THE DAY AFTER THE SENATE VOTED TO REPEAL DON’T ASK/Don’t Tell, President Obama had to decide whether or not to risk a Senate vote on ratifying the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty he had negotiated with Russia.
It was a chancy move because he couldn’t be certain he’d prevail. If the vote went badly, his standing at home would be diminished, his concerted effort to bolster ties with Russia would be in tatters, and his attempt to nudge the world toward zero nuclear weapons would be discredited. He’d be seen as weak. No vote would be better than a losing vote.
Given the Senate’s starchy rules—and the few days left on the legislative calendar—this day, December 19, was essentially the deadline for Harry Reid to file a cloture petition that would set up a vote to end debate on the ratification legislation and allow the Senate to move toward an actual vote on the treaty. Once the petition was filed, the cloture vote would have to occur on December 21.
The White House was sure it had the sixty votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, yet if it succeeded on cloture, the administration would essentially be locked into a vote on ratification. This was the dilemma: approving the treaty required sixty-seven votes, and Obama did not have that number of firm commitments. It was entirely possible he would win the cloture vote but fall short on the final vote. Obama conferred with Vice President Biden, who was in charge of ushering the treaty through the Senate. Biden believed the votes were there, even though he hadn’t pocketed enough pledges.
The president didn’t have the luxury of waiting until Biden nailed down the nine GOP votes the White House needed to win ratification. Obama had to decide now whether to pull the trigger, even if he might be committing himself to a defeat.
Let’s go for it, he told Biden.
BIDEN FELT CONFIDENT. BUT NOT EVERYONE IN THE WHITE House trusted his intuition. That afternoon, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser (who had succeeded Jim Jones in this position two months earlier), organized a conference call for a handful of aides working on the treaty. Donilon had long worried that a losing vote would be an enormous strategic failure and was wary of any action that could lead to rejection.
On the call, Donilon raised the question: Should the White House proceed with the Senate vote? Louisa Terrell, a former Biden aide who worked in the White House legislative affairs shop, noted that they still didn’t have a sufficient number of hard commitments from Republican senators.
Then Biden came on the line. What’s this call about? the vice president asked.
Donilon said he was checking that the White House had the votes before the cloture petition was filed.
“Tom, we have the votes,” said Biden, who had spoken to a dozen senators in recent days. Stop worrying, he added.
Donilon wanted to go through the Republican senators one by one. Biden wasn’t interested. “I’ve personally talked to the senators,” he said.
Donilon suggested having one more conversation with the president. Biden insisted the votes were there.
“I’m calling Harry. I’m telling him to file,” Biden said.
The clock was now ticking.
IN APRIL 2010, OBAMA AND RUSSIAN PRESIDENT DMITRY MEDVEDEV signed the New START treaty, a follow-up accord to an earlier START treaty first proposed by President Ronald Reagan. (START stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.) The product of a year of US-Russian negotiations—which began soon after Obama took office—New START would compel both superpowers to reduce their strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 within several years. (Russia maintained a stockpile of about 2,800 warheads and bombs; the United States, about 2,200.) It would also revive mutual monitoring of each nation’s nuclear arsenal, which had ended in December 2009 when an earlier arms control treaty expired.
Though the treaty would lessen the number of nuclear missiles pointing at Americans, the agreement was a modest accord, certainly nothing radical, just a continuation of a process Reagan initiated. Yet it had significance beyond the warheads it would limit. The agreement was a component of Obama’s attempt to improve relations with Russia, and the administration was hoping this effort would lead to more Russian pressure on Iran regarding Tehran’s nuclear program.
There was another ancillary benefit. Obama, since the start of his presidency, had repeatedly stated his intention to lead the world toward a nuclear-free day. Administration officials and arms control experts considered approval of the New START treaty necessary to convince other countries—including aspiring nuclear nations—that Obama was serious about the march to zero nuclear weapons.
BEFORE THE INK WAS DRY ON THE ACCORD, CONSERVATIVES AND Republicans began complaining it would impede deployment of the missile defense systems they cherished. (There was nothing in the treaty that specifically set such restraints.) They moaned that the treaty had nothing to do with the more immediate threat of Iran’s nuclear program. For some foes, the main objection seemed to be that this was Obama’s treaty.
Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican and minority whip, was chief of the opposition. For years, he had been a stalwart foe of arms control treaties and a devoted fan of missile defense. He was allergic to the very idea of accords that limit nuclear weapons, huffing in a 2000 speech, “Honorable nations do not need treaty limits to do the right thing.”
Kyl had long been grousing about one issue in particular: the modernization and maintenance of the existing US nuclear arsenal. He claimed that the federal government was not spending enough money on the upkeep of warheads. This debatable point was a separate issue from the number of world-destroying warheads maintained by the United States and Russia, but Kyl saw an opportunity to squeeze more funds for his pet cause. His fellow Senate Republicans viewed Kyl as their point man on arms control issues; thus, he controlled a bloc of votes. The White House would have to do business with him. If Obama couldn’t win over Kyl, he’d have to neutralize him.
THE ADMINISTRATION BEGAN ROMANCING KYL BEFORE THE accord was signed. In a February 2010 speech on nuclear security at the National Defense University, Vice President Biden noted that the president agreed that “our nuclear complex and experts were neglected and underfunded.” He pointed out that the president had called for $7 billion for “maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.” This was $624 million more than Congress had approved the previous year—and an increase of $5 billion over the next five years.
But Kyl wouldn’t be bought off so easily. He, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman sent the White House a letter warning that they would oppose the treaty if the Russians were to claim the right to withdraw from the agreement in the event any US missile defense deployments altered the strategic balance. It was common for parties to an arms control agreement to reserve the right to pull out unilaterally. By making this a big deal, Kyl and the others were signaling that they would use whatever ammo they could dredge up to torpedo the treaty.
ONCE OBAMA OFFICIALLY SENT THE TREATY TO THE SENATE IN May for ratification, its fate was in the hands of Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Like Biden, Kerry had long labored on arms control matters. Winning this battle was important to Kerry, who had been a key ally of the Obama White House on foreign policy matters. It was widely assumed within Washington that Kerry yearned to be secretary of state, should Hillary Clinton vacate the post. His chances of attaining that position could depend on how he managed this task.
Kerry and his staff immediately began collaborating with Biden and White House aides, especially Brian McKeon, Biden’s deputy national security adviser who had for years worked on treaties in the Senate as a Biden aide. Their goal was basic: figure out how to navigate the Republican opposition.
Though previous arms control treaties had passed through the Senate with overwhelming support and little fuss, Kerry knew this time it would be different. The political climate was toxic.
Collaborating closely with Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry developed a plan to gain Republican support. His secret weapon: keeping the partisan rhetoric low—an approach in sync with the institutional temperament of the White House. Obama and Kerry agreed that this was a fight to be won with finesse, not fisticuffs.
KERRY AND LUGAR HELD TWELVE HEARINGS ON THE TREATY, which featured officials from the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bush administrations who testified in support of the agreement. The committee collected endorsements from seven former commanders of the US Strategic Command and past secretaries of state, including Republicans James Baker, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Henry Kissinger.
Kerry and Lugar dutifully conveyed dozens of questions regarding the treaty from Kyl and other Republican senators to the White House for quick and thorough answers. Kerry’s aim was to do everything possible to prevent ratification from becoming another one of those Washington mud-wrestling matches. Kerry would afford critics the chance to express their opposition. He would not hurry ratification—to deny Kyl and others a line of attack: We can’t vote for a treaty that is being bum-rushed through the Senate!
No drama—that was the strategy.
THE FIRST MAJOR HURDLE WAS OBTAINING A STAMP OF APPROVAL for the treaty from the Foreign Relations Committee. The White House and Kerry knew they could easily win the panel’s okay on a party-line vote (with Lugar joining the Democrats). But that would create a D-versus-R story line. Instead, Kerry and White House staffers targeted two Republican senators—Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Georgia’s Johnny Isakson—as possible pickoffs. If they gained their votes, ratification would prevail on a 14–5 vote, an undeniable signal of bipartisanship.
While Kerry and Lugar courted Corker and Isakson, the White House lay low. And Kerry took the clever step of allowing Lugar to draft the resolution of ratification. This could make it easier for Republicans to support the bill. Kerry even griped publicly that he wasn’t fully satisfied with Lugar’s resolution—a way to make it more attractive to Republicans.
As is so often the case in Washington, timing was key. The hearings finished in mid-July. If the committee vote didn’t happen right away, it could not occur until after the August recess—which would allow scant time for the full Senate to consider the treaty before Congress scurried out of town for the midterm elections. Obama wanted to wrap this up before the elections; otherwise, Republicans would inevitably argue that ratification ought to be postponed until the next (more Republican) Congress.
But Corker and Isakson were not yet in the bag. They said they needed more information from the administration on nuclear modernization. Corker was sympathetic to Kyl’s concerns about funding for the nuclear stockpile; the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility was based in his home state of Tennessee.
At one point, Kerry and Lugar were at the White House discussing with Biden how to handle this important scheduling matter. Obama dropped by and listened as Kerry explained that a prerecess vote could create a partisan environment. Some White House aides were concerned that Kerry was following in the footsteps of Senator Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee, who, during the health care debate, kept pleading for more time to win over moderate Republicans. Yet he failed to do so. Was Kerry falling into a similar trap?
But Kerry believed he had little choice and postponed the committee vote. A ratification vote in the full Senate before the election was now out of reach.
Meanwhile, Kyl was pressing for more money and more information. “It looked as if Kyl intended to slow-walk the treaty to kill it,” a Democratic Senate aide recalled.
As the mid-September committee vote approached, Obama did not get directly involved; there was no need. Lugar had extracted commitments from Corker and Isakson, and Biden called them to make sure they had no last-minute concerns. The committee approved ratification on a resounding 14–4 vote (Republican Senator Jim DeMint did not vote), but now the treaty was heading for the lame-duck session, where nothing was assured.
AFTER THE ELECTION, SOME OBAMA AIDES—MOST NOTABLY, Biden—were eager to forge ahead; others feared the Republicans would thwart a vote or, worse, defeat the treaty. National security adviser Tom Donilon considered any scenario that could end with a loss as perilous. But the plow-ahead gang pointed out the obvious: Obama would start the next Senate with fewer votes for ratification.
Biden was confident he could pull this off. The vice president had identified fourteen GOP senators who were in play and started meeting one-on-one with each.
“I always thought there would be enough Republicans who would think it’s in the national interest to lower the number of nuclear weapons and who wouldn’t want to damage the US relationship with Russia,” a senior administration official recalled, “but that we wouldn’t be able to show sixty-seven votes until close to the end.”
THE GAME WAS STILL ABOUT KYL. DAYS AFTER THE ELECTIONS, Kerry, traveling in the Sudan at Obama’s request, made a 3:00 A.M. call to Kyl to discuss the prospects for proceeding in the lame-duck session. The White House then committed to an extra $5 billion over the next decade for nuclear weapons modernization and maintenance. And in response to Kyl’s request, Obama also produced the next year’s budget for nuclear weapons activity months ahead of the normal schedule, so the senator could review it.
Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Kyl to tell him about the new budget numbers—we think you’ll be impressed, they said—and asked to send a team to Arizona to brief him. Two days later, the White House dispatched three officials to the Grand Canyon State—Jim Miller, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy; General Kevin Chilton, the head of the Strategic Command; and Neile Miller, the deputy director of the National Nuclear Security Administration—to review the budget figures and discuss Kyl’s never-ending concerns. Defense secretary Robert Gates also called Kyl. A meeting between Kyl and Clinton, Gates, and Biden was in the works.
The ratification effort was turning into a production that could be called Waiting for Kyl. Reid couldn’t even consider scheduling a debate and vote until the White House reached an accommodation with him. Yet a deal did seem close at hand.
“Kyl never said to us, ‘If you do all this, I’ll let the Senate vote on START,’ ” a senior administration official recalled. “But it was implied.”
Then Kyl pulled the rug out. On November 16, 2010, he issued a press release saying he did not believe there was time to consider the treaty in the lame-duck session, noting there were too many “complex and unresolved issues related to START and modernization.” He said he looked forward to continuing to work with the administration on these matters—presumably in the next Congress.
Biden was presiding over the regular monthly meeting on Iraq in the Sit Room when news of Kyl’s double cross reached the White House. The vice president gathered with McKeon; Tony Blinken, his national security adviser; Denis McDonough; and Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.
They quickly put out a statement in Biden’s name declaring ratification could not be delayed. The point was to signal to senators that Kyl’s sabotage was not the final act. Yet at this stage, the White House could count on only three Republican votes.
Reporters covering the treaty depicted Kyl’s retreat as a deathblow. Some White House aides raised the possibility of bailing on ratification for the year. They didn’t want to face a loss that would undercut the president, but that afternoon, Obama waved aside the questions and told his aides, “We’ve just got to go ahead.”
OBAMA AND BIDEN HAD NOT ACTUALLY COUNTED ON KYL’S vote. “The vice president expressed more than once that we would never get Kyl,” a senior administration official later said. The strategy had been to address Kyl’s demands to keep him from raising a fuss that would cause other Republicans to shy away from ratification. If Senate Republicans thought Obama had treated Kyl shabbily, they would be more likely to side with him against ratification. Obama was willing to do much to make sure they had no such excuse.
“We wanted to show other Republicans we had gone the extra mile or five miles to satisfy Kyl,” this aide noted.
Understandably, White House staffers and Kerry aides were pissed off. Kyl had delayed the process repeatedly, with requests for information and assorted demands. Now he was saying they had to wait until next year?
But the White House quickly made a calculation: no one was to say anything nasty about Kyl. An assault on Kyl, Obama’s aides thought, would prompt Senate Republicans—including those moderate GOPers on their wish list—to circle the wagons around him. When Robert Gibbs, during a briefing, was asked about Kyl’s move, he calmly asserted that the White House would “continue to work through this process.”
To outsiders, it may have seemed that Obama was refusing to fight tough. He had been sucker punched by Kyl, and the White House was barely responding. Here was more evidence for those who considered Obama a weak or uncertain combatant.
“In the old days,” a senior administration official subsequently explained, “we’d have brought reporters into the Roosevelt Room and said—wink, wink—Here’s what we’re doing and why.” Such an off-the-record chat would be held just so journalists wouldn’t spread the impression that the president was shying from a fight. But these days, word of this sort of meeting would inevitably leak, and the White House’s counter-Kyl strategy would become public. Restraint was a strategic resource.
This moment highlighted a source of frustration for Obama and his aides: the constant instant judgment of the pundits and the politerati. With the 24/7 cable-, blog-, and Twitter-driven media pouncing on every twist and turn of the main stories of the instant, Obama confronted dramatic pronouncements about his actions, decisions, and performance every day. He was up; he was down. This tactic guaranteed success; that move would ensure failure. Obama always counseled his aides not to be sucked into the cable-chatter black hole, even as he himself paid attention to how prominent commentators were scoring his daily efforts.
“We get graded every day,” Axelrod noted (that is, complained). “But in this world, it’s not how you do on the final exam; the media judgment unfortunately is an amalgam of daily quizzes. Yet Obama is focused on the exams. Worse, you get rewarded for the daily theatrics. And if you’re not doing the daily thing viscerally, you’re called detached. . . . You have to decide whether you do what you do to feel good at the moment or to do good overall. Plenty of times it’s more viscerally satisfying to eviscerate the other side.”
Obama, Biden, and their aides were opting against evisceration. “Our M.O. was always to tend to the long game,” a senior administration official later remarked. “There often will be turbulence in the short run.”
IT WAS TIME FOR OBAMA TO UP HIS OWN INVOLVEMENT IN THE New START battle. The White House scheduled an event at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—featuring former national security honchos and Republican luminaries backing the treaty—to rally support for the accord. Originally, Biden was to preside. Now Obama was handed the starring role to pump up the White House’s PR push for ratification.
With Kyl now openly on the dark side, the White House and Kerry shifted their attention toward John McCain. He had griped about the treaty, but they thought he was reachable—and if he supported ratification, it would be easier for moderate Republicans to do so as well.
On November 18, after the White House event, Kerry hurried back to the Senate and arrived late at a meeting on the treaty with several Republican senators. The conversation was hostile. The GOPers besieged Kerry with questions: How can we ratify the treaty in such a short time? Doesn’t it concede too much to the Russians? McCain looked like a human ball of anger. To one participant, ratification appeared to be a lost cause. But as they left the meeting, Kerry placed his arm around McCain, and the two whispered to each other. Moments later, Kerry told an aide: McCain has an amendment, and we need to work with him on it.
McCain’s issue was the same one he had raised months earlier: the Russians declaring they would abandon the agreement if the United States went too far in deploying missile defense systems. Kerry knew this was a red herring because such declarations were common for arms control negotiations. But if he could satisfy McCain and gain his vote, that would be just as good as winning over Kyl. McCain might in the end be unattainable. But most of all, Kerry didn’t want McCain, that old bull, leading a charge against the treaty. His goal was to string McCain along, keep him in play, and the White House was keen to do what it could on this front.
Obama and his aides felt they were on a roll. The White House event and a subsequent NATO summit in Lisbon (where the leaders of the NATO nations officially called for the ratification) appeared to generate momentum for the administration. But Biden, working through his GOP target list, was not obtaining firm commitments. His conversations convinced him that if the Republicans were provided a generous amount of time to debate ratification on the Senate floor, there would be enough votes to pass the treaty. Yet some White House aides wondered if Biden was overstating his case—and overestimating his own powers of persuasion.
ON DECEMBER 15—THE DAY THE SENATE PASSED THE TAX-CUT compromise—the upper chamber voted to begin debate on ratification. The day before, Kyl and a group of influential Republican senators had held a press conference to denounce the Democrats for rushing ahead with ratification. (This rushing charge was thin; there had been a half year of hearings and ceaseless back-and-forth with Kyl and others.) Kyl went so far as to accuse Obama and Reid of “disrespecting one of the two holiest days for Christians” by debating the treaty so close to Christmas. Republican Senator Jim DeMint declaimed the situation as “sacrilegious.”
Kyl, though, still refused to say, after all this time, if he would vote against ratification. “If I announce for or against the treaty at this point, nobody would listen to me,” he said, acknowledging his own gamesmanship.
Reporting on this press conference, the Wall Street Journal called it a “decisive blow” to the treaty.
Kerry’s task was to manage a floor debate that afforded the Republicans room to vent while smothering (oh so respectfully) the dozens of amendments they were proposing. If an amendment to alter the treaty were to pass, the accord would have to be renegotiated with the Russians—which would threaten the entire agreement.
At an “emergency” meeting of the Democrats of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry counseled self-control: “Don’t go to the floor and say anything angry about the Republicans. It doesn’t get us one more vote.”
The White House, with Brian McKeon in the lead, set up a war room in the Foreign Relations Committee’s ceremonial room on the first floor of the Capitol and staffed it with the lead negotiators and experts from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. They were quick to whip up talking points, respond to amendments and assertions from Republicans, and answer technical questions posed by senators.
Over several days, there would be seventy hours of debate—far more than other arms control treaties had drawn. For most of this time, Kerry was at the center of the floor action, parrying with Republicans who raised objections or offered killer amendments. He maintained his cool through it all—and kept the partisan temperature low—to smooth the way for moderate Republicans to support the treaty.
Biden and Kerry were doing whatever they could to pick up Republican senators one by one. Kerry arranged for Democratic leaders in the Senate to cosign a letter to Obama requested by two Republicans—Thad Cochran and Lamar Alexander—asking the White House to treat the nuclear weapons budget (housed within the Department of Energy) as a military line item. This would protect the program from nondefense spending cuts. Obama agreed to do so—and pocketed these Republican votes.
Biden kept talking to McCain, trying to work out something—or at least to prevent McCain from declaring his opposition to ratification. (Around this time, McCain and Lindsey Graham were letting the White House know that if it abandoned the effort to repeal Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, they could be convinced to vote for ratification.)
On December 16, Kerry handed McCain a letter from Obama that was meant to address McCain’s key objection; it reiterated the White House position that the New START treaty would place no limits on US missile defense programs. The following day, McCain, with Graham by his side, came to the White House to talk with Obama and Biden. The meeting was not placed on the president’s public schedule.
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 18, A SATURDAY, KERRY WAS AT the White House to have breakfast with Donilon and plot final strategy. Donilon was running late, and while Kerry waited, he called Reid. There was a problem: McCain.
Reid was considering later in the day filing the cloture petition that would set up a vote to end debate and move to a final vote on ratification. The White House had not yet signed off on that, but this was truly not the right time for Reid to take this step.
Later that morning, the Senate was scheduled to vote on the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. The White House had the votes to win that hot-button face-off, and there was tremendous anger among Republicans on the losing side. Before Kerry had reached the White House, he had caught wind of the fact that McCain was livid about the cloture petition for the New START bill—and McCain was already irate about the pending repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.
If Reid moved this day to end debate on the treaty, McCain might be pushed over the edge. To some that might sound silly: the fate of an agreement governing nuclear weapons dependent on the mood of a resentful legislator. But that was how the Senate worked. Legislative decisions were not always based on policy or politics; sometimes it was personal.
“We feared an avalanche if McCain said no that day,” a Senate aide recalled. “We thought he was the linchpin.”
Though McCain had continued to be grumpy about the treaty, Kerry and his aides still believed they had a chance of roping him in for the final vote. But now their main goal was to keep him out of the nay column—if only for a day or two. Several of the moderate Republicans on their wish list would be lost if McCain were to go ballistic.
Kerry reached Reid on the phone: “Harry, don’t do this now. We’ll lose.”
The Senate majority leader saw the logic, and a potential treaty-busting explosion was averted. Later that day, during the continuing floor debate on the treaty, Kerry read the letter on missile defense Obama had written for McCain. The Arizona senator also was given the chance to offer an amendment that would excise language from the treaty’s nonbinding preamble noting a relationship between offensive and defensive weapons. (McCain claimed that this portion of the treaty would deter US plans for missile defense—a contention challenged by arms control experts.)
McCain’s amendment was shot down on a 59–37 vote. But Kerry and his aides talked with McCain about alternative amendments in which the former Republican presidential candidate could express his sentiments regarding missile defense. The goal: keep McCain on the hook.
THE WHITE HOUSE COULDN’T WAIT ANY LONGER TO MOVE toward a vote. The Senate would be adjourning in days. The next day was the deadline for filing a cloture petition that would allow enough time for a final vote.
That Sunday morning, McConnell declared his opposition to ratification, and Kyl finally did the same. Biden was now confident he had at least thirteen GOP votes—more than enough to hit the sixty-seven mark. But he wasn’t sure which Republicans. A senior Democratic Senate aide estimated that Kerry could depend on about sixty-four or sixty-five senators to back ratification, with several still up for grabs. Close but no guarantee. That night, Reid, per Obama’s decision, filed for cloture. The vote would happen in two days.
“The president made a gutsy decision that he was willing to lose it,” Kerry later said.
Then things fell into place for the White House. Kerry had been leaning on Senator Scott Brown, the Republican from his home state of Massachusetts, and Brown announced he’d support the treaty. The White House arranged for Mullen to appeal to Republican senators, and other Republicans either endorsed ratification or signaled they were leaning in favor: Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, George Voinovich of Ohio, Bob Bennett of Utah, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Counting the votes of Lugar, Corker, and Cochran, the White House was almost there.
“My hat’s off to the Democratic leadership,” Senator Lindsey Graham said. “They’re running rings around us. . . . They’re like Sherman going through Georgia.”
The morning of December 21, Biden was busy calling Republican senators to reaffirm they’d be voting for cloture. At a press conference, Kyl moaned that “this process has not enabled us to consider this treaty in the serious way it should have been considered.”
It was another hollow charge: the Senate was devoting a full week—including a weekend—to debating the treaty. (The original START treaty had received only five days; START II, only two days.) Graham decried fellow Republicans for acting as accomplices as the White House “jammed” the accord through the Senate.
Later that day, the Senate voted 67–28 to end debate and proceed to the ratification vote. Eleven Republicans had joined the triumphant side; McCain had not. Obama and Biden had overcome the obstreperous opposition led by Kyl and McConnell (while neutralizing McCain) and forged a bipartisan coalition.
The final vote the next day was almost anticlimactic. As Biden presided over the Senate and Obama watched on a small television screen in the Outer Oval Office, the treaty was ratified on a 71–26 vote, with the White House picking up two more Republicans. Biden, Kerry, and Lugar had persuaded almost one-third of the Senate Republican caucus to break with its leaders. The sophisticated and deft strategy devised by the White House and Kerry had resulted in a complete success.
The treaty was a modest one, yet overcoming the Republican defiance was an important victory for the president. “No Russian-American arms treaty submitted for a Senate vote ever squeaked through by a smaller margin,” the New York Times reported. “But for a president seeking his way after a crushing midterm election, it was a welcome validation that he could still win a battle.”
The Hot Air conservative website offered a dispirited but snarky reaction: “The tax cuts deal, then DADT repeal, now this. Man, I’ll bet The One wishes every session could be a lame-duck session.”
SHORTLY AFTER THE SENATE VOTE, OBAMA WALKED FROM THE West Wing to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to hold a press conference. It would be his last before the new political reality hit Washington. As he strode across the driveway between the two buildings, Gibbs, Axelrod, and Pfeiffer were with him, each of them smiling.
At the podium, Obama evinced triumph. After the midterm elections, he said, “A lot of folks in this town predicted Washington would be headed for more partisanship and more gridlock. And instead, this has been a season of progress.” And there was more than the tax-cut deal, New START, and the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Obama cited a food safety bill (“the biggest upgrade of America’s food safety laws since the Great Depression”) enacted in the lame-duck session and pointed out that Congress that day was on the verge of approving legislation previously blocked by Republicans that would pay for medical care needed by 9/11 rescue workers. Congress had also okayed a child nutrition bill that expanded the school lunch program—a bill much favored by Michelle Obama.
“This has been the most productive postelection period we’ve had in decades,” Obama said.
He was correct. After suffering a historic electoral loss, he had scored a series of notable policy victories.
THERE HAD BEEN PLENTY OF SKEPTICISM INSIDE AND OUTSIDE the White House after the elections. “Nobody in the West Wing thought he would get as much as he got,” Bill Burton recalled. But Obama had not yielded to the nay-saying within his own circle.
“Being a great leader means absorbing all the anxiety and doubt and knowing in your own heart your commitment,” a senior administration official said of Obama. “He absorbs a lot of pain.”
In the ten weeks since the “shellacking,” Obama had demonstrated a political dexterity, outflanking fierce Republican opposition on several fronts. The rap on him had been that he was a lousy negotiator—and he might indeed have conceded too much during the fights over the stimulus and health care—but in the recent weeks he had employed a firm, though quiet, negotiating style that allowed him to outmaneuver Republicans. The downside: much of this transpired far from public view. Obama had achieved these wins not by mobilizing millions and shaping the overarching narrative but by engaging in crafty negotiations and tactics.
Nevertheless, as White House aides saw it, Obama had boosted his appeal for various constituencies. The tax-cut deal had impressed independent voters. The repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was a reminder for die-hard progressives. The New START treaty ratification played well with the keepers of elite opinion.
WITH THIS LAME-DUCK SESSION OVER, THE POLITERATI WERE looking toward the next act: Obama versus the Republican House. Could he negotiate with the Tea Party–driven GOPers? Was he prepared to duke it out with them? How could he use this coming year to set up what was already looking to be a damn difficult reelection?
When reporters at the press conference asked him about the prospects of working productively with Republicans in the months to come, Obama optimistically declared it would be possible to find “common ground.” The Republicans, he predicted, will “recognize that with greater power is going to come greater responsibility.”
Maybe. Obama appeared to be in a charitable—perhaps too charitable—mood. The day before, Congress had approved a temporary funding bill for the federal government, averting a shutdown. The law would keep the government afloat only until March 4, setting up a full-fledged budget battle early in the new year.
That evening, Obama shared a champagne toast with White House staffers who had worked on New START. Then he departed for a family vacation in his native Hawaii. He knew he would soon be returning to a much different and more difficult Washington.
Yet as he boarded Air Force One, the president was smiling and singing “Mele Kalikimaka,” the popular Hawaiian Christmas song.