Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

by Ron Suskind

  “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

  And what did this answer consist in?

  “It’s the answer that led those, who have been told for so long, by so many, to be cynical and fearful and doubtful of what we can achieve, to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

  In speeches over the years, Obama had often referenced his favorite line of King’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Everyone borrows from everyone else and pays homage to their heroes. But in Obama’s rendering tonight, King’s arc now bent “toward the hope of a better day,” skewing in this bright direction for the simple fact of his election.

  What change really had come, beyond the extraordinary fact of his arrival, was not clear—nor clarified in this speech. Instead, the president-elect retreated from his opening salvo, dialing back expectations:

  “This victory alone is not the change we seek,” he explained. “It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.”

  None of this kept anyone from weeping and cheering, not his avowals that the “road ahead will be long” or that our “climb will be steep.” They were dancing in Kenya, and all across Africa. From South Side Chicago out across at least one country and continent, the streets filled with young and old, in inner cities and suburbs, gated communities and slums alike. It was a difficult world everyone lived in, each day, but tonight was the long-awaited counterpoint to all that, to the wars, the collapsing economy, and that growing sense, in the long Bush twilight, of being leaderless.

  But you can miss the moment, even the one you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

  Not that the crowd could be quelled or could see in Obama, in his Kennedy suit hanging perfectly from his angular shoulders, anything but the confidence of a true leader and the promise of better days, brighter skies. People were overcome. Even the ever-competitive Jesse Jackson, a few rows back from the stage—a man who carried King’s bags and long thought he would be the man’s heir onstage tonight—wept like a child, tears soaking his weathered face. It was no different on either side of him, or among those crowded a mile back from the first row. Everyone let the moment’s emotion run through them.

  Everyone except the man on the stage.

  He had tried on his presidential voice, flatter and soberer than the night before, to see how it fit, to see if any posture or presentation, much less word or deed, could rise to meet the roaring hopes of this expectant crowd. But it hadn’t fit—at least not like it had the night before in Manassas. And the theater of the campaign had suddenly given way to a sobering reality: he was going to be the president. Something in that lofty title, for all his demonstrable talents, didn’t fit.

  After five minutes of waving to the massed convulsions, Obama stepped down into the stage’s tented wings, where Michelle, the woman who knew everything, knew him when he was Barry and sat up nights with him wondering what sort of life they could look forward to, raised her palm for a high-five, her face aglow.

  He took her raised hand and gently lowered it. Not tonight, he whispered. Not tonight.

  7

  The B-Team

  The day after the election, Obama got up early, donned a sweatshirt and White Sox cap, and stepped out into a brisk Chicago morning. The autumnal tranquility of early November was already giving way to the frosty throes of winter in Chicago. He quietly slipped into the health club at a friend’s apartment building and by 12:30 was at his desk in an office building near Hyde Park meeting David Axelrod and his transition chief, John Podesta.

  A best-kept secret could now begin openly to bear rewards: Podesta had been meeting with the candidate since June to prepare him for a transition to the presidency. Word of this preemptive planning had been closely guarded to avoid the impression of entitlement to victory.

  Obama said later that, because of the economic crisis, “In some ways, my presidency began in September of 2008.” His words and deeds—consulting with Paulson about his efforts at Treasury, or meeting with congressional leaders about emergency measures—carried the weight of presidential engagements. At that point, he was almost like the leader of the opposition in a Parliamentary model, supporting ministers, like Paulson and Bernanke, in their emergency actions.

  By late September, when polls started to show him pulling firmly into the lead, Podesta secretly called together former chiefs of staff to help Obama sketch out his presidential future.

  They met in a Reno hotel. Two former Clinton chiefs of staff, Erskine Bowles and Leon Panetta, joined Podesta, also a former Clinton chief of staff, and a clutch of Obama’s oldest and closest advisers, Jarrett, Axelrod, and Rouse. Also called in was William Daley—son of Chicago’s former mayor, brother of its current one—who had been commerce secretary and deputy chief of staff to Clinton. He was now a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase. Each brought a list of potential appointees for senior positions, as well as their most incisive advice for the management challenges Obama was about to face.

  “If I win, what advice can you guys give me” about how to proceed? Obama queried.

  Erskine Bowles cut right to the chase. “Leave your friends at home,” he said. “They just create problems when you get to Washington.”

  Jarrett and Axelrod looked on, dumbfounded.

  The former chiefs nodded. They’d all been in White Houses where old friends or senior campaign aides found themselves lost and ineffective in managing a presidency. Panetta talked about the need for a strong chief of staff who could run the White House and, himself, command loyalty and accountability, but always be in sync with the president. Bowles agreed. “You can’t run this operation on your own—you need to have someone solid you can rely on so you can be president.” As this discussion progressed, Obama cut them off. “Sounds like you’re talking about Rouse.” There were smiles all around—everyone in the room was a Rouse fan—but Pete demurred. He said being chief wasn’t right for him at this point for a variety of personal reasons. He felt he’d be better as the trusted guy Obama could call into the Oval Office to talk about tough issues, just one-on-one. “Well, not now,” Obama nodded, “but maybe later.”

  The attendees then spent hours offering their best suggestions for the chief job and other senior positions. The name of Rahm Emanuel never came up.

  He had not been a perfect friend to the Obama campaign. Caught between his allegiances to Obama and Clinton during the primary, he opted to “hide under his desk,” in his words, rather than endorse either candidate, and never did much to assist in the general election.

  In the ensuing six weeks, Obama had often thought of the Reno meeting. As one close adviser said, “I think he heard everyone in the room, but deep down he felt that his charm and intelligence would be plenty to handle these management issues, which of course often sneak up on presidents to show how important they can be.”

  By November 4, Obama had narrowed his chief of staff choices down to two names: Tom Daschle and Rahm Emanuel, who’d been recommended by the Chicagoans, including Axelrod.

  Sitting that afternoon with Podesta and Axelrod, with the ink barely dry on his electoral victory, Obama knew that picking the chief of staff was job one. The position is widely recognized to be among the most powerful among nonelected officials in the executive branch, possibly in the entire government. The compare-and-contrast between the two men was simple: in Daschle, Obama would get a like-minded partner, calm, intelligent, and surprisingly firm; in Emanuel, the yang to his yin, someone excitable, action-oriented, and by certain accounts ruthless. Emanuel was in many
ways Obama’s antithesis, but as the campaign wore on, especially in the weeks leading up to November 4, it had become clear that Obama was leaning toward the pugnacious congressman.

  Emanuel was, of course, a widely known entity, a D.C. fixture with a reputation for a two-fisted style of politics and boundless tactical energy. Though the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, he had even loftier ambitions. It was universally known that he hoped to be the chamber’s first Jewish Speaker. Two decades younger than Pelosi and her two deputies, who were all approaching seventy, Emanuel seemed a shoo-in to take the job one day.

  But he also came with White House experience, having worked for Clinton as political director in the 1990s, in what everyone agreed had been a tumultuous tenure. Dubbed “the enforcer,” Emanuel was at one point demoted for being abrasive, only to reemerge as the tactical force behind NAFTA. He went on to engineer a series of small-bore Clinton initiatives before leaving in 1998 to take a job in finance.

  Like many Democrats in exile from the late ’90s on, “Rahmbo,” as he was jokingly known, monetized his talents. With no MBA and little business experience, he was nonetheless able to secure a job as a managing director at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella, which netted him more than $16 million during his brief tenure. Insofar as it was always clear that he’d return to government, the compensation makes sense, said one former investment chief, a fan of Emanuel’s, who now works in Washington: “Paying someone who will be a future government official a lot of money for doing very little? On Wall Street we call that an investment.”

  By 2002, when he was elected to Congress, Emanuel already knew the upstart state senator with the funny name and presidential ambitions. They were not close friends but, like a pair of ions, had an opposites-attract quality that was instantly apparent. At a roast of Emanuel during a Chicago fund-raiser in 2005, Obama, cool and coy, with his flawless timing, zinged the emotive Emanuel, claiming the onetime ballet dancer had adapted Machiavelli’s The Prince to dance, “with a lot of kicks below the waist.” Obama went on to explain that the loss of a middle finger in a teenage mishap with a meat slicer had left Emanuel “practically mute.” The crowd roared. But when he had finished with the barbs, Obama offered a concise, accurate description of his colleague.

  “Rahm is a little intense,” Obama had said. “He’s strong, he’s aggressive, he’s emotional, he’s moody.”

  Why Obama would want a right-hand man with these qualities—especially the last two—was puzzling to a few senior members of his campaign staff. One later remarked, “Rahm’s all impulse and action, with very modest organizational skills. This was not a mystery to people who’d worked with him. Either Obama didn’t know that, which is unlikely, or he didn’t care.”

  The campaign’s innermost circle, meanwhile, was all slipping into key roles. The three “senior advisers” would be David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Pete Rouse. Right behind them was a trio that had been with Obama since 2004: Robert Gibbs, who would become press secretary; Bill Burton, deputy press secretary; and Jon Favreau, now all of twenty-seven, as head speechwriter.

  These decisions were all but foregone conclusions, but others would prove thornier. Obama’s toughest calls, everyone knew, would concern his economic team.

  In a single day of informed consent, the Windy City had become the de facto center of American politics. While President Bush and Washington plodded through a lame-duck season, Democrats were mulling over what they would do come January 20. Insiders and policy experts found themselves heading from Washington to Chicago, for a chance to bend the president-elect’s ear.

  The day after the election, Peter Orszag booked a flight to Chicago for the following week. He had much less personal experience with Obama than many of those—especially from the campaign—who hoped to score a position on the economic team. In the midst of the September crisis, Orszag—who held one of Washington’s most influential jobs as head of the Congressional Budget Office—watched from afar as a veritable who’s who of economists gathered around the senator. Despite his lengthy tenure in the capital, he’d met Obama on only a few occasions, but the young senator seemed to speak clearly to Orszag’s “super-wonk” sensibilities.

  Orszag was a bona fide academic phenomenon who blew through Princeton for his bachelor’s (summa) and went on to get a master’s while a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, where he later received his PhD. He could think in numbers, talk in full sentences, and he worked nonstop, all of which impressed the era’s ubiquitous mentor to young economists, Bob Rubin. Ever nearby through these years was another, even more accomplished Rubin protégé, twenty years past his wunderkind moment of becoming, at twenty-eight, one of the youngest tenured professors ever at Harvard. That of course was Larry Summers, who became Treasury secretary in 1999, around the time that Orszag was promoted to senior economic adviser to the president. When Larry and Peter met across the conference table in those days, staffers joked that the Treasury Department could add to tax receipts by selling tickets. They both felt entitled to “smartest guy in the room” honors—and, after all, how could there be two?

  During the Bush era, when Summers began his stint as Harvard president, Orszag became a senior fellow in economic studies at the renowned Brookings Institution and then in 2005 became director of the Hamilton Project, a think tank within Brookings set up by Rubin to bring hard-eyed analysis to long-standing liberal positions.

  That’s when he first met Senator Barack Obama. After more than a decade in D.C., Orszag was no stranger to what he referred to as the “Senate gestalt.” One custom obliged him to pick his seat only after a senator had picked his or her own. So when he walked into Obama’s office, Orszag found himself standing around awkwardly, waiting for the senator to sit down.

  Finally he asked, “Senator Obama, where should I sit?”

  Obama looked at him perplexedly. “I sit where you aren’t,” he directed. “I’m not into this whole alpha-senator thing.”

  From there, it got even better. A policy geek, Orszag was prone to tangents and often lost listeners in his love of esoteric facts. So as the conversation with Obama wandered, Orszag, in typical fashion, found himself citing a vaguely relevant study out of the Brookings Institution. “I know exactly the study you’re talking about,” Obama interjected, catching the never-one-to-be-outwonked Orszag entirely off guard. “I thought it was interesting how . . .” And off he went.

  Orszag was bowled over. There was simply no way Obama’s staff had distracted him with such obscure policy studies. The guy was the real deal. There are few things as awing or as humbling to a professional whiz kid like Orszag as the realization that among the nation’s senators, a group he was accustomed to having to sway toward intellectual sunlight, there was someone as smart as he was, if not smarter still.

  These thoughts played through Orszag’s mind as he made his way to Chicago for his job interview with the leader-in-waiting of the free world. Because of his day job, Orszag had to handle matters with the utmost delicacy: no calls to his office from anyone in the Obama campaign, only to his cell phone and only after work hours. He was, after all, in one of the last true honest-broker positions in the federal government, heading up the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office.

  The “bipartisan” tag was hard-won and ever more the key to CBO’s franchise. With its hundred number-crunching analysts—both Democrats and Republicans—the office served as Congress’s official scorekeeper, offering the consensus view of a given law’s impact on the federal budget. Not that everyone heeded CBO’s projections, but at least someone was keeping score.

  During his years in D.C., Orszag had come to be a leading expert on what, year by year, the government was recognizing as its greatest existential threat: the rising cost of health care. When he had arrived in Washington in the mid-1990s, in the wake of Clinton’s failure to reform the health care system, Medicare and Medicaid spending—though only a fraction of what they would become—were already showing
steady increases driven by rising medical costs. The cost of health care had, in short, moved onto the political radar. But in typical D.C. fashion, the problem could not really be confronted until it was matched with a politically viable solution.

  So this was what Orszag looked for—and what he found. The place was Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and the man was named Jack Wennberg.

  A quiet revolution in medicine had begun in 1967. Wennberg, a headstrong and independent thinker, was settling in Vermont after a postgraduate stint at Johns Hopkins. His research interest had been piqued by President Johnson’s recently established programs, Medicare and Medicaid, the data on which, in those days, were easily obtained, rich, and complete. By virtue of the large population these programs embraced, Wennberg found he could suddenly track medical outcomes across a vast sea of patients. What he found was startling. Thousands of risky and expensive procedures were being performed each year without any likely medical value.

  This conclusion took a while to come to, but strong clues were evident from the very beginning. In a pair of demographically similar counties Wennberg looked at in Vermont, there were wide variations, he found, in the numbers of common procedures performed. Some were conducted two or three times as often in one county as in its neighbor. But despite this, there was virtually no variation in medical outcome. People got sick and died from the conditions in question at all but identical rates. Could this mean that some procedures had virtually no medical value? he wondered. The answer would turn out to be yes, and Wennberg, who was treated for years as a dangerous heretic by America’s medical papacy, eventually founded the Dartmouth Atlas Project and a new school of “evidence-based” medicine.

  By the early 2000s the medical establishment had reluctantly conceded the basic soundness of the so-called Wennberg Variation. The institute built around his early breakthroughs had in the meantime gathered similar data from across the country. The purview of evidence-based medicine had widened to embrace thornier issues about the stunning variance between both practice and cost. Some hospitals, for instance, were charging twice as much as others, with no discernable added value for patients. Certain procedures appeared to come into vogue based on revenues per hour, rather than on their provable medical value. Most damning of all were the supply-driven findings, which showed that the number of specialists in a given geographic area often determined the number of procedures performed there. Twice as many gynecological surgeons meant twice as many hysterectomies. The same correlations applied with orthopedic surgeons and back operations, cardiac surgeons and heart shunts, and so forth.