by Balz, Dan
A day after giving the order to go ahead with the raid and a day before it was carried out, Obama attended the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, delivering his jokes with perfect timing. He showed none of the tension that gripped those few in the administration who knew about the president’s order. Before the dinner, Axelrod had lunch with the president. A national security aide came in, and the president asked Axelrod to leave. As he waited outside the Oval Office, he overheard nearby chatter that the National Security Council team did not want Obama playing golf the next morning because of a possible meeting. He was curious about that. When he went back in to see Obama, they went over some of the jokes the president was considering for his speech that night. One involved Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who was running for president. The joke went something like: Poor Tim Pawlenty, he had such potential as a candidate, except for the unfortunate middle name bin Laden. Obama said, “That’s so hackneyed, why don’t we take that out?” One of the president’s speechwriters offered up an alternative. It was changed to “Hosni” rather than “bin Laden.” Axelrod thought the new version was not as funny but thought, What the hell, it’s his routine. He had no idea that Obama was planning something more permanent for bin Laden than eliminating him from his comedic routine.
The president’s approval ratings spiked in the wake of the killing of bin Laden, though everyone around him knew the spike was temporary.
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Vice President Biden led the opening round of bipartisan negotiations, which went on for weeks. At times there was a sense of optimism that the two sides could reach agreement, as they identified a series of specific spending cuts. But Republicans were divided and revenues were not a serious part of the discussions, as the administration was insisting. In late June, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who had close ties to the Tea Party freshman class, announced that he was pulling out. Obama had been largely invisible to that point, and the lack of progress generated new criticism of the president’s lack of leadership. New York Times columnist David Brooks, to whom the White House paid considerable attention, wrote a column about management styles and how to get things done in an era of austerity. He compared Obama with New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, describing Christie as a “straight up the middle” leader and Emanuel as an insurgent. “Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis,” he wrote. “He makes you want to sit down and discern.” It was time, he said, for the “former messiah” to become a manager. Two days later, Obama held a news conference and showed uncharacteristic flashes of anger. He said his daughters took a more responsible approach to their homework assignments than Congress was taking to the debt ceiling issue. “Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time,” he said. “They don’t wait until the night before. They’re not pulling all-nighters.” Republicans in Congress, he said, “need to do their job.” He noted the on-again, off-again congressional schedule. “You need to be here,” he said. “I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek [debt] crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done.”
The next day I sat down with one of Obama’s senior White House advisers. He said Obama had come off the stage after the press conference and told his advisers that it “felt good just to speak the truth.” The adviser said a lot of what Obama said was extemporaneous, but not entirely. “In our prep, we decided, ‘Let’s challenge Congress a little bit,’” he said. “‘Let’s sort of tell the truth,’ like this whole notion of where’s the president’s leadership? I mean give me a break.” Doesn’t it bother him? I asked. “It doesn’t bug him, he’s bemused by it.” That spring, an unnamed official in the administration had been quoted in the New Yorker as saying that on the uprising in Libya, the president was “leading from behind.” The characterization triggered a torrent of uncomplimentary commentary, especially from the right, and seemed to capture a growing perception about Obama during his third year in office. The president’s adviser said, “When you look at the fights he’s taken on in terms of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ health care, saving the auto industry, I think when this story is known about the deficit—however it ends up—I think people will at least acknowledge that there was some boldness there.”
Obama liked John Boehner personally but saw the speaker as a Chamber of Commerce type, a country club Republican suddenly forced to try to tame the Tea Party tiger. He invited Boehner to play golf, and from that outing came a secret meeting between Obama and Boehner at the White House on June 22, which then led to the first serious negotiations over a grand bargain. Their private negotiations seemed to be making progress until some of the details began to leak. Cantor was alarmed at what he saw as Boehner’s coming capitulation. The Wall Street Journal editorial page weighed in on Saturday, July 9, with a tough editorial warning the speaker not to cut the deal. “Mr. Boehner shouldn’t bet his majority on Mr. Obama’s promises,” the editorial stated. That night, Boehner called the president, who was at Camp David. “I just can’t do it right now,” he said. That marked the beginning of weeks of turmoil in Washington, which were later re-created in meticulous detail in a series of books and articles. The two neared an agreement and then pulled back, eventually producing a miserable compromise that resolved none of the big issues and set the stage for what would be repeated confrontations over the next two years. The low point came when Obama could not get a call to the Speaker returned for twenty-four hours, which was followed by dueling press conferences assigning blame to the other side. It was a failure of leadership by any measure.
For Obama it brought a sudden end to his belief that he could somehow lead the Republicans and his own party to an agreement. From that moment forward, he would operate with a different calculus. “There was no hoping, dreaming, or encouraging for any alternative,” Daley said. “[Obama] said, ‘That’s it. What are we going to do, sit here and keep getting pounded, trying to reach out? No. We’re not going to do this anymore.’ . . . When it got to the end of that week, when it finally got done, I think our whole attitude was, this thing’s over and any dream of anything coming together—for anything—is over.” Another official said, “The president is a person who likes to do big things, has a taste for the legacy project, over a series of school-uniform kind of things. I think in his mind was growing the desire of, okay, it’s a new environment, but we can do a legacy project of long-run fiscal consolidation.” When the talks collapsed, Obama “realized there are not going to be any legacy items for the next two years. There’s just going to be a big fight over who’s going to be the president.”
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In the aftermath of the debt ceiling collapse, Obama’s inspiring rhetoric from the 2008 campaign about changing Washington seemed quaint, even naïve. Instead of bipartisanship there was polarization as deep as it had been in modern times. Instead of cooperation there was constant confrontation. Instead of civility there was rudeness. The political system appeared frozen and more resistant to compromise than ever. Republicans bore the principal responsibility. The party’s strategy of opposing Obama at every turn created what some analysts called asymmetrical political warfare. But Obama was not blameless. Presidents are expected to solve problems and overcome political obstacles. Did Obama ever have a strategy to achieve that goal? Should he—could he—have built better relationships with congressional Republicans? Most important, would it have made any difference if he had done any of these things? He arrived in Washington with the hope of bringing the parties together through a guiding hand, not a whip. But his belief that he could guide opposing parties to a consensus and eventual compromise collided with the ingrained partisanship of Washington and a Republican Party that was playing by new rules. Almost every battle drove the two sides further apart.
There were few better illustrations of how the two sides had ended up at loggerheads than a story involving Newt Gingrich
, the former House Speaker who had both fought with and compromised with former president Bill Clinton during the 1990s. Gingrich was at the Capitol with his wife, Callista, for Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. He was impressed with Obama’s rhetoric—the speech on election night in Grant Park and now what he said on inauguration day. He said he believed that the country was hungry for a diminishment of political conflict in Washington and truly wanted the nation’s first African American president to succeed. “I told Callista leaving the Capitol after the inaugural, I said, ‘If he follows through he will be Eisenhower and he will split the Republican Party,’” Gingrich said to me. Later that evening, Gingrich joined a dozen or so other Republicans, who were dispirited but determined to plot a comeback, for a dinner at the Caucus Room restaurant just off Pennsylvania Avenue. Robert Draper in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do quoted Gingrich as he left the dinner saying, “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.” When I later asked Gingrich how he reconciled his belief that the country wanted Obama to succeed and that the president was in a position to split the Republican Party with the plotting that went on at the dinner, his response encapsulated both the initial promise of the Obama presidency and the obstacles he would encounter in trying to fulfill it. “Our job was to design the optimum GOP strategy,” Gingrich said. “Obama’s job was to govern so our strategy would fail.” David Axelrod scoffed at Gingrich’s explanation. “If on inaugural night leaders of the Republican Party are meeting to talk about how they could thwart the president, it belies the notion that they are waiting patiently by their phones for a call from the president to see if they could work together,” he said. “They had a strategy predicated on not working together.”
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Republicans complained that Obama never genuinely tried to reach out to them. Axelrod said, “We entered office at a time of maximum peril. We frankly didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the logjam to break before we could act.” The debt ceiling collapse brought back talk of Obama’s failure to build relationships, something he had heard in the weeks after the midterm election. He made some preliminary efforts, hosting receptions for members of Congress during the first months of his presidency, inviting a bipartisan group to watch the Super Bowl, and meeting with committee leaders from both parties on issues such as education and financial regulatory reform. The role of schmoozing with Congress fell to the vice president. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander said the president didn’t seem interested in even trying to develop relationships. When I asked whether it was really worth trying, given the implacable opposition of congressional Republicans, he replied, “If just that causes you to stop, that just shows you don’t know very much about what you’re doing.” Democrats said Obama didn’t work very hard to develop relationships with them either. One senior senator described him as “aloof, cold.” A senior House member said, “I find him a very warm person with a good sense of humor—a good guy to be with. But there is a sort of reserve that he has that does not encourage the sort of relationships beyond that crowd that he feels comfortable with. That’s not his inclination on either the Democratic side or the Republican side, and I think it’s hurt him.”
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The debt ceiling battle ended any illusions about Obama’s power to change Washington, certainly for his first term. He was up against an implacable foe, opposition he had not bargained for. He had not found a way to break the gridlock in the face of that opposition. The aspirational candidate of 2008 who came to bind up the nation’s wounds now faced a difficult and extremely partisan reelection campaign. His Democratic critics said he was foolish to have believed he could extract any concessions from the Republicans. Republicans saw in Obama a combination of ideology, ambition, vanity, and weakness. The final indignity after the talks collapsed was to see the government’s credit rating downgraded because the political system was judged to be so dysfunctional. “I think there’s no doubt that I underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trumps problem solving,” he would later tell Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning. “Washington feels as broken as it did four years ago,” Obama said. “And, if you asked me what is the one thing that has frustrated me most over the last four years, it’s not the hard work, it’s not the enormity of the decisions, it’s not the pace. It is that I haven’t been able to change the atmosphere here in Washington to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—who I think just want to see their leadership solve problems. And there’s enough blame to go around for that.”
In the wake of the debt ceiling battle, Obama’s reelection prospects appeared worse than ever.
CHAPTER 4
Message for the Middle Class
One of the hallmarks of Obama’s 2012 campaign was its prodigious appetite for research and data. The trio at the top of the operation—Jim Messina and David Axelrod at the campaign and David Plouffe in the White House—were all enthusiastic consumers of research. Though different in their approach to politics—Axelrod operated intuitively; Plouffe’s watchwords were “prove it”; Messina wanted to be able to measure everything—they all pushed the campaign team for more research, testing, analysis, and innovation. Everyone knew that the economy represented the president’s biggest obstacle to reelection. Obama’s top advisers wanted to make the 2012 election a choice and not a referendum on the president’s economic stewardship. They doubted he could win a race on the latter. But to avoid the election becoming a referendum, they knew they had to do two things. First, they had to develop and refine a message that somehow leapfrogged the debate about the current state of the economy, which would always leave Obama on the defensive. And second, they had to disqualify their opponent—they assumed that would be Mitt Romney—from being seen as a credible alternative able to do for the economy what Obama had failed to do.
The first priority was to understand what had happened in 2010: Why had many of the people who had bought into the hope and change message from Obama’s 2008 campaign decided just two years later that they were ready to burn down the house? Obama’s team was eager to know what was really behind the shellacking. They decided to look for answers in a familiar place: Iowa. For Obama’s team, Iowa was always the touchstone. Whenever the Obama team was in trouble, whenever they needed reassurance or understanding, or were merely curious about something, they thought first of Iowa. What do Iowans think? So in late 2010 they convened a focus group in Des Moines composed of independent voters who had supported Obama in 2008 and then backed the Republicans in 2010. One man in particular, who was in his fifties, caught the attention of the Obama advisers who were watching from Washington. One adviser summed up the grievances encapsulated in the man’s response this way: “I can’t send my kid to college next year. I can’t do it because my house is underwater now and I was going to refinance it to pay for tuition. I don’t think any parent knows how hard it is to tell your kid I can’t send you to school. I haven’t had a raise in five years. I’m paying more for health insurance and getting less. My 401(k) that was supposed to be the reward for doing everything the right way is gone. I am sick and tired of giving bailouts to the folks at the top and handouts to the folks at the bottom. I’m going to fire people [politicians] until my life gets better.”
That was the beginning of what would become a massive research effort that went on from early 2011 into the late summer. As Obama engaged in politically debilitating hand-to-hand combat with congressional Republicans, his political advisers were quietly at work developing the framework for the reelection campaign message. The Obama team launched parallel efforts in early 2011 to probe more deeply the psyche of the country. “We began to understand that the real demand in the electorate was not just to recover from the recession,” said Larry Grisolano, who oversaw media and message. “If we just got back to where we were in 2008, that was not a good place to be. They saw the long erosion of what it meant to be middle class in America.�
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Not long after David Plouffe had settled into his new role at the White House, he had a conversation with Joel Benenson, Obama’s lead pollster in 2008, who was in the same role for 2012. They talked about the research operation for the coming two years, and Plouffe urged Benenson to think creatively about new ways to examine the electorate and the state of the country. Benenson described a project he had done for the Service Employees International Union after the 2004 election—what he called the “middle-aged, middle-income, middle America” study. They had mailed journals to a selected group of people and asked them to fill them out, describing their lives from a personal financial perspective. The more he explained it, the more Plouffe liked the idea. That conversation launched the campaign’s ethnography project, which David Simas, the director of opinion research for the campaign, later described as “the best and most important research we did the entire campaign because of the insight it gave us into truly how people view the economy, not on a macro level but on a day-to-day level.”
Benenson started the project in the spring of 2011. He recruited about 150 people who said they were willing to participate; in the end just over 100 actually did. The participants were all between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-five, with household incomes of $40,000 to $100,000. They were either white or Hispanic and lived in the suburbs of Columbus, Denver, or Orlando. They had little or no allegiance to either political party. They were either self-identified independents or weak partisans. While definitely planning to vote, they were undecided—they were open to both Obama and the eventual Republican nominee. Obama’s campaign, which wanted what Benenson called a “totally nonpolitical deep dive into their lives and values,” did not reveal that it was behind the research. The subjects were chosen because they were considered emblematic of the “up for grabs” voters Obama’s team always kept a close watch on. The Obama campaign asked the participants to fill out a journal twice a week for three weeks. In contrast to the SEIU project, Benenson decided to do this all online. Twice a week, he sent the participants eight to ten questions, different topics for each session. Rather than asking one broad, open-ended question, the campaign posed an opening question and a series of follow-ups to drill deeply into the topic. The journals provided a revealing body of work about how people were living with the economy day to day, what choices they were making, whether they were putting off purchases or buying a used car rather than a new car, how they viewed their work and their career options, their fears about the future, and their doubts that the American dream still meant something. “If you want to know about being treated unfairly at work,” Benenson said, “we would ask, ‘When was the last time you felt you were treated unfairly at work? What specifically happened? What made you feel you were being treated unfairly? How was that different or similar to times you were being treated? Was the way you were treated same or different than your coworkers?’ It was designed to provoke in-depth responses.” The journal entries eventually added up to more than fourteen hundred pages of raw material.