When I opened my eyes, I saw Billy’s head appearing and disappearing in the front window. He was jumping up and down, trying to see inside the bus to figure out what on earth I was doing. Standing up, I felt absolutely sure of what I was doing. I pushed open the bus door and walked into the chilly, late-October air. I saw Elaine shaking hands, and the stage from where I’d speak, and the people and families who had come to offer their support and share some stories of their own. As I walked toward the crowd, I was greeted by the sound of applause.
Billy stopped me and leaned to speak in my ear. “Sir, just to let you know, the tracker is here.” He was referring to the young man from Lunsford’s campaign who would follow us, coming to every event to film me, in hopes I would make a mistake they could exploit. “I got a volunteer ready to block his camera.”
“No need,” I said. “Let him film.”
“Sir?”
I started up the steps to the stage. “Let him. I won’t be making a mistake.”
I didn’t that day, or any of the days that followed, because I didn’t allow myself to get distracted or down. Instead, I knew that I had to bring the two qualities to this race that had guided me throughout my life, from my decision to methodically build my skills before taking on a Democratic incumbent in a state like Kentucky, to my decision against a run for Senate majority leader at age sixty knowing it may be years before I had another shot: patience and perseverance. They had been the hallmarks of my career, and for the last few weeks of the election, I employed both.
On the night of the election, I rented a suite at the Galt House in downtown Louisville. I arrived a few hours before the polls closed to a whirl of activity. In one room, staff members were setting up phones so they could call into the precincts for the latest results. Others were plugging in computers, and someone was setting up equipment so we could project the results on a wall. At about 5:30 p.m., just before the night got started, I found Stef. “Gather the staff,” I said. “I want to say a few words.”
“You sure you don’t want to wait until after? Until we get the results?”
I knew she was trying to give me an out, to protect me from having to go down and face my staff when we were all still so unsure if I was going to win. Three days earlier, I had called Brian McGuire, my speechwriter, to ask him to do something I’d never asked of anyone before: write me a concession speech. I’d told him not to share this request with anyone else, as I didn’t want to discourage the others. But I also wanted to be prepared in the case of a loss—especially with regard to expressing, more than anything else, how deeply grateful I was to the people of Kentucky. They had allowed me to do the one thing I’ve wanted to do more than anything else, and for a very long time. My sense of gratitude to them wouldn’t change based on the number of votes I received that night, and the same was true about my feelings toward my staff.
“My message to them is going to be the exact same, whether we win or lose,” I said to Stef. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
There were about a hundred people waiting in the Segell Room when I arrived, many of them seated at one of the round dinner tables.
“Everybody put your BlackBerrys down for a minute. This won’t take too long, and I want you to hear what I have to say.” This announcement got their attention, as my staffers are rarely asked to put down their beloved BlackBerrys. “I know we’re looking at a potential loss tonight,” I continued. “But no matter what happens, I want to thank every one of you for your work. And for your dedication to what we’re trying to do here, and for everything we—not me, but we—have accomplished these last few years. Now stay in your seat, please, as I’d like to come and thank each of you personally.”
It took a long time to stop and personally tell each member of my staff how much I appreciated them. By the time I got to Billy, I was no longer able to hold back my tears. If it had been a year of bad news for me, it had been a particularly hard year for him. His mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and she’d died in the midst of his work on the campaign. He’d been with me since he graduated from college, and I knew what losing her meant to him. We were both only children, and Billy’s dad had died in 2000. I considered him as much a part of my family as my daughters, and with little success, I tried to keep it together as I told him how much not only his work, but he personally, meant to me. It was equally emotional for him, and I could see how uncomfortable he felt as he wiped away a tear.
“Okay, boss,” he said. “Can I go now? I gotta go upstairs to see if we’re winning this thing.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Professor Obama
It was a proud moment for our country, given our original sin of slavery, to witness Barack Obama elected president of the United States. His victory demonstrated one of the finest qualities of our country: here, all things are possible. I called Obama to congratulate him, and when he returned my phone call a few days later, I was standing in the cereal aisle of a Kroger supermarket in Louisville.
“Hello, Mr. President,” I said as the people around me juggled children and picked out their Cheerios. We had a friendly and cordial conversation during which I told the president I was eager to work with him. I was glad he didn’t gloat, which he had every right to do because the results of the election were devastating for Republicans.
Brian’s concession speech landed in a garbage can at the Galt House. I won my reelection handily, by over 100,000 votes and a comfortable six points, and in fact, it was my third-largest victory, winning 86 out of 120 counties. I was, along with Susan Collins from Maine, the only Republican incumbent targeted by the DSCC to keep my seat.
But, with eight seats going to Democrats, the good news stopped there. We were down to a minority of just forty-one in the Senate. Meanwhile in the House, Democrats increased their majority by eleven. Not long after my win, Hillary Clinton called to congratulate me.
“Thanks for the visit to Hazard,” I joked, referring to the at least half a dozen campaign trips either she or her husband, or both, had made in support of my opponent. “You and Bill sure did everything you could to make sure I didn’t win.” Hillary laughed—but I would later, during her term as secretary of state, successfully convince her to come speak at the McConnell Center by reminding her of these efforts to unseat me.
I suppose the one salve was that I was reelected without opposition to my second term as Republican leader, and with a Democrat in the White House, I was, for all intents and purposes, considered the most powerful Republican in the nation. But with the Democrats holding at least fifty-eight seats (possibly fifty-nine—the race in Minnesota between Al Franken and Norm Coleman would not be decided for another few months), effectively, I had very little power at all.
I invited President Obama to join the members of our conference for lunch at the Capitol soon after he assumed office. After a long and rough campaign season, it was essential to begin the session, and Obama’s first term, acknowledging that there were some areas where we were in broad agreement. After sharing a meal, President Obama spoke a few words, and I then opened the room to questions. Johnny Isakson, my colleague from Georgia, rose to speak. “Mr. President, I just want you to know that every night before I go to bed, I pray for you, your family, and your success.” It was an incredibly simple and powerful thing to say. The president’s election was a stunning American success, and Senator Isakson’s words beautifully summed up what all of us in the room were thinking.
On a policy level, however, in the wake of his landslide victory, I was very worried about the direction of our country. I knew from history that a combination of a troubled economy and one-party control of the White House and Congress often results in an explosion of legislation and government control, such as we saw in the New Deal and, later, the Great Society. I worried we were headed in that direction.
It wouldn’t take long for Obama to prove me right. A lot of people ask me what President Oba
ma is really like. I tell them all the same thing. He’s no different in private than in public. He’s like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he’s the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation. And he’s simply a very liberal guy who is determined to move the country toward the kind of progressive ideal that Western European societies embraced decades ago. He has a bold progressive agenda, and if he can’t get what he wants through the legislative branch, he’ll work to do so through the bureaucracy. For someone who came up through the Senate, the president’s indifference (or hostility, depending on how you look at it) to Congress is curious. Knowing I could do little to change his perspective on things, my goal has been to stop him when I think he’s pushing ideas that are bad for the country.
And to do that, I needed everyone in my conference to stand firmly behind that mission. Since becoming leader, I have, every January, hosted a one-day retreat for the members of my conference. The purpose is to come together, look ahead to the year facing us, and decide on our priorities. This year, the retreat was held on January 9 in the Library of Congress, and the weather was perfect for the occasion: cold, dreary, and rainy. As I welcomed my forty colleagues, sheets of rain hammered the windows, obstructing our view of the Capitol. Nobody was in a good mood.
What we were facing was best summed up by Obama’s new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who said, soon after his election: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” What he meant was that Obama and his team were going to exploit the financial crisis still gripping our economy to enact radical changes. With Democrats in control of both houses by large margins, he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.
And yet I believed there was still reason to hope.
Here’s what I knew: in 2008, the American electorate was eager to turn the page on the Bush years and go in a new direction, and Obama was an exciting pick. But it was also true that Obama was so far to the left—in 2007, the National Journal released a study finding him the most liberal politician in the Senate—that his policies might not be as popular as he thought. Yes, Americans wanted something new in the short term, but our country is and has always been a nation that is to the right of center. While Obama may have satiated the need for change in the moment, when it came to what Americans wanted in the long term, it was not the far-reaching government control that he championed. At the retreat, I counseled my colleagues, first and foremost, to have patience. I was a young man in the Watergate era, and had been around long enough to know there’s no such thing as a permanent majority, despite the joyous proclamations to this effect by the mainstream media, who were all but predicting the imminent demise of the Republican Party. Newsweek even ran a cover story declaring, “We Are All Socialists Now.”
But this was a very short-term perspective on things. I reminded my colleagues that Americans, fatigued after eight years of Bush, voted for change, but the country itself had not changed. We hadn’t suddenly become France. There were still a hundred million Republicans in America who were counting on us to represent them. To do that, we had to stick together. Starting immediately.
On the day Obama was sworn in, he announced his intention to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the year. This was hasty beyond belief, and with grave implications for our nation’s security, decisions about what we were going to do with the prisoners were decisions we needed to get right. Obama had no plan. And folks in Kentucky didn’t want these guys living in their backyards any more than people in the rest of the country did. Then, a month into his presidency, Congress enacted a stimulus package of almost $1 trillion—a figure that still boggles the mind. In Clinton’s first year in office, he proposed a $19.5 billion stimulus that Congress easily rejected for being too expensive. Obama’s package was going to cost taxpayers more than fifty times that, and when coupled with the economic rescue package, could add as much debt in one year as about half the federal budget.
As abysmal as this idea was, it paled in comparison to Obama’s plan to take on the great, unfinished task of all American liberals: government takeover of the health-care system. Our one salvation was that the Democrats were one vote short of the sixty-vote supermajority that would enable them to do whatever they wanted. I kept reminding myself and my colleagues of this, urging us all to remain focused. Forty-one wasn’t a lot, but when it came down to it, it was enough if we all stuck together. These were the thoughts on my mind one morning, just as spring arrived. It was going to be a good day. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. I was scheduled to speak at the unveiling of a bust of Sojourner Truth, the famous abolitionist, recently installed at the Capitol. Later in the afternoon, I would welcome Howard Baker and Bob Dole for a meeting with a few other senators. I was preparing to head to the Sojourner Truth ceremony when Stef buzzed to tell me I had a phone call.
“Take a message, please, Stef,” I said.
“It’s Senator Specter,” Stef said. “He says it’s important.”
“Shut the door,” I said to Kyle.
“Am I fired?” Kyle joked as he closed my office door and took a seat across from me.
“Arlen Specter is changing sides.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just called. He’s leaving the party. He’s going over to their side. He said he can’t win his reelection in Pennsylvania as a Republican,” I said. “He’s facing a challenger in the GOP primary. He took a poll and found he can’t beat him. They’re killing him for his vote on the stimulus. He’s switching sides to try to win as a Democrat.”
“He said that out loud?”
“Yes. He took a poll.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him that he’s had a long and distinguished career. But that if he did this, it would be the only thing he would ever be remembered for.” I buzzed Stef in. “I need you to call a meeting of leadership,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “And you’re expected now at the unveiling. There’s about five hundred people there waiting.”
“Fine. Tell leadership to meet here in thirty minutes.”
Stef looked at me. “You know you won’t be done with the ceremony by then.”
I headed out the door. “Come and get me in twenty-five minutes.”
I sat onstage at the awards ceremony, beside the First Lady and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, amazed at my own composure. This was devastating. The race in Minnesota between Al Franken and Norm Coleman was still being decided. If that went to Franken, which was looking increasingly possible, Specter’s decision would get the Democrats to that magic number of sixty. I was lost in my thoughts when I saw Stef, her face blushed crimson, trying to remain unnoticed as she tiptoed across the stage, in front of a crowd of hundreds, and handed me a note that simply read: “It’s time.”
Although I didn’t relish the task, it was my job as leader. I had to go speak to my colleagues. The news had already gotten out, and as I stood in front of the quiet room, the shock and disappointment was nearly palpable. Unfortunately, the feeling of being demoralized would persist for weeks. In May, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, conducted a classified briefing for senators on the situation in those countries. After Holbrooke held forth on the mistakes of the previous administration, I had to speak up.
“I’ve been around here awhile and I have to be quite candid with you,” I said. “Those were the single most partisan comments I have ever heard from a US official in a classified setting in twenty-four years. We haven’t been attacked here in seven and a half years and some of us think it isn’t an accident, and you all better hope nothing happens on your watch. It’s time to turn the campaign machine off. This is governing, and it’s difficult, and this kind of partisanship is completely inappropriate.” As I walked out of that room, feeling utterly annoyed,
I couldn’t help but think, I know when the bad news started: Hurricane Katrina.
But when was it going to stop?
On June 30, 2009, Al Franken, the comedian and former cast member on Saturday Night Live, was declared the winner of his race against Norm Coleman by a margin of 312 votes. He was sworn into the Senate a week later, thus giving the Democrats a supermajority of sixty and making Obama’s plan to take over health care all but inevitable.
I did what I like to do in times of great stress or annoyance: I went to watch baseball. The Nationals were playing at home, and I invited Brian McGuire, my speechwriter, to join me for a game. Brian had an interest in baseball that rivaled my own, and he’d been an integral member of my team since I’d become the leader. I wanted to thank him for his efforts. One area in which he’d been particularly helpful was what I considered to be the most important speaking responsibilities I’d had since becoming leader: offering eulogies. Being asked to deliver a eulogy for colleagues like Senators Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens was a request I took very seriously. I also, very sadly, offered eulogies for people who were close to me not professionally, but personally. People like Mary Gabriel Carmack, the wife of my aide and good friend Terry Carmack, who died far too young. And—although this one would come a few years later—my dear friend Judge John Heyburn. I’d met John in 1971, when we were both young men working on Tom Emberton’s campaign for governor. He and his wife, Martha, were two of the people closest to me in the world. Having to say good-bye to people like him and Mary Gabriel, to honor the lives they’d led, was not something I could have done without Brian’s help.
The Long Game Page 19