Double Down: Game Change 2012 (6 page)

Obama’s reaction to Wall Street’s displeasure was acute indifference tinged with exasperation. On substance, he hadn’t an ounce of sympathy for the plaints of the bankers. Not only had he resisted the calls to nationalize the banks, but his White House had helped thwart the proposals of some in his party to break them up. He had left the bankers’ bonuses alone, incurring the wrath of the left. Sure, he had tossed brickbats at the fat cats. So what? You folks are too sensitive, you need to get over yourselves, he told his Wall Street friends. “I can take a punch,” Obama said. “Why can’t you guys take a punch?”

When it came to the whining about the lack of stroking and schmoozing, he shrugged. Obama had never courted donors. He had worked his tail off at fund-raising in 2008, but he hadn’t toadied—and the money cascaded in. There was something inside him that made him recoil from even the faintest hint of political or personal indebtedness. If the Wall Streeters wanted to punish him for his policies, so be it. If they wanted him to kiss their behinds, to hell with that.

Obama was unwilling or unable to change his ways even when he needed to hook the most titanic financial fish—George Soros. Soros, of course, was a billionaire hedge-fund operator and philanthropist whose avid liberal leanings had led him to spend lavishly in campaigns past, including $27.5 million through an outside group in 2004. In the 2008 campaign, Obama’s introduction to Wall Street took place in Soros’s Manhattan office. But when Soros sought a meeting in the White House, he was repeatedly rebuffed for more than a year. Soros wasn’t trying to have legislation tweaked or a regulatory rule revised. All he wanted, he insisted, was to discuss the economy.

Finally, in September 2010, a secret summit was set up at the Waldorf Astoria in New York by Patrick Gaspard, in the hope that Soros could be induced into serious check-writing on behalf of the Democrats ahead of the midterms. Soros held forth for forty-five minutes, lecturing Obama not about the economy but about how the president should
talk about
the economy—the financial savant as self-appointed message guru. In the room, Obama was annoyed and bored. Afterwards, he fumed, “If we don’t get anything out of him, I’m never fucking sitting with that guy again.”

Soros apparently felt no better about the meeting: no big checks were forthcoming. And the Democrats could have used them. In the first election cycle of the post–
Citizens United
era, Republican outside groups poured nearly $200 million into House and Senate races, more than double the total on the Democratic side. The flashiest new players were American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, both set up by Bush ur-strategist Karl Rove, and Americans for Prosperity, backed by right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. But equally dramatic was the shift in Wall Street’s contributions: from 70 percent to Democrats in 2008 to 68 percent to Republicans in 2010.

In a way, the spending figures were more of wake-up call for Obama than the midterm results; they signaled that the ground was shifting ominously beneath his feet. In 2008, the magical elixir of hope, change, Clinton fatigue, and Bush ennui had carried Obama a long way toward victory, but the fact that he had outspent John McCain by more than two to one hadn’t exactly hurt. Now Obama faced the likelihood of spending parity or worse—a bracing reality brought home in early 2011, when Rove announced that Crossroads planned to raise $120 million for 2012, followed quickly by the Koch brothers pledging to kick in another $88 million.

Obama was hardly confronting a hanging at dawn, but the threat of a barrage of negative TV ads even before the GOP nominee was chosen did concentrate his mind. As Messina prepared to decamp from Washington for Chicago, Obama pulled him into the Oval Office. Plouffe had suggested the president might refrain from fund-raising until the summer so he could focus on governing. The president disagreed. We need to get going, get this money together, he told Messina. I don’t want to wait.

In a political meeting before the midterms, Obama had observed that he saw no need to curry favor with business and finance then, because if Democrats lost the House, “we’re gonna have to kiss their asses anyway.” The appointment of Daley was, in effect, a big smooch on the backside of Wall Street. His presidential puckering up continued in March, when Obama invited two dozen bankers, hedgies, and private equitizers who had supported him in the past—Lasry, Kramer, Wolf, et al—for a meeting in the Blue Room of the White House.

“I know you guys take a lot of flak in your community for supporting me,” the president said. Teasingly, he referred to some of their colleagues as “babies.” Solicitously, he asked, “How do you think we’re doing?” Then Obama questioned them about how he could do better. Some were cynical about the outreach: He’s only doing this because he’s worried. Others were heartened: Hey, at least he’s trying.

Obama let the Wall Streeters know he planned to be in New York a lot in the months ahead. And by the time he turned up at the Daniel dinner, it was, in fact, his seventh event in the city in three months. The condensed stump speech he delivered amid the clink of crystal stemware was crisp and free of either pandering or apologies; he mentioned Wall Street only once.
But he deftly and charmingly acknowledged that he knew the bloom was off the rose.

“I hope you will be as enthusiastic as many of you were back in 2008,” Obama said. “I’ve got to tell you that, partly because of the gray hair, I know that it’s not going to be exactly the same as when I was young and vibrant and new. And there were posters everywhere:
HOPE
. The logo was really fresh. And let’s face it, it was cool to support me back then. At cocktail parties you could sort of say, ‘Yeah, this Obama guy, you haven’t heard of him? Let me tell you about him.’”

Most of the Wall Streeters who had been in the Blue Room were at Daniel, too. They sat there smiling, chuckling, nodding—and wondering if it was all for naught. Lasry, a billionaire and close pal of Clinton’s who often lent the former president his jet, was an admirer of Obama’s. But he was well aware that this made him an outlier in his circle. The antipathy for Obama had become an emotional thing on Wall Street. Over at Goldman, Lasry had heard, an edict had come down that there would be no giving to the president. And when Lasry asked around among his friends who had raised money for Obama in 2008, three-quarters said they wouldn’t vote for him again, let alone bundle or donate.

When Obama finished his Daniel remarks, he made a loop around the room, stopping at each table, asking the same question he’d posed in the Blue Room: How do you think we’re doing?

Three months earlier, Lasry had sugarcoated his reply, offered some suggestions. This time he thought,
What the hell, tell the truth.
He said, It’s not going well. Nobody here trusts you.

Obama flew back to Washington more convinced than ever that he needed to make the grand bargain work. It was the only plausible way, he thought, to reduce the dyspepsia of the plutocrats. On the surface, his fund-raising looked healthy. In the three months since the reelect got up and running, he had raked in $86 million. But Obama sensed the fragility undergirding that big number. He knew it had required him to crank through thirty-one events, a pace he couldn’t hope to maintain. And, indeed, as June turned to July and Obama became engrossed on a daily basis in negotiating with Boehner, he found himself having to cancel fund-raisers left and right.

That was the bad news. The good news was that he and Boehner seemed to be making progress. Oh, and another thing: in the president’s absence from the fund-raising trail, his campaign had discovered a new star to take his place, one who happened also to be named Obama.

•   •   •

F
OR ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH
the first lady, her emergence as a top-drawer buck-raker would have once seemed as likely as Biden moonlighting as a mime. Michelle had long cast a jaundiced eye on politics, and, in truth, she still did. In her husband’s first presidential campaign, she was initially a conscientious objector, then a reluctant conscript plagued by missteps that fed a caricature of her as an unpatriotic, aggrieved, and resentful black woman. But after her knockout speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and two years in the White House radiating warmth, humanity, and devotion to her daughters, her public image was pure platinum. Working mothers saw her as one of them, but with a bit more glamour. Independents loved her efforts to help military families and combat childhood obesity. Her approval ratings were in the high sixties, well above her husband’s.

She enjoyed her celestial popularity and did much to protect and enhance it. She also enjoyed the perks of the White House, much as the admission pained her. But she chafed at the constraints of the bubble and the glare of nonstop scrutiny—“I have to put my makeup on to walk my dog in the backyard,” she complained—and at times made it sound as if she considered being first lady a burden. She never wanted this position, never asked for this position, and it irritated her when people couldn’t grasp the sacrifices she was making—any semblance of a normal life, for instance. When she planned to take Sasha and Malia on a swanky trip to Spain in the summer of 2010, she was warned it would cause a royal ruckus, as it did. (“A modern-day Marie Antoinette,” scolded the New York
Daily News.
) But didn’t she have a right to take her girls on holiday? Didn’t they have a right to see the world?
Forget it,
she thought.
We’re going.

There were tensions, too, with the West Wing staff—with Rahm, Gibbs, Axe, and even Jarrett now and then. Michelle was exacting, lawyerly, precise; she thought them sloppy, disorganized, and presumptuous. (Mostly
they were scared to death of her.) In the run-up to the midterms, they had begged her to campaign actively for Democratic candidates. She resisted for months, then demanded to see a detailed plan. At a meeting in the Oval Office in mid-September, they laid it all out for her, complete with reams of data and even a PowerPoint. Michelle said she was impressed with the level of preparation—but agreed to do only eight events, a sliver of what her husband’s political team wanted. But here was another good-news/bad-news story: at the events she did, she sparkled.

In truth, Michelle didn’t care about congresspeople. Her opinion of them was even lower than the president’s. What she cared about was Barack. She worried that campaigning in a partisan way in the midterms would erode the pile of political capital she’d painstakingly amassed.
My husband’s going to need every bit of it,
she thought.
That’s what I want to use it for—I want to campaign for MY GUY.

Messina prayed those sentiments applied equally to fund-raising. In March, he sat down with Michelle in her East Wing office to make his pitch. Like his colleagues in September, he put together a granular presentation. Her events would entail her stump speech only, no questions. She would just do day trips that yielded at least $1 million. (Biden’s floor was $250,000.) She would never be away from the girls when her husband was traveling. She would lend her signature to e-mail and direct-mail solicitations, which she hadn’t done in 2010. Messina expected her to push back at least on some elements of the plan—this was Michelle. Instead she changed nothing, approved it all without hesitation.

And then she killed, pulling in $10 million in that first fund-raising quarter. As the summer rolled on, her mail and online pleas for money outperformed her husband’s. And while she couldn’t say she was having a ball, she was surprisingly game. When Messina sat down with her again to discuss her schedule for the fall, Michelle studied his cautiously culled requests and said, “That’s all?”

From the moment the first couple arrived in the White House, Michelle had confided to friends that she could live with her husband being a one-term president. But the accumulation of the attacks from the right, the repudiation embodied by the midterms, and what she saw as the know-nothing ingratitude of the middle—“Look at all these great things he’s
doing, and nobody knows,” she would say to Jarrett—had changed her tune. She was “absolutely determined,” she said, that her husband be reelected, for that was the only source of vindication for what he—and they—had accomplished.

“We’re in it to win—we’re
gonna
win,” Michelle told one donor. “We’re gonna show everyone.”

•   •   •

H
AD OBAMA’S DEALMAKING BEEN
going as well as FLOTUS’s rainmaking, the summer of 2011 might have been a day at the beach. Instead, it was a season of misery.

On July 22, after weeks of dark nights and false dawns, the president’s talks with the speaker faded to black. Looking wan in a televised press briefing, Obama grouched that, for a while, he “couldn’t get a phone call returned” by Boehner and that he’d been “left at the altar.” With the debt-ceiling deadline fast approaching, Geithner briefed Obama on the consequences of default. “Catastrophic,” the treasury secretary said; it might trigger a cataclysm worse than the Great Depression. Obama’s longest-serving advisers were concerned about their chief: never had they seen him more strained, more fretful, more weighed down by the burdens of his office.

And then, voilà, a breakthrough. On Sunday night, July 31, Obama again went before the cameras and announced that an agreement had been reached: $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over ten years, with a special committee of Congress tasked with finding another $1.2 trillion. “Is this the deal I would have preferred? No,” Obama said, in an epic understatement.

What the president had done was avert Armageddon, which wasn’t nothing, and he had managed to protect certain categories of safety-net spending, along with a deferral of the next debt-ceiling vote until after the election. But having beaten the drum all summer long for a “balanced approach” of cuts and new revenue, he secured none of the latter. The Republicans had taken America’s full faith and credit hostage, and Obama had paid them ransom.