The New New Deal (36 page)

Obama aides sometimes joke about the three big lies: The check is in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and my project is shovel-ready. “Shovel-ready,” the president later mused, “was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Unfortunately, the killjoy economists had been right. Infrastructure work was tough to get started, even a routine bridge repair that seemed to have all its jackhammers in a row.

“People had this vision that the day the law was signed, we’d have tens of thousands of guys out there building projects,” Klain says. “It doesn’t work like that.”

The Biden Bridge delay was an early warning that the Recovery Act’s strict spending deadlines—the entire $27 billion for highways had to be committed to projects within a year—would require unheard-of bureaucratic speed. And if the stimulus couldn’t even start repairs on the 182-foot Biden Bridge right away, it certainly wouldn’t have time to build a twenty-first-century version of the Brooklyn Bridge—although it would help repaint and repave the nineteenth-century version of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bulk of its transportation dollars would go toward relatively quick and easy upgrades that wouldn’t captivate the public imagination, but would provide real public benefits: resurfacing pitted roads, bridges, and runways; buying new buses and trains; replacing old
railroad ties; installing cable barriers to prevent drivers from plowing across highway medians.

The innovative TIGER grants had looser deadlines, so they would promote more transformative projects, like new streetcar lines in Dallas, Tucson, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Salt Lake City; light-rail expansions in Charlotte and Los Angeles; and new networks of bicycle and pedestrian trails in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and the Bay Area. They funded green-themed improvements throughout a low-income Kansas City neighborhood; an “electric vehicle corridor” of fast-charging stations along I-5 in Oregon; and New Urbanist projects to revitalize streetscapes in the Everytowns of Peoria and Dubuque. In the New York metropolitan area alone, the Recovery Act has jump-started three long-stalled transit megaprojects—an expansion of Penn Station, a Second Avenue subway, and a new commuter rail route from Long Island to the East Side of Manhattan. It also would have jump-started an equally massive rail tunnel from New Jersey to the West Side of Manhattan if New Jersey governor Chris Christie hadn’t killed the project.

But the main emphasis would be repairs. In its first year, the stimulus financed over 22,000 miles of road improvements, and only 230 miles of new roads. This fix-it-first mentality, whatever it lacked in inspiration, pushed money into the economy faster than grandiose new Skyline Drives ever could. It made fiscal and environmental sense, too. Repairs reduce swollen maintenance backlogs and future budget deficits, while new projects increase backlogs and deficits. And the new rural roads that many state highway departments yearned to build would have worsened sprawl and deepened our oil addiction.

Still, the Biden Bridge hiccup was a daunting reminder that the Recovery Act would be the mother of all management challenges. Here was a no-brainer fix-it-first project, totally shovel-ready, and it was already making the administration look silly.

W
hen Biden thought about it, the entire Recovery Act had the potential to make the administration look silly. It would fund over 100,000 projects
through 275 separate programs at 28 federal agencies, with endless opportunities for headaches and glitches. Tax dollars could get wasted on saunas, picnic tables, makework jobs for the nephews of county commissioners. Spending deadlines could be missed, or overwhelmed agencies could make stupid mistakes to avoid missing them. There could be political scandals, financial scandals, corruption scandals. Had anyone ever doled out $787 billion without some of it getting stolen or squandered?

Biden realized that someone in the White House would have to ride herd on the stimulus to make sure the money was spent fast and spent well. It would have to be an energetic senior official with the president’s ear, someone who could haul in a cabinet secretary for a come-to-Jesus meeting if a problem festered. It would have to be a people person, an arm-twister as well as a cheerleader, someone who could wheedle and coax Democratic and Republican governors and mayors to pump money into the economy in a hurry. At his weekly lunch with Obama on February 20, Biden handed the president a memo outlining how that official could run point for the entire stimulus adventure.

Obama scanned the memo, then flipped it back across the table. Biden was in many ways his polar opposite, an exuberant, unfiltered Irish pol from Scranton, fire to his ice, id to his superego, insider to his outsider. Two decades older than the president, Biden sometimes evoked that blowhard uncle who makes the family cringe at holiday dinners; when they had been rivals during the Democratic primary, he had said Obama wasn’t ready for the White House, and was only generating buzz because he was “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” The tensions in their shotgun marriage surfaced publicly the day after the inauguration, when Biden teased Justice Roberts for flubbing the oath, and Obama shot him a stop-it glance that could have frozen lava. But Obama respected Biden’s Washington experience and man-of-the-people horse sense, if not his message discipline. And there was only one senior official who fit the memo’s description.

“Great,” the president said. “Do it.”

Biden told Obama before joining the ticket that he wasn’t looking to build Cheney-style independent fiefdoms. He just wanted to be a valued adviser, invited to every big meeting, included in every big decision. Obama agreed, and they ended up spending several hours together almost every day. But Biden also said he’d be happy to take on a few discrete tasks with definite “sell-by” dates. Overseeing the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be one. Overseeing the Recovery Act would be another.

“Honest to God, I had no intention of doing this,” Biden told me, with somewhat less than his usual honesty to God. “But it was all about credibility. People don’t think government can deliver.”

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was determined to prove those people wrong.

“T
he first principle of politics, the foundational principle, I learned in the 1950’s in my grandpop’s kitchen.”
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Thus begins
Promises to Keep
, Biden’s 365-page stream of consciousness masquerading as an autobiography. And then he’s off, stopping at the Handy Dandy to get caps for his cap gun, checking out the live monkey at Mr. Thompson’s market, reenacting the latest Tarzan movie with Charlie, Larry, and Tommy, and so on for a few thousand words until he gets to grandpop’s principle. Except it’s two principles, one about equality, one about honesty. And then he’s off again, a few thousand more words about his heroes, his passion for the Senate, his tumultuous career, the horror of September 11, until suddenly he remembers grandpop’s real principle: “
Get up!
The art of living is simply getting up after you’ve been knocked down.”

Joe Biden is an American original.

He was a stutterer as a kid, teased as Joe Impedimenta and Buh-Buh-Biden, but he tirelessly practiced his elocution—
Get up!
—and is now a veritable tornado of verbiage. His first wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash after his first Senate election. He was forced
out of the 1988 presidential race over a plagiarism scandal, and nearly died of a brain aneurysm a few months later. But he’s always gotten up. He’s still an enthusiastic backslapper with a “hey man” for everyone, constantly respinning his favorite yarns, quoting his Scranton relatives, giving his solemn word as a Biden.

Sure, he can be a gasbag; during one of Biden’s Senate soliloquies, Obama handed an aide a note that read: “Shoot. Me. Now.” Sure, Biden’s mouth often outruns his brain. He had just aired his off-message concerns about the stimulus: “If we do everything right, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”
²⁶⁵
But that was Joe being Joe. Muammar Gaddafi once asked him why the United States still classified Libya as a terrorist nation, and he replied: “Because you’re a terrorist!” As an aide says, you never have to wonder what Biden thinks, because he just said it. He’s the least mysterious politician in Washington. And while Beltway types often caricature him as a buffoon, he’s smart in a nonacademic way, with an acute understanding of human needs. Some of the best-and-brightest Ivy Leaguers filling up the West Wing rolled their eyes at his simplistic comments—okay, okay, we’ll explain what this means for an ordinary middle-class family—but he had some insights that they lacked.

By the time Biden moved into his office—which, while indeed slightly smaller than Rahm’s, had priceless portraits of former vice presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the walls—he no longer doubted Obama’s readiness.
²⁶⁶
In private, Biden could still mock the president’s people skills, chilliness, and inability to curse properly. When talking about policies, he often said the president “gets it,” a condescending Bidenism for “agrees with me.” But he also talked up his boss in genuinely awestruck tones: a steel backbone, a brain bigger than his skull, a heart in the right place, a guy who gets the facts and makes the call and never looks back. After watching Obama’s crisp decision making during the transition, he told Klain: They got the order of this ticket right. Obama warmed up to Biden, too. He was a straight shooter, giving the blunt advice presidents often have trouble finding. “He wanted me to be the bastard at the family picnic, which, politely, I
am,” Biden says. He had Beltway knowledge that Obama lacked, and he embraced the personal-contact side of politics that Obama found tiresome; his Energizer Bunny salesmanship had come in handy during the stimulus debate. A week after signing it, Obama announced that Sheriff Joe would be his enforcer, holding mayors, governors, and cabinet members accountable for every buck.

“Because nobody messes with Joe,” Obama said with a smile.

Over the next two years, Biden would convene twenty-two cabinet meetings on the Recovery Act, more than the president would convene on all topics, and visit fifty-six stimulus projects. He’d host fifty-seven conference calls with governors and mayors, and spend countless hours checking in, buttering up and banging heads to keep the cash flowing. He’d speak about the stimulus with every governor except Sarah Palin, who abruptly resigned to pursue a career in punditry and reality TV before he had a chance. He’d also block 260 Recovery Act projects that didn’t pass his smell test, from recreational bike paths to skateboard parks to a $120,000 Army Corps of Engineers plan to print brochures advertising a lake cleanup in Syracuse.
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“We said, ‘Hey, man, put it on a website,’” Biden says. “Stupid little thing, but it saved that dollar amount.”

Another time, Republican Pat Roberts complained on the Senate floor about a Kansas highway that was about to be resurfaced with stimulus money, just in time for heavy trucks working on a nearby stimulus-funded environmental cleanup to rip up the road again. Biden says he immediately picked up the phone and told the Transportation Department to rearrange the schedule: “Hey, man, don’t pave that road before the project is finished with the heavy trucks. Flip it!” The next day, Roberts sheepishly returned to the floor. “The White House moved in an expeditious fashion,” he admitted. “Quite frankly, I didn’t expect they could move that fast.”

Biden heard that a lot about the Recovery Act, and he developed a stock response: “Look, I’m in charge of it, man. My rear end is on the line.” If the Recovery Act perpetuated business as usual, he often warned, Americans would never trust government again. So he promised
state and local officials that any stimulus-related question would be answered within twenty-four hours, stunning his own staff as well as the officials. “If you have any problems getting an answer, just call me,” he told them. “People used to call me all the time. I miss it!” He demanded monthly updates on major projects, even though the law only required them quarterly; he told the cabinet that anyone who had a problem with that could take it up with Obama.

Biden often stressed that the push for accountability was coming from his boss. Obama frequently grilled him about the Recovery Act, especially about waste and fraud. At an introductory meeting in Washington for stimulus coordinators from every state, there was a gasp when Obama barged into the room unannounced, as if Santa Claus had arrived during a reading of “The Night Before Christmas.”

“All of you are on the front lines of what is probably the most important task we have in this country,” he said.
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He gave a stirring pep talk, but he also warned that his administration wouldn’t stand for misspent money. Keynes might not have cared if stimulus cash got into the economy in a messy or crooked way, but in the words of Biden’s devoutly Keynesian chief economist, Jared Bernstein: “I’m loath to be critical of the master, but that’s not how we rolled.” Scandals wouldn’t just be bad politics; they could stop the stimulus in its tracks, which would be disastrous economics.

“If someone can prove we wasted a billion dollars, it’s gone, man!” Biden told his staff. “Gone!”

Biden and Obama sent a zero-tolerance message from the top. But human nature being what it is, they also wanted a tough cop walking the stimulus beat.

E
arl Devaney was ready to retire to Florida. He had spent forty years in law enforcement—as a local officer, Secret Service agent, and finally inspector general for the Interior Department, where he had exposed the sex-and-drugs scandal among Bush’s oil regulators and broken open the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. When Biden summoned him to chat about running the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency
Board, he practiced saying no to the vice president in the mirror. But once he arrived, Biden immediately ushered him into the Oval Office. “I hadn’t practiced saying no to the president,” Devaney says with a rueful laugh. “Hey, I’m Secret Service.”