Obamacare’s mandates were the central partisan issue in 2012. Romney was compromised: He had signed a largely similar Massachusetts law. His strategy was to argue that it was illegal and wrong to impose federal mandates. The Supreme Court seemed poised to agree, and Obama responded with a pressure campaign unseen since FDR’s day to threaten the public legitimacy of the Court if it ruled against him. In late June, in a 5–4 decision, the Court upheld the core of Obamacare, with Bush-appointed chief justice John Roberts finding that it exceeded Congress’s power under the commerce clause but (in a passage that read like a hostage note) reworking the insurance mandate into an exercise of the taxing power. This, too, revived recurrent Republican fears of betrayal by the party’s own elites.

All of this left Republican voters seething. Time and again, their champions were smeared and sneered at, and refused to fight back with the same ruthlessness they deployed against their own intraparty rivals. Republican campaigns were helmed and staffed with figures such as Stuart Stevens, Steve Schmidt, Matthew Dowd, and John Weaver, who turned out to have no regard for the party’s voters and no loyalty to its causes. The Election Day meltdown of the Romney campaign’s get-out-the-vote Web application (known as “ORCA”) became an icon of party-establishment failure. The hunger for someone who would give Democrats a taste of their own belligerent medicine was palpable — and people remembered the guy so unafraid of being branded a racist for hitting Obama that he went there on the birth certificate.

The madness of the 2012 election had only just begun.