The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Obama left it to his political aides to admit that they had blown the basic blocking and tackling of politics. Looking back, they felt they hadn’t gone negative early enough or strongly enough. “The one thing we could never solve was to create enough sense of risk about voting Republican,” Axelrod said. It was a mistake they vowed to fix.

  MITCH MCCONNELL WAS crystal clear about the stakes over the next two years. Just before the midterms, he famously told the National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Two days after the election, he not buying health insurance he had B doubled down, saying he didn’t regret the comment and adding, “The fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto all these things.” Over time McConnell’s “single most important thing” would come to symbolize how disconnected the political games in Washington were from the concerns of ordinary Americans. Their number one priority was a better life for themselves and their kids, which required a better economy, which in turn required the politicians to work together.

  McConnell’s Senate colleagues knew that in truth neither beating Obama nor helping the economy was his true priority. The minority leader’s number one goal was retaking the Senate for Republicans so that he could be majority leader again. The biggest threat over the next two years to McConnell’s dream wouldn’t be Democrats but his more dangerous adversaries: House Republicans. If they messed with Medicare, he might not pick up the three Senate seats that he needed to take power.III

  When he heard McConnell’s statement, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told his spokesman, Jim Manley, “My number one priority for the next two years is to reelect Obama.” Even if Reid didn’t mean it literally—he managed a legislative calendar that would not be dictated by the White House’s political calculations—the private comment made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue to Pete Rouse and to the president. Naturally it bound Obama more closely to the majority leader.

  If reelection was the central goal, Obama would have to do something to reengage and reenergize his base. In 2010 the proportion of young voters fell by a third from 2008; the proportion of older voters (who favored Republicans) grew by a third; and the proportion of white voters grew by a third. Had turnout been the same in 2008 as it was in 2010, McCain would have won.

  The big problem moving forward was the long-range outlook for the economy. What kept him up at night, the president told aides, was that he didn’t know where the jobs for the long-term unemployed were going to come from. The economy didn’t have a “next big thing” to employ people with no college education and few skills. He knew that the green jobs he had touted so hard in 2009 were a chimera. He mused that the factory workers laid off after the collapse of the manufacturing sector in the 1980s had in many cases been absorbed into construction trades during the housing bubble of the 1990s. But now they had been laid off again, and there was nothing else for them on the horizon. These folks, he feared, were spiraling downward. He was struck by an article in the March 2010 Atlantic describing how the social dysfunction in white working-class areas was beginning to mirror that of black neighborhoods. He felt that the answer, to the extent that there was one, lay in infrastructure, a multiyear “paid for” agenda to rebuild sewage systems, retro-fit schools and hospitals, and do a lot more on job creation that the GOP had long supported. Big projects, from the railroads to the interstate, had always been championed by Republicans. But those days were over. For 2011 at least, he would have to play defense while they carried the ball on austerity.

  At the same time, the president would have to mute any message of progress “the Night Stalker.”s small on the economy. People just weren’t buying it. The political commentator James Carville had laid out the challenges: “The hardest thing to do in all of political communications is deal with a bad but somewhat improving economy.” Doing so required “threading the needle”—convincing people that things were getting better when they didn’t yet feel it. Carville confessed that Clinton’s White House had also failed at that early on: “It is not like someone has the holy grail of how to do this.”

  But even when he was in deep trouble politically, Clinton always loved the game. This wasn’t true of Obama. His long list of policy achievements in his first two years occurred in spite of an aversion to the normal requirements of politics: dealing with legislators, building coalitions, selling relentlessly with a message repeated ad nauseam. The uncomfortable truth was that he didn’t much like politics and didn’t enjoy the company of other politicians; in fact he didn’t even consider himself to be one, at least not at heart. Most of those around the president didn’t think of him as a politician and marveled that he had come so far without the usual political equipment. Sure, he spent plenty of time calculating the political angles, but this engagement was usually from a distance, as if he had to prevent the grubby realities of his business from soiling his image of himself.

  It was sometimes said that he didn’t like people; this was wrong. It was needy and shortsighted politicians, entitled donors, and useless grandstanders who tried his patience. He liked people, including children, who could satisfy his curiosity, make him laugh, and tell him things he didn’t know. He didn’t like people who wanted a piece of him, failed to do their jobs, or who thought their wealth and position made their advice by definition superior to that of the less powerful.

  Obama’s rise had been so rapid that his natural political skills were never deepened by experience. So, for instance, he misconstrued a piece of old Chicago political lore. The first Mayor Daley had famously said in the 1950s that “good government is good politics,” by which he meant that if you ran a smart and reasonably effective government that delivered services to people, they would vote for you. This was true as far as it went. But as Obama knew perfectly well, Daley’s legendary “machine” was also built on an obsession with the machinations of politics for its own sake. It wasn’t until January 2010, a year after taking office, when Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, that the president saw the shortcomings of his faith in just doing the right thing and expecting political rewards to follow.

  And yet the events of his first year set up a perfect test of Daley’s maxim. Obama had moved ahead with the auto bailouts even though they were unpopular even in the industrial Midwest, and with the Affordable Care Act despite being told by all of his top advisers that it was a loser with voters. He was betting on the ebbs and flows of fortune in politics, where time can change anything. The 2012 presidential election would resolve whether doing unpopular things to help the country could end up as crowd-pleasers down the road.

  AGAINST ALL ODDS, the lame duck session of the 111th Congress proved to be one of the most productive of all time. Both McConnell and Boehner knew it would get worse for them in 2011, when the Tea Party would be flexing its musclesCommodities Futures Trading Commission early, so it made more sense to do business with the outgoing Congress in late 2010, before the freshmen radicals got to town. But at first it didn’t look as if much would happen.

  The new START Treaty that Obama had signed the previous April in Prague with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia was languishing in the Senate, where sixty-seven votes were needed for ratification. The treaty cut in half the number of nuclear warheads on both sides, bringing the stockpiles (around 1,500 nuclear weapons) down two-thirds since START was initiated in the 1990s. That was still enough to blow up the world but moving significantly in the right direction. Three Senate Republicans came out in favor of the treaty, but the rest deferred to Jon Kyl, the savvy Republican whip who didn’t have much use for arms control of any kind. In mid-November Kyl said there was “not enough time” to renew the treaty before the new Congress began. That was code for saying the GOP would not j
ust stop START, but kill it.

  The president decided to fight hard for the treaty, even at the expense of other priorities. “We said, ‘Holy shit! We can’t lose START,’ and doubled down,” recalled Ben Rhodes, the deputy director of the National Security Council. Obama saw START as the linchpin of much of the rest of his foreign policy, from resetting relations with Russia to handling China, getting North Korea “below the fold” (out of the headlines), and confronting Iran. The hard-line view, exemplified by Senator James Inhofe’s claim that “Russia cheats in every arms control treaty we have,” caused consternation in Moscow. Rejection of the treaty would have meant no cooperation on anything from the Russians. “We would not have gotten sanctions against Iran without START,” Rhodes said.

  Obama and Biden went into overdrive building elite public opinion for the treaty, enlisting in the cause NATO, German chancellor Angela Merkel, former president George H. W. Bush, Mitt Romney (already a likely 2012 presidential candidate), and all six living former secretaries of state. The key was winning over John McCain, who was lobbied by everyone from Henry Kissinger to the neoconservative writer Robert Kagan. When McCain came out for the treaty, he brought other Republican senators along and, to the surprise of almost everyone, isolated Kyl thoroughly enough to win ratification.

  Obama was also skillful in winning a change in the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military. The key was the favorable testimony of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Bob Gates had been opposed to a new policy but grew convinced that the Pentagon’s hand would be forced by the courts. And Gates was impressed by a report prepared by Jeh Johnson, general counsel to the Pentagon, and army general Carter Ham, that said the military could absorb the change without harm. By letting the Pentagon take the lead on Capitol Hill in 2010 instead of pushing hard from the White House for a reversal of DADT, Obama might have been leading from behind, as an anonymous insider charged, but he was leading.

  AFTER THE MIDTERMS, the pressure to allow expiration of the 2001 Bush tax cuts grew more intense. The leader of the charge was Senator Chuck Schumer, who thought the best idea was to let all of the tax cuts expire, then vote in February 2011 to restore those for the middle class, but not for those making more than a million dollars a year. He said this loudly and publicly, which enraged the White House. Axelrod swore oaths against Schumer to anyone who would listen not buying health insurance he had B, and Pete Rouse and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina told Schumer that the president wanted him to put a sock in it.

  Obama’s view at the time was that letting middle-class tax rates go up for even a couple of months in early 2011 would violate a campaign promise and validate the GOP victory. Democrats would take the blame and be in a poor negotiating position with the new Congress in February. He preferred using the Bush tax cuts to win all kinds of other concessions. This was shrewd poker by a player with only one good card in his hand.

  Biden and McConnell did most of the negotiating in early December, but the president got involved when necessary. At one point, the Republicans wanted to scale back refundable tax credits—checks for a few thousand dollars from the government to families that made under about $30,000 a year. Obama said he would walk away from the table if that happened, telling Boehner and McConnell that he couldn’t sign a bill with continued tax breaks for the wealthy and let breaks for working-class families expire.

  In the middle of the talks, the president made a surprise holiday season visit to the troops in Afghanistan. He stayed on the ground for only six hours of a thirty-six-hour trip. After Marine One landed back on the South Lawn on Saturday, December 4, he went directly to the Oval Office, where he called Reid, Pelosi, McConnell, and Boehner with his bottom line: He would veto any bill that contained just the extension of the tax cuts anxiously sought by Republicans and an extension of unemployment insurance anxiously sought by Democrats. The deal had to be much bigger. For the next several hours, the haggling continued, with Biden, at home at the Naval Observatory, turning to the new budget director, Jack Lew, for fresh ideas. By the following week, the outlines of one of the most productive deals ever cooked up by a lame duck Congress were coming into view.

  By the time Congress adjourned for the 2010 holidays, Obama had won a victory unimaginable just six weeks before. In exchange for extending the tax cuts—the GOP’s true bottom line—Obama won approval of the START Treaty, an end to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, extension of unemployment benefits, a payroll tax holiday, the first expansion of the school lunch program in four decades, a continuation of the Recovery Act’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (the most successful antipoverty program in a generation, which boosted the incomes of the working poor), and increased medical care for 9/11 rescue workers at Ground Zero. The result of the fiscal parts of the compromise was a “stealth stimulus” of nearly a trillion dollars—a much-needed boost to the economy. All in all, not bad for a president depicted as politically weak.

  Everything in the lame duck session was interconnected, and even seemingly unrelated external events were critical. The decision of Rich Daley not to run for reelection as mayor of Chicago turned out to have a big impact. Had Daley run, Rahm Emanuel would have stayed past the election as chief of staff. And if he was handling negotiations with the Hill during the lame duck session, Emanuel would likely have traded repeal of the ban on gays in the military for the START Treaty instead of holding out for both. As one of his White House colleagues pointed out, it was simply in Rahm’s nature to jump at such deals. Instead the key negotiator in this period was Rouse, who had replaced Emanuel as interim chief of staff. Rouse had been the top aide to Senators Dick Durbin, Tom Daschle, and Barack Obama. Over the course of three decades on the Hill, he had earned the nickname “the 101st Senator.” On the DADT-START deal, he didn’t take the bait. He and “the Night Stalker.”s small the president held out for a bigger deal, and they got it—a significant win.

  The historical consequences of this lame duck deal were much greater than recognized at the time. When the repeal of DADT went smoothly, it created more political space for gay marriage. Had the old Pentagon policy remained in place longer, it’s hard to imagine the climate of opinion on same-sex unions shifting as quickly as it did. Only a year later, the president endorsed gay marriage, and the military’s years of discrimination already seemed a distant memory.

  A key moment in the aftermath of the midterms came on December 12, when Bill Clinton went in to talk with the president. Their relationship was still fraught, but Clinton for the first time showed that he could be of genuine help to Obama. He calmed liberals who were concerned that Obama’s big concession in exchange for all these achievements—letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy continue past the end of the year—was a sellout. For seventy minutes in the White House press room, long after the president had left, Clinton was back in his element, doing what he now did best: explaining Obama. He made the case for the president’s year-end strategy better than the president did himself. Talk of insurrection in the Democratic ranks died down.

  Just six weeks after the shellacking, Obama was back in the game, with caveats. Congress was still habitually unable to agree on a budget. The government would have to operate, yet again, on a “continuing resolution” or be forced to shut down in April 2011. Otherwise Congress failed to act on only two major items, both of which would have big consequences through 2012 and beyond. The first was the DREAM Act, which offered a path to citizenship to immigrants who arrived in the country as children and had kept out of trouble and stayed in school. The second was an obscure measure that most of the public knew little or nothing about: a vote to raise the debt ceiling so that the government could pay bills for expenses it had already incurred. Nancy Pelosi, the lame duck speaker, knew that the Republicans would use the debt ceiling as a weapon to hurt the president, and she urged the White House to make it an issue. Obama raised it several times. He asked his advisers, “Could we roll that into this d
eal?” They said no, that it was, as Axelrod later put it, “one brick more than the load could take.” Boehner’s staff said the biggest shock of the whole year was that Obama didn’t stress confronting the debt ceiling in the lame duck session. “We were floored by that,” Brett Loper, the top policy aide to the speaker, said the following summer.

  The president miscalculated. He and Biden were working under the assumption that Republicans would threaten a government shutdown in early 2011, but it would be over the continuing resolution, which came before the debt ceiling had to be raised. It was hard to imagine Republicans would risk a government shutdown (which had gone badly for them in 1995) and a default on the national debt. A president respected by his team for thinking a few steps ahead failed to do so, with major consequences for his presidency.

  Obama understood that the upcoming 2011 legislative calendar would require bipartisan cooperation to avoid a catastrophe. In December he invited Ken Duberstein to the White House for a chat. Despite the lame duck deal, Duberstein, a wise Republican who had been Reagan’s last chief of staff, thought the president hadn’t done enough relationship-building with Republicans. He suggested that Obama and Boehner get together and smoke cigarettes over a bottle of wine. The president laughed and said nothing. He’d just kept his promise to Michelle and given up smok not buying health insurance he had Bing for good. The incoming House speaker, a proud smoker, would later snort with disdain to his staff that Obama always seemed to be chewing Nicorette gum.

  NOT LONG AFTER the midterms, Obama and Rouse undertook a rigorous assessment of what had gone wrong over the previous two years. The president expressed great frustration over his failure to communicate better with the public but he also concluded that the policymaking process had failed, especially on the economy though also on breaking his promise to close the prison that held suspected terrorists at Guantánamo, where the administration had dithered until its hand was forced by Congress.