The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Sarah Palin could always be counted on to share creatively extreme ideas with Fox viewers. She told host Sean Hannity that Obama’s “philosophy of radicalism” was a throwback to “the days before the Civil War.” Obama, she said, was moving the country backward to “those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.” Glenn Beck won notice in 2009 for saying that Obama had a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” but this was merely business as usual for him. His popular Fox News program (later switched to his own TV network) featured disjointed monologues in which he routinely depicted Woodrow Wilson as a socialist Sat to the outside world.

  “the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.” For a time it seemed as if Obama’s alienated enemies could punch him again and again and he would never respond. Then one day he did.

  JEROME CORSI WAS sure that he had another bestseller about Barack Obama. This one tackled the big white whale: the president’s place of birth. Corsi’s book Where’s the Birth Certificate? was scheduled for publication in April 2011. It brought together in one handy place all the lies about a forged short-form birth certificate and a missing long-form birth certificate and all of the conspirators involved. Three weeks before the book’s publication, Obama decided to release his birth certificate. This was a response not to Corsi but to the real estate billionaire Donald Trump, who had transformed himself into a birther as part of his flirtation with running for president. The highly public toe-in-the-water never seemed serious; Trump was believed to have already quietly signed a contract to continue his NBC show. But taking his clown act into the political realm (“The blacks love me”) helped feed The Donald’s addiction to publicity.

  In 2009 Obama had been bemused by the birther rumor, and in 2010 he was not yet willing to dignify the stupid story with a response. But now, in 2011, he was increasingly frustrated with the oxygen that it was consuming. John Boehner was asked on Meet the Press about Trump’s claims that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. George Stephanopoulos asked Obama directly about it. The story was getting in the way of the White House assault on the budget plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan. Studies showed the two stories roughly tied in the amount of media coverage they received.

  On April 14 Obama went to Chicago for a fundraiser and decided to rummage around in his late mother’s possessions, which were stored at his Kenwood home. There he found his short-form birth certificate, which he’d never seen before. He told his advisers that politically it was better for him to have the birth certificate story play out for a while and let the Republicans make fools of themselves. It would build up Trump, which would hurt the other side. But, he said, it was bad for the country; everyone had better things to talk about, and he was planning to go into the press room and say so.

  Of course, releasing the short-form birth certificate he found in Chicago wouldn’t solve the problem; the press had seen copies of it already. So before Obama went public, White House Counsel Bob Bauer worked with the attorney general of Hawaii to obtain a waiver allowing the long-form birth certificate to be released. Copies wouldn’t do, which meant that Judy Corley, the president’s personal attorney at the law firm of Perkins Coie, had to fly to Hawaii to pick it up. When she returned with the document, the president told his staff that this could be a “teachable moment” about silly politics interfering with important matters of state.

  The original idea was that Bauer and Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications on the ground he had B director, would release the birth certificate and the president would answer a question about it on Oprah, where he had a scheduled interview. But Obama didn’t want to reflect on the smallness of American politics on Oprah, a venue he saw as more appropriate for uplifting themes. He wanted to disclose the document in the briefing room because he saw the press as bearing a share of the blame for spreading the bogus story in the first place. David Plouffe asked if they needed the speechwriter Jon Favreau to draft a statement, but Obama said he would speak from handwritten notes, though he did give Bauer, Press Secretary Jay Carney, and other staffers a heads-up on what he would say. Pfeiffer hadn’t seen him feel so strongly about a communications issue since his speech on Jeremiah Wright and race during the 2008 campaign.

  When the birth certificate was handed out at 8:45 a.m., the press went crazy with the story. In public, the president seemed angry about the distraction from serious issues by “sideshows and carnival barkers.” But in private he also saw the humor in it—and the potential for rallying his base. “Where are the mugs?” he asked a couple of weeks later, when it took a little longer than expected for the Obama-Biden online souvenir store—a significant source of revenue for the campaign—to produce coffee mugs with the birth certificate emblazoned on the side. “I want my mugs.”

  DONALD TRUMP GAVE himself a pat on the back: “I’m very proud of myself, because I’ve accomplished something that no one else has been able to accomplish.” Just to be sure that his message was received, he added, “I really did a great job.” But it went without saying that the crazies wouldn’t be satisfied by the release of the long-form birth certificate. Not a single birther apologized or admitted error. Instead a talk show host named Eric Bolling, auditioning on Fox to replace Glenn Beck, hosted Pam Geller, who had championed opposition to the placement in lower Manhattan of a mosque sponsored by moderate Muslims. Bolling and Geller began claiming the long-form birth certificate was a forgery.

  Obama’s release didn’t impress Joe Arpaio either. Arpaio, the demagogic sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, used his office as a platform for keeping the birther story alive. He spent $10,000 in taxpayer money sending investigators to Hawaii, where, of course, they came up with nothing. In July he held a press conference that was not well-received. “Show us the microfilm!” Arpaio demanded to puzzlement all around. Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate? went to number six on the bestseller list even after Obama answered the question and produced it. Corsi claimed that even if Obama was born in the U.S. he still was not a “natural born citizen” under the Fourteenth Amendment because his father was not—a slur against all Americans who are the children of immigrants.

  Obama occasionally tried to joke about the fictions, which his friends thought would be almost funny if they weren’t so sick. “Some folks say, ‘Well, you know, he’s not as cool as he was, when they had all the posters around and everything,’ ” Obama told a small group of supporters in California. “Now I’ve got a Hitler mustache on the posters. That’s quite a change.”

  THE CRAZIES WERE plenty racist, with their talk about the president’s laziness and the first lady’s big bottom, but most Republicans had learned long ago to take explicit references to race out of the discussion. Instead they adopted euphemisms. In 1968 Richard Nixon, implementing his Southern Strategy, used the phrases law and order and forced busing to signal to white voters that he shared their fears. Ronald Reagan, who never mentioned race as such, began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of all places, the site where the civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. Reagan spoke of states’ rights and “welfare queens” in ways that contained an obvious racial subtext. The Willie Horton ad made on behalf of George H. W. Bush’s campaign against Michael Dukakis had the same effect. Bush’s chief political strategist, Lee Atwater, explained the evolution of the code in a 1981 audiotape made public by the dogged researcher James Carter (Jimmy Carter’s grandson) in 2012:

  You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, “forced busing,” “states’ rights,” and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . . “We want to cut this” is
much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

  As fear of blacks became more “abstract” at the turn of the new century, the strategy was expanded to include fear of Arabs. George W. Bush didn’t play racial politics and tried outreach to Muslims. But by the time Obama was president, code words and “dog whistles” (language understood only by the intended recipients) were once again part of the dialogue, as Obama’s race and Muslim middle name made him a twofer in the minds of the fringe. The contradiction between Obama’s being a Muslim and being in thrall to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a Christian minister, didn’t faze zealots who believed both to be true.

  As the fear moved from Tea Party rallies to the campaign trail, the code wasn’t hard to decipher. The president embodied not just the intolerable present but the terrifying future, when hordes of dark-skinned people would make whites a minority in the United States within less than thirty years. The 2008 election had shown it was possible to elect a president who didn’t receive the most white votes. And this was terrifying to some Americans.

  This fear of losing control was matched by at least some measure of guilt. Even if they hadn’t been personally responsible for subjugating blacks, white Americans knew somewhere deep in their psyches that the country had been conceived at least partly in sin and built with the help of blacks who might have some reason for revenge. That racial fear and guilt was not directly connected to Obama; assuming as much would be an oversimplification of tangled social psychology. But it was unmistakably present, as it had been throughout American history.

  The tactical brilliance of dog whistles was that these dogs knew exactly how to respond to their commands. When blacks or their white liberal allies complained about the cod { font-family: "TradeGothicLTStd-BdCn20";ved racial messages, conservatives (the dogs in the metaphor) would loudly accuse them of playing the race card. Both sides could then be counted on to play out their tiresome racial psychodramas.

  But a strange thing happened to those who believed they could easily destroy the new black president. He was unflappable, even cold, and when they couldn’t rattle him, it was the critics who came unglued. Tom Burrell, founder of the nation’s first large black-owned advertising agency, made a study of how Obama interrupted the familiar cycle of racial recrimination. By refusing to react to their taunts, Burrell noticed, the president was depriving the other side of its usual opening. He was smart, a family man, ethically clean, and, in his first two years, successful at getting his program through Congress. This meant that the target on his back was much smaller than his enemies expected. Where Bill Clinton gave his critics plenty of ammunition, Obama offered little more than some pot smoking in high school and a couple of so-called scandals (Solyndra and Fast and FuriousII) that were more about bureaucratic bungling and partisan wrangling than genuine wrongdoing in the White House.

  4

  Strangled in the Bathtub

  It was Obama’s historical misfortune to serve as president during the most partisan era in modern American history. For generations Democrats and Republicans included both conservative and liberal (or at least moderate) wings; now, in a period defined by what political scientists called “asymmetrical polarization,” this was true only of the Democrats. Republicans had only one wing, a malformation that would affect the party’s flight pattern as far as the eye could see.

  As an Illinois state senator, Obama worked we to the outside world.at Oy ll with Republicans in Springfield. After his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, devoted to looking beyond blue states and red states, the first magazine cover he ever appeared on bore the headline “Seeing Purple.” In 2007 a Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, was so convinced of Obama’s bipartisan sincerity that he appeared in an ad for him to use in the Iowa caucuses.

  As president, Obama continued to take bipartisanship seriously, not because he was naïve but because he believed it was the most productive approach to governing. Moreover, he calculated that it wouldn’t be politically smart to abandon a theme that had helped bring him so far. He routinely described himself in private as “not your classic party animal” and made a point of stressing that two of his four favorite presidents, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, were Republicans. (The other two were FDR and Truman.)

  But by the summer of 2010, a few months before Democrats lost the House, the president was deeply worried about the direction of the GOP. He told visitors that he thought the other party was shot through with hypocrisy, full of members saying, “We love fiscal discipline unless it’s our stuff.” He longed for the party of George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, and Howard Baker and the “fact-based conversations” they held with Democrats. “All I want for Christmas is a smart, loyal opposition,” Obama said, mentioning how great it would be to negotiate with David Cameron, then the head of the Tory opposition in Great Britain. “We’d make music together.”

  The president, of course, was dreaming. The Bush-Dole-Baker world was as far removed from the current GOP as Lincoln’s Republican Party. Obama was famously Lincoln-obsessed, but a lesser-known part of his interest in the sixteenth president revolved around Lincoln as a believer in the federal government’s investing in people and infrastructure. Lincoln was a former Whig still devoted to that party’s platform of “internal improvements”—in other words, spending that would be anathema to the GOP of 2012. At the bicentennial celebration of the Great Emancipator’s birth in February 2009, Obama went out of his way to note that beyond winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves, Lincoln also subsidized railroads and launched the Homestead Act, the first land-grant colleges, the National Academy of Sciences, and a national currency. Obama didn’t mention that his hero also instituted the first American income tax, which was revived with a constitutional amendment in 1913. Until the late twentieth century Republicans routinely supported not just critical infrastructure but raising income taxes in the interest of fiscal responsibility. Now they opposed all of that.

  ONE EVENING IN 1974, the economist Arthur Laffer was having drinks in the bar of the Two Continents restaurant in Washington with Donald Rumsfeld, who was Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff, and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Dick Cheney. Laffer sketched what was to become the famous “Laffer curve” on a cocktail napkin. It purported to show that tax revenues would actually go up when tax rates went down, and vice versa. Laffer was right that confiscatory taxes at a certain level—say, the 70 to 90 percent top rates of the Eisenhower era—were often counterproductive; they forced the wealthy to figure out convoluted ways to avoid paying them. In 1978 Representative William Steiger, a Republican from Wisconsin, succeeded in cutting the capital gains rate from 49 to 28 percent, SUMMER s small kicking off an investment boom. But Steiger, an environmentalist who had helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, died that year at forty, leaving Republicans who were fiscally conservative but otherwise moderate without a champion.

  The principle behind supply-side economics took a beating in the 1980s. After slashing marginal tax rates in 1981, Reagan ended up presiding over a soaring deficit—just the opposite of what Laffer and other supply-siders predicted. Buffeted by a recession, he signed two budget deals in the early 1980s in which tax hikes accounted for 80 percent of the deficit reductions. The much praised bipartisan tax reform of 1986, brokered by Democratic Senator Bill Bradley, sharply lowered rates and closed loopholes but helped make the deficit worse.

  In 1990 George H. W. Bush signed off on a budget deal with a 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. The members of Congress who backed their president were the last congressional Republicans for the next two decades to vote for an income tax increase. When Clinton proposed raising the top bracket from 31 to 39.6 percent in 1993, he received no support from any Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole and his colleagues went to the floor and argued en masse that Clinton’s tax increases would sap incentives to save and invest and send the economy into a recession. T
he bill was approved on a party-line vote and the country had a clear test: Would tax hikes on the wealthy hurt job creation? The answer was an emphatic no. The combined effect of the Bush and Clinton budget deals—and a later deal between Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich—helped balance the budget in 1999 and did nothing to dampen what soon became the greatest economic boom of modern times, with 22 million new jobs and a soaring stock market.