Double Down: Game Change 2012 (10 page)

Around the room, everyone was transfixed by the pile of pages Obama had placed on the table in front of him. Most of his advisers had expected
him to bring a list—but an index card, not
War and Peace.
They were even more surprised by what the president was saying now: that as much as he had been faithful to his beliefs, there were places where his efforts had been insufficient. Where he’d trimmed his sails or been inhibited by the exigencies of the politics of the moment. Where he’d been less than honest about where he stood.

For the next half hour, Obama, speaking evenly, made his way through the items on his list—as his advisers sat mute and motionless, their smartphones for once idle.

Obama talked about energy and climate change. He understood why cap-and-trade had failed, why they hadn’t sought to further elevate the debate. But the issue remained vital, and they would need to return to it. “We’re never gonna outdrill the other guys,” Obama said. “We gotta take some risks on this issue.”

He talked about immigration reform. We made a calculated decision not to push hard for it, Obama said, because although it’s popular with Hispanics, it’s less popular with the rest of the country, especially in an economic downturn. But he had been pounded for being pusillanimous by his Latino allies, and they weren’t wrong, he said. It was a moral matter as well as an economic one, and the campaign would give him another chance to push on it. “This election could be the thing that picks the lock,” Obama said.

He talked about poverty among African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and poor whites in places like Appalachia. We need to do more, we need to reaffirm that we haven’t abandoned that concern as a country, Obama said.

He talked about Israel and Palestine. We all know that Bibi Netanyahu is a pain in the ass, Obama said. But the president blamed himself for accepting the distorted political prism through which every effort to achieve a settlement in the region was mediated.

He talked about Guantánamo Bay. Obama’s vow to close the prison there had been one of his most deeply felt promises from 2008. Yes, he had tried. Yes, Congress had thwarted him. But he hadn’t pushed hard enough, he said, and he wanted to take up the cause again. “No one is gonna persuade me that we should run a penal colony in perpetuity in America,” Obama said.

And he talked about gay marriage. Obama’s public posture on the issue had been all over the map. In 1996, in a questionnaire supplied by a gay newspaper in Chicago, he said that he favored marriage rights for same-sex couples. Two years later, he answered “undecided” on the publication’s questionnaire, and by 2008 he was officially against it. In the White House, he remained opposed but said that his position was “evolving”—even as he fought for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and deemed the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, ordering his attorney general to stop defending it in court.

But now Obama uncloseted his unvarnished convictions. Look, he said, everybody here probably knows that I’ve long since evolved on this issue. I haven’t been comfortable for some time with where I am publicly. I don’t want to keep ducking it. Gay marriage is now legal in New York, and a bunch of other states are heading in the same direction. Things are moving fast. It’s only a matter of time before someone is going to ask me the question the right way: If you were still a state senator in Springfield and this came up, how would you vote? And if I get the question that way, I’m going to answer it honestly: I would vote in favor.

Among the advisers around the table, most believed that Obama had been for gay marriage all along. Gibbs had heard him say so as far back as 2004. In debate prep in 2008, Obama had seemed uncomfortable with his public opposition. Two years later, after seeing a screening of the movie
The Kids Are All Right,
he remarked to a handful of aides, You know, at some point, we’re gonna have to give up the ghost on this. And indeed, he had been talking for months in 2011 with a group of confidants—Axelrod, Daley, Jarrett, Plouffe—about the question of when and how he would switch his stance. But this was the first time he had been candid with a wider group.

Taken in sum, Obama’s list was a revealing document. Throughout his time in public life, and most markedly in his presidency, there had always been a tension in Obama’s governing philosophy between its moderate, reformist threads and its more traditionally liberal strands. The best working definition of Obamaism was “pragmatic progressivism,” with all the inherent strain that suggested. With his list, Obama was saying he believed that over the past three years his progressive impulses had too often been
trumped by the demands of pragmatism. That he had trimmed his sails in just the way his critics on the left had charged. That Obama the president hadn’t always lived up to the Obama brand of politics.

To those in the Roosevelt Room, there were few things on the list that were surprising. These were his people. They knew him well. And yet most were amazed by what they were witnessing: a sitting president reviewing the regrets of his time in office, at times reflectively, at times defensively, at times self-reproachfully. Regret wasn’t the only element, however. There was also resolve—Obama talking about his unfinished business, laying out in a rudimentary way what his second-term agenda might look like.

Obama was not a man given to self-critique. Or acts of public intimacy. Or displays of vulnerability. Some around the table regarded his reading of the list as brave or moving, others as simply tough-minded. Still others mused about the fate of those yellow pages.
They’ll end up in his presidential records,
thought Dunn.

But Daley had a different thought.

Holy shit, we have a bunch of leakers here. I hope to God this doesn’t get out.

•   •   •

T
HE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICES OF
Bill Clinton occupied the top floor of a fourteen-story brick-and-glass building on West 125th Street in Harlem, two blocks from the Apollo Theater. On November 9, six weeks after hearing Obama’s list, a four-man traveling party—Axelrod, Benenson, Gaspard, and Messina—set off to that destination on a goodwill mission: to draw the former president further into the orbit of the current one and, in particular, to enlist his assistance in getting Obama reelected.

The last time an Obamaworld contingent had made the pilgrimage to Harlem was in September of 2008, under sharply different circumstances. Obama himself was there for the first tête-à-tête between him and Clinton since the sour Democratic nomination fight. Eager to avoid any awkwardness, Obama kept the conversation focused on governance rather than politics. But as they were wrapping up, Clinton dutifully offered to hit the trail with the nominee. Obama assented, although his people were ambivalent about the prospect. They didn’t believe that Clinton would move many
votes, and were interested in having the two men appear together only to quiet media speculation about the relationship. The joint rally finally took place six days before the election, and was flat and lifeless. The Obamans didn’t care. As one of them put it afterwards, “We were all just so far past the Clintons.”

But, of course, they weren’t—not when Obama was already thinking of making Hillary his secretary of state. From the moment they’d met, in 2004, he liked her, respected her, admired her. And for all of the rancor of 2008, he emerged wanting her on his team.

He was less enamored of her husband. Obama had long thought Bill Clinton’s style of politics was cynical, self-serving, ignoble. Clinton’s behavior during the nomination tussle only darkened that view: the railing against Obama’s Iraq War record as a “fairy tale”; the rope-line explosion in South Carolina; the comparison of Obama’s victory there to Jesse Jackson’s in 1988. In Obama’s 2006 book,
The Audacity of Hope,
he had postulated that the partisan wars of the nineties were an outgrowth of baby boomer “psychodrama.” Watching WJC in 2008, BHO thought,
QED.

His appointment of Hillary sparked a hint of détente. At first, she hadn’t wanted the job, she required persuasion, and both Obama and her husband pressured her hard. That Obama not only made the overture but pursued her so aggressively meant a lot to Bill. Once his wife was ensconced in Foggy Bottom, he returned his attention to his philanthropic labors. He spent scant time licking his wounds. Instead Clinton did what he always did: got back to work.

Which isn’t to say Clinton was shy about critiquing Obama’s performance in office. On policy, there was little daylight between them. Clinton was for the stimulus and Dodd-Frank, and was mightily impressed by Obama’s ability to get a health initiative passed, as he himself had been unable to do. At the same time, he was baffled by Obama’s failures at the basic blocking and tackling of politics, his insularity, his alienation of business. Obama got all the hard stuff right, Clinton believed, but didn’t do the easy stuff at all.

Clinton had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the calls that Clinton kept expecting from his successor rarely came. The cold shoulder had little to do with
Obama not liking Clinton; 44 rarely called anyone for advice, so why would it be different with 42? Obama didn’t think he
needed
Clinton.

But then came the midterm shellacking—and Clinton’s phone began to ring. On December 10, 2010, in the midst of the lame duck, Obama invited him to meet in the Oval Office. The current president had just negotiated the compromise on the Bush tax cuts and was facing the insurrection on the left. After talking for more than an hour, their longest conversation since Obama had taken office, they decided to stage an impromptu press conference, walking out of the Oval with Obama chirping, “Let’s go have some fun!”

Their sudden and unscheduled joint appearance in the White House briefing room sent a jolt through the press corps and cable-news control-room producers everywhere. At the podium, Obama explained that he and Clinton had “just had a terrific meeting” and he thought “it might be useful” to “bring the other guy in” to “speak very briefly” about the deal while he went off to attend a Christmas party (Michelle was waiting).

“I feel awkward being here, and now you’re going to leave me all by myself,” Clinton said, smiling sheepishly—then proceeded to field questions alone for twenty-three minutes after Obama bailed.

Clinton’s intercession marked the beginning of the end of the liberal rebellion over tax cuts. But the next day there were stories and cable chatter chiding Obama for abdicating the big stage to the Big Dog.
Classic Washington,
Obama thought.
One minute they tell me to be more like Clinton, the next they trash me for embracing him
.

Obama’s people had always harbored more anti-Bill venom than their boss. But after the August inferno, they realized they could no longer let old scores stand in the way of survival. Clinton’s name was synonymous with a period of broad prosperity, his capacity to raise money was considerable, and he had special traction with the white working-class and suburban voters (and Jewish ones in Florida) that Obama found hard to reach. With the election on the horizon looking more daunting every day, it was clear that having 42 on board would be less a luxury than a necessity.

The early phases of the reconciliation were riddled with mutual ambivalence. As reticent as the Obamans were about Clinton, they were leerier of Doug Band, his longtime aide-de-camp, who had a reputation as a tenacious
(and self-serving) gatekeeper. Drawing the short straw, Gaspard was assigned to deal with Band, who had a number of ideas about how to break the presidential ice.

Clinton has noticed how frequently the president golfs, Band said, and he’s never been asked—even though Obama found time to play a round with New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. And at some point, you guys need to come up here and sit down and walk Clinton through the race. His mind’s not on politics, so you gotta get him to exercise that muscle. Once he does, he’s gonna want more.

Obama and Clinton convened on the first tee at Andrews on September 24. Two more different types of duffer would be difficult to imagine: Obama intent on playing the game, getting up and down; Clinton cracking jokes and yakking, taking mulligan after mulligan. Even though ample time had been set aside, they didn’t finish eighteen holes. When Obama came off the course, he was asked by an aide how it went.

Obama grimaced and replied, “I like him . . . in doses.”

Clinton wasn’t swept away either. A week later, at a Little Rock reunion of his campaign troops from 1992, Clinton spent much of the time buttonholing people about Obama’s deficiencies. You’ve gotta explain your accomplishments, boil them down to a card that fits in voters’ pockets, Clinton said. Obama doesn’t do it. I don’t know why. It’s not that hard!

In mid-October, Daley invited a passel of former Clinton staffers to a meeting at the White House to offer political advice. When word got around, the push-back from the Obamans was immediate. Invite some non-Clinton people, Daley was told. (
You want a bunch of Carter people? Really?
Daley thought.) Plouffe begged off. Rouse left early. Pfeiffer looked as if he would have rather been receiving a root canal. Obama poked his head in, said hello, and exited at once—though he heard later from Jarrett that the meeting had gone well. Daley told Obama, “We should do it again, you should sit in, and tell your staff to stay out.”

The Harlem meeting started off more propitiously. Aware of Clinton’s voracious appetite for data, the Obamans brought a ton of it: polling, electoral scenarios, the works. Sitting across the table from Clinton, Benenson began putting slides up on a monitor. Soon enough, 42 was on his feet, moving closer to the screen, peppering the Obamans with detailed
questions, spouting aperçus and opinions. Drilling down on low-income white voters, he argued that Obama’s deficiencies with them could be overcome—especially if their opponent was Romney, with his personal wealth and regressive economic policies. But Obama would have to work it.