Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (11 page)

It was fine to be progressive. But tone deaf? Some of the progressives in the caucus had actually been against the Democrats participating in the January 6 reading of the Constitution—as if a show of patriotism was beneath them. Not Weiner. He wore a flag lapel pin. A Democratic consultant had told Weiner one day, “You really shouldn’t be photographed wearing a flag on your lapel. Our base doesn’t like that.”

Weiner was apoplectic.
So we’re handing the flag over to the Republicans now? Are we really that dumb?

And at the same time, it astonished him how, in the Democrats’ abiding zeal to govern—to tinker, to legislate, to compromise—they would so willingly back away from a fight. Obama’s debt commission put Social Security on the chopping block. The president himself caved in and preserved Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy during the lame-duck session. Frank Luntz went around bragging that he relabeled the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill “the bailout bill” when the legislation in fact
prevented
bailouts—and who, besides Weiner, refused to take this shit lying down? For that matter, when health care reform foe Dr. Betsy McCaughey insisted over and over that the Democrats’ bill made “death panels” the law of the land, Weiner didn’t just cry foul—he debated McCaughey for two hours, at one point calling her
“a pyromaniac
in a straw man factory.” Someone had to counter the lies (and of course enjoy precious airtime doing so).

The Republicans, at least, seemed to appreciate his chutzpah. A number of freshmen had come up to him since the beginning of the session. Eyeing him at first like a zoo exhibit, then grinning and saying:
I’ve been wanting to meet you. I see you on TV. I use you as a dirty word sometimes.
They meant it as a compliment, he’d decided.

The Democratic caucus lacked Weiner’s appetite for alley fighting. Seeing that the Republican freshmen were already making noise, Weiner had approached Pelosi and Hoyer and said to them, “Here’s what we should do. We should get a hundred and fifty of us and agree
not to raise the debt ceiling—that’s the Republican majority’s job. That gives us negotiating position.”

This is too serious an issue to be demagoguing
, they had told him. But in Weiner’s view, the Republicans were only going to be having conflicts if Democrats
drove
the conflict.

During a caucus in late January, Pelosi and one of her top messaging deputies, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were exhorting the Democrats to hammer the Obamacare-killing Republicans for not focusing on jobs. Weiner stood up and told the others that there was a better counterthrust available.

“These eighty-odd Republican freshmen don’t even know what’s in the bill!” he exclaimed. He reminded them that one of the freshmen had claimed that senior members of Congress were exempted from the health care bill. “They’ve been spouting lies so long, they don’t even know what’s in the bill! So why don’t we read it to them on the floor? Every time they lie, one of us goes down to the floor and says, ‘If they’d read the bill they’d know that’ and then you read the relevant part. Then TV commentators would start asking them, ‘Well, did you read the bill?’ ”

The Democrats didn’t think that was so hot an idea—perhaps because several of them hadn’t read the bill, either.

Weiner had read the bill. They could say that he was disengaged, easily bored, not a team player, overly focused on his singular ambition to become mayor of New York in 2013—but they couldn’t say he was lazy. Weiner worked fifteen-hour days. He expected his staffers to work approximately twice that. They nearly wept with gratitude whenever his wife, Huma Abedin, the longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, showed up at the office to take him away. Weiner behaved differently around his wife. She had a sedating, even humanizing influence. This was known as “the Huma Effect,” and it was an affirming spectacle for those who otherwise had cause for doubting that Anthony Weiner cared about anyone other than himself. When the Clintons hosted an engagement party for the couple in July 2010, Weiner gave a toast to his bride-to-be and broke down in tears as he described his love for her.

The only other times he showed any degree of vulnerability were the inevitable moments when staffers would come into his office and say
that they had to quit because they couldn’t take the hours and his yelling anymore. Then his tone would become beseeching.

“Could you not say anything to the press about this?” he would ask.

Weiner spent much of the morning of
January 25
, 2011, the day of Obama’s State of the Union address, on the second-floor balcony of the Cannon building, making a succession of stops at the various TV crews haloing the area. That evening, a phalanx of cameras cluttered Statuary Hall in the Capitol—set up in preparation for the on-the-air opining that dozens of congressmen would engage in immediately following Obama’s speech. Anthony Weiner did not want to wait that long. He arrived in Statuary Hall early and offered himself up for pre-speech interviews. Sidling up to a couple of reporters, he confided, “I’m gonna sit next to two Republicans tonight—one I like, and one I can say ‘fuck you’ to. Just for ballast.”

Then a host of security agents descended on the room, preventing anyone from leaving. A procession of dignitaries streamed out of the Senate side of the Capitol, heading toward the House chamber. Among them were Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, senators, and the president of the Senate, Joe Biden.

“Hey Mr. Vice President!” hollered Weiner—his voice cutting through the din like a rotary blade. “Big fan!
Big fan!
”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Madam Minority Leader

Nancy Pelosi was not in the TV frame as Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address: a call to
“win the future”
by spending more federal dollars on education, research, and clean energy technology—the president’s attempt to counter the new budget-cutting ethos, and one that the White House would soon abandon. Rather, Pelosi took her place once again among the rank and file—albeit at the front and on the aisle, a prime location befitting her status as minority leader. Obama did not mention her tonight as he had in the previous two addresses, and as he did the new Speaker. This was Boehner’s chamber now. Pelosi was relegated to playing defense.

Everything that she had achieved during the past two years, at great electoral expense, Boehner’s Republicans now endeavored to obliterate. The Affordable Health Care Act, Pelosi’s single greatest legislative accomplishment, was their primary target, but hardly their only one. Scores of progressive federal programs would be targeted for severe cuts. The environmental, food, and drug safety regulations that had multiplied on her watch were destined for evisceration. The Republicans even intended to defund the ex-Speaker’s pet project, Green the Capitol, with its energy-efficient lightbulbs and recyclable utensils in the House cafeterias. It was as if they sought to annul the very fact of Nancy Pelosi’s historic Speakership. A lesser woman—or man—would have lost all resolve.

Not Pelosi. She spent her mornings and her evenings tirelessly raising funds so that her party could take back the House and return her to the Speaker’s chair in 2012. During the day, she was a ubiquitous presence on the House floor,
a self-styled messaging coach
to the minority party. Sitting next to each Democrat before they spoke, leaning into
their faces, waving her hands and exhorting them to focus their message, she cut a figure of manic determination:
Jobs, jobs, jobs. The American people want to know what they’re going to do to create jobs—and all
they’re
talking about is taking health insurance away from pregnant mothers and throwing children out of Head Start. JOBS!

On January 5, the opening day of the 112th Congress, Nancy Pelosi sat and watched as all 242 Republicans voted for Boehner as the House’s new Speaker. She maintained a lacquered smile as nineteen Democrats voted for someone other than Pelosi as minority leader. One of the Blue Dogs’ leaders, former Washington Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler of North Carolina, had received eleven of the votes.

Shuler had called her
two days after the midterm elections. They spoke for forty-five minutes. “I just want you to understand that every single Blue Dog who lost, one hundred percent of the attack ads that were run associated you with them. You have a very low approval rating in our districts.

“Now, I can relate to this,” he went on. “As a football player, I was successful in high school and in college. When I went to the NFL, things didn’t go the way I wanted them to. They replaced me as starting quarterback. And I had two options. I could say, ‘I’m not the problem—it’s everyone else.’ Or I could support the other guy taking my place. I decided to be a team player. And I’m asking you to be a team player.”

“I totally understand,” she had replied when Shuler was done. “But you need to understand, Heath, that there are a lot of other members who are calling me and asking me to maintain the leadership role.”

What she told her other colleagues was, “I’m the person to lead.” Pelosi had returned them to power in November 2006. She would do the same again. The Democrats had lost power because of the economy. Who else was going to hold the base together and raise the sums of money needed to return them to the majority, if not Nancy Pelosi?

She knew, of course, that moderate Democrats had been beaten senseless by a cudgel that had Pelosi’s face on it. In the past, Republicans had sought to wrap liberal Democrats like Speaker Tip O’Neill and Senator Ted Kennedy around the necks of their colleagues. Democrats had done the same with Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich—and Pelosi herself had been a part of such efforts. Never before, however,
had a party spent
$65 million
in an attempt to emblazon a gross caricature of a House member into the minds of the American electorate.
Sixty-five million dollars.
And zero dollars spent by the Democrats defending their leader. Instead, the most vulnerable House members did all they could to distance themselves from her. In some cases, they openly criticized her.

“Do what you have to do,” Pelosi would tell them. “Hit me if you have to.”

She was an exquisite target: a San Francisco liberal who lived in a mansion and flew around on a taxpayer-funded private plane; a woman of a certain age whose trim and strangely unmarred physical appearance spurred conservative pundits to deride her as a Botox Frankenstein; and a specialist of the inside game who did not fare as well under the light of day. When the Speaker memorably said, two weeks before final passage of the health care bill, that
“we have to pass
so that you can, uh, find out what is in it,” the context of that remark—that voters had been misled about the bill’s contents but would eventually come to understand its true benefits—was forever erased from memory. “They understand what I was saying,” she had insisted to her staffers, who knew better—and so, surely, did she.

Her aides had devoted enormous effort throughout 2006 to promoting the incoming Speaker, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi, as America’s quintessence—a child of Baltimore, granddaughter of Italian immigrants, daughter of Mayor and Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., devoted Catholic and grandmother. That entire backstory was also forgotten. It hadn’t stuck, in part because the benign image failed to capture not only her shortcomings, but also her greatest strengths. She could be charming, witty, reasonable, and deferential when the situation called for it. But most of all, she was tenacious.

“I know how to win
elections.” That was her self-assessment, and also her impetus to lead the House Democrats. For the 2000 elections, her caucus had only needed to gain seven seats to retake the House majority. Pelosi herself promised that she would deliver four of those from races in her home state of California. She did—and it still wasn’t enough. The Democrats managed a net loss of one House seat in 2000 and remained in the minority. How could Nancy Pelosi keep going back to her donors and asking for more resources without anything
positive to bring back to them?
Someone needs to teach these people—these men—how to win!

In truth, fully two years before the 2000 elections, Pelosi had set her sights on the party leadership by deciding to run for minority whip, the second-highest post, as soon as David Bonior made good on his vow to vacate it. The problem was that someone else was already in line for the job: Steny Hoyer, with whom she had worked back in the mid-1960s, in the office of Maryland Senator Daniel Brewster. They were friends. But this wasn’t personal. It was about winning. She informed Hoyer that she intended to run against him. He was, to put it mildly, taken aback.

Pelosi aided her cause by distributing $964,000 in campaign donations to members who would be voting in
the whip race
. Hoyer didn’t have the funds to match Pelosi’s effort. She beat him by twenty-three votes on October 10, 2001, thereby becoming the first woman whip in the history of Congress.

Two years later, when Dick Gephardt resigned from the House to run for president, Nancy Pelosi became the House’s first-ever female minority leader. In January 2007, she became America’s first U.S. representative ever to be addressed as “Madam Speaker.”

On January 20, 2009, George W. Bush left the White House. Pelosi commented that his departure
“felt like a ten-pound anvil
had been lifted off my head.” Now she had a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the Senate alongside her.

But she and her Democrats were living on borrowed time. At the House Democratic retreat just days after Obama’s inauguration, party pollster Stan Greenberg—who was married to one of Pelosi’s closest friends in the House, Connecticut liberal Rosa DeLauro—gave a sobering presentation to the victors. The Democrats had benefited from consecutive “wave elections” in 2006 and 2008, Greenberg reminded them. Their power now extended into traditionally Republican districts. And yet the number of voters who identified as Democrats had barely grown at all during the same time frame. History and the odds were sure to catch up to them in 2010.