Pelosi by Molly Ball

Author:Molly Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

18

The time line bordered on preposterous: not one but two giant pieces of liberal legislation in the space of a single year. But Pelosi liked big plans.

Obama’s team had drawn up a schedule for its main priorities once the stimulus was out of the way. (The stimulus, they wrongly thought, would be easy.) The House would spend March through June getting an energy and climate bill passed, while the Senate spent that same period working on a health care bill. Both would finish their work by the July 4 holiday, and then they would switch. By fall, the House would be passing health care and the Senate would be picking up the climate bill.

In the wake of the brutal stimulus fight, this time line began to look about as realistic as the idea that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would glide through Congress with bipartisan support, immediately get the economy chugging away and be admired by a grateful public. Longtime Washington observers were skeptical. The Congress, they said, could focus on only one big thing at a time. And with the economy still cratering, shouldn’t that one thing be jobs, not pie-in-the-sky liberal wish lists? Republicans started throwing Emanuel’s “never waste a crisis” line back at him, accusing the White House of using the recession as cover to smuggle in its big-government agenda.

The president’s more politically minded advisers Emanuel and Axelrod were starting to think the pundits might be right. Maybe they needed to pick one big priority at a time and focus on that. Health care and climate reform were both massive endeavors. Both would be big, complex, thousand-page pieces of legislation. Both would entail massive structural changes to the U.S. economy, which was still circling the drain at an alarming rate.

But the “Yes We Can” president didn’t want to be told to trim his sails. He saw health care and climate change as challenges that couldn’t wait. And he knew that according to historians and political scientists, presidents tend to notch the most accomplishments at the beginning of their terms, when their momentum and political capital are highest. In interviews, Obama had taken to repeating a line from FDR’s 1933 Inaugural Address: “Action and action now.”

Obama’s bold ambition impressed Pelosi. She believed in pushing hard and gambling big. She found Obama’s hopeful message and grand vision genuinely inspiring. “Let’s not try this, it will never work” was about as persuasive an argument to Pelosi as “I can’t vote for this, it’s unpopular in my district.” And she was tired of notching “accomplishments” that consisted mostly of snatching concessions here and there from the GOP without ever being able to set the agenda. Her members had been waiting since 1994, fourteen years, for a Democratic Congress and Democratic president to be able to enact some of the policies they held dear. For more than a decade, they’d campaigned on the solutions they thought would solve America’s problems, only to have to settle for little or nothing after they got done bargaining with a Republican Speaker or Republican president.

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