The first thing he did was commission a national poll to show fellow Republican congressmen that while Obama was personally popular, his policies were not. Then he assembled what he called the House Republican Economic Recovery Working Group to come up with an alternative stimulus package. The group’s plan was larded with tax cuts that would make it a nonstarter for Obama, but the president’s expected rejection was part of the plan. “If we were going to oppose it,” Cantor says now of Obama’s stimulus package, “our members needed to be able to go home to their districts and say to the Rotary Club or their Chamber of Commerce that it’s not just ‘no’ but that we have our own way of doing it.”
Once Obama unveiled his own nearly $1 trillion stimulus package, Cantor went to work picking it apart piece by piece in the press. He realized—in a way that previous minority whips didn’t—that an essential part of his job was messaging. “The notion that a minority is going to be pushing pieces of legislation through the House is ludicrous,” explains John Murray. “So we needed to be communicating, and doing it very aggressively.” Working from a windowless office in the Capitol, three Cantor communication staffers ran a campaign-style war room that was devoted to finding the porkiest or most controversial pieces of Obama’s stimulus bill—from the $200 million to be spent in part on resodding the National Mall to the provision that devoted millions of dollars to family-planning initiatives—and then turning them into Drudge links and Fox News hits. Democrats ultimately wound up dropping a number of those provisions from the legislation, but it didn’t matter. When the bill passed the house eight days after Obama’s inauguration, it did so without a single House GOP vote.
That lockstep unity would carry over to future votes, including, most significantly, health-care reform. And while Obama chalked up some impressive legislative victories, he was unable to deliver on one of the fundamental promises of his presidential campaign: that he would change Washington and usher in a new era of bipartisanship.