How the GOP threw Dole under the bus in 1996…

And uhh…is there really a reason to think the game plan might be different this year?

Occasionally in this business a story that totally ruins your life will at least teach you something in the process. So it goes with George Mason University, a subject I have spent approximately 78 years researching for a sequence of progressively lower-circulation publications that ultimately ended up killing their pieces. I will never get back the afternoon I squandered at the GMU Law School panel on the evils of net neutrality legislation, or the day I spent at the campus Starbucks surrounded by earnest freshmen devouring fresh copies of Atlas Shrugged for their Honors Contemporary Society seminar over vanilla Frappucinos purchased with their Freedom Funds, or the week and a half I spent sifting through the archives trying in vain to divine when and how a state university came to be so thoroughly annexed by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy…But at least for all that squandered concentration I can proudly name one pointless thing to which I have not wasted any time paying attention: the 2012 presidential “election.”

It would have been hard in any case forcing myself to care about Mitt Romney’s tax shelters or the manufactured campaign season outrage over some diplomat’s tweets apologizing for another manufactured outrage designed to divert attention from whatever is actually going on in another Middle Eastern country whose now-dead dictator we long ago appointed to our manufactured Axis of Evil in still another ploy to divert attention from whatever was exactly going on…but I would have caved at some point, probably the Ryan nomination, had it not been for all the afternoons I wasted last summer at the GMU library last year flipping through doctoral dissertations produced by the school’s (two-time Nobel Prize-winning!) economics department. For it was there in the stacks that I randomly happened on what looked unmistakably like the probable blueprint for the Republican Party’s 2012 Game Plan, a plan that aims to elect Barack Obama as a means of holding on to the House at all costs.

But before I go into that, some context on the loser odyssey that led me there. George Mason is a kind of okay state university with some well-regarded graduate programs and a stadium at which Green Day played a pretty awesome concert in 1994. It is also the most underratedly powerful institution in Republican politics, a status that is periodically acknowledged by the mainstream media: in 1988 the Wall Street Journal proclaimed GMU the “Pentagon of conservative academia”; the school “trains warriors bent on dismantling the welfare state” remarked the National Journal in a 1995 survey of the GOP establishment. In her epic 2010 New Yorker survey of the Koch family oil-cattle-gas-ideology empire, Jane Mayer quoted a Democratic operative say of GMU: “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.” 

But how did some oil oligarchs from Wichita come to annex a public university 1,200 miles east in the heart of the military industrial complex? And what exactly were they after? I stupidly set out to try and figure that out, and while I am still not entirely sure I can tell you one thing: “dismantling the welfare state” is not nearly as fun as Grover Norquist makes it sound. Ditto “defunding the left” and “deregulating industry” and “destroying public employee unions” and the rest of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy To-Do List; it all sounds simple enough in concept, but execution, especially in the days before Fox News, was a bitch. It hadn’t really hit me how much hard labor went into the process of rendering American democracy so comprehensively corrupt until I stood before the dissertations shelf trying to figure out whether to start with “Gerrymandering and the Cube Law of Elections” or “An examination of campaign finance regulation from an interest-group perspective” or “Legislative reapportionment in a public choice perspective.” So I started instead with the fattest volume on the shelf, The Political Economy of the Malt Beverage Industry, the 1,380 page 1997 PhD-winning opus of one David K. Rehr. 

Like every other specimen of GMU-affiliated thought output I had seen on the topic of a regulated industry, Dr. Rehr’s tract championed a “less is more” approach to beer regulation, albeit on the somewhat unusual grounds that (among other things?) the multiplicity of federal and local laws governing beer distribution had actually bestowed upon the industry outsized political influence, a phenomenon generally met with approval within the VRWC. Mercifully (since economics dissertations, even mercifully math-free ones like Rehr’s, don’t make for the lightest reading) a footnote explained that the then New Yorker writer Elizabeth Drew had explored the beer lobby’s electoral clout at length in plain English in a book on the 1996 election called Whatever It Takes. 

It turned out that Dr. Rehr had been a pretty big player in the 1996 election, albeit not for his malt beverage scholarship—which went unmentioned in the book—but in his “day job” as chief lobbyist for National Beer Wholesalers Association, one of the five lobbies* Drew deemed most instrumental to executing Republican campaign strategy. Incidentally, Drew claims that it is (or was) technically against the law for industry trade lobbyists to coordinate campaign strategy with one another, but Grover Norquist had formed his whole personal brand around the weekly meetings he hosted for precisely that purpose; the role Norquist plays in the popular imagination is something like the genuine institutional role the GMU law and economics programs play behind the scenes behind the scenes.

But far more intriguing than the GOP strategists was the strategy they concocted for the 1996 campaign: to deliberately lose the presidency, as a circuitous means of holding on to Congress. Of course! Suddenly the diabolical self-satisfaction with which every fucking dude in DC had inexplicably greeted the Tea Party Congress made total sense: their historic articulate hip-hop-savvy young president would be getting a second term! America would get to watch Malia crowned prom queen! And four more years of Beyonce at the White House Correspondents Dinner!! Hell, who needs entitlements? Etc. etc.    

Drew had initially picked up on the story in 1995, when she remarked to an unnamed GOP power player type that it seemed as though his party was much more intent on keeping control of the House of Representatives than moving into the White House the following year. “I’ve been waiting for someone to figure that out!” he replies. Skeptical, she spent the following year specifically covering a few dozen of the most competitive House races from the perspective of the DC money guys. And indeed, as she explained to Linda Wertheimer the following year, the lobbyists threw Bob Dole under the bus:

They did it early and you could say they did it early and often. The Republican hierarchy was sharing this goal more and more overtly. That, I mean, Haley Barbour, the chairman of the R -- Republican National Committee. Newt Gingrich, Dole's new friend, tried to help Dole up to a point, and then he joined in this strategy of throwing him overboard, as did Trent Lott who succeeded Dole in the Senate.

They did it again towards the end of the campaign. They made a secret decision after Dole didn't do very well, to say the least, in the first presidential debate. They said, well, that's it: we're cutting loose and they ran some ads that, in effect, said forget about the presidency. It's the House that matters. They didn't even tell Dole and his campaign manager.

I have never seen anything like this in national politics. We've all seen party people, maybe, keep a distance from the presidential candidate if he thought that that person was a problem -- too far left, too far right. I've never seen this kind of, in effect, assassination of a candidate by his own party.

Now, before I challenge this last assertion I’ll just note that you can tell that Drew was onto something from the hysterical boredom with which the DC hack consensusphere dismissed Whatever It Takes. “It Takes A Whatever”  the headline of Brit Hume’s Weekly Standard review; the book “studiously avoids the sin of entertainment,” the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby sniffed in one of those hatchet jobs that suggests the critic studiously avoided the sin of actually reading the work being reviewed. Walter Shapiro speculated in a Washington Monthly review the book had been so boring it had moved Tina Brown’s recent purge of Drew from the New Yorker masthead. “Brings to mind Gertrude Stein's immortal judgment…” blah blah blah you know where this is going, cf Washington Times. Someone should start an ebook imprint re-releasing the top 100 or so “Most Totally ‘Boring’ Nonfiction Works of All Time” with all the boilerplate contempt blurbed on the front covers. As David Brock wrote of a similarly blasphemous title in 1990, close to a decade he wrote his own reviled bestseller, “When the Beltway wisemen decide to join forces in this way, it's a good idea to check your wallet, or in this case, the offending book.”

If only Drew had taken Brock’s advice at the time: the book he was reviewing, Agents of Influence, was written by the one guy on the 1996 presidential ticket to whom Drew should have been paying attention, Reform Party vice presidential candidate Pat Choate, whose famous running mate Ross Perot was the diminutive elephant in the proverbial House cloakroom without whose 8.1 million die hard voters the K Street cabal’s strategy would have been pretty much impossible. If not for this oversight—“Perot” makes all of six appearances in the book—Drew might have written the only book you’d need to understand the 2012 election fifteen years ahead of the game.

On the other hand, she might never have finished it at all. See, if Whatever It Takes has been any less “boring” it would have flirted with leprous “conspiracy theory” slur, because it essentially advances the argument that a shadowy clique of data mining, money laundering propagandists exercises more influence over the outcomes of American elections than the candidates, voters and reality combined. This probably would have strained my credulity had I not been initally drawn in from the vantage point of George Mason, whose economics department had launched the astroturf outfits now known as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the two grassroots lobbying operations most widely credited with inventing, nurturing and sustaining the Tea Party movement.

What I didn't quite get before I read up on Pat Choate and Ross Perot was how dangerously real the Tea Party movement might be, if not for the sheer formidability of the Tea Party astroturf lobby that initially emerged to co-opt the Perot movement twenty years ago this campaign cycle. What I still don't get is why no one within the Democratic Party establishment fought back.

CONTINUED: You fucking people, how could you fail to grasp that H. Ross Perot was the Last American Leftist…

*Along with Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, the National Rifle Association’s Tanya Metaksa, and Marc Nuttle, a consultant to the National Federation of Independent Business, where Rehr had worked before defecting for the beer distributors. All have some degree of affiliation with George Mason, most notably Nuttle, who founded a service in the nineties rating state and federal judges on the basis of their perceived business friendliness; the ratings were in turn used to identify ideal candidates for reeducation in the GMU's Law and Economics seminars.