When I wrote those words, I had no idea how hard finishing the job would be.
• • •
The hostility between Republicans and Democrats in Washington is readily apparent. What’s striking, when you spend a little time there, is the outright contempt between the House and Senate, even among members of the same party.
It was the system the Founders envisioned: a “People’s House,” burning with popular passions; and the more reflective Senate, to provide needed ballast. Yet as Obama discovered when he returned to Washington, it is an ingenious system unless you have to negotiate differences between them over something as volatile and complex as health reform. If playing Dr. Phil to warring factions of his own party was what it would take to reach agreement, though, then that seemed a small price to pay after all we had been through.
For several days and nights in early January, House and Senate Democrats met in the Cabinet Room in the White House, working to harmonize their plans. Meanwhile, voters in Massachusetts were preparing to force these two warring blocs to come together.
Ted Kennedy had died the previous August. Even before the holidays, I had begun hearing disturbing rumblings about the special election in January to fill his unexpired term.
David Simas, my deputy and a Massachusetts native, was wired into the Bay State’s politics. He had warned me that Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, was taking the race for granted, while her Republican opponent, Scott Brown, was running a strong campaign and closing in on her. Traveling the state in a pickup truck and projecting an easy, working-class affability, Brown, a state senator, had deftly captured the anti-Washington zeitgeist, using the machinations around health reform as Exhibit A in his case for change.
Coakley hadn’t exactly displayed that same common touch. When a reporter asked whether attending photo opportunities with local officials was the best expenditure of her time, she committed an unpardonable sin. She said: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?” Unlike her opponent, Coakley had taken a pass on campaigning outside the storied ballpark, where Boston’s beloved Bruins had played a New Year’s Day game outdoors against the Philadelphia Flyers.
The president strolled into my office just as I was hearing the details, and inveterate ESPN watcher that he is, the cultural meaning of the gaffe was not lost on him. “Nooooo!” he cried in disbelief, grabbing my shirt for emphasis. “She didn’t say that?” At this point, the president of the United States began jumping up and down in exasperation. “She’s going to lose! She’s going to lose!”
It wasn’t the prospect of Coakley’s loss that had the president hopping mad. It was what he feared her defeat would mean for health reform.
We had exactly 60 Democratic votes in the Senate, including the interim senator appointed to fill Kennedy’s seat until after the special election. If she lost the seat, we would only have 59, dooming any chance of bringing a compromise House-Senate bill back for a vote. Moreover, the symbolic damage would be incalculable. “There is no doubt that a defeat on Tuesday is an unmitigated disaster,” the president said. “If we lose Ted Kennedy’s seat on the eve of the health care vote, it will send Washington into a frenzy, and it will take months to clean up.” Rahm was darker and more succinct: “If we lose Coakley, we’re done.”
The president appeared for Coakley on the final weekend, but we couldn’t save her from herself. Obama was furious. He had worked his tail off to make health reform a reality. Now, at the eleventh hour, an indifferent candidate and our inability to prop her up had put the whole deal in jeopardy. “I just wish everybody would do their jobs,” he said pointedly.
Washington would be gunning for Obama now, expecting admissions of failure—perhaps a midcourse correction. Yet the president was more defiant than defeated. “These guys are so cynical,” he said of McConnell and the Republican leadership. “They would take the country over the side just to score some points . . . and they shouldn’t be rewarded for that.”
So, on the day after we lost Ted Kennedy’s seat, when everyone in town was reading last rites over our health care bill, Obama began plotting the miracle of its resurrection. There was no possibility of bringing a different piece of legislation to the Senate floor now; McConnell had the votes to block it. We would have to persuade House Democrats to accept the Senate bill that many of them loathed. If they held their noses and moved forward, we would clean up some of the technical, finance-related issues in the bill through a process called budget reconciliation, which would require only 51 votes. “We only have two hundred votes in the House right now to pass the bill,” Schiliro reported. “We need two eighteen.”
“We may have to pivot for a few months. We have to put the focus on jobs and take it off of health care, while we regroup,” Obama said.
Obama conferred with Reid and Pelosi. The Speaker was as committed as the president to passing health reform, but she wasn’t about to get out in front of her Democratic caucus too quickly by endorsing the Senate plan. Pelosi intended to get us there, but first she would poke and prod us as well as the Senate to demonstrate to the firebrands in her caucus that she had done everything she could and there was no alternative course.
I was asked to appear before a grumpy Senate caucus in early February. They had been polite and reasonably well behaved earlier in the day when they heard from the president, but they plainly didn’t feel they owed me the same consideration and instead demanded to know our strategy to pass the bill. When Reid called on Minnesota senator Al Franken, the retired Saturday Night Live star decided to put on a performance. “I am just livid! I am doing a slow burn over here!” he said, with a forced flourish that revealed why he had been a comedian and not a dramatic actor. “Both the president and you come here, and neither of you has told us how we’re going to get health care done . . . When is he going to show some leadership?”
Now I was livid, too. Health reform would have been dead long ago but for the president’s leadership, I told Franken, reciting everything Obama had done to bring the issue to the brink of final passage. As we continued to spar, Harry Reid sat quietly, staring at the floor. Harry was in close communication with the White House and approved of our play, but he was content to let his caucus vent its frustrations—and far better on me than him.
Franken wouldn’t let up. “Then why doesn’t he just walk on over to the House of Representatives and demand a vote on the Senate bill?”
“Senator,” I said through slightly gritted teeth, “if you have a piece of paper with two hundred eighteen votes on it, give it to me and I’ll walk it over to the Speaker right now. I don’t think she has such a list.”
As is customary in turbulent moments, many Washington savants were calling for the heads of Obama’s team as well. In early February, Steve Clemons, a widely read Washington blogger, wrote a piece entitled “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidency.” Leslie Gelb, a former correspondent for the Times and certified establishment Wise Man, chimed in with a piece entitled “Replace Rahm.”
If I was mildly dismayed by this, Rahm was furious. He had done heroic work to help pass key pieces of the president’s agenda in 2009 and to keep all the balls in the air. Now health care was faltering, just as he had warned, and he was bearing the brunt of the blame. In the aftermath of the Massachusetts election, Rahm continued, at the president’s direction, to hold discreet discussions with members of Congress about a smaller health care package that we could pass. Yet, Obama wouldn’t relent as long as he saw a path to the more comprehensive bill. He was worried a retreat could influence the remainder of his presidency, and other presidencies to come.
“I’ll tell you what’s keeping me up at night,” the president said one day during this period. “What health care has exposed is whether we have the opportunity to do big things anymore . . . On bipartisanship, people want it, but the question is, how much are we willing to compromise before what we do
in the name of bipartisanship becomes meaningless?”
I had been deeply concerned about taking on the health care fight at the beginning, but now that we were here, I saw the president’s point. A smaller health care bill would be seen for what it was, a surrender, a sign of weakness, not strength. I admired the president’s determination, and felt we had to play this out.
In the midst of these internal and existential struggles, Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist, wrote a defense of Rahm—but it was help Rahm could have done without. “Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care,” Milbank wrote, detailing Rahm’s advocacy for a smaller health care bill. “Had it gone Emanuel’s way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel’s strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.”
I didn’t believe that Rahm was Milbank’s source or that he would separate himself publicly from the president in this fashion, but he had many loyal friends in whom he had confided too much. One or more of them had taken it upon themselves to tee up Milbank on behalf of Rahm. Rahm understood the damage the effort had caused the president.
“I decided I am going to resign,” Rahm told Gibbs and me. “This isn’t working for the president. I can’t go out for him and can’t function inside. Our friendship has changed. I’m going to see health care through and then I’m leaving.”
I told Rahm to take a deep breath. The Milbank column was bad, even inexcusable, but his value to the president was such that he couldn’t leave—and certainly not on this note. I was fairly sure that Obama would feel the same way. I saw Rahm a few hours later, after he returned from his talk with the president. “I tried to resign, but he wouldn’t let me,” he reported, groaning. “He said, ‘Oh no. You’re not resigning. Your punishment is that you have to pass health care!’”
Later, the president gathered his senior advisers, urging us to remain united. “Rahm made a mistake, but the problem is Washington,” he said. “This is what I hate about this town. Small people try to stir up the intrigue and pit people against each other. I want everyone to know that I have your backs, and I hope you have mine. And I want you to stand up for one another.”
Rahm apologized to the group. “I let you down,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, but I did.”
My turn came next. I got a call from Mark Leibovich, a reporter for the New York Times. I liked Mark, a smart, funny writer with an appropriately biting perspective on the nation’s capital. I enjoyed reading his pieces when they were about others. I wasn’t thrilled when he said his next story would be about me, particularly when he added, “I’m sorry.”
Leibovich was going to write the piece with or without me, so I agreed to sit down with him. I had a fresh shipment of deli food from Manny’s in Chicago stowed at the White House, and I invited Leibovich to join me in tackling it. I figured we could bond, Jew to Jew, over corned beef sandwiches and the Flintstones-size turkey legs that were a Manny’s specialty. It was a terrible mistake, furnishing the writer with vivid color for a story about a guy who ate too much, slept too little, and was buckling under the pressures of Washington. It didn’t help when the president walked into my office in the middle of lunch and found me with an enormous turkey leg in my hand. “What is this, King Arthur’s Court?” he quipped, providing another great line for Leibovich, who, as it turned out, was there to feast on me.
Under the headline “White House Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointed at Him,” the story’s lead set the dispiriting tone: “David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon—tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.” It went downhill from there, including quotes from my sister and a friend from Chicago hinting that I was near collapse.
I read the story while in Phoenix, trying to enjoy some rare days off with Susan and the kids, who suffered the fallout as I sulked away the remainder of our rare, brief vacation time together. I was accustomed to shots at my strategy, and my eating habits were well-trod ground, but the image of a guy utterly defeated irritated the hell out of me.
I wasn’t back at my desk in the White House for long before the president walked in and sat down. Casually stretching his arms and legs, he said, “So, how you doing?” I knew why he was asking and told him I was fine. “I saw that story,” he said. “It’s Washington bullshit. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get health care done, and all this will get better.”
And little by little, the prospects of getting health care done were improving.
Part of that comeback had to do with two widely covered events, in which the president directly confronted his opponents, answering their questions face-to-face in front of TV cameras. The first was at a House Republican retreat in late January. Before the president appeared, we pressured the caucus to open the event to cameras, and what unfolded was a candid, unscripted, and riveting exchange of views. Obama clearly got the better of it and came back to the White House with an idea.
“Why don’t we invite everyone down here, Republicans and Democrats, who are involved in the health care issue and have a health care summit? We can televise the whole thing, get all the questions on the table, and give this thing a thorough airing?”
After ten months of closed-door negotiations and backroom deals, the seven-hour summit on February 25 at the Blair House was a welcome disinfectant; a small gesture to make good on Obama’s pledge to work through health care on C-SPAN. It wasn’t that many watched it. It was that they knew they could.
Meanwhile, Pelosi, slowly and skillfully steered her caucus to the only logical conclusion: that the Senate bill, however imperfect, was now the only path forward.
Coakley’s defeat had widely been read as the death knell for health reform. Paradoxically, it might have saved it by breaking the deadlock between House and Senate Democrats. The House would have to accept the Senate bill they hated—without a public plan or some of the more generous emoluments—or there would be no health reform law at all.
There was, of course, the inevitable last-minute drama—this over the perennially vexing issue of abortion—but after a few tense hours, a compromise was reached, and on March 21, the House gathered for a rare Sunday session to consider the Senate bill.
That night, the president, vice president, senior advisers, and all the men and women who, for over a year, had led the health care effort, gathered in the Roosevelt Room to watch the vote on TV. As the vote wound down, I left the room and went across the hall to sit alone in my own office. When I heard the cheers from next door, I began to cry—not little sniffles, but big, heaving sobs. Suddenly the political calculations and ups and downs of the previous year seemed irrelevant. I thought about Susan and Lauren and the horrific struggle we had endured to save our child and pay for her treatments. I knew that because of what had happened on this night, because of what we had done, because of the president’s determination against all odds, other families would be spared that ordeal. It was emotionally overwhelming.
Because politics was my arena, I understood, perhaps better than Obama, the steep price he had paid for this historic achievement. His standing with moderate, swing voters had taken a hit. Elected as an apostle of change in Washington, he had compromised when he had to, employed the traditional tools of the trade to achieve his goal, and jammed the law through on a straight party-line vote. In doing so, he had ignited a blazing grassroots opposition that would cost him his House majority and bedevil him for the remainder of his presidency. Yet, on this night, all of these calculations seemed beside the point. He had spent his political capital on a worthy cause, and had brought
about real, substantive reform that would save and improve lives and strengthen the country for generations to come.
When I composed myself, I went and found my friend, the president, and thanked him on behalf of my family and all those who, in the future, would never have to confront the trials we had known. He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled.
“That’s why we do the work,” he said.
TWENTY-SIX
WAR AND PEACE PRIZE
HE WAS THE ANTIWAR candidate turned wartime commander in chief, the constitutional scholar struggling to balance our values and rights with our security in a new age of terrorism. He would be the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who sent tens of thousands of additional troops into battle.
In the two years I worked at his side in the White House, I watched him carefully parry with the military to define, and confine, America’s mission in Afghanistan. I saw him confront the daily reality of terrorism and explain to a roomful of skeptical civil libertarians the limitations those threats, and practical politics, imposed on him as commander in chief. And I was in the audience in Oslo as the reluctant Nobel Prize winner reconciled his vision for a more peaceful world with his belief that there are times when evil must be met with force.
• • •
It is an inspiring strength of our democracy that, by a vote of the people, the unquestioned authority over the military is handed to the civilian president. At any hour of the day or night, he might be called upon to make decisions about the deployment of manpower or weaponry that almost certainly will cost someone (or many someones) their life. Sometimes those missions are covert. Often they present scenarios he couldn’t have imagined when he was crisscrossing the country auditioning for the job.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 48