by Edward Klein
Democratic political strategist James Carville, a native of Louisiana, lambasted Obama for the “political stupidity” of his response to the calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “The president doesn’t get down here in the middle of this,” Carville said. “ ... I have no idea of why they [the White House] didn’t seize this thing. I have no idea of why their attitude was so hands off here. The president of the United States could’ve come down here, he could’ve been involved with the families of these eleven people [who died in the explosion]. He could’ve demanded a plan in anticipation of this.... It just looks like he’s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this.”
Obama’s view of himself as a superior human being who isn’t bound by the same rules as other politicians has frequently gotten him into hot water. While campaigning for the presidency, he refused to wear a flag pin, as though he agreed with Samuel Johnson’s supercilious remark that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” When his missing flag pin became an issue in the campaign, he started wearing one. After he won the White House, his failure to attend church services resurrected old questions about whether he was a Christian. To tamp down the criticism, he started showing up at church services near the White House, making sure there were photographers on hand to record his pious devotions.
But to a remarkable degree, Obama has compounded his amateurism by failing to learn from his mistakes and correct them. Case in point: When the president campaigned for the 2009 stimulus package at the start of his presidency, he promised that large chunks of the money would go to “shovel-ready projects.” Two years after he signed the $800 billion package, a shamefaced Obama acknowledged, “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” Yet, though the initial “stimulus” was a flop, that didn’t stop Obama from going back to Congress to ask for more money: a budget-busting $450 billion.
Another case in point: In September 2011, Obama decided he wanted to address a joint session of Congress in order to lay out his agenda on job creation. Trouble was, no one in the clueless Obama White House realized that Congress wasn’t in session, and that the president’s choice of date fell on the same evening as a planned Republican presidential debate. The president was forced to accept another date and time, which turned out to be just as embarrassing, because it conflicted with the regular NFL season opener between the Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints.
Obama’s most glaring political error was to make a massive overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system his first priority instead of concentrating, as he should have, on the economy and jobs. “Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support,” noted Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. “He opposed the public option as a needless distraction. The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.”2
What’s more, even after Obama got his signature healthcare bill passed by Congress, he never found a way to sell it to the American people. It was as if he was more interested in having a signing ceremony than in what he signed.
“To me,” said a former staff director of a major Senate committee, “that signals inexperience, because as president Obama has not managed to get any benefit from the major piece of legislation that he’s passed. It’s almost as though he doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s not out there touting these things because he’s not sure how he really feels about them. From my experience dealing with the White House, I’m not convinced that Obama’s wedded to these programs. Leaving aside the campaign rhetoric—give hope a chance and all that stuff—what will Obama bleed for? What will he go to the mat for? What does this guy believe in his core?”
At the beginning of 2012, just as the limping American economy started to show some signs of movement and Obama’s poll ratings began to stir, he stepped in deep doo-doo again. This time, he announced that all religious-affiliated institutions would be required to pay for insurance that covered birth control, including contraception. As could have been predicted, there was an instant backlash from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as well as from both conservative- and liberal-leaning Catholics. Even Obama’s true believers found it hard to comprehend the president’s amateurish decision, which stomped on the religious liberty clause of the First Amendment. Hardball’s liberal chatterbox, Chris Matthews, called it “frightening,” and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, an ardent Obama loyalist, wrote that Obama had “utterly botched” the issue.
That Obama could so completely misread the public mood was nothing new. It recalled the time during the 2008 presidential campaign when he criticized white working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest for clinging to “guns or religion.” After Hillary Clinton jumped on him for those comments, saying, “The people of faith I know don’t cling to religion because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich,” Obama was forced to apologize and eat crow.
And that’s exactly what happened with his regulation requiring religious-affiliated institutions to provide birth control insurance. In the midst of the firestorm of criticism, he called a press conference and, looking glum and sounding resentful, announced a policy to quiet his critics. Under the new policy, health insurance companies—not religious employers—would pay for contraceptives.
To many conservatives, it was a distinction without a difference. Obama had only made matters worse. “Insurance companies won’t be making donations,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal. “Drug makers will still charge for the pill. Doctors will still bill for reproductive treatment. The reality, as with all mandated benefits, is that these costs will be borne eventually via higher premiums. The balloon may be squeezed differently over time, and insurers may amortize the cost differently over time, but eventually prices will find an equilibrium. Notre Dame will still pay for birth control, even if it is nominally carried by a third-party corporation.”
CHAPTER 8
CLARK KENT
With all of Obama’s rhetorical brilliance and flash, he went into the phone booth as Superman and came out as Clark Kent.
—Presidential historian Fred I. Greenstein
To put all this in perspective, I asked former Secretary of State
James Baker, who served as chief of staff in President Reagan’s first administration, how he would rate Obama’s performance.
“The conditions under which Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan came to power are startlingly similar,” said Baker, who is widely regarded as the most effective chief of staff in modern presidential history. “Both inherited a terrible economic situation. But Reagan set about focusing with laser-like intensity on economic issues. [Then Secretary of State] Al Haig wanted to take some action in the Caribbean while we were trying to focus entirely on the economy, and we shut him down. By contrast, Obama didn’t focus on the big problem of the economy. He didn’t even draft his own stimulus package; he subcontracted it out to the Democrats in Congress.
“Immediately after the drubbing Obama took in the 2010 midterm elections,” Baker continued, “I was asked to come to Washington to meet with him. His secretary called my office to set up a time. Then I got a call from [chief of staff] Bill Daley. ‘I understand you’re going to meet with the president,’ Daley told me. ‘Would you stop by and meet with me afterward?’ Then I got another call, this one from [national security adviser] Tom Donilon, who said the same thing as Daley. In the Reagan administration, we would never have scheduled a meeting with the president that the chief of staff and the national security adviser found out about later.
“All this comes from the fact that, before he became president, Obama never had the responsibility for running anything. He’s a policy wonk; he’s very smart, very knowledgeable. But he was a community organizer, and a community org
anizer doesn’t have the lines of authority that you have when you’re running an organization.”
Obama’s handling of the 2009 fiscal crisis showed an alarming lack of experience and a complete ignorance of how Washington works. For instance, during the presidential race, Obama campaigned against earmarks—the notorious legislative gimmick used by congressmen and senators to allocate funds for favorite projects in their home districts. Yet, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent an omnibus spending bill with $8 billion worth of earmarks to the White House, Obama naïvely believed Pelosi and Reid, who told him that that was the only way he could get his $800 billion stimulus bill passed. Obama signed the omnibus spending bill with all the earmarks intact, signaling that the barons of Capitol Hill could roll the amateurish president.
For a long time, some people—especially those in the liberal mainstream media—thought that Obama would somehow make up for what he lacked in experience with his oratorical skills. Liberals considered Obama to be a great communicator—right up there with such masters as Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
Not anymore.
Most of his recent speeches have fallen flat. Americans have tuned him out. His 2012 State of the Union address was seen by 37.8 million television viewers—down from the 52.3 million people who tuned in to his first address to Congress in 2009. As
Maureen Dowd noted in the New York Times: “[Bill] Clinton will often forcefully—and feelingly—frame the argument for Obama policies... in a way that Obama himself, once hailed as a master communicator, can’t seem to muster.”
Other presidents have entered the White House as amateurs. John F. Kennedy immediately comes to mind. JFK stumbled badly during his first year in office; the Bay of Pigs calamity was only the most notable of his many mistakes. But he grew in the job and was well on his way to becoming an effective chief executive when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas.
So why hasn’t Obama grown in the job?
There are several answers to that question, which we will explore in depth in the pages that follow. But for now, the short answer is:
Barack Obama has the wrong temperament for the presidency.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said about Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second class mind, but a first class temperament.” The opposite is true of Barack Obama, who for all his academic credentials is not cut out by temperament to be the leader of the free world.
By all accounts, Obama was elected to a job for which he has little relish. He doesn’t find joy in being president. Like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, he is an introvert who prefers his own company to that of others. The Times’ Peter Baker puts it this way: Obama is “someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him.... While [Bill] Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight groups of advisers.”
“I’ve been in a lot of meetings with him on foreign policy,” a former State Department official told me. “While I was in the room, he’d get phone calls from heads of state, and more than once I heard him say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve got to meet with all these congressmen from Podunk city to get my bills passed.’ And when the meeting with him was over, it was over—no lingering, no schmoozing on the way out. There was no clinging to personal relationship like with Bill Clinton.”
In his study of the presidency, Hail to the Chief, historian Robert Dallek lists five qualities that have been constants in the men who have most effectively fulfilled the oath of office: 1) vision; 2) political pragmatism; 3) national consensus; 4) personal connection with the people; and 5) credibility.
Dallek places the greatest emphasis on numbers 4 and 5. “The best of our presidents,” he writes, “have always recognized that leadership required a personal connection between the president and the people, or that the power of the Oval Office rests to a great degree on the affection of the country for its chief. From Washington to Lincoln to the two Roosevelts and, most recently, Reagan, the force of presidential personality has been a major factor in determining a president’s fate.... [P]residents who are unable to earn the trust of their countrymen are governors who cannot govern and lead.”
Barack Obama has been unable to earn the trust of his countrymen because he is, at heart, predominantly concerned with his own thoughts and ideas and feelings rather than the thoughts and ideas and feelings of the people he was elected to serve. He believes that he was chosen as president to save a wayward America from its dependency on free-market capitalism. This has led him to push clumsy and unpopular far-left policies—universal healthcare, Wall Street bailouts, cap and trade, green jobs, and renewable energy—at the expense of rational policies aimed at putting America back to work.
CHAPTER 9
GROUND ZERO
She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context.
—Michelle Obama, speaking about Valerie Jarrett
“If it wasn’t for Valerie Jarrett, there’d be no Barack Obama to complain about.”
The speaker was a member of the White House press corps who has covered the Obamas, husband and wife, since their early days on the political scene. My colleague and I were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Washington, eating chimichangas and exchanging notes about Valerie Jarrett, or VJ as she is known in the West Wing.
Jarrett is ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s first friend and consigliere. Once asked by a reporter if he ran every decision by Jarrett, Obama answered without hesitation: “Yep. Absolutely.” Her official title is a mouthful—senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement—but it doesn’t begin to do justice to her unrivaled status in the White House. Nor does it explain her responsibility, which has gone largely unnoticed by the public, for the incompetence and amateurism that have been the hallmark of Obama’s time in office.
Jarrett occupies a piece of prime real estate in the White House—Karl Rove and Hillary Clinton’s old office on the second floor of the West Wing. She has an all-access pass to meetings she chooses to attend: one day she’ll show up at a National Security Council meeting; the next day, she’ll sit in on a briefing on the federal budget. When Oval Office meetings break up, Jarrett is often the one who stays behind to talk privately with the president.
At 6:30 on many evenings, Jarrett can be seen slipping upstairs to the Family Quarters, where she dines with the Obamas and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. She is the only member of the White House staff who goes on vacations with the Obamas. She is also one of the few people in Washington besides Michelle Obama and Barack’s live-in mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, who is on such familiar terms with the president that she can call him by his first name to his face.
“Valerie is the quintessential insider,” one of her longtime friends told me. “She functions as the eyes, ears, and nose of the president and first lady. She tells them who’s saying what about who, who’s loyal and who’s not. She advises them about who they should see when they visit a city or a foreign country. She determines who gets invited to the White House and who is left out in the cold.”
Jarrett is supposed to be the point person for the administration’s efforts to keep in touch with the outside world—everyone from senators to foreign dignitaries. Obama sent her to talk to the Dalai Lama before he visited China. However, if you talk to Democratic donors, businessmen, congressmen, and African-Americans, as I have, it turns out that Jarrett is far better at giving people the cold shoulder than at welcoming them with open arms. Like Obama, she has a fundamental lack of respect for businessmen. In a typical blunder that sent shudders through the business community, she dismissed Tom Donohue, the highly regarded CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as irrelevant, say
ing that she preferred to deal with “real” industry executives.
“I have always thought Valerie was a liability,” a prominent donor told the Washington Post. “I’ve talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.”
Behind its “no-drama” façade, the Obama administration has been rocked by major personnel shakeups (both the president and the first lady have gone through several chiefs of staff), but Jarrett is still the indispensable person in the mix. When speculation arose that Jarrett might want the Senate seat vacated by Obama when he became president, Michelle put the kibosh on the idea.
“I told her,” said Michelle, “that I wanted her [in the White House], in that position, that it would give me a sense of comfort to know that [my husband] had somebody like her there by his side.”
The president has made it abundantly clear that he feels the same way. As he told the New York Times: “Valerie is one of my oldest friends. Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she’s like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely.”
Trying to figure out Valerie Jarrett’s mysterious hold on the president and first lady is a favorite guessing game in the parlors and dining rooms of Washington.
In part, her influence stems from the fact that Jarrett is the president’s trusted watchdog. She protects the vainglorious and thin-skinned Obama from critics and complainers who might deflate his ego. No one gets past Jarrett and sees the president if they have a grievance, or a chip on their shoulder, or even an incompatible point of view. That goes for such high-profile supporters as Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy, who have been largely frozen out of the White House because Jarrett believes they would use the opportunity of a meeting with Obama to push their own competing political agendas.