Biden’s epiphany came at the end of April, when he was out in L.A. on a fund-raising trip. At an LGBT round table at the home of a gay couple, he spent some time in the kitchen with them and their two young kids, who gave him flowers; the warm family scene moved him. The first questioner at the event asked, What do you really think about us—gay people?
I think it’s all about love, Biden said, and then it dawned on him: It’s time.
The L.A. sojourn was part of a busy and satisfying spring for the VP. After the uneasiness between him and the Davids in the fall, his role in the campaign had been carved out cleanly. Chicago told his chief of staff, Bruce Reed, that Biden would be the “sharp tip of the spear”—stepping out early, ahead of Obama, and framing the argument against the Republicans and Romney. In a series of big policy speeches on topics from manufacturing to tax reform to foreign policy, he’d done the job with gusto.
Returning from the West Coast, Biden started preparing for an upcoming appearance on Meet the Press. In his nearly forty years in Washington, he had been on the show some forty times. (Only Bob Dole and John McCain had made more appearances.) Joe loved the format. He loved the set. He felt right at home. None of which deterred his staff from prepping him to the gills. One of Biden’s challenges in transitioning from the Senate to the vice presidency had been getting used to the fact that he was no longer a free agent; that whenever he opened his mouth, he was representing the administration. His people always worried when he went on Meet that his comfort level would lull him into behaving like a senator again—into speaking just for himself.
So Bidenworld approached his murder-boarding with diligence and care. The West Wing was involved, too; Plouffe and Carney sat in. Over several days, they devoted upwards of twelve hours to drilling Biden. They covered domestic policy, economics, foreign affairs, the campaign, the works. The only notable thing they somehow left out was gay marriage.
It was Friday, May 4, when Biden sat down with David Gregory to pretape their chat for that Sunday’s show. When Gregory posed the question, Biden didn’t think twice—and made a beeline for the kind of place his advisers feared. “I am vice president of the United States of America; the president sets the policy,” he said. “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.”
Biden went home after the taping thinking that he hadn’t made news and had done nothing wrong. That he’d been clear he wasn’t enunciating new policy, just stating a personal opinion. He knew that Obama was planning to voice his support for same-sex marriage at some point this year, but he had no inkling that anything had been settled. Late that afternoon, his staffers sent a transcript of the interview over to their West Wing colleagues, highlighting the portion on gay marriage. Bidenworld assured the VP that no heads were exploding in the vicinity of the Oval.
Plouffe’s head was still firmly attached to his neck, but he wanted Biden’s on a platter. WHAT THE FUCK? was his reaction when he took a look at the transcript. We were going to do this! In the next two weeks! As a fucking surprise! HOW CAN THIS HAVE HAPPENED?!
Plouffe had been planning the coming-out party since early in the year. When Obama returned from the Christmas holidays in Hawaii, he raised again with Plouffe and Pfeiffer the readiness he expressed in the fall: to let the world know that his evolution on gay marriage was complete. We can’t stall out the clock through the election with me not telling voters I’m for gay marriage and then turn around after Election Day and say, “Oh, by the way . . . ,” Obama said. So the next time I’m asked, I’m just going to say it.
Plouffe and Pfeiffer implored Obama to reconsider. This is gonna be a big civil rights moment in American history, said Pfeiffer. Let’s not do it because Jake Tapper asks you at a press conference. Let’s do this in the time and moment of your choosing.
“Find the time and moment soon rather than later,” Obama replied.
For the next four months, an inner circle within the president’s inner circle explored options and weighed political implications. Benenson polled on the subject; subtle questions were thrown into the campaign’s focus groups. The potential benefits were clear: rousing young voters and raking in dollars from gay donors. As were the potential costs: turning off culturally conservative Democrats and independents in critical states such as Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia. There was also a broader risk: that undecided voters across the board would say, Why in the world is Obama focusing on this when the economy is still so shaky?
Plouffe was a rigorous, data-driven, nothing-to-chance operative, sometimes wrong but rarely in doubt. But on gay marriage, his mental spreadsheet spit out pure uncertainty. Could help, could hurt, could make winning harder, could make winning easier—it’s a crapshoot, he thought. Messina was even more nervous. Axelrod and Pfeiffer both believed that Obama would be a better candidate if he were being authentic, but they saw the dangers, too. Only Michelle and Jarrett seemed immune to the heebie-jeebies; they counseled the president to do what was in his heart, politics be damned.
The queasiness in Chicago and the White House led to the kind of slow walking and stutter stepping that produces four-hour miles. Endless meetings were held. Plans were made and scrapped. There were always excuses for delay—the payroll-tax extension, the contraception dustup, the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.
Obama, meanwhile, was increasingly antsy. He understood the political hazards in play but took comfort in a conversation he’d had a year earlier with Ken Mehlman. In addition to his Bush and RNC pedigrees, Mehlman was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama’s who made headlines when he strode out of the closet in 2010. Mehlman argued that, as a political attribute, strong leadership transcended issues. In 1984, he told the president, one out of four Ted Kennedy backers in the Democratic nomination contest voted in the general election for Ronald Reagan. “This can be a political winner for you,” Mehlman said. “It will show you’re a guy who stands up for what he believes.”
Obama was sick and tired of not being that guy on this issue. He had long considered his gay marriage answer weak; now it was becoming embarrassing. He assumed the question would come up in his debates with Romney, and he dreaded answering it lamely. More immediately, there was the Democratic platform at the party’s convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in which party members and activists wanted to include an unequivocal endorsement of marriage equality. I am not going to have a convention where I am taking a different position on this than my party, Obama told Plouffe. It’s not sustainable.
Charlotte was scheduled to start on September 4. Plouffe and the rest of the inner-inner circle wanted a decent interval between Obama’s coming out and the party jamboree. They settled on the second half of May. Obama was booked to appear on The View on May 14, when he would be in New York for an LGBT fund-raiser. Maybe they would do it there. Or maybe in a more decorous interview setting. (Mehlman advised Plouffe to use a solitary female interviewer and soft lights.) No final decision on timing or venue had been made, but Obama knew it would be soon. To Plouffe, it was essential that there be no impression his hand was being forced by the convention.
All of which explained Plouffe’s fury at Biden. As convoluted as the VP’s comments on Meet had been, it was obvious that the press was going to cast them as an endorsement of gay marriage—and thus make it seem that Obama’s hand indeed had been forced, but by Delaware’s favorite son instead of the North Carolina convention.
The West Wing labored mightily that weekend to refill the toothpaste tube, with attempted walk-backs, tweets, and a flurry of phone calls to reporters. But by late Monday afternoon, May 7, the White House was caked in Crest. On Morning Joe, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was asked if he supported gay marriage and replied flatly, “Yes, I do.” At his press briefing, Carney was peppered with more than two dozen questions on the subject (“He opposes bans o
n gay marriage, but he doesn’t yet support gay marriage?” “Why can’t you from this podium say whether or not the president supports or opposes same-sex marriage?”) and some outright catcalls (“You’re trying to have it both ways before an election”).
The next morning, Plouffe and Pfeiffer met with Obama in the Oval, told him they thought the situation was untenable, and advised that he do an interview the next day with ABC’s Robin Roberts.
Having caught the highlights of Carney’s briefing, Obama was inclined to agree. “I’ve got to put Jay out of his misery,” he said, and signed on with the plan.
Obama’s attitude toward Biden was his usual mixture of protectiveness, amused detachment, and eye-rolling exasperation. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t worked up. He left all that to Plouffe. But on Tuesday he began to express annoyance, not at what Biden had done but about the fact that he hadn’t heard a peep from Joe since he unleashed the shitstorm. It was redolent of an incident in 2008, when a Biden gaffe in October—a prediction on the stump that if Barack were elected, “an international crisis” would erupt within six months to test his mettle—provoked anger in Obama but induced no immediate apology from Joe. The silence had bothered the candidate then; it was bothering the president now.
Biden was on the road that Monday and Tuesday. Also simmering. Ever since Meet, various West Wing and Chicago persons had been dumping all over him (anonymously) in the press—casting aspersions on his motives, claiming he had privately opposed the idea of Obama coming out and then publicly front-ran the president to further his 2016 ambitions. Joe was shocked and hurt by the treatment, found it incomprehensible. “I don’t understand why everyone’s so mad at me,” he told a confidant. I was asked a question. I answered it honestly. I said something I know the president agrees with and was going to say anyway. What’s the harm? Is the president upset? Or just his staff?
Biden’s communications director, Shailagh Murray, informed Biden that Obama was upset—and why. Oh, Joe said. On Wednesday morning, hours before the Robin Roberts interview and right after the president’s daily intelligence briefing, Biden hung back and apologized to Obama for the fuss he’d caused. I’m sorry I put you in a tough spot, the VP said. But he also raised the issue of the West Wing pile-driving him in the press. Are you telling these people to do this? Tell them to stop! What’s the deal?
The act of contrition was all the president needed to hear to put him back on Biden’s side.
Don’t worry about what you said, Obama told him. Don’t worry about the staff sniping. Don’t worry about the media. The most important thing, Joe, is that you and I don’t let other people divide us. Whatever comes down the road, we’re in this thing together, and that can never go astray.
• • •
AT A CERTAIN POINT, 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,” the president said, a touch awkwardly, on camera with Roberts in the Cabinet Room. The statement meant nothing in terms of policy. The politics were up for grabs. But when Obama walked back into the Oval Office, it was as if a crushing weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I feel so good about that,” he said to Plouffe.
Out in Oklahoma City, where he was campaigning, Romney felt less swell. Having declined to answer a reporter’s rope-line question about gay marriage earlier in the day, he held a brief afternoon news conference to address Obama’s move. His tone was far from strident. “This is a very tender and sensitive topic, as are many social issues, but I have the same views I’ve had since running for office.” Invited to skewer the president for the sin he himself had so often been charged with—flip-flopping—Mitt again trod lightly. “I believe that based upon the interview that he gave today, he had changed his view, but you’re a better judge of that than I.”
Romney and his people saw Obama’s decision as a naked effort to appeal to his base—pure and simple constituency politics. But they saw no advantage in trying to play the game in reverse. With few exceptions, Mitt’s senior advisers were personally moderate or liberal on most social issues; they had no lust for a contentious debate on gay marriage. Their core calculus heading into the general election was that any day spent talking about topics besides the economy was a day out the window. The trouble was that this left the candidate betwixt and between: holding positions on paper that the Obamans could use to rile up their supporters, but failing to capitalize on their appeal to social conservatives with a full-throated articulation.
In the White House, Plouffe greeted Romney’s reaction to the news with guarded but growing optimism. With gay marriage, the president and his people had done something for which Mitt and his team had so far demonstrated no appetite: taking a considerable, if calculated, risk. And while it was far too early to render a verdict on its impact, the early signs were encouraging to the Obamans. When the administration repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell” and ceased defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, the president’s people had put on their flak jackets, but the public outcry was close to nil. Now the same muted reaction greeted the president’s statement on same-sex unions. And despite all the worries that Biden had stolen his boss’s thunder, Obama was showered with press coverage that was salutary and often glowing—his new posture interpreted not as cravenly expedient but as coming clean.
In the days ahead, Obama would reap some unexpected political benefits from endorsing gay marriage. Just as Bush 43’s courtship of African American voters played well with white suburbanites in 2000, the president’s stance proved resonant with college-educated women. Some in Chicago had worried about alienating churchgoing black voters, but the campaign’s research saw not the slightest evidence of that. Instead, Obama’s imprimatur had the effect of dramatically increasing support for gay marriage among African Americans—an outcome in which the president took enormous pride.
And then there were the anticipated dividends. The night after the Roberts interview, May 10, Obama attended a fund-raising dinner at the Hollywood home of George Clooney. The organizer of the supper was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation and a near billionaire, who led his introduction of the president with a hosanna—“Yesterday, he did the right thing yet again”—that drew loud applause and cheers from the star-studded crowd. But the evening yielded more than praise: an extraordinary $15 million haul.
For much of the past year, Obama had been determined to keep his mind on his job and push off the preoccupations of the campaign. Yet the one worry he could never banish from his brain was money. As low as his opinion of Romney was, the main reason Obama believed he could still be beaten was that he might be outspent, not by Boston per se but by Mitt’s operation in combination with the Republican super PACs. The conservative millionaires and billionaires conspiring against Obama had always unsettled him and still did. The question was what kind of defenses his campaign might deploy against them. What Obama didn’t know was that his arsenal had been enhanced earlier that day—with the anonymous delivery of a mysterious envelope, like something out of John le Carré.
15
FAILURES TO LAUNCH
THE MYSTERY BRUNETTE WALKED into the lobby of the Bank One Building, in Evanston, Illinois, and took the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Reaching the office that was her destination, she asked to see Pete Giangreco, but was told he had stepped out. “He doesn’t know me,” the brunette said. “It’s probably good that he’s not here—just give him this.” And handed over an unmarked manila envelope.
Giangreco was a Democratic direct-mail maven and Obaman in good standing, a veteran of the 2008 campaign and consultant to the current one. When he returned to his office and opened up the envelope, Giangreco found a bound, fifty-four-page booklet that made his eyes get as big as saucers. The first page bore the title THE DEFEAT OF BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA and that day’s date, May 10. The next fifty-three laid out a $10 million plan to trash the president and disrupt the Democratic convention: T
V spots, outdoor ads, aerial banners over Charlotte, all designed to revive the 2008 furor over Obama’s incendiary former pastor. “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” the document said. “The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician” who has “brought our country to its knees.”
I can’t believe someone put this in writing, Giangreco thought at first. Am I being set up? But the level of detail and names in the document made him suspect otherwise. Behind the plan were a bevy of brand-name Republican operators, including former Huntsman ad maker Fred Davis. And its ostensible financial backer was Joe Ricketts, the seventy-year-old founder of TD Ameritrade and patriarch of the family that owned the Chicago Cubs.
The Obamans were always on a hair trigger in matters of race. A scheme fusing race with major dollars put Giangreco in full Defcon mode. Grabbing the phone, he called Messina and said, “I need to come see you.”
Um, okay, Messina replied. When?
“Right the fuck now,” Giangreco replied.
The genesis of what the document called “The Ricketts Plan” was a parable of the post–Citizens United era. The man who commissioned it was another billionaire with the bit between his teeth. A native Nebraskan based in Wyoming, Ricketts presided over a politically divided clan. His eldest son, Pete, was the Republican national committeeman in the Cornhusker State. His three other kids lived in the Windy City and ran the Cubs: Todd was conservative, Tom was apolitical, and Laura was an Obama bundler and lesbian activist. Their father had been a Democrat, then a Republican, and was now an independent. But his driving cause was fiscal restraint, and his distaste for Obama intense.
Double Down: Game Change 2012 Page 35