September 28, 2010: Obama Says Republicans Refused to Work with White House, Democrats on Economic Recovery Even Before Talking with Obama

President Obama tells how his ideas of bipartisan compromise with Republican lawmakers were dashed. Obama reflects on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law in February 2009. Interviewer Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone asks: “When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?” Obama responds: “Well, I’ll tell you that given the state of the economy during my transition, between my election and being sworn in, our working assumption was that everybody was going to want to pull together, because there was a sizable chance that we could have a financial meltdown and the entire country could plunge into a depression. So we had to work very rapidly to try to create a combination of measures that would stop the free-fall and cauterize the job loss. The recovery package we shaped was put together on the theory that we shouldn’t exclude any ideas on the basis of ideological predispositions, and so a third of the Recovery Act were tax cuts. Now, they happened to be the most progressive tax cuts in history, very much geared toward middle-class families. There was not only a fairness rationale to that, but also an economic rationale—those were the folks who were most likely to spend the money and, hence, prop up demand at a time when the economy was really freezing up. I still remember going over to the Republican caucus to meet with them and present our ideas, and to solicit ideas from them before we presented the final package. And on the way over, the caucus essentially released a statement that said, ‘We’re going to all vote “No” as a caucus.’ And this was before we’d even had the conversation. At that point, we realized that we weren’t going to get the kind of cooperation we’d anticipated. The strategy the Republicans were going to pursue was one of sitting on the sidelines, trying to gum up the works, based on the assumption that given the scope and size of the recovery, the economy probably wouldn’t be very good, even in 2010, and that they were better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve the problem.” No House Republican voted for the package; only three Republican Senators voted for it. [BBC, 2/14/2009; Rolling Stone, 9/28/2010]