The New New Deal (49 page)

Even Senate Democrats were divided about stimulus. For months, while Max Baucus was slow-walking his health care negotiations, Byron Dorgan had been a man on fire, telling his colleagues the same thing he told Obama: We’ve got to lead on jobs. In the fall, he and Dick Durbin led a series of brainstorming sessions, trying to unify the caucus around a Democratic jobs agenda. But at the final meeting in January, Baucus of all people showed up to propose a more bipartisan approach. “He basically threw his crowbar into the transmission,” Dorgan says. Soon the caucus had two competing plans. Baucus and other centrists thought the Dorgan plan, heavy on spending, had no hope of sixty votes. Dorgan and other populists thought the Baucus plan, heavy on business tax cuts, was straight out of the trickle-down Republican playbook. Eventually, Majority leader Reid rejected both. He decided the only stimulus measures that could actually pass were a short unemployment insurance extension and an almost unrecognizable version of Obama’s hiring credit, watered down and slimmed down to $13 billion.

For the White House, it was a letdown. But it was better than nothing.

Obama’s critics on the left often claim he crippled his presidency by pushing too small a stimulus in early 2009, then failing to follow up with more stimulus in 2010. As one liberal economist puts it, the Recovery Act was Obama’s version of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment in Iraq—and he didn’t even follow up with a surge. But there weren’t sixty votes for an economic surge. And the Republican minority was close to breaking the Senate filibuster record it set in the last congressional session, so legislation that didn’t have sixty votes wasn’t going to make it to Obama’s desk.
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In fact, one untold story of the 111th Congress is how much stimulus Obama did manage to wring out of that poorly oiled machine. “We never stopped planning and plotting and pushing for jobs bills,” Bernstein
says. In a hostile political climate, the president ended up supplementing the Recovery Act with about $200 billion in additional fiscal pop before the 2010 elections.
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So the left got its trillion-dollar stimulus after all.

It wasn’t an easy lift. For example, Republicans filibustered a state aid bill designed to prevent more teacher layoffs, but a shrunken $23 billion version finally squeaked through the Senate when Snowe and Collins agreed to vote yes. It also took months to finagle two Republican votes for a $42 billion bill to cut taxes and expand credit for small businesses. Voinovich, the decisive vote on the small business bill, could not believe his party was marching in lockstep against “job creators,” even though the bill—like the hiring credit and the state aid—was fully offset over 10 years.

“I said: What could be more Republican than that? But McConnell was furious with me,” Voinovich says. “Come on. My good Republicans are dying on the vine, the banks are cutting off their credit, and you’re telling me I can’t do this for them? Oh, I didn’t like that. Instead of doing what was right, partisan politics always came first.”

Senate Republicans even fought Obama’s efforts to extend unemployment benefits for victims of the Great Recession. In late 2009, GOP senators used procedural shenanigans to hold up an extension for a month—and then voted for it unanimously. “You can only categorize that as malicious mischief,” Axelrod says. By mid-2010, even though unemployment was still 9.5 percent, with five times as many job applicants as openings, the Republican strategy had shifted from delay to all-out obstruction; Snowe and Collins were the only GOP senators to support another extension of unemployment benefits without offsetting cuts, which had never been required for emergency relief. Ben Nelson, the most conservative Democrat, had turned against unemployment insurance as well, so when Robert Byrd died in June, the Democrats could no longer break a filibuster. Two million laid-off workers had their benefits lapse before Byrd’s replacement was appointed.

The Republican Party’s newfound concern about deficits did not end its push for deficit-exploding tax cuts with no offsets. And it did not
translate into a single vote for Obamacare, which the CBO projected would cut the deficit by $1 trillion over two decades. In fact, at the same time Republicans were slamming the president’s leftist plot to create a government health plan, which Obamacare isn’t, they were bashing his heartless cuts to Medicare, which actually is a government health plan. While some Republican positions were consistent with a desire to put the brakes on the deficit, they were all consistent with a desire to put the brakes on the president. The GOP had become the Groucho Marx character in
Horse Feathers
:

“Your proposition may be good
,

But let’s have one thing understood
,

Whatever it is, I’m against it
.

And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it
,

I’m against it!”

B
ob Bennett was a loyal soldier in McConnell’s army of No. The Utah senator voted against the stimulus, against the omnibus, against Obamacare. Bennett had been just as loyal a soldier in President Bush’s army of Yes.

But to the Tea Party, that was no longer a point in Bennett’s favor. The Republican base now mocked him as “Bailout Bob,” the turncoat who voted for TARP. And while he was a solid conservative partisan, he wasn’t an angry conservative partisan. He was pals with Biden, and described Obama as “misguided” rather than “socialist.” He didn’t seem to realize the Constitution was under assault. One leading Utah Republican told him: Bob, we want to see
passion
. At the state Republican convention, he tried to explain to the mad-as-hell grass roots that TARP had prevented a catastrophe, that the banks were paying back the money with interest.

“It was just: ‘You betrayed us! You voted with Bush!’” Bennett says.
“I remember being at Republican conventions where people would say: ‘Stand firm with Bush!’ So I did, and now you hate me?”

The convention didn’t even give Bennett a chance to defend his seat in a primary, selecting two Tea Party activists to run instead. Bennett says his friend Mitt Romney commiserated with him about the ingratitude of the Tea Party, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher.

“Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” Bennett says. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

For Republican officeholders, insufficient anti-Obama fervor was now politically fatal. Centrists like Specter and Crist had no shot of winning rage-a-thon Republican primaries, and even establishment conservatives like Bennett were in danger of being “scozzafavaed,” a new verb describing what happened to Republicans who ran afoul of the Tea Party. It was coined after a November 2009 special election in upstate New York, where the moderate Republican congressman, John McHugh, had committed partisan treason by accepting a job as Obama’s army secretary. To try to hold his seat, local GOP power brokers handpicked another centrist named Dede Scozzafava, who had supported the Recovery Act. The Tea Party revolted, and rallied Republicans behind a third-party right-winger instead. Scozzafava eventually dropped out and endorsed her Democratic opponent, who ended up winning the race.

Establishment Republicans fretted that if their most electable candidates kept getting scozzafavaed, they’d lose a historic chance to exploit Obama fatigue in 2010. Congressman Mike Castle, a beloved figure in Delaware and a strong favorite to move up to the Senate, got scozzafavaed by a loopy far-right activist named Christine O’Donnell, best known for dabbling in witchcraft as a teen and crusading against masturbation as an adult. Castle had first realized he might face a rough primary during the Tea Party summer, when he was raucously booed at a town hall meeting for saying Obama was a U.S. citizen. “I voted against the stimulus and health care, but I guess I wasn’t adamant
enough,” he says. Tea Party Republicans also won Senate primaries over less dogmatic candidates in Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Nevada, and Alaska, where Senator Murkowski had to launch an independent write-in campaign after getting scozzafavaed.

The most obvious results of this intraparty cannibalism were the nominations of extremist Republicans like O’Donnell in otherwise winnable races, and the drift of scozzafavaed Republicans (including Scozzafava herself, who ended up in Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration) across the aisle. Republican leaders who had portrayed Obama as a radical threat to American values were reaping what they sowed, as their base demanded maximum ferocity in the war it had been told was being waged for the nation’s soul. Even McConnell’s preferred candidate for Senate in Kentucky, an establishment conservative named Trey Grayson, got scozzafavaed by Tea Party firebrand Rand Paul, the son of the libertarian icon Ron Paul. And in Florida, Rick Scott, the disgraced health care executive who had founded an advocacy group to fight Obamacare and comparative effectiveness research, rode a Tea Party wave of Obama hatred to upset a Republican insider for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

The threat of Tea Party retribution also had a real impact on policy, giving congressional Republicans who might have been cooperation-curious an even stronger incentive to double down on obstruction. For example, Scott Brown’s election provided a clear opening for Republicans to cut a favorable deal with the shell-shocked White House on scaled-back health reforms; instead, they stuck to their strategy of no-no-no, and Democrats with no option of settling for half a loaf eventually used parliamentary legerdemain to get the whole loaf to the president’s desk. Politically, Obamacare would be an albatross for Democrats in 2010, partly because of the side deals—the “Cornhusker Kickback” for Senator Nelson, a nonaggression pact with the drug industry—the White House cut to get to sixty. But substantively, if Republicans had been a bit nicer to Specter, or offered Obama some modest reforms as a face-saving compromise, they could have stopped a big liberal victory.

Republican leaders decided before Obama even took office that their main goal, the “purpose of the minority,” would be regaining power. And unpopular Democratic laws like the stimulus and health reform would help them achieve that goal; for example, Chairman Obey, under fire for writing the Recovery Act, suddenly decided to retire after twenty-one terms in the House. But those unpopular laws were also achieving age-old Democratic policy goals. So who was really winning? Republicans took pride in their political successes as an insurgent minority, and the backlash against Obama was helping them motivate voters, recruit candidates, and raise money. But he was also enjoying one of the most productive legislative sessions since the New Deal.

“They got what they wanted,” says Josh Holmes, a senior McConnell aide. “That’s to our dismay.”

P
resident Obama liked to remind the Clinton veterans on his staff:
We’re not here to do school uniforms
. Maybe he had botched some of his politics—he admitted that after Scott Brown’s election—but his policies were making change. Clinton and every other postwar Democratic president had dreamed of universal health care; Obama’s reforms would get it done, while cracking down on insurance abuses and starting to bend the cost curve. Obama had also put two progressive women on the Supreme Court, signed a Credit Card Bill of Rights to crack down on surprise fees and retroactive rate hikes, pushed through long-sought reforms of the predatory student loan business, and saved the U.S. auto industry. Not to mention the change he was driving through the Recovery Act’s investments in energy, education, health IT, infrastructure, and a fairer tax code. Or the end of the war in Iraq.

Yet the left was unhappy. While the right was trashing Obama as a new Che Guevara, congenitally disillusioned liberals were trashing him as a wimp and a sellout.

Sometimes liberal activists and bloggers had genuine ideological disagreements with Obama’s less liberal policies, like his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his refusal to nationalize banks, or his empty rhetoric about helping homeowners. But often they merely seemed to
resent Obama’s insistence on playing the hand he was dealt. Why didn’t he fight harder for immigration reform, for cap-and-trade, for card-check for unions? The same reason he didn’t fight harder for a larger stimulus in 2009, or an aggressive second stimulus in 2010: He didn’t have the votes. Sure, Obama had increased clean-energy funding tenfold and ushered in a new era of energy efficiency, but a column on the eco-website
Grist
still declared: “Environmentalists Need a New President.”
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Sure, Obama’s historic health reforms would cover 32 million uninsured Americans, but the disillusionment addicts on the left were upset he hadn’t insisted on a government-run “public option.” Again, there weren’t sixty votes in the Senate for a public option, and that wouldn’t have changed if Obama had lobbied harder or talked purtier.

Obama often tweaked these “griping and groaning Democrats” who seemed to think presidents were endowed with superpowers. “Gosh, we haven’t yet brought about world peace,” he mock-whined at a fund-raiser. “I thought that was going to happen quicker!”

Liberal activists often complained that the Obama team was nastier to them than to Republicans, and there they had a point. Gibbs publicly mocked the “professional left.” Rahm showed up at a Common Purpose meeting to denounce a liberal group’s decision to run ads attacking Blue Dog Democrats as “fucking retarded.” At one closed-door House caucus meeting, the usually conciliatory president called out Peter DeFazio, the one liberal who had voted against the Recovery Act: “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” Whining from the left seemed to irritate him more than abuse from the right, the way a rebellious teenage son causes more angst than a crazy old neighbor.

One of the more thoughtful liberal critiques of Obama—echoed by some White House aides—was that he ought to fight some losing battles, to highlight Republican obstructionism and fire up his base. In Washington, this is called “getting caught trying.” But Rahm believed that losing begat losing, and didn’t want Obama associating himself with liberal crusades just to get caught trying. The president didn’t want to spend time or political capital picking unnecessary fights with Republicans. It would alienate centrists in both parties whose votes he still
needed for Wall Street reform and other legislative priorities, and it just wasn’t his style. Anyway, staying above the fray had political benefits for Obama. Even in the intensely polarized climate, he was still way more popular than his fellow Democrats, especially with independent voters. He figured he’d keep focusing on making progress, whether progressives liked it or not.