The New New Deal

by Grunwald, Michael

  “It was just: ‘You betrayed us! You voted with Bush!’” Bennett says. “I remember being at Republican conventions where people would say: ‘Stand firm with Bush!’ So I did, and now you hate me?”

  The convention didn’t even give Bennett a chance to defend his seat in a primary, selecting two Tea Party activists to run instead. Bennett says his friend Mitt Romney commiserated with him about the ingratitude of the Tea Party, telling a presumably apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher.

  “Mitt said the Tea Party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” Bennett says. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

  For Republican officeholders, insufficient anti-Obama fervor was now politically fatal. Centrists like Specter and Crist had no shot of winning rage-a-thon Republican primaries, and even establishment conservatives like Bennett were in danger of being “scozzafavaed,” a new verb describing what happened to Republicans who ran afoul of the Tea Party. It was coined after a November 2009 special election in upstate New York, where the moderate Republican congressman, John McHugh, had committed partisan treason by accepting a job as Obama’s army secretary. To try to hold his seat, local GOP power brokers handpicked another centrist named Dede Scozzafava, who had supported the Recovery Act. The Tea Party revolted, and rallied Republicans behind a third-party right-winger instead. Scozzafava eventually dropped out and endorsed her Democratic opponent, who ended up winning the race.

  Establishment Republicans fretted that if their most electable candidates kept getting scozzafavaed, they’d lose a historic chance to exploit Obama fatigue in 2010. Congressman Mike Castle, a beloved figure in Delaware and a strong favorite to move up to the Senate, got scozzafavaed by a loopy far-right activist named Christine O’Donnell, best known for dabbling in witchcraft as a teen and crusading against masturbation as an adult. Castle had first realized he might face a rough primary during the Tea Party summer, when he was raucously booed at a town hall meeting for saying Obama was a U.S. citizen. “I voted against the stimulus and health care, but I guess I wasn’t adamant enough,” he says. Tea Party Republicans also won Senate primaries over less dogmatic candidates in Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Nevada, and Alaska, where Senator Murkowski had to launch an independent write-in campaign after getting scozzafavaed.

  The most obvious results of this intraparty cannibalism were the nominations of extremist Republicans like O’Donnell in otherwise winnable races, and the drift of scozzafavaed Republicans (including Scozzafava herself, who ended up in Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration) across the aisle. Republican leaders who had portrayed Obama as a radical threat to American values were reaping what they sowed, as their base demanded maximum ferocity in the war it had been told was being waged for the nation’s soul. Even McConnell’s preferred candidate for Senate in Kentucky, an establishment conservative named Trey Grayson, got scozzafavaed by Tea Party firebrand Rand Paul, the son of the libertarian icon Ron Paul. And in Florida, Rick Scott, the disgraced health care executive who had founded an advocacy group to fight Obamacare and comparative effectiveness research, rode a Tea Party wave of Obama hatred to upset a Republican insider for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

  The threat of Tea Party retribution also had a real impact on policy, giving congressional Republicans who might have been cooperation-curious an even stronger incentive to double down on obstruction. For example, Scott Brown’s election provided a clear opening for Republicans to cut a favorable deal with the shell-shocked White House on scaled-back health reforms; instead, they stuck to their strategy of no-no-no, and Democrats with no option of settling for half a loaf eventually used parliamentary legerdemain to get the whole loaf to the president’s desk. Politically, Obamacare would be an albatross for Democrats in 2010, partly because of the side deals—the “Cornhusker Kickback” for Senator Nelson, a nonaggression pact with the drug industry—the White House cut to get to sixty. But substantively, if Republicans had been a bit nicer to Specter, or offered Obama some modest reforms as a face-saving compromise, they could have stopped a big liberal victory.

  Republican leaders decided before Obama even took office that their main goal, the “purpose of the minority,” would be regaining power. And unpopular Democratic laws like the stimulus and health reform would help them achieve that goal; for example, Chairman Obey, under fire for writing the Recovery Act, suddenly decided to retire after twenty-one terms in the House. But those unpopular laws were also achieving age-old Democratic policy goals. So who was really winning? Republicans took pride in their political successes as an insurgent minority, and the backlash against Obama was helping them motivate voters, recruit candidates, and raise money. But he was also enjoying one of the most productive legislative sessions since the New Deal.

  “They got what they wanted,” says Josh Holmes, a senior McConnell aide. “That’s to our dismay.”

  President Obama liked to remind the Clinton veterans on his staff: We’re not here to do school uniforms. Maybe he had botched some of his politics—he admitted that after Scott Brown’s election—but his policies were making change. Clinton and every other postwar Democratic president had dreamed of universal health care; Obama’s reforms would get it done, while cracking down on insurance abuses and starting to bend the cost curve. Obama had also put two progressive women on the Supreme Court, signed a Credit Card Bill of Rights to crack down on surprise fees and retroactive rate hikes, pushed through long-sought reforms of the predatory student loan business, and saved the U.S. auto industry. Not to mention the change he was driving through the Recovery Act’s investments in energy, education, health IT, infrastructure, and a fairer tax code. Or the end of the war in Iraq.

  Yet the left was unhappy. While the right was trashing Obama as a new Che Guevara, congenitally disillusioned liberals were trashing him as a wimp and a sellout.

  Sometimes liberal activists and bloggers had genuine ideological disagreements with Obama’s less liberal policies, like his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his refusal to nationalize banks, or his empty rhetoric about helping homeowners. But often they merely seemed to resent Obama’s insistence on playing the hand he was dealt. Why didn’t he fight harder for immigration reform, for cap-and-trade, for card-check for unions? The same reason he didn’t fight harder for a larger stimulus in 2009, or an aggressive second stimulus in 2010: He didn’t have the votes. Sure, Obama had increased clean-energy funding tenfold and ushered in a new era of energy efficiency, but a column on the eco-website Grist still declared: “Environmentalists Need a New President.”362 Sure, Obama’s historic health reforms would cover 32 million uninsured Americans, but the disillusionment addicts on the left were upset he hadn’t insisted on a government-run “public option.” Again, there weren’t sixty votes in the Senate for a public option, and that wouldn’t have changed if Obama had lobbied harder or talked purtier.

  Obama often tweaked these “griping and groaning Democrats” who seemed to think presidents were endowed with superpowers. “Gosh, we haven’t yet brought about world peace,” he mock-whined at a fund-raiser. “I thought that was going to happen quicker!”

  Liberal activists often complained that the Obama team was nastier to them than to Republicans, and there they had a point. Gibbs publicly mocked the “professional left.” Rahm showed up at a Common Purpose meeting to denounce a liberal group’s decision to run ads attacking Blue Dog Democrats as “fucking retarded.” At one closed-door House caucus meeting, the usually conciliatory president called out Peter DeFazio, the one liberal who had voted against the Recovery Act: “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” Whining from the left seemed to irritate him more than abuse from the right, the way a rebellious teenage son causes more angst than a crazy old neighbor.

  One of the more thoughtful liberal critiques of Obama—echoed by some White House aides—was that he ought
to fight some losing battles, to highlight Republican obstructionism and fire up his base. In Washington, this is called “getting caught trying.” But Rahm believed that losing begat losing, and didn’t want Obama associating himself with liberal crusades just to get caught trying. The president didn’t want to spend time or political capital picking unnecessary fights with Republicans. It would alienate centrists in both parties whose votes he still needed for Wall Street reform and other legislative priorities, and it just wasn’t his style. Anyway, staying above the fray had political benefits for Obama. Even in the intensely polarized climate, he was still way more popular than his fellow Democrats, especially with independent voters. He figured he’d keep focusing on making progress, whether progressives liked it or not.

  — SIXTEEN —

  Green New World

  Higher-Speed Rail

  Let me ask you a question,” Vice President Biden said.363 It was the day after the 2010 State of the Union, and he was warming up a crowd at the University of Tampa. “How can we, the leading nation in the world, be in a position where China, Spain, France, and name-all-the-other-countries have rail systems far superior to ours?”

  Amtrak Joe and his boss were in town to announce the Recovery Act’s $8 billion in high-speed rail grants, including $1.25 billion for that Tampa-to-Orlando route that had miraculously united Florida’s politicians. These investments wouldn’t provide much short-term stimulus; the bulk of them wouldn’t be spent until 2011. And they wouldn’t get America anywhere close to name-all-the-other-countries; China was spending forty times as much on its high-speed network. But for a car-crazed nation that spent more on highways in a year than it had spent on intercity passenger rail in four decades, this was real change. It was a down payment on Obama’s goal of creating fuel-efficient alternatives to long drives and short flights—and on Biden’s prediction that Obama would lead “the most train-friendly administration ever.”

  As a Chicago resident, Obama probably took more trains in an average month than Bush took in his life. Rahm Emanuel, the godfather of high-speed rail, was another Chicago guy, as was Obama’s federal railroad administrator, Joe Szabo. To Republican critics, this explained a lot; they saw high-speed rail as cosmopolitan elitism, a Euro-socialist assault on the freedom of the open road. But while the high-speed program did represent an investment in a metropolitan future, an implicit vote for Chicago over Crawford, there were plenty of culturally and politically neutral reasons to like trains. You didn’t have to watch the road, stew in traffic, or pull over to eat, stretch your legs, or buy gas. You didn’t have to risk arrest or accident by drinking or texting. As Obama pointed out in Tampa, you didn’t have to take off your shoes at security.

  Anyway, bullet trains felt like the future.

  “I mean, those things are fast,” Obama said. “They are smooth.”

  The Tampa–Orlando line would be eighty-four miles, short for a high-speed line, with a top speed of 168 miles per hour, slow compared to the wow machines whipping around Europe and Asia.364 But it would be a showcase, a project that, if not exactly shovel-ready, was at least plan-ready, unlike any other U.S. bullet train. It could be the proof of concept for high-speed rail in America, producing images of sleek trains shooting past bumper-to-bumper congestion on I-4. It was expected to be profitable, thanks to the Disney stop, and while it wouldn’t be completed until 2015 at the earliest, it was the only bullet train that Obama would have any chance to ride as president.

  “You all have a date!” Obama told the crowd. “When that thing is all set up, we’ll come down here and check it out.”

  I rode a train from Miami to Orlando that March. I had a comfortable seat with Shaq-worthy legroom. I avoided the schlep of the airport and the maniacs on the highways. I did some work, ate a passable spinach lasagna, and watched Funny People on my laptop; it wasn’t Amtrak’s fault the people weren’t funny. At one point, we stopped in the middle of an old-Florida ranch, beside a majestic oak dripping with Spanish moss, and I thought: There’s no better way to see America.

  Unfortunately, for the next half hour, I remained beside that majestic oak. Door to door, the journey took ten hours for a trip I usually drive in four. My seat cost only $36, but taxis to and from the stations cost twice that. It was a stark reminder why America’s passenger rail system was a laughingstock, and why Obama was pushing an upgrade.

  His high-speed rail program awarded $3.5 billion to Florida and California to start building dedicated lines for snazzy new bullet trains. It spread the other $4.5 billion around thirty-one states to repair bridges, straighten tracks, and otherwise upgrade existing Amtrak lines that would still go much slower than bullets but would more consistently go faster than oaks. Once again, the administration was sending a two-part message—somewhat faster trains soon, super-fast trains later. The program’s official (and more accurate) name was High-Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail. For all the rhetoric about catching Spain with a fleet of ooh-and-aah bullet trains, it was really “higher-speed rail.”

  The morning after my slow-speed rail experience, I joined three hundred business types at a conference of the year-old U.S. High Speed Rail Association, one of those Washington lobbying outfits that spontaneously generate whenever multibillion-dollar initiatives are born. At a Hilton alongside the future location of a high-speed station, vendors hoping to cash in on the Tampa–Orlando line displayed slick models of German, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese super-trains, as well as video of a French train traveling a record 357 mph. Thirty foreign manufacturers had already pledged to build U.S. factories if they landed contracts, and the national market was so lucrative that everyone wanted a foot in the door in Florida. A marketing rep for one European firm was bragging to me about its expansion plans when she spied the head of Florida’s rail program across the room, broke off our chat in mid-sentence, and raced off to introduce herself. When I asked one lobbyist what he was doing there, he grinned and rubbed his thumb against two fingers.

  If greed was the conference’s main theme—a promising sign, I thought—then grumbling was the subtheme. USHSR leaders were all about bullet trains; few of the firms that paid their pricey membership and conference fees were interested in improving Amtrak’s hundred-year-old tunnels, eighty-year-old electrical systems, and sixty-year-old trains. So their initial excitement about Obama’s high-speed program had given way to gripes about his investment choices: Why throw money at old Amtrak lines that bleed cash and share track with slow-moving freight, instead of focusing exclusively on game-changing new 200 mph bullets? How on earth did Ohio’s 3-C Corridor linking Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati at a pitiful average speed of 39 mph and a top speed of 79 mph—first achieved in Andrew Jackson’s administration—qualify as “high-speed”?

  One of the sharpest critics at the Hilton was Orlando congressman John Mica, the ranking Republican on the House transportation committee. Mica was an enthusiastic infrastructure advocate who had led the chorus of complaints about the stimulus being light on public works; he had always been an enthusiastic advocate of high-speed rail as well. But now he wasn’t even enthusiastic about the bullet train in his backyard. It would have five rapid-fire stops, and none would link up with Orlando’s new commuter line, prompting talk of a sixth. “You can’t have real high-speed rail if you’re stopping all the time,” Mica told me. “I should be as happy as a hog eating trash. But we need a real success, and this is pretty marginal.” Mica said the only high-speed grant worthy of the name went to California, to start building a route that would connect Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours. But the land had yet to be purchased, the route wasn’t set, and the estimated cost was ballooning in a state that was already broke. “California is the only hope—if they don’t totally screw it up,” Mica groused.

  Mica was even harsher on the Amtrak upgrades, calling them “slow-speed trains to nowhere,” perpetuating a “Soviet-style monopoly” that lost money on every ticket it sold outside the Northeast Corridor.
If Obama was so desperate to improve Amtrak, Mica asked, why not focus on that profitable stretch in the Northeast, where Biden’s beloved Acela trains already reached 150 mph but averaged only half that? In Acela’s first decade, rail had displaced air as the dominant mode between New York and Washington, but the majority of U.S. flight delays were still at congested New York airports. Imagine how many more travelers would switch if Acela ever reached its potential.

  “We need to pick routes that make sense,” Mica said. “If we pick dogs, we’ll end up scratching fleas.”

  Later that week, in LaHood’s office overlooking the Washington Nationals ballpark, I recounted what his former Republican colleague had said. LaHood’s eyes narrowed. His face turned fuchsia. “It’s just a stunning about-face!” he shouted. “It’s schizophrenic! We did everything John asked!” It was Mica who invited him to Orlando to deliver his stern message about commuter rail, and later thanked him for saving high-speed rail in Florida. LaHood was starting to feel like the only Republican allowed to say nice things in public about anything Obama supported.

  No, Tampa–Orlando was not a classic bullet route, but it would knit together two boomtowns quickly and cheaply, showing the country what trains could do. And the extension to Miami was perfect for high-speed rail; my ten-hour slog would be sliced to two hours. Sure, the dense Northeast Corridor was train heaven, but eliminating its urban bottlenecks would require huge investments to produce modest reductions in trip times. Anyway, none of the name-all-the-other-countries relied exclusively on state-of-the-art bullet trains. Why should we?