Working around the clock, Sperling and his team drew up a long, expensive wish list. Extending the payroll tax cut: $175 billion. Investing in transportation infrastructure: $50 billion. Rehiring teachers and first responders: $35 billion. And so on. Sperling’s goal was a package that, if implemented, would create 1.5 million jobs and push GDP growth up by two points. He had thought $375 billion would do the trick—until the August employment report delivered that awful aught, leading many economists to predict that a double-dip recession was in the offing. So now Sperling stood before Obama and informed him that an even larger payload was required: $447 billion, to be precise. Obama signed off without blinking.
Three nights later, September 8, the president stood in the well of the House and declaimed, “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away.” Fifteen more times, he made a nearly identical plea: “pass this bill,” “pass this jobs bill,” “pass this jobs bill right away.” Leaning in on the payroll tax cut extension, Obama said, with a pinch of sarcasm, “I know some of you have sworn oaths never to raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes.”
There was nothing eloquent about the speech, but eloquence wasn’t his aim. Since the midterms, Obama had played the inside game, spending countless hours in quiet rooms, laboring to find a middle ground where none existed. Just as the Beltway panjandrums advised, he had courted Boehner the old-fashioned way—with golf, wine, and cigarettes, away from the cameras. And it got him worse than nowhere. He had positioned himself as the capital’s reasonable grown-up. But reasonableness in the face of reckless unreasonableness looked a lot like impotence. From now on, there would be no more pointless reaching out, no more parleys in hushed compartments. Instead he would take his case to the country, galvanize public opinion. If it compelled the Republicans to act, fantastic; if not, the contrast would be clear. And though people would say he was being political, campaigning rather than governing, at least no one would call him a doormat.
And, indeed, they didn’t. From the hog pen on the Hill, Boehner and House majority leader Eric Cantor emitted conciliatory squeaks, while congressional Democrats oinked approval. The liberal blogosphere and cableverse squealed with delight, and even Krugman was pleased. The next day, Obama hit the trail to sell the plan in the swing state of Virginia (in Cantor’s district, no less). A few days after that, he was in Ohio (not far from Boehner’s domain). The campaign to rehabilitate Obama’s public image was under way, but it would be no easy thing. His approval rating didn’t budge, and would flatline for months to come. The weakness meme was like a virus: nasty, infectious, and hard to shake. And it would keep on cropping up in new quarters all the time, including the most quaint. In the era of the infinite elastic news cycle, of Twitter and blog posts, Obama’s nemesis was the book—several books, in fact—that threatened the White House’s no-drama image.
• • •
THIS IS LARGELY A PIECE of fiction,” Obama griped to Plouffe, referring to a new book by journalist Ron Suskind. Confidence Men chronicled the travails of Obama and his economic team in their first two years, painting a withering portrait of the president: as a clever, well-meaning neophyte, a feckless, passive ditherer undermined and overridden by his bumptious advisers at every turn. “I went through that whole book,” Obama said. “I don’t recognize myself.”
Endowed with acute writerly sensibilities and sensitivities, Obama could be prickly when it came to books about him. And that September, the West Wing was awash in authors. Among the scribes were A-listers such as David Maraniss, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Clinton biographer who had spent two years digging deep into Obama’s personal history, and Bob Woodward, who had already published one Obama book and was eyeing another. Political books sometimes seemed the vestigial tails of mass media, but when their authors were credible, they retained a distinct power: to create headlines, drive news coverage, influence elite perceptions. Thus far, the president’s treatment by mainstream authors had been (at best) beatifying or (at worst) benign.
Confidence Men broke that string of good luck. Beyond its judgments about the president, the book was teeming with tittle-tattle. Summers was quoted as telling former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag, “We’re really home alone . . . There’s no adult in charge.” Obama’s communications adviser Anita Dunn was quoted as saying that his White House “fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” Making matters worse was the degree of access granted Suskind. Everyone had talked to him, including the president, who sat with the author for forty minutes in the Oval Office.
Obama’s participation in the book did little to mitigate his anger about it. Like every president before him, he complained ceaselessly about leaks and gum-flapping to the press. His impulse to keep a tight lid on information—from national-security secrets to White House scuttlebutt—was intense and omnidirectional. Breaches of confidentiality, airing of soiled linen, and settling of scores: all were present in Suskind’s pages, and all of it drove Obama crazy.
Particularly irritating were Dunn’s remarks about sexism in the White House. “I just don’t understand why someone would say something like that,” Obama sputtered. When he was told that Suskind had truncated Dunn’s quote in a way that made it more damaging, he snapped, “Why is she even talking about this?”
To Dunn, now serving as an outside consultant to the White House, and to the rest of the communications team, Confidence Men demonstrated that they had lost control of the process by which they handled book authors. The access given to Suskind enhanced his credibility. But before the book’s publication, no one knew precisely to whom he had talked, what they told him, or what he had in his pocket—so they were all blindsided.
And the same thing was about to happen again, with a book on the first couple by Jodi Kantor of The New York Times, due to hit shelves in January. Kantor had covered the Obamas since 2007, conducting a rare joint interview with the couple about their marriage in 2009, which led to a magazine article that in turn led to her book contract. It was anyone’s guess how much time Kantor had logged with Jarrett and other officials, especially in the East Wing, and with folks in Chicago. Really, the Obamans only knew one thing: Kantor had nailed down a specific anecdote they had labored to suppress for more than a year.
The story involved Jarrett, Gibbs, and, indirectly, Mrs. Obama. It took place in September 2010, in the aftermath of a claim in yet another book—one published in France, in which the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, allegedly said that Michelle had told her that living in the White House was “hell.” When the story hit the wires, Gibbs scrambled, eliciting an official denial from the Élysée Palace by 11:00 a.m. But in a meeting of senior advisers the next morning, Jarrett contended that Michelle thought his efforts had been insufficiently vigilant. Gibbs, whose relationship with Jarrett was poisonous by then and who suspected she was representing her own views rather than Michelle’s, blew a gasket.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” he screamed. When Jarrett replied tartly that the first lady would disapprove of his language, Gibbs exclaimed, “Then fuck her, too!” and stalked out of the room.
The rest of the senior staff sat in silence, many sharing the same thought: that Gibbs, whose hold on his job was already tenuous, had just sealed his doom.
Emanuel said softly, Robert’s our friend. He lost his temper. This should never leave this room.
And yet it slipped out. Kantor had the story, in all its gory detail, from multiple sources. Worse still, when she got Gibbs on the phone, he fulminated even further, calling Jarrett a liar and trashing her violently, all of it on the record. Jarrett got wind of what he’d told Kantor and went ballistic, demanding that Gibbs, now serving as a consultant to the reelection campaign, somehow retract what he had said. Axelrod and Rouse, desperate to save their friend from being consigned to purdah, urged
him to try to walk back his comments. But Gibbs was a prideful man—no dice.
Obamaworld feared the Kantor book would lay bare the breadth and depth of the White House’s dysfunction; reveal the contentiousness around Jarrett, the touchiest of Obama’s top advisers; and even scuff up the shimmering veneer on Michelle’s public image—which the West Wing was astonished hadn’t happened already, even as the East Wing scurried to safeguard it.
For all her popularity with the public, FLOTUS had received mixed reviews in official Washington. On Capitol Hill, she was seen as standoffish, raising hackles among congressional better halves. She rarely invited them, even the Democrats, to the White House, and when she did, she treated the occasions as perfunctory. Attending the annual Congressional Club spouses’ luncheon, where she was the guest of honor, she spoke briefly and then split, inspiring unfavorable comparisons with Laura Bush, who had always brightly worked the tables. Michelle’s upmarket tastes and fashionista tendencies sparked concerns in the White House, too. A few stories about her designer clothes had turned up in the press, but delivered only glancing blows. What if Kantor had a trove of tales?
Around that time, Michelle made a surprise visit to a local Target, where an AP photographer got some apparently candid snaps of her dressed down and pushing her own shopping cart. The official line was that the pictures were happenstance, but more than a few of Obama’s West Wing advisers wondered if the East Wing was trying to get ahead of any negative stories on the horizon. Daley considered making inquiries but then decided to let it go. The less you know about this, the better off you are, he thought.
Obama didn’t know much, either. Not about the Kantor book, not yet. But the Suskind experience had him steaming. Even after the post-midterm reshuffle, his White House staff remained fractious, replete with infighting and prone to smack-talking in the press. Since January, Daley had been telling Obama that another shakeup was in order, exhorting him before he took off for Martha’s Vineyard, “You have one last shot to make changes if you want” before the campaign season kicked in. On returning from vacation, Obama had given his answer: “The team is what it is.”
But now, in the wake of a pair of Democratic losses in congressional special elections in New York and Nevada on Tuesday, September 13, both widely attributed to Obama’s unpopularity, James Carville was singing from the Daley hymnal. “Fire somebody. No—fire a lot of people,” Carville wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com. “For God’s sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers that got us into this mess?”
Obama wasn’t inclined to heed Carville’s advice, but if he was going to stand behind his people, they needed to pull together and start acting with a unity of purpose. On Saturday, his extended political squadron would be gathering in Washington for the first of a series of meetings to discuss campaign strategy. They would talk about the Republican nomination fight, which was heating up. They would talk about coordination between the White House and Chicago, which had been patchy. But most of all they would talk about Obama: what he had to do to win reelection, the kind of president he had been—and the kind he actually wanted to be.
• • •
OBAMA WALKED INTO THE State Dining Room that morning and there they were, two dozen aides and operatives crowded around a long oaken table under the famous George Peter Alexander Healy oil painting of a hand-on-chin Abraham Lincoln. From the West Wing: Daley, Plouffe, Jarrett, Rouse, Pfeiffer, Carney, deputy senior adviser Stephanie Cutter, deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco, and Jarrett’s deputy, Michael Strautmanis. From the East Wing: Michelle’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen. From Biden’s office: the VP, his chief of staff, and his counselor. From Chicago: Axelrod, Messina, and media guru Larry Grisolano. From the DNC: Gaspard, who had become the committee’s executive director. From the far-flung universe of outside adjutants: lead pollster Benenson, focus-group maestro David Binder, ad maker Jim Margolis, Gibbs, Dunn (raising eyebrows), and Bauer, no longer the White House counsel but instead the campaign’s lawyer.
Plouffe looked at the humongous assemblage and thought it was insane. Any meeting resembling a scene from a David O. Selznick movie was a meeting not worth convening. Whenever you have more than ten people, you have problems, he’d told Obama beforehand. Pick a setting, it doesn’t matter: family, campaign, church. It’s less about the people than it is about the math—the law of averages. Stuff is gonna leak.
But Obama insisted on the big group, and as he opened the meeting he explained why.
Carville says that I should fire you all, but I’m not gonna fire you, Obama said. Everyone around this table is here because I want you here. This is the team I believe in. You’re my people, I trust you, we gotta trust each other. I have to be able to walk in here, say whatever I need to say, and know it’s gonna stay in this room.
Now, we’ve come through a rough period, Obama continued, and a lot of what I read about myself in the press these days bears no resemblance to who I am. That I’m not strong. That I don’t stand for anything. I’m not sure how we got here, but we have to fix it. This is gonna be a tough campaign, tougher than 2008. The economy is weak, and it’s not likely to get much better. We’re not going to get a grand bargain out of this Congress, or much of anything else that would help. So from now on, we’re going to pick clear fights and pocket victories where we can. The stakes for the country were high last time, but they’re even higher now. “And if I go down in this,” Obama said, “I’m not gonna go down being punk’d.”
Benenson took the floor and presented his polling data. The numbers showed that the debt-ceiling imbroglio had inflicted significant damage to Obama. He had suffered setbacks with three crucial swing constituencies—young voters, independent women, and low-income whites—and with portions of his base. Whereas in 2008 Obama claimed 96 percent of black voters and 67 percent of Hispanics, he now stood at 89 and 55. At the same time, the GOP had also taken on tremendous water. Undecided voters were horrified by the Tea Party and suspicious of Republican policies on taxing and spending, which they saw as strongly tilted toward the rich. Benenson’s conclusion was crystalline: We need to make this election into a choice about economic values.
This would be no slam dunk, Benenson went on. Though the Republican field was crowded with entrants, the Obamans continued to believe that Romney would almost certainly be the party’s standard-bearer. Head to head with the former Massachusetts governor, Obama had 45 percent of the vote and a one- or two-point lead. But his base of strong support was both smaller and softer than Romney’s.
Many around the table looked at the data and took comfort: After everything we’ve been through, we’re still in this thing. Plouffe’s view remained: No margin for error, but I’d rather be us than them. Daley thought: It’ll go down to the wire, and he’ll either win by a few or lose by a lot. But Obama’s reaction was more visceral and stark: Man, I’m in deep shit.
Axelrod followed Benenson with a video presentation: a clip from Obama’s iconic keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, some ads from 2008, and footage from the summer of 2011. When the first snippet came on, Axelrod poked at the president, “I didn’t know you had a younger brother!” But in truth the contrasts were sobering—the Obama of yesteryear fiery and soaring, the Obama of today pallid and sluggish, spouting bromidic Washingtonese. (Oh, God, he sounds like Harry Reid, thought Gaspard.) Pointing to the earlier clips, Axelrod declared, “That’s the guy they elected president, and that’s the guy they want to be president.”
After eight months outside the White House, Axe had regained his equilibrium. And while his message was ostensibly for the entire group, he was really hurling it like a dart at an audience of one. “You were seen as someone who would run through the wall for the middle class,” Axelrod said. “We need to get back to that.”
Obama bristled slightly. I’ve been talking about the middle class for almost three years, he said.
Maybe, Axelrod replied, but we’ve also sent mixed messages.
We talk all the time about accountability and responsibility, but what voters see is Wall Street paying no price for having crashed the economy. We talk about tax fairness, but what voters see is Jeff Immelt in the presidential box at the jobs speech. (Immelt was the CEO of General Electric, which had made headlines for earning $14 billion in profits in 2010 but paying not a dime in taxes.)
Axelrod wasn’t alone in these views. Most of Obama’s outside advisers shared them, and so did Biden. Middle-class people, they don’t think we’ve done anything for them, the VP said. I hear it all the time when I’m on the road. They think the wealthy are going gangbusters. They think health care reform will help the poor and illegal immigrants. But, man, they think nobody’s doing squat for them.
On and on it went like this, for four and a half hours. Obama sat there, taking in the critiques—and maybe it was all true. Maybe he’d lost sight of the middle class. Maybe he’d been bridled by the Beltway. But there was one thing the president knew: under any of these Republicans running to replace him, everything would be so much worse.
We can’t turn this thing over to them, Obama said. We can’t turn the country over to them. We can’t let them take us straight back to the Bush years. We’ve made a bunch of hard decisions and taken a lot of fire. We’ve made progress—not enough, but some. Eventually the economy’s going to turn the corner, and when it does, I don’t want it to be President Mitt Romney who gets the credit for the work we’ve done.
“I’m a competitive guy,” Obama said defiantly, in conclusion. “There’s nothing that I hate more than losing—and I do not intend on losing this election to that guy.”
• • •
THE NEXT MONDAY MORNING, September 19, Obama delivered a major address from the Rose Garden. The so-called supercommittee created by the debt-ceiling deal to find $1.2 trillion in cuts and/or revenues to reduce the deficit was holding hearings as it worked toward a Thanksgiving deadline. In his speech, Obama returned to his framework from the summer, proposing a $3.6 trillion mix of spending cuts and tax increases. But he also etched a line in the sand: “I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share.”
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