Obama wasn’t a camera hog, but he could be a bit of a control freak and he feared that surrogates with their own pet policy agendas might take him off-message. He wasn’t comfortable with prominent figures who might not be easily managed by his White House, which routinely denied requests for Cabinet members to appear on television. Theed in a day or twov president had Hillary Clinton in his Cabinet, but his controlling White House never took to Richard Holbrooke, Elizabeth Warren, or other camera-ready, larger-than-life characters who might have taken some of the pressure off him had they been allowed to represent the administration more often. Time after time, Obama promoted from within instead of reaching out for harder-to-control but better-qualified people to serve in his administration. He never followed (or even showed awareness of) FDR’s example of hiring “dollar-a-year men.” New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg would have been a perfect choice for a special assignment convincing American businesses to invest in the United States, but he was never asked.
Of course, the largest of the larger-than-life figures was Bill Clinton. The president and the former president had disliked each other intensely in 2008, circled each other warily in 2009 (when Obama waited six months into his presidency to call him), warmed up a little in late 2010, when Clinton helped calm the left in the lame duck session, and settled into what Hillary Clinton described as a “complicated” relationship—yin and yang—in 2011. Part of the contrast between the two men revolved around communications. Obama’s rendition of his own record in 2011 and early 2012 unconsciously reflected his frustration at having to repeat it yet again, as if it should be self-evident to anyone paying attention. Clinton understood this. During his 1992 campaign and the first three years of his presidency he had refused to repeat refrains; it bored him to do so. But in 1996, facing reelection, he began repeating, “We’re building a bridge to the twenty-first century.” Now Obama had to do the same. Senator Dick Durbin, as close to the Obama White Houseasure trove o
10
Missing the Schmooze Gene
The president often mentioned his impatience with “the bubble,” which referred not just to Secret Service protection but to the air of unreality at the top. The metaphor fit his natural restlessness. It spoke to the artifice and isolation of the presidency that sometimes caused him to feel trapped. He yearned for the simple pleasure of driving a car or browsing in bookstores. His effort to escape the bubble accounted for everything from the ten letters from average people he read and responded to each day (preselected, of course, by the White House Office of Correspondence), to his role as assistant coach on his daughter’s soccer team and the pleasure he took from remaining close with Chicagoans and other nonpolitical friends who knew him before he was famous and could make him laugh.
Obama prided himself on his self-awareness, his ability to stand a step removed from his circumstances and apply a sense of perspective. It was one of his best qualities and proved critical to smart decision making on the job. But it didn’t always serve him well on the bubble question. The steps he took to keep it real with the outside world did little to address the insularity of his White House and his inability to establish more relationships outside his administration, especially with members of Congress.
Self-assessment should have told Obama that it was his habits that were worsening the problem. If he genuinely wanted to escape the bubble, he would have to make connections outside his circle. Even when he traveled with the explicit purpose of getting outside the tunnel vision of Washington, he often hung out with his staff instead of the local members of Congress and other important regional figures who knew the area best. Making an unscheduled stop at a restaurant (though not so unscheduled that the advance team hadn’t made sure the owner wasn’t a Joe the Plumber type) wasn’t usually much more than a photo-op.I Maybe there was no escape, but Obama’s way of operating condemned him to the very fate he claimed he sought to avoid.
By 2011 Obama’s failure to reach out was hurting him inside the Democratic Party, where donors, elected officials, and party activists soon made insularity their single most frequent criticism of his presidency. Democratic senators who voted with Obama found that their support was taken for granted. Many would go two or even three years between conversations with the president, which embarrassed them (constituents were always asking about their interactions) and eventually weakened Obama’s support on the Hill. The president had good relations with Harry Reid (who despised socializing anyway) and Nancy Pelosi, as well as with three or four others. Most of the other senators, not to mention House members, were rarely invited to the White House for anything except big parties. This included powerful committee chairs who might have helped the president on legislation. By late 2012 many members of Obama’s Cabinet had gone six months or a year without speaking personally to the boss. Not once in the first term did the Obamas invite Bill and Hillary Clinton over for dinner in the residence.
Bill Clinton, who even now was rarely reluctant to point to Obama’s shortcomings in private, told friends he was puzzled by the president. He thought he was surprisingly good at the hard things, like foreign policy, and surprisingly bad at the easy things, like connecting to more than ten people and making them feel as if he liked them.
It was hard to assess the consequences of this operating style. No one could specify something in the Washington gridlock that would have gone differently if only the president had been more of a schmoozer; no landmark bills would have passed or wars been averted. In his hyperrational way, he applied a balancing test to the social part of the job. Obama figured he had good family reasons to curtail his socializing. He had missed a chunk of his daughters’ childhoods. For nearly six years, from early 2003, when he first started running for the U.S. Senate, to late 2008, when he was elected president, he had been on the road almost constantly. In late 2006 Michelle had signed off on a presidential campaign with the condition that he return to Chicago in the evenings after a day of campaigning. This proved to be impossible. He had been raised without a father and was determined, now that he lived over the store, to have dinner with Sasha and Malia at 6:30 almost every night when he wasn’t traveling abroad. Afterward he often dropped by receptions in the East Room, but he saw his evenings as mostly time for contemplation and for getting a head start on the next busy day.
His friends said the trade-off was worth it. “Maybe by not schmoozing he won’t get that extra $100,000 from that guy he kinda knows,” said George Haywood, an old friend. “But if you take care of your core, you’re a more content human being. That makes you better off and, if you’re president, makes the country better off.”
The president was sure the whole “not reaching out” business was another false media narrative. He could play golf with John Boehner every week for all the difference it would make, he said. Boehner agreed. In 2011 the speaker insisted he had no interest in “roasting marshmallows at Camp David.” The president was annoyed that after a hugely successful legislative record in his first two years he was being depicted as failing with Congress because he didn’t have drinks with congressmen and senators on the Truman Balcony. When reporters in late 2012 questioned the insularity, he had a retort ready: “When I">Black Hawk Down, ,Pa’m over here at the congressional picnic and folks are coming up and taking pictures with their family, I promise you, Michelle and I are very nice to them, and we have a wonderful time—but it doesn’t prevent them from going on to the floor of the House and, you know, blasting me for being a big-spending socialist.”
Nice to members of Congress at a picnic? The president went on to raise the case of Governor Charlie Crist, who lost the support of Florida Republicans in 2010 because of a photo of him embracing the president. He said that Republicans feared becoming “too cooperative or too chummy” with him lest they face primary challenges. This was true, but it was his job to forge relationships with the few who had the guts to talk to him, not look for ways out of the age-old practice of using perks and personal contact to lubricate the g
ears of government.
SUFFERING FOOLS HAD always been part of the presidency. George Washington held weekly dinners with legislators—senators one week, congressmen the next. Franklin Roosevelt filled part of many workdays with fifteen-minute meetings with individual members of Congress, some of whom got to stay for cocktails that FDR mixed himself. Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill traded barbs in public but made time for plenty of jokes in private.
By contrast, the Obamas, with the help of Valerie Jarrett, adopted an informal code in the White House. Obama would bring members of Congress into the White House for large meetings and maybe even give them a ride on Air Force One when he went to their state, but the socializing they craved, the invitations to dinner or a movie, were not often part of the package.
His excuse for not having the GOP leadership over more often was that he had repeatedly invited them and they usually said no. And he had unpleasant memories of intensely courting Republican senators in 2009 to no avail. After passage of the Recovery Act, which won the support of three moderate Republican senators, he received no Republican support at all on his other major legislative victories of 2009 and 2010. He spent many hours with Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, whose objections to Obamacare (including some from the left) he was sure he addressed. But under pressure from her leader, Mitch McConnell, she too voted no.
Obama believed that the days of politicians in Washington settling everything over bourbon and branch water (or, in the case of Reagan and O’Neill, a couple of beers) were over. It used to be that if a president leaned on a member to change his vote, most of his constituents wouldn’t find out. But in the age of instant access to voting records and twenty-four-hour cable, the threat of being “primaried” trumped any influence that might come from a ride on Air Force One or a trip to Camp David.
Besides, Obama liked to think of himself as nontransactional, above the petty deals, “donor maintenance,” and phony friendships of Washington. Here his self-awareness again failed him. In truth, he was all transactional in his work life. He reserved real relationships for family, friends from before he was president, and a few staff. Everything else was business. The senators and billionaires who longed to brag about their private advice to the president were consistently disappointed. Defensive on this point, Obama didn’t believe that listening to powerful blowhards was generally worth his time. But that is the thing about relationships: They’re investmentsn Springfield early that don’t necessarily pay off right away. His failure to use the trappings of the presidency more often left him with one less tool in his toolbox, one less way to leverage his authority.
It was a sign of his talent that he was quite good at a part of the job that he didn’t much enjoy. At fundraisers he was lithe and charming and, most of the time, seemed fully present in the moment. Flashing that thousand-watt smile and exchanging pleasantries were enough for some, but others yearned for at least the impression of friendship, or what passes for it in Washington.
Obama wasn’t a loner, just a relatively normal person—warm with his friends—who preferred not to hang out too much with people he barely knew. This was a fine quality in an individual but problematic for a president. Part of the explanation lay in his upbringing. He hadn’t spent his early life planning how to become important, as Johnson and Clinton had. Nor was he a legacy, soaked in politics from an early age. No one had to instruct the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes (and Romneys) on how to build lists and get credit for their gratitude. Bargaining was in the background of most of Obama’s predecessors. Eisenhower learned to negotiate with balky allies during the Second World War, and Reagan gained bargaining experience as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Unlike Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, Obama had never been a governor herding state legislators, and his experience closing deals with Republicans in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate was minimal. (It was no coincidence that the last two presidents before Obama who went directly from the Senate to the White House were John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Warren G. Harding in 1921, and neither got much done with Congress.) In Democratic Chicago he rarely had to talk to people who fundamentally disagreed with him. His self-image was that of a bridge-builder, but he came up so fast that he’d never built a big one.
The president didn’t have the schmooze gene. Politics self-selects for certain traits, the most common of which is an essential neediness, an emotional hole many politicians are trying to fill that makes them crave attention, thrive on the artificial calories provided by superficial relationships, and make the personal sacrifices necessary for public life. Obama’s childhood in Hawaii was marked by a peculiar combination of abandonment and unconditional love. It bred self-reliance and security. By the time he left Chicago for Harvard in 1988, he had the ambition and willingness to sacrifice that is standard equipment in politicians, but he lacked the neediness thaart of the package. As he ascended, this made the inherent neediness of other politicians, CEOs, and other high achievers an abstraction for him, not a shared condition. The backslapping, stroking, gripping, and grinning that were second nature to politicians like Clinton and Biden were often chores for Obama. During a scene in By the People, a documentary about the 2008 campaign, Obama complains loudly to his staff about having to work rope lines. Where Clinton usually found such contact energizing, Obama frequently found it enervating. There were exceptions; at the end of a campaign, when the competitive juices were flowing, he liked pressing the flesh just fine, but he rarely stuck around to soak up the love longer than the schedule demanded. He didn’t need to.
MOST OF THE president’s subordinates didn’t care that he wasn’t big on small ">Black Hawk Down, ,Patalk. They continued to be impressed with him in their official interactions. Often he would say nothing during long stretches of a briefing; those who didn’t know him thought his mind was elsewhere. Then he would interject with something from page 32 or 56 or 63 of the briefing material from the night before, a question or comment that showed that he had both done his homework and developed a sophisticated understanding of the complex issues at hand. This could be intimidating. He prided himself on being conscious of the effect the presidency had on people telling him hard truths, but his briskness and focus didn’t leave much room for out-of-the-box thinking.
While Obama was personally gracious, he could be politically stingy in expressions of gratitude, especially in comparison to the norm among politicians. Most elected officials made almost a science of their list of contacts; Obama didn’t give it much thought. Of course, not every supporter can go to the parties and receive the nice letters and calls. And not every president can operate in the style of George H. W. Bush, who graciously thank-you-noted his way to the White House (though it didn’t keep him there). But the list of those who felt excluded by the Obamas was long. It included everyone from people who hosted fundraisers for him in their homes to loyal sub-Cabinet officials, important senators, and old friends from Chicago. They may have gotten a Christmas card.
Obama was somewhat better with staff on this score. He didn’t send off the type of friendly emails that bosses often use to keep morale up among the troops (his email list was too small), but he compensated occasionally with phone calls and letters. When he ran into Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr on the White House Portico, the president thanked him for his efforts on the Dodd-Frank financial reregulation and other matters. Barr was stunned when Obama followed up with an exceptionally warm handwritten note, with its distinctive and orderly lettering. After Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued for the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court, the reviews were scathing. But not from the president, who called to express his appreciation.
Outside of the Obama orbit and those who had suffered some hardship, many of his notes weren’t truly personal. Starting in his Senate days, his staff would type up letters to important people that Obama would then carefully write out in longhand, a practice that he continued in the presidency. He didn’t understand why the recipients cared so much ab
out a handwritten letter. The historical importance of a letter from the president was something he shrugged off. “He fundamentally doesn’t relate to their impact because he wouldn’t particularly care if he got one,” Pete Rouse said. The same went for telephone calls, a source of pride for those on the receiving end. He phoned members of Congress, key supporters, major CEOs, and other influential players when their names were on a call list prepared by staff, and though he often suggested names for that list, he hardly looked forward to making contact. He handled the calls well enough, but many important ones slipped through the cracks. For instance, he called neither Alan Simpson nor Erskine Bowles to thank them for chairing his deficit-reduction commission. Democrats routinely complained that there were many fewer calls than they were used to under Clinton, and the politicians and supporters who did receive a call sometimes found it a bit forced. Amid the charm and relaxed bonhomie, they could tell the president would rather be doing something else. After word spread that this was not exactly his favorite activity, they knew for sure that the calls were more dutiful than sincere.
Nancy Pelosi thought Obama was plenty sincere but that “he always projects his decency onem; margin-left: 1.2em; margin-right: 1.2em; text-indent: 0em; s small to other people.” When Mitch McConnell said the most important thing was to get rid of him, she expected that the president would be furious in private. But he just waved it off. That was the essence of the problem that Democratic politicians had with him—that he floated above the fray. Pelosi had grown up in the scrum of Baltimore politics. As a child, “Little Nancy” often kept the ledger where her father, the mayor of Baltimore, tracked favors he had granted or owed. Absenting oneself from the grubby requirements of politics was unimaginable for her.
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies Page 16