Double Down: Game Change 2012 (7 page)

From every corner, the deal was greeted by a deafening Bronx cheer. The stock market, jittery for weeks over the prospect of default, shed twelve
hundred points in the days after it was forestalled. Meanwhile, every Democrat to the left of Obama castigated the pact. Emanuel Cleaver, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), dubbed it a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich,” which Nancy Pelosi helpfully expanded to include “Satan fries on the side.” In
The New York Times,
Paul Krugman wrote that the deal would “take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”

That Wednesday afternoon, August 3, Obama flew to Chicago for a fund-raiser. Backstage in a holding room, he had a quick dinner with Messina, who informed him that the campaign had been testing ads with four different messages to try to put the best face on the deal. But all fell flat. Voters think you’re the adult in the room, Messina told Obama. They don’t think you’re the prick. They think you’re trying to fix the mess, but also they think you’re failing.

So which ad are we gonna run? Obama asked.

“We’re not gonna run anything,” Messina replied. They were stymied.

The next day, Obama turned fifty. Michelle staged a lovely party for him, starting on the South Lawn and ending in the East Room. Obama drew up the guest list himself—a mixture of old friends and celebrities such as Jay-Z and Tom Hanks—using the task to distract himself during spare moments in the debt negotiations. The first lady, determined to lift her husband’s sagging spirits, moved through the crowd, pulling folks aside, imploring them to stay late. She delivered the evening’s one toast to her man, and it was moving, funny, and frank, acknowledging that she had been hard on him sometimes, but he had been a trouper. Obama had a ball, dancing with his wife to Stevie Wonder, who performed live. His capacity for compartmentalization was otherworldly but not total, as he spent part of the evening lobbying Geithner’s wife, Carole, to persuade Tim to stay on at Treasury through 2012. (Obama then handed her over to Hanks for the same purpose; spying Carole and Tom talking in the Rose Garden, Daley turned to Geithner and said, “You’re fucked—it’s over, okay?”)

The next morning, though, the gloom engulfed Obama again. Throughout the summer, the credit-rating agencies had been threatening to downgrade the United States’ debt. Now, despite the deal, Standard & Poor’s notified the Treasury that it would do so after the market closed. Geithner met with Obama and informed him that the S&P’s analysis contained a
basic mathematical error, causing it to overstate the federal debt by $2 trillion—and yet the agency was going ahead anyway. Geithner, usually impassive, was angry and agitated. America’s credit rating was about to be downgraded for the first time in history, a black mark on his boss’s legacy, as a result of pure hackwork.

Obama was almost always impassive about events over which he had no control. The administration would push back against S&P as best it could, but there was nothing more to be done. That afternoon, he boarded Marine One for Camp David, where he and Michelle would be spending the weekend with friends from Chicago. But the bedlam followed him there, too. The next day, a NATO helicopter was shot down in eastern Afghanistan, killing thirty Americans, including twenty-two Navy SEALs, most of them from Team 6—the same unit that had taken out bin Laden.

On the phone with one of his national security aides, Ben Rhodes, a shaken Obama learned that none of the servicemen from that fabled mission had died, but that provided no comfort. It was the largest loss of American life in a single incident in the Afghan war—and, Obama would later tell Rhodes, the most wrenching moment of his time in office.

He returned to Washington in a foul mood that would quickly turn rancid as the criticism being heaped upon him intensified. Obama had sought a big deal with Boehner because he believed it was the correct thing to do, but also to get right with the monarchs of high capitalism. He had cut the small deal to avert an economic conflagration. Here he was that Monday, August 8, facing the cameras in the State Dining Room, addressing the downgrade, citing Warren Buffett, articulating an obvious truth: “No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a triple-A country.” And still the stock market kept on falling—635 points that day, 200
while he was speaking.

Then there was the ululating of the left, now aimed less at the deal than directly at Obama. On the op-ed page of
The New York Times
the Sunday he was at Camp David, liberal psychology professor Drew Westen gutted him in a jeremiad that was burning up the blogosphere: “Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama . . . believes on virtually any issue.” California congresswoman Maxine Waters and the rest of the CBC were shelling him mercilessly. The African American TV talk show host
Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West, on a sixteen-city poverty tour, were doing the same. “Too often [Obama] compromises, too often he capitulates,” West told ABC News. “I think the Republicans know that. I think they laugh when he’s not around.”

Obama had little patience for the “professional left,” and vanishingly close to zero for what one of his senior African American aides, Michael Strautmanis, referred to as “professional blacks” (as opposed to black professionals). Apart from Georgia congressman John Lewis and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Obama had nearly as much contempt for the CBC as he did for the Tea Party Caucus. New York’s Charlie Rangel he derided as a hack; Jesse Jackson Sr. was effectively banned from the White House. Obama remembered all too well a conversation with West in 2009, in which the professor used the precious time to complain about his seating at the inauguration.

Still, Obama never fully shrugged off criticism from those quarters. In a meeting with civil rights leaders in 2010, he had answered a question about black unemployment by saying “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and since then the reply had been thrown back in his face frequently to question his commitment to his race—and his racial authenticity, he thought. One day in the spring of 2011, as he sat with some staffers preparing for a speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Obama rattled off a list of his policies. Cracking down on predatory lending. Education reform. Student loan reform. Most important, health care reform. All with an outsize impact on African Americans. All achieved at a time when half of the GOP believed he’d been born in Kenya. Obama threw up his hands. After all that, he said, “am I still not black enough?”

Jarrett, in charge of constituency politics at the White House, always kept close, if wary, tabs on the president’s standing with the professional black community—while arguing that it had no bearing on his popularity with black voters. But in the wake of the debt-ceiling debacle, she began to wring her hands, provoking scoffs from the rest of his political team, which saw no evidence in the polling that Obama was suffering with his base, African American or Caucasian. “If we’re in trouble with the black community, fuck it,” Daley told Jarrett. “Let’s just wrap it up and go home.”

For Obama, however, polling data was beside the point. Across the
ideological spectrum, he was being derided and belittled. On Wall Street and on CNBC, he was flayed for his lack of leadership, for not bringing the grand bargain home. In the CBC and on MSNBC, he was flogged for caving to the GOP, for being coreless, rudderless, at sea. Inside the Beltway, he was lashed for his maladroit handling of the levers of power, for being unable to work his will on Congress. (And this showed up in his campaign’s focus groups, where a startling number of people would cite Lyndon Johnson’s ability to twist arms and get his way and ask why Obama couldn’t do the same.) The critiques were different in important ways but shared a central theme, which had now become a meme: Obama was weak.

He was scheduled to take off on August 15 for a three-day midwestern bus tour, and then for a ten-day holiday on Martha’s Vineyard. But before he left, he convened a meeting of his senior advisers in the Roosevelt Room. The president rarely railed on his people, and many of them turned up expecting a pep talk and not what they received: a reaming.

Look, Obama said, this has been hard. We all need a vacation. But we can’t continue like this. Things need to improve, we need to improve.
You
need to improve. We didn’t execute the way we needed to execute. This can’t ever happen again. I know everybody’s been working hard. We need to work harder. This has been a tough summer, but I don’t want to hear any whining. We were the ones that pulled the country back from the brink of a default that would have devastated the economy, and somehow we’re the ones getting our asses kicked over it. It doesn’t make any sense. We need to do better at explaining what it is that we did, why we did it, and why this is good for the American people.

The communications piece of the puzzle gnawed at Obama. A year had passed since he made the decision to retool his message team; Axelrod and Gibbs had been gone for seven months. And yet somehow he and his operation still hadn’t figured out how to speak with the clarity of purpose people remembered from the last campaign. “The deal was better than we’re getting credit for,” Obama told his communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, regarding the compromise that avoided the default. “It feels to me like we’re not doing enough to shape the overall narrative here.”

Pfeiffer was thirty-six years old, droll, acerbic, faintly cynical, and whip smart. He had been with Obama for four years—and in every one of them,
without fail, he found himself on the receiving end of this gripe from his boss. So Pfeiffer did what he always did: pounded out a memo with various suggestions. More off-the-record briefings for Daley and Plouffe with reporters. More outreach to liberal columnists, bloggers, and the talking heads at MSNBC. Blah, blah, blah.

“We could do all those things, but part of this is about strategic choices,” Pfeiffer told Obama. “We made a strategic choice that we were gonna portray you, because you are, as reasonable. But in today’s media environment, there is no caucus for reasonableness, with the possible exception of David Brooks. And there is no communications strategy that will make David Brooks and Paul Krugman like the same thing. So you’re gonna have to choose.”

Pfeiffer walked out of the Oval Office thinking that Obama grokked his argument. But the truth was, Pfeiffer himself was plagued by a different possibility. What if they had reached the same kind of turning point that George Bush had in the summer of 2005? What if they simply could not come back?

What if
people are saying we’re just tired of listening to you?
Pfeiffer thought.

•   •   •

O
BAMA WAS TOO CONFIDENT
in the power of his voice to harbor such bleak thoughts, but as he set off for the Vineyard he was as low, frustrated, and exhausted as he had ever been. The bus tour through Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota had been a decidedly mixed bag: a blessed escape from confinement in the White House, yet filled with variations on the weakness meme—as voters, his voters, asked him over and over, Why did you negotiate with those guys? Why’d you let that happen? The stock market continued to quake and quiver. Gas prices were sky-high. Unemployment was still stuck at 9 percent. And Gallup now had his approval rating at an all-time low of 38.

But the Vineyard always bucked Obama up, gave him time to think. Four years earlier, he had come there in a similar state of discombobulation over his faltering White House bid; after eight days of pondering, long walks, and long talks, he returned to the mainland and changed the game.
There were some in the White House now who suggested he forgo this vacation or at least go someplace else, someplace less chichi. But the girls loved the Vineyard, and that was that concerning venue. As for bailing entirely, Plouffe shut down that idea quick. This would be Obama’s last chance to get away before the campaign began in earnest. Without it, his performance on the trail might suffer.

For the next ten days, the Obamas lolled about on a twenty-nine-acre farm turned fortified compound in Chilmark—the humbler digs in Oak Bluffs where they’d once stayed were a distant memory. Obama managed to squeeze in a scooch of politicking, masked as socializing: a reception at the home of an old Harvard Law School professor of his, Charles Ogletree, which included prominent African American progressives, such as Spike Lee; another at the estate of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, where the crowd was lousy with corporate chieftains. (It’ll be good for you to have Brian embrace you publicly, Jarrett told him.)

Obama returned to the White House raring to go, ready to turn his public focus to jobs, the topic that had eluded him for so long. Before decamping for the Vineyard, he had asked Gene Sperling, head of the National Economic Council, to put together a jobs bill for introduction to Congress in September. The economy had gained 117,000 jobs in July. The consensus forecast for August was a measly 68,000, though Obama was hoping, as he did every month, that the jobs report would surprise him.

The latest tabulation arrived on Thursday, September 1, in the hands of Sperling, who walked into the Oval Office bearing a copy for Obama. The president was standing in front of his desk, Plouffe hovering nearby.

Obama could see from Sperling’s expression that he was not bearing glad tidings.

What’s the number? Obama asked.

“Zero,” Sperling said.

“What do you mean, zero?”

“Zero,” Sperling repeated.

“You mean
exactly
zero?”

“Yes.”

“You mean if I take that piece of paper from you, there will actually be a
zero on it?” Obama pressed. In a $16 trillion economy with more than 130 million jobs, it seemed impossible.

“Zero.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Obama asked.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Sperling said.

No one could believe it. Even a negative number would have been better in a way—more explicable, less hauntingly symbolic. The Obama economy: a big fat goose egg.
You couldn’t make it up,
thought Plouffe.