The Amateur (10 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
So why hasn’t Obama grown in the job?
There are several answers to that question, which we will explore in depth in the pages that follow. But for now, the short answer is:
Barack Obama has the wrong temperament for the presidency.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said about Franklin Roosevelt that he had a “second class mind, but a first class temperament.” The opposite is true of Barack Obama, who for all his academic credentials is not cut out by temperament to be the leader of the free world.
By all accounts, Obama was elected to a job for which he has little relish. He doesn’t find joy in being president. Like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, he is an introvert who prefers his own company to that of others.
The Times’
Peter Baker puts it this way: Obama is “someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him.... While [Bill] Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight groups of advisers.”
The Times’
Peter Baker puts it this way: Obama is “someone who finds extended contact with groups of people outside his immediate circle to be draining. He can rouse a stadium of 80,000 people, but that audience is an impersonal monolith; smaller group settings can be harder for him.... While [Bill] Clinton made late-night phone calls around Washington to vent or seek advice, Obama rarely reaches outside the tight groups of advisers.”
“I’ve been in a lot of meetings with him on foreign policy,” a former State Department official told me. “While I was in the room, he’d get phone calls from heads of state, and more than once I heard him say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve got to meet with all these congressmen from Podunk city to get my bills passed.’ And when the meeting with him was over, it was over—no lingering, no schmoozing on the way out. There was no clinging to personal relationship like with Bill Clinton.”
In his study of the presidency,
Hail to the Chief,
historian Robert Dallek lists five qualities that have been constants in the men who have most effectively fulfilled the oath of office: 1) vision; 2) political pragmatism; 3) national consensus; 4) personal connection with the people; and 5) credibility.
Hail to the Chief,
historian Robert Dallek lists five qualities that have been constants in the men who have most effectively fulfilled the oath of office: 1) vision; 2) political pragmatism; 3) national consensus; 4) personal connection with the people; and 5) credibility.
Dallek places the greatest emphasis on numbers 4 and 5. “The best of our presidents,” he writes, “have always recognized that leadership required a personal connection between the president and the people, or that the power of the Oval Office rests to a great degree on the affection of the country for its chief. From Washington to Lincoln to the two Roosevelts and, most recently, Reagan, the force of presidential personality has been a major factor in determining a president’s fate.... [P]residents who are unable to earn the trust of their countrymen are governors who cannot govern and lead.”
Barack Obama has been unable to earn the trust of his countrymen because he is, at heart, predominantly concerned with his own thoughts and ideas and feelings rather than the thoughts and ideas and feelings of the people he was elected to serve. He believes that he was chosen as president to save a wayward America from its dependency on free-market capitalism. This has led him to push clumsy and unpopular far-left policies—universal healthcare, Wall Street bailouts, cap and trade, green jobs, and renewable energy—at the expense of rational policies aimed at putting America back to work.
CHAPTER 9
GROUND ZERO
She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context.
“I
f it wasn’t for Valerie Jarrett, there’d be no Barack Obama to complain about.”
f it wasn’t for Valerie Jarrett, there’d be no Barack Obama to complain about.”
The speaker was a member of the White House press corps who has covered the Obamas, husband and wife, since their early days on the political scene. My colleague and I were sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Washington, eating chimichangas and exchanging notes about Valerie Jarrett, or VJ as she is known in the West Wing.
Jarrett is ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s first friend and consigliere. Once asked by a reporter if he ran
every
decision by Jarrett, Obama answered without hesitation: “Yep. Absolutely.” Her official title is a mouthful—senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement—but it doesn’t begin to do justice to her unrivaled status in the White House. Nor does it explain her responsibility, which has gone largely unnoticed by the public, for the incompetence and amateurism that have been the hallmark of Obama’s time in office.
every
decision by Jarrett, Obama answered without hesitation: “Yep. Absolutely.” Her official title is a mouthful—senior adviser and assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement—but it doesn’t begin to do justice to her unrivaled status in the White House. Nor does it explain her responsibility, which has gone largely unnoticed by the public, for the incompetence and amateurism that have been the hallmark of Obama’s time in office.
Jarrett occupies a piece of prime real estate in the White House—Karl Rove and Hillary Clinton’s old office on the second floor of the West Wing. She has an all-access pass to meetings she chooses to attend: one day she’ll show up at a National Security Council meeting; the next day, she’ll sit in on a briefing on the federal budget. When Oval Office meetings break up, Jarrett is often the one who stays behind to talk privately with the president.
At 6:30 on many evenings, Jarrett can be seen slipping upstairs to the Family Quarters, where she dines with the Obamas and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. She is the only member of the White House staff who goes on vacations with the Obamas. She is also one of the few people in Washington besides Michelle Obama and Barack’s live-in mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, who is on such familiar terms with the president that she can call him by his first name to his face.
“Valerie is the quintessential insider,” one of her longtime friends told me. “She functions as the eyes, ears, and nose of the president and first lady. She tells them who’s saying what about who, who’s loyal and who’s not. She advises them about who they should see when they visit a city or a foreign country. She determines who gets invited to the White House and who is left out in the cold.”
Jarrett is supposed to be the point person for the administration’s efforts to keep in touch with the outside world—everyone from senators to foreign dignitaries. Obama sent her to talk to the Dalai Lama before he visited China. However, if you talk to Democratic donors, businessmen, congressmen, and African-Americans, as I have, it turns out that Jarrett is far better at giving people the cold shoulder than at welcoming them with open arms. Like Obama, she has a fundamental lack of respect for businessmen. In a typical blunder that sent shudders through the business community, she dismissed Tom Donohue, the highly regarded CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as irrelevant, saying that she preferred to deal with “real” industry executives.
“I have always thought Valerie was a liability,” a prominent donor told the
Washington Post
. “I’ve talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.”
Washington Post
. “I’ve talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.”
Behind its “no-drama” façade, the Obama administration has been rocked by major personnel shakeups (both the president and the first lady have gone through several chiefs of staff), but Jarrett is still the indispensable person in the mix. When speculation arose that Jarrett might want the Senate seat vacated by Obama when he became president, Michelle put the kibosh on the idea.
“I told her,” said Michelle, “that I wanted her [in the White House], in that position, that it would give me a sense of comfort to know that [my husband] had somebody like her there by his side.”
The president has made it abundantly clear that he feels the same way. As he told the
New York Times
: “Valerie is one of my oldest friends. Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she’s like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely.”
New York Times
: “Valerie is one of my oldest friends. Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she’s like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely.”
Trying to figure out Valerie Jarrett’s mysterious hold on the president and first lady is a favorite guessing game in the parlors and dining rooms of Washington.
In part, her influence stems from the fact that Jarrett is the president’s trusted watchdog. She protects the vainglorious and thin-skinned Obama from critics and complainers who might deflate his ego. No one gets past Jarrett and sees the president if they have a grievance, or a chip on their shoulder, or even an incompatible point of view. That goes for such high-profile supporters as Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy, who have been largely frozen out of the White House because Jarrett believes they would use the opportunity of a meeting with Obama to push their own competing political agendas.
In part, too, Obama views Jarrett as the voice of authentic blackness in a White House that is staffed largely by whites. Jarrett comes from the top rung of African-American society, and Obama—a man who struggled for years with questions about his black identity and status—has always been more than a little in awe of Jarrett’s pedigree.
No minority group is more conscious of social status than blacks. While whites often see the black population in the United States as monolithic, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson, in his book
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
, sees not one, but essentially five distinct Black Americas: a mainstream middle class; a large, abandoned minority living in poverty and dysfunction; a small “Transcendent” elite with enormous power and wealth; individuals of mixed race; and communities of recent black immigrants.
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
, sees not one, but essentially five distinct Black Americas: a mainstream middle class; a large, abandoned minority living in poverty and dysfunction; a small “Transcendent” elite with enormous power and wealth; individuals of mixed race; and communities of recent black immigrants.
Jarrett comes from the class of light-skinned “Transcendent” elites. “Among African-Americans, there is a keen perception of the gradation of skin color,” says Rahni Flowers, who was Michelle Obama’s hairdresser from the time she was eighteen years old until she went to Washington. “It often determines how successful you are and what opportunities you are given. Michelle is darker; she’s not from the class of so-called ‘high-yellow’ blacks. Many African-American women are proud of the fact that she is a typical-looking black woman in hue and hair.”
Whereas Barack and Michelle Obama came from modest middle-class backgrounds, Jarrett sprang from one of America’s most distinguished black families. The Robert Taylor Homes—the largest housing development project in America when it was completed in 1962—was named after her grandfather, a noted African-American activist. Her father, James Bowman, was a famous pathologist and geneticist, who was a member of Sigma Pi Phi, a national fraternity of high-achieving blacks that was founded in 1904. Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, was a psychologist who helped found the Erikson Institute for child development in Chicago. Valerie attended Stanford University and the University of Michigan Law School, and was married for a time to the late Dr. Robert Jarrett, the son of famed
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Vernon Jarrett, who was responsible for landing Valerie her first city job, as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s corporation counsel.
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Vernon Jarrett, who was responsible for landing Valerie her first city job, as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s corporation counsel.
For all their Ivy League degrees, Barack and Michelle Obama were originally social outsiders in Chicago, which boasts more black millionaires than any other city in America. The Obamas didn’t break into the exclusive world of Chicago politics and money until Jarrett met Michelle and hired her to work for Mayor Daley. At the time, Jarrett was Daley’s deputy chief of staff, and was known in Chicago as the “public black face” of the Daley administration.
“She talked the liberal talk, but she didn’t walk the liberal walk, because she was essentially a creature of the Daley Machine,” said a former community organizer who worked with Jarrett.
In addition, Jarrett was a member of the boards of exclusive cultural institutions in Chicago, such as the Symphony Orchestra and the Art Institute. Thanks to her high-level connections in the nexus of politics, culture, and money, she was able to introduce Obama to the affluent African-American and Jewish communities in Chicago.
In the eyes of many African-Americans, however, Jarrett’s elitist background helps explain her condescending manner and inability to help Obama where it counts the most—remaining on good terms with his diverse and far-flung constituencies.
“Growing up, Valerie had very limited contact with African-American working-class people,” said a Chicagoan who worked with her. “The closest she came to the [mostly black] South Side was when she drove through it in her Mercedes convertible with the top down. She never had to work her way up. Everything was handed to her because of her pedigree. She is naturally attracted to African-Americans who have a pedigree like hers. I question her capability. I never felt that she was astute enough to do her job in the White House.”
Despite her impeccable social credentials, Jarrett’s record before she went to Washington was spotty at best. After Mayor Daley made her commissioner of planning, she became embroiled in a massive screw-up in the city’s public housing revitalization plan, which cost Chicago millions of dollars in overruns. Daley fired her without any explanation.
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