From Mom-and-Pop proprietors to middle-management drones to Business Roundtable grandees, the business community had long allied itself with the Republican Party. But now, thanks in good measure to the most fervent voices in that party, credit was frozen, the housing industry was headed for collapse again, and retailers from one end of Main Street to the other were facing empty stores. How was this good for business?
The labor movement had provided the foot soldiers and the financial fuel for the Democratic Party for decades, But now, thanks in good measure to the most “progressive” members of that party, there was no work for the men and women who built houses, maintained roads or worked for contractors whose invoices the government could not pay. How was this good for labor?
“We must return to bipartisanship!” the political class thundered. And from countless corners of the country came this question: Just what had bipartisanship done for us lately? In the 1990s, the Clinton White House and the Republican Congress jointly embraced the explosion of so-called innovative financial instruments, free of regulation, that within a decade had trashed the economy, wiping out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars’ worth of savings. A few years later, a Republican president gained the support of prominent Democrats as he led the country into a disastrous war.
“When 2 parties are gridlocked — disaster,” read one widely circulated tweet. “When 2 parties work together — disaster. Enough!”
Then came two House special elections in late October 2011. In a heavily Democratic congressional district in California, a 55-year-old school administrator — running as an independent with the slogan “Enough!” — routed her Republican and Democratic opponents with nearly 60 percent of the vote. And in an Ohio district that had been voting Republican since the Civil War, an unemployed factory hand, running with the same slogan, trounced his major-party rivals. Within two days after that second vote, hundreds of Facebook pages and Web sites had emerged, all working off the “Enough!” theme.
But the most consequential event of all involved a 19th-century tool of communication: When the governor of one state, a member of one party, picked up the phone and called a colleague of another party half a continent away.
“I want you to listen to me for three minutes,” he said. “If you haven’t hung up the phone by the time I’m finished, then maybe you don’t think I’ve gone off the deep end.”
On March 21, 2012, with the effects of the temporary default still battering the economy, the two governors announced their intention to run on an independent ticket. It was, Washington insiders assured one another, a passing fever, certain to fade just as every other independent bid had. But when the campaign brought in $13 million on the Web within 90 minutes of the announcement, the assurances were replaced by concern, which led to panic after the first debate, which led to resigned acceptance well before Election Day confirmed what everyone knew would happen.
The chief justice stepped away, and the new president walked to the lectern. He would not be the first president to warn of hard choices and tough years ahead. But he would be the first who had won the office not just because of the stark evidence of what had gone wrong, but because voters had finally rendered a harsh but long-overdue verdict: A plague on both your houses.
jgreenfield64@gmail.com
Jeff Greenfield, a former network correspondent for ABC, CNN and CBS, is the author of “Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan.” Follow him on Twitter: @greenfield64.
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