Bob Woodward?s new book exposes how America?s leaders squabbled on the edge of a financial precipice
If you think the US cliffhanger is on November 6, wait until New Year for the real fiscal cliff.
A year after America barely prevented a damaging debt default with Band-Aid, the wounds are opening up. Automatic spending cuts and tax hikes triggered by the failure of the Congressional super committee are closing in, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. Time for another roller-coaster ride.
Celebrated author Bob Woodward?s The Price of Politics is a blow-by-blow account of how the wise men of Washington revelled in dogma, arrogance, inexperience and one-upmanship and squabbled at the edge of the precipice. A lot of the details about the debt-ceiling battle are already in the public domain, but Woodward spices up the dish with his unique fly-on-the-wall reporting and gets critical dramatis personae to open up. The retelling is meticulous?sometimes too meticulous for anyone other than a data centre operator at the Treasury department.
Inexperience, once seen as giving the advantage of innocence to Senator Barack Obama when he squished rival John McCain in the 2008 Presidential elections, returned to haunt him in the Oval Office. The new President did not bother?or did not have the mental makeup?to cultivate essential personal relationships with lawmakers, preferring the bully pulpit to bilateral talks. The result was a growing gulf between the White House and the Congress, leading to the kind of policy paralysis we thought was the USP of Incredible India. You can almost imagine House Speaker John Boehner shaking his head as he tells Woodward that there?s no one in charge at the White House?a line also previously attributed to (and promptly denied by) Obama?s former economic advisor Larry Summers.
Among Obama?s memorable lines likely to go into history is a rejection of Republican leader Eric Cantor?s recipe for spending cuts, made at his very first meeting with the vanquished GOP: ?Elections have consequences, Eric, and I won,? said the new President, in a clear snub. Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi?s equally arrogant response to a question on co-opting
Republicans for the healthcare bill? ?We won the election; we wrote the bill.?
This non-strategy worked until November 2010, when Democrats lost the House to Republicans and droves of Tea Party-backed freshmen entered the Congress. By then, ObamaCare had passed in the Congress without a single Republican vote and the President had expended considerable
political capital for the same. The Tea Party-backed candidates who recently sailed into the House radicalised the GOP, rendering chances of bipartisanship even more remote. They waited. Their time would come.
As Woodward mentions in passing, when you need friends, it?s
often too late to make them. Starting early 2011, seasoned lawmakers started worrying about America?s monstrous debt and its consequences. Once America hit its constitutionally-set debt ceiling, it would not be able to borrow more, unless the Congress authorised an increase. Without this, the country wouldn?t be able to honour its debt, a cataclysm that would make l?affaire Lehman look like a picnic in the woods. However, raising the debt ceiling would require Republican votes. The White House?s my-way-or-the-highway philosophy had reached its logical dead end.
Despite the conviction across parties that America?s debt was unsustainable, compromise was nowhere to be found. Woodward narrates the story of the Simpson-Bowles commission, whose bipartisan recommendations to reduce the deficit were rejected by both parties. At a meeting expected to greenlight Simpson-Bowles where his political rivals were invitees by accident, Obama ripped into the Republican Party, burning whatever remnants of bridges were left.
Woodward?s story brings out the dogmas and dilemmas of various actors in the Republican and Democratic parties, who tried to outwit each other at every step. There is Obama, who always pursued the debt deal with an eye on his re-election chances; Boehner, who struggles to keep his rambunctious flock together as he strives to reach a deal; Cantor, whose own ambitions often take precedence over economic sense; Joseph Biden, a sincere centrist pulled in all directions; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Democrats? answer to Tea Partiers who undermine the President?s agenda; and a cast of Congressional and White House aides working mostly in silos and often at cross-purposes.
If there is one politician who appears truly statesman-like in The Price of Politics, it is Vice President Biden, who burns the midnight oil with Speaker John Boehner to arrive at a solution in true bipartisan fashion. The rest come across as political pygmies, unable to push their agenda, guard their flock, reach across the aisle or overlook dogma for the greater good. Woodward?s retelling of the debt deadlock is a fascinating look into the minds of the men who mind Washington, and how scared one should be about leaving the fate of the global economy in their petty hands.
The Price of Politics
Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
Hardback, Pg 448
Rs.899