The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Before the 2012 campaign intruded, the president hosted a monthly lunch for a group of one hundred CEOs, arranged by Jarrett. At best, these were exercises in “checking the boxes,” as one Obama friend put it; more often, they were a waste of everyone’s time. Some of the executives felt lectured to; others believed the president and Jarrett sounded receptive but rarely followed up. The visitors routinely left the White House unimpressed. A CEO in the semiconductor industry, for instance, paid a call on Jarrett and pointed out that he was paying only 9 percent taxes on his Asian operations and had no incentive to move those jobs back. Jarrett offered him no policy ideas in response. “When we go to the White House we talk to people we wouldn’t hire,” he said.

  From the White House’s perspective, the CEOs needed to get real; just because some job creation idea might sound appealing didn’t mean it could be brought to fruition. When Obama challenged his visitors on substance, such as where they would make up the lost revenue for the Treasury that would come from a tax amnesty on their overseas earnings, the CEOs felt he wasn’t listening. In fact he was puzzling through the problem, hoping someone would come up with a formula to make ">161–62 earlyit work. He had no ideological or even political objection to the business agenda, only a practical one, and the visiting business leaders were of little or no help in solving it.

  When the president challenged a CEO on a substantive point, it was often an experience the corporate chieftain hadn’t had in many years. Like the president of the United States, he, too, was surrounded by people unwilling to go toe-to-toe with him. “You run a company and you’re just not used to people disagreeing with you,” remarked Robert Wolf, a former UBS banker and a friend of Obama. While the president, with his background in the classroom, got an intellectual charge out of these policy arguments, his visitors usually did not. Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, himself a CEO, had a theory that businesspeople came to the White House with something to get off their chest but were too scared to say it to the president, who had more facts at his disposal. This was their moment to say, “Pay attention to us!,” and afterward they felt chagrined that they hadn’t given the president a piece of their mind.

  Because they were unwilling to attack Obama directly, Jarrett often became the punching bag. By 2011 CEOs were complaining that the White House had a “Hyde Park vibe”—a reference to the Chicago neighborhood that the Obamas called home. One Wall Street CEO said that the president viewed intellectuals as a cut above political operatives and two cuts above businessmen, whom he often brushed right past in social situations. Being worth a billion dollars wasn’t going to get the president and his people to believe that your insights were better than anyone else’s. CEOs grew resentful that a president only a few years past student loan debt didn’t appear to care much what they had to say.

  It was true. He didn’t have a lot of patience for their complaints. The president was annoyed with people like Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, whom he’d known from when they both lived in Chicago, for leading the lobbying charge against the Dodd-Frank bank reregulation, as if nothing should change after the banks brought the country to the brink of economic collapse. And Dimon was one of the better ones. Obama felt bankers as a group were ungrateful or didn’t even remember that he pushed the second $350 billion portion of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout through a reluctant Congress in early 2009 (just before he was sworn in as president) and soon stabilized the U.S. financial system with stress tests and other remedies. After all the drama, the bank bailouts ended up costing taxpayers only $24 billion—much less than the savings and loan bailouts of the early 1990s—but they were politically painful for Obama; they helped fuel the Tea Party anger that cost the Democrats the House and hobbled his presidency. And the bankers’ reaction? As one of the president’s friends put it, likely echoing Obama after hours, he saved their sorry asses and all they could do was whine about him or Jarrett or some tax favor or bonus they thought they deserved.

  Handling the egos of CEOs was not something Obama had ever done before. The president had never been a governor, a job that would have given him plenty of experience convincing companies to move to his state. Obama and the country desperately needed businesses to invest in the economy, but he didn’t understand intuitively how to do it, didn’t have a feel for how to motivate businesspeople, who are more suggestible than he perhaps understood. The complex psychology of business confidence was only partly about their tax rates and the threat of regulation; the real problem was personal: They had an intuitive sense that Obama didn’t particularly like them, and t">N THE SUMMER ,Pahey responded in kind.

  “We got a lot of Barack Obama’s Wall Street money,” Spencer Zwick, Mitt Romney’s finance director, said after the election. While their wives often stuck with the president, the Masters of the Universe who had supported Obama in 2008 began deserting him en masse. More than 15 percent of all the money Romney raised, nearly $150 million, came from New York, which meant mostly from Wall Street. Tens of millions of that was Obama ’08 money that the president and Jarrett had failed to keep.

  HARRY TRUMAN SAID that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Obama got a dog but decided early on that he also wanted some real friends around, so he invited his Chicago buddies Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker to visit often, and he gave Jarrett pride of place in his White House. This was understandable; every president deserves having people he can fully trust at his side.

  But there were sound reasons why Kennedy didn’t give his “Irish mafia,” Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, much in the way of line responsibilities and why Clinton decided that Bruce Lindsay, a close adviser he had brought with him from Arkansas, should have no official portfolio. George W. Bush’s best friend, Roland Betts, stayed out of government, and his other confidant, Don Evans, went across town to be secretary of commerce. Unlike those aides, Jarrett ran a fiefdom that was supposed to be in fair competition with other sections of the White House. Under normal circumstances, she would be offering ideas in meetings to be embraced, debated, or rebutted by her colleagues running different departments. But in the Obama White House, Jarrett didn’t have to bother with much of that. She expressed her views one-on-one with the president. Some colleagues said it was as if a CEO made his irritable and overprotective sister the head of marketing. Others thought Jarrett was more like an adoring mother who thought her son could do no wrong.

  Jarrett had had no formal role in any of Obama’s campaigns, preferring to exercise her influence as “friend of the candidate.” This had caused friction with David Plouffe, the 2008 campaign manager, though he later learned to steer clear of her. Rahm Emanuel, the incoming chief of staff, was so determined to keep Jarrett out of the White House that he tried to convince Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois to appoint her to fill Obama’s Senate seat. Neither the governor, soon embroiled in scandal, nor Jarrett was interested.

  Once in power, Jarrett had great influence on personnel matters and on issues related to women, minorities, the gay community, and who got invited to the White House. She had little to do with foreign policy unless it involved trade. Nonetheless she often accompanied the president overseas, where she would frequently take one of the half-dozen seats alongside the president in bilateral meetings, which meant one less seat for a policy expert.

  In staff meetings and conference calls with the president’s political advisers, Jarrett rarely said much. Her explanation—“I don’t talk just to hear myself talking”—did not satisfy her critics. “If you have a dissenting view, say it in the room,” one argued. “If you want to advocate for something, do it in the room, not later with the president.” In meetings with Obama, she often lingered afterward, which left other aides to guess what she said to him after they departed. And she could and often did wan the killing of Osama bin Laden

  Jarrett felt this widespread perception of her role was inaccurate and peddled by disgruntled former White House officials. “If I have something to sa
y, I don’t hold back in meetings so I can have a private conversation with the president. I respect the process,” she said. “No one can say that Valerie went in to talk with the president and changed his position on X.” She said that when she was having dinner with the Obamas in the residence, they were relaxing and talking about their children or what happened on Downton Abbey, not policy. She and the president “compartmentalized.” She denied that there was any more conflict between her personal relationship and her line responsibilities than there would be for Axelrod or Plouffe or anyone else who both worked for the president and enjoyed a friendship with him, though neither of those two vacationed with the boss.

  Jarrett was the gatekeeper not so much to the Oval Office, though she played a role there too, as to the good graces of the Obamas. Sometimes she had a valid reason to protect the president: This friend from Harvard Law School talked too much to reporters; that old buddy from Chicago had ties to Tony Rezko, a Chicago businessman and felon who had once befriended the Obamas. And sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she was acting on instructions from the president and first lady, and sometimes she only made it seem as if she were. Her power came in the ambiguity between the two.

  Within the White House, Jarrett rarely confronted anyone in person when she was unhappy with them, which people didn’t appreciate. For second-tier officials, her weapon of choice was the blistering email. If she thought someone got in her “lane” or had wronged the president, she threw what one former senior staffer described as a “brushback pitch” that would churn the stomach and maybe even ruin the week of the person who received one. It wasn’t just that she had influence over who got invited to everything from state dinners to the small party for family and inner staff at the White House swimming pool on the Fourth of July. The problem was that in carrying the imprimatur of the president she had a way of making even the most loyal aides who had been with Obama from the beginning feel as if they had exposed him to harm or let him down. Perhaps they had erred on some (usually minor) matter, but it mortified them to think the president they revered might have been told by his closest counselor that they weren’t looking out for him. Even though she didn’t seem to be a grudge holder, this tendency to jump to conclusions about people hurting the president did not endear her to the White House staff. Pete Rouse and David Plouffe were loved, as was Rahm Emanuel, when he wasn’t hated. Valerie Jarrett was feared.

  Jarrett’s critics didn’t fully appreciate that fear can be a useful form of discipline in an institution famous for leaking and in-fighting. One veteran of the chaotic Clinton White House wished Clinton had hired a “Valerie Jarrett type” to scare people. More important, when she went out of her way to help someone, she was usually doing favors for people who deserved them, not for donors looking to buy access. Her role in keeping the White House free of influence-peddling was often overlooked, as was the help she offered to young staffers, especially women.

  Besides">161–62 early her line responsibilities, Jarrett helped handle the hundreds of small but important decisions that a president must make every day, from what gift to give a foreign leader to who should get the Presidential Medal of Freedom and which Democratic critic needed to be told to cool it (for example, Donna Brazile during the 2010 Gulf spill). She protected the Obamas in ways both good and bad. It made sense to shield them from hangers-on and build in family time that she knew they craved. But this constant urge to protect could also indulge their resistance to socializing, which meant that the role of compensating for the president’s missing schmooze gene fell to no one. “They’re not going to stand for all those pictures,” she’d say, acutely sensitive to their moods and preferences. But what if those pictures with donors or old friends were important politically? What if he could use someone to tell him “Dammit, Barack, inscribe those twenty-five letters tonight!” Jarrett rejected the idea that he needed her to “teach him good etiquette” or remind him to perform other political chores. Early on, she told a pair of old Washington hands who paid a call, “He doesn’t feel he needs to thank his friends.” They were supposed to understand that it was all for a greater cause. At the same time, the idea that he didn’t use his plane as a perk was a myth, she said. He wandered to the back on Air Force One to chat with senators and House members when he was flying to their states. When Republican Senator Lamar Alexander (a gettable vote on some issues) complained of never being on Air Force One with Obama, the White House let it be known it had a picture of him aboard, which merely annoyed the senator more while ignoring his larger point: that Obama was missing a chance to build bridges.

  By late 2011 the bridges the president wanted to build were outside of Washington. He handwrote letters each evening, Jarrett said, in reply to the average Americans whose letters had been selected for him to read that day. This was what he should be doing with his time, she said, not going to dinner parties in Georgetown or massaging the egos of politicians and old acquaintances.

  As for others getting closer, Jarrett put out the word early on that “We’re not making new friends”—that the president and first lady were busy enough without expanding their personal circle after arriving in the White House. In truth, the Obamas did make some new close friends in Washington, including Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and their wives. But the friend club was small. This was the Obamas’ prerogative, of course, and the outer ring of friends understood it, though they didn’t appreciate Jarrett’s being the one who shut the door. They may not have understood, of course, that if it weren’t Jarrett, it would be someone else.

  Jarrett’s influence on policy was quiet but often effective. Her mother, Barbara Bowman, was a renowned expert in early childhood education, an issue Jarrett pushed inside the White House. (The president eventually made it a centerpiece of his plans for a second term.) But much of the time her thinking was opaque. Reading Jarrett became a nervous pastime in much of the White House. It required interpreting sighs, glances, cleared throats, even terms of endearment. “It’s all an elaborate mind game where if you’ve made a mistake or even if you haven’t, Valerie will in effect say, ‘I forgive you, sweetie,’ and that’s supposed to mean you’re back in, but it doesn’t really mean that,” said one former White House official. “If she calls youEleventh Circuit Court of Appealsv ‘sweetie,’ run!”

  WHEN IT CAME to tensions with the business community, the answer was supposed to be Bill Daley, who had worked in a senior position at JPMorgan Chase and had scores of friends in that world. But within days of his arrival as chief of staff in late 2010, Daley quickly found himself sharing power with the triumvirate of Jarrett, Plouffe, and Rouse. It was reminiscent of Princess Diana saying of her husband and his mistress, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” In Daley’s relationship with the president, there were five.

  He had expected to be heavily involved in the 2012 campaign but was effectively excluded from it, as he had been in 2008. Plouffe’s focus was reelection, communication, and messaging, which left room for Daley to work on policy and legislation. But because he had been gone from Washington for a decade, Daley didn’t know the players or the subtleties of the protocol anymore. Inside the White House, he ruffled feathers. After he canceled an 8:30 a.m. meeting that was too big to accomplish anything, second-tier aides were upset. “No one would accuse me of being a morale guy,” Plouffe said one day in mid-2011, “but morale is terrible.” Advised that he needed to keep the troops happy, Daley, normally an affable and popular boss, replied within earshot of staff, “Well, fuck happy. Everybody should just get up in the morning and be thankful they work in the White House.”

  Daley and his deputy, David Lane, were outnumbered. They came taff had becom

  13

  Obama’s Low Point

  The period surrounding Barack Obama’s fiftieth birthday on August 4, 2011, was the lowest point of his presidency—in the polls and in the president’s own mind. When David Plouffe saw gas prices spike i
n the spring of 2011, he told senior staff, “The summer is going to suck.” But neither he nor the president nor anyone else in the White House knew just how bad it would be.

  For nearly four months the Republican opposition held the full faith and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, dcredit of the United States hostage. Conservatives, bolstered by the Tea Party, finally had the hammerlock on the process that Grover Norquist and the movement’s other leaders had dreamed of for years. The Washington drama of mid-2011 was dreary but instructive, a window on a political party that, flush with victory in the midterms, veered to the right and lost sight of the country’s true center.

  The man most responsible for walking the fine line between pragmatism and extremism was John Boehner, first elected in 1990 from a district outside Cincinnati. The White House thought Boehner was handicapped by a searing political experience that rarely seemed to turn up in profiles of the speaker. In early 1999, after serving four years as the House Republican Conference chairman, the fourth-ranking position in the leadership, Boehner lost his position to Representative J. C. Watts of Oklahoma. Boehner had been caught up in the Byzantine politics surrounding Newt Gingrich’s departure as speaker. Normally there was no way to recover from such humiliation, but he did, maneuvering his way back via his relationship with House Speaker Denny Hastert, a fellow midwesterner.

  Obama’s team believed this comeback made Boehner a fearful, skittish leader, always worried about being dumped again by conservatives in the caucus. The speaker’s aides, not surprisingly, saw him as an exceptionally resilient man underestimated by the White House. They said the White House mistook Boehner as “either a weak leader or a lazy drunk,” as one Boehner confidant put it. Senior staff in the speaker’s office believed “the Dean Martin schtick” disguised how hard he worked—up at 5:30 reading the papers, Drudge, Real Clear Politics—certainly not the sun lamp he was wrongly accused of using (some of his family shares his dark complexion).