Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  “Then we’re cancelling the press conference,” he said, panicked at the prospect of Obama taking stands on these freighted issues that would rile swing voters. “How many bricks do you think this load can stand?” he demanded. His consternation only grew when we raised the issues with the president.

  “I’m happy to take these questions,” he said, as I had predicted. “The Fourteenth Amendment? The amendment that guarantees equal protection under the law? We’re going to tamper with that for politics? It’s offensive. And folks want to build a mosque on private property and they can’t? That’s offensive, too. This is not who we are. I would love to get those questions. These folks out there play to people’s fear and anger. This is not who we are. Or it is a part of who we are, but it’s the worst part.”

  While the press conference was cancelled, we proceeded with an off-the-record luncheon for some of the print reporters who covered the White House. Predictably, the mosque question came up.

  “This country was built on the principle of religious freedom,” Obama responded. “That we would tell people that they could not build a house of worship, with their money, is deeply offensive.”

  “That’s really interesting, Mr. President,” said Margaret Talev of McClatchy. “Are we the only ones who know you feel this way?”

  The question stung Obama, who assured the reporters that he would be addressing the matter soon. On our way back to the Oval, the president said, “We have a Ramadan dinner here tomorrow night for leaders of the Muslim community. If you guys don’t find some outlet to address this before then, I am going to do it there.”

  Rahm was livid, convinced that the rest of us were encouraging the president. He thought it was unnecessary for Obama to wade into choppy political waters that would create problems for other Democrats. Yet the president was determined, and did make a statement at the Friday night dinner. “You guys did this,” Rahm fumed, storming into Gibbs’s office where a number of us had gathered. Predictably—at least predicted by him—Rahm was pummeled over Obama’s statement by his former colleagues, home for the break and nervous about their prospects.

  By the time the story broke, I was in Italy for a long-planned vacation with Susan. Soon after arriving, though, I was flat on my back, knocked down by a parasite or stomach virus that lingered for our entire stay. Susan enjoyed gourmet Italian meals at the villa in Tuscany where we were staying, and brought back dry toast and ginger ale for me. The only virtue of the vacation debacle was that it forced me to discipline my diet.

  When I returned, the president was reflecting on our quandary.

  “I’ve been too isolated, too shut off,” Obama told me. “I need to go out there and be myself. Reagan was an actor and he was good at reading scripts. That’s not me . . . I just don’t know how we change this sour mood, this blanket of pessimism out there. I know I can’t do it myself. But it’s what I continue to think about.”

  In early September, I got a call from Bill Daley giving us a heads-up (a five-minute one) that his brother was about to announce that he was not running for reelection as mayor of Chicago. “He’s done,” Daley told me. “Twenty-two years as mayor is enough.” It made sense. Rich’s standing had suffered in recent years. His wife, Maggie, was in ill health. Still, it was hard to imagine him giving up a job he loved so much.

  I also knew instantly that Daley’s decision likely would change my world, too.

  Ever since Rahm was elected to Congress, we had discussed the possibility that he would one day run for mayor. It was a job tailor-made for him. Successful big-city mayors, particularly Chicago mayors, have to be tough, larger-than-life characters with an ability to cut a swath from the neighborhood streets to the downtown boardrooms. Rahm is exactly that kind of person.

  Minutes after Bill’s call, Rahm appeared at my door. “You heard about Rich?” he asked, hands on his hips. “What do you think?”

  I knew Rahm wasn’t asking me for my astute analysis of Daley’s decision or tenure. “You have to run,” I said. “This is the right time.”

  The race was the following February, with filing in late November. To set up a campaign and meet the filing requirements, he would need to leave by early October at the latest. He would take a few weeks to make a decision. Yet standing in my office that day, Rahm already knew in his heart that he was going home. It was the job he had long coveted as well as the escape from the White House that he needed.

  One thing none of us could escape was the omnipresent drumbeat of unsolicited counsel coming from all quarters. That cacophony reached surreal proportions in late September, when I traveled to New York with Obama for the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly. UNGA week is always a scene, mixing world leaders, politicians, and cause-oriented celebrities. Rupert Murdoch and Mayor Mike Bloomberg had made a practice of co-hosting a dinner during the week for an eclectic handful of invited guests. At a rooftop reception afterward, I got a full blast of advice from a cavalcade of stars. Barbra Streisand was one who summoned me over for an urgent consultation.

  “He needs to speak to people in simple, easy-to-understand ways,” said the chanteuse, who famously sang that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” On this night, though, she offered a slightly different take on “people.” “I hate to say to say it, but people are stupid. Bill Clinton really knows how to speak to them.”

  Then I was confronted by Marianne Williamson, the self-styled spiritual author and Democratic activist from LA, who had written an array of books on love, miracles, and healing of the soul. Yet she didn’t approach me on a mission of love or healing.

  “Do you know how betrayed and devastated we are?” she demanded. “Do you know how let down we feel?”

  Just to get my bearings, I asked her who “we” were. “The Left!” she said. “Just remember. We got you elected! And then you give us a health care plan without a public option? It’s so disappointing.”

  At the end of the evening, Mayor Bloomberg added his two cents—or whatever the corresponding number is for a billionaire.

  “You know what his problem is? You have to like people to be successful. You have to connect,” the mayor said, opining on the president. “I saw him greet people at the golf course. You probably told him to do it. But he doesn’t feeeel it. You have to have that!”

  I have a lot of respect for Bloomberg, whose public works and private philanthropy have made a real difference for his city and far beyond. But “warm” and “fuzzy” were not the first words that came to mind when describing New York’s brusque and sometimes imperious mayor, which made his critique of Obama more than a bit ironic.

  During the dinner, Murdoch, who was seated beside me, insisted that the president had to move on immigration reform. “We have to do something about immigration. We have to protect our human capital,” he said, a common and valid lament of the business community about highly skilled, young professionals, trained in American institutions but denied the right to stay and work in the United States.

  “But the solution has to be comprehensive,” I said. “We can’t just attack a piece of the immigration problem. And, you know, there’s one big thing that you can do to help, and that is to keep your cable network from stoking the nativism that keeps us from solving this.”

  Murdoch shrugged. “You’ll have to talk to Roger about that.”

  “Roger” was Roger Ailes, the impresario Murdoch had hired to create and build the Fox News network, which, by catering to a conservative viewership, had become one of the greatest profit centers of Murdoch’s News Corp empire. As it happened, I already had a coffee set up with Ailes for the next day. Even though Fox had kicked the living hell out of us, often in ways I found patently dishonest, I enjoyed Ailes, an old political warhorse and masterful storyteller. Back in 1988 he was the architect of one of the most brilliant and diabolical ad campaigns in the history of presidential politics, helpin
g to bring Vice President George H. W. Bush back from seventeen points behind to defeat Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts.

  A working-class son of small-town Ohio who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s, Ailes still speaks the paranoid, antigovernment language of that era’s John Birch Society, and he built a wildly successful television network to appeal to people of like mind.

  “The problem with liberals is you all want to intellectualize things,” he told me, fulminating about Obama’s position on the New York mosque. As he spoke, it struck me that Ailes was one of those people whose form reinforces their image. Short and squat, he very much looks like a bulldog. “You never connect with people. Where’s his heart? Does he know what it means to be an American? Does he care?”

  Even considering the source, it was a stunning question, coming just two years after Obama was swept into office by passionately articulating a shared vision of America—the country, he often said, that had made his story possible. He had connected plenty well then.

  Having been beaten up by the Left, Right, and center, I returned to Washington to hunker down for the final run-up to the midterm election. Every scrap of data suggested that we were going to be routed, and the White House was, not surprisingly, on edge.

  In this emotional tinderbox, it didn’t take much to set off sparks. In mid-September, an authorized biography of Carla Bruni, the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, created a five-alarm fire. The book alleged that Michelle Obama, sharing with Bruni her feelings about the role of First Lady, had said, “It’s hell. I can’t stand it.” Michelle heatedly denied it.

  Concerned that Bruni’s claim, if unchallenged, could become a troubling story line for both Obamas, Gibbs swung into action, hammering every Frenchman he could get on the line for hours until that country’s government formally disclaimed the quote. It was heroic duty, as the president himself would acknowledge, but when we arrived for the morning meeting, Valerie startled us with her report. “The First Lady is very disappointed in how the Bruni story was handled.” I was sitting next to Gibbs, which was like watching the formation of a volcanic eruption. He was understandably proud of the effort he had put in the day before, not to mention the positive result, and was absolutely stunned to be told that he had fallen short. “Excuse me?” he said. Valerie repeated her claim. I wanted to grab Robert and put my hand over his mouth because I knew this was about to get ugly. Flushed and angry, he directed his remarks to Valerie, and the First Lady in absentia, in words that were unmistakably clear, if imprudent. Then he stormed out of the room.

  • • •

  A week before the election, I sent the president a seven-page memo analyzing the morass we had now found ourselves in, and how we could get out of it.

  “More than any issue, the fundamental appeal of our campaign was to bring a renewed sense of responsibility to Washington,” I wrote. “That meant overcoming withering partisanship and ideology, and bringing people together around commonsense solutions to stubborn problems. It meant reining in the power of special interests that tilted policies in their own favor at the expense of the middle class and the country. It meant disciplining the budget. It meant doing business in the light of day, so the American people could see how decisions were being made, and participate in them.”

  We had put a premium on getting things done, which was his ultimate responsibility. In doing it, though, we appeared to have ignored, if not flouted, our campaign commitments. We would have to reset, I said, and return to a focus on our core themes.

  As he prepared for what promised to be painful postelection interviews, however, the president was not in an apologetic mood. He might acknowledge errors in style and approach, he said, but he believed in the programs and policies he had pursued. He was proud of historic achievements, such as health reform, which would pay huge dividends to the country and everyday people for generations to come.

  “I’ve read some of the commentary, and here’s the problem,” he said. “They want me to say the policy was wrong. That it was a mistake to do what we did. And I’m not going to say it because I don’t believe it. And so they’ll never be satisfied.”

  On Election Night, a few of us gathered in my office to monitor returns, which turned out to be not as bad as had been predicted, but far worse. As state after state reported, Democratic member after Democratic member was swept away, delivering the House to a new tea-flavored Republican majority. In all, sixty-three seats were lost.

  Obama called and started ticking off the names of some of his favorite young House members who were in tough races. “What about Patrick Murphy in Pennsylvania?”

  “Gone,” I said.

  “Boccieri in Ohio?

  “Gone.”

  “Perriello in Virginia?”

  “Gone.”

  “The sad thing is that we’re losing all these promising young guys who were the future of the party,” he said glumly.

  At midnight, after reading the coverage, he sent me a succinct e-mail: “Brutal.”

  The only thing that consoled me was history, the knowledge that the sainted FDR did even worse in the 1938 midterms, when Democrats lost seventy-one seats. Two years later, he was reelected by a wide margin. I even recognized a perverse benefit in what Obama would publicly acknowledge as our “shellacking.” The Republican Party was now firmly in the thrall of its right-wing.

  The same forces that had energized the GOP for its House takeover would play an outsize role in the 2012 presidential nominating process. This meant the nominee would have to pass their litmus test by pledging to support draconian budget cuts and oppose any tax increase, even on the wealthiest Americans. He or she was likely to oppose immigration reform, making it harder for Republicans to capture swing states with large blocs of Hispanic voters in the general election. And the Republican nominee would line up with the social conservatives on issues such as the right to choose, giving us a chance to replicate the large advantage we held with women voters in 2008. The result was bad for governance and bad for the country, but from a strictly political point of view, not necessarily bad for our chances of winning reelection.

  “I think the seeds of your reelection may have been planted yesterday,” I told the president the day after the carnage. He looked at me for signs of temporary dementia, perhaps brought on by stress.

  Obama was less concerned about reelection than the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress. Many essential items had been put on hold for the midterms. Unchastened by the beating we had taken, and perhaps spurred on by the realization that his hefty Democratic majorities would expire in eight weeks, the president arrived for work the day after the debacle toting an ambitious wish list for the rest of the year.

  As official Washington was hanging black crepe on the White House, Obama was rallying his team.

  “Okay, we got our asses kicked,” he said. “But we have stuff we have to get done here, so I want to focus on that.”

  If Congress failed to act to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, every American would face a steep tax increase on January 1, placing an unwelcome new burden on them and the still-fragile economy. Obama and Democrats had promised to end the tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 a year, a popular position. Yet Republicans were dead set against any such decoupling.

  Beyond taxes, Obama was desperately fighting to ratify the New START nuclear arms treaty with Russia. He wanted votes on the DREAM Act, to make the children of undocumented immigrants eligible for citizenship upon completing military service or some college; and repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy banning from military service gays and lesbians who weren’t willing to keep their sexuality secret—a change for which the president had been working since taking office. He wanted to pass new laws to help ensure food safety, and favored a children’s nutrition law that had been championed by the First Lady. “First, it’s a good law. Second, I want to go hom
e at night,” he said wryly.

  I thought it was nuts. What about the midterm election did he not get? Yet Biden, it seemed, who had spent much of his life in the Senate and had good relations across the aisle, was bullish. Obama had sent him to the Hill in October to try to get some of our judicial appointments unstuck, and Biden used the opportunity for a broader discussion with McConnell. The truth was that Biden, a proud, lifelong politician, was a far better conduit for such deal making than Obama, and he came away convinced that we could reach a sweeping agreement with the opposition. For their own reasons, the Republicans wanted to get the New START done, and didn’t want to get blamed for raising taxes. “But they’re never going to decouple the high end from the middle class,” the VP said of the Bush tax cuts. “And if we force the issue, I would bet over time more than a few of our own folks will get wobbly.”

  After days of back-and-forth, the contours of a deal emerged. It would require the president to swallow a two-year extension of the entire Bush tax cut, including the portion for the wealthy. It would include a one-year payroll tax cut for every American and a one-year renewal of extended unemployment insurance for millions of Americans, who otherwise would have lost it on January 1.

  The final stumbling block was the extension and expansion of estate tax exemptions, which were set to expire as well. Under the Republican proposal, more multimillion-dollar estates would be sheltered from taxation. Yet the Republicans were refusing to continue refundable tax credits for low-income workers. “One principle we can defend is that taxes shouldn’t go up on anyone right now,” Geithner said. “To raise taxes on millions of Americans while we sweeten the pot for the wealthy? It’s a terrible deal. Almost indefensible.” Obama agreed. “I’m not going to give new tax breaks to folks at the top, and see taxes go up on folks at the bottom. Unless we get those refundable tax credits, it’s no deal.”