HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
sional Democrats were prepared to
offer, according to multiple sources
involved in negotiations.
“Our intent was to avoid the
shutdown of the government,”
Daley told Huffington. “The president was committed to getting
spending under control, and that’s
why we agreed to the deal that
ended up passing.”
Privately, the administration
had determined that the president
would be hurt badly if the government shut down. Bill Clinton had
won that battle in the mid-1990s.
But he had benefitted from having a tempestuous Speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich, as his political bete noir.
“[House Speaker John]
Boehner was not going to become
the enemy,” said one top Obama
aide, who spoke on condition of
anonymity to discuss those internal deliberations. “He was not
going to be the guy who people
emoted anger towards.”
The two sides eventually
reached an 11th-hour agreement
to keep the government open. But
the White House’s hope that these
types of deficit-reduction negotiations could produce a detente on
other items was quickly dashed.
House Republicans began plotting
how to use a historically mundane
vote to raise the debt ceiling as
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
This attitude only bogged the
White House down further within
the inside game. The lame duck session saw major victories on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and
an end to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the
longstanding military policy that
prohibited gay members from openly serving. But even with the public
in favor of letting tax cuts expire
on high-end income brackets, the
administration bowed to concerns
from within their own party and
negotiated a deal with Republicans
to extend all the Bush tax cuts for
two more years.
In strategy sessions, the president and his advisers looked at
ways to move various agenda
items, from immigration reform
to additional stimulus, through
a divided Congress. Top officials
believed that if they could earn
the public’s trust on the deficit
and remove that issue from the
table, Republicans would join
them on other items.
And so, in the spring of 2011, as
congressional Republicans threatened to shut down the government
unless Democrats agreed to steep
spending cuts, the White House
looked for middle ground. Without
prior warning, then-White House
Chief of Staff Bill Daley offered
House GOP leadership a higher
level of cuts than what congres-