The Price of Politics (16 page)

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As soon as Obama concluded, Sperling dashed to intercept Ryan. But Ryan had gotten up quickly and headed out with Camp and Hensarling. This is going to be a long two years, Ryan was thinking, a hard slog. Obama had just doubled down on his ideology. The debt crisis was only going to get worse. He prayed they could hold the bond markets at bay “long enough to get somebody new to fix this problem.”

Striding out of the auditorium, Ryan heard someone shouting, “Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!” He thought it was a reporter. He was not going to stop and answer questions, so he ignored the voice.

Then he saw it was Sperling running after him. Catching up with him, Sperling practically grabbed Ryan’s coat.

This wasn’t planned, he said. This wasn’t a setup. Sperling saw that Ryan was genuinely ripped.

“I can’t believe you poisoned the well like that,” Ryan said quickly, and kept walking. Sperling kept talking and following. Ryan kept walking and didn’t listen.

Back in Hensarling’s Jeep, the three congressmen vented. This was outside the normal boundaries of partisan discourse—right between the eyes from the president himself. Why did he invite us? Why did he invite the whole Simpson-Bowles commission? What was he up to?

Ryan took out his BlackBerry and began punching out a statement calling the Obama speech “excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis.”
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Back at the Capitol, Ryan took a call from Alan Simpson.

“I’m going to go throw up in the tulips,” Simpson said. The president’s words and demeanor, he said, were way over the line.

Then Erskine Bowles called. “I was disgusted,” the longtime Democrat said. “I couldn’t believe that he did that. And I’m going to talk to the president about it.” He said he was apologizing.

“It’s not your fault,” Ryan replied. “You don’t need to apologize for anything.”

Ryan’s presence at the George Washington University speech fundamentally changed the public and media perception of what the White House had hoped would be a major budget moment.
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Instead of reshaping the debate, the speech widened the partisan divide. The contrast between the cool bipartisan talk at the White House in the morning and the attack on the Republicans was stark.

Ryan felt betrayed. He’d expected an olive branch. What he got was the finger.

• • •

At the White House, there was no witch hunt launched to uncover who in the congressional relations office had failed to tell senior staff and Obama that Ryan and company would be at the speech.

Sperling waited several days and then called Camp and Ryan.

That’s our speech, Sperling said to Ryan. Proud of it. But it wasn’t a setup. He tried to explain how and why the president didn’t know the trio of Republicans was in the audience.

There are fights, Ryan said, and of course, we beat the hell out of the president. But we’re just Congress. He’s the president. Isn’t he supposed to be kind of above it all?

• • •

“I was not aware when I gave that speech that Paul Ryan was going to be sitting right there,” President Obama later acknowledged in an interview.
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Had he known Ryan was in the audience, Obama said, “I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations
open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him.

“We made a mistake,” he said.

• • •

For Dave Camp, the 57-year-old chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the White House claim that the invitation to the George Washington University speech had been an honest mistake didn’t sound right. No White House did anything that wasn’t calculated. That they had been given reserved front row seats by accident was hard to believe.

Camp was puzzled. This administration’s approach to Congress was different from what he was used to.

He had first come to Washington as a congressional staffer during the Reagan administration. Reagan had deployed administration liaisons all over Congress. White House aides were everywhere on Capitol Hill. Camp could remember Reagan getting on the phone with a lowly freshman congressman to discuss legislation. Not coincidentally, Reagan was often able to get things he wanted out of Congress, whether by cajoling or muscle.

Camp was a congressman himself by the time Bill Clinton, another president who often bent legislators to his will, took office in 1993. A self-described “nobody” on the Ways and Means Committee, he had gotten a call from Hillary Clinton about a bill he had introduced. As Reagan had, President Clinton deployed congressional liaison staff across Capitol Hill to develop relationships and create trust.

But from the Obama administration there was virtually no outreach or contact.

During Obama’s first two years in office, Camp was the ranking Republican on the Democrat-controlled Ways and Means Committee. He was one of the more politically moderate House Republicans. Yet the administration’s Hill staff didn’t even seem to know who he was. He never saw them.

After Republicans won control of the House, the administration didn’t seem to know how to connect with them on either personal or
policy terms. They hadn’t found their bearings. The Rahm Emanuel approach to congressional relations—“We have the votes. Fuck ’em.”—wouldn’t work anymore. They didn’t have the votes. Obama’s post-election promise of regular meetings and better communication had never materialized.

More than four months later, with Camp sitting in the Ways and Means chairman’s seat, one of the most powerful and coveted positions on Capitol Hill, nothing had changed. Polite and approachable, he was the tax man in a time dominated by debates over taxes, and he still felt like a stranger to the White House and the president.

The result was a lack of trust that made even the most bipartisan legislative efforts impossible at worst, and a chore at best.

Not long after the April 13 speech, Camp spoke privately with Geithner about three free trade agreements the administration had negotiated, with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. They had broad support from both parties—Republicans could sell them as good for business, and Democrats could pitch them as creating good middle-class jobs.

Roll out these trade agreements right away, he told Geithner, and I can guarantee you, they will pass the House with a large bipartisan margin. It wasn’t an idle promise. Camp was close to Boehner and knew the importance of free trade to the Republican leadership.

Geithner didn’t have much of a response.

Camp raised the issue with Sperling. And with White House chief of staff Daley. But the agreements still didn’t come to the Hill. It was clear to Camp that the White House wouldn’t take him at his word. The administration seemed paralyzed by uncertainty. Where were the administration’s legislative representatives? Where was the president?

Does Obama want to chair the Democratic National Committee, or be president of the United States? Camp wondered. Why isn’t Obama doing what presidents are supposed to do?

The three free trade agreements didn’t come before Congress until October of 2011, when they were introduced, passed and sent to the president in the space of six days.
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All three passed with large bipartisan majorities in the House on October 12. The vote on the South
Korea agreement was 278–151, on Panama 300–129, and on Colombia 262–167.

Two days later, on October 14, Obama traveled to Camp’s home state of Michigan, where he touted the benefits of the agreement with South Korea, noting that it “won support of business and labor, from auto makers and auto workers, from Democrats and Republicans.
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That doesn’t happen very often.”

N
ot long after the president’s speech at George Washington University, Joe Biden tracked down Gene Sperling and deputy National Economic Council director Jason Furman in the White House.

“Sperling, I know Furman’s your principal deputy,” the vice president began. “For the next few months, he is my principal briefer. He’s mine; I’m taking him.”

By way of explanation, Biden told a story about a confrontation he had with Senator Russell Long, the son of the flamboyant populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long, during Biden’s early days in the Senate in the 1970s.

I was talking about a tax expenditure benefiting oil companies, Biden explained. “I had a great staffer, and he wrote these great talking points for me.” And he had delivered them with all the confidence of a new senator.

A senator since 1948, Long was one of the old breed of larger-than-life Washington pols. He chaired the Finance Committee, and was the Senate’s preeminent tax expert. Being from Louisiana, he knew a lot about drilling for oil.

“Son,” Long told Biden, “I know you’re from Delaware, so I’m sure that you know all the details about how you get this type of oil out of the ground.”

Biden obviously did not, and Long began defending the tax break, going through the oil drilling process in excruciating detail.

“As I sat there humiliated,” Biden told Sperling and Furman, “I thought to myself, I am never going to speak on something that I don’t know about again.”

The president had asked him to lead a group of lawmakers in an effort to deal with the mounting federal deficit, and the debt ceiling extension, Biden explained, and he was going to need preparation. A lot of it. He had once voluntarily given up his seat on the Senate Budget Committee because he disliked budget work so much.

“I am not a budget guy, but you’re going to brief the hell out of me,” he told Furman, a 40-year-old Harvard Ph.D. economist. Day after day, the two spent hours poring over the budget with other experts from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council.

• • •

On a sunny spring Thursday, May 5, 2011, at 10:35 a.m., Biden convened a meeting of some 25 top congressional Democrats, Republicans, senior Obama administration officials and staffers at Blair House across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The question before them was whether they could forge a deal to prevent the United States from defaulting on its $14.3 trillion debt. The only way was to pass legislation to increase the debt ceiling.

The new reality was that the Republicans in the House had the leverage. Democrats were going to have to agree to large cuts in federal spending if the Republicans were going to support a debt increase. There was no way around that central truth. But a large number of the new Tea Party–affiliated House members had vowed not to raise the debt limit, so Democratic votes would be needed to pass anything.

Biden saw the group as a sort of search party being sent out into the jungle of federal spending. The key Republican at the table was Eric Cantor, and all eyes, including Biden’s, were on him.

Biden began by clearing the room of everybody except the congressmen and senators, the standard way to ensure confidentiality.

Their topic was the federal budget, but with the exception of Representative Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, the members of the group were not budget experts. Van Hollen, a 52-year-old attorney and a certified budget wonk, was a favorite of Pelosi’s. He was a strong progressive voice in the Democratic caucus.

Biden saw the group’s lack of budget expertise as an advantage. While preparing for the meeting, he had told his staff that after 40 years of dealing with politicians—and being one himself—he had come to the view that “most elected officials don’t know squat about the details. Because they’re doing so many things, they know the shorthand and they know the talking points and they have a general sense.”

Politicians are always better when you push them off their talking points, Biden said. You can spend a whole career on Capitol Hill without ever having to defend the weaknesses of your positions. But when everyone is learning together what the facts are, then you can see where the real differences are and it’s a lot easier to reach agreement.

He was trying to create that atmosphere. He believed that the best way to do it was to keep people in the same room for a long period of time, give them a stake in the outcome, and make sure there were no leaks.

When staff was called back into the room, Biden was soothing. “There are no ultimatums here. Our purpose is to find agreement. Our operating concept is that there’s no deal till there’s a deal.” That meant that, even if they reached consensus on certain specifics, nothing was set in stone until a comprehensive package was completed. “And we want to keep it in the room,” he continued, meaning no leaks to the media. “The objective today is to have no doubt where everyone starts out.” We will have a set of marathon meetings over the next weeks, but now I want opening bids.

President Obama’s and his: “We want $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years. Everyone else is very close to that. Our proposal is three-to-one, cuts to revenue.” That meant roughly $3 trillion in cuts with $1 trillion in new tax revenue.

Tamping down expectations, he said, “We won’t settle the Bush tax
cuts here.” The across-the-board tax cuts were currently due to expire at the end of 2012.