Harry Reid agreed. During the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Reid made up a list of Democratic senators for the president to call. Obama dutifully worked his way through the list but complained to his staff the entire time. Why do these guys need this? Are they so insecure that they can function only if they get to tell people, “Hey, the president called me!”? When the purpose of a specific call was explained to him, he was fine with it, but if he were asked to call five members of Congress a week just to stay in touch, he wouldn’t comply. The plain fact, one of his senior aides said, was that he simply didn’t like phone calls and notes: “He fundamentally doesn’t understand how important it is. It’s not in his DNA. He’d rather go exercise for another half-hour than bullshit with a member on the phone.”
Obama didn’t intuitively understand the ego gratification that association with a president provided. “They have two pictures with me. Why do they need three?” he complained one day to an aide after some visitors came by. The aide felt the comment summarized Obama’s feelings about the ceremonial parts of the job, most of which he could do without. The president, she thought, was a strange combination: a gifted campaigner oddly clueless about the importance of retail politics; a natural president but not a natural politician. This was the opposite of the conventional conservative critique, which was that all he knew how to do was campaign and couldn’t govern.
Michelle Obama had her own reluctance about making nice to legislators. On more than one occasion, the president was reminded that when Lyndon Johnson brought small groups of legislators over to the White House for stroking, Lady Bird would take their wives on private tours. Obama said Michelle would never do that. She considered the congressional lunches she was compelled to attend an ordeal.
Of course, nothing the first couple did could ever be enough. When they stood for a total of seventeen hours over two weeks for pictures at 2011 White House Christmas parties, the people invited to other parties without pictures complained. If the president signed fifty posters and books at a campaign event, he would disappoint the five hundred people who didn’t get a signature. Throughout the day he was always signing one thing or another, often ten or twenty documents at a sitting. It was understandable that someone who didn’t have a passion for rope lines and thank-you notes would think he had done what the job required.
OBAMA’S PROCESSING OF his failures—some combination of awareness that he was overconfident, missing his old rhythm, feeling he got played—made him a harder, sometimes colder person, at least for a time. As one old friend put it, “It’s a little sad to see. Except with his family and closest friends, the sweetness is gone.” He had always known abstractly that politics was a tough business, forever telling protégés that if they didn’t have a thick of malice toward the al d skin, they should find some other line of work. But he didn’t always take his own advice. He read widely at night on his iPad from various websites, learning exactly what was being said about him. Old friends thought he was hurt by some of it.
Obama wasn’t as self-pitying as many politicians, but he often complained about how hard the job was. Early on, one of his first big financial supporters, a Chicagoan, brought him up short in the Oval Office by saying, “You wanted this. We all worked like hell to put you here. Stop complaining.” Obama smiled and said he was right and not enough people talked to him that way. This supporter always knew Obama had a huge ego—anyone challenging Hillary Clinton with so little experience had to have one—but he thought Obama had been humbled by the opposition’s intransigence. He had never failed to bring anyone around before, and it changed him.
You could see it at public events in 2011, before he put on his friendly game face for the campaign. For those who knew him, and for many who didn’t, his vibe was unmistakable in the East Room: I’ll flash a smile, then, please, someone get me the hell out of here. It wasn’t that he had to be back in the Oval Office for something urgent. He just didn’t want to hang out for an instant longer than he had to, even with long-lost Chicago friends. The quality that his girlfriend from the 1980s, Genevieve Cook, described as “a bit of a wall—the veil,” was back. The encounters when Obama would stand very close and use his height and star power to leave admirers swooning were rarer, except at fundraisers, when he knew he had to turn it on. He sometimes exuded an unspoken exasperation: I saved Detroit, the Dow is up, we avoided a depression—I have to explain this to all of you again?
When the president got away from elites and spent time with those he called “ordinary folks,” he relaxed. Even if they disagreed with him on certain things, most Americans still liked and trusted him. The fact that he wasn’t a typical politician and stayed above the fray was a huge asset in their minds. The same traits that hurt him in Washington helped keep his poll numbers afloat. As time went on, he began to enjoy his trips out of town—not the fundraisers (as many as six in one day at the height of the campaign) but the other interactions. In his second term, he told friends, he would spend much more time outside Washington.
THE PRESIDENT’S PREFERRED escape from the claustrophobia of the White House was golf. Where Clinton routinely took mulligans, Obama got annoyed if he thought someone was missing shots to keep the president from losing too badly. (“This is bullshit,” he muttered to Marvin Nicholson, the White House trip director, after Nicholson blew an easy putt.) He usually golfed with underlings who were strong golfers, like Nicholson, Reggie Love, Ben Finkenbinder of the press office, and David Katz of the Energy Department, or with old friends rather than with other politicians or A-list types. He knew that even some of his friends thought this was a missed opportunity, but he didn’t care. Golf was for relaxation, not business, and unlike most golfers he preferred to separate the two. He felt that he didn’t recharge when he was with other politicians—it wasn’t genuine downtime—and he needed that.
Same with poker. Where Truman played with important lawmakers and the chief justice as well as his cronies,n Springfield early Obama usually opted for the latter only. He hung out, ESPN blaring in the background, with a rotating group of friends and administration officials that included his old law school friend Julius Genachowski (now head of the Federal Communications Commission), Ron Kirk (the U.S. trade representative), Denis McDonough (“McDonough can’t even afford cable,” Obama joked one night when the soon-to-be chief of staff bid low), Pete Souza, the White House photographer, and George Haywood, a businessman who had once traveled the world winning thousands of dollars counting cards at blackjack.
If Obama had free time, he liked to read novels; Emma Donoghue and Daniel Woodrell were recent favorites. The whole family embarked on a project in 2012 to read classic American novels together, like Catcher in the Rye and Tender Is the Night. The president set to work on a new book of his own, written in collaboration with Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor with whom he forged a strong personal bond. On TV, Homeland was a particular favorite. When he was briefed on a possible sleeper terrorist, he replied, “Sounds like Homeland!” He liked the show so much that he would sometimes close his office door on weekends, pretend to be working, and put on old Homeland episodes.
EVERYONE WHO KNEW him well said essentially the same thing: There were not “two Obamas” as there had famously been “two Clintons,” the brilliant policy analyst and clinical political strategist and the volcanic and self-pitying victim of his own appetites. Obama spoke more candidly (and more profanely) when the press wasn’t around, especially when it came to political calculation.II But most of the time he was pretty much the same calm and self-contained guy inside the bubble as he was in public, with one big exception.
In public, Obama rarely chose to talk about being the first black president, but in private, after hours, when the conversation flowed freely, it was never far from the surface. He knew that it mattered and that it changed the nature of the opposition to him. He didn’t lash out at racist critics; that wasn’t his style, even among his closest friends. But the intense racial consciousness that he had
nurtured in his own mind since childhood was more apparent in private. He knew that if he crossed a certain line in reacting to criticism, he would hand his enemies a weapon: “See, he’s like all the rest of them.” It was better for him to be perceived as “different,” with all the challenges that brought.
This stifling of himself, the inability to swing at certain pitches, made him, as one aide who saw him nearly every day put it, 5 percent more aloof than he had been before coming to the presidency. Inside the White House this could take the form of an icy contempt. In March 2011 former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, parroting Dinesh D’Souza’s outlandish book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, said twice in a radio interview that Obama’s worldview had been shaped by “growing up in Kenya,” where he had learned to hate British imperialism. When a White House aide informed the president that Huckabee had just acknowledged that he “misspoke,” Obama replied coldly,">Black Hawk Down, ,Pa “He knows what he said. He knows what he meant. He knows what the truth is.” Leaving an event at Miami-Dade Community College, where the young Latino students inspired him, he got angry thinking about opponents of the DREAM Act. “They’re just bullies. Who could hate these kids?”
THE BUBBLE MAY have hurt the president most by preventing him from getting the real story about what was going on in his own administration. As in any organization, the truth was sanitized or eliminated entirely as reports made their way up the chain of command. Part of Obama’s job was fighting that bureaucratic imperative, and he didn’t always succeed.
Both Franklin Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the navy during the First World War, and Lyndon Johnson, who had run a region for the huge New Deal–era National Youth Administration, knew where the bureaucratic bodies were buried, and it helped them immensely. By contrast, Obama’s lack of experience in government hampered him on management questions. He was committed to making his administration run more efficiently, but he didn’t have the fingertips for it.
The president tended to hire former Hill aides who didn’t know their way around large organizations, and they in turn hired people like themselves. His efforts to incorporate new approaches to management foundered. Despite the president’s desire after the 2008 election to bring in stars from Silicon Valley, the White House lured exactly one manager from the huge tech companies that were reshaping the American economy, Andrew McLaughlin of Google. He quit after a couple of years, frustrated by the ignorance of government officials about technology (the federal government spent $78 billion annually on IT, much of it wasted) and the failure to tap the enthusiasm of federal employees. The contrast with the Chicago campaign’s digital focus was glaring.
There were bright spots. Obama was the first president to use performance-based budgeting. With little public notice, the “Cuts, Consolidations and Savings” budget from the Office of Management and Budget saved about $20 billion through 2012. The president liked to brag that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program introduced competitive grants for the first time, and the Department of Education reduced its total number of programs from thirty-eight to eleven. He was always leaning on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to find “commonsense” Pentagon savings.
Of course, old Washington hands knew that “reorgs” inevitably failed, as agency heads and the congressional subcommittee chairmen who oversaw them dug in to defend their turf. Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of OMB, spent a year trying to reorganize the Commerce Department, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and other agencies for global competition in the twenty-first century. He got nowhere with Congress. Had Obama enjoyed better relationships on Capitol Hill, he might have convinced lawmakers to give him the reorganization powers that he needed to restructure the government.
The unpleasant fact was that in some areas the White House had become almost dysfunctional. Relations with Cabinet-level departments were so tangled that it was often hard to get decisions made. While centralizing the national security apparatus at the White House worked well enough (unless you happened to work at the State Department), domestict is usually p
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The Keeper of the Essence
Through 2012 Obama had a poor relationship with the business community, which eventually deteriorated to the point where it threatened not just his ability to get things done but his donor base. The fault lay largely with thin-skinned business leaders who were offended by what they viewed as his antibusiness rhetoric (mild by historical standards) and his resistance to their opinions on taxes and regulation. But blame also rested with Obama and with his senior counselor, Valerie Jarrett, who the president described as a big sister, so close to the family that she went on vacation with them to Hawaii and helped them buy gifts for one another. Jarrett, who met Michelle and Barack in 1991, before they were married, quickly became a lightning rod, even a scapegoat for the president in elite circles. Her power over policy was episodic, but she dominated his connections to the outside world.
Jarrett, a former executive at a Chicago housing company, wore two hats: As head of the White House Office of Public Engagement, the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and the White House Council on Women and Girls, she was the point person for business, women, minorities, state and local officials, and other constituencies. But she also was what some called the “Keeper of the Essence”—the defender, protector, and avenger of the first family. Even many of those not suffering from jealousy thought her roles were in conflict. They felt Jarrett was often uncomfortable with people she didn’t know, a handicap in such a political job, and that her closeness to the president and first lady gave her an unfair edge in battles over policy and personnel.
IN 2009, AFTER Obama chose his economic policy team, the CEOs who had supported his campaign had a legitimate question: When will there be someone inside the White House who truly speaks our language? By that they didn’t mean officials who, between stints in government, had worked briefly on Wall Street (a category that included several officials) but people who had run a major business or spent their careers in markets and knew from firsthand experience the challenges that companies faced. These business leaders were sophisticated enough to know that the skills required for effective government service are often different from those in business; they weren’t calling for a whole team of former CEOs at Treasury and in the White House. But none? To have no one in the room in the middle of an economic crisis who truly had an understanding of business seemed foolhardy, even hostile. It didn’t escape their notice that during the BP oil spill in 2010, no one in the White House picked up the phone and called the CEO of Exxon-Mobil or another oil company.
Ronald Reagan had Donald T. Regan, a former chairman of Merrill Lynch. George H. W. Bush had Nicholas Brady of Dillon Reed and Jim Baker, a former Treasury secretary and revered figure in the corporate world. Bill Clinton had Robert Rubin, former head of Goldman Sachs. George W. Bush, himself a Harvard MBA, turned much of his White House over to business (though doing so didn’t give him a heads-up on the impending economic disaster). The charge that Obama had no one inside his White House with business experience other than Jarrett was false. One of his closest friends from Harvard Law School, Michael Froman, spent his career mostly as a senior executive at Cit">161–62 earlyigroup. He handled international finance issues from the National Security Council and was consulted on a wide variety of business policy matters. Jeff Zients, chief performance officer and then deputy director of OMB, was a successful entrepreneur. But for the most part, Obama hired people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, and Cass Sunstein—academics and former government officials, not CEOs. Even his first commerce secretary, former Washington governor Gary Locke, didn’t come from business.
When business leaders challenged Obama directly on this point, the president always said the same thing: Valerie Jarrett was a former CEO. “When he’d say that, we just looked at each other in disbelief,” one CEO who backed Obama in 2008 recalled. This wasn’t
the level of business titan these men (the critics were almost all men) had in mind. The Chicago-based real estate business that Jarrett briefly ran, the Habitat Company, had $2 billion in assets, but it was widely known to be Dan Levin’s company. He was founder and chairman. In early 2007 Levin promoted Jarrett to CEO, but she held the job for less than two years before coming to Washington, and for at least half of that time she was working hard for the Obama campaign.
New York snobbism toward Chicago played a part in the disregard of Jarrett, and no doubt some sexism too. It turned out that Jarrett had more boardroom experience than patronizing critics knew. She had chaired the Chicago Transit Board, the Chicago Planning Commission, the Chicago Stock Exchange, and the University of Chicago Medical Center, and she had served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. None of this changed the widespread impression in the business community that she was not the full-fledged former CEO she claimed to be.
Some of the patronizing of Jarrett was a case of shooting the messenger. It wasn’t fair to blame her for, say, the National Labor Relations Board decision against Boeing moving a plant to South Carolina (later allowed) or a Commodities Futures Trading Commission ruling that added new regulations. Many business leaders, not to mention voters, didn’t seem to get the concept of an independent regulatory agency. They blamed everything they didn’t like coming out of Washington on Obama, even if the president was often only indirectly responsible for far-flung decisions in a huge federal bureaucracy. And of course, when they complained about taxes and regulation their demands were simply at odds with administration policy.
The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies Page 17