by Brian Abrams
JENNIFER GRANHOLM
All of the factories were shutting down before the president took office. The suppliers were not getting orders. Nobody was loaning to the suppliers . . . Our [state’s] unemployment rate was [10.1 to 12.2] percent. This was December-January-February that we were just in the middle of this unbelievable vortex.
JOHN DINGELL
The one company they couldn’t make walk and do well was Chrysler. Chrysler first fell in the hands of the German company,30 and that German company sucked ’em dry with their large technology and then said, You’re on your own.
BRIAN DEESE
With respect to Chrysler, there was more acceptance of the reality of their dire circumstances, in part because Chrysler had been in a much more precarious operating state for a longer period of time. They recognized that they were in a really tough bind. They needed a partner, and they were struggling to find one. And so, with Chrysler, it was more an acknowledgment of the straits but not having many cards on the table in terms of alternative plans that might work.
GENE SPERLING
I didn’t live the auto rescue every moment of the day like Brian did, but we would consult almost every day. He said that there was no way there would be a Big Three—that it’s not going to happen—then he said, “There’s just one slim possibility that somehow, in the next couple of months, there would be a potential merger partner with Chrysler.” So, you were having somebody tell you something deeply scary and then telling you that there was one potential way out. That one potential way out started to emerge with Fiat.
STEVEN RATTNER
Lead Advisor, Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry (2009)
We were simultaneously fielding inquiries from people who wanted to partner with Chrysler or, for that matter, GM, as well as deciding what to do about them. Chrysler was a marginal case, and there was a very spirited discussion about whether a number-three competitor that was in a weakened stage should be saved or not. But at the same time, we were in parallel talks with Sergio Marchionne [of Fiat] about his ideas for an alliance or an affiliation or whatever you wanna call it.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
The whole industry was about the SAAR, and that’s basically just, “What’s the total sales of cars in the nation, in the aggregate?” The SAAR was averaging about sixteen million a year through the 2000s and then, in the recession, it went down to the lowest in decades.31 So then the question was, What is the national sales of cars going to go back to? If it’s going to go back to sixteen million a year, then it’s conceivable to have all three of those companies, if they could get their costs down enough and be viable. But if you thought it would come back to, let’s say, twelve million, then it’s not at all clear that there’s enough space to preserve three companies. If you insisted on keeping Chrysler alive, you might actually endanger Ford and GM.
BARNEY FRANK
I was supportive of using the TARP money for the auto bailout.
JARED BERNSTEIN
It was pretty clear that the public didn’t always distinguish between the Recovery Act and TARP, and TARP was pretty unpopular. So there was some nervousness there. Some real dissension built up after that.
BARNEY FRANK
There was increasing resentment, and that was the problem of the [home] foreclosures . . . When you had Santelli go on television . . . what you had was this anger because, even with foreclosures, most of those people were paying off their mortgages.32 And it was also true that some of the people facing foreclosures had been irresponsible. People took out home-equity loans to buy boats because the value of their houses went up, so it became politically impossible to use any public funds to alleviate foreclosures, and I saw great resentment, misunderstanding about what we were doing with the banks with TARP . . . The critical point came when AIG announced that it was giving bonuses to the very people who had incurred the huge losses. I had never seen such anger on the part of the public. They were out there with their knives and pitchforks and torches. I understood. It was March of ’09 when I realized we were getting the blame for all of this.
GLENN NYE
Because of the Great Recession, because of the rawness that was created among the American people, their worries about their jobs, whether they were going to be able to pay their mortgages tomorrow, it was a very difficult time . . . I think, sadly, Republicans capitalized on that worry and turned it into cynicism. They created a really difficult political well for Democrats to climb out of.
BARNEY FRANK
That, I thought, was the turning point. All of us were in a panic trying to alleviate the anger at government. We were in power when [the bailouts] happened, even though the decisions were made in the Bush administration. Today, if you ask people who’s responsible for bailouts, “It’s the Democrats!” All five bailouts were started by Bush,33 but the anger over that, and particularly the AIG bonuses, just sunk us. That’s a major reason why Chris Dodd couldn’t run again. He was unfairly blamed for that.
CHRIS DODD
I was hardly the guy who’s going to argue with the administration about what they wanted to do. The point is, these things happen. It’s not unique. I realize they had a point of view that they were trying to get the things done, and I paid the price for it.
BARNEY FRANK
[The media] got it backwards. Chris originally founded the [Recovery Act] amendment to ban the bonuses retroactively, and Treasury said to him that you couldn’t do that constitutionally. Unfortunately, they were right. So Chris said, All right, I’ll do the best I can. Let’s ban any more being included, and then he was totally unfairly accused of having legitimized the retroactive ones which he wanted to get rid of but couldn’t constitutionally. It was a totally unfair accusation against him—absolutely ass-backwards.
CHRIS DODD
It’s not complicated. Tim Geithner felt that there were constitutional issues on a clawback. We disagreed. And I recall very vividly going to some meeting in the basement of the Dirksen garage, and my old friend Rahm Emanuel called—he spent fifteen minutes working for me back in 1992—and we had a shouting match. Rahm was arguing very strenuously that he wanted that whole [retroactive] provision out, and I vehemently disagreed. Anyway, the administration didn’t give up and, unbeknown to me entirely, they convinced a person on the [Senate Banking Committee] staff to delete a section of that sentence of the amendment. I never knew about it.
ED SILVERMAN
Staff Director, US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (2009–2011)
I wasn’t there during the AIG thing. I had been Chris’s chief of staff back in the ’80s and had gone off to the private sector. I didn’t come back to the committee until April of 2009, although once I got back, I did try and piece it together. It was a staff guy, who will remain nameless, who basically acquiesced to the Treasury. We were, quite frankly, in between staff directors. So the committee was not functioning well, and certainly not with anybody in charge who was aligned with Senator Dodd.
NICK SHAPIRO
The tone was really set by Rahm. He was the chief of staff on day one. Most of us hadn’t worked in the White House before.
JOE LIEBERMAN
Rahm knew Congress. He knew how to cajole and coerce and swear at you, laugh with you, whatever, and he made a big difference.
JEN PSAKI
Deputy Communications Director, White House (2009–2011)
Traveling Press Secretary and Senior Advisor, Obama for America (2012)
Spokesperson, US Department of State (2013–2015)
Communications Director, White House (2015–2017)
You know, I loved working for Rahm. That wasn’t the case for everybody, but he was completely straightforward and a straight shooter. He would come to you—this was so abnormal for a chief of staff—come into [your] office and say, “What the F is happening with” whatever it was, and he’d do that to people around the building. He would go directly to the person who he thought knew the most about wh
atever it was. Now, that wasn’t always the most senior person in every department, which ruffled some feathers, but that was his style. And, you know, there were always reports about how he offended people. He never offended me.
DANIELLE CRUTCHFIELD
Director of Scheduling, White House (2009–2014)
If you ask any White House staffer, their jargon’s pretty similar.
JIM MESSINA
Very early on, we both found respect for each other. I’d heard of the great Rahm Emanuel, but I didn’t realize how deep he was on the issues. I remember one of the first [Office of Health Reform Director] Nancy-Ann DeParle health-care briefings, Rahm got way into the weeds. The very first weekend of the administration, I read his book and was like, Holy shit, he really knows this stuff. And he could see how well I knew those guys [in the Senate] and how close I was to them. He could also tell that I was on Obama’s side. I just wasn’t going to be a whore for the Senate Dems.
TOM DASCHLE
The president was accused of being somewhat naive, but I really felt he could break the mold and, by his own deportment, set an example that would ultimately catch on and help create a new climate. After he got elected, we were in the room with him on many occasions when deciding how to position his administration on health care. He got a lot of advice to start on the left and recognized that, as time went on, he would have to compromise and move to the middle. I remember how determined he was to demonstrate his good faith by actually doing something incredibly counterintuitive, to take the 1993 Heritage Foundation draft and use that as his opening bid for health reform.34 He thought it would make a statement with an exclamation point about his desire for bipartisanship.
VALERIE JARRETT
What President Obama set out to do was what seven presidents before him had been incapable of doing. Many were concerned about the political risk of doing something like that, particularly when we were faced with a challenging economy. There were folks who thought, when it was hard, that perhaps we should compromise, and many thought we would never get bipartisan support, so why bother?
CHRIS DODD
Rahm Emanuel, again, was rather outspoken. He thought it was a mistake to take on health care—in light of all the other issues, dealing with the collapsing economy, that we took on too much. So there was an internal debate in the White House about whether or not it should be a slimmed-down bill or a larger bill. Teddy [Kennedy] was really in many ways the spiritual leader.
RAHM EMANUEL
This will be the thirtieth time I’m going to correct the record, even though it was written contemporaneously at the time. I said to the president, which was what he asked for, “Look, this has been tried for a hundred years. It’s going to be a lot of politics—political capital that you won’t get back—and there will be a lot of time, given the robustness of the agenda. Time is the most valuable asset you have, because of your political standing.”
DAVID AXELROD
I was conflicted, because I have a child with a chronic illness. I almost went bankrupt because of flaws in our insurance system, and yet, as his political advisor, I was frightened about taking it on, particularly in the midst of everything else. But when we had this discussion, he said, “If we don’t do this in the first two years, it probably won’t get done. If it doesn’t get done, we’re going to continue to have this runaway health-care inflation. We’re going to have tens of millions more without coverage, and the whole thing will implode.” And he looked at me and said, “What are we here for? Are we here to put our approval rating on the shelf for eight years and admire it, or are we here to draw down on that capital and do things that are important for the long term?”
RAHM EMANUEL
I said early on, “If we’re going to go all in, go in with a big universal. But, given the complexities, you should have [another plan] in the drawer.” This had come from my Clinton days. If you look at history, the successful plans were the ones that universalized populations: Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for poor, veterans, children’s health care. And I said, “My recommendation is, there may be a point in time we’re going to want to do back-offs.” I said, “I would universalize small business and family. [It’s] smaller, cheaper, more affordable, and you’ll get in and out of it, and you’ll have the political capital to do other things.” It was not like “Don’t do health care.”
ROB ANDREWS
D-New Jersey, First District, US House of Representatives (1990–2014)
The public side of it would have been when the president held a White House summit, and Senator Kennedy made a dramatic appearance at that.35 He was ill at the time but wanted to indicate his support. But the private work really started in the House where Speaker Pelosi decided to convene three committees to meet on essentially a weekly basis, and the staff would work around the clock. And that, of course, was the Ways and Means Committee, at the time chaired by Charlie Rangel; it was Energy and Commerce, chaired by Henry Waxman; and Education and Labor, chaired by George Miller. I was the subcommittee chairman under George Miller that had the health jurisdiction for Education and Labor.
DAVID BOWEN
In the spring of 2009, I distinctly remember sitting at a table by a window in our then temporary offices in a Russell courtyard and having this moment of realization of what a privilege it was to take a blank sheet of paper and start the process—obviously, there were many others involved—but to start the process of what became the Affordable Care Act.
ROB ANDREWS
We would meet at least once a week—the three committees—usually in a room off of the House floor. The staff would talk about the policy choices that were incumbent in making that decision. That was a process that began in March of ’09 and came to ultimate fruition in either late June or early July of ’09. Where that group, the so-called Tri-Committee Group, decided it would sign off on a draft.
DAVID BOWEN
We had talked to a lot of people. We had done a lot of thinking. One of the [realizations] we made vis-à-vis the Clinton effort in ’93 was that their effort was viewed, perhaps mischaracterized, as kind of sweeping away the former structure of health care and replacing it with something new. We consciously decided to build on the existing structure, because one of the things that sank the Clinton effort in ’93 was this organized attack [claiming] that it would take away what you had. There’s this funny duality in people’s minds, like they hate Congress but they’re a member of Congress—they sort of hate the health system, but most, especially those with employer-based health care, are generally satisfied with the coverage they have and are loath to change it.
BARBARA LEE
D-California, Ninth District, US House of Representatives (1998–2013)
D-California, Thirteenth District, US House of Representatives (2013– )
I was chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and we put together what we called the “Quad Caucus.” It was the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Progressive Caucus. And we wrote to the president and Speaker Pelosi and laid out our principles, what we wanted to see in the bill. I led the effort in the negotiations to get our health disparities based on race and ethnicity [addressed] as part of the Affordable Care Act and expanded the Office of Minority Health.
DAVID BOWEN
So what we did to build on this structure of the current system was the Medicaid expansion—to expand Medicaid as the floor, and build from that with existing employer-based coverage. Plus the ACA exchanges would act as regulated marketplaces along the lines of—ironically, in retrospect—the Mitt Romney bipartisan bill only in Massachusetts.36 So, coming back to that moment where I was sitting with a cappuccino and a blank piece of paper, I wasn’t making things up from a blank slate. I had a sense of what we wanted to do, and literally the first thing I wrote was a table of contents. That was the framework.
CECILIA MUÑOZ
Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, White House (2009–2012)
Direc
tor, Domestic Policy Council, White House (2012–2017)
One of the reasons, ultimately, that health-care [legislation] moved in the way that it did was because of our deep understanding that health care was essential to fixing the economy—that the cost of health care, both to the government and the people, was unsustainable and was a huge drag on the economy . . . It was not a given that immigration reform was low on the list. In fact, it was high on the president’s list.
President Obama meets with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the State Dining Room, March 18, 2009. Pete Souza, White House
LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
He wasn’t thinking about immigration. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s first meeting with Obama at the White House, I brought about three of those banker boxes, because I’d gone and collected petitions in Providence, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago. Obama. Keep your promise. Immigration reform. Keep the families together. He’s not too happy. Here’s exactly what he said to me: “Luis, I’m gonna assign that to Rahm Emanuel,” which basically meant, “This is bullshit to me,” and on that day, he called me to the side. He said, “You’re from Chicago. I’m from Chicago. We should be working together. You shouldn’t be getting on my ass all of the time.”
JARED BERNSTEIN
There was no space between Obama and myself on issues around the Recovery Act or the need for Keynesian stimulus. Most notably where I saw this was around the auto sector. There were a lot of people, even on the economic team, who were pushing him not to bail out the auto sector. They just felt that was an economic mistake. A number of us pushed in the other direction.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
So the vote that took place at the [National Economic Council] meeting in Larry’s office was about the narrow question of Two years from now, if we do this, where will Chrysler be, alive or dead? And it’s fifty-fifty whether Chrysler could survive or not if they got the money. That became the question: Do you think we should do this? We went back and forth.
