why were Senate Republicans walking on eggshells and letting Cruz get away with his stunts?
Cruz was a polished Supreme Court litigator who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His SCOTUS victories marked him as a star-in-themaking, suggesting a bright future in a courtroom, a governor’s mansion, or perhaps even the White House. Why, then, did he decide to run for president without building on his strengths? Why did he come to Washington as the destructive Mr. Hyde, and not the refined Dr. Jekyll?
I also had questions about Congress. The Republican-controlled House passed sixty-seven bills to repeal Obamacare during its namesake’s administration, safe in the knowledge that the president would veto their attempts. Yet in 2017 they had unified control in Washington without any plan for how to replace Obamacare. Were they merely playacting the entire time during Obama’s presidency? This was the most visible demonstration of moon-promising bravado without a realistic policy to fulfill their promise. However, it was not as damaging as the factional fights among representatives and senators.
Whenever there is a surge of new representatives or senators, the freshman class pushes for changes in the direction of their party as they work their way
into their party’s leadership system and committees. After the 2010 midterm election, some conservative Republican representatives who had previously aligned themselves with the “Tea Party” movement coalesced into a party within the party. This faction eventually became the Freedom Caucus, a faction too narrow to lead but big enough to block the majority. How did the insurgents maintain a distinct identity without ever offering feasible policies of their own?
Soon thereafter, Republican members of the House, and then the Senate, began using weapons inside their party that in the past had been deployed only against the opposition. Incumbent senators and representatives raised money to unseat their colleagues in primaries, forced government shutdowns to dramatize pet issues, and employed obscure legislative tactics to humiliate their own party’s House or Senate leader—solely for personal media coverage. These maneuvers highlighted the reality that some party members cared more about the size of their faction than about the ability of their party to legislate or bargain with the other party’s president.8
The Freedom Caucus blocked any compromise with their Republican colleagues, scoring publicity for themselves while claiming—in defiance of all logic and history—that total victory could be achieved. The end result of that continuous overpromising was a loss of confidence in party leadership among voters that tainted their opinions of Republican presidential candidates with government experience. Donald Trump’s history of bankruptcies, relations with organized crime, and praise of dictators were well known, but voters still preferred a candidate unsullied by close relations to a perpetually ineffectual party. (Cruz, the only person who had a chance against Trump, devoted his four years in Washington to demeaning, disparaging, and undermining the party leadership to signal clearly that he was not part of the party establishment.)
Weak Parties Enable Strongman Rule
After President Trump was sworn in, there were ominous forecasts of an inevitable “stress test for the Constitution” that his presidency would pose. The real stress test, however, was for the Republican Party. A president can be checked and balanced if, and only if, Congress acts to control defiance of the rule of law. Would Republicans—in unified control of Congress, but disunited as a party—be capable of constraining the president?
When Gary Cox and Barry Weingast examined 150 years of executive constraint and electoral accountability, they found that “the health of legislatures is more important than the health of elections” for stable economic growth. In a system with low constraint of the executive, there is more cronyism and corruption, and it shows up in the number of investments whose values plummet or soar when there is a transition in power.9
There is nothing self-evident or intuitive about the fact that the British Parliament or the American Congress, each comprising several hundred self-interested members, should produce a more stable and transparent government and support more rapid economic growth than would be possible in a government run by a single self-interested executive. If it were obvious, we would not see reruns of the fantasy that a single strong, determined person could do it all.
Strongman rule rarely ends well, and it never lives up to its promise. A strongman is subject to influence by a few, whereas a legislative process draws upon input from many. When one person dominates the political system, access to that person becomes crucial, and whoever has the leader’s ear has a chance to receive special benefits. Strongmen leaders, be they authoritarian or democratic, become isolated, paranoid, subject to flattery, and prone to caring more about loyalty than competence. In contrast, when a legislature votes on whether to pass a law that changes the rules, all of the diverse opposing interests have a chance to enter the fray and compete over benefits, blocking many of the most egregious possible actions in the process.10
In the Trump era, we are undergoing a version of the same crisis that led to the creation of parliaments and the end of monarchical rule centuries ago. The president used his delegated powers, in effect, to reverse-engineer democracy and increase the power of the unitary executive—actions which will almost surely continue to shape our political system long after Trump’s exit from the Oval Office.
All legislation requires give and take within the parties, which is only possible when party leaders have the authority to make the final judgments on who is given more and who is given less. Those decisions are always somewhat subjective, because so many intangibles are involved, but they invariably give the legislators from the most partisan districts or states less than their voters want in order to protect the more vulnerable politicians upon whom the party’s majority status depends.
A political party can only act responsibly when legislative leaders have the resources necessary to punish and reward party members and build
consensus on the legislation that is central to the party brand. When parties stand together, voters can connect their vote to the government’s policies. This is hardly a new point, but it has become even more important in the last twenty years. As Morris Fiorina wrote in 1980, and again in 2002, “The only way collective responsibility has ever existed, and can exist given our institutions, is through the agency of the political party; in American politics, responsibility requires cohesive parties.”11
And yet parties are given relatively little respect as institutions. Nancy Rosenblum’s dissection of the “ceaseless story of antipartyism” in the United States shows how little concern political theory and political science have devoted to the importance of parties. “Any concession to parties and partisans,” she notes, is “pragmatic, unexhuberant, unphilosophical, grudging.”12
Indeed, as the New York Times literary critic Jennifer Szalai ruefully wrote:
Politicization is the last refuge of the scoundrel. To “politicize” something— hurricanes, intelligence, science, football, gun violence—is to render it political in a way that distorts its true meaning. That, at least, seems to be the reasoning of those who use the term as an insult: We adhere to pristine, unadulterated facts and call for unity; they politicize those facts for partisan gain and divide us even more.13
Politicization, Szalai adds, sometimes functions as shorthand for everything wrong with our current political moment. But America’s problems are due to the breakdown of parties, not an excessive politicization of issues by the parties.14
The only way problems, ideals, and demands can be turned into accomplishable goals is though successful politicization, and that always entails compromise and bargaining. Rosenblum’s central insight, missed by many reformers, is that parties do more than respond to or reflect the passions and demands of the voters; they also construct legislative debate and bargaining by drawing “politically relevant lines of division.”15
An issue does not become an issue just because people tell pollsters they are concerned about it. The passion, anger, and frustration that lead to demands for action reduce change to slogans people can chant, put on a bumper sticker, or wear on a pin. But those slogans or chants don’t include the steps needed to effect the change. If they did, the Gordian knot would already be cut.
From a party’s point of view, an issue is important if it confers benefits to some groups within the party without alienating others. Bargaining and trade-offs are always necessary, and the more passionate the demands, the more necessary is the bargaining. The process is always messy because it requires coalitions of legislators with diverse interests to build a majority for all the steps.
Since the 1960s, reforms intended to cleanse the political system and make politicians more responsive to voters have had the consequence of weakening the ability of legislative leaders to reach intraparty consensus. Democracy requires compromises about principles, but it can be hard to defend principled compromise against charges of weakness and betrayal—and even harder when trust in the government and parties is absent.16 While principled compromise has become harder than ever to achieve, we blame the parties for undesirable outcomes, even as we put the solutions outside their control.
American parties have never been like corporations. There is no CEO who can enforce cooperation among party elites. No party executive can compel a candidate to withdraw for the sake of another candidate, fire a legislator who threatens the party’s brand name, or prevent billionaire donors from funding disruptive candidates who promote divisive issues. With weakened party leaders and unlimited, unregulated spending by outsiders, critical decisions shift from public view to “shadow parties” responsible to no one but a few wealthy donors.17
With these observations, we begin to see how we ended up where we are today. The consequences of party crackups are not simply political; they also directly impact the health of our economy, our society, our citizens. As I write this, the US death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 350,000, and the number of domestic cases has crossed twenty million. In the first year of this pandemic, there were more American deaths than all four years of World War II battles.18 While the end of 2020 saw the stock markets at or near record highs, the holiday season for many was more like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The Bureau of the Census’s December surveys of the pandemic’s impact recorded that one in eight Americans were struggling to obtain enough food, and one in three had difficulty paying their ordinary expenses. Twenty million persons lost jobs due to business slowdowns and closings; 5.9 million were out of work with COVID symptoms, or caring for someone with COVID symptoms; and 6.8 million were out of work because their children’s schools were closed or online.19 None of this was foreordained in a country with the world’s greatest scientists and most advanced capacity for medical research.
And all this would have been avoidable if the party controlling the White House had been able to adapt its priorities to deal with the crisis.
What Is the Right Time to Change?
Unfortunately, adapting a party’s strategies and priorities—even in a time of apparent crisis—is far easier said than done. As a party’s stand on an issue becomes difficult for many politicians to defend, these politicians will argue that the party must change its position or lose the next election. But for whom is that stand indefensible, and at what cost? What should be the party’s priority: control of governors’ mansions, the House of Representatives, the Senate, or the White House? The interests of presidents, senators, representatives, and governors are different enough that changes necessary to control one branch often impede or undermine attempts to control the other branches.
Politicians will also always disagree on whether the current problem is a temporary aberration or a permanent shift. As climate scientists and economists know, it is difficult to sway people to make immediate changes to prevent an eventual crisis. In a federal system, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between momentary growing pains and a crisis that will lead to massive fissures; between an issue affecting only one region or demographic group and an emerging change in the national consensus; between the everpresent conflicts between representatives, senators, governors, and presidential candidates, and conflicts that might damage all of them. Supreme Court decisions can transform state issues into national issues; wars and economic crises can turn yesterday’s conventional wisdom into today’s nonsense; and every generational shift changes social norms. So many events can end the peaceful coexistence within a political party, and the multiple and overlapping conflicting interests within a party can persist for years before enough of its members can agree on how to rebrand and unify the party.
Indeed, the current Republican crackup has been in the making for nearly two decades. In 2003, during a fierce Democratic primary battle, former president Bill Clinton remarked wistfully that in every campaign, Democrats want to fall in love with a candidate, while Republicans just “fall in line.”20 At the time, that view—organized Republicans and disorganized Democrats— seemed correct. In 2000, after all, the GOP had settled on Texas governor George W. Bush as its candidate without much acrimony or disaffection,
while Democrats were still brawling over whether Al Gore should have been more liberal or more moderate.
But, as we will see, even as Clinton spoke about Republican harmony, the GOP was quietly entering the most fractious period either party had gone through since the 1960s, leading directly to where we are now.
1
The Last Republican President?
In late 1998—two years before the 2000 presidential election and eighteen months before the parties would coronate their nominees at their national conventions—Republican Party leaders already had their man.
It was after the midterm election in November, during the Republican Governors Conference in New Orleans, that party officials began the informal process of vetting potential presidential candidates. They were anxious about the 2000 election; the last four years had been a bewildering series of triumphs and setbacks. The GOP had won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, followed by a Senate majority in 1996. Then, their attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice backfired with voters. For the first time in 174 years, the president’s party had gained in the midterm. In addition, the two senators leading the impeachment trial were voted out of office, and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his chosen successor Bob Livingston both had to resign when their own affairs were exposed.
As the party leaders began their deliberations in New Orleans, no one doubted that a governor—as someone untainted by the disarray in Washington—would be the best presidential candidate in 2000. Republican strategist Mike Murphy described the meeting:
“Who’s gonna run?” And then they all look around at each other warily, and they begin this process of selection. [Tom] Ridge [of Pennsylvania] can’t go because he’s pro-choice. Tommy Thompson [of Wisconsin] can’t go because he can’t raise any money. [John] Engler [of Michigan] can’t go because he’s not charismatic enough. . . . The only guy left standing in the room when they got done canceling each other out was [George W.] Bush.1
In 1999, as the 2000 primary season was in its nascent stage, Republican Party chairs flew to Texas to meet with the “bad-boy,” born-again former governor, and son of the forty-first president. Afterward, one official recalled, “Everybody was happy . . . we were like pigs in shit.”2
Bush turned out to be the last candidate for at least twenty years—and possibly longer—to win the nomination of a unified Republican Party. Twelve years after his re-election, the party seemed so irrevocably divided that he confided to close friends, “I’m worried that I will be the last Republican president.”3
Gradually and Then Suddenly
Breakdowns in party unity often happen in two phases, “gradually and then suddenly,” as a Hemingway character explained bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises. Rudiger Dornbusch would later repurpose Hemingway’s words to describe a common pattern of national economic breakdown: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”4
Implicit in Murphy’s summary of that New Orleans meeting in 1998 were three critical criteria for a Republican presidential candidate in 2000: support from religious conservatives, the talent to sell a conservative vision of the country’s future, and the ability to raise the massive amounts of money now needed to win the nomination—which meant supporting tax cuts for big donors.
Left unspoken was a fourth essential attribute, one too sensitive to discuss openly: the ability to avoid collateral damage from commitments popular with some voters that would alienate many others. With public opinion veering away from Republican Party orthodoxy on several fronts, who would best be able to navigate the needs of the base without estranging enough independent voters to make winning a general election impossible? Religious conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and defense hawks all wanted policies that they could get from the GOP only as long as they could support each other’s goals. But their marriage of convenience, which Ronald Reagan had officiated back in 1977, was strained to its near-breaking point.
It was getting harder for the party to appeal to social and religious conservatives without turning off less-religious and secular voters, especially as attitudes toward contraception and abortion moved to the left. It was also becoming more difficult to promote tax cuts for the wealthy without alarming older voters about the future of Social Security and Medicare.
Bush looked like the one candidate that could hold the party together. Long before New Orleans, Bush’s longtime strategist, Karl Rove, had been
maneuvering behind the scenes to connect Bush to the key players and critical constituencies within the Republican Party, privately reassuring conservatives of all stripes of the governor’s bona fides.5
Bush’s pre-primary outreach was devised to make as many private promises as possible without public commitments on complex issues. He knew better than to hamper his own general election chances, and the critical interest groups to whom he catered were reassured enough to refrain from loud public demands during the primaries. If Bush won and failed to deliver, they could sit out his re-election campaign.
One of the most powerful GOP activists, the anti-tax champion Grover Norquist, privately recounted the governor’s overtures:
Bush went to every piece of the coalition and said, “I know you want to be left alone on guns. Deal.” “I know you want to be left alone on taxes. Deal.”
“Property rights? Deal.” “Home schooling? Deal.” Went to everyone and got ’em signed up or neutralized, including me, two years before the election.6
The Doomsday Button
Once primary voting began, it took Bush less than a month to gain certain victory—and yet the process foreshadowed ongoing conflicts between party elites and Republican voters. Without a covert, mud-slinging attack on Senator John McCain’s character, Bush might not have won the nomination.
McCain, lacking Bush’s establishment money and deep ties to evangelicals and social conservatives, skipped Iowa (the first primary battleground) altogether. Instead, he hunkered down in New Hampshire, riding through the Granite State in his bus, the “Straight Talk Express.”
That left Iowa as a battle between Bush and Steve Forbes, the wealthy heir to the magazine that bore his name. As in 1996, when Forbes spent $37 million on a failed, quixotic run for president, the centerpiece of his 2000 campaign was a flat tax. Bush had already privately assured Republican leaders that he supported tax cuts on the upper-income groups whose taxes had risen under the Clinton administration; he and Rove prepared a preemptive tax cut to blunt the impact of Forbes’ message.
It worked, though not as well as he’d hoped. In a state where the Republican primary caucus is dominated by voters mobilized through their churches,
the born-again Bush managed only 41 percent of the vote, against Forbes’s 31 percent. The support for Forbes’s large tax cuts among conservative primary voters and the widespread support for protecting middle-class entitlements—Medicare and Social Security—were on a collision course. Republican voters, like all others, wanted more government than they were willing to pay for.
New Hampshire signaled more trouble for Bush and the conservative core of the party. McCain’s independence, candor, and heroism attracted moderate Republicans and independents. In contrast to Bush’s well-documented checkered past, no one doubted the character and honor of a man who had endured years of torture in North Vietnamese captivity, refusing to accept an early release in exchange for denouncing the war—and even trying to hang himself to ensure he didn’t crack under torture.
Despite the money and media Bush dumped into the state, McCain won the New Hampshire primary with 49 percent to Bush’s 30 percent. National coverage flourished for McCain, and ordinary voters poured money into his campaign. Over the next few days, McCain’s campaign took off. In the critical South Carolina primary that followed New Hampshire, McCain jumped from 20 points behind Bush to virtually tied in less than a week.7
Bush was saved by the primary calendar—and the religious right. With McCain soaring in the polls, Bush pushed “the doomsday button” and his lieutenants sent out word to “take the gloves off.” Ralph Reed, a top Christian Coalition operative, may have looked like a choir boy, but in private he liked to boast: “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”8
The Christian Coalition had tied their fate to Bush’s, and they delivered. McCain was ambushed with waves of dishonest attacks, some of which were even spread by his Republican colleague (and Senate Majority Leader) Trent Lott.
Some smears could not be pinned directly on Bush—notably the waves of phone calls claiming that the McCains’ adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his biological child, or the letters and e-mails sent to South Carolina voters from Richard Hand, a Bible professor at Bob Jones University, alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage.”9
Other attacks, however, were orchestrated by the campaign itself. With Bush standing at his side, the chairman of the National Vietnam and Gulf War Veterans Coalition told a campaign audience that McCain had “come
home and forgotten us.” At McCain rallies, Bush supporters told people that McCain was not a war hero, and was secretly pro-choice.10
Bush triumphed in South Carolina, effectively stopping McCain’s surge. Neither the Arizona senator nor any of his staff ever forgot the dishonest attacks, or that Bush had silently stood on the stage when McCain’s war record had been impugned. Conceding the South Carolina primary, McCain said, “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land. . . . I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way.”11
Bush had won support from the moneyed Republican donor class and anti-government conservatives with his program to cut taxes, but he had to adapt quickly during the general election campaign to deal with the fiscal achievements and economic growth of the Clinton presidency.
At his 1998 State of the Union address, Clinton announced that the federal government would actually run a budget surplus—the first since 1969. That budget surplus meant double trouble in the campaign for “W,” the nickname used to distinguish the governor from his father, President George H. W. Bush. First, it countered the Republican argument that a tax cut was necessary to balance the budget. Second, when Clinton announced the surplus to an unusually large national audience—many of whom had tuned in to hear if he would refer to the just-breaking story of his affair with Monica Lewinsky—he proposed that the country should use the surplus to “save Social Security first.”
Bush’s polling made clear that his tax cuts were his least popular proposal with swing voters. As the Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore, pointed out that his opponent would give more money to the top 1 percent of the country than to education, health care, and defense combined, Bush downplayed his tax cuts and focused on his plans for saving Social Security and improving education.12
Once the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Bush v. Gore and confirmed Bush’s general election victory, it was imperative for the president-elect to firm up his legislative base before moving ahead. He was well aware that the Democrats would pounce if any splits developed among Republicans.
Rove believed that the two parties were at a point where they had “exhausted their governing agendas,” and was determined to create a new synthesis. Solidifying the base was the first stage of Bush and Rove’s plan to make the GOP the majority party.13
Before he was even inaugurated, Bush was hit with demands—in most cases, more extreme than his own plans—from religious leaders and
anti-government conservatives, all of whom wanted to be first in line to get their rewards before the well ran dry or conflicts flared up.
Bush’s (relatively) bloodless anointment as leader of the Republican Party did nothing to minimize the cracks within the GOP. The minute he had to actually follow through publicly on his private promises to one group, there was open resistance from other parts of his coalition. There was an everwidening regional divide over the rights of women and gays; a split between affluent and moderate-income voters over whether to cut taxes or protect the safety net; and divides between younger, more educated voters and older Republicans over the role of government in environmental regulation.
Even when national public opinion shifts, politicians do not easily change long-standing positions if it makes it harder for them in their district or state. Actually changing the party’s agenda meant confronting members of Congress uninterested in bending their personal reputations and pledges for the good of the president and the party.
Legislative Ambition versus Presidential Success
When George W. Bush won in 2000, it gave the Republicans their first unified national government since 1954. He now faced conflicts between legislative ambition and presidential success; in every area, the president had to deal with newly energized Republican representatives more concerned about maintaining their own individual power than a national majority for the president.14
When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, it capped a long, slow shift in the balance of power between the parties. Thereafter, either party was capable of winning or losing control of the House or Senate in every election. Frances E. Lee, for the Senate, and Adam Bonica and Gary Cox, for the House, have shown how near-parity between the two parties after 1994 changed the nature of bipartisanship. When every district mattered, politicians had less ability to separate from their party brand in campaigns, so the incentives for any legislator to work with the other party dwindled.15
Bush enjoyed Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, but there were still problems. For one thing, nearly every Republican in Congress—not to mention the president himself—had signed “The Pledge.”
This was the brainchild of Grover Norquist, hailed by Newt Gingrich as “the single most effective conservative activist in the country.” Norquist’s
avowed goal was to cut the federal government so much he could “drown it in the bathtub.” That meant cutting taxes as much as possible, no matter how much it affected popular programs like Social Security or Medicare.
He used his weekly breakfast meetings in Washington to create what he called the “Leave Us Alone” coalition. For Norquist, the ideal citizen was “the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit . . . because that person doesn’t need the goddamn government for anything.”16
Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform created the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” in 1986, and signing it—thereby committing “to oppose any and all tax increases”—became a litmus test for Republican candidates, as well as Democratic candidates running in red-leaning districts.
Once a politician commits to an absolute principle like Norquist’s, any concession becomes a sign of weakness—or even “an admission of depravity.” For Norquist, deficits were never a reason to increase taxes; they were evidence more cuts in spending were needed.17
“ ‘No Compromise,’ ” the late Nobel Prize–winning economist Thomas Schelling wrote, “is a great battle cry but usually a poor strategy.” While absolute positions are generally a bad strategy for political parties, the pledge proved to be a brilliant move for Norquist, who equated any bipartisan legislation with “date rape.”18
Within a month of Bush’s inauguration, the challenges of balancing commitment and compromise became clear as the Republican-led Congress began legislating a major tax cut aimed at upper-income taxpayers. Bush’s proposal called for $1.6 trillion worth of cuts over ten years, while many Democrats and some Republican senators wanted no more than $1 to $1.2 trillion, so that more would go to Medicare, education, and infrastructure.
Republican dissent was quickly squelched. When GOP Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont publicly stated his displeasure that the tax cut meant cutting support for special education, Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff, went on Vermont Public Radio and argued that Jeffords should support the president’s agenda, not special education. Another senator told the New York Times that the tax cut was the Bush administration’s “crown jewel,” and Jeffords was trying to steal it, like “the Pink Panther.”
Despite the White House’s efforts, Republicans could not push the $1.6 trillion cut through. The Senate bill moved $450 billion from tax cuts to education and debt reduction, and it passed 65–35, with the support of fifteen Democrats.19
