Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  When the tightly contested presidential race ended late on November 6, Barack narrowly won reelection, receiving 51 percent of the popular vote and carrying 26 states. Overall Barack topped Romney by almost 5 million votes, and his Electoral College margin was a healthy 332 to 206. Reacting to Barack’s victory, Sheila Jager recounted how he “always said to me that becoming the president wasn’t the goal in and of itself,” that “he wanted to be a great one.”

  Speaking with Time magazine, Barack stressed how as president “the amount of power you have is overstated.” In addition, “anything we do is going to be somewhat imperfect . . . so what we try to do is just tack in the right direction.” Yet in a remarkable implicit comparison, Barack also stated that as president one was no longer who one had been previously. “The Lincoln who is a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois isn’t the same Lincoln as the one who addresses Gettysburg. For that matter, the Lincoln who’s elected President is not the same as the Lincoln who delivers the second inaugural. They’re different people.”

  Soon after New Year’s, an unusual poll reported that many Americans believed that Barack Obama was a different person too. Indeed, 36 percent thought that Obama is “hiding important information about his background and early life,” New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University reported. Since “among Republicans . . . more knowledge leads to greater belief in political conspiracies,” that 36 percent figure masked how 64 percent of Republicans, and 42 percent of whites, but only 17 percent of blacks, agreed that it was “probably true” that Barack was hiding something crucial.37

  As Barack prepared to take the oath of office for a second time, CBS News’ Mark Knoller summarized the statistical record of Barack’s first term. Unemployment had remained static at 7.8 percent, but the national debt had risen from $10.6 to $16.4 trillion, “the largest increase in the national debt under one president.” Over the course of four years, Barack had delivered 1,852 public speeches and had granted 591 media interviews, 104 of which had been with national television networks. Barack had taken thirteen vacations, totaling 83 days, and had played 113 rounds of golf. Some months earlier Barack had told Oprah Winfrey that in 2008 “I promised I wouldn’t be a perfect president, but I’d wake up every single day working as hard as I could . . . and that promise I’ve kept.”

  NBC’s Chuck Todd believed that even before his second inauguration, Barack “set himself on a path to failure” by embracing a conflictual policy agenda on top of his lack of outreach to members of Congress. Without expressly naming his source, Todd reported that moderate West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, elected to office in 2010, received his first telephone call from Barack more than two years later. But “Obama didn’t call many senators, period.”

  Speaking in unusually personal terms at Morehouse College’s commencement, Barack said, “I sure wish I had had a father who was . . . involved” in his life, and “I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father was not for my mother and me.” He described what he called “the special obligation I felt, as a black man . . . to help those who need it most, people who didn’t have the opportunities that I had.”

  In early June, Edward Snowden’s astonishing revelations about the depth and extent of U.S. government electronic surveillance programs shook Obama’s administration and all of American politics. European anger at the U.S. executive branch was especially acute, and as an aura of failure began to settle over Barack’s presidency, old friends struggled to come to terms with why things had gone so wrong. “Barack is a tragic figure: so much potential, such critical times,” but “such failure to perform . . . like he is an empty shell,” one longtime Hyde Park friend lamented. “Maybe the flaw is hubris, deep and abiding hubris, as if his touch, his deep understanding, will clear the path. . . . How else could he possibly be so . . . unruffled” despite what was happening? Yet no one alive brought deeper insight into the tragedy of Barack Obama than Sheila Jager.

  I think the seeds of his future failings were always present in Chicago. He made a series of calculated decisions when he began to map out his life at that time and they involved some deep compromises. There is a familiar echo in the language he uses now to talk about the compromises he’s always forced to make and the way he explained his future to me back then, saying, in effect, I *wish* I could do this, but pragmatism and the reality of the world has forced me to do that. From the bailout to NSA to Egypt, it is always the same. The problem is that “pragmatism” can very much look like what works best for the moment. Hence, the constant criticism that there is no strategic vision behind his decisions. Perhaps this pragmatism and need to just “get along in the world” (by accepting the world as it is instead of really trying to change it) stems from his deep-seated need to be loved and admired which has ultimately led him on the path to conformism and not down the path to greatness which I had hoped for him.38

  In late August, Barack unexpectedly reversed course about launching military strikes against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was continuing to murder thousands of Syrian civilians. His sudden change of heart, which occurred following a one-on-one conversation with Denis McDonough, who seven months earlier had succeeded Jack Lew as White House chief of staff, stunned other top aides and world leaders alike. Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama’s most-favored foreign policy commentator, wrote that National Security Adviser Susan Rice was “shocked” and believed that “the damage to America’s credibility would be serious and lasting. Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself.” One Middle Eastern head of state told Goldberg that Obama was “untrustworthy,” and even Barack’s former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta spoke disparagingly of him. “Once the commander in chief draws that red line, then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn’t enforce it.” Former Clinton administration aide William Galston rued how Barack’s “allergy to the use, or even the threat, of force has rendered U.S. diplomacy all but toothless.”

  At the end of September, as the Affordable Care Act’s new Web site, HealthCare.gov, prepared to debut, Barack promised that “any American out there who does not currently have health insurance can get high-quality health insurance.” But as it soon became clear that the Web site was a dysfunctional disaster, journalists like NBC’s Chuck Todd wondered “how could a president so powerfully make a law so central to his legacy and then fail so miserably to make it real?” Politico’s Michael Grunwald observed that “the crash of the Obamacare website” was “a debacle that seemed to confirm every attack ever leveled at Obama’s competence.” Simultaneously, press anger at Barack’s White House increasingly spilled into public view. Veteran New York Times reporter David Sanger said that “this is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered,” and longtime CBS newsman Bob Schieffer concurred: “Whenever I’m asked what is the most manipulative and secretive administration I’ve covered, I always say it’s the one in office now.”

  In mid-October, in his third book on Obama’s campaigns and presidency, Richard Wolffe zinged Barack’s “lack of preparation and disengagement at vital times,” a failing that a Washington Post story soon highlighted. “Former Obama administration officials said the president’s inattention to detail has been a frequent source of frustration,” and even after almost five years in the White House, “Obama has yet to master the management of information within his administration.”

  The negative commentary kept on coming. A front-page New York Times story on Democratic fund-raising stated that “more than a dozen Obama supporters . . . described the president as an introvert,” and in a new book on the 2012 campaign, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann wrote that stories of Barack’s “aloofness and inattentiveness to his donors were legion.” In the Wall Street Journal, the distinguished foreign affairs commentator Fouad Ajami wrote that what energized opposition to Barack “wasn’t his race” but “his exalted view of himself” as “above things, a man alone and an
ointed.”39

  A seeming culmination of all the months of negative commentary came in early November when Vanity Fair published former New York Times reporter Todd S. Purdum’s profile of Barack, “The Lonely Guy.” Purdum believed “Obama has always been alone,” since “he was abandoned not only by his black African father . . . but also by his white American mother.” Longtime Chicago friends agreed that Barack “is the functional equivalent of an orphan,” someone who “craved acceptance” as a result of his abandonment. Purdum thought that “Obama’s resolute solitude—his isolation and alienation from the other players . . . has emerged as the defining trait of his time in office,” for “self-possession is the core of his being.”

  Purdum highlighted “Obama’s persistent assumption that supporters (and staffers, for that matter) don’t need to be thanked.” In Chicago, that behavior was well known, but as Barack’s time in the presidency lengthened with few former aides and friends hearing anything at all from the White House, feelings of disappointment hardened into anger. Barack “doesn’t feel indebted to people,” a once-close assistant explained, but among friends who had known Michelle as well as or even better than Barack, the surprise and pain at the extent to which both Obamas had “gone Hollywood,” as with Jay Z and Beyoncé, was pronounced. Friends had believed that “Michelle will always be there to keep him in check,” because “she grounded him,” but now the evidence was undeniable that “she’s more caught up” in celebrity hobnobbing than Barack was. “She’s an even bigger disappointment than he is,” one black Chicagoan remarked. In New York too friends of many years expressed anger over how “they just fucked all these people who were so loyal to them.” Yet conversations about “all the people that Barack has burned” were most common in Chicago, with once-fervent campaign volunteers explaining how they no longer supported Barack “because of how he was treating all of those people.” One former protégé had realized “that’s what he’s about,” but “you don’t treat people like that,” he exclaimed, his voice full of emotion. “I don’t think people know who politicians are versus who they project.” Todd Purdum wondered “how someone wired the way Obama is got so far in politics,” yet Purdum concluded that the absence of any “strong intellectual rivals” in Barack’s inner circle reflected “a basic insecurity” on the part of the president.40

  As 2013 ended, Politico quoted longtime Washington observer David Gergen criticizing how, as with the Affordable Care Act and HealthCare.gov, “there’s enormous value placed, within the White House, upon winning” but “there’s less and less value placed upon executing the law itself.” Barack’s team is “much, much better at campaigning . . . than they are in governing and in management,” Gergen explained. Speaking with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Barack once again minimized his role, saying that “as president . . . you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history.” The president, he emphasized, “cannot remake our society,” but congressional expert Charlie Cook reported that “on Capitol Hill, few Democrats love, fear, or even respect their president.” In part that was because “this administration has delivered very little,” and the New York Times’ Peter Baker concurred that Democrats also blamed Barack “for not doing more to work across the aisle.”

  By late February 2014, progressive Afro-English Guardian journalist Gary Younge wondered if any purpose whatsoever remained in Barack’s presidency. Health care reform is “not likely to be remembered as transformational,” Younge rightly pointed out, and if Barack “can’t reunite a divided political culture . . . then what is the point of his presidency?” Barack’s “presence in power . . . lacks purpose,” Younge believed. A front-page New York Times story about Barack’s impact documented “the gap between what his supporters expected and what they now see.” As a young arts activist explained, “there are a lot of people being let down by a president they were very enthusiastic about. There’s a big sense of betrayal.” A subsequent Politico profile labeled Barack’s presidency “a remarkable descent,” contrasting his “lack of engagement” with Congress to how “Obama spent 46 days on the golf course in 2013” and “follows obsessively” the NBA playoffs. A friend described Barack as “fatigued,” but the piece powerfully conveyed people’s “disappointment for what might have been.”41

  On April 7, Barack’s aunt Zeituni Onyango, the closest living link to his late father, died in Boston at age sixty-one. Her sudden passing surprised friends, for just weeks earlier she had still been sending e-mails whose upbeat tone—“With fondest joy and love, Auntie Zeituni”—belied her penurious circumstances and made no mention of her health problems. Omar Onyango and Malik Abon’go hosted a wake, with the New York Times’ Jason Horowitz reporting that Barack “helped pay funeral expenses and sent a condolence note” but “did not attend, as he was golfing.”

  Aboard Air Force One in late April, a president peeved at news stories highlighting what one journalist called his “flaccid responses” to “global turmoil” told his traveling press corps that “I can sum up my foreign policy in one phrase. Don’t do stupid shit.” New York Times reporter Mark Landler felt Obama’s remark “seemed crude, almost juvenile,” but it quickly threatened to become “perhaps the signature slogan of his presidency” as it was “roundly mocked for its blinkered message about American power.” The Times’ editorial board protested Barack’s “maddeningly bland demeanor” and his “frustratingly cautious” foreign policy. Picking up on his paper’s editorial, Landler wrote of Barack’s “shrunken vision” for U.S. foreign policy and observed that “Obama’s instinct when he gets into a difficult situation has always been to deliver a speech.”

  In Foreign Policy, former Defense Department counselor Rosa Brooks apologized to Hillary Clinton for supporting Barack in 2008. “In the Obama White House, innovation became reactiveness, discipline became rigidity, and a tight circle of campaign aides and Chicago pals tried to micro-manage the entire executive branch,” Brooks explained. It was readily apparent that “Obama’s an introvert. . . . Look at his tight body language; listen to the undertone of irritation in his voice. Barack Obama is a man who almost always looks and sounds like he’d prefer to be somewhere else. He’s a politician who hates politics.”42

  The chorus continued. In an op-ed headlined “Barack Obama’s Presidency Is Spiraling Downward,” U of C political science professor Charles Lipson told Chicago Tribune readers that Barack “is a poor manager. He doesn’t pay attention to crucial details, surrounds himself with sycophants and doesn’t hold anyone accountable.” In Politico, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy asked, “Did Obama Fail Black America?” Kennedy’s answer was that “for many African-Americans, he has been a hero—but also a disappointment. On critical matters of racial justice, he has posited no agenda, unveiled no vision,” and seemed “virtually mute.” Although “blacks as a whole have fared badly during Obama’s tenure,” the latest Gallup Poll showed Barack with 87 percent approval among blacks as compared to only 35 percent among whites. With his “serious” and “dignified” demeanor, plus his marriage to a black woman, for African Americans Barack was “the antithesis of The Black Man as Failure,” Kennedy wrote. In contrast, Cornel West, another well-known black voice, intensified his long-standing criticism of Barack. “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be a counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency . . . we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton: another opportunist.”

  Back in Chicago, libertarian Tribune columnist Steve Chapman complained about how “Obama led Americans to believe that he would be far more sensitive to privacy and civil liberties than George W. Bush was. But more often than not, he reflexively indulges the demands of law enforcement agencies. . . . In clashes between government and the individual, the president almost invariably sides with the former.” Similarly, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd quoted her courageous colleague James Risen calling Barack “the greatest enemy to press freedom i
n a generation.”

  In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan complained that Barack “seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf,” and “seems disinterested, disengaged almost to the point of disembodied. He is fatalistic, passive, minimalist,” the former Reagan speechwriter lamented. Presidents are “not supposed to check out psychologically,” and “it is weird to have a president who has given up. . . . It is unprecedented and deeply strange” plus “unbelievably dangerous.” A Politico tally showed that as of midsummer, Barack had played golf on more than 180 days as president, about two-thirds of the time with White House “body man” Marvin Nicholson. “His lonely golfing sojourns should be seen as a reflection of the man as well as the president,” wrote Politico editor Michael Hirsh.

  Even Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, a consistently supportive voice, admitted that “this has been a disappointing presidency” and wondered “whether a more experienced hand in the Oval Office might have done a better job,” especially on foreign policy. Marcus warned that if Barack “leaves office with the country in more danger than it was eight years earlier, the rest of the legacy will be for naught.”43

  In Oberlin, Ohio, Sheila Jager worried about the man whom she still loved. “My past with Barack still seems very present and I think that’s true for both of us. I still care for him very deeply as you already know; our relationship was so complex and deep and filled with so many contradictions.” Seven years earlier, when she had posted those critical Web comments, “I was angry that he hadn’t contacted me and had left me, so to speak, in the lurch . . . that he wrote me completely out of his memoir, which I thought was a deliberate effort to avoid confronting some painful truths. I was really angry about that.” Sheila’s “feelings have evolved” since 2007 “because some of the issues between us have since been resolved” once Barack began calling her. In retrospect, Sheila wished Barack had read history, rather than literature. “I think if he had, he’d have much less faith in the ‘arc of history’ or ‘21st century behavior and norms’ and a better understanding that we lead blessed lives not because it is the natural order of things but precisely because it is so very unnatural, and that people have had to fight and die to attain and maintain it. I think that history teaches us that evil is much more a prevalent force in the world than goodness and peace.”