But the Democrats’ newfound momentum was crushed less than a month later.
The January special election to fill Kennedy’s seat was expected to be a snoozer: Dark blue Massachusetts hadn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since the Jimmy Carter administration. With health care reform hanging in the balance, and the liberal lion’s dying wish awaiting fulfillment, Democrats couldn’t possibly lose. This assumption was profoundly arrogant, given that Republicans had several months earlier won the governors’ elections in Virginia and New Jersey—a purple and blue state, respectively, both of which Obama had carried comfortably.
The certainty Democrats felt about holding Kennedy’s seat also ignored the one intangible that can transform any race: candidate quality. Scott Brown, the truck-driving, barn jacket–wearing, up-by-the-bootstraps Republican, was a superb candidate; Martha Coakley, the Democrat who mocked the idea of shaking voters’ hands outside Fenway Park, was not. Brown won the race by 5 points, eliminating the Democrats’ 60-vote majority and, it seemed very possibly, the prospects for enacting health care reform.
The problem for Obama was that the House and Senate had passed two different bills, and there was no longer a sufficient number of Democratic votes in the Senate to pass a merged version. Some top party officials, including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, argued for a scaled-back product. Others, most notably Pelosi, rejected this approach. (“Kiddie care,” she scoffed.) Harry Reid pressed for the House to pass his chamber’s version, but Pelosi’s members were cold to the idea: Moderate Democrats objected to the scope of abortion coverage, while liberals protested the lack of a government-sponsored insurance entity.
Still, there was no other way—and Obama knew it. As the president launched a public relations campaign, touring the country and citing news of insurance rate hikes to argue for the bill as a cost-containment measure, Reid and Pelosi agreed on a two-step legislative strategy. The House would pass the Senate bill; then the Senate, using a parliamentary tactic known as reconciliation, would pass a package of changes demanded by House Democrats in exchange for their votes.
As it became clear that their plan would work, it became equally clear that Pelosi was asking some of her centrist members to walk the plank. Dozens of House Democrats were already facing stiff reelection fights; voting for the president’s polarizing bill was akin to nailing shut their own coffins. “She is a strong Speaker—there isn’t any question about that,” Boehner told reporters at the time. “So, you pass a very unpopular bill. You shove it down the throats of the American people, and you lose your majority. How good is that? How smart is that?”
Pelosi did nothing to tamp down Republican criticisms of the product, and the process, when she remarked in early March, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” The Speaker knew what was in the Affordable Care Act; it had been debated for many months, and her comment, in full context, was clearly meant to assure the public that they would like the bill once its benefits were realized. But Pelosi’s verbal blunder was a political gift that would keep on giving in the years ahead.
“Look at how this bill was written,” Boehner barked from the House floor. It was March 21, minutes before the House would pass the Senate bill in a landmark victory for the Democratic Party. “Can you say it was done openly?” Lawmakers in the chamber shouted in response. “With transparency and accountability?” The shouts grew louder. “Without backroom deals struck behind closed doors, hidden from the people?” Boehner mustered every ounce of righteous indignation. “Hell no, you can’t!”
When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law a few days later, it was, in the immortal words whispered into his ear by Vice President Joe Biden, “a big fucking deal.” Democrats had succeeded, where generations of their forebears had failed, in approving a sweeping reorganization of the American health care industry. That meant, among other things, the implementation of a requirement to own insurance; expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income individuals; the opening of a federal insurance marketplace with government subsidies for those who qualified; and revamped regulations governing how insurance companies provided or denied coverage, such as to people with preexisting medical conditions.
It was also a big deal for the GOP. Not a single Republican in either chamber had voted for the bill dubbed “Obamacare,” even though a number of Senate Republicans had spent months negotiating the details and said privately that they found the legislation to be fair-minded. “Mitch did everything he could to keep a Republican from crossing over. We had meetings every Wednesday just to keep discipline,” recalls Tennessee senator Bob Corker. “Mitch is really good at loosening lug nuts, and over time the wheels just fall off. That’s what he did with Obamacare.”
“It was the unifying effort for us, the definitive effort going into the 2010 elections,” McConnell says. “It gave us a chance at a comeback. It set up a referendum in the country on whether or not [voters] were suffering from some buyer’s remorse over the decision two years earlier. I think that would have been less likely had we signed on and a bunch of people had gone over to the other side. They would have claimed it was bipartisan.”
Boehner was correct in saying the law did not have majority support. One day before the president signed it, CNN released a poll showing 59 percent of Americans opposed and just 39 percent in favor.4 This was one of many surveys to suggest that the partisan exercise had aggravated the middle of the electorate. The Republican base was already on fire in opposition to Obama, and now there were signs of an independent exodus away from the Democratic Party as well.
Perhaps most significant, in the political short term, was the Democrats’ decision to cut $500 billion from Medicare to help pay for the legislation. The cuts were not immediate; in fact, they were designed to slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade, a longtime goal of reform-minded Republicans. This introduced no small amount of irony to the 2010 campaign season. Two years earlier, Paul Ryan had been ostracized within the GOP for his entitlement-tweaking “Roadmap”; his cosponsors of the legislation numbered fewer than ten. Now, with the Tea Party rewriting the rules of the GOP, dozens of candidates nationwide ran for Congress endorsing Ryan’s proposal.
It suggested a potential inflection point: Perhaps Republicans would become the party of hard truths and tough choices, after all.
Instead, party strategists, eyeing big gains among elderly voters and middle-income whites nearing retirement, made “Obama’s Medicare cuts” the go-to attack of 2010. The maneuver reflected equal parts tactical brilliance and intellectual nihilism.
ONE DAY AFTER OBAMA’S SIGNING CEREMONY, THE INK STILL WET ON Democrats’ historic legislation, Republicans filed bills in both chambers of Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
This was a promise made by effectively every single Republican running for Congress in 2010: They would repeal Obamacare. Boehner and the House GOP leadership stated as much in their “Pledge to America,” a document that itemized the reforms Republicans would make once back in power. Among the party’s other vows: to slash $100 billion from the budget in year one; to reduce overall government spending to pre-2008 levels; to prohibit federal funding for abortions; and to post all bills online for three days before a vote could occur.