The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  “Then, half an hour later, the phone rings again,” Wright went on. “It’s Barack. And he said, ‘Rev, Rolling Stone’s gotten ahold of one of your sermons, and they’ve already given it out to the Hillary people, and it’s a big mess. And, you know, you can be over the top at times, and David thinks it’s best that you don’t do the invocation tomorrow. You’re gonna become the media focus and all the attention will be deflected away from my announcing my candidacy. So we’re asking that you don’t do that. But I have two other requests to make of you.’ And I said, ‘What are those?’ He said, ‘Number one, I really want you to be here [in Springfield] and I want you to come and pray privately with Michelle, the kids, and me. Number two, I want my church represented, because my church means a lot to me, so I want Pastor [Otis] Moss [Wright’s chosen successor at Trinity United Church of Christ] to do the invocation.’ I said, ‘Well, okay, let me give you his cell phone number.’

  “After Barack hung up, I called Otis and said, ‘Man, I just gave your private cell number to Senator Obama, because Rolling Stone got ahold of some sermon that they’re gonna make a big issue out of, and Barack doesn’t want me in front of the public eye. Actually, it’s David Axelrod who doesn’t want me in front of the cameras. But Barack wants his church to be represented, and he’s gonna call you and ask you to come for the invocation.’ And Otis said, ‘Wait a minute! Eric Whitaker has already called me.’”

  Dr. Eric Whitaker, the associate dean and vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center, was a member of Obama’s tight-knit circle of friends. While Whitaker was Illinois health chief, he got caught up in a scandal involving the political fixer Tony Rezko, who was subsequently sent to jail. Whitaker, who was never formally charged with any wrongdoing, traveled with Obama on his campaign plane, played basketball with him, and—unbeknownst to the press corps—secretly handled some of Obama’s stickiest personal problems. It was only natural that Obama would turn to Whitaker, a member of Trinity United Church of Christ, to deal with their irascible minister.

  “Otis said Eric Whitaker had already called him and tried to persuade him to go to Springfield and deliver the invocation,” Wright told me. “Otis was very upset. ‘Reverend,’ he said, ‘I feel I’m being used. They’re trying to drive a wedge between us and I’m not gonna do that unless you give me a direct order. I’m not going down to Springfield. You’ve been his pastor. I just got here. He doesn’t even know me. I’m not gonna do that.’” (In the end, Otis Moss relented and delivered the invocation.)

  In the week that followed, Father Michael Pfleger, the bomb-throwing pastor of Saint Sabina’s Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s South Side, came to Wright’s defense and publicly attacked Eric Whitaker from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ.1

  Obama called Wright to complain. “Do you know what it’s like being attacked by my own church?” he told Wright and his daughter, Jeri, who was also on the phone.

  “Why are your people disrespecting my Daddy who’s the pastor of that church?” Jeri Wright shot back. “You called Daddy and asked him would it be all right if Otis gave the invocation, but Eric Whitaker had already made the invitation.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Obama said.

  “Well, you need to talk to Eric,” Jeri said.

  David Remnick captured the bitter atmosphere created by this blowup in his book The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. “And so... poisonous seeds had been planted,” Remnick wrote. “[T]he Rolling Stone article, one would have guessed, would surely inspire a footrace among media outlets and opposition researchers to comb through all of Wright’s sermons of the past thirty-five years....”

  David Remnick’s guess turned out to be wrong: media outlets did not engage in a race to follow up on the explosive Jeremiah Wright story. For more than a year, the media ignored the story. Liberal journalists didn’t want to rock the boat or do anything to stand in the way of Barack Obama’s becoming America’s first black president. One could only imagine how these journalists would have behaved if the shoe had been on the other foot and the liberals’ bugaboo, President George W. Bush, had sat for twenty years in a white-supremacist church and listened to antiblack rants.

  “Never in my memory were so many journalists so intent on effecting [liberal] change as they were during the campaign of 2008,” wrote Bernard Goldberg in his bestselling book, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. “Sure,” Goldberg continued,mainstream journalists always root for the Democrat. But this time it was different. This time journalists were not satisfied merely being partisan witnesses to history. This time they wanted to be real players and determine the outcome. This time they were on a mission—a noble, historic mission, as far as they were concerned. In fact, I could not remember a time when so many supposedly objective reporters had acted so blatantly as full-fledged advocates for one side—and without even a hint of embarrassment.

  Then, on March 13, 2008, during the height of the primary battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent of ABC News, broke the media’s gentlemen’s agreement and broadcast videotapes of Wright’s sermons.

  “I was surprised that no one else had picked up on the Jeremiah Wright story and pursued the videotapes,” Ross said in an interview for this book. “I assumed that the Clinton people would have been after the tapes. But they weren’t; they were pushing the Tony Rezko scandal with the media. And not everybody at ABC News was thrilled that I ran with the story. People who liked Obama were not happy with me. In fact, my story ran on Good Morning America but was never picked up by World News Tonight.”

  In one particularly damaging sermon broadcast by ABC, Wright fulminated against the treatment of African-Americans: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes the three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No! No! NO! Not God bless America—Goddamn America! ” In another sermon, which Wright delivered on the Sunday after the September 11 terrorist attacks, he charged that al Qaeda’s assaults were the result of America’s imperialist foreign policy. “We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards! America’s chickens... are coming home... to roost.”

  “Man, the media ate me alive,” Wright told me when we met in his office at the Kwame Nkrumah Academy. “After the media went ballistic on me, I received an email offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election.”

  “Who sent the email?” I asked Wright.

  “It was from one of Barack’s closest friends.”

  “Who?”

  He named him.

  “He offered you money?”

  “Not directly,” Wright said. “He sent the offer to one of the members of the church, who sent it to me.”

  “How much money did he offer you?”

  “One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Wright said.

  “What did Obama do?”

  “He sent me a text wishing me happy Easter, which fell that year on March 23—ten days after the ABC News broadcast. And he sent Joshua Dubois, the director of his religious outreach program, to see me. And when Dubois came to Chicago, he didn’t know Adam’s house cat from Ockham’s razor. He spent all day with me trying to figure out what we were going to do next.”

  “Did Obama himself ever make an effort to see you?”

  “Yes,” Wright said. “Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue, right off 95th St
reet, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere. And one of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.’ He knew I had some speaking engagements lined up, and he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak at the NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner and not do the National Press Club appearance. It’s gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.’”

  “And what did you say?” I asked.

  “I said, ‘I don’t see it that way. And anyway, how am I supposed to support my family? I have a daughter and granddaughter in college, whose tuitions I pay. I’ve got to earn money.’ And he said, ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t speak in public. The press is gonna eat you alive.’”

  “How did you two leave each other that day in your living room?” I asked.

  “Barack said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t see it the way I do. Do you know what your problem is?’ And I said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ And he said, ‘You have to tell the truth.’ I said, ‘That’s a good problem to have. That’s a good problem for all preachers to have. That’s why I could never be a politician.’ And he said, ‘It’s going to get worse if you go out there and speak. It’s really going to get worse.’

  “And he was so right.”

  PART II

  AMATEUR HOUR AT THE WHITE HOUSE

  “If I win [the presidency], what advice can you

  guys give me” ... Obama queried. [Former White

  House chief of staff] Erskine Bowles cut right

  to the chase. “Leave your friends at home, ” he

  said. “They just create problems when you get

  to Washington. ”[Valerie] Jarrett and [David]

  Axelrod looked on, dumbfounded.

  —Ron Suskind, Confidence Men

  CHAPTER 6

  DRINKING THE OBAMA KOOL-AID

  That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

  —Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson

  On the evening of Tuesday, June 30, 2009, Barack Obama invited nine like-minded liberal historians to have dinner with him in the Family Quarters of the White House. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered the invitations to each historian with a word of caution: the dinner was to remain private and off the record.

  All nine eagerly accepted the invitation, and at the appointed hour they gathered for drinks and hors d’oeuvres in a room decorated with African art, which Barack and Michelle Obama had brought with them to the White House from their home in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. After a while, an usher announced that dinner was being served, and the president led the historians into the dining room, where they hunted for their place cards around a long oval table. The president sat in the middle on one side of the table. Two of his aides—Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, the president’s powerful behind-the-scenes senior adviser—had been invited to attend, rounding out the number of diners to twelve.

  At the time of this dinner, Barack Obama was still enjoying a honeymoon period with the American people. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Not surprisingly, he was in an expansive mood as he tucked into his lamb chops and went around the table questioning each historian by name—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, David Brinkley, H. W. Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack, and Gary Wills.

  During the presidential campaign, most of the evening’s dinner guests had dropped any pretense at historical objectivity. Upon first meeting candidate Obama, Doris Kearns Goodwin (the author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln ) felt she was “in the presence of someone with a really spacious intellect.” And Michael Beschloss (Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989) described Obama as “probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” which appeared to put Thomas Jefferson in his place. Like their liberal counterparts in academia, the media, the mainstream churches, and the entertainment industry, the historians had drunk deeply of the Obama Kool-Aid.

  Judging from Obama’s questions, one subject was foremost in his mind: how he could become a “transformational” president and change the historic trajectory of America’s domestic and foreign policy. Despite his woeful lack of experience, he believed he could pull off this formidable feat. In fact, shortly after he won the presidential election, but before he took office, he had confided to David Axelrod, his chief political strategist: “The weird thing is, I know I can do this job. I like dealing with complicated issues. I’m happy to make decisions. I’m looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be an easier adjustment for me than the campaign. Much easier.”

  Tonight, in front of nine prominent American historians, Obama wasn’t shy about flaunting his famous self-confidence. He intended to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. He would open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. He’d pass legislation in Washington to revolutionize the country’s healthcare system and energy policy. And he’d inject the regulatory hand of the federal government into the American economy in an effort to create “a more just and equitable society.”

  When several of the historians brought up the difficulties that Lyndon Johnson had faced trying to wage a foreign war while implementing an ambitious domestic agenda, Obama grew testy. He knew better. He could prevail by the force of his personality. He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Iraq, and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world.

  It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of narcissistic grandiosity from a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of seven undistinguished years in the Illinois Senate, two mostly absent years in the United States Senate, and five months and ten days in the White House. Unintentionally, Obama revealed the characteristics that made him totally unsuited for the presidency and that would doom him to failure: his extreme haughtiness and excessive pride; his ideological bent as a far-left corporatist; and his astounding amateurism.

  These characteristics had already set the pattern of his presidency. He conducted his own foreign policy more than any previous president, including Richard Nixon. He made all the decisions, because he believed that only he understood the issues. He spent his evenings writing decision papers on foreign affairs when, instead, he should have delegated that chore to experts and devoted his time to befriending members of Congress in order to get his bills passed. He still loved making speeches to large, adoring crowds, but he complained to foreign leaders on the QT that he had to waste precious hours talking with “congressmen from Palookaville.”

  In meetings with his Cabinet and national security team, he acted as though he was the smartest person in the room, which didn’t encourage people to speak their minds. He rarely bothered to pick up the phone and seek the advice of outside experts, and he never called the people who had brought him to the dance—those who backed his presidential bid with their money, time, and organizational skills. The Kennedys didn’t hear from him. Oprah Winfrey didn’t hear from him. Wealthy Jewish donors in Chicago, who had helped fund his 2008 campaign, didn’t hear from him. The “First-Day People”—African-American leaders in Chicago who had paved the way for his political ascent—never heard from him, either.

  The senior people in his administration proved to be just as inexperienced and inept as Obama when it came to the business of running the government. Members of his inner circle—David Axelrod, campaign manager David Plouffe, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and éminence grise Valerie Jarrett—had proven their mettle in the dark arts of political campaigning, but they had no serious experience in dealing with public policy issues. If they could be said to have any policy exposure at all, it w
as their ideological enthusiasms for the Left.

  What’s more, the members of Obama’s inner circle didn’t treat him as the most important politician in America, which he was by virtue of occupying the Oval Office. After all, politician was a dirty word in Obama World. Instead, they treated Obama as though he was a movie star or the heavyweight champion of the world, a political Muhammad Ali who never tired of hearing that he was the greatest. “He is the living, breathing apotheosis of the American melting pot,” enthused David Axelrod, who privately coined a nickname for his boss: “Black Jesus.”

  The one discordant note in this chorus of hosannas came from Obama’s hard-as-nails chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a professional pol who in years to come would privately confess, “I whipped ass up and down, front room and back room, and I got sick and tired of the White House. I got sick of fighting and losing in the White House, and I was eager to leave.”

  Over the two-hour dinner, Obama and the historians discussed several past presidents. It wasn’t clear from Obama’s responses which of those presidents he identified with. At one point, Obama seemed to channel the charismatic John F. Kennedy. At another moment, he extolled the virtues of the “transformative” Ronald Reagan. Then again, it was the saintly Lincoln... or the New Deal’s “Happy Warrior,” Franklin Roosevelt ... or ...

  In the words of Victor Davis Hanson, who, like other conservative historians, had not been invited to attend the dinner, the new president seemed to be looking for “a presidential identity not his own.... endlessly trying on new presidential masks.”

  Obama told the historians at the table that he had come up with a slogan for his administration. “I’m thinking of calling it ‘A New Foundation,’” he said.