The Long Alliance, page 18
After Obama had selected Biden the previous summer he had looked for ways to keep Tim Kaine close and, recognizing that they basically saw politics the same way, he’d made the Virginia governor the DNC chairman. Obama asked him to be “his eyes and ears around the country” and to tell him what no one else would about the national mood. Kaine took the assignment seriously and, as one of just about two dozen people with Obama’s personal contact information now that he was president, directly sent him a written report each month about what was working and what wasn’t.
It didn’t take long for the latter part of the memos to heavily outweigh the positives, even as the macroeconomic picture slowly stabilized. For months, the reports got progressively darker, revealing not only communities struggling with their finances but also Americans in a deepening malaise with increasingly entrenched skepticism about the opportunities for them in the postcrash economy and downright cynicism about Washington’s willingness to do anything about it. Republican activists were plainly radicalizing, too, though it wasn’t yet clear what the new Democratic president should—or even could—do about that, even with his personal approval rating remaining shockingly high, in the sixties, for his first half-year in office.
This was the landscape within which Obama sought to enact the most dramatic change to the American health-care system in history, an endeavor he knew wouldn’t be simple but also one that he was convinced was necessary after hearing a parade of horror stories while campaigning—and after watching Democrats try to get it done his entire political life, continuing a push that was older than he was. He’d made the intention clear when recruiting his cabinet and senior team, insisting internally that he wanted to get millions of Americans without access to insurance covered, to hold insurers to account, and to mandate coverage for preexisting conditions. No other policy push could possibly help so many Americans all at once, he’d figured.
He shouldn’t have been surprised when, as soon as January, even some of his own top advisors said he was being unrealistic about the political moment. It wouldn’t be clear for months that they were the ones underestimating his persistence. Biden was first and loudest, building on the case he’d started making during the transition that, given the state of things, voters would give Obama “a pass on this one” if he focused only on the economy. Over a few weeks in Roosevelt Room meetings, he told Obama, with increasing agitation, that pushing a health-care overhaul would kneecap his presidency from the start. Insisting on this kind of historical political loser in Year One while facing an already unsettled public would swamp the rest of the agenda, he said, urging Obama and the rest of the administration to listen to his analysis, since he had by far more DC experience than the rest of them. Obama, however, was unimpressed by the next step of Biden’s argument, which was that he had to focus on middle-class economics. Well, Obama asked more than once, what exactly would that look like? We’re already doing everything we know how to do for the economy, so all you’re proposing is giving up on health care. That was status quo DC thinking.
Biden, however, wasn’t alone, and Emanuel was on his own mission to steer Obama to other priorities. He’d had a front-row seat for the failure of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s universal health-care push, and he advised Obama to at least prepare a backup plan if his comprehensive one failed. First, though, he brought Chuck Schumer to the White House to advocate for a combination of family investments, jobs plans, and immigration overhauls instead of health care. If that wasn’t to Obama’s liking, the senator suggested, they could consider a manufacturing program being pushed by some midwestern Democrats. At the very least, they should wait on health care until Congress had more of an appetite for such a huge push, a suggestion that sounded good to the already overwhelmed economists in the room. Still, Obama was unmoved, refusing to budge in these large meetings and increasingly impatient with the arguments.
It wasn’t until Obama had a series of smaller conversations with Axelrod that others in the administration started to sense the inevitability of the health-care effort. The strategist approached the matter with two competing mindsets. First, he was a father who had experienced the system’s flaws while almost going bankrupt trying to get care for his daughter with epilepsy. Second, though, he was a political advisor who saw little but doom in the effort. He told Obama that the data showed Americans were vehemently opposed to government involvement in their care, and that while he agreed the system needed drastic changes, they could wait until the recession was under control. Obama had been internalizing all of Biden’s and Emanuel’s arguments, and understood Axelrod’s concern. But, he said, “What are we supposed to do? Put our approval rating on the shelf and admire it for eight years? Or draw down on it and do things of lasting value?”
On this much Biden agreed; he just thought Obama should do it over more time, not all at once. Obama kept scheduling health-care reform planning meetings, so Biden could see where this was all headed, but he still tried arguing for a less dramatic first effort. At one session, the president and VP listened to a procession of policy experts’ pitches before Biden tore into them for five excruciating minutes. This will never pass, we’ll get bogged down on it, and it will distract from everything else, he said, amazed that the room still couldn’t see this political certainty. Obama shifted in his chair, his discomfort and impatience more obvious by the moment as Biden’s voice rose into a yell. The president had already made his decision, and this wasn’t the cerebral, considered way he wanted to have his policies determined.
Both Obama and Biden recognized the precarity of the moment, but where one saw opportunity for dramatic change that might yet shift the cynical culture of Washington and, over the long run, help Americans who needed the support, the other feared his boss was missing a dire political reality. Nonetheless it would have made theoretical sense for the ensuing push for reform to deploy their complementary skills, Obama the inspirer trying to soothe and then galvanize a hurting nation while Biden worked the inside game in Congress to get the necessary House majority and sixty votes in the Senate. The VP did, after all, support the ultimate goal of revamping the insurance system. Instead Obama gave Biden no central strategic role on the initial push as they designed their policy. Biden was rather deployed for individual vote-winning missions on Capitol Hill over the course of the fight, an important but more targeted role that left him to focus happily on separate projects. In the White House others were entirely focused on the health-care effort, which Biden still suspected might be blowing the administration’s political goodwill. Biden, thus, was as surprised as Obama was relieved when they ultimately pulled it off, setting up a lasting legacy less than two years into their administration. By then, though, both had little choice but to admit even amid their elation that they’d still been caught off guard by the size of the GOP-led wave of fury and the depth of the Democratic terror that had hit them.
For the moment, however, it was Obama’s intense assurance about his political abilities and radar that won out. He repeated to Biden and his team that he’d promised a big-picture reform and that’s what he’d deliver, even after the first few Friday senior staff meetings where Christina Romer gave them early looks at abysmal jobs numbers. See? Obama would ask after absorbing the reports of millions of Americans losing their jobs, and therefore their coverage. There was nothing financially sustainable about the health-care status quo. To the arguments that he’d be overwhelming the rest of his agenda by pushing on health care, he replied that they just had to get the legislation through before the midterms, at which point they’d lose political momentum and running room. Then, he’d say to immense skepticism—but with little doubt of his read on the public’s pulse—if it all worked, they could stop worrying about political suicide, since voters would appreciate the reform’s benefits.
This was only rational, he figured, and Obama’s unemotional style, insisting on treating everyone as logical actors, ruled the day in his White House. So much so that when in February CNBC personality Rick Santelli went on a televised rant about a program aimed at helping homeowners avoid foreclosures, roaring that “the government is promoting bad behavior,” that it was making successful Americans “subsidize the losers’ mortgages,” and “we’re thinking about having a Chicago tea party in July,” the administration figured they could reason with him to head him off. Obama dispatched advisor Stephanie Cutter to give Santelli a call, hoping that would be the end of that.
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No one close to Obama thought there was anything preordained about his decision to prioritize health care until he was elected. He’d clearly cared about the topic for years, at least as far back as his time leading the health-care committee in the Illinois state senate, where he’d annually introduced a constitutional amendment to establish health care as a fundamental right. That experience had given him an education in the history of the matter, so he knew that DC had been discussing reform for nearly a century and that Democrats in particular had been pushing for some sort of single-payer program since the Truman administration. But despite his 2008 promise to enact universal health care by the end of his first term, neither his aides nor the public appeared to consistently consider it a top real-world priority. For many, it seemed just a campaign-season promise, especially after Obama bombed at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) health-care forum in the primary—where he clearly wasn’t yet up on the specifics of his own proposal—and then amid the primary- season debates over his decision not to include an individual mandate to buy insurance in his plan. Yet he’d taken seriously the constant tales of unaffordable care that he’d heard at town halls and on rope lines, and had no issue with the idea that this fight would be the first, and probably the most prominent, domestic test of his approach to the presidency.
Obama wanted to be intimately involved in setting the bill’s text, but he almost immediately put its passage in Reid’s and Pelosi’s capable and immeasurably more experienced hands, which at first forced the Senate into the spotlight. Reid would have to find votes to pass it from skeptical moderates, and Pelosi had no such pressing requirement. Reid and Biden hadn’t always seen eye to eye since they had different focuses as colleagues, but they both knew the Senate as well as anyone and therefore understood what a political lift this was going to be. The House had just passed a cap-and-trade scheme, but Reid decided to shelve the environmental plan in order to focus fully on the health-care side. Obama trusted his and Pelosi’s judgment and bill-passing chops as long as they coordinated regularly with Emanuel; they could leave the policy to his team and the external political-slash-moral campaigning for the measure to him.
Obama continued to figure even after a few months of DC slog that he still had a decent legislative majority and a universally agreed-upon sense of purpose within his party with the economic recovery still in rough shape. So why should he spend all his time marching over to the Hill or inviting attention-seeking lawmakers to his home to hang out? When, in the health-care push’s early days, he began understanding that some conservative Democrats were skeptical, he insisted on hanging back, sure they would come around for their party eventually at Reid’s prodding. He was unwilling to be the one to woo or strong-arm them so early, figuring his political influence should be held in reserve until it was absolutely needed.
Biden, however, watched curiously. His style of negotiation was different, as they had already learned when discussing the stimulus bill. Not only did he want a lot more person-to-person face time with counterparties than Obama ever did, but he also tended to start at a point of basic agreement, then build on deals, adding pieces that each side wanted to make everyone happy. Obama, though, usually started from his ideal spot and negotiated down to a place of mutual acceptance, and he didn’t much like doing it. Biden was starting to suspect that Obama didn’t enjoy negotiating—or members of Congress—at all. He wasn’t hanging around with guests at White House receptions after giving his welcome remarks, and he only rarely had even his former Senate colleagues over for strategy sessions. It was all stuff Biden would’ve loved to do as president but which Obama thought was superfluous and, often, bullshit—a long cry from his weekly bipartisan poker game in Springfield.
But Obama wasn’t wrong, at least when it came to Washington’s Republicans. He was aghast in May when GOP pollster Frank Luntz circulated a twenty-eight-page memo to his party’s representatives on Capitol Hill instructing them on how to talk about the president’s health-care plan. They should call it a “Washington takeover,” Luntz had written, since “takeovers are like coups—they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom. What Americans fear most is that Washington politicians will dictate what kind of care they can receive.” They should avoid mentioning Obama directly, since he was still popular, the pollster had advised, and instead frame the fight against the bill as a war against “politicians” getting involved in health care.
It was an early piece of a broader reorientation of Republican Party strategy toward stopping Obama’s presidency in its tracks. Around that time, Obama asked Biden in one of their lunches why he thought Republicans suddenly seemed to be in perfect lockstep against him, and why they were proving so difficult to even get to the negotiating table.
Biden had been considering this question and was glad Obama had asked. First, he told Obama, he had to consider that the culture change was a long time coming, dating back to the election of Newt Gingrich and the subsequent rise of his acolytes—conservatives who specifically ran against “business as usual” and “the establishment,” and whose whole platform was shaking Washington up. Over time, that attitude had become a dominant ethos among the loudest Republicans, and one of its central tenets was never being perceived as cozy with any Democrats.
There were more factors to consider, like recent reforms in the earmarking process that made it harder to bring politicians to the table with one another with the promise of perks for their districts, Biden conceded. But the second major factor he blamed was the recent explosion of money in politics. It had given politicians extra reason to go home to their districts over the weekends, as so many of their races were hard fought and their opponents well funded, Biden explained. This meant the pols were spending less time together in DC, so fighting one another came a bit easier.
Obama, who’d barely spent any time at all with his colleagues during his brief stay in the Senate, listened and considered it all quietly. This was why he’d chosen Biden, and why he was still content with that choice whenever he thought about it.
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They wanted the health-care bill done as quickly as possible, and as the summer of 2009 arrived the only approval it still needed before it went to a vote was from the Senate’s finance committee. This effectively left the legislation in the hands of Max Baucus, the committee’s Democratic chairman, and both Reid and Biden—who’d known the Montanan forever—counseled Obama to give him time to work through his issues and get the members of his panel on board. No one thought setting an artificial deadline was a good idea, though, and conservative groups used the delay as a chance to organize. Both Obama and Biden were thus blindsided when, in August, Democratic lawmakers were greeted back home by angry right-wing crowds branding the push as “Obama care” in an attempt to poison both the president’s popularity and the image of a bill they likened to a Communist plot.
Within the West Wing this was viewed as little more than organized political violence—Gibbs compared the town hall disruptions to the 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot,” where GOP staffers posed as Florida locals protesting the presidential recount—but they should have known something like this was coming when, in July, South Carolina senator Jim DeMint said on a call with an Indiana congressman named Mike Pence and a group of activists, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”
It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that neither Obama nor Biden, nor anyone else in the White House, knew quite how to deal with this new wave of organized conservative fury by the time Sarah Palin started claiming in August that the proposed law would include “death panels” to determine who deserved care. As the health-care plan’s popularity sank and more congressional town halls were overwhelmed by protesters calling themselves members of the “Tea Party,” their primary concern was still with making sure Baucus remained on track. They were convinced the disruptions were a sideshow, akin but not necessarily connected to the unhinged “birther” movement that had started bubbling back up to ludicrously claim Obama’s presidency was illegitimate because he was supposedly really born in Kenya. No serious Republicans were talking about this stuff, they figured, so it felt distant and deserved little concerted pushback or consideration, even though Obama was unamused to find himself villainized and then attacked with a racist conspiracy that wouldn’t go away. The health-care bill was the matter at hand to the president and chief of staff, and well into the summer Obama and Emanuel were still sure they could find enough Republicans to make a deal.
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