Still a party of twins, today the divisions are between greed and ignorance. The greed includes the old-school establishment avarice of Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. Its modern fratricidal twin: The reality-defying, fear-driven anti-intellectualism of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Little wonder the Grand Old Party is in such a mess. And BuzzFeed political reporter McKay Coppins’ new book is shining a light on that mess.
Portions of this book have been adapted for BuzzFeed and can be found via his author’s page there and some of the links below. Be sure to check out his 2014 interview with Donald Trump (which is included in the book), the article “36 Hours On The Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump,” and the ensuing fallout.
In this look at the Republican Party in disarray and its efforts to get itself back together, Coppins focuses on a handful of potential presidential candidates: Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump. Far more attention is given to Bobby Jindal than to Donald Trump, but then again, no one expected The Donald to actually run, much less achieve his frontrunner status. And apparently Coppins did not expect Jindal to sink so far, so quickly.
Chock-full of anecdotes and insider strategies, it is clear that yes, McKay Coppins did conduct some 300 interviews as well as rely on other printed material including candidate biographies in preparing this book. For those of us without the appetite (or the stomach) for doing the same, the resulting book is a one-stop learning center about the men and one woman vying for the Republican win as seen through the eyes of this BuzzFeed writer.
The Wilderness begins on election night 2012, with a secretly gleeful Rand Paul. Not that he was happy for President Obama’s win, mind you.
But the fact that Romney’s humiliating defeat might finally expose the GOP’s moneyed, Waspy, corporatist breed of country-club patricians for the frauds that they were— well, that was cause for celebration in the Paul household.
For Rand, this was personal. As far back as he could remember, his family and friends had been getting their lunch money stolen by political bullies in the GOP who looked and behaved like Romney.
Rand Paul is one of a half-dozen candidates to get an in-depth examination by Coppins. We are treated to his high school years followed by his college career at Baylor (including the strange, perhaps pot-fueled faux kidnapping episode), as well as a look at the father-son rivalry that derailed Rand Paul’s early attempt to run for president in 2012. Also included is an examination of Rand Paul’s early refusal to accept that the plagiarism that Rachel Maddow uncovered in 2013 was a serious issue.
Coppins seems to approve of Rand Paul’s wife, Kelly, calling her “warm and thoughtful” during their interview, “showcasing an impressive savvy about politics and a disarming deftness in handling my questions.” She turns out to be one of only a few people that the author appears to admire.
Paul Ryan has to be included in the group that Coppins admires. Although he is not now a candidate in the primary race, Coppins devotes a lot of ink to him. Ryan was disappointed in the campaign run by Mitt Romney, for whom he was a loyal soldier. His decisions were based, in part, on WWPD: What Wouldn’t Palin Do? He felt that making the campaign one that was simply against Obama was a mistake, and that it should have focused more on a Republican agenda for progress.
After the loss, Ryan returned to Congress and in 2013 began making solo visits to meet actual poor people and to try to learn from them what worked and what didn’t, and what policies or programs Washington could institute that would help solve the problems of poverty. A Jack Kemp protege, he wanted to help, but did not feel that LBJ’s War on Poverty was the way to provide any long-term assistance. Ryan wanted to replace traditional welfare programs with grants that would allow states to decide how to help move welfare recipients to full-time work.
He proposed expanding the earned income tax credit for childless adults; reviewing and potentially eradicating regulations that hurt disadvantaged workers, like occupational licensing requirements; and looking for ways to reduce incarceration.
Coppins portrays Ryan as a dedicated, idealistic policy wonk who, during his 18-month long poverty tour, displayed an abysmal lack of communication skills. Appearing on a talk radio program to push his poverty proposals, Ryan famously said:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
In his defense, after the pushback from the meanies on the left, Coppins writes:
In truth, what Ryan’s foot-in-mouth moment revealed wasn’t bigotry but a debilitating lack of experience in interacting with the urban poor and people of color— a problem that afflicted his party at large. Ryan wasn’t racist, nor was he trying to curry favor with racists; he was a tone-deaf white guy who had never developed the vocabulary required to talk about race and urban issues, because as a professional Republican he never had to.
(On the other hand, the poverty policies that Ryan eventually proposed were striking for their micromanagement style, according to a Think Progress report on them.)
Coppins’ portrait of Jeb Bush is far less flattering. On Bush at Andover:
In its place was a considerably less appealing sketch: the unpleasant, cocksure prince who reeked of privilege and seemed bitterly beset by the problems of the aristocracy.
…
He also showed glimpses of a trait that would become more pronounced later in life: a proclivity for using blunt force to get his way and exert dominance. At six foot four, he towered over most of the boys on campus, and his size— combined with his cavalier confidence— made him an intimidating figure to some. He picked fights with classmates he felt had crossed him, and hulked over students who were smaller and less self-assured than he was.
Jeb’s ruthlessness was on display in his employment of “shock and awe” to convince Mitt Romney to stay out of the 2016 race. The term refers to the military doctrine that an initial display of overwhelming force will discourage the enemy.
Applied here, the idea was to quickly amass a vast arsenal of high-dollar donors, topflight operatives, and establishment endorsements so intimidating that Romney would conclude he couldn’t compete. And along the way, they’d make the process so painful for him that he wouldn’t even want to. The goal was to crush Romney’s spirit and scare off any other potential challengers who were on the fence.
The ruthlessness continued in the Bush campaign’s alleged use of unsubstantiated rumors about Marco Rubio’s “zipper problem.” Marco Rubio receives a close look from Coppins, starting in his Las Vegas home as the child of Cuban immigrants, and includes the fact that the opposition research investigator that the Rubio campaign hired to look into the infidelity rumors found that they lacked any concrete evidence. Also claiming a lot of space in the book is Ted Cruz, his past, his hashtag politics, and his lead role in the 2013 government shutdown. Chris Christie, Scott Walker. and Carly Fiorina get drive-by looks. Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Lindsey Graham get even less, and Ben Carson is not mentioned at all.
As much fun as the book is, one must keep in mind the perspective of the writer, best shown here:
These sorts of delusional fringes existed on both sides of the political spectrum, and they tended to thrive when their respective parties were out of power. In the conservative fever swamps of the nineties, a decades-old investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton’s finances turned into a fanatical conviction that the First Couple had pursued a massive cover-up of past corruption, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. During George W. Bush’s presidency, the left-wing fever swamps teemed with crazed speculation about the White House orchestrating terrorist attacks on American soil. And in the Tea Party fever swamps of the Obama era— which comprised a corps of professionalized, well-funded websites— crusading swamp warriors fought to purge the GOP of ideological traitors, while also flooding social media with rumors of Sharia law in suburbia, or a fast-approaching “race war” in America targeting whites, or secret crimes committed by the president that called for his impeachment.
This completely misses the fact that the fever swamps of the right led to eight years of politically motivated congressional investigations and the impeachment of Bill Clinton by mainstream Republican politicians. And it was Republican politicians who helped raise the temperature in those same fever swamps during the Obama administration by declaring war on any proposal he or his party advanced, swearing on the day of his inauguration to just say no, while state and local Republicans were busy investigating his birthplace.
Meanwhile, speculation about Bush causing terror attacks on American soil was found only on conspiracy websites that don’t really have any political affiliation. Never was any support given to the swamp-dwellers by a Democratic politician. Nor were multiple hearings held to investigate his involvement.
That said, McKay Coppins is a talented writer, and the book is a fun read for a political junkie who loves process stories—even if said junkie is a Democrat. After all, the rumors and stories about Hillary Clinton have been around for years, and Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem to have any to be told about him, so what is a junkie to do?
For all of his talent, however, Coppins still has a long way to go before his work can begin to compare to the early works of Theodore H. White. Admittedly, by waiting until after the election, White’s work was able to focus on the main participants. But more than that, he tied the election to a tale of American politics that began well before 1960. In The Wilderness, Coppins tells us lots of insider stuff, but fails to tie any of it into a broader picture of what the Republican Party is, or what it wants to be. It may be that he was not able to accomplish that, as the party itself seems to have no clear vision. And as long as there is no true party identity, men like Donald Trump are free to build their own—with possibly devastating long-term consequences.