When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds. Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming—and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.
What Biden could see, though, was that the campaign was turning his way in one respect, at least. From the start of the administration, the VP had advocated that the White House adopt a more populist stance on the economy. And he believed it even more strongly now, with Occupy Wall Street raging in Lower Manhattan and hundreds of other places around the country. Populism had never been a language in which Obama was fluent—but all of a sudden, the president was speaking in tongues.
• • •
OSAWATOMIE, KANSAS, was a dust-speck town sixty-one miles southwest of Kansas City. It had a population of 4,477 and a rich but slight political history as a Jayhawker stronghold in the Civil War. In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt went there for the dedication of a park to abolitionist John Brown, delivering a storied speech in favor of a progressive platform that he called the “New Nationalism.” A hundred and one years later, Obama arrived to give an oration, less stirringly titled “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas.”
Like Biden, Obama had taken note of the Occupy movement when it sprang up in September and pushed the topic of income inequality front and center. Obama decided he wanted to give a speech about that. The subject was important, he told his team, and he had things to say. Some of his advisers were less than overjoyed. They worried he would have no solutions to offer for the problem he was raising. They feared he’d get too close to the Occupy fire and come back with his eyebrows singed. But Obama was insistent: I’m giving this speech.
Axelrod argued that the address could be made bigger and broader, incorporating themes they had talked about in the first strategy meeting in the State Dining Room: the contest of economic values, the fight for the middle class. Obama agreed. Over his career he had given two economic speeches that he considered touchstones, the first at Knox College in 2005, on the disruptions caused by globalization, the second at the Nasdaq, in New York, in 2007, on the perils of Wall Street run amok. He told Favreau he was aiming for something like that again.
I want to frame what the election is going to be about, Obama said. A choice between a belief that there are things we can do as a country to combat the forces that have left a lot of workers dislocated and struggling—and a belief on the other side that we should let everybody fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
It was Favreau’s assistant who came up with Osawatomie. Between the Roosevelt connection and the fact that Obama’s mother was from Kansas, she thought it might be a choice venue. When Favreau brought the suggestion to the president, he lit up. “Great, I love the Nationalism speech,” he said. “It’s pretty far out there—the most radical speech Teddy Roosevelt ever gave.”
Obama’s address wasn’t as piping as TR’s, but it had plenty of Tabasco in it. Onstage in the Osawatomie High School gym, the president homed in on the issue of inequality that had so animated him initially. Noting that the average income of the top 1 percent—the marker made totemic by Occupy—had risen 250 percent over the years, to $1.2 million, while everyone else treaded water, he argued that “for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded.” Obama pounded on the “breathtaking greed” of Wall Street, on “insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity and denied care to patients who were sick, [and] mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford.” Contrasting Republican “you’re-on-your-own economics” with his philosophy, which was aimed at creating an “economy that’s built to last,” Obama said, “This is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class.” And: “This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare.”
The Osawatomie address received only modest attention from the press, but Obama believed he had scored. Though his people had worried about turning out a crowd in a tiny town in a scarlet-red state, the atmosphere in the gym was electric. And while Obama, in an hour-long speech of more than six thousand words, never once uttered Mitt Romney’s name, the themes he laid out were tailor-made for a campaign against him—a man whose calling card was having banked hundreds of millions of dollars at a private equity firm that could be painted as epitomizing much of what Obama decried in Kansas.
To the extent that Obama’s trip garnered coverage, it was portrayed as part of his ongoing crusade to win the payroll tax cut extension—which he did indeed mention in the speech. (“If we don’t do that, 160 million Americans, including most of the people here, will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,000 starting in January, and it would badly weaken our recovery.”) The president had now been bludgeoning Republicans on the issue for three solid months. Boehner and McConnell were tied in knots, squabbling with their own caucuses, trying to figure out what kinds of budgetary offsets they should demand in return.
This was a trap that Sperling had set a year earlier, during the lame duck. Rather than push for a two-year extension then, he had argued for rolling the dollars from both years into one. That way, the economy would receive a bigger immediate boost—and a year later, especially if growth was still slow, Republicans would find it politically difficult not to vote in favor of another extension. Some on Obama’s political team were hoping that they would do just that, giving the president the upper hand on a tax issue for the campaign. But Sperling was adamant that it was worth trading almost anything to get a deal. With the congressional supercommittee having failed to strike a deficit compromise by its Thanksgiving deadline, business confidence was as shaky as ever. And the payroll tax cut extension would be the last chance to significantly goose the economy again before Election Day.
Back in Washington, Obama affirmed to his staff privately what he had said publicly: he would demand that Congress stay in town until the issue was resolved—through Christmas, if need be. As the holiday approached, the Senate passed a two-month extension, but the House was in disarray. On Sunday morning, December 18, Boehner appeared on Meet the Press and said, “Well, it’s pretty clear that I and our members oppose the Senate bill—it’s only for two months. How can you do tax policy for two months?”
The Obamans were over the moon at the sight of the most powerful Republican in the country announcing his opposition to a tax cut. The Wall Street Journal noted the insanity of the speaker’s stance in an editorial headlined THE GOP’S PAYROLL TAX FIASCO, which pummeled the party’s leaders for having “somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass.”
Boehner called Obama to try and negotiate. Obama was having none of it. Like the Journal, he was confident not only that Boehner would cave now but that, after the new year, the politics of tax cutting would make it all but inevitable that the White House would ultimately get the full-year extension through.
The next day, December 23, the House gave the president his victory. A year earlier, Obama had prevailed in the lame duck by forging bipartisan compromise. Now he had won through partisan confrontation, as his new posture of playing the outside game bore its first fruit. In the White House briefing room, Obama told reporters, “This is some good news, just in the nick of time for the holidays.” Michelle and the girls were already over in Hawaii. He was eager to get there, too. Cocking a slight smile, he brought the political year to a close with a crisp “Aloha.”
• • •
OBAMA GLANCED AT HIS schedule and was puzzled by an item on it: a 2:30 p.m. meeting with Dunn, Carney, Daley, Pfeiffer, and Plouffe to talk about some book. It was Tuesday, January 3, 2012, and the president was just off the plane back from Honolulu.
“What is this book?” Obama asked Pfeiffer. “What is this meeting?”
The book was Jodi
Kantor’s The Obamas, due to be published the following Tuesday, and the meeting was to brief Obama on the press shop’s response strategy. The White House had obtained an early copy through sub-rosa channels and combed through it looking for items that were embarrassing, controversial, newsworthy, or all three. Happily for them, there wasn’t much there—except for the “Then fuck her, too” anecdote involving Robert, Michelle, and Valerie.
It had long been a mystery in the West Wing as to whether either Obama knew about the incident. Some believed that Jarrett had tripped over herself to tell one or both of the first couple; others thought she had held her tongue. In any case, it now fell to Dunn, who had been brought in to deal with the Kantor book because of her strong relationship with Michelle, to fill in the Obamas—and see how the cookie crumbled.
Obama didn’t seem especially perturbed when Dunn told him the Gibbs story. It was no secret to him that Robert had scratchy relationships with his wife and Valerie. “I guess that’s going to be interesting to the press” was pretty much all Obama said. (Not long after, the former press secretary arranged a meeting with the president and apologized for cursing out his wife, though not for labeling Jarrett a scheming liar.)
A different tidbit in the book grated on the president more, however—a story about his and Michelle’s vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2010. They had been sitting on a deserted beach with two old friends, Allison and Susan Davis, when Allison reached over to fold some towels. Obama told her that his staff would handle that. “When I leave office, there are only two things I want,” he said, according to Kantor’s account. “I want a plane and I want a valet.”
Obama, still rankled about Dunn’s quotes about the White House’s boys’ club mentality in Confidence Men, stared at Anita. “Why do people who claim to care about me say really stupid things to book authors?” he asked pointedly.
Michelle, briefed separately by Dunn, seemed even less ruffled by the Gibbs story than her husband. “Oh, you know Robert, he says things,” she said.
But Michelle was irritated with Kantor, who the White House felt had conveyed the impression that she had a closer relationship with the first lady than was the case. The day after The Obamas was published, Michelle did an interview with Gayle King of CBS News, in which she uncorked the kind of spiky comments that her aides believed were a thing of her distant past. “Who can write about how I feel? Who? What third person can tell me how I feel?” she said of Kantor. She then addressed the picture of herself in the book as a source of White House friction. “That’s been an image people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”
Under normal circumstances, Daley would have grimaced; the first lady dredging up a racially loaded stereotype for no apparent reason was bound to kick up dust (and, self-defeatingly, generate publicity for the book). But none of this was Daley’s problem anymore. On January 5, he had tendered his resignation. The final straw for him was an internal flap over the selection of a new domestic-policy adviser. Daley wanted an A-list name: former Time managing editor and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson or former Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer. But he was overruled peremptorily by Jarrett and Rouse. And with that, Daley had had enough.
So had Obama. Within three months of Daley’s appointment, the president could tell that it wasn’t working, that he hadn’t found the silver bullet. By the fall, Plouffe, reflecting a consensus in the building, was urging Obama to let Daley go. “It’s your call, but you can’t make a change six months from now.” The populist shift in the president’s posture—from kissing business’s ass to kicking it in the teeth—only made Daley’s continued presence more untenable. And the chief of staff had done nothing to improve relations with Congress. His replacement would be OMB head and policy maven Jack Lew, who would focus on governing and have almost nothing to do with the reelect, thus enhancing Plouffe’s already estimable degree of power.
With Daley on his way out the door, Obama turned to deal with Biden. At one of their weekly lunches in January, Joe addressed the internal uproar over his strategy-group meeting, the California trip, and his alleged designs on 2016—all of which Obama had heard about in detail from the Davids.
This has all been a big misunderstanding, Biden said. I’d never do anything—anything—to jeopardize our chances of being reelected. Secondly, I’m not holding secret meetings. Any meeting I ever have on any topic, Axe and Plouffe are more than welcome. But here’s the thing. In 2008, when I joined the campaign, I was an invited guest at your party. This time it’s different. I’m the vice president. I’ve been working shoulder to shoulder with you for three years, living it every day. This isn’t your campaign anymore, Mr. President. This has to be our campaign. I need to be more involved. I want to be your partner—the junior partner, but your partner.
Look, Joe, Obama replied. It’s important people not think you have a separate agenda. People need to see us as one team. That’s good for me, it’s good for you. I accept that you didn’t mean to do anything behind the campaign’s back. But when it comes to 2016, the best thing for you is if we win. If we lose, it’s not gonna matter anyway. And if we win, you’ll be in a position to do whatever you need to do. So let’s win.
Biden left the lunch satisfied, as did Obama: they seemed to have had a meeting of the minds. On the issue of contraception, however, they remained in different places. In mid-January, after weeks of internal deliberations, Obama was preparing to make a final decision on the religious exemption; he was sticking with the narrow rule Sebelius had put forward. Biden still thought it a terrible mistake, and told Obama so. The president had avoided culture wars in 2008, much to his advantage. Now he was on the brink of engulfing himself in one, not just due to the ruling itself but by going back on his word to Dolan. Biden knew the archbishop well enough to predict that it would not be pretty.
On January 20, Obama phoned Dolan to let him know his decision. Within hours a video was on the bishops conference website, in which Dolan condemned the administration. “Never before,” he said, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience.” Across the country, hundreds of bishops said much the same. And even many liberals were incensed. Under a headline accusing Obama of a “breach of faith,” Washington Post columnist and reliable White House defender E. J. Dionne blistered the president for “utterly botch[ing]” the decision and hit him squarely in the solar plexus of his political vanity. “This might not be so surprising if Obama had presented himself as a conventional secular liberal,” Dionne wrote. “But he has always held himself to a more inclusive standard.”
Obama wore a mask of misery. He had returned to Washington from Hawaii hoping to put 2011 behind him. It had been the worst year of his presidency—of his political life. With the Kansas speech and the payroll tax victory, he thought perhaps he had turned a corner. But now, just three weeks into 2012, the landscape was cruelly familiar. He had been compelled to choose a third chief of staff in as many years in office. His vice president was on the warpath, and his wife was out there making the wrong kinds of headlines. Conservative multimillionaires and billionaires were delivering checks hand over fist to Karl Rove, as were some of the president’s former Wall Street supporters. His approval ratings remained stubbornly mired in the mid-forties. The economy was still dreadful. And more than two-thirds of voters believed the country was on the wrong track—which, if history was any guide, meant that he was hosed.
There was a silver lining in this cloud, however, and it was a sparkly thing to behold. In the other America, the red America, the Republican nomination contest was under way.
PART TWO
5
PRESERVING THE OPTION
TOM RATH DROVE DOWN from New Hampshire to Lexington, Massachusetts, cruising past the old Raytheon building just off Route 2 and into the parking lot of the low-slung brick structure at
80 Hayden Avenue. It was November 18, 2008, and Rath had come to the offices of Free and Strong America PAC for lunch with Mitt Romney, the man Rath believed should have been elected president that year—and who he dearly hoped would try again in 2012.
Romney’s campaign for the 2008 GOP nomination had been an expensive and embarrassing flameout, but he’d decided to put off any postmortems until after Election Day. Now, with the eyes of the world trained on President-elect Obama and the all-enveloping financial crisis, Romney was reaching out to key supporters such as Rath to divine the lessons of his loss.
A former New Hampshire attorney general turned lawyer-lobbyist, strategist, and sherpa, Rath was a fixture in Granite State politics. Every four years, presidential hopefuls solicited his services in navigating the first-in-the-nation primary. Starting in 1980, he had advised the campaigns of Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander, George W. Bush, and, finally, Romney. Gnomic and twinkle-eyed at sixty-three, with the waist of his khakis hiked up over his belly, Rath was a classic moderate New England Republican, ideologically squishy but strategically and tactically shrewd.
They sat down over sandwiches from a local deli. Rath, an irrepressible kibitzer, could have spent half an hour bantering about the Patriots or the Red Sox. Romney’s only aptitude for small talk revolved around his family, and after dispensing with such chitchat, he came to the point.
“What do you think we did wrong?” Romney asked.
“We told the wrong story,” Rath replied.
The story Rath had wanted Romney to tell arose naturally from the candidate’s résumé: former CEO of Bain and Company and founder of Bain Capital; savior of the beleaguered 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; pragmatic one-term Bay State governor. It was the story of a man who accomplished extraordinary things in the private sector, then turned to public service. A candidate with a million-dollar head of hair and a multi-million-dollar net worth who could be cast as the ultimate Mr. Fix-It, offering managerial and economic perspicacity at a time when even Republicans acknowledged that Bush’s detachment and incuriosity had created a hot mess.
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