Divider-in-Chief (3 page)

Obama's remarkable transformation from uniter to divider has not gone unnoticed. As Florida Senator Marco Rubio told a group of South Carolina Republicans about Obama in May 2012:

In May 2012, former Democratic representative Artur Davis, a former Obama ally and early endorser of his presidential run, switched political parties. “If I were to run again, it would be as a Republican,” he wrote in an online post. Echoing Rubio, he said, “Frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country.... I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by
bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured.”
²³

A flashpoint for Obama's divisiveness was the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, Obama's signature legislative initiative. As Kantor reveals in
The Obamas
, the president didn't care that his proposal was unpopular. “Rahm Emanuel saw a disaster in the making. He spent the final week of July mounting what another aide called a ‘nonstop campaign' to convince the president to scale back his efforts on health care,” she writes.
²⁴
But to no avail. “The president plunged ahead anyway.”

In other words, forget the American people. Let's do whatever is necessary to fundamentally transform America's economy in a statist direction. Obama's ideology trumped the rhetoric of unity.

B
esides the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama's most consequential election occurred not in 2004 (when he won his U.S. Senate seat) or in 1996 (when he won his Illinois State Senate seat), but in 1989, when he was elected president of the
Harvard Law Review.
That election gave Obama his first taste of national prominence and helped him secure a contract to write his first autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
.

What's most interesting about Obama's
Harvard Law Review
election is that Obama was seen as the compromise candidate. The
Law Review
staff was split between conservatives and liberals, and Obama won because, as one former staff member put it to David Remnick in
The Bridge
, “There was a general sense that he didn't think [conservatives] were evil people, only misguided people, and he would credit us for good faith and intelligence.”
¹

Christine Spurell, an outspoken liberal Harvard Law student, complained to Obama about not getting the position she wanted on his staff. She told Remnick that Obama explained to her it was because she was “‘too
confrontational, too abrasive—qualities that he could not bear,' she said.”
²
Spurell continued: “I had no patience for the idiots on the other side and Barack did, which annoyed me, even angered me sometimes, but it made him the better person, certainly a better one to be president of the
Law Review
.”
³

Running for president, Obama sounded much like the compromise candidate of two decades earlier. He promised he would put an end to the type of politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism” and would help us “rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that's come to characterize our politics.”
⁴

He pledged to work with the other side. In March 2008, he said, “I'm a big believer in working with the other side of the aisle. Even if we've got a majority of Democrats, I think it's very important to listen to Republicans, to respect them.... I want to have a weekly meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders to talk about the economy, to talk about foreign policy, so that we're actually trying to solve problems away from the TV cameras, not trying to score political points.”

On election night, he told Republicans, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”
⁵

In the initial days of his presidency, Obama took the unusual step of traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with the Republican House caucus to hear their ideas and concerns for the economy. Vice President Joe Biden was deployed to do the same in the Senate.

But when that little bit of outreach didn't yield immediate results, Obama gave up. As Jonathan Alter relates in
The Promise
: “For Obama this was the greatest surprise of 2009. ‘[It wasn't that] I thought that my political outreach and charm would immediately end partisan politics,' the president said. ‘I just thought that there would be enough of a sense of urgency that at least for the first year there would be an interest in governing. And you just didn't see that.'”
⁶

Since then, Obama has done very little aisle-crossing, and has been remarkably willing to blame others for his failures and to threaten those who don't agree with him or do his will.

In February 2009, Obama warned the country's mayors that he would “call them out” and use the “full power” of the presidency to expose and crack down on them if they misused the economic stimulus dollars.
⁷

Later that year, he began telling congressional Republicans to get out of his way as he tried to fix the economy. “I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” he told a crowd at a campaign event for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds.
⁸
“I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking.”
⁹
So much for “listening to you especially when we disagree.”

He called Republicans “hostage-takers” for demanding certain tax cuts in a tax cut compromise in 2010. “It's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers unless the hostage gets harmed,” Obama said at a press conference. “In this case, the hostage was the American people.”
¹⁰

During the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011, as Democrats and Republicans debated whether and how much to raise the limit on the amount of debt the federal government could take on, Obama condescended to Republicans. He told them it was time to “pull off the band aid. Eat our peas.”
¹¹

Then he took them to task for taking a recess with the debt ceiling deadline looming, comparing them to children. “Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time,” he said. “Malia is 13, Sasha is 10. . . . They don't wait until the night before.... Congress can do the same thing.”
¹²

When Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin unveiled his budget in 2011, Obama criticized it and demonized those who supported it. “Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America,” he said.
¹³
He alleged that the budget pits “children with autism or Down syndrome” against “every millionaire and billionaire in our society.”
¹⁴

In 2012 Obama compared Republican presidential candidates who pushed for the production of more domestic oil to “founding members of the Flat Earth Society.”
¹⁵

He has characterized the Republican philosophy as “We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”
¹⁶
The Republican vision, according to Obama, is to leave elderly Americans unable to afford nursing home care, and to leave poor children and children with disabilities to “fend for themselves.” The GOP favors “dirtier” air and water. And Republicans in Congress consistently “put party before country.”
¹⁷

Obama and his Democratic allies suffered two major electoral defeats during Obama's first term. And after each, instead of taking a new path toward the promised conciliation and compromise, Obama doubled down on his divisive agenda and was impervious to advice or criticism.

In January 2010, Republican State Senator Scott Brown defeated Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley to win the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy. Obama dismissed what was indisputably a historic defeat, blaming it on his predecessor, George W. Bush. “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” he explained. “People are angry, and they're frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years.”
¹⁸

After describing the Democrats' historic losses in the 2010 mid-term elections as a “shellacking,” Obama said, “I am very eager to sit down with members of both parties.... No party has a monopoly on wisdom.”
¹⁹
But, once again, the conciliation didn't last long.

Obama met with various Washington, D.C., veterans and insiders, according to David Corn, author of
Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party
. Vernon Jordan, the preeminent Washington fixer, told Obama he had been overly partisan. And, as Corn wrote:

Obama hosted a lunch with congressional Democrats who had lost their seats in 2010. This group, too, was struck by Obama's lack of regret. “In retrospect we can look back and say we could have done things differently, but I had a very ambitious agenda,” Representative Jim Oberstar recalled Obama saying.
²¹
“‘In the end this is for the greater good of the country.' He seemed entirely sure he knew what was best for the country; he seemed to think that he was a better judge than the public.”
²²

The feeling among some in Congress was that Obama regarded them with contempt, because Obama views himself as being superior to other politicians, and he feels they should bend to his will. Obama found solidarity with his wife in his low regard for Congress. As Jodi Kantor explains in
The Obamas
, “It was one of the areas where the Obamas seemed to reinforce and stoke each other: the president's opinion of Capitol Hill legislators was low, and his wife's was lower.”
²³

In his bestselling book
The Amateur
, Ed Klein was told by a former State Department official, “I've been in a lot of meetings with [Obama] on
foreign policy. While I was in the room, he'd get phone calls from heads of state, and more than once I heard him say, ‘I can't believe I've got to meet with all these congressmen from Podunk city to get my bills passed.'”
²⁴

Obama has blamed George W. Bush for seemingly every setback of his administration—so much so that it's become a sort of national joke. In fact, even three and a half years into his administration, and into his run for re-election, Obama continues to make “It's Bush's fault” his go-to explanation not only for the financial crisis and the 2007–2009 recession, but also for the subsequent years of stagnation.

Anytime he talks about the economy, Obama is either “cleaning up the mess” left by Bush or rescuing America from a “financial disaster” that he “inherited” from Bush. Even after taking ownership of the unemployment crisis by ramming the stimulus through, promising that unemployment would not rise above 8 percent, he continued to blame Bush as unemployment rose beyond his self-imposed marker.

While it was reasonable for Obama to tie financial conditions to Bush in the initial stages of his presidency, at some point, say after two years, much of the Bush blaming became implausible, then downright laughable.