As the scene unfolded on the floor, Rosengarten and other Senate aides watched from the gallery. Rosengarten turned to a colleague and said, “Now it’s our turn. We’ve got to go pass this thing in the Senate.”
When the Obama era began, John Kerry was looking for a new political identity. Like Lieberman, he had a strained relationship with the new President. Kerry had been scheduled to endorse Obama the day after Obama’s presumed victory in the New Hampshire primary. But Obama lost, and that night he nervously called Kerry and asked, “Are you still on board?” Kerry said he was. “Ninety-nine per cent of politicians would have walked away at that moment, because our odds of winning the primaries were quite low,” Dan Pfeiffer, now Obama’s communications director, told me in a 2008 interview. “It was a huge moment.” Kerry and his aides believed that, if Obama was the President, Kerry’s endorsement would give him the inside track in the competition for the job as Secretary of State. But Obama passed him over.
Kerry, as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, could help steer the Administration’s foreign policy, but he wanted to play a big role in shaping Obama’s domestic agenda. In 2007, he had written a book about environmental activism, “This Moment on Earth,” and the issue was a rare one in which the junior senator from Massachusetts had a deeper interest than the senior senator, Ted Kennedy. For most of their quarter century together in the Senate, Kennedy was the legislator (the Americans with Disabilities Act, State Children’s Health Insurance Program, No Child Left Behind), and Kerry was the investigator (P.O.W.s in Vietnam, B.C.C.I., Iran-Contra). Now that could change. “This was Kerry’s opportunity to prove that he could be in a major, really historic piece of legislation,” Lieberman said.
At first, Kerry joined forces with Barbara Boxer, and spent months trying to find a Republican co-sponsor for her bill, which was almost a carbon copy of Waxman-Markey. In August, Rosengarten was eating lunch with Kerry’s climate-policy aide, Kathleen Frangione, at Sonoma, a Capitol Hill wine bar. Rosengarten said she had spent hours working on the nuclear legislation with Graham’s policy aide, Matthew Rimkunas, and she was shocked by something he had recently told her: Graham would have backed a climate-change bill that Lieberman had co-sponsored in 2007 if it had included the language supportive of nuclear power that they had just worked out. Kerry and Graham had to talk. Perhaps Kerry could split off from Boxer and try to work with Graham on a bipartisan bill.
Within days, Kerry and Graham were meeting in Kerry’s office to negotiate the language of a Times Op-Ed piece announcing their partnership. As they talked, Kerry suddenly found himself having to reassess his convictions on oil drilling, nuclear energy, and environmental regulations with someone he barely knew and whom he had reason not to like. In 2004, Graham had gratuitously told the Times that Kerry “has no charisma” and “doesn’t relate well to average people.” But the two men agreed that their eventual bill would have to help the nuclear industry and expand oil drilling. As they wrote the article, Graham introduced a third issue: revoking the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Kerry was furious, but he eventually relented. The Op-Ed would include language signalling to insiders that E.P.A. authority would be curtailed: “Industry needs the certainty that comes with congressional action.”
The article ran on October 11th. The next day, Graham was holding a town-hall meeting in the gym of a high school in Greenville, South Carolina. His constituents were not happy. One man accused him of “making a pact with the Devil.” Another shouted, “No principled compromise!” One audience member asked, “Why do you think it’s necessary to get in bed with people like John Kerry?” Graham, dressed in a blue blazer and khakis, paced the floor, explaining that there were only forty Republicans in the Senate, which meant that he had to work with the sixty Democrats. A man in the bleachers shouted, “You’re a traitor, Mr. Graham! You’ve betrayed this nation and you’ve betrayed this state!”
Soon afterward, Graham called Lieberman. He was concerned that Kerry might drag him too far to the left, and he knew that Lieberman, a close friend with whom he had travelled during McCain’s Presidential campaign, could serve as a moderating force. Graham may not have remembered that Kerry and Lieberman had, according to a Senate aide, “a tense personal relationship.” (Lieberman and Kerry ran against each other for President in 2004. In 2006, Kerry endorsed and campaigned for Lieberman’s Democratic opponent in his Senate race.) “I’m happy to try and negotiate a bill with Kerry,” Graham told Lieberman. “But I really want you in the room.”
On October 28, 2009, Graham was eating dinner at the Capital Grille, an expense-account steakhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, with Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, and Rick Davis, a Republican consultant who had managed McCain’s two Presidential campaigns. The E.D.F., virtually alone among green groups in trying to form bonds with Republicans, prides itself on being the most politically sophisticated environmental organization in Washington. Krupp, who has short gray hair and a Brooks Brothers look that announces his disdain for hemp-wearing environmental activists, had helped to educate McCain on climate change, and the two men became close. Now he wanted to do the same for Graham. He called Davis, who was an E.D.F. board member, and arranged the dinner.
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