Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (56 page)

Not a triumph for American diplomacy.

I
N
THE
SPRING
OF
2010
,
I
was summoned to a meeting with the
S
peaker of the
H
ouse.

I genuinely admire Nancy Pelosi. Watching her shepherd the politically fraught health care bill through her chamber was an awesome thing to behold. She loved to get things done, and was as deft and fearless at navigating the crosscurrents of Washington as anyone I met there.

Yet Pelosi didn’t need my pat on the back, and wasn’t calling me over to offer hers. She was worried about the upcoming midterm elections, and was unhappy about the president’s rhetoric.

I had continued to frame the president’s speeches in the language of change, taking aim at excessive partisanship and special interest power that everyone in America except those in Washington recognized as obstacles to progress. The rhetoric, it seemed, didn’t sit well with our allies on Capitol Hill.

“We can’t run against Washington,” she insisted. “We
are
Washington!” I was relieved that no one was videotaping our meeting. It would have made one hell of a Republican ad.

Pelosi wanted us to put the focus squarely on the Republicans, not the entire town. Yet I was reluctant to turn the president, who had run promising to end gridlock, into the point man in the partisan wars. When Pelosi took her case to Obama, however, he was more sympathetic. He appreciated that his string of legislative successes had been achieved only with the help of Pelosi, Reid, and congressional Democrats.

“I think Nancy’s right,” he said, dialing back some of my less measured language. “Democrats are not the reason things are all gummed up here. We shouldn’t give people the impression that the two parties are equally culpable.”

And that was only one dilemma. Overclaiming success was the other.

We had made historic achievements up to that point, playing by Washington’s rules and pushing our partisan advantage in the Congress. There was undeniable progress on a variety of fronts.

The health care battle was finally behind us. The war in Iraq was winding down, or so it seemed, and a decision had been made about the path forward in Afghanistan that would lead to an end to that conflict, too. Also, by April 2010, it looked as if the economic recovery was fully engaged. The job numbers were steadily moving up, the unemployment rate inching down.

Still, I was focused on the political realm, where the numbers and news weren’t nearly as good. The damage from the recession was so vast that it would take years to recover the more than eight million jobs lost. Benenson’s polling and Binder’s focus groups revealed a nation in which anxiety still ran high and a siege mentality had taken hold, as most Americans were still struggling to keep their heads above water.

Moreover, Obama had been elected promising something more ambitious, a wholesale change in our political culture—and by this measure, he was failing. The country was no less divided. The debate seemed no less riveted in ideology. And the perverse effect of our aggressive challenge to so many institutions was that the lobbyists, hired to protect the special interests, had never fared better. Eager to move his agenda, but denied cooperation from the other party, we had accommodated and abetted the status quo.

Soon enough, a growing debt crisis in Europe caused a pullback in the nascent economic recovery. The jobs picture returned to a dispiriting cycle reminiscent of the administration’s early months: minus 125,000 in June and minus another 131,000 in July. As the election season approached, any hint of recovery seemed a distant memory, and any effort to blame this backsliding on Europe was clearly futile. You might as well have been talking Greek to exasperated American voters.

Then, in late April, Carol Browner, the president’s chief adviser on energy and environmental issues, brought another headache to Rahm’s morning meeting.

“There’s oil gushing out of the broken well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico,” she said, explaining that a deep-sea oil rig owned by BP had exploded. “This could be a real mess.”

Carol’s report was brief, to the point, and duly noted. Government agencies were activated, but even as we listened, none of us could have imagined just how much damage that calamity would do the Gulf Coast and to the administration.

I learned quickly that, for all the sophisticated technology required to haul oil up from beneath the seafloor miles below the surface, it turns out no one had a clue how to stop an underwater gusher that would foul the Gulf waters, wildlife, and livelihoods of people in four states. An underwater camera, positioned near the leak, became an inky testimony to futility, playing around the clock on cable TV.

It is a fact of modern political life that when such disasters strike, even those Americans who say they believe in smaller government, or no government at all, quickly break glass and call the government, demanding relief. The media fans their expectations and turns such events into tests of leadership. The fact that there was no easy or immediate remedy to stop the gusher notwithstanding, folks wanted action. So as the oil continued to flow, the president increasingly bore the blame. Opponents began calling the leak “Obama’s Katrina,” and even our friends piled on. “Man, you got to get down here and take control of this!” said James Carville, the Democratic political consultant, and New Orleans resident, who unleashed on us during a national TV interview about a month after the initial explosion. “Put somebody in charge of this thing and get this moving! We’re about to die down here!”

With each passing day, the gusher dominated the news and the attention of a White House grappling with a looming midterm election that seemed increasingly daunting for Democrats.

“I have to tell you that for the first time I feel really let down, and it breaks my heart,” the president told me in late May, after weathering an hour-long press conference on the leak. “I should not have had to stand up there explaining for an hour because we let this story get away from us. It shouldn’t have happened.”

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, was disconsolate after the president questioned us about a barrage of bad press.

“I don’t want to be defensive,” Dan said, slumped in a chair in his small office near the main entrance to the White House, looking like a man tempted to sprint through those doors and never return. “But it’s tough to persuade people you’re doing well when there is oil pouring out of a hole, and it’s hard to persuade people you’re doing great on the economy when unemployment is at nine-point-nine percent!”

For the president, there was no escaping the story, even at a seemingly benign White House event for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

“There was a little kid with glasses, sitting in a wheelchair,” Obama told a few of us in the Oval. “So I lean over to talk to him and he says, ‘When are you going to get that hole filled?’ And I’m thinking, Come on, kid. Give me a break! Then he says, ‘You know if you don’t fix that soon, you’re going to have a lot of political problems.’ I mean, he was like nine years old! Can you believe that?”

He could only laugh about the kid, but the advice was no joke—and by June, Obama, who was leading oil spill meetings that resembled a war cabinet, was blunt about the toll the ongoing siege and stalled recovery were taking. “We have to get back to where we were a month ago,” he said. “We are back to where we were a year ago. There is a feeling of chaos in the world.”

The president summoned Rahm and me to the small, private dining room next to his office to vent about the oil spill problem.

“So how do we get out of this mess?” he asked us, as he ate an impeccably healthy lunch. “We have to cauterize this thing because it’s paralyzing. It’s corrosive to the morale of this White House. It’s corrosive to
me
!”

Rahm laid out a cohesive plan, already under way, to recover damages from BP, repair the coast, and reform oversight of deep-sea drilling.

In subsequent weeks, the president would summon BP executives to the White House for a tongue-lashing over their apparent negligence, compelling the oil giant to pony up twenty billion dollars for reparations to the coast and the fishermen and hotel and restaurants owners whose businesses were damaged by the disaster.

Still, the paramount challenge remained the one a nine-year-old boy could identify, and it was still the hardest to solve.

One day, at the height of our distress, I sought a few moments’ escape at Ike’s, a little deli in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. As I was walking in, I noticed Steven Chu, the secretary of energy, sitting alone at a table in the corridor, doodling on a napkin.

“Steve, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“I think I’ve figured out how to shut down this well,” he said, lifting up his napkin to share his work. Chu, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, then launched into an impenetrable monologue on how to detect the well pressure and all the implications of that. I stopped him in midflow.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, holding up my palm. “I barely made it through high school physics. But have you shared this with anyone who can do something with it?”

Chu wound up leading an all-star team of scientists that augmented the BP team and, ultimately, played a huge role in capping the leak. Still, the intervening months had been a symbol of government futility that, when added to the economic reverses during the summer, robbed us of the forward momentum we had hoped for with the job growth in the spring.

Just as we were close to plugging the leak, I got a message from a media star who wanted to talk about oil.

“Listen,” Donald Trump said when I called him back. “That admiral you have down there running this leak operation seems like a nice guy, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I know how to run big projects. Put me in charge of this thing, and I’ll get that leak shut down and the damage repaired.”

I thanked the Donald and assured him of our optimism that a solution was close at hand. Either way, I promised to check back with him within a few weeks. By the time I did, the leak had finally been plugged.

“Yeah, yeah, it looks like you have that one under control,” Trump acknowledged, quickly moving on. “But I’ve got another thing for you. I build ballrooms. Beautiful ballrooms. You can go to Tampa and check one of them out for yourself.” Not being much of a dancer, I didn’t quite know where this was heading. “I see you have these state dinners on the lawn there in these shitty little tents. Let me build you a ballroom you can assemble and take apart. Trust me. It’ll look great.”

 • • • 

In the midst of all this dismaying news, another unwelcome and unexpected problem unfolded in June, in the pages of
Rolling Stone
. For some inexplicable reason, General McChrystal and his team had granted extraordinary access to an edgy reporter named Michael Hastings, during a trip to Paris, where they had gone to brief NATO leaders on developments in Afghanistan. Hastings, who had spent time with them there and in Afghanistan, was perfectly positioned to pick up on all the towel-snapping fun of McChrystal’s team, including derisive comments made about Vice President Biden, or “Bite-me,” as one of the general’s aides called him; and about Jim Jones, the president’s national security adviser, whom another aide labeled “a clown.” While the president was spared such harsh descriptors, another McChrystal aide revealed his disappointment upon meeting the president in the spring of 2009. The headline on the
Rolling Stone
piece, “The Runaway General,” wasn’t chosen idly. Though the general himself was shown as more circumspect, he was present for much of the inappropriate banter, and he made a number of embarrassing remarks.

Obama liked and admired McChrystal, and he feared that a change in command at a time when the war effort was at a critical juncture would be a setback. Yet he felt that many of the derisive comments reported in the piece represented a challenge to civilian authority and could not be allowed to stand. Despite Gates’s recommendation that McChrystal be allowed to hang on, Obama accepted the general’s resignation, replacing him with David Petraeus.

“This is not a good thing,” he told us, after meeting with McChrystal for twenty minutes in the Oval Office. “It is not a good thing. It was the right thing to do. But I don’t want anybody exploiting this or making it seem as if we’re triumphant about it. If I find anyone doing that, I will land on them like a ton of bricks.”

We had a few big wins before Congress left town. The president signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and the Senate confirmed Obama’s second Supreme Court pick, Elena Kagan, the former Harvard Law School dean who had been our solicitor general. In Kagan, Obama saw a leader who could match wits with Chief Justice Roberts. “Roberts thinks strategically about these decisions,” he said. “Elena will, too. I think she can be a real leader on the Court.”

These substantive gains did little, though, to lift the pall hanging over the White House, and the relentless pressures were beginning to tear at our team. We appeared wounded and inept, and nothing titillated Washington more than the sense of blood in the water, particularly when the blood belonged to the smart-asses who had defied the Washington establishment to get there.

As the message strategist and frequent voice of the administration, I felt particularly vulnerable, a condition exacerbated by the fact that I was physically exhausted and mentally drained. Some days, I was so beat I felt as if I were having an out-of-body experience. I would speak during a meeting or interview and my voice sounded as if it were coming from some other person. All I could do was listen carefully as I spoke, hoping my words made sense or, at the very least, sentences.

In trying to meet the president and Pelosi’s mandate, I had written a strategy memo in the spring and refined it for summer, urging the president and Democrats to posit the fall elections as a choice between moving forward or returning to the failed policies of the past. Still, the plain fact is that it is hard to turn a midterm election into anything other than a referendum on the party in power. Anticipating a huge drop-off in voter turnout, most of it among young and minority voters who had come out in droves for us in 2008, the prospects for the fall were dismal.