Double Down: Game Change 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page B

You and Boehner both smoke; bring him over, then break out the butts and a bottle of nice merlot, counseled one Beltway wise man.
    Daley was a big proponent of this approach. It was Politics 101. But Obama and his people had come a long way practicing Politics 2.0. That winter, when the new chief of staff had floated the Camp David plan—a weekend getaway for the congressional leadership and their spouses—Michelle’s East Wing staff shot it down: who wanted to be cooped up on a cold day in the woods with Mitch McConnell? The smoking summit was a nonstarter, too, since Obama apparently had finally quit although Daley marveled at how much Nicorette his boss chomped through every day. ( It’s embarrassing, Daley thought, restraining himself from chastising Obama. Hey! Enough with the fucking gum! )
    The idea of a shared golf round was more promising. At first, Obama brushed off the idea, saying, “Nah, Boehner’s too good.” But now, with the deadline on lifting the debt limit looming, Republicans seeking $2 trillion in spending cuts for raising the ceiling, and Biden leading bipartisan negotiations with the Hill that were stuck in quicksand, Obama decided the time was ripe to hit the fairway. The famously competitive president wasn’t about to lose to the speaker, though. When the Ohioans arrived at Andrews, their expectations of teaming up against the Democrats were dashed by an executive switcheroo.
    “Hey, Boehner,” Obama announced, “you and I, we’re gonna take these two on.”
    Obama-Boehner edged Biden-Kasich on the final green. (Boehner described the narrow victory as a whipping, while Biden moaned about his swing and Kasich informed the VP that shorts were not a good look for him.) When the group repaired to the nineteenth hole, the conversation turned to the debt ceiling. Boehner pointed out that, despite the difficulties of the Biden talks, all sides—the White House, the Republicans, and Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit commission—agreed in principle on the $4 trillion deficit-reduction goal. And Boehner said he still believed such a “big deal” was possible. Obama concurred and proposed that the two of them chat in more detail, one on one.
    Four days later, Boehner arrived at the White House and huddled with Obama on the Truman Balcony. Achieving a big deal, the speaker said, would require entitlement reform, meaning significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security, programs that Democrats were loath to touch.
    I’m open to that, Obama said. But Republicans would have to accept new tax revenues, which they’d been adamantly opposing.
    We’re not raising rates, Boehner countered, but we can do broad tax reform. “If we lower all the rates, clean out the garbage in the code, you know, there could be some revenues,” he said.
    Obama and Boehner circled each other warily, but with a dawning sense that they might be able to do business—that the big deal, a “grand bargain,”was worth pursuing. They agreed to keep talking and have their staffs start consultations, all in strictest confidence.
    After the meeting, Obama briefed his senior advisers. On a personal level, he liked Boehner, saw him as an old-fashioned Republican—a Kiwanis Club guy, a Rotarian. A conservative, sure, but not a nuthouse conservative, and certainly no Tea Partier. And therein lay the problem. Unlike Gingrich, who led the insurgency that seized the House in 1994, Boehner had played little part in fomenting the latest GOP revolution. Now he was coping with a caucus filled with raucous freshmen, over whom his sway was modest.
    Like his boss, Plouffe was skeptical about whether Boehner could deliver. But from his place at the president’s side, with one eye trained on governing and the other on reelection, the potential benefits of a big deal were simply too great not to chase. It would be another, far more powerful, demonstration of the president’s ability to forge bipartisan consensus, as he had in the lame-duck