HIGHLANDS, N.C. — House insurgent Mark Meadows embarrassed the White House and forced his fellow Republicans to turn tail on a seven-year pledge to tear down Obamacare.

His constituents are throwing him a party.


“This is the face of leadership!” declares a flier posted by the local tea party here in western North Carolina, urging supporters to turn out for a rally celebrating the three-term congressman who leads the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus. “Thank Mark and all those who gave us an opportunity to get health care right.”

Meadows — perpetual thorn in the side of GOP leadership, dismissed by institutional Republicans as a bomb-throwing saboteur and tarred by colleagues as a traitor — can still come home again.

In these small rural towns that double as ground zero for the type of populist, anti-establishment politics that thrust Donald Trump into the presidency and gave Republicans control of Washington, Meadows remains a hero. He demanded full repeal of Obamacare, more than the failed House bill would have attempted. And his star only shines brighter here after he cost House Republicans their first big win on health care — and their first big win as the governing party.

His constituents — roughly 45,000 of whom, ironically, were covered by the Affordable Care Act in 2016, most with subsidies, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate — now expect him to go back to Washington and pick up the fight to uproot and destroy the law completely.

“I respect him for staying true to his principles,” said Jerry Moore, who runs the Kilwins Chocolates & Ice Cream shop in Highlands, N.C., the hometown that gave Meadows his political start. “Trump promised repeal. That was no repeal.”

That sentiment is echoed all over this town, and it strikes at the heart of the dilemma facing Republican leaders — how to enact big complex legislation without compromising the ideological purity they nurtured for years among lawmakers and voters alike. The Freedom Caucus, which pushed former Speaker John Boehner out in late 2015, now counts more than 30 members. The hardline bloc is powerful enough to derail any Republican bill deemed insufficiently conservative — and it’s backed by voters eager to reward them, even if it means bringing down still more of the GOP hierarchy.

“What’s happening now is no longer the Trump plan. It is the Obama plan,” Ralph Slaughter, the GOP chairman in North Carolina’s Jackson County, said of House Republican leaders’ three-step proposal to replace Obamacare, with the bill that failed last Friday marking the crucial phase one. “They thought perhaps that they could just force it through, and I really think to a certain point President Trump was sold a bill of goods that it would carry. That all they would have to do is present it.”

The 57-year-old Meadows, who made his fortune as a real estate developer before entering politics, has emerged as the flag bearer for conservatives’ all-or-nothing view on Obamacare repeal. It’s a bit of an awkward fit — Meadows has said himself that he wants to be liked, and was one of Trump’s first and most ardent supporters. His office didn't respond to requests for an interview for this article, but those who know him say he’s charismatic and eager to please.

“He’s smooth as punch,” said Highlands’ mayor, Patrick Taylor, a former art professor and Bernie Sanders supporter, who disagrees with Meadows on politics from gun control to health care but is struck by his ability to connect with the region’s blue-collar workers and simultaneously woo the country club set.

“People like the Affordable Care Act. They don’t like Obamacare,” said the mayor. "And they just don't realize" they are one and the same.

In North Carolina, the ACA has drawn significant enrollment — but it has clear challenges. In most of the state, only one insurer is participating on the Obamacare exchanges. The state elected a Democratic governor Roy Cooper last fall who wants to address the problems, and to finally get the state to take up the law’s Medicaid expansion option. But he faces a conservative, often hostile, state legislature.

But within Meadows' district spanning the western third of the state — a patchwork of blue-collar workers and affluent vacationers at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains — the harsh anti-Obamacare platform fits with the conservative tenor. And Meadows’ hardline views separate him from the rest of a Washington crowd that people here describe with a mixture of suspicion and disgust.

“I think they lack wisdom in Washington,” said Moore, the owner of the ice cream parlor, who believes too many lawmakers have lost touch with what voters want and need. “I think Mark Meadows brings wisdom.”

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Like many in the district, Moore was suspicious of Obamacare from the start. He spurned the Obamacare markets in their early years, taking advantage of the law’s “grandfathering” option to stick with his original pre-ACA health plan. After two years of rising premiums, he jumped ship and joined Medi-Share — a Christian network that pools funds to help members cover each others’ medical costs. The $10,000-deductible plan covers his family of six for just $300 a month, he says, though it provides only basic benefits.

But after discovering a bulging disk in his neck, Moore got a little nervous. He bought an Obamacare policy for himself, which costs more than double his family’s Medi-Share plan. By his calculations, he could spend 24 percent of his yearly income covering the plans’ combined premiums and deductibles before any benefits kick in. He makes too much to qualify for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

“Our health care is so good, we can’t even afford it,” Moore quipped, cringing at the thought of cutting those checks each month. “God only asked for 10 percent.”.

The way he sees it, the entire health care system is broken. And fixing it starts with tearing the existing structure down — all of it. In his view, the failed House Republican health care proposal was nothing but a Frankensteinian version of Obamacare, rearranging bits of the existing law, fusing it with industry giveaways and bringing it no closer to the free-market ideal conservatives hoped for when Republicans swept into power.

“I was glad it failed,” said Moore, who voted for Trump in hopes he would revolutionize Washington, but is now discouraged by his divisiveness. “Why try to fix a broken system with broken parts?”

But as the president famously said, health care is difficult. Republicans had already spent seven years trying to agree on a fix, before crashing and burning last week. Despite GOP leaders’ vows to move on to new priorities, Meadows that he’ll keep pushing for full repeal.

“To put a stake in it today would not be accurate,” he said Sunday on ABC’s "This Week." “We’re not at the end of the game.”

For conservatives here, that’s the moment they’ve been waiting for — a chance to show that the party’s right flank is worth far more to the GOP than pure obstructionism.

“They will come up with a plan that will make health care better for all Americans,” predicted Slaughter, the Jackson County GOP chairman, dismissing concerns about White House retribution for tanking this first repeal push. “The Freedom Caucus people are one of the reasons that Donald Trump is president of the United States right now. He is indebted to these people.”

It’s also a big new test for Meadows, whose short legislative career to this point is defined by three big confrontations: the 2013 government shutdown; the successful challenge to Boehner’s speakership and the health law repeal, a story that may still unfold in unpredictable ways.

Now Meadows says that rather than stand in the way, he wants to take responsibility for moving the GOP forward on health care — finding a brand new solution, and, somehow, uniting the fractured GOP behind it.

That’s a long shot without the Trump administration’s blessing, even admirers in Highlands will admit. But Meadows has used intraparty skirmishes as springboards before. And, as Taylor attests, he has a knack for charming even his most ardent opponents.

“He’s leading the cause, and he’s not going to deviate,” Taylor said. “He’d be tough to beat.”