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Putnam Walks A Tightrope

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 5, 2008

Last week was a tough one for the leadership teams in the House of Representatives, and when Adam Putnam visited The Tampa Tribune's editorial board during a break Tuesday, he made it clear it's also a tricky time to be an incumbent.

Nevertheless, the three-term Republican congressman from Bartow is the odds-on favorite to win a fourth. Whether he retains his leadership position in the next Congress depends on the outcome of the elections and the forbearance of colleagues who initially bucked their leaders and voted against the bipartisan economic rescue plan.

Putnam, a gifted politician, approaches his role as both congressman and leader in an intelligent, deliberate way. Still, as head of his party's conference and the minority's third-ranking member, it often falls to him to explain the Republicans' policy positions. At times he comes across as fiercely partisan, which is tough to watch from home. Yet we admire him for his ability to disagree with his colleagues across the aisle without making it personal.

He was clearly frustrated last week that so many people, including most of his constituents and many colleagues, failed to recognize the economic tsunami facing them. Concluding that absent congressional action the economy could fail, he voted for the rescue measure and in the process pivoted from one of his party's core principles: letting the markets decide. Clearly there needs to be an ideological shift within the Republican ranks.

Putnam failed to explain in any meaningful way how we're going to pay for the rescue, but he acknowledged the bailout will affect the domestic agenda of both the Congress and the presidential candidates in the months to come.

He also talked about energy, drilling off the coast and the presidential campaign. Below is an edited version of our 90-minute conversation.

Do you have a sense of what people want who don't want this rescue?

The term "bailout" has absolutely poisoned the popular conception of this, and there are still a very large number of people who think that this has zero impact on their savings, employment, their access to credit, in short, their daily life. To them this is all about a handful of greedy, mismanaging Wall Street bankers.

What would happen to the Dow if you in Congress just said hands off? How far would it fall?

I think it is important for policymakers and opinion leaders - we should not be boxed into the thought that the Dow is the only barometer on this. Nobody understands credit markets outside a select group of Americans, and that is where the real pain is. We should not be slaves to the Dow, but we should be cognizant of the impact of the credit markets because this is where the consumer is going to hurt. Businesses have other methods to get access to credit. They can issue stock. They can do other things to generate cash. The consumer basically has a bank loan and a credit card, and they will dry up for consumers.

...We have to have an extraordinary intervention that would otherwise be against my market principles. But it is because we face an economic downturn that is greater than a typical, cyclical movement.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has long said, "Let's not foreclose on anybody." Why won't that work?

There's a pretty clear moral hazard there, and I think that the people calling my office who were unhappy by what they perceived to be a Wall Street bailout would go bananas if the person next to them who has three new cars, two jet skis, a boat, eat out all the time, and are members of every club have no consequence for having overleveraged themselves when the person has been doing everything right, I mean that is the root, visceral anger about this bill and that issue would, I think, make it that much worse.

If you think the price tag on this is big, and that the time for considering other options is short, think about the legislation you're going to get the morning after a real crash. I mean Congress does two things well: nothing and over-react. Think about what we would rush to the president, what blanket authority we would give the Treasury secretary if we weren't standing on the precipice but had fallen over the cliff.

Do you think leadership might change as a result of this?

You have to plug this into the overall environment where members weigh a number of considerations about who there leaders ought to be, how you do on Election Day, whether they figure their leaders stood up for them throughout their term. So I would not say leadership will change because of this vote, but there's not a doubt in my mind that among a lot of our members this will be an important consideration.

On offshore oil drilling, I know the Republicans were unhappy with the compromise. How close to the beaches do you want to go?

I'm glad you brought that up. In 2006, Mel Martinez and I and Bobby Jindal, who was in the House from Louisiana at the time, and Mary Landrieu and gas is $2.33, we said the other 49 states are coming to Florida. You cannot hold off the political pressure to do something in Florida.

So we put together a political compromise that opens 8.5 million acres, establishes a 125-mile delta around the state minimum - it's actually 235 off Naples and 180 off Tampa or St. Pete. So we get shellacked for selling out Florida.

Fast forward two years later, that's the golden deal that everyone needs to stick to. This is what Congress promised Florida, This is the protection we need. It must be allowed to stand. We want this bill to exclude Florida and abide by the 2006 agreement. We must have cut a pretty good deal.

But it was your party, the Republican Party, saying that this was not a good deal.

There are people in my party and there are people in the Democratic Party who would drill next to your child's sand castle if they could. There are people who would drill on the beach if they could. And technically, based on everybody's best estimates, there is a lot of near-shore resource. My guiding principles were and are: Anything inside 100 miles is near-shore exploration. And anything near shore ought to be up to the state that you're dealing with. Floridians need to make a decision about that, not some majority leader from Texas or speaker from California or Energy and Commerce chairman from Oklahoma or any other. Floridians need to make decisions about their near-shore waters and the federal government needs to make decisions about anything outside 100 miles. That was No. 1. No 2, any state that participates needs to share the revenues.

Are people talking about Iraq on the campaign trail?

No. Here's proof things are better in Iraq. Code Pink, the organization born out of the protests against the Iraq war, they were all over the Capitol protesting helping Wall Street. Even Code Pink's moved on.

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