Double Down: Game Change 2012 (8 page)

Obama took the paper from Sperling and stared at it a good long time, focusing and refocusing his eyes, gazing at it from various angles.

“I’m looking at this all kinds of different ways, but it’s zero,” Obama said. “How can it be zero?”

3

OBAMA’S LIST

F
OUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION
was the much larger figure Obama faced four days later. Once again, the setting was the Oval Office. Once again, the number was presented by Sperling, this time as the proposed price tag on the jobs bill Obama would introduce later that week. The legislation and the speech to launch it were important to the president. They would likely be his last chance to accomplish anything substantial before electioneering began in earnest, and thus his last opportunity to boost the economy. They would also represent a shift to a new posture. For the past three months, as he dickered endlessly with congressional leaders, Obama often felt as though he was “wrestling with pigs,” as he put it to one aide. Now he wanted to soar above the trough. But gaining altitude would prove much harder than he could possibly have imagined.

The measure, dubbed the American Jobs Act, was a Sperling special. Enamored of his work in the way that Dean Martin enjoyed martinis, Sperling had lived at the nexus of budget policy and politics most of his adult life, including eight full years in the Clinton White House. All summer, he had been cobbling together proposals to shrink the jobless rate, presenting some at the Fort McNair conclave, back in June. But after the debt-ceiling imbroglio concluded, Obama threw Sperling into his favorite mode:
overdrive. Tell me what you think is the best economic policy, the president instructed him. Don’t self-edit based on political feasibility. Be big, brash, and bold. And get it done in a hurry.

Working around the clock, Sperling and his team drew up a long, expensive wish list. Extending the payroll tax cut: $175 billion. Investing in transportation infrastructure: $50 billion. Rehiring teachers and first responders: $35 billion. And so on. Sperling’s goal was a package that, if implemented, would create 1.5 million jobs and push GDP growth up by two points. He had thought $375 billion would do the trick—until the August employment report delivered that awful aught, leading many economists to predict that a double-dip recession was in the offing. So now Sperling stood before Obama and informed him that an even larger payload was required: $447 billion, to be precise. Obama signed off without blinking.

Three nights later, September 8, the president stood in the well of the House and declaimed, “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away.” Fifteen more times, he made a nearly identical plea: “pass this bill,” “pass this jobs bill,” “pass this jobs bill right away.” Leaning in on the payroll tax cut extension, Obama said, with a pinch of sarcasm, “I know some of you have sworn oaths never to raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes.”

There was nothing eloquent about the speech, but eloquence wasn’t his aim. Since the midterms, Obama had played the inside game, spending countless hours in quiet rooms, laboring to find a middle ground where none existed. Just as the Beltway panjandrums advised, he had courted Boehner the old-fashioned way—with golf, wine, and cigarettes, away from the cameras. And it got him worse than nowhere. He had positioned himself as the capital’s reasonable grown-up. But reasonableness in the face of reckless unreasonableness looked a lot like impotence. From now on, there would be no more pointless reaching out, no more parleys in hushed compartments. Instead he would take his case to the country, galvanize public opinion. If it compelled the Republicans to act, fantastic; if not, the contrast would be clear. And though people would say he was being political, campaigning rather than governing, at least no one would call him a doormat.

And, indeed, they didn’t. From the hog pen on the Hill, Boehner and
House majority leader Eric Cantor emitted conciliatory squeaks, while congressional Democrats oinked approval. The liberal blogosphere and cableverse squealed with delight, and even Krugman was pleased. The next day, Obama hit the trail to sell the plan in the swing state of Virginia (in Cantor’s district, no less). A few days after that, he was in Ohio (not far from Boehner’s domain). The campaign to rehabilitate Obama’s public image was under way, but it would be no easy thing. His approval rating didn’t budge, and would flatline for months to come. The weakness meme was like a virus: nasty, infectious, and hard to shake. And it would keep on cropping up in new quarters all the time, including the most quaint. In the era of the infinite elastic news cycle, of Twitter and blog posts, Obama’s nemesis was the book—several books, in fact—that threatened the White House’s no-drama image.

•   •   •

T
HIS IS LARGELY A PIECE
of fiction,” Obama griped to Plouffe, referring to a new book by journalist Ron Suskind.
Confidence Men
chronicled the travails of Obama and his economic team in their first two years, painting a withering portrait of the president: as a clever, well-meaning neophyte, a feckless, passive ditherer undermined and overridden by his bumptious advisers at every turn. “I went through that whole book,” Obama said. “I don’t recognize myself.”

Endowed with acute writerly sensibilities and sensitivities, Obama could be prickly when it came to books about him. And that September, the West Wing was awash in authors. Among the scribes were A-listers such as David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Clinton biographer who had spent two years digging deep into Obama’s personal history, and Bob Woodward, who had already published one Obama book and was eyeing another. Political books sometimes seemed the vestigial tails of mass media, but when their authors were credible, they retained a distinct power: to create headlines, drive news coverage, influence elite perceptions. Thus far, the president’s treatment by mainstream authors had been (at best) beatifying or (at worst) benign.

Confidence Men
broke that string of good luck. Beyond its judgments about the president, the book was teeming with tittle-tattle. Summers was
quoted as telling former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag, “We’re really home alone . . . There’s no adult in charge.” Obama’s communications adviser Anita Dunn was quoted as saying that his White House “fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” Making matters worse was the degree of access granted Suskind. Everyone had talked to him, including the president, who sat with the author for forty minutes in the Oval Office.

Obama’s participation in the book did little to mitigate his anger about it. Like every president before him, he complained ceaselessly about leaks and gum-flapping to the press. His impulse to keep a tight lid on information—from national-security secrets to White House scuttlebutt—was intense and omnidirectional. Breaches of confidentiality, airing of soiled linen, and settling of scores: all were present in Suskind’s pages, and all of it drove Obama crazy.

Particularly irritating were Dunn’s remarks about sexism in the White House. “I just don’t understand why someone would say something like that,” Obama sputtered. When he was told that Suskind had truncated Dunn’s quote in a way that made it more damaging, he snapped, “Why is she even talking about this?”

To Dunn, now serving as an outside consultant to the White House, and to the rest of the communications team,
Confidence Men
demonstrated that they had lost control of the process by which they handled book authors. The access given to Suskind enhanced his credibility. But before the book’s publication, no one knew precisely to whom he had talked, what they told him, or what he had in his pocket—so they were all blindsided.

And the same thing was about to happen again, with a book on the first couple by Jodi Kantor of
The New York Times,
due to hit shelves in January. Kantor had covered the Obamas since 2007, conducting a rare joint interview with the couple about their marriage in 2009, which led to a magazine article that in turn led to her book contract. It was anyone’s guess how much time Kantor had logged with Jarrett and other officials, especially in the East Wing, and with folks in Chicago. Really, the Obamans only knew one thing: Kantor had nailed down a specific anecdote they had labored to suppress for more than a year.

The story involved Jarrett, Gibbs, and, indirectly, Mrs. Obama. It took
place in September 2010, in the aftermath of a claim in yet another book—one published in France, in which the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, allegedly said that Michelle had told her that living in the White House was “hell.” When the story hit the wires, Gibbs scrambled, eliciting an official denial from the Élysée Palace by 11:00 a.m. But in a meeting of senior advisers the next morning, Jarrett contended that Michelle thought his efforts had been insufficiently vigilant. Gibbs, whose relationship with Jarrett was poisonous by then and who suspected she was representing her own views rather than Michelle’s, blew a gasket.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” he screamed. When Jarrett replied tartly that the first lady would disapprove of his language, Gibbs exclaimed, “Then fuck her, too!” and stalked out of the room.

The rest of the senior staff sat in silence, many sharing the same thought: that Gibbs, whose hold on his job was already tenuous, had just sealed his doom.

Emanuel said softly, Robert’s our friend. He lost his temper. This should never leave this room.

And yet it slipped out. Kantor had the story, in all its gory detail, from multiple sources. Worse still, when she got Gibbs on the phone, he fulminated even further, calling Jarrett a liar and trashing her violently, all of it on the record. Jarrett got wind of what he’d told Kantor and went ballistic, demanding that Gibbs, now serving as a consultant to the reelection campaign, somehow retract what he had said. Axelrod and Rouse, desperate to save their friend from being consigned to purdah, urged him to try to walk back his comments. But Gibbs was a prideful man—no dice.

Obamaworld feared the Kantor book would lay bare the breadth and depth of the White House’s dysfunction; reveal the contentiousness around Jarrett, the touchiest of Obama’s top advisers; and even scuff up the shimmering veneer on Michelle’s public image—which the West Wing was astonished hadn’t happened already, even as the East Wing scurried to safeguard it.

For all her popularity with the public, FLOTUS had received mixed reviews in official Washington. On Capitol Hill, she was seen as standoffish, raising hackles among congressional better halves. She rarely invited them, even the Democrats, to the White House, and when she did, she treated
the occasions as perfunctory. Attending the annual Congressional Club spouses’ luncheon, where she was the guest of honor, she spoke briefly and then split, inspiring unfavorable comparisons with Laura Bush, who had always brightly worked the tables. Michelle’s upmarket tastes and fashionista tendencies sparked concerns in the White House, too. A few stories about her designer clothes had turned up in the press, but delivered only glancing blows. What if Kantor had a trove of tales?

Around that time, Michelle made a surprise visit to a local Target, where an AP photographer got some apparently candid snaps of her dressed down and pushing her own shopping cart. The official line was that the pictures were happenstance, but more than a few of Obama’s West Wing advisers wondered if the East Wing was trying to get ahead of any negative stories on the horizon. Daley considered making inquiries but then decided to let it go.
The less you know about this, the better off you are,
he thought.

Obama didn’t know much, either. Not about the Kantor book, not yet. But the Suskind experience had him steaming. Even after the post-midterm reshuffle, his White House staff remained fractious, replete with infighting and prone to smack-talking in the press. Since January, Daley had been telling Obama that another shakeup was in order, exhorting him before he took off for Martha’s Vineyard, “You have one last shot to make changes if you want” before the campaign season kicked in. On returning from vacation, Obama had given his answer: “The team is what it is.”