It’s difficult to improve upon Dan McLaughlin’s exhaustive documentation of the 2012 presidential election campaign, and more difficult still to dispute his thesis: “If 2016 exposed the destruction of the post-war American political order, 2012 was the election that broke it.” I just want to add a few observations of my own about that time, as I’m young enough for it to have been the first presidential election I followed as a reasonably educated and informed adult, and to add a related thesis of my own: 2012 might have been America’s last chance for a “normal” politics.
The summer of 2012 was the first I spent in D.C. as a lowly intern. Somehow it was known which morning in late June the decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, the case assessing the constitutionality of Obamacare, would be decided, and I was there on the steps of the Court to see what was going on. I lived close enough to the Supreme Court that I partook in what has become a strange ritual of our post-congressional politics: the swarming of the Court on decision days.
I did not stay long enough to be present when the decision was announced. But I did get to see that guy who always shows up to things dressed in American colonial garb; this was the Tea Party era, after all. There was also an even-stranger sight: a woman belly-dancing in front of a flag that read “Medicare for All.” At that point, I had never heard of the idea; that it was being presented as literally exotic seemed appropriate. Now, of course, it is mainstream on the left.
I only learned later that day, after initial confusion, that the Court voted 5–4 to uphold Obamacare. It took several days for the Right to process the bizarre jujutsu Chief Justice John Roberts employed to keep the statute on the books (after he effectively rewrote it, of course). In fact, we still haven’t really processed it; every frustrating Roberts decision or action since has merely reopened that old wound. Even Dobbs v. Jackson itself, in which Roberts would have kept Roe v. Wade on the books even as he upheld the Mississippi abortion law at the case’s center, reminded us that a majority separate from Roberts would be necessary for true constitutional victories to come from the Court.
As summer came to a close, I watched the 2012 Democratic National Convention somewhat in horror. And not just because of the Onion‘s deliberately hyperbolic parody of the affair (“Obama stated that his administration would then seek to make free, taxpayer-funded abortions legal at any stage of pregnancy, even up to one full year after birth, in order to supply his newly created ‘federal stem-cell harvesting plants’ with raw materials”). It didn’t seem that far off from the party’s leftward drift. It was also because the thematic takeaway of the affair seemed to capture Barack Obama–era liberalism well: “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.”
This attitude was perfectly consonant with the Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” propaganda earlier that year. Julia, for those who don’t remember, was shown at all stages of her life being helped by government programs and virtually no one else (at one point, she even “decides to have a child” without the presence of a man in her life so much as being hinted at).
As Yuval Levin wrote at the time, “the Life of Julia is deeply telling of the view of American life underlying contemporary progressivism.” (See also “Linda,” Biden’s similar Build Back Better mascot from last year.) Having turned 19 that summer, I still wasn’t exactly sure what I believed . . . but I was pretty sure I didn’t believe in any of that.
Like many conservatives, I was also not completely sold on Mitt Romney as the nominee, having enjoyed the candidate merry-go-round that prevailed during that nominating cycle. (I even held out for Mitch Daniels, but he demurred.) But once Romney won, negative partisanship sufficed to make me share the journey of Romney’s presidential campaign, mostly by checking National Review, of which I was already a reader. A fan of Paul Ryan from his fiscal-focused duels with Obama and other technocratic mandarins during Obamacare and other budget battles, I was excited by Romney’s choice of him as VP. I attended Ryan’s first rally at Miami University (his alma mater, not far from my hometown). I also went to an Ohio Romney-Ryan rally at which Senator Rob Portman and now thrice-failed Senate candidate Josh Mandel spoke. I thrilled to Romney’s evisceration of Obama at that famous first debate; was perplexed that Joe Biden’s boisterous behavior at the vice-presidential debate was considered a “win” over the Midwestern politeness of Paul Ryan; was annoyed by Candy Crowley’s intervention on Obama’s behalf re Benghazi; and refused to understand why the smug Obamabros thought so highly of “the ’80s called, they want their foreign policy back” and feigned such offense at Romney’s “binders full of women.” And when the polls stubbornly resisted the possibility of a Romney win, I partook in that familiar loser’s fantasy: the polls must be “skewed.” (I was hardly alone in doing so, though I recall a distressing conversation with my father a week out from Election Day about the possibility that the polls might, in fact, be correct.)
So when the results rolled in, I, of course, ended up disappointed, as did many of my friends on the campus of Hillsdale College, where I was then a sophomore. But it took a while for some of the 2012 election’s more destabilizing effects to wend through our politics. The perception — not entirely unjustified — that Romney did not ‘fight’ hard enough eventually overcame the initial pessimism about the possibilities for the Right in the aftermath of Romney’s defeat, ultimately congealing into the ‘middle finger’ of Donald Trump in 2016. That middle finger owed much of its appeal and potency to the sort of trolling and triumphalism that the Left, convinced its coalition truly was ascending, began to display as Obama’s second term proceeded — especially after Democrats lost control of the Senate and the Left began looking elsewhere, both in the machinery of the state and in the commanding heights of the culture, for victories.
When recounting any history, recent or not, the temptation is to place it in a context of inevitability: x led to y led to z. And while sequence does matter and causality is real, so are contingency and coincidence. Much of what happened in 2012, and led to 2016, did not have to happen. And while it’s perhaps just my nascent nostalgia as someone unused to thinking of my life in terms of decades, I nonetheless look back on the 2012 election as a series of missed opportunities, a better pathway the country decided not to take. Don’t get me wrong: The Romney-Ryan vision for America was hardly perfect, and I myself have evolved away from the immature, incomplete fondness I once had for them and for it. And while not all of the debates conservatism has had internally since then have been productive, some rethinking was clearly necessary. But I still feel like an America without an Obama second term might have been a much saner and more stable place, circumventing much of the civic poison that has come since. (In private, some of my liberal friends have admitted the same to me.) That, however, is not the path we now tread, which is one of many reasons why the 2012 election should still loom large in our memory ten years later.