The Party Of No

It was December 2008, Barack Obama had just been elected–and the Republican Party had just followed George W. Bush off a political cliff. After preaching small government, balanced budgets and economic growth while producing bigger government, exploding deficits and economic collapse, they had gotten pasted for the second straight election. Publishers were rushing out titles like The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. “We were in disarray,” recalls Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. “People were comparing us to cockroaches, saying we weren’t even relevant. We had to change the mind-set.”

With the economy in free fall and Obama’s approval rating in the stratosphere, the Beltway believed chastened Republicans would have to cooperate with him. But Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new House minority whip, believed chastened Republicans should start acting like Republicans. He summoned his whip team to his condo building to plot strategy, and the strategy was: Fight. He invited two pollsters to the meeting, but no policy experts because he wanted Republicans to be communicators, not policymakers. They lacked the power to block the Obama agenda, but they could win the battle for public opinion if they could stick together, so Obama couldn’t claim bipartisan victories.

“We’re not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another 40 years,” Cantor said. “We’re not rolling over. We’re going to fight these guys. We’re down, but things are going to change.”

A few weeks later, Sessions began his presentation at a House Republican leadership retreat in Annapolis, Md., with an existential political question: “If the purpose of the majority is to govern … What is our purpose?” The answer was not to promote Republican policies, or stop Democratic policies, or even make Democratic bills less offensive to Republicans. “The purpose of the minority is to become the majority,” Sessions wrote. “That is the entire conference’s mission.”

Mission accomplished. In the 2010 elections, the GOP reclaimed the House, ushering in two years of bitter stalemate with Obama and the Democratic Senate. But they still haven’t done much legislating. They’ve defined themselves politically by their opposition to Obama, papering over tensions between the Republican Party establishment and Tea Party activists. They’ve defined themselves ideologically by their tentative embrace of Paul Ryan’s ambitious budget plan. So if Mitt Romney wins the White House with Ryan at his side, how would the Party of No try to govern?

To make an educated guess, it helps to go back to the start of the Obama era.

‘IF OBAMA WAS FOR IT …’

Senate republicans held their own retreat in January 2009 at the Library of Congress, and they were even gloomier than their House counterparts. “We might find ourselves in the minority for generations,” groaned Utah Senator Bob Bennett. Five of the 41 surviving GOP Senators would soon announce their retirement.

“We were discouraged, dispirited and divided,” Bennett recalls. “The one guy who recognized that it need not be so was Mitch McConnell.”

The owlish, studiously bland Senate minority leader from Kentucky was the unlikeliest of motivational speakers. He was a strategy guy, cynical and clinical; he reminded his members to stay calm, stay on message and stay united. Obama had promised postpartisanship, and Republicans could turn him into a promise breaker by withholding their support. “We got shellacked, but don’t forget we still represent half the population,” McConnell said. “Republicans need to stick together as a team.” Or as Ohio Senator George Voinovich summarized the strategy: “If Obama was for it, we had to be against it.”

The first major Obama initiative would be his stimulus plan, an $800 billion package of tax cuts and spending programs designed to resuscitate an economy that was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs a month. Who could oppose a jobs bill during a jobs crisis? Every presidential candidate had proposed a stimulus during the 2008 campaign. Romney’s plan was actually the biggest.

But McConnell believed Republicans had nothing to gain from me-too-ism. He reminded his caucus that Republicans wouldn’t pay a price for opposing Obama’s plan if it succeeded, because politicians get re-elected in good times. But if the economy didn’t revive, they could return from the political wilderness in 2010. “He wanted everyone to hold the fort,” Voinovich later explained. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

The Republican strategy on the stimulus was as simple as it was clever. The Obama plan had $300 billion worth of tax cuts, plus all kinds of spending that had enjoyed some bipartisan support: unemployment benefits, infrastructure, research and much more. It even included the Race to the Top education reforms, anathema to Democratic teachers’ unions. But the GOP message never wavered: Big Government, big spending, big mess.

Inside the leadership team, though, there were tensions between Cantor, who wanted to put Republican politics first, and GOP conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, who wanted to put ideological conservatism first. Ultimately, the Republicans fell off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion GOP alternative was a Pence-style ideological bill, consisting entirely of tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Republicans also crafted a Cantor-style political bill, a $715 billion substitute with even more traditional infrastructure than the Democratic bill. Most House Republicans–including Ryan–voted for both. They never did explain how their stimulus could be good public policy while Obama’s similar $787 billion stimulus was freedom-crushing socialism, but their no vote was unanimous. “The caucus had decided we weren’t going to give Obama a bipartisan victory on this,” recalls moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware.

But three moderate GOP Senators voted yes, so Obama won a huge policy victory, a down payment on his campaign promises to reform energy, health care, education and the economy. And one of those moderate Republicans, Arlen Specter, faced such a backlash that he defected to the Democrats, giving Obama the filibuster-proof majority he needed to pass his health reforms.

Nevertheless, Republicans were jubilant. The stimulus was unpopular, so they believed they had won by losing. At a caucus retreat at a Virginia resort, House minority leader John Boehner replayed the video of the vote, prompting a standing ovation. “We’ll have more to come!” Cantor said. Pence showed a clip from Patton of the general rallying his troops against their Nazi enemy: “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!”

The stimulus debate established the pattern for the next four years. Republicans opposed the entire Obama agenda–a health care plan based on Romney’s, a cap-and-trade regime that McCain had supported in 2008, financial reform after a financial meltdown. Obama squeezed his health care and Wall Street reform bills through Congress anyway, but the quest for 60 votes in the Senate forced him to cut deals that made his initiatives look ugly. And the Tea Party–which held its first rally 10 days after Obama signed the stimulus–became a powerful force opposing the Obama agenda, and a double-edged sword for Washington Republicans.

CAN THEY GOVERN?

Senator Bennett was a loyal soldier in McConnell’s army of No, voting against the stimulus and Obamacare. He had been just as loyal a soldier in Bush’s army of Yes. But to the Tea Party, that was no longer a point in “Bailout Bob’s” favor. Utah’s GOP convention didn’t even let him defend his seat in a primary in 2010, choosing two Tea Partyers to run instead. “It was just, ‘You betrayed us! You voted with Bush!'” Bennett says. “I remember being at Republican conventions where people would say, ‘Stand firm with Bush!’ So I did, and now you hate me?”

Bennett says his friend Romney commiserated with him about the Tea Party’s ingratitude, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher. “Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” he says. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

Insufficient anti-Obama fervor had become politically fatal in the GOP. Tea Partyers won rage-a-thon Republican primaries against less dogmatic candidates in Delaware, Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, Kentucky and Alaska, which ultimately cost the GOP control of the Senate in 2010.

As the party comes together in Tampa, it’s still not clear whether it can unite behind an agenda. Since the midterms, Washington Republicans have struggled to ride the Tea Party tiger. They’ve crusaded against spending and debt, threatening to shut down the government if Obama wouldn’t agree to their austerity demands. They have pushed–although less vigorously after it polled terribly–the Ryan plan of massive tax cuts for “job creators,” a controversial overhaul of Medicare for future generations and dramatic but unspecified cuts in other nondefense spending.

Romney has already distanced himself from some of the few draconian specifics of Ryan’s plan. But he has proposed even more-aggressive tax cuts for businesses and investors, which have defined the GOP agenda for decades. Would the Republicans also cut spending? That’s harder to say. They haven’t in the past; history suggests their concern about deficit reduction mostly emerges when they’re out of power. There’s a reason Romney won’t specify what he wants to cut beyond NPR and Amtrak. It’s the same reason Ryan trashed the stimulus as a “wasteful spending spree” while seeking stimulus dollars for his district. Government spending–on Medicare, defense and even the actual contents of the stimulus–remains popular, even though “the government” is not.

And while “deficit reduction” is popular, the spending cuts that actually reduce the deficit are not.

In 2008, Republicans said they were done with Bush-style Big Government conservatism. But the temptation to cut taxes and keep spending remains. Romney will have to decide how fully to embrace the Tea Party vision. And then the ferret will have to decide whether to bite.

Adapted from The New New Deal, copyright 2012 by Michael Grunwald. Published August 2012 by Simon & Schuster Inc. Reprinted by permission

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