Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  When the Republicans caved on the tax credits for the working poor, the president announced the deal, which touched off an immediate firestorm among the Left, who felt Obama had given up too much.

  I was asked to call a few commentators to explain the deal, including Keith Olbermann, whose hour-long show was a mainstay on the left-leaning MSNBC. When I reached out to him by e-mail, though, the tempestuous host wasn’t interested in chatting.

  “You can kiss the base goodbye,” he said, in a terse reply.

  “I think when they learn what is in this package, the base will think differently,” I answered.

  “Oh THAT’S the problem?” he shot back. “The people who elected you are too stupid to figure out what’s going on?”

  At the end of the week, Bill Clinton dropped by the White House for lunch, during which the presidents went over details of the package. When Clinton blessed the deal, Obama suggested the two of them make a joint statement. They wandered into the press office, looking for someone who could open the door to the White House Briefing Room. “We want to talk to some reporters,” the president explained to a junior staffer who was hoping to catch up on some work on what was supposed to be a lazy Friday afternoon. Gibbs came along and asked the presidents to stand by while he rustled up the press corps. When he did, Obama spoke briefly, turned the lectern over to Clinton, and departed for an event with the First Lady. Clinton continued for nearly half an hour, brilliantly and cogently making the case for the deal.

  Some reporters wrote after Clinton’s exegesis that Obama had diminished himself by ceding his lectern to his predecessor. Obama waved that off. “I don’t care about that stuff,” the president said. “He was doing the Lord’s work in there.”

  As Biden forecast, the deal paved the way for other votes that had been frozen. The DREAM Act failed, albeit with 55 votes, but the president got everything else on his list—New START; the food safety and nutrition bills; the defense authorization bill to fund the ongoing war efforts; and, to our mild surprise and great relief, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a major milestone in the social history of the country.

  Despite unhappiness among some on the left and right over aspects of the tax deal, the lame-duck session, historic in the scope of what it achieved, was met with relief from most Americans, who were just happy to see something get done on a bipartisan basis. Coming after a devastating election, the deals proved a surprising close to what had been a challenging year, and Obama’s poll numbers would soon reflect this.

  • • •

  By then, I was a lame duck as well.

  In September, anticipating the outcome of the election, I made public what I had planned from the beginning, announcing that I would be leaving the White House in early 2011 without specifying an exact date. In my own mind, I wasn’t sure. I knew Plouffe was coming to replace me, and he would arrive in January. Yet as dizzying as the White House merry-go-round could be and as spent as I was, it was still hard to jump off the carousel. For two years I had been in the middle of everything, in close and constant contact with the president, grappling with extraordinary, sometimes excruciating issues and battling on his behalf on television and in the halls of Congress. Like any addiction, it’s not good for you in the long run, but it’s damned hard to kick.

  The president resolved that problem for me.

  “You have to get out of here early in the year,” he said, as we chatted in his dining room in mid-November. “You need some time to clear your head. Hell, I’d like to do it myself. But I can’t go. You can. And I need you rested and ready for the campaign. You’re the closest to me, to how I think. I need you firing on all cylinders.”

  He had handled the matter well. After all, this just codified what we had agreed to two years earlier. Still, it was uncomfortable. On the same day, he told me that he would be naming a new press secretary, which seemed inevitable after the Carla Bruni flap. Robert and I bore the scars of a thousand battles, inside the White House and out. Rahm was gone. Now it felt as if the president were clearing the decks for a new team. “Next to me, you get beat up the most. Gibbs is next,” the president said.

  I stayed a month into the year, long enough to help guide the State of the Union speech process and to overlap briefly with Plouffe. On my last weekend, some friends threw a large going-away party, which was a wonderful coda to my Washington years. The president came and milled around for a couple of hours with a crowd of my White House colleagues, government leaders, and quite a few news media folks with whom I had become close. Having been raised in journalism, I still—for all the lofty company I had been keeping since my arrival in Washington—felt most comfortable with reporters.

  Then there were my speechwriters, the brilliant, spirited kids whom I would miss the most. They presented me with a leather-bound, gold-embossed book entitled, Hello, Wordsmiths. It was a volume of major speeches on which we had collaborated, annotated with alternately touching and hilarious commentary. On an inside page, I saw an inscription in familiar handwriting that caused my eyes to well up. The president had written, “This book is a testament to our collaboration and how you’ve always been there to help me find my voice.”

  PART SIX

  TWENTY-NINE

  FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

  FOR FOUR YEARS, two on the campaign trail and then two in the White House, I had been in constant motion, on call 24/7. Then, on February 1, 2011, when I left Washington and returned to Chicago, I had no schedule and only the vaguest sense of what I would be doing in the coming weeks and months. The sole trapping left of my former life was the Secret Service, and that would end quickly. As a courtesy, my splendid detail leader, Cleveland Brown, accompanied Susan and me on the flight home. Soon enough, I thought, as Cleveland whisked us past airport security, I would be back in long lines with everyone else, slipping off my shoes, emptying my pockets, and walking through metal detectors.

  Contributing to an eerie sense of otherworldliness was the weather. Chicago was about to welcome us with a blizzard. Ours was one of the last flights to land before the airport shut down. I found the snowstorm comforting, a fitting “welcome home” to the Windy City. Throughout my time in Washington, I had referred to myself as a “Chicagoan on Assignment.” It was my way of signifying that my heart and soul were firmly planted on the shores of Lake Michigan, where I would eagerly return after my tour of duty. Now that day had come, and the whole town was at a standstill due to one of its signature winter storms. And so was I.

  After a short break, I would begin to travel the paid speaker’s circuit. I would return to my old offices in the loft building in River North, by the elevated train tracks, renting workspace from my old firm. But during my first weeks home, and without much to do, I would occasionally catch Susan staring at me with all the focus of an intensive-care doctor, apparently checking my vital signs to gauge how I was tolerating this sudden separation from all the action back in DC. “I just worry you’ll be bored,” she said. I wasn’t, exactly. It was good to be home with her and enjoy the newfound freedom to do whatever I pleased. Still, I found that, too often, I was incessantly checking my iPhone, perusing my e-mail, and glancing at Web sites for breaking news—habits that were hard to break.

  The most difficult adjustment, though, wasn’t so much that I missed the action as much as I missed the main actor. Throughout the previous seven years, I had been in close touch with Obama. In the White House, I would see or speak to him several times a day. Unrealistically, as it turned out, I had expected that contact to continue. “Don’t worry, I’ll be calling you at least once a week,” the president had assured me when I went to the Oval to say good-bye. Yet as days and weeks passed, I rarely heard from him. My e-mails to him, which once fetched quick replies, often went unanswered. Suddenly, after serving for years as Obama’s principal adviser, my advice was not being solicited and was, perhaps, unwanted. The silence stung—and I found it depress
ing.

  It had been a while since I had seen Obama when I returned to Washington in late spring. He had just spent the previous few weeks mired in a dreadful budget standoff. It ended with a deal that merely postponed some tough choices that needed to be made, which of course left everyone involved looking bad, especially the president.

  I was in town for the over-the-top celebrity weekend that had become the White House Correspondents Dinner. As usual, the dinner called for the president to deliver a comedic speech that skewered him and others. I had contributed a few lines to his routine, and came by the White House to go over the speech with him and his speechwriters.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and the White House was largely empty. The president had just returned from a tour of tornado-devastated communities in Alabama. “I met a little boy down there, maybe ten years old, who was standing with his dad,” he told me as we ate lunch in his dining room. “And as the dad told me the story of how their house was blown away around them while they huddled to survive, I could see this kid’s lip quivering. He was trying so hard to be brave, you know, for the president. So I just kind of wrapped him up in a hug and told him it was going to be all right.”

  It was a nice, warm conversation of the sort I had often shared with Obama over the years.

  While we were speaking, there was a knock on the door. The president’s assistant peeked in and passed him a note, which he acknowledged with a quick nod. “Can you step out for a minute?” he asked me. “There’s a national security briefer here who has to go over something with me.” I didn’t think anything of it, and waited outside the Oval with Favreau and some other speechwriters. When we reconvened to go over the speech, Obama laughed his way through the comedy routine until we got to a joke about one of his prospective opponents, Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota. “Poor Tim Pawlenty,” the line went. “He had such promise, but for that unfortunate middle name, bin Laden.” It was a self-deprecating joke, coming from a president whose middle name was Hussein. But Obama wanted it removed. “Bin Laden,” he said. “Bin Laden . . . that’s so hackneyed . . . so yesterday. Let’s think of something else.” I thought it was funny, but he was the guy who had received the 365 electoral votes, so we changed the joke. Even without it, the routine played to rave reviews.

  I woke up early the next day to prepare for an appearance on Meet the Press, and turned in early that night. I had barely put my head on the pillow when Susan burst in. “You’d better get up,” she said. “I think they’ve killed bin Laden.” I scrambled out of bed and looked at my iPhone, which was overflowing with urgent e-mails from the White House imploring me to turn on the TV to hear Obama’s remarks.

  As I watched the president announce to the nation that bin Laden was dead, killed by an elite unit of Navy SEALs, I thought about our visit the day earlier. Now I understood why he’d wanted the bin Laden joke eliminated. He already had given the order that would eliminate bin Laden! “That’s so hackneyed . . . so yesterday.” Obama undoubtedly knew when we met that if the risky mission had failed, it would trigger huge recriminations that might doom his reelection prospects. “Amazing,” I told Susan. “He was completely calm. As normal as could be. Not a hint that anything out of the ordinary was going down.” This is one of Obama’s greatest strengths. He can be painfully deliberative in making decisions, assuring himself that he has thought things all the way through. Once he decides, however, he won’t wring his hands or second-guess himself. He is willing to live with the consequences, an indispensable virtue in a president.

  Given the complexity of the mission, the uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was even in the compound, and the divided counsel of the president’s advisers, Obama’s decision to authorize the raid—made without Pakistan’s knowledge let alone its approval—was a courageous one. “Honestly, I didn’t have the balls to tell him to go for it,” Biden confided to me later. “And neither did many others around the table, regardless of what they say now. It was a big, big call.”

  When I visited the president a few weeks later, I mentioned the iconic photo that had been released of him and his team watching a feed of the mission, just as one of the two U.S. helicopters crashed in bin Laden’s compound.

  “Were you thinking about Jimmy Carter?” I asked. Carter’s failed mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, in which U.S. choppers crashed in the desert, was a harbinger of his doomed candidacy for reelection.

  “How could you not?” Obama said. “But mostly I was thinking about those SEALs and getting them out of there.”

  But the afterglow of the successful mission was short-lived. Washington became mired in a high-stakes standoff between Obama and House Republicans over the once-routine act of raising the nation’s debt limit. The Republicans essentially handed the president an ultimatum: agree to deeper budget cuts than he thought wise or fair, or face the first-ever default on the nation’s debt, which would have catastrophic implications for our fragile economy.

  Faced with this stark choice—a lousy deal or economic disaster—he chose to save the economy. But this episode only showcased Washington politics at its worst—gridlock, brinksmanship, and an unsatisfying “solution” that merely kicked the can down the road. Many of our supporters were outraged because, after fighting for “balance,” the president had been forced to accept a cuts-only package. The Tea Party had thrown a tantrum and, in the minds of many of our supporters, had won; the hostage takers had walked off with the ransom.

  A few days after the debt ceiling resolution, Susan and I returned to Washington for the president’s fiftieth birthday party at the White House. The combination picnic and dance party was, for a beleaguered Obama, a welcome interregnum in a downbeat summer. After the beating he had been taking, it was nice to see the guy I used to call Barack happy and relaxed, amid a sea of friends, family, and a smattering of celebrities. When we left after midnight, the president was still cutting a rug in the middle of the crowded dance floor, Michelle in one hand and a martini in the other.

  The next morning, he might have felt like reaching for another libation. Standard and Poor’s, dismayed with the debt resolution, downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time ever. That decision, along with burgeoning debt crises in Italy and Spain, triggered the steepest drop in the stock market since the height of the financial crisis.

  All in all, things were a mess.

  I thoroughly understood the strategy of trying to transcend Washington’s dispiriting partisan divides, not least of all because it was a fundamental principle that had drawn many independent voters to us in 2008. I recognized that we needed to signify seriousness about deficits and spending. Yet by almost single-mindedly pursuing those objectives for much of the year, we had largely lost the sense of advocacy for the middle class and middle-class values that had been the lynchpin of our message. After the debt ceiling debacle, Obama’s image as a leader had taken a major hit.

  The president called me while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in late August, clearly angry over his lost summer. “I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks thinking about where we go from here,” he said. “We’re not going to play defense from now until next November.”

  I agreed, and took the opportunity to send him a blunt memo summarizing my thoughts on what had gone wrong these past few months.

  “People need to know what you are fighting for beyond the bloodless, ministerial task of cleaning up the balance sheet,” I wrote.

  You were elected, first and foremost, because you brilliantly and passionately described the central challenge of our time: the erosion of the middle class and the “American Dream”—a phrase that is now in disrepute because it feels to so many Americans like an unobtainable cliché . . . Your message ultimately carried for two reasons: One is that it was rooted in the idea that we are a better and stronger country when everyone gets a fair shot and a fair shake; when hard work and responsibility is rewar
ded, and all of us are accountable. The second is that it recognized that there are things we must do together as a country to ensure a brighter future . . .

  You have been way ahead of the curve on the impact on the middle class of revolutionary changes in the economy and the unsavory tilt of the playing field in this new Gilded Age. Much of what you’ve done as President has been aimed at addressing these challenges, and at restoring the economic security so many Americans have lost. But we are not consistently telling that story. We are not consistently communicating the values of fairness and responsibility. We are not consistently describing the vision of an America where hard work once again pays off, and opportunity is widely available, or how everything you’re doing is aimed at achieving that goal . . .

  Despite everything, however, I’m convinced we can win this election. It won’t be easy. But the research is clear. Our values and vision beat theirs. We just have to be seen as fighting for [people], day-in and day-out, and identify those who stand in the way.

  September 2 was my thirty-second wedding anniversary—a gratifying, if unremarkable milestone—but it became a memorable day for another reason. Plouffe called me with news of the monthly jobs report. He was never one to be carried away by irrational exuberance, but on this occasion he sounded downright glum.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said. “In this whole, vast country, guess how many jobs were created last month?” I didn’t hazard an answer, but assumed from Plouffe’s tone that the news wasn’t good.