Double Down: Game Change 2012 (3 page)

“Hey,” Obama announced, “look what I found when I was out there!”

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N
O INCUMBENT PRESIDENT EVER
travels a road to reelection paved with peonies and primrose. But Obama’s plunge into the fever swamp of birtherism was just the latest detour on what had already been a long, strange trip—with many miles still to go.

From the outset of his improbable and dazzling journey to the presidency, Obama had been endowed with an almost superhuman confidence and self-possession. His ascension had taken place with astonishing speed, leaving both his public image and his private self-conception unblemished by the hyper-partisan freak show of American politics. On the eve of his decision to run for president, Obama pledged to his wife and team, “I’m going to be Barack Obama and not some parody—I’m going to emerge intact.” And, amazingly, he had. By the end of the campaign, he had proven almost entirely impervious to the right-wing hit machine. On Election Day, he carried a majority of independent voters and nearly 10 percent of Republicans. He sailed into the White House as a transformational figure, an avatar of a new era of post-partisanship, a leader capable of mitigating the ruinous divisiveness that had bedeviled Washington for two decades.

Now, at forty-nine and on the brink of his bid for a second term, Obama confronted a different political reality. Rather than bringing the country together, he had become an even more polarizing presence than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. When he glimpsed his own image in the media, it was no longer one he recognized; instead he saw a cartoon. His reelection campaign would be waged in the teeth of a feral opposition and an economy that had improved on his watch but remained god-awful, plagued by slow growth and high unemployment. He was vulnerable, beatable, perhaps even the underdog.

That he had been dealt a horrific hand upon assuming office was beyond reasonable dispute: an epochal economic meltdown, a worldwide financial crisis, a collapsing auto industry, an imploding housing market, and two costly, unpopular wars in need of denouement. That he had taken dramatic action was also inarguable. He had signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the largest fiscal stimulus in U.S. history. He had rescued the financial sector and also reregulated it with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. He had tossed a lifeline to Detroit and was moving to end the conflicts in Iraq (rapidly) and Afghanistan (slowly). He had achieved a long-held Democratic dream with the passage of near-universal health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

Obama had no regrets about any of this. He had done the right things, the difficult things, the necessary things—of this he was certain. But he knew that the political price he would pay was steep. On the night of the passage of health care reform, in late March of 2010, Obama celebrated with his staff on the Truman Balcony of the White House. Holding a champagne flute, the president approached his political director, Patrick Gaspard, a wiry Haitian-born operative who earned his political stripes in New York’s ruthless union backrooms. Tipping his glass and cocking an eyebrow, Obama said, “You know, they’re gonna kick our asses over this.”

Truth be told, the tuchus kicking had been going on from the start. Congressional Republicans assailed Obama at every turn, painting him as a profligate, reflexive liberal, opposing his legislative agenda loudly and in lockstep. In the business world, he was widely regarded as either clueless about or hostile to the private sector. On the far right, he was denounced as an amalgam of Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Huey Newton—even as the left was disappointed to discover that he wasn’t a combination of Ted Kennedy, Norman Thomas, and John Lewis. In the middle of the electorate, the stimulus, the bailouts, and health care reform proved unpopular; independent voters abandoned him in droves. From a high of 69 percent on Inauguration Day, his approval ratings had slid to the mid-forties by summer 2010.

With the congressional midterm elections looming in November of that year, Obama and his people saw the writing on the wall. After a season they had christened “Recovery Summer,” the economy was growing at just 2 percent, the unemployment rate was 9.5, and the Tea Party was on the rise.
Obama had watched this new force take shape from a remove, but with gathering alarm. The incendiary town hall meetings the previous year. The reports of vandalism at Democratic congressional district offices. The roiling populist outrage on display that reminded him of the jagged outbursts at McCain-Palin rallies at the end of the 2008 campaign. And the more Obama learned about the Tea Party candidates poised to win in November, the greater his incredulity—and disgust.

“If people vote for
this,
” he said to one of his aides, “they deserve it.”

But vote for it they did, on Election Day 2010, delivering to the president and his party what Obama aptly termed a “shellacking.” Democrats were stripped of eleven governorships, including those in the battleground states of Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In the Senate, they ceded six seats, while in the House they were massacred, suffering the largest midterm loss since 1938—sixty-three seats, many to be filled by Tea Party freshmen.

In the wake of the midterms, Obama was besieged by the Democratic establishment with calls for a midcourse correction. He should steal a page from the playbook employed by Bill Clinton when he endured a similar drubbing in 1994, Obama was told. Reach out to Republicans. Mend fences with business. Move to the middle.

Obama believed that he was already there. His lament on the topic was all too familiar to his advisers.

I didn’t push for a single-payer health care law, he would say, pointing out that the individual mandate at the heart of his plan was a Republican idea, concocted at the Heritage Foundation and implemented by Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts. My climate change policy—cap-and-trade—was Bush 41’s, Obama would complain. My auto rescue was more market-minded than the one proposed by Bush 43. I didn’t nationalize the banks when everyone, even Alan Greenspan, said I should. And my critics call me a socialist? Please.

What the president did want to reboot was his political team, which throughout his career had been a tight and static crew. In the 2008 campaign, there were only five people he trusted on big decisions and with whom he actively conferred: his chief strategist, David Axelrod; his communications director, Robert Gibbs; his close friend Valerie Jarrett, from
Chicago, also an intimate of Michelle’s; his campaign manager, Plouffe; and his Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse. He carried four of them into the White House—Axelrod, Jarrett, and Rouse as senior advisers, Gibbs as press secretary—with Plouffe taking what he called a “two-year sabbatical” to write a book and hit the lecture circuit.

This cadre had been the essential cogs of a well-oiled campaign machine: disciplined, devoted, and light on drama. But inside the White House, with the core Obamans working alongside a claque of high-wattage Clintonites—notably chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and National Economic Council director Larry Summers—the dynamic was wildly, dysfunctionally different. The political and policy shops were often in conflict, arguing and rearguing issues in front of the president. Tactics frequently trumped strategy. On-the-fly decision making was more the rule than the exception. There was infighting and leaking, backchanneling and backbiting, much of it revolving around Jarrett, whose relationship to the first couple inspired envy and enmity. It was a noisy, tumultuous scene.

Michelle was unhappy with her husband’s team, and she made no bones about it. The president was unhappy, too. He wanted the noise to stop.

Obama placed much of the blame on the brilliant, abrasive, frenetic Emanuel—but Rahm was already out the door, having departed the White House in October to run for mayor of Chicago after Richard M. Daley announced he would not seek reelection. As Emanuel’s replacement, Obama chose Daley’s youngest brother, Bill, who brought to the job a formidable résumé: commerce secretary under Clinton, chairman of Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, and, most recently, a top executive at JPMorgan Chase. Daley also had deep ties to Obamaworld, if not to Obama; he had known Axelrod for thirty years, served as Joe Biden’s political director on his 1988 presidential bid, and was one of Emanuel’s biggest boosters in Chicago. He was sixty-two years old, with a shiny bald head, a brawler’s build, and no tolerance for bullshit—a word he employed as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and definite article.

The addition of Daley to Obama’s White House team was coupled with a pair of even more significant subtractions: Axelrod and Gibbs. The fifty-five-year-old Axelrod, with his slouchy stance and sauce-splattered ties, had been Obama’s “keeper of the message” since his start in national politics;
Gibbs had been with him since his Senate race in 2004. But Obama believed his communications operation was a mess. He was overexposed. The thread had been misplaced.
The reason I’m here,
Obama thought,
was that I told the American people a story—and somehow we lost track of that.

Axelrod seemed burned out to Obama. Axelrod
was
burned out. He had planned to return home to Chicago in the spring to help guide the campaign. Obama told him no—he should go even sooner, after the State of the Union address in January.

As for Gibbs, Obama was convinced that the White House’s relations with the media were needlessly contentious, thanks in part to his press secretary’s combative briefing style. Gibbs had also recently become embroiled in a string of distracting flaps: annoying House speaker Nancy Pelosi in July by conceding on TV that Democrats could lose majority control of the lower chamber in the midterms; inflaming progressives by dismissing liberal activists as the “professional left”; and contributing to the White House’s internal friction through his rocky relations with Michelle and Jarrett. The president wanted Gibbs off the podium. This was fine with the press secretary—he expected to step up into a broader West Wing role with a grander title—but Obama made it clear that he preferred to have Gibbs trumpet his message from outside the building. I need my own James Carville out there on cable, arguing my case, Obama told him. You’ll make money, get to see your family more.

Axelrod and Gibbs were more than advisers or even friends to Obama; they were closer to kin. But the president betrayed little emotion as he ushered them out the door. “It’s good,” he said coolly to one intimate about the departures.

Obama’s approach to his White House overhaul was shot through with such clinicality, and sharply focused on two challenges: coping with the newly Republicanized legislative landscape and gearing up for his reelection battle. Axelrod and Gibbs were household names, ubiquitous presences on TV, widely perceived as shameless partisans—so off to the campaign side they went. By contrast, Obama saw Daley as the solution to a multitude of problems. He would help repair the rift with business, be a potent economic spokesman and a bridge to Republicans on Capitol Hill, and, as a quasi
outsider to Obamaworld, answer the accusation that the White House was suffocatingly insular.

Significant as these changes were, Obama wasn’t cleaning house entirely. Though Jarrett had become a lightning rod for criticism beyond the building as well as within it, Obama left her role untouched. Rouse, who had been serving as acting chief of staff since Emanuel’s exit, remained as influential as ever. (So influential that Obama told him that he wouldn’t hand the job over to Daley if Rouse wanted to keep it.)

Most critically, Obama summoned Plouffe back to the fold. Data-driven and pretense-free, relentlessly cool and collected, Plouffe, forty-three, was in many respects the antithesis of both the disorderly Axelrod, his former consulting partner, and the volatile Emanuel. His remit was, in effect, to function as the chief strategist for both the White House and the campaign.

While Obama reshuffled the personnel deck in the last days of 2010, he was dealing simultaneously with the lame-duck session of Congress. And to this he brought a similar sort of reelection-driven calculation. The message of the midterms, Obama believed, was that voters were exhausted by the partisan warfare of the previous two years.
They want to see Democrats and Republicans agreeing on . . . anything,
he thought.

The lame duck presented a golden opportunity, and Obama seized it. He abandoned his opposition to renewing the Bush-era income tax cuts for the wealthy, in return for $238 billion in new fiscal stimulus (an extension of unemployment insurance, a payroll tax holiday, and more). Then, in quick succession, he pocketed an array of additional victories with bipartisan support: the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting gays from serving openly; ratification of the New START treaty on nuclear arms; a $4.2 billion compensation package for 9/11 first responders; and a child nutrition bill beloved by Michelle.

The left was livid with Obama for folding on the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which had been a campaign cornerstone for Democrats in the midterms. Obama didn’t give a fig. The flagging economy needed juice, the deal would provide it, and the idea of letting the tax cuts expire for everyone in the hope that a better compromise could be brokered down the road—after Republicans had taken control of the House—was ludicrous on its face. Case closed.

Looking ahead, Obama had no doubt about the correct approach to the congressional Republicans: cooperate when possible, confront when necessary, exploit conservative overreaching. But Obama’s reelection would depend on his ability to undertake a broader project. To occupy a higher plane than he had in his first two years, elevating himself above the posturing, petulance, and bile spewing of the linthead extremes in both parties. To play the role of presiding adult in a town full of adolescents. In other words, to be Barack Obama again.

For a moment, it looked as though he would have the chance. On the back of his legislative victories, his moving speech at the Tucson memorial after the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others in a supermarket parking lot, and his State of the Union address, the president’s approval ratings in the early weeks of 2011 edged up above 50 percent for the first time in more than a year.