government is promoting bad behavior! This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage [on a house] that has an extra bathroom and [they] can’t pay their bills? Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy,” he went on. “They moved from the individual to the collective and now they are driving Chevys, the last great car to come out of Detroit.”
By the end of February, voter discontent began mounting. The President’s 24% disapproval rating was twice as high as the average for a month-old presidency and twice the 12% disapproval rating that he had the month before. While Liberal and Independent support held fairly steady, the rookie Chief Executive’s approval among Republicans plunged from 41% to 30%, with an especially steep drop among Conservatives—from 36% at his inauguration to 22%. Middle-class Americans, touted as the group of people who would reap the most benefits from Obama’s plan, dropped their approval from 69% to 58%.
Democrats shrugged off the dip in the polls, ignored critics, and promised to push ahead with more legislation. “We are only in the beginning stages of remaking America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ominously told reporters. “My biggest fight has been between those who wanted to do something incremental and those who wanted to do something comprehensive. We won that fight and there’ll be more legislation to follow.”
Chapter 2
Ronald Reagan was physically and mentally exhausted.
Having just completed the toughest campaign of his life, and narrowly missing the top nomination, he decided to retreat to his 700-acre ranch high in the Santa Ynez Mountains. There, he gave himself two orders: rest and get the pain out of the way.
Resting proved the easier task. After years on the campaign trail, Reagan found he liked the solitude. No newspapers. No television. No Internet. No more kissing babies and shaking hands. But as much as the quiet provided comfort, Reagan could not ignore the pain of losing to a man he deemed a political and intellectual inferior.
John McCain’s muddled campaign, preceded by two terms of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” had steered the Party’s message away from its fiscally conservative roots. Spending under GOP control had actually dwarfed that of spending under Democratic predecessors. The list of legislative accomplishments under the Bush administration read more like Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. “No Child Left Behind” shifted power from local educators to the Federal Government. The 2002 Farm Bill saw agriculture spending double its 1990s level. The 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit was the biggest single expansion in the program’s history. By the time Bush left office, his vision of creating a permanent Republican majority had evaporated, along with his poll numbers. Not only was the United States left in the midst of a financial meltdown, it was also still at war in two countries. Judging by the outcome, McCain’s campaign had presented no viable solution to these problems. It was safe to say the Republican Party was in shambles.
Not everyone was willing to stand by quietly. Across the country, groups of discontented citizens began forming in protest. People from different walks of life, with different political affiliations, joined together under a shared ideology to protest exorbitant government spending and control. This leaderless group became known as the Tea Party—a name which was both a reference to the famous Boston strike against taxation and the acronym, “Taxed Enough Already.”
Meanwhile, believing that Reagan was too old, the conservative base was desperately searching for its new standard-bearer. This was a common theme. Reagan’s opponents had been writing him off for as long as he could remember.
Reagan had begun his foray into politics as a registered Democrat, even voting for Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, but his political world had begun to tilt rightward when, after two disastrous Carter terms, he campaigned (as a Democrat) for George Bush as President. He had officially changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1990.
Reagan had first burst on the national political scene on October 27, 1996, when he delivered a television address in support of Bob Dole’s fledgling presidential campaign. “A Time for Choosing” turned out to be the highlight of the lackluster Republican effort, and it had instantly put Reagan on the map as a political force. The soaring rhetoric had spelled out a clear, coherent, conservative message that had been sorely missing from Dole’s campaign.
Known simply as “The Speech,” Reagan’s ode to freedom became a rallying cry for conservatives across the country:
“This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
“A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So, governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
The blistering attack on liberal orthodoxy might have been too little too late to save Dole from his landslide loss to Bill Clinton, but the nationally broadcast speech made Reagan an instant hero among the conservative base.
After “The Speech,” requests for speaking engagements began to pour in to Reagan’s offices from all across the country—especially from colleges where Reagan possessed an almost cult-like following among young students. Reagan began a syndicated column and honed his political skills by touring the country, making speeches espousing his conservative principles.
When Reagan decided to run for governor of California in 1998, most in the political establishment treated his candidacy as a joke, but after defeating incumbent Governor Gray Davis, it was the “washed-up, B-list movie actor” who left laughing.
Reagan was even drafted by a group of fiscal conservatives to make a run for President, but after a half-hearted attempt he quickly withdrew his candidacy, lending his support to George W. Bush.
After balancing the budget in California, a feat most assumed at the time to be all but impossible, Reagan easily won reelection for the governorship in 2002. His star was rising. Many political pundits were already measuring his seat for the White House. Reagan entered the 2008 race heavily favored to win the nomination, but during the campaign his ineffectual ground game and frequent gaffes badly tarnished his image as a leader, even amongst his most loyal supporters.
Despite his inspired impromptu speech at the 2008 Republican Convention, it was a widely held belief that Reagan’s time had come and gone. That he had missed his moment.
But not everyone thought so. During the first week of February 2009, a group of disillusioned Americans, led by the wealthy Koch brothers, made a bold move toward Reagan, asking him to consider one more presidential run, this time under a third party. While Reagan gave no answer, once he got back to the Ranch, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Though he made no formal statement, word was leaked to the press.
At first, Reagan stunned politicos, who assumed his age had disqualified him from seeking another run, when he appeared open to a third-party candidacy, telling reporters outside his ranch, “This could be one of those moments in time, I don’t know. I see statements of disaffection by people in both parties.”
Reagan, however, reversed course two days later
