About the Author
NAFTALI BENDAVID is deputy Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. Since 1997, he has served as the paper's Justice Department correspondent and White House correspondent. Bendavid has also worked at several other papers, including the Miami Herald and Legal Times. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
AN IMMOVABLE OBJECT
Five hundred conservatives applauded excitedly as Karl Rove rose to speak in an elegant ballroom at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers on the evening of June 22, 2005. This was a heady time for the activists who had gathered to honor Rove and give him an award that had previously been bestowed on such stars as Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. President Bush had been reelected five months earlier by a margin of 3.5 million votes, despite fierce campaigning by grassroots Democrats and millions of dollars poured into the race by liberal donors. Republicans and conservatives viewed Bush’s victory over John Kerry as nothing less than an emphatic affirmation of Americans’ support for their principles. Bush himself said at a press conference two days after the election, “I’ve got the will of the people at my back.” The Republican victory in fact owed a good deal to superior political tactics, and Bush and his party were still benefiting from the emotions surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks, but those factors were downplayed in the post-election euphoria. “I earned capital on the campaign–political capital,” Bush said. “And now I intend to spend it.”
It wasn’t just Bush’s victory that lent credence to the notion that America was becoming more Republican in a fundamental way. In the Senate, Republicans swept six open seats in the South and increased their majority to 55—45. For some conservatives, the sweetest part of that outcome was the defeat of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, a frequent Bush critic. Republicans had fared well in the House also, increasing their majority by three, to 232—203. Never had the party’s future seemed more assured. That was the landscape as members of the Conservative Party of New York gathered to hear Rove’s speech at the Sheraton. Founded in 1962 in the belief that even the Republican Party was too liberal, the Conservative Party had become an important political force in the state. The audience could not have been more friendly to Rove, widely praised as the architect of Republican victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004. “It was fantastic,” Shaun Marie Levine, the Conservative Party’s executive director, said of the celebratory atmosphere that night. “When a gentleman gets up and says what you believe, it’s refreshing and wonderful to know he is right up there with the leader of the free world…People went wild.”
The pudgy, bespectacled, buzz–cut Rove was to make news that night with the sort of cutting comment that had become his trademark. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war,” Rove said. “Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” In the following days, Democrats angrily demanded that Rove retract his statement that liberals wanted to offer terrorists “therapy.” It was a reflection of the political moment that Rove shrugged off their demands without consequence, while the White House stood by his comments.
But by far the greater significance of Rove’s speech was the vision he outlined of an imminent era of conservative Republican dominance. Rove was a student of history; his White House office featured two pictures of Abraham Lincoln, a Lincoln campaign banner, letters from James Madison, and a Theodore Roosevelt campaign ribbon. The first book Rove had ever read, in second grade, was Great Moments in History, and he kept a framed copy of its first page. The strategist was fascinated by the presidency of William McKinley, who had ushered in a Republican era at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rove’s grand theory, as he offered it in his speech, was this: American liberalism had peaked forty years earlier with the landslide election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Back then, it was liberals who had energy, idealism, and momentum. With the just concluded 2004 election, the pendulum had swung forcefully in the other direction, and it was now the conservatives’ turn to dominate the American scene. “Today conservatism is the guiding philosophy in the White House, the Senate, the House, and in governorships and state legislatures throughout America,” Rove said. “Liberalism is edging toward irrelevance.” He added, “The conservative movement has gone from a small, principled opposition to a broad, inclusive movement that is self-assured, optimistic, forward–leaning, and dominant…This president and today’s conservative movement are shaping history, not trying to stop it.”
That was certainly how it felt to the conservatives in the room–that they were shaping history. “It was natural for Republicans and conservatives to have felt pretty full of themselves after that election,” said Howard Lim, secretary of the Conservative Party, who was there. “It bucked so many trends in terms of reelecting a president and having a ripple effect on his party in Congress.” Party chairman Michael Long, for his part, well remembered the darkness of the 1964 election that Rove had cited. Fresh out of the Marine Corps, an idealistic Long had volunteered for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, only to see his hero lose forty–four of fifty states and get crushed by Johnson. “Election Night was tough to take at that time for a young, aggressive conservative like myself,” Long said. “I clearly thought the lights were going out forever. You feel you’re never going to be able to overcome that.” But listening to Rove, he felt the opposite. “It struck a chord from a conservative point of view in the audience—not just Republican dominance, but conservative Republican dominance,” Long said.
Rove’s speech that night crystallized the triumphalist mood, but he was far from the only Republican to assert that Bush’s reelection had sealed the Democrats’ fate as a minority party for decades. That became a fashionable view among conservative intellectuals, and even many Democrats fatalistically accepted the idea. Fred Barnes, executive editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, cited the “breadth and depth” of the Republicans’ strength in the Wall Street Journal on January 1, 2005. “They have all but completed the sweeping political realignment they could only dream about a generation ago,” Barnes wrote. “In the dark days after the 1964 rout, those dreams seemed quixotic, farfetched, even crazed. Now they’ve been realized.” Barnes emphasized Bush’s growing support among blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Catholics, and women–all traditionally Democratic groups. “There’s reason to believe Republican dominance, absent a catastrophe such as a depression, will last,” Barnes wrote. The National Review, in an editorial in its edition of November 29, 2004, titled “Victory,” predicted that “a conservative era in American governance could be starting now.”
This portrait of the Democratic Party as the victim of large historical trends rather than more transient factors made its plight seem all the more hopeless. Few were more definitive about this than Grover Norquist, the hard–hitting activist who served as the nerve center of the conservative movement. Bearded and bespectacled, Norquist ran a meeting of conservative leaders in Washington every Wednesday morning to discuss issues and strategy over bagels. The power of this “Wednesday group” was such that virtually any Republican thinking of running for national office dropped by to try to win its favor. The Bush White House was careful always to send a representative. Among Norquist’s missions was to try to get Ronald Reagan’s name on as many buildings as possible, to balance the impression made by all those Franklin D. Roosevelt schools and highways. In his official job, as president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist had persuaded hundreds of politicians to sign a “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” vowing opposition to any tax increase. A combative true believer, Norquist was given to outrageous statements that a more circumspect figure would avoid. “I don’t want to abolish government–I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” he said once. He told National Public Radio that those who opposed cutting the estate tax were adhering to “the morality of the Holocaust.” After the 2004 election, Norquist took his usual nuanced approach. He flatly told PBS Frontline that “Republicans have the House until at least 2012, but probably another decade. They have the Senate indefinitely.” If the Iraq war went badly, it could slow the GOP ascent, he acknowledged, but that was unlikely. “I think it would be difficult to see what would turn it around,” Norquist said. “Obviously some great depression or something could do it.” The assessment was not limited to conservatives. The independent political analyst Charlie Cook wrote in his newsletter, the Cook Political Report, on January 22, 2005, “[Democrats] run the risk of becoming perpetual losers, with a self-defeating mentality to match.”
It was against that backdrop that Nancy Pelosi, who’d been in Congress for seventeen years and leader of the House Democrats for two, called Rahm Emanuel, the volatile second-term congressman from Chicago, and asked him to run the Democratic House campaign. Pelosi came from a political family, and her father and brother had both been mayors of Baltimore. After moving to San Francisco, marrying a businessman, having five children, and throwing herself into California politics, Pelosi had won a congressional seat representing San Francis...
