The morning after Obama’s victory, a senior RNC official handed down orders to his communications staff. They were to plant a story in the media about grassroots support for a new party chairman, a black Republican by the name of Michael Steele.
AS THE NEW PRESIDENT PREPARED TO TAKE OFFICE, REPUBLICANS faced a moment of reckoning. For the past generation, the party had promoted a set of principles colloquially described as a “three-legged stool”: fiscal responsibility, social conservatism, and strong national defense. Sifting through the wreckage of 2008, they found that the stool had collapsed. Republicans had spent recklessly while exposing their military’s limitations after fighting a two-front war for the better part of a decade.
Only the social conservatism had been strictly adhered to, and even within that foundational conception, cracks were showing. The Bush administration’s effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, for instance, had rankled many in the Republican professional class. This foretold of the growing disconnect between the party’s elite and its base on many other issues that transcended the divide between secularists and religious voters. Whereas the questions of immigration, trade, and entitlement spending were understood by upscale, white-collar Republican moderates through a prism of macroeconomics, they were processed by the party’s working-class conservatives through a filter of societal insecurity.
The GOP had once been a country club party, drawing its life force from the discipleship of affluent suburbanites. But that was changing. As America’s wealthier, better-educated voters grew more progressive in their social views, they had begun drifting into the Democrats’ column. At the same time, the Democratic Party’s rejection of Bill Clinton’s centrism—and its abandonment of big labor’s focus on protecting American jobs—was beginning to push its blue-collar, less-educated voters rightward into the Republican camp.
Into this moment of realignment had stepped Obama, the urbane citizen of the world, and Palin, the tough-talking hockey mom whose husband worked oil rigs and raced snow machines.
Even as Democrats ran away with the election of 2008, Palin’s appeal was a revelation. She was connecting with portions of the electorate in ways that nobody had since Reagan. But unlike the Gipper, she was not channeling their hopes and ambitions and highest aspirations. Instead, she was provoking their fears, fanning their anxieties, inciting their animosities. And it worked.
This, more than any botched interview or off-the-cuff comment, fueled the rift over Palin within the GOP: She was doing that which horrified the party’s establishment, and doing it well.
“She was the early embodiment of some of the problems that would plague the party: mediocrity, anger, resentment, populism, proudly anti-intellectual, and increasingly bitter. And she was a rock star for it,” says Wehner, the Bush White House official. “That was a sign that something was going on in the Republican base. We went from glorifying excellence and achievement to embracing this anger and grievance and contempt.”
It was a long time coming. Palin’s resonance with Republican voters was, above all, an indictment of the party’s tone-deaf arrogance. Having catered to the aristocrat caste atop the GOP for decades, winning far more elections than they lost along the way, Republicans were blissfully ignorant of the discontent simmering below the surface. When it boiled over, the defensiveness of the elites—reproaching Palin, for example—only made things worse.
“I really think what created the problem we have today in the party was the donor class and the intellectual class blaming that loss on Sarah Palin,” says David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman and longtime leader in the conservative movement. “We felt the establishment guys blew it—they were the ones in charge under Bush. They lost; they were out of power. So, the effort to scapegoat Palin fell on deaf ears.”
In the aftermath of the 2008 election, McIntosh and several other heavyweights on the right launched a group called the Conservative Action Project.20 Its mission was to bring together under one roof the leaders of prominent activist groups, hoping to pool their ideas and leverage their numbers to rebuild a Republican Party that sounded more like Palin than Bush. They began holding weekly meetings in early January of 2009, their first one in a conference room at the Family Research Council, plotting the ways in which they could steer the new GOP farther to the right.
The energy these conservatives saw and tapped into might have been lost on the Republican establishment, but it did not escape the Democrats. Indeed, while many GOP leaders worried about a permanent tilt in the country’s political axis, Obama knew, by virtue of the huge expectations for him, that backlash was inevitable. The only question was its size and strength.
Six weeks after the election, the incoming president and his advisers met with Bush’s team for an official transition briefing on the economy. The updates were brutal: While the bank bailouts had prevented a systemic collapse, families and communities were being pounded. Thousands of jobs were being shed, waves of homes were going into foreclosure, and all indicators pointed to things getting much worse before they got better.
When the meeting ended, David Axelrod walked out of the room and looked at his boss. “We’re going to get our asses kicked in the midterms,” he told Obama.
WHATEVER WAS TO HAPPEN BETWEEN THE TWO PARTIES, OR WITHIN them, was no longer Bush’s concern. He was taking a vow of political silence, he told friends, eager to extract himself from the public glare after eight enormously trying years.
He would not spend his life as a private citizen consumed by partisan wins and losses. He would be rooting for the country; he would be rooting for his successor. If there was one thing Bush worried about as his tenure closed, it was the “isms” he saw infecting America’s mind-set—and how they might animate the GOP’s opposition to Obama.
On Wednesday, January 14, six days before he left office, the president convened a group of conservative talk radio hosts in the Oval Office. The firebreathers, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, were not invited; they were hopeless cases. Bush wanted to speak to the “reasonable right-wingers,” including Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and former secretary of education Bill Bennett.
“Look, I asked you here for one reason,” Bush told the group in a solemn tone. “I want you to go easy on the new guy.”
Chapter Two
January 2009
“He could have annihilated us for a generation.”
THE CANNONS THUNDERED AT FIVE MINUTES PAST NOON. THE FORTY-FOURTH president of the United States had just taken his oath of office, and the faux artillery fire merged with the roar of some two million people1 on the National Mall to create a spectacle befitting the momentous occasion. Stepping to the podium, surveying the record-setting crowd braving a subfreezing chill to witness the inauguration of America’s first black president, Barack Obama itemized our national crises: protracted wars abroad, economic hardships at home, rising health care costs, failing schools, flawed energy policies, and a reluctance to recognize the changes inherent to a new century.
“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time,” Obama said. “But know this, America: They will be met.”