by Tim Alberta
“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time,” Obama said. “But know this, America: They will be met.”
He continued: “On this day, 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. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation, the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”
Seated on the stage risers behind him, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, felt a twinge of panic. This wasn’t just a quadrennial shift of power in Washington; it might prove a tectonic disturbance in the trajectory of the country. Obama and the Democrats, it seemed, could rule for as far as the eye could see.
“I had the best seat in the house at that inauguration. I was sitting against the rail and looking out across that sea of people, all the way to the monument, and it was just staggering,” Cantor says. “We had elected a black president, and here he was, talking about changing America and certainly acting as if he wants to incorporate us into the end product. He had a seventy-some-percent approval rating2 and these Democratic supermajorities. We were up against it.”
Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina congressman, who’d never seen such a crowd in his life, had a more visceral reaction. “I thought we were completely, permanently screwed.”
He wasn’t the only one. Two weeks earlier, the president-elect had returned to Washington for the first time since Election Day and called a meeting with congressional leaders of both parties. As they gathered in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, just off the Senate floor, Obama made brief comments to a gaggle of reporters. “We are in one of those periods in American history where we don’t have Republican or Democratic problems, we’ve got American problems,” he said. “My commitment as the incoming president is going to be to reach out across the aisle, to both chambers, to listen and not just talk, to not just try to dictate but to try to create a genuine partnership, so that we are actually doing the people’s business at this time of extraordinary difficulty.”
The Republicans lawmakers in the room exchanged smirks—putting on a show for the press, they figured. But once the journalists were shooed away, and the players got to work discussing the framework of an economic stimulus package, the incoming president’s tenor remained the same: earnest, approachable, even humble. This was not the Obama they’d expected. He listened intently to Republicans’ ideas. He acknowledged their concerns. He hinted that he was receptive to their biggest priority, making tax relief central to the stimulus.
By the time the meeting adjourned, those Republicans present were somewhere between delirious and devastated. They had never bought Obama’s campaign rhetoric, his promises to transcend partisanship and heal a fractured body politic. They believed him to be a hardened progressive with velvety eloquence, and they were counting on the emergence of his true colors for their survival. They hoped to use his sky-high potential against him: Once voters realized that Obama wasn’t a great compromiser, his astronomical numbers would fall back to earth and Republicans would begin their journey out of the wilderness. Masterminding this theory was Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, who told allies after the election that the key to regaining power would be shattering the mystique of Obama’s post-partisan image.
The January 5 meeting was hardly the start McConnell or his colleagues had envisioned. There was nary a negative word to say about Obama as Republicans confronted a waiting horde of media outside the LBJ Room. “I think this bill is going to start out, and hopefully end, as an example of very significant bipartisan cooperation,” McConnell said.
Ducking the cameras, Cantor hustled across the Capitol complex. He glanced at his chief of staff, Steve Stombres. “What did you think?” Stombres shook his head. “I was inspired,” he replied. Brad Dayspring, Cantor’s communications director, was somewhat less diplomatic. “If he governs like that,” Dayspring told his boss, “we are all fucked.”
Cantor knew as much. So did Boehner. But they were in no position to sabotage the incoming president. There would be plenty of opportunities to draw lines in the sand; for the time being, with the economy on life support and Washington under tremendous pressure to produce, they would take Obama’s promise of cooperation at face value. Back on the House side of the building, Boehner popped into Cantor’s office with a request: Put together an outline of some core Republican suggestions for the stimulus bill. “And none of the right-wing stuff,” he added. “We want broad support.”
Sitting on the inauguration stage two weeks later, Cantor fretted. He had done what Boehner asked, drafting a list of five items to share with Obama when they reconvened after his swearing-in. But now he wondered what good it would do. Staring out at the National Mall, Cantor would recall to friends, he wondered: Was the GOP going extinct?
THAT NIGHT, MORE THAN A DOZEN CONSERVATIVE LAWMAKERS, INCLUDING Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy from the House and Jim DeMint, Bob Corker, and Jon Kyl from the Senate, gathered inside the Caucus Room, a stylish Washington steakhouse. Parties were jumping across the capital city in honor of the new president, but Republicans weren’t in any mood to celebrate. Organized by focus group guru Frank Luntz, and featuring a guest appearance by former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the dinner would gain infamy as the inception of the GOP’s coordinated resistance to Obama.
And yet, opposition was not the only item on the menu. The dinner also was an exercise in wound-licking and soul-cleansing for members of a Republican Party that had strayed far from its principles, as the journalist Robert Draper, who first reported on the dinner, wrote in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.3 History will remember the GOP’s obstructionism as its organizing principle during the Obama years, and appropriately so. But the backdrop of Bush’s presidency and the pall it cast over conservatism often goes ignored in understanding the mentality of Republicans circa 2009. Cooperating with the new president was dangerous not just because it handed him a victory, but because it fed a perception on the right that there was no longer any meaningful distinction between the two parties.
The dilemma within the GOP, of course, was that many rank-and-file Republicans were moderates. They didn’t diverge sharply from the Democrats. They hadn’t objected to the big-government policies of the Bush administration. And they weren’t keen to tangle with a dauntingly popular new president. This was especially true for the thirty-seven House Republicans whose districts Obama had just won.4
Cantor understood this better than most. As minority whip, the House GOP’s designated vote-counter, he was tasked with knowing his members the way a husband knows his wife: likes and dislikes, goals and motivations, verbal tics and personality quirks. Raised in Southern Virginia as an observant Jew, Cantor had long since learned to straddle disparate worlds. (There weren’t many Jewish lawmakers to be found in the GOP, though Cantor always got a kick out of hearing Mike Pence, his evangelical colleague from Indiana, refer to Jews as “our people.”)
Despite being more conservative than most in his party, the forty-five-year-old Cantor had skillfully worked his way into its leadership, intuitively harmonizing the dueling instincts of pragmatism and purity. Now he was confronting intraparty dynamics that were seemingly impossible to balance: Conservatives had incentive to fight Obama, while moderates had reason to work with him.
The stimulus offered a fascinating first case study.
Describing the economy as a “very sick” patient who needed to be stabilized, Obama set a deadline of February 1
6, Presidents’ Day, for the stimulus package to arrive on his desk. Democrats weren’t waiting around. By the time Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House three days after his inauguration, Pelosi and her colleagues had already drafted legislation. This irritated House Republicans, whose ideas Obama had promised to consider. Pelosi scoffed at those concerns. “Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” she told reporters at the Capitol.
The next morning, when Obama hosted a meeting with lawmakers inside the Roosevelt Room, Cantor promptly handed out copies of the five-point priority list he had crafted. It was more than a tad presumptuous, and laid the foundation for Obama’s dislike of Cantor, but the president played it cool. “Nothing on here looks outlandish or crazy to me,” he remarked.
The list was heavy on tax relief: for families, small businesses, home buyers, the unemployed. This surprised no one. (Republicans and Tax Cuts: A Love Story.) More telling was what it omitted: infrastructure.
Boehner and Cantor knew the one thing that could buy off their members was big spending on roads and bridges; Republican voters, whether in busy commuter suburbs or neglected rural communities, love few things more. What they didn’t know was whether Obama knew this. By not proposing a massive investment in infrastructure, GOP leadership was both testing the new president and carving out a potential escape hatch if the negotiations went south.
This bit of chicanery crystallized the GOP’s quandary in dealing with the unified Democratic government. Obama had the votes to pass laws with or without them; the trick for Republican leaders was influencing legislation in a way that made it appealing to conservatives, not just moderates, so they wouldn’t be accused of selling out their right flank. A more experienced Democratic president might have recognized this and reacted accordingly. But having served less than one full term on Capitol Hill before winning the White House, Obama seemed not to fully grasp the ideological fault lines within the congressional GOP—or how to exploit them.
Their own suggestions aside, Republicans were puzzled by many of the Democrats’ priorities. Obama had conceptualized the legislation as a shot in the arm to the flatlining economy—instant help in the form of shovel-ready jobs, tax cuts, and funding for state governments. Yet the emerging bill looked more like a liberal grab bag of programs years in the wishing: increased Pell Grants, expanded broadband internet, investments in green energy companies. These proposals had merit, certainly, but Republicans were justified in questioning why billions of dollars should be spent on projects that paid no immediate dividend when urgency was the buzzword inside the Beltway.
As this debate intensified in the January 23 meeting, with Cantor and Kyl, the Senate minority whip, pressing Obama on why the White House was favoring certain programs, the president lost his sense of humor. “Elections have consequences,” he told Republicans around the table. “And I won.”5
It was an unforced error by Obama—and an immeasurable gift to the GOP.
Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell had already seized on Pelosi’s quote to impress upon their colleagues that the House Speaker, a San Francisco progressive, was pushing Obama leftward, persuading him not to waste time playing footsie with Republicans. Not everyone believed that. But now Obama had echoed Pelosi’s sentiment in a way that seemed dismissive at best and hostile at worst.
Back on Capitol Hill, Boehner and Cantor convened their members inside a sprawling conference room in the House basement. They relayed the details of the meeting, including Obama’s quote and the disagreements over spending in the package. In that moment, the process surrounding the stimulus package changed in fundamental ways. Not only were members bothered by Obama’s remark, but they were dismayed at the relative pittance being allocated to infrastructure.
Cantor, before that morning’s White House visit, had counted at least thirty Republicans whom he expected Democrats to pick off, especially if the final product featured significant spending on shovel-ready projects that would be visible in their states and districts. But the Democrats, to his disbelief, weren’t prioritizing transportation infrastructure. They weren’t doing anything to court his most easily converted members. Soon, Cantor’s number of susceptible Republicans was cut in half. Within a few days, it had dwindled into the single digits, and then even lower.
Boehner was stunned. He knew there would be a renewed emphasis on fiscal restraint among conservatives hoping to turn the page on Bush’s legacy. And he suspected that, sooner or later, if the economy didn’t show signs of life, moderate Republicans would feel emboldened to do battle with Obama as well. But the stimulus was an unlikely showdown. The minority leader had felt certain that at least a few dozen of his members, particularly those in Obama districts, would support the president’s first initiative.
On January 28 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House—and remarkably, not a single Republican voted for it.
Because of Cantor’s well-publicized confrontation with Obama, and the fact that one-third of the bill comprised tax breaks,6 it was natural to blame the minority whip (or credit him) with imposing total discipline on his ranks. But this missed the bigger picture. By allowing the stimulus to become larded with pet projects, by not pressing for massive infrastructure investments, and by saying, “I won,” however benign the intent, Obama had given Boehner and Cantor just what they needed to lock up a House Republican Conference that was primed for a jailbreak. It also played right into McConnell’s master plan of puncturing the president’s bipartisan aura.
“We came back in here at the beginning of 2009, we were on the way down to forty, which is the irrelevant number in the Senate. And the question was, is there a way back?” McConnell recalls. “My view was we needed to test whether the American people were simply frustrated in 2008 by the war, and the financial meltdown, or whether they really wanted to go hard left. . . . We had to draw a bright line of distinction between us and what the Democrats in full control of [government] were trying to achieve. And that meant keeping our fingerprints off things.”
The Democrats walked right into this trap. They had been out of power for eight years—twelve, really, when considering the turbulent second term of Bill Clinton—and Republicans had run roughshod over them during that period, doing “nothing to encourage bipartisanship,” as Boehner admitted. Now, imbued with absolute authority over Washington and feeling compelled to act quickly, congressional Democrats had convinced the new president that he didn’t owe Republicans anything. The result was a flawed bill hustled onto the House floor just eight days after the inauguration and approved by the Senate less than two weeks later.
“If it’s passed with 63 votes or 73 votes, history won’t remember it,” Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator and a mentor to Obama, told the Washington Post the day of the contentious White House meeting.
In fact, the vote totals are about the only thing history remembers about the stimulus.
Three Republicans broke with McConnell when the bill passed the Senate, giving Obama’s legislation the faintest whiff of bipartisanship. But it was the House GOP’s blanket opposition that stole the headlines and set the tone for eight years of escalating polarization.
“That was the beginning of the end for Obama,” Boehner says of the stimulus fight. “If he had reached across the aisle in a meaningful way, he would have found a lot of Republicans ready to work with him—whether Eric and I liked it or not. He could have annihilated us for a generation.”
TWO DAYS AFTER HOUSE REPUBLICANS UNIFORMLY REJECTED THE stimulus package, another tense vote was under way—this one inside a Washington hotel ballroom. It was time for Republicans to choose a party chairman. Mike Duncan was Bush’s handpicked choice to lead the RNC during the final two years of his presidency, but the winds of change were gusting after the party’s drubbing in November, and Duncan dropped out after the third round of balloting. That left four remaining candidates. The insiders were Katon Dawson and Saul Anuzis, chairmen of the state parties in South Carolina and
Michigan, respectively. The outsiders were Ken Blackwell and Michael Steele. The RNC is composed of three members—a chairperson, a committeeman, and a committeewoman—from each of the fifty states and five territories, plus Washington, DC. Blackwell and Steele were not part of “the 168,” as the RNC’s membership was known. But something more conspicuous set them apart: Both candidates were black.
Diversity had never been a strength for the Republican Party, yet the homogeneity of its national leadership was especially striking: Only three of the 168 were black. With the post-Bush GOP suddenly leaderless, and Obama dramatizing the racial chasm between the two parties, there was a groundswell among the party elite to choose a nonwhite chairman. And despite being a non-RNC member, Steele was an obvious fit. Not only did the former lieutenant governor of Maryland have establishment cred (Johns Hopkins undergrad, Georgetown Law, longtime insider, and a onetime state party chairman), but he was also a regular on the cable news circuit, exuding a charismatic media savvy rarely associated with Republican politics.
Not everyone was sold. The GOP’s most glaring vulnerability was organization; whatever remained of the Rove/Bush machine had been wiped out by Obama’s historic grassroots army. Steele was selling himself as an optical counterbalance to the new president, someone who could lead the GOP’s messaging and public relations operation. A party chairman’s work, however, is done primarily behind the scenes, raising money and strengthening state affiliates. For this task, Dawson, the South Carolina chief, was better equipped. But as the contest intensified, so, too, did the whispers about Dawson’s membership in an all-white country club. It was enough to tip the scales: On the sixth ballot, Steele prevailed over Dawson to become RNC chairman.