Decodedc

Five years ago. It was the early days of the Obama presidency. And it was a panicky moment in what came to be called the Great Recession. Congress already had bailed out Wall Street’s most troubled companies with a program called TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Now Congress was desperately trying to find a way to pump some blood into a very sick economy. The markets, the experts, the country wanted action. 

In the House of Representatives, the man in the middle of coming up with stimulus plan fast was David Obey, a longtime Democratic congressman from Wisconsin who chaired the Appropriations Committee. Obey was known for his mastery of the appropriations process and his blunt talk. He retired in 2011, and now he is really blunt about what went on in the smoke-filled rooms five years ago and about today’s bitter budget battles. With the economy in free fall, Obey met with his Republican counterpart Jerry Lewis of California to start writing a bill. “And Jerry just grinned and said ‘Dave, I’m sorry,