by Obama Barack
It was out of both temperament and necessity, then, that Crist agreed to introduce me at the town hall and publicly endorse the stimulus bill. Despite the fact that home values in Fort Myers had dropped about 67 percent (with a full 12 percent of houses in foreclosure), the crowd was raucous and energized that day, mostly Democratic and still swept up in what Sarah Palin would later call the “hopey, changey stuff.” After Crist offered up a reasonable, somewhat cautious explanation of why he supported the Recovery Act, pointing out its benefits for Florida and the need for elected officials to put people before party politics, I gave the governor what was my standard “bro hug”—a handshake, an arm around the back for a pat, an appreciative look in the eye, a thank-you in the ear.
Poor Charlie. How could I know that my two-second gesture would prove to be a political kiss of death for him? Within days of the rally, footage of “the hug”—accompanied by calls for Crist’s head—began appearing in right-wing media outlets. In a matter of months, Crist went from a Republican star to a pariah. He was called a poster child for appeasement, the kind of weak-kneed, opportunistic RINO who needed to be made an example of. It would take time for the whole thing to play out: In the 2010 U.S. Senate race, Crist was forced to run as an independent and got clobbered by conservative upstart Marco Rubio; Crist eventually mounted a political comeback only by switching parties and winning one of Florida’s congressional seats as a Democrat. Nevertheless, the immediate lesson was not lost on congressional Republicans.
Cooperate with the Obama administration at your own peril.
And if you have to shake his hand, make sure you don’t look happy about it.
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LOOKING BACK, IT’S hard for me not to fixate on the political dynamics that unfolded in those first weeks of my presidency—how quickly Republican resistance hardened, independent of anything we said or did, and how thoroughly that resistance colored the way the press and ultimately the public viewed the substance of our actions. After all, those dynamics set the course for so much of what happened in the months and years that followed, a cleaving of America’s political sensibilities that we are still dealing with a decade later.
But in February 2009, I was obsessed with the economy, not politics. So it’s worth pointing out a relevant piece of information that I omitted from the Charlie Crist story: A few minutes before I walked out onstage to give him that hug, I got a call from Rahm letting me know that the Recovery Act had just cleared the Senate, assuring the legislation’s eventual passage through Congress.
How we got it done can’t be considered a model for the new brand of politics I’d promised on the campaign trail. It was old-school. Once the House vote made clear that a broadly bipartisan bill wasn’t in the cards, our focus narrowed to securing 61 Senate votes—61 because no Republican senator could afford to be tagged as the sole vote that put Obama’s bill over the top. In the radioactive atmosphere McConnell had orchestrated, the only Republicans even willing to consider supporting us were three self-identified moderates from states in which I’d won handily: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Those three, along with Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska—the unofficial spokesman for the half dozen Democrats from conservative states whose priority on every controversial issue was to position themselves somewhere, anywhere, to the right of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, thereby winning the prized label of “centrist” from Washington pundits—became the gatekeepers through which the Recovery Act had to pass. And none of these four senators were shy about charging a hefty toll.
Specter, who had already battled two bouts of cancer, insisted that $10 billion of the Recovery Act go to the National Institutes of Health. Collins demanded the bill be stripped of dollars for school construction and that it include an “AMT patch”—a tax provision that prevented upper-middle-class Americans from paying a higher tax bill. Nelson wanted extra Medicaid money for rural states. Even as their priorities added billions, the group insisted that the overall bill had to come in under $800 billion, because any figure higher than that just seemed “too much.”
As far as we could tell, there was no economic logic to any of this, just political positioning and a classic squeeze play by politicians who knew they had leverage. But this truth went largely unnoticed; as far as the Washington press corps was concerned, the mere fact that the four senators were working in “bipartisan” fashion signified Solomonic wisdom and reason. Meanwhile, liberal Dems, particularly in the House, were furious with me for letting a “Gang of Four” effectively determine the final contents of the bill. Some went so far as to suggest that I barnstorm against Snowe, Collins, Specter, and Nelson in their home states until they relinquished their “ransom” demands. I told them this wasn’t going to happen, having calculated (with concurrence from Joe, Rahm, Phil, Harry, and Nancy) that strong-arming tactics would likely backfire—and also shut the door on getting the quartet’s cooperation on any other bill I might try to pass in the future.
Anyway, the clock was ticking; or, as Axe later described it, the house was burning and those four senators had the only fire hose. After a week of negotiations (and plenty of cajoling, pestering, and hand-holding of the senators by me, Rahm, and especially Joe), an agreement was reached. The Gang of Four mostly got what they wanted. In return, we got their votes, while retaining almost 90 percent of the stimulus measures we’d originally proposed. Other than the votes of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, the modified, 1,073-page bill passed both the House and the Senate strictly along party lines. And less than a month after I took office, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was ready for me to sign into law.
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THE SIGNING CEREMONY took place before a small crowd at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We had asked the CEO of an employee-owned solar energy company to introduce me; and as I listened to him describe what the Recovery Act would mean to his business—the layoffs averted, the new workers he’d hire, the green economy he hoped to promote—I did my best to savor the moment.
By any conventional yardstick, I was about to sign historic legislation: a recovery effort comparable in size to FDR’s New Deal. The stimulus package wouldn’t just boost aggregate demand. It would help millions weather the economic storm, extending unemployment insurance for the jobless, food assistance for the hungry, and medical care for those whose lives had been upended; supply the broadest onetime tax cut for middle-class and working-poor families since Reagan; and provide the nation’s infrastructure and transportation systems the biggest infusion of new spending since the Eisenhower administration.
That’s not all. Without losing our focus on short-term stimulus and job creation, the Recovery Act would also put a massive down payment on campaign commitments I’d made to modernize the economy. It promised to transform the energy sector, with an unprecedented investment in clean energy development and efficiency programs. It would finance one of the largest and most ambitious education reform agendas in a generation. It would spur on the transition to electronic medical records, which had the potential to revolutionize America’s healthcare system; and it would extend broadband access to classrooms and rural areas that had been previously shut out of the information superhighway.
Any one of these items, if passed as a stand-alone bill, would qualify as a major achievement for a presidential administration. Taken together, they might represent the successful work of an entire first term.
Still, after I toured the solar panels on the museum’s rooftop, stepped up to the podium, and thanked the vice president and my team for making it all happen under extreme pressure; after I expressed my appreciation for those in Congress who’d helped get the bill over the finish line; after I used my multiple pens to sign the Recovery Act into law, shook everybody’s hand, and gave a few interviews—after all that, as I finally found myself alone in the back of the Beast, the main emotion I
felt was not triumph but deep relief.
Or, more accurately, relief with a heavy dose of foreboding.
If it was true that we had gotten a couple of years’ worth of work done in a month, we had also spent down a couple of years’ worth of political capital just as fast. It was hard to deny, for example, that McConnell and Boehner had clobbered us on the messaging front. Their relentless attacks continued to shape coverage of the Recovery Act, with the press trumpeting every spurious accusation of waste and malfeasance. Some pundits embraced the GOP-driven narratives that I had failed to reach out enough to Republicans in shaping the bill, thereby breaking my promise to govern in a bipartisan fashion. Others suggested that our agreement with Collins, Nelson, Snowe, and Specter represented cynical Washington horse-trading rather than “change we can believe in.”
Public support for the Recovery Act had grown over the weeks it had taken to pass the bill. But soon enough, the noise would have an impact, reversing that trend. Meanwhile, a decent portion of my own Democratic base—still flush with election-night hubris and agitated by Republican unwillingness to roll over and play dead—seemed less content with everything we’d managed to get into the Recovery Act than mad about the much smaller number of things we’d had to give up. Liberal commentators insisted that if I had shown more spine in resisting the Gang of Four’s demands, the stimulus would have been bigger. (This despite the fact that it was twice as big as what many of these commentators had been calling for just a few weeks earlier.) Women’s groups were unhappy about the contraception provisions that had been removed. Transportation groups complained that the increase in mass transit dollars wasn’t all they had sought. Environmentalists seemed to be spending more time objecting to the small fraction of funding that went to clean coal projects than celebrating the Recovery Act’s massive investment in renewable energy.
Between Republican attacks and Democratic complaints, I was reminded of the Yeats poem “The Second Coming”: My supporters lacked all conviction, while my opponents were full of passionate intensity.
None of this would have worried me if passing the Recovery Act was all we needed to do to get the economy to start working again. I was confident that we could effectively implement the legislation and prove our critics wrong. I knew that Democratic voters would stick with me for the long haul, and my own poll numbers with the general public remained high.
The problem was that we still had at least three or four more big moves to make in order to end the crisis, each one just as urgent, each one just as controversial, each one just as hard to pull off. It was as if, having ascended the face of a big mountain, I now found myself looking out over a series of successively more perilous peaks—while realizing that I had twisted an ankle, bad weather was coming, and I’d used up half my supplies.
I didn’t share these feelings with anyone on my team; they were frazzled enough as it was. Suck it up, I told myself. Tighten your laces. Cut your rations.
Keep moving.
CHAPTER 12
Dear President Obama,
Today I was informed that effective June 30, 2009, I will join the rapidly growing number of unemployed in this country…
As I tucked my children into bed tonight, fighting the panic that is threatening to consume me, I realized that as a parent, I will not have the opportunity that my parents had. I cannot look at my children and tell them honestly that if you work hard enough and sacrifice enough, then anything is possible. I have learned today that you can make all the right choices, do all the right things, and it still might not be enough, because your government has failed you.
Although my government has been talking quite a bit about protecting and helping middle America, what I have seen has been to the contrary. I see a government that has been catering to lobbyists and special interest groups. I see billions of dollars that are being spent on bailouts for financial institutions…
Thank you for allowing me to voice just a few of my thoughts on this emotional night.
Sincerely,
Nicole Brandon
Virginia
IT SEEMED LIKE I READ two or three letters like this every night. I’d slip them back into the folder they had come in, adding it to the high pile of papers on the desk. On that particular night, the face of the Treaty Room’s grandfather clock read one in the morning. I rubbed my eyes, decided I needed a better reading lamp, and glanced up at the massive oil painting hanging over the heavy leather couch. It depicted a stern, portly President McKinley standing like a bushy-eyebrowed headmaster while a group of mustached men signed the treaty ending the Spanish-American War in 1898, all of them gathered around the very table where I now sat. It was a fine piece for a museum, but less than ideal for what was now my home office; I made a note to myself to have it replaced with something more contemporary.
Other than the five minutes I’d spent walking across the hall to tuck in the girls and kiss Michelle good night, I’d been planted in my chair since dinnertime, the same way I was just about every night of the week. For me, these were often the quietest and most productive hours of the day, a time when I could catch up on work and prepare myself for whatever was coming next, poring over the stacks of material my staff secretary sent up to the residence for my review. The latest economic data. Decision memos. Informational memos. Intelligence briefings. Legislative proposals. Drafts of speeches. Press conference talking points.
I felt the seriousness of my job most acutely when reading letters from constituents. I received a nightly batch of ten—some written in longhand, others printed-out emails—arranged neatly in a purple folder. They were often the last thing I looked at before going to bed.
It had been my idea, the letters, one that came to me on my second day in office. I figured that taking in a steady dose of constituent mail would be an efficient way for me to reach outside the presidential bubble and hear directly from those I served. The letters were like an IV drip from the real world, an everyday reminder of the covenant I now had with the American people, the trust I carried, and the human impact of each decision I made. I insisted on seeing a representative cross section. (“I don’t just want a bunch of happy-talk stuff from supporters,” I told Pete Rouse, who was now a senior advisor and the West Wing’s resident Yoda.) Other than that, we left it up to our Correspondence Office to choose which of the ten thousand or so letters and emails that flowed into the White House daily went into the folder.
For the first week, what I read was mostly feel-good stuff: notes of congratulations, people telling me how inspired they’d been on Inauguration Day, kids with suggestions for legislation (“You should pass a law to cut down on the amount of homework”).
But as weeks went by, the letters became more somber. A man who had worked at the same job for twenty years described the shame he felt when he had to tell his wife and kids he’d been laid off. A woman wrote after the bank foreclosed on her home; she was worried that if she didn’t get immediate help, she’d end up on the streets. A student had dropped out of college; his financial aid had run out, and he was moving back into his parents’ house. Some letters offered detailed policy recommendations. Others were written in anger (“Why hasn’t your Justice Department thrown any of these Wall Street crooks in jail?”) or with quiet resignation (“I doubt you’ll ever read this, but I thought you should know we are hurting out here”).
Most often they were urgent appeals for help, and I would write back on a note card embossed with the presidential seal, explaining the steps we were taking to get the economy moving again, offering whatever encouragement I could. I would then mark the original letter with instructions for my staff. “See if Treasury can check with the bank about a refinancing option,” I’d write. Or “Does the VA have a loan program for vets in this situation?” Or simply, “Can we help?”
This would usually be enough to focus the attention of the relevant agency. The letter w
riter would be contacted. Days or weeks later, I’d receive a follow-up memo explaining the actions taken on their behalf. Sometimes people would get the relief they had sought—their home temporarily saved, a spot in an apprenticeship program.
Still, it was hard to take any satisfaction from individual cases. I knew that each letter represented the desperation of millions across the country, people counting on me to save their jobs or their homes, to restore whatever sense of security they had once felt. No matter how hard my team and I worked, no matter how many initiatives we put into place or how many speeches I gave, there was no getting around the damning, indisputable facts.
Three months into my presidency, more people were suffering than when I began, and no one—including me—could be sure relief was in sight.
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ON FEBRUARY 18, the day after I signed the Recovery Act, I flew to Mesa, Arizona, to announce our plan to deal with the collapsing housing market. Other than job loss, no aspect of the economic crisis had a more direct impact on ordinary people. With more than three million homes having gone into some stage of foreclosure in 2008, another eight million were now at risk. Over the final three months of the year, home prices fell almost 20 percent, meaning that even families who could manage their payments suddenly found themselves “underwater”—their house worth less than they owed, their primary investment and nest egg now a millstone of debt around their necks.
