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The Republican Plan for
Dominance in the 21st Century
Journalists Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
discuss their new book, "One
Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st
Century ." In it, they reveals how the
Republican party owns a clear advantage in the fundamentals of
campaigning and has built up a series of structural advantages
that make it increasingly difficult to beat.
Broadcast : 09/13/06
Democracy Now! - Runtime 38 Minutes
AMY GOODMAN: I’m joined here in Washington, D.C. by
the book's authors, Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten. Tom
Hamburger is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles
Times, specializing in the White House and executive branch.
Peter Wallsten covers the White House and national politics for
the Los Angeles Times, as well. We welcome you both to
Democracy Now!
TOM HAMBURGER: Thanks. Good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: One Party Country. Tom Hamburger,
you spent a lot of time going to Wednesday meetings. Can you
describe what they are?
TOM HAMBURGER: Sure, Amy, thanks. The Wednesday
meetings refer to the gatherings of conservative activists at
the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, the activist
organization established by Grover Norquist, effective organizer
and gadfly on the right, who brings together the conservative
coalition every week for a private -- generally closed to the
press -- meeting to hash out, to discuss both issues of the day
and to sort of get the message from the White House, from the
Republican National Committee, from the constituent groups of
the conservative coalition. And it's a place where the disparate
members of this group can come together, and do come together,
every week to plot strategy and to air their differences, but to
do so in private.
AMY GOODMAN: Why were you allowed in?
TOM HAMBURGER: Well, this was an important part of our
reporting. And to get in the door, we did agree to some ground
rules, which included our going in agreeing to accept some
things off the record, that is, not publishing everything that
took place, because there's a lot of strategic material that's
discussed, and so forth. But we very much wanted to get inside
this meeting, to understand how it is that this coalition on the
right has become -- we argue in this book and we believe --
unusually successful, both in organizing the disparate wings of
the Republican Party and of the conservative movement and
getting them to focus on both short-term and long-term goals. We
wanted to see how it worked, and it was important for us to do
that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, what’s the secret? How does it
work?
TOM HAMBURGER: Part of it is that -- part of the
success is that groups with different short-term goals -- say
the business wing of the party, corporate interests, versus the
social conservatives -- are able to come together with the idea
of saying, how can we -- what is it that we can compromise on?
What is it that we can come together on for a short-term -- sort
of paper over short-term differences for long-term gain?
An example, we were there when the Medicare proposal,
Medicare drug proposal, was backed by the White House, and the
White House came to make the argument that this drug proposal,
even though it was antithetical to some traditional
conservatives, would be good for the movement in the short term,
because it could bring seniors into the Republican fold and
encourage votes in the midterm elections for Republicans. And
so, we watched as conservatives were asked to basically tamp
down your disagreements over this, what was considered a
non-conservative expansion of a federal entitlement program, in
order for Republicans to make gains short-term in the midterm
elections.
AMY GOODMAN: And Grover Norquist's significance within
the Republican Party, the man who said -- what was the famous
quote about the bath tub?
TOM HAMBURGER: Oh, ‘My goal is to -- I don't just want
to shrink the size of government, I want to bring it into the
bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’ I think that's the quote.
Grover Norquist is a guy who grew up in conservative
politics. He was a leader in College Republicans, notably came
to know, while he was in college, Karl Rove, also a leader in
that movement, and guy called Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, a whole
cadre of the sort of leaders of the movement who came of age
roughly at the same time.
Grover then worked for the Reagan White House and then came
to lead this anti-tax wing of the Republican Party, which became
-- is a very important part of the conservative movement today
and, we argue in the book, also introduced discipline in the
party, in a sense. When the father of the current president was
in the White House and broke his pledge -- remember this, “Read
my lips: no new taxes” -- Norquist and his organization and this
group of anti-tax conservatives really went after that first
President Bush. And we argue in the book that that was an
enormous lesson to his son, which is, understand the power of
these movement conservatives and don't cross them.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wallsten, where does redistricting
fit into all of this?
PETER WALLSTEN: That's actually an important point
that I think -- that we both think has been lost in a lot of the
current debate over who is going to win the House, who’s going
to win control of the House this year. You know, we don't know
who’s going to win control of the House, but we can tell you
this: Republicans have a huge advantage when it comes to the way
that districts are drawn. And this is an interesting point.
It happened actually in the 1980s, the Democratic Congress
passed a rewrite of the Voting Rights Act. And what that did was
encourage the creation of more districts that would be drawn to
elect more minorities to Congress, which seemed like a good goal
at the time to the Democrats who were in charge and certainly to
the civil rights groups that were advocating for it. But what
Lee Atwater, the kind of the late and legendary Republican
operative, strategist, realized then was that since
redistricting was done every decade typically, that after the
1990 census when state legislatures in states around all over
the country would be doing their map redrawing, Lee Atwater
realized that the Republicans could actually create alliances
with these civil rights groups and give them more minority seats
than the Democrats could give.
And the reason for that is because the Republicans realized
that when you take minorities and pack them into districts that
would elect, say, a minority member with 60% or 70% or 80% of
the vote, that bleaches out the surrounding districts. It
creates more white conservative districts. This happened in
Florida and across the South. And that helped create this map
that is now, we argue, tilted in favor of Republicans,
especially when it comes to districts that are maybe a little
more closely competitive but lean Republican. The fight for
control of the House is not fought out on a level playing field.
It is on a playing field that benefits Republicans.
So this year, for a lot of reasons that your viewers and
listeners know about, the Republicans are having a hard time.
And many think that they might lose control of the House. This
is what some analysts call a tsunami effect of problems that
could lead Democrats to win. But even Democratic strategists
will tell you that they don't know that they’re going to win in
this environment, which is a pretty remarkable acknowledgement
given everything that's gone on. And even if they do win, it
would be only by a narrow margin, and that's because they’re
constrained by these maps, and this redistricting plan is
important to this day for that reason.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the Republican strategy to
reach more deeply into the African American, Latino communities,
to immigrant communities?
PETER WALLSTEN: It's also a very important tenet of
One Party Country, as we lay out in the book, that really
under the leadership of the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb,
they tried to redefine the way the Republican Party goes after
minority voters. Latinos, George W. Bush won 40% of the Hispanic
vote nationally, which is a pretty remarkable number for
Republicans. Jeb has won with huge numbers, not just the Cuban
Republicans, but non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida who tend to vote
Democratic, as well. And they did this with a strategy that some
strategists call the “I love you” strategy, where they manage to
appeal to a sense of emotion, rather than issues, in the case of
Latinos.
In the case of African Americans, we can talk more about
programs and issues that they use, but one that we lay out in
the book is called the White House faith-based initiative, where
the White House actually helped -- created a program to funnel
taxpayer dollars to African American churches across the
country, kind of bringing influential ministers into the fold,
so they would turn around and campaign for Republicans.
You mentioned Hurricane Katrina. There's the immigration
debate. There's lots of reasons right now why this outreach to
minorities is strained. What we argue, though, is that the point
was never to win a majority of these groups. The Karl Rove
vision is to peel away slices of the electorate. So, Republicans
don't need to win the majority of African Americans to win
elections. They don't even need to win 20% of them. They could
win 15% of African Americans, and that would give them the
chance to really keep Democrats in the minority.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you explain how the whole
Sensenbrenner bill, immigration bill that criminalized
immigrants, criminalized those that would help them,
criminalized priests, nuns, people who helped those who are
undocumented in this country, how did that fit into an
Republican strategy?
PETER WALLSTEN: Well, I would say that that is
probably not part of the Karl Rove strategy, per se, however, in
the long-term strategy. In the short term, you have the White
House pushing for what some might call a more open immigration
policy, and you have conservative Republicans pushing for this
more restrictive policy, so all bases are covered for the
Republican Party right now, depending on which district you’re
running in.
But as far as the long-term strategy that we write about,
this is really one of the strains and one of the pressure points
of this strategy, that, you know, George W. Bush, the one issue
that you can really point to that he seems to understand and
feel strongly about is immigration. We went back to Midland,
Texas and talked to Hispanics that he knew as a young
businessman. I mean, George W. Bush has long been close personal
friends with immigrants, Mexican Americans and even Mexicans
living in the United States who are in the citizens. It's
something that he actually has strong feelings about, and he
believes that the immigration policy should not be restrictive.
He also is very close with corporate America, as Tom can talk
about later, and they obviously have strong feelings about
inexpensive labor.
So, but in the big picture, the White House is pushing for
this more open policy, because, in part, Karl Rove and Ken
Mehlman believe that Hispanic voters are going to be key to any
Republican majority, if it's going to be long-term. And George
Bush realized this in ’94, when he actually challenged Pete
Wilson personally on Proposition 187 in California, where George
Bush, at a time that the Republican Party overall was thinking
that immigration was going to be a huge issue for them -- Pete
Wilson won reelection, he was viewed as a possible challenger to
Bill Clinton in ’96 -- George Bush told them Prop 187 was wrong.
And that’s in part because they realized the power of the
Hispanic vote.
And one more point to that is that a lot of Republican
strategists right now believe that if the party nominates a
candidate in 2008 who believes in a more restrictive border
policy, that this majority plan could actually die.
AMY GOODMAN: And they’re not going to vote on
immigration before the election.
PETER WALLSTEN: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: They see they’re in big trouble on this
issue.
PETER WALLSTEN: That's right. And again, that keeps
all bases covered for now.
AMY GOODMAN: Tom.
TOM HAMBURGER: Your question, Amy, gets to this: one
of the big threats to the Rove-Bush plan for building this
majority is expanding entree into the Latino community, and this
split on immigration within the party, Sensenbrenner’s bill
versus the White House position, is a threat to that plan.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of big business, the
Republicans almost completing their strategy to incorporate it
as -- what do you call it? -- an arm of the party.
TOM HAMBURGER: Yeah. Amy, one of the dreams of
conservative strategists for decades actually has been to
mobilize business, making business and the corporate community
an arm of the Republican Party, in the same way that labor has
been to the Democrats. That's the analogy that's been used. And
we argue in the book that they have become, in the last six
years particularly, remarkably successful in mobilizing business
and in mobilizing business in new ways that weren't imagined
previously.
You know, for decades, business executives have written
checks to the Republican parties, inordinately to Republicans,
60% to 70% GOP, as opposed to 40%, 30% to the Democrats. But
what's happened over the last six years, as Republicans have
grabbed on and there's been a general understanding of the
importance of reaching out in a campaign to individuals through
niche person-to-person marketing, is that business has been
engaged in this effort in a way we've never seen before. So it's
no longer just writing checks, but it’s actually using the email
systems of large corporations, mobilizing the workforce on the
factory floor and, in some cases, actually having employers
urging their employees to vote or to recommend voting for a
specific candidate. This is new, and we argue in the book that
it's had a powerful effect, and we expect to see more of it in
2006, even a year in which some business executives, always very
practical, are at least publicly trying to hedge their bets.
AMY GOODMAN: How significant was Karl Rove being under
the cloud of indictment?
TOM HAMBURGER: Well, that's -- Karl Rove played an
enormous role in everything we've been talking about so far,
both the sort of master strategist, a guy who has what some
Republicans call bifocal vision, meaning he focuses on both
short-term games the next election and also the long-term
prospects, the long-term need to build what he likes to call the
dominant majority of Republicans. But Karl, we think, was
significantly sidelined and hampered by the Fitzgerald
investigation and the threat of being indicted in the Valerie
Plame investigation. It took a toll on him and on the plan. We
were going to the Norquist Wednesday meetings and observing all
of this. In fact, when the White House made a serious misstep
nominating Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court -- they had to,
as you know, take back that nomination -- that occurred really
at the time when Karl Rove was under the most pressure from the
Fitzgerald investigation. He was being brought back to the Grand
Jury, and so on.
So I think he was enormously distracted and is now, as a
result of knowing that he's been cleared, enormously relieved
and, in a sense, back in the saddle again. We think he's playing
an enormous role, contrary to some of the news stories that
appeared of late suggesting that his influence isn't as great.
He’ll be, we believe, once again the field marshal for these
midterm elections, even if not quite as visible as he’s been in
the past.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wallsten, Voter Vault.
PETER WALLSTEN: Another important tenet of the one
party strategy, Amy. Voter Vault is a massive database of
millions of names, not just names of voters, but their tastes,
their opinions on issues, what brand car they drive, what kind
of alcoholic beverage they might prefer, whether they have --
what kind of features they have on their home telephone. And
this is a database that’s kept here in Washington at the
Republican National Committee headquarters, but that is
accessible on a web-based program to Republican operatives
around the country. If you’re a Republican strategist running a
state senate campaign in Florida or a congressional campaign in
Arizona, you can have access to this database and within minutes
have a list of names of people in a particular neighborhood,
where you want to send a volunteer to go knock on doors, based
on whether they’re -- based on what level of conservative they
are, if they’re very conservative, moderately conservative, not
conservative at all.
It's a way that the Republicans can go into, you know -- they
can focus their attention not only on well-known conservative
areas in an exurb or a suburb, but they can go into the middle
of Cleveland or the middle of Philadelphia, and in a
neighborhood of liberal Democrats, they could find a person to
vote Republican. And it's part of a key to winning close
elections. There's a lot of closely competitive House races this
year. We believe that Voter Vault gives the Republicans an
advantage in those close House races, because they have more of
an ability than the Democrats. The Democrats do not -- they have
a database, but it’s not nearly as sophisticated as this.
AMY GOODMAN: Where do they get the information?
PETER WALLSTEN: They buy it from retailers. It's
marketing data that's available. It's not unique to the
Republican Party, but --
TOM HAMBURGER: Drug chains, supermarkets keep an
enormous amount of information, Amy, about your buying habits
and mine. And what marketers have learned is that this can be an
enormous advantage if you want to design a specific narrowly
tailored campaign.
Can we give you an example? We came across in a suburb in
Ohio an African American woman called Felicia Hill. She’s a
nurse married to a UAW auto worker. Traditionally, this would
not be a household in which Republicans would target or spend a
lot of time, African American UAW union household. But what
Voter Vault told Republican field operatives was that the Hills
not only were traditionally registered as Democrats, but that
they also sent their children to private schools. They knew also
that Mrs. Hill subscribed to golfing magazines, because she's an
avid golfer. They knew that they were members of a conservative
church that was opposed to gay marriage initiatives and to
abortion.
And this allowed the party to make a series of entreaties to
the family, and particularly to Felicia Hill, like which they
had never seen before, to woo her to Republican events and to
convince her that the Republican Party, based on her interest in
supporting private schools and school vouchers, for example,
might be a home for her. So for the Republican Party, getting
Ms. Hill to attend Republican events and to be open to
Republican argument was an enormous victory. It was an example
of how you can use a database or data on individuals to reach
out to new voters who might not traditionally be in your corner.
AMY GOODMAN: Did she change her vote?
TOM HAMBURGER: She did not, actually. What she told us
was that she went to some Bush events. She met Republicans and
for the first time felt at home. But when she got into the
voting booth, she could not bring herself to cast her ballot for
George Bush and voted for John Kerry. But when we talked to
Republicans -- and this is an example of this sort of long-term
thinking that we think Republicans have developed that Dems have
not yet to the same degree -- this was a victory, because she
didn't vote for George W. Bush or for Republicans in 2004, but
in 2006 or 2008, who knows? We now have an avenue of
communication. And this was considered a victory.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter?
PETER WALLSTEN: I was going to say that the Voter
Vault also has helped them find -- going back to the point of
the ethnic politics, in 2004, the Bush campaign managed to track
down millions of Hispanic voters that they viewed as potentially
sympathetic and who might vote Republican, especially in the
Southwest, which was such an important -- which continues to be
such an important battleground. And what they did with these
people that they found is they sent a DVD, a five-minute-long
DVD narrated by President Bush, which was remarkable if you
viewed it, especially in the current climate of the immigration
debate, because in this DVD, it opens with President Bush on his
vacation property in Texas fishing. And he's talking about how
all this land used to be Mexico, and the people who lived here
weren't foreigners, they weren’t necessarily Hispanics, they
were Mexicans. So some congressmen like Tom Tancredo first of
all might find it interesting that the President of the United
States is somewhat ceding Texas to Mexico.
But on top of that, the DVD goes on to have the President
bragging about all of the Hispanics he's appointed to high
office, how he hopes more Hispanics will run for office and how
they’ll be Republicans. And kind of amazingly, the DVD ends with
an image of then-Governor Bush marching in a Mexican
Independence Day parade in Texas, waving a Mexican flag, which
is interesting because many of the conservative Republicans now
are critical of some of the protesters who have shown up at
these immigration protests waving Mexican flags.
Also, there was an interesting event in Cleveland on the
weekend before the election in 2004, where the Republicans
managed to find creative ways to build a database of potentially
sympathetic Jewish voters. And these happened to be
Russian-speaking immigrants, Jewish immigrants, who lived in
big, tall apartment buildings out in a suburb of Cleveland. And
they put together lists. They contacted the local rabbis, and
they put out an order for everybody to vote. And then, on the
Sunday before Election Day, the Bush campaign actually held a
rally that they put on entirely in Russian, that by the end of
the rally had all the elderly Russian immigrants standing up,
waving their arms, chanting “Bush! Bush! Bush!” in their thick
Russian accents. And they all went out and voted in mass for
Bush. And, you know, this sounds like a very small group of
people, and it is, but in a close election, as everybody has
learned, every vote matters.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Wallsten, I want to end by asking
you about that exchange that you had with President Bush back in
June. You were wearing sunglasses during a news conference. The
President on the White House lawn. Let's watch and listen.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Peter, are you going to
ask that question with those shades on?
PETER WALLSTEN: I can take them off for you.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: No, I’m interested in
the shade look, seriously.
PETER WALLSTEN: Alright, I’ll keep it then.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: For the viewers, there's
no sun.
PETER WALLSTEN: I guess it depends on your
perspective.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Touche.
AMY GOODMAN: This became a very big story, you and
your shades. Why?
PETER WALLSTEN: Well, the President, of course, had no
idea at the time that I have a retinal condition, a form of
macular degeneration called Stargardt’s, so I have -- most of my
central vision is gone. But in that context, what was important
was that it was outside in the rose garden, it was an overcast
day. But even on an overcast day, the glare can be hard to take,
especially sitting outside for an extended period of time. That
press conference was over an hour long. So it's pretty painful
to sit outside with that much glare without sunglasses. And I
frankly forget I had them on. It's just natural for me to have
them on outside, and I forgot about them, until he mentioned it
when he called on me and asked me, of course, as you just saw,
if I was going to keep them on. I offered to take them off, and
it became funny.
But he had made fun of several reporters that day, and he did
not know about my condition. So it didn't strike me as that big
of a deal at the time. I got back to the office a little while
later and noticed that the blogs were beginning to go crazy and
then cable. There was, I guess, very little news out of the
press conference itself, so cable TV kept playing it over and
over again. And the Daily Show made fun of it. Anyway, he
-- and when it started becoming a big deal, he actually called
me on my cell phone and apologized. And as I told him, I didn't
think personally an apology was necessary. It just didn't -- I’m
used to this. It's natural for me. I wasn't offended, and it
just didn't seem like it should have been a big deal.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we'll leave it at that. One
Party Country is Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten's book,
The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century.
Thanks very much for joining us.
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