Stuart Stevens is a well-known Republican political consultant. He’s done work for John McCain, Mitt Romney, and many Senate and House candidates. Back in the 1980s when I was a political consultant, I did some work with him. As hard as it is to believe today, back then there were moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats.
This book is a scathing critique of his party’s move towards supporting Donald Trump, but he argues that Trump’s ascendance was the logical outcome of shifting Republican beliefs and strategies over the past few decades.
He starts off by saying what his party stood for fifty years ago when he became politically aware. Core values included: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party that invited all. He chronicles the shift against most of those positions which were designed to help the party stay in power even as demographic changes shift the country towards the Democrats.
Race Stevens talks about race as the original Republican sin. Before the 1964 presidential election, Republicans could expect 30 to 40 percent of the Black vote. Barry Goldwater was the presidential candidate then and went hard right against the Civil Rights Act and ended up with 7% of the Black vote. Four years earlier, Richard Nixon got 32% and in 1956 Eisenhower received 39% of those ballots. Over the past few decades, Republicans have had a Southern Strategy that went after white voters, often by marginalizing and showing condescension for minority voters. The party did not support a federal role in integrating schools which got a lot of votes in Dixie. Stevens references Ronald Reagan’s use of the “welfare queen” story in 1980 when he asserted that a Chicago woman with 80 fake names grabbed $150,000 a year in benefits. It turns out that she was a crook with 4 aliases who got $8,000 in one year, a bad thing but not close to what Reagan was alleging. Nixon played to the “silent majority” and ignored African American voters and played to the “race-based politics of resentment.
He brings up Donald Trump’s criticizing NFL players who took a knee before games. The president’s response: ”Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired.” That was pretty effective with white voters who did not think that we have race problems in the country.
Family values Stevens next takes a look at Republicans and family values, which he argues were used mainly to paint the opposition party as not having the right values. Democrats are pro-choice; against the traditional family unit where the mother is home with the kids; promote homosexuality; and aren’t big on going to church. The reality is that a lot of Republicans strayed big-time from family values, including mega-church ministers who did all kinds of bad stuff. Trump is supported by evangelicals because he appoints conservative judges and he rails against liberals. The fact that often his behavior is totally inconsistent with any kind of church teaching doesn’t matter.
The Reverend Robert Jeffress, Senior Pastor of the 14,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, eloquently put it, “Evangelicals still believe in the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star’ … However, whether the president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant for our support of him.”
Federal spending One area where the party really has changed concerns government spending and the national debt. For most of our history, the Republican party had been cautious about spending money. That has also changed. In terms of reducing the national debt, the big winners were Truman, Clinton, Eisenhower, Johnson (before cranking up Vietnam), and Nixon. One reason Republicans today, even before the pandemic relief package, weren’t serious about controlling debt is that reliably Red states get a lot more back from the feds than they pay in taxes. West Virginia, Mississippi and similarly poor - usually Republican - states get back about two to three times more in aid than they pay the feds. The evil empires of Massachusetts, New York and California get back less than they put in; the better-off states subsidize the more impoverished ones.
Donald Trump ran on a platform of reducing the national debt by 2 trillion dollars a year; instead, even before pandemic spending, he increased it 2 trillion dollars a year. Even when Barack Obama was president, the Republican Congress had no problem increasing spending.
An interesting budget piece that helps Republicans politically is farm subsidies. The average farm has a net worth of $827,000, about ten times that of non-farmers. The author argues that these tax breaks were developed decades ago when farms really needed help to stay open. That is not the case now, but once you create an entitlement, it’s around forever. Since Democrats tend to be big spenders and Republicans see spending as good for their constituents, the debt keeps going up.
The thinkers Stevens sees the Republican party as lacking any intellectual firepower. He cites several Republican intellectuals that I never heard of – Myron Magnet being one – and he references William Buckley, who didn’t become a thoughtful thinker until he moved away from his racist stereotyping of people that characterizes a lot of his early work in the 1950s. To be fair, back then such thinking was pretty typical in both parties.
Stevens references people in George W. Bush’s administration that he worked with - Michael Gerson, now a Washington Post columnist; Nicolle Wallace, who now has a show on MSNBC; and Mark McKinnon, who was a key strategist for Bush’s philosophy of governing and recently appeared on the Showtime program about the 2020 election, The Circus. These people really thought things through; they wanted to craft policies that made sense from a reasonable conservative perspective that could lead to electoral victories. Now all that counts is winning the election. He has a neat quotation on this: “Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants.”
Of course, you could make the same observation about Democrats today.
Radio talk shows The Republicans do have a stable of talk show hosts - Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc., but they don’t pretend to try to develop any intellectual underpinnings to their prattling. Stevens chides William Bennett, college professor and former secretary of education and author of The Book of Virtues. Bennett pilloried Bill Clinton for his “reckless personal conduct” and then embraced Donald Trump who bragged about assaulting women and has been credibly accused of paying hush money to a porn star and consistently lied about where Barack Obama was born. It’s all about winning, even to Dr. Bennett.
Talk radio has been very good for the Republican brand. Back in the late 1940s and 1950s, conservatives figured out that if they developed communications mechanisms, they could have a major influence on the American public. They positioned themselves as the holders of the truth. Regular media didn’t give you the true facts; only they did.
In the early 1960s, H. L. Hunt, a Texas oil millionaire, set up a loose network of 300 radio stations in 42 states. There was a conservative bent to the content, but back then something called the “fairness doctrine” balanced coverage. If your station attacked someone, that person had a right to respond. As a result, most of what was broadcast was mainstream conservative dogma, not personal attacks on enemies.
In 1987 the FCC stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine. That created the Wild West in talk radio, with no check on what went out over the airwaves. Rush Limbaugh figured out that he could say whatever his audience wanted to hear without having to worry about being accurate or having to give someone equal time to respond. His listeners were “ditto heads" because they reflexively echoed his statements and attacks. There were no professional journalism standards; whatever you said went out with no fact checking.
That reality helped Donald Trump misinform talk radio listeners about Barack Hussein Obama’s birthplace. Anyone with that middle name is not a true American. Talk radio had a field day claiming that the Mueller Report, which they called a liberal hit job, found no evidence of Russian collusion when that is the one thing the report did find. The Internet Research Agency, staffed by Russian agents, created all sorts of political discord via American social media. Stevens makes the pretty good point that in almost all situations where there was evidence of foreign meddling in an election, the center-right party would be outraged. Not here.
The Democrats did try to create their own liberal talk radio presence, but they weren’t very good at it and the media markets where Democrats live – the cities – have lots of competing radio stations. Many Republicans tend to live in the more rural regions of the country which are not densely populated. As a result, there aren’t too many radio stations, a natural advantage for conservative commentators looking for listeners. Having driven tens of thousands of miles all over the USA, I know that the two things you can always get over the air in outlying areas are farm reports and Rush Limbaugh.
Organizations becoming political The book discusses the National Rifle Association’s shift from a gun safety and education non-profit to a pro-gun-with-no-controls political organization. For decades, the NRA promoted responsible gun ownership and safety. That changed several decades ago. In 1995, Wayne LaPierre, the NRA leader, attacked the proposed federal assault weapons ban for “giving jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” He also characterized Secret Service and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (AFT) agents as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” These are strong assertions with no basis in fact, but they do raise money and get your organization noticed. It is also the same type of over-the-top incendiary language that the Nazis used when talking about Jews or gypsies.
Former President George H. W. Bush, a lifetime NRA member, wrote an eloquent letter to LaPierre resigning from the organization and chastising him for perpetrating a slander on good people, including federal agents that Bush knew who had recently been killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Stevens makes the point that the NRA, like the Republican Party, has moved away from its core values, which were good and beneficial, to embrace a much narrower agenda of complete support for unrestricted gun rights. This inflexible position does not support the common good – people really don’t need assault weapons to hunt or defend their homes or business – but lets them wave red meat in front of people who see themselves as potential victims of the liberal agenda to confiscate all guns. That is just a silly fantasy, given the second amendment.
Unlimited money in politics This is a problem with both parties. One of the reforms coming out of the post-Watergate era was to publicly finance presidential campaigns. Once you made your acceptance speech at the convention, you'd get a check sent to your campaign. When Barack Obama ran against John McCain, candidates received 80 million dollars. Obama figured out he could raise more money on his own and didn't take the public money. He raised 300 million dollars compared to John McCain’s 83 million. That, coupled with the Supreme Court's decision to allow unlimited corporate and union contributions, means that special interests pay for our political campaigns. It shows.
Trump won? The author admitted that he never thought that Donald Trump had a chance to be elected president. As he put it: “It seemed obvious that the Republican party would not nominate someone who was a bankrupt casino owner who lost the Reform Party nomination for president to Pat Buchanan in 2000, was a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, had attacked Republicans for being against abortion, had bragged that his building was now the tallest after the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11, and who talked longingly about dating his daughter.”
Stevens was wrong, just like everyone else. There are lots of reasons why Trump won - the press gave him unlimited coverage any time he wanted; Hillary Clinton was very polarizing and ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in history; and FBI Director James Comey was pretty sure that Clinton would win when he released his letter revealing that the FBI was investigating a new batch of Clinton-related emails that were damaging to her campaign.
But Trump did win. Stevens is concerned that, since his party has let Trump be Trump with no attempt to curtail his most troubling tendencies, we have set back the whole idea of centrist parties being the adults in the room. During this election, President Trump basically called into question the entire American voting process with absolutely no evidence. He sees enemies everywhere - the press; his opponents; “nasty” women. Many people like enough of what he accomplished that they are willing to put up with whatever he says or does or believes, regardless of the civic consequences to the country. Any sense of higher duty among Republican office holders has been subsumed by a fear that Trump will do nasty tweets about anyone who goes off the reservation.
The future The book makes the point that as the population of the country becomes less white, the Republican Party, which recently has relied on going after white voters, will be in trouble. He uses statistics from recent elections showing that Black and Latino voters tend to reflexively vote for Democrats. This presidential election may or may not indicate that there is room in the Republican party for non-whites.
● The president’s performance among Latinos jumped to 32% this year from 28% in 2016.
● In 2016 Democrats won Hispanic and Latina women by 44 percentage points; in 2020 they won by 39. Trump picked up 5 points.
● In 2016 Trump got 8% of the Black vote. This year he got 12%.
● In 2016, Democrats won black women by 90 percentage points. This year, by 81 points. In a year when a black woman was on a major party ticket for the first time in US history, the margin between Democrats and Republicans among black women shifted 9 percentage points in the other direction – towards Trump.
This may be a one-time deal – some minority voters may just like Trump’s rough populism. But there may be more to it. If you’re a minority business man or woman, you may see the benefit in having a president who cuts regulations and is pro-business on tax changes. As time goes on, the traditional African-American voter population declines, as does the white population. Latinos are a diverse population. Cubans and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans have very different voting interests. And the biggest demographic change in the country is towards biracial individuals who may not share the traditional values and voting patterns of their parents or grandparents. We shall see.
Bob’s Take
This was a short book - 200 pages - but it may be too long. Stuart Stevens is a good writer who laces a lot of humor into his words, something that is sorely missing from politics today. He does repeat himself a lot; the last half of the book is pretty much the first half of the book with more anecdotes thrown in.
He really whacks his party hard. He sets out good evidence. The party sees that making it easier for more people to vote makes it less likely that the GOP will win. That explains the backflips party minions are doing now to invalidate millions of legitimate presidential votes, not to mention the way some party officials tried to limit remote ballot drop-off options and such in this election in the year of the pandemic.
Stevens sees race as a major fixation of the Republican party which he would argue is becoming a good old white boys club. He also is very disappointed with the fact that almost no one in power in the GOP will take Trump on for anything. Given the almost-cult-like support he enjoys, they don’t want to take any chances.
Having said all that, the book was a little mean and snarky. Perhaps it was just too long for what he had to say. This would have been a fascinating long piece in a journal or serious magazine, but it was a book and it repeated a lot of things.
There is a difference Not too many years ago, some people felt that there wasn't a lot of difference between the two parties. You had the center-left D’s - Bill Clinton, Gore, Obama - and the center-right R’s - Bush 1, Bush 2, McCain, Romney. That has changed. None of the candidates I just mentioned could get their party’s nomination for the presidency today.
Today the Democrats have gone hard left, although their presidential candidate was a centrist. Defunding the police and passing the Green New Deal are both extreme positions. The Republicans have created a new brand of conservatism. Unlike George W. Bush’s vision of the party, today’s GOP doesn’t have much compassion in it. Trump, who defines the party today, appeals to nationalistic populist impulses with a lot of victimhood thrown in. He does not do empathy, which his supporters seem to see as a sign of strength.
Donald Trump’s moral shortcomings really bother Stevens, who, as a traditional Republican, thinks those things matter. At the end of the book, Stevens sums things up: “Without moral legitimacy, a center-right party becomes a soufflé of grievances and anger that exists to settle scores, not solve problems.”
Stevens wrote this book a year ago but he anticipated this election, as his quotation shows. He makes the consistent point that Donald Trump marginalizes anything that doesn’t work for him. He asserted that he got more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and that his inaugural was the best attended one of all time. Trump rails against the Deep State - career professionals that work for the country, not him - much as Joe McCarthy inveighed against all of the communists in the government, of which there were precious few. There has been no concerted federal response to the pandemic, which I believe will be the defining characteristic of the Trump presidency. This year, he constantly tweets that we had a fake election that was rigged. His lawyers are either the worst in history or there is nothing there to litigate; probably both are true. Donald Trump is objectively wrong on all of these points but his base believes that he is right, which is why he will be with us way beyond January 20, 2021.
The problem for the republic is that, while the Republican party has morphed into a Trump support machine, the Democrats have evolved into a party of special interests that forgot the working man and woman and tend to see everything as identity politics.
Tom Rush’s Take
Tom Rush is one of my favorite singers. I have seen him perform many times. Bob in the Basement’s Indiana correspondent, Stan Levco, is more of a fan than I am; he gets into stalker territory.
This is from Tom’s latest newsletter. Not only is he a great song writer, he is an eloquent spokesman for people of good will.
“Seriously, I think a major challenge for us all at this time is that apparently, 40 percent of us on each side think the other 40 percent is Evil or Stupid, or both. (The remaining 20 percent apparently have no opinion or just don’t care — and they might be the lucky ones.) It’s going to be a real challenge to get from where we are back to where we can respect someone whose opinions differ from our own. I seriously fear that if we cannot meet that challenge the country that we all love shall indeed perish from the earth.”
Bob’s Advice
Party hearty, but not with these parties. We need better political parties. We deserve better political parties.
