This arbitrary hurdle is the debt ceiling. The difference is that if you don’t pay your bills, a pushy guy calls your house a lot. If America defaults on its debts, the global economy implodes.
The debt ceiling is an accident of history. There is no good reason for the world financial system to have a self-destruct button on Capitol Hill. But it does, and on May 10, 2011, House Speaker John Boehner threatened to press it. At a fund-raiser with wealthy Manhattanites, he acknowledged that triggering a default would be catastrophic. Yet he also warned that unless Obama cut trillions of dollars to federal programs, without raising taxes on the rich by even a penny, he would default nonetheless. His threat was almost comically absurd.
BANK ROBBER (somehow straight-faced): Violence is never the answer. Also, hand over the money or I’ll shoot!
As late spring became early summer, Boehner’s ransom demands occasionally came up in our West Wing meetings. But I never got the feeling we were truly alarmed. Because the debt ceiling was so dangerous, threatening not to raise it had always been a hyperbolic form of protest. It was the political equivalent of declaring that you’ll kill yourself if Melissa from work posts another baby picture online.
Besides, it seemed only fair to cut the speaker some slack. A new, angry cohort of Tea Partiers had swelled the Republican ranks. By making extravagant threats, Boehner was throwing a bone to his most radical members. After letting his fellow Republicans shake their sillies out, he would surely join President Obama in a grand, bipartisan bargain to reduce the national debt.
If this was Boehner’s strategy, however, it proved too clever by half. Only after he had begun his game of chicken did he realize that the right wing had cut the brakes. Instead of paring back their wish list, Republicans began adding to it. Eager to stay on the Tea Party’s good side, Majority Leader Eric Cantor dropped out of negotiations he was supposed to lead. Throughout June and July, sillies were shaken. Wiggles were waggled. But nothing went away. Each day President Obama was presented with a choice that might as well have been written in letters cut from magazines.
IF YOU WANT TO SEE YOUR ECONOMY ALIVE, YOU WILL AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING DEMANDS.
It was around this time that Smokey became, in my mind at least, a constant fixture on the fringes of West Exec. Senior advisors stopped delivering remarks. Check-in sessions were scrapped. I was eager to write speeches, but Valerie was busy dealing with behind-the-scenes emergencies. She no longer had speeches to give. Each morning I’d display my fancy badge, walk down the grand corridor to my office, and have almost nothing to do.
As the crisis snowballed, I responded like any self-respecting millennial: I retreated into my phone. When I wasn’t reading press clips about stalled negotiations, I passed the time with a game called Race Penguin. This sounds like a slur one Black Panther might hurl at another, but in fact the game’s protagonist was a black-and-white bird, a cartoon one, who slid on his belly across different landscapes. If he got through the level fast enough, he lived to slide another day. If not, a polar bear ate him. As I tapped the screen, controlling my penguin’s actions, I imagined his tortured existence, each moment a cocktail of monotony and stress. I could relate.
Race Penguin featured twenty-four levels, divided into three stages of eight. I completed the first stage, Ice World, around the time Republicans added an unworkable balanced budget amendment to their ransom demands. As I polished off the second stage, Desert World, Democratic leader Harry Reid made a major concession. Tax increases would no longer be required as part of a final deal.
By July 25, I was on the game’s very last level, the final section of Rainbow World, and President Obama had no choice but to deliver a prime-time debt-ceiling address. It was a tense moment for the president. The economy was less than two weeks from collapse. It was also a tense moment for me. My penguin was stuck. No matter how flawless his performance, how well-timed his slides, the polar bear always caught him. I could reach only one conclusion. The game was broken. It was impossible to win.
“TONIGHT, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE DEBATE WE’VE BEEN HAVING in Washington over the national debt.”
The president’s address to the nation was the kind of speech reporters were already calling “Vintage Obama.” Sober. Smart. Postpartisan. “The American people may have voted for divided government, but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government,” he said.
Watching the livestream from my office, headphones in my ears and feet on my desk, I was sure the remarks would move the needle. Two and a half years earlier, one of Obama’s speeches had changed my life. Surely tonight’s speech could change public opinion and bring Congress to its senses.
A few days and several hundred penguins later, President Obama announced he would cut more than two trillion dollars from the budget, while getting essentially nothing in return.
The moment the news broke, Jon Carson, the Office of Public Engagement’s executive director, called a meeting in one of the EEOB’s handsomely decorated conference rooms. Ensconced in leather chairs, surrounded by portraits of severe-looking dead white men, we went over our talking points. Most of the cuts weren’t immediate. Most social safety-net programs had been spared.
But was I wrong to think the stern, pasty faces on the walls looked skeptical? As hard as we tried to frame the debate, the most important point was the one that went unsaid: if you have to hold an hour-long meeting about why you won, you didn’t.
The debt-ceiling deal did nothing to pacify Republicans in Congress. If anything, the situation grew worse. “It’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming,” declared Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, promising more brinkmanship to come.
I longed to wipe the self-satisfied grin from McConnell’s turtlish face. If I was being honest, however, my anger at the Tea Party was nothing compared to my disappointment in the president who caved to its demands. From the moment I laid eyes on my candidate, what drew me to him was not just that he was on the right side of history. It was that he knew how to win. Sure, there would be small setbacks, but when the stakes were highest, Obama would prevail. Not this time. In his biggest fight yet with the Republican Congress, with trillions on the line, he had come up short.