Despite being more conservative than most in his party, the forty-five-year-old Cantor had skillfully worked his way into its leadership, intuitively harmonizing the dueling instincts of pragmatism and purity. Now he was confronting intraparty dynamics that were seemingly impossible to balance: Conservatives had incentive to fight Obama, while moderates had reason to work with him.
The stimulus offered a fascinating first case study.
Describing the economy as a “very sick” patient who needed to be stabilized, Obama set a deadline of February 16, Presidents’ Day, for the stimulus package to arrive on his desk. Democrats weren’t waiting around. By the time Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House three days after his inauguration, Pelosi and her colleagues had already drafted legislation. This irritated House Republicans, whose ideas Obama had promised to consider. Pelosi scoffed at those concerns. “Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” she told reporters at the Capitol.
The next morning, when Obama hosted a meeting with lawmakers inside the Roosevelt Room, Cantor promptly handed out copies of the five-point priority list he had crafted. It was more than a tad presumptuous, and laid the foundation for Obama’s dislike of Cantor, but the president played it cool. “Nothing on here looks outlandish or crazy to me,” he remarked.
The list was heavy on tax relief: for families, small businesses, home buyers, the unemployed. This surprised no one. (Republicans and Tax Cuts: A Love Story.) More telling was what it omitted: infrastructure.
Boehner and Cantor knew the one thing that could buy off their members was big spending on roads and bridges; Republican voters, whether in busy commuter suburbs or neglected rural communities, love few things more. What they didn’t know was whether Obama knew this. By not proposing a massive investment in infrastructure, GOP leadership was both testing the new president and carving out a potential escape hatch if the negotiations went south.
This bit of chicanery crystallized the GOP’s quandary in dealing with the unified Democratic government. Obama had the votes to pass laws with or without them; the trick for Republican leaders was influencing legislation in a way that made it appealing to conservatives, not just moderates, so they wouldn’t be accused of selling out their right flank. A more experienced Democratic president might have recognized this and reacted accordingly. But having served less than one full term on Capitol Hill before winning the White House, Obama seemed not to fully grasp the ideological fault lines within the congressional GOP—or how to exploit them.
Their own suggestions aside, Republicans were puzzled by many of the Democrats’ priorities. Obama had conceptualized the legislation as a shot in the arm to the flatlining economy—instant help in the form of shovel-ready jobs, tax cuts, and funding for state governments. Yet the emerging bill looked more like a liberal grab bag of programs years in the wishing: increased Pell Grants, expanded broadband internet, investments in green energy companies. These proposals had merit, certainly, but Republicans were justified in questioning why billions of dollars should be spent on projects that paid no immediate dividend when urgency was the buzzword inside the Beltway.
As this debate intensified in the January 23 meeting, with Cantor and Kyl, the Senate minority whip, pressing Obama on why the White House was favoring certain programs, the president lost his sense of humor. “Elections have consequences,” he told Republicans around the table. “And I won.”5
It was an unforced error by Obama—and an immeasurable gift to the GOP.
Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell had already seized on Pelosi’s quote to impress upon their colleagues that the House Speaker, a San Francisco progressive, was pushing Obama leftward, persuading him not to waste time playing footsie with Republicans. Not everyone believed that. But now Obama had echoed Pelosi’s sentiment in a way that seemed dismissive at best and hostile at worst.
Back on Capitol Hill, Boehner and Cantor convened their members inside a sprawling conference room in the House basement. They relayed the details of the meeting, including Obama’s quote and the disagreements over spending in the package. In that moment, the process surrounding the stimulus package changed in fundamental ways. Not only were members bothered by Obama’s remark, but they were dismayed at the relative pittance being allocated to infrastructure.
Cantor, before that morning’s White House visit, had counted at least thirty Republicans whom he expected Democrats to pick off, especially if the final product featured significant spending on shovel-ready projects that would be visible in their states and districts. But the Democrats, to his disbelief, weren’t prioritizing transportation infrastructure. They weren’t doing anything to court his most easily converted members. Soon, Cantor’s number of susceptible Republicans was cut in half. Within a few days, it had dwindled into the single digits, and then even lower.
Boehner was stunned. He knew there would be a renewed emphasis on fiscal restraint among conservatives hoping to turn the page on Bush’s legacy. And he suspected that, sooner or later, if the economy didn’t show signs of life, moderate Republicans would feel emboldened to do battle with Obama as well. But the stimulus was an unlikely showdown. The minority leader had felt certain that at least a few dozen of his members, particularly those in Obama districts, would support the president’s first initiative.
On January 28 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed the House—and remarkably, not a single Republican voted for it.
Because of Cantor’s well-publicized confrontation with Obama, and the fact that one-third of the bill comprised tax breaks,6 it was natural to blame the minority whip (or credit him) with imposing total discipline on his ranks. But this missed the bigger picture. By allowing the stimulus to become larded with pet projects, by not pressing for massive infrastructure investments, and by saying, “I won,” however benign the intent, Obama had given Boehner and Cantor just what they needed to lock up a House Republican Conference that was primed for a jailbreak. It also played right into McConnell’s master plan of puncturing the president’s bipartisan aura.
“We came back in here at the beginning of 2009, we were on the way down to forty, which is the irrelevant number in the Senate. And the question was, is there a way back?” McConnell recalls. “My view was we needed to test whether the American people were simply frustrated in 2008 by the war, and the financial meltdown, or whether they really wanted to go hard left. . . . We had to draw a bright line of distinction between us and what the Democrats in full control of [government] were trying to achieve. And that meant keeping our fingerprints off things.”
The Democrats walked right into this trap. They had been out of power for eight years—twelve, really, when considering the turbulent second term of Bill Clinton—and Republicans had run roughshod over them during that period, doing “nothing to encourage bipartisanship,” as Boehner admitted. Now, imbued with absolute authority over Washington and feeling compelled to act quickly, congressional Democrats had convinced the new president that he didn’t owe Republicans anything. The result was a flawed bill hustled onto the House floor just eight days after the inauguration and approved by the Senate less than two weeks later.
“If it’s passed with 63 votes or 73 votes, history won’t remember it,” Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator and a mentor to Obama, told the Washington Post the day of the contentious White House meeting.