The Amateur (22 page)
Authors: Edward Klein
The Sherrod Case was a turning point in relations between Obama and the black leadership. No longer were blacks willing to bite their tongues when speaking about the black president. By the summer of 2011, the Congressional Black Caucus was openly warning Obama that black voters were frustrated by his administration’s unwillingness to address black joblessness, which was more than double the national average, and which rose as high as 40 percent in urban centers like Chicago and Detroit. The message was clear: although Obama would probably still get more than 90 percent of the African-American vote in 2012, he couldn’t count on the kind of black turnout he had generated in 2008 to offset the white vote in swing states.
“I’m frustrated with the president, I’m frustrated with the Senate, I’m frustrated with the House,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal
. “The president and his White House team [are] trying to minimize the discussion of race as it relates to job creation.”
Wall Street Journal
. “The president and his White House team [are] trying to minimize the discussion of race as it relates to job creation.”
Emanuel Cleaver’s complaint was echoed by Maxine Waters, a former chairman of the caucus. “The worry should be that are [black] people going to be enthusiastic about getting to the polls, or are they not going to be as enthusiastic.”
Obama compounded his problem with African-Americans in August 2011, when he set off on a three-day bus tour through the Midwest to talk about his push to create jobs. With his approval ratings at an all-time low of 39 percent, Obama campaigned before all-white audiences in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. This set off a chorus of criticism from black leaders, who wanted to know why the president had avoided African-American communities.
Stung by all this criticism, Obama appeared before the Congressional Black Caucus in September 2011 and gave a no-holds-barred speech chastising his critics. He told the attendees at the gathering to “take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes” and “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”
In response, Maxine Waters deftly put the president in his place. “I’ve never owned a pair of bedroom slippers,” she said.
If relations between Obama and black politicians were touchy, they were downright contentious with black businessmen. I spoke with Harry C. Alford, the president and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents the nearly two million black businesses in the United States.
“When Obama became president, we were all happy about the symbolism—America’s first black president,” Alford told me. “We didn’t really care about his position or views on anything. We just wanted a black president no matter what. We should have been more careful, as his views on small business, especially black business, are counter to ours.
“His view of business is that it should be a few major corporations which are totally unionized and working with the government, which should also be massive and reaching every level of American society,” Alford continued. “Thus, his first Executive Order was the reinstatement of Project Labor Agreements in government contracting. PLAs give labor unions an exclusive [option] in construction jobs—all participating firms must use union labor or, at least, pay union wages and abide by union rules. This activity, in effect, discriminates against blacks, Hispanics, and women per se, as trade unions deliberately under-employ them....
“President George W. Bush eliminated PLAs from federal contracting and his main reason was ‘unions discriminate against small business, women, and minorities.’ So here we were with the first black president who deliberately discriminates against small business, women, and minorities. How ironic!”
As he headed into his fourth year in office and began to gear up for his reelection campaign, Obama was forced to face an uncomfortable fact: he was profoundly unpopular with black leaders, who found him cold and distant, an inauthentic “brother.” If he hoped to generate a large black voter turnout in 2012, something had to be done to counter this growing disenchantment. He had to rally his base.
Suddenly, I started hearing from prominent blacks, whose phone calls and emails to the White House had gone unanswered for three years.
“I wanted you to know that I finally got an invitation to the White House—I was asked to attend the White House Christmas party,” one of Obama’s severest black critics told me. Others confirmed that the White House had undertaken a full-court press to win black approval.
In January 2012, the president turned up at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, the mecca of African-American culture, where he broke into the opening of Al Green’s recording of “Let’s Stay Together.” A month later, he hosted a tribute to the blues at the White House and joined bluesmen B. B. King and Buddy Guy for the first few lines of “Sweet Home Chicago.”
“It makes the president more likable because it’s humanizing,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican political strategist and a onetime Nashville songwriter. “Just the fact that he tried to sing in public was a single. That he sang well was a double. That he didn’t sing ‘America the Beautiful’ was a triple. That he sang Al Green was a home run.... Not saying that he could win
American Idol
, but he’s got some decent pipes. History will judge his presidency, but it’s probably not a stretch to say he may be the best crooner to occupy the Oval Office.”
American Idol
, but he’s got some decent pipes. History will judge his presidency, but it’s probably not a stretch to say he may be the best crooner to occupy the Oval Office.”
PART IV
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE
The United States under Barack Obama
is less assertive, less dominant, less power-minded,
less focused on the American people’s particular
interests, and less concerned about preserving
U.S. freedom of action.—Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey, “The Obama Doctrine
Defined,”
Commentary
magazine, July 2011
CHAPTER 17
THE WAR ON GENERAL JONES
They’re a bunch of Chicago thugs.
D
iane Jones had reason to be bitter.
iane Jones had reason to be bitter.
No one in the Obama White House had a more distinguished record of service to his country than her husband, James Logan Jones Jr. The six-foot-four, plainspoken, retired four-star Marine Corps general was a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, the first Marine Corps general to serve as supreme allied commander in Europe, and a trusted military adviser to both Democratic and Republican presidents. And yet, within months of being appointed as Obama’s first national security adviser, Jones became the victim of a snarky whispering campaign by White House aides, who spread word in the media that he was so detached from his job that he bicycled home to McLean, Virginia, for lunch and left work early.
As a rule, Jones followed John Wayne’s advice in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
: “Never apologize, never explain—it’s a sign of weakness.” But things became so nasty in the West Wing that, less than four months into his tenure, he took the unusual step of defending himself in the press: “I’m here by 7 o’clock in the morning and I go home at 7, 7:30 at night; that’s a fairly reasonable day if you’re properly organized.... There is a generational thing here,” continued Jones, who at age sixty-five was some twenty years older than most of his staff. “There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.... When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the [National Security Council] to go with me.”
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
: “Never apologize, never explain—it’s a sign of weakness.” But things became so nasty in the West Wing that, less than four months into his tenure, he took the unusual step of defending himself in the press: “I’m here by 7 o’clock in the morning and I go home at 7, 7:30 at night; that’s a fairly reasonable day if you’re properly organized.... There is a generational thing here,” continued Jones, who at age sixty-five was some twenty years older than most of his staff. “There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.... When I first went into the Oval Office, I didn’t expect six other people from the [National Security Council] to go with me.”
Asked by a
New York Times
reporter about the behavior of young Obama officials who prided themselves on staying at the White House until late at night, Jones snapped: “Congratulations. To me that means you’re not organized.”
New York Times
reporter about the behavior of young Obama officials who prided themselves on staying at the White House until late at night, Jones snapped: “Congratulations. To me that means you’re not organized.”
The late Richard Holbrooke, the most talented diplomat of his generation and Obama’s representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, respected Jones. In response to charges that Jones delegated too much responsibility to his subordinates, Holbrooke pointed out that, as a Marine, Jones “believes in team-building” and had produced “a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the National Security Council that did not exist before.” Holbrooke didn’t suffer fools or amateurs gladly, and as far as he was concerned, hiring someone as mature and experienced as Jim Jones and then not using him properly displayed a lack of executive sense on the part of Obama. But Holbrooke’s defense of Jones fell on deaf ears. Holbrooke had been a Hillary Clinton loyalist during the primary campaign and, like Jones, he was treated as an outsider by the inbred claque of Obamans.
Jones’s brutal turf fights with Obama’s inner circle were chronicled in Bob Woodward’s book,
Obama’s Wars
, for which Jones was a major source. The general complained to Woodward that the political team Obama had imported from Chicago—Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs—made it virtually impossible for him to do his job. The Chicagoans even went so far as to block his access to the president. He described them to Woodward as “water bugs,” the “Politburo,” and “the Mafia.”
Obama’s Wars
, for which Jones was a major source. The general complained to Woodward that the political team Obama had imported from Chicago—Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs—made it virtually impossible for him to do his job. The Chicagoans even went so far as to block his access to the president. He described them to Woodward as “water bugs,” the “Politburo,” and “the Mafia.”
A clash of personalities was only part of Jones’s problems. For all of Obama’s talk about being open-minded and willing to listen to competing ideas, he was only comfortable with people who shared his view of America as a less predominant power in a multipolar world. Though a registered Democrat, Jones was non-ideological; he was neither a hawk nor a prophet of American doom. He was a warrior-diplomat in the tradition of Generals George C. Marshall and Maxwell Taylor, and the sorry saga of his tenure in the White House said volumes about how Barack Obama conducted America’s foreign policy.
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