The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era by Michael Grunwald

Author:Michael Grunwald [Grunwald, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics
ISBN: 9781451642322
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

“A Very Narrow Party of Angry People”

Mount Redoubt did feel like a hint from the universe that the Republican Party was blowing itself up.281

Minority parties often look inept in the penalty box, but the GOP was starting to look like a new Donner party. In the words of one critic, it had become “a very narrow party of angry people,” “gasping for air,” consumed by “gratuitous partisanship”—and that critic was Utah’s Republican governor, Jon Huntsman. Party chairman Michael Steele confessed there’s “absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions.” McCain’s campaign manager said the party was extinct on the West Coast, nearly extinct in the Northeast, and endangered in the Mountain West and Southwest. It remained strong in the South, but while Texas governor Rick Perry’s speculation about secession resonated with the party’s base of older white conservatives, it was not a national outreach strategy.

“We’re excluding the young, minorities, environmentalists, pro-choice—the list goes on,” Snowe said. “Ideological purity is not the ticket to the promised land.”

But Republican politicians couldn’t afford to ignore the Republican base, which was growing in influence as the party was shrinking in size. So they were catering even more to the base’s biases, trashing the New Deal, denying climate science, doubling down on supply-side economics. Washington Republicans also overcame their initial reluctance to attack a president with approval ratings in the mid-60s, denouncing him as a big-spending radical, a smooth-talking con artist, an affirmative action mediocrity who’d be lost without a TelePrompTer. Boehner accused him of launching “a new American socialist experiment.” To the base, Obama was a threat to American values.

That base now had a name: the Tea Party. Two days after Obama signed the stimulus, a CNBC commentator named Rick Santelli unleashed an antigovernment rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, attacking Obama’s plan to help homeowners as Cuban-style statism, calling for a Chicago Tea Party.282 The historical reference seemed off; the original Boston Tea Party was a protest against an unelected leader who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected leader who had just cut taxes. But Santelli’s diatribe went viral. At a time of economic pain and anxiety, it tapped into widespread resentment of Obama and big government, deep-seated suspicions that the deserving were being looted to reward society’s moochers.

“The real nerve struck seems to be the pent-up emotions felt by millions of Americans regarding spending TRILLIONS of dollars to fix the housing market, the banks, and the economy,” Santelli wrote later.283 “SPECIFICALLY WHO WILL PAY … WHO WILL BENEFIT … and above all the government’s role in all of this.”

Washington-based conservative groups sprang into action, organizing the first Tea Party rallies in forty cities a week later. A movement was born. And it got a boost with the news that bailed-out AIG executives would get to keep $165 million in bonuses after producing the worst results in capitalist history—in part because of Senator Dodd’s late stimulus addition preventing the feds from rescinding perks retroactively. The rest

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