Barack Obama, to hear his advisers tell it, has finally found The One he has been looking for: John McCain.
“We have been looking literally for years for someone we can cut deals with, and finally someone has stepped up,” a White House official said. West Wing aides say they now talk with McCain roughly every other day.
McCain, to hear fellow Republicans tell it, has finally found The Two he has needed to make such conversations worth the bother: Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who can actually get things done in the Senate, and Denis McDonough, a White House chief of staff who actually cares what senators say and think and do.
(PHOTOS: John McCain’s life and career)
While Obama and party leaders clash endlessly and hopelessly, these three men are showing it is possible to put aside political and personal grievances to get consequential stuff done, even in Washington’s currently twisted state.
They would never say it this way, but more often than not, they do it by going around those party leaders — their bosses — who seem stuck in fights they will never be able to end.
This new alliance has resulted in an immigration bill and a deal to avoid the nuclear option for confirming nominees, and is in preliminary conversations to avert a government shutdown over the budget. It has created trust — tenuous but real — among these three officials (and others) who can deliver results.
The House no doubt will kill most or all of their compromises. But three men from the three power centers talking, much less agreeing, is something this city hasn’t seen in the Obama years.
The return of McCain the Maverick rankles many Republicans, but he can reliably count on seven to 10 GOP senators to back him, including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
Schumer, while watched with suspicion by some Democrats and leadership staff, can deliver the vast majority of his party — and he isn’t afraid of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), as others are. “Harry, to his credit, gives people some space to do this stuff,” Schumer said.
(POLITICO reports: Senate averts ‘nuclear option’)
And McDonough, who came into the job after the Inauguration, has more credibility with many senators than Obama himself, largely because he calls constantly and seems to genuinely care. He was a foreign policy adviser to former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, so he gets the rhythms, neediness and vocabulary of the Hill. Plus colleagues and senators say McDonough is more willing to take advice on strategy than some other top Obama aides over the years.
Each of the three has huge personal incentives to make this work. For McCain, it’s redemption in his twilight, a chance to end his career as a deal-making senator. For Schumer, it’s validation in his prime, a chance to show his colleagues he’s more than a showboat — he’s someone who can get things done and should be the party’s next Senate leader. And for McDonough, it’s relevancy in the moment, a chance to show he can do what Obama’s prior chiefs of staff have had such difficulty doing — navigating Congress.
During a joint interview with McCain at the Capitol, Schumer said that while White House officials have always had to return Democrats’ calls, “sometimes you got the feeling … they didn’t really want to. With Denis McDonough, you get the feeling he wants to.”
The relationship to watch most closely is the one between McCain and Schumer.
A year ago, they weren’t even friends. They fought over matters big, like legislation, and small, like whether Long Island should be part of the United States. After McCain said Long Island was “regrettably” a part of our nation, Schumer demanded an apology. “I’m sorry there’s at least one of my colleagues that can’t take a joke,” McCain said on the Senate floor.
The two first got together late last year, on a successful effort to defuse a previous threat of the nuclear option with a proposal for filibuster reform. “McCain and I sort of bonded over stale Danish,” Schumer said. Still, they didn’t jell.
Sen. Lindsey Graham urged Schumer to make sure McCain joined the Gang of Eight working on immigration reform.
“I said, ‘He and I don’t like each other.’ And he said, ‘Let me work on it.’ And he did,” Schumer recalled. By the end of January, McCain and Schumer were buddy-buddy during a joint appearance at a Playbook Breakfast, and later took a field trip together to the Arizona-Mexico border. “It was hard to schedule, but he kept pushing me,” Schumer said.
They now talk on the phone five or six times each day. “I run out of juice,” McCain said.
White House officials said the process seemed to loosen up McCain. He no longer seems petulant or stubborn in their private conversations. This was on full display in a 90-minute conversation McCain and others had with Obama last week in the Oval Office.
“He has been a little bit grumpy — that’s gone,” said the senior White House aide. “He was joking with people in the room. He would say, ‘Let me frame it this way.’ In the past, generally what you got, not just with him but with most members, was, ‘I disagree with you.’”
It’s one thing to talk and get things done on issues they fundamentally agree on, like immigration. But it’s another to help the White House and two congressional parties find common ground on budgets and debt. McCain just called Schumer to see if they can pull off what looks like the impossible right now, a fiscal compromise when the country hits the debt limit this autumn.
“The real test,” says McCain, “will be this fall.”
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