Obama- An Oral History

by Brian Abrams

  Pete Souza: “There were times when he might be having a lunch, and I’d see some scene, still life in the Oval because of the light, so I’d walk in and snap a couple pictures. He didn’t have that much stuff on his desk in terms of mementos or anything like that.” Pete Souza, White House.

  DAVID AXELROD

  The God’s-honest truth was that plaque was less related to the ACA than it was to Social Security and some entitlement reform, because he was concerned about the actuarial strength of these programs, and I said, “There’s a reason they’re not fixed and why there’s not a winning constituency for it, you know, because hard things are hard to do.” That engendered a lot of laughter in the room because it seems like a truism, but the nature of politics is that it’s very hard to get hard things done.

  JOEL BENENSON

  President Obama was aware, all the way through, of the potential political fallout of Obamacare, but he believed strongly that, for the well-being and health of millions of Americans, it was the right thing to do. We had the most developed economy in the world. We could not continue to leave tens of millions of people without health-care coverage every day. He knew that he could pay a political price for it, potentially.

  JEREMY BIRD

  It’s disappointing when people say that he wasn’t aggressive enough or that he wasn’t progressive enough. To that, I’d like to say, “You look [at] those tens of millions of Americans who now have health insurance and grew up in the trailer park I grew up in, and you tell them it would have been better to be self-righteous and not get that passed by trying to go for something that we weren’t going to get.”

  KAREEM DALE

  Associate Director, Office of Public Engagement, White House (2009–2013)

  People talk about health care and, if you think about it, it was the left-off arm of the ADA.78 To get that done was huge for people with disabilities—no preexisting-conditions exclusion, the Medicaid enhancements. Sometimes people looked at what the administration did for people on disabilities and they just looked at the initiative. But, like so many other things, what the president did in the broader scope benefited people with disabilities. Health care was a huge example of that.

  RAHM EMANUEL

  [Obama] got it done because of what happened in the ’06, the ’08 elections that built up big majorities for Democrats. Without the ’06 victory or the ’08 House victories, a lot of his agenda could not have happened. It was because of the prior elections that he had a majority that could move something like this.

  TOM DASCHLE

  Both Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi deserve credit. I didn’t think they probably got the attention they deserved. Were it not for the fact that we were the majority and had leaders who really had the capacity to work with the president, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish a lot. Nancy Pelosi, particularly, took an unruly House, a caucus that was not inclined, in some cases, to be that supportive, and found the wherewithal to get it done.

  DAVID AXELROD

  Politicians shy away from hard things. It jeopardizes their well-being, and it does relate to the Affordable Care Act, because that was a very hard thing to do. A lot of politicians put their careers on the line. Some lost their careers for that.

  JOHN TANNER

  That was my last year. I didn’t seek reelection in 2010, but I remember talking to the Democratic leadership about it. I thought it was not the best way to approach the health-care system. Before so-called Obamacare was passed, the system was in disarray. The burden of the money going out of the tax base was escalating at an unsustainable pace, and so, for all of the problems Obamacare had, it could be fixed. But it had to be fixed by several different bills, not just one . . . I guess their feeling was they had to do it that way and then they’d come back and fine tune it. Anytime you have a two-thousand-page bill, you’re going to have some problems.

  JIM DOUGLAS

  I wouldn’t say governors were as united on health care as we were on the Recovery Act. We don’t like mandates, as a general principle, and we obviously didn’t want something that would put the states in even more fiscal stress. Actually, it was a Democrat, Governor Bredesen of Tennessee, who called the Medicaid expansion “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” So, as there was bipartisan support for the Recovery Act, there was bipartisan at least concern about some of the stuff in the ACA.

  BEN NELSON

  There was the whole question whether you could have state-based regulation, whether you were going to have state exchanges . . . Then that created the whole Burwell case.79

  JIM DOUGLAS

  I thought part of it was the president’s patience wore thin on the obstructionism, and so there’s blame to go around. The problem, from my standpoint, was that it really divided the governors. All the Democrats who had been saying the right things about states’ prerogatives and no mandates all of a sudden fell in line and were loyal to the president. It caused a schism within the ranks of the governors, and that’s something that I regret.

  JOHN DINGELL

  Look. There’s no saint walking the streets—and that includes John Dingell—who could come up with something that’s the perfect cure to the problem. But if you look, we had come a long way. Roosevelt intended to do this in 1935. This was a step that had to be taken. It covered millions of Americans who otherwise would not have been covered.

  JOE LIEBERMAN

  I thought President Obama and Rahm felt, and I agreed with them, that they were to achieve something historic and transformational. Not perfect, by any means, in what they put together, but they wanted to get it done.

  ARUN CHAUDHARY

  Every meeting someone had with the president was historic. That constantly heightened sense could be exhausting, but what I would find mind blowing were the sort of grounding and interesting meetings that didn’t happen every day. [Secretary of Commerce] Gary Locke came into the Oval with the [US] Census, which only got done every ten years. It seemed like another thing he had to sign, but then Gary Locke’s like, You know, there have only been twenty-two of these in the history of our country. And not just me, but also President Obama kinda looked down and kind of went, Oh yeah, this is a big deal.

  MONA SUTPHEN

  It had been years since Congress had approved a treaty . . . We’d sign treaties all the time, but we didn’t necessarily try to ratify them if US law was basically abiding by it already, so we didn’t go through Congress. But in the case of New START80 because you’d be reducing nuclear arsenals, that meant you’re taking a step. It needed to be ratified.

  ARUN CHAUDHARY

  We were in Prague to sign the nuclear treaty,81 and [Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev’s videographer and I asked what the rules were—often in G8s and bilaterals it’s very regimented what you can film—and everyone was like, There hasn’t been one of these signed in about twenty years. There really aren’t any rules. Just make sure that both of you stick together. In those moments you get brought out of yourself. Things could seem so routine—the next G20, the next G8, whatever—but then there were these rare important moments. You’d have to be able to differentiate them from the run-of-the-mill historical moments. That’s the real problem. Everything was historic. It’s just that some of it was extra historic.

  MONA SUTPHEN

  Everybody knew that Putin was still incredibly powerful. Let’s put it this way: Medvedev wasn’t going to do something that Putin was strongly against with the United States, but we technically weren’t negotiating with him, at least directly. People weren’t naive about that.

  TERRY SZUPLAT

  Medvedev was in the president’s position, and Putin was behind the scenes, pulling the strings, so to speak.

  MONA SUTPHEN

  In terms of warming up the bilateral relationship, even though we disagreed on 1,001 other things, the Russians were interested in doing business with us and us with them. That’s kind of where we started things off, and New START was part of that—fewer nukes is a good thing. And o
bviously, for a bunch of reasons, things went sideways on all of that relatively quickly, unfortunately for everybody. But [we] just thought, This is important. Let’s see how much business we can do with these guys. Hopefully this’ll work out and we’ll keep the page turned.

  MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS

  The crazy thing about that time was, while we were dealing with the final throes of passing health care, moving through the auto bailout, and probably about four other things, the oil spill was going on.

  CAROL BROWNER

  We first heard about it on Earth Day. Obama was having all the environmentalists over to the White House, and we were in the Rose Garden. My husband and my husband’s eighty-year-old mom were there to meet Obama, and a reporter overheard me. “I have to leave. There’s a problem in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the wells has fallen or is on fire. Something has happened.”

  MONA SUTPHEN

  What we just thought of as an explosion we’d have under control relatively quickly turned into what it turned into, which was a major undertaking with all kinds of moves. Early on it was literally, Okay, what’s actually happening? How are we going to come up with a reporting chain that is both timely and relevant?

  JAKE LEVINE

  This was an unprecedented disaster. The morning it happened, we really didn’t know the scale of the problem. Part of that was we didn’t have enough information from BP. This was after seven lives were lost. So you had the feeling of a tragedy. You didn’t have the feeling for how large scale of an environmental disaster it was.

  CAROL BROWNER

  I told my husband that I couldn’t go to dinner because I had to meet with the president in the Oval Office, and the Coast Guard was in there. Everyone was there. Half the people were like, This’ll be fine. These things happen. I just remember saying, “You know what? This is not going to be fine. This is going to be a problem.”

  DR. STEVEN CHU

  After the blowout, they didn’t know the state of the valves. All they could see was oil and gas gushing out. They had remotely operated vehicles going down there and trying to figure out what was going on. I had made the suggestion to use gamma rays to try and find out whether the valves were opened or closed, but the BP engineers initially laughed at it. Then they said, “You know, you may be right.”

  JAKE LEVINE

  The president ended up sending Steve Chu down there to sit in the control room with BP and think through solutions. That felt like a real turning point in terms of the kind of information that we were getting. We were able to build trust with BP. He was a constructive partner, arguably critical in helping to design the actual engineering solution to getting this blowout preventer. There was a lot of vocabulary that I’ve since forgotten.

  DR. STEVEN CHU

  I wanted a small team of people—maybe four, five, or six—and we’d go down there and roll up our sleeves together. It was not a committee making recommendations.

  CAROL BROWNER

  The depth at which this was happening was hard to explain. People were like, Can’t you just put divers down there? and you’re like, People don’t actually go down that far. This was so beyond what anyone had ever focused on. Obviously, when you’re working for a president, your first thought was, Does this become his Exxon Valdez? We were trying to get the hole closed to get it capped. They’re building the technology. There were some dark moments, and Steve Chu might have mentioned where they were actually modeling when the pressure would equalize. At some point enough oil would have spewed out to where it’s not going to spew out anymore. And we’re sitting there thinking, Well, this is really frightening.

  DR. STEVEN CHU

  It was BP’s initial conclusion that the well was damaged and could not be sealed from the top; therefore, you had to wait for a relief well at the bottom two months later. And I said, “No, I think it’s equally likely that the well might not be damaged. We don’t know from the data.” After a day of thinking about that they said, “Yeah, you’re right.” There were decision points, which always entailed some risk, and so that was actually satisfying because I was there acting in capacity as a scientist with the president’s backing.

  JAKE LEVINE

  There’s this hat that was supposed to go on top of the blowout preventer that they weren’t able to get back on because of all of the difficult conditions at that depth, and so the oil was just coming out of the bottom of the earth, essentially, and the equipment that was down there to manage and mitigate that needed to be manipulated in a way that Secretary Chu was very instrumental in figuring out.

  DR. STEVEN CHU

  We had the national weapons labs go through the entire design and make very strong recommendations. You had to right the swivel joint if you put the sealing cap on the way it was tilted. Again, you presented this This is a concluded analysis from the weapons labs. Here it is. So the BP engineers again said, “You’re right.”

  MONA SUTPHEN

  I was usually just trying to make sure that the president was getting a complete picture, and that the issues on the table were the right ones, that everybody who needed to be involved in something had been involved—side issues that, obviously, Carol and the guys were way too busy to deal with.

  DR. STEVEN CHU

  In my opinion, we helped them stop the leak in very substantive ways.

  CAROL BROWNER

  In addition to the environmental concerns, people had rights, under the law passed after Exxon Valdez, to be reimbursed if they weren’t able to work. There was a trust fund to pay people like the shrimpers. So I started looking at that and realized only a handful of people worked on the [reimbursement] program. They would be quickly overwhelmed with all the claims, and, secondly, there weren’t many resources in the fund. That’s when we began negotiations with BP over setting up a fund, which BP, at the end of the day, probably wished they hadn’t done.

  JAKE LEVINE

  You started to see Gulf Coast characters come out of the woodwork and manufacture different narratives that advanced their particular political needs. A lot of that was, frankly, jockeying to get a piece of what would become the settlement. It became known eventually that BP would commit to this gigantic $20 billion settlement, which the president negotiated directly.

  MICHAEL STRAUTMANIS

  If you think about the Gulf, those were mostly Republicans. So it was a bipartisan effort. We wanted our office to function across party lines, making sure that people on the ground were able to stay connected to their government and the federal government and get things done.

  RAHM EMANUEL

  The president was [also] implementing the Recovery Act at that point. I, also, was an advocate, after the Recovery Act and after TARP, to tackle financial regulation. Because those two votes were very partisan and on big spending—the Recovery Act and the TARP—financial regulation had no money involved. [It] had regulations the financial industry was gonna fight, and therefore I believed there was some Old Testament justice written into the script.

  BARNEY FRANK

  I think he wised up by late ’09 or early ’10, because we had one meeting in the White House82—Obama, top staff, Chris Dodd, and myself. There was a point at which Dodd was still hoping, reasonably, to get a bipartisan coalition for the financial-reform bill. [Senator Richard] Shelby sort of switched signals at the end, and the president and I were both worried that, to get Republican support, Chris might water things down.

  CHRIS DODD

  That was certainly true. I had an awful time. I went down to the fifth member on the Banking Committee to find someone willing to work on drafting a bill. Dick Shelby was a good friend of mine. If he decided to work with us on that bill it would have been a different bill. Not substantially different, but certainly different if I had a partner. [There was] this idea that “You should fight everything” by that time. Don’t give ’em anything. We got a chance to regain control.

  BARNEY FRANK

  The president and I both said to Chris, “Hey, let’s try t
o get the votes without them if the cost of getting their votes is too much compromise.” Obama joined me and said to Chris, “Write them off if that’s the way they’re going to be, and do our best bill with our own people.”

  TED KAUFMAN

  Shelby, [Senator Bob] Corker, and those guys were saying, “We’re going to negotiate.” They were never going to negotiate. All they wanted to do was drag this thing for as long as they could. It was the same way with the stimulus.

  ED SILVERMAN

  It would have been a better bill with eighty votes and Republican help, and, quite frankly, Dodd-Frank83 had a lot of Republican provisions, which they will disown to this day, but they’re there.

  SCOTT BROWN

  Barney Frank tried to screw me and put stuff in it during the committee wrap-ups. Had it passed in its original form—Harry wanted to do it in a day—it would have included auto dealers, dentists, doctors, and it would affect financial services, which had nothing to do with this. There were really serious flaws, so I told them I wasn’t going to [vote for the bill]. So they pulled it back and made the changes.

  CHRIS DODD

  We did sixty amendments on the floor of the Senate over a period of eight days. Only one of those amendments required a sixty-vote margin. Every other amendment was fifty votes, up or down. But nonetheless, I was determined to prove you could bring a major bill to the floor, conduct it to where people could talk—not endlessly, I didn’t shut anybody off—but you could raise your amendments, there could be a full-throated debate, and an up-or-down vote. In fact, Mitch McConnell used to talk about, if you’d bring a bill to the floor, if it could be managed in that way, there would be less obstruction to the consideration of bills. I was a great believer in that.

  SCOTT BROWN