Double Down: Game Change 2012 (11 page)

These people have been through a rough time, Clinton said. They’re going to be looking to blame someone, so you gotta make sure they know you’re on the right side on taxes and all that.

Clinton had been watching the Republican debates and was impressed with Romney’s skills, but he saw soft spots in his performances. He’s good on the first question, bad on the second, Clinton said. You’re gonna want to make sure in your debate negotiations to get follow-ups and lots of back-and-forth.

Clinton also offered a blunt warning: “Do not underestimate how much money he’s gonna raise.” Every bank, every hedge fund in this town will finance his campaign—they hate you guys. But working stiffs would wind up feeling the same way about Romney. “In the end,” Clinton said, “they’re going to figure out who he is.”

Flattery goes a long way in life, and even further with Clinton. And, to a large extent, flattery was what the Harlem sojourn was about. After ninety minutes, Clinton was cheerfully sated—yet unable to resist a parting shot. One thing you fellas should keep in mind, he said, is that running as an incumbent won’t be like it was for you last time. Incumbents don’t have the media in their hip pocket. This time you’ll get to see what a real election is like.

The Obamans bit their lips and held their tongues. Beyond general-purpose ingratiation, they had a specific request to make: that Clinton appear in a long-form video being crafted for the campaign by the Academy Award–winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim. Band had told them repeatedly that Clinton would not agree. He doesn’t do videos anymore, Band said. “Don’t ask.”

The Obamans thanked Clinton profusely for giving them so much time. We’re happy to do another briefing whenever you like, they said. Finally, as they packed up their things and headed for the door, Axelrod and Messina, disregarding Band’s admonitions, popped the question.

There’s one more thing, Mr. President. We’re really trying to get this video done. We know you’re busy, incredibly busy, but we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a little bit of time and we could get some footage of you.

“Absolutely,” Clinton said. “Love to.”

The Obamans would soon come to understand that an easy yes from Clinton always had strings attached. But for now they were triumphant. From LaGuardia, they headed back to Washington for another strategy meeting with Obama the next day. None expected the fury that would face them in the morning.

•   •   •

O
ABMA EXHALED HEAVILY WHEN
he learned the news. He was stunned, then angry, then disappointed, then hurt. “I can’t believe this,” Obama said. “This is exactly what I said couldn’t happen.”

Obama was in the Oval Office early that Thursday, November 10—and being told that his list had leaked. The details came from Plouffe and Messina, who had learned that two authors writing a book on the 2012 campaign knew all about the extraordinary session six weeks earlier; they had the whole roster of Obama’s regrets in copious detail.

“How could someone do this to me?” Obama asked. “If I can’t be honest with you people, how can we keep having these meetings?”

“Well, that’s the issue,” Plouffe replied, reminding Obama of the warning he’d been given at the outset. “I think we obviously can’t.”

The immediate problem was that the next session was scheduled to start in a few minutes, at 10:00 a.m. The group was assembling in the Roosevelt Room, while Obama was doing a slow burn across the hall. Maybe they should just cancel the thing, shut it down? No, Obama said. I want to go in there and say my piece.

He walked into the room looking stern, asked Messina to explain to every one what had occurred—and then laid into his team.

When we started having these meetings, Obama said, I told you that I trusted everyone in this room. But now somebody has betrayed that trust. The fact is, I can’t trust anybody here anymore. I was cautioned about there being too many people in the meetings. But I thought we were all in the
trenches together and that all of you should be included on every part of this journey. I’ve found these meetings helpful and productive, because everybody here has been able to speak openly. But I no longer feel I can do that. So unless and until the person who did this comes to me, tells me they did this, and apologizes, these meetings are over. I’m gonna be in the Oval Office. When somebody is ready to come forward and own up to this, you know where to find me.

With that, Obama stood up and walked out the door, leaving a crashing silence behind him.

Everyone in the room had seen the president upset before. The Mr. Cool caricature was largely accurate, but Obama had a temper. No one had experienced anything like this, though—the combination of bone-chilling iciness and simmering fury, the sense that he felt wounded, even violated, by his own people. For what seemed an eternity, they stared at their shoes. And then the voice of Biden broke the hush.

That guy is the most amazing guy, the VP said, with evident emotion. It’s been a privilege for me to serve under him. I would throw myself in front of a bus for him if he asked me to do it. This guy sticks up for everybody in this room. You make mistakes, he sticks up for you. He doesn’t always tell you to your face, but when he’s out talking to other people, he’s incredibly proud of you. He’s always got our back. And we have to have his back. To violate his trust this way is a serious, serious blow. It’s unconscionable—just unconscionable.

Obama had spoken for maybe four minutes. Biden’s soliloquy lasted twice that long. When he ran out of steam, he pushed back from the table and stomped out of the room, too.

For the next two hours, the remaining Obamans sat there shell-shocked, sorting through the rubble of the POTUS-VPOTUS double walkout. A discussion ensued about what had now become an even more pressing topic than before: how to subdue the plague of books and authors. Gibbs, himself mired in controversy over the story about him in the upcoming Kantor tome, let fly with a red-faced tirade in which the operative word was “fucking.” (“This is fucking unprecedented” . . . “It’s fucking bullshit” . . . “He fucking doesn’t deserve this” . . . “We can’t fucking win this election if we can’t fucking trust each other, and we’re letting him fucking down.”) Others
angrily insisted that the question of books was a side issue. Someone stuck a knife in the president’s back; he wanted the perpetrator to come forward. And we’re talking about these process questions? Say what?

Obama, meanwhile, returned to the Oval to wait for a confessor to arrive—a wait that would turn out to be interminable. Surely Plouffe was right that the strategy meetings would need to be shrunken down, but that was merely falling action. Obama had just come through the worst political stretch he had ever suffered. Now he was hurtling into the campaign, the greatest challenge of his life. He needed help, he needed focus, he needed the team to right the ship, set their course, and sail into 2012. Instead he felt like he was splashing around in a sea of drama, with no land in sight.

Obama had no time to brood; his schedule was always packed. From the tsuris of the Roosevelt Room, he would move on to a White House tour for “wounded warriors,” then to lunch with his cabinet secretaries—and then to an indignity so fitting and ironic it made his head spin. At 2:55 p.m. he had a meeting in the Oval Office. The meeting was with David Maraniss. For a fucking book interview.

4

THE UNCLE JOE PROBLEM

D
ALEY DIDN’T FOLLOW BIDEN
out the door that day, but in spirit he was right there with him. The chief of staff and the vice president were a pair of plump green peas in a pod: both Irish Catholic sexagenarians with old-school tastes, old-school tendencies, and old-school values. In the hypermodern Obama White House, they often seemed the odd men out—which in the late fall of 2011 was creating yet another set of headaches for Obama.

Biden and Daley talked all the time about their alienation from their colleagues. They didn’t use the term “alienation,” though—that was a ten-cent word. The COS’s office was across the hall from the VP’s, and Daley would often go in there and close the door and the two of them would let loose. Plouffe they considered as sharp as a scalpel but just as sterile, a guy incapable of glad-hand bullshitting, which was Joe and Bill’s avocation. They cackled about the fact that Emanuel referred to Jarrett and Rouse as Uday and Qusay, after Saddam Hussein’s power-mad sons, and over the nickname others had bestowed on Jarrett: the Night Stalker, for the way she would visit the Obamas in the residence after hours and eviscerate her rivals. They admired the president, but marveled at his lack of bonhomie. (“He doesn’t even know how to swear right,” Biden complained.) They were
like the gray-haired hecklers in the balcony on
The Muppet Show,
the Statler and Waldorf of the White House.

What set Biden and Daley apart was about more than personalities, however. It was also about their approach to politics, which centered around the New Deal coalition and its attendant geography: blue-collar voters, Catholics, ethnic whites, and senior citizens in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Obamans cared about those people and places but were more intently focused on the coalition that had elected their man: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites (especially single women), and young voters in new swing states such as Colorado and Virginia. The tension between these views bubbled beneath the surface throughout Obama’s term, with implications for the reelect. And in November, the conflict reached a boil over a potentially scalding issue: contraception.

The source of the controversy, as with so many others, was the Affordable Care Act. Under the law, insurers were compelled to offer “preventive health services” to women for free, but Congress had left it to the Department of Health and Human Services to determine which benefits to include. In August 2011, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius—with the backing of Jarrett, Michelle’s chief of staff, and several other female White House aides—issued interim rules saying that contraceptives would be covered. While the agency provided an exemption for “religious employers,” it was so narrow that it largely left out Catholic hospitals, universities, and other church-affiliated institutions.

Dozens of Catholic groups cried foul. Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, who had invited Obama to give the commencement address at the school in 2009 over the objections of many Catholic bishops, wrote the president a letter contending that the rule would violate religious freedom. As the initial uproar made its way into the press, some of the administration’s prominent Catholics began to fret. “Now we’re fighting the Catholics?” defense secretary Leon Panetta complained to Daley by phone. “What’s going on here?”

Biden and Daley objected to the policy, thinking the religious exemption should be broadened. And they worried about the political fallout from getting crosswise with Catholic voters and the church hierarchy, already up
in arms over the administration’s decision to no longer support the Defense of Marriage Act—which Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York declared could “precipitate a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions and to the detriment of both institutions.”

Dolan was a towering figure in the church, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a cagey political operator. Biden knew him well. In early November, with Dolan planning to be in town ahead of the conference’s annual plenary, the VP slipped the archbishop’s name onto Obama’s schedule—without alerting the White House staff.

Obama walked into the meeting with little preparation, believing it would be about a range of issues—then found himself cornered on contraception. He hadn’t analyzed the arguments surrounding the exemption in detail, let alone reached a conclusion. On top of that, he was sympathetic to the church’s position. Now on the spot, feeling ambushed, Obama edged out over the tips of his skis, telling Dolan he would seek a solution agreeable to both sides.

That was all the pink-cheeked prelate needed to box Obama in. On November 14, Dolan told reporters at the plenary about the meeting, describing it as “extraordinarily friendly” and adding that Obama had been “very sensitive” to church concerns over the contraceptive mandate. “He was very ardent in his desire to assure me that this is something he will look long and hard at. And I left there feeling a bit more at peace about this issue than when I entered.”