He continued: “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation, the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”
Seated on the stage risers behind him, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, felt a twinge of panic. This wasn’t just a quadrennial shift of power in Washington; it might prove a tectonic disturbance in the trajectory of the country. Obama and the Democrats, it seemed, could rule for as far as the eye could see.
“I had the best seat in the house at that inauguration. I was sitting against the rail and looking out across that sea of people, all the way to the monument, and it was just staggering,” Cantor says. “We had elected a black president, and here he was, talking about changing America and certainly acting as if he wants to incorporate us into the end product. He had a seventy-some-percent approval rating2 and these Democratic supermajorities. We were up against it.”
Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina congressman, who’d never seen such a crowd in his life, had a more visceral reaction. “I thought we were completely, permanently screwed.”
He wasn’t the only one. Two weeks earlier, the president-elect had returned to Washington for the first time since Election Day and called a meeting with congressional leaders of both parties. As they gathered in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, just off the Senate floor, Obama made brief comments to a gaggle of reporters. “We are in one of those periods in American history where we don’t have Republican or Democratic problems, we’ve got American problems,” he said. “My commitment as the incoming president is going to be to reach out across the aisle, to both chambers, to listen and not just talk, to not just try to dictate but to try to create a genuine partnership, so that we are actually doing the people’s business at this time of extraordinary difficulty.”
The Republicans lawmakers in the room exchanged smirks—putting on a show for the press, they figured. But once the journalists were shooed away, and the players got to work discussing the framework of an economic stimulus package, the incoming president’s tenor remained the same: earnest, approachable, even humble. This was not the Obama they’d expected. He listened intently to Republicans’ ideas. He acknowledged their concerns. He hinted that he was receptive to their biggest priority, making tax relief central to the stimulus.
By the time the meeting adjourned, those Republicans present were somewhere between delirious and devastated. They had never bought Obama’s campaign rhetoric, his promises to transcend partisanship and heal a fractured body politic. They believed him to be a hardened progressive with velvety eloquence, and they were counting on the emergence of his true colors for their survival. They hoped to use his sky-high potential against him: Once voters realized that Obama wasn’t a great compromiser, his astronomical numbers would fall back to earth and Republicans would begin their journey out of the wilderness. Masterminding this theory was Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader, who told allies after the election that the key to regaining power would be shattering the mystique of Obama’s post-partisan image.
The January 5 meeting was hardly the start McConnell or his colleagues had envisioned. There was nary a negative word to say about Obama as Republicans confronted a waiting horde of media outside the LBJ Room. “I think this bill is going to start out, and hopefully end, as an example of very significant bipartisan cooperation,” McConnell said.
Ducking the cameras, Cantor hustled across the Capitol complex. He glanced at his chief of staff, Steve Stombres. “What did you think?” Stombres shook his head. “I was inspired,” he replied. Brad Dayspring, Cantor’s communications director, was somewhat less diplomatic. “If he governs like that,” Dayspring told his boss, “we are all fucked.”
Cantor knew as much. So did Boehner. But they were in no position to sabotage the incoming president. There would be plenty of opportunities to draw lines in the sand; for the time being, with the economy on life support and Washington under tremendous pressure to produce, they would take Obama’s promise of cooperation at face value. Back on the House side of the building, Boehner popped into Cantor’s office with a request: Put together an outline of some core Republican suggestions for the stimulus bill. “And none of the right-wing stuff,” he added. “We want broad support.”
Sitting on the inauguration stage two weeks later, Cantor fretted. He had done what Boehner asked, drafting a list of five items to share with Obama when they reconvened after his swearing-in. But now he wondered what good it would do. Staring out at the National Mall, Cantor would recall to friends, he wondered: Was the GOP going extinct?
THAT NIGHT, MORE THAN A DOZEN CONSERVATIVE LAWMAKERS, INCLUDING Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy from the House and Jim DeMint, Bob Corker, and Jon Kyl from the Senate, gathered inside the Caucus Room, a stylish Washington steakhouse. Parties were jumping across the capital city in honor of the new president, but Republicans weren’t in any mood to celebrate. Organized by focus group guru Frank Luntz, and featuring a guest appearance by former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the dinner would gain infamy as the inception of the GOP’s coordinated resistance to Obama.
And yet, opposition was not the only item on the menu. The dinner also was an exercise in wound-licking and soul-cleansing for members of a Republican Party that had strayed far from its principles, as the journalist Robert Draper, who first reported on the dinner, wrote in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.3 History will remember the GOP’s obstructionism as its organizing principle during the Obama years, and appropriately so. But the backdrop of Bush’s presidency and the pall it cast over conservatism often goes ignored in understanding the mentality of Republicans circa 2009. Cooperating with the new president was dangerous not just because it handed him a victory, but because it fed a perception on the right that there was no longer any meaningful distinction between the two parties.
The dilemma within the GOP, of course, was that many rank-and-file Republicans were moderates. They didn’t diverge sharply from the Democrats. They hadn’t objected to the big-government policies of the Bush administration. And they weren’t keen to tangle with a dauntingly popular new president. This was especially true for the thirty-seven House Republicans whose districts Obama had just won.4
Cantor understood this better than most. As minority whip, the House GOP’s designated vote-counter, he was tasked with knowing his members the way a husband knows his wife: likes and dislikes, goals and motivations, verbal tics and personality quirks. Raised in Southern Virginia as an observant Jew, Cantor had long since learned to straddle disparate worlds. (There weren’t many Jewish lawmakers to be found in the GOP, though Cantor always got a kick out of hearing Mike Pence, his evangelical colleague from Indiana, refer to Jews as “our people.”)