The Amateur

by Edward Klein

  Jarrett’s dubious judgment on Solyndra had one unintended consequence: it focused renewed attention on Obama’s wrongheaded and naïve approach to government stimulus spending on green energy projects. Even Brad Jones of Redpoint Ventures, an investment firm with financial connections to Solyndra, saw the error of Obama’s ways. “The allocation of spending to clean energy is haphazard; the government is just not well equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much,” Jones wrote Larry Summers. “One of our solar companies [Solyndra] with revenues of less than $100 million (and not yet profitable) received a government loan of $580 million; while that is good for us, I can’t imagine it’s a good way for the government to use taxpayer money.”

  Jarrett’s lack of judgment in domestic affairs was matched by her inexperience in international and military affairs. She was out of her depth during the Obama administration’s nearly yearlong internal debate over how to deal with CIA intelligence that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Pakistan.

  The Defense Department calculated there was a 40 to 60 percent chance that Osama bin Laden was living in a compound in Abbottabad, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy. The way the compound was built plus the human intelligence the United States had on the ground led the intelligence community to conclude that the compound was at the very least a high-value target. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to drop bombs on it and obliterate it.

  The CIA argued that, whatever the risks, if the target was as valuable as the intelligence apparatus said it was, then there was no sense in wiping it out. The CIA didn’t want to lose the valuable intelligence the compound might contain.

  Though Jarrett did not attend meetings in the Situation Room, she privately urged the president not to send in a Navy SEAL team. She told Obama that the raid could turn out to be a replay of 1980’s Desert One, when President Jimmy Carter’s effort to rescue American hostages in Iran backfired so badly that it helped doom the Carter presidency.

  In this case, Obama didn’t listen to Jarrett. He believed strongly in what the CIA told him, and decided to send in the Navy SEAL team to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. It was a brave act, but Obama had at least one other motive: he was worried about what voters might think if they became aware he had had a chance to get Osama bin Laden and hadn’t taken it.

  Neither the president nor his closest advisers came to Washington with experience managing a large staff, and they failed to hire a team of experienced people who knew how to run things in the nation’s capital. As a result, many of the Chicagoans who staff the West Wing, including Valerie Jarrett, are strangers in a strange land. In this atmosphere of callowness and insularity, the Obama White House has assumed the trappings of a royal court.

  “There is a tremendous amount of jockeying in the White House under Barack Obama, people hoping to push other people out of their positions, fighting over stupid stuff,” a former high-ranking member of the staff told me. “This fighting is not built around flattering the king and queen. It’s about arousing suspicion in their minds. If the king and queen feel that they need someone to look out for them, it makes them more dependent. They want to know who is really behind them? Who’s really their friend? What is the Washington community saying? What is the black community saying?

  “In all of this, Valerie Jarrett is both the arsonist and the firefighter,” this person continued. “She has been able to spread her tentacles into every nook and cranny of the executive branch of government. She creates problems so she can say to the president and first lady, ‘I would do anything for you; I would put everything at risk to show you how trustworthy I am.’ The president and to a lesser degree the first lady are worried about big stuff, which means that they must depend more and more on the people around them.

  “Valerie creates fear. She keeps the Obamas off-balance and keeps them coming back to her. She makes sure that a lot of other people don’t have access. She keeps old friends and supporters away. If she can’t control you—what you’re going to say to the president and the first lady, the issues you’re going to push—then you’re not going to get in. Only the people she feels she can control can get in. The people who are given access are beholden to Valerie. Every one of the current crop of people in the East Wing are her friends. They think they owe their lives to her.

  “Fear is the operative word. When people on the staff hear that Valerie’s in the Family Quarters, it scares them. ‘What is she saying to the president and first lady about me? Is she giving me credit for what I’ve done? Is she distorting what I’ve said?’ Valerie tells everyone that she’s going up to the Family Quarters, even if she’s only delivering a letter.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE WRATH OF MICHELLE

  My staff worries a lot more about what the First Lady thinks than they worry about what I think, on a full range of issues.

  —Barack Obama

  Of all the ways the mainstream media have kowtowed to the Obamas, none has been more disgraceful than their coverage of Barack’s marriage to Michelle. Typically, he is portrayed as the contented husband who is in total sync with his wife. She’s depicted as an advocate for military families, a crusader against childhood obesity, the devoted mom to Sasha and Malia, and a creature of serene domesticity.

  In this storybook rendering of the Obamas’ marriage, Barack runs the country while Michelle keeps him grounded and takes care of the home. When they lay their heads down on their pillows at night, she might turn to him and offer a few household hints on how things could be managed a little better in the White House. But other than that—at least according to this version—Michelle is no Hillary Clinton. She’s a traditional, hands-off first lady.

  Recently, this insipid portrait of Michelle Obama has undergone some sorely needed revision. In The Obamas, by New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor, a mainstream journalist acknowledges for the first time that Michelle is in fact an unrecognized force in her husband’s administration. As Kantor writes: “She was sometimes harder on her husband’s team than he was, eventually urging him to replace them, and the tensions grew so severe that one top adviser erupted in a meeting in 2010, cursing the absent first lady.”

  In reaction to Kantor’s book, the White House PR machine mounted a swift and vigorous campaign to re-sanitize Michelle’s image. The first lady herself went on TV and, in an interview with Gayle King of CBS This Morning, declared: “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced—that I’m some angry black woman.”

  Jodi Kantor’s journalistic amour propre was deeply wounded by the charge of racism. She defended her portrayal of Michelle, pointing out that she hadn’t cast the first lady as an angry black woman. “Those words aren’t in the book,” said Kantor. “There’s nothing that implies she is. She is portrayed as a very strong woman.... [Barack Obama] came to Washington on top of the Earth and has kind of been descending to Earth ever since, and Mrs. Obama came here with low expectations and exceeded them.”

  Michelle exceeded expectations. Indeed, a close reading of the book makes it abundantly clear that Kantor admires the first lady and thinks she has done a terrific job in a difficult role. The book may expose some of the first lady’s sharper edges and hint at her true role in the White House, but the author hardly lands a punch.

  So, what is the truth about Michelle?

  Not since Bill and Hillary Clinton burst upon the political scene more than twenty years ago, promising two for the price of one, have we seen anything like Barack and Michelle’s partnership of power in the White House. There is, however, a crucial difference between the Clintons and the Obamas. Whereas the Clintons were open and aboveboard about their co-presidency—boasting that Hillary was an equal partner with Bill—the Obamas have been careful to hide the fact that Michelle is the president’s most important political adviser and the one he listens to above all others before he makes major decisions.

  Their stealth co-preside
ncy has obscured a vital fact—namely, that the Obamas share a sense of entitlement, an attitude that they know best, a contempt for the political process, and a callow understanding of the way the world works. Their common worldview drives the president’s agenda and has brought the United States ever closer to a European-style socialist welfare state.

  By any measure, Michelle Obama is further to the Left politically than her husband. And that’s saying a lot. Take the president’s trillion-dollar, budget-busting healthcare legislation: while presidential advisers Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and Vice President Joe Biden all urged Obama to scale back on the unpopular bill, Michelle encouraged her husband’s messianic impulses, urging him to save America from its wicked ways and press ahead, no matter what the consequences.

  “The health care overhaul fit perfectly with their shared sense of mission—their joint idea that the president’s career was not about pursuing day-to-day political victories but the kinds of fundamental changes they had sought since they were young,” Kantor writes in The Obamas.

  This was Michelle’s most profound influence on the Obama presidency: the sense of purpose she shared with her husband, the force of her worldview, her passionate beliefs about access, opportunity, and fairness; her readiness to do what was unpopular and pay political costs. Every day he met with advisers who emphasized the practical realities of Washington, who reminded him of poll numbers; he spent his nights with Michelle, who talked about moral imperatives, aides said, who reminded him again and again that they were there to do good, to avoid being distracted by political noise, to be bold....

  The first lady’s handlers have painted a picture of Michelle as a woman who, throughout her marriage, has done everything in her power to discourage her husband from running for public office. This view of Michelle is accepted as gospel among the chattering classes on the East and West Coasts, where liberal conventional wisdom holds that Michelle Obama hates politics and politicians.

  “I didn’t come to politics with a lot of faith in the process,” she has said. “I didn’t believe that politics was structured in a way that could solve real problems for people.” Another time she said, “I am tired of just giving the political process over to the privileged. To the wealthy. To people with the right daddy.” And of course there was her famous remark to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France’s first lady, that her life in the White House was “hell—I can’t stand it.” (Michelle denied having made the remark, but few believed her.)

  Conventional wisdom aside, Michelle’s comments raise some puzzling questions:• If she hates politics so much, why did she hitch her wagon to a political star like Barack Obama, who had an insatiable ambition to achieve national public office?

  • What can she possibly have against a political system that has brought her family nothing but financial fortune and unimaginable comfort, made her a celebrity as America’s first black first lady, and put her on Forbes’ list of the World’s Most Powerful Women?

  • How can she say she hates politics when she is playing a major role raising money and delivering speeches on behalf of her husband’s 2012 reelection campaign?

  Political wives have always found something to complain about. After all, politics is a blood sport, and spouses end up with many of the same wounds as their husbands. However, based on my reporting, I believe that Michelle’s scornful attitude toward politics has far less to do with her life as a political wife than it has to do with deep-seated grievances that she has carried over from her childhood.

  Although you wouldn’t know it from the way she talks now, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson came from a family steeped in politics. The Robinsons depended for their modest livelihood and fragile perch in the middle class on political connections. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, was a precinct captain in the political machine run by the original Mayor Daley—Richard J.—who was the last of the big city bosses. In exchange for working as a precinct captain in old man Daley’s corrupt Democratic machine, Fraser Robinson was given a low-level patronage job as a Chicago city pump operator.

  Precinct captains were the machine’s foot soldiers at the neighborhood level. They delivered votes on Election Day and, if necessary, stuffed ballot boxes. When Michelle was growing up, the machine was dominated by Irish Catholics like Daley who resisted racial integration and gave Chicago the reputation of being the most segregated city in the North.

  Despite Fraser Robinson’s lifetime devotion to the regular Democratic organization, he and black folks like him were treated as second-class citizens. The South Side where the Robinson family lived had the worst schools in the city. When it snowed, their streets didn’t get plowed. Uncollected garbage piled up on their sidewalks. Fraser, who suffered from a painful case of multiple sclerosis and needed two canes to walk, never missed a day of work. He hobbled about the neighborhood and listened to people tell him that they needed a Parkway fence or another cop on the beat. But he didn’t receive the raises and promotions that customarily came to white precinct captains.

  Fraser was a proud man who never complained about his disability or treatment. But Michelle grew up feeling sorry for him. She resented the political power structure that failed to recognize her beloved father’s value. At night, when the Robinson family gathered around the dinner table, they often talked about how it was necessary to game the system in order to get along. If you wanted to hold on to your steady job in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, you had to soil your hands in Democratic politics. As far as Michelle was concerned, however, the system was stacked against black people and she didn’t want any part of it.

  According to friends, Michelle was ashamed that her father worked in such a dirty business. Though she and Santita Jackson, the daughter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr., were inseparable friends at the Whitney Young Magnet High School, Michelle never admitted to Santita that her father was a precinct captain. Young Michelle spent many afternoons in the Jackson household, but she kept her father’s job as a precinct captain a secret from her best friend.

  Michelle’s cynical attitude toward politics was encouraged by her mother, Marian Robinson. Friends and neighbors say that Michelle got her attitude and biting sarcasm from her formidable mother. In the words of her son, Craig Robinson, currently the men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University, Marian was “a force to be reckoned with”—a phrase that is echoed today by people who work with Michelle Obama in the White House.

  In his memoir, A Game of Character, Craig tells a story about his mother that’s worth repeating for the light it casts on the formative influence that Marian Robinson had on her children. Once, a policeman stopped Craig and accused him of stealing the bike he was riding. “Instead of taking me at my word, [the policeman] insisted on loading the bike into the back of his cruiser and driving me home so he could speak to my parents,” Craig wrote.

  From downstairs I called up to Mom that the policeman had accused me of stealing a bike, and when she came outside, I saw a look on her face that I’d never seen before. “Go on inside, Craig,” she said, barely glancing at me but steeling her eyes on the officer, preparing to read him the riot act. I stood watching from the front screened-in porch, and she must have talked to that policeman for forty-five minutes. Then he pulled the bike out of the trunk, set it on the curb, and drove off.... But that wasn’t the end of it. The next day, Marian Robinson paid a visit to the station house. And the day after that, the policeman came to our home and apologized to me.

  Like her mother, Michelle doesn’t let sleeping dogs lie. She often behaves as though others have let her down and she’s better than they are. Even on the rare occasions when people do meet her exalted standards—such as when whites came out and voted in large numbers for her husband in the Democratic presidential primary—Michelle can’t help but let her sense of grievance show through. Thus her most notorious remark, which she made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 18, 2008: “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally mak
ing a comeback.”

  Everyone in Michelle’s family is afraid of her. “My mom and I and my dad, before he died, we were all worried about, ‘Oh, my god, my sister’s never getting married because each guy she’d meet, she’s gonna chew him up, spit him out,’” Craig Robinson said. “So I was thinking, Barack says one wrong thing and she is going to jettison him. She’ll fire a guy in a minute, just fire him.”

  Later, after Michelle and Barack married, Craig was asked if his brother-in-law used a nicotine patch to help him quit smoking. To which Craig laughingly replied: “Michelle Obama—that’s one hell of a patch right there!”

  Despite her fiery reputation among friends and family, stories about Michelle’s temper have rarely appeared in the liberal mainstream media, which have gone out of their way to protect her. A reporter has to dig hard to find people who are willing to talk about their encounters with Michelle. Here are three first-hand accounts from people who have witnessed the Wrath of Michelle:

  From a Harvard Law School classmate of Barack Obama’s, who asked to remain anonymous: “When Michelle came to visit Barack at Harvard, he was living in a rundown basement apartment in a working-class neighborhood called Somerville, where he socialized almost exclusively with other African-Americans. The furniture was cobbled together from god-knows-where, and you’d sit on a chair and it would break. He had an old Toyota, which Michelle drove around. It used to break down, and they argued about it all the time.