A decade later, Flake, who touted his TARP opposition while jumping from the House to the Senate in 2012, is the only such Republican to express regret for how he voted in September 2008. “In the House, it’s much easier to vote no and hope yes,” he explains. “When you’re one of 435, it’s easier to cast an ideological vote and force someone else to carry your water. But it’s irresponsible. When I got to the Senate, I decided I couldn’t do that anymore.”
TARP is quite possibly the most successful government program of its generation. All the money was paid back, with interest, and experts believe that the intervention almost certainly staved off a Depression-like catastrophe.17 But the entire episode was scarring for millions of Americans who became convinced that Washington and Wall Street were playing by a different set of rules; that the economy was rigged against them; that professional politicians had sold them out.
“McCain came back to bail out the banks. He had a chance. I was hoping he wouldn’t vote for it,” says Jordan. “That was when the populist sentiment started to take root around the country. I think that was probably laying the groundwork for what happened in 2016.”
THE FINAL MONTH OF THE CAMPAIGN WAS ANTICLIMACTIC. THOUGH the financial rescue package had finally passed, the Republican Party’s management of the affair had hardly inspired confidence. After a second term plagued by volatility, it was yet another crisis on the GOP’s watch. This, combined with his own economic amateurism and his running mate’s slow-motion implosion, was too much for McCain to overcome.
The candidate came to peace with this. But many Republicans could not.
Palin thrashed wildly in the campaign’s final weeks. She alleged that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” She also invoked his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial sermons at a black church McCain had declared out-of-bounds for criticism, determined that, win or lose, he would not be remembered for injecting race into the contest.
Several of McCain’s top aides spent the home stretch bad-mouthing Palin to the press, attempting to pin the imminent defeat on her. Steve Schmidt, the senior strategist who had insisted on picking Palin (and who, ten years later, would announce his departure from the Republican Party due to Trump’s takeover) suffered what friends described as a nervous breakdown and left the campaign for three weeks in October, returning just before the election to begin shoveling blame onto Palin.
On Hannity’s Fox News show, a guest described the nature of Obama’s community organizing work in Chicago as “training for a radical overthrow of the government.” In battleground Pennsylvania, Bill Platt, chairman of the Lehigh County GOP, warmed up a McCain rally by mentioning how Obama didn’t wear an American flag lapel pin. “Think about how you’ll feel on November 5 if you wake up in the morning and see the news that Barack Obama—Barack Hussein Obama—is the president-elect of the United States of America,” Platt warned.18
McCain’s closing argument—“Who is the real Barack Obama?”—aimed to contrast the Democratic senator’s ultraliberal voting record with his centrist rhetoric. Obama promised to deliver comprehensive immigration reform, for instance, but the Illinois senator had helped torpedo the McCain/Kennedy effort by supporting a “poison pill” labor amendment. Obama railed against money in politics, but he became the first presidential nominee ever to reject public financing for his campaign, reversing an earlier pledge and triggering an avalanche of outside spending.19 Even Obama’s opposition to same-sex marriage, Republicans felt, was insincere, aimed at mollifying white moderates and black churchgoers.
Yet more than drawing attention to these issues, McCain’s approach was unwittingly successful in eliciting ugly responses from the right. Shouts of “terrorist!” echoed at Republican events nationwide. Conservative websites exploded with last-minute allegations that Obama had been born overseas; that he was a Muslim; that he was a Manchurian candidate. Rock bottom was reached at an October 10 rally in Minnesota, where McCain was repeatedly booed for telling his town hall audience that they should not be scared of Obama. At one point, a woman named Gayle Quinnell stood to speak. “I can’t trust Obama,” she told McCain. “I have read about him and he’s not . . . he’s not . . . he’s an Arab.”
McCain shook his head and took the microphone from her hands. “No, ma’am,” he replied. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that’s what this campaign is all about.”
Watching the news coverage with Obama and their team at Chicago headquarters, Axelrod says he was stunned—not at McCain’s honorable defense of his opponent, but at the reactions to it. “I remember when John McCain was the ‘it’ guy among the young Reaganite class in Congress,” Axelrod says. “To see him shouted down at his own rally for showing a modicum of civility, I just said out loud, ‘My God, I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
Obama brought out the worst in the Republican base. The seeds of anger and resentment, of nativism and victimization, were sown by forces outside his control long before his ascent. But he harvested them in a way no other Democrat could. The succession of liberal policies; the ostensive shaming of patriotism (“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”); the imperiously lecturing tone; the hints of class condescension (“They cling to guns or religion”); perhaps most critically, the dark skin and the African roots and the exotic name—any of these elements, on their own, might not have been so provocative. But in this era of convulsion and cultural dislocation, Obama was a perfect villain for the forgotten masses of flyover country.
DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION, RICH BEESON, THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL Committee’s political director, told a pair of junior staffers that they were about to witness history. The youngsters perked up, having heard nothing but doom and gloom for the past month with regard to their party’s prospects. “The way we lose this election,” Beeson told them, “is going to be historic.”
Barack Obama won the presidency in a landslide, carrying the Electoral College by a margin of 365 to 173 and winning the popular vote by nearly ten million—the biggest spread since Ronald Reagan’s forty-nine state reelection romp in 1984. There was no silver lining for the GOP: Democrats expanded their majorities in both houses of Congress, giving the incoming president and his party unified control of the government and a mandate to make wholesale changes to Washington and the rest of the nation.
More concerning for Republicans than the scope of Obama’s victory were the fundamentals behind it: The Democratic nominee had turned out huge numbers of minorities, young voters, and women with college degrees. This “coalition of the ascendant,” as journalist Ron Brownstein described it, represented the fastest-growing segments of an electorate undergoing a rapid, far-reaching makeover. While McCain captured 57 percent of white men and 55 percent of whites overall, he won just 43 percent of women, 31 percent of Hispanics, and 32 percent of voters under age thirty.
The implications were chilling. Republicans weren’t just heading into political hibernation; they were at risk of entering a demographic death spiral. “Things looked pretty bleak,” Boehner recalls. “You’ve got this young, dynamic African American who rebuilt the Democratic Party in one fell swoop. There was no way out. We were going to be in the minority for one hell of a long time.”