The Price of Politics (35 page)

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“How many people do you think are going to vote for it?” the president asked Nabors.

“How many people are you going to tell to vote for it?” Nabors replied. There were no natural votes. “No one wants to vote for this. If you throw it on the floor, it’s going to get zero votes. Because there’s something in here for everybody to hate.” He believed he had an accurate whip operation with the Democrats and could get a vote count. “I have it name-by-name, this is who we’re going to get, this is how we going to get them.” The Democrats are cranky about this, he said, as he produced preliminary lists of House Democrats for the president. He said that he, Pelosi and Hoyer would be able to take care of 60, 70 or 80 House Democrats. Some would come aboard out of loyalty to Obama, some would have to be leaned on.

Obama seemed to agree.

“These are the members that you’re personally going to have to call,” Nabors said. “If we are putting the full power of the White House behind it, what can I get?” He had a list of about 50 House Democrats—a big number, a healthy number—that Obama would have on his list.

Nabors would long remember exactly what the president said to him. “At the end of the day,” Obama said, “this is more important than health care, in terms of the fiscal condition of the country.” He would have the meetings, make the phone calls. “I’ll get it done.”

So that would take them to about 120 or 130 Democrats, Nabors said, well on the way toward the necessary 218. There were, however, two questions.

Was the president going to put his political capital on the line, put
everything on the line? Frankly, Nabors said, they did not have a lot of capital left, post–health care, post–loss of the House, and after the recent battle over the appropriations bills.

But, he added, it was an odd dynamic. In a face-off such as this with the Republicans and a willingness to double down with political capital, the 120 to 130 votes was reachable. “It’s not a lot of votes to get.”

The other question was Boehner’s strength. “A speaker should be able to stand up and say, ‘Vote for it because I’m the speaker. Don’t even read it. I’m the speaker, vote for it,’ ” Nabors said.

The question, they agreed, was could Boehner deliver the additional 100 votes or more from the Republican side? Was that possible? Did he have enough clout?

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Boehner was a mixture of confidence and uncertainty. In an interview he recalled a discussion with the president when they were alone.
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“At some point that week I said to the president, I said, ‘Mr. President, don’t underestimate the difficulty in getting this thing passed,’ He must have been sitting next to me because he reached down, touched my forearm, and said, ‘John, I’ve got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people.’ It almost took my breath away. It was just one of those moments you never forget. And he was very serious.”

Asked about this, the president said, “I don’t recall that precise conversation.”
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Boehner told him he could persuade enough House Republicans.

It was really about votes? I asked.
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“It’s about votes,” Boehner said.

Did you ever talk to the president about votes and ask how many votes are you going to get?

“Well, no, no, no. We never got into that. Never got into it.”

I said I understood that the president thought he could get 120 to 130 votes from House Democrats.

“We always assumed that they’d have to get half the votes and we’d have to get half the votes,” Boehner said, adding that he was confident he could deliver. “And I always assumed I could get half the votes.”

B
y Monday morning, the White House had sent nothing.

It’s coming, Daley and Nabors promised Jackson.

Boehner and Cantor kept their staffs at the office well into the evening, ready to get to work when the White House offer arrived. They had legislative language to draft. They had the responsibility of coming up with the precise definition of the trigger. Jackson in particular was focused on how they were going to sell this to the conference. Congress was out of session so not too many people were around. There had been no leaks that they were on the verge of a deal.

As a precaution, Jackson had begun discussions with staff from Reid’s and McConnell’s offices on a fallback plan in case they weren’t able to reach agreement with Obama.

Sometime between eight and nine o’clock, Nabors called Jackson. The offer isn’t coming tonight. We’ll have it to you first thing in the morning.

• • •

At nearly every White House senior staff meeting for months, Sperling had said, “The Gang of Six might come out with something today.”

The Gang was made up of six senators—three Democrats and three conservative Republicans—who had been working on a big, supposedly
dramatic, deficit reduction plan. The bipartisan makeup of the Gang suggested it might have clout in the ongoing budget wars. The group had been formed in the wake of Simpson-Bowles and included Senator Conrad, the fiscal hawk and Budget Committee chairman, and Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican who was one of Boehner’s closest friends.

Sperling’s invocation of the Gang of Six had become a daily joke.

“You’ve said that every day for the last three months,” Nabors told Sperling one morning. “Stop saying that.”

But suddenly, on the morning of Tuesday, July 19, it was no longer a joke. Sperling reported that the Gang was going to have a meeting that morning to announce its framework.

Nabors called Jackson.

“This may end up being a potential problem for both of us in terms of votes,” he said. The Gang undoubtedly was going to be more aggressive on spending cuts, thus appealing to the anti-government hard-liners among the House Republicans. And it was also surely going to be more aggressive on revenue, appealing to the progressive Democrats who wanted more tax increases.

That’s weird, Jackson thought. Given Boehner’s closeness to Chambliss and McConnell, he would have expected a heads-up.

They’re supposed to have a roll-out in the Senate in a little while, Nabors told him.

• • •

The Gang—Democrats Durbin, Conrad and Virginia Senator Mark Warner, plus Republicans Chambliss, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo and Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn—had been crashing around in the forest since the previous December. But in a meeting with fellow senators that morning, they announced a plan calling for $3.
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7 trillion in deficit reduction, including new revenue of at least $1.2 trillion.

Because it was bipartisan, it drew a great deal of media attention.
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Plouffe went to the president with the other senior staff. This is a very important moment, he said. Perhaps a watershed, because it was the first time Republicans were coming forward publicly and embracing
the concept of more revenue. Three Republican senators, including Boehner’s close friend Chambliss, were out there with a big revenue number. If Chambliss was coming out for more revenue, Plouffe said, while the president was having these negotiations with Boehner, it was probably not unrelated.

“Now, let me get this straight,” Obama said. “So Saxby is saying he’s willing to vote for $1.2 in revenue? And they can bring the Republicans along? Because if that’s true, we definitely have a deal.”

“We need to shape this for two reasons,” Plouffe said. “One, let’s build momentum around Republicans wanting to do revenue.” It would help Boehner, giving him room to maneuver in the Republican world. Second, the Gang of Six was giving explicit support to the president’s main argument that they should take a balanced approach to deficit reduction—spending cuts and a big chunk of additional revenue.

Daley, Lew and Sperling were fine with the idea. Nabors agreed strongly because they would look, he said, like “the weakest presidency in the history of mankind” if Obama was proposing less revenue than six senators including three Republicans. There was no further debate.

In the modern media age, it was important to act, get out there, be part of the daily conversation, shape the perception. No one tried harder at it than Obama. It was part of the permanent campaign, and at the moment the message seemed more important than the sensitive negotiation with Boehner. In the rapid-fire move and countermove of a presidential campaign, no one tipped the other side to the next move. One of the principles of campaign warfare was surprise. So, no one thought to give a heads-up to the speaker or his staff. The instincts of the former campaign manager carried the day.

At 1:32 p.m. Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House Briefing Room.

“Some progress was made in some of the discussions, some narrowing of the issues,” he said carefully, hedging about the meetings with Boehner and the congressional leadership.
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“The good news is that today a group of senators, the Gang of Six, put forward a proposal that is broadly consistent with the approach I’ve urged.” He went further,
“I want to congratulate the Gang of Six.” He also said that the plan McConnell and Reid were working on was “necessary” to ensure that the debt ceiling was raised if a larger deficit reduction deal could not be reached. “We have to have that fail-safe that Senator McConnell and Senator Reid are working on.”

Jackson’s head was almost spinning. “Why did the president come out and do a press conference to wrap his arms around the Gang of Six when they were in the middle of secret negotiations with us? We were so close to a deal. Why would he come out and say that he wants something, he applauds something that is so different than what we were so close on? We were just trying to nail down a few last pieces.”

The Gang was the kind of high-profile, vocal and self-appointed group that could dwell in the world of fiscal and budget abstraction, relying on the high principle of less spending and more taxing. They did not have to live in the real world of the present crisis, in which the administration and Congress had about two weeks to avoid a calamity. That freedom also gave the Gang plenty of time to stir the pot and cause trouble.

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Asked about his reaction to the Gang of Six, Obama later recalled that he had tried to walk a delicate line in discussing the revenue number.
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“I did not endorse that number, precisely to protect that number,” he said. “I praised the concept of Republicans being willing to actually do revenue in exchange for some serious cuts. Now, to be honest, part of the reason we didn’t endorse it was because we knew that whatever they were coming up with in terms of revenue, over on this Gang of Six side, was fuzzy. They hadn’t identified it, they hadn’t specified where it’d come from. The cuts that they were looking for I think were substantially greater in exchange for the revenues.

“And so the notion here was not to try to embarrass Boehner or to force his hand. The notion was simply to lift up a principle, which was, if Republicans are willing to move on revenue, I’m willing to move on entitlements, and we can get a deal done.”

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Cantor invited Paul Ryan to his ceremonial corner office to dissect the Gang of Six plan with their staffs. With almost computer-like precision, Ryan and the others clicked through the proposals. It was a mix of the good, as they saw it, such as lowering the top marginal income tax rate to 29 percent, and the bad, including a failure to address what they believed were the budget-busting consequences of Obamacare.

The Gang of Six appeared to raise revenue of $1.2 to $2 trillion, through tax reform. A tall order, Ryan said.

But in their proposed deal with Obama, Boehner and Cantor were to raise “up to” $800 billion. They could not completely crap on the idea of tax reform because they might be driving down a similar road.

“We might be making the same argument in a day or two,” Cantor’s policy director, Bradley, said.

It also appeared that the Gang paid for cutting the top income tax rate to 29 percent with a massive tax increase on capital gains and dividends—Republican heresy.

So Cantor put out a statement praising the Gang’s “constructive ideas” but voicing his concern about the revenue target and lack of detail.
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Through a spokesman, Boehner said the plan “shared similarities” with the grand bargain he had been negotiating with the president.
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Boehner and Jackson reviewed the situation. Boehner couldn’t see why the Gang of Six plan should have any real impact on his discussions with the president. It was just a handful of senators getting together and making a point. It had no bearing on discussions between the White House and the House of Representatives.

“Senators being senators,” Jackson said derisively. “We will come rescue the day because nothing’s getting done and we’re all in a panic.”

Senator Tom Coburn, a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission and one of the Six, thought Obama had made a mistake. Coburn was one of the few in his party who regularly said that higher taxes were necessary to balance the budget. He thought that Obama did not
realize how toxic he was to Republicans, who would see his embrace of the Gang of Six as a prelude to a tax hike. He said it showed how inexperienced a negotiator Obama was. He later told
The Washington Post
that the president’s statement “absolutely killed anything we were doing with the Republicans.”
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