Obama wasn't waiting for the polls to close in Massachusetts at 8 that evening. He already knew that his Democratic Party was about to suffer an embarrassing loss. In the bitterest of ironies, the Senate seat held for nearly 47 years by Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, who had been the leading voice in Congress for universal health care, was about to fall into Republican hands. The wheels were coming off...
Now the president was asking members of his assembled brain trust: What were they going to do?
Mathematically, Scott Brown's impending victory would deny Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. With only 59 votes loosely under his control, Reid wanted the House to adopt the version of the health-care bill that had barely squeaked through the Senate on Christmas Eve.
No way, said Pelosi. "The Senate bill is a non-starter," she said. "I can't sell that to my members."
Yet, in only 61 days, San Fran Nan did exactly that.
As Pelosi and Reid left the White House that night, the administration was coming to the conclusion that its fatal mistake had been giving up so much control to Congress. Although the strategy was intended to correct the mistakes President Bill Clinton made in 1993 when his wife's task force wrote a health-care bill in secret, the Obama White House belatedly realized that the months of delay, closed-door negotiations and special deals had tarnished the effort and a president who won office by promising to change the way Washington operates.
And he changed it, all right!
And so came the first attempt at a retooled strategy: a commander in chief back in charge. Obama would still need Pelosi and Reid to deliver votes, but this time the White House intended to steer more aggressively. Obama, who felt particularly stung by critics who said he had broken his pledge to air the health-care debate on television, immediately embraced the summit concept. It would be a chance to reset the effort, display his willingness to accept Republicans' ideas and claim - albeit more for show than substance - that he was crafting a "new" bill that was not sullied by the deals struck in Congress.
And in the end, we got the old bill, as far as I can tell.
The first House tally had been close, with just two votes to spare, and it was headed for defeat until an extraordinary day just before when Pelosi, confronting a major rift over federal funding for abortion, called together the female Democrats in the House and said, "We're standing on the brink of doing something great. I'm not letting anything stand in the way of that."
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) launched into a tirade against David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser and one of Obama's closest confidants. "I have been in a slow burn here, a slow burn!" the lawmaker hollered from the last row of the meeting room. "I'm just livid." Lacing his commentary with
"Goddamn it, what's the deal here?" he said, as colleagues, their spouses and aides looked on. "You're talking platitudes, and we have to go home and defend ourselves. We're getting the crap kicked out of us!"
Just wait, Al, just wait.
Kucinich's support was more than just one vote in the "yes" column; it was the start of the momentum the White House had been struggling to create. In short order, the news rolled out in a steady, well-choreographed clip.
Obama, meanwhile, doused a brush fire with organized labor over changes to a new excise tax that unions did not like. In a chance encounter in an aide's office that was actually well planned out, Obama pulled AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka into the Oval Office. "We're at the one-yard line. We've just got to get the ball in the end zone," the president said, imploring Trumka to hold his complaints for another day. "Rich, you've got to stay with me."
At 4 p.m., Altmire released his statement and at 7:30 Obama called once more. "I want to give you something to think about before the vote," the president said gently into the phone. "Picture yourself on Monday morning. You wake up and look at the paper. It's the greatest thing Congress has done in 50 years. And you were on the wrong team."
Protesters on the Capitol lawn. Rumors of enticements - a Cabinet post, water access in California, money for NASA. More phone calls, more news conferences, frayed nerves, exhaustion. At the Capitol, Pelosi was once again dealing with the specter of abortion funding, shuttling from office to office as she locked down the final votes.
So they won. But nothing about the promised Executive Order that would convert Stupak. Did I dream that?