by Balz, Dan
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Among those who traveled with the presidential party to Hawaii was Jim Messina, who was preparing to leave the White House to become campaign manager for Obama’s reelection committee. Messina was tall, rangy, and intense. “My favorite political philosopher is Mike Tyson,” he said. “Mike Tyson once said everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don’t have a plan anymore. [The Republicans] may have a plan to beat my guy. My job is to punch them in the face.” Before joining the Obama team, Messina had worked for Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus was like a father to him. In the summer of 2008, when Plouffe was on the verge of leaving the Obama campaign because he was burned out, Messina was recruited to shoulder many of the day-to-day responsibilities of running the campaign. After the election, he was named White House deputy chief of staff and troubleshooter and was almost immediately slotted to become campaign manager for the reelection effort. In one of his early conversations with the president, Messina asked for a pledge that they not rerun the 2008 campaign. Obama looked puzzled. “You know we won that one,” he deadpanned. Messina explained that in their bids for reelection, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush had both tried to rerun their first campaigns. Clinton and George W. Bush threw the rulebook out and ran a different race. Obama accepted what Messina said but reiterated his insistence that he wanted to run a grassroots-based campaign for a second time. He did not want to lose that connection.
In Hawaii, Messina began to devour everything he could about past campaigns, reading books and other materials. His Christmas reading list included Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He made sticky notes as he read and pasted them around the room. This is looking like a scene from Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind, he thought. To make other notes, he used a whiteboard and a roll of butcher paper. “I went all the way back to the Johnson [campaign in 1964] and just kind of tried to find advice.” The two most relevant campaigns were Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 2004, but of the two, 2004 offered the most compelling lessons and parallels. Messina was not alone in that conclusion. “The brilliance of the George Bush campaign in 2004 was they thought they were going to run on the strength of a triumphant war,” David Axelrod said. “The war turned sour, everybody hated the war. They rotated the message and the message became, ‘Here’s a guy who had the courage to do an unpopular thing because he knew it was in the interests of the country.’ And they turned it into a character point and against Kerry it was particularly effective.”
From his study of past campaigns, Messina concluded that he had to use the coming year to get a few big things done. He presented a list of five objectives to the president. The first was to reconnect Obama to people. In December, Obama had met with Bill Clinton at the White House. Clinton said Obama likely would experience what he had experienced as he prepared for his 1996 reelection campaign. People don’t know what you did, he said. You’ve got to go tell them what you did, and the campaign is the vehicle to do that. Messina’s second goal was to rebuild the grassroots operation that had been so important in 2008. He and others knew there was much work to do here. Obama’s 2008 supporters were disappointed, fatigued, or simply not engaged. Messina’s plan was to begin with a listening tour, to go to the states and sit down with volunteers from 2008 and find out how they felt, what they wanted, and what it would take to reengage them. A third goal was to improve the campaign’s use of technology. This surprised the president. His 2008 campaign had been lauded for technological innovation. No other campaign had done more with the emerging tools of social networking. But Messina was obsessed with how technology had changed in just four years. Smartphones were the symbol of that change—a platform for the delivery of messages and fund-raising appeals that didn’t even exist in 2008. Facebook was now an even more powerful force for organizing. Messina toured Silicon Valley tech giants to tap their expertise. Google’s Eric Schmidt became a key adviser on everything from how to manage a start-up, to the kind of computer platforms to set up, to the most efficient placement of online advertising. “Jim is extremely analytical, so what he wanted was a technology base and analytical base to make decisions,” Schmidt told me. “For advertising, he would like to have a scientific basis for where you put the money, and so we worked at some length to try to understand what kind of marketing made sense.”
The fourth goal was to build a financial operation that could equal or exceed the campaign’s phenomenal fund-raising totals from 2008. Obama’s first campaign raised $800 million, more than half of it from online donations. Messina told the president the campaign needed to reenergize the grassroots supporters before starting to ask them for money. In the meantime, he said, he hoped to build a national finance network that would make what George W. Bush had done with his Rangers and Pioneers look small in comparison. He said he planned to start traveling the country recruiting bundlers who would be expected to raise $350,000 by the end of 2011. In 2008, the campaign had two hundred bundlers at $250,000 each. Messina was looking for double the number, at the higher threshold. Lastly, Messina said the campaign had to be relevant in 2011 while the Republican presidential candidates were flooding Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, attacking the president’s record. He wanted to quickly establish a presence anywhere Obama would be under attack from the GOP candidates.
Unstated but obvious was the importance of continuing to find new voters. Obama had won in 2008 in part because he attracted new voters—young people, more African Americans and Latinos, women, especially single women and younger married women. Messina knew that would be even more important in 2012, given the likely drop-off in support for the president because of dissatisfaction with the economy. As he prepared to leave Washington for Chicago, he told me, “We’ve got to go expand the electorate even more in some ways than we did the last time.”
Messina’s departure from the White House was one of a series of personnel changes under way, aimed at fixing the deficiencies that by then had become glaring and at preparing for the reelection. Gone were two of the president’s closest advisers. David Axelrod returned to Chicago to reprise his role as chief strategist of the campaign. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, departed for a role as general surrogate and attacker of Republicans. To replace Rahm Emanuel, the first chief of staff, who was on his way to becoming mayor of Chicago, Obama brought in another Chicagoan, Bill Daley, the brother of outgoing mayor Richard M. Daley. To some people, that looked like substituting one Chicago pol for another. But Daley was not an Obama confidant and was not able to assemble a team of his own around him.
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At the beginning of 2011, tragedy struck. On January 8, twenty-two-year-old Jared Lee Loughner opened fire outside a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding thirteen. Among the most gravely injured was his apparent main target, Gabrielle Giffords, a young and popular Democratic member of the House. On January 12, with the country convulsed by the tragedy, Obama participated in a service for the victims. The crowd that night was noisy and raucous, and the event took on many of the characteristics of a political rally rather than a solemn remembrance. Despite the atmosphere, Obama delivered one of the most effective speeches of his presidency. “At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do—it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds,” he said. “What we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.”
Obama’s speech drew praise across the political spectrum. Conservatives who had led the political movement that dealt Obama’s party such a terrible defeat in November gushed in their reactions. Two weeks later, on the eve of his State of the Union address, Obama’s approval rating had agai
n risen, to 54 percent, in the Washington Post/ABC News poll, the highest point in nine months. Far faster than Bill Clinton after his drubbing in 1994, Obama appeared to have rebounded and begun to right his presidency as he headed into the battles ahead.
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Once the 112th Congress was sworn in, with Republican John Boehner installed as Speaker of the House and its big freshman class of Tea Party–inspired newcomers, Obama faced months of trench warfare over the budget, spending cuts, taxes, and the deficit—all the issues that had come into play during the midterm elections. With an eye on the coming campaign, Obama hoped he and Congress could reach agreements that would bolster the economy. His advisers believed there was no more effective reelection strategy than boosting growth and reducing unemployment. Anything they could do on either front would improve his shaky prospects for reelection.
In early February, House Republicans offered their first plan to cut the current-year budget. “Washington’s spending spree is over,” said Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman who chaired the House Budget Committee. Democrats in the House and Senate attacked the plan, but the White House held its fire. Administration officials worried that an all-out assault on the Republican measure could poison negotiations over a continuing resolution needed to fund the government for the rest of the year. Democrats were critical of the White House. Obama was playing a longer game, his advisers said, aimed at getting through an early fight to fund the government in a way that would help bring about a bigger deal later in the year when the debt ceiling needed raising. In the early months, many Democrats were trying to goad Republicans into shutting down the government in the spring, believing they and Obama could profit from a repeat of what had happened in 1995, when Republicans had forced a shutdown in negotiations with Bill Clinton and paid a political price. Obama was more worried about what a shutdown would do to economic confidence, given the economy’s still fragile state. “I don’t think any of us are anxious to test the proposition,” said one of the president’s closest advisers. “The best thing here would be to come to an agreement through the end of the fiscal year. Then you can move to the bigger act, which is, how are you going to deal with the rest of the budget?” White House officials were also hopeful that the fervor of the freshman Republicans in the House would ease as they were confronted by the consequences of trying to cut the budget too much and too quickly.
Instead, negotiations over the continuing resolution dragged on and on—through March and toward the April deadline. When the two sides finally reached agreement just before a midnight deadline that would have shut down the government, Obama sounded an optimistic note. “It’s my sincere hope that we can continue to come together as we face the many difficult challenges that lie ahead, from creating jobs and growing our economy to educating our children and reducing our deficit,” he said. “That’s what the American people expect us to do. That’s why they sent us here.”
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As the negotiations over the continuing resolution were concluding, Republicans put down their next marker in the budget wars: Paul Ryan’s blueprint for shrinking the federal government and restructuring Medicare and Medicaid. It became an opening volley of the presidential campaign. Ryan was being urged to run for president in 2012 but was reluctant to do so. But he was a far bigger force within his party than were many of those seeking the presidency. His budget would become a central part of the presidential campaign debate. Ryan, who was in his seventh term in the House, came from Janesville, Wisconsin, a blue-collar town in the state’s southern tier. The once vibrant city had seen its share of economic hardship and plant closings, including a General Motors factory. After graduation from Miami University in Ohio, Ryan considered graduate work at the University of Chicago in economics, but politics kept calling him. As a college student he worked in the office of Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten. After college he went to work at Empower America, a conservative think tank, where he wrote speeches for Jack Kemp, the former NFL quarterback and congressman from Buffalo and the party’s 1996 vice presidential nominee, and for William Bennett, the sharp-tongued outspoken former secretary of education. Kemp was a father of supply-side economics. He was also a proponent of a brand of conservatism that believed in trying to revitalize urban America. He challenged his party to reach out to African Americans and Hispanics. Ryan adopted much of Kemp’s worldview but came to believe that the growth in government spending and rising deficits—never great concerns to Kemp—had to be dealt with as well. He was a number cruncher in a world where such attention to detail was considered unusual. He became an expert on the budget and over time was rewarded by his colleagues, who looked to him to flesh out their vision of a smaller federal government. Ryan produced such a plan in 2010. Obama even praised it as “a serious proposal,” though he disagreed with most of the specifics. With Republicans now in control of the House, Ryan offered an updated version of the plan, called “The Path to Prosperity.”
Obama had earlier issued his fiscal 2012 budget, which everyone in both parties had ignored. Ryan’s budget was the first serious deficit plan of the new Congress, but it was also politically toxic. He sought to reduce deficits by $4 trillion over ten years. He advocated deep cuts in domestic spending and in income tax rates for individuals and corporations. He proposed turning Medicaid into a block grant for the states. Most controversial was his recommendation that Medicare undergo dramatic restructuring. For those already retired or nearing retirement, he called for a continuation of the existing program. For younger workers, Ryan wanted the government to offer payments to individuals, who then would purchase insurance on the open market. Polls showed strong public opposition to the Medicare changes—or, for that matter, most changes to entitlement programs. Democrats saw the controversial budget as the vehicle that could help them win back the House in 2012.
On April 13, 2011, Obama went to George Washington University, where he outlined a plan of his own to cut the deficit by $4 trillion, the same target as Ryan’s but over twelve years rather than ten. He called for a ratio of three dollars in spending cuts for each dollar in new revenues. Far more memorable than the specifics of the proposal was Obama’s blistering political attack on Ryan and the Republicans. He called Ryan’s blueprint a “deeply pessimistic” one that would lead to a “fundamentally different America” than the country had known for generations. “This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America,” he said. “Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said there’s nothing ‘serious’ or ‘courageous’ about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. That’s not a vision of the America I know.” He said of the Medicare restructuring in Ryan’s plan, “Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.”
White House officials had decided it would be helpful to invite the leaders of Obama’s fiscal commission, former Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, to the speech. Then they decided to invite all members of the commission, even those who had voted against it. That included Ryan, who was given a front-row seat for what turned into a public whipping. When the newly installed Bill Daley walked into the auditorium, he immediately saw Ryan. “Holy shit!” he thought. One of the president’s aides had told Ryan he would like the speech. Ryan said he expected a Clintonesque, politically triangulating speech by the president. “Then this torrent of demagoguery comes out,” Ryan said. The congressman noticed a photographer with his telescopic lens trained directly on him. He sat poker-faced as Obama spoke, but inside he was seething. “It occurred to me, holy cow, this guy [Obama] is not a moderate. This guy is a real ideologue and he is already in hyper campaign mode,” he said. When the speech ended, Ry
an and several of his House colleagues left quickly. Ryan issued a curt statement calling the speech “excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate, and hopelessly inadequate to address our fiscal crisis.” The next day the president asked Simpson and Bowles to the White House. Simpson said that Bowles told the president, “I thought you were very harsh on the Republicans and on Ryan.” Simpson said he told Obama that “it was like inviting the guy to his own hanging.” He said it would have been better not to invite him or not to attack him. “Well, [Obama] didn’t like that,” Simpson said.
The first two rounds of the budget battle were now over, and instead of creating a climate for cooperation and bipartisanship, they had done the opposite. The president’s speech had turned what was to have been a moment designed to set a tone for productive talks into another show of partisanship. Austan Goolsbee, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers at the time, later concluded that the president’s policy team had made a sizable error in judgment. They had assumed that with every small deal, they were making a grand bargain more possible. Instead, those small deals were leaving Tea Party activists more and more dissatisfied. “So that sets the stage for the debt ceiling, for it to blow up there, and unfortunately that’s the worst possible place for it to blow up,” he said.
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Obama began the negotiations over the debt ceiling just after one of the crowning achievements of his presidency: the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1. Obama had made the risky decision to launch the Navy SEAL team strike against the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, over the opposition of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the strong reservations of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden. The intelligence was no better than fifty-fifty that bin Laden was in the compound. “If you went in to get a search warrant on the evidence we had, no judge in Washington would have given you that search warrant,” one senior administration official said a month after the raid.