Double Down: Game Change 2012 (9 page)

But now, in the wake of a pair of Democratic losses in congressional special elections in New York and Nevada on Tuesday, September 13, both widely attributed to Obama’s unpopularity, James Carville was singing from the Daley hymnal. “Fire somebody. No—fire a lot of people,” Carville wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com. “For God’s sake, why are we still looking at the same political and economic advisers that got us into this mess?”

Obama wasn’t inclined to heed Carville’s advice, but if he was going to stand behind his people, they needed to pull together and start acting with a unity of purpose. On Saturday, his extended political squadron would be gathering in Washington for the first of a series of meetings to discuss campaign strategy. They would talk about the Republican nomination fight, which was heating up. They would talk about coordination between the White House and Chicago, which had been patchy. But most of all they
would talk about Obama: what he had to do to win reelection, the kind of president he had been—and the kind he actually wanted to be.

•   •   •

O
BAMA WALKED INTO THE
State Dining Room that morning and there they were, two dozen aides and operatives crowded around a long oaken table under the famous George Peter Alexander Healy oil painting of a hand-on-chin Abraham Lincoln. From the West Wing: Daley, Plouffe, Jarrett, Rouse, Pfeiffer, Carney, deputy senior adviser Stephanie Cutter, deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco, and Jarrett’s deputy, Michael Strautmanis. From the East Wing: Michelle’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen. From Biden’s office: the VP, his chief of staff, and his counselor. From Chicago: Axelrod, Messina, and media guru Larry Grisolano. From the DNC: Gaspard, who had become the committee’s executive director. From the far-flung universe of outside adjutants: lead pollster Benenson, focus-group maestro David Binder, ad maker Jim Margolis, Gibbs, Dunn (raising eyebrows), and Bauer, no longer the White House counsel but instead the campaign’s lawyer.

Plouffe looked at the humongous assemblage and thought it was insane. Any meeting resembling a scene from a David O. Selznick movie was a meeting not worth convening. Whenever you have more than ten people, you have problems, he’d told Obama beforehand. Pick a setting, it doesn’t matter: family, campaign, church. It’s less about the people than it is about the math—the law of averages. Stuff is gonna leak.

But Obama insisted on the big group, and as he opened the meeting he explained why.

Carville says that I should fire you all, but I’m not gonna fire you, Obama said. Everyone around this table is here because I want you here. This is the team I believe in. You’re my people, I trust you, we gotta trust each other. I have to be able to walk in here, say whatever I need to say, and know it’s gonna stay in this room.

Now, we’ve come through a rough period, Obama continued, and a lot of what I read about myself in the press these days bears no resemblance to who I am. That I’m not strong. That I don’t stand for anything. I’m not sure how we got here, but we have to fix it. This is gonna be a tough campaign,
tougher than 2008. The economy is weak, and it’s not likely to get much better. We’re not going to get a grand bargain out of this Congress, or much of anything else that would help. So from now on, we’re going to pick clear fights and pocket victories where we can. The stakes for the country were high last time, but they’re even higher now. “And if I go down in this,” Obama said, “I’m not gonna go down being punk’d.”

Benenson took the floor and presented his polling data. The numbers showed that the debt-ceiling imbroglio had inflicted significant damage to Obama. He had suffered setbacks with three crucial swing constituencies—young voters, independent women, and low-income whites—and with portions of his base. Whereas in 2008 Obama claimed 96 percent of black voters and 67 percent of Hispanics, he now stood at 89 and 55. At the same time, the GOP had also taken on tremendous water. Undecided voters were horrified by the Tea Party and suspicious of Republican policies on taxing and spending, which they saw as strongly tilted toward the rich. Benenson’s conclusion was crystalline: We need to make this election into a choice about economic values.

This would be no slam dunk, Benenson went on. Though the Republican field was crowded with entrants, the Obamans continued to believe that Romney would almost certainly be the party’s standard-bearer. Head to head with the former Massachusetts governor, Obama had 45 percent of the vote and a one- or two-point lead. But his base of strong support was both smaller and softer than Romney’s.

Many around the table looked at the data and took comfort: After everything we’ve been through, we’re still in this thing. Plouffe’s view remained:
No margin for error, but I’d rather be us than them.
Daley thought:
It’ll go down to the wire, and he’ll either win by a few or lose by a lot.
But Obama’s reaction was more visceral and stark:
Man, I’m in deep shit.

Axelrod followed Benenson with a video presentation: a clip from Obama’s iconic keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, some ads from 2008, and footage from the summer of 2011. When the first snippet came on, Axelrod poked at the president, “I didn’t know you had a younger brother!” But in truth the contrasts were sobering—the Obama of yesteryear fiery and soaring, the Obama of today pallid and sluggish,
spouting bromidic Washingtonese.
(Oh, God, he sounds like Harry Reid,
thought Gaspard.) Pointing to the earlier clips, Axelrod declared, “That’s the guy they elected president, and that’s the guy they want to be president.”

After eight months outside the White House, Axe had regained his equilibrium. And while his message was ostensibly for the entire group, he was really hurling it like a dart at an audience of one. “You were seen as someone who would run through the wall for the middle class,” Axelrod said. “We need to get back to that.”

Obama bristled slightly. I’ve been talking about the middle class for almost three years, he said.

Maybe, Axelrod replied, but we’ve also sent mixed messages. We talk all the time about accountability and responsibility, but what voters see is Wall Street paying no price for having crashed the economy. We talk about tax fairness, but what voters see is Jeff Immelt in the presidential box at the jobs speech. (Immelt was the CEO of General Electric, which had made headlines for earning $14 billion in profits in 2010 but paying not a dime in taxes.)

Axelrod wasn’t alone in these views. Most of Obama’s outside advisers shared them, and so did Biden. Middle-class people, they don’t think we’ve done anything for them, the VP said. I hear it all the time when I’m on the road. They think the wealthy are going gangbusters. They think health care reform will help the poor and illegal immigrants. But, man, they think nobody’s doing squat for
them
.

On and on it went like this, for four and a half hours. Obama sat there, taking in the critiques—and maybe it was all true. Maybe he’d lost sight of the middle class. Maybe he’d been bridled by the Beltway. But there was one thing the president knew: under any of these Republicans running to replace him, everything would be so much worse.

We can’t turn this thing over to them, Obama said. We can’t turn the country over to them. We can’t let them take us straight back to the Bush years. We’ve made a bunch of hard decisions and taken a lot of fire. We’ve made progress—not enough, but some. Eventually the economy’s going to turn the corner, and when it does, I don’t want it to be President Mitt Romney who gets the credit for the work we’ve done.

“I’m a competitive guy,” Obama said defiantly, in conclusion. “There’s
nothing that I hate more than losing—and I do not intend on losing this election to
that guy
.”

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT MONDAY MORNING,
September 19, Obama delivered a major address from the Rose Garden. The so-called supercommittee created by the debt-ceiling deal to find $1.2 trillion in cuts and/or revenues to reduce the deficit was holding hearings as it worked toward a Thanksgiving deadline. In his speech, Obama returned to his framework from the summer, proposing a $3.6 trillion mix of spending cuts and tax increases. But he also etched a line in the sand: “I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share.”

The veto threat had been a subject of debate within Obamaworld. Daley and a number of White House advisers were against it, fearing the president would be blamed for messing with the supercommittee. Chicago and the rest of the external gang disagreed. Their worry was that, for all the bravado about playing an outside game and picking fights, Obama was in danger of being sucked into the morass of haggling with Capitol Hill again. We need to take a stand and stick to it, Axelrod said. “We really can’t afford another ‘Obama caves’ moment.”

Obama didn’t plan on caving. He was spoiling for a scrap. But his political instincts were muddier now than they had ever been. In his charmed electoral career, Obama was almost entirely unacquainted with loss, let alone humiliation. In 2000, after three years in the state senate, he had challenged Bobby Rush, the incumbent congressman from Illinois’s first district, and been trounced by a two-to-one margin. But taking on Rush was a suicide mission—one that everybody from Michelle and Jarrett to Richie Daley warned him against—and after a brief period of mortification he was back in the saddle, running for the U.S. Senate. He’d been beaten by Hillary Clinton in various primaries in 2008, yet ultimately won the war. The midterms had been a historic drubbing for his party, but despite all the commentary (and common sense) to the contrary, deep down he never saw that election as a referendum on himself.

The debt ceiling was different: a high-stakes contest in which he’d
invested himself personally, followed his gut on strategy and tactics, fought to the bitter end—and got creamed. Still reeling, Obama ruminated on his first term, how he had conducted himself throughout, and on the constraints of his office and politics itself. All too often, Obama had felt as if he were driving with his foot on the brake. The causes for this were multitudinous: relentless Republican obstructionism, Democratic sclerosis, the nonstop crisis management, the sometimes conflicting advice of his advisers. Now his campaign team was telling him to be more aggressive, unshackle his 2008 self. But on many issues the complications were ever present and confounding.

At the next strategy meeting, the following Saturday, Obama brought up one example: climate change. In the 2008 campaign, he had singled out the transition to green energy as the most urgent issue facing the country. But the White House’s push for cap-and-trade had been halfhearted at best—“Look, the dolphins will be okay for another year” was what Emanuel said about it privately—and, even in the aftermath of the BP spill in the summer of 2010, the bill had stalled in the Senate. Obama knew that raising the climate change banner with unemployment sky-high would pose electoral risks in places like Ohio and Michigan. But it might rouse young voters, and, more important, he cared about the issue, wished he’d done more, wished he’d said more.

Axelrod keeps talking to me about authenticity, Obama said. Maybe I should just come out and say what I really feel about this. Maybe I should just go out and say what I think about
everything.

Flipping through a pile of color-coded maps showing how narrow Obama’s path to 270 electoral votes might be, Gibbs looked up and said, “Well, Mr. President, I don’t really see a
Bulworth
scenario in here.”

Everyone in the room cracked up, but Obama was at least partly serious. There was a range of issues that he might want to start talking differently about than he had been. Maybe he ought to jot them down. Maybe he should draw up a list.

Yes, yes, Axelrod said. That could be a useful exercise.

Obama was an inveterate list maker. He loved sitting down with a yellow legal pad and filling up pages with his thoughts. It helped him to quiet his mind. At important meetings during the 2008 campaign, he often showed
up with a list. He did the same in the White House when he was working with Favreau on a big speech. Upstairs in the residence late at night, he would retreat to his personal office—the Treaty Room, which, unlike the Oval, he’d outfitted with a computer, a printer, and a TV for monitoring ESPN—and station himself behind his cluttered desk, scratch-scratch-scratching away.

The Obamans met again on September 30, a Friday afternoon. An hour beforehand, the president was on the phone with talk radio host Michael Smerconish, savoring the major news of the day: a Predator drone strike, ordered by Obama, had killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born firebrand Islamist preacher who had become a senior Al Qaeda leader in Yemen. Al-Awlaki had been connected to the failed efforts of at least two would-be terrorists—the “underwear bomber,” in December 2009, and the Times Square bomber, in May 2010—imperiling American lives during Obama’s tenure. “We are very pleased,” the president told Smerconish, “that Mr. al-Awlaki is no longer going to be in a position to directly threaten the United States homeland.”

A few minutes later, Obama strode into the Roosevelt Room, just across the hall from the Oval, to which the meetings had been relocated with a slightly (but only slightly) slimmed-down cast. In his hand the president held a stack of yellow legal pages—nine or ten of them—filled with his neat, compact southpaw handwriting.

Last time, I told you guys I wanted to spend time thinking about some issues, he began. Now, we have a three-year track record that I feel good about. We’ve delivered on many of the promises I made when I ran for this office. We’ve faced incredible challenges, foreign and domestic, and done a good job meeting them, by and large.

Obama didn’t need to run through this preamble. Everyone knew the litany of his achievements. Foremost on that day, with the fresh news about al-Awlaki, it seemed the president was pondering the drone program that he had expanded so dramatically and with such lethal results, as well as the death of bin Laden, which was still resonating worldwide months later. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama said quietly. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”