Authors: Richard A. Viguerie
Kristol criticized Republicans for slamming on the brakes in reaction to past missteps, saying he feared that “the party has decided they shouldn’t go anywhere. No speed is the favorite speed.” In some respects, the agenda favored by many Republicans in 2012 remains similar to the one that shaped the Contract with America in 2014. But there are important differences now in how vigorously the party may pursue those policies.
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If the losing 1996 Republican candidates for president had failed to establish themselves as conservative leaders and potential candidates for the presidency in 2000, and Newt Gingrich and the conservative leaders of the House were diminishing themselves by the minute in internal squabbles, who was left to provide leadership to conservatives and Republicans at the national level?
The consensus gradually emerged that, if new leadership was going to be found, it would be found among the GOP’s governors, who had not been tainted by the infighting endemic to the nation’s capital and
who were implementing a host of conservative ideas about how to encourage economic development, and deliver needed public services while balancing their budgets and holding down taxes.
The 1996 election produced mixed results for the Republican governors. Their numbers remained at thirty-two. They lost New Hampshire but gained West Virginia. However, in eight states, the Republicans weren’t able to deliver their states to Dole, and in four of them—Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, Illinois—the Democrats won the state legislature, too.
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The thirty-two Republican governors were by no means thirty-two movement conservatives, and they were by no means happy with the conservative agenda adopted by Newt Gingrich and the House conservatives.
At the postelection 1996 meeting of the Republican Governor’s Association, Wisconsin’s establishment Republican governor Tommy Thompson came right out and said, “What happened is we went too far. … The Democrats picked up on the severity of our rhetoric and threw it back on us.”
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Even if establishment Republican governors, like Tommy Thompson, weren’t happy with the conservative agenda, voters in other parts of America outside the Beltway were.
After the 1996 election, Democrats held a 20 to 18 edge in the Kentucky Senate.
That margin disappeared overnight when five Democrats refused to follow the customary procedure of meeting in party caucus to elect leaders of the new Senate, condemning the procedure as undemocratic. “Secret caucuses,” said state senator Larry Saunders (D), are “why people in Kentucky have such low esteem for elected officials.” So he and four Democratic colleagues teamed up with Republicans to select the new Senate leaders.
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The Kentucky state senate revolt was sparked in large measure by Democratic governor Paul Patton’s liberal higher education agenda and the liberal Democratic leadership’s plans to stymie conservative legislation on abortion and other social issues.
In New Jersey’s off-year gubernatorial election, liberal Republican governor Christine Todd Whitman had a big lead in the polls, but was worried about Rep. Robert Andrews, her probable Democratic opponent. Andrews was seen as a good candidate who would not be the easy target for Whitman that tax-increasing governor Jim Florio was in 1993, because Andrews had inoculated himself by signing Grover Norquist’s no-tax-increase pledge.
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Conservative ideas were not defeated in the 1996 election, because, just like in 2012, the Republican presidential candidate did not run on a conservative agenda. The conservative Republican Congress had been re-elected, in spite of the controversy and media antagonism Speaker Newt Gingrich generated.
What conservatives were lacking after the 1996 election defeat was not a change in the agenda, as suggested by establishment Republicans such as Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson; it was a leader who would run on and advocate the conservative agenda without the personal controversy and bombast that had become the hallmark of Gingrich and the leading House Republicans.
The next term of Congress would see more dilution of the message that brought Republicans to power in 1994, and just as important, the utter abandonment of the grassroots conservative campaigns that had powered insurgent conservative Republican candidates to victory.
As Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation said in a 1998 election postmortem meeting, Republicans, generally speaking, won the “air war” (commercials and similar activities) in 1998 while the Democrats won the “ground war” (voter identification and turnout). “You can be 7 percent ahead and if the other side knows where their voters are and turns them out, you lose,” said Weyrich.
Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute added in the same meeting that campaigns must be about more than raising money and spending it on advertising, activities that, he said, not coincidentally permit campaign consultants to keep 15 percent of expenditures. Campaigns must include training, voter ID, precinct organization, turnout activities, etc.
The Republican House majority’s aggressive solicitation of special-interest campaign funding and embrace of the Big Government that Washington insiders feed off had disconnected them from the conservative grassroots voters who elected the “Contract with America” majority.
The way I saw it, Republicans lost because they had become the establishment.
Into that leadership vacuum swaggered a young Republican governor who had a reputation for getting conservative policies past a Democratic legislature, a bankable national name, a base in one of the nation’s most powerful Republican states, and a man who wowed his fellow Republicans when he said:
I base my decisions on principle and on a conservative philosophy that most Texans share. And I want you to know I’m proud to be a Republican, just like I know you’re proud to be a Republican as well.
Ours is a party that stands for something—a conservative philosophy that is fair and decent and compassionate and full of hope for the future of our great country. We must proclaim our principles with pride and conviction, because I know and you know that when acted upon, our philosophy will make our country a better place for every American.
Republicans must outline our hopes for America’s future. We must make our case with reason and respect. We must inspire others to follow. In short, we must lead. And our leadership must be based upon principles and core convictions from which we will not waver.
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That Republican governor, with what he claimed was a set of conservative “principles and core convictions from which we will not waver,” was Texas governor George W. Bush.
G
eorge H. W. Bush was never a conservative, but he was able to use his role as Reagan’s vice president to secure the GOP nomination and be elected president in 1988. His one term in office was an affront to Reagan conservatives, as he began his term in office with an “Inauguration Day Massacre” that swept most Reaganites—even ones who had worked tirelessly for his election—out of the federal government, and he broke his promises to us and the American public, most infamously by breaking his “read my lips” pledge never to raise taxes.
Many conservatives responded in 1992 by staying home or supporting third-party candidate Ross Perot, and as a result, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, with only 43 percent of the vote, brought the White House back under Democratic control.
This was a setback to the progressive establishment of the Republican Party who had backed Bush, and benefited politically from his presidency, but it was a boon to conservatives, who channeled a rebellion against Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Big Government initiatives to win conservative GOP control of the House of Representatives in 1994, ending forty years of Democratic rule.
The 1994 rise of the “Contract with America” Congress coincided
with and was fueled by an expansion of the conservative media. No longer confined to a few publications of limited circulation, and with the use of direct mail to bypass the establishment media filter, conservatives expanded the new and alternative media of talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet to spread the conservative message and generate public opposition to Big Government Clinton-style.
In 1996 Republicans (much as they did again in 2012 by nominating Mitt Romney) largely squandered the enthusiasm and power of the 1994 “Contract with America” grassroots rebellion by nominating Senator Bob Dole, another “it’s his turn” establishment presidential candidate, and Clinton was handily reelected, despite his scandal-plagued first term in office.
As the 2000 primaries approached, Washington’s inside elite of both parties was exhausted. What’s more, the GOP was tarnished by the Clinton impeachment and the attendant PR disaster for congressional Republicans, who found themselves labeled as hypocrites when it was revealed that a number of their leaders who had attacked Bill Clinton for his adultery and lies were guilty of the same sins.
The stage was set for Republicans to look outside of Washington for their presidential nominee, and against that backdrop Texas governor George W. Bush announced his candidacy for president.
Lined up against Bush were Arizona senator John McCain, social conservative activist Gary Bauer, businessman Steve Forbes, Utah senator Orrin Hatch, former ambassador Alan Keyes, former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, former Red Cross director and cabinet member Elizabeth Dole, Ohio congressman John Kasich, and former vice president Dan Quayle.
Forbes campaigned on the flat tax and worked hard to attract support from social conservatives. Although Forbes was a close second to Bush in the Iowa caucuses and tied with him in the Alaska caucuses, the only other candidate to move the needle against Bush and win any of the GOP primaries was Arizona’s John McCain.
McCain didn’t fit neatly into any political box, and he liked it that way. Even though he had a solid conservative voting record on
many issues, he seemed to relish antagonizing and picking fights with leaders of the conservative movement—especially social conservatives.
Senator McCain’s “base,” to the extent he had one, like Bob Dole, was the establishment media. The media loved McCain’s frequent sallies against conservatives and those he labeled “special interests.” Even though McCain himself was a darling of those who wanted to reform Washington’s corrupt lobbying and campaign finance system, the defense industry largely escaped his jibes and calls for reform because he was one of the defense industry’s most reliable votes in the Senate and a major beneficiary of their special-interest political contributions and support.
If McCain was the alternative to the Republican establishment, many of the other candidates qualified as more conservative, but none of them attracted the money or support as did Governor George W. Bush.
Hailing from Texas, Bush started out with an extensive fundraising advantage, and an “in” with the state’s large group of conservative activists and donors.
But Bush had a number of negatives, not the least of which was his name and his lack of personal political skills. It hardly seemed possible, but going into the 2000 Republican primaries, George W. Bush was a weaker public speaker and more uncomfortable in front of a TV camera than his father had been, leading one longtime conservative political operative who saw Bush and McCain side by side in New Hampshire to conclude (wrongly, it turned out) that there was no way anyone could be elected president who was as bad onstage as Bush was.
However, Bush’s lack of stage presence was compensated for by his money, organization, and vast army of consultants, family political contacts, retainers, and acolytes. Only the Kennedys could match Bush in having a ready-built national political franchise—no one on the Republican side was even close.
Bush’s 2000 campaign was, according to the London
Independent’s
writer Andrew Marshall:
[O]ne of the most highly organized in the long history of American politics. Every base is covered. The candidate is just the tip of the spear, almost an incidental: there are the advance men, the press handlers, chartered aircraft, the coaches [buses] lined up outside, speech writers, conference calls, banks of telephones primed to ring every voter in the state, television studios churning out attack slots and crash ads, computers running Microsoft Access databases, Palm Pilots crammed with telephone numbers and dates and names, senators, congressmen and mayors just waiting to make endorsements, websites, virtual press conferences, and bank accounts as deep and wide as the Atlantic ocean.”
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Fourteen years later, historians and pundits are still arguing over whether Bush won South Carolina by deploying the infamous Bush smear machine that has worked over every candidate who ever ran against a Bush, or whether it was McCain’s lack of organization and campaign by personal caprice that led to his defeat in South Carolina.
Certainly the hammering McCain took from the smear machine hurt him, and South Carolina has been the home of a well-organized group of Bush-family operatives since at least 1988, as Andrew Marshall noted in his article for the
Independent.
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And the value of the personal Bush-family relationships in South Carolina could not be overestimated, as the
Boston Globe
observed in March of 1999, “Some of the same forces that crushed Pat Buchanan’s insurgency in the 1996 South Carolina primary and helped Lee Atwater throw up a ‘firewall’ in the state to protect George Bush in 1988 are at work to give an advantage to the former president’s son in next year’s primary.”
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However, South Carolina was also the first state where social conservatives had a major say in the outcome of an election, and in 2000 Governor Bush learned from his father’s mistake in alienating conservatives.
The younger Bush worked hard to convince conservatives, especially social conservatives, that he was “one of us,” by campaigning on the social issues in South Carolina while McCain campaigned
mostly on being McCain.