Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (51 page)

“I would take the Snowe plan in a heartbeat!” the president said. “We’ll
call
it the Snowe plan. Hell, she can live here in the White House! Michelle and I will get an apartment.” Obama would continue to court Snowe throughout the fall and winter, but she would dither until the end, whipsawed between her desire to make progress and the relentless hammering by McConnell. “You can’t blame her for hesitating,” Obama said, even as he worked to win her over. “If she bolts on this, it won’t be pleasant in that caucus. They’re not pleasant people.”

In November, the House passed its plan, which was more generous in its benefits than the plan emerging in the Senate; benefits paid for by taxes on the wealthy. It also included a government-run “public option” to compete against private insurers in the health care exchange. All these were nonstarters for Nelson and some of the more conservative members of the Senate.

Finally, in early December, the Senate debate began. On a Sunday afternoon, Harry Reid asked the president to make his case to Senate Democrats at the Capitol. When we got back into his limousine to return to the White House, he was reflective. “Why is everyone so scared?” he asked quietly, glancing out the window. “They’re scared because these are the best jobs they’ve ever had and they want to keep them,” I said. He looked at me. “But what good is it to be up here for thirty years and never get anything meaningful done? I don’t get it.”

It was a revealing moment that helped explain the disconnect between Obama and so many in Washington. He hated life in the Senate, with its endless talk and abstruse rules that seemed designed to frustrate solutions instead of promoting them. The idea of staying there and “doing nothing” was as incomprehensible to him as casting votes that might cost them their seats was to his former colleagues.

The president continued to make his case nine days later, when the still-unsettled Senate caucus visited him at the White House.

“Why did we get into this business in the first place?” he asked them. “Not to see our names in the lights, not to go to White House parties. It was to help people . . . so this is it. This is the moment. This is why you want to be here, so that forty years from now people will look at us as people look back today at those who passed civil rights. I didn’t mention Teddy the last time, but I do think about if he were here today, he would say, ‘This is the moment and we have to seize it.’”

With the final showdown nearing, a single Democrat, Nelson of Nebraska, was holding out, and Republican Snowe had yet to declare. Rahm sent a pair of Senate staff veterans, Rouse and Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, to Capitol Hill to reel in Nelson, a conservative former insurance executive who was often an outlier in his own party.

Unless we could round up one of the two, McConnell and the Republicans could, and would, simply block a final vote. Rahm was glum. “McConnell warned everyone that he’d pull the chairmanships of anyone who votes for cloture,” he told us. “They’re whipping the vote. It’s over, that’s it.” Phil Schiliro, the legislative director who had been trapped for a year between the president’s determination and Rahm’s reticence, snapped back. “It’s not over!”

That night, Rahm and I ran into Vicki Kennedy, who was working the bill on her own, tapping old friendships to try to advance her late husband’s legacy. “I met with Olympia for an hour today, and she really seemed eager to be for this,” Vicki said. “Tonight, she sounds different. Something’s changed.” Then, as Rahm studied his BlackBerry, he pulled me aside. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ve got Nelson.”

Rouse, Messina, and the Senate grandees had bargained with Ben Nelson for thirteen hours. The final deal included a special provision that Nelson had demanded to help Nebraska offset the tab for expanded Medicaid, as the new law would require. When news of the “Cornhusker Kickback” spread, it caused a huge firestorm that would taint the process. In the meantime, we had our sixtieth vote. The president was already en route to join his family in Hawaii when the Senate passed the bill at dawn. “Congratulations! Your determination—not your luck—made this possible,” I wrote. “We’re all very proud. But before you type it, I know we just have to finish the job.”

When I wrote those words, I had no idea how hard finishing the job would be.

 • • • 

The hostility between Republicans and Democrats in Washington is readily apparent. What’s striking, when you spend a little time there, is the outright contempt between the House and Senate, even among members of the same party.

It was the system the Founders envisioned: a “People’s House,” burning with popular passions; and the more reflective Senate, to provide needed ballast. Yet as Obama discovered when he returned to Washington, it is an ingenious system unless you have to negotiate differences between them over something as volatile and complex as health reform. If playing Dr. Phil to warring factions of his own party was what it would take to reach agreement, though, then that seemed a small price to pay after all we had been through.

For several days and nights in early January, House and Senate Democrats met in the Cabinet Room in the White House, working to harmonize their plans. Meanwhile, voters in Massachusetts were preparing to force these two warring blocs to come together.

Ted Kennedy had died the previous August. Even before the holidays, I had begun hearing disturbing rumblings about the special election in January to fill his unexpired term.

David Simas, my deputy and a Massachusetts native, was wired into the Bay State’s politics. He had warned me that Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, was taking the race for granted, while her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, was running a strong campaign and closing in on her. Traveling the state in a pickup truck and projecting an easy, working-class affability, Brown, a state senator, had deftly captured the anti-Washington zeitgeist, using the machinations around health reform as Exhibit A in his case for change.

Coakley hadn’t exactly displayed that same common touch. When a reporter asked whether attending photo opportunities with local officials was the best expenditure of her time, she committed an unpardonable sin. She said: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?” Unlike her opponent, Coakley had taken a pass on campaigning outside the storied ballpark, where Boston’s beloved Bruins had played a New Year’s Day game outdoors against the Philadelphia Flyers.

The president strolled into my office just as I was hearing the details, and inveterate ESPN watcher that he is, the cultural meaning of the gaffe was not lost on him. “Nooooo!” he cried in disbelief, grabbing my shirt for emphasis. “She didn’t say
that
?” At this point, the president of the United States began jumping up and down in exasperation. “She’s going to lose! She’s going to lose!”

It wasn’t the prospect of Coakley’s loss that had the president hopping mad. It was what he feared her defeat would mean for health reform.

We had exactly 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, including the interim senator appointed to fill Kennedy’s seat until after the special election. If she lost the seat, we would only have 59, dooming any chance of bringing a compromise House-Senate bill back for a vote. Moreover, the symbolic damage would be incalculable. “There is no doubt that a defeat on Tuesday is an unmitigated disaster,” the president said. “If we lose Ted Kennedy’s seat on the eve of the health care vote, it will send Washington into a frenzy, and it will take months to clean up.” Rahm was darker and more succinct: “If we lose Coakley, we’re done.”

The president appeared for Coakley on the final weekend, but we couldn’t save her from herself. Obama was furious. He had worked his tail off to make health reform a reality. Now, at the eleventh hour, an indifferent candidate and our inability to prop her up had put the whole deal in jeopardy. “I just wish everybody would do their jobs,” he said pointedly.

Washington would be gunning for Obama now, expecting admissions of failure—perhaps a midcourse correction. Yet the president was more defiant than defeated. “These guys are so cynical,” he said of McConnell and the Republican leadership. “They would take the country over the side just to score some points . . . and they shouldn’t be rewarded for that.”

So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection. There was no possibility of bringing a different piece of legislation to the Senate floor now; McConnell had the votes to block it. We would have to persuade House Democrats to accept the Senate bill that many of them loathed. If they held their noses and moved forward, we would clean up some of the technical, finance-related issues in the bill through a process called budget reconciliation, which would require only 51 votes. “We only have two hundred votes in the House right now to pass the bill,” Schiliro reported. “We need two eighteen.”

“We may have to pivot for a few months. We have to put the focus on jobs and take it off of health care, while we regroup,” Obama said.

Obama conferred with Reid and Pelosi. The Speaker was as committed as the president to passing health reform, but she wasn’t about to get out in front of her Democratic caucus too quickly by endorsing the Senate plan. Pelosi intended to get us there, but first she would poke and prod us as well as the Senate to demonstrate to the firebrands in her caucus that she had done everything she could and there was no alternative course.

I was asked to appear before a grumpy Senate caucus in early February. They had been polite and reasonably well behaved earlier in the day when they heard from the president, but they plainly didn’t feel they owed me the same consideration and instead demanded to know our strategy to pass the bill. When Reid called on Minnesota senator Al Franken, the retired
Saturday Night Live
star decided to put on a performance. “I am just livid! I am doing a slow burn over here!” he said, with a forced flourish that revealed why he had been a comedian and not a dramatic actor. “Both the president and you come here, and neither of you has told us how we’re going to get health care done . . . When is he going to show some leadership?”

Now I was livid, too. Health reform would have been dead long ago but for the president’s leadership, I told Franken, reciting everything Obama had done to bring the issue to the brink of final passage. As we continued to spar, Harry Reid sat quietly, staring at the floor. Harry was in close communication with the White House and approved of our play, but he was content to let his caucus vent its frustrations—and far better on me than him.

Franken wouldn’t let up. “Then why doesn’t he just walk on over to the House of Representatives and demand a vote on the Senate bill?”

“Senator,” I said through slightly gritted teeth, “if you have a piece of paper with two hundred eighteen votes on it, give it to me and I’ll walk it over to the Speaker right now. I don’t think she has such a list.”

As is customary in turbulent moments, many Washington savants were calling for the heads of Obama’s team as well. In early February, Steve Clemons, a widely read Washington blogger, wrote a piece entitled “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency.” Leslie Gelb, a former correspondent for the
Times
and certified establishment Wise Man, chimed in with a piece entitled “Replace Rahm.”

If I was mildly dismayed by this, Rahm was furious. He had done heroic work to help pass key pieces of the president’s agenda in 2009 and to keep all the balls in the air. Now health care was faltering, just as he had warned, and he was bearing the brunt of the blame. In the aftermath of the Massachusetts election, Rahm continued, at the president’s direction, to hold discreet discussions with members of Congress about a smaller health care package that we could pass. Yet, Obama wouldn’t relent as long as he saw a path to the more comprehensive bill. He was worried a retreat could influence the remainder of his presidency, and other presidencies to come.

“I’ll tell you what’s keeping me up at night,” the president said one day during this period. “What health care has exposed is whether we have the opportunity to do big things anymore . . . On bipartisanship, people want it, but the question is, how much are we willing to compromise before what we do in the name of bipartisanship becomes meaningless?”

I had been deeply concerned about taking on the health care fight at the beginning, but now that we were here, I saw the president’s point. A smaller health care bill would be seen for what it was, a surrender, a sign of weakness, not strength. I admired the president’s determination, and felt we had to play this out.

In the midst of these internal and existential struggles, Dana Milbank, a
Washington Post
columnist, wrote a defense of Rahm—but it was help Rahm could have done without. “Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care,” Milbank wrote, detailing Rahm’s advocacy for a smaller health care bill. “Had it gone Emanuel’s way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel’s strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.”

I didn’t believe that Rahm was Milbank’s source or that he would separate himself publicly from the president in this fashion, but he had many loyal friends in whom he had confided too much. One or more of them had taken it upon themselves to tee up Milbank on behalf of Rahm. Rahm understood the damage the effort had caused the president.

“I decided I am going to resign,” Rahm told Gibbs and me. “This isn’t working for the president. I can’t go out for him and can’t function inside. Our friendship has changed. I’m going to see health care through and then I’m leaving.”

I told Rahm to take a deep breath. The Milbank column was bad, even inexcusable, but his value to the president was such that he couldn’t leave—and certainly not on this note. I was fairly sure that Obama would feel the same way. I saw Rahm a few hours later, after he returned from his talk with the president. “I tried to resign, but he wouldn’t let me,” he reported, groaning. “He said, ‘Oh no. You’re not resigning. Your punishment is that you have to pass health care!’”