"W" to the Tea Party
“Poppy” Bush's son, George W. Bush (aka “W”), worked with campaign manager Lee Atwater during Bush senior’s presidential campaign. In W’s 1994 campaign for Governor of Texas his master of disinformation was political operative and self-described “nerd,” Karl Rove. Rove remained a key advisor to Bush until 2007.
In the 2000 Republican presidential primary the (then) moderate Republican Main Street Partnership supported Senator John McCain. McCain’s “brand” was that of a “maverick.” Geoffrey Kabaservice describes McCain as “not really a moderate,” but a conservative with a libertarian streak who became an ally of the Republican moderates against the religious right. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, but in South Carolina Rove and Co. promoted false narratives that McCain wanted to cut the anti-abortion plank from the Republican platform, and that his adopted East Asian daughter was in fact an illegitimate black child. Bush wooed the right wing, speaking at Bob Jones University, and vocally supporting South Carolina conservatives’ efforts to keep flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol. Bush easily won the South Carolina primary; McCain never recovered and Bush went on to win the Republican nomination.
The 2000 presidential election was famously close. On election night it became clear that the contest would be decided by votes in the state of Florida, which had 25 electoral votes (now 29). News networks called Florida for Gore, then retracted that and later called the state for Bush. Gore initially called Bush to concede, but then called him back and retracted his concession. Under Florida law Bush’s narrow election night victory triggered a recount. In an action that some observers have compared to protests in the days after the 2020 election, Republicans conducted a violent protest in Miami, FL, demanding that the recount be stopped. Pretending to be locals, most of the protesters were in fact Republican Congressional aides from Washington, DC, leading the action to be labeled the “Brooks Brothers Riot.” Eventually the election was resolved in the US Supreme Court, which ruled that continuing the recount would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush’s victory. Having won the popular vote, Gore conceded that he had lost the electoral vote.
Gaslighting
In W’s presidential campaign of 2004 a key emotionally loaded issue was gay marriage — handed to Bush and Rove by the Massachusetts legal system in an echo of the Willy Horton narrative in “Poppy’s” 1988 campaign. In February 2004 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the right of homosexual couples to marry. Voters were barraged with news stories of same-sex marriages, many featuring same-sex couples kissing. Bryant Welch suggests that for many viewers this created the imagined experience of kissing someone of the same sex, which would have been disturbing to some individuals with feelings of sexual inadequacy. A surge of support for constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage, and limiting the rights of gay people followed. W responded by calling for a ban on gay marriage.
Welch cites Josh Green’s October 2004 article in The Atlantic describing a Rove tactic that is now part of the QAnon arsenal. In 1994 Rove was working on the campaign of Harold See who was running against George Wallace’s son-in-law, Mark Kennedy, for a spot on the Alabama supreme court. Among other things, Kennedy’s campaign showcased his volunteer work with abused children, including a commercial that showed him holding hands with them. The See campaign promoted a “whisper campaign” that Kennedy was a pedophile and homosexual.
Welch describes two sets of victims of gaslighting: the direct targets of the gaslighters, and the audience that witnesses the gaslighting. Direct targets of gaslighting frequently suffer severe psychological effects, including “personal disintegration, self-destruction, and even suicide.” Bryant writes, for example, that the suicide note that Clinton White House aide Vince Foster tore into 27 pieces, but left in his briefcase, “suggests that the psychological effect of gaslighting was a more likely cause of death than the untethered speculations that abounded in its wake.”
For the witnessing audience gaslighting can be “confusing, distressing, and destructive,” as well, says Welch. “In those times they simply create, or let others create for them, an alternative reality that at least temporarily fills the void in their own reality sense.” Writing in 2008 he cites the post-9/11 mass delusion when “Americans’ inability to detect political manipulation caused them to fall out of sync with the rest of the world by blindly accepting the Bush reality.”
Welch has written that the barrage of conflicting messages we encounter in daily experience” can create what he terms “perplexity.” The mind’s “power to weave a coherent reality,” he writes, is also a liability. When the mind can’t “maintain a comfortable sense of a cohesive world,” its owner becomes “perplexed.” “Perplexity,” he writes, “is the emotional result of not being able to distinguish with confidence what is real and what is not.” It can create a state of panic in which the mind begins to construct a sense of reality that feels true. The process can circumvent logic, morality, and common sense, and ultimately trigger a kind of regression to a more childlike way of thinking. People in this state can literally become more simpleminded, Welch asserts. In the regressed state, superstition and fantasy may be more easily accepted, and individuals become more reliant on others for judgment, interpretation of events, and definitions of morality.
Gaslighters “are quite willing to fill this void,” Welch writes.
As noted above, Roger Ailes, the mastermind of “Poppy” Bush’s Willie Horton ad campaign became CEO and chairman of Fox News. Welch describes Fox News as a “tripartite media creature that is part infotainment, part news channel, and part instrument of political gaslighting. The four primary tools Fox News employs, Welch writes, are “[s]ymbols, manufactured feeling states, repetition, and associated reasoning.”
For the use of symbols Welch cites Ailes' work on behalf of tobacco companies starting in the late 80s. One notable ad used the slogan “Think, Don’t Smoke.” Like the adage about not thinking of an elephant, one can’t think of not smoking without thinking of smoking. Welch refers to smoke as the “symbolic object.” “Once there’s an image about smoking in people’s heads, they are just as likely to light up a cigarette as to become more resistant to lighting one up.”
In the mind smoking is not just a word, but an imagined experience. The experience is linked to other images and memories, from the Marlboro Man to scenes from movies, celebrities, etc. These are the “associations” that function as a kind of suggestion – in this case encouraging people to smoke.
For Fox News, “fair and balanced” is symbolic language, repeated incessantly, and associated in viewers’ minds with the network. Citing linguist George Lakoff, Welch writes that repetition goes beyond “persuading someone that what is being said is true; it actually makes it true in the inner workings of the mind.” Similarly associations “create the illusion of logical connections….” Welch quotes William James who famously said “People often think they are thinking when in fact they are just rearranging their prejudices.” Fox News’ understanding of the functioning of its slogan is exemplified by its 2003 lawsuit against comedian (later Senator) Al Franken. Fox contended that Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right essentially infringed on a Fox trademark. (The judge dismissed the suit as “wholly without merit” after only about a half hour of argument.)
Tea Party
“W” won re-election in 2004 and embarked on a campaign to privatize Social Security and Medicare, “in effect rolling back much of the New Deal,” in the words of Geoffrey Kabaservice. But his administration’s widely ridiculed response to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005 (“heck of a job, Brownie”) fed popular perceptions that competence in government was not important to conservatives, and that they were not concerned with the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. Republicans lost control of House and Senate in the 2006 elections, and lost more seats in 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidential election over Republican Sen. John McCain.
Responding to an economic downturn “W” had signed the $152 billion Economic Stimulus Act in February 2008, which passed Congress with support from 165 Republican representatives and 33 Republican senators. Over the next several months investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed, and the US Treasury took over control of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), which together financed more than half of all home loans in the US. The continuing economic turmoil led Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, to craft the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to shore up failing banks, stabilize financial markets, support the US auto industry, and help prevent mortgage foreclosures, among other measures.
Initially, even though the bill was supported by a Republican president, treasury secretary, and congressional leadership, on September 29, 2008, two-thirds of Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against it. Financial markets tanked, and the bill passed a few days later. Some observers have pointed to the initial rejection of the TARP bill as the birth of the Tea Party.
The original TARP bill authorized expenditures of $700 billion in two $350 billion chunks, with the first half largely available to be deployed at the discretion of Secretary Paulson, but Congress could block the second installment with a resolution. (The Dodd-Frank bill of 2010 eventually reduced TARP authorization to $475 billion.) Authorization for the second $350 billion passed the Senate on January 15, 2009, handing newly elected President Barack Obama an apparent early legislative victory.
One of the Obama administration’s initiatives under the TARP umbrella was the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which helped homeowners avoid foreclosure. On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, reporting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, launched into a tirade against the HAMP program, then still a proposal:
… Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages…? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?
Santelli’s rant is considered by some to be the informal launch of the Tea Party movement. Tea Party organizers presented themselves as an authentic grass-roots movement, and media tended to treat it as a popular uprising, but in fact Tea Partiers received guidance from well-known national conservative groups, including several related to the Koch brothers. Despite the now familiar image of the rural independent rugged individualist, Tea Partiers tended to be in Geoffrey Kabaservice’s words “financially secure members of the middle and upper-middle classes, predominantly male and middle-aged, and overwhelmingly Republican.” Kabaservice continues:
…[M]ovement affiliated candidates … claimed the mantle of fiscal conservatism [but] had no real plans for reducing government expenditures beyond the standard conservative pursuit of politics as warfare: cutting programs that benefited Democratic constituencies while preserving programs that benefited Republican constituencies and avoiding any serious reform of defense spending or middle-class entitlement programs.
The Tea Party moved the Republican party drastically to the right, bringing the extreme ideas of the John Birch Society into the Republican mainstream. Tea Partiers hyped the now familiar false and contradictory claims that Democrats were socialists or Nazis. Amplified by right-wing media, Tea Partiers later helped spread the conspiracy theory that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim – something that Donald Trump with the help of Fox News repeated ad nauseam during Republican primary season in spring 2011.
An example of the new Tea-Party-dominated Republican party was the Conrad-Gregg deficit reduction initiative of 2009/2010. In spring 2009 Senator Mitch McConnell advocated the measure from the Senate floor, saying it deserved “support from both sides of the aisle.” Yet when the Senate voted on the measure on January 26, 2010, in another now familiar pattern, Republicans filibustered. Among Republicans voting to kill the measure were McConnell, along with Senator John McCain and six other Republicans who had originally co-sponsored the bill. In a continuation of Gingrich's methods, Republicans united in obstructing and decrying any Obama initiative. So although Obama had achieved legislative victories during his first two years in office when Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress, in the 2010 midterm elections they lost six Senate and sixty-three House seats, yielding a Republican majority in the House.
Writing in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Mann and Ornstein observe:
Paradoxically, the public’s undifferentiated disgust with Congress, Washington, and “the government” in general is part of the problem, not the basis of a solution. In never-ending efforts to defeat incumbent officeholders in hard times, the public is perpetuating the source of its discontent, electing a new group of people who are even less inclined or capable of crafting compromise or solutions to pressing problems.
The Republican primary ahead of the 2012 presidential election was competitive, and was the first to operate under the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which removed limits on independent contributions (including from corporations) to political action committees. Republican candidates included Rep. Michele Bachman, businessman Herman Cain, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., Rep Thaddeus McCotter, Rep. Rand Paul, Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former Senator Rick Santorum. Santorum won the first primary – Iowa; Romney won the second – New Hampshire; Gingrich won the third – South Carolina. Romney went on to win the nomination, selecting Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. At the Republican convention, technically Sen. Ron Paul came in second for the nomination, although he received only 8% of the delegates.
Obama won a second term with 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, although he was the second president to win a second term with fewer electoral votes than his first term. (Woodrow Wilson was the other.) Only four states – Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia – were won by less than 5% of the popular vote.
As commentator Ezra Klein observed, during Obama’s second term he seemed to adopt a strategy of acting alone, ignoring Congress, and leaving them to do the same. He opened dialogue with Cuba and Iran, predictably angering his Republican critics, and embraced marriage equality especially in the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court Obergfell v Hodges ruling that declared marriage equality protected under the Constitution. He used executive actions to try to advance his policies regarding immigration and climate change.