In fact, the vote totals are about the only thing history remembers about the stimulus.
Three Republicans broke with McConnell when the bill passed the Senate, giving Obama’s legislation the faintest whiff of bipartisanship. But it was the House GOP’s blanket opposition that stole the headlines and set the tone for eight years of escalating polarization.
“That was the beginning of the end for Obama,” Boehner says of the stimulus fight. “If he had reached across the aisle in a meaningful way, he would have found a lot of Republicans ready to work with him—whether Eric and I liked it or not. He could have annihilated us for a generation.”
TWO DAYS AFTER HOUSE REPUBLICANS UNIFORMLY REJECTED THE stimulus package, another tense vote was under way—this one inside a Washington hotel ballroom. It was time for Republicans to choose a party chairman. Mike Duncan was Bush’s handpicked choice to lead the RNC during the final two years of his presidency, but the winds of change were gusting after the party’s drubbing in November, and Duncan dropped out after the third round of balloting. That left four remaining candidates. The insiders were Katon Dawson and Saul Anuzis, chairmen of the state parties in South Carolina and Michigan, respectively. The outsiders were Ken Blackwell and Michael Steele. The RNC is composed of three members—a chairperson, a committeeman, and a committeewoman—from each of the fifty states and five territories, plus Washington, DC. Blackwell and Steele were not part of “the 168,” as the RNC’s membership was known. But something more conspicuous set them apart: Both candidates were black.
Diversity had never been a strength for the Republican Party, yet the homogeneity of its national leadership was especially striking: Only three of the 168 were black. With the post-Bush GOP suddenly leaderless, and Obama dramatizing the racial chasm between the two parties, there was a groundswell among the party elite to choose a nonwhite chairman. And despite being a non-RNC member, Steele was an obvious fit. Not only did the former lieutenant governor of Maryland have establishment cred (Johns Hopkins undergrad, Georgetown Law, longtime insider, and a onetime state party chairman), but he was also a regular on the cable news circuit, exuding a charismatic media savvy rarely associated with Republican politics.
Not everyone was sold. The GOP’s most glaring vulnerability was organization; whatever remained of the Rove/Bush machine had been wiped out by Obama’s historic grassroots army. Steele was selling himself as an optical counterbalance to the new president, someone who could lead the GOP’s messaging and public relations operation. A party chairman’s work, however, is done primarily behind the scenes, raising money and strengthening state affiliates. For this task, Dawson, the South Carolina chief, was better equipped. But as the contest intensified, so, too, did the whispers about Dawson’s membership in an all-white country club. It was enough to tip the scales: On the sixth ballot, Steele prevailed over Dawson to become RNC chairman.
Immediately following his victory, Steele was whisked two hundred miles southwest to Hot Springs, Virginia, where House Republicans were holding their annual retreat. The atmosphere there was ebullient. Fresh off their defiance of Obama, and for the first time in months, the GOP lawmakers felt a sense of optimism. Pence, the newly elected number three House Republican, planned a weekend-long pep rally. Boehner told his troops that the stimulus vote would be remembered as the party’s return to fiscal responsibility. Cantor asked his lieutenants to autograph a bottle of wine that they would uncork after winning the majority in 2010. And Pence played a clip from Patton in which George C. Scott, portraying the famed World War II general, says, “We are advancing constantly, and we’re not interested in holding onto anything—except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose, and we’re gonna kick him in the ass. We’re gonna kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose!”
None of this seemed terribly realistic. Their rejection of the stimulus did not change the fact that House Republicans, by and large, were big spenders. Or that House Republicans, deep in the minority, stood little chance of retaking the majority in two years. Or that House Republicans, intimidated by Obama’s approval rating, still believed they would be obligated to cooperate with him.
In fact, exhilarating as their stand against the stimulus was, many of Boehner’s members had hoped to vote for it. Those representing districts in the industrial heartland were especially desperate to help their constituents. Paul Ryan, whose hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, was being devastated by the closing of a General Motors plant, had expected the stimulus package to offer something closer to a fifty-fifty split between tax cuts and infrastructure spending, and was slack-jawed by the Democrats’ final product.
Ryan still believed, however, that there was plenty of work to do with the new president. Having crafted a controversial bill in 2008 calling for a restructuring of entitlement programs—a proposal that the House GOP’s campaign arm urged its incumbents to disown—Ryan was pleasantly surprised when Obama, after taking office, reached out privately to offer positive feedback. There seemed to be real potential for an alliance: A year later, in early 2010, Obama would praise Ryan as a “sincere guy” with a “serious proposal” for cutting the deficit.7
Ryan, an annoyingly earnest midwesterner who came to Washington straight out of college—he worked as a waiter, a think tank researcher, and a Capitol Hill staffer before winning his congressional seat at age twenty-eight—was under no illusions about Obama’s liberalism. But unlike most of his comrades, Ryan believed the president was uniquely suited to pursue major bipartisan reforms to government in a way Bush had never been. While other Republicans spent the retreat talking tough about Obama, the congressman from Wisconsin’s First District was more circumspect.
“The president did a good job laying the groundwork for the future,” Ryan told Politico, referencing their recent conversations. “Speaking for myself, I think the president is showing us that he wants to collaborate.”8
Steele, meanwhile, received a standing ovation when he stood to address the gathering. “My mom was a sharecropper’s daughter with a fifth-grade education,” the new party chairman said. “If my mother knew how to balance the budget without taking money out of my pocket, I’m sure that the rest of the folks out here on the other side should know how to do that as well.”
Republicans were ecstatic at the new voice, and the new look, of their party. It wouldn’t last.
Over the next few months, Steele put his foot in his mouth so many times it warranted a surgical relocation. He promised to bring conservatism to “hip-hop settings.”9 He said Democrats voting for the stimulus were trying to “get a little bling, bling.”10 He jokingly linked Bobby Jindal, the Indian American governor of Louisiana, to the film Slumdog Millionaire, a film set in the ghettos of Mumbai.11 He called abortion “an individual choice” that should be left to the states.12
None of this should have been surprising. Steele was a known quantity in the party, an opinionated rabble-rouser with a penchant for provocation. Interestingly, while the RNC tried to tame its leader in some respects—members suggested, for instance, that his colorful suits and ties were a bit much—they were eager to use his uniqueness in other ways. When Steele went to give a major speech early in his tenure, he was handed prepared remarks that included several jokes about Obama’s birthplace. He refused to read them.