Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (59 page)

“This is a Joe Friday moment,” I wrote in an urgent memo, invoking the laconic 1950s TV detective. “[The American people] don’t want a lot of analysis or explanation or rhetorical flourishes. (In fact, in this cynical environment, rhetorical flourishes will work against us.) They want good, solid ideas—in plain, simple English—about how he plans to spur job creation right away. They want to know that the guy in charge isn’t out of bullets . . .”

I rewrote the top of the speech to reflect my advice and better capture the mood of the country. Favs polished it and rewrote its body in language to match—punchy, insistent, and rife with an authentic sense of advocacy that people hadn’t heard too often since 2008. Obama skipped the usual windup and plunged right in, with an arresting open that cut through the cynicism and captured the mood of the nation.

“Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country,” he began. “We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse. This past week, reporters have been asking, ‘What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?’ But the millions of Americans who are watching right now, they don’t care about politics. They have real-life concerns.

“The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities. The question tonight is whether we’ll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.” Here he was interrupted with a burst of sustained applause. “The question is whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.”

Delivered with passion and purpose, Obama’s performance was more than the presentation of a plan, though the plan was helpful. It was a clear and powerful reaffirmation of the values on which he had run for president and would animate our reelection campaign. It was plainly clear for what and whom he was fighting.

I was thrilled with the speech, and happy when he phoned later that night. “I don’t often say it, but I just wanted to thank you,” Obama told me. “You did a good job working with Favs in shaping the speech.” After spending the better part of the year in the wilderness, cut off from Obama and the action, his call meant a lot to me. I was thrilled to be back in the game—maybe not at center stage all the time, but still a vital resource at critical moments.

As the strong reviews poured in for the jobs speech, I could finally see the way back—most critically, of course, for the president, but also for me.

W
HEN
THE
PRESIDENT
’
S
TEAM
gathered in the ornate
W
hite
H
ouse
S
tate
D
ining
R
oom, on
S
eptember 17, 2011, for the first major strategic meeting of his reelection campaign, the setting was far grander than the small conference room where we had held the first
O
bama for
A
merica strategy meeting in early 2007, but there was little of the romantic, tilting-at-windmills exhilaration
I
remembered.
B
ack then we knew the odds were long, but we were energized by the challenge, and thrilled to have the chance to try to change the world.
N
ow, after three of the toughest years any president had faced, we were just as determined, but far more subdued.

“I know we’re probably underdogs,” the president said in kicking off the meeting. “But I intend to win this race. There’s too much at stake here.”

I had come to the meeting on a mission.

After a year dominated by Obama’s fruitless efforts to find common ground on deficits with the Republicans in Congress, the president needed to come out swinging for his vision of an economy driven by a growing, thriving middle class. The compelling jobs speech before Congress was a good start, a hint of the power of his economic message and a reminder of his extraordinary gifts as a messenger. Even so, we had to build on it.

Obama had devoted his entire life to the vision of that jobs speech. Yet his focus had become muddled in the minds of voters, diluted by competing messages, a slow economic recovery, and some unpopular decisions, such as the Wall Street rescue forced on him by the financial crisis.

I intended to convey that sentiment in no uncertain terms. “I’m going to go in there and be really blunt,” I told Grisolano before the meeting. “And if he throws me out on my ass, so be it. To win this thing, we need Barack Obama to
be
Barack Obama.”

To dramatize the point, I put together a short video reel of some of Obama’s public moments throughout the years. The first was footage of his magnificent convention speech in 2004, in which he so eloquently gave voice to the hopes and struggles of hardworking Americans he had met while traveling in Illinois. There were some highlights from the 2008 campaign, as well, including the Jefferson-Jackson Day speech that was such an inspiring and authentic manifesto for change on behalf of the middle class. I finished with more recent footage, documenting a restrained president sharing the details of his deficit reduction policies and what they would mean for some distant fiscal year. It was a clinical and bloodless performance, lacking both passion and a sense of advocacy. The contrast was striking—not just in how much Obama had aged during this seven-year journey of ours, but also in his cramped tone.

It was not the Obama we knew, but it was increasingly the one the public was seeing. “We need you to be
that
guy again,” I said, referring to the earlier Obama, passionate and purposeful. “The guy who is out there urgently fighting for people and their values, for a country in which folks can still work hard, get ahead, and hope for better for their kids.”

This was the issue of our time. This was our North Star. It provided the strongest economic contrast with the Republicans. In response to the crisis, they offered the same old laissez-faire, trickle-down theory—an absolute killer at a time when the yawning gap between the rich and everyone else was growing and the excesses of Wall Street were viewed as the prime cause of our nation’s economic woes.

Obama listened impassively, but he was plainly frustrated by my suggestion that he had lost his focus. “I talk about the middle class all the time,” he protested, insisting that the media had simply lost interest in a familiar theme. He knew where his heart was, as of course did I. We had shared so many conversations: about the letters he received from anxious Americans, about his life path, and about his disdain for those who mistook their own vast and growing fortunes for the nation’s progress. However much he agonized about the problem in private, though, it was not enough to sprinkle mentions of the middle class formulaically in speeches—not remotely the same as waging a day-in, day-out campaign on the issue. That, I told him, was what we needed from him now.

I had never met a brighter person or one more capable of inspiring others. Yet Obama was inclined to divide his roles, viewing campaigning as one thing and governing as something entirely different. When he was campaigning, he worked hard at connecting with people, invoking shared values, and defining the choice before them. He yielded, albeit grudgingly, to the need for short, message-laden sound bites that reporters would use and voters would remember. As president, however, he had taken to heart Mario Cuomo’s dictum that you “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”—and followed it to a fault.

That was most conspicuous during press conferences and interviews. As a candidate, he came to view questions as opportunities to burnish his message. As president, he eschewed that discipline, too often giving long, complex answers—sometimes running seven or eight minutes—and, finally, ending with the point he should have emphasized from the start. During my White House years, he would bristle whenever we tried to push campaign-like discipline on him. “I’m not a candidate now. I’m the president,” he would say whenever I complained about the length and construction of his answers. “And people want to know the details.”

In drawing this stark line between campaigning and governing, Obama had misread history and his role in it, I would argue to him. Even as they compromised on the details of governance, the truly transformative presidents—be it the Roosevelts or Ronald Reagan—never stopped campaigning or communicating their basic message or core values. JFK’s press conferences were exercises in elegant message efficiency. Bill Clinton self-consciously slid to the center after the disastrous midterms of 1994, but he never stopped talking to, or for, his working-class base.

Getting Obama into a campaign frame of mind was the key, and the nearly five-hour meeting in the State Dining Room proved a good start. “We’re in campaign mode now,” the president said at the conclusion of the meeting. I was heartened to hear this, and as he traveled the country in subsequent weeks, challenging the Republican Congress to pass his jobs bill, Obama appeared ready to embrace it. More and more, he returned to being the advocate for working people. In a meeting with us a few weeks later, he said, “If Congress won’t act on this jobs bill, I’m going to take every step I can on my own. We can’t wait!” That simple line, “We can’t wait,” became a mantra for him on the stump, conveying the sense of urgency he shared with the American people.

Obama’s mood was brighter when I visited him in the Oval Office in late October. As I was coming in, Michelle was just leaving. She had been in Chicago a few days before, where she had given a truly inspiring speech to the campaign staff. I told the president that FLOTUS had done a great job.

“She always does,” he said, beaming at his wife.

“Raised a little money, too,” she said, with joking self-reverence.

“And,” I added, “she told the kids at headquarters that she’s going to jump into the campaign with both feet!” Obama laughed, knowing what a reluctant campaigner Michelle had always been.

“She already is. She just made them believe she’s excited about it!” he said, as the First Lady smiled and walked out the door.

“I feel a little better out there,” the president said as he settled in behind his desk. “I think this ‘We Can’t Wait’ thing works well. And I’m working on the stump, trying things out. It’s not like 2007, where I could test stuff out in New Haven. We’re on Broadway every day now. But I am doing some stuff out there that I think works.”

In one sense, he was wrong—Barack Obama had been on Broadway since 2004—but he was right about this: things
were
improving. Still, in a conversation a few weeks later, he conceded that he felt constrained by the economic message, and for that he faulted his political advisers. “You want me to be authentic. You want Obama to be Obama. Well, there are other things I believe are really important to the future of this country. I’m pretty sure you guys would say they’re
off message
, but maybe part of being
authentic
is saying them. I mean, I don’t want to go down knowing I hadn’t said everything I wanted because we were afraid to be honest.”

Here was the recurring tension between Obama the idealist and Obama the politician; between the man who understood that in order to serve and make a difference, you had to be elected, and the one who sometimes resented the compromises that the process required and the advisers who enforced them.

He repeated that lament at another of our large campaign strategy meetings in November, provoking more than a little anxiety among his team. “There are things I feel strongly about,” he said, “things I’ll want to work on in my second term. Some of them may make you guys nervous. But Axe keeps saying I should be ‘authentic.’ So maybe I should go out there and just let it rip.”

“Given our situation, sir, I’m not sure we’re in a position to go all
Bulworth
out there,” Gibbs quipped, referring to the dark comedy in which Warren Beatty plays a despondent senator, on the verge of losing reelection, who goes on a boozy bender of truth telling.

To show respect for the president’s concern while setting the matter aside for a while, we suggested he write down those things he wanted to talk about on the trail, for discussion at our next meeting.

A week later, the president returned to the group with the yellow legal pad, covered with his meticulous scrawl—for pages and pages. It was not just a list of important issues on which he felt he had been insufficiently forthright, but expansive thoughts on each. He had apparently been up until 2:00 a.m. preparing for this session. “Maybe we overshot the runway when we suggested this exercise,” I murmured, after glimpsing his notes.

The president’s list didn’t surprise me: immigration reform, climate change, Guantánamo, poverty, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of course gay marriage, something that had vexed him for years. They were difficult issues, rife with controversy and political challenge, that he had hoped to tackle and resolve before his presidency was done. Yet his efforts so far had revealed just how difficult that would be.

On some, he had been stymied by Congress: immigration reform and the DREAM Act, to give legal status to the children of illegal immigrants; “cap and trade,” to curb the emission of greenhouse gases at the root of climate change; and the closing of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Those efforts hadn’t satisfied his own party activists, who were intent on holding Obama to the letter of his campaign promises and who scolded him for not making each of these issues the same, single-minded priority that health reform had been.

He had fought for refundable tax credits for the working poor and vastly expanded college aid for needy students. Yet here he was, the first black president, a man who began his career in the inner city as a community organizer, and poverty had
grown
on his watch. He regretted not having made its eradication more of a visible national priority.

From almost his first day in office, he had pushed the Israelis and Palestinians for a two-state solution, but his efforts, like those of presidents before him, had been run aground by the intractable politics of the Middle East. He was frustrated with both sides, but felt he had pulled his punches with Netanyahu to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community.

Gay marriage was a particularly nagging issue. For as long as we had been working together, Obama had felt a tug between his personal views and the politics of gay marriage. As a candidate for the state senate in 1996 from liberal Hyde Park, he signed a questionnaire promising his support for legalization. I had no doubt that this was his heartfelt belief. “I just don’t feel my marriage is somehow threatened by the gay couple next door,” he told me. Yet he also knew his view was way out in front of the public’s. Opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church, and as he ran for higher office, he grudgingly accepted the counsel of more pragmatic folks like me, and modified his position to support civil unions rather than marriage, which he would term a “sacred union.” Having prided himself on forthrightness, though, Obama never felt comfortable with his compromise and, no doubt, compromised position. He routinely stumbled over the question when it came up in debates or interviews. “I’m just not very good at bullshitting,” he said with a sigh after one such awkward exchange.

By 2010 he had told reporters that his position was “evolving,” and in 2011 the administration announced that it would no longer fight in court to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, a controversial Clinton-era law absolving federal and state governments of their obligation to recognize gay marriages sanctioned in states where they were legal. Yet if Obama’s views were “evolving” publicly, they were fully evolved behind closed doors. The president was champing at the bit to announce his support for the right of gay and lesbian couples to wed—and having watched him struggle with this issue for years, I was ready, too. Jim Messina, the campaign manager, was nervous about the impact of such a step. “We’ve looked at this and it could cost you a couple of battleground states; North Carolina, for one,” he said. By year’s end, however, Obama was no longer interested in analysis. “I just want you guys to know that if a smart reporter asks me how I would vote on this if I were still in the state legislature, I’m going to tell the truth. I would vote yes.”

As Obama ran through all the issues on his legal pad, I doubted there was anyone in the room who disagreed personally with the positions he took. As weighty as they were, though, none of them rose to the top of the list of concerns in a country where the economy was still weak and the middle class was under siege. Going
Bulworth
on a range of “hot-button” issues was not only risky; it would detract from our ability to drive the winning economic argument. While some of these issues (gay marriage, immigration reform, climate change) had important, targeted appeal, we simply couldn’t afford to make them the focus of the campaign to the exclusion of our economic message.