The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  So Chicago decided to match its quantitative modeling with some qualitative noodling. In 2011 Benenson designed an “ethno-journal” program in which one hundred swing state residents wrote in online diaries six times in sixteen days, detailing their economic lives, then answered eight to ten nonpolitical questions on such subjects as their feelings about their job, their aspirations for their children, and their views of their community. The 1,400 pages of transcripts showed an American working class that was less focused on getting ahead (the phrase American Dream didn’t seem to be in their vocabularies) than concerned about not falling behind. It seemed as though every week in the ethno-journals someone wrote about putting food that was too expensive back on the grocery shelf or skipping a night at the movies. Their optimism was fragile, if it existed at all.

  Chicago’s takeaway, which informed the tone of campaign ads and the president’s speeches, was to show sensitivity to their anxieties and avoid the word progress in describing economic conditions. Plouffe occasionally forwarded a collection of “verbatims”—excerpts from ethno-journals, focus groups, and polls—to the president so that he could hear more voters describe their lives in their own words.

  Benenson was a numbers guy, but he liked to remind people of the sign that hung in Albert Einstein’s office in Princeton: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”I

  AS THEY PREPARED for the 2012 State of the Union, the message mavens knew that Osawatomie wouldn’t be enough. Alarmed by polling that showed voter confusion about what Obama stood forNational Youth Administrationyv, Benenson told Axelrod that the campaign needed a simple line, an organizing principle. “Our problem is not that we don’t have the right message,” Benenson said. “We’re just not saying it simply. It’s so easy to draw the contrast and we’re not doing it!” Benenson’s idea for a memorable message was “An economy built to last.” He thought it conveyed the president’s long-range vision and focus on fundamentals. It didn’t hurt that the line, originated by management guru Jim Collins, had worked for years for Chevy trucks. The president decided to try it in the State of the Union.

  Obama’s poll numbers on the deficit weren’t as bad as some imagined. Voters thought the two biggest causes of the deficit were the wars and the bailouts. The stimulus and health care reform were far behind as culprits. Benenson and Binder were impressed by how well respondents could contextualize recent history. Almost all of them understood that it was Bush who landed the country in this mess. The centerpiece of the Republican agenda on Capitol Hill—more tax cuts for the rich—was extremely unpopular. “This was the campaign where Democrats finally took the theory of Reaganomics straight on and turned it on its head,” Benenson said later.

  Even so, Democrats were having a hard time getting people to absorb how extreme the Republicans had become. Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney convened focus groups in the spring for their pro-Obama super PAC and found that the Republican position was, literally, incredible to respondents. When informed that Romney supported something called “the Ryan Plan” that voucherized Medicare, slashed education, and included more tax cuts for the wealthy, the people in the focus groups didn’t believe any politician would propose it.

  The top two reasons focus group members gave for sticking with Obama were that no president could solve the problems he faced in just four years and that Romney would have to learn on the job; they didn’t buy that his business background would make him competent on Day One. Many thought he had the wrong kind of business experience. This played into the Obama campaign’s Bain narrative, which was focused less on attacking the company itself than on showing that Romney hadn’t created jobs when running it.

  But message remained a challenge for Obama, who knew that “Republicans want to cut more and Democrats less” wasn’t going to be a winning theme. Larry Grisolano was sure what else wouldn’t work: bragging about economic recovery. “The problem with ‘We’re getting back to normal,’ ” he said, “is that normal sucked for most people too.” The toughest group for Obama was forty- to forty-nine-year-olds, the “Anxiety Generation,” with stagnant incomes, kids going to college, and parents retiring. The challenge was to convey that the president was committed to putting the middle class on a more stable course. Over the months, whenever the seas got rough, Stephanie Cutter always reminded herself that the auto rescue, outsourcing, manufacturing—all of the specifics they raised had to be connected to the struggles of ordinary people. “The middle class is our North Star,” she said.

  FOR SEVERAL WEEKS in mid-2012, Axelrod and Cutter barely spoke to one another. Axelrod believed at the time that Cutter had accepted an invitation to appear on one of the networks that was meant for him. (He later concluded that partner, Russ Schriefer, convinch2the fault lay with a Cutter underling.) Cutter, who had worked as an Axelrod deputy in the White House, was a skilled communicator and strong on execution, a talented Democratic operative with experience handling Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. She rightly thought that she was better on TV than Axelrod and should represent the campaign not just online (where her jabs at Bain and other subjects were developing a cult following) but on the networks. She was right that the boys’ club around the president didn’er the proper respect. But she was relentlessly territorial—her nickname inside the campaign, “the Ninja,” referred to more than her kick-ass anti-Romney videos—and that she was no match for Axelrod in either strategic vision or understanding of the president. Pete Rouse began to fly regularly to Chicago to smooth out that rivalry (among others) and to coordinate campaign rhetoric with official administration policy. Before long, Cutter and Axelrod repaired their friendship and stoutly defended one another.

  Inside the White House, Plouffe kept the political ship on an even keel. Setbacks—disappointing jobs reports, say, or disturbing economic news from Europe—were taken more in stride than in the past. Plouffe had always been calmer than the easily agitated Democratic fundraisers he called “the bed-wetters.” Now he convinced other battle-tested staffers to be philosophical about the ups and downs of Washington. When something went wrong, they liked to say to one another, “It’s New Hampshire,” which was code for an event that, like the loss to Hillary Clinton there in 2008, was merely a bump in the road.

  One of those bumps was Obama’s formal campaign kickoff at Ohio State University on May 5. The crowd at the indoor arena, estimated by the Columbus Fire Department at fourteen thousand, would have been huge for a Romney event, but it was underwhelming by Obama’s 2008 standards. Despite roughly four thousand empty seats, Obama staffers urged attendees to move onto the floor of the arena. The idea was to make the event seem more crowded on television, but the cameras predictably panned to the vast empty spaces above. While the president gave a rousing speech, conservative websites normally confronted with rapt Obama audiences had no trouble finding video of people in the crowd yawning and checking their iPhones. The New York Times described the rally and another that day in Virginia as at times conveying “the feeling of a concert by an aging rock star.”

  THERE WAS ONE issue in 2012 that gave Obama the chance to stop the yawning and make history: gay marriage. The country was in transition on the subject. In 1996 Bill Clinton felt compelled to sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, but he did so at 1:00 a.m. because he wanted minimal press coverage for a bill he didn’t really believe in. At that time, a mere 27 percent of Americans favored same-sex unions. In 2004 Karl Rove arranged for referenda banning gay marriage to be on the ballot in eleven states, and the resulting turnout among evangelicals was considered decisive in Ohio, where President Bush beat John Kerry by fewer than 120,000 votes. Without the backlash against gay marriage, Bush would have been a one-term president.

  By 2012 forty states had approved statutes or ballot measures banning same-sex marriage. Even as Republicans like Dick Cheney, Ken Mehlman, and John Bolton endorsed same-sex marriage, the political risks of joining them we
re considerable. Nearly half the twentieth century,

  For months Obama stuck to his awkward position that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” This was doubtful. Sixteen years earlier, during his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate, he had told a local gay newspaper, “I favor legalized same-sex marriages,” which meant that he was either pandering then or holding back now. He took comfort that his dawdling paralleled Lincoln’s careful evolution on the issue of slavery, which displeased impatient abolitionists in 1860. The president’s position reflected where Americans were in 2012, still in transition. Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan’s support in 2011 was seen as a handy wink to the LGBT community that the president would move on the issue after being reelected. Gay fundraisers, who accounted for one-sixth of Obama bundlers, seemed fine with the straddle, especially since the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in late 2010 and Obama’s decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court. The president was under little pressure to “evolve” right away to full support of marriage equality.

  Then Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Press and dropped a “Joe bomb.” He noted that he was “absolutely comfortable” with gays and lesbians having the same legal rights as anyone else. Biden, who until recently had what one aide described as a “Village People” conception of gays, had just been to a fundraiser at the home of HBO executive Michael Lombardo and his husband in Los Angeles, where he was genuinely moved by his conversation with the adorable children of gay parents. On the air he engaged in a little sociological analysis of the impact of popular culture. “I think Will and Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far,” he said in reference to the first TV hit with major gay characters.

  Biden’s appearance ignited a round of news stories that the vice president was off-message and implicitly endorsing same-sex marriage. Contrary to published reports, Biden never apologized to the president, though they both later used the same formulation to describe Biden’s gaffe: that he had “gotten out over his skis.” Obama was unhappy because of the way it was handled, not the policy change.

  The president insisted that Biden had simply beaten him to the punch, that he intended to support gay marriage before the convention. He told aides that he was surprised no one had asked him how he would have voted on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s marriage equality bill had he been a New York state senator; he would have answered that he supported it. But there were no definite plans on the schedule and no political incentive to fully endorse gay marriage. Chicago was nervous about the issue because it didn’t play well among many swing state independents.

  Looking forward, the impact of gay marriage on the campaign was tricky to calculate. Two days after Biden’s appearance, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly approved a ban on same-sex marriage. According to exit polls, large numbers of African American voters there supported the ban, and many black ministers in North Carolina and other states continued to thunder from the pulpit against gay marriage. Obama nonetheless moved forward with plans to make his own statement on the issue the day after the North Carolina vote. He was never going to give a bold speech à la Lyndon Johnson’s partner, Russ Schriefer, convinch2“We Shall Overcome” address to the nation in 1965 on civil rights. Such a speech would be “too much in-your-face,” as Dan Pfeiffer put it, for voters who were still in transition.

  Instead the White House called Robin Roberts, an African American coanchor of ABC News’ Good Morning America to ask if she wanted to interview Obama the next day, May 9. In contrast to his tortured answers to the question in the past, the president appeared comfortable on the air as he said, “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He stressed that it was still a matter for the states to decide but that working with staff in same-sex relationships and listening to Malia and Sasha talk naturally about their friends with same-sex parents made it difficult “to explain to your child that some people should be treated differently.”

  A chorus of conservatives immediately charged that Obama was playing politics. In truth, the specific timing was politically motivated, but the underlying decision was not. It wasn’t that Romney and the Republicans intended to bludgeon him over it; independent voters and pro–gay marriage donors like former RNC finance chairman Lewis Eisenberg and hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Daniel S. Loeb wouldn’t allow them to do so. But the decision on balance was still more likely to hurt Obama, especially among black and Latino voters, where even a marginal drop-off in support could prove devastating. And evangelicals who supported Obama in 2008 might vote for Romney over it.

  The objections to gay marriage turned out to be more muted than expected, in part because the ranks of the leadership of the religious right had thinned. Jerry Falwell was dead, Pat Robertson and James Dobson passé, and Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, had dipped into birther politics and challenged Obama’s Christianity, thereby discrediting himself as a credible spokesman in mainstream media. Even as Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition prepared literature attacking the president on the issue, Chicago stepped up its outreach to religious voters in North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio, confident it could cut into Romney’s lead among them.

  After all the political calculations, the fact remained that Obama had done something historic. Staffers in Chicago certainly thought so. Many found themselves watching the interview with tears in their eyes. In a Newsweek cover story entitled “The First Gay President,” Andrew Sullivan confessed to the same: “I was utterly unprepared for how psychologically transformative the moment would be. To have the president of the United States affirm my humanity—and the humanity of all gay Americans—was, unexpectedly, a watershed. He shifted the mainstream in one interview.”

  But it was not a shift that either campaign wanted to dwell on. Chicago realized that any undecided gay or straight independents knew about the decision and didn’t have to be reminded of it, while those Democrats who objected shouldn’t be reminded either. And Boston understood that, as Steve Schmidt, McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, put it, the GOP was “on the wrong side of history” on this one. Almost everyone in the country had a friend or family member who was gay, which meant that the movement for marriage equality proceeded at a pace much faster than the struggle for civil rights.

  Amid all the commentary about the decision, few noticed the concrete political benefits for partner, Russ Schriefer, convinch2 the president in solidifying his base and energizing his fundraising. Good values—of dignity, respect, humanity—would prove to be good politics too.

  WITH GAY-BASHING OUT of bounds, Republicans settled for attacking Obama as excessively political. “Team Obama has turned the candidate of hope and change into a ferociously political animal,” Alex Castellanos wrote in May, confident that Romney would win. Castellanos cited Obama’s being caught on an open microphone telling outgoing Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, “After my election I [will] have more flexibility.” He quoted a poll showing that 67 percent thought Obama’s decision on gay marriage was made “for political reasons,” while only 24 percent said he did it because “he thinks it’s right.” Castellanos argued that these were ominous findings for Chicago and called into question the president’s entire strategy. The numbers suggested that Obama had been brought to earth as just another politician and was on track to squander his greatest asset, the transcending of red state–blue state distinctions that had launched him as a national figure at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

  Even if the advice hadn’t come from Republican strategists with suspect motives, Chicago had no intention of letting up on its barrage of anti-Romney ads and videos or otherwise changing its approach. Obama believed that one of the secrets of his success in 2008 was sticking with the strategy even when the campaign ran into choppy waters. Retooling was for other campaigns. Theirs was about consistency and ex
ecution of the master plan. Besides, throwing punches was popular with the Democratic base and made him look tough. Obama was the rare candidate unhurt by going negative.

  The single most important strategic decision of the campaign was to spend heavily in the middle of 2012 instead of in the fall. Here Chicago took a leaf from the Bush family playbook. In 1988 Vice President George H. W. Bush defined Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis over the summer. In 2004 his son, the incumbent, did the same to John Kerry. Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the fall campaign, was now too late for much persuasion. Axelrod believed that by September and October voters had made up their minds and tuned out the barrage of ads. This turned out to be right. Exit polls would later indicate that 70 percent of 2012 voters had decided by Labor Day, and Obama won that group 53–46. That meant that to win, Romney would have had to carry the other 30 percent by 58–41, a nearly impossible feat.

  Jim Messina and the Chicago contingent came to the Roosevelt Room in May for a final sign-off on spending more than $100 million defining Romney in the summer rather than hoarding the money for the fall. The meeting, later depicted as high drama, was in fact anticlimactic. Obama wanted to know all the risks, how strapped the campaign would be in October if fundraising didn’t pick up. But for all the expressions of concern about “uncharted waters,” neither he nor anyone else questioned the basic strategy. The poker-playing president wasn’t pushing new chips to the center of the table, just leaving his stack where it was.

  A MYTH DEVELOPED later in the season that Chicago was bent on depicting Romney as a flip-flopper until talked out of it by Bill Clinton, who favored making Romney outNational Youth Administrationyv to be a “severe conservative.” In truth, Clinton talked them out of nothing. The original flip-flopper line—“Governor Romney has no core,” as Plouffe said on Meet the Press on October 30—was meant to sow dissension in the GOP primaries. It was never intended by Chicago to be the brickbat that clocked Romney in the fall.