by Ron Suskind
It was too cold to camp out, but people still tried, and some managed it. They had come to watch history unfold before their eyes, to be a part of its unfolding. Toughing out the brutally cold night seemed to bind them more closely to the historic moment, as hero participants. By midmorning, assembling in the sunless cold was a crowd many times the size of Grant Park’s. Later estimates would put it at nearly two million, making it the largest gathering ever in the nation’s capital.
The emotions of Election Night had widened and deepened, becoming, in light of the crisis, more urgent still. Everyone knew the economy had collapsed, losing three and a half million jobs over the past six months, a slide that showed no sign of slowing. But no one needed to see those numbers to know the country was in trouble. You could feel it. Things were out of control.
So people controlled what they could. For most of the two million, that meant finding a way to Washington, a place to stay, clothes warm enough for long exposure, and a path to the Mall through the teeming throngs. They had come to be inspired. That was what they needed and couldn’t manage on their own. That’s what presidents are for.
A year before, almost to the day, Obama had given an interview to the Reno Gazette-Journal that prompted a line of ongoing analysis and controversy. On the issue of which recent presidents had been “transformational,” the senator had said that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”
This prompted a dustup. During a debate the following week, Hillary Clinton, smarting from the slight to her husband’s tenure, accused Obama of “admiring Ronald Reagan.”
Obama’s response was almost legalistic: “What I said was—is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests.”
Since then, there’d been a change in tense. Obama and others began to think more seriously about how Reagan had managed his transformative magic, how it might be created again and put to a different purpose.
Obama had been meditating on Reagan’s presidency and legacy for a long time. In The Audacity of Hope he writes that “Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order . . . our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith.”
Fifteen minutes into his Inaugural Address, he echoed that passage in the central passage of his own speech: “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Reagan’s difficult task when he stepped to the lectern in January 1981 was similar, if less dire. Unemployment had eclipsed 7 percent, and inflation was averaging a startling 12.5 percent. Having won electoral support from conservatives for his stances on a host of social issues, Reagan was compelled to put all these aside when he took the oath of office and to focus instead on the economy. Fortunately for him this dovetailed with another theme of his campaign: reining in the growth of government and unleashing the power of the private sector. Or at least he could claim it did.
And this was just what he claimed, with considerable rhetorical skill, in his Inaugural Address, asserting brazenly that the country’s troubles were for good reason “parallel and proportionate to the . . . unnecessary and excessive growth of government.” Following this with the bold affirmation that we were “too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams,” Reagan cast government as the bad guy, standing in the way of the country’s hopes and aspirations. “In the days ahead,” he continued, “I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy.”
While Reagan’s address lacked a signature line like Kennedy’s famous “ask not,” it spoke to a shifting cultural current—to the individual and entrepreneur—laying a vicious right cross on the talk of shared sacrifice that dominated the late seventies: “We have every right to dream heroic dreams.”
But Reagan’s most remembered line—“In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems”—sounds today hedged and conditional, his qualification about not wanting to abolish government but “make it work, work with us, not over us,” altogether tame.
Nearly thirty years later Obama would utter almost identical words during his inaugural speech, explaining that the “question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This was, in fact, the centerpiece of what he put forward as a remedy to our long list of ills. The speech was mostly that list—what had gone wrong and the country’s history of overcoming challenges similar and even greater in their breadth. No one would ever forget attending Obama’s inauguration, but for most of them the speech itself underwhelmed. They had come to be inspired, and he had denied them.
The next day would be Obama’s first full one as president, and he would spend it diving full bore into the stimulus debate. On a conference call with Nancy Pelosi’s office, he pushed for the very “inspiration” he had deliberately withheld the day before.
“This stimulus needs more inspiration!” he shouted into the speakerphone.
Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes. Inspiration works ideologically and rhetorically. It can consume and invigorate the masses, and get results when their ire or enthusiasm is then directed back at the permanent government. But day to day, in the clinch with the canny operators of Washington, inspirational gifts find no neat application.
Next to the speakerphone was that morning’s Washington Post, so thick with photos and purple prose about the inauguration that it looked like a special collector’s edition.
That’s the way it was. The town was swept up in the power of a moment, of an African American man taking the oath of office before two million people, those who’d “seen it all” but still wept, and others who hoped to tell their grandchildren of this day.
But after covering nine presidencies, the dean of the city’s press corps, Washington Post columnist David Broder, still spry at seventy-nine, managed to summon a kernel of hard perspective in the last line of his column that morning.
“What speeches can accomplish, they have delivered handsomely for Barack Obama,” he wrote, in a gentle warning to the young president. “Now, it will depend on his deeds.”
Photographs
UBS-America president Robert Wolf, whose bank was leveraged at more than 50 to 1, sounded a first alert to then-candidate Obama on August 4, 2007, warning that a “market-driven disaster” was on the way. Wolf, pictured here golfing with Obama in 2010, said, “This could be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
In September 2007, Obama delivered a speech on financial reform at NASDAQ. Still a long-shot candidate, 30 points behind Hillary Clinton, he was well ahead of his rivals in warning of the need to reform Wall Street. The speech got little coverage, but Wall Street noticed.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Employees of Lehman Brothers leave their New York offices with their possessions in boxes after the 158-year-old investment bank declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The bankruptcy initiated the most turbulent economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Chris H
ondros/Getty Images
A managing director of Lehman’s real estate department, Carmine Visone—after thirty-six years at the firm—saw his “standards of value” under siege by both the real estate boom and his outsized pay. His response was to regularly rent a truck, fill it with groceries, and deliver “something of indisputable worth—food!” to the hungry and destitute on the streets of New York. The financial crisis left the city’s food pantries overflowing with the homeless and Visone, his world shattered, considering dire options.
Privately Held Photograph
Merrill Lynch president Greg Fleming was in a footrace with Paulson, Geithner, and Bernanke as “Lehman weekend” approached. Both Lehman and Merrill needed to be saved, but Fleming, in a bold stroke, persuaded the only credible suitor, Bank of America, to buy his investment firm. The next day, Lehman collapsed into the government’s arms and chaos ensued.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson did little in the year-long run-up to Lehman’s collapse—fearful of undermining “confidence” in the financial system—then went to Capitol Hill to beg lawmakers to pass the unpalatable bank bailout later known as TARP. Here, in September 2008, with Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, he warned Congress of impending disaster, as SEC chairman Christopher Cox and Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) look on.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The electric moment of the Obama family stepping onto a shining stage in Grant Park etches itself into collective memory. Already, though, Obama—who said “my presidency began in September,” as the financial crisis boosted him to an insurmountable lead—was a step removed, feeling the burden of the challenges he faced and trying to tamp down Election Night enthusiasm.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Obama announced his key economic appointments in November 2008. The team, largely replacing his campaign’s more progressive group of Volcker-led advisers, would be marred by bitter infighting and constant “relitigation.” From left to right: Tim Geithner, Christina Romer, Larry Summers, Melody Barnes, and President-elect Obama.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
While Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s “points on the board” focus never became a coherent managerial strategy, the ensuing drift and confusion often left him and Larry Summers acting in the president’s stead. Obama was delighted in September 2010 when an opportunity opened up in Chicago’s mayoral race, saving him the prospect of dismissing his top aide.
The White House/Getty Images
Two top economic advisers, NEC chairman Larry Summers (left) and OMB director Peter Orszag (right) clashed frequently after Obama took office, but held a grudging respect for each other’s intellect. Summers repeatedly told Orszag that, with Obama as president, “we are home alone,” and that “Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”
Pool Photograph/Getty Images
A gender divide in the White House immediately struck White House communications director Anita Dunn when she arrived in April 2009. Looking back, she and others considered it a hostile workplace for women. Here Dunn consults with another adviser who spanned both the campaign and administration, Obama’s trusted counselor David Axelrod.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Assistant Treasury Secretary Alan Krueger (right) said, “We lost the country with the AIG bonuses and never won them back.” A leading labor economist, Krueger—seen here with Treasury Secretary Geithner—briefed Obama on ways to reduce unemployment and fought fiercely, though futilely, for a major federal jobs program.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s jammed schedule for Monday, March 9, 2009. Through the day and evening, he talked to the FDIC’s Sheila Bair four times and Citibank chief Vikram Pandit twice. On the 3:00 to 3:45 conference call with Bair, Bernanke, and others, he blocked the FDIC chair’s effort to have Citibank’s managers fired and the bank restructured. Little more than fifteen minutes later, at 4:05, he was again on the phone briefing Pandit.
Publicly Available Document
While Obama focused on health care, the Senate’s Democratic leadership—eager to push forward financial reform—was kept at bay. In a terse mid-March letter to Emanuel, North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan, representing seven senators, shows frustration over Rahm’s attempt to reroute their long-delayed meeting with Obama over to Larry Summers.
Privately Obtained, Nonclassified Document
After details of AIG’s post-bailout bonuses leaked to the press in mid-March 2009, protestors—these in Connecticut—demonstrated. As anti–Wall Street populism reached a fever pitch, the administration quietly approved some of the largest governmental supports for Wall Street and ducked uncomfortable questions.
Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (left) and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (center) talk to reporters after Obama met with the thirteen bankers representing the country’s largest banking institutions. After Obama said, famously, to them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” his tone turned conciliatory. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help.”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Launching his top priority of health care reform, Obama introduced Ted Kennedy, then dying of brain cancer, to cap an inspirational White House Health Care Summit on March 5, 2009. Little was done, though, in the coming months, as the White House lost control of the debate to bickering senators and Tea Party activists.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, chosen by Obama to head Health and Human Services, was forced to withdraw when a tax scandal surfaced. He tried to advise the president on health care, but was shut out in the crucial early months as the dysfunctional White House came to be known as the “black hole.”
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Group/Getty Images
The “grand bargain” by health insurers to support universal coverage to bring millions of new customers onto the insurance rolls was a starting point—and, later, most of what remained—of health care reform. The insurers’ lead lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, initially broke with other health care providers to join the administration in pushing for dramatic cost controls. Once the White House abandoned that position—its strongest bipartisan stance—the insurers became a convenient scape goat.
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Group/Getty Images
In January of 2010, Scott Brown, an upstart state senator, shocked Massachusetts and the country by winning a special election to take Ted Kennedy’s seat. His win killed the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and sent health care reform into near chaos.
Robert Spencer/Getty Images
Despite being excluded early on by White House officials, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker saw his ideas gain in popularity. The administration, reeling from Scott Brown’s victory, hastily embraced his “Volcker Rule,” an attempt to restructure parts of Wall Street, but “their hearts are not in it,” Volcker complained, about making it into law.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
FDIC chairman Sheila Bair, unaware of Obama’s interest in closing and restructuring Citibank, pushed to execute just such a plan. Her efforts were met with strict resistance from Treasury Secretary Geithner.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, often called the King of Wall Street, had over $3 trillion in assets under management and $9 trillion he oversaw, mostly of toxic assets he priced and managed for the government. In September 2010, Emanuel put forward Fink as a replacement for Summers and ushered him into the Oval Office.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive named chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, pulled a “Nixon to China” in becoming an outspoken advocate for regulating a vastly profitable derivatives industry at the center of the global financial meltdown. This placed Gensler on a coll
ision course with Wall Street’s largest banks and their tens of billions a year in derivatives-related profits.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Summoning Goldman Sachs executives, led by CEO Lloyd Blankfein, to contentious hearings before the Senate in April 2010 recharged the financial reform debate. Here costumed activists from Code Pink sum up the widespread antipathy toward Wall Street that senators would try to harness.
Privately Held Photograph
In spite of overwhelming public support for fundamental financial reforms, the Dodd-Frank bill, signed into law in July 2010, added regulations and capital requirements but left the industry largely as it was in 2007. From left: Vice President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, Senator Dodd, and Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.).