The New New Deal (35 page)

Blake Jones got to show Obama and Biden around the rooftop that day, and he was struck by the contrast between the two pols. Biden looked him in the eye and made him feel at home, spinning yarns, cursing up a storm. Obama was all business: What are the best policies for promoting solar? How should they be structured?

“I tried cracking a joke, and the president didn’t laugh,” Jones recalls. “He was working. He had twenty minutes, and he was going to make the best use of every one. He was purpose-driven. I was thinking: Is he on like this all the time?”

R
ahm’s backroom dealmaking wouldn’t have looked good on C-SPAN, but Obama knew the Recovery Act wouldn’t have happened without it. When Rahm called to congratulate him, the president said: “Look, man, you did all the work.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get all the glory,” Rahm replied. “And I know who’s gonna get the blame.”

Rahm was an operator, and he had been hired to operate; Washington backrooms were his natural habitat. His tactics—however unsightly, however jarring after Obama’s rhetoric about a new kind of politics—had gotten the stimulus through the swamp, while allowing the president to stay out of the muck.

“Come on, man, he was pure! It was his chief of staff who was the whore,” Rahm cackles.

Still, Obama had lost his first message battle. That may have been inevitable; as the president later said, any stimulus bill was going to be “easy to caricature as a big-spending liberal agenda.” And the inside game of passing legislation is inherently messier than the outside game of campaigning; it’s always tough to stay on message in a game with 535 other players. But some aides thought the White House’s immersion in congressional sausage making had taken an unnecessarily heavy public relations toll, making the president look too much like a Washington politician and not enough like an inspirational leader. The Obama campaign had prized itself on discipline, on ignoring the news cycle and taking the long view. Rahm didn’t work that way.

“The message suffered, because we were all over the place,” one senior official says. “Rahm must have cut fourteen thousand deals. You can’t win messaging like that.”

Rahm thought the real communications error was putting too many eggs in the bipartisanship basket, and some of his colleagues agreed. The president let Republicans control the narrative, because he didn’t want to get into a partisan brawl, but when the partisan brawl happened anyway, Republican obstructionism only seemed to prove that he had failed to change Washington. Most of the Clintonites on Obama’s staff had been skeptical of post-partisanship all along, and the Recovery Act seemed to confirm their suspicions.

“From the beginning, a lot of the Clinton types were like: Okay, Barack, awesome speeches, now it’s grown-up time,” says one Obama loyalist. “After that House vote, they got to say, I told you so, Republicans are never gonna play.”

Biden says that when Obama entered the White House, he was neither as naive about bipartisanship as liberals claim, nor as disinterested in bipartisanship as Republicans claim. “He was in between,” Biden says. He extended his hand to GOP leaders, but was always deeply skeptical that any hand would be extended back.

“If it had been, he would’ve grabbed it,” Biden says. “Did he believe anything would happen? Highly unlikely. Was he hoping maybe something would change? Look, there was a faint hope that when our Republican colleagues realized how bad things were for the country, they would have said: ‘Okay, let’s go. Grab my hand.’”

In any case, the White House concluded after the stimulus that Republican leaders had no interest in hand grabbing. Obama would keep reaching out publicly, but as Obama told a group of liberal columnists: I’m an eternal optimist, but I’m not a sap. Another eighteen months would pass before his next private conversation with McConnell. After the 2010 midterm elections, his aides would realize they didn’t even have a phone number for Boehner. If Obama was going to continue to advance his agenda, it clearly wasn’t going to happen by consensus. It was going to require scratching out sixty votes.

“It was a real wake-up call,” Ron Klain says. “When Republicans can’t support tax cuts and infrastructure they’ve always supported in the past, that’s a pretty strong sign they’re not going to support anything with Obama’s name on it.”

For the White House, the main political lesson of the Recovery Act was the importance of getting to sixty. Obama would have to draw an inside straight on every major piece of legislation, and that had powerful political implications. When push came to shove, the Obama team figured it would always be able to roll House Democrats, but it needed to keep moderate Republican and Democratic senators on his side. In fact, when liberal groups began attacking Democrats in the gang of 18 for obstructing Obama’s agenda, Jim Messina, Rahm’s deputy, yelled at them to stop.

“I said: You’ve got a mandate. The president needs to call Ben Nelson into his office and say: Stop messing around!” says Bob Borosage, director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “Messina said: Back off. We know how to handle this.”

A related stimulus lesson was the importance of congressional relations in general.
Schoolhouse Rock
’s bill-to-law rules still applied, and Rahm and Schiliro did not want to alienate the Democratic leaders who would be needed to move Obama’s agenda on health care reform, cap-and-trade, and Wall Street reform. Obama’s first major dilemma after the Recovery Act was whether to sign a porky $410 billion omnibus budget that Congress had failed to complete in 2008. It was larded with over eight thousand earmarks, and Axelrod warned that embracing it would further muddy the message of change. The legislative team argued that it would send a chilling message if Obama rewarded Reid and Pelosi for their loyalty on the stimulus by humiliating them with a veto on the omnibus. The president agreed it wasn’t worth picking a fight; he’d pledge to reduce earmarks on future bills, but would accept this last pork platter as leftover business from the Bush era.

“Later, the president regretted signing that,” says one aide. “It just looked weak. And it didn’t feel right.”

For Republicans, the main political lesson of the Recovery Act was the upside of resistance to Obama. For the first time in ages, their base was fired up. And independent voters seemed to be responding to the politics of austerity.

“Once we voted no, we started hearing cheers, and we were like,
‘Hey, this is great! Life just got better!’” Tom Cole says. “We didn’t have a convincing message yet. We were just against Obama. But we stood up, and we didn’t get overrun.”

The stimulus did not make it inevitable that Republicans would accuse Obama of bowing down to the Saudi king, trying to indoctrinate children by giving a back-to-school speech, demeaning the presidency by filling out a March Madness bracket, or disrespecting Christmas by putting his dog on a holiday card. Obama probably didn’t expect Republican congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina to scream “You lie!” in the middle of a presidential address, or his corpulent colleague James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin to suggest that Michelle had a “large posterior.” But by the end of Obama’s first month in office, it was already clear the next forty-seven would be dominated by partisan warfare. A week after lampooning Pelosi,
Saturday Night Live
opened with a skit of Boehner, McConnell, and other Republicans debating whether to try to impeach Obama.

“My gut tells me it’s too soon,” the fake Boehner said. “Maybe in April.”
²⁶²

O
n the campaign trail, Obama had promised to bridge the partisan divide and reform the ways of Washington. To the cynics who claimed it would be impossible to change the Beltway’s political culture, he had said: We don’t have a choice. As long as politicians insisted on slagging each other instead of working together, as long as Washington remained obsessed with evanescent nonsense instead of things that matter to ordinary families, America wouldn’t even be able to start solving festering problems like its addiction to fossil fuels, its broken health care system, its shameful public schools, and the decline of its middle class. Substantive change, he argued, would be impossible without political change. Transactional politics could not produce transformational results.

It was a powerful argument. But then the economy imploded, and Obama inherited a crisis. He needed to pass something audacious in a hurry, and he simply didn’t see any way to change Washington over-night.
It seemed impossible. Instead, he pursued what he had said was impossible but now seemed at least conceivable: substantive change without political change.

The Obama campaign had been all about defying conventional wisdom, thinking out of the box, changing the rules of the game. As a candidate, Obama had accepted the nomination in an open-air stadium, taken an overseas trip, and done all sorts of things candidates weren’t supposed to do. Two years later, I asked Axelrod why the president didn’t try to re-create that defiant spirit in the White House.

“The campaign was conducted in America, not in Washington,” he told me. “We were operating in a different arena, and we were able to overcome some of the traditional thinking and some traditional obstacles. But Capitol Hill is a different arena. The ability to change the dynamic up there was a lot more difficult.”

It’s a fair point. The Republicans were plotting to destroy Obama even before he took office. As the PowerPoint said, “The purpose of the minority is to become the majority.” And the Recovery Act proved that transactional politics could produce transformational results, that substantive change without political change was possible. It was just extremely hard. It required unpleasant compromises. It looked messy. But in four weeks, Obama had already made tremendous progress on his agenda for energy, health care, education, and the economy. He hadn’t forged a post-partisan consensus or reinvented the legislative process, but he cared more about changing the country than changing Washington.

The Obama fans who expected the mess of the last eight years to vanish the second he stepped into the White House were bound to be disappointed. The Recovery Act was never designed to restore full employment; by the time it passed, the economy had already shed more jobs than it was designed to save or create. “We knew that single act wasn’t a horse that could pull the whole sleigh,” Biden says. And the mess was far worse than anyone realized at the time. At the time the stimulus passed, the official GDP estimate for the fourth quarter of 2008 was –3.8 percent. That was disastrous, but a couple weeks later, it
would be revised to an unthinkable –6.2 percent. And it would eventually be rerevised to –8.9 percent. That’s Great Depression territory.

Passing the Recovery Act was a big step toward change, but the stimulus wasn’t going to spend itself. Change takes work, and the real work was just beginning.

B
efore the final vote, Vice President Biden also took a road trip—literally!—to pitch the Recovery Act on Route 34 outside Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
²⁶³
There he toured one of the state’s six thousand structurally deficient bridges, an eighty-year-old span that seemed to be groaning for stimulus. A jagged crack like something out of a Road Runner cartoon sliced across the roadway. Biden poked his shoe through a badly rusting steel girder. “This is actually missing rivets,” he marveled.

Governor Ed Rendell, an infrastructure evangelist who cochaired the group Building America’s Future, then delivered his standard sermon about the power of public works. He explained that bridge repairs and other hard-hat projects were the key to reviving the middle class, supporting construction jobs that can’t be outsourced and manufacturing jobs at U.S. steel and concrete firms. And no matter what the killjoy economists said about speed, this was a perfect example of a shovel-ready project. The plans and contracts were all set—just add cash.

“The point you’re making is, if the stimulus passes, you’d be able to get jackhammers out here,” Biden said for the camera.

This raggedy bridge over Conodoguinet Creek—Rendell dubbed it the Biden Bridge—offered a simple yet powerful argument for the Recovery Act. Pennsylvanians obviously needed work, and here was
work that obviously needed to be done. After the president signed the stimulus, Ron Klain called to find out when Biden could return for the groundbreaking, so Americans could see that work getting under way.

Eventually, a Rendell press guy got back to him: We’re thinking June.

“JUNE?” Klain was flabbergasted. “This was the number one project on your list!”

Apparently, school buses depended on the Biden Bridge to reach a local neighborhood, so the town didn’t want it shut down until summer vacation. Biden had to wait four months for the ribbon cutting. By then the story was less about the thirty jobs the project was creating than the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were still disappearing.

“From the town’s perspective, it made perfect sense,” Klain says. “From our perspective, it was a disaster. We had told everyone this would happen
fast
.”