The Speechwriter (10 page)

10

STIMULUS

A
round this time the word “stimulus” became part of every working day. The new president was pushing Congress to pass what the news media liked to call a “stimulus package,” a giant spending measure designed to “jump-start” or “stimulate” or “revive” an economy that, according to the metaphor, was moribund. The size of this package kept growing; reports cited $400 billion, then $500 billion, then $675 billion, and nowhere, so far as I could tell, was there any explanation of what was responsible for this growth. I remember this clearly because, although I've never understood numbers at all, I was used to thinking about our little state's $5 billion General Fund and $19 billion total budget. These were the big numbers to me. And now Congress
was debating a single bill—not the budget itself, but just an ordinary piece of legislation—that was twenty, twenty-five, thirty-five times larger than the state's entire budget. For the first time in my life I considered the fact that a billion is a thousand millions.

The governor was in demand. Almost every day, it seemed, we were preparing talking points for another television interview. He was one of only a few politicians in the country who could talk knowledgeably about fiscal policy in broad terms, and he was the sort of person who, in contrast to most of his peers, might say something interesting at any moment. As maladroit as he usually was with words, occasionally he'd find some phrase that expressed the forebodings of millions. In one interview with one of the cable networks, he worried that the United States was creating a “savior-based economy,” an economy in which “what matters is not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power.” Instantly the phrase was everywhere, and I wished I could take credit for it.

It was often said during these years that the relationship between the governor and the legislature was as sour as it had been in generations. I don't know if that was true in any verifiable sense; I doubt it. But now, in the winter and spring of his greatest and worst year, it certainly felt true. Legislators sensed that his attention was elsewhere; they knew what his ambitions were, and many of them longed to show the world that he wasn't the brave and winsome statesman many people thought they saw. He was popular, and they hated him. For the most part, though, they couldn't come up with any way
to discredit him, unless you count overriding nearly all his vetoes.

Occasionally they'd come out with some gimmicky ploy, but it all remained pretty silly. In March, for example, Senator Leatherman and Speaker Harrell, together with the newly appointed state university president, staged a press conference showcasing a new jobs plan. This consisted, strangely, of a pyramid: on the lower parts of the pyramid were written the names of various state agencies; in the middle were the names of other state agencies; and at the top were the words “Economic Development Executive Council.” It wasn't absolutely clear how such a thing would result in greater employment opportunities for actual people, but the purpose of the jobs plan wasn't to carry it out, since it had already been carried out and was nothing but a confusing, top-heavy bureaucratic bungle; the purpose rather was to show how concerned Leatherman and Harrell were about the economic well-being of the state. Unlike the governor.

Nat and I were at the press conference. You couldn't hear most of what was said because they'd made the unfortunate choice of staging it near a busy road. The reporters seemed perplexed about what the pyramid meant. One of them called it a “triangle.”

I'm sure Leatherman's and Harrell's staffers told their bosses that the press conference was a huge success, that it was all over the media, that they were creating a “narrative” about how the governor cared more about his national ambitions than about jobs in his own state. But it was a petty shot, and you could tell journalists weren't buying it. They were
prepared to accept the allegation that the governor had his eye on Washington but not that the legislature's leadership, with their preposterous pyramid, had something new or better to offer.

During February and March the governor became his party's most salient critic of the new president's economic stimulus, which Congress passed in mid-February. Every other day, it seemed, he was on cable TV news or talk radio or speaking on the phone to a
Washington
Post
or
New York Times
reporter. Often he'd be introduced as “one of the president's most outspoken critics.” And he was traveling more. Any governor, certainly any popular one, speaks from time to time at out-of-state events, either to do favors for other politicians or to make connections with potential high-level donors (or, sometimes, just because it's fun). But in these months the governor was flying everywhere all the time—to Austin, to Jackson, to Chicago, to Anaheim.

He didn't speak exclusively on the stimulus bill at all these engagements, but the topic of that bill, and of government spending generally, was never far away at any of them. Why was he so deeply opposed to it? The idea behind the stimulus was to pump large amounts of cash into the economy in order to ignite consumer spending and, in turn, growth. The governor thought that idea was foolish for many reasons, but the two that led him to oppose the policy with all his energy were these: the cash was borrowed, and most of it would pass from the federal government to state governments. He understood the culture and habits of government well enough to know that that federal money wouldn't be used to spur economic growth but
to balance state budgets. Maybe it was a good idea to help states shore up their budgets and maybe it wasn't, but that wasn't the justification given for the stimulus, and in any case it would have no effect on economic growth. And he understood that, when the stimulus failed to achieve its purpose, people would remember that it was he who had inveighed against it with greater fervor than anybody else.

All this was happening while the legislature was in session, so the workload in our office became almost intolerable. I was doing all my usual duties: writing remarks for grand openings and graduation ceremonies and responding to every well-wisher who wrote a letter to the governor asking whether he liked barbecue or if he had any thoughts on energy efficiency or whether he would sign a photograph for a nephew or grandson. Now I was also drafting op-eds on the inchoate “bailout culture” of Washington, DC, writing talking points for televised interviews, collecting articles from the
Wall Street Journal
,
Washington Post
, and
New York Times
on debates over monetary policy, and responding to every swooning enthusiast or angry crank who wrote letters telling the governor to “stand firm” against the stimulus or to stop “playing politics” during a national emergency.

The governor himself was constantly agitated. Ordinarily he would dislike my drafts, but he would at least use what I'd written to create his own versions. Now he either hated what I'd written or bypassed me altogether. He would explode into the press office, hair disheveled, wearing jeans and a tattered T-shirt, and want to know some fact about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe or interwar Germany or Argentina
during the 1980s. Once you gave him an answer, he'd disappear into his office again, and eventually he'd give Aaron the finished product and tell him to pitch it to one of the national papers. Some of these were printed, but many were not. One that wasn't contained the sentence “Oddly enough, the silver lining to graying economic and financial clouds may well be that reforms that have previously fallen on deaf ears may be a little bit more politically palatable.”

Sometimes he'd forget which products had been drafted for him and which he'd written himself. Once, he came into the conference room and held up a piece of paper. Stewart, Paul, Gil, and I were in the room. “Who wrote this?” he asked. “It doesn't have a name on it. Again, always put a name on it.” Rather than telling us what it was, the governor had us all look at it. It was a draft of a veto letter. I hadn't written it. Paul said he hadn't.

“Oh, that was mine,” Gil said. “Sorry. Forgot to put my name.”

“Okay,” the governor said in an unpleasant tone. “What's this?” He then read aloud a dreadful sentence. We all sat in silence. He looked at Gil. “I'm asking,” he said. “What is this?”

Gil, whose involuntary response to tense situations was to giggle, made a staccato sound with his throat and said, “I'm a terrible writer.”

“No!” the governor almost shouted. “It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're a good writer or not. You don't have to be a good writer to know that that sentence”—he slapped the paper and, in his rage, didn't know what to call the sentence. Finally he said, “Represents a poor effort.”

Then he did something that surprised even Stewart. He held up the offending paper and, slowly, ripped it from top to bottom. He then dropped the pieces into a trash can and walked out.

Gil held back tears.

What it had taken me two years to realize, and what I suspect Gil never learned, is that the governor wasn't trying to hurt you. For him to try to hurt you would have required him to acknowledge your significance. If you were on his staff, he had no knowledge of your personhood. In such an instance as this, he was giving vent to his own anxieties, whatever they were. It was as if you were one of those pieces of cork placed in the mouths of wounded soldiers during an amputation. The soldier didn't chew the cork because he hated it but because it was therapeutic to bite hard. Often I felt like that piece of cork. For weeks at a time I would drive to work in the morning nervous to the point of vomiting. I wasn't worried about any one thing—it was everything. Almost every day threatened to produce some new debacle: an oversight or blunder that would provoke the governor to wonder with inarticulate rage how someone could do such a moronic thing. I would find myself longing for a job as a liquor store cashier or a mailman or a pizza delivery guy, some inconspicuous functionary who had no connection with allegedly important things and allegedly important people. I remember there was a middle-­aged man who worked for the State House maintenance crew; one of his duties, or maybe his only duty, was to make sure the building's lightbulbs still worked. I would see him wandering around the State House looking up at the various
light fixtures. Sometimes I'd see him at the top of a ladder changing a bulb. He would come into the press office, look up at the lights and, satisfied that all were working, walk out. He always wore a tattered New York Mets baseball cap. He didn't seem anxious. I wanted to be him.

The governor made the decision early to do everything he could to stop that federal money from transferring to the state. He had criticized the bill in innumerable television interviews and op-eds. When it passed Congress in February, he had the choice of dropping the issue and taking the money on the grounds that what was done was done. Lots of people, mainly those who didn't know much about either him or politics, thought that's what he would do. At some point, though, maybe in an op-ed or an interview, it became clear that he intended to refuse the money.

There were lots of persuasive piecemeal arguments for turning it down. It would be two or three years before that much money could pass through the various stages of government and be injected into the economy, if it ever reached the private sector at all. But of course it wouldn't; the supposedly stimulatory funds would be eaten away by bureaucratic processing and so do nothing to stimulate anything but the public sector. Accepting several billion dollars in nonrecurring funds would mean losing that very large source of income two years later when the money ran out; then what? And there were the notorious strings attached to the funding; the federal government never gives states money without telling them how it must and must not be used, and the stimulus bill itself required that, in order to get large portions of the money, states
first had to expand Medicaid and unemployment eligibility to levels that, once the stimulus funds dried up, would be unsustainable. You can see how boring all these arguments were. They're good, in a desiccated logical sense, but they're boring. For the average person they don't amount to much compared with this message: The money's going to be spent anyway; we're paying for it; why in the land of the living wouldn't we take it?

The governor had no gift for articulating complex arguments, and when he put forward his views on the unwisdom of taking stimulus money he usually relied on a few homely phrases: “You can't solve a problem caused by too much debt by piling on yet more debt”; “You're talking about a billion-­dollar hole in the budget two years from now.” The phrase “billion-dollar hole” always sounded weird to me (a hole worth a billion dollars?), and I doubt very many people understood what he meant by it. Anyhow he never had a cogent retort to the objection that the state had a right to its share of the cash and if we didn't take it somebody else would.

For a lot of people, though, that argument was beside the point. These people had become frightened by the prospect of wanton government spending and generational debt, and here was a man who, in apparent violation of his own political interests, was saying No. He already had the reputation of saying No to his state's legislature, to his own party, to federal bullying; now he was saying it again, only this time everybody seemed to be awake and listening.

The governor's enemies in the legislature thought they sensed weakness. The disputed $700 million, to be spent over
two years, would mostly go to education, both K–12 and public colleges. About $37 million, if I remember, would go to law enforcement and prisons, and a few million to other, small-fry programs. But the bulk was meant for education, and education is, of course, the one thing nobody likes to oppose funding for. Over the previous few months, as the governor made clear his opposition to the stimulus, there had been talk about schools having to lay off teachers, of schools in poor rural areas becoming even more ramshackle than they already were, and of districts cutting science and arts programs. In an important sense, all this talk was purely irrational. For a variety of reasons, when people think about forgoing federal money—that is, of going without federal funding that might have been available under different circumstances—they think of it as a cut. The fact that it isn't a cut at all becomes immaterial; suddenly everyone is bemoaning budget reductions that haven't happened and won't happen. In any case, nobody really believed teachers would lose their jobs if the governor turned down the stimulus money. Members of the legislature would starve every agency in state government before they'd open themselves to the criticism that they had let teachers be laid off. Even so, it seemed almost everybody felt that the governor's intention to turn down stimulus money would somehow result in the widespread firing of teachers.