Ultimately, the sequence played out perfectly for McCain: Huckabee won Iowa, weakening Romney, whose loss of momentum allowed McCain to win New Hampshire and South Carolina. With Romney starved of an early-state victory, Huckabee strapped for cash, Giuliani exiting after a poor performance in Florida, and the other fringe candidates a nonfactor, it was McCain’s nomination to lose.
But Romney would not quit. Pouring millions of his own fortune into the campaign, he hung around, amassing enough delegates to remain mathematically alive and stirring an eleventh-hour optimism on the right that McCain could be defeated. Romney’s speech to CPAC on February 7, then, was meant to commence a last stand, rallying the conservative troops against the reviled front-runner.
Instead, with the endgame increasingly apparent, and his political future to consider, Romney sat down on the eve of the event and crafted a withdrawal speech.
Nobody told Ingraham. When Romney’s director of conservative outreach, Gary Marx, picked her up for the event, the radio host still believed she was calling for the storming of McCain. Informed that Romney was quitting, Ingraham looked puzzled at first, the news not fully registering. She then became agitated, promising Marx and other Romney staffers that she would change his mind. “If none of you can convince him, I will,” she huffed. Confronting Romney backstage at the event, Ingraham pleaded with him to reconsider. To no avail: The candidate said his mind was made up. Ingraham looked volcanic. Romney’s aides wondered whether it was a good idea to send her out onstage.
Minutes later, Ingraham strode to the lectern inside the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington. She appeared visibly torn between delivering the scorched-earth speech she had prepared and giving the decaffeinated version the party now needed. “I don’t think it’s enough to say that you were a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” she said, mocking McCain’s claim to the Gipper mantle. “I think the question is, what have you been doing for conservatism lately?”
The crowd roared lustily. With both McCain and Huckabee set to speak after Romney at CPAC, and attendees still unaware that their champion was about to quit, Ingraham, dressed for a funeral in her black jacket, dark blouse, and cross necklace, announced, “He is a national security conservative. He is a proud social conservative. And he is a fiscal conservative. In other words, Mitt Romney is the conservative’s conservative.”
The boy band–shrieking welcome of Romney onto the stage quickly dissolved into a bad breakup melancholy at the realization of the news he’d come to share. “If I fight on, in my campaign, all the way to the convention”—he was drowned out by cheers. Romney looked as though he were putting the family dog to sleep. It was a pained expression, his lips pursed, his eyes betraying the fact that he was sincerely concerned about the state of the country and had a whole lot more to say about it.
“I want you to know, I have given this a lot of thought,” Romney said. “I would forestall the launch of a national campaign, and, frankly, I would make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.” Cries of protest now filled the ballroom. “Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”
When McCain arrived at the event two hours later, his coronation as the now-presumptive Republican nominee was interrupted by boos and jeers. “Many of you have disagreed strongly with some positions I have taken in recent years. I understand that,” McCain said. “I might not agree with it, but I respect it for the principled position it is. And it is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative.”
The next morning, the two biggest news stories in America were McCain clinching the GOP nomination and pop star Britney Spears leaving a mental hospital. Both were subjects of popular psychoanalysis; in the case of McCain, the question was whether he could possibly placate conservatives. It wouldn’t be easy. As right-wing author and provocateur Ann Coulter had told Fox News host Sean Hannity days earlier, “If he’s our candidate, then Hillary is going to be our girl, Sean, because she’s more conservative than he is.”5
When Bill O’Reilly hosted Ingraham on his Fox News show, hours after her performance at CPAC, he asked whether the hard-liners on talk radio would now cease their bludgeoning of McCain. Ingraham protested, saying their critiques had been substantive and demanding evidence to the contrary.
“They call him ‘Juan,’” O’Reilly replied.
IF THE RIGHT’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH ROMNEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN FOR lack of a better option, then its loathing of McCain owed in part to frustrations with the man they called “Dubya.”
Increasingly, Bush’s legacy was feeling treasonous to small-government Republicans: prodigious spending, endless war overseas, rising debt and deficits, a massive federal intrusion into K–12 education, the biggest entitlement expansion since the Great Society. “Who in the end prepared the ground for the McCain ascendency? Not Feingold. Not Kennedy. Not even Giuliani. It was George W. Bush,” conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post after Romney quit. “Bush muddied the ideological waters of conservatism.”6
Perhaps most irritating to the base, Bush had proclaimed upon winning reelection that he had “political capital” and would spend it on two things he barely mentioned during the 2004 campaign: privatizing Social Security and reforming the country’s immigration system.
Paul Ryan, a young congressman from Wisconsin, had distinguished himself as the most outspoken advocate in the House of Representatives for making changes to Social Security. He found himself at once excited and perplexed when Bush suddenly pledged to tackle the issue. “He didn’t really talk about Social Security at all,” Ryan says. “The campaign was more about security—you know, 9/11, three Purple Hearts, the swift boat stuff. So, I remember him declaring what he wanted to do, which I thought was spectacular. But I also thought, gosh, he didn’t really till the field for this.”
Soon, Ryan was aboard Air Force One with Bush, flying to Wisconsin for an event aimed at selling the Social Security overhaul. Of all the Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation, he was the only one to accompany the president. “They all thought it was too risky,” Ryan recalls.
His colleagues were smart to sense trouble: Bush’s plan to create personalized accounts, while fashionable among the conservative intellectual class, was a nonstarter with much of the party’s base, particularly blue-collar workers, middle-class earners, and the elderly. The backlash was so harsh, in so many congressional districts, that Speaker Denny Hastert and his GOP leadership team refused to give the president’s bill a committee hearing.
The failed Social Security push was crucial—not just for what it foretold about the party’s fraught relationship with entitlement programs, but for its dooming of immigration reform as well. White House officials had vigorously debated which initiative to lead the second term with; Social Security reform, the heavier lift, ultimately won out. By late May, when House GOP leadership apprised members of the summer schedule, Bush’s proposal was dead.
The time and momentum lost proved critical: Democrats won back majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2006, leaving Bush weakened to sell an immigration deal to Republicans and the Democrats emboldened to hold out for something better. “The sequencing was off,” Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist, admits. “If we had done immigration first, it would have passed.”