Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia – POLITICO
A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. Thats why they thought they were elected.
To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout, a dupe of the Democrats, and a traitor. Some of them had me in their sights from day one. They saw me as much of an enemy as the guy in the White House. Me, a guy who had come to the top of the leadership by exposing corruption and pushing conservative ideas. Now I was a liberal collaborator. So that took some getting used to. What I also had not anticipated was the extent to which this new crowd hatedand I mean hatedBarack Obama.
On election night 2010, after Republicans made massive gains, President Barack Obama makes a phone call to Congressman John Boehner, the presumptive incoming speaker of the House. | The White House/Pete Souza/AP
By 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives. When I was first elected to Congress, we didnt have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review. The only people who used the internet were some geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.
Hes a secret Muslim!
He hates America!
Hes a communist!
And of course the truly nutty business about his birth certificate. People really had been brainwashed into believing Barack Obama was some Manchurian candidate planning to betray America.
Mark Levin was the first to go on the radio and spout off this crazy nonsense. It got him ratings, so eventually he dragged Hannity and Rush to Looneyville along with him. My longtime friend Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, was not immune to this. He got swept into the conspiracies and the paranoia and became an almost unrecognizable figure.
Fox News CEO Roger Ailes in 2006. | Jim Cooper/AP
Id known Ailes for a long time, since his work with George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. Hed gone to college in Ohio, and since we had that connection, he sought me out at some event and introduced himself. Years later, in August of 1996, when I was in San Diego for the Republican National Convention, I ended up having dinner with Ailes and a veteran broadcasting executive named Rupert Murdoch. At that dinner they told me all about this new TV network they were starting. I had no idea I was listening to the outline of something that would make my life a living hell down the line. Sure enough, that October, Fox News hit the airwaves.
I kept in touch with Roger and starting in the early 2000s, Id stop in and see him whenever I was in New York for fundraisers. Wed shoot the breeze and talk politics. We got to know each other pretty well.
Murdoch, on the other hand, was harder to know. Sometimes hed invite me to watch the Super Bowl in the Fox box, or hed stop by the office. Wherever he was, you could tell he was the man in charge. He was a businessman, pure and simple. He cared about ratings and the bottom line. He also wanted to make sure he was ahead of any political or policy developments coming down the line. He was always asking who was up, who was down, what bills could pass and what couldnt. If he entertained any of the kooky conspiracy theories that started to take over his network, he kept it a secret from me. But he clearly didnt have a problem with them if they helped ratings.
At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didnt expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.
When I put it to him like that, he didnt have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.
Theyre monitoring me, he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a safe room built so he couldnt be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like hed been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.
I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club.
And it was clear that he believed all of this crazy stuff. I walked out of that meeting in a daze. I just didnt believe the entire federal government was so terrified of Roger Ailes that theyd break about a dozen laws to bring him down. I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club. One of us was crazy. Maybe it was me.
I have no idea what the relationship between Ailes and Murdoch was like, or if Ailes ever would go off on these paranoid tangents during meetings with his boss. But Murdoch must have thought Ailes was good for business, because he kept him in his job for years.
Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives. Sean Hannity was one of the worst. Id known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. So one day, in January of 2015, I finally called him and asked: What the hell? I wanted to know why he kept bashing House Republicans when we were actually trying to stand up to Obama.
Well, you guys dont have a plan, he whined.
Look, I told him, our plan is pretty simple: were just going to stand up for what we believe in as Republicans.
Top: Fox News host Sean Hannity. Bottom: Conservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh (left) and Mark Levin (right). | AP photos
I guess that wasnt good enough for him. The conversation didnt progress very far. At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, its safe to say our relationship never got any better.
Besides the homegrown talent at Fox, with their choice of guests they were making people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars. One of the first prototypes out of their laboratory was a woman named Michele Bachmann.
Bachmann, who had represented Minnesota's 6th Congressional District since 2007 and made a name for herself as a lunatic ever since, came to meet with me in the busy period in late 2010 after the election. She wanted a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful committee in the House. There were many members in line ahead of her for a post like this. People who had waited patiently for their turn and who also, by the way, werent wild-eyed crazies.
There was no way she was going to get on Ways and Means, the most prestigious committee in Congress, and jump ahead of everyone else in line. Not while I was Speaker. In earlier days, a member of Congress in her position wouldnt even have dared ask for something like this. Sam Rayburn would have laughed her out of the city.
So I told her nodiplomatically, of course. But as she kept on talking, it dawned on me. This wasnt a request of the Speaker of the House. This was a demand.
Her response to me was calm and matter-of-fact. Well, then Ill just have to go talk to Sean Hannity and everybody at Fox, she said, and Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and everybody else on the radio, and tell them that this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House.
I wasnt the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now.
She was right, of course.
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Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia - POLITICO