Double Down: Game Change 2012 (14 page)

Back in Washington, Obama affirmed to his staff privately what he had said publicly: he would demand that Congress stay in town until the issue was resolved—through Christmas, if need be. As the holiday approached, the Senate passed a two-month extension, but the House was in disarray. On Sunday morning, December 18, Boehner appeared on
Meet the Press
and said, “Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill—it’s only for two months. How can you do tax policy for two months?”

The Obamans were over the moon at the sight of the most powerful Republican in the country announcing his opposition to a tax cut.
The
Wall Street Journal
noted the insanity of the speaker’s stance in an editorial headlined
THE
GOP’S PAYROLL TAX FIASCO
, which pummeled the party’s leaders for having “somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass.”

Boehner called Obama to try and negotiate. Obama was having none of it. Like the
Journal,
he was confident not only that Boehner would cave
now but that, after the new year, the politics of tax cutting would make it all but inevitable that the White House would ultimately get the full-year extension through.

The next day, December 23, the House gave the president his victory. A year earlier, Obama had prevailed in the lame duck by forging bipartisan compromise. Now he had won through partisan confrontation, as his new posture of playing the outside game bore its first fruit. In the White House briefing room, Obama told reporters, “This is some good news, just in the nick of time for the holidays.” Michelle and the girls were already over in Hawaii. He was eager to get there, too. Cocking a slight smile, he brought the political year to a close with a crisp “Aloha.”

•   •   •

O
BAMA GLANCED AT HIS
schedule and was puzzled by an item on it: a 2:30 p.m. meeting with Dunn, Carney, Daley, Pfeiffer, and Plouffe to talk about some book. It was Tuesday, January 3, 2012, and the president was just off the plane back from Honolulu.

“What is this book?” Obama asked Pfeiffer. “What is this meeting?”

The book was Jodi Kantor’s
The Obamas,
due to be published the following Tuesday, and the meeting was to brief Obama on the press shop’s response strategy. The White House had obtained an early copy through sub-rosa channels and combed through it looking for items that were embarrassing, controversial, newsworthy, or all three. Happily for them, there wasn’t much there—except for the “Then fuck her, too” anecdote involving Robert, Michelle, and Valerie.

It had long been a mystery in the West Wing as to whether either Obama knew about the incident. Some believed that Jarrett had tripped over herself to tell one or both of the first couple; others thought she had held her tongue. In any case, it now fell to Dunn, who had been brought in to deal with the Kantor book because of her strong relationship with Michelle, to fill in the Obamas—and see how the cookie crumbled.

Obama didn’t seem especially perturbed when Dunn told him the Gibbs story. It was no secret to him that Robert had scratchy relationships with his wife and Valerie. “I guess that’s going to be interesting to the press” was pretty much all Obama said. (Not long after, the former press secretary
arranged a meeting with the president and apologized for cursing out his wife, though not for labeling Jarrett a scheming liar.)

A different tidbit in the book grated on the president more, however—a story about his and Michelle’s vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2010. They had been sitting on a deserted beach with two old friends, Allison and Susan Davis, when Allison reached over to fold some towels. Obama told her that his staff would handle that. “When I leave office, there are only two things I want,” he said, according to Kantor’s account. “I want a plane and I want a valet.”

Obama, still rankled about Dunn’s quotes about the White House’s boys’ club mentality in
Confidence Men,
stared at Anita. “Why do people who claim to care about me say really stupid things to book authors?” he asked pointedly.

Michelle, briefed separately by Dunn, seemed even less ruffled by the Gibbs story than her husband. “Oh, you know Robert, he says things,” she said.

But Michelle was irritated with Kantor, who the White House felt had conveyed the impression that she had a closer relationship with the first lady than was the case. The day after
The Obamas
was published, Michelle did an interview with Gayle King of CBS News, in which she uncorked the kind of spiky comments that her aides believed were a thing of her distant past. “Who can write about how I feel? Who? What third person can tell me how I feel?” she said of Kantor. She then addressed the picture of herself in the book as a source of White House friction. “That’s been an image people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”

Under normal circumstances, Daley would have grimaced; the first lady dredging up a racially loaded stereotype for no apparent reason was bound to kick up dust (and, self-defeatingly, generate publicity for the book). But none of this was Daley’s problem anymore. On January 5, he had tendered his resignation. The final straw for him was an internal flap over the selection of a new domestic-policy adviser. Daley wanted an A-list name: former
Time
managing editor and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson or former Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer. But he was overruled peremptorily by Jarrett and Rouse. And with that, Daley had had enough.

So had Obama. Within three months of Daley’s appointment, the president could tell that it wasn’t working, that he hadn’t found the silver bullet. By the fall, Plouffe, reflecting a consensus in the building, was urging Obama to let Daley go. “It’s your call, but you can’t make a change six months from now.” The populist shift in the president’s posture—from kissing business’s ass to kicking it in the teeth—only made Daley’s continued presence more untenable. And the chief of staff had done nothing to improve relations with Congress. His replacement would be OMB head and policy maven Jack Lew, who would focus on governing and have almost nothing to do with the reelect, thus enhancing Plouffe’s already estimable degree of power.

With Daley on his way out the door, Obama turned to deal with Biden. At one of their weekly lunches in January, Joe addressed the internal uproar over his strategy-group meeting, the California trip, and his alleged designs on 2016—all of which Obama had heard about in detail from the Davids.

This has all been a big misunderstanding, Biden said. I’d never do anything—anything—to jeopardize our chances of being reelected. Secondly, I’m not holding secret meetings. Any meeting I ever have on any topic, Axe and Plouffe are more than welcome. But here’s the thing. In 2008, when I joined the campaign, I was an invited guest at your party. This time it’s different. I’m the vice president. I’ve been working shoulder to shoulder with you for three years, living it every day. This isn’t your campaign anymore, Mr. President. This has to be
our
campaign. I need to be more involved. I want to be your partner—the junior partner, but your partner.

Look, Joe, Obama replied. It’s important people not think you have a separate agenda. People need to see us as one team. That’s good for me, it’s good for you. I accept that you didn’t mean to do anything behind the campaign’s back. But when it comes to 2016, the best thing for you is if we win. If we lose, it’s not gonna matter anyway. And if we win, you’ll be in a position to do whatever you need to do. So let’s win.

Biden left the lunch satisfied, as did Obama: they seemed to have had a meeting of the minds. On the issue of contraception, however, they remained in different places. In mid-January, after weeks of internal deliberations, Obama was preparing to make a final decision on the religious exemption; he was sticking with the narrow rule Sebelius had put forward.
Biden still thought it a terrible mistake, and told Obama so. The president had avoided culture wars in 2008, much to his advantage. Now he was on the brink of engulfing himself in one, not just due to the ruling itself but by going back on his word to Dolan. Biden knew the archbishop well enough to predict that it would not be pretty.

On January 20, Obama phoned Dolan to let him know his decision. Within hours a video was on the bishops conference website, in which Dolan condemned the administration. “Never before,” he said, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.” Across the country, hundreds of bishops said much the same. And even many liberals were incensed. Under a headline accusing Obama of a “breach of faith,”
Washington Post
columnist and reliable White House defender E. J. Dionne blistered the president for “utterly botch[ing]” the decision and hit him squarely in the solar plexus of his political vanity. “This might not be so surprising if Obama had presented himself as a conventional secular liberal,” Dionne wrote. “But he has always held himself to a more inclusive standard.”

Obama wore a mask of misery. He had returned to Washington from Hawaii hoping to put 2011 behind him. It had been the worst year of his presidency—of his political life. With the Kansas speech and the payroll tax victory, he thought perhaps he had turned a corner. But now, just three weeks into 2012, the landscape was cruelly familiar. He had been compelled to choose a third chief of staff in as many years in office. His vice president was on the warpath, and his wife was out there making the wrong kinds of headlines. Conservative multimillionaires and billionaires were delivering checks hand over fist to Karl Rove, as were some of the president’s former Wall Street supporters. His approval ratings remained stubbornly mired in the mid-forties. The economy was still dreadful. And more than two-thirds of voters believed the country was on the wrong track—which, if history was any guide, meant that he was hosed.

There was a silver lining in this cloud, however, and it was a sparkly thing to behold. In the other America, the red America, the Republican nomination contest was under way.

PART TWO

5

PRESERVING THE OPTION

T
OM RATH DROVE DOWN
from New Hampshire to Lexington, Massachusetts, cruising past the old Raytheon building just off Route 2 and into the parking lot of the low-slung brick structure at 80 Hayden Avenue. It was November 18, 2008, and Rath had come to the offices of Free and Strong America PAC for lunch with Mitt Romney, the man Rath believed should have been elected president that year—and who he dearly hoped would try again in 2012.

Romney’s campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination had been an expensive and embarrassing flameout, but he’d decided to put off any postmortems until after Election Day. Now, with the eyes of the world trained on President-elect Obama and the all-enveloping financial crisis, Romney was reaching out to key supporters such as Rath to divine the lessons of his loss.

A former New Hampshire attorney general turned lawyer-lobbyist, strategist, and sherpa, Rath was a fixture in Granite State politics. Every four years, presidential hopefuls solicited his services in navigating the first-in-the-nation primary. Starting in 1980, he had advised the campaigns of Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander, George W. Bush, and, finally, Romney. Gnomic and twinkle-eyed at sixty-three, with the waist of his khakis hiked up over his belly, Rath was a classic moderate New
England Republican, ideologically squishy but strategically and tactically shrewd.

They sat down over sandwiches from a local deli. Rath, an irrepressible kibitzer, could have spent half an hour bantering about the Patriots or the Red Sox. Romney’s only aptitude for small talk revolved around his family, and after dispensing with such chitchat, he came to the point.

“What do you think we did wrong?” Romney asked.

“We told the wrong story,” Rath replied.