Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In advance of Barack’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, former Harvard Law classmate Frank Hill Harper wrote in Essence that “President Obama has sparked a transformation in the psyche, self-esteem and aspiration of young black males. His positive impact will be seen for generations to come,” but on inauguration day itself, some of Barack’s most important black supporters, like Chicago’s Jim Reynolds, were all but left in the lurch. “Do you realize that Jim took a bus to the inauguration?” another unhappy black donor complained. Some of Barack’s old friends and advisers, like Berkeley Law dean Chris Edley, had strongly opposed his decision to name Chicago congressman Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff, and even in the first week of Barack’s presidency it became starkly apparent that “Rahm wanted Obama out in public constantly,” as David Axelrod put it. Hardly a week passed before Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan nailed the problem. “When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common.” Robert M. Gates, whom Barack had asked to stay on as secretary of defense, soon came to agree. “When it comes to the media, often less is more. . . . If one appears infrequently, then people pay more attention when you do appear.” In time Axelrod concurred. “We used him way too much. It robbed him of his power as the narrator of a larger story.”

  By March, close observers worried that “Obama’s White House was slipping into a kind of dysfunction,” with Emanuel and National Economic Council director Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, playing more dominant roles than Barack. “The president was concerned about showing his uncertainty, or his lack of acquired knowledge on lots of these policies, to his own advisers,” one of them told Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind. On March 11, Barack reluctantly signed into law the $410 billion Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, which included more than eighty-five hundred congressional “earmarks” totaling over $7.7 billion. The earmarks had a richly deserved reputation for reflecting what the Washington Post called “a connection between campaign contributions and spending programs,” and the Post’s front-page news story called Barack’s signing of the bill “an early blow to his attempt to change how business is done in Washington.” The Wall Street Journal reported that David Axelrod had strongly but unsuccessfully argued for a veto, with Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prevailing. The Post detailed how “Obama backed away from bolder proposals” for earmarks reform advocated by Senate reformer Russ Feingold, and NBC News’ Chuck Todd rued how “one of Obama’s core principles was jettisoned for the sake of expediency.”24

  Speaking with Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Barack revealed that “the hardest thing about the job is staying focused.” He was very concerned about “making sure that . . . we start getting a handle on our long-term structural deficit,” a point he reiterated to C-SPAN’s Steve Scully. “The long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation significantly, we can’t get control of the deficit.” On a brighter note, living above the office could not be beat. “The White House has been terrific for our family life compared to some of our other previous situations like campaigns, because we are all in the same place,” and each evening Barack could go upstairs at six thirty for dinner with his daughters before retiring to his study.

  On Monday night, May 25, Barack made one of his most consequential decisions when he called federal appellate judge Sonia Sotomayor to tell her that on Tuesday he would nominate her for the Supreme Court seat from which Justice David H. Souter was retiring. “He asked me to make him two promises. The first was to remain the person I was, and the second was to stay committed to my community,” Sotomayor recalled a few months later, after winning Senate confirmation and being sworn into office.

  By mid-July Barack had turned his attention toward his long-envisioned health care reform measure, telling ABC’s Terry Moran that “we can get this done by the fall” and that “we also do want to reform the insurance industry.” Polls showed that over the course of Barack’s first six months in the White House, his disapproval rating had risen from an initial 20 percent to 39, but journalists continued to be impressed—and worried—by the sort of support that Barack attracted. The Economist’s Lexington column stated that “Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern president,” but warned of how “the personality cult that surrounds him . . . has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights” that disappointment was certain.

  Inside the West Wing, decision-making remained troubled, with a Wall Street Journal headline calling Barack “a micromanager.” The former law professor would ask aides “to do justice to a view other than their own,” saying “I want more than what’s in this room” when they could not do so. But “the president had lost control of his White House,” Ron Suskind learned from his interviewing. Obama “had almost no process to translate his will into policy on the occasions when he could decide on a coherent path. But such decisions were rare,” and the tenor of debate was often fouled by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who decried liberals as “fucking retards” in one large meeting. “We are treated as though we are children,” a leader of one progressive group told a reporter.25

  On Thursday morning, August 6, in Oberlin, Ohio, Sheila Miyoshi Jager opened her e-mail. Sheila had long worried that her identity could prove “politically explosive given the nature of our relationship,” but now she was happy to reminisce about Barack. “So you see, this is really, really sensitive stuff” since “we did not go our separate ways after 1988” and “I do not think Michelle knows.”26

  In mid-September, the administration’s health reform plan, the Affordable Care Act, was introduced into Congress, and Barack told CBS’s Steve Kroft that “once this bill passes, I own it. And if people look up and say, ‘You know what? This hasn’t reduced my costs. My premiums are still going up 25 percent, insurance companies are still jerking me around,’ I’m the one who’s going to be held responsible.” Barack again noted that “the only way I can get medium- and long-term federal spending under control is if we do something about health care.” On November 7, the Affordable Care Act was approved by the House of Representatives, but passage came on a vote of 220 to 215, with only one Republican in favor and 39 Democrats opposed.

  Writing in New York magazine, John Heilemann lamented how the White House had “badly botched the job of presenting reform to the country” and seemed “more interested in passing something, anything, no matter how ineffectual, that could be labeled reform than in making sound policy.” As one Democratic senator told Heilemann, “We’ll get a health care bill, but we’ve squandered the ability to change America.”

  On December 1 Barack approved a “surge” of thirty thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Barack told Steve Kroft that authorizing that deployment was “absolutely” the most difficult decision he had made as president. In Afghanistan, his hope was “to scale this down to a point where it is manageable and we are protecting American lives. . . . That is my ultimate job.”

  When Oprah Winfrey asked him in a pre-Christmas interview how he would grade his first year in office, Barack gave himself a “good, solid B+.” Stating he had “inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Barack said he had “stabilized the economy” and prevented “a significant financial meltdown. . . . We are on our way out of Iraq. I think we’ve got the best possible plan for Afghanistan. . . . We have achieved an international consensus around the need for Iran and North Korea to disable their nuclear weapons. And I think that we’re going to pass the most significant piece of social legislation since Social Security, and that’s health insurance for every American. . . . If I get health care passed,” Barack would up his grade to A-, and on December 24 the Senate passed a bill slightly different from the House one with sixty affirmative votes, the minimum number needed to foil a filibuster. One day before the first anniversary
of Barack’s inauguration, Massachusetts voters upended his political game plan for final approval of the Affordable Care Act by electing Republican Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy, thereby reducing to fifty-nine the Democrats’ Senate majority.

  Barack granted a trio of first-anniversary interviews. He expressed pleasure in how well his daughters had adjusted to life in the White House, but disappointment that “what I haven’t been able to do . . . is bring the country together. . . . That’s what’s been lost this year—that whole sense of changing how Washington works.” Barack told Time’s Joe Klein he had hoped “that health care wouldn’t take this long” and that “if there’s one thing I have learned” it’s that things “always take longer than you think.” To ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Barack said, “one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. . . . The easiest thing for me to do . . . would be to go small bore . . . just make sure that everybody’s comfortable and we only propose things that don’t threaten any special interests. . . . I don’t want to look back on my time here and say to myself, all I was concerned about was nurturing my own popularity.”

  Barack’s one-year anniversary also offered commentators a chance to assay his presidency to date. CBS News’ assiduous Mark Knoller reported there had been only twenty-one days when Barack “did not have a public or press appearance,” and that he had golfed twenty-nine times. With Barack relying heavily upon the quartet of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs, the Financial Times’ Edward Luce rued how not since Richard Nixon’s presidency had there been “an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.” Given the all-but-complete partisan divide over health reform, Luce quoted an academic as observing that Barack “totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office.”27

  On March 21, by a vote of 219 to 212, the House of Representatives passed the Senate’s previously approved version of the Affordable Care Act, with no Republicans in favor and thirty-four Democrats voting nay. Two days later, Barack signed it into law, and the White House celebrated what it viewed as the greatest achievement of Barack’s presidency to date. As Neera Tanden, one of Barack’s top aides on the measure, emphasized, “there was never an issue that was in the bill that was more important than just passing the bill.” Yet as NBC’s Chuck Todd stated, “the Affordable Care Act can hardly qualify as the universal health care Obama promised,” and he believed it exemplified “a familiar Obama pattern: grandly proclaim a bold new direction, then move to the establishment middle.”

  In April, David Remnick’s The Bridge, the first serious biography of Barack, was published to mixed reviews. Some critics were disappointed by Remnick’s “idolatrous” and “all but starry-eyed” view of Obama, ruing how in Remnick’s portrait “Obama emerges as nearly flawless.” Others objected to Remnick’s “defining Mr. Obama largely through the prism of race,” with veteran New York Times reporter Howard W. French writing that Remnick’s “insistence on race” represented “an approach that all but declares the man’s race is the most interesting thing about him.” Another reaction was equally fundamental. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani lamented that The Bridge does “not really explain how this young, rootless outsider acquired the self-confidence that fueled his ascent in national politics.” In the New York Review of Books, former Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld complained that “no one can pin down exactly when the young Obama first thought seriously of running for president.” Salon editor in chief Joan Walsh zeroed in on a lengthy comment Barack had made to Remnick about his 1980s transformation, which he dated to moving to New York City rather than to Chicago. “Obama’s answer is weirdly unsatisfying, disembodied and impersonal, like he’s narrating someone else’s story.”

  The Bridge also drew the attention of Sheila Jager, who took issue with how it spoke of Barack’s unnamed girlfriend as being “a white University of Chicago student.” “I don’t consider myself exclusively white, as I am half Asian,” and “what Remnick wrote is wrong. Race and identity being a central theme of the book, I think Remnick completely missed what I believe was the most important factor that led Barack to resolve his torment over this central issue of his life.” Sheila felt that Remnick “seems to take things too much at face value,” especially Dreams.

  But for Sheila The Bridge reopened a deep emotional wound. “The nature of the relationship” and how “it continued post-Chicago . . . is the real problem,” for “in fact there is a lot to hide.” Indeed, “our relationship was a tragedy that has weighed and haunted my life,” such that “I hoped so much for Clinton to be the nominee and then that McCain would win not for politics or policy positions, but only because I feared this would happen. And now, what I had feared more than anything, feared because I didn’t know exactly how it would affect me, only that I knew it would affect me in a manner that would bring out all the pain that I had worked so hard to put past me” had indeed come to pass.28

  As a trio of valuable books emerged covering the first year of Barack’s presidency—Jonathan Alter’s The Promise, Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, and Richard Wolffe’s Revival—press commentary on how to understand Barack continued. Writing that “the president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much,” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen asked, “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” A month later, Cohen repeated his plaintive call: “Who Is Barack Obama?” Given how the president “has opined on virtually everything in hundreds of public statements,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, many analysts’ remained puzzled about Barack’s core beliefs.

  On August 4, Senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell visited the Oval Office for his first one-on-one conversation with Barack, more than eighteen months into his presidency. Reporters learned that the invitation had been extended only after former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott asked former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle to complain to the White House about Barack’s disinterest in developing personal relationships with congressional leaders. The following day, with only five Republicans voting yes, the Senate confirmed Barack’s second Supreme Court nominee, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, to replace the retiring John Paul Stevens by a tally of 63–37.

  While journalistic commentary on his presidency grew increasingly critical, one problem Barack faced was beyond his control. A July CNN poll found that 27 percent of Americans believed Barack likely was born outside the United States, and an early August Time one showed that 24 percent of respondents, and 46 percent of Republicans, thought Barack was a Muslim. Speaking with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, Barack boasted that “here I am, halfway through my first term, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do.” Granted “Afghanistan is harder than Iraq,” but “we have been very successful in recruiting and beginning to train Afghan security forces.” Barack also emphasized that “we are not going to use a shroud of secrecy to excuse illegal behavior on our part.” He repeated his “70 percent” claim to the New York Times’ Peter Baker while explaining that “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right.” That would remain Barack’s view going forward. “In those first two years, I think a certain arrogance crept in, in the sense of thinking as long as we get the policy ready, we didn’t have to sell it,” he recounted in 2015.29

  But Washington’s best-connected journalists offered portraits of Obama’s presidency far more critical than Barack’s own rosy image. In the style he had mastered for more than three decades, Bob Woodward described how top Democratic insider John Podesta believed that “Obama’s approach was so intellectual” and that “sometimes a person’s great strength, in this case Obama’s capacity to intellectualize, was also an Achilles’ heel.” The national security adviser, General Jim Jones, who was leaving the White House, found Barack “cerebral and distant,” Woodward wrote, and Defense Secretary Bob
Gates would recount that “one quality I missed in Obama was passion.” But “the only military matter, apart from leaks, about which I ever sensed deep passion on his part was ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’” concerning gay service members. As someone whose government service reached back forty years, Gates also appreciated how Barack’s “White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.”

  Liberal commentators took some solace when Rahm Emanuel resigned as chief of staff in order to run for mayor of Chicago. Pete Rouse temporarily replaced Emanuel before former commerce secretary Bill Daley took up the post. In a long and comprehensive New York Times Magazine cover story titled “The Education of President Obama,” Peter Baker wrote that Barack “rarely reaches outside the tight group of advisers” led by Jarrett; “he’s opaque even to us,” a top White House aide told Baker. “Except maybe for a few people in the inner circle, he’s a closed book.” Baker revealingly described how “on long Air Force One flights,” Barack “retreats to the conference room and plays spades for hours, maintaining a trash-talking contest all the while, with the same three aides,” Reggie Love, Marvin Nicholson, and presidential photographer Pete Souza.

  One of the president’s top economic aides described to Ron Suskind “the Barack Obama he first met in 2007. He felt there was a clarity of thought and purpose to that earlier version that was increasingly difficult to find in the years he was the president . . . somehow the president had lost ownership of his words and, eventually, his deeds.” The New York Times’ Sheryl Stolberg, building on her colleague Peter Baker’s story, quoted Democratic policy maven William Galston: “I can’t believe that he wants to go down in history as the president who promised to overcome polarization and ended up intensifying it.” Nebraska Republican senator Mike Johanns told Stolberg that Barack “needs to build friendships and he needs to build trust” in order to work more successfully with Congress.30