Divider-in-Chief (2 page)

Obama has embraced a slash and burn approach to his 2012 re-election bid. As early as August 2011, the Obama campaign signaled it would focus on, according to
Politico
, “a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney's character and business background.”
⁵

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments,” a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House told
Politico
, “[Obama] will have to kill Romney.”
⁷

To that end, the Obama campaign hired Stephanie Cutter as deputy campaign manager to oversee the campaign's daily combat operation. Cutter is famous among Democrats for her “Dresden-esque” campaign tactics, referring to the Allies' overwhelming and indiscriminate bombing of Dresden, Germany, at the end of World War II.

“What Obama and his team have accepted is that, while there's a lot to be said for changing politics and elevating the discourse, your most important job as president is to defend your priorities,” the
New Republic
's Noam Scheiber wrote.
⁸
“And the way you do that is to win.”

The Obama way—sowing division to get his way—is essentially undemocratic. Obama seeks to avoid any honest back-and-forth, the messiness of Congress and democracy. He does this by encouraging divisiveness. So, for instance, if he can convince the American people that Republicans are anti-woman, then he can shut down debate on any issues involving women. He won't need to argue the merits of an idea; he wins without uttering a single cogent thought merely by impugning the motives of the other side.

But that's not the way our system works. Our two-party system, our republican form of government, is successful because it is premised on contrasting ideas that offer the American people clear choices. The idea that wins a majority of the people (or their elected representatives) to its side, wins. The system falls apart
not
when differing ideas exist and are debated vigorously, but rather when the debate is shut down.

When the debate is either carried out in an undemocratic way—behind closed doors where special interests and money rather than ideas or the people's interests prevail—or is shut down through scare tactics and division, democracy is diminished. What Obama has done by trying to stifle debate and hide his true intentions is not only divisive, it is also completely contradictory to the essence of America and what makes her great.

This book is meant to be a thoughtful, clear-eyed examination of Obama's first term. My hope is that it shines light on the ways Obama has betrayed his promises of unity and post-partisanship and instead embraced division and polarization as a method of governing and campaigning.

Obama is not the first president to practice the politics of division. But he is the first to do so with so much tenacity and skill, and such complete disregard for our democracy. Obama is indeed a new kind of politician: he is the most divisive president in modern history—one whose divisiveness promises to cut even deeper as the 2012 campaign reaches its climax.

—President Barack Obama, remarks at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, Washington, D.C., January 17, 2010

 

 

O
n January 20, 2009, nearly two million people huddled on the National Mall in frigid Washington, D.C., to witness Barack Obama's swearing in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.

For many Americans, Obama had come to personify the hopes of a battered and weary nation. Inexperienced and un-vetted, Obama won not because he possessed executive experience or foreign policy expertise, but rather because he promised a unique capacity to transcend politics, unite divided factions, and heal the nation.

Rising to the podium after his swearing-in, the new president declared:

Obama's call to unity of purpose had by then become familiar—it was a variation on a theme he had visited again and again at key moments during his political rise.

“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he told the audience in his show-stealing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Hope, unity, and post-partisanship weren't merely key parts of Obama's message. They were his entire message. Obama's 2006 autobiography,
The Audacity of Hope,
is a 350-page lament for the highly polarized politics Obama encountered when he reached the U.S. Senate in 2004. The book, which became Obama's presidential campaign manifesto, is also an
indictment of the grievance politics that dominates the political left. “I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation or victimhood generally,” Obama wrote in the prologue.
³

The unity theme pervaded Obama's 2008 presidential run. Early in the campaign, he told Iowans, “I don't want to pit red America against blue America—I want to be the president of the United States of America.”
⁴

On Super Tuesday, he claimed that his candidacy prompted many Americans to realize that “maybe we don't have to be divided by race and region and gender ... that we can come together and build an America that gives every child everywhere the opportunity to live out their dreams.”
⁵

And at Grant Park in Chicago on the night of his election, Obama pledged to Republicans, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for too long.”
⁶
In part due to such lofty rhetoric, Obama began his presidency with a 68 percent job approval rating—“one of the better initial ratings of post-World War II presidents,” according to the Gallup polling firm.
⁷

Of course, by the most objective measure, Obama had not united the country. The nearly 70 million votes he had received were more than any presidential candidate in U.S. history.
⁸
But more than two-thirds of eligible voters did not cast a ballot for Barack Obama. That included more than 61 million Americans who voted for somebody other than Obama,
⁹
and another 90 million eligible voters who found the idea of Obama as president so rousing that they couldn't even drag themselves to the voting booth on Election Day.
¹⁰

Obama was, as many conservatives pointed out, an unlikely uniter. Rhetoric aside, his record was that of a rigid, doctrinaire liberal with almost no history of bucking his party. According to
National Journal
, Obama had the Senate's most liberal voting record in 2007, the year he started running for president.
¹¹

What's more, Obama had cut his political teeth in the corrupt machine politics of Chicago and had already shown hints of a nastier, more divisive
side. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he told a crowd of supporters in Philadelphia about how to counter Republican attacks, “because from what I understand, folks in Philly like a good brawl.”
¹²

During the transition period after the election, before he was sworn in as president, Obama selected Chicago scrapper Rahm Emanuel—a.k.a. “Rahmbo”—as his chief of staff. The profanity-spewing Emanuel was known for employing ruthless, brass-knuckle tactics. Obama had chosen a political enforcer as his chief “uniter.”

During the 2008 campaign, it was evident to clear-eyed observers that Obama was applying to politics the lessons he had learned as a community organizer in Chicago. Obama was a disciple of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based radical community organizer who from the 1930s to his death in 1972 helped shape the activist left. As a community organizer himself, Obama helped train hundreds of other young activists in Alinsky's methods in the 1980s.

In
Rules for Radicals
, a primer for young leftwing activists, Alinsky explained that a community organizer's task is to take “apathetic workers” and stir discontent with the status quo, fanning “resentments and hostilities by a number of means.”
¹³
But he must do so carefully. As Stanley Kurtz writes in
Radical-in-Chief,
“Community organizers in the tradition of Saul Alinsky keep their political beliefs to themselves. They make a point of presenting themselves as pragmatists in search of ‘commonsense solutions for working families.'”
¹⁴

But, Kurtz continues, “though commonsense pragmatism unfettered by ideology is their public theme, Alinskyites use polarization as a tactic. Organizers search for ‘enemies'—businessmen and political leaders who can either offer the group something valuable or serve as ‘targets' for anger. Targets are sometimes baited to strike back, thus further enraging the group.”
¹⁵

During his years as a community organizer, Obama became an expert in Alinksy's tactics of division. Mike Kruglik, a community organizer who worked with Obama in the 1980s, told the
New Republic
that Obama was “the undisputed master of agitation ... with probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”
¹⁶

Obama didn't leave the world of community organizing behind when he entered politics. He has called his years as a community organizer the best education of his life. Politics was the natural next step to organizing an ever larger community. Or, in Obama's own words, “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?”
¹⁷

In her book
The Obamas
, Jodi Kantor reports that when the president saw his old community organizing boss Jerry Kellman at a White House party, he happily pulled him aside and said, “I'm still organizing.” Kantor adds, “It had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once—‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.'”
¹⁸

Once ensconced in the Oval Office, President Obama quickly abandoned all pretense of post-partisanship.

Just three days into his administration, Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and told them to quit listening to radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Then, when Minority Whip Eric Cantor laid out familiar conservative arguments about taxes, Obama shot back, “I won. I will trump you on that.”
¹⁹

During his first few days in office, Obama ignored Republican objections and made enormously contentious decisions. He issued an executive
order to close Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and another to restore taxpayer funding of overseas abortion groups. He supported a controversial United Nations declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity and lifted a ban on taxpayer funding of research using stem cells from human embryos. Hardly the stuff of compromise.

After just two months in office, Pew Research Center found that, “for all his hopes about bipartisanship, Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval of any president in the past four decades.”
²⁰

A year later, Gallup found that Obama had had the most polarizing first year of any president in the pollster's history. “The 65 percentage point gap between Democrats' (88 percent) and Republicans' (23 percent) average job approval ratings for Barack Obama is easily the largest for any president in his first year in office, greatly exceeding the prior high of 52 points for Bill Clinton,” Gallup reported.
²¹