Obama- An Oral History
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I liked the fact that those laws hadn’t been updated in half a century, and I was tired of banks acting like casinos. But I never liked that [Dodd-Frank gave] the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unlimited power with no check and balance, like a runaway freight train, and I didn’t like community banks and credit unions being treated like the big Wall Street banks. It would put them out of business. The overregulation’s out of control, and the hope was I would get reelected. I hoped to get on the Banking Committee and make it better.
TED KAUFMAN
There’re a lot of good things in Dodd-Frank. We got the Volcker amendment,84 but in terms of the banks, on how to stop “too big to fail,” we didn’t do anything, as far as I was concerned. Brown-Kaufman didn’t pass because the administration came out against it.85 Again, the administration [had been] so focused on pulling out of [the recession], they didn’t want to put more financial burdens on the banks. That’s really what it came down to. The Brown-Kaufman amendment would have required the banks to hold more assets and better assets, [a proposal] which had been accused of breaking up the banks and may well have broken up some. They weren’t going to pass that.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE
The first thing to recognize is, deposits aren’t risky. Deposits are the safest things in the system. So capping banks by You shouldn’t be able to take more than x amount of deposits was not really what the origins of the crisis were about; they’re about shadow banks, and not real banks, taking a bunch of financing other than deposits. Because we have the FDIC, deposits don’t tend to cause bank runs anymore. The second thing is, “too big to fail” was a misnomer. It wasn’t size that made them dangerous. You could have broken up Bank of America into eight pieces and every one of those eight pieces would be bigger than Bear Stearns was. But Bear Stearns was too connected to fail, because if they failed, they were gonna have this smallpox virus. Patient zero would have spread it to the next one and to the next one, and [the potential for] that domino effect was what made them so dangerous.
TED KAUFMAN
[Not passing Brown-Kaufman] was a conscious decision. So that’s the reason why. It wasn’t politics or anything else. It was just a difference of opinion about how much the economy could take and how important it was to do something so that this didn’t revisit itself at some not-too-distant place—the kind of tough medicine that we needed, based on the fact that we had the most deadly economic turnback since the Great Depression.
PETE HOEKSTRA
A battery plant in Holland, Michigan, got money out of the stimulus bill. We went to the groundbreaking, and the president showed up. It’s Ottawa County. It’s rock-solid Republican. It’s my hometown. My local mayor and folks invited me to come, and so we’re sitting in this field on our folding chairs. The president and the mayor were on the stage, and I was the only federally elected official that’s there. So I’m sitting front row on the aisle, right in front of the podium. There’s maybe 350 people there, and the president went through his nice speech, and about halfway through he made a crack somewhere along the lines of how people who didn’t vote for the stimulus bill have no problem showing up for the groundbreaking.86 I thought about walking out, but you know, it’s the president. He’s visiting here, and I had 350 pairs of eyes burrowed into the back of my head—people that I knew. They’re just wondering what I was going to do, and as soon as the president’s done, they all ran up to me. “Hey, the president just took a shot at you!”
SCOTT BROWN
Here’s the thing about the president: He blew it in terms of not spending time with any of the Democrats or House members. He just was kind of aloof. He didn’t reach out to me. I just took away the supermajority. You would think they’d call me. “Hey, good job. Let’s get together and find things.” As I told Harry Reid, I’d be the forty-first senator or the sixtieth senator. I didn’t have an agenda. I just wanted to pass good stuff.
PETE HOEKSTRA
You know what Bill Clinton would have done? Bill Clinton would have said, “I just want all of you to know how much I appreciate Pete Hoekstra, and when I need some help, I know I can count on Pete Hoekstra.” And I would be waving my hand saying, “No, he can’t! He can’t count on me for anything!” But that’s the difference. Bill Clinton would not have taken the opportunity to go into somebody’s hometown and use the office of the president to slam the local politician. Bill Clinton would recognize [that] if he was there and being nice to me, he’d have 350 people saying, “Hey, Bill Clinton’s an okay guy” . . . That’s the story that always captured for me why this president was not successful in getting Congress to work with him.
BARNEY FRANK
Total and complete bullshit—it would not have made any difference. He was not warm and fuzzy, but so what? I’d never met George Bush or had a conversation with him during the whole time we were doing TARP, and I had worked closely with Hank Paulson. I had worked closely with Ben Bernanke. The only time I had talked to Bush was during that meeting in the White House when he complained to people that I was talking without being called on. It wasn’t Obama’s style, but you could not have schmoozed your way into any softening their resistance.
ROB ANDREWS
Obama was very friendly, but a more human and reserved person. The challenge of his presidency was to literally rescue the world from potential financial catastrophe, turn the economy from bleeding jobs to growing them, and reduce the deficit. Bill Clinton didn’t succeed because he could stay up all night playing cards and learn all about your district. It helped, but if he had done all those things but had a nameless agenda and no sense of where he wanted to take the country, and surrounded himself with incompetents, he would have failed.
BARBARA BOXER
My relationship with the Clintons was different, because my daughter was married to Hillary’s brother for seven, eight years. So we had kind of a familial relationship for a while. But I felt very aligned with what [President Clinton] was trying to do on most things. I did not support NAFTA. There were a couple other issues I didn’t support, but it was kind of the same thing. I was able to have my knockdown drag-out with the cabinet member. I always had this deep and abiding respect and understanding that the president of the United States literally had the world on his shoulders. So if it didn’t rise to the level of life or death, I was usually able to work everything out with the Obama team.
RAHM EMANUEL
The average stay for a chief of staff in modern times was eighteen months. I stayed twenty-one, not counting the transition, and he knew from day one that if the opportunity provided itself for me to run for office again, having given up my own electoral position, I would do that. I wanted to be mayor. He knew it. We talked about it when he asked me to be chief of staff, because he knew that, being in Congress, I was getting off a path from my own career that I wanted. So one day Mayor [Richard M.] Daley announced he wasn’t running. We talked about it. There’s not a lot of intrigue. I moved back to Chicago on October 3, I think it was.
DAVID AXELROD
I had always lived in Chicago and felt I was a better political strategist because I lived outside of Washington, where the conversation was entirely different. I used to have meetings every week or two with some of the other outside strategists, consultants, and so on who had worked on the campaign, because I felt that I was losing my touch. It’s easy to lose your touch, your feel, when you’re in that building.
GENE SPERLING
As we went into the fall of 2010, we faced a difficult issue. Even in our own party. I guess you’d call it “fiscal stimulus fatigue.” People did not support doing more at that time. And the Republicans were completely opposed to anything, and yet we were still looking at unemployment that was over 9 percent. So at that point we did start asking, instead of what were our ideal policies, what was something that could actually pass to increase demand and help real people in the next year or two?
GLENN NYE
Democrats were stuck choosing between doing things that
were pleasing to their base and things that were pleasing to independent voters. And in the political chess game, you don’t win by putting yourself in the position of choosing whether to give up your queen or your castle. You win by forcing your opponents to make that tough choice.
GENE SPERLING
We did not consider the payroll-tax cut to be one of our most effective demand policies—we didn’t think it was as effective as increasing Medicaid or infrastructure. It did feel like it would still be somewhat effective, and if this was something we could pass, shouldn’t we focus on getting something done, as opposed to saying, We’re just gonna go forward with ideal message proposals when people are suffering? That’s not being practical or trying to cut deals. That’s thinking what you can actually do in real life for millions of people.
GLENN NYE
The Republicans observed the worry among the American public, that people were having a hard time digesting a lot of things on the Democratic agenda. They just decided that the best course of action would be to ride the wave of that worry, versus doing things to alleviate the worry. They made it the Democrats’ job to explain any policy ideas instead of working to solve major problems in the country. They determined just to play into the cynicism as much as they could, and they were correct in that it really was a successful strategy for them for the 2010 election.
JAMES KVAAL
There used to be a difference between a political season and a legislating season. There was an ethic, even if it was not always carried out in practice, that there was a time to set aside the politics and legislate, and then a time to campaign. It was true that, in our system, ultimately the president was accountable for what happens, and yet he couldn’t do it without the cooperation of Congress. So you had an opposition party in Congress that had the incentive to block the president from carrying out his agenda.
JOEL BENENSON
If you went back and looked at President George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, major pieces of legislation passed with Democratic and Republican votes—not always, and not a lot of those from the [opposing] party, but enough, because the majority of the people in Congress supported them. That disappeared under President Obama. It was a new era of obstructionism, and a manipulation of the legislative process on the part of the Republicans, to deny this man normal negotiations and potential for progress that other presidents had always enjoyed across party lines.
JOHN TANNER
Mitch McConnell said his number-one priority in the United States wasn’t trying to do something about ending the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. He said “the single most important thing [we want to achieve]” was to “deny Obama a second term.”87 I’d never seen that.
STUART STEVENS
Chief Strategist, Romney-Ryan 2012
I didn’t think that was as historically as unusual as it’s made out. I knew [of] McConnell’s statement, but pretty much everybody had thought that, whenever the next person got elected. McConnell just said it out loud.
BARBARA BOXER
Mitch McConnell basically said, “My mission is to defeat the president.” The only thing I would say, I was able to get a lot done at times, but because it mattered to their states, whether it was a highway bill, a water bill, after-school care—it had nothing to do with the president. It had to do with self-interests and self-preservation.
BARBARA LEE
I worked with a variety of Republicans. You had to work issue by issue by issue and not let it get personal.
BARBARA BOXER
I did have colleagues to work with on specific issues, but they never disassociated themselves with what Mitch said, which was disappointing.
GLENN NYE
I talked to a number of Republican members in the House who complained [about] Tea Party primary challenges. So when you play with fire sometimes you get burned. I wasn’t sure I was sympathetic to their cause at that time.
MARY BONO
It was a movement that didn’t have answers. It just had anger. In a tough swing district like mine, I thought they did themselves more harm than good. No Republican was good enough, pure enough, or conservative enough.
ALLYSON SCHWARTZ
I did have a tough reelection. Nobody believed it, but there were so many members of Congress at the time in swing districts leaning Democrat. It was expensive. I won it handily at the end of the day, but I took it seriously. I was glad I did. Many members, whether they voted for the health-care law or didn’t, felt the brunt of it.
JOSH LIPSKY
On election night in 2010, I was on advance in South Korea because the president was going there the next week. As we landed we got reports from the embassy about the huge losses, sixty-three [seats] in the House.
RAHM EMANUEL
We had seats in the House level in ’06 and ’08, cumulatively, that required an extraordinary Democratic year to keep those seats. It was inevitable that you were going to lose some portion. It did not have to be as bad as it was. You could argue there were things that were done that exacerbated what, no matter what, was going to be a challenging year. You could argue there were things you could have done that would have softened it a little, but nobody will ever know.
ERIC LESSER
David [Axelrod] met with members of Congress who had lost, who had taken courageous votes on health care and on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. We always talk about beating up on people who don’t show political courage, and there’s plenty of that, but I remember pretty vividly thinking that a lot of these members stood up and took tough votes in difficult districts, in rural Virginia or in rural Ohio.
GLENN NYE
It’s funny to hear the other side of that perspective. I thought the Democratic caucus shrunk because moderates didn’t win elections. That process was really accelerated when the House Democratic leadership decided to bring really complicated cap-and-trade legislation in the middle of the Great Recession. That destroyed the political capital that the president and the Democrats had brought in after 2008.
CAROLYN MALONEY
It was horrible to lose the majority. I never would have passed the CARD Act if we did not have a majority in the House and the Senate. We never would have passed TARP without a majority in the House and the Senate. We never would have passed Dodd-Frank reforms. We never would have passed health care. Anytime you bring change, there’s always a shift back.
BARBARA LEE
Another part of it was turnout. We didn’t invest like we should, and the White House didn’t communicate clearly the impacts and achievements that the Affordable Care Act would bring. It was a convergence of a bunch of issues.
GLENN NYE
Health-care reform was much more important to the president than climate-change legislation. Had that been taken up first, things might have turned out a little bit different. A key difference between these two bills, of course, was that cap-and-trade did not have a chance to go through the Senate. Health care did. So voting on cap-and-trade was particularly damaging without the upside of still having a good chance of becoming law.
RAHM EMANUEL
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, look, health care was the main focus. Everybody knew it was the main focus.
ROB ANDREWS
I didn’t think it was the health-care bill. I thought it was outrage about the economy being in bad shape. Unemployment started to fall by late in 2010, so when people said he didn’t go after the economy first, that’s not factually correct. It just didn’t work soon enough for the Democratic majorities. The one criticism I would lodge was that they weren’t good enough at taking credit for what they did.
DAVID AXELROD
You know, we recovered more rapidly from the biggest crisis since the Great Depression than what was the average for those kinds of crises, and a lot of it had to do with the steps the president took, including the Recovery Act. But all of that was meaningless if you were one of the people who lost their jobs, one of the people whose wages were frozen. So what we learned very quickly
was, even when there were signs of progress, if you claimed too much progress, people would recoil from that. They weren’t feeling it in their own lives. It was a very tricky path to navigate.
JON FAVREAU
I just don’t know that better communication—that telling people No, no, no, no, you’re fine when they weren’t—would have fixed anything.
BARNEY FRANK
Right, I agree. He shouldn’t have said how great it was, but to say, Hey, things are terrible, but we’re trying to make them less bad? I had a slogan I wanted to use in 2010, and one of my friends actually made a bumper sticker for me: Things would have sucked more without me. But he should have been blaming [Republicans] more.
VAN JONES
The stupidity of the way that the stimulus package was marketed really hurt us. There was a little emblem next to a bunch of signs all the way across America—a worthless thing. Paid for by the Recovery Act, blah blah blah. No American had seen that symbol, before or afterward. Obama’s “Hope” campaign symbol could have been put on everything. Or it could have had a picture of Obama. Everybody would have said he was a narcissistic crazy person, but people would have seen that symbol all across the country.
JON FAVREAU
Now, it’s interesting to talk about using his picture. The Recovery Act, if we had to do that over again, should have branded that better. Every time there was a new shiny road somewhere, it should have been called “the Obama Road,” or I don’t know what we could have done. We could have figured out something, but there was a little too much bureaucracy in terms of branding of the Recovery Act.
VAN JONES
It could have been an Uncle Sam. “Brought to you by Uncle Sam.” Anything. Instead, in typical blind, deaf, and dumb DC fashion, they invented a completely different symbol that nobody had ever seen before and would never see again.
JON FAVREAU
But you’d be driving around and see, like, a bunch of construction that would stop traffic, and it’s like, “Well that’s the Recovery Act.” Putting Obama’s name on that wouldn’t have helped. It’s a bunch of people stuck in fuckin’ traffic. Now, could we have spent every day trying to figure out how we could have come up with a better story? Yeah, maybe. But it always seems to be a communications problem, and communications people don’t exist to make problems better. They exist to tell the best-possible story, and the story of the early Obama years was, We’re in the middle of a crisis. We’re taking every possible step to fix it that is politically feasible, and yet, even with that, it’s going to take a long time to get out of that.