Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  • • •

  My days would begin with Rahm’s senior staff meeting at 7:00 a.m., in the chief of staff’s office in a corner of the West Wing.

  We would start by going over the president’s schedule and breaking news before each of us was given the floor to share issues of concern. Still, it was unquestionably Rahm’s show. He generally came armed with a long list of ideas, questions, and follow-ups. Some he formulated during sleepless nights, others during his predawn swim. Not surprisingly, Rahm’s meetings could sometimes take on the raucous quality of a Jewish family dinner. When the group veered into too much levity, though—and I was a frequent culprit there—Rahm would bang the table with the stub of his right middle finger, severed on a meat slicer at Arby’s when he was a seventeen-year-old fast-food worker. “Okay, okay, okay, okay,” he would yell. “Let’s get focused here.”

  Rahm is a pile driver who values, above all else, getting things done. He wants to put “wins on the board.” Given the multiple challenges we were facing, that was exactly the kind of chief of staff the new president needed. Yet Rahm’s approach underscored a fundamental tension between a campaign that promised to change Washington and a White House that had to deal with the town as we found it.

  Everything I saw in my years there merely confirmed Obama’s campaign critique: most members of Congress are fundamentally concerned with winning and holding on to their seats and to power. The special interest lobbyists who fund their campaigns leverage far too much influence. The partisanship is intense. The entire community is obsessed from day to day with who’s up and who’s down, and the politicians with scoring points for the next election more than solving problems for the next generation.

  It was all true, but now we were there, in the middle of multiple crises. We weren’t going to change politics overnight, but almost overnight, we damn well had to pass a stimulus bill to save the economy. We had to ask Congress to authorize more help to shore up a Wall Street that was in maximum disfavor. We had to petition for more money to fight the wars we’d come there to end, until we could end them. Finally, the president had a long and ambitious list of additional priorities that he put on a fast track.

  Obama had hired Rahm because he needed someone who could skillfully navigate the Washington that is, not the Washington as we hoped it could one day be. We banned lobbyists from key administration jobs, kept public logs of everyone who visited the White House, and affected stricter ethics guidelines than any administration had before. Yet we couldn’t force Congress to play by our rules; nor could we afford to walk away from the process in bouts of pristine righteousness.

  So Rahm would grow impatient whenever Gibbs and I objected to a tactic that we felt violated a commitment or the spirit of the campaign. “I’m goddamned sick of hearing about the fucking campaign,” he would scream. “The campaign is over. We’re trying to solve some problems here!” As close as we were and will always be, the next two years would test our friendship.

  One early, illustrative confrontation came over the issue of congressional earmarks, the time-honored but sometimes tawdry practice of allowing members to add pet projects to the budget. Earmarks had become symbolic of wasteful government, and Obama had campaigned vigorously against them. In the first weeks of the administration, however, we received word that Congress would soon be sending over a spending bill to keep the government operating that included nine thousand separate earmarks. When the president said that, in keeping with his pledge, he was inclined to veto the bill, Rahm was uneasy.

  “You could do that Mr. President, but it might cost you your Recovery Act,” he said. Rahm added that the bill and the earmarks were important to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Furthermore, in discussions about the passage of the Recovery Act, Rahm had assured Reid that the leftover spending bill would be signed. Harry would view a veto as a breach of trust, Rahm explained. Gibbs and I argued that signing the bill would be a breach of trust with the American people. The president listened to the arguments and, though clearly pained by the prospect of green-lighting the earmarks, agreed to sign the bill. With the economy cratering, he believed there were bigger things at stake.

  Such was the constant tug and pull between the principles we hoped to establish (principles we had run on) and the progress we absolutely had to make. While I worked to ensure that we didn’t trample those principles, I also recognized that symbolic battles over reform wouldn’t halt the spiraling recession or put food on anyone’s table—other than, perhaps, those of the lobbyists hired to fight those battles. I appreciated Rahm’s focus on the bottom line, and so did the president, and I came to realize that in this imperfect world, some of the things we’d campaigned against, such as earmarks, were essential tools with which leaders marshaled votes.

  Rahm and I would clash over other things, the biggest of which was the use of the president’s time. Rahm wanted Obama out in public constantly. “If you leave a vacuum, someone else will fill it,” he said more than once. I was concerned that overexposure and too many B-level press events would turn the president into a play-by-play announcer for the government rather than the narrator of a far larger story. “Rahm, this is a long game. We don’t have to win every news cycle,” I told him once, when he proposed an event I thought unworthy of Obama’s time. “Oh, yeah? Well, I do!” Rahm replied, and stormed out of my office.

  I would not have wanted to be in the White House without Rahm, particularly given the crushing array of challenges we faced when we walked in the door. Yet the very same qualities that made him an indispensable force would occasionally drive me nuts.

  • • •

  There is no handbook for the senior adviser role I played, and every person who has held the job has brought with him or her a different set of strengths. A big part of my role was to monitor polling, guide our message, and try to keep us true to Obama’s principles and campaign brand. Apart from providing advice to the president and others who spoke publicly for the administration, I exercised control primarily through the speechwriting process I oversaw.

  Every day I could, I carved out an hour to meet with the president’s speechwriters. As they filed into my office, I would always greet them with genuine enthusiasm and the same salutation: “Hello, Wordsmiths!” Led by Favreau, who was twenty-seven when we arrived at the White House, the team was talented, creative, and versatile. I relished these sessions and came to love this young corps of writers as if they were my own kids.

  On major speeches, such as the State of the Union or a significant policy announcement, Favs and I would begin with the president, whose thoughts about what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it were generally well ordered and already elegantly expressed. Still, the president didn’t have the time to set a direction for the day-to-day speeches. So that job fell to me.

  Typically, I would begin my meetings with the Wordsmiths by going over the schedule of upcoming presidential speeches, statements, and scripts. I’d explain the strategic imperatives and then riff on how I would approach each one. Favs and the writer chosen for each assignment would then probe the subject while others chimed in with their ideas. Out of that free-for-all process, we produced remarkably cohesive speeches. Not only were these sessions fun, but they gave me my best chance to try to orchestrate consistent themes that were faithful to the president’s message and that could be heard through the gale force distractions that regularly blew in Washington. My days were largely spent navigating one political morass after another, and as the Wordsmiths were passionate believers, my time with them was nourishment for the soul.

  Gibbs and I also would speak a dozen or more times a day. His office was on the other side of the Oval, closer to the pressroom, where his restless charges in the press corps were penned in and waiting to be fed dollops of news.

  There is an expectation that presidents in the modern era must react to whatever news is breaking—and in an age when cable TV, Twitter, an
d online media outlets all can seize the national debate in a flash, there is a new freneticism to that process. In today’s media age, Teddy Roosevelt’s stout “bully pulpit” has been atomized. Americans now get their news from countless varied sources. Presidents must try to steer their agenda through a tumultuous environment in which anyone with a cell phone camera has the potential to hijack the story of the day. Managing this media chaos during a campaign was bracing enough. Now the stakes were infinitely greater.

  Robert and I would take turns shuttling back and forth to consult on how to handle the tempest of the moment or, not quite as often, genuinely meaningful news. If the issue couldn’t wait for our daily senior staff meetings, one or both of us would poke our heads into the Oval to see if the president was free so we could read him in.

  One role I carried over from the campaign was that of the “public face.” Even before we took office, I was defending our economic plans on the Sunday television shows, jousting with hosts who served up edgy questions hoping to knock me off my talking points and goad me into acts of news I didn’t want to commit. Every comment I made had greater consequences now that I was speaking for the president of the United States, and I spent many sleepless nights gaming out the likely questions I would get and the answers I would give. Ten minutes before every show I would invariably be seized by a bracing sense of impending peril. Often I did these interviews from Chicago or from the North Lawn of the White House, so I became practiced at carrying on lively exchanges with a TV camera as the voices of disembodied interlocutors came at me through an earpiece. I also carried the administration’s message to more unorthodox venues that had become important forums in the new media age. During my White House years, I found myself sitting across the desk from Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart.

  There were regular scheduling meetings in Rahm’s office, at which the president’s itinerary for the coming weeks would be plotted. I would then spend considerable time with the scheduling and communications team as they worked to marry message with execution. What recovering small business could we visit to underscore hopeful signs about the economy on a day when we expected a downbeat monthly jobs report? Which clean-energy start-up would provide the best backdrop to tout the benefits of the investments we had made? As we considered such questions, there was the overlay of future battleground states and markets.

  I also tried to keep close tabs on what members of the cabinet were saying and doing, as I knew their actions and pronouncements would reflect on the president. This led to the occasional row, including an early dustup with Eric Holder, the new attorney general. In a speech delivered just a few weeks after taking office, Holder described America as a “nation of cowards” when it came to confronting deep-seated issues of race—which provoked the predictable firestorm. America had just taken a remarkable step forward by electing the first black president, one who was busy trying to rally the nation behind tough measures to confront multiple crises. It was a terrible time to divert the country’s attention with a provocative speech on race relations.

  I liked Eric, but he was a lawyer and not a politician, so I asked for a meeting at which I suggested adding someone to his communications staff who could help advise him on these nuances and protect him from unnecessary errors that might splash back on us. Holder listened politely, but soon was complaining to others that I was trying “to stack the Justice Department with political people.”

  I was furious. During the Bush administration, Karl Rove had come under justifiable fire and congressional scrutiny for his involvement in the highly political hirings and firings of U.S. attorneys. I was determined never to interfere at Justice in that fashion, and I never did. A few days later I cornered Holder after a White House meeting and let him know my strong feelings about his insinuation. The discussion, which began in an open corridor of the White House, became so heated that Valerie shooed us into a private office to finish it.

  One great challenge of the White House is that while you are trying to affect policies that speak to the concerns of the American people, you rarely leave the building to meet those people. Working in the White House, a colleague once said, is like working in a submarine—and it’s hard to get a read on the pulse of America when you’re looking at the country through a periscope. I tried to remedy this by hosting a meeting every Wednesday night at my apartment with key White House communications players and my campaign strategic team. Benenson, Binder, and Grisolano would offer readouts of and insights into their research, and we would fill them in on the administration’s plans. These meetings became a lifeline that helped me keep in touch with the world beyond the White House gates.

  That said, I can’t remember a time during my two years in the White House when I looked at my watch wondering when the day would end. Instead, I regularly found myself asking where the day had gone. I worked at the office well into the evenings, often catching a late dinner with a reporter, colleague, or member of Congress. When I arrived home, almost always after ten, I would spend an hour or two catching up on papers and news stories I had missed and reading materials for the next day. Some nights ended with late calls from the president, who’d want to chew over the events of the day. After a scant few hours’ sleep, the whole cycle would start all over again.

  It was a relentless, bone-wearying, pressure-filled grind. However, after the initial shock to my system, I found it thoroughly addictive and engaging. In what other job could you deal with issues of war and peace, an economic crisis, pirates, pandemics, and natural disasters—sometimes all in one day? Where else could you have the opportunity every day to play a small role in history?

  During those two years, we would pass more meaningful legislation than any new president had in half a century: a vast expansion of college aid for needy students; new consumer protections for credit card holders; a long-sought law tightening regulation of tobacco; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, strengthening the tools for women to fight for equal pay; and the abolition of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military. Obama would forge a breakthrough agreement with the auto industry for higher fuel efficiency standards and end a ban on potentially lifesaving stem cell research. Also, he would put two splendid women on the Supreme Court—including the first Hispanic, Sonia Sotomayor—making America’s highest court more reflective of the nation it serves.

  For all that, though, three historic undertakings loomed so consequential and consuming that they would define not only my two years in the White House, but the Obama presidency.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  NOTHING BUT BAD CHOICES

  THROUGHOUT THE LONG CAMPAIGN, Obama was preparing to assume office in a time of war while facing an ongoing terrorist threat. We expected that. Now we also faced a once-in-a-century economic disaster that would hover over us for years, through long, grinding days and short, sleepless nights. Obama had inspired a battered and disillusioned nation to believe that there were better days ahead. Yet there was no magic wand to wave to deal with this calamity; no easy or painless answers—just a series of necessary but unpopular choices.

  To break the downward cycle and jolt the economy, we would have to fight for the massive emergency spending bill we had begun plotting back in Chicago in December. To keep capital flowing while the financial crisis deepened, we were forced to buttress some of the very bankers whose greedy schemes had brought down the economy. Also, within months of taking office, the president would have to decide whether to save the American auto industry from its own strategic mistakes or allow it—along with communities across the industrial Midwest—to collapse. All this would only add to the record deficits Obama has pledged to bring under control.

  Bemoaning our dismal hand, I wondered out loud how it would have been to arrive at the White House in good times. Obama smiled. “Don’t kid yourself, brother,” he said. “If these had been good times, we wouldn’t be here!”

  So we dug
in, drawing down on the popular new president’s goodwill to try to resuscitate the rapidly failing economy, spending money we didn’t have and bailing out those who had helped inflict this catastrophe on the rest of us.

  I knew that each of these decisions would rankle millions of Americans, neither rich nor poor, who already were deeply alienated in the modern-day economy. The explosion of technology coupled with globalization had lifted productivity and corporate profits to new heights and created lucrative opportunities for the highly educated. It also had cost millions of Americans good jobs and put downward pressure on wages. The Great Recession would only accelerate these trends. Many Americans were working harder to meet their responsibilities, and falling further behind. Now they watched in dismay as, all around them, the people and institutions that had failed to meet their responsibilities were being extended lifelines by the government.

  Some of their ire was directed at the poor, who were the beneficiaries of modest public assistance. Increasingly, though, their anger was aimed at Wall Street and the folks at the top, who they felt had rigged the game in their favor to the detriment of the country. This wasn’t lost on Obama. It rankled him to ride to the rescue of high-flying financiers and oblivious auto executives. He had campaigned to reform the irresponsibility on Wall Street and in Washington, and had promised to tackle the Bush deficits. Yet with the economy crashing, the inescapable truth was that for President Obama to meet his responsibility, he would have to take steps that some who voted for him would view as an abrogation of those principles.

  In doing so, Obama would come under withering criticism from all corners—from his supporters who yearned for heads to roll; from a financial community that felt it was above penalty or even rebuke; and from a united Republican opposition content to sit back and blame the new president for failing to promptly clean up an epic disaster that their policies had helped to create over many years. He was caricatured as fickle and feckless.