The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  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.

  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.

  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.

  “I’ve known Valerie since she became commissioner of planning,” said a Chicago real estate developer. “She served her master, she was a functionary of her master, Richie Daley, and I didn’t like her. She would be cunning and not straightforward. She was very tough on people. She’d go to the wall for Daley and make sure her boss’s wishes were carried out. But her advice to Daley was damaging to other people and to her benefit and standing with the mayor. Her job was never policy, and she’s never been an operational person. She was an implementer. And she made sure that her fingerprints weren’t on things.”

  Later, after Jarrett left city hall, she became the CEO of Habitat Executive Services, where she earned $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. She managed a federally subsidized housing complex that was seized by the government after inspectors found crime-infested slum conditions and widespread blight.

  Throughout her career, Jarrett has failed upward. Today she is at the pinnacle of power as Michelle Obama’s closest confidant and Barack Obama’s political soul mate. When I asked the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin if she could think of anyone in the past who occupied such a special relationship with both the president and first lady, she mentioned Harry Hopkins, one of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s closest advisers. Other historians, searching their memory, came up with the name of Michael Deaver, who was a member of Ronald Reagan’s staff and an intimate friend of Nancy Reagan’s.

  But unlike Hopkins, who was the chief architect of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Deaver, who had a thirty-year career working for Reagan, Jarrett came to her White House job with few if any achievements. Many insiders in Chicago and Washington find her friendly and pleasant enough, but off the record they use almost identical words to describe her: “She doesn’t have the stuff to be a principal adviser to the president of the United States.”

  “She has no international experience and no background in economics or fiscal policy,” said Michael Lavin, the retired vice chairman of the global accounting firm KPMG and a major force in Chicago’s social and cultural institutions. “There were people in previous Democratic administrations who were real heavyweights. But Valerie is no [former Secretary of State] Cyrus Vance.”

  “I was at a dinner where Valerie sat at our table for ten minutes, and I wasn’t particularly impressed,” said a major Obama donor. “She didn’t say anything interesting. I expected her to be smarter. She ain’t no Karl Rove. Karl Rove would eat her for breakfast.”

  CHAPTER 10

  VALERIE V. RAHM

  The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  Not long after Rahm Emanuel returned to Chicago to run for mayor of the Windy City, a hard-bitten old pol buttonholed him on a street where he was campaigning. “You’re nobody’s fool,” the old pol said, “so why did the White House reek of rank amateurism on your watch?”

  “I fucked up,” Emanuel replied.

  “Bullshit!” the pol said. “I don’t accept that excuse.”

  “Why not?” Emanuel asked, taken aback.

  “Because nobody ever heard from the president while you were there, and yet you and I know that every politician’s got a list on his desk of people to call,” said the old pol. “Every politician has such a list. Maybe two, three, four hundred calls come into the president every day and he can answer only four or five or six. You need someone who knows how to make that list, the call list. You tell me Obama didn’t have a list? I don’t believe it. He had a list when he was raising money to run for the White House. You tell me that that list didn’t exist anymore?”

  Emanuel tried to get a word in edgewise, but the pol had worked himself into a lather and was in no mood to listen.

  “For
chrisssake, it was never your list anyway, Rahm,” he said. “During the primary campaign, you were working with the Hillary people. The Obama people had their own list. Why didn’t Obama call people on that fucking list?”

  Emanuel thought for a moment, then said: “I guess it all comes down to one person.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Valerie Jarrett.”

  By general consensus, Valerie Jarrett, the White House official responsible for “public engagement,” has conspicuously failed to engage. I heard this complaint about Jarrett from practically everyone I interviewed for this book—Republicans and Democrats, African-Americans and Jews. They all blamed Jarrett for keeping the president isolated even from those whose good opinion he needed the most.

  This included the White House press corps, who found the Obama administration largely impenetrable. Journalists covering the president were like prisoners in Plato’s cave: they watched shadows projected on the wall and believed they were viewing reality. Perhaps no reporter better insinuated herself into the White House than the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor, who did more than thirty interviews with current and former White House staff for her book The Obamas. But when asked if she had ever seen the Obamas’ White House private quarters, Kantor replied: “No. I can’t even name a journalist who has ever been up there under the Obama watch....”

  “Before Valerie left Chicago, we had a talk,” said Hermene Hartman, the publisher of N’DIGO. “At the time, I was president of the African-American business group called ABLE, which had given significant dollars to Barack and had met with him every three to six months when he was a United States senator. And I wanted to continue that connection between us ‘Day One People’ and Barack. But Valerie said to me, ‘I will meet with six people, but I won’t meet with all thirty of the people in ABLE and listen to them bellyache.’ And I said, ‘We don’t want to bellyache, we just want to talk. Let’s talk about some boards we might be interested in and some appointments.’ But she wouldn’t relent. We thought she would stay connected to Barack’s black base in Chicago. It didn’t happen.”

  “Some of my friends who gave money to Obama in 2008 complain to me that they never hear from him, that he doesn’t call them,” a prominent figure in Chicago’s Jewish community told me. “Well, he doesn’t call me either. He never picks up the phone and calls me. He’s not like Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton, who picked up the phone just to chat with you. Barack Obama isn’t that kind of warm, fuzzy guy. He’s cooler than that, a bit detached. He doesn’t put his arm around you and slap you on the back. He’s not a glad-hander. I wish he would call me, but that’s not the kind of guy he is.”

  There was no love lost between Jarrett and Emanuel when he was the president’s chief of staff. Jarrett was aware that Emanuel had tried to block her appointment to the White House staff, and Emanuel knew that Jarrett didn’t have much use for his one-hand-washes-the-other style of politicking. Blunt and famously profane, Emanuel is an unsentimental realist who operated as Obama’s “legislative brain.” When it came to dealing with Congress, Emanuel was in favor of cutting deals and putting up numbers on the scoreboard. It was his job to give the president clear-eyed advice on how to get things done and to apprise him of the cost and benefits of his actions.

  However, at almost every turn, Emanuel was thwarted by Jarrett, who functioned along with David Axelrod as Obama’s “political brain.” Axelrod and Jarrett were charter members of the Cult of Obama; they had drunk deeply of the Obama Kool-Aid. They made certain that the president remained true to his roots as a big-spending, big-government liberal. When Obama retired in the evening to the Family Quarters, he would often turn to Jarrett and say, “Rahm thinks this is the practical thing for me to do. What do you think the right thing to do is?”

  “There are always separate legislative and political operations going on in every White House,” said Billy Tauzin, a veteran Washington lobbyist, who is often described as “a master of politics and policy.” “In previous administrations,” he said, “there’s usually been a coherent meld of these two operations, some sort of broad strategy that was being managed. But that didn’t happen in the Obama White House under Emanuel and Jarrett.

  “I haven’t seen such incoherence in the White House since Jimmy Carter,” Tauzin continued. “Whenever the legislative team struck a clear path, a clear understanding and agreement with the leaders in Congress, the political team didn’t bother to track it or know about it. They acted as if they were in a completely different paradigm. They ran on a totally different track. That’s one of the reasons there’s been such frustration among Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress. They don’t sense any coherence. The only thing consistent in this White House is that politics always trumps legislative policy. The major goal is whipping your opponent.”

  In the bitter fights between Jarrett and Emanuel, Obama frequently sided with Jarrett and ignored Emanuel’s advice. For instance, though Emanuel warned the president time and again that he didn’t have the votes to ram a comprehensive, single-payer healthcare bill through Congress, Jarrett, along with David Axelrod and First Lady Michelle Obama, persuaded the president to go for broke and side with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her gaggle of leftwing Democrats. Just as Jarrett and her ideological compatriot Axelrod failed to foresee the emergence of the Tea Party, they didn’t understand that an enormously complex Rube Goldberg machine like ObamaCare needed to be explained to the public in simple terms.

  Emanuel tangled with Jarrett over her effort to put the prestige of the presidency behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Emanuel was suspicious of Jarrett’s motives; he believed she was working on behalf of her old boss, Mayor Daley, and his political cronies, who stood to benefit from the billions of dollars that would be spent on construction, tourism, sponsorships, and advertising. That idea seemed to be lost on the president.

  Always the pragmatist, Emanuel urged Obama to leave the Olympic crusade to others and deal instead with pressing national issues, such as skyrocketing unemployment, which was then reaching 10 percent. But Obama ignored Emanuel’s entreaties and sided once again with Jarrett, who then persuaded First Lady Michelle Obama to fly with her to Copenhagen and make a dramatic presentation to the International Olympic Committee. “There won’t be a dry eye in the room,” said Jarrett, sounding shockingly naïve. “I’m sure that it will touch the hearts of each of the IOC members.”

  “The White House staff didn’t want this to happen,” said someone who was present during the debates over the Olympics. “They thought it was a loser, and that it would be of no value to the president and his office. What’s more, you never let the president go abroad without knowing the outcome in advance. But Valerie had a lot of relationships in Chicago—business and political—and she was still tied in with Mayor Daley.”

  When it became apparent that the voting in Copenhagen was going to be dicey, Jarrett dropped the first lady as Chicago’s chief spokesperson. Instead, she turned to the president for help, arguing that he was “the best brand in the world” and that only his star power and brilliant rhetorical skills could carry the day with IOC members, especially those from African nations. Easily flattered, Obama thought he could prevail by the force of his personality, and he flew off to Copenhagen, where he made an impassioned plea to the assembled IOC members. However, just as Emanuel feared, when the votes were tallied, the Olympic games were awarded to Rio de Janeiro, not Chicago, which finished fourth of four candidate cities. The loss dealt a stinging blow to Obama’s international standing.

  Jarrett was on the wrong side of several other consequential issues, not the least of which was her stand on Solyndra, the California solar company that went belly up and cost American taxpayers half a billion dollars. Shortly before Obama paid a visit to Solyndra, which had received a $535 million taxpayer-funded loan guarantee, Steve Westly, a prominent venture capitalist and member of Obama’s 2008 national finance committee, wrote Jarrett: “A number o
f us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra. There is an increasing concern about the company because their auditors ... have issued a [warning] letter.... Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term.”

  Westly wasn’t alone in warning Jarrett about Solyndra. Lawrence Summers, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, opposed the administration’s loan guarantees to Solyndra, writing in a 2009 email that “the government is a crappy venture capitalist.” Nonetheless, Jarrett gave her stamp of approval to Obama’s visit to the Bay area solar company, where he used words that would come back to haunt him: “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.” Five months later, the company filed for bankruptcy, making it the third U.S. solar manufacturer to fail in a month. As of this writing, Solyndra was under FBI investigation for accounting fraud.

  Why did Jarrett ignore the warnings from Steve Westly and Larry Summers? “The process for this particular loan guarantee began under President Bush,” said White House spokesman Eric Schultz, ignoring the fact that the Bush administration ultimately rejected the loan. A more honest answer to the question could be found in Valerie Jarrett’s Chicago connections, especially her close ties to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which controlled 35.7 percent of Solyndra. The foundation had made a sizable donation to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett once served as chairwoman and where one of Obama’s best friends, Eric Whitaker, is currently executive vice president. Billionaire George Kaiser, one of Obama’s top 2008 campaign fundraising bundlers, visited the White House no fewer than sixteen times, and Jarrett herself met at least three times with Solyndra lobbyists, who pushed for government assistance.