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most of its money attacking latte-drinking Republicans whom the organization calls RINOs—Republican in name only. The best way for a Republican politician to get on the Club for Growth’s “RINO Watch” list is to cast a vote with the Democratic Party—though driving a Volvo probably helps too. The Club for Growth has spent millions backing conservative challengers in Republican primaries. It has been blamed for defeating a number of moderate Republican incumbents in the House and for contributing to Sen. Lincoln Chafee’s (R-RI) election loss by drawing his resources into a primary battle.31 The Club for Growth also backed Pat Toomey’s 2004 primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Moore ominously warned, “It will put all Republicans in the House and Senate on notice that we’re watching their votes.”32 Specter won the primary but later calculated that he would lose to Toomey in 2010 and defected to the Democrats. With Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) retiring in 2011, there remain only two Republican moderates in the Senate, both from Maine (which should suit Stephen Moore’s geographic sensibilities).

Club for Growth beneficiaries include some of the most paranoid right-wing members of the House, such as Michele Bachmann, who told Hannity, “A revolution every now and then is a good thing,” and Paul Broun, who accused Obama of preparing a civilian security force to enforce his radical Marxist ideology.33 It christened Steve King (R-IA), who empathized with kamikaze pilot Andrew Joseph Stack, “Defender of Economic Freedom.”34 The Club for Growth has also been heavily supporting Tea Party candidates, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

By 2006, the Republicans’ star had begun to sink. Americans had grown unhappy with lingering wars, a deteriorating economy, and a relentless series of political scandals. Republicans had controlled both Houses of Congress for ten of the previous twelve years and the presidency for six; the electorate was ready for change. When Democrats swept back into Congress during the midterm elections, political analysts declared that the Republicans had lost the center, and strategists encouraged them to follow the “California way” of moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.35 Pundits touted the former mayor of New York, moderate Republican Rudi Giuliani, as a likely presidential candidate in 2008.

But conservatives would have none of it. The problem was not that the party was too conservative, they argued, it was that it wasn’t conservative enough. “There’s no doubt in my mind it was not a repudiation of conservatives but it was a repudiation of the Republican Party,” argued Pat Toomey, who replaced Stephen Moore at the helm of the Club for Growth after losing to Specter.36 Rush Limbaugh concurred, “Republicans lost last night but conservatism did not.” Instead, he blamed “blue-blood, country club, corporate type . . . Rockefeller-type” Republicans.37 But the Rockefeller-type Republicans had gone extinct years before, and most of the surviving moderates had been wiped out in the 2006 election. It was Rush Limbaugh’s GOP if it was anyone’s.

Something about Sarah

What Limbaugh’s GOP lacked, however, was a viable presidential candidate in the 2008 election. Mike Huckabee was popular among evangelicals, but small government conservatives despised him. The Club for Growth produced ads in Iowa that portrayed him as a tax-and-spend liberal, exclaiming, “He even wants to tax the Internet.”38 Gradually and somewhat reluctantly, the party began to coalesce around McCain, if only because there was no one better to coalesce around. As McCain said, “I feel like Will Smith in I Am Legend. You know I’m the last guy standing who is not a zombie.”39

McCain was no moderate, but he had established a reputation as a maverick, which means that he only voted with George Bush 95 percent of the time.40 He had also once called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance,” condemning “the evil influence that they exercise over the Republican Party.” But in 2006, McCain and Falwell made