The New New Deal (20 page)

“I know it’s Christmas,” Biden said after a December 23 meeting with the economic team. “But President-Elect Obama and I are absolutely determined that this economic recovery package will not become a Christmas tree.”

This was also important for legislative reasons. Obama needed at least two Republican votes to break a filibuster in the Senate, and he wanted more to set a post-partisan tone. A Democratic Christmas tree would alienate potential aisle crossers. Obama also had to make sure Blue Dogs in the House and centrist Democrats in the Senate didn’t jump ship; they were already sounding alarms about runaway spending. Indiana senator Evan Bayh had voted against his party’s modest stimulus package in the fall, and he went on Fox to warn that Democrats were already misinterpreting their electoral wave, assuming voters wanted Washington to start squirting cash in all directions.
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“My concern was that if you let Congress draft this, it becomes a laundry list of long-deferred desires,” Bayh recalls. “The old adage in Congress is that you get your stuff attached to any vehicle that’s moving. This was moving!”

O
bama’s political aides figured that once they had their Democratic ducks in a row for the Recovery Act, some Republicans would be likely to follow. GOP leaders had called for tax cuts and infrastructure; Obama’s blueprint had plenty of both. And once Democrats agreed on
a basic vessel, it could always be tweaked to lure more Republicans on board. Why would an unpopular minority want to block a popular new president’s jobs bill during an existential crisis? Who would want to vote against unemployment benefits, highways, and middle-class tax cuts? Democrats had just put aside partisanship to help Bush pass a Wall Street bailout two months before the last election; why wouldn’t Republicans help Obama pass something for Main Street twenty-two months before the next election?

To which some Democrats replied: Because they’re Republicans! Rahm’s former colleagues in the ultra-polarized House were especially dismissive of Obama’s post-partisan promises; Barney Frank of Massachusetts quipped that they were giving him post-partisan depression. “You’re not going to get anything from the Republicans,” Frank told Rahm. “Everything’s a holy war for them.” Why would partisans who had just spent months attacking Obama as an America-hating socialist want to help him pass his tyrannical left-wing agenda? Their only likely rewards would be primary challenges from the right in 2010.

There were already signs that after nearly derailing TARP, House Republicans planned to embrace their inner obstructionists. They were closing ranks against a bailout for GM and Chrysler, even after Vice President Cheney warned they might cement the GOP’s reputation as the party of Hoover. And most Republican appropriators—usually considered the likeliest targets for bipartisan cooperation on spending bills—boycotted Chairman Obey’s first stimulus hearing. The old saying that there were three parties in Washington—Democrats, Republicans, and appropriators—no longer seemed to apply.

Rahm understood the radicalization of the GOP and the cutthroat culture of the House as well as anyone, but he figured that if business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce could be persuaded to endorse the Recovery Act, Republicans would follow. He suspected they wouldn’t want to oppose a jobs bill. Their eagerness to get home for Presidents Day recess—“the smell of jet fuel at National Airport,” as Rahm put it—would help, too. “Start those airplane engines, they’ll fucking figure out a way to get to yes really quickly,” he explains.

Obama seemed even more likely to pick up Republican votes among his recent colleagues in the Senate, where “bipartisan alliance” was not yet a complete oxymoron. Senators didn’t face reelection every two years, and running statewide tended to encourage moderation. Schiliro was spreading the word that the stimulus could attract as many as eighty votes in the Senate.
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“There was an assumption that in a time of national emergency you could get bipartisan support,” Axelrod says.

The Obama team made plenty of faulty assumptions—underestimating the scale of the downturn, overestimating their ability to go back for more stimulus, expecting the initial stimulus to expand on the Hill—but that was the faultiest.

R
epublicans were talking about change, too.

How could they not? They had just followed George W. Bush into political oblivion. After preaching small government, balanced budgets, and economic growth while producing bigger government, exploding deficits, and economic collapse, they had gotten pasted for the second straight election. And the electorate was getting less white, less rural, less evangelical—in short, less demographically Republican. Just a few years earlier, books like
One Party Country
and
Building Red America
had heralded Karl Rove’s plan for a permanent Republican majority.
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Now publishers were rushing out titles like
The Strange Death of Republican America
and
40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation
.
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If the GOP brand were dog food, one retiring congressman warned, it would get pulled off the shelves.

“We were in disarray,” recalls Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had just taken over the House Republican campaign committee. “People were comparing us to cockroaches, saying we weren’t even relevant. We had to change the mind-set.”

Beltway conventional wisdom held that chastened Republicans would be forced to cooperate with a popular new president during a national emergency. But Congressman Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new
minority whip, thought chastened Republicans should start acting like Republicans. Cantor, an ambitious forty-five-year-old conservative who was the only Jewish Republican in Congress, summoned his whip staff to his condo building that December to plot strategy for the coming year. In a word, the strategy was: Fight. The liberal media might want Republicans to roll over and give Obama a honeymoon, but the base didn’t. Why have an opposition party if it wasn’t going to oppose?

“We’re not here to cut deals and get crumbs and stay in the minority for another 40 years,” said Cantor, a Richmond lawyer with a genteel Southern accent and sunken cheeks. Cantor dripped with disdain for get-along Washington Republicans who happily supported Democratic bills as long as they extracted a bit of pork for themselves. “We’re not rolling over,” he said. “We’re going to fight these guys. We’re down, but things are going to change.”

Cantor’s chief of staff, Rob Collins, had invited two pollsters to address the group, and no policy experts. That’s because he recognized that House Republicans were now communicators, not legislators. They didn’t have the numbers to stop Pelosi from steamrolling Obama’s agenda through the House. They needed better PR strategies, not better policies. “They’re just going to ram right over us anyway,” Collins explained. When House Republicans had the numbers, they had done the same thing. Now their battle was in the arena of public opinion.

To win that battle, Cantor believed, the whip team had to keep Republicans united, so Obama wouldn’t be able to brag about bipartisan support for his agenda. That would require picking fights carefully, focusing on stark conflicts that could define their party and the president. There was no point in whipping Republicans against a children’s health bill like S-CHIP—and maybe hurting them back home with voters who liked the sound of children’s health—now that Obama was sure to sign it into law. Whips didn’t have much power to enforce unity anyway, especially minority whips. They had few carrots and fewer sticks. They could only build team spirit, so Republicans would voluntarily stick together on more fundamental legislation—not to block it, but to send a message about its flaws.

The challenge would be developing a consistent message of No without looking like a reflexively anti-Obama Party of No. The whip team agreed that at first the targets should be Pelosi and “Washington Democrats” rather than Obama. The president-elect was riding a wave of goodwill, while Pelosi remained unpopular, especially among the independent voters who had abandoned Republicans in November. There was little upside to whacking “Saint Barack” now, and little downside to attacking ancient Democratic power brokers like Ways and Means chairman Charlie Rangel, a nineteen-term Harlem liberal with a raspy voice, slicked-back hair, and an ongoing ethics investigation. Cantor also insisted that Republicans needed to offer solutions—not with the delusion that they’d be implemented, but to give members something to say yes to while voting no on the Obama agenda. He’d begin by recruiting thirty-three colleagues, nearly one fifth of the conference, to an Economic Recovery Working Group that would draft a GOP alternative to the stimulus. Its details would matter less than its existence.

But the main theme of the meeting was that the fetal position was for losers. Cantor and his deputy, Kevin McCarthy, represented a new generation of GOP leaders who looked like Wall Street traders and projected the same lean-and-hungry vibe; along with Paul Ryan, the budget wonk of the caucus, they were known as “The Young Guns.” They weren’t interested in playing footsie with Democrats, and they didn’t intend to spend decades out of power. “That was the relentless focus: We’re going to do everything we can to take this thing back,” Collins recalls.

I
n early January, the House Republican leadership team held a retreat at an Annapolis inn. Pete Sessions, the new campaign chair, opened his presentation with the political equivalent of an existential question:

“If the Purpose of the Majority is to Govern … What is Our Purpose?”
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Not to govern, that was for sure. His next slide provided the answer:

“The Purpose of the Minority is to become the Majority.”

The team’s goal would not be promoting Republican policies, or stopping Democratic policies, or even making Democratic bills less offensive to Republicans. Its goal would be taking the gavel back from Speaker Pelosi.

“That is the entire Conference’s Mission,” Sessions wrote.

House Republicans were now an insurgency—an “entrepreneurial insurgency,” Minority Leader Boehner declared—and Sessions thought they could learn from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban. The key to success in this asymmetrical warfare, he argued, was to “change the mindset of the Conference to one of ‘offense,’” to take the fight to the enemy. The Democratic landslides of 2006 and 2008, while decimating the Republican conference, had created a target-rich environment for Republican artillery. There were now eighty-three Democrats representing districts Bush won in 2004, and Obama-Pelosi liberalism was unlikely to help any of them politically. Michigan’s Mike Rogers, a brash former FBI agent who had been tapped to play bad cop for Sessions on the campaign committee, says that PowerPoint served as a wake-up call, a reminder that Democratic control of Washington could be the Republican ticket back to power.

“You just got pounded. It’s the lowest of the lows,” Rogers says. “And then you look at the numbers, it’s not as bad as you thought. All those guys winning in red seats, they’re going to vote with Obama and his agenda, and I don’t think the people who sent them here really want that. Hey, here’s how we can come back.”

Two consecutive drubbings, while shrinking the Republican conference, had also dragged it even further right. Staunch conservatives from safe districts had survived, while the herd of moderates from competitive districts had been culled, including the entire House GOP delegation from New England. The Republican Study Committee, once a marginal outpost for hard-line conservatives, now included a solid majority of the conference, including Cantor, Sessions, and Mike Pence of Indiana, a former RSC head who was now conference chairman.
Boehner had an occasional history of bipartisan behavior, cutting the No Child Left Behind deal with Senator Kennedy and Congressman George Miller in 2001, but that was “in a universe far, far away,” as Miller puts it. Even if Boehner had wanted to reach out to Obama, he had to guard his right flank against Cantor, whose interest in his job was poorly concealed. So Boehner was already mocking the idea that spending could ease the recession, berating Democrats to “start listening to the American people” as if Election Day had never happened.

Some establishment Republicans feared the party was slipping into a suicidal feedback loop, doubling down on an anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-science, anti-gay agenda that could command excellent ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but not a national majority. As the GOP downsized to its Fox News base, it would be tempted to pursue even harder-line policies, which could lead to further losses and an even harder-line caucus, surrendering the center to Obama. After Republicans got whipped in 2006, party stalwarts like the House campaign chairman, Tom Cole, a rock-ribbed conservative from a rock-ribbed Oklahoma district, had argued for a less dogmatic message. Cole had been a political consultant before running for office—House Republicans had hoped he could be their Rahm—and he had warned that the country was center-right, not right-wing.
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But after history repeated itself in 2008, Cole lost his post to the more dogmatically conservative Sessions.

The new leaders who gathered in Annapolis had a new mantra: Our mistake was abandoning our principles, not following our principles. They saw John McCain as a typical Republican In Name Only who had sought electoral salvation in ideological equivocation—and look what happened to him. They even revised their opinions of George W. Bush, who in retrospect seemed less a conservative hero, more a big-spending apostate. And they viewed the homogeneity of their conference as an advantage. For the outside game, it could help them reclaim their brand as the party of limited government, firing up their base, and reminding the rest of the country what they stood for. For the inside game, it would be easier to unify a purer conservative team against Obama and Pelosi. They would have fewer “problem children,” as they privately described the conference’s moderates and iconoclasts.