HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
would actually do both, that he
would play the inside game while
he was building up the outside
strategy of more of a global network that he could pull the trigger
on, push a button and, you know,
1,300 people would respond in 10
minutes type thing,” said Steele. “I
was actually, absolutely surprised.
I think they took it for granted. I
think they assumed that, ‘They
love me so much, they’ll always be
there.’ Well, as you know, in this
town, love is fleeting. It’s a very
fickle thing.”
When Collins decided that the
stimulus could include no money
to upgrade schools, Bernstein
said, the White House decided not
to fight her on it. “The idea that
the president would then go to
Maine strikes me as a questionable strategy and one we chose
not to follow,” he said.
The success of the stimulus is
still being debated. Time’s Michael Grunwald’s book The New
New Deal makes the case that it
was a historic investment in reshaping the U.S. economy along
the lines of what took place under
FDR. But economists have also
documented how insufficient the
Recovery Act was in filling the
hole the recession created. And
for many Democrats, the failure
to fight on the ground for a policy
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
hand with congressional leaders
to develop the actual language of
the bill. The president did venture
outside the Beltway to sell the
stimulus, making a trip to Florida
to stand alongside one of the few
supportive Republican lawmakers, then-Gov. Charlie Crist. But
he did not travel to Maine to convince the moderate Republican
Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia
Snowe — who, unlike Crist, actually had a vote — to back the measure, as progressives urged him to
do. The infrequent use of his campaign arm, Organizing for America, was also criticized.
“We did put pressure on them.
We did go out and campaign. We
went down to Florida and stood
with Charlie Crist and he was almost never heard from again,”
said Axelrod. “We made the case
that we needed to intervene [to
save the economy]. But as a political matter there was an upward
limit for what was sellable.”
As the White House negotiated, Republicans stole a page
from the Democratic playbook
and took their arguments to the
American people.
“We used their model, and what
surprised me was they stopped
using their model,” Steele told
Huffington.
“I always thought that Obama