“I said, ‘Do you understand what it’s like for a black man to stand up and say another black man is not born here?’” Steele recalls. “People in the party wanted me to go out there and start hitting Obama on his birth certificate to score points with the base and get them all fired up. I’d rather get people fired up about being right about policy and challenging the status quo that way, as opposed to playing the race card against the president.”
Others weren’t so reluctant. As Rush Limbaugh led conservative talk radio down a dim path of racial dog whistling, declaring himself in the summer of 2009 to be a full-fledged “birther”—one who doubted that Obama was born in the United States—Steele felt compelled to push back. Most memorably, he went on CNN with comedian D. L. Hughley and denounced Limbaugh when Hughley suggested the radio jock was the leader of the Republican Party. “Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment,” Steele said. “Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly.”
Predictably, El Rushbo devoted much of his next show to lampooning Steele.13 The coverage of the incident, and the fury in the base, indicating mass allegiance to the talk radio host instead of the party chairman, suggested that the tail was wagging the dog.
Meanwhile, Steele was trying to back-channel with the White House to set up a meeting with the president. He wanted to get acquainted; to let Obama know that he would be civil and attempt to keep the party’s nativist voices at bay. But the president never responded.
“Despite the public image of Barack Obama, he’s very, very partisan. He does not like Republicans. He didn’t like any of us,” Steele says. “I don’t think he really appreciated the roles that we were both in, at the same time, as black men. And in my estimation, there should have been some space for the two of us to get in a room together, just so we could say, ‘Hey, can you believe these white people?’”
As Steele grappled with concerns over identity and image, the GOP’s fund-raising sputtered and its state-by-state organization fossilized. The buyer’s remorse was sudden. Steele had barely moved into his new office when the mutiny began. In early March, The Hill reported that North Carolina committeewoman Ada Fisher, one of the RNC’s three black members, had emailed her colleagues calling for Steele’s resignation.14
“I don’t want to hear anymore language trying to be cool about the bling in the stimulus package or appealing to D. L. Hughley and blacks in a way that isn’t going to win us any votes and makes us frankly appear to many blacks as quite foolish,” Fisher wrote.
Steele survived the uprising, thanks in part to the rigorous defense of a baby-faced Wisconsin lawyer. He was the RNC’s general counsel and the chairman’s right-hand man, Reinhold Richard Priebus—“Reince” for short.
FROM THE FLOOR OF THE CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE, A MAN flapped his arms and bellowed into the camera. It was February 19 and CNBC reporter Rick Santelli was irate—not just about the recently enacted stimulus, but about the Obama administration’s plans to rescue homeowners from bad mortgages.
“How about this president and new administration,” Santelli shouted. “Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? Or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure, and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?”
Back in the studio, the hosts of Squawk Box chuckled at their correspondent’s indignation. But Santelli grew only more animated.
“This is America!” he shouted, motioning to the traders surrounding him. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand!” The traders cheered in solidarity. Santelli turned back to the camera. “President Obama,” he cried, “are you listening?”
Santelli’s rant blew up overnight. He had bottled the anger fermenting over Bush’s bailout and Obama’s stimulus, not to mention the inevitability of further government intervention into the automotive companies, the energy sector, and the health care industry. Worried that Democrats were exploiting the economic upheaval to make wholesale changes to the country—a suspicion fed by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s comment “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”15—Republicans were already on the edge. By warning that he might organize a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest, Santelli provided the push.
Soon, they were everywhere: people in the streets, some wearing revolutionary-era costumes and toting Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, demonstrating against the president and his party and the skulking odor of socialism. These weren’t the first protests since Obama was elected, and Santelli wasn’t the first person to use the phrase “Tea Party” in opposition to Obama’s policies, but the CNBC host had galvanized a movement.
The day after Santelli’s outburst, roughly two dozen conservative activists joined a conference call to harness the sudden vigor in the grass roots. Many of them had never met in person; they were associated through the internet, particularly social media, having huddled under the hashtag #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter). The organizer of this online community, a business consultant named Michael Patrick Leahy, put together the conference call. “We need to strike while the iron’s hot, while people are talking about Santelli,” Leahy announced.
One of the participants on the call was Jenny Beth Martin, an Atlanta-based computer programmer who had become active in conservative forums online. Having lost her home to foreclosure and moved into a downsized rental just two weeks earlier, Martin and her husband were doing odd jobs to make ends meet. She says that they didn’t need the government’s help and were livid at its intervention on behalf of the powerful.
“People sensed that Washington was rigging the system against the average American and expecting the average American to pay for that rigged system,” she says. “Big business and big labor and big technology teaming up with big government against the average American.”
The voices on the call agreed to coordinate their first events one week later, on Friday, the twenty-seventh of February. They hoped to hold ten events and draw a few thousand demonstrators; instead, nearly fifty rallies popped up across the country, and attendance was five times what anyone had anticipated.
This had been achieved on short notice and with almost no money behind it. Watching with interest, the right’s wealthiest benefactors saw an investment too good to pass up. Hoping to capitalize on this burst of momentum, some of the biggest donors in conservative politics, including the libertarian-minded industrialists Charles and David Koch, jumped into the action, spending heavily to build out expansive lists of activists and volunteers. Rare was a movement that came about so quickly; even rarer was an opportunity to shape it. By pumping untold millions of dollars into a network of right-wing organizations, deep-pocketed ideologues such as the Kochs aimed to build a machine capable of displacing a hollowed-out Republican Party.
Meanwhile, smaller, more organic groups were springing up across the country under the Tea Party banner, planning meetings and coordinating with sister outfits. One of them, cofounded by Martin, was the Tea Party Patriots, which in a matter of weeks had amassed thousands of members in its Atlanta chapter alone.