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"FacebookPinterest\n\nGQ correspondent Robert Draper embedded himself with the freshman Republicans in the House of Representatives for his new book Do Not Ask What Good We Do, an inside account of congressional dysfunction in the first term of the Obama administration. At the time, our correspondent Marin Cogan was a Politico reporter covering the freshmen beat. In an interview, the two talk about the most memorable freshmen members, who\u2019s really to blame for the debt ceiling crisis, and what Anthony Weiner\u2019s up to now. \n\nThis interview has been edited for length.\n\nMarin Cogan: So let\u2019s talk about your new book. To report it, you spent the last year immersed in the House.\n\nRobert Draper: The timing went like this: On the evening of the midterms I was watching TV rather wistfully because I had an existing book contract to work on race relations in America during the forty year period between King\u2019s assassination and Obama\u2019s election, and watching these Tea Party freshmen who\u2019d just been elected I began thinking \u2019These are my people.\u2019 They seemed like such great characters, particularly the ones that never had political experience at all, and so I thought that their own narrative, following them into Washington to watch them try to change the institution or possibly be changed by it was an irresistible story ... From that point onward I embedded myself within the House and what this meant was that every day they were in session I was on the Hill following these guys around, was often at their town halls when they were not in session, like where you saw me for first time in Fort Lauderdale. That\u2019s where it began. I finished the last word of the book the day after Obama\u2019s State of the Union address on January 26th of this year and then we published it less than three months later.\n\nMarin Cogan: I was the House freshman reporter for Politico at the time, also embedded with the class, so I feel like I know these guys pretty well. And so if you got this wrong it\u2019d be pretty awkward...but you got it so right. Even if someone was totally tuned out of Congress for the last two years, they could read your account and get a rundown of the best and the most important stories\u2014the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the implosion of Anthony Weiner, the debt ceiling standoff, all the way to the horrible kabuki dance that was the supercommittee negotiations\u2014with these lovely profiles of some major (and minor) House figures woven throughout.\n\nFirst, let\u2019s talk about the characters that populate the book. How did you choose them? Jeff Duncan (SC-3) was an interesting choice. The four horsemen of South Carolina were by far my favorite delegation in the class. They were all such funny, intelligent, larger than life guys. And Duncan always did struggle to stand out around those big personalities like Trey Gowdy (SC-4) and Mick Mulvaney (SC-5) and Tim Scott (SC-1) \u2014but he was in some ways very emblematic, an everyman.\n\nRobert Draper: Right, I feel like that is the ongoing experiential narrative of the House. I knew that there would be some drama particular to the 112th Congress. I didn\u2019t know what it would be, but I figured that with these 87 freshmen something unusual was likely to happen, but what I also wanted to capture was the ongoing experience of being one member in a body of 435, trying to be heard. And when I first met Duncan he was not the most distinguished politician, he was far from a rock star like Allen West (FL-22) or Sean Duffy (WI-7) or Kristi Noem (SD-AL), but I began to realize maybe that was the point, that maybe what my book needed was the everyman.\n\nAs you know with Duncan, these bumper sticker reductions of humans don\u2019t get you very far. Duncan is a very forthright guy, he\u2019s a deeply conservative South Carolina Christian, but he also says what\u2019s on his mind, and in his own way, he became an important congressman in this session. He symbolized or was emblematic of the conservatism of the freshmen bloc that pulled leadership and rest of House Republican to the right and created a dynamic in congress that could basically be described as paralysis. But I think just as I was finishing the book I remember talking to a certain top staffer in Speaker Boehner\u2019s office who asked me who my main characters would be and when I mentioned Jeff Duncan, he wrinkled up his face and said \u2019Who?\u2019 That\u2019s when I realized that the experience I was capturing of Duncan\u2019s struggles to be heard was a very poignant one if a top member of the Speaker\u2019s office didn\u2019t know who he was.\n\nMarin Cogan: Some of the characters in your book, I\u2019m thinking Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18), or Anthony Weiner, or Allen West, were examples of what some people would plainly consider to be the problem with Congress. People who came to Washington with maybe good ambitions, or who fight for good causes, but are undone either by personal ambition or vice or partisan vitriol. But they\u2019re characters you portray with such empathy. Did you ever struggle with that\u2014did you ever think, this person is clearly a part of the problem?\n\nRobert Draper: You bring up a really good point, which is that these are individuals who would seem to be a part of the problem, but that in and of itself illustrates a duality in an institution that, on the one hand, has a record low approval rating, but on the other hand has so many damn incumbents who continually get reelected. They hate Congress but they seem to be okay with their own congressmen. As for the empathy factor, I just as a journalist become interested in people, and what motivates them, and in particular with those who are widely disliked. Those people are subject to caricature, the caricatures don\u2019t come close to encompassing the whole person. That\u2019s true for example with Anthony Weiner, who, though I think the book furnishes even more reason to dislike this guy, none the less was brilliant and whether the Democrats realized it or not is missed by the other Democrats.\n\nMarin Cogan: There was a narrative about these freshmen that began before they got there\u2014and it was largely true, I think, that they were just going to obstruct like crazy and vote against everything and drag everyone to the right. Politico and more recently the New York Times did a vote analysis on this, saying that the freshmen voted against their leaders with roughly the same frequency as their upperclassmen counterparts. How do you explain that?\n\nRobert Draper: The problem is that Politico and also The New York Times and other media organizations have concluded from those statistics that therefore there is a \u2019myth\u2019 to the freshman voting bloc. As the book makes clear, and the more candid members of Republican leadership spell out, so much energy was erted in getting freshmen to vote with leadership and so many concessions were extracted by those freshmen that ultimately every bit of legislation at least implicitly had the stamp of the freshmen all over it. The result was legislation that was so far to the right of legislation that had been previously contemplated by Republicans, that became thoroughly unpalatable to the Democratic controlled Senate and to Obama, which guaranteed paralysis. Marin, don\u2019t forget that [Budget Committee Chairman] Paul Ryan, which my book mentions, had offered his Ryan budget in 2008, 2009, 2010. And a big chunk of Republicans voted against that budget. Only when these freshmen came on board did Ryan realize through the listening sessions with [Majority Whip] [Kevin McCarthy](http://kevinmccarthy.house.gov/) that these guys were right where he was, and it laid a path for virtually unanimous passage among Republicans of the Ryan budget. That\u2019s because of the freshmen class.\n\nMarin Cogan: There were a mix of other factors, both the RSC and outside groups like Heritage Action, helping them push, and the upperclassmen who were emboldened by the meaning of the freshmen class and the rhetoric of the class, to stand with them and push harder. It was also the leadership strategy of letting the House work its will, and McCarthy\u2019s hands-off style. Do you ever wonder about what it would have been like if they had cracked the whip a little more with these freshmen?\n\nRobert Draper: Yeah. I wondered about it a lot, because as the book details in that meeting near the end, where the appropriations cardinals had a meeting with Speaker Boehner and the other leaders to yell at them because so many people were voting against the CR, and Boehner\u2019s position to them then was, \u2019We can\u2019t punish them, people will just make martyrs out of them. We\u2019ll just reward them for good behavior rather than try to exact reprisals for bad behavior.\u2019 And yeah, it does beg the question, even with no earmarks, even with vigilance of right wing groups, couldn\u2019t there have been a little more done to turn the screws? I think that McCarthy has a real affinity for the freshmen and maybe that\u2019s been a good thing ultimately for leadership, but he\u2019s not the one to break knuckles, that\u2019s just not his style. Even if he had the tools I doubt he\u2019d be able to do it. The big question, the one I wrestled with was: What if Tom DeLay were Whip? Or Majority Leader or Speaker? DeLay was not just a knuckle breaker but he knew how to bait the hook, and he also knew the pressure points. McCarthy, this is only his third term there, and Boehner for his part is kind of an aloof CEO, friendly but aloof, and doesn\u2019t have a relationship with these newer members. We\u2019re not going to know answer to these questions but it\u2019s an interesting question to ask.\n\nMarin Cogan: You touched on this in the book, but from their point of view, the freshmen really didn\u2019t seem to know what the hell was going on most of the time. Their leaders were negotiating behind closed doors, which was the opposite of what they wanted, and not telling them anything, and then they have a million reporters like me chasing them down in the hallway asking them about frameworks for negotiations leaked by the White House. It plainly frustrated them. How did that shape their role in the negotiations?\n\nRobert Draper: Well, you\u2019re right that the backroom negotiations between Obama and Boehner raised the suspicions of these freshmen, who believed this kind of behavior was exactly what was wrong with Washington. Raul Labrador (ID-1) had made a point of saying that in one of the Republican conferences mentioned in the book. Their basic suspicion, and the fact that they were never allied with Boehner to begin with, the way the freshman class of \u201994 was beholden to Newt Gingrich in \u201994, meant that Boehner\u2019s hold over them was always pretty tenuous. During debt ceiling standoffs, as book mentions, some of Boehner\u2019s allies came to warn him that if he produced a deal with Obama that didn\u2019t get the requisite votes from Republicans there could very well be a mutiny, one that would benefit Eric Cantor, the Majority Leader, and prove to be the undoing of Boehner. There\u2019s no question that that warning had an impact on Boehner.\n\nMarin Cogan: I remember the press pack mentality pretty well during the debt ceiling standoff, and I think it\u2019s fair to say that the media mostly agreed with the White House line that Republicans were just being intransigent and impossible. Some of the recent reporting, by The Washington Post for example, that has suggested that really Obama bears more responsibility than we might have thought at the time because of the last minute request for more revenues. I know that\u2019s a story line Republicans pushed. Do you buy that?\n\nRobert Draper: No. I agree that the Obama administration moved the goal posts. They did so, however, because the Gang of Six was discussing a deal in the Senate that was in alignment with the numbers in Simpson-Bowles, and it didn\u2019t make sense in the view of the Obama administration to be negotiating something much lower than that in terms of revenues. My point of view is that, as fine a story as Matt Bai\u2019s story in The New York Times Magazine was and as comprehensive as The Washington Post story was, what neither story takes into account is that Boehner never had the votes. He never had the votes for a grand bargain, there\u2019s just simply nothing that he would have been able to sell to his conference.\n\nI should say also that Kevin McCarthy had told me of his way of viewing the new conservative behavior in the Republican conference. He mentioned that one of his two older Labradors had died and he replaced it with a puppy, and as a result the older Labrador began to behave like a puppy too. He analogized it to the Republicans in the House. Now that the puppies/freshmen were on board, it proved to be invigorating to more of these senior more reptilian congressmen, that they too were showing new life. This is further to the point of not only the votes that Boehner couldn\u2019t get on the debt ceiling, but also to the point of who was voting most with whom, the freshmen or senior conservatives. In a lot of ways the freshmen were catalytic to the behavior of conservatives who had always been conservatives but felt somewhat demoralized until they came on board.\n\nMarin Cogan: Have you spoken with any of them lately? I remember talking to a few who were trying to reconsider how they looked at their jobs as legislators. They\u2019d more or less given up on trying to get legislation into law in this Congress and they were starting to think, is it drilling down on subcommittee work, or focusing on constituent services, or something else?\n\nRobert Draper: Yeah, I have. Of course it depends on who you talk to. For all of my elucidation of the freshmen bloc, I try in my book to disaggregate them and look at them as individuals. There are some, like Duncan for example, who are hoping they can climb the ladder of a particular subcommittee and become chairman. There are others like Kristi Noem who have been intensely focused on district issues really from the start, and then there are others like Joe Walsh from Illinois, who, when he hasn\u2019t been focused on trying to get on television, has simply asserted himself as the spokesman of the national Tea Party movement. I do think there\u2019s a shared frustration among all of these new Republican congressman and an ongoing skepticism about how leadership is going to produce legislation that they want to see produced. It\u2019s not as if there\u2019s a growing movement to clean house amongst leadership, but, at same time, I can tell you that it\u2019s not like the freshmen, with a few exceptions, have suddenly decided that John Boehner is the ideal Speaker. I\u2019ve seen no sign of that.\n\nMarin Cogan: A lot of books about Congress come with these policy prescriptions about how we can make this all better at the end. Your book is different. Did you come away from this with any sense of how this Congress could be fid?\n\nRobert Draper: There are a couple of things, I guess. One would be redistricting reform. Of course, waving a wand and making that happen would be a trick. But what has occurred is that because of redistricting, slowly the number of swing districts has been eliminated, and instead we have only very Democratic and very Republican districts. Guys who come to town are hard left and hard right and it creates prescription for nothing being agreed upon. There\u2019s been efforts, all of them fruitless, by John Tanner and others to pass legislation that would have commissions rather than legislatures do the redistricting, that would make a difference. But another that may be equally difficult would be the emergence of a third party, because right now the center is taken for granted, right now moderates and independents are taken for granted. But if there was a place for them to gravitate, a party, and if both sides first began to lose all of their votes in the middle by people who were only barely Republican or barely Democrat then they might realize that there might be something to be gained by appealing to those people who are turned off by partisan extremism. Those are the two possibilities for reform short of a depression or a war that might cause these guys to get their act together.\n\nMarin Cogan: You sound really hopeful.\n\nRobert Draper:  Yeah, sure thing! No not at all, but there\u2019s nothing behaviorally\u2014after all, Marin, they came back from the debt ceiling stand off with their approval rating plummeting and people saying \u2019Can\u2019t you get your act together?\u2019 And nothing of the latter sort occurred. Of course there is another prescription, it\u2019s the most obvious one. It\u2019s called the ballot box. This is the most democratic institution in America, they have to face the passions of the public every two years, and nothing would cause them to change more than if virtually every incumbent were voted out of office, but I don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to happen either.\n\nMarin Cogan: Right but this is another thing that we both saw, which is that the electorate is often schizophrenic. They get home and get screamed at for being too intransigent and not getting along and they also get screamed at for capitulating and working too closely with congressional leadership.\n\nRobert Draper: One thing I found particularly dismaying as I went to these guys\u2019 districts is that when they would throw town halls, the people who would show up would be the people who are the most activist in their party, and in the case of the Republican party it\u2019s the Tea Party activists.\n\nMarin Cogan: Have you talked to Anthony Weiner lately?\n\nRobert Draper: We traded emails. He emailed me when the first excerpts of the book were leaked to Politico, and it was a humorous exchange, and further an invitation to have him buy me a drink when I got to New York. But then the New York Post started really beating up on him and hyperbolizing what was in my book and I never quite received that invitation from Weiner. I talked to Jon Stewart back stage about it in the green room. Stewart has known him a long time, and he thought Weiner probably felt okay about the book because in Stewart\u2019s view treatment of Weiner was more than fair. But I\u2019ve come to believe that people don\u2019t want to just be treated fairly. They want to be rhapsodized over or exonerated.\n\nRead more from Death Race 2012:\n\n[Tapas with the Four Horsemen: South Carolina\u2019s Most Influential Conservatives on Newt\u2019s Brain, Romney\u2019s Personality, and 9 1/2 Weeks\u2019 Best Scenes\n\n](http://www.gq.com/news-politics/blogs/death-race/2012/01/the-four-horseman-of-south-carolina.html#ixzz1tYsDeckP)\n\n Weekend Watching: Robert Draper on The Daily Show\n\n&amp;quot;I can do it one night, but don\u2019t ask me to come again tomorrow night.&amp;quot; Scenes from the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner\n\nThe Most (And Least) Powerful People in Politics This Week\n\nFollow GQ correspondent Marin Cogan on Twitter for more updates from the campaign trail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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