The Grand Bargain is the term President Wright has given to her enormous bipartisan government reform package, the precariousness of which provides a portion of the novel’s stakes. She was driven to craft this legislation to save the country after she learns that “the latest quantum computers at MIT’s Sloan School are producing numbers that disprove our long-held assumptions about how much time we have to make tough national-finance decisions” (45). President Wright believes that without this government reform, federal debt will spiral out of control, resulting in hyperinflation of the sort that “led to Adolf Hitler” (83) in Weimar Germany. The Grand Bargain is generally referred to as an entitlement reform package, meaning that it will restructure Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to save money. The text suggests that the Grand Bargain is a fictionalized version of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which restructured and reduced welfare payments and which he passed with the support of a Republican Congress.

The final list of policy proposals given in President Wright’s speech in Chapter 139 suggests it is more of an omnibus legislation, meaning it is a compilation of new laws to change a wide variety of programs, including tax reform and student loan reform. It also proposes bringing back another Bill Clinton-era reform policy, “Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative” (454), technically the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, which resulted in the elimination of 250,000 federal jobs and the expansion of the use of private-sector contractors in the federal government.

Within The First Gentleman, the Grand Bargain largely functions as a McGuffin, or a relatively meaningless signifier of something a character wants that drives the plot. It raises the stakes of the story, as Cole Wright’s murder trial imperils the legislative action that is needed to save the United States.