Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (45 page)

We had spent the last two years condemning George W. Bush’s policies as a failure of epic proportions. Yet from the moment the election’s outcome was known, he and his team were gracious, cooperative, and open. Maybe part of it was due to Obama’s working closely with Bush and Paulson after Lehman’s collapse. Mostly, I suspected, Bush had a respect for the meaning of the transition period. After all, he was not just the president, but also the son of a president. Transitions were a critical rite of democracy, and George W. Bush was intent on managing this one properly.

That became even clearer a few days after our arrival in Washington, when, at Obama’s request, Bush hosted a White House luncheon for Obama and the three living former presidents Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter. At the same time, all of our counterparts on Bush’s senior staff invited us to lunch to provide a rundown on their operations and answer any questions.

I had visited the White House several times during the Clinton years, but still felt a sense of awe as I entered, thinking about the larger-than-life leaders who had served there and all the history they had made. The imposing oil portraits in heavy wood frames and even the musty, museum odor of the place reeked of history. The other striking thing about this citadel of American power is its size. Small! Very small! The halls are narrow, the office spaces cramped and limited in number, which made the West Wing the most select real estate in Washington, and it felt surreal that I would have such a prominent spot there, with my office right next door to the president’s.

Ed Gillespie, the counselor to President Bush, was waiting for me in the lobby. Ed, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, played the same strategic communications role in the White House that I would assume less than two weeks later. He spent hours with me, going over the nature of his routine and life in the White House. It was a generous gesture and an invaluable primer.

When we were done, we walked down a tight staircase and past two Secret Service agents and into the Oval Office. I had never before stepped inside. It was like walking onto a movie set. Standing across from us was Obama and his four living predecessors. Has there ever been such a gathering, I wondered?

The curved, windowed door to one side of the president’s desk opened, and Dana Perino, President Bush’s press secretary, led a phalanx of photographers into the Oval Office to capture the moment. Gibbs, who would take her job, trailed along. As the cameramen clicked away, the two Bushes flanked Obama, with Clinton and Carter to the younger Bush’s left. All were smiling, but the taciturn Carter, perhaps revealingly, stood a few steps apart from the group. When the cameramen were gone, Barack motioned Gibbs and me over to meet the elder President Bush. “Mr. President, this is Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod. These guys helped get me elected.” George H. W. Bush smiled his warm, crooked smile and pumped a fist in the air. “Nice going, boys,” he said.

The next day, Summers and I appeared before a closed meeting of the Senate Democratic Caucus in the ornate Capitol room named for Lyndon B. Johnson. A few of the senators had been my clients, and I knew others, but this was my first command performance before the entire boisterous crew. Many were palpably smart. Others left you wondering how in the world they had ever reached such heights. Running this circus was Harry Reid, who spoke like the small-town Nevada lawyer he once was, but who managed the show like a firm ringmaster.

We were there to advocate for Obama’s stimulus plan, which we had dubbed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act after research revealed that people didn’t like or even understand the word
stimulus
but supported almost anything “American.” I briefed the group on the polling and strategy for the plan, while Summers conveyed the urgent need for its implementation. The size of the emerging proposal, just shy of eight hundred billion dollars, worried some senators. Others were annoyed that one-third of it would come in tax cuts, which they viewed as an ineffective sop to Republicans—even though these breaks would be targeted to the middle class and working poor. Larry made a powerful case and respectfully answered all their questions, including some contentious ones, displaying a patience that belied his prickly reputation.

I would return to the Senate Democratic Caucus periodically over the next few years, often to absorb a beating from allies distressed by the impact of the economy and Obama’s decisions on their reelection prospects. What I quickly learned is that if you go to the caucus expecting to be challenged, poked, prodded, and even slapped around a bit, you will never leave disappointed.

I went home to Chicago the following weekend to see Susan and to deal with lingering details of my move. Before returning to DC on Monday morning, I stopped off to speak at a fund-raising breakfast for Misericordia, the wonderful community for people with special needs where Lauren lived. I shared some reflections on the campaign and thoughts about the challenges ahead. When I finished, Lauren came onstage for a surprise presentation. One of her favorite activities was painting, and she was very good at it. Our vacation house in Michigan was decorated with her nature scenes. The painting she presented me on this day, however, was a new subject: the White House. Lauren had painted the Chicago skyline reflecting in the North Lawn fountain, so I would never forget home. I hung that painting in the White House, where it was the first thing I saw each day when I walked into my office.

The day before the inauguration, I went to the Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House, where the Obamas were staying. I was there, along with Favreau and Michael Sheehan, the speech coach, for a rehearsal of the inaugural address. Barack was late for the session, and when he finally arrived, he waved us off. “Sorry, guys, I’m a little tired,” he said. “Let’s do this later, if we can.” I didn’t think much of it. He had been on the run constantly.

That evening, Susan and I were having drinks with Joel Benenson, the pollster, and his wife, Lisa, when Rahm called me on my cell phone. “Can you call me right away from a hard line?” he asked, giving me his number. Rahm sounded a bit agitated, but that was hardly unusual. What was unusual was his request for me to use a more secure phone line. We were at the Benensons’ apartment, so I used the phone in their bedroom.

“I’m going to tell you something you can’t share with anyone, not even Susan,” he said. “We’ve been talking to Chertoff all day, and there is a serious threat on the inauguration.” Michael Chertoff was Bush’s secretary of homeland security so the nature of the threat was clear. Rahm said that four young Somalis from the United States, who had been radicalized overseas, might have slipped back into the country, and there were concerns that they might target the inaugural ceremonies. While he didn’t go into detail, Rahm said there was sufficient worry that contingency plans were being made to disperse the crowd quickly. If that were necessary, he explained, the Secret Service would alert Obama, who would proceed to the podium and inform the assembled crowd to follow directions and leave in an orderly fashion.

“I can’t read the speechwriters into this,” Rahm said, “so I want you to write a brief statement for the president-elect. Meet him right before the ceremonies in the Speaker’s office and give it to him. He’ll put it in his pocket in case it’s needed.”

As instructed, I kept quiet, and as Rahm requested, I wrote out the emergency instructions for Obama. I couldn’t sleep that night, one of the first I would spend in the apartment Susan had rented for us six blocks from the White House. All night long, I tossed and turned, listening to police sirens and wondering if they were related to the search for the fugitive Somalis. In the morning, I was booked for a series of TV interviews, during which Susan and our son Ethan would join the Obama and Bush families at the traditional ecumenical worship service at St. John’s Episcopal Church, across Lafayette Park from the White House. I was frantic. What if an attack happened
there
? I desperately wanted to tell them to stay away, but that would have violated Rahm’s edict. As I watched my wife and son disappear through the door, I worried that I might have made a terrible mistake, one I would regret for the rest of my life.

I wended my way through a fortressed Capitol to the Speaker’s office to wait for Obama, who, in accordance with tradition, would ride to the ceremony together with the outgoing president. Bush came into the room first, and I thought I would take the opportunity to thank him for the generosity he and his team had shown us.

“Mr. President,” I said.

“Yeah, Axelrod,” he replied. It made sense, after all the exposure I had gotten, that he would recognize me, yet it surprised me nonetheless.

“I was on television this morning—” I began to say, but he cut me off.

“I don’t watch TV,” he barked, with a wave of a hand.

“I know, sir, but I wanted you to know what I said. I said that you handled this transition like a true patriot, and we really appreciate it.”

Bush shrugged and put his hands on my shoulders.

“Axelrod, I’ve been watching you,” he said, in that familiar Texas twang. Given the many unkind things I had said about the Bush administration over the past two years, I wasn’t sure what would come next. “I’ve been watching you, and I think you’re all right. You’re going to do just fine. Listen, you’re in for the ride of your life. Just hang on and really enjoy it, ’cause it’ll go by faster than you can imagine.”

I believed then, as I do today, that the decisions Bush made in office—the war, the tax cuts, the derogation of policy making to industry lobbyists—were epically wrong, and that America will be living with the consequences for generations. Yet I will never forget his kindness to me in that moment. It gave me a window into George W. Bush as a person and an understanding of why so many who had worked for him were unwaveringly loyal.

A few moments later, the president-elect walked into the Speaker’s office. After he greeted the luminaries assembled there, I cornered him and handed him the sheet of paper with the emergency instructions. He tucked it into his pocket without even looking at it—and thankfully, he would have no reason to read it later.

“Thanks for an incredible journey,” I said. “It’s been a great partnership.”

He smiled and extended his hand. “And it’s only just begun.”

T
HE
MORNING
AFTER
THE
INAUGURATION
,
I
cast my bleary eyes on the
W
hite
H
ouse and my first full day as a presidential aide.
T
he buoyant memories of the long, historic day and night were fading fast.
N
ow
I
was late for my first senior staff meeting with the man
I
had known for years as
B
arack, but from this moment on would call only
M
r.
P
resident.

What made my late arrival particularly embarrassing was that I didn’t have far to travel. Rahm had assigned me the room adjacent to the Oval Office, which was the small but coveted space he occupied during his years as senior adviser to President Clinton. In those days, there was an interior door that led directly into the president’s private dining room and, beyond it, the Oval Office. Yet this back door to the inner sanctum had long since been walled over.

The rest of the senior staff was already in place when, delayed by a call, I hurried into the Oval to join them. These meetings took place in a seating area opposite the president’s desk. There were two chairs with coffee tables near the fireplace and a couch on each side. The conversation was already under way when I slipped into the chair across from the president. As soon as I sat down, Rahm locked disapproving eyes on me and motioned vigorously with his head until I got the hint and moved to the couch. It turned out that the chair I had grabbed is traditionally reserved for the vice president—even when the VP isn’t in attendance.

I was entering a new world, and I needed to adjust to it.

Just the ritual of waking up before dawn and putting on a suit was for me an unnatural act. Ever since my new suit was ruined covering a tornado on my first day at the
Tribune
, I had seldom worn one. My new uniform felt confining. Far worse, though, was that, after the inaugural week, I would be waking up alone. The apartment Susan rented us had a balcony overlooking the Washington Monument. It was a swell view, but most of the time I was gazing at it on my own. The encrypted national security phone installed in my apartment; the card I carried in my wallet instructing me on where to go to be evacuated in case of attack; the Secret Service detail assigned to me after a deranged gunman was found with my name and address in his notebook—all added to the sense of how profoundly my life had changed.

In those first days, as I sat behind a desk staring at a card filled with my appointments, I missed my family, friends, and freedom—the life I had left behind. Yet with all hell breaking out around us, there was little time for brooding or doubt. The challenges confronting us were monstrously complex. Even in more placid times, there is no easing into life in the White House. It operates at full bore, every hour of every day.

 • • • 

My days would begin with Rahm’s senior staff meeting at 7:00 a.m., in the chief of staff’s office in a corner of the West Wing.

We would start by going over the president’s schedule and breaking news before each of us was given the floor to share issues of concern. Still, it was unquestionably Rahm’s show. He generally came armed with a long list of ideas, questions, and follow-ups. Some he formulated during sleepless nights, others during his predawn swim. Not surprisingly, Rahm’s meetings could sometimes take on the raucous quality of a Jewish family dinner. When the group veered into too much levity, though—and I was a frequent culprit there—Rahm would bang the table with the stub of his right middle finger, severed on a meat slicer at Arby’s when he was a seventeen-year-old fast-food worker. “Okay, okay, okay, okay,” he would yell. “Let’s get focused here.”

Rahm is a pile driver who values, above all else, getting things done. He wants to put “wins on the board.” Given the multiple challenges we were facing, that was exactly the kind of chief of staff the new president needed. Yet Rahm’s approach underscored a fundamental tension between a campaign that promised to change Washington and a White House that had to deal with the town as we found it.

Everything I saw in my years there merely confirmed Obama’s campaign critique: most members of Congress are fundamentally concerned with winning and holding on to their seats and to power. The special interest lobbyists who fund their campaigns leverage far too much influence. The partisanship is intense. The entire community is obsessed from day to day with who’s up and who’s down, and the politicians with scoring points for the next election more than solving problems for the next generation.

It was all true, but now we were there, in the middle of multiple crises. We weren’t going to change politics overnight, but almost overnight, we damn well had to pass a stimulus bill to save the economy. We had to ask Congress to authorize more help to shore up a Wall Street that was in maximum disfavor. We had to petition for more money to fight the wars we’d come there to end, until we could end them. Finally, the president had a long and ambitious list of additional priorities that he put on a fast track.

Obama had hired Rahm because he needed someone who could skillfully navigate the Washington that is, not the Washington as we hoped it could one day be. We banned lobbyists from key administration jobs, kept public logs of everyone who visited the White House, and affected stricter ethics guidelines than any administration had before. Yet we couldn’t force Congress to play by our rules; nor could we afford to walk away from the process in bouts of pristine righteousness.

So Rahm would grow impatient whenever Gibbs and I objected to a tactic that we felt violated a commitment or the spirit of the campaign. “I’m goddamned sick of hearing about the fucking campaign,” he would scream. “The campaign is over. We’re trying to solve some problems here!” As close as we were and will always be, the next two years would test our friendship.

One early, illustrative confrontation came over the issue of congressional earmarks, the time-honored but sometimes tawdry practice of allowing members to add pet projects to the budget. Earmarks had become symbolic of wasteful government, and Obama had campaigned vigorously against them. In the first weeks of the administration, however, we received word that Congress would soon be sending over a spending bill to keep the government operating that included nine thousand separate earmarks. When the president said that, in keeping with his pledge, he was inclined to veto the bill, Rahm was uneasy.

“You could do that Mr. President, but it might cost you your Recovery Act,” he said. Rahm added that the bill and the earmarks were important to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Furthermore, in discussions about the passage of the Recovery Act, Rahm had assured Reid that the leftover spending bill would be signed. Harry would view a veto as a breach of trust, Rahm explained. Gibbs and I argued that signing the bill would be a breach of trust with the American people. The president listened to the arguments and, though clearly pained by the prospect of green-lighting the earmarks, agreed to sign the bill. With the economy cratering, he believed there were bigger things at stake.

Such was the constant tug and pull between the principles we hoped to establish (principles we had run on) and the progress we absolutely had to make. While I worked to ensure that we didn’t trample those principles, I also recognized that symbolic battles over reform wouldn’t halt the spiraling recession or put food on anyone’s table—other than, perhaps, those of the lobbyists hired to fight those battles. I appreciated Rahm’s focus on the bottom line, and so did the president, and I came to realize that in this imperfect world, some of the things we’d campaigned against, such as earmarks, were essential tools with which leaders marshaled votes.

Rahm and I would clash over other things, the biggest of which was the use of the president’s time. Rahm wanted Obama out in public constantly. “If you leave a vacuum, someone else will fill it,” he said more than once. I was concerned that overexposure and too many B-level press events would turn the president into a play-by-play announcer for the government rather than the narrator of a far larger story. “Rahm, this is a long game. We don’t have to win every news cycle,” I told him once, when he proposed an event I thought unworthy of Obama’s time. “Oh, yeah? Well, I do!” Rahm replied, and stormed out of my office.

I would not have wanted to be in the White House without Rahm, particularly given the crushing array of challenges we faced when we walked in the door. Yet the very same qualities that made him an indispensable force would occasionally drive me nuts.

 • • • 

There is no handbook for the senior adviser role I played, and every person who has held the job has brought with him or her a different set of strengths. A big part of my role was to monitor polling, guide our message, and try to keep us true to Obama’s principles and campaign brand. Apart from providing advice to the president and others who spoke publicly for the administration, I exercised control primarily through the speechwriting process I oversaw.

Every day I could, I carved out an hour to meet with the president’s speechwriters. As they filed into my office, I would always greet them with genuine enthusiasm and the same salutation: “Hello, Wordsmiths!” Led by Favreau, who was twenty-seven when we arrived at the White House, the team was talented, creative, and versatile. I relished these sessions and came to love this young corps of writers as if they were my own kids.

On major speeches, such as the State of the Union or a significant policy announcement, Favs and I would begin with the president, whose thoughts about what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it were generally well ordered and already elegantly expressed. Still, the president didn’t have the time to set a direction for the day-to-day speeches. So that job fell to me.

Typically, I would begin my meetings with the Wordsmiths by going over the schedule of upcoming presidential speeches, statements, and scripts. I’d explain the strategic imperatives and then riff on how I would approach each one. Favs and the writer chosen for each assignment would then probe the subject while others chimed in with their ideas. Out of that free-for-all process, we produced remarkably cohesive speeches. Not only were these sessions fun, but they gave me my best chance to try to orchestrate consistent themes that were faithful to the president’s message and that could be heard through the gale force distractions that regularly blew in Washington. My days were largely spent navigating one political morass after another, and as the Wordsmiths were passionate believers, my time with them was nourishment for the soul.

Gibbs and I also would speak a dozen or more times a day. His office was on the other side of the Oval, closer to the pressroom, where his restless charges in the press corps were penned in and waiting to be fed dollops of news.

There is an expectation that presidents in the modern era must react to whatever news is breaking—and in an age when cable TV, Twitter, and online media outlets all can seize the national debate in a flash, there is a new freneticism to that process. In today’s media age, Teddy Roosevelt’s stout “bully pulpit” has been atomized. Americans now get their news from countless varied sources. Presidents must try to steer their agenda through a tumultuous environment in which anyone with a cell phone camera has the potential to hijack the story of the day. Managing this media chaos during a campaign was bracing enough. Now the stakes were infinitely greater.

Robert and I would take turns shuttling back and forth to consult on how to handle the tempest of the moment or, not quite as often, genuinely meaningful news. If the issue couldn’t wait for our daily senior staff meetings, one or both of us would poke our heads into the Oval to see if the president was free so we could read him in.

One role I carried over from the campaign was that of the “public face.” Even before we took office, I was defending our economic plans on the Sunday television shows, jousting with hosts who served up edgy questions hoping to knock me off my talking points and goad me into acts of news I didn’t want to commit. Every comment I made had greater consequences now that I was speaking for the president of the United States, and I spent many sleepless nights gaming out the likely questions I would get and the answers I would give. Ten minutes before every show I would invariably be seized by a bracing sense of impending peril. Often I did these interviews from Chicago or from the North Lawn of the White House, so I became practiced at carrying on lively exchanges with a TV camera as the voices of disembodied interlocutors came at me through an earpiece. I also carried the administration’s message to more unorthodox venues that had become important forums in the new media age. During my White House years, I found myself sitting across the desk from Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart.

There were regular scheduling meetings in Rahm’s office, at which the president’s itinerary for the coming weeks would be plotted. I would then spend considerable time with the scheduling and communications team as they worked to marry message with execution. What recovering small business could we visit to underscore hopeful signs about the economy on a day when we expected a downbeat monthly jobs report? Which clean-energy start-up would provide the best backdrop to tout the benefits of the investments we had made? As we considered such questions, there was the overlay of future battleground states and markets.

I also tried to keep close tabs on what members of the cabinet were saying and doing, as I knew their actions and pronouncements would reflect on the president. This led to the occasional row, including an early dustup with Eric Holder, the new attorney general. In a speech delivered just a few weeks after taking office, Holder described America as a “nation of cowards” when it came to confronting deep-seated issues of race—which provoked the predictable firestorm. America had just taken a remarkable step forward by electing the first black president, one who was busy trying to rally the nation behind tough measures to confront multiple crises. It was a terrible time to divert the country’s attention with a provocative speech on race relations.