Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (64 page)

There is nothing quite like that final coast-to-coast barnstorming of a presidential campaign, when the frenzied pace and pandemonium delivers the excitement of a rock-and-roll mega-tour. The “road show” becomes a world unto itself, and the ultimate bonding experience for those who share it. And there was a renewed sense of mission that was palpable in the final weeks. You could feel it in the warm, enthusiastic crowds that greeted us everywhere, reminiscent of 2008, if not quite as large. As we traveled, I was like a retiring baseball player in the fall of my final season, appreciating every last moment of a glorious rite I knew I would never experience again.

I felt the same way every time I walked into our bustling campaign headquarters and found it overflowing with inspiring, joyful, sleep-deprived kids who had come from all over America to be a part of our effort. I would miss the high-energy collaborations and the ceaseless banter with my gifted and creative colleagues. We were a tight team, bound together, day and night, by this urgent, heady mission, all of us working toward a single goal and a single day when America would choose its leader and its course.

Along the way, I spent hours with reporters who were misled by public polls and the Romney campaign into believing that the race was closing. In a moment of exasperation, I wagered my mustache of forty years to Joe Scarborough on his eponymous morning TV show. After the election, I would parlay my winnings into a larger deal to raise money for CURE. It cost me the ’stache, shaved off on national TV, but raised $1.2 million for epilepsy research. Susan was thrilled with the money and, to my surprise, the chance after all those years to glimpse my naked lip.

Only Mother Nature would disrupt our sprint to the finish line. When a colossal hurricane named Sandy slammed into the Eastern Seaboard on October 29, Obama’s official responsibilities trumped his campaign schedule. With more than a hundred dead and fifty billion dollars’ worth of destruction, Sandy pushed the election news off the front page. While the storm and its aftermath didn’t determine the outcome of the election, the pictures of the president and Governor Chris Christie, a GOP stalwart, working together as they toured the ravaged New Jersey coast was a heartening show of bipartisanship for a country that, of late, had seen far too little of it.

When the president resumed campaigning on the final weekend before Election Day, Bill Clinton joined us for a Sunday rally in New Hampshire. Clinton had campaigned so aggressively in the closing days that he barely had any voice left. On the ride to the event, Clinton gazed out the window at the passing countryside and remarked on how much he loved New Hampshire. What went unspoken was that the state had revived not only his political fortunes in ’92, but Hillary’s in ’08. Plouffe, pugnacious to the end, couldn’t resist. “We feel the same way about Iowa!” he said with a big grin.

So it was only fitting that Iowa, which four years earlier had given life to our campaign, would be where this final race would come to an end. Bruce Springsteen joined us for the final day, and before the Obamas made their last appeals to a massive crowd in the late evening chill, the troubadour offered his sage and world-weary perspective on the distance we had traveled.

“I’ve lived long enough to know that the future . . . it’s rarely a tide rushing in,” he told the crowd between songs. “It’s often a slow march, inch by inch, day after painful, long day . . .

“President Obama last time ran as a man of hope and change and you hear a lot talk about how things are different now . . . Things aren’t any different. They’re just
realer
. It’s crunch time now. The president’s job, our job—yours, mine; whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, independent; rich, poor; black, brown, white; gay, straight; soldier, civilian—is to keep that hope alive and to combat the cynicism and the apathy; and to believe in our power to change our lives and the country and the world that we live in.”

Springsteen had captured the moment. This wasn’t the beautiful, innocent rapture of 2008. Our idealism had been tested and tempered by four hard years of wrenching problems and brutal politics. It was
realer
now. Progress had come, but not as a “tide rushing in.” The gains we had made were the product of a “slow march, inch by inch, day after painful, long day.” And for all he had done, Obama could never match the outsize expectations he had first stirred in Iowa.

On the plane home to Chicago, Obama stopped in the senior staff cabin for one last bit of campaign analysis from Plouffe, Gibbs, and me. Based on all our data, we believed we would win 332 electoral votes. I was hoping North Carolina might even give us another 15. Either way, tomorrow figured to be a very good day. The president listened and nodded, as if he had heard such confident expressions from us before.

“Okay, but I don’t want the three of you knocking on my door with long faces again tomorrow night to tell me you were wrong,” he said, shifting his gaze between us as he recalled that moment in the hallway of a Nashua hotel, almost five years earlier, when we had to tell him we had come up short in the New Hampshire primary.

“He didn’t sound like he was kidding,” Plouffe said with a nervous smile after Obama left the cabin.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think he was.”

One of the enduring mysteries of the 2012 election is how the Romney crew so thoroughly missed the reality of what was happening on the ground. Even on Election Day, the Romney team was still preparing its victory party—complete with a barge loaded with fireworks to light up Boston Harbor. It wasn’t that Romney and his team weren’t smart people, but that they seemed so detached from minority communities and younger generations that they wholly underestimated their commitment to the country and its election process. That is why Team Mitt was shocked when the numbers rolled in.

When Messina, Plouffe, and I arrived at the president’s hotel suite that night, there was no trace of the serene Obama who awaited us on Election Night in 2008; this time, he was pumped, and he greeted us with fist bumps and high fives.

He was a president who believed he had made tough decisions at a critical time, only to find himself dismissed as a shooting star whose fire had burned out, a certain one-termer. Now he had won and won decisively—not just with 332 electoral votes but by a margin of almost four points in the popular vote. “In some ways, this one’s sweeter,” he told us. “Because it was harder. And there was so much on the line.” He felt the differences between his vision and Romney’s were so stark; the stakes were even greater than 2008.

There was a mob of delirious supporters waiting for him a few miles down the road, and he was eager to celebrate with them, but we had heard nothing yet from Boston. “How long do we have to hang here?” Obama wondered about the protocol of waiting for Romney’s concession. “If he doesn’t call soon, we should go. I don’t want to leave those folks just standing there.”

While we were waiting, I sat down with Plouffe in a quiet corner of the suite. He was never one for sloppy emotion; that was my province. Yet, after ten years of partnership and collaboration, it was an incomparable moment for both of us, one I knew we would never again share. We spent a few minutes reflecting on what we had accomplished together. “It’s been a pleasure, brother,” I told him, extending my hand. “I’m proud that we’ll always be linked together in history. The Davids!”

Shortly before midnight in Chicago, Romney called. We gathered around Obama as they spoke. Obama said the appropriate things, congratulating his opponent on a hard-fought race and wishing Romney’s family well. He was unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over. “He said, ‘We were surprised. You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee.’ In other words, black people,” the president said. “That’s what he thinks this was all about.”

Before we left the suite, he wanted to make one more call. “Can someone get Bill Clinton on the phone?” Four years earlier, they had gone after each other hard, and it had taken time for those wounds to heal. Yet now they had become true allies, even friends—and maybe most important of all, they were peers, among a handful of living men who had known the burdens of the American presidency.

“Bill,” the president said. “I’m just calling to say thanks. You were the MVP of this campaign.”

When we reached the event site, I scrambled out of the motorcade to look for Susan. For the second straight Election Night, we had crossed signals and been separated. We finally met up in the tangle of staff and friends who were penned off at the side of the stage where Obama would speak. Susan said that she had encountered the president and First Lady backstage and shared a warm embrace.

“I’m happy for David,” said the man who was our friend long before he was our president. “He’s going out a winner!”

I winced a little when Susan shared Obama’s words. The winning was sublime, but “going out” was a jarring reality. On this night, surrounded by the White House colleagues and campaign warriors with whom I had marched for six long years, it was hard to accept that the moment had finally arrived and this vital, intense part of my life was ending.

I had much to look forward to in my new life. I had already agreed to launch an Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, where I would have the chance to inspire a new generation—one desperately needed—to consider careers in the public arena. And I was excited about spending more time with Susan, our family, and wonderful friends, whose company I had sacrificed so often for too long.

I contemplated just where this long journey had left me. I certainly wasn’t the wide-eyed little boy on a mailbox anymore. I was hardened and sobered by enough battles to know that democracy is more than fluttering flags, swelling music, and inspiring words. It is a tough, messy business, always demanding and often disappointing. Still, as I gazed up at my friend the president, who had made such a difference, I knew that there was no other work I could ever do that would mean so much.

M
Y
MOTHER
DIED
IN
J
anuary 2014 at the age of ninety-three.
S
he left this world just as she lived—on her own terms.
F
our days before she passed,
I
got a call from a hospice doctor. “
Y
our mother has made a decision,” he said. “
I
told her that if she stopped taking her heart medication, she would die within a few days.
A
nd that’s what she wants to do.
S
he’s very much at peace with her decision.
I
f you would like to say good-bye, you should get out here right away.”

Congestive heart failure and old age had taken their toll. Mom was weak and often confused, but just aware enough to hate what her life had become. She had willed herself to live long enough to see Obama’s second inauguration, and had hoped to attend. Yet, tethered to walkers, wheelchairs, and oxygen tanks, she was in no shape to travel. My sister staged an “Inaugural Gala” in Mom’s building, so she could wear her gown and brag about her son one more time.

When I arrived at her assisted-living apartment in a Boston suburb, she was as upbeat and bright as I had seen her in years. “I’ve had a great life, Dave,” she explained, having blessedly forgotten or simply overlooked long periods of personal unhappiness, including a difficult marriage and our own tenuous relationship. “I’ve done everything I wanted to do. It’s just too hard now. It’s time.”

We spoke for hours about her life and mine, about her grandkids and how pleased she was with their progress in life. Never one to forget a grudge, Mom asked for a piece of paper so that she could sketch the seating arrangement at the rehearsal dinner before my wedding, thirty-four years earlier, and point to the exact spot where Susan’s uncle stood when he toasted “my wonderful niece and the nebbish she’s marrying.”

It was one of the best talks we ever had, and as mom slipped away, I passed the time looking through the files and memorabilia she had maintained for some seventy years. There were yellowed newspaper clippings and magazine stories she had written in the ’40s and ’50s, articles from trade newspapers announcing her appointments as she climbed the ladder in advertising, and seemingly every note of thanks or commendation she had ever received from editors, clients, and bosses.

Those files revealed so much. I could see in them the prodigious drive that had made her a professional success, but that had also robbed me as a child of her focus and attention. All her talent was reflected in those pages, but also her painful insecurity and insatiable need for approbation. It was impossible to escape the plain fact that, for better and worse, she had passed the good and bad on to me.

Yet, nearing sixty, I was looking back at my mother’s life through a more discerning lens, with greater understanding and less resentment. Those last days also were a stark reminder of the fleeting nature of time, something that seems infinite when you’re young and in such a hurry to get somewhere that you’re incapable of appreciating life’s sublime gifts.

I value those gifts more now. Susan is alive and healthy, and I’m grateful every day for her and the life we share. Once, we dreamed of a day when Lauren might be happy and healthy, too. Today, miraculously, she is, having been seizure-free for fourteen years. Every day, that makes me smile. Our boys, Michael and Ethan, who were tested and sensitized by their sister’s struggles, have become fine men, with successful careers of their own. Mike married the lovely Liz, and baby Maelin came along in 2014, casting her new grandparents in her enchanting spell.

With the years come perspective, and that extends to my journey in politics. I can see the gray better now, not just in my hair but in the world around me.

It makes me smile to think of the cocksure audacity it took for me to walk into a publisher’s office as an eighteen-year-old kid and assert confidently that I was equipped to share my insights about politics in the pages of his newspaper. I’m so glad I did, and so lucky he believed me, or at least took a chance on me. Reflecting back on my life, I’m reminded of the sage line: “I’m not young enough to know everything.”

Back then, I sure thought I did.

When I arrived on the South Side of Chicago, four years after the bloody ’68 Democratic National Convention, I saw little need for nuance. I felt the prevailing political machine was corrupt and racist and run for the benefit of the insiders and I pretty much wrote from that righteous but limited perspective.

I wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story. The machine was greased by patronage jobs and “sweetheart” contracts and by elected officials (even judges) often slated more for their loyalties than their abilities. It was a feudal structure dominated by white ethnic ward bosses, and it left the burgeoning black and Hispanic communities on the outside looking in. Yet when JFK needed votes for the Civil Rights Act, he could count on Mayor Richard J. Daley to deliver them—and the mayor, in turn, could count on largesse from Washington with which to build his city.

As a kid columnist, I reflexively sided with the earnest, upright do-gooders who believed that all patronage was inherently evil and that every public dollar should be awarded on the merits—and then only after rigorous public debate, rather than the bartering that sealed backroom deals between politicians. I still tend to see it that way, but I’m a little less certain and sanctimonious about it at sixty than I was at eighteen.

As a White House aide, I had argued for the elimination of earmarks, the open-ended funds from which individual members of Congress could direct dollars to projects in their district. It was a system that had been egregiously abused and had become an obvious symbol of corruption in Washington. Obama had campaigned against it, and I agreed it had to go. Yet, in my years in Washington, I learned how few tools a president and congressional leaders now have at their disposal to corral support for their initiatives. So I see the wisdom of allowing legislators greater ability to target resources within their communities. Had we at once “reformed” the system yet made it less workable and responsive?

I’m not young enough to know for sure.

 • • • 

Back in the day, I learned that some of the beguiling rogues I covered took genuine pride in governing and ministering to their constituents, and some of the “reformers” I put on a pedestal had little feel for people or, far worse, lectured about ethics as they lined their own pockets. Most of the folks I’ve met in politics are neither pure saint nor unrepentant sinner. It was a joy to hear Dan Rostenkowski reminisce about the writing of Medicare or how he helped save Social Security from insolvency or the 1986 tax reform law he negotiated with Ronald Reagan. “The question I always asked is whether it was good law,” Rostenkowski would say. Yet he ended his career on the wrong side of the law, mostly for penny-ante crimes such as trading in postage stamps from his office and pocketing the cash. Raised in the culture of the old Democratic machine, Rosty went down like a two-bit grifter. It would be easy to write this as his epitaph, and there was a time when I would have. Yet he also was one of the most effective and impactful legislators of his time, an ebullient politician who loved the process of horse trading and knew how to work across party lines to get vital things done for the country. I’m a little nostalgic for that.

For years, Rosty would drive home to Illinois each weekend with Bob Michel, a Republican from Peoria who would become House minority leader. It’s a quaint memory today, when the idea of senior members of the two parties sharing a meal, much less an eleven-hour car ride, would be regarded as a treasonous act. Yet Rostenkowski and Michel were of a different generation, raised during an era when Americans served side by side to save the world from fascism, an experience that bound this big, diverse nation as one. They were friendly adversaries who had different views on many things—which is, after all, why there
are
two parties—but neither ever questioned the other’s intentions and certainly never his patriotism or love of country.

Another of Rosty’s friends was George H. W. Bush, with whom he briefly served in the ’60s on the House Ways and Means Committee. Decades later, the two of them, Bush as president and Rosty as chair of that powerful tax-writing committee, helped fashion a budget plan to reduce the yawning gap left by Reagan’s supply-side fiscal policies. Many analysts credit the deal with paving the way for the prosperity of the ’90s, but it also touched off a right-wing rebellion within the Republican Party that helped sink Bush and led to Michel’s ouster as GOP leader in the House.

That
putsch
was orchestrated by a crafty young conservative from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, who frowned upon Michel’s moderation and his fraternization with folks on the other side of the aisle. It was a watershed event, setting in motion the mad cycle of polarization that turned the aisle between parties into a jagged divide, one that today is increasingly difficult (or, far too often, impossible) to cross.

Gingrich doesn’t shoulder all the blame. Today’s cable and Internet-driven media, in which Americans increasingly seek “news” from sources that affirm, rather than inform, their views; the trend toward partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, making primary elections the only risk faced by most incumbents; the mind-boggling explosion of special interest and ideologically driven money in campaigns—all have conspired to make conflict in Washington more rewarding for politicians than compromise.

Obama’s “hope and change” campaign of 2008 was about many important things, from ending the war in Iraq to reclaiming the American dream. Above all, though, it was about fixing the broken politics of Washington. “E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one,” he liked to say, invoking the national motto. Obama preached the gospel of one America, a diverse nation with shared concerns and a common destiny. Together, he promised, we could overcome the grip of partisanship and special interest influence that had hijacked our national politics. It was a vision he painted with inspiring passion and genuine conviction. Given who he was and the life he had led, Obama stood as a living symbol of the possibility for greater harmony and progress.

The huge and enthusiastic crowds Obama drew—the resounding vote on Election Day that reached well beyond the Democratic base—offered genuine hope to a country hungry for change. Yet it must have been a terrifying prospect to Republicans in Washington, who are in the business of winning elections and had reason to fear that this was only the beginning. If Obama could forge the kind of bipartisan solutions he had promised as a candidate, he could remake American politics for a generation. They weren’t going to let that happen. So while most of Washington celebrated on the night of Obama’s inauguration, key House and Senate Republicans skipped the parties to meet with Gingrich and plot a strategy of relentless resistance.

In his first two years in the White House, Obama accomplished more than any president since LBJ. Not only did he staunch the bleeding of an economy on the brink of disaster and pass health care reform, but he also saved the American auto industry, passed landmark Wall Street reform, raised fuel efficiency standards in cars and trucks, struck down the ban on gays in the military, expanded college aid and reformed student loans, paved the way for new clean energy sources, and passed the Lilly Ledbetter Law to combat pay discrimination against women. He also began to make good on ending America’s longest-running wars, negotiated a new arms control treaty, and rallied the world behind withering sanctions that would bring Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program.

Yet his legislative victories were possible only because of the strong Democratic majorities that Obama had helped sweep into Congress. The Republicans stuck to their game plan and refused Obama cooperation from the start, compelling him to pass every major bill on party-line votes, thus denying him the claim to bipartisanship that both the president and the country desired.

The Republicans knew the recovery would be long and arduous, and decided it was far better to blame the president’s policies than to be complicit in shaping them. Mitch McConnell openly boasted about the strategy of obstruction and thrilled the GOP base when he vowed that defeating Obama would be his top priority. Then things got worse. When Republicans took over the House in 2011 after the Tea Party stormed the election, everything ground to a halt. Small-government conservatives were edged out by no-government conservatives, and Americans witnessed bitter, partisan retrenchment that took the country to the edge of a catastrophic default on its debt. The frenetic action of the first two years surrendered to a more virulent strain of gridlock than any we had witnessed before.

Throughout my years with Obama, I publicly deflected questions about whether the vehemence of his opposition was rooted in race. “I’m sure some people voted for the president because he is black and some people voted against him because he is black,” I would say, with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime working with minority candidates to knock down racial barriers that blocked higher offices. “The election of the first black president was a dramatic step forward for America, not a magic healing elixir.” I simply didn’t want to fuel the discussion or appear to be setting the president up as a victim.

Still, the truth is undeniable.

No other president has seen his citizenship openly and persistently questioned. Never before has a president been interrupted in the middle of a national address by a congressman screaming, “You lie!” Some folks simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the first black president and are seriously discomforted by the growing diversity of our country. And some craven politicians and right-wing provocateurs have been more than willing to exploit that fear, confusion, and anger.

Obama feels this, I’m sure, though it’s not in his nature or interest to dwell on it. He remains calm, deliberative, and ultimately rational, which are virtues in a president and commander in chief and were welcome qualities after the bombast and bluster of the Bush-Cheney era.