Free The Price of Politics by Bob Woodward Page A

to expire.
    “That’s the administration’s position, period,” he said.
    But privately, Orszag was increasingly concerned that the administration was going to move to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. “A disastrous course,” he warned, because the Treasury needed more revenue.
    His last day as OMB director was to be July 30, and with his time in the cabinet waning, Orszag had his good-bye session with Obama. His kids had their photo taken with the president, and Obama made one last request of Orszag.
    “Can you write me another one of those memos?” the president asked. He wanted a private recommendation, which Orszag had provided before. Obama wanted no one else to see it. Independent, out-of-channel communications could be more honest.
    Why not, Orszag said. Yes, sir.
    He began a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, and from there he went to work. The country was facing an unsustainablebudget deficit over the next 10 years and beyond. It just did not add up. Tax cuts simply were not affordable. Yes, raising taxes in the recession would impact consumer spending—the necessary driver of a recovery. But the United States would not solve its long-term budget problem unless revenue—meaning tax increases—was part of the equation.
    In a draft of his memo for the president, Orszag made his case for additional revenue, but noted that “Even with substantial fiscal pressure, Republicans are extremely unlikely to affirmatively vote for revenue increases.”
    He proposed what he called “the best alternative among admittedly very unattractive options.” The administration should move to extend the Bush tax cuts for a year without offsetting them, and then demand that the cost of any further extensions be fully offset.
    Ideally, only the lower- and middle-class tax cuts should be continued, but Republicans, of course, would want to extend them for the high-income brackets as well. Reaching a deal on extending them all would be worth it, but just for a year or two.
    Orszag sent these thoughts in his memo to Obama, back-channeled through the president’s personal secretary, Katie Johnson. He heard nothing back.
    By late August, Orszag had branched out. He was preparing for his debut as a columnist on the op-ed page of The New York Times , some of the most valuable and high-visibility opinion real estate in journalism. He sent Katie Johnson an email saying that in a week he was planning to write a column on taxes, and he planned to make the same arguments he had made in his private memo to the president. Please, make sure you tell the president about what I am going to do.
    I have told the president, thank you, Johnson emailed back.
    It was a delicate path, Orszag was aware. He wanted to alert the president, but not give him veto power. Johnson’s response and thank-you was all he needed. He took parts of the Obama memo and cut and pasted them into his column, which ran in the Times on September 6. 35 It proposed a compromise: “Extend tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether.”
    At his press briefing the following afternoon, White House spokesmanRobert Gibbs attempted to distance the administration from Orszag’s column. 36 “We certainly didn’t see Peter’s column before it appeared today,” he said, adding, “nobody that I’m aware of saw the column before.”
    It’s not true that no one in the White House was notified about the coming column, Orszag wrote in an email to Rahm Emanuel.
    Are you saying you told me? Rahm emailed back.
    No, I’m saying I told your boss.
    The former budget director was slightly surprised that Obama would hoard information, but Orszag often said that it was a mistake to think you’ve got someone figured out.
    • • •
    Orszag continued his star turn in the op-ed spotlight and a month later drafted a column to appear October 20, 2010, on the sensitive subject of Obamacare. 37 He wanted to focus on one of its weaknesses. The health care legislation