Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Despite the radical expectations projected onto him, Obama was by inclination a bipartisan centrist. What he had not reckoned with was the sheer violence of the conservative hostility toward him. There was no possibility of bipartisanship. Whereas at least a minority of Republicans had voted with the majority of the Democrats to pass the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts and TARP, in January 2009 in the House of Representatives not a single Republican voted for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, despite the tax cuts with which it was festooned.5 In the Senate only three did. It was a warning of the depth of partisan hostility the Obama administration would face. From the outset of his presidency, a large section of Republican opinion effectively denied the legitimacy of Obama’s leadership. At the grassroots this expressed itself in the “birther” conspiracy, doubting Obama’s status as a natural-born citizen. In Congress it manifested itself in a stance of absolute opposition. America’s right-wing think tanks mobilized in force to denounce the bailouts and to discredit the stimulus and the financial regulations to come. By the spring the wave of antigovernment indignation that dubbed itself the “Tea Party movement” would roil the base of the Republican Party and hog the television news cycle. In the background, billionaire “dark money” donors, led by the Koch brothers, stirred the pot.