The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Obama was also much taken with an article in the New Yorker by Ezra Klein debunking the notion of the presidency as what Theodore Roosevelt called “a bully pulpit.” The evidence proving that presidential speeches changed minds was scant. Klein cited work by the political scientist George Edwards showing that even Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric had no effect on public opinion. While missing the enduring power of the presidency to set the agenda, the story made Obama into a fatalist about how his words would be received.

  OBAMA BEGAN HIS presidency with a low-key inaugural address intentionally stripped of rhetorical flourishes. The aim was to lower expectations and get down to the business of governing. “It’s as if Superman stepped out of a phone booth and became Clark Kent,” Princeton professor Fred Greenstein said the week after Obama was sworn in, meaning it as a compliment. But toning down the high-flown speechmaking bought the new president nothing. Obama not only didn’t have a honeymoon, he barely had a wedding night. Republican legions launched their onslaught on January 21, 2009, the president’s first full day in office. That day the GOP talking points, distributed to any politician appearing on television, included complaints about plans to reseed the National Mall (unaffordable in a recession, according to Republicans), money for women’s health that might go to contraception, and anything else they could cherry-pick from a nearly $1 trillion recovery plan that could conceivably make the president look bad. The steady cable barrage attacking what the GOP immediately dubbed “the stimulus” (which sounded worse than “Recovery Act”) meant that Obama’s opposition controlled much of the conversation from the start.

  The question of why Republicans seemed better at messaging even when they had less popular ideas had bedeviled Democrats for years. Part of the problem was cultural. Democrats were more policy-oriented and vulnerable to jargon. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan liked to say that while Democrats talked like twits about “renewable portfolio standards,” Orwellian Republicans called their clear-cutting schemes “healthy forests.”

  David Axelrod, the man first assigned to marry policy and communications, was well-liked inside the White House and among reporters, but he had no experience in Washington or even in state government, and he was unprepared for the right-wing media attacks. Of course, no one want the killing of Osama bin LadenJUed to hear complaints about Republican unfairness in early 2009, when the president enjoyed high approval numbers and a near-supermajority in Congress. The presumption was still that Obama had the power to dictate the terms of the debate. He told his people not to worry about winning the cable wars. Echoing the boss, Axelrod developed a mantra that in Washington every day is Election Day, but that’s not so in the rest of the country.

  It was true that the public wasn’t keeping score of who was winning the day-to-day communications war in the capital. But in war and peace, the side that seizes the initiative often keeps it, especially when the opposition refuses to see the battle for what it is. Obama developed a habit of letting the dialogue deteriorate until he rode to the rescue like a one-man cavalry, solving all the problems with a big speech, large chunks of which he wrote himself at the last minute. The MO had worked spectacularly well during the 2008 campaign, and it could succeed in the White House for a news cycle or two, but the effect wore off quickly.

  THE PRESIDENT DIDN’T cater to White House reporters other than to occasionally bring them cupcakes on their birthdays. He held only thirty-six news conferences in his first term, fewer than Reagan and Clinton and less than half the number held by George H. W. Bush. (The fact that this openness did nothing to help Bush win reelection in 1992 didn’t escape attention in the Obama White House.) George W. Bush held only thirteen full news conferences during his first term, but he engaged in regular informal exchanges with reporters, whereas Obama deigned to answer shouted questions only a couple times a month. He preferred one-on-one interviews where he could be more contemplative and the journalists would have less incentive to show colleagues how tough their questions were.

  The White House thought this approach protected the president, but it more likely hurt him. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, who held two Oval Office press conferences a week for most of his presidency (with quote approval from his press secretary), presidents had understood that frequent interactions with the press helped them do their jobs better. To handle these press conferences well, especially the prime-time televised variety, presidents needed to go through what were once called “murder boards” with their staff—prep sessions in which hard questions from all quarters were flung at the president. The murder boards and the reporters’ actual questions often gave him and his staff early warning about stories brewing inside his government. David Plouffe believed this was no longer the case, that reporters’ questions were now so narrowly focused on political angles and the transitory “story of the day” that they taught the president nothing new. This was an excuse. More relevant was that press conferences, like debates, were part of the theatricality of the presidency that the president disliked. Later, in Denver, this distaste for performance would contribute to a disastrous outcome for Obama in the first presidential debate.

  BECAUSE OBAMA DIDN’T much like the public parts of the presidency, he wanted them to be as easy, and easily controlled, as possible. From the start, his reliance on a teleprompter became an issue. Even liberals like former vice president Walter Mondale thought the “idiot boards,” as of malice toward the he had B Mondale called teleprompters, were shielding Obama’s “brilliance” and inhibiting his connection with the American people.

  Every president since Eisenhower had relied on a teleprompter; Johnson, reluctant to go off-script, called his “Mother.” Obama used his more than Clinton and about the same as or less than George W. Bush. This didn’t deter conservatives, beginning with Bill Sammon, Fox’s Washington Bureau manager, from deciding to make Obama’s reliance on the device a theme of their coverage. Taking their cues from Fox, the right went wild with the story. “Obama is helpless without a teleprompter,” a blogger named Andrew K. Dart wrote, in a vein repeated tens of thousands of times across the blogosphere over four years: “If Mr. Obama is so smart, and has even a loose grasp on all the important issues of the day, why does he need to rely on a teleprompter for every word he speaks?” This right-wing meme conveniently ignored that the president sat for many more off-the-cuff interviews than all of his recent predecessors.

  The falsehood was connected to deep-seated hatreds. “Why is Obama a Slave of the Teleprompter?” asked the Texas Hill Country Blog, inadvertently illuminating the subtext of at least some of the attacks on Obama. The president could be rightly accused of many things, but inferior intelligence was not among them. The idea that he wasn’t smart enough for the job—and was some speechwriter’s puppet—grew out of pernicious racial stereotypes.

  SOMEHOW, A COUPLE of years after assuming office, the president had allowed himself to be portrayed as in over his head, when in fact he had largely mastered foreign policy and pushed more major legislation through Congress in a shorter period than had any president in half a century.

  The worst communications failure was on health care reform, where the messaging was bollixed up from the beginning. Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and health policy adviser in 2009, gave the White House (including his brother, Rahm) an “F-minus” on it. Had they been better able to sell health care reform, the Democrats might not have lost the House in 2010 and put control of the White House in such jeopardy in 2012.

  Progressive efforts to pass national health insurance had consistently fallen short since first proposed in the platform of Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in 1912. Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton all failed to overcome the various interests opposing reform. After a century of trying, Obama succeeded. It was, as Biden whispered at the signing ceremony, “a big fucking deal.”

  There was a reason it took so long. For years Democrats had mindlessly framed the public debate as a struggle for “universal c
overage,” a technical term that meant nothing to the public. When Americans finally learned what it meant, they didn’t much like it. Polls showed that more than 90 percent of people who vote already had health insurance; the 30 to 40 million uninsured were often younger singles and the unmarried poor who didn’t vote. This meant that liberal politicians were asking voters to support benefits for someone else, not themselves, which is the hardest thing to do in politics. Explaining that taxpayers were paying more by subsidizing emergency room care for the uninsured was too complicated for the shorthand of modern communications.

  In 2009 Obama dropped ">Plessy v. Ferguson,Pauniversal coverage from his lexicon and also stopped framing health care as a right, an approach Ted Kennedy and other liberals had tried without success for a generation. Instead he sold the bill on cost, affordability, and access. But this didn’t work any better. The idea that insuring another 30 million Americans would be cheaper for the country and for individuals defied common sense, even if it passed muster with the Congressional Budget Office. And access wasn’t much of an issue for those who already had insurance.

  A bigger problem was that the president didn’t campaign in 2008 on an individual mandate and didn’t realize that a change that big required a sustained conversation with the American people. One senior White House aide compared the situation to the Bush administration’s assumption that the invasion of Iraq would be quick and easy. The White House, he said, prepared for a three-month engagement over health care, but it lasted at least a year.

  All along, the president’s polling showed the best way to sell the idea was to make the whole thing an insurance bill instead of a health care bill. But the political reality, as Rahm Emanuel reminded everyone, was that beating up on the insurance companies too much early on would make it harder to get the legislation enacted, though doing so at the end, when it was too late for the industry to oppose the bill en masse, was helpful to passage.

  It didn’t help that no one was hired as a spokesperson for the bill, so the only face associated with it was the president’s. On the few occasions when he did talk about the Affordable Care Act, he inadvertently reminded voters that he had more important things to do than hawk a bill that had already been passed.

  Steve Kagen, a colorful doctor and congressman from Appleton, Wisconsin, met in the White House with Stephanie Cutter, the point person on health care communications, in mid-2010 and begged her to have the president stand up and claim credit for changing the country. Kagen argued that Obama should flip the bill right back on top of the Republicans by telling the public, “Don’t let Republicans take away your new ‘Five Freedoms’—freedom from discrimination due to pre-existing medical conditions; freedom from going broke and losing your home just because your child gets seriously ill; freedom to choose your own doctor; freedom to go to the nearest emergency room; and freedom from being dropped by insurance companies if you are sick.” Maybe this wasn’t the right frame, the congressman said, but the White House needed something to show pride in what had been accomplished for the American people. Cutter listened politely but said that the White House believed the more Americans heard about the Affordable Care Act, the more they would like it, and the White House was preparing a really good website to spread the word.

  The website and other messaging failed, and along with fifty-three other Democrats, Kagen lost his House seat that fall. Finally, on Super Bowl Sunday, February 6, 2011, Obama, after rarely mentioning health care reform on the stump, crystallized the message in an interview with Bill O’Reilly. “In this country, there’s no reason why, if you get sick you should go bankrupt,” the president said. It was cogent and convincing and not too late to use in defense of his greatest achievement. But he rarely did.

  EPlessy v. Ferguson,PaE9OFR">ARLY ON, OBAMA thought he could do more to control how the White House communicated. But over time, he grew more philosophical, anthropological (studying the media almost as though it were a tribe), and cynical. The president chalked up much of his failure in this area to a media obsessed with politics and indifferent to policy. For instance, the era of classifying as national security something that was merely embarrassing was over—and the news media didn’t notice. Nor did many reporters cover the major but slow-moving news that 100,000 fewer troops were in Iraq and that the war in Afghanistan was winding down, with the surge ending as promised in July 2011 and 100,000 troops on the way home from that country too. The same liberals who had confidently predicted that the United States would construct a string of permanent bases in Iraq were reluctant to give the administration credit when the troops withdrew. The president noticed.

  A more adept performer in the presidency would have made a joke about the press missing big stories. Obama was enormously confident in most things but not about making jokes in public without going too far. He didn’t trust himself to stay on the right side of the line if he tried spontaneous humor in public. This gave him one less tool for handling the press.

  The most common critique of Obama in the liberal media was that he had found no “narrative” to his presidency (to use the cliché of the moment). The best explanation for why the president had dropped the ball rhetorically since the glory days of 2008 was his allergic reaction to sound bites. Ever since his Philadelphia speech in 2008 on Reverend Wright and race succeeded magnificently without snappy one-liners, Obama figured they were not only phony—a threat to his much-prized “authenticity”—but unnecessary for getting his message across. Whenever a speechwriter put in anything that sounded at all precooked, he’d bristle. Only Axelrod and later Plouffe could convince him to work in a line. Eventually the speechwriters, anxious to please the boss, came to see the art of the presidential speech the way he did. The president and his team somehow forgot that all great communicators, from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, used cogent one-liners. And while the bully pulpit might not change his standing in the polls, particular lines—“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR); “And we, too, shall overcome” (LBJ); “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (Reagan)—had the power to shape a president’s legacy.

  Obama had disdained slogans in the 2008 campaign too. He had to be talked into “Change We Can Believe In” (“Do you really think it says enough?” he asked Plouffe) and even “Yes We Can,” the line, originated by the late Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers union, that helped him come back from a devastating loss to Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary. In the spring of 2009 Obama gave a major policy address at Georgetown University that laid out a “new foundation” for the country. But the press never picked up on the slogan and he stopped using it altogether after Doris Kearns Goodwin told him that “New Foundation” sounded like a girdle. He allowed “Winning the Future” into his 2011 State of the Union address but quickly abandoned it.

  The lesson he took from these speeches was to do what came naturally—professorial explanations—and give tub-thumpers only in the right context. Obama was an author before he was a politician, and his medium was long-form nonfiction, which was hardly conducive to pithiness. Unfortunately for him, audiences no longer clung to his every worded in a day or twov. They still liked him, but the magic was wearing off. So instead of a half-million downloads or more of a YouTube video of a speech, he would get under fifty thousand.

  In his impromptu remarks, Obama had a verbal tic that spoke to his high expectations that the public would respond to reason. He often began sentences with the words, “Now keep in mind . . .” It was a professorial and no doubt unconscious way of trying to get the listener to use the mind—not the heart—to process sometimes contradictory information. Emotional appeals, which he learned by studying great speakers, were for getting votes, not for governing or persuading journalists or others with influence. Obama bought into the respectable view that “speaking in sound bites” was a pejorative. But this reflected a misunderstanding of the news, which is the water in which every president must swim. Reporters and headline w
riters need something catchy and memorable or they will all end up with different interpretations of the news in a newsmaker’s remarks. What was the point of Obama’s using his valuable time to give a speech when the only people who absorbed it other than the few hundred people in attendance were those watching on C-SPAN or maybe MSNBC? That’s thousands of people, to be sure, but out of an electorate of 130 million. The only way the rest of the world would hear about the speech was through news reports, videos, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. And the best way for them to convey the point of the speech was with a phrase, a line, a couple of sentences that framed the message or crystallized a theme with an image or a metaphor that stuck. That wasn’t to say Obama’s political speeches should have been a bunch of hackneyed ideas strung together. But there was room between all sound bites and no sound bites, and for months the president didn’t find it.

  The basic problem with Obama’s speeches was that they had many beautiful paragraphs but not enough tight, memorable sentences. In rationalizing the president’s loquaciousness, his aides often fell back on analysis of the fragmented media marketplace. This was true enough, but earlier presidents confronted a news climate with plenty of turbulence, including cities with a dozen or more loud daily newspapers. What for generations had cut through the noise were the very catch-phrases that Obama disliked. Joel Benenson pointed out that Mario Cuomo, for whom he once worked, was a complicated thinker but knew how to get to a sound bite. Cuomo had famously said that the best politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Even the president agreed that he sometimes overlearned the Cuomo lesson and governed too prosaically. Now he had to find at least a little poetry again—something serviceable but not too grand.

  ANOTHER COMMUNICATION PROBLEM Obama faced from 2009 through mid-2012: He was often the only major player on the field. When Axelrod engaged in Monday-morning quarterbacking, his mind went to the late Chicago Bears star Walter Payton. For several years it seemed as if the Bears quarterback handed off the ball to Payton on every play. It got boring and predictable. “We did to the president what the Bears used to do to Payton,” Axelrod said.