Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  When the midterm elections took place on November 2, Republicans gained six seats in the U.S. Senate and sixty-three in the House, seizing control of the latter chamber. In Newsweek, Eleanor Clift wrote that Barack’s problem was that “there’s too much hero worship around him” and that “if his aides weren’t so in love with him and wrapped up in the idea of him as a transformational president, they might have seen this coming.”

  Speaking with CBS’s Steve Kroft, Barack expressed regret over having signed the earmark-laden 2009 appropriations bill. “That’s an example of where I was so concerned about getting things done that I lost track of the reason I got elected, which was we were to change how business was done here.” Barack said that “in terms of setting the tone and how this town operates . . . that’s an aspect of leadership that I didn’t pay enough attention to.” In addition, passing the Affordable Care Act was “actually a little more costly than we expected, politically,” particularly one-offs like the “Cornhusker kickback,” necessary for Nebraska senator Ben Nelson’s vote, which “really hurt us politically.” Acknowledging that “part of my promise to the American people when I was elected was to maintain the kind of tone that says we can disagree without being disagreeable,” Barack admitted that “over the course of two years, there have been times where I’ve slipped on that commitment.”

  Following New Year’s, first David Axelrod and then Robert Gibbs exited the White House. Axelrod “was pushed out” in what wired-in journalist Richard Wolffe called “a wrenching expression of disaffection from the president he had fallen for,” and Wolffe purposely used the exact same words to characterize Gibbs’s departure, too. “The president broke Axe’s and Robert’s hearts,” a “member of Obama’s inner circle” told Wolffe. “Axe and Gibbs were effectively fired,” that person explained, and David Plouffe moved into Axelrod’s former office while former Time reporter Jay Carney succeeded Gibbs.

  In Chicago, unhappiness with the Obama White House was widespread. African American publisher Hermene Hartman sarcastically congratulated Emanuel on taking the first black president and making him non-black, and retiring mayor Richard Daley complained that “we’ve got a Chicago guy in Washington and he’s forgotten Chicago.” In March 2011, Hartman went public about black Chicago’s disappointment with Barack, telling Chicago Magazine’s Carol Felsenthal that Barack “has not been loyal to some of the people who were there for him from day one,” like Jim Reynolds. “Did you outgrow us, or did you forget?” Hartman asked.

  Sentiments like Hartman’s could also be found in Roseland’s modest bungalows. Barack “forgot where he came from,” longtime Reformation Lutheran custodian John Webster said, his voice full of tears. “I don’t forget people who help me,” but “he lost his soul,” and “it hurts me so bad.” On Roseland’s decrepit South Michigan Avenue shopping strip, one young woman, asked what she would tell Barack, had an easy reply: “Just take all the guns away. The guns are ridiculous.” Pastors whose churches abutted Palmer Park, across from what once had been Barack’s office at Holy Rosary, warned that the park was entirely unsafe after dark. Data showed that Chicago’s public schools were serving black students no better than they had twenty years earlier, with only one in two graduating high school. That of course helped explain why black unemployment in Chicago was 24.2 percent; in 1987 it had been 17.2. “Chicago remains the most racially segregated city in the country,” the Tribune noted, but across the South Side everyone’s uppermost fear was the “escalating violence.” Visiting Roseland, a journalist described “the barren, empty feel of the streets,” and a thirty-nine-year-old native said that “things in Roseland were pretty bad when I was growing up . . . but they are much worse today.”31

  In Washington, the president refused to embrace the proposals of a bipartisan panel he had appointed to address the United States’ burgeoning deficit. The following day, in a budget speech to which Republican lawmakers had been specially invited, Barack used what the Washington Post called “a sharp, partisan tone” to accuse Republicans of seeking to “end Medicare as we know it.” Furious House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan warned a presidential aide that “You just poisoned the well,” and dismayed congressional Republicans told the Post that “Obama’s partisan tone made no sense.” Panel cochairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson were similarly upset. Bowles called the speech harsh, and Simpson said, “I thought it was like inviting a guy to his own hanging.”

  Visiting 5046 South Greenwood for only the third time in two years, Barack discovered a Kapiolani Hospital booklet documenting his August 4, 1961, birth among his late mother’s papers. Charmed by the keepsake, Barack directed his attorneys to ask Hawaiian officials to release his long-withheld “long form” birth certificate. Five days later, in a far more consequential surprise, U.S. special operations troops confronted and killed Osama bin Laden in what promised to be the signature accomplishment of Barack’s presidency. Speaking again with Steve Kroft, Barack said the time that U.S. forces were inside bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was “the longest forty minutes of my life with the possible exception of when Sasha got meningitis . . . and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right.”

  In midsummer, in the aftermath of a golf game with Republican House Speaker John Boehner, Barack appeared to be “within a handshake” of a bipartisan “grand bargain” on deficit reduction before suddenly altering his stance. “There appeared to be a very different president in attendance” than three days earlier, a superb Washington Post “tick tock” reported, and Boehner said no, but forty-eight hours later Barack reverted to his prior position. “His message: I’ll take your last offer,” the Post wrote, but by then the deal was dead. “White House advisers conceded that the collapse of the debt talks was a disaster from a policy perspective,” the Post reported. In the wake of the debt deal collapse, one of Barack’s “closest friends” told Richard Wolffe that “I have never seen him this mad,” as Barack “cursed the media and what he saw as its gross inadequacies and failings.”

  A scathing verdict came from distinguished African American Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy. Barack’s “lists of retreats from progressive commitments is considerable,” Kennedy wrote, and “Obama’s much-vaunted pragmatism degenerates at key moments into mere expediency.” Barack’s less than persuasive fence-straddling on gay marriage “is a sad spectacle: the prevarication of a decent politician impelled by his perception of electoral realities to adopt an indecent position with which he disagrees.” There now was no question that “Obama is a professional politician first and last. For the sake of attaining and retaining power, he is willing to adopt, jettison, or manipulate positions as evolving circumstances require.”32

  In late September, after a U.S. drone strike ordered by Barack killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born al Qaeda leader in Yemen, the president met with his top aides. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine,” Barack remarked before launching into an extended self-critique, the first one any of them had ever heard him voice. Barack questioned his carefully calibrated political stances on many issues, particularly gay marriage, but chief of staff Bill Daley was worried that word of Barack’s comments would leak out. Six weeks later, just before another meeting, David Plouffe informed Barack that New York magazine’s John Heilemann knew about Barack’s earlier comments. “How could someone do this to me?” Barack asked, telling his assembled aides, “I can’t trust anybody here anymore,” as Heilemann again soon learned. Barack demanded that the guilty party apologize and stalked out. Vice President Joe Biden echoed Barack’s anger before likewise leaving. The aides all agreed that Barack’s presidency was under siege.

  In his annual round of pre-Christmas television interviews, a visibly defensive Barack insisted to CBS’s Steve Kroft that “our deficit problems are completely manageable.” Barack boastfully claimed, “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first t
wo years against any president” except perhaps Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, although he conceded that “when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do.” When ABC’s Barbara Walters asked him, “What’s the trait you most deplore in yourself?” Barack answered “laziness,” explaining that “deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me” that he attributed to “growing up in Hawaii.”

  As 2011 headed toward its close, Barack’s closest personal aide, Reggie Love, left the White House to finish his MBA at the Wharton School of Business. Reporting Love’s departure, the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor, whose forthcoming book The Obamas had White House aides worried, called Barack “a private, solitary president who allows few people to grow close to him,” but Kantor was unaware that in the wake of the Affordable Care Act’s passage, Barack had finally, after years of failure, completely given up smoking. Her book’s portrait of Barack was far from warm, and she wrote that Barack’s “self-confidence often made him lazy.” Aides believed “there was nothing spontaneous or vulnerable about the president,” and Kantor emphasized how even after three years “they could not fully read their boss.” The most notable controversy generated by The Obamas concerned a quotation that Barack’s friend Allison Davis had given Kantor, which he said was off-the-record, but she nonetheless published: “When I leave office there are only two things I want. I want a plane and I want a valet,” Barack had told Davis.

  In the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows quoted an unnamed administration official as explaining how “Obama’s extra-high intellectual capacity is simply not matched by his emotional capacity . . . he does not seem to have the ability to connect with people.” Noting how multiple tomes all detailed Barack’s “emotional distance from all but a handful of longtime friends and advisers,” Fallows described Barack as an “incrementalist operator” whose interpersonal demeanor was “cool to the point of chilly.”33

  In late January, Office of Management and Budget director Jack Lew was named chief of staff, replacing Bill Daley, whose one-year tenure Richard Wolffe termed “a walking disaster.” Both the New York Times and then the Washington Post published long stories detailing how the previous summer’s debt deal had failed, with the Times’ Jackie Calmes saying that Barack’s “partisan turn undercuts a central promise of his 2008 campaign, to rise above the rancor,” and that “Obama arguably failed to show leadership on perhaps the country’s biggest problem.”

  Barack had known since November that a forthcoming book on his parents and his own young adulthood would “out” both Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook. Author David Maraniss had learned about Alex’s private life from an old Oxy acquaintance, and at the behest of a mutual friend she spoke with Maraniss by phone, telling him that “he could not read the letters” Barack had written her in 1982–83 while giving him “a handful of quotes . . . that I didn’t think would in any way embarrass” Barack. Maraniss had also gotten Genevieve Cook on the phone, and Genevieve later explained that her “main motivation in my desire to talk to Maraniss was anger/indignation: I thought it was exclusively about having a venue to respond to Barack’s decision to conflate (and thus misrepresent) the girlfriend in NYC” in Dreams. Genevieve shared with Maraniss some excerpts from her journals, and one photo of her and Barack, but she made no mention of the letters Barack had written her.

  With Vanity Fair scheduled to release in early May an excerpt from the book featuring Alex and Genevieve, Barack’s deep fear about a vastly more explosive revelation led him to pick up an aide’s phone to do something that he had not done in over twenty years. As Sheila Jager related, “Barack called me out of the blue a few weeks ago. Of course it was a surprise,” and Barack said he was “disgusted” by Maraniss’s interest in his sexual history. “I told him that Maraniss had contacted me,” as he had another 1980s U of C anthropology student also named Sheila, “but that I had . . . cut him off. Barack seemed relieved.” Sheila was ecstatic that Barack had contacted her, for that showed “it never ended badly” and reflected “the warm feelings we still have for one another.”

  The Vanity Fair excerpt previewed the only two newsworthy nuggets in Maraniss’s book, and reviewers panned the volume’s shortcomings. “Obama does not really emerge in Maraniss’s biography,” complained Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books, and “Maraniss can’t find in Obama’s story the scene when he revealed to someone that he possessed a sense of having an extraordinary destiny.” In The New Republic, Nicholas Lemann dismissed Maraniss’s book as “raw and under-processed.” Lemann appreciated that “Obama’s childhood circumstances were more emotionally difficult than he has made them out to be,” but he found it “remarkable and unexplained” that Barack “wound up with both an unstoppable drive to power and complete self-control.”34

  On May 9, three days after Vice President Joe Biden publicly voiced his support for same-sex marriage, Barack tardily admitted that he agreed. “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts in a hastily scheduled interview. It was now all but official that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would be Barack’s Republican opponent come November, yet America’s increasingly widespread acceptance of gay equality made Barack’s long-standing political pusillanimity appear embarrassingly outdated. Among onetime supporters, expressions of profound disappointment with Barack’s presidency continued apace. “Obama must be defeated in the coming election. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States,” declared Roberto Mangabeira Unger, once Barack’s favorite teacher.

  In the African American community, Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris observed that “Obama stopped talking about racial inequality once he solidified support from black voters.” Similarly, “campaign ads highlighting Obama’s white heritage . . . constantly reminded voters of the candidate’s not-completely-black identity.” Equally bad, “instead of pressuring Obama to move on certain policies, black leaders and black voters act more as cheerleaders than players.”

  Speaking with Barack’s best-known black supporter, Michelle Obama agreed with alacrity when Oprah Winfrey asked Barack, “So you can compartmentalize?” “Oh, he’s very good at that,” Michelle immediately volunteered. Barack’s younger brother Mark believed Barack “compartmentalizes his life into the private and public spheres,” but Mark explained that Barack “is so impenetrable” that “he remains an enigma.” Chicago friends acknowledged Barack’s “deep compartmentalizing,” but to Winfrey Barack said, “I’m in constant conversation with God and that voice that is true about doing the right thing.”35

  Barack’s renomination for a second term on September 6 offered journalists and insiders an opportunity to judge his first. “He doesn’t feel he needs to thank his friends,” Valerie Jarrett admitted to Jonathan Alter, and an unnamed big donor complained to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that Jarrett herself “seemed to think she was blessing me by breathing in the same space.” Politico’s John Harris and Jonathan Martin judged Barack “a man of conventional instincts, practicing conventional politics,” and people who were disappointed failed to “understand the arc of Obama’s career before the presidency.” Barack “has presented no set of ideas that collectively represent anything that might last beyond his term,” and in addition, “Obama’s cultural impact has been virtually nil.”

  The day after Barack’s renomination, Bob Woodward’s second book on the Obama presidency appeared, with former National Economic Council director Larry Summers saying of Barack, “I don’t think anybody had a sense of his deep feelings about things. I don’t think anybody has a sense of his deep feelings about people. I don’t think people have a sense of his deep feelings around his public philosophy.” In his autobiography, the late Paul Simon had emphasized that “a strong president has to have strong convictions,” but in Summers’s eyes Barack’s fundamental probl
em was his “excessive pragmatism.”

  Speaking once again with Steve Kroft, Barack admitted that “the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted . . . I haven’t fully accomplished that. Haven’t even come close in some cases . . . If you ask me what’s my biggest disappointment, it’s that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.” Unlike Winfrey, Kroft posed some challenging questions. “The national debt has gone up 60 percent in the four years that you’ve been in office,” he accurately told Barack, who responded that that was 90 percent George W. Bush’s fault. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I did,” Barack declared.

  In New York in mid-September, Barack attended a $40,000-per-person fund-raiser hosted by hip-hop stars Jay Z and Beyoncé that raised $4 million for his campaign. “Let me just begin by saying to Jay and Bey, thank you so much for your friendship,” Barack told the one hundred guests as they imbibed “$800-per-bottle Armand de Brignac champagne.” The White House declined to schedule a New York meeting with visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “telling Netanyahu that Obama was too busy to see him,” USA Today reported. In response, Chicago’s Susan Crown, once a major Obama donor, switched her support to Mitt Romney. “I am so embarrassed that our current President, instead of taking a meeting with Netanyahu, is going to New York and hanging out with Jay Z and Beyoncé,” Crown stated. “Why Jay Z and Beyoncé are your priority?”

  Similarly unhappy was veteran Industrial Areas Foundation organizer Arnie Graf, whom Barack twenty-six years earlier had quizzed about the realities of interracial marriage during his IAF training. In 2003 Graf had been favorably impressed with Mitt Romney when he dealt with him in Massachusetts, but now both presidential contenders “are not the equals of their own former selves,” Graf wrote. Citing “the errors and lapses that have made his first term a disappointment,” Graf said, “I’d like to hear the Obama of 1986 comment on the Obama of 2012.” With both Romney and Obama, “their ambition to be president has overwhelmed their core beliefs,” and “the earlier version of each man would never have supported the current version—or even recognized him.”36