The Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is 58 years old, but he has never been famous before, and after this year, he will most likely never be famous again. Even this kind of fame, brief and slight, is uncomfortable on him. Cole is a party man, a lifelong Republican consultant, campaign worker and politician whose career, like that of a typical European Social Democrat, has recognized only a fluid and fungible line between political operative and elected official. It sometimes seems an accident he’s in Congress at all. He is tall and slightly formal, and slightly awkward; people who meet him casually describe him as cordial or gentlemanly. The Republican Party, in its current uncertainty, might have chosen an ideologue to fill Cole’s post or, as is its habit, a money man. Its choice of Cole, an operative, was the establishment insisting that its own learned habits were enough to save itself. “Right now, with where we are,” Ken Mehlman, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me, “Tom Cole is the perfect leader.”
Cole is a year into his term as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group charged with managing the party’s simultaneous campaigns for 435 seats in Congress, and this role has made him responsible for rebuilding the Republican Party from the ground up, and for mounting a defense of the political map. All campaign operatives are, to some extent, geographers, and the map of the United States, endlessly studied, is the object of their pieties and contains their own compulsions. Every operative has his own map, weighted by income, by ethnicity, by the practiced habits of ideology, but each believes his map is determinative and that elections do not contain surprises but more precise revelations of the map, of tendencies buried deep.
Early in December, I met Cole for the first time in the N.R.C.C.’s offices on Capitol Hill, in a building it shares with the R.N.C. The building has small cubbyholes like telephone booths, from which representatives make fund-raising calls, and a sleek phone bank in the basement that is populated, election nights, by the party’s interns and operatives. His own office walls are crammed with so many tribal curios — Cole, who is part Chickasaw, is the only registered member of a Native American tribe in Congress — that it can seem as if they are being offered for sale.
In 2006, the Democrats won so many elections in what was traditionally Republican territory that Cole, as his party’s chief Congressional recruiter, now finds himself in the unlikely position of flying into what used to be considered safe conservative districts and trying to goad Republican businessmen and state senators into running for Congress. His progress, he told me, has been mixed. He mentioned a black Republican prosecutor from Indiana named Curtis Hill, from a district that the party lost in 2006. Cole said he thought the seat was a more natural fit for his party than for the Democrats, and he wanted badly to convince Hill to run. Hill happened to be a founding-fathers buff, and so Cole flew him to Washington to meet with the White House political team and be briefed on how he could win, to look out at the monuments from his window seat and imagine himself as part of history. “Very intoxicating,” Hill told me afterward. But he was not convinced. Cole then flew out to Indiana to press Hill to run, telling him that the Democratic congressman, Joe Donnelly, could be depicted as a tool of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and out of touch with the values of the district. Hill thought about it hard. But he had five kids at home, and he also didn’t quite buy Cole’s description of Donnelly, whom Hill considered “a relatively conservative Democrat. I don’t think he’s done anything in his record that’s irritated anyone.” Hill turned the offer down. Cole said he had become convinced that Hill’s political gifts were so great that he would be running for senator or governor soon. “God, he’s just great,” Cole told me wistfully. “He’s just a star.”
After the 2004 elections, Karl Rove began to talk with growing conviction about a permanent majority for the Republican Party. That majority lasted two more years. It would have been difficult then to imagine a more stunning reversal. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and suddenly enjoy an advantage in campaign funds that, given the G.O.P.’s intimacy with big business and the recent supremacy of Republican fund-raising, would have been unimaginable just three years ago. Cole maintains that the 2006 election was an event of equal scale and significance to the Republican victory in 1994 — “in many ways, it’s a flip.” Republican operatives now worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove’s majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation, that the party’s position on social issues like gay marriage may permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters.
Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. Worse still, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently discovered, during an internal audit, accounting fraud so extensive that it had to call in the F.B.I., which is now investigating embezzlement by the committee’s former treasurer. Many conservative activists have become so dissatisfied with the party’s heresies, particularly on immigration and government spending, that as Cole’s staff took over, the committee’s fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces.After 2006, most observers thought that those results suggested a onetime event, a so-called wave election, and predicted that come 2008, Republicans would reclaim some of those seats, the usual correction after a wave like this passes. But now, seven months before the 2008 election, that does not seem likely. The influential, independent Cook Political Report recently concluded that 12 of the 14 districts most vulnerable to change parties in this election will belong to Republicans, suggesting that Cole’s party is likely to end up in an even deeper hole.
The situation has provoked an uncommon modesty in the Republican establishment. “Most of us can’t wait to get to 2010,” Dan Mattoon, a lobbyist and former deputy chairman of the N.R.C.C. told me. John Ensign, Cole’s counterpart in the Senate, has made a point of acknowledging, publicly, that he doesn’t expect to win back seats this year. The Republican consultant Rich Bond told me, “Tom was dealt an almost unwinnable hand.” Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. “This isn’t an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that,” he told me in January. “But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that.”
Like the other Republican operatives of his generation, Cole spent his career building the map that eventually elected George Bush, with the South, the Plains and mountain West and the rural parts of the Midwest committing firmly to their party. For the past decade, the politics of the country has been defined by this map — a conservative heartland and two bracketlike liberal coasts. As Cole has begun to study the landscape of the 2008 elections, his hopes — and those of the Republican Party — rest on the insistence that this map remains essentially unchanged. “They have 61 Democrats in seats that voted for Bush in 2004, and we only have 8 Republicans in seats that voted for Kerry,” Cole told me. “Those numbers work in our favor. Not all of them are going to flip back. But these are Republican districts, and in a presidential year a lot of them are going to return to the way they usually vote.” He recalled a list of vulnerable Democrats his staff had put together and noted that many of them represented reliably conservative parts of the country. “In most districts they’re going to be asking voters to split their tickets, and that’s a tough ask,” Cole said. “Does anyone really believe Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is going to carry those two seats in Kansas, or seats in Georgia? The old ideological divisions are there, and they won’t go away.”
n the summer of 2006, the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson was conducting surveys for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the Eighth Congressional District of Indiana, working-class, conservative towns around Evansville and Terre Haute. Brad Ellsworth, a conservative Democratic sheriff who took pains to distance himself from the antiwar camp, had just been picked as the party’s nominee against a six-term Republican incumbent named John Hostettler, a former power-plant engineer.
As the survey returns came in, Benenson noticed that one group was far more receptive to the Democratic position than he had expected: working-class evangelical voters, the lower-to-middle-income whites in small cities and small towns who had defected to the Republican Party under Reagan and not returned. When Benenson ran focus groups, he found that they weren’t voting because of the war or against corporate influence — Hostettler didn’t take money from lobbyists. The opportunity lay in very basic economic issues, like Hostettler’s votes against raising the minimum wage. “Every election is different,” Benenson told me. “There are elections where evangelicals will vote on social issues. The difference in 2006 was that we finally caught up on fiscal responsibility and taxes. Those were supposed to be big parts of the Republican brand, and they’ve surrendered them on multiple levels.”
Ellsworth, running on those issues, would eventually win the race. Lower-middle-class evangelical voters are a small segment of the national electorate — less than 10 percent. But for Benenson they seemed to augur a broader recalculation, the Reagan Democrats subsuming social concerns to economic ones, the populist sentiment in the country sliding from the Republicans to the Democrats and even firmly conservative districts suddenly thrown open to competition. In 2006, the Democrats won in those kinds of blue-collar districts not just in Terre Haute but also in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, in the old industrial towns in western Pennsylvania and in upstate New York. “The map,” Benenson told me, “has already changed.”
For decades, the campaign committees were obscure, partisan chambers, organizations designed largely to protect incumbents. The media that covered the groups were mostly limited to two newsletter publishers, Charlie Cook (The Cook Political Report) and Stuart Rothenberg (The Rothenberg Political Report), and when the parties had weak candidates, they just avoided introducing them to Cook and Rothenberg. Part of the reason for this prolonged obscurity was the static map; the advantages of incumbency had become so powerful that almost all Congressional districts were presumed safe, so that for most of the ’90s and the first term of the Bush administration, the parties were realistically competing for only 30 or 35 seats each election cycle. It did not take a strategic genius to manage a static map. “Many of our members assumed,” Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and Republican senator from Michigan, told me, “that the majority would not change hands in their lifetime.”
When the Democratic congressman and former Clinton administration adviser Rahm Emanuel took over the Democratic campaign committee for the 2006 election cycle, the character of the committees, and the level of scrutiny they were accorded, began to change. Emmanuel’s plan was to expand the map, recruiting Democratic challengers in dozens of formerly written-off districts to force the Republican Party to defend seats in places where they had not expected to. As the Democrats used small-dollar donations, largely raised online, to erase the vast money advantage Republicans had recently enjoyed, it became clear, Cole says, that the G.O.P. was operating from “a deficient model.”
By the early fall of 2006, the number of competitive seats had more than doubled, and this more complex field required a higher level of coordination and sophistication from the campaign committees than had generally existed before. The candidates Emmanuel ended up running were, in many cases, rough around the edges, and some were inexperienced activists whom the committee had unsuccessfully tried to beat earlier in the Democratic primaries. They ran as politically diverse outsiders, not primarily against the war but against the Republican “culture of corruption” in Congress, and their ideological span was broad enough that the Democratic majority in the House now includes both the lefty singer-songwriter John Hall, who got his political start at anti-nuke rallies, and Heath Shuler, the North Carolina Democrat, “who is,” Cole says, with a certain envy, “to the right of Genghis Khan.”
By Election Day, the playing field — the competitive seats for which the Republican campaign committee bought advertising — was more than 80 seats, about two and a half times the usual. The committee, taken by surprise, went at least $18 million into debt trying to defend seats it once assumed it would hold without great effort. Their majority still collapsed. The Democrats won back 30 seats from the Republicans, and with them the House. Cole is good-humored and bipartisan by inclination, and enough of a friend to Emmanuel that he was the lone Republican invited to speak at a charity roast of Rahm, to which he contributed a very slow-building joke about a cross-country trip the Democrat took with a minister, a rabbi and a Hindu priest. But when Cole campaigned for Republican campaign committee chairman, it was the final acknowledgement that the nature of the Congressional campaign had changed: it was now impossible to view the composition of Congress as the consequence of 435 individual races. The campaigns had been centralized, he says, and what was needed was a single strategist to run it all. “You don’t have to like George Patton,” Cole said, “to know you need George Patton.”
Still, many within the Democratic Party believe that the gains of the 2006 election weren’t merely the result of good strategy. They believe that the map was undergoing a fundamental shift. Perhaps the most-studied Democratic detailer of the map’s evolution is a consultant named Mark Gersh, whose analysis of the 2006 election results has become the Democratic Party’s official version. “Most people think of politics as changing from the grass roots up,” Gersh says. “It doesn’t. It changes from the top, from presidential races on down.”
For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. “The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992,” he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emmanuel earlier this month, he told me: “I believe there’s a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts.”
In 2008, when the key Congressional battlegrounds are mostly not in the Northeast but in places like Albuquerque, Huntsville, Ala., and Canton, Ohio, the question is slightly different: Can Democratic candidates retain and expand their advantage in historically conservative parts of the country that have not been accustomed to voting for them?
What has been startling is how thorough some of the shifts have begun to look. Cole had said his first targets would be areas that were long-term Republican districts that flipped to the Democrats in the 2006 election. But few of those districts now seem likely to flip back to Cole’s party. In some districts that had been held by a Republican for more than a decade before 2006 — Ohio’s 18th, New York’s 19th — Republicans haven’t even been able to find a credible challenger. In others with long-running Republican histories — Florida’s 22nd, Iowa’s First, North Carolina’s 11th — Cole’s committee acknowledged early on that these races were long shots. It is possible to interpret this as a recruiting failure by Cole’s committee. But it’s also possible to see the void in these districts as an acknowledgement by up-and-coming Republican politicians that something has changed, and that this land has been swallowed by the tide.
In their intimacy with the numbers, many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.
“What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics,” said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.
For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party’s appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. Buffeted by those movement passions, the great thing at the center of it all — the party — began to fray. “If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up,” Mehlman told me. “It was a rejection.”
Cole is by training a historian, even though in his professional career he has been a consultant, a pollster, a state senator and a congressman; he has worked as the executive director of the N.R.C.C. and as chief of staff at the R.N.C.; and he even put in a brief, and perhaps ill-advised, shift as a political adviser for the Chamber of Commerce just before he ran for Congress. He inclines toward the long view. Cole says that he believes in the fixed nature of the two-party system. But he also acknowledges that there have been moments when partisan geographies have changed for the long term. I asked Cole what he believed the legacy of 2006 would turn out to be. “Right now, we don’t know,” he said. “That’s exactly what the 2008 election is going to prove.”
The day that President Bush delivered the State of the Union in January, Cole met in his offices at the National Republican Congressional Committee with a favored Congressional challenger from a Midwestern swing district to be briefed on the progress of the campaign and to give what advice he could — on what consulting firms to hire, how to plan for the cadence of the campaign. (As a condition of allowing this meeting to be observed, the candidate asked not to be named.) Cole began to talk through Republican figures who might be brought in to help raise cash. If McCain were the nominee, Cole and the candidate agreed, donors would turn out for a fund-raiser he headlined. Cole mentioned Bush, but everyone thought that would be a mistake. “I think this cycle he and the vice president are going to be doing a lot of fund-raisers in the South and the Plains,” he said, and everyone guffawed in agreement. Even for an audience of Republican donors, in politically contested parts of the country, the president provokes complicated feelings. On another occasion Cole said to me, “I love the president, but his appeal isn’t universal.”
It is difficult to watch Cole these days, or the Republican apparatus generally, and not be aware of the distancing from the Bush presidency that is taking place. Cole says that his task is to help the Republicans move from something that looks roughly like Bush’s party to something that looks mostly like John McCain’s. The places where Cole must hold the Republican line are largely moderate districts, where the president’s conservatism is a divisive thing and where McCain’s maverick reputation might permit the party to pull the trick of running against Washington even while controlling the White House. “I don’t need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours,” Cole said. “I need him to be Gerald Ford.”
Throughout the winter, Cole watched the presidential primaries with apprehension. The problem was the gap in intensity between the party’s bases; in many states twice as many Democrats were turning out to vote as Republicans. Last month, Obama’s campaign passed around a memo listing six states won by Bush in 2004 where Obama’s votes in the primary beat the votes of the top two Republicans combined: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota and South Carolina. The map looked as if it were beginning to cave in on itself.
But surprisingly, the ground began to shift after the March 4 primaries, and with it Cole’s disposition. It wasn’t that conservative voters had discovered any new zeal for McCain. But the Republicans had a nominee, and the acclaim that comes with it, and the Democrats did not. “Who would’ve thought two months ago that we’d essentially be over by Super Tuesday, and the Democrats would be in the middle of a death fight between Clinton and Obama?” Cole told me earlier this month.
Cole has been giving that race a lot of thought. “I happen to think Hillary Clinton is a stronger candidate in the end,” he told me. “You couldn’t raise money against Obama right away like you could with Clinton, that’s true, and so maybe by the time you were able to raise money it wouldn’t matter. But he’s ideologically well to the left of Hillary Clinton, for all his rhetorical gifts, and I also think he’s got a national-security deficit. I think she’s a plausible commander in chief, and I don’t think he is. It may not matter. But those two areas are where we would fight the election, and with McCain, I think we contrast with him very well.”
On the Congressional level, Cole says that he believes that this election will be contested across a map just about as broad as the last one, with at least 75 seats in play, and that McCain contributes to opening up that map. “Let’s break it down,” he said. “Obviously in the Southwest, he’s going to make us much stronger. In Arizona, we have a couple of opportunities where he’ll help us, but also in New Mexico. Frankly, while some people have problems with his stand on immigration, he probably keeps Hispanics in play at the presidential level in a way no one else could. He really helps us in the Northeast and upper Midwest — Illinois and Pennsylvania. Then, anywhere where there’s a veterans population or military bases. Think of Jim Marshall’s seat in Georgia. That’s a huge advantage for us. Florida, big military presence. We have a couple of opportunities in Texas. But I think the biggest thing is he’s seen as an authentic American hero, someone who can take on and shake up Washington.”
Cole’s strategy is not complicated, but it does contain an essential difficulty: at a moment when Washington is deeply unpopular, he wants his candidates to run as insurgents, but voters still identify Republicans with what they don’t like about Washington — they prefer a generic Democratic Congressional candidate by a margin of 49 percent to 35 percent, according to a March 7-10 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll; in an ABC/Washington Post poll released in early February, they preferred Democrats to Republicans on seven out of seven issues. Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”
In the euphoria of 2006, Cole believes, Democrats made promises that were too grand to deliver: “Nancy Pelosi said, Put the Democrats in Congress and we’ll get you out of Iraq, and they didn’t do it. They ran against the culture of corruption, and they’re absolutely killing us in raising money from PACs. The president would have signed any bill the Democrats would have handed him on immigration, and I think they could have got S-Chip [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program] done too. But they had the same problem with George Bush we had with Bill Clinton. They hated him too much to get it done.”
Part of the problem, for a Republican Party that wants to get back to basics, is that George Bush and Karl Rove’s party was not theirs alone but a pretty precise articulation of decades of post-’60s Republican strategy. “You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend,” Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole’s committee, told me. “The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we’ve tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it’s not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there’s more of a libertarian view on social issues.” Cole says that the party’s rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. “My problem on social issues is the tone — sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us,” he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren’t.
If Cole has a final argument, a closer to convince his preferred candidates that they should run for office, it is the briefing delivered by the consultants John Morgan Sr. and John Morgan Jr. They cover two conservative generations: John Morgan Jr. is a former executive director of Gopac, and his father worked in the Reagan White House’s political shop. Late in September, Cole brought a millionaire businessman named Steve Greenberg, a moderate Republican from the Chicago suburbs, into Washington to woo him — to meet the House minority leader, John Boehner, to visit the White House and to meet the Morgans. Cole wanted Greenberg to run against a Democrat named Melissa Bean, who had managed to hang on to a Republican-leaning seat, Illinois’s Eighth District, through two competitive elections. Greenberg was so attractive to national Republican recruiters that he was weighing two bids for his candidacy, one from Cole and one to challenge Senator Dick Durbin. “He’s undoubtedly a top recruit,” Cole said.
The Morgans are geographic essentialists; they are working on an encyclopedia of American elections that will trace in minute detail the results of every election since the Constitutional Convention. They began to show Greenberg slides detailing the ways each township in Bean’s district had voted over time. They had broken the township down by religion, income and ethnicity — Americans of German descent are solid Republican voters in the Chicago suburbs, controlling for income and hometown, while Polish- and Italian-Americans are iffier propositions. Through all of this a few townships in the center of the district kept flipping their colors, from blue to red and back again. “There are five townships here, and that’s the whole race,” Morgan Sr. said. “Those are the only votes that flip in this district, and they decide every election.”
Cole’s staff didn’t know all that much about Greenberg ideologically, but then they don’t make it their business to know. I once asked Cole about the positions his candidates were taking on immigration and the war. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked a candidate what he believes,” he said. “We’re just looking for winning candidates.” But one of the things they did know, and do make it their business to know, was geography. Greenberg was from one of the towns that tended to flip back and forth, the wealthy suburb of Long Grove. If he could simply prevail upon his neighbors to vote for him, Greenberg would have gone a long way toward winning back the seat. “There’s a head start already,” Morgan Sr. said.
Steve Greenberg was something pretty close to Cole’s ideal candidate, the embodiment of recruits that Cole is searching for everywhere. Usually the N.R.C.C.’s political staff finds recruits by asking local Republican officials who would be a viable general-election candidate, a process that turns up a consensus surprisingly often, but whose consensus often settles on a local elected official. This time, Cole’s team was trying to recruit candidates who could plausibly run as political outsiders, which they believed Greenberg could. He was rich enough to finance his own campaign — a big advantage for a national campaign committee that has almost no money. He came from the swing sector of the district. “You always want to ask, who can a candidate bring that’s extra, beyond what the Republican Party can deliver on its own — with J. C. Watts it was African-Americans and evangelicals; with me it was Indians,” Cole said. With Greenberg, he thought it might be people like the candidate himself, rich moderate Republicans who might have been leery of the party’s evangelical tilt. A month later, Greenberg declined the overtures from the senatorial recruiters. He would challenge Melissa Bean.
The Republican map still has some startling gaps. Some of the party’s top targets, like Representatives Zack Space in Ohio and John Hall in New York, still face no credible challenger. And in many swing districts — like Pennsylvania’s 10th and Florida’s 16th — Republicans have only a muddled field and contested primaries to offer. But given all the problems that the national Republican Party has had, Cole has done reasonably well. “In all honesty,” Stuart Rothenberg told me in February, “I’m surprised this time around that Cole’s been able to get candidates as good as he has.”
The perversity of Cole’s position is that the consummate party man has arrived at precisely the moment when the party is eroding beneath him. The problem is the money.
The Democratic Congressional committee’s eight-to-one fund-raising advantage over its Republican counterpart has been understood by Republican operatives in the stiff terms of a morality play. Though Republicans traditionally built their fund-raising on small donations from grass-roots conservatives, the party began to pay less attention to that group after 1994, when its position in the majority meant contributions from K Street, which came more easily and in larger chunks. After 2006, the party found that its financial support from both groups had eroded — the base because it was disappointed by a party that had ignored it, and the lobbyists because the Democrats were now in control of Congress. “Corporations and PACs go where the power is,” the Republican strategist Scott Reed told me. But mostly the party’s operatives blame themselves for not realizing this. (Republican operatives say that the Republican National Committee’s small-donor list, diligently tended to, is the reason it, alone among the party’s committees, has been able to outraise the Democrat’s national committee.) When I asked the House minority leader John Boehner how he assessed the committee’s fund-raising so far, he told me: “It stinks. No other way to put it.”
At the beginning, some in Boehner’s circle seemed leery of Cole. The Oklahoman did not have a national reputation as a fund-raiser, and yet he was taking over a committee more than $18 million in debt. And at a moment when Boehner was trying to rebuild the party’s reputation on small-government principles (Boehner told me that the matter of the Republican abuse of earmarks, in which congressmen secure funds for favored projects in their districts, is “the most poignant” reason voters rejected Republicans), Cole was openly skeptical of this approach. “Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election,” Cole told me. “I can’t find a single seat we lost because of them.”
In September, Boehner demanded that Cole fire his chief of staff, Pete Kirkham, as a public price to pay for the committee’s money troubles; Cole responded by threatening to resign, and ultimately, Kirkham was allowed to keep his job. The financial stresses persisted. In November, Cole asked the party’s leadership to give him a seat on the appropriations committee, making the case that he would be able to raise more money from corporations if he were in a position to reward them for their generosity. The Democrats published gleeful press releases (“Is Tom Cole carrying on the Abramoff-DeLay legacy?”) and Cole eventually withdrew his name from contention, with Boehner’s staff, in a final indignity, leaking early word of the departure to the media. Things got bleaker in January, when Cole’s staff discovered accounting irregularities so troubling that they turned their books over to the F.B.I. (In mid-March, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced that its former treasurer, Chris Ward, may have funneled several hundred thousand dollars into his personal and business accounts; the F.B.I. is investigating.)
In a normal year, the committee would be able to shape the field by buying an avalanche of ads in the weeks before an election in those districts where it hoped to challenge Democrats and by the same mechanism decide which of its own incumbents were under enough threat that they needed defending. But in this election cycle, that money is not flowing to the N.R.C.C. When I visited the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in February, the group’s executive director, Brian Wolff, told me that he considered his central competition not to be Cole’s committee but outside conservative groups that he expects will outspend the N.R.C.C.
Without the money, the party’s power has begun to wane, and with it the usual ability to control the process. Early in the fall, the Club for Growth, the hyperaggressive low-tax lobbying group, chose to run ads attacking Bob Latta, a Republican state senator who was running for Congress in a special election in Ohio, on behalf of another Republican who was contesting the nomination, Steve Buehrer, whom the Club considered more conservative. Cole was damned if he could figure out the ideological difference between the two. “Bob Latta is a straight arrow,” he told me. “Nice guy, conventional Republican. And they go dump a bunch of money into another guy who you can’t tell the difference! Bob Latta’s not going to raise taxes. He’s with them on dividends. He’s a free trader.”
The Club for Growth’s ads had attacked Latta and connected him to the corrupt and convicted former Republican governor of Ohio, Bob Taft. Though Latta survived the primary, his Democratic competitor in the special election began to run ads mimicking the Club’s line of attack. “The problem I have with the club is I think they’re stupid,” Cole said. “I think they’re politically inept. They spend more money beating Republicans than Democrats.” He shook his head. “I mean — Bob Latta! Give me a break!”
In the middle of January, I flew to Oklahoma to travel with Cole through the rougher end of his Congressional district. South-central Oklahoma is raw territory, poorly off. “You ever read Robert Caro’s ‘Means of Ascent,’ the L.B.J. book?” Cole asked. “The first chapter, where he’s talking about the hill country where L.B.J. came from, how poor it is? That’s this. We’re still in the development business in Oklahoma.”
All of the evident modernity and wealth in this part of Oklahoma — the occasional office buildings, the restored hot-springs resorts, the new hospitals and gyms — seems to have been built by the Chickasaw Nation, with money that began to accumulate after they won the right to operate casinos two decades ago. Cole remains extremely close to the leadership of his tribe. There’s a hand-in-hand relationship here: Cole works to win government support for Chickasaw projects, and the entrepreneurial Chickasaw, like a shadow government, use their profits in part to build social-service projects that help Cole’s constituents.
This is the territory — the poorer sectors of the red states; populist, patriotic and Christian — that operatives of Cole and Rove’s generation have spent their careers turning from bedrocks of the permanent, post-New Deal Democratic majority in Congress to the soul of the rising Republican one. Cole has been in the politics business here for decades. He left Oklahoma for Grinnell College in Iowa and then fellowships in London, came back to the University of Oklahoma to get a Ph.D. in British history and began working in politics by running his Republican mother’s campaigns for the state senate (Helen Cole is enough of a figure here that she has a highway named after her), and then those of her colleagues. By 1994, he had left a post as executive director at the N.R.C.C. to become the most influential Republican consultant in the state. He ran four campaigns for Congress that year, as well as Frank Keating’s campaign for governor. All of his candidates won. “Oklahoma had been voting Republican for president since Goldwater. What we had to do was convince them that the Democrats in Washington were completely out of touch with Oklahoma values.”
Nineteen ninety-four is the source of Cole’s generation’s war stories, its clutched box of poems. It was also the moment when the economically populist feeling that had lingered for decades began to change, converted into a Republican sensibility more amenable to business interests. “Keating has this wonderful chart,” Cole said with a laugh. “A very unfair chart, but a great chart. He had all the border counties marked in red because every county in Oklahoma that bordered another state had a lower income than the county across the state line. And he’d say: ‘Why is it? Is the air different in Oklahoma than in Kansas, or Texas or for God’s sake Arkansas?’ And of course, he’d say, ‘Well, they’re right-to-work states.’ Or, ‘They have had tort reform.’ Or, ‘Their tax rates are lower.’ And, see, that’s how he got his agenda.”
But that conversion was never perfect or complete. When Cole has differed from the Republican Party in Congress, it has often been on the New Deal-legacy projects that he views as doing right by Oklahoma and that they view as pork. He has voted against the party’s small-government wing on the farm bill, the water bill, most native issues and, maybe most significantly for him, on a bill that provides federal money for the first member of a family to attend college, a population that in his district is more than three times the national average. “I knew the moment we did that it’d be cast as, the president’s heroic, you’re pork-barrel spenders. Well, no, it’s just the green-eyeshade guys are wrong about this,” Cole said. “If it’s a transcendent national question, then I’m a Burkean conservative, but I like to think I represent the interests of my district.”
The danger is that these positions, held at the same time, can come to look like hypocrisy. In Ada, Okla., at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Cole gave a localized version of his national partisan pitch, that the Democrats were out of touch with the country on tax-and-spend issues, when a man raised his hand and asked how he could be expected to believe that line, given the excesses of the Republicans. Cole launched into a disquisition on why the contributions of earmarks to the federal deficit was overhyped but eventually conceded that the man, who turned out to be the publisher of an Oklahoma travel guide, had a “good point.” When I talked to him afterward, the publisher, Bob Rubin, said he was “not very impressed. They are not accepting responsibility.” It was hard not to conclude that Cole, and his party, were caught in something. And it was hard to see what else exactly he might have said.
“The biggest problem with earmarks,” Cole told me, “is the potential for corruption.” He said he believed that the impact of the scandals — Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham — that eroded the party’s majority in 2006 would fade fairly quickly. “Scandals kill a politician,” he said. “They don’t kill a party, or the next guy to run in that district.” But it was beginning to seem more difficult to box up the Tom DeLay era and ship it off into the past. In August, the Arizona Republican Rick Renzi announced he would not run for re-election. Last month he was indicted on 35 federal charges, including of fraud and extortion, involving a series of land deals; some of the individual counts carry sentences of up to 20 years. As we were driving back to the Oklahoma City airport, Cole told me, “My mother was very fond of the Lord Acton line, that absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Rahm Emanuel stepped down as the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee after the 2006 victories, replaced by the Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen, but for Cole and the Republican operatives Emmanuel remains a powerful and goading presence. When Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was speaker of the House until the 2006 election, announced this fall that he would retire and be replaced in a special election to be held in March, it seemed to give Emmanuel the chance for a triumphant coda to 2006, a symbolic beheading. “It’s Rahm’s home state,” Cole told me in January. “We know they’re going to come at us hard.” The district was solidly Republican — the kind of prosperous Midwestern suburb that would be a linchpin of the imagined McCain coalition and that the party had to hold.
A few special elections in the fall had been promising for Cole. In a Massachusetts special election in October, the Republicans came close to winning back a seat that had been Democratic for more than a quarter century. In early December, Republicans successfully defended two seats in highly contested races in Ohio and Virginia. The day after those elections, Cole called his staff in to the committee’s conference room. “I’ve seen more lobbyists this morning than I’ve seen in four months,” he said. The lobbyists were passing out checks, he told them gleefully. “I’ve got one in my pocket from a guy I ran into in the street.” In the month of January, the National Republican Congressional Committee barely outraised the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and it seemed as if things might be about to turn.
For the Hastert seat, Cole spent $1.2 million on the race — close to a quarter of the committee’s cash on hand and more than what the exponentially richer Democrats had contributed. McCain himself, in the middle of the presidential election, flew in to hold a fund-raiser. It was a strong effort, the strongest they could muster. When a reporter asked Cole, a couple of days before the vote, how the public would interpret the results of the election if the Republican candidate, the dairy millionaire Jim Oberweis, lost the election, the Oklahoman couldn’t help himself. “My God, it’s the end of the Republican Party,” he said.
The vote was decisive. In a district where President Bush won by 10 percentage points in 2004, Oberweis, running against a physicist and political novice named Bill Foster, managed to lose even Kane County, where Hastert is from. In the vote’s aftermath, the N.R.C.C. conceded it probably wouldn’t be able to offer Oberweis much help if he ran against Foster again in November. One anonymous Capitol Hill staff member was quoted by the Politico newspaper as saying that losing Hastert’s seat “is like the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad for Republicans.” Two days after the election, Cole was telling a reporter he wasn’t sure whether he would stay in his position for another term, as had been the habit of his predecessors.
There is a strain of belief in the Republican Party that anyone can manage a good election, but it takes a veteran to handle a bad one. “There are operatives who’ve known nothing but a Republican majority,” the Republican media consultant Rich Bond told me. A week after Oberweis lost, I spoke with Cole by phone. Oberweis, he said, had perhaps not been the best candidate; he had gone into the election with high negatives. And as good a fit as McCain is for the district, he said, he couldn’t be expected to contend with “Obama-mania” in Illinois. Cole told me that he believed the presidential race was tilting his party’s way and that he felt good about the fall elections. He had been in this game a long time, he said, and the fundamentals looked sound to him. The stories about his departure had been exaggerated.
“It is not,” Cole said, “as if I’m unhappy in my work.”
Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes about national affairs for Rolling Stone. His last article for the magazine was a profile of David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist.
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