The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  The story of Obama’s contacts with Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Chicago resembled what happened with Cornel West, except with a happier ending. Gutiérrez had been, according to one White House official, “weirdly obsessed with the president.” He called often in 2009, claiming an old Chicago friendship, and eventually Obama stopped taking his calls. In May 2010 the congressman got himself arrested during a demonstration in front of the White House protesting the de always said the same thing: kh2portations. At Christmas, just after the DREAM Act failed, Obama invited Gutiérrez, Representative Nydia Velázquez, Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and other Latino lawmakers to the White House and told them that he expected no legislation on immigration for another two years. “Let’s put our thinking caps on,” he suggested, and figure out a solution from the executive branch. The president hugged Gutiérrez and the two Chicagoans shared a laugh.

  But in 2011 their relationship deteriorated again. Chief of Staff Bill Daley invited Latino leaders in for a meeting and Gutiérrez asked what the “thinking caps” had produced. When Daley said, in effect, nothing, Gutiérrez went ballistic. He even accused the president of sending him a letter that sounded sarcastic, which Cecelia Muñoz of the White House said was ridiculous. “They’ve been silent for two years and now they’re bragging about deporting a million people, many of them kids? I can’t shut up about this,” Gutiérrez said. He predicted that Obama would still get two-thirds of the Latino vote, but turnout would be so depressed that he might lose the election. The White House was furious with Gutiérrez. After the congressman had promised to keep his complaints private, he went on a national speaking tour blasting the president.

  The problem Gutiérrez complained about continued to eat away at the president’s Latino support. Muñoz, the White House official responsible for Latino issues, admitted to colleagues that the administration did a “crappy job” of explaining the Secure Communities program, whose aim was stepped-up deportations of hardened criminals, which is what led to the record number of deportations. But she kept telling Latino critics that the climate in 2010 was brutal. Representative Gabby Giffords of Arizona would call up Rahm Emanuel when he was chief of staff and implore him on the phone, “You gotta send me more National Guard [to secure the border].” Giffords was worried about losing her reelection fight.V

  In June 2011 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to start using prosecutorial discretion in deciding deportations, but the new policy didn’t work on the ground, where ICE agents complained that they couldn’t easily make judgments about which immigrants deserved prosecution and which didn’t. In the year that followed, the government halted the deportation of only 593 students.

  All year the problem festered, and even Latinos sympathetic to Obama grew frustrated. Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, had become persona non grata in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party by jumping to Obama in 2008 after explicitly promising Clinton at a Super Bowl party that he wouldn’t. He was slated to be secretary of commerce in 2009 (until derailed by a New Mexico scandal) and was as friendly with the president as any politician could expect to be. But in August 2011 Richardson, normally an easygoing sort, broke the festive mood of Obama’s fiftieth birthday barbecue in the Rose Garden. With Jay-Z and Tom Hanks nearby, he bent the president’s ear about how the deportations were hurting innocent immigrants, including a disturbingly large number of children. Obama told him he was working on it, but Richardson didn’t see any evidence of movement for many months.

  Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, claimed to want a more nuanced deportation policy, but her hard-line subordinates, who came mostly from law enforcement backgrounds, draggedNational Youth Administration73,Pa their feet on changing the policy. Their people were trained to arrest, not act as admission officers trying to figure out whether a kid did well in school. And the department’s general counsel threw up legal objections to easing deportations without a change in the law. But as usual in the government, there was wiggle room in “enforcement standards” and “prosecutorial discretion.” Kathy Ruemmler, the White House counsel, recognized that while ad hoc discretion was unworkable, the government could set new rules that made arresting young, law-abiding high school graduates the lowest priority of the department and allowed young people in that category to apply for such status.

  On the Hill, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin wouldn’t let the issue go. In early 2012 his office received calls nearly every week from young people being deported. Muñoz, a former immigration reformer who was now director of the Domestic Policy Council in the White House, began pushing in meetings for a new policy. Muñoz liked to say internally that “Democrats can no longer rely on Republicans being bigger assholes” on the issue. Now they had to do something.

  On June 17, 2012, the president decreed that 800,000 young people who had arrived when they were younger than sixteen, finished high school, and met other requirements could be given temporary status and avoid deportation. “We’re happy he’s our leader and champion,” Gutiérrez exulted. “This is the president we elected.” Almost immediately, thousands of young people stepped out of the shadows and formed long lines to apply for new status.

  Not everyone was so sure the decision would yield huge political benefits for Obama. It was hard to say whether more Latinos would vote just because others in their community avoided deportation. Many had been directly hurt by the foreclosure crisis, which hit Latinos harder than any other group. Some experts in Latino voting patterns said it would still take the reemergence of someone like Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck spewing venom to motivate enough voters to match the Latino turnout numbers of 2008.

  Just as in gay marriage, the delay in exercising presidential authority inadvertently worked to Obama’s advantage. By waiting so long to make his decision, the president gave the media an opening to interpret it as a political act aimed at reelection. But at least they were covering it. Had the decision been announced a year earlier, the story would have been “policy,” not “politics,” and thus largely ignored by a press corps obsessed by the latter. Instead many more people saw the president showing leadership on immigration—and showing up Romney in the process. Five times Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked Romney if he would reverse Obama’s initiative, and five times Romney declined to answer. It was all upside that weekend for the Obama campaign.

  Even so, Plouffe and Pfeiffer were nervous about the DREAM Act, which they thought Republicans could depict as amnesty. This turned out not to be a problem. Romney knew that he had to cut into Obama’s margins. “We have to get Hispanics to vote for our party,” he told a Florida fundraising dinner when he didn’t realize the press outside could hear. Anything short of that, he said, “spells doom for us.”

  OBAMA’S “LATINO TRACK” was almost like running a presidential campaign in a different country, or a country that the United States was about to become. It the killing of Osama bin Laden month included messages, voter contact strategies, and celebrities that were off the radar of the Washington press corps.

  Everyone knew the Latino giant was stirring, but only the Democrats were doing anything about it.VI About 40 percent of eligible Latinos weren’t even registered. And of those who were, fewer than half usually voted, compared to about 65 percent participation among all registered voters. To change that, Operation Vote launched an aggressive marketing campaign at soccer matches, boxing tournaments, and Latino beauty parlors and barbershops. (Similar efforts in the black barbershops had been critical in the 2008 primaries.) OFA field organizers attended citizenship ceremonies in battleground states and discreetly asked new citizens if they wanted to register. Messina worried for months that word of the effort would leak and make it seem as if the Obama campaign was politicizing a solemn event.

  The campaign hired Bendixen & Amandi, a Miami-based communications consulting firm that specialized in Latino voters. In the past, ads aimed at Latinos ran only at the end of a campaign. Obama’s start
ed in March. And instead of merely translating issue ads into Spanish, the usual practice, Chicago created separate and carefully tailored messages. Roughly a third of all TV viewers now routinely time-shifted the shows they watched, which meant that they saw many fewer ads. Only a tenth of Latino viewers did so. That made advertising on telenovelas and other Spanish-language entertainment programs especially efficient.

  The firm’s early focus groups were discouraging for Obama. Latinos liked the president personally but didn’t think he was effective. Over and over, focus group respondents said, “He hasn’t really done anything.” They were largely unfamiliar with achievements like the auto rescue and the health care bill, but they knew the president had failed on immigration reform. “He promised a bill and then he deported my next-door neighbor’s kid,” one said.

  The best way out of that hole was to educate Latino voters about Obamacare, which was immensely popular when Latinos learned the details. The pitch was much more direct than in Obama’s English-language media. Certain families, the Spanish-language ads said, “will receive economic help from the government to pay for quality [health] insurance.” If the election was partly about the role of government in American life, Chicago was betting that Latinos favored a big role. Romney went the other way, targeting his ads at Latino small business owners. They were an important subgroup but made up less than 10 percent of Latino voters.

  For the Latino market, the messenger is often more important than the message. The surrogate Chicago chose was Cristina Saralegui, known as “the Latina Oprah.” Saralegui had just finished a twenty-year run hosting one of the top-rated shows on Univision, the Spanish-language commercial network that beats all cable networks in the ratings and in some time slots bests NBC, ABC, and CBS too. A Cuban American, she had enormous crossover appeal with Mexican Americans (who made up more than half of Latinos in the United States) and other Latinos. Fernand Amandi, also Cuban American, begged Saralegui to appear in Obama TV spots, and though she had never done anything political before, she finally agreed. By coincidence, her signature sign-off line on her show, “Pa’lante!,” translates roughly as “Forward!” Saralegui conducted an “interview” with Michelle Obama in which she pointed to the first lady’s midsection and asked, “Is the factory partner, Russ Schriefer, NVh2 closed?” Michelle said she and the president were done having kids. That exchange didn’t air, but Saralegui’s ads on Univision and Telemundo were known by almost all Latino voters, and by almost no one in the separate universe of white America.

  Sheldon Adelson had a lot of experience hiring Latinos for his Las Vegas casinos, and he urged the Romney campaign to do more to win their votes. Romney’s son Craig appeared in an ad speaking Spanish, but it contained only platitudes about his family and didn’t penetrate. Neither did a negative spot Republicans ran in Florida entitled “Chávez por Obama,” pegged to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s comment that he preferred the president over Romney. Negative ads rarely had much traction with Latinos, though an Obama spot attacking Romney for opposing Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court seemed to resonate in the Puerto Rican community, where turnout would help determine the outcome in Florida. The big difference was volume. Romney ads were far less visible on Spanish-language television; Obama ran 13,232 spots compared to 3,435 for Romney.

  In August Obama’s numbers with Latinos sagged a bit, and Bendixen & Amandi pushed hard for a big ad buy connected to the DREAM Act. After some resistance, Chicago agreed. The president appeared in a direct-to-camera spot in which he spoke in Spanish of the “buen ejemplo” (good example) offered by the young “dreamers” who were brought to this country illegally as children and stayed to make something of their lives. Native speakers were impressed by Obama’s accent, especially in contrast to Romney, who spoke only in English.

  Between June and Election Day, many dreamers and their extended families and friends became passionate Obama supporters for a simple reason: fear of what would happen if Romney was elected and reversed the policy. Because these young people had stepped out of the shadows, the government would have their names and be able to quickly deport them.

  TO WIN, OBAMA needed the gender gap to stay wide, but he couldn’t lose too many Catholic votes. These conflicting goals played out on the issue of contraception.

  When George Stephanopoulos of ABC News pressed Romney about his views on contraception during a January primary debate, Boston was livid. The liberal media, it seemed, was trying to make Romney out to be against birth control. But the bigger flap was a confrontation between the White House and Catholic bishops over state-funded contraception. When the administration moved to limit religious exemptions to the Obamacare requirement that employers provide birth control as part of their standard package of health care benefits, Romney pounced.

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  In the Scrum

  Republicans in 2012 had differing theories of combat. Boston abided by the old adage “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Under this theory, the challenge of a campaign is to stick to message—in this case the weak economy under Obama—and not get pulled off your game by responding to attacks. The other view was summarized by Mississippi’s governor Haley Barbour, a former chair of the RNC: “An attack unanswered is an attack admitted.” Republicans in the Barbour camp felt Romney got clobbered in so-called free media, the cut-and-thrust of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  Fox understood that cut-and-thrust better than anyone, but the fantasyland it built to sustain ratings blinded the network to political realities. Roger Ailes couldn’t fathom that the assault on Bain Capital might be convincing, so he made no effort to defend the company or Romney, for whom he had no great love anyway partner, Russ Schriefer, to be seemed . Neither did the Romney campaign, which was cash-strapped until after the Tampa convention. So week after week, the attacks of Chicago and the pro-Obama super PAC went answered.

  It used to be that general elections didn’t start until Labor Day. Now they were all but over by then. Worse for Romney, the 2012 election had been much more stable than other recent elections. Millions of people made a decision in the winter or spring and never revisited it. Obama’s failure to return the economy to full prosperity hurt him, especially with older voters who considered themselves underemployed. But huge numbers of voters who viewed the economy as the number one issue favored him nonetheless.

  Republicans were losing the economic argument. Austerity was failing badly in Europe, and it made no intuitive sense that cutting spending would put people back to work. Contrary to the Republicans’ claim, the deficit had led to neither inflation nor higher interest rates. Blaming unemployment insurance for encouraging people to be lazy didn’t correspond to the suffering of the jobless that voters saw in their own communities. Cutting taxes for the “job creators” may have sounded good to the wealthy and even to small business owners, but tax cuts weren’t popular with strapped voters who didn’t think their bosses needed fatter incomes.

  The Romney strategy was to make the election a referendum on Obama and the economy; the Obama strategy was to make it a choice. Both were wrong. It turned out to be a referendum on Romney and the Republicans.

  IN THE SUMMER Jim Messina confessed that he had completely misread the Romney strategy. He thought that Romney would pivot away from the base and toward the center in order to woo swing voters. “Instead, they’re running the Bush ’04 race again—an incumbent’s strategy instead of a challenger’s.” In Boston Stuart Stevens thought that pivoting to the center on immigration and other issues would make his candidate look like a phony. Obama would simply “outbid” them on anything they tried, and it would cost them in the character department.

  Paul Begala, an aggressive operative under Clinton, liked to quote Zell Miller, a former governor of Georgia, who taught him that “a hit dog barks.” But Romney remained silent on his record at Bain, which stunned Begala. He was helping out Bill Burton’s super PA
C and was amazed that Romney let Chicago and one tiny underfunded super PAC “define him as Gordon Gekko.” Without his business record, Begala said, “Romney was left with nothing but his charm.”

  The pro-Romney super PACs couldn’t compensate for him. While they weren’t allowed to coordinate with the campaign, nothing prevented them from working with each other. They held plenty of meetings but advertised on different themes. One week in August, Restore Our Future was on jobs, Crossroads GPS on the deficit, and Americans for Prosperity on the Solyndra “scandal,” while the Romney campaign was focused on welfare. These pro-Romney super PACs spent $400 million—more than five times as much as Burton’s pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action. But they had four or five messages and Burton had one: Mitt Romney is bad for the middle class.

  The summer ad wars reached a fever pitch when Burton’s super PAC posted (but never aired on television) an ad featuring Joe Soptic, a former employee of a Bain-owned steel company. Soptic recounted how, after the plant closed and he lost _hi earlyhis insurance, his wife got cancer and died.I The ad implied that Romney was responsible for her death. The press referees immediately jumped on the factual time line, which showed Soptic’s wife had insurance from another employer for a time and that Romney was no longer running Bain when the events transpired. After Chicago tried to claim no connection to the ad, reporters dug up the fact that, months earlier, Stephanie Cutter had introduced Soptic and his story to the media on a conference call. This allowed Boston to charge that Obama and his backers were taking the campaign to a new low.