Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (33 page)

Emerson did not regard party affiliation as a passcode into her personal life (a good thing, considering that in 2000 she married attorney Rod Gladney, a registered Democrat). And though she tended to be a mostly reliable vote for the Republican whip team, it was telling that on September 15, 2009, Jo Ann Emerson was one of only seven GOP members voting for a House resolution disapproving of Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s joint session health care speech. For her, party loyalty ended where partisan disrespect began.

Her aversion to I-am-Republican-woman-hear-me-roar pep rallies notwithstanding, Emerson decided to make an exception of tonight’s dinner. Until now, there hadn’t been an opportunity for her to get to know her new female colleagues. They tended not to speak up in conference in the manner of Raul Labrador or Steve Southerland, or to cast dissenting votes on important matters like the South Carolinians, or to
gravitate toward the TV cameras as in the case of Illinois congressman Joe Walsh—who had told some of his Republican colleagues, with a straight face, that he had “a cult following.”

As something of an accidental congresswoman, Emerson had trouble identifying with women who were lifelong office seekers. For the most part, these nine freshmen were not of that ilk. Ann Marie Buerkle, for example, had been a lawyer and right-to-life activist in Syracuse, New York, before bumping off a one-term Democrat with very little support from the NRCC. Bedford, New York–based Nan Hayworth, an ophthalmologist with no political experience, had defeated Democrat incumbent John Hall, a musician best known for the song “Still the One,” which Hall had to ask both Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 to refrain from using as a campaign jingle. Vicky Hartzler had grown up on a farm in Archie, Missouri, and briefly served in the Missouri legislature a decade ago but since then had devoted her energies to the anti-gay-marriage movement and to authoring a faith-based campaign book,
Running God’s Way.
Sandy Adams of Florida had served in the state legislature for eight years but as a deputy sheriff for nearly two decades before that.

The thirty-nine-year-old woman seated next to Emerson, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, had attained Republican celebrity status before her arrival in Washington. A striking brunette with glacier-blue eyes, Noem had defeated Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, the Blue Dog leader whose political pedigree—her father had been a longtime state legislator; his father was South Dakota’s governor and his mother its secretary of state—had made her appear invulnerable the previous three election cycles. Noem’s looks and rancher’s-daughter rugged backstory enabled comparisons to Sarah Palin that Noem herself took pains not to encourage, but which enthralled McCarthy. He promoted her and Tim Scott (the other African-American Republican, besides Allen West) as the nominees for the two seats at the House GOP leadership table allotted to the freshman class. As no other nominees were on the ballot, Noem and Scott were duly elected. The whip subsequently brought Noem and Sean Duffy back to his district for a local Republican dinner, introducing the telegenic ex-lumberjack and the woman who saved the family ranch after her father’s death as the quintessence of a camera-ready Republican youth movement.

Kristi Noem struck Emerson as clearly intelligent and focused on proving herself legislatively—but was also, for an anointed leader, pronouncedly reserved. Emerson engaged in a far lengthier conversation with Martha Roby, a former city councilwoman from Montgomery, Alabama. Roby was a personal favorite of McCarthy, and Emerson could see why. She spoke with an unvarnished southern-girl frankness and had told a funny story that evening about the day she informed her mother she was getting married and subsequently peeled out in a big-rig truck. Her dream had been to work in the music industry.

Roby was also thirty-four, just a year older than Emerson’s oldest daughter, Victoria. The freshman herself had two young kids, aged two and six, who lived back in Montgomery with her husband, Riley. Three weeks earlier, Roby had spent Mother’s Day on a CODEL in Afghanistan. Like most of the class of 2010, she had run on an anti-Washington message. But, she asked Jo Ann Emerson, “What do you think about living here?”

Emerson advised Roby to seriously consider bringing the family up to Washington. During Bill Emerson’s first term in 1981, Jo Ann was thirty-one and had stayed back in the district with their two young children. They rarely saw Bill, and she came to resent him for not being an active parent. After three years, they decided to relocate the family to Washington, where Jo Ann Emerson had lived ever since.

“That’s how we did it,” she concluded. “I can’t speak for anyone else, obviously.” But she could see the relief on Martha Roby’s face. Emerson imagined that she might be having another regular dining companion in the not-too-distant future.

One freshman
Emerson didn’t get much of a chance to visit with that evening was Renee Ellmers, though she had already seen quite a bit of the North Carolinian on television and on the House floor. Ellmers was blond, wore eye-catching outfits, and possessed an open-faced Dixie charm. Unlike Emerson, whose path to Washington had been paved by her husband’s colleagues, Ellmers had been shunned by the Republican establishment. Now, in six months’ time, she had become a favorite of the House Republican leadership team.

How Renee Ellmers climbed her way up from the bottom rung would stand as an object lesson in political entrepreneurship. Neither the ex-nurse nor anyone on her staff possessed Washington experience,
and she relied on a blogger back in her district to fulfill press secretary responsibilities. In late January, Ellmers missed an opportunity to speak at a well-attended pro-life function on the Hill because her aides took a circuitous twenty-minute drive to the event, which was a five-minute walk from the Capitol.

Her early forays into the public eye were unsteady. When she attended Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s press conference in April to push back against Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s criticism of the GOP’s “extreme anti-woman agenda,” Ellmers delivered her brief remarks with the jittery intonation of a hostage victim: “The Senate needs to pass H.R.1. It needs to do it today. The issue is the spending. And we need to come to an agreement—we need to put that certainty back into Americans’ lives . . .”

Ellmers powered through her misadventures with the kind of aplomb that Newt Gingrich liked to call “cheerful persistence.” When a tornado struck her district on April 16, she chose to attend to some of the victims rather than fly to Washington to appear on the Sunday TV show
This Week with Christiane Amanpour.
Kevin McCarthy could not stomach the sight of blood and admired the trauma nurse’s casual toughness. He helped arrange for the ABC show to film her at a nearby studio. Ellmers had not been shy about reminding the whip of how completely he had overlooked her during the 2010 cycle. The two came to develop a brother-sister fondness—the whip giving the freshman staffing advice that usually went unheeded, the sassy North Carolinian clapping her hands in the Californian’s startled face when she felt she wasn’t getting through to him.

In late April, she finally got around to hiring a Washington-based press secretary. Tom Doheny had no previous experience on Capitol Hill, but the twenty-six-year-old press aide’s résumé—which included stints working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the billionaire Koch brothers’ conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and the Delaware and Pennsylvania state Republican parties—was that of a consummate go-getter.

Immediately after Ellmers hired him, Doheny contacted nearly every reporter on the Hill and invited each of them for coffee. He believed that Republicans tended to have an aversion to the media, to their detriment. Doheny’s strategy was to be forward leaning:
Congresswoman Ellmers is one of the very few Republican freshman women. She’s young, she’s energetic, she’s got a great story, she’s never been in politics before this
. . . Doheny created new email lists. He established a standard format for press releases. He taught the office assistants how to put a snippet up on YouTube. He began having coffee sessions with the communications directors for each committee, seeking to convince them that the diamond-in-the-rough North Carolinian was fast acquiring polish and ready to be a face of the Republican majority.

In the meantime, Doheny began to work one-on-one with his new boss. He learned quickly that Ellmers functioned poorly when inundated with briefing books. She did far better with face-to-face dialogue. The freshman often spoke in long, tangled sentences. But when she slowed down, Ellmers came across as sensible and empathetic. Together they would sit and watch Chris Matthews mutilate fellow freshman Joe Walsh on
Hardball
. “See, this is exactly why (a) we don’t do
Hardball
, (b) we vet all the requests we get, and (c) we’re prepared,” the young aide would tell her.

Ellmers was a quick and self-aware study. She knew what she didn’t know. The congresswoman was not about to go on the air to expound on Libya or North Korea in the pontificating manner of Sheila Jackson Lee. She would focus on jobs and health care, and her approach would be pitched in the reasonable cadence of the small-town nurse and Wal-Mart habitué that Ellmers was. By early June, she was logging multiple appearances on Fox every week, the message as unwavering as her plaintive gaze into the camera: “removing that uncertainty” caused by “burdensome regulators” so as to motivate “our job creators.” The Speaker’s office began to take notice. When Doheny released a statement from his boss praising the soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, following the killing of bin Laden, Boehner’s press secretary Mike Steel sent over his assessment:
Smart.
The day after Obama visited her state for a jobs summit, Boehner’s people asked that Ellmers join a House GOP leadership team press conference to say a few words about the jobs roundtable
she
had conducted a month ago. A few days after that, Boehner senior advisor Johnny DeStefano asked the freshman if she would deliver the Republicans’ weekly address. She did so on June 25, repeating yet again the somber song of the American Job Creator: “
Uncertainty, burdensome
regulations, and the fear of higher taxes are making
it harder to create jobs and stay afloat . . . They don’t want a bailout. They just ask that we get government out of the way.”

But Ellmers was more than just Kevin McCarthy and Tom Doheny’s apt pupil. As the Victory Mosque ad had demonstrated, she possessed her own flair for drama. On the eve of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s testimony before the House Small Business Committee, of which Ellmers was a member, she and her staff huddled to discuss how she should handle her five-minute questioning segment. The congresswoman was urged to forgo theatrics and instead stick to the subject of the hearing, which was small business job creation. Ellmers, however, had her own ideas.

At the hearing
on June 23, she wore a casual off-white dress and beaded necklace—an unfussy everywoman squared off against the bloodless and stuffy Geithner, who for all the months and months of efforts by White House handlers still came off as condescending and galaxies removed from the plight of small business owners. Ellmers began her segment by asking why the Treasury secretary would raise taxes on people making more than $250,000 when “those are our business owners.”

“They’re three percent of your small business owners,” Geithner could not resist correcting.

Countering with her own favorite data point, she replied, “Sixty-four percent of jobs created in this country are from small businesses.”

The secretary agreed. But, he said, the high deficits necessitated an increase in revenue. Otherwise, Geithner said, “I’ll have to go out and borrow another trillion dollars over the next ten years to finance those tax benefits for the top two percent. I don’t think I can justify doing that. And if we were to cut spending by that magnitude to do it, you’d be putting a huge additional burden on the economy—probably a greater net economic impact than that modest change in revenue.”

“What is the goal, then, in increasing taxes?” Ellmers asked.

The goal, Geithner reiterated, was to reduce the deficit.

Believing that she had scored a point, Ellmers pressed, “But if as you stated, only three percent of small businesses will be affected, then how can that increase in taxation be that significant to turn that around?”

“Well, you’re making our case,” Geithner said. He went on to explain that, as in the case of the Ryan budget plan, failure to increase taxes
meant that deficit reduction would have to come from “exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans.”

“Okay, I’d like to reclaim my time,” Ellmers eventually cut in. “We all agree: jobs are the answer. And yet, you are willing and more than capable of putting that excessive burden—which we already know from our small business owners is the issue—why would we do more? Why would we harm them more? Why would we create more uncertainty in the private sector?”

Geithner seemed a bit confused. “I’m not sure we disagree fundamentally,” he managed. “Our economy needs to grow to create jobs. Our basic challenge . . .” And from there the Treasury secretary listed what he believed were the planks to such a foundation: increasing exports, expanding infrastructure and education, and “a balanced, growth-friendly approach to deficit reduction over time. Because if you don’t fix that problem, you’ll leave a broader cloud over the economy, longer-term. But we’ve got to be careful how we do it, so we don’t hurt the economy.”

“Well, Mr. Secretary,” said Ellmers as she looked earnestly into Tim Geithner’s eyes, “I would just like to close by saying that on behalf of the business owners in North Carolina, and across this country: you are wrong.”

YOU ARE WRONG
became the
Drudge Report
’s insta-headline. The Ellmers-Geithner YouTube video went viral. Though her declaration had been willfully unresponsive to Geithner’s points—a kind of playground so’s-your-face rejoinder—Ellmers was savvy enough to know what mattered. What mattered was the cinematic appeal of a spunky Republican freshman from a small North Carolina town uttering those words to the imperious Obama cabinet secretary and Wall Street titan. The next day, a reporter saw her and Ann Marie Buerkle emerging from the House chamber and called out, “Mr. Secretary, you are
wrong!
”