by David Garrow
In retrospect, Sheila believed “that something changed in him after we went our separate ways after Harvard, as if the part of him that was so vulnerable and open (and sensual?) went underground and something else—raging ambition, quest for greatness, whatever just took over instead.” But her feelings for Barack remained unchanged. “You of course know how deeply I loved him, and will always love him, and . . . I feel a sense of protectiveness toward him.” Barack “is almost always the brightest person in the room, and he knows that.” Yet “he is also stubborn and prone to think he is always right.”44
Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s 60 Minutes in September, Barack was visibly defensive when first Chuck Todd and then Steve Kroft posed tough questions about U.S. strategy for combating Daesh’s expanding presence in Syria and Iraq. When former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta published a memoir of his time in government, coverage immediately focused on his statement that Barack sometimes “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” In a interview with USA Today’s Susan Page, Panetta contended that Barack as president had “kind of lost his way.”
Most eyes focused on November 4’s upcoming midterm elections, with Republicans appearing poised to win enough Democratic Senate seats to easily seize control of the upper chamber. Come election night, the Republican sweep was overwhelming: thirteen Democratic House seats and a decisive seven Senate seats were lost, a number that soon grew to nine as ones in Alaska and Louisiana also switched hands. Mitch McConnell replaced Harry Reid as majority leader, and a Washington Post headline stated “Midterm Disaster Rips Apart Awkward Ties Between Obama and Senate Democrats.” Post reporter Paul Kane wrote that Barack’s “approach to social engagement with lawmakers is almost nonexistent.”
Chicago Magazine columnist Carol Felsenthal took to Politico with a call that many Obama friends would echo: “Fire Valerie Jarrett!” Felsenthal’s sources detailed how “Jarrett micromanages guest lists . . . hangs out in the private quarters and often joins the Obamas for dinner” upstairs at the White House. Felsenthal knew that the reason for Jarrett’s seemingly all-powerful role lay in how “it was important to Michelle that Valerie be in the room.” Yet Jarrett “seems to isolate” Barack “from people who might help him,” Felsenthal wrote. A New Republic profile of Valerie by Noam Scheiber emphasized “Jarrett’s obsessiveness about control.” The piece described how Jarrett rebuffed helpful criticism. “She just cuts off. It’s stone cold,” one source told Scheiber, who thought Jarrett was as responsible as anyone for how “Obama has become even more persuaded of his righteousness as the years have gone on.”45
On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer asked Barack the most astonishing questions. “Do you like politicians? Do you like politics? Do you like this job?” and “Is it what you thought it would be?” Barack’s response was unchanged from years prior. “There are times,” he explained, when “we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we are trying to do and why this is the right direction. So there is a failure of politics.” The following week, Foreign Policy publisher David Rothkopf’s book National Insecurity targeted Barack’s relationships with foreign leaders. An unnamed Latin American president contrasted Barack to George W. Bush, who “was always direct and a man of his word. I cannot say the same for Obama.” Indeed, out of “three dozen or so” heads of state, “not a single one of those foreign leaders with whom I spoke preferred Obama to Bush,” a devastating verdict. An even more telling blow was landed by General Michael Hayden, CIA director under George W. Bush, who was pleased that “there was surprising continuity between the 43rd and 44th presidents of the United States . . . despite the campaign rhetoric” Barack had used in 2008. “He ran against Bush 43.1 and governed like Bush 43.2 in terms of security issues,” Hayden stated. Even Barack’s signature accomplishment—killing Osama bin Laden—“did not actually reduce the terrorist threat in any material way,” Rothkopf noted.46
Public criticism of Barack’s all-out support of U.S. intelligence agencies burgeoned. New York Times reporter James Risen lamented how six years earlier Barack “had a mandate to do something different, and he didn’t do it.” As president, Barack “surrounded himself with a lot of the Bush people,” like now-CIA director John Brennan, and “he normalized the war on terror. He took what Bush and Cheney kind of had started on an emergency, ad hoc basis and turned it into a permanent state and allowed it to grow much more dramatically than it ever had under Bush or Cheney, and part of that . . . was his attack on whistleblowers and journalists.”
Retiring Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forcefully criticized “the White House’s strong deference to the CIA. . . . While aspiring to be the most transparent administration in history, the White House continues to quietly withhold from the committee more than 9,000 documents” detailing the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush years. “I am simply disappointed, rather than surprised, that even when the CIA inexplicably conducted an unauthorized search of the committee’s computer files and e-mails at an offsite facility,” Rockefeller added, that “the White House’s support for the CIA’s leadership was unflinching.” His Intelligence Committee colleague, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, likewise denounced the CIA’s surveillance of the committee as “a separation of powers violation.” Lame-duck Colorado Democrat Mark Udall, who had lost in November, took to the Senate floor to protest “the unprecedented actions that some in the intelligence community and administration have taken in order to cover up the truth. . . . One would think this administration is leading the efforts to right the wrongs of the past and ensure the American people learn the truth about the CIA’s torture program. Not so.” Instead, Barack’s White House “continues to try to cover up the truth” by supporting “the Agency leadership’s persistent and entrenched culture of misrepresenting the truth to Congress and the American people.” Decrying “the White House’s willingness to let the CIA do whatever it likes,” even when “barbaric programs” in which “real actual people engaged in torture” were involved, Udall issued a personal challenge. “The President needs to purge his administration of high-level officials who were instrumental to the development and running of this program. He needs to force a cultural change at the CIA” and take “real action to live up to the pledges he made” when first campaigning for the presidency.
A front-page New York Times story endorsed Udall’s attack and focused on CIA director John Brennan. “In the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Mr. Obama has forged with Mr. Brennan,” Peter Baker and Mark Mazzetti wrote. “The result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.” Retiring Michigan Democratic senator Carl Levin joined the chorus of critics, telling the Times that “Brennan has gotten away with frustrating congressional oversight. He shouldn’t have gotten away with it.” Writing in Politico, Lindsay Moran, a former undercover officer who had resigned in disgust, termed the CIA “a morally bereft wasteland,” explaining that even in 2003 she knew “that to stay with the Agency would be to end up on the wrong side of history.” In retrospect, she realized that “our enemies’ principal triumph may” be “in what they prompted us to become.” As 2014 came to a close, another front-page New York Times story said the CIA was “an agency that has been ascendant since President Obama came into office.” One of Barack’s former cabinet members explained that “presidents tend to be smitten with the instruments of the intelligence community. I think Obama was more smitten than most,” for “this has been an intelligence presidency in a way we haven’t seen maybe since Eisenhower.”47
As 2015 dawned, public colloquy about Barack’s shortcomings continued apace. Arizona Republican John McCain, now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recounted to the New York Times how sixteen months earlier he had endorsed Barack’s plan to intervene militarily
in Syria before the president reversed course. “When somebody looks you in the eye in the Oval Office and says they’re going to do something, don’t you take their word for it? I did. I took his word for it. And obviously I shouldn’t have.” In an even more remarkable statement, former presidential adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times that the Obama presidency had failed to accomplish its uppermost goal. “We didn’t achieve what we set out to achieve. We clearly haven’t changed the tone in Washington.”
Inside the White House, stasis reigned, with Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank ruing how “for far too long, this president has surrounded himself with yes men, living in a self-congratulatory world of affirmation.” Milbank cited what he called “the twin pillars of detachment that have underpinned his presidency: insularity and secrecy.” He noted how after Barack had offered up “some contemptuous remarks about Democratic critics” on Capitol Hill, “Obama went to play golf . . . not with lawmakers but with old friends and staffers.” A Politico survey of the White House press corps found almost 75 percent agreement that “President Obama dislikes the press,” and when asked which administration was “the least press-friendly,” Barack outpointed George W. Bush 65 to 11 percent. Looking back to 2008, CBS’s Bob Schieffer struck an apologetic note, remarking that “maybe we were not skeptical enough” about Barack’s candidacy.48
More than a continent away, Genevieve Cook pondered why Barack’s presidency had gone so badly wrong. Just like Sheila Jager, Genevieve too remembered how the Barack whom she once loved “was afraid of consigning himself to a life where he cut off his emotional side in the name of his political ambitions.” Now she grasped “what a political animal Barack is,” so “ruthlessly ambitious,” papering over “a great deal of self-doubt” with “arrogance . . . some degree of self-glorification, and a strong dislike for being embarrassed, losing status, or having his reputation tarnished.” Underlying everything was “a willingness to be insincere in order to bolster his need to be on top and in control . . . a personality where the need to win . . . trumps all the other stuff.”
In midsummer, soon after a white gunman killed nine black people inside Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, Barack told an interviewer that gun violence “has been the one area where I feel that I’ve been most frustrated and most stymied.” But Barack understood that “in the absence of a movement politically in which people say ‘enough is enough,’ we’re going to continue to see, unfortunately, these tragedies take place.” He rightly pointed out that “Americans are not more violent than people in other developed countries. But they have more deadly weapons to act out their rage, and that’s the only main variable that you see between the U.S. and these other countries.”
In late July, with almost eighteen months left in his second term, Barack astonishingly admitted, “I’ll be honest with you—I’m looking forward to life after being president.” Asked whether his daughters felt likewise, Barack intriguingly answered “not as much as Michelle, but certainly ready,” without explaining his wife’s eagerness to leave the White House. Barack revealingly confessed that his favorite television program was a Golf Channel reality show, Big Break, in which the winner gets to join the professional tour, and reporters highlighted how golf had become “something of an obsession” for him. Barack “now lets few weekends go by without hitting the links,” and by early fall CBS’s careful tally showed that “Obama has played 256 rounds since becoming president.” As the New York Times’ Mark Landler noted, Barack’s meetings with foreign leaders at various resorts rather than in the White House “have seemed an elaborate excuse to hit the links.”49
Behind the scenes, many Democrats were just as eager for Barack to exit the White House as he himself now seemed. “No president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics,” wrote the historically savvy journalist Jeff Greenfield. When Barack took office, Democrats held sixty seats in the U.S. Senate; they now held forty-six. In the House of Representatives, there were sixty-nine fewer Democrats than there had been in January 2009. “The decimation of the Democratic Party nationally” had begun in 2010 with the loss of Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, and “when you look at the states, the collapse of the party’s fortunes are worse,” with nine—and soon ten—more Republican governors in office than in 2009. Democrats had then controlled twenty-seven state legislatures; now that number was reduced to eleven, with Republicans up to thirty from fourteen in 2009.
Following Greenfield’s lead, a lengthy New York Times story cataloged how Barack “today presides over a shrinking party whose control of elected offices at the state and local levels has declined precipitously” since he took office. “Democratic losses in state legislatures under Mr. Obama rank among the worst in the last 115 years, with 816 Democratic lawmakers losing their jobs” and Republicans controlling more legislative chambers that at any time in American history.
With interviewers like Steve Kroft, Barack’s defensiveness was now greater than ever. “I feel like I’m being filibustered,” an exasperated Kroft remarked during an early October taping, and Barack continued to minimize how much influence a president had. “What I didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the position, is how decentralized power is in this system,” Barack claimed. When asked about his signature domestic achievement, Barack asserted that the Affordable Care Act “is working better than even I thought it was going to work,” a statement that a trio of New York Times stories shredded. The headlines depicted Obamacare as underwhelming: “Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Care All but Useless,” “Many See IRS Fines as More Affordable Than Insurance,” and “Lost Jobs, Houses, Savings: Even Insured Often Face Crushing Medical Debt.”
One New Jersey man told the Times that “we have insurance, but can’t afford to use it,” since “the deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor.” Many people were “paying for insurance I could not afford to use,” like an Illinois family who were paying $1,200 a month in premiums for coverage whose annual deductible was $12,700. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that “more than seven million people who are eligible for exchange coverage would pay less in penalties than for the least expensive insurance available to them,” such as a couple who were paying $455 a month but faced a $6,000 deductible. “It literally covered zero medical expenses,” the wife explained. “I do not believe it serves the public good to entrench private insurance programs that put actual care out of reach for those they purport to serve.”
Journalists reacted with dismay but not surprise when Marilyn Tavenner, who had been “chiefly responsible for” the administration’s rollout of HealthCare.gov, was named “the top lobbyist for the nation’s health insurance industry,” as the Times worded its story. Tavenner’s appointment “highlights how federal health programs have become a priority for insurers, which increasingly depend on revenues from Medicare and Medicaid and the new public insurance marketplaces,” reporter Robert Pear wrote. Politico confirmed that “the insurance industry has largely made peace with Obamacare,” and the Times highlighted how the United States remained “the most expensive place in the world to get sick.”50
Overseas, Barack’s foreign policy legacy was faring worse than his domestic one. The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl wrote that thanks to Barack, all around the world “the dictators are winning.” Post columnist Richard Cohen mocked Barack’s “ringing call to do as little as possible” in Syria, and Cohen’s colleague David Ignatius highlighted how “Obama’s failure to develop a coherent strategy left the field open” for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to wreak bloody havoc. Barack’s “policy of minimalism” was one that he defended “with an off-putting petulance,” Cohen complained, yet Cohen understood how Syria was “a foreign policy debacle in which the measure of Obama has been taken. He’s been bullied off the playground,” or as someone might once have put it in Springfield, punked by Putin.
the next president must be resolute. He or she must be very cautious about drawing red lines in foreign policy, but other leaders must know that crossing a red line drawn by the president of the United States will have serious—even fatal—consequences. The public, members of Congress and foreign leaders alike must know that the president’s word is his or her bond, and that promises and commitments will be kept and threats will be carried out. The next president must hold people in government accountable; when programs or initiatives are bungled, senior leaders should be fired. He or she needs to have the courage to act in defiance of public opinion and polls when the national interest requires it.