by Al Franken
By the time I got there, it was clear just how deeply I had stepped in it. I learned a couple of things that day. First: Don’t smirk at a colleague, let alone the minority leader, when you’re presiding. Second: When you’re the senator and you really screw up, the job of the staff is to support you and not to tell you that you’re an idiot and then leave the office in disgust. For that, I thank Drew, who went right into “let’s figure this out” mode.
I handwrote a note of abject apology to Mitch and walked back over to his office to deliver it personally. Then Drew and I and the press team composed a statement admitting my mistake, acknowledging that I had been completely in the wrong, and expressing my desire to apologize directly to the minority leader.
The statement made the press accounts, and so did a statement from a McConnell aide: “Senator Franken apologized and that’s a perfectly appropriate way of handling the situation.”
Both statements helped limit the damage, but especially the one from Mitch’s office, which of course wouldn’t have gone out without Mitch’s okay. He had done me a real solid. And so I guess I actually learned three things that day, the third being that Mitch McConnell can actually be kind of a mensch—once in a while.
That day was the last day of a long work period (hence me being tired), and afterward, we immediately broke for the August recess. The night we returned to D.C. was especially nice, so I took a few staff members out to dinner at a Mexican place on Capitol Hill that has a little patio. Then I spotted Mitch and his wife, former labor secretary (and current transportation secretary) Elaine Chao, dining alfresco at the restaurant next door.
I walked over to them and started with some small talk about how much Franni had enjoyed getting to know Elaine through the spouse club meetings, which had the virtue of being true. Then I thanked Mitch for the statement his office had released.
“Well,” said Mitch, “we all make mistakes. What counts is that we learn from them.”
And from then on, I made it a point never to have an interaction with Mitch unless I had something nice to say. Usually, that meant complimenting some speech he gave in a setting that was completely bipartisan: “Mitch, that 9/11 commemoration speech you gave on the Capitol steps yesterday was really moving.”
Every year, the spouse club holds a dinner at which the majority leader and minority leader both speak. Mitch’s remarks at these are always great, which gives me at least one annual opportunity to compliment him. One year, he gave an especially beautiful speech, quoting from legendary former majority leader Mike Mansfield (a true giant of the Senate) about how we senators owe everything to our spouses. The next day, I approached him on the floor and said (meaning it), “That was just a lovely speech last night.”
“Well, you can’t go wrong quoting Mansfield,” he replied modestly.
We were standing alone, and for some reason, I felt enough of a connection to take a risk. “Mitch,” I said, “I have to say, I really like your speeches better that aren’t in the service of evil.”
Mitch favored me with his best Grinch smile. Then he said, “I like the evil ones better.”
I laughed, and he seemed pleased. Now we’re very close, and even though he and I may disagree, when we’re off the clock, we’re the best of friends—sometimes we go to dinner and Mitch will laugh so hard that milk shoots out of his nose.
Chapter 32
Operation Curdle
Frankly, being civil with Mitch isn’t always so easy. The fact is that his campaign of obstruction wasn’t just obnoxious. It was deeply cynical—and ultimately proved to be downright dangerous.
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama had offered a refreshing and even inspirational vision of what our democracy could be. We needn’t be trapped by our old partisan divides, he told Americans. We can change the tone in Washington. We can set aside our differences and recognize our common humanity. The cynics be damned—we should dare to hope for something better from our politics.
“On this day,” he declared in his inaugural address, “we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
To which Mitch McConnell basically responded, “Oh yeah? Well, screw you, buddy!”
Even before the inauguration, Republicans had decided that they were going to prevent the new president from keeping his promise to move the country beyond the rank partisanship that had consumed Washington. McConnell had laid out the strategy to his caucus at a resort in West Virginia that winter: Instead of working with the popular new president to pass his agenda (or trying to find areas of compromise), Senate Republicans would focus on making the new president less popular.
Journalist Alec MacGillis, who reported on the summit in his book The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, summed it up this way: “In other words, wait out Americans’ hopefulness in a dire moment for the country until it curdles to disillusionment.”
The way I see it, Republicans had three options for how to deal with the new political reality they faced in January 2009.
Option 1: Recognize that the new president was hugely popular and had a mandate from the American people to deal with a series of pressing crises, and ask, “How can we help?”
Option 2: Recognize that the new president was hugely popular and had a mandate from the American people to deal with a series of pressing crises, and say, “Congratulations, but we have some political standing, too, and we’re going to make you come to the table and negotiate. So let’s sit down and work out something we can all live with.”
Option 3: Focus on reducing his popularity, refuse to respect his mandate, and as for those pressing crises? Not only are we not going to help him solve them, we’re going to do everything we can to prevent him from solving them, and then we’re going to blame him for failing to solve them. In fact, after a while, we’re going to start blaming him for creating the problems in the first place!
Democrats and Republicans had faced this dilemma many times before, but never before had anyone ever chosen Door Number 3.
In part, Republicans were able to get away with “Operation Curdle” because of timing.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, the country had been suffering with the Great Depression for almost four years. The message from the American people to the new president was loud, clear, and universal: Do something! Anything! Standing in his way would have been an act of political suicide. Even Option 2 would have taken some real chutzpah.
President Obama, on the other hand, took office just as the economic meltdown was beginning to peak. The day he took the oath of office, George W. Bush shook his hand, saying, “The economy’s losing eight hundred thousand jobs a month. The stock market’s in free fall. The foreclosure crisis is out of control. Businesses are closing their doors across the country. I’m going home to Texas. Good luck!”
Then he left, only to pop his head back in: “Oh, and there’s still a war going on. Maybe a couple? Not sure.” Then he headed for the helicopter. “Oh, hey!” he shouted over the roar of the propellers. “That bin Laden guy? Never gonna find him. Anyway, I’m outta here!”
Then he and Laura flew away, waving goodbye to an economy he had left in ruins.
The timing mattered not just because the most devastating effects of a recession caused by Bush’s policies were about to be felt under Obama’s watch, but because the delay in the impact of the recession gave Republicans just enough wiggle room to play politics with it.
Of course, while ordinary Americans were just beginning to realize how bad things were getting, economists had already issued dire warnings that if dramatic action wasn’t taken, the Great Recession could turn into Another Great Depression. The numbers were scary. And the solution was clear: an emergency stimulus package that could put people back to work quickly, build shovel-
ready infrastructure projects, and rescue state and local governments that were shedding teachers and other workers who were delivering desperately needed services.
Economists agreed that in order to be effective, this stimulus would need to be massive—at least a trillion dollars. But political scientists agreed that Democrats only had fifty-nine votes. And one of those votes (me) was, at the time, stuck in recount hell. Which meant in order to get the sixty votes necessary to break Mitch McConnell’s filibuster and proceed to an actual vote on the stimulus, President Obama would need two Republicans.
Desperate to find just two Republicans willing to help him save the economy, President Obama had to make compromise after compromise, eventually reducing the total package to $787 billion. On top of that, a couple hundred billion was diverted away from the direct spending economists were calling for and instead used to cut taxes for individuals and businesses. That’s what it took to get Arlen Specter (who would soon defect to the Democratic caucus) and Maine’s two moderate senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, on board.
Thanks to those three—and not one other Republican—the stimulus package barely broke Mitch McConnell’s filibuster and passed in the Senate over the hysterical denunciations of the rest of the Republican caucus.
And then, when it went to the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had to pass it all by themselves. It received not one single Republican vote, which Republicans celebrated like they’d just won the Super Bowl (a few of them even lit a cop car on fire).
And then, having enjoyed making a big show out of refusing to help the president succeed, Republicans then turned to making a big show out of complaining that he had failed.
In reality, he hadn’t. The stimulus kept us from falling into Another Great Depression, and created millions of jobs. But it took a while to kick in, and it wasn’t as strong as President Obama and Democrats wanted (or as economists had called for). It’s hard to get people excited about avoiding a hypothetical depression when you’re slowly muddling through a huge recession. The economy didn’t feel very stimulated. So it was very easy for Republicans to win the “messaging fight.”
At a caucus meeting months later, Harry Reid reminded us Democrats that the stimulus had included the biggest middle-class tax cut in history (true). Sherrod Brown leaned over to me and grumbled sarcastically, “Yeah, I get thanked for that every day.” People had no idea. Because while the Bush administration had celebrated its 2001 tax cut by mailing taxpayers a letter (at taxpayer expense) announcing it, this time Americans simply had a little less withheld in every paycheck.
Meanwhile, the construction jobs, the infrastructure upgrades, the “shovel-ready” projects all across the country? The Obama administration put up signs at all these sites—but the signs read, “Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” The what?
Democrats always have a disadvantage in messaging—not because we’re idiots, but because we have complex ideas and, sometimes, a hard time explaining them succinctly. Our bumper stickers always end with “continued on next bumper sticker.” And by the time I got to the Senate in July, Republicans were giddily (and successfully) blaming the still-sluggish economy on “Obama’s failed stimulus.” Which didn’t stop them from simultaneously taking credit for stimulus projects in their districts, grinning widely for photo ops at groundbreakings and, later, ribbon-cuttings.
Not long after I got into office, I went to a groundbreaking ceremony in Maple Grove for a three-mile, $47 million extension of Minnesota State Highway 610 made possible by an infusion of $27 million in stimulus funds. There were about a dozen public officials there—a few state legislators, a mayor or two, some county commissioners, and Senator Klobuchar and me. I was surprised to see Minnesota’s 3rd District Republican congressman, Erik Paulsen, who, like every House Republican, had voted against the stimulus, smiling under his hard hat.
When I got up to speak, I said, “Well, I certainly don’t deserve any credit for this. I got to the Senate after the stimulus was passed. I guess we should thank the members of Congress here who voted for the stimulus.”
I looked down the line of hard hats, and said, “Okay, there’s Amy Klobuchar. Let’s hear it for Amy!” Applause. “And… let’s see,” I continued, looking directly at Representative Paulsen. “Well… I guess just Amy.”
Meanwhile, presiding over the Senate, I heard Republican senators claim that the only jobs created by the stimulus had been for federal bureaucrats. Presumably these included federal bureaucrats who had moved to Minnesota to operate the excavators, bulldozers, compacters, and pavers to build the three-mile extension of Highway 610.
The stimulus had been a successful test run of the Republican strategy: Abdicate their responsibility to govern, obstruct the president’s agenda, complain that things weren’t getting better, and wait for Americans to get fed up so they could profit politically at his expense. Operation Curdle was well under way. And any notion of building a better politics, any hope of “changing the tone in Washington,” was quickly erased.
Soon after I walked into this mess, I asked a few of my veteran colleagues if it had ever been this bad. Sure, a couple of them said. Remember that guy who almost got caned to death on the Senate floor?
“Charles Sumner?”
“Yeah. That’s the guy.”
So the one time that anyone could think of when it was this bad was the near-fatal beating of a sitting senator in the lead-up to the Civil War and the deaths of more than six hundred thousand Americans?
But then again, that was the summer of 2009. It actually got worse from there.
That September, a South Carolina Republican congressman named Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama during an address to a joint session of Congress, shouting, “You lie!”
It was a pretty shocking breach of protocol. But over the next four days, Wilson took in a million bucks in campaign donations. Stuff like this was already becoming par for the course. Republicans had already decided to disregard President Obama’s mandate—and some were even going so far as to question his legitimacy.
After listening to one too many examples of a sitting congressman fanning the flames of the “birther” myth, I told Drew that I wanted the Capitol Police to install a special metal detector before the State of the Union address for any member of Congress who didn’t believe the president was born in the United States.
Drew thought I was joking. I was—I think. But I made a serious case. If you believed that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, I reasoned, it meant two things: One, you were generally insane, and two, you believed that the president was a usurper. Exactly the sort of people who should get wanded before being allowed into a room with the guy.
“You can’t do that,” said Drew.
“Okay,” I said. “But if one of these guys plugs the president, you’re going to feel pretty stupid.”
Republicans made huge gains in the 2010 midterms, seizing the majority in the House and picking up six seats in the Senate.
Worse, these gains were powered, and the new House majority controlled, by the ascendant Tea Party. These folks weren’t just extremely conservative. They were openly uninterested in actual governing. They saw themselves not as legislators, but as revolutionaries. More than a few of them were just plain nuts. All year, they’d been raising hell at town hall meetings, complaining about everything from the Affordable Care Act (more about this in a bit) to the president’s secret Muslim heritage (more about this, I’m guessing, in Donald Trump’s presidential memoir). Now they had come to Washington—and, what’s more, they were clearly running the show.
At the 2011 State of the Union, I walked in with Rand Paul, the libertarian new senator from Kentucky who had chosen me to be his mentor.* I gave him some mentorly advice: “Rand, if the president says something you don’t like, your job is to stand up and yell, ‘You lie!’”
He laughed—but then added, “Actually, you know, that would be pretty good for fund-raising.”
The chamber was crowded, and I had to scramble to find a seat. Winding up next to Marco Rubio, another new Republican senator, I tried my joke again. “Marco, some advice: If the president says something you disagree with, get up and yell, ‘You lie!’”
Chuckling, Marco responded, “That’d be great for fund-raising.”
I turned to my other side and poked Saxby Chambliss, a veteran Republican. “Saxby,” I said, “I just told Marco that if the president says something he doesn’t like, he should get up and yell, ‘You lie!’”
Saxby laughed and said, “Not a bad fund-raising tactic.”
The message had clearly gotten through to Republicans, even the noncrazy ones. Not only were they not being punished for the strategy they’d embarked upon at the beginning of President Obama’s term, but they were being rewarded for it by a conservative base hell-bent on destroying the guy. And so instead of trying to tamp down the most extreme elements of their party, Republicans indulged them time and time again, sometimes even egging them on by promising victories that they knew were impossible, just to keep them on board and engaged.
This dynamic manifested itself in years of ugly brinksmanship. For example: Raising the debt ceiling had always been relatively routine, but with the Tea Party pulling House Speaker John Boehner’s strings, it became an opportunity to take the fiscal future of the country hostage. Sign Paul Ryan’s radical austerity budget into law, they threatened, or we’ll force America to default on its debt for the first time ever.
That’s what these guys were about. As my friend Norm Ornstein (the guy who played “Norm Ornstein” for Indecision ’92) and his less funny colleague Tom Mann would later write in their book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, this new Republican Party was “an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
